Madness

There is no freedom in being uncomfortable within your skin

It was only a matter of time before libertarianism jumped the shark.

The childishly optimistic sect of the liberty movement is moving past pot legalization and gay marriage. Their detente with liberals resulted in a massive culture victory. Pot and sodomy are de rigueur in mainstream American culture, whether you agree with them or not. Those troglodyte conservatives can wipe their tears with white flags!

The next fight for libertarians lies in the traditional gender spectrum. Not content to keep politics within politics, the loud-mouthed revolutionaries are moving into the messy world of transgenderism. This is a huge jump from the philosophy associated with Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek. Ayn Rand would be frowning in heaven if she didn’t think God put a damper on her ego trip.

In a recent Daily Beast column, Reason Magazine’s Nick Gillespie praises the latest American hero: Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner. Wait a second, you may say. Didn’t Jenner trounce the Soviets in the decathlon almost three decades ago?  Why is he now the latest emblem of liberation?

(more…)

Advertisements

The brown scare goes after libertarians, endorses throwing rocks at Pope Benedict

                                             Once more
My quondam dean in University Hall
Stands in the breach of peace, whence he will call
Down fire on the bald, woolly heads of all
Professors of the other point of view,
Who, flanked and enfiladed and too few,
Will soon throw down their dated arms of course,
And yield themselves to a superior force
Of well-drilled intellectual police,
Sworn on honor to enforce the peace.

— L.E. Sissman, “Peace Comes to Still River, Mass.”

I got in trouble on Twitter the other day, for quoting a post by Henry Dampier. Jesse Spafford, a writer who has contributed to the flagship magazine of Brooklyn leftism, the New Inquiry, says I shared “an essay lamenting that the Nazis lost WWII.” Readers can decide whether the following passage “laments” that:

Imagining that the Nazis won World War II is a popular jumping-off point for a lot of speculative fiction. The reader is supposed to feel glad that the Nazis did not in fact, win. Unfortunately, a more brutal, cruel, and anti-human government won World War II — the Soviet Union.

This is a heterodox version of the story, maybe, but not that controversial, and certainly not the exclusive domain of Nazi apologists.’Yalta could have gone better’ is a fairly well-accepted point of view. That Dampier quote is straight out of Pat Buchanan, though by no means confined to the populist corner of the right. Or even just the right. The independent left Tribune, of which George Orwell was literary editor, objected to the Yalta agreement. And here’s Dwight MacDonald in the 1952 debate with Norman Mailer at Mount Holyoke:

… the only historically real alternatives in 1939 were to back Hitler’s armies, to back the Allies’ armies, or to do nothing. But none of these alternatives promised any great benefit for mankind, and the one that finally triumphed has led simply to the replacing of the Nazi threat by the Communist threat, with the whole ghastly newsreel flickering through once more in a second showing.

Who knew MacDonald was a Nazi apologist? I’m sympathetic to Christopher Lasch’s criticism of him famously, and grudgingly, “choosing” the West, which he lodges in The New Radicalism in America, that “to “choose” between the two, however, was to assume that conflict between Russia and the West could not be avoided. If one assumed such a conflict, one had to choose — as most people had felt obliged to choose between Hitler and the West.”

At this point, I suppose it’s worth noting that by the standards of the anti-colonial style that dominates the left today, to “choose” the West at all is to side with a kind of fascism. You’d have to ask Spafford about that one, but it is at least clear that, to our Pomona philosophy graduate, it is impossible to think both that Nazis are bad and the post-World War II peace conceded far too much to the Soviet Union; the only person who could possibly think that is a Nazi apologist. It went on like this for a while before I blocked him and he tweeted about it.

I’d go so far as to say there’s one thing about about all of this that resembles the way the Stalinist left in America behaved after Operation Barbarossa, insinuating pacifists and Trotskyites were on Hitler’s payroll. In his tweet, Spafford cc’d Michael Goldfarb, the registered foreign agent and chairman of the Free Beacon, a neoconservative website that publishes unverified, fake propaganda from Senate offices intended to gin up the case for war in Ukraine. Spafford, a committed leftist, is not only aping Debbie Wasserman Schultz, but making common cause with neoconservatives to do so. This is interesting not just because the Free Beacon is staunchly pro-Israel (Spafford thinks Israel is fascist too). It also speaks to the idea that the neoconservative and left-wing narratives about World War II are roughly the same.

