Nicki Brøchner

Recent polls, like this, shows that former Congressman Bob Barr, now Libertarian candidate, wins 6% of the voters in November. Now this has started some speculations for what this will mean for the election. An obvious comparison is Ralph Naders candidacy in 2000. Many democrats still believe that Ralph Nader “stole” the election from Al Gore. Now Can Bob Barr “steal” the election from John McCain?

That Bob Barr today a president candidate for the Libertarian party weren’t something that many people would have thought just 2 years ago. His times as member of congress his record shows that he isn’t your typical libertarian. He voted for the Patriot Act, he vote for the war in Iraq and he where one of the leading figures in the case against Bill Clinton.  But today he is a changed man, according to his website Bob Barr supports an immediately withdraw from Iraq, the reinstatement of habeas corpus, an ensuring that every wire tapping is approved by a judge. He also believes that it is up to the federal state to determent the issue of gay married.

The Ron Paul effect
Normally the Libertarian party is not a factor in the presidential. I believe that the reason for there popularity this “The Ron Paul effect”. Ron Paul brought the subject of liberty and freedom into this presidential election. There can be no doubt about Ron Paul continues success in bringing the libertarian ideas forward to the masses now the question is can Bob Barr transferee this into votes? It is highly unlikely that he can win, but if he gets enough votes it might just be enough to reinforce the libertarian movement.

Interview with a Bob Barr voter
In addition to my view on the matter I have found one of the 6 % that is planning to vote for Bob Barr in November, Jay Wiegmann:

What is your age?
JW: I am 34 years old

Where in the US do you live?
JW: I live in Roswell, GA (roughly 34°″N 84°W)

What do you do for a living?
JW: I’m an IT professional in the medical field.

What is the single most important issue in the election for you and how do you feel that Bob Barr delivers on that?
JW: The most important issue for me is the preservation of liberty and freedom.  The Barr camp embraces this in the most fundamental way - pledging to reduce the amount of federal government intrusion into the lives of citizens by restricting the size and role of government.

What attracted you to the Bob Barr platform?
JW: The stated goal to reduce the size of government, the embrace of the concept of states’ rights (in that some decisions have no business being made at the federal level, and should be left to the 50 individual states), and the possibility of the enactment of the Fair Tax.

Accoutring to the media landscape are there only two candidates, Obama and McCain. Let for a second assume that they are right, who would have been your second choice?
JW: I do not believe in voting against a candidate, which is commonly stated as “voting for the lesser of two evils”.  If I HAD to select between Obama and McCain, I’d probably write in my own name or simply ignore the presidential section of the ballot entirely.

Ron Paul introduced the ideas of liberty and minimal government to this presidential election. How does Bob Barr compare to Ron Paul?
JW: In my mind, Bob Barr embraces the same tenets as Ron Paul (those can generally be found in the works of Milton Friedman), but sees the devastating consequences of the re-adoption of the gold standard as a whole.  Both have extensive experience in the legislature, and while I generally agree more with Ron Paul’s voting history in the House, Barr is the candidate up for consideration.

In a system that in practice is a two party system, what made you decide to vote for a three party candidate?
JW: The major two parties simply stopped presenting candidates I could vote for.  Democrats generally soured me to their party with their absolute vitriol for Ronald Reagan (who came the closer to the ideals of Friedman than any president since JFK), and though that didn’t stop me from listening to their message, the parade of special interests they catered to and the political correctness their strategists put into place (later to filter in to the rest of society) certainly increased my distaste.  Republicans generally turned me away after comprising on promises to reduce taxes, reduce the size of government, and generally even consider trying to do anything but legislate morality.  Democrats wanted to control my wallet, Republicans wanted to control my bedroom.  Neither extreme could possibly satisfy me.

Before two years ago Bob Barr couldn’t be called a libertarian, now he is? Is that reliable?
JW: Four years ago, Barr could be called libertairan as he publicly supported Mickael Badnarik.  Prior to 2003, he would generally ONLY be described as a conservative Republican.  He was considered so much of one, that I volunteered in the campaign that unseated him (Georgia’s state legislature changed the district he represented so as to force him to run against John Linder).  While he didn’t completely toe the party line (his insistence on a sunset clause in the PATRIOT act is one example), he did support the very actions that soured me on the Republican party.  His willingness to see reason and publicly change his stance on abortion and the war on drugs are a good sign to me.

Because of the recent bump in some polls Bob Barr is being compared to Ralph Nader in 2001, because he could cost the republicans the elections, what do you say as a voter/support?
JW: In 2001, Al Gore didn’t lose the election because of a shortage of votes in the popular election.  He lost it by not managing to win the electoral votes of his home state.  Barr’s 8% polling numbers are encouraging as they may represent that the US voter is willing to make a real change.  If Barr’s votes cost McCain Georgia (the most likely state for that to happen I would think), then it would seem that the McCain campaign would not have listened enough to the voters of Georgia and that someone else did.  That would be a fault of McCain’s rather than of Barr’s.

