Originally Posted by roachboy

this libertarian stuff gets old fast. no matter the issue, it's always the same silly binary between "the individual" and "society" or "government" or "the collective" as if john locke was not writing speculative fiction in the second treatise on government and was instead offering a coherent view of the origins of the social as a voluntary association of "individuals" who otherwise have no relations one to the other except mysteriously enough they are able to communicate and that means they use that collective dimensioning (*gasp*!) of experience that is language.
which must be in libertarianville like it was for william s burroughs, a virus from outer space.

enough. this loopy ayn rand stuff lets you say nothing---at all---about the actual topic of this thread, which concerns yet another bit of information that's surfaced concerning the extent of the bush administration's flaunting of law under the cover of the "war on terror"

which is not a matter of any general opposition between "the individual" and anything else, but rather a matter of a particular (conservative) administration undertaking a particular (conservative) view of foreign and domestic policy based on a particularly expansive (conservative) view of executive power which was enabled by that favorite of fascist and neo-fascist regimes (conservative) the world round, the state of emergency packaged for your pleasure as "the war on terror."

and it's about consequences for these political choices, whether there are or should be or will be any for the people inside that administration who were responsible for these choices.

which means its about the question of whether the american political system can self-correct as the edifice it's a part of continues its sliding away from being an imperial power thanks in large part to the consequences of the bush administration's (conservative) actions.

but i can sure see the appeal of trying to divert the thread into yet another rehashing of some ayn rand binary.

you can of course always start your own ayn rand threads in which important ayn rand-y topics are debated by people who can find it within themselves for whatever reason to take them seriously.