(more…)

Pete Davis on the West Wing mentality and how it’s ruined Washington’s Millennial politicos

Over on the porch:

The act of “engaging” with national politics has come to resemble more and more the act of watching The West Wing, as political media – from MSNBC to POLITICO – focuses in on the internal dramas of the Beltway kings’ courts. After you have watched all the episodes where Josh Lyman wheels and deals his way to another win, you can turn on the real news and watch talking heads discuss how Mitch McConnell’s or Valerie Jarrett’s next move might give their team a win, too. It’s no surprise that political statistician Nate Silver joined ESPN last year: his meteoric rise over the past elections was the final keystone in the complete ESPNification – with its wins and losses, points and scorecards – of American political journalism.

Viewing hundreds of millions of Americans who are not Washington insiders as useful only for votes and campaign donations is not an idiosyncrasy of Jim Messina and his fictional counterparts on The West Wing— it’s endemic to Beltway politicos. As Theda Skocpol pointed out in her wonderful book Democracy Diminished, we have moved from a “membership democracy” to a “management democracy” in the past century. A once-thriving national network of participatory federated societies – which involved routine local activities in small town chapters which cascaded bottom-up into member-driven state conventions and influential national offices – gave way to a politics where we send our checks in to D.C. managers, who engage in democracy for us. The West Wing will be a perfect historical artifact of this age of political management.

Go read the piece, it’s great.

An open letter to a budding terrorist

Dear Budding Terrorist,

Greetings. You don’t know me, although perhaps you might be inclined to think that you do, but I thought that I might do something different and break the ice. I understand how unsettling it is for an infidel or mindless sheep or collateral damage or whatever to make the first move, but relationships in violence don’t seem any more or less complicated than relationships in love. And seeing as how we’re basically going to be getting off on the wrong foot no matter how we carry ourselves, I hope you will permit my indulgence.

First I want to offer my most heartfelt congratulations. I mean that sincerely. You’ve found something to believe in; you’ve found something far larger than yourself, and to which you have submitted your whole being in order to be defined by it so totally that it almost obliterates everything you were up until that point. That is not an easy thing to do, I imagine; to wholly dedicate yourself to this or that creed, however abstract on its face, however diluted or manipulated by cleverer but still lesser minds. This is more than I can say for most people I know and love, and I am very close to respecting you far more than I do them. Speaking for myself, living in a fog of unbelief has proven satisfactory and securing in only the most superficial sense, like going into a vast wilderness with nothing but a sharpened tree branch.

That you found something, a proverbial light penetrating an otherwise total darkness, in other words, is great. I am happy for you. You want something better than what you have, and moreover you want it spread as far and wide as possible so that, I presume, it gives others the feeling that it gave you. It’s on this point that I’d like to offer some advice.

In setting about with persuading people of the superiority of your beliefs, it helps to have a sense of proportionality when doing so. I know that this seems rich coming from a citizen of the United States, a country that never knew a disproportion it didn’t like, but be assured that I speak to you as someone thoroughly fatigued by any and all disproportion, not only those inflicted against my fellow countrymen but those inflicted in our names against others wholly undeserving. To put it bluntly, I speak as someone who is tired of seeing people get killed. I’ve not seen very many compared to others, I admit, but I’ve seen enough at a reasonable enough distance to know that whatever good anyone thinks will come out of it just won’t.

Perhaps you’d think it out of line of me to presume that you’d kill anybody. Perhaps you’re convinced that people you seek to persuade will very clearly see the very same light you saw and fall in line with no bloodshed or other force necessary. I think you and I both know that that is the highest order of bullshit. Whatever the content of your belief, your fervor will be stoked so early and often that it may well eclipse the former. It will very likely be stoked by people who casually disregard your worldview. It will certainly be stoked by people who willfully disregard it, indeed, who disregard it with vulgarity and vehemence, with insensitivity and antipathy. Perhaps they do not seek to harm you personally, but you may feel wounded all the same. How dare they persist in flouting The Truth? How dare they belittle and ridicule that to which you’ve so dedicated your time and energy? These people are beyond persuasion, you’ll conclude, they are beyond redemption, and so making an example of them will surely make more sense to you. Against vile words and images you’ll take action and your point will be made.

Even if you haven’t made up your mind on that point, I offer only this suggestion: don’t. Don’t make an example out of anyone for expressing this or that crude criticism. Don’t threaten and don’t kill, if not for the sake of your victims then at least for the sake of yourself and whose name under which you do it. It will not only fail, it will elicit negative results. Your cause, for one, will be regarded outwardly as unjust, even malignant if it isn’t already, but more crucially your actions will be responded to, and likely overtaken, by the very sentiment you hoped to stifle. Your vulgar, locally renowned target will go national, even international; its subversive infamy will be imbued with an almost knightly heroism. Innumerable people of all stripes, of all backgrounds and views, will go out, into the cold if necessary, to express solidarity with it and defend its right to be as vile as it wishes.

