I Can Do Whatever I Like: Freedom of Expression Guaranteed

I've decided that all government coercion is wrong.  Government has no right to tell me what to do with my body.  Self-expression is a fundamental right.  And nudity is completely natural.  I have a total right to be naked in public.  Anywhere in public.  It's just your personal hang-up if you are bothered by it.  There's nothing inappropriate about it.  Keep your laws off my junk.

You don't want your kids seeing something like that?  Well, keep them indoors.  My nudity isn't going to cause them problems; your uptight attitude will, though.  Let those kids out in public and I have a right to dance nude in front of them if I want to.  This conspiracy to force me to be clothed in public when that is not my natural state--well, it just won't stand.  In the next 25 years, the Supreme Court will realize that these anti-nudity laws are straight-up discrimination, and worse, they are old traditional morés based on religion.  Keep your religion off my junk.

If you don't want your kids to be exhibitionists or nudists, then don't raise them to be.  It's not like they're going to catch "the naked" from me.  Come to think of it, I have a natural right to touch any part of my body in public. I don't understand this country's fetish with restraining natural urges.  If it bothers you, don't look.  People are prurient these days because they're taught to inhibit themselves. You can be inhibited if you want, but don't make me be that way.

Of course, I don't actually think this way.  But I bet many "left-libertarians" and progressives do.  I bet many teachers and college professors do.  Like that college professor who had a sexual act exhibited in a university classroom for his students and later explained that at the time he couldn't think of a good reason not to do it.  "I did not wish, and I do not wish, to surrender to sex negativity and fear."  Wow, that professor is just a beacon of freedom, isn't he?  Setting minds free with parent-funded and public-funded live pornography.

John Stossel's Awkward Bedfellows

I like a lot of what John Stossel has to say, and even if I am not always convinced by what he seems to be touting, it's thought-provoking.  And yet, he seems to use Ann Coulter as an excuse to criticize social conservatism.  Coulter is practically a shock jock--she gets attention by not caring who she offends--and she's better at pointing out what is silly about liberalism than she is at articulating conservatism; that's better left to heavyweights like Sowell.

My reply to John Stossel's 'Libertarians' Awkward Bedfellows':

I think that that libertarians and paleo-conservatives are working at cross purposes.  If libertarians want to do something constructive and not just appear as some kind of hip, socially acceptable conservative in order  to gain political advantage, they could provide some leadership for (a) school vouchers and (b) relegating these culture war issues to the states and get them out of D.C. politics.  A federal government big enough to guarantee the right to abortions and to wear a shirt profaning another's religious beliefs is a government big enough to decide that all rights need to be revised.  By siding with progressives in certain ways, libertarians unwittingly(?) support a federal government that won't leave societies free to govern themselves; using tyranny in the large to "protect" us against the bugbear of tyranny in the small.  Without a solid stand on the 10th Amendment, libertarians end up selling themselves as "in touch" conservatives or fiscally responsible progressives, and it DOES come across as pandering.  Worse, it looks like they're trying to out-"sell out" the neocons.  Give Middle America real control over who is teaching their kids and what they're being taught.  Give us academic choice.  Give us a real remedy against judicial activism.  Expose the indoctrination.  Help give us our culture back.  Otherwise, libertarians are just "all the coerced social change without the free stuff."  

You want the conservatives to give up the Culture War?  Put teeth back in our Tenth Amendment.  Make it so that liberal educators aren't teaching our kids their values instead of our values.  Make it so that our kids aren't forced to go to homosexuality normalization training (i.e. re-education) to cure their intolerance.

True conservatives tend to truly believe that it takes a village.  Progressives believe that it takes a national government (e.g., Obama's "something we can only do together, with . . . the help of a nation").  If libertarians can't work with paleos to bring power back to the village, then maybe Ann Coulter is right about them.

LINOs: Libertarians In Name Only

Libertarianism.

Self-described libertarians often like the sound of it.  Who doesn't like liberty?  And the identification puts distance between them and pro-Establishment neo-cons.

During the last half of the Bush II era, many conservatives started identifying as libertarians, partly in response to Bush's pseudo-conservatism and partly because of the Left's false (but effective) identification of Bush's Big Government policies with essential conservatism.

So many self-described libertarians who do so because they realize (at least superficially) that the Democrats are cronyist spendthrifts, like the idea of the government letting you do anything you want with regards to sex and drugs, and/or think that being Republican means exalting money and wealth -- fold under any realy test of getting the government out of their lives.

Cut what?!  How will anyone have healthcare without national healthcare?  No Federal Reserve?  Are you nuts?  No mandatory unionism?  How else are we going to have guaranteed jobs no matter how shitty a job we do?   Which benefit?  Hey! I like that free(?)bie!  I want government to stay out of my business but I want them to take care of me as much as possible!

Between 2003 and 2008 I used to see a quote (usually attributed to Ben Franklin) make the rounds frequently: