Hip-Hopping Hordes Send Tortoise Packing

I've always been a little embarrassed that Robert "Winning Through Intimidation" Ringer considers himself a libertarian, so it is with a light heart and a bounce in my step that I report that he has left the fold. Liberty, he writes, is "the noblest of all objectives," but it "often collides with the dominant aspect of secular life: reality."

And what realities have eroded Ringer's devotion to liberty? As you'd expect, 9/11 plays a role, but "aggression from brainwashed fanatics from other countries is not the most ominous threat to Western civilization. Far more threatening is the enemy from within. Or, more properly, the enemies from within." Among them: activist judges, Internet porn, violent video games, and the fact that Americans "are now willing to refer to 'rap' -- a savage wailing that extols, among other things, drugs, crime, and sexual exploitation of women -- as a form of music and thereby anoint it with an air of legitimacy."

Also on Ringer's website: his list of trite words and phrases, "in order from worst to least worst." Strangely absent from the list, but not from his farewell to libertarianism: "proactive," "fallacious underpinnings," "relativism," "anything-goes attitude," "History makes it clear," "the foundation of Western culture," and "the very heart and soul of Western civilization."

[Via Stephan Kinsella.]