About Last Night

There are legitimate concerns about the US strike in Iran last night, but there are also illegitimate concerns as well.

On Facebook this morning, I put up a post about how it seems that some people who seem anti-war are outing themselves as simply anti-Israel.

Some took issue with my post.

Perhaps I painted with too broad a brush, because it was not my intent to say that there are not legitimate reasons to oppose war against Iran - but of course, Trump being Trump, there is a lot of anti-war sentiment from people who supported or called for bombing in Libya, Syria, Kosovo, and other sites in the Middle East, but believe it is wrong when Trump does it.

I'm not pro war, what I am for is when a strategic decision is made, it has such an impact that the target knows America is serious and factors that seriousness into their future decision-making processes.

I lose patience with people who want to blame this on the 1953 CIA engineered coup in Iran what put the Shah back in power as if that was the direct reason for a brutal theocracy taking over Iran during the Carter administration - a part of a wave of radical Islamist takeovers in the Middle East and South Asia. The Mullah's didn't (and don't) want to destroy America for any particular action, they want to destroy us because they see us as Satan, just as they see Israel and the Jewish people the same way.

This was actually posted as a comment on a statement from the Indiana Libertarian Party:

"This started, really, during the asymmetric dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, WWI, and plutocratic plans ever since. We really ought to stop looking at such tiny time slices as defined by practically irrelevant election cycles. TE Lawrence, Ike, Smedley Butler, Wesley Clark, lots of wise folks have warned us about this for decades. Stupid people have planned it for decades."

My reply:

"So human nature and history are directly to blame for what happened last night?"

Some Libertarians, along with Democrats, want Trump impeached because, according to them, he violated the War Powers Act of 1973.

I've never been that sure that the WPA is even constitutional - there are some pretty good arguments that it isn't - and it has been skated around by Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden and as far as I know none of them were impeached for it.

I took a shot a while back at libertarians - I actually hold quite a few libertarian views, so I guess it is actually the big "L" libertarians I was shooting at, and it is things like this that are why.

This is the libertarian form of historical intersectionality. "We shouldn't focus on tiny time slices unless we can say that 500 years of history lead to this exact action, at this exact location and at this exact moment - and thank goodness we can use vague interpretations of history and context to do just that."

The truth is that I think we are seeing an example of something I’ve long been intrigued by - the “Horseshoe Theory” of French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye. It is a theory which states that rather than the far left and the far right being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear political continuum, given enough time, their positions will come to closely resemble one another, much like how the ends of a horseshoe "circle back" toward one another.

If you pay attention, and many hardcore libertarians will unsuccessfully deny it, you will see their positions begin to look a lot like those of the radical progressives. From open borders to drugs to structural racism, sometimes it is hard to tell them apart.

It’s hard to jump from one end of a linear political spectrum without being noticed – but when that distance is closed by bending the ends close to each other, the jump is less noticeable. It is more of a big step.