Liberty for all

“When I am old, I shall write criticism; that will console me, for I often choke with suppressed opinions.”

Gustave Flaubert in a letter to Georges Sand

I feel compelled to unburden myself on the topic of libertarianism.  There are all sorts of people who describe themselves as libertarians, and it’s hard to make sense of the mix.

• You have gun-obsessed Rambo-wannabees like the guy who created the picture here (Click on it to visit his blog if you have a robust tolerance for the way out!).
• There are folks like Clint Eastwood who once remarked, “My political philosophy is simple.  Everybody should leave everyone else alone.”  Yep, good one, Clint.  That’s a real roadmap for governing a modern industrial state of 300 million.
• There are those inpsired by the crackpot intellectual, Ayn Rand, who at least must be granted the credit for inventing a new literary genre, the philosophical soap opera.
• And then there are thoughtful people, like a fellow I work with, who are quite reasonable but seem to revel in the libertarian cachet of ornery contrarian thinking.

I often find myself in agreement with specific critiques of libertarians, whether they are left-libertarian nearly-anarchists or right-libertarian, free market ideologues.  In fact, many of the respectable, i.e., rational and scientific, critics of the global warming point of view (AGW) are, in fact, libertarians.  But, in the end, I find it to be a bizarre and utopian political philosophy that is in full denial of the facts of human history.  As a point of view that influences the political choices you make, yes, I can see that, but anything more…?  Closer to wacko.

For libertarians of all stripes, the state, um…I mean, THE STATE, is the greatest evil.  The state, and “collectivist” actions that seek to improve life, or enslave others.  I’m all against enslavement, but I rather like improving life, even if the agent is the evil state.  Libertarians would say that’s a Faustian bargain, bound to end in the Gulag or the death camps.

Why The State?  Why not money?  Isn’t that the root of all evil?  Or…language?  Without language, now state, no money!  It’s a rather simplistic point of view.  Are they realistic in their expectations of what would succeed the present situation of vigorousl state activity?  Do they care?  Do they want to revert to pre-industrial, geographically isolated “eco-regions?”  I dunno…

Sure, some state solutions fail.  Bureaucracies are cumbersome and can mutate into strange things that frustrate the very improvements they were created to bring about.  What else is new in this, the fallen state of mankind?

As a practical political philosophy, liberatarianism is pure hokum.  People advocating it are either naive or dishonest.  Naive if they believe that a general attempt to apply libertarian principles would result in anything other than the most powerful economic and political forces capturing the state and bending it towards their own ends, which is what they are always trying to do; or dishonest because they are part of those forces and they see libertarianism as a nifty way to pursue that goal under cover.  Mostly the former, I think, because corporate and political power has captured so much of state power today, that libertarianism is probably more of an annoyance than a help.

Does it get better than this?

Who better than MAD to satirize the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction, aka MAD?

Thanks so much to Doug and Scott of The Mad Cover site and The MAD Store for digging up this old favorite of mine!

Post-racial America

So, Rudy Giuliani was speaking to a gathering of orthodox Jews in Brooklyn and said that the city’s frightening, crime-ridden days could swiftly return if they don’t come out to vote and give the mayor [Bloomberg] a third term.  You all remember that pogrom in Crown Heights, when that…black guy…was mayor, right?  

Yesterday, Public Advocate-in-waiting Bill de Blasio said Giuliani’s comments verged on “race-baiting” and called on Bloomberg to disavow them to “show that he doesn’t buy into that kind of rhetoric.”

Instead, Bloomberg responded by invoking Detroit as an example of a city that went downhill and is “basically holding on for dear life.

The wrinkled white knight, former Mayor Ed Koch rode to his rescue.  “That isn’t racism, Detroit will never recover.  That’s a fact!” 

Yes, maybe so,  but what does it have to do with NYC? 

Uh…I hope that NYC doesn’t go the way of …Mali, or, uh…the Congo!  It could happen ya know.

Some girls like it like that…

Ex-Assemblyman Duvall says resignation not an admission of affairs

Former Assemblyman Mike Duvall officially gave up his seat Thursday as a recording of him describing graphic details of sexual trysts with two women continued to send shock waves through the Capitol.  But the married champion of family values insisted late Wednesday that his resignation is “no way an admission that I had an affair or affairs.”

“My offense was engaging in inappropriate story-telling, and I regret my language and choice of words,” he said in a statement posted to his campaign Web site Wednesday night. “The resulting media coverage was proving to be an unneeded distraction to my colleagues, and I resigned in the hope that my decision would allow them to return to the business of the state.”

Duvall’s decision to step down came shortly after two Southern California news outlets broadcast a tape of the Orange County Republican bragging to fellow Assemblyman Jeff Miller, R-Corona, about having sexual affairs with two women. The remarks were recorded by a microphone left on during a break in a July committee hearing.

