Sad News

Lee, the head libertarian-conservative blogger at Right-Thinking, has apparently passed away.

Like Harry Browne's death, this is sad news for all lovers of liberty. Right-Thinking was literally the first blog I ever read, and it was the blog that initially got me into politics. It was not only persuasive, but extremely entertaining and funny. Lee had an outrageously crude sense of humor, along with a passion for profanity that can hardly be matched.

The man was an atheist who constantly blasted creationists, Christians, Muslims, and just about every other religious group--usually in a hilarious, scathing fashion. He despised the Bible-thumping wing of the Republican Party, but also the political correctness of the Left. While he was not a Rothbardian in any sense of the word, he had a heavy libertarian bent to his thinking. His stances on just about everything (the war on drugs, gay marriage, assisted suicide, economic policy, etc) showed profound respect for individual liberty. He was an independent thinker (not a kool-aid drinker) who didn't have an ounce of respect for the Ann Coulters or Rick Santorums of the world.

After I converted to libertarianism, and then to radical libertarianism, I stopped reading Right-Thinking for quite a while. This was mostly due to the neoconservative stances on foreign policy. I felt Lee had a serious blind spot when it came to militarism, and that he was often very stubborn about it.

However, although it took him longer than me, Lee eventually became extremely critical of the Bush administration and the neocon establishment. He switched from the GOP to the Libertarian Party. He started to oppose the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's dangerous assault on our civil liberties. He gave the strongest arguments against torture that I've ever read, and lost a significant portion of his readers for it. In short, he became increasingly libertarian and radical as time went on.

Recently, he had been posting less and less at Right-Thinking, leaving it mostly to a handful of others with similar views (Hal_10000 and West Virginia Rebel). He began investing more time in his (non-political) blog about living in China--where he was transferred for work stuff. I never registered or posted any comments on his blogs, but was always happy to lurk.

None of this is meant to imply that Lee would approve of everything on this blog. But he was a wonderful human being and his death really, really sucks. An extremely sad day.