re: #201 CuriousLurker

I was having pretty much the same series of thoughts earlier: Free market! No government regulation! Information wants to be free! We want Google to be bound by the rules we dictate, and if they won’t do it voluntarily, then the… um… government*cough*or someone should intervene… and… um… force them to… uhhh…

When they talk about absolutes they sound stupid, like that woman in Delaware who ran for Congress, Christine Whatever-her-name-was saying she believed in telling the truth all the time, no matter what—so basically if the Nazis had come looking for Anne Frank and she knew her whereabouts, then she’d have to rat her out (unless God saved her).

O’Donnell—that was her name: Christine O’Donnell on human mice, lying to Nazis, and the women of Middle Earth When people talk about absolutes they sound stupid like her.

Yeah, it’s always a good source of amusement, hearing libertarians try to rationalize keeping government out of everything until they actually acknowledge that government serves a useful purpose. One of their usual favorites is to make a bunch of noise about “government only to protect rights,” but sometimes you can’t protect everybody’s rights without imposing limits. And they absolutely hate the idea of government setting limits, but at the same time will acknowledge that not everybody will personally agree to the same limits.