Miller, who lets out an occasional laugh during the recorded conversation, said Thursday that he “wasn’t really paying attention” as Duvall boasted about his lover’s “eye-patch underwear” and his penchant for spanking her during sex.

So reads the news.  What more could I possilby add?

Duvall - Conservative Family Man

Moonshot

Yes, I remember the moon landing too.  I thought it was cool, but despite the fact that I loved building models of the rockets, watching them take off on TV, read endless sci-fi stories, and was truly fascinated by the idea of space travel, I found the event itself rather unexciting.  Uh, well, that’s me.

I find myself a little dismayed at much of the hoopla over the 40th.  There is much nostalgia, which I don’t share.  I try and avoid nostalgia, but, again, that’s me.  If people want to get dreamy over their bygone days, it’s not my business.

No, what dismays me, and also amuses me a bit, is the prevailing spirit of declinism. Everything’s just going to the dogs.  The country has just gone to hell.  We were so much stronger in the past.  Yada, yada, yada.  As if people haven’t been saying that since history was first written, and I mean that literally!

Two examples from Watts Up With That, a blog that I read because it is very informative about global warming, or the lack of it, but which has a wide audience among various right-leaning people with whom I probably agree on nothing at all except that the Kyoto Treaty is a bad idea.

For a moment, let’s take time to think about earlier generations:

Some of our grandparents lived through the advent of the first automobile, the first aircraft, World War 1, the Great Influenza Epidemic, the Great Depression, World War 2, the Korean conflict, and so on. Some of them even lived long enough to see the first man walk on the moon.

My grandparents and and my parents’ generation were sensible and strong. In comparison, recent generations have become weak and frivolous.

No offense to The Greatest Generation, but they also brought us The Great Depression, Jim Crow in abundance, lots of pollution, the Red Scare, prohibition, the Teapot Dome Scandal, Al Capone,  McCarthyism, and lots of other unsavory things.  I’m not sure what strength is shown by “living through the advent of the first automobile.”

Following, we have an example of what is sometimes called The Politics of Resentment, that fertile soil for all sorts of nasty political movements:

For All Mankind.
The documentary. [on the moon walk] Watch it and be proud.
Notice the great bold letters U S A as the behemoth Saturn V rocket lifts the best of this great country into the future.
Notice the very large US flags worn proudly on their space suits.
Ask yourself . . . .
Would this kind of unabashed visible pride in country be permitted today?
Ask yourself . . .
Would the words ‘men’ and ‘mankind’ left behind on the plaque be permitted in today’s PC world.?
Ask yourself . . .
Do we still have the right stuff?
If your response is a concerned furrowing of your brow I suspect you’re not alone.
My admiration for these men and the great country that made their success possible swells my heart to bursting.

People today wear flags on everything.  To be a government employee practically requires it.  How terrible if we went to Mars and left a plaque commemorating the “human race” instead of “mankind.” Yes, how terrible our fall has been.  Things change, isn’t that awful?

I wish we could return to The Golden Age, but unfortunately, according to the ancient Greeks, who lived when things were really good, it predated them by centuries, and was sometime during the late Stone Age or early Iron Age.  Have fun!

Oh, that stupid Bush!

Yes, I am getting a bit tired of all this Bush-bashing.  Frank Rich’s column in the NYTimes today is a good example.  I agree with everything in it, but really, what’s the point?  Here’s the opening, emphasis added:

WE like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.

Uh…I’m not sure I get the logic of that clever allusion to Hannah Arendt, but I”m sure Rich’s smart fans do.  Or think they do.  And his references to all of us leads to the old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto:  “What you mean “we” white-man?”  Behind it all, Rich is separating himself and reaping satisfaction with his “I told you so’s” heaped on the Republican right.

Well, if he is going to say “We like …,” he ought to face up to the unpleasant fact that we elected him.  Yes, even those of us who didn’t vote for him!  We live here.  We aren’t renouncing our citizenship.  It’s our country, our society, and it made a big mistake.  If you want to talk about our country in the collective, you have to own up to its failures, too.  It’s like being in a family – the sins of the wayward are, in some sense, your burden, if you are truly a family.

Intellectuals like to harbor the secret thought that if everyone were just smart enough to listen to them, the one’s who are really smart, everything would go fine, but it never works that way.  People are just too…well, let’s say it, dumb! (Or are they not dumb enough?)

Rich isn’t talking about all of us, he’s talking about himself and his friends.  I happen to agree with him completely, but those yahoos who supported Bush aren’t going away, and neither am I.  We’re just going to have to find a way to exist together.

