Year: 2013
First World Camping Problems, USDA Tyranny, a Fish Story, and Some Epic Snapshots
[A slightly updated version of a post that first appeared on The Libertarian Liquidationist]
I went on a 50 mile hike in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness (Montana) the week before last. The trail is called “the Beaten Path”. That doesn’t really mean much. It wasn’t rock climbing or cliff scaling, but it wasn’t far removed at times. Or at least it seemed that way with our heavy backpacks and the average of ten miles we covered each day. Two good friends (from Cheyenne, Wyoming) and I camped below the mountains on Saturday night (August 3rd). A $9 fee and the roads on the way there were still super-crappy. What gives? Wasn’t that supposed to be one of the things governments were good at?
Add to that my $26 fishing license (right in the middle of the year-long season, and just past the height of that season) and we’ve already been taken for 35 Federal Reserve Notes. I understand the need for wise management, but does licensing really solve it (to say nothing of the natural right to catch fish)? I’m not so sure. Charging everybody the same fees for what end up being different costs imposed by them can’t be anything but inefficient. In my case, it incentivizes me to go out and fish more than I otherwise would, imposing more costs, just to make it worth getting the license. Considering that I never catch anything, I have a lot of fishing to squeeze between now and the season’s end.
Just how bad is my fishing? I brought a nice little pole that comes with a cast reel and a fly reel. I stimulated the local economy by purchasing several fancy new lures (having temporarily misplaced my other good ones). What could go wrong? Well, within the first five casts my lure got snagged on a rock at about 6 feet depth. I had to wade out to three feet of depth and alternately jerk and loosen my line from several positions to get it unstuck. Nothing I hadn’t had to do before.
I should have quit while I was ahead. Maybe another five casts later I outdid myself. If it weren’t for the fact that my reel had become loosened from the rod I know it would have been my farthest cast yet. Instead, the entire reel went flying out into the lake and the rest of the line hung up on the rod. Not wanting to lose my reel, I panicked and dove in after it. I figured, “8 feet? This will be a cinch!” After going head first to the bottom (the sun was behind the clouds and I was stirring up the mud, so I couldn’t see it) four or five times I decided it would be best to pull on the line until it was completely unraveled and hope that it was tied to the reel. Luckily it was. I was happy to recover all my gear, but I was soaking wet and the sun wasn’t out. Luckily no one witnessed my floundering. No doubt my friends would have gotten a kick out of it.
On my way back to camp, dripping, shivering, holding my tangled line and my dismembered pole I was stopped by some ranger chick (the US Forest Service is an agency of the US Department of Agriculture). Just what I needed. She detained me for about five minutes to ask me where I was from, where I was going, how far away our campfire was from the lake, whether we knew not to burn our soup cans, etc. She was at least nice about it (heck, she didn’t even mention the Glock 40 belonging to my friends’ brother, strapped to my belt, or ask to see my fishing license) and eventually realized how uncomfortable I was and said she would come to our campsite later to finish her lecture. Which, of course, she did. She had no problem telling us that we were her worst demographic, three young men. Can you imagine a police officer saying that to a black teenager in a large urban area? I’d say that’s profiling, but I digress. She told us she was going to be off for the next two days but when she came back she would be checking up on us. Add to the profiling some harassment. We had yet to be told or to admit that we had broken any “rules” (which, of course, we had). Luckily we managed to evade her the rest of the hike, but we made sure not to have any extra fun lest we incur her wrath.
So I was basically done fishing on the first day unless I wanted to fly-fish or untangle my other line. I did try a little fly-fishing at one lake a few days later but didn’t catch anything. Luckily, four or five gentleman from Chicago (with thick former-Soviet bloc accents) whom we camped near saw I had no luck and offered us some of their surplus. Five fresh trout. Of course, we had to gut them ourselves, but it was worth it. I wrapped them in aluminum foil and seasoned with lemon juice, garlic, dill, black pepper, red pepper, and salt. Then I put them on our grill over our camp fire for 20 minutes. If I swallowed any bones, I didn’t notice. As a courtesy, in the morning we gave them a package of noodles we would have otherwise eaten the night before. Does that qualify more as reciprocal gifting or as barter? I hope for their sake those boys had their Montana fishing licenses (better yet, that they didn’t have them but managed to dodge the rangers), though as out-of-staters it would have cost them an arm and a leg.
