Libertarian Debunked

I venture into town on the occasional Wednesday (or sometimes Friday) to meet up with some buddies to have a little drink and talk a little treason.  Sitting at the outside tables on a recent evening, I spotted the ubiquitous Driving-While-Cell-Phoning motorist and made the usual comment, "Hey lady, hang up and drive your car".

My Libertarian friend contended that I sounded like "a typical Nanny-State Liberal who needs to tell everybody how to live their lives".  Something else came up and we didn't get into it, but I've been thinking about that for a while now.  His assertion that basically, I was butting in where I didn't belong is one of those great turnaround attacks that tend to stop debate, but here's the thing:  Isn't it really the case that the driver talking on the phone is the one forcing the rest of us to live by her standards?  Why do all the other drivers and bike riders and pedestrians have to accommodate her?  What's so special about her and what she has to do?  Why do all of us have to adjust and be a little extra cautious just because she has to "be in touch"?

If I'm a client or a colleague (eg) on the phone with her while she's driving, I know I'm not getting her full attention, and I think I deserve better.

If I'm her friend and I care about what happens to her, then I think I should tell her to hang up and I'll catch her later - or at least I should tell her to pull over for a bit so we can talk.  After all, there's a lot of boneheads on the roads these days who aren't paying as much attention to their driving because they're distracted by something like - I dunno - TALKING ON THE FUCKING PHONE!

Today's Point Rebuttal

Point: Don't blame the war on the warrior.

Rebuttal: What kind of a war ya gonna have if nobody shows up to fight?

Buh Bye, Newt

I'm gonna miss ol' Newt.  The guy's been a consistent source of entertainment, running the gamut of content from his deadpan "Yes" when asked if he was calling Willard a liar, to the way he projects himself into the future and talks about how all the numbers make it impossible for him not to get the nomination, or how we'll have a permanent moon base by the end of his 2nd term.  There's nobody more fun to watch - kinda like some kid on YouTube who does a ballstand when he tries to jump his bike off his mom's porch - it's a little retch-inducing, but I just can't turn away.

It's pretty easy to see why this guy gets 50 large for a speech.  It's a polished performance, and it doesn't matter that it's the classic sales-y yarn that any good huckster learns how to spin - if you do it right, you can get 'em to believe almost anything.  Just make sure you put plenty of plausible sounding goals together with some techno-jargon, place it all far enough in the "future" so the vision is a bit misty and soft-focus, but not so far as to be out of reach.

The message: "Newt has this vision because he's amazing.  I do not have this vision (because I am not amazing), so I need to work really hard to make up for not being amazing like him."

Translation: Newt has some ideas, but no fuckin' clue how to make any of it work, so I get to bust my ass to make it work for all of us.  I also get to pay him large sums of money for the privilege of working my ass off and making him rich, and while I get a little something in return, it'll only be enough to keep me interested, but not enough to make me independent of a guy like Newt, and never enough to be considered his equal."



One other quick note:  At about 16:30, Ol' Newt laments the nastiness of the tone of the rhetoric in congress.  I wonder how it got that way.

Huh?

I've been sifting thru a lot of YouTube stuff on god and religion lately, and sometimes these little tiffs pop up at the oddest times for the oddest reasons.  Here's a "report" on one of my recent faves.

Butter Up And Bend Over

You have to drill down and look deep to get the "whole story", but when it looks this kinda stark it's pretty clear just how fucked we are.

hat tip = TPM

The New Hoover

Vote Romney - 2 Escalades for every wife and an elevator in every garage.

From Prof Krugman via NYT

So, about that doctrine: appeals to the wonders of confidence are something Herbert Hoover would have found completely familiar — and faith in the confidence fairy has worked out about as well for modern Europe as it did for Hoover’s America. All around Europe’s periphery, from Spain to Latvia, austerity policies have produced Depression-level slumps and Depression-level unemployment; the confidence fairy is nowhere to be seen, not even in Britain, whose turn to austerity two years ago was greeted with loud hosannas by policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

Just A Thought

We keep hearing about what a horrible problem the National Debt is, but do we know for sure what all has contributed to it? Why is it such a huge number?