It’s perverse, really, that it would take you killing someone to remind everyone else of freedom’s presence. Freedom, don’t get me wrong, is every bit as abstract as the ideas to which you’ve clung, hell it might even be more so, yet therein lies its power. You come to us with a mind to impose rigidity and obedience, perhaps more than was intended at that, or worse if we refuse; freedom imposes generosity and presupposes at least some dignity in pretty much everybody. To some it is granted far more easily than others; it was to me and I’d hazard a guess that it was almost equally as much to you. I feel sorry for people who don’t quite grasp that feeling, but in the end there’s only so much time to give to people like you and me when there are others under more trying circumstances and with some responsibility for them attached to us.

You and I are not really all that impressive, valuable or memorable in the grand scheme of things. Maybe we should just be friends.

Sincerely,

Chris

(Image source)

How sad it must be to be angry all the time

Well I didn’t call it.

The perpetually indignated lefties at Slate have declared 2014 “The Year of Outrage.” They aren’t wrong; and it’s more than a bit ironic the writers making the claim are also responsible for the madness that now defines the internet news cycle. A handful of the site’s reporters weighed in on the outrage phenomenon, some admirably taking responsibility for it. Jordan Weissmann, to his credit, lamented the “impulse to jump on the outrage cycle” and drive traffic to small pieces of life’s innumerable injustices. He defends the practice however, saying “viral hits help finance other less outraged, more important journalism.” Yes and drug-dealing can also be used to fund soup kitchen operations. The latter doesn’t make the former any less immoral.

Betsy Woodruff does a decent job highlighting the more embarrassing attempts to use outrage machinations by conservatives. But even while well-meaning voices on the right are apt to use harsh-worded demonization, the kind of determined vitriol progressives embrace is another matter altogether. For the left, outrage is a lifestyle instead of a seldom-felt emotion.

(more…)

Sorry to hear that, but let’s remember that I’m the real victim here

Words are useful insofar as they have publicly agreed upon definitions. From definitions, we can have discourse that leads to some sort of useful truth. But what happens when the meat and potatoes of a discourse is made up of terms that have a powerful connotation, but no precise definition? You get people talking past each other in a fog of emotion and cognitive bias.

Slate Star Codex started the new year with a very long but very important post on the a specific expression of feminism’s contempt for nerdy men. It concerns an MIT professor, Scott Aaronson, opening up about being tormented throughout his adolescence by crippling self-hatred issues.

(sigh) Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. You can call that my personal psychological problem if you want, but it was strongly reinforced by everything I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.

My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did. Anything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.

Of course, I was smart enough to realize that maybe this was silly, maybe I was overanalyzing things. So I scoured the feminist literature for any statement to the effect that my fears were as silly as I hoped they were. But I didn’t find any. On the contrary: I found reams of text about how even the most ordinary male/female interactions are filled with “microaggressions,” and how even the most “enlightened” males—especially the most “enlightened” males, in fact—are filled with hidden entitlement and privilege and a propensity to sexual violence that could burst forth at any moment.

Aaronson goes on to explain that he was so tormented that he’s tried to castrate and kill himself. So what useful truth to feminists have for him? It’s made clear that he needs to recognize that his misery is necessarily of a lower grade than what women feel. Women are oppressed and men are not, so no matter how bad he feels, it’s never oppression-grade bad, whatever that means. Secondly, we are to believe that his own assessment that feminism made him feel the way he did is wrong, and that It’s actually the patriarchy. For whatever reason, whenever gender is part of the story, the focus has to be on women.

The best example of this is an article posted on the New Statesman. Laurie Penny wrote an article explaining Aaronson’s folly for him, titled “On Nerd Entitlement.” Jesus Christ, we’re off to a bad start. I am going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that the tears shed for him were not of the Crocodile variety, but they sort of look that way. She is, intentionally or not, using one man’s heartfelt expression of suffering to make it about her. His painful collision with the diktats of a powerful cultural force was made into a passion play about about how that very same cultural force is the medicine that he needs to learn to learn to like. The problem I have with this way of approaching the issue isn’t that it’s mean, it’s that it presumes that all of society has taken certain vague concepts as gospel.

By using the loaded terms “patriarchy” and “oppression,” feminists are begging the question that these things actually exist in line with their definition. The fact is that those are both controversial and non-falsifiable concepts. There’s a few things that, if they are actually interested in a discourse, feminists need to establish.

(more…)