CFLarsen said:
Nope. That's Libertarian politics alright: Badnarik can do it, because he is a Libertarian.
In Libertopia, Libertarians can do whatever they want. The rest can croak, for all they care. Those who disagrees with Badnarik are persecuted and go to jail.
To be fair Badnarik at one point did say the UN bit was hyperbole, saying something like "Of course I wouldn't blow up the UN. It's someone else's property."
Whether he was spinning or not or whether someone sane in the LP fed him the line I have no idea, and it doesn't make the original any less alarming...
He did at least retract it, so to suggest that this sort of action is a typical Libertarian policy rather than just an example of Badnarik thinking out loud is unfair.
As an aside, this is why I consider him a "living fossil record." He tends to publish at some level his entire thought process about a lot of issues. I wish more politicians had the guts to do it, and I give Badnarik credit in that regard, but his thought processes are quite suspect.
Like this gem:
How could Timothy McVeigh's Ryder truck knock down so much of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, while doing no damage to the building across the street except for a few broken windows? Doesn't that violate the laws of physics? How could the explosion of McVeigh's truck throw bricks and debris out into the street, once again, violating the laws of physics? What ever happened to all of the evidence from the Waco disaster that was being kept for “safe keeping†in the FBI offices in the Murrah Federal Building? THINK dammit! We may not know who blew up the building, or what their motivation was, but the government's version of the truth is completely implausible.
(from varwoche's collection
here )
He starts with what is a valid question about the physics, but rather than actually look into the physics of the matter he skips over that into "why the government would do it themselves."
Which is typical poor thinking that leads to conspiracy thinking. Instead of confronting the intital doubt about a fact by either verifying it or debunking it, he moves on to find collateral evidence that support the doubt.
Worse yet, when he confronts the typical curious man on the street type note the argument is now not framed around physics, rather about the motives of the government. When Badnarik gets the typical "the government wouldn't do that" response, Badnarik is now set up to just list really bad things the government has done, some genuine, some similarly supported nonsense.
Our poor man on the street is forced to admit that it is possible the government could do such a thing, which is the trap in the argument from incredulity...
A better response to the rant is: "What evidence do you have that such a result violates the laws of physics besides your own incredulity?"
That is the skeptic answer. The one that cuts through the nonsense. This is the sort of thing we should be discussing and promoting here. Stopping the spread of the political/legal version of homeopathy... Both are cut from the same cloth.
