David McElroy

Since this site launched on May 13, we’ve now had visitors from 138 countries, which truly astounds me. I compiled a few stats about where everybody’s coming from and what they’re using to get here.

The 10 countries that are most heavily represented have been the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Germany, Italy, Spain, India, Finland and New Zealand. Just as an example, this is a map of the cities in the UK that have sent visitors.

The 10 most active U.S. states are Texas, California, New York, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington. On the flip side the states with the fewest visits have been Vermont, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Hawaii, Delaware, Alaska, Montana, Idaho and Rhode Island.

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Many people who’ve tried to organize libertarians or anarchists will tell you it’s like trying to herd cats. Sheep might blindly follow a leader, but cats all know what they want. It’s the same way with this crowd. Each one of us believes he knows everything — which is frustrating for those of us who really do know everything.

Yes, I’m kidding, but only a little. For those of us who want individual freedom, we’re frequently our own worst enemies. Even though we’re in a tiny minority — roughly 10 percent of the population — we’re so fragmented among ourselves that we seem to be even smaller minorities than we are. What’s even worse is that many of the people within the 10 percent do more shooting at each other than anyone else.

Part of the problem is that you can make so many (very different) rational arguments for how to pursue individual freedom. I’ve certainly run the gamut, so I’m familiar with most of them. You can make pragmatic arguments to get what you can through the existing system. You can make semi-pragmatic, but still principled arguments to try to transform the existing system through a third party. Or you can make principled philosophical arguments against the coercive state as a whole. Some people even combine bits and pieces of the different arguments. What they rarely do is overcome their differences in approach to work together for very long.

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Was Manssor Arbabsiar really part of an Iranian plot to murder the Saudi ambassador to the United States? Or is he a pawn in a scheme to drive the United States to war with Iran? Who do you believe when you don’t trust any of the people involved?

The man who the U.S. government accuses of being the ringleader of a bizarre Iranian plot to kill a diplomat has been a used car salesman in Texas for 25 years. He’s also a naturalized U.S. citizen, so he’s probably lucky the Obama administration didn’t just order him killed.

Although the U.S. government claims that Iran’s elite intelligence service was behind the plot, the facts coming out make it clear that it was amateur hour. Not only that, but some legal analysts are suggesting that a paid federal “confidential source” was actually the source of the plot and that the case against Arbabsiar is weak and might fall apart in court.

For their part, the Iranians say the accusation against their country is just a diversion to keep Americans from paying attention to their failing economy and protests on Wall Street. Although I don’t tend to believe much the Iranians say, their story might actually make more sense than the badly plotted spy comedy that the U.S. government is alleging as the work of terrorist masterminds.

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