The problem with TNR’s Pope Francis cover story

Here’s a very long piece at the Daily Caller disputing points factual and theological:

As a “vertically integrated digital media company,” the investment fund known as the New Republic still produces dead-tree editions to keep up appearances. Once the flagship magazine of American liberals — the white ones, anyway — it also must keep up appearances in an ideological sense despite the billionaire CEO Chris Hughes, the spouse of a failed Democratic congressional candidate, taking the company in a more capitalistic direction. For example, the cover story in this month’s issue is a tissue of misrepresentations by a self-styled Christian socialist about conservative and traditional Catholics.

Read the whole thing here.

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Death and taxes

I violate the libertarian code by calling for a war tax in my latest piece for Taki’s Mag. Here is an excerpt:

“What is taxation but theft on a gigantic, unchecked, scale?”

Murray Rothbard’s question doesn’t have an answer. The coercive taking of money is theft. No exceptions. Mental masturbation on the “social contract” or necessities of public action don’t eliminate that fact. The duties and obligations of society shouldn’t translate into pickpocketing folks to pay for a myriad of welfare goods.

That said, I’m ready to do the philosophically impossible: compromise. Call me a squish; I’ll own it. But the matter is of high importance. Bickering over marginal tax rates is a debate for DC talking heads. I’m talking about the most important topic: war. It’s a topic of such importance that serious folks in the news glide over it like it were a peaceful outing in the country. Americans treat war as a state of being. We’re stuck with it, we’re told, because danger lurks behind every corner.

If that’s the case – and it very well is – then I propose an unorthodox idea: let’s pay for war. I don’t mean rack up deficits and debt to foot the bill now. I mean have an actual tax that pays for sending soldiers and weapons over to foreign lands. Whether it be a tax on income or the final sale of goods is no matter. Tax, baby, tax!

Read the whole thing here.

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stocks

A response to Nick Ford: get off your high horse bro

By golly, I’ve stumbled upon another reason libertarians will never win: the complete absence of a sense of humor.

“It’s happening” gifs notwithstanding, the liberty movement can’t take a joke. I write one measly piece poking fun at a silly idea, and suddenly I’m a monster. Go figure. I’ve been through this crapshoot before, but the game is getting old.

Here’s what I’m talking about: my recent article on the anti-work crusade has engendered an interesting response from the target of ridicule, Mr. Nick Ford. This wasn’t your typical internet rebuttal. Rather, it was a “meta” rejoinder that focused on the style of my argument rather than the substance. For that, I say, “good job Mr. Ford.” The nature of debate is a topic seldom discussed today. Liberals too often wax and pamper their own victim status, while conservatives cherish their fatalism — a flaw I’m certainly guilty of.

Ford contends that my entire takedown of his philosophy is compromised by not fully understanding his view. He claims my critique “isn’t much of a critique at all.” I made the mistake of going off “on tangents” and brought up “irrelevant” points in “pretty noxious ways.” To Ford, I committed the great crime of not being “familiar” with my subject. Clearly, I deserve a good stint in the stocks!

Jokes aside, do Ford’s accusations have any merit?

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Barron’s AP test prep book butchers the French Revolution

The following guest post is by William J. Upton

The Daily Caller’s Eric Owens has an interesting piece up on a bizarre section in Barron’s AP European History (a study guide aimed at preparing high school students for the Advanced Placement European History exam – a test that could earn them college course credit). The guide provides a chart that details the political factions and ideologies behind the French Revolution – Owens ran with the bizarre conflation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the Ku Klux Klan as the “Reactionary/Fascist” forces (more on the use of “fascism” later). As outrageous as that is – and it is definitely outrageous – the real lede is buried completely. If you look at the chart, it gets pretty much nothing right.

I present, how Barron’s sees the French Revolution: IMG_0982
Photo Credit: The Daily Caller 

Let’s begin from left to right on their “Political Spectrum.” The sans-culottes are placed somewhat reasonably – though the chart misspells the term as “Sams Culottes,” like a Sam’s Club but for pants only). Here, though, it would also be appropriate to note that the sans-culottes were less of a mob and more along the lines of a motley group of radicalized laborers who became militant partisans during the Revolution. They weren’t so much “Communist” as they were radical democrats and republicans spurred on by anarchist factions like the Enragés and anti-Christian/terrorist factions like the Hébertists. The inclusion of the Enragés and Hébertists would have given some perspective into the radical nature of the far-left drive of the revolution.

