Michael Wolff:has a really smart piece in The Guardian about the three show trials this year – each about the scandal du jour – cyberbullying of young people (Dharun Ravi); insider-trading (Rajat Gupta); and covering up adultery with campaign finance money (John Edwards). All three, he argues convincingly, demonstrate how the modern trial is more about the public and the jury’s inflated self-righteousness than it is about the facts in the case.

In fact, in all three, there was no real crime at stake.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t bad behavior. It just means the behavior didn’t warrant the full-blown media strobe lights and prosecutorial theatrics on display:

“Someone has to pay for being rich. (Likewise, of all the people committing adultery, someone has to occasionally pay for that, too.) In this case, the prosecutor has the further advantage that Rajat Gupta is accused of exchanging information with Raj Rajaratnam – and what does that tell you?

As for Dharun Ravi, the jury members seemed particularly gleeful in their jobs. Although nothing that Ravi did would have merited anything more than a ordinary college disciplinary proceedings (if that), were it not for the suicide that the prosecutors could not connect Ravi to, the jury nevertheless agreed that he could go to jail for a decade or more.

It took the New Jersey Middlesex Country judge, Glenn Berman, to restore, solomonically, some perspective. Judge Berman delivered the lecture that Ravi deserved, and then reduced his possible decade or more of incarceration to 30 days – in effect, tossing out the verdict and the point of the trial. Still, the prosecutors, you can figure, will not be chastened so much as galvanized by such judicial proportion.

And then, there is John Edwards. Is it possible to imagine a more preposterous prosecution? The money he used to hide his mistress was a “campaign contribution” because if voters had known he had a mistress, they surely would not have voted for him. There is something here as convoluted as the cause-and-effect chain in insider trading cases: everything that you know and are converges in a circumstance that is suspicious because it is advantageous (note: people who lose money on insider information are never prosecuted). Success is the crime. If he had been a less successful politician (and hence, less hypocritical), if he had been less self-dramatizing, if his wife had been less self-dramatizing, if his aide had been less self-dramatizing, it would have been just ordinary adultery – instead of campaign finance abuse adultery.

Would anyone argue that any of these cases would have been brought without the vast media attention that they have gotten? It is almost impossible to imagine what a jury would think, if it didn’t also understand that it was acting as the conscience of the world. If it just saw itself as an untangler and arbiter of fact, it might more reasonably pull up its nose and ask what it was doing here? I doubt any prosecutor could reasonably explain these cases – or would they even try? – if they were not inflated by social purpose and juiciness.

Trials have often existed in a tabloid world, but that is usually because they have showcased bloody dramas and primal human conflict. As the tabloid world has changed, becoming more about how men rise and fall, about who knows what about whom, and about whatever sanctimony is the flavor of the month, the great trials have, not coincidentally, become about that, too.””

One good thing to take from these three is that two of them, Edwards and Ravi, ended the right way, with the defendants winning. It shows that the legal system, even under the pressure of public opinion, can give the right answer.

Hopefully, the Gupta trial will end the same way.

It is a myth that crime is worse in the third world, compared to the US and other developed countries.

Corruption is rampant in Asia, but violent crime is actually low  in per capita terms (at the bottom of world rates), although it has to be said that reporting might not be as extensive in poor countries as it is in rich ones.  And in cities like Bombay (no Mumbai for me) and Delhi, it’s probably much, much higher, leading to the perception foreigners have of a seething cauldron of crime.

Still, it’s indisputable that the  highest rates for violent crimes, overall, are to be found outside Asia and the Middle East, in Africa and the New World, including the US.

The Middle East and most Muslim countries are  some of the safest places in the world, because street crime is simply not tolerated.

You don’t even get to take random photos of people. They have such a developed sense of privacy and such low tolerance for barbaric behavior on the streets.  So-called honor-killings just don’t occur at rates comparable to street crime in the US or South Africa or the Honduras, so, on the ground, where it matters, Islamic countries actually protect women better than most other countries.

Strikingly,  the highest levels of crime taken altogether are actually in the United States, mostly, it seems, the work of organized gangs.

Stories of slums and dacoits play well in the West, but relative to the enormous numbers of people in India, the actual crime rates aren’t anywhere as high as they are in, say, Colombia or even in the US.