We camped again the night we got back down. Another $9. 46 FRNs total. Roads were still pretty bad. No hand sanitizer or lights in the bathroom facilities. Almost no good firewood other than some dead, dried pine boughs and a giant old stump which we put set aflame around 7:30 PM. It took two of us to drag it to the fire and all three of us to lift it into the fire. A lot of the weight came from the few large stones that the root system had wrapped itself around. It was 3:30 AM before I decided to douse the fire. The stump was still there. It was a lot smaller, and in two pieces, but still could have burned another hour or two on its own. My one friend had turned in around 11, the other one was up with me until about 2. I knew if I went to bed as early as they I would be awake, tossing and turning after only a couple hours’ rest. Plus, being a night owl, I couldn’t help it.
I’m not sure what our backpacks weighed, but even a week after we got back (on August 9th), my shoulders were still a little stiff, and even now, two weeks later, my right knee aches when I straighten my leg out. Even with all this, I had a great time.
Relative or Absolute Gains: A Question of Conditional Cooperation
From Mastering Space…:
The Harvard political economist Robert Reich […] asked a set of groups of students, investment bankers, professional economists, citizens of the Boston area, and senior State Department officials this question: for the United States which of the two following scenarios is preferable? (1) one in which the US economy grows by 25 per cent over the next ten years, while that of Japan grows by 75 per cent or (2) one in which the US economy grows at 10 per cent while the Japanese economy grows at 10.3 percent (132).
Before I continue, I guess it would be better to ask this question to readers as well. I’ll post the rest of my thoughts later (as well as the answer), but right now I am genuinely curious as to which option NOL’s humble readership would pick.
More Dramatic News on Climate Change
I am giving this link as a small public service. I am trying to do my little bit to counter the media swamping, the totalitarian endeavor by climate change proponents. I perceive the bulk of those proponents as totalitarian because they use various devices to silence their opposition. They are forever declaring the subject of the reality of man-made global warming that is also catastrophic closed.
I can hear them salivating about the fantasy of owning their very own gulag (a Russian word; look it up.) They are positively drooling (like me before a nice cheese tray).
I am unable to vouch for the scientific validity of the contents of the article of reference, of course. I am only able to recognize a calm contrarian voice and, in general, I respect the Cato Institute. (For those who don’t know, Cato is conservative, libertarian tendency.)
Racial murder and dereliction of duty by the press
A collegiate baseball player from Australia by the name of Christopher Lane was recently murdered by three black teenagers in Duncan, Oklahoma. One of these teens, James Edwards, Jr., had previously posted violent, racist language on his Twitter account. According to police, Lane was jogging near his girlfriend’s house in Duncan when Edwards and two accomplices, Michael Jones and Chancey Luna, followed him out of their house and shot him in the back. Edwards and Luna have been charged as adults with first-degree murder, and Jones, their getaway driver, has been charged as an accessory after the fact.
The racial angle to Lane’s murder has become extremely inflammatory, and the police and the media have been slow to face it. Jones has been identified in police and media reports as white. In a strange sense, this is at once true and false; he’s apparently mostly white and part black. Luna and Edwards are indisputably black, and Edwards is fairly dark-skinned. Questions about the precise race of any of these young men, however, are red herrings. Edwards proudly cast his lot with the black underclass, and Luna and Jones joined him in the racially motivated murder of an innocent white man who happened to be in their neighborhood. They were three racists who tried to assuage their festering boredom and grievance by shooting an innocent stranger in the back because he was white and within range. This was by all appearances a racial crime. Even had they somehow brought a dead ringer for John Denver into their gang and used him as an accomplice, the crime would still be a racially motivated murder of a total innocent in cold blood.