As you begin to move to right from the sans-culottes, the chart becomes a mess of inaccuracy. The Montagnards weren’t just some “leftist” group that wanted to “regulate banks and corporations.” Led by Maximilien Robespierre, the Montagnards held down the far left of the Legislative Assembly. Their political rivals – only slightly to their right in terms of ideology – were the Girondists (not the Girendists as Barron’s spells it). The Girondists, as with the Montagnards, were anti-monarchy. The key difference between the two factions, however was over the general course of the revolution. The Girondists were killed in mass executions during the Reign of Terror in which the radical-Jacobin Montagnards and Hébertists hunted down and murdered their political rivals. The Barron’s chart bizarrely insinuates that the Jacobins were anywhere from leftist to moderate/centrist – a laughable designation when you take into consideration that the chart has the Girondists to the right of the Feuillants.

The Feuillants were a faction in the Legislative Assembly who broke with the more left-wing Jacobins over what form of government France would take. While the radical Jacobins wished for a republican or democratic form of government, the Feuillants pushed for a constitutional monarchy – rejecting the more radical Jacobin propositions. As mentioned above, the ideological beliefs of the Feuillants should see them placed to the right of the Girondists as the Feuillants were far more “conservative.”

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“That’s gross,” and other hedonic considerations

You may be familiar with Truffaut’s famous quote, “there’s no such thing as an anti-war film,” which captures the quandry of inadvertently glorifying war by giving it a cinematic representation. I think this is quote is better rendered the more general a “there is no such thing as an anti-hedonistic film.” Or at least it’s really hard. Cinema is an engaging sensory experience, and good and bad are most easily expressed through an engagement of appreciation or an engagement of revulsion. This convention obviously extends beyond movies and into media like books, and it was in fact a book that I read recently that got me thinking about this whole thing.

For anyone who thinks I don’t give feminism a fair shake, I will have you know that I’ve read the radical feminist sci-fi novel Woman on the Edge of Time. On a related note, I have black friends. Anyway, the short of it is that in the novel there’s two potential futures presented to the 1970’s present-day heroine. The first is a Marxist pastoral “utopia” in which gender has been essentially been abolished through Brave New World-like biotechnology. Pretty creepy, but that’s a discussion for another article.

The second future is a hellish capitalist dystopia, where most people are part of a slave-like underclass that are little more than walking organ banks for the rich elite. Women are, of course, particularly oppressed, being kept as ignoramuses who are only valued for their appearance – they are surgically modified to have grotesquely exaggerated sexual characteristics. The grotesqueness is really driven home to let the reader feel just how bad this potential future really is.

Is sickening excess the logical consequence of our unchained material appetites? Of course it isn’t – actual hedonism, by definition, always finds the sweet spot. Excess is, by definition, anti-hedonic. Intentionally eating so much cake to become nauseous isn’t something that people do. Similarly, people find cartoonishly enhanced women revolting; if they didn’t, the author wouldn’t be able to use such a thing as a cautionary tale to scare the reader straight. Showing good or bad in terms of the hedonic calculus is easy, but you can’t have it as both terrifyingly revolting and believably alluring.

Perhaps it is, then, a cautionary tale against changing social norms of the grotesque? Even so, we would need to establish a moral standard outside of “appreciation vs. revulsion” to say that this change of taste is more than merely a value neutral disjunction between our revulsion and their appreciation. After all, the supposed utopia is just as radically different from our current cultural standards as the dystopia is.

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For the U.S., force is not enough to defeat ISIS

Reprinted from the Press and Journal:

She never saw it coming.

Appearing on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf was caught off-guard by the host’s tough questions. When asked what it will take for the U.S. to defeat the Islamic State, Harf admitted “we cannot win this war by killing them.”

She went further: “We need in the medium and longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s a lack of opportunity for jobs.”

Islamic radicals are capturing vast swaths of Iraq and Syria because they want… jobs?

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