EndOfTheAmericanDream lists some supporting statistics about American crime.

#1) The city of Detroit, Michigan literally looks like a war zone and violent crime is thriving.  So far this year in Detroit, car thefts are up 83%, robberies are up 50%, burglaries are up 20% and property destruction is up 42%.

#2) Lawmakers in Illinois say that violence has become so rampant in Chicago that the National Guard needs to be sent in.  In just one night last week seven people were killed and 18 were wounded – mostly by gunfire.  In fact, there have already been 113 murders in Chicago this year.

#3) The city of Phoenix, Arizona has become the car theft capital of the world as millions of illegal aliens who can’t get work have found that stealing cars can be very profitable indeed.

#4) There are approximately 12 million crimes committed in the United States every single year. That is by far the worst in the world.  No other nation has more than about 6 million reported crimes per year.

#5) In New York City, the number of homicides in the first quarter of the year had shot up by approximately 22 percent compared with 2009.

#6) U.S. prisons are already bursting at the seams.  As you read this, there are over 2.2 million people in prison in the United States.  In fact, America leads the world in the number of prisoners and in the percentage of the population in prison. The United States has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s incarcerated population.

#7) U.S. law enforcement authorities claim that there are now over 1 million members of criminal gangs inside the country. These 1 million gang members are responsible for up to 80% of the crimes committed in the United States each year.

#8) There are over 100,000 rapes in the United States every single year. That is the highest number for any of the countries in the United Nations.

#9) According to USA Today, 58% of state and local law enforcement agencies in the United States reported that violent criminal gangs were active in their areas in 2008.  That was up from 45% in 2004.

#10) Every year, one out of every five people is a victim of a crime in the United States.  No other nation on earth has a rate that is higher.

In twenty years living a relatively sheltered life in mostly safe neighborhoods in the US, I’ve had, two break-ins, in which my things were stolen; I’ve been physically accosted on the road three times, and assaulted more than once;  I’ve been the victim of a rental scam.  I’ve had jewelry stolen twice, once by visitors. I’ve been cheated several times by merchants. I was the target of a dating scam. I was accosted by a sexual pervert. My computer’s been hacked and my telephone conversations monitored over months, maybe even a year.  I was the victim of serious medical malpractice twice. I suffered intellectual property theft/misattribution several times. My car was stolen the glove box rifled through twice. I’ve been the victim of a hit-and-run driver. I was sued indirectly twice (unsuccessfully). I’ve been threatened/intimidated more than once and been discriminated against illegally dozens of times. I was slandered  and harassed in the workplace once and was extorted twice. I’ve been libeled on the web scores of times. I was even subjected to false charges once….

It might be as bad in India. I don’t know. But when I lived there, life felt a lot more secure. Difficult and restricted in many ways. And I do recall eve-teasing  in the form of occasional pinching and prodding of us girls on buses.  Some minor short-changing in the shops.

But I don’t recall violence. I don’t recall theft.

But then again, I was one of “us” there.  Here, I’m one of “them”.

SOURCES: UNICRI (United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute). 2002. Correspondence on data on crime victims. March. Turin; UN International Crime Victims’ Survey; Transparency International; The Eighth United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (2002) (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Centre for International Crime Prevention); Amnesty International; Wikipedia: Gun violence ; The Eighth United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (2002) (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Centre for International Crime Prevention); World Health Organization: World report on violence and health, 2002; International Centre for Prison Studies – World Prison Brief; Fifth Annual BSA and IDC Global Software Piracy Study; GECD Society at a Glance 2001, Statistical Annex Table D3

North America > United States > Crime

Assault victims                                   1.2% [11th of 20]

Believe in police efficiency                   89% [1st of 17]

Bribe payers index                                6.2 [9th of 19]

Car thefts                                   1,246,096 [1st of 46]

Drug offences                            560.1 per 100,000 people [4th of 46]

Executions 42 executions           [5th of 22]

Gun violence > Homicides > % homicides with firearms        39.5604 [7th of 32]

Gun violence > Homicides > Overall homicide rate > per 100,000 pop. 9.1  [14th of 32]

Jails 1,558    [5th of 80]

Murders committed by youths 8,226    [3rd of 73]

