Be Seeing You (Robert Wright & Mickey Kaus)

[Don Zeko]

Originally Posted by Wonderment

I'm in a huury now so cannot answer fully, but I'll just say that people who develop strong pro-peace convictions early in their political lives are likely to sustain them till the day they die (except Christopher Hitchens). This has been my experience in living through Vietnam and all subsequent permutations of antiwar activism. It's a powerful conviction like anti-racism or anti-sexism. Eventually those kinds of core convictions change the world.

Well ok, I'll stipulate that people converted to pacifism by Ron Paul will remain pacifists indefinitely. How many people are converted, and how many of his supporters were already disaffected liberals/antiwar libertarians/pacifists? When will this actually effect policy? Your explanations of the beneficial effects of Paul's candidacy continue to sound like unfalsifiable happy talk to me, driven more by your frustration with Obama than by any rational appraisal of Paul as a candidate.