Tuesday, October 05, 2004

"Protecting the Homeland"

It's great that we have the government to protect us and our freedom. In order to fulfill that duty, it has recently acted to tackle 3 of my worst fears - fears shared by millions of Americans. The government's agents scored victories for freedom by taking the following actions on our behalf:

1) A small bootleg radio station was sacked by the feds last Wednesday. Apparently the government hadn't granted them a freedom license to broadcast.

2) An indebted former Stanford Law student had $61,000 seized by the feds without charges on suspicion of prostitution. She (kinda sorta) allegedly worked as a call girl to pay off her debts.

3) A pregnant woman was shoved to her knees and arrested by the Metro Police in D.C. after having talked too loudly on her cell phone.

The government agents involved in these cases are obviously heroes. They should be saluted for protecting our freedom from the threat posed by small, anti-state radio stations; for protecting our freedom from someone else accepting payment for sex; and most of all, for protecting our freedom from hearing pregnant women yell at people on their cell phones. All of these innocent (oops didn't mean that!) people deserved what they got - a nice drubbing from the state's agents who protect our freedom. We should be thankful for their service. But for the heroic feats of these agents this would not be a free country.

Sunday, October 03, 2004

Bad News for the International Social Engineers

After internal conflicts ravaged the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, the UN and NATO intervened decided to turn Bosnia and Kosovo into protectorates devoid of sovereignty. The international organizations then declared their plans to turn both into multi-ethnic liberal democracies. Apparently, those who declared such goals must have forgotten that the ethnic groups in these areas have deep-seated hatred and/or mistrust for the other group(s) (as if the wars between the groups weren't enough evidence of this). Such an environment couldn't breed a stable dictatorship, let alone a democracy.

This fact is being borne out today, where all three ethnic groups in Bosnia are about to elect nationalist candidates in upcoming elections, showing no trust for candidates of other ethnicities, and in Kosovo, Serbs are planning to boycott the election due to the lack of security provided by the region's NATO-appointed rulers - the Albanian "Kosovo Liberation Army" who hates them.

If these examples, along with the ongoing "catastrophic success" in Iraq, aren't proof of the futility of international social engineering, then I don't know what is.