There appears to have been at least an incipient campaign by police and media outlets to sanitize the racial angle of this murder. Early on, at least two Duncan police officials fastidiously described the murder as “random.” According to a commentator at Chateau Heartiste, the CNN website aggressively censored users’ comments about the racial angle of the murder and the subsequent coverup:
I was following the story yesterday on the CNN website. The comments section was going crazy. I’d never seen anything like it. Literally every thirty seconds there were fifty or sixty new comments posted. This went on for hours. And I’d say 90% were SERIOUSLY pissed off white people questioning why CNN hadn’t posted pictures of the perps, why they hadn’t mentioned race, why Obama hadn’t gone on TV to discuss the case, pointing out that these three boys “could be Obama’s sons”, etc. The moderators couldn’t keep up with deleting all the “crime think”. The comment count would go up to 19,000. Then it would be down to 18.000. Then back up to 19.000. And on and on. It was quite a site to behold. The funny thing is that, by the time they’re done, all the comments that will be left will be those calling for more gun control laws. The comments section will have been scrubbed as clean of any mention of race as the original article. Reminds me of the Ministry of Truth in 1984. Anything conflicting with the narrative just ceases to exist.
CNN has since extensively edited its main article about the Lane murder to include discussion of the racial angle. I assume that pressure from readers and scoops from competing independent bloggers persuaded CNN’s editors to provide more honest and thorough coverage. They must have been embarrassed and, more importantly, worried about their company’s viability when they realized that they were losing credibility and their audience to marginal outlets that they normally wouldn’t even conceive of as their competitors. If I’m correct about this, it means that American journalism is healthy, resilient and competitive enough to force even craven and cowardly outlets with huge market shares and ulterior motives to behave responsibly.
Sometimes, that is. CNN is still prone to rampant journalistic corruption and dishonesty. The trouble doesn’t take root when news organizations try to execute blatant snow jobs on major news stories; it takes root when they execute subtle snow jobs on relatively minor stories. In other words, most of the time.
And who are these marginal players that scoop big outlets like CNN? You probably don’t want to know. CNN can be disingenuous and slippery, but it has the decency–the responsibility, really–not to aggressively traffic slurs about “orcs,” “pavement apes,” “uruk-hais,” and “mudsharking.” I assume that Chateau Heartiste is not operating at the lower bound of this kind of racial incitement, either; it is only incidentally a racist site, not a dedicated white supremacist organ like Stormfront. Even so, it is all too reminiscent of Radio Mille Collines on the eve of the Rwandan genocide; it’s much closer to Georges Riggiu than to George Wallace, who merely demanded that the races live separately, and did so with much more restrained public language.
If the rabid peanut galleries on these sites are just loners masturbating to revenge fantasies in their parents’ basements, perhaps no harm will come of the inflammatory language. My concern is that some of them weapons, military training, sympathetic military or police contacts, and the physical fitness and organizational acumen to act on their hatred. It is not safe to assume that they’re all a bunch of goosestepping potbellied clowns like the most ridiculous “citizen militias” of the 1990’s. We forget at our peril that Timothy McVeigh ran in those circles, too.
If this racist constituency can’t get honest, responsible news about racial violence from mainstream outlets, it will turn to abettors of communal bloodletting. Mainstream news organizations absolutely need to reestablish their credibility and reclaim their audiences from marginal provocateurs who encourage their peanut gallery proxies to call for genocide.
From the Comments: American Politics without the Romance
Longtime reader (and prolific blogger in his own right) –Rick riffs off of the Obama administration’s latest attempt to flaunt the rule of law:
Many of the tactics being used by Democrats and President Obama, today, derive from past tactics approved by Republican majorities and Republican Presidents who sought to avoid the difficult role of governing properly by seeking work around exceptions to the Constitution by reassigning or allowing the usurpation of powers between branches or though Constitutional amendments on requirements that stood as roadblocks.
So, neither party is better or more moral than the other in this regard.
Read the whole thing. Upon second thought, I probably should have titled this post “politics without romance” and just omitted the “American” part of it. In fact, you can pretty much use –Rick’s comment to explain every social conflict imaginable if you just make sure that the words ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ are replaceable by any faction and the word ‘Constitution’ is interchangeable with the word ‘power.’
I got the phrase “politics without romance,” by the way, from Nobel laureate James Buchanan.
What Obamacare is Really About
The good folks at the Reason Foundation, who have the stomach to follow such things, tell us that the bureaucrats entrusted with implementing Obamacare have missed half their deadlines. Even well-connected consultants, they tell us, remain largely in the dark. And for sure, the general public is totally in the dark and generally suspicious.
