Kos asks libertarians to jump on the FISA issue. At Reason magazine’s aptly-named Hit & Run blog, David Weigel’s response is, “How high?”
Weigel writes that “Reason has been on the FISA beat for a while,” which is another way of saying “not heavy on the surveillance beat since the 1970s,” but sharing Kos’s aversion to the current administration.
Weigel was so eager to jump in bed with the Kossacks on this issue that he misleadingly referred to it as “domestic surveillance.” The original post as been altered to read “international surveillance” in response to a commenter, but without any acknowledgement in the post itself.
Kos and Weigel don’t wish to fight, or to be involved in the fight against the nations enemies. Which is fine, it’s their choice. Where they go crazy is that they want the rest of us to pretend that there is no fight to begin with, or if there is, that it can be won without actually doing anything. Which isn’t fine.
Ahh, left libertarians… free riders on everybody else’s efforts to build and defend a live-able society. I remember a couple years ago the enormous fascination that Reason had with this wonderful utopian, a Danish ‘anarcho capitalist commune.’ Stories painted it as heaven on earth, with an economy comprised primarily of legalized drugs and prostitution.
Yet the facts don’t quite fit the Reasonoids’ breathless accounts. The commune was actually an utterly ungoverned and ungovernable squatter community on a disused Danish air base, and the primary source of income outside the closed “commune” economy (of drugs and commercialized sex) was welfare checks from the Danish government. I suspect it looked a little bit more like Major Colvin’s legalized drug zone experiment on the Wire, more than anything More or even Marx would recognize as utopian. If that’s what passes for heaven to a Rothbardian, I think I’d rather look for a nice address in hell, maybe one with a lake(of fire)view.
Christiania, Denmark http://tinyurl.com/2c7f25
I was there for a couple of days in the fall of 96. They made a fair amount of money selling hash and weed, but didn’t allow anything harder, and there was no prostitution there at that time. It was actually a pretty cool little place, the drug scene sadly draws all the media attention. There was a definite spirit of entrepreneurship there, lots of gardens and restaurants and little shops of craftsmen, even a neat little bicycle shop with there own design of bike. People who didn’t contribute anything were tossed out, freeloaders were definitely not welcome. It wasn’t exactly a utopia, but it was clean and pleasant and an interesting little community, if you are ever in Copenhagen I would recommend checking it out. We played at a club called the Loppen, was a pretty cool place.
Hey, why is there a FISA post here and no trollery? Where’s Mr. Balloon-Fence?
Assuming Christiania is what Al M was talking about (it could’ve been the Camp at Thy which preceded it), it has slowly and surely gone down hill since ’96. The whole area around it is part of the (now) somewhat ancient fort that protected the sea side of Copenhagen. The place itself was an “abandoned” army barracks. Squatters moved in and through some happy-hippy means managed to get the Danish Defense Dept to pay for all gas and water – a deal which went on for years. Christianites must now pay for their utilities.
While the hippy residents had all sorts of good intentions, the place became for all the expected reasons, a narcotics center of Scandinavia. Whether this is solely cannabis or includes other, harder products is irrelevant to most Danes. The criminal milieu is much harder than it once was; see, for example, the Pusher films for a glimpse into the Danish underworld. Supposedly a gun fight/execution on Pusher Street occurred in 2005 involving Muslim extremists (Hizb ut-Tahrir) trying to take over the lucrative Copenhagen hash market.
The majority of Danes are now tired of the so-called free state. They want Pusher Street to be destroyed (ryddet) and the free state status (legally as well as metaphorically) abolished (normaliseret).
PS Loppen means “the flea”
When Jeff comes back who’s gonna read Reason?
Comment thread story so far: We shall use warrantless wiretaps to take down Danish hippies. Because of the terrorism!
“Supposedly a gun fight/execution on Pusher Street occurred in 2005 involving Muslim extremists (Hizb ut-Tahrir) trying to take over the lucrative Copenhagen hash market.”
Fuckin Muslims fuck up everything, imagine what pains in the ass they would be if they weren’t so peaceloving. Sad to hear that about Christiania, there were some cool people there with some good ideas. It is just so hard to overcome the irrational dreamers in a situation like that.
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