Tales from the Lunatic Fringe

Posted by Andrew L. on 06.10.2009

Outside the mainstream, but coming from the maelstrom, it's a little column I like to call the Lunatic Fringe.

Greetings and salutations dear reader. I am your host, master of ceremonies, and all around wacky guy, Andrew. Answering Ashish's recent call for more commentators, bloggers, and/or whole unpaid slaves of his greatness, I have been deemed worthy of inflicting my views, keyboard cowboy-ness, and over the top vocabulary upon you, my soon to be infuriated, challenged, and hopefully thoughtful reader.

My goal with this column will be to present my take on the sociopolitical stories of the day. I will endeavor to accomplish this task by applying a fundamental and, hopefully, consistent set of principles to different topics. No matter what your political persuasion, I am certain you will find many things to agree with in my columns, and also many things that will hopefully anger you, cause you thought, and hopefully a fair degree of cognizant dissonance.

If you are conservative, you will find my principled defense of fundamental rights to be refreshing. However, you will also perhaps be challenged when I apply those same principles to the realm of personal choice and responsibility.

If you are a liberal, you will find my steadfast defense of social issues to be mostly in agreement with your own views. However, you will also find my application of the principles that lead me to defend the right to privacy, sexual orientation, and to ingest whatever substances we want, to the fundamental question of the role of government to be equally challenging.

If you are a libertarian, you will find most of my views to be in agreement with you. However, I will also challenge the basic assumptions of the role of the State and government. For I am a hardcore libertarian, and I border on the anarchist label. Specifically, the anarcho-capitalist point of view.

I welcome vigorous debate. I don't tolerate unfounded ad hominem attacks or other such immediate, unsupported nay-saying. Contrary to what you may assume, I do not criticize people for fundamental beliefs. However, I want reasoned, well thought out reasons for positions anyone may advance in opposition to my own. I have hard core liberals as friends; I have staunch conservatives as friends. I can be friends with both because we have distilled our disagreements to a set of fundamentals. If someone truly believes the world is flat, you cannot discuss anything else from this fundamental view. At some point you have to recognize that two people may see the world from fundamentally reasoned different points of view. It does not necessarily make a view valid, but it presupposes useful debate on a topic.

So put the ultra flame retardant suits on and lets gird for battle. For this is the Lunatic Fringe and your viewpoint will be challenged. (What? Too melodramatic?)