This I can predict with confidence: there will be train wrecks but some parts will work well. Some people will be happy and others won’t. Republicans will holler I-told-you-so while Democrats will hail the successes and call for patience while the glitches are fixed. How could it be otherwise? Such a complex piece of legislation, even as it falls way short of Obama’s initial promises, will inevitably stumble into a few successes, if only for the short term.
But does anyone believe the perpetrators of Obamacare didn’t know that? While playing up its seeming successes, feeble as they might be, they will blame its failures on the greedy private sector. A mixed system won’t work, they’ll say, and they’ll be right. (A central theme of the great Ludwig von Mises was the instability of a mixed economy.) They will then trumpet the slogan they’ve kept under wraps for some years: single payer!
Single payer, of course, means total government seizure of the health care sector. Having already achieved near total control of the education and financial industries and a heavy grip on energy, they will be one step further along the road to their real goal: the extinguishment of the last of our freedom and prosperity and the establishment of total fascist dictatorship. That’s what Obama, Hillary, et. al. are really after, folks.
Jean Bethke Elshtain: 1941-2013
Prominent international relations theorist (and hawk) Jean Bethke Elshtain has died. She is most famous for bringing gender into the field of international relations and for being an ardent hawk in the post-9/11 world.
I came across her work when she had a spat with philosopher David Gordon over at the Mises Review. You can read most of the exchange here, and then pick up the trail from there if you wish.
A Problem with Political Authority
As a libertarian with deep anarchist leanings, I have plenty of problems with political authority myself. Nevertheless, I find the society in which I live to be libertarian enough, and that any deviation from the rules and procedures in place can be considered to be a threat to my freedom. With this being said, the Wall Street Journal has a great editorial out on the Obama administration’s increasingly authoritarian and cavalier approach to the political process. What I like best about this editorial is that it focuses on one of the Obama administration’s less well-known attempts at consolidating power: that of granting regulators powers that they don’t actually have. Observe:
In re: Aiken County is another episode in the political soap opera about spent-fuel storage at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, an Energy Department project that requires the approval of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission […] Yucca has since been infamously stop-and-go amid opposition from the green lobby and not-in-my-backyard Nevadans and Californians. This particular application was submitted to the NRC in June 2008.
Mr. Obama promised to kill Yucca as a candidate and the Energy Department tried to yank the license application after his election. But an NRC safety board made up of administrative judges ruled unanimously that this was illegal unless Congress passed a law authorizing it. Mr. Obama then teamed up with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada to stack the NRC with anti-Yucca appointees.
Although Congress appropriated money to conduct the review, the NRC flat-out refused, in violation of the three-year statutory deadline.
The explanation continues:
A federal court is stating, overtly, that federal regulators are behaving as if they are a law unto themselves. Judge A. Raymond Randolph notes in a concurrence that former NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, who has since resigned, “orchestrated a systematic campaign of noncompliance.” If Mr. Jaczko worked on Wall Street he’d be indicted.
Judge Kavanaugh then offers some remedial legal education in “basic constitutional principles” for the President who used to be a constitutional law professor. Under Article II and Supreme Court precedents, the President must enforce mandates when Congress appropriates money, as well as abide by prohibitions. If he objects on constitutional grounds, he may decline to enforce a statute until the case is adjudicated in the courts. “But the President may not decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections,” writes the court.
That is especially notable given that ObamaCare’s employer-insurance requirement and other provisions are precisely such unambiguous statutory mandates, with hard start dates […] All of this highlights that Mr. Obama is not merely redefining this or that statute as he goes but also the architecture of the U.S. political system.
Indeed. Dr Delacroix has suspected the Obama administration of authoritarianism from the beginning, and it looks as if time has proved him right (which is a good thing for him, given his penchant for missing the mark in foreign affairs). Stay tuned. This blog is just warming up.
Legitimizing Terrorism in Egypt
Mr Morsi is president of Egypt through valid and hotly contested elections. I don’t like his Islamic Brotherhood. I like even less his extremists Salafist allies. There is almost nothing to like about that crowd.