Murders with firearms 9,369   [1st of 36]

Perception of safety > Walking in dark 82%   [2nd of 15]

Prisoners 2,019,234 prisoners   [1st of 168]

Prisoners > Per capita 715 per 100,000 people   [1st of 164]

Rape victims 0.4%    [13th of 20]

Software piracy rate 20%    [107th of 107]

Suicide rates in ages 15-24 13.7 per 100,000 people   [7th of 17]

Suicide rates in ages 25-34 15.3 per 100,000 people   [10th of 17]

Total crime victims 21.1%   [15th of 20]

Total crimes 11,877,218    [1st of 50]

Rand Paul’s recent endorsement of Mitt Romney has put the Paulbots into a tizzy, poor souls.

They should have seen it coming.

Not only was it quite obvious that Rand was a neocon and a corporatist,  it’s also pretty clear that his father, although a more likeable and principled man, has been hitting everyone BUT Romney in his campaign.

Mark Ames of eXiled magazine, whom I’ve criticized for really vicious personal attacks, isn’t wrong  when he writes about Paul’s peculiar softness on Romney. I’ve pointed this out myself on in the comment section of Economic Policy Journal.com. And  I think Ann Coulter has also made similar points.

The end result of Paul’s campaign has been to line up Romney (Mr. Wall Street) against Obama (Mr. Main Street)….which suits the globalists fine.

Romney gets the nomination and the Dems get the target they want in a time of recession and Wall Street insider trading scandals.

My gut has been telling me for some time that the whole Ron Paul/Mises/Agora/extreme anti-government wing of libertarianism is peculiar.

It’s strikingly dominated/ by Zionist  (North, Block/Schiff) intellectuals and businessmen (with plenty of Gentile faces out front, of course, to keep the rube patriot crowd happy). Note: there are many good guys in that group. This is just my perception of the overall direction of its advocacy.

It’s easy to check out on the web. Just google and pay no attention to cries of “anti-semitism” and “conspiracy theory” – follow the facts where they lead.

Then, there’s the campaign and manager Jesse Benton’s stunt of wrapping Ron Paul in Reagan’s mantle. That was a move that nobody really scrupulous would have made.

Paul repudiated Reaganism.  He shouldn’t then try to cash in on his association.

Altogether too slick for my taste.

Then there was that double-billing for air travel that went on for years.

Minor…probably accidental, sure…. but troubling.

And then there’s this, also from Ames.

Ames finds it suspicious that there’s a Paul SuperPac in Utah that seems to have been founded by a business partner of governor Jon Huntsman’s:

“Huntsman endorsed Mitt Romney when he bowed out of the race—in fact, Huntsman has a history of stepping aside for Mitt Romney and playing his second banana, going back at least to the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, which John’s billionaire dad helped to fund on behalf of Mitt Romney.

So to repeat: Ron Paul’s SuperPAC is based in Salt Lake City, and one of the founders is Ladd Christensen, John Huntsman’s business partner in Huntsman-Christensen and Huntsman Chemicals.

Nothing to see here folks, keep moving along…”

Huntsman, in case you didn’t know it, was the choice of Lynn Rothschild.

I’ll leave it at that.  Might be something there. Might not.

Lots of people found firms in Utah.  It’s a popular incorporation state for some things.

Back to the Rand Paul endorsement (?):

Have to say the Paulbots had it coming. They were acting just like the left, swarming on people on the net with absurd denunciations,  excommunications, and inquisitions, rantin’ and ravin’ like some hick Bible-thumper with the heathen.

So,  suck it up, fellas.  Idolatry ain’t libertarian….or Christian.

And it sure ain’t smart.

An interesting new bill aims to cut down anonymous trolls on the net.

“A new bill in Albany has its sights set on anonymous internet trolls. The Internet Protection Act would require sites to have online commenters identify themselves.

The Act, sponsored by Assemblyman Dean Murray (R-East Patchogue) and Senator Thomas O’Mara (R-Big Flats), would require New York-based websites to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.”

(Gawker be warned.)

I dare say it won’t pass constitutional tests, but there may be good reason to raise the issue and hope for a constitutional amendment that would allow free speech protections to be applied more selectively to genuine political criticism or public interest commentary.

