Liberty

Tales of other cities: tweakers, hobos, some odds and ends, and Santa Rosa’s “welfare block”

muricaderp Liberty

Armistead Maupin I ain’t. Nor do I particularly wish to be. Even if every Millennial brat is working on his novel, my years around downwardly mobile bohemians in denial are too raw to fictionalize, and I find the upwardly mobile sort of San Franciscan too narrowminded and ideologically extreme to examine closely. Besides, I’d rather be the William Faulkner of Tacoma, not because there’s any taste in being such a writer, but because there isn’t any. Pierce County is a place whose dysfunction has gone surprisingly unexamined in American literature and film despite its having sheltered a mentally ill and ultimately murderous police chief (David Brame), a notorious killing spree duo (John Allen Muhammad and Boyd Lee Malvo), a disgruntled father who immolated himself and his kids in their house (Josh Powell), and an Army neurosurgeon (Dr. Dennis Geyer) who used a metal thermos to vent his road rage on the head of a man named, I kid you not, Robert Speed.

If Tacoma isn’t the anti-Seattle, it’s close. Actually, the Parkland-Spanaway-Graham corridor on the east flank of Fort Lewis is the real anti-Seattle, and a fairly awful place. My mom is right that it has too many nail salons. There are reasons why commissioned officers and those of us who associate with them often have bad things to say about the enlisted and their hangers-on, just as there are reasons why some of the common epithets for military wives (“dependent whales,” “commissary cows”) verge on being unprintable. To be clear, the dysfunction goes much deeper than limited education, intelligence, or finances. Fat women in the Nordic countries and the culturally Nordic parts of the Pacific Northwest don’t have that defiant slovenliness about them. Nor is the proliferation of jacked-up crew cab pickups with pristine paint jobs (or, as I like to call them, shlengtheners with room for the general staff) around JBLM a sign of poverty, even if the drugstore cowboys who drive them are in debt for the honor; I’d have to sell my trusty old Civic several times over to buy one, and the fuel bill on those things is obviously a bitch. These people aren’t lower-class; they’re classless. I’ve barely scraped the surface of the myriad pathologies that keep Pierce County social workers busy. One can travel in an arc from Lakewood through South Tacoma and back up the left bank of the Puyallup River to the edge of civilization without really leaving the gnarly shit. Actually, there are some pleasant agricultural districts and old villages up in the hills, such as Eatonville; there are also some picturesque but disturbing ones, such as Yelm, which features a gun shop in an old clapboard church. The northbound leg of this arc has a lot to do with generic West Coast ghetto culture, but the southbound leg, into the woods, is more readily explained by the kind of people who get dredged up for military service these days. There are exceptions, but as a rule these are not the kind of troops who incline me to support our troops, and I have backup from a family friend and Army captain who explained my disturbance about all the thugs on base quite simply: “Those, my friend, are the enlisted.”

You don’t read about these places in the tourist pamphlets. They’re a huge bummer. But as much as the Chamber of Commerce and some of our politicians would like to pretend that they don’t exist, they do. Contrary to popular (and aggressively propagandized) belief, they are not just a problem in and around big cities, either. For example, crystal methamphetamine, which tends to turn its addicts into pathetic wrecks, is largely a rural and small town problem. I lived for a time on the edge of the tweaker ghetto on the west side of Eureka, CA. One description I heard of the commercial strip a few blocks west of my apartment went like this: “If all anyone from out of town saw of Eureka was Broadway, no one would ever come back.” Most of Eureka’s residential motels are clustered along Broadway. These are exceptionally vile, dilapidated properties. Their tenants include tweakers whose five-year-olds stumble into the crank stash and get fucked up, as well as a rogue’s gallery of other gross dirtbags. It’s an accidental sort of truth in advertising, since 101 runs along Broadway and has made this skid row the main southern portal for tourists on their way to visit the quaint Victorians downtown. Only the locals know to detour through Henderson Center if they’d like to avoid the nastiness.

Many locals do not, however, have an inkling of how awful some of the city’s biggest landlords are. They don’t all have their heads in the sand; it’s just that they don’t rent or hang out with people who rent. They may live not two miles away and drive by these slumlord ratholes all the time, but the tenants aren’t doing silly walks out front with their pants on the ground, so the disorder and evil are a lot harder to notice.

I was recently told one of the most amazing stories I’ve ever heard about urban disorder in an unexpected place: Santa Rosa. Santa Rosans have always struck me as an exceptionally well-mannered and functional lot. It seems that I just hadn’t met the dregs because they don’t leave town.

My source for this story was a woman who described herself as a former “mental health token” in Sonoma County social services lobbying (“I was young and could string a sentence together, so they hired me”). She told me that she had several meetings with Nancy Pelosi in this capacity, and