2 + 2 = 5

Our Big Brother

Will I ever tire of citing George Orwell and his book, 1984?  As I like to say, “It’s always 1984 somewhere!”  Right now, it seems like it’s then right here in the USA.  In his book, Orwell has the Party functionaries say that if The Party says the laws of arithmetic are suspended, then 2 + 2 = 5 and that’s it.  Believe it or die!

George Romney told the RNC that we need “a party of big ideas, not Big Brother!”  This from a minion of the party that has implemented domestic surveillance and suspension of habeus corpus.

The Republican flunkeys, one after another, tell us that we should elect their man because “Washington is broken!”  Uh, yeh…YOU’VE been in charge for the last eight years.  No wonder it’s a mess!

Funny also that the bedrock American political culture, even at the RNC, seems to be Democratic:  references to profiles in courage (JFK), the glass ceiling being shattered by Hillary and Geraldine, calls to service (FDR)…etc.

Keep calm…

Did ya hear the one about the war hero?

Did John McCain listen in on Obama as he was interviewed?  He was not in the “cone of silence.”  His aid had this to say:

“The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,” Ms. Wallace said.

Get ready for more of the same.  I foresee something like this:

Mr/Ms fill in name stated that it was

choose one: [outrageous, scurrilous, sickening]

to imply that John McCain, a FORMER PRISONER OF WAR AND A WAR HERO had

choose one: [lied, failed to fully disclose the truth, made a mistake, mispoke, voted for something he now opposes, opposed something he now supports, accepted money from rich people, insulted anyone, etc.]

Electioneering Food for Thought

Some new statistics on the distribution of wealth in the USA.  I think those in my previous post on this topic are somewhat out of date.  As Lester Thurow pointed out years ago, 40% of the non-residential wealth (i.e., not your home values) is controlled by about 400 people and families in our democracy.  Lately, there has been a lot of huffing and puffing about the estate tax, known to Republican killjoys as the Death Tax.

Right now, the estate tax is on a downward path to zero, and then after 2010, it’s supposed to go back up to its original level.  This creates a rather queer situation for those deciding when they should kick off.  Aside from that, the idea that the estate tax is something that ordinary people have to be upset about is one of the more remarkable successes of Republican political propaganda.  

In 2006, about 23,000 tax returns kicked in the estate tax.  The top 5% of those estates held 40% of the wealth taxed.  (Forget about what wasn’t taxed!)  In other words, a restored estate tax would fall most heavily on those with more than $20 million.  That’s the target of the policy, not the small estate holders near the threshold of $1.5 million.  But no – give the feds a chance, and they’ll go after that fat middle, the $2-$5 million estates that comprise nearly 60%  of all taxable estates, but hold only 30% of the value.  Yes, that’s the conservative line.  We must protect the rights of the SUPER rich because WE will be next.  An interesting twist on an old idea…

Of course John Lennon had a nice twist on another old idea:  “You’re all fuckin’ peasants anyway…”

Tom Paine, Libertarian. NOT!

Poor Tom Paine! He was all for the French Revolution, and travelled to Paris to support it, but was nearly guillotined for his trouble! In his own land, with the post-revolution religious revival under way, he was reviled as a free-thinking atheist, though he was a Deist who denouced as wrongheaded those who denied the existence of a Supreme Creator (I beg to differ…) And today? He is the favorite of right wing libertarians, many of which can be found spouting off here and there around the Internet.

When I hear so-called “conservatives” say that they are against people being “forcibly taxed” to support things that some others have decided is a public good, I am reminded of Lenin’s characterization of anarchists as “infantile.” Not that I’m a Leninist, but he had a point – and these libertarians are similarly situated on the maturation-politico spectrum. In other words, like so many of us, they want something for nothing, though they will not admit it.

The excerpt below is from an essay Tom Paine wrote for the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1782. Would that it were read more widely by students of American politics and history (emphasis added):

It is a pity but some other word beside taxation had been devised for so noble and extraordinary an occasion, as the protection of liberty and the establishment of an independent world. We have given to a popular subject an unpopular name, and injured the service by a wrong assemblage of ideas. A man would be ashamed to be told that he signed a petition praying that he might pay less than his share of the public expense, or that those who had trusted the public might never receive their money; yet he does the same thing when petitions against taxation, and the only difference, that by taking shelter under the name, he seems to conceal the meanness he would otherwise blush at. Is it popular to pay our debts, to do justice, to defend an injured and insulted country, to protect the aged and the infant, and to give to Liberty a land to live in? then must taxation, as the means by which those things are to be done, be popular likewise.

…Why has the back country been ravaged by the repeated incursions of the enemy..but from the inability of the revenue to provide means for their protection? And yet the inhabitants of those countries were among the first to petition against taxation. In so doing, they eventually prayed for their own destruction, and, unhappily, for them, their prayer was answered. Their quota of taxes would have been trifling, compared with their losses, and, what is still worse, their domestic sorrows.