There is every reason to dislike Morsi and his coalitions. Reasons include: they would end up stopping the pretense of separation of religion from government in their large Arab country; eventually, they would implement a severe downgrading of the status of women; immediately, Morsi’s followers are venting their rage brutally persecuting Egypt’s remaining minority:the native Coptic Christians.
As I write, at least 500 of Mr Morsi’s followers have been killed in the streets by the Egyptian police and by the Egyptian army. That’s the same army that was displaced through a popular revolution only two and a half years ago. A couple of weeks ago, that army staged a coup to overthrow the properly elected government of Egypt. The Obama administration declined to call it a coup although everyone in the world knew that it was a coup. That was another way Mr Obama reconciled America with the World in general and with the Arab World in particular; through shameless lying, through a lie so gross there is zero chance anyone will believe it.
The army coup was triggered, encouraged, applauded by my natural buddies: The Egyptians – mostly urban, I guess – who are secular, and the many moderate Muslims who do not aspire to a religion-ridden government. My natural friends couldn’t resist the temptation: Take the easy way, ask the armed forces to do what they did in Egypt for forty years: Be the government, supplant the will of the people as expressed through proper elections.
The latest military coup achieves two things:
First, it will stand as a sort of proof that Arabs do not really want a democracy or that they are unable to sustain democracy. The reasoning will go like this: If democratic habits cannot take place in Egypt, a country with a long deeply rooted tradition of secularism, where will it?
Second, the current massacres in the streets of unarmed (or almost completely unarmed )civilians are planting the seeds of fifty years of future rage. Rank-and-file Islamists will have the right to say, “We tried their democracy; it was only a trap to defeat us, to make us cower in fear of our lives, of our children’s lives. We now know that only the fear of us will bring the kind of society we want.”
The current repression in Egypt sounds like a declaration of legitimacy for terrorism.
Now, I know that elections, even fair elections – such as the elections that brought Pres. Morsi to power do not, in and of themselves, constitute democracy. Other institutions matter, some matter more. It would be easy to convince me that the rule of law, for example, is more important than elections. Yet, if you love democracy, if you hate authoritarianism, close your eyes and ask yourself which side is acting heroically in Egypt today. Is it the narrow-minded, bigoted obscurantist religious party that was removed militarily, or is it those who have clamored for and obtained another twenty or thirty years of military dictatorship for their country?
A Libertarian Moment in the US?
I think you’re seeing a growth of self-conscious libertarianism. The end of the Bush years and the beginning of the Obama years really lit a fire under the always-simmering small-government attitudes in America. The TARP, the bailouts, the stimulus, Obamacare, all of that sort of inspired the Tea Party. Meanwhile, you’ve simultaneously got libertarian movements going on in regard to gay marriage and marijuana. And I’ll tell you something else that I think is always there. The national media were convinced that we would be getting a gun-control bill this year, that surely the Newtown shooting would overcome the general American belief in the Second Amendment right to bear arms. And then they pushed on the string and it didn’t go anywhere. Support for gun control is lower today than it was 10 or 15 years ago. I think that’s another sign of America’s innate libertarianism.
This is from David Boaz, who is being interviewed by Molly Ball for the Atlantic. Read the whole interview. There is stuff on Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Marxism, the politics of welfare and some recent SCOTUS rulings.
There is a lot to be pessimistic about, but I can see a more libertarian US in 15 or 20 years, provided we do something about ObamaCare and Social Security. One thing we must be very vigilant about is the inevitable push for a more isolated society. Protectionist tendencies are probably going to get stronger if the economy continues to perform as dismally as it has been, and protectionism is the bane of prosperity and cooperation.
Around the Web
- On the Problematic Political Authority of Property Rights; Kevin Vallier, a philosopher, reviews a recent book on market anarchism (be sure to check out the ‘comments’ thread as well)
- Compton as the Bellwether for Urban America; interesting article from a graduate student at UCSD
- Rand Paul is no “isolationist,” contrary to the opinion of the ill-informed
- Liberty’s lost decade; the Economist decides that enough is enough
- Tyler Cowen’s ‘international trade’ reading list
Your weekly multimedia derp: Fox News shills for a talentless bottomfeeding trustafarian “musician” from La Jolla by way of concern-trolling the poor taxpayer
There are stupid press-generated scandals that leave me with some residual hope that the United States is capable of self-government. Then there’s the other kind of stupid press-generated scandal, the kind convincing me that my country is utterly and irredeemably fucked as a polity and that our only really sensible course of action is to go tailgating in front of the international arrivals hall at Lindbergh Field, so that we might offer our Chinese receivers the culturally typical refreshments of beer and hot dogs when they arrive to sort out our affairs.