The hope is instead to hamper speech that is injury, defamation, false light or cyber-bullying.

While SOPA (like the NDAA) was written too broadly,  that doesn’t mean more thoughtful approaches to delimiting free speech in the public sphere should not be tried.

This bill comes at the same time that Preet Bharara, US Atty for the Southern Dt Of New York, penned an article about the growing menace of cybercrime in the NY Times – cybergeddon, he calls it.

I’m not sure what his motives are in labeling it thus, but he’s not wrong about the extent of cyber crime, from hacking to bullying.

It’s all very well to argue for counter-speech as the only remedy for defamatory speech on the net (the default libertarian position).

That argument leaves the net wide open to the most powerful media monopolies and networks joining forces to squash legitimate criticism from lone individuals, while allowing the monopolies the ability to amplify their own slanders and lies.

The playing field hasn’t been leveled by the internet, as some mistakenly believe. The internet actually empowers the criminal and the corporate racketeer (do I repeat myself) to a far greater degree than it does legitimate journalists or commentators.

As for the “chilling effect” of restrictions on anonymous speech  – bunkum.

With all the free speech available in the US,  with all the freedom afforded anyone  to write the most vulgar, false trash about anyone, did the mainstream media get to any important stories in time? No.

Were the people who got to those stories hiding behind anonymous handles? No.

Did the stories involve crude personal attacks and name-calling? No.

Most of the big stories were broken by responsible journalists writing openly (both in the mainstream and in the alternative press –  for example, the excellent, “Den of Thieves” written decades ago)… or they were disclosed by whistle-blowers using their own names.

The Enron story, it is true, was broken open because of  short-seller analysis.

Fair enough, if the analysis was done legally. My point is not to say short-sellers aren’t god’s children. It’s to say that it’s not necessary to break the law if you’re a good analyst.

No need for hacking, espionage or theft or abuse.

Correction: Enron actually confirms my thesis. Jonathan Weil, an excellent reporter, is the one who broke the story. All Chanos did was use his research to trade. Big effin’ deal.

Besides,  a smarter analysis of the Enron story is not that short-sellers got to it before anyone else, because they were pursuing their own self-interest (journalists pursue their own self-interest too).

The smarter analysis is this:  Were journalists actually doing their job and not under the corrupt influence of  money (activist hedge-funds paying them off for negative stories and managers paying them off for positive ones), they would have figured out what was going on a long time before.

The whole leverage racket was laid out in detail in “Den of Thieves” long before Enron blew up.

The myth of the anonymous truth-teller is just that. One of those myths that have turned “free speech” into a tyranny of the mind, the very opposite of free speech.

That is what democracy tends to do. The demos are never smart enough to reason things out in any kind of nuanced way, so what starts out as a good idea turns into a slogan that is pushed so extremely it turns into the very opposite of itself.  It becomes a propaganda tool of corporations, states, and criminals…

There is room for anonymous criticism, but to pass muster it must be couched in reasonable language (i.e. the opposite of the filth purveyed by anonymous message board-bashers in the financial industry) and it must include some evidence.

All other forms of critical speech must be presumed to be false or baseless speculation and must be disallowed as potentially felonious.

Why should short-sellers and promoters not be held to the same professional standards applied to managers and employee?

I wouldn’t be sorry to see criminal sanctions against anonymous abuse, equal to the sanctions levied against the physical equivalent of the abuse.

Thus, IP theft should be treated like robbery; email hacking  of sensitive personal information or business information should be treated like breaking and entry; computer monitoring and surveillance should be treated like physical stalking; vulgar abuse of the kind doled out against women (Matt Taibbi, Daniel Loeb,  and a few others come to mind) should be treated like assault; posting of personal details (such as some of the stuff on Gawker) or hacked emails or private conversations should be treated as rape, voyeurism.

This is not delusion.

Decades of psychiatric and psychological research have shown that verbal abuse leaves greater damage than any physical abuse short of the most extreme. Women in domestic abuse cases have said the same thing. So have children who suffer emotional and verbal abuse, and so have victims of government torture.

Even the CIA has reached the same conclusion. That is the rationale behind “no touch” torture codified in the KUBARK manual, where psycho-sexual  and religious imagery is used to break down the sense of identity of the victim. It is real. It is traumatic. It is torture.

