11 February 2013

This is Your Moment of Schadenfreude

For the past 7 years, fans of the libertarian icon Congressman Ron Paul have run RonPaul.com, and now the batsh%$ insane iconoclastic politico has decided that he wants the domain.

So, is he offering to buy the site?  Nope, he is appealing to the United Nations to seize the domain:
Ron Paul is feuding with his rabid fan base over the ownership of RonPaul.com. Paul wants it, but his fans own it. They're willing to sell it to him... for a price Paul doesn't agree with. So now he's taken the dispute all the way to the United Nations.

………

The proprietors of RonPaul.com say they reached out to the retired politicain and offered him RonPaul.org as a free gift, but if he "insisted" on owning RonPaul.com then they would sell it to him. There was a catch, though. It would be part of a "liberty package" with the site's 170,000 person mailing list for... wait for it... $250,000. They think the price is totally worth it:
The value we put on the deal was $250k; we are getting our mailing list appraised right now but we are confident it is easily worth more than $250k all by itself. Claims that we tried to sell Ron Paul “his name” for $250k or even $800k are completely untrue, and there is little doubt that our mailing list would have enabled Ron Paul to raise several million dollars for the liberty movement this year. It would have been a win/win/win situation for everyone involved.
But Paul did not respond to their generous offer. Instead, he went to the United Nations' World Intellectual Property Organization to file a 13 page complaint asking for control of both domains. Oops! Paul's opting for legal action is notable because he's spoken out against the U.N. in the past. They generally aren't very popular among libertarians. They aren't so bad now that he wants control of his own name's website.
(Emphasis mine)

The United f%$#ing Nations????? Seriously?

I guess that it's Libertarianism for thee, and not for me.

I think that Ron Paul has officially entered into the world of the "leeches", as Ayn Rand would put it.

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