Saturday, April 16, 2005

The Ward Watch

I find this guy fascinating, in a sort of, "rubbernecking horrific car accident" sort of way. A writer for the Weekly Standard spent a couple of days with him, and he tells us a lot about this crackpot, as well as those who admire him.

"He's fighting against terrorism," the other says. "We are destroying whole peoples, nearing levels of genocide, that's how bad the U.S. military is." The kids are excited, but are calmed down a bit when a cooler head interrupts. Daniel Burton-Rose, a guy with hoop earrings and an AK Press T-shirt, is sitting in a nearby chair, reading a book on Chinese medicine. He is himself the author of Confronting Capitalism, and when I carelessly identify him as an anarchist, he corrects me, saying he's an "anarcho-daoist." Clearly I've reached the rarefied strata where even people's shorthand IDs contain dialectical disputes.

To grossly dumb down Daniel's argument, which would take several pages to replicate, Churchill is precisely the galvanizing public intellectual the anti-globalization movement needs. For while many elements of the movement seem contradictory--the neo-Marxists agitating for a transformed and all-controlling state, the anarchists espousing the obliteration of the state altogether--all sides, including the boutique'ers in between, are unanimous on one tenet: America, as it's presently constituted, sucks.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/496cjzrn.asp

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