Free speech arguments meanwhile have lagged two centuries behind, beating the same tired drum of the “slippery slope” that ostensibly runs from kicking the pants of  the average net psychopath to the coming of the Fourth Reich.

Rubbish. The truth is exactly the opposite. It was the Nazis – like Julius Streicher – who used the most violent sexual and racial language to dehumanize the Jews and inflame the population.

Besides, to my mind, the Fourth Reich, or some version of it, is already here. This is it. This is how it operates. Through spying, blackmailing and pornographically violent abuse on the internet.

If you can’t see that, you are its tool or its victim.

The Nazis  of yesteryear live on in their new incarnation in the financial world today and in the media of the modern West.  Pornographic gossip sites, voice-mail hacking, cyber-stalking, blackmailing…what are these but the methods of Nazis? And this “freedom” is what the this government wants to export all over the world through its NGO mouth pieces.

This tyranny of porn abuse that keeps women out of political life, forces them out of the media,  harasses them in their business life, terrorizes them in their personal lives; that turn them into pieces of meat that can be hung out in public for any man to randomly spit on and abuse, prod and poke and jeer at.

This is what the West exports as its great emancipation of women, the centerpiece of its civil society.

This it exports to cultures far more protective of women and children than the West  has ever been. This it uses as its rationale to bomb and destroy countries.

This is the means by which cowardly hedge-fund managers, hiding behind anonymous handles and piles of ill-gotten cash, savage strangers with lies, squash subpoenas, silence whistle-blowers, and bend the terms of contracts to make a mockery of justice.

Except for one eccentric businessman I don’t see anyone else wise to what’s going on, or if wise to it, either brave enough or honest enough to take the part of the victims.

The crooks, like all crooks, have opted for the winning side, and the rest are silent.

Well, critics say, wouldn’t a new law also be subject to abuse?

Perhaps. But perhaps not, if it was written astutely.

It might instead be a help to victims of cyber-bullying and fraud who are struggling against the widespread misuse of free speech protections to commit criminal acts.

It all depends on how the new laws will be written.

It’s really  not a question of new laws at all, but a rethinking of the original laws and what they entail in the age of virtual reality, mind-control, trauma-based conditioning, mind-reading software, and psycho-sexual torture.

It is not a question of government versus the rest of us. With government directly  behind 40 percent of the economy and enmeshed in the other 60 percent, the government IS US. We are the government.

It is from “us” that politicians are drawn, media pundits are drawn, courts and corporations and armies are drawn.

Where is the bright line between businesses and government? I don’t see it. We all use Google, in bed with the CIA, we use the dollar, propped up by B52’s and napalm, by easy money and Fed policies.

We all fall silent when we should speak, speak half-truths when only the unvarnished truth will help,  or talk so much and with such forked tongues that our truths might as well be lies.

Speech and act are not as far apart as our current laws take them to be.  Holistic approaches to the human body that take into account the ancient Vedic sciences of energy (of which yoga is a part) demonstrate that the body is not only the physical body but also its emotional and energetic sheaths.

In fact, those energetic sheaths are much closer to ourselves than our physical bodies.

And injury to them is often more damaging and long-lasting than to the body.

Just read the comments and posts on forums and boards all over the net and ask yourself if public culture here isn’t criminal.

I don’t think the internet culture in India or anywhere else is nearly as bad, at least from the evidence of the comments.

It is the internet here in the US that is most awash with criminality. And it is here that the clamp-down should begin.

Exercise self-restraint, or restraint will be forced on you, one way or other

…that’s the way life seems to work.

Just a thought.

McKinsey is Ground Zero for outsourcing.

The Gupta trial is really a spectacle intended to appease the American masses.

That’s why the FBI is going after him on such a scale, with wire-taps spread out over years.

No doubt, if Gupta did betray corporate board confidences, that certainly wasn’t right and he should be reprimanded and fined, as warranted.

But this degree of attention and media hooplah has more to do with optics. The optics of diverting attention from the real perps.

This entails diverting attention away from the largely Anglo-Jewish ethnicity of the most egregious and important figures in the financial crisis and redirecting it to a non-white foreign group that is exceptionally successful and therefore likely to attract envy and hostility from the American working population. 

