Pessimistic Libertarians and the Libertine Fly Trap

Posted on December 11, 2003 in Clueless Oafs IRC/Chat

I spent part of this evening talking about “what to do about the world” with a fellow who I guess was a muddled middle of the road libertarian or so he thought. He admitted that he didn’t “trust other people with his freedom”. I told him and the #political channel at Undernet this story about a Talmudic scholar that I heard recently:

He’d been researching the matter of Heaven and Hell for all his life. So when he arrived at Heaven, he said to the angels: “You know, I’m curious. I want to see what Hell is like. It’s been my life study after all.”

The angels discuss this and say “Oh sure. We can do that. So they take him down to Hell. He gets there and the first thing he sees are these tables piled with food. Way high! He can’t see very well, but he hears this loud moaning coming from the direction of the tables.

So he gets closer. And there are all these people there. Their hands are tied and they’ve got these huge wooden spoons tied to their arms. There’s all this food in front of them, but they can’t bring it to their mouths because of these damned spoons! So there they are, bitching and moaning about how terrible it is.

Well, the scholar has had enough. He wants to go to Heaven. And the first thing they do is tie these huge wooden spoons to his arms! Just like the ones down in Hell! They bring him to the tables where the food is and everyone there is shoveling up the food and feeding his or her neighbor. No one’s going hungry. Everyone’s happy because they’re helping each other out.

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My fellow progressives and leftists often fall for bait laid out by Libertine Republicans. It is well established that there have been no WMDs found in Iraq and it’s not likely that there will be. Every day — sometimes every hour — some propagandist on the Right announces that they’ve found evidence or that some ancient intelligence report that shows that Bush did not mislead the American public. Immediately, half the leftists and moderates on the channel start shouting the guy down. And they keep at it and at it, demanding sources that will never be provided, fighting the fight that has already been won.

What I ask is why allow the Libertines to make us play in their show? We’re past the question of whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction as a country: the question is now that we know they didn’t exist, that we were misled, where do we go as a country?

The Libertine Fly Trap is a deadly predator, but you can only get caught in it by flying into its jaws.