Keep in mind that it’s also possible that Obama supporters who are becoming disillusioned with his more recent announcements may be willing to have a look at Barr, and possibly even vote for him. This ’spoiler role’ works both ways when you have a candidate espousing the economic freedoms supported by Republicans as well as the social freedoms supported by Democrats.

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In the end I believe that Bob Barr is going to be an interesting candidate to follow. As Jay Wiegmann puts it “Barr’s 8% polling numbers are encouraging as they may represent that the US voter is willing to make a real change.” - Coming November I am suddenly going to see if the Ron Paul effect is going to help Bob Barr set the real stage for change.

Yeah what a great idea, lets further more combine the two institutions that really know how to fuck things up. Now that is real chance that we can believe in. it is not like it have been done before … oh wait

In my last post about Nelson Mandela I briefly touched the subject of terrorism and terrorist. This has made me start thinking about what terrorism is and what constitutes a terrorist? The subject of terrorism has in recent decades become once more something that fills the media landscape and the everyday lives of citizens all over the world, but what is it?

The subjectivity of terror
To answer the question we first need to establish what terror is, an in the true spirit of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz what it is made of, what the building blocks of terror is. Well the purpose of terror is to frighten or terrify someone. It is true fear that a terrorist is trying to reach his or her goal. What is terrifying and courses fear is a subjective matter. What I find terrifying is not necessarily the same as what you or anyone else for that matter fears. An example of this is Arachnophobia or Coulrophobia. This is the irrational, intense, persistent fear of either spiders or clowns. Now what is important here is that it is an irrational fear, which means that even if a person knows that there is no danger, or that the object form where the fear comes has no intensions of causing harm, the person suffering from the phobia is still terrified. As sad before; fear is a subjective matter, it is not every person that is afraid of spiders or clowns. So for those people spiders and clowns wouldn’t be considered terrifying. Furthermore we wouldn’t say that a spider is terrorising a person with Arachnophobia or that clowns is terrorising a spectator in a circus, which suffers form Coulrophobia. The reason for this is that it is considered an irrational fear and form that we can deduct that for something to be terror it needs to be a rational fear.

The rational fear
Then what is a rational fear? A rational fear is where there is a clear and eminent danger for something undesirable is happening. This fear has to orientate on a given situation. For example a person walking home, at night, in a “good neighbourhood” does properly not fear being assaulted. In contrast the same person walking home, still at night, in a “bad neighbourhood” would reasonably fear being assaulted. As with the irrational fear is would be a subjective matter, whether or not a person considers a given neighbourhood as being “good or bad” or how well that person knows the neighbourhood is all factors in if that person is afraid or not. Therefore just as irrational fear I subjective, rational fear also is. But what here is the reason for the subjectivity is not the object of the fear, the assailant, but the situation, the circumstances we have a different kind of subjectivity in play.

The object of fear
It is given, that when we are looking at fear that for a person to be afraid, that fear has to be of something. The person needs some object that can be the reason for the fear. Since fear is an internal reaction of an external threat. Being afraid by the unknown is inheriting a human feature, but it is also a feature that we over time have coped with and with reason overcome. Therefore for a given object to really be the source of a persons fear that person needs to have clearly identified that object as something to be afraid of. For example the fear of being left alone is only a real fear when that person realises what it means to be alone. It is also typical here that panics sets in. It makes no deferens if we are looking at the rational or irrational fear.

Now that brings us to a somewhat broad answer to what terror is:

Terror is a rational fear that exists in a given situation with a clear identified object.

Now what?
Now that we have this definition of what terror and terrorism is, then what? The next natural step would be to debate the historical and current use of the term terror and terrorism. So in my next post I will be looking into this. I am planning to post Part II in the begging of next week. In the mean time I would like to invite everyone reading this post to comment on this definition, help me correct any errors that you might find in my reasoning so that when I analyse historical and current international politics it would be with the best possible tools.

63 Days ago USAtoday could report to the world that the Nobel Peace Prize winner and international symbol of freedom Nelson Mandela where flagged on U.S. terrorist watch lists and therefore needed special permission to visit the USA. Now today the German newspaper Die Spiegel is reporting that finally both Nelson Mandela and the ANC (African National Congress) has been removed from the terrorist watch lists.

The funny part of this ridicules story is that the reason for having Mandela on the terror watch lists in the first place is because that in the 1970’s the ANC where classified as a terrorist organisation because they where spearheading the fight against apartheid. Because of the “good” relations between the former white government of South Africa and the United States, they just followed the apartheid regime, and classified the ANC as a terrorist organisation.

This for me is an elegant example on why governments should be extremely careful in there foreign policy. Because governments usual support whom ever is in power in a given nation, there are some exceptions of course but they are mostly rooted in ideology rather in reason. The former South African government had a clear incentive for calling the ANC a terrorist group because they where a treat against there control over the country. I am not going to speculate, on why the American government did as they did, but I suspect that one of the reasons where diamantes and natural resources.

This raises once more the question of what is a terrorist? Because it is commonly known that the American terrorist watch lists is unreliable. I wonder if it takes 63 days for a Nobel Peace Prize winner to get of the list, by law. How long, if possible, is it going to take for an ordinary citizen to get off?

I am going to the states in three weeks. Or I should rather say I hope…