Affluent businessmen will also garner no sympathy from the left, which might otherwise side with a minority.

The trial also diverts attention from the origins of the  financial heist, mostly in the financial industry (Federal Reserve, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, hedge-funds), abetted by the incompetence of  the government (SEC and FBI) and the failure of the Wall Street media.

By focusing on McKinsey and making Goldman Sachs a witness for the prosecution, the government gets to rehabilitate Goldman, give Mr. Blankfein’s reputation a bit of a polish. cover up its own incompetence, and simultaneously rehabilitate the US media, which fell down on the job abysmally.

Most important of all, the trial re-frames the financial crisis and makes the kingpin of the outsourcing industry and its foreign chief the villain of the piece.

That plays nicely to nativist sentiment.

Some good points in this essay by Robert Locke in The American Conservative about the fatuity and insularity of the mutant species called American libertarianism.

My positions are much closer to the classical liberal, but, for a long time I believed I was one too.

Now, I don’t.

Whatever the merits of libertarianism in theory, in practice most American (and Indian) libertarians strike me as faddish, dogmatic, insular, shrill, and intellectually superficial.

And not a few of them here seem to be flim-flam men of various kinds. I can see why they would embrace a content-less notion of liberty.

And, I no longer think libertarian anti-war positions are really meaningful either. I think most of  that is  posturing, unlikely to have any impact and adopted solely for the sake of  popularity.

There are a few exceptions, like Justin Raimondo and the Independent Institute  left libertarians (Long, McElroy etc.), who are honorable sorts. Then there are a handful of (real) Christian libertarians.

But the common or garden financial world libertarian is a wretched fraud and fools no one but himself…maybe not even himself. Libertarianism  in the financial world is mostly an ideology that allows the  predominantly Jewish elites (assiduously supported by their Gentile chamchas) to excuse uncivilized and predatory behavior toward the community in which those elites derive their income, while simultaneously posing as victims.

Gentiles accept this kind of thing because they are relatively powerless.

The PC cries of anti-semitism are only meant to prevent the masses from recognizing, naming and fighting this kind of ethnic supremacist thinking, no different in its way, however offensive the comparison might sound, from Nazism.

And there are also a whole lot of corporate sociopaths who mouth libertarian slogans as an excuse for their aberrant behavior.

Meanwhile, where the fight has counted, even the honorable  libertarians have been AWOL, or busy defending various shady personalities, compromising themselves in the process.

“Libertarian naïveté extends to politics. They often confuse the absence of government impingement upon freedom with freedom as such. But without a sufficiently strong state, individual freedom falls prey to other more powerful individuals. A weak state and a freedom-respecting state are not the same thing, as shown by many a chaotic Third-World tyranny.

Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more.

This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should know better.”

One criticism of that last paragraph. Libertarianism is more a theory of how society is best ordered. It doesn’t set itself the task of choosing the individual ends each person pursues, i.e. how they will use freedom. Nor does it really say all choices are equal. It says all choices are equally valid choices. A different thing,

A more accurate criticism would be to point out that when all choices are allowed to be valid choices, it leaves open the possibility that some of the choices will end up destroying society as a whole.

A simple way to put it is this. Without a clear and correct idea of what is the good life, and without some restraints on individuality, preferably imposed by social codes and mores more than a proliferation of laws, libertarian societies will tend to move very quickly to totalitarianism.

That is precisely what has happened in the US, although observers keep trying to say the answer is “more liberty from government.” Yes, of course, government should be limited.

But before that can happen, we need something else. More self-restraint.

Can’t have one without the other. Or you get a criminal society. And a criminal society will always tend toward totalitarianism.

But you’ll never hear that from libertarians.

From Haindava Kerelam, a clever initiative aimed against Christian proselytizing, as well as against denunciations of Hinduism because of caste:

In an Agniveer sponsored event, 40 Christian families in Western UP reverted back to Vedic Hindu Dharma yesterday jettisoning fanatic belief that those who do not believe in some son of God would go to eternal Hell.

Of these 40 families, one member from each family will receive training as Purohit from Agniveer so that they become respected Brahmins and are able to conduct religious and social rituals. Also they would be able to conduct Vedic induction ritual for others. This is our way of slapping the faces of casteism and blind evangelization.