Oh, and barbecued fresh lobster. We’ll see shortly just how crucial the lobster is, God help us all. But first, let’s meet the principals.
For the prosecution, Brett Baier. I knew his type back when I was a Boy Scout. BSA is a great organization for those young men (I was once in your shoes) who enjoy watching sniveling, sanctimonious, pompous twits melt down in public like late-stage Nicolae Ceaucescus because some little brat with Tourette Syndrome was running around, heaven forbid, a church complex yelling at his peers to “give me back my fucking pencil!” (a stuffed animal pencil with eyes, which they had inevitably stolen), thus defiling the auxiliary facilities of God’s holy place, or because a troop went on stage during a District lock-in and glorified the use of illegal drugs by performing an a Capella rendition of the Grateful Dead’s “Casey Jones.”I witnessed both incidents, and I can easily imagine Brett Baier taking his place astride the barricades of Scouting history and yelling “STOP!” I can also imagine him whining at the rest of us to stop baiting our sister troop’s premier subnormal to jump out of a tent and serenade us with the week’s camp anthem, “Stay on the Sunny Side of Life.” The most memorable verse: “Chesterfield! Chesterfield who? Chesterfield my leg, so I slapped him! Awwwwww!”
Don’t even try to make sense of any of this. Just understand that it is exactly the sort of environment in which officious blowhards like Brett Baier flourish when they can’t secure lucrative gigs bugging all of America about wedge issues. Also realize that your boys are probably better off in a whorehouse; they’ll come across less sexual perversion, for one thing.
For the defense, Jason Greenslate, aka “RattLife.” Basically, RattLife is just another two-bit bougie loser with a shitty garage band trying to impress his peers by being vulgar and badass and loudly averring, “Bitch, I’m transgressive!” Think of him as a sort of cash-flow-negative American Mick Jagger, but without the inflammatory racial shtick, because at heart, dude seems awfully milquetoast for a serious game of hardball with the big boys and girls. Nor is he the kind of badass who moves to the Southeast Side to handle accounts receivable for an honest-to-God crack den; that wouldn’t be his style of gnarly, and the consensus is that his parents paid for his Escalade, meaning that he doesn’t have to hustle for “dem shine rim.”
The class and racial aspects of RattLife’s shtick are confusing and incoherent. By numerous accounts, he’s from a moneyed family, and in most respects he and his boys have a very derivative, and very white, surfer-punk act. They’d fit in in Huntington Beach. In a sentence, they are why you hate La Jolla. On the other hand, the Cadillac Escalade, which RattLife has adopted as one of his props, has also become a vehicle synonymous with some of the coarsest black entertainers active today, the vehicle to which his business partners would probably be aspiring if he were, as I suggested, running product in Logan Heights instead of being a candy-ass north shore poseur. Basically, he’s doing a cross-cultural mix-and-match of various oversold consumer products in the hope of convincing the impressionable that he’s a trendsetter. His tastes (sic) have what some activists like to call “intersectionality,” although it’s more apt to think of them as a collage of the socially destabilizing vulgarities of two antagonistic cultures made manifest in the persona of one pathetic man.
The lynch pin for this ridiculous shtick, not surprisingly, is a promise of sex. Maybe sex in fact comes to those who adopt the RattLife, or maybe it doesn’t, but he’d certainly like his followers to think that he and his bros are certified pussy magnets. RattLife’s conception of sexuality is too shallow and derivative to merit comment, except to note that it surely has a disproportionate effect on the haplessly undersexed. One way to not end up a marginally employable loser who makes a public ass of himself in pursuit of skanks is 1) to learn and practice a trade and 2) to hire hookers when one’s amateur friends aren’t in the mood. Notice that this approach to life hasn’t stopped Germany and Switzerland from kicking America’s ass in legal harlotry and precision machining. Or maybe both of these trades are just bourgeois structures of oppression blocking the lumpenproletarian vanguard in its pursuit of Fall-of-Rome dissipation and leech socialism. That makes as much sense as anything about Jason Greenslate’s adult life.
