I think if I flipped the pages of the BBS back a year or two, I could find an angry, sarcastic reply to you much like my recent one in this thread.


I ought to be careful of pointing the finger at others and crying "Demagoguery!", but I have to say that I find this statement objectionable, as if environmentalist is unworthy and that subjugated to socialism it all becomes evil. I cherish the more genial expressions of socialism. Like my public library.


You appear to look down on your fellow citizens who do not struggle like Atlas to achieve pure, complete individual rights and "universal morality" (oh, and property rights). You seem to neglect that other people reside on the planet (good people, many of them) who don't share all of your assumptions. Reading some of the posts, I feel like I am reading about the struggle of the pure heroic Ubermensch against the contaminated, deficient denizens of the lumpen underworld.

Yes, your comments remind me a Gary Cooper-esque figure struggling against mediocrity and compromise, but I have to say that I find the purist "big L" position with respect to "rights" (oh, and property rights!) to be dogmatic, vacant, and positively depressing.

Unless you are making some progress on the fusion front, or have some other solutions to offer, I don't quite understand how you can comfortably stand on an exclusivist set of "individual and property rights!" as a defining principle for the common wealth.

Perhaps you can engrave your principles on a gold-plated record and launch them into space (using a private launch company, of course) so that they can be found by some distant civilization who will make better use of them than we are able.

In the meantime, it doesn't look like we are going to make it, but I hate saying so in a forum where members are excitedly announcing the birth of a new child.

But if none of this makes sense to you, don't worry. You don't always have to have a particularly good or cogent position or argument to prevail. I am thinking that, in practical terms. you have prevailed.