Obviously, there're plenty of factors, but I think we can identify 3 main things:
1) Direct Revenue Reduction - aka Tax Cuts
2) Recession - higher unemployment equals fewer tax payers equals lower tax collections
3) Wage Stagnation plus Speculation-Driven Inflation - a multiplier effect

But it seems like we never stop to consider what we've had to borrow in order to spend at least $2 Trillion on a couple of wars, plus an amount we don't even get to know about that's been sucked up by all the Black Ops / Homeland Security boondoggles over the last 10 years.  If you borrow $2 Trillion, you're gonna have to repay it to the tune of about $6 trillion when it's all over - if we get that far.

Anyway, here's a thought:  Let's call it "Bush's War Debts".  But only for a little while - just long enough to squeeze out all of the Sunshine Patriots like Cheney and Giuliani and Bolton, and anybody else who was married to the NeoCons' bullshit fantasies.

Pin the word "debt" to their lapels and let's see how long the rubes stay in line behind 'em.

After a while, it'll naturally evolve to The War Debt, and we might have a chance to get back to where we understand that we don't get to do anything without paying for it - sometimes in ways we hadn't anticipated.

The Greatest Scam

Religion tries to tell me that my life is meaningless without an AfterLife©, and then proceeds to tell me I can obtain this Heavenly Glory only if I believe in this or that brand of god.

Religion is a scam that gives you a disease, and then sells you a cure.

History New Found

"I join you therefore in sincere congratulations that this den of the priesthood is at length broken up, and that a protestant popedom is no longer to disgrace the American history and character." --Thomas Jefferson

From a site called Liars For Jesus, and a lady who knows her shit.



This David Barton guy is running a typical play from "conservatives".  Take a guy like Tommy Jeff, who practically personified The Enlightenment and who was pretty representative of The Founders' near-unanimous rejection of "princes and popes" - you take that guy and you turn him into something he's not, using revisionist bunkum and outright lies.

Today's Quote

A golden oldie:

"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."  --Steven Weinberg, quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999

Uh Oh

At least one headline writer at one media outlet has had a sudden attack of conscience or integrity or truth-telling - or something - I'm not sure we even have a word for it anymore.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Not to worry tho'.  I'm sure it was just a momentary lapse.  A little Paycheck Reduction Therapy should straighten that guy up and make sure he doesn't run the risk of becoming Fact Addicted or anything.

Today's Oxymoron

Cool Republican

Do you knuckleheads really think you have any chance to compete with this guy?

Atta Boy, Willard

Because it's just a universal absolute that their parents have all the money any kid will ever need to start a business or go to college or spend a coupla years in Europe or whatever.

The sense of entitlement on the part of way too many "conservatives" is like having a whole family of dead rotting rodents stuck in your wall space.

Push Button To Add Drama

What we really need is a Drama Removal tool - which, I think may actually be the point here.

Today's Pix

An Aha Moment

"Conservatives" will always argue against making any serious cuts in Defense Spending by trying to make it all about National Security.  They have to ignore the 6 million American jobs that are directly dependent on the Pentagon because of course, "gubmint don't create no jobs", so they have to rationalize the flat-out waste of things like F-22 and F-35, the B-1 and the B-2, and the maintenance of a Doomsday Capable nuclear arsenal etc etc etc.  Hey, ya just never know when them Rooskies might start feelin' peckish, so we need to be ready.

I have to admit, I've been a little reluctant to hack away at the military budget because of the those jobs.  I remember a few times when cutbacks put a lot of good people out of work and had a pretty bad ripple affect across the economy; and I remember thinking Reagan's huge deficits were OK because the gi-normous military buildup was really just a federal jobs program in disguise.

But guess what.  Turns out it was mostly bullshit.  Imagine that - somebody with a vested interest in keeping the money flowing telling me stories about jobs that weren't really true just to keep the money flowing.  Sometimes, my own ignorance and gullibility shocks even myself.

So here it is - a new look from The National Priorities Project, and The Project For Defense Alternatives

hat tip = Wonkette

Here's the PERI link

Here's the PDA link

Disclaimer: Everybody's playing an angle of some kind, but not all angles are equal.