If you’re thinking that I’m giving the guy too hard a time for being a dime-a-dozen make-believe badass, take a look at what he just did to make national news. He is no longer a local nuisance. He is no longer merely San Diego’s bro abatement problem. RattLife submitted to Brett Baier’s concern-trolling on behalf of YOUR HARD-EARNED TAX DOLLARS. He sulked and smirked through round after round of Baier’s moral puffery, bedecked in sunglasses indoors like a downmarket Bono. He gleefully led a camera crew through an upscale supermarket where he bought fresh seafood with his EBT card. He invited the camera crew to a party where he and his bros barbecued and cracked open a fresh lobster that he had bought with YOUR TAX DOLLARS. He invited the cameras into a concert where his band sang a defiant anthem about fucking stealing shit, and that kind of thing. He did it all for make benefit glorious nation of get off my lawn.
That, and for the publicity. Dare I ask, cui bono? The piece was obviously reactionary agitprop of the lowest order, but was it also product placement? I like to imagine the negotiations between RattLife and the Fox account executive sounding like one of the wiretapped Blagojevich phone calls, because that would frankly be several steps up, morally and intellectually, from the corrosive mind rot that they contrived to air.
Some good came of this fiasco as it diffused away from the original broadcast and its Bircher/Klan-grade target audience. Chateau Heartiste’s essay on RattLife was thoroughly jaded but quite thoughtful, and a couple of the comments below it put the Fox piece into a disturbing context. First, from Joe Sixpack (spelling of all excerpts is in the original):
I live in San Diego and have worked in La Jolla for the last 8 years. I’ve lived in La Jolla and train at La Jolla shores about 3x per week. While I do not know this guy, I am very familiar with the Jason Greenslate phenomenon,
Southern California is simply infested with them.
They are the flatbillers you see on your way to work, you in your car heading off for another day of bringing home the bacon. While they are the crew passing you in their lifted F350 headed out to the desert with their dirtbikes on board.
They are the giggling sorostitutes, valet parking their new white BMW curbside, their wardrobe costing in the thousands, lined up to pay a doorman $50 for a handstamp and the honor of stepping into a nightclub where men will buy them $15 drinks.
They are the unemployed hipsters, adorned in $200 scarves, $1000 manpurses and $3000 Macbooks sitting at coffeeshops 8 hours a day “looking for work” before meeting up with their friends (who’ve they’ve known since kindergarten, as they all still live at home) at a tapas bar.
Such people are legion in Southern California, where the cost of living is like kryponite save for the trustfunders, the Boomerang Kids and the STEM H1N1s. Occasionally a 1st generation wealth builders will be spotted in the wild, dodging high taxes and burdensome regulations while slowly trolling Home Depot parking lots for illegals who will work for cash only.
Jason Greenslate and his ilk drive nice cars, yet live at home and/or are funded entirely by wealthy relatives. Word is that Jason’s parents made their fortune in the gym industry, although I cannot verify that.
Their social network is often of similar caliber, and there is no shame whatsoever in living at home. Often parents (who are BFFs with their kids) allow them total freedom to bring girls over, smoke and drink at home as they’d “rather have them do that stuff at home than some random party”.
The entire culture down here has turned upside down. It is truly La-La Land. Where hypergamy is just a way of life and hard-working Betas are seen as boring, predictable and useless (except to fund the pensions of the plethora of government retirees and keep the EBT cards of guys like Jason fully funded).
Hot chicks down here? Yes. But only those that can afford to live here. Which means, to a large degree, Daddy’s girls, trophy wives, married/kept women and entitled college princesses.
Game in Man Diego must be rock solid and well-calibrated.
You have been warned.
He adds a follow-up:
In laying out my long diatribe, I forgot to reiterate the point which is the commonality between the Southern California Flatbiller, the Sorostitute and the Hipster, as well as Trustifarians like Mr. Jason Greenslate and his fellow brahs.
In short, none of them can so much as wipe their own asses if Mommmy and Daddy don’t buy them toilet paper.
