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Notable: Signs of Intelligent Life

[04-JAN-08]

THE [RON] PAUL DEMOGRAPHIC is essentially the same group of people the Left was attempting to organize at its apex in the 1930s, before we became a mostly irrelevant group of detached navel gazers, and postmodern-bullshiters. If we want any kind of revolution, large or small, we better stop being diversity-mongers, claiming we embrace everyone, aside from those we disagree with. How the Left could be so out of touch with regular Americans is beyond me.
Joshua Frank, The Failures of Sectarianism

[29-Dec-07]

PEASANTS TOILING ON A LATIFUNDIA at the borders of the late Roman Empire, should they have been overrun by the "barbarians," actually found the tribute exacted by the wild barbarian tribes lower than that mulcted by their erstwhile Roman imperial masters. The sustainment costs of the empire, its sybaritic court, and its hideously expensive military, were simply too high by that point. When enough peasants caught on, the Roman Empire was doomed, not by military invasion, but by the fact that its subjects no longer believed the whole imperial contraption benefited them.
Werther, Flying Potlatch