Dots

There's a connection here that has everything to do with conducting ourselves in private in a way that makes our public lives worthy of whatever honor and respect we can reasonably expect from other people.  It's all about learning to live our lives without needing Jesus or a cop or our mommies looking over our shoulders the whole time.

From The Atlantic:

What Does It Take To Break The Athlete's Code Of Silence?

Rare is the sports scandal, whether it's blood doping on the Tour de France or Tiger's sex life, in which complicit silence does not lie at or near the heart of events. It played a key role in the NFL's Bountygate. And in last fall's nightmare at Penn State. If baseball's antisnitching poster boy is not Weaver, it's Greg Anderson, the longtime friend of and personal trainer for Barry Bonds. Anderson was willing to spend time behind bars rather than testify against his friend. The blind loyalty of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil can give lots of cover for doing evil.

-and-

Television News And Accountability

Part of this comes out of an old sense that the power of news media emanates from its unfailing accuracy. But given that no one ever is unfailingly accurate, and given that we now exist in a world where numerous sites are dedicated to pointing this out, it may well be smart to emphasize other values.

When wrestling with your conscience, it's important to remember that you need to lose once in a while.

Today's Pix

The Hand Of God

Communist My Ass

Mr Jefferson said some things that get clearer and wiser the more I revisit them.

"Every generation needs a new revolution."

-and-

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots."

We hear a lot about how China is this big and powerful and scary thing.  We also hear lots of criticism of China's "Communist System" and how these dirty commies may be doin' great capitalistic things, but they're still just a buncha dirty commies blah blah blah - well, they aren't really.  At least not completely.  Not when there's a story about the grandson of one of China's old guard Party People, who's been hangin' like a rock star as he matriculates at Harvard, cuz suddenly it's kinda hard for me not to see it as another example of the amazing resilience of the very human propensity towards aristocracy.

From NYT:

One Chinese friend of mine was a judge in corruption cases, and made a good living taking bribes from defendants. Another friend, the son of a Politburo member, was paid several hundred thousand dollars a year simply to lend his name to a real estate company.

Officials have a maddening sense of entitlement. When I lived in China, my wife and I once attended a party with many middle-age officials (including one now in the Politburo) and a crowd of trophy female secretaries. One cabinet minister mistook my wife, who is Chinese-American, for a secretary and crassly made moves on her. Let’s just say that my wife ruined his evening.

The scale of corruption has become mind-boggling. Zhang Shuguang, a railways official,managed to steal $2.8 billion and move it overseas, the state news media have reported. A Chinese central bank report suggested that 18,000 corrupt officials had fled China and taken $120 billion with them. The average take was almost $7 million per person.

The backdrop is the staggering wealth enjoyed by the elite. More than 300 million Chinese lack access to safe water, but one tycoon’s home I visited had an indoor basketball court, a movie theater and a pond with rare fish worth up to tens of thousands of dollars each.

In Chinese, the words for power (“quan”) and money (“qian”) sound alike, and in China one often translates into another.

The Old Made New Again

Reading thru this today from The ArchDruid, via The Agonist:
(while trying to find a new way of saying "forget your history and you'll have to relive it")

The first of these shifts was the Great Depression or, more precisely, the feckless response of both American mainstream political parties to the economic collapse that followed the 1929 stock market crash. In the crucial first years after the crash, Democrats and Republicans alike embraced exactly the same policies they are embracing in today’s economic troubles, with exactly the same lack of success, and showed exactly the same unwillingness to abandon failed policies in the face of economic disaster. Then as now, the federal government launched a program to bail out big banks and corporations—it was called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in those days—and pumped dizzying amounts of money into the upper end of the economy in the belief, real or feigned, that the money would work its way down the pyramid, which of course it didn’t do. Then as now, politicians used the shibboleth of a balanced budget to demand austerity for everybody but the rich, and cut exactly those programs which could have helped families caught by hard times. Then as now, things got worse while the media insisted that they were getting better, and the mounting evidence that policies weren’t working was treated as proof that the same policies had to be pursued even more forcefully.

And then I had to go reread the Kipling piece:

The White Man's Burden --Rudyard Kipling, 1899

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!