Try as I may, try as I might, I struggle to think of anything less Alpha than that. That 24/7 gnawing, deep-seated knowlege that you are a full-grown man still drawing an allowance from your parents.
(Prob is, most girls today simply do not care what the source of the cashflow is, whether that be dealin’, pimpin’ scammin’ or trustfundin’. Ironically, the man who puts in 80 hours a week working is seen as boring and “works too much”).
A SHTF financial and sexual market correction would go a long way toward waking people from their current hypnotic trance.
Next, from Prof:
I’ve seen more middle-class versions of this. I strongly suspect that he’s got affluent if not rich parents, and they bought the car and probably send a check each month. His exit strategy is inheritance — that’s why he’s got great self-confidence, *nothing he does now matters*.
Chateau Heartiste being a manosphere establishment, the article also elicited comments like this one, from Carlos Danger:
I bet he gets hot as hell poon. He’s a rich surfer bum. Good looking, very fit, and easy going and fun. Chicks dig this stuff as long as pregnancy isn’t involved. There were guys I knew in college who came from rich families and got welfare because they could. They also pulled quality poon.
These comments were mixed in with conspiratorial racist speculation that Fox News ran this story to deflect attention from the disproportionate number of black recipients who use food stamps to support their profligate breeding habits and comments about Jewish control of the media. And that’s exactly the problem with stories like this. They bring all the Storm Front nutters to the yard. The producers who run that sort of inflammatory tripe full well know it, but they run it anyway because it’s lucrative. There is no civic core to preserve in these cases; there is only the early precursors to communal violence, a horde of ignorami being spoon-fed baldfaced agitprop and happily swallowing it. Jason Greenslate is a self-dealing cretin, and Brett Baier is also a self-dealing cretin; the rest of us are victims of their joint attack on the commonweal. I hope I’m wrong, but people who take that kind of cherry-picked, inflammatory rubbish at face value seem beyond hope as worthwhile contributors to civic life.
We might as well go curbside and get the grills going before our technocratic overlords land from Beijing. Y’all bring the beer and weenies, Jason will bring the lobster, brah, and I’ll bring some of the bong-quality vacuum-packed halibut that my uncle’s buddy brings down from Alaska every fall.
Actually, never mind that; he gets that stuff for work-trade on the free market. What a buzzkill.
A Cheaper, Stronger Army?
How can this be so? Doesn’t a “strong defense” for a hegemonic power necessarily entail a large military budget and the capacity to police potential rivals?
Of course not. I’ve argued as much here before (numerous times), but it appears that more and more people on the American Right are beginning to come around to my view. The latest example comes from an op-ed by a conglomerate of retired and still-serving military officers in the pages of the National Interest.
It appears that only neoconservatives (former Democrats) and most Democrats still cling to the notion that our military needs to be large in order to be strong. I don’t agree with everything the op-ed recommends. I think the Army should be liquidated entirely and that the special forces components of the Army should be shuffled into the other branches of the military. There is no need to occupy foreign lands these days and hence no need for an Army.
Nevertheless, it is very refreshing to see members of the military embrace the inevitable and start proposing solutions that deal with budget cuts and the post-Cold War world.
Update: what is very interesting to note is that the various Right-wings in states that depend on American protection are very opposed to notion of a leaner, meaner American military. The notion that Right-wings tend to be a bit more nationalistic than their counterparts on the Left is, it would appear, a rather superficial one. After all, how can one really be more chauvinist in his social beliefs when he actively calls for another polity to protect his lands?
The Obama Presidency as the Pinnacle of Progressivism
Recently, I have been seeing a lot of libertarians tsk tsking progressives for pinning their hopes on somebody like President Obama. For example, in a thread initiated by this article by Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic, an anonymous libertarian stated that Obama was “no progressive at all.”
Yet this is untrue. If anything, the Obama administration represents the pinnacle of Progressivism: “big” government taking care of the forgotten man in all aspects of his life. Self-styled progressives feigning disgust in the current administration’s dirty laundry need not do so. Either they implicitly endorse the authoritarianism of the Obama administration and pretend not to in polite company, or they don’t fully understand the moral and intellectual foundations of the ideology they purport to adhere to.
Notes On Liberty 