Buckley Encore

Why am I revisiting this post? There was an online column by Dick Cavett in the Times today, that describes his friendship with WFBuckley. I loved Cavett’s show as a kid, but his column makes him seem a bit of a shallow fawning admirer, much like David Brooks revealed himself to be in his memorial column. But then again, as Cavett makes clear, he wasn’t, as they say, a political person.

Among the many responses online to the column, some favorable, many savaging Buckley, was this absolute gem of a letter. (Emphasis added.) The no-nonsense description of class mentality is like a bolt from the blue! This is how things are. Take it from one who knows!

Consider Brooks’ comment that he wanted to be WFB in the light of this note – You?… a middle class Jew! This letter is a bit of straight talk from the social stratosphere, a realm that likes to stay out of the limelight as it pulls its strings. [For some statistics, visit The Super-Rich, The Plain Rich, The Poorest Rich..etc. a slightly loopy, but very informative website.] Brooks’ column brings to mind that wonderful scene in “Reversal of Fortune,” the movie about Desrshowitz’s defense of Claus von Bulow. When Claus wants to introduce his girlfriend to Dershowitz, she at first doesn’t recognize the name, then responds, “Oh, the Jew!”

Response No. 13 March 8th,2008

Hi Dick Cavett,

Unfortunately after all these years you have exposed yourself and your wife for the common people you are. That is not a bad thing. It is just a shame you spent so much of your life trying to hide the fact that you grew up with nothing, achieved something and eventually expected everything just because of whom you thought you had become rather than who you really are.

Bill Buckley was born into extreme privilege. He never had to work for anything and he knew it. His Mommy made sure of that. If it wasn’t for the privilege of his birth, he would have been just another drunk, drug addict without a high school education much less a college edu living on the street somewhere. Brains do not equate into educational equality. Money, privilege and connections do, not necessarily in that order. This is not rocket science. All people raised in my class know this. People like you and your wife do not know this simple fact. That’s why nothing ever changes.

You were not fortunate to know and think you were friends with Buckley. People in your class are never viewed as real friends in their, Buckley’s, class. (You know this, but you will always be in deep denial.)

Bill Buckley was fortunate to know you and your wife.

You will not understand this, but people in my class and Buckley’s do.

cby

— Posted by Catherine Brunson Young

A Memory of William F. Buckley

When I think of William F. Buckley Jr., I think of a piece he wrote for the New York Times Op-Ed page a few years ago on Darwin and “Intelligent Design.” (I cannot find the piece in the Times archive online, and I’d be grateful for a link. I know my memory of it is correct, because Buckley refers to the piece himself elsewhere.) In that piece, he reprised an argument that he had used before, and that has been popular with religious anti-evolution critics since Darwin first published his theory.

Simply stated, the argument is that organisms are too complex and perfectly suited to their environments to have evolved by random mutation. To bring this home, Buckley and others employ, with various degrees of derision and sarcasm, the reductio ad absurdum of the room with ten monkeys and ten typewriters on which they bang away happily, and randomly. Could we expect this monkey business to produce Shakepeare’s Hamlet? Well…since the play has a finite number of words, and since the number of possible combinations of the letters in the text of the play is finite, albeit unfathomably large, it is possible if there were enough time provided for the (immortal) simians to do their work. Now, Darwin shivered at the colossal lengths of time his evolutionary scheme required, but that was as nothing compared to the duration we are contemplating here! Intelligent Design triumphs?

Of course, the entire argument is based on a complete misunderstanding, a profound ignorance of what Darwin’s theory entails. Evolution is not a random process. Genetic mutations occur randomly, but their selection and propagation is based on their survival value for the organism. As Ernst Mayr says, it’s a two-step process: mutation, then selection. Sort of as if those tapping monkeys had an editor in the room looking at their output, saving the good scraps of random prose, and somehow feeding that back into the process. Except, of course, the “editor” in evolution is not intelligent or active, but only the blind, crushing, indifferent force of the environment that leads to the disappearance by death or disuse of most mutations.

This fundamental ignorance is how I recall Buckley. He was clever and genial, and ever willing to evade a hard question. When verbal puffery wouldn’t do, he would employ snide humor, innuendo, or sarcasm. He was serenely confident of his opinions, bigotted and otherwise, and acted as though it was bizarre that anyone would question them. When an interviewer asked him if he had felt isolated from “real life” as a young man – he was home schooled – he replied that no, of course not. After all, you don’t need to experience things to understand them. He read a lot. Yes, true, reading is wonderful. But only a blockhead or someone uninterested in testing their ideas would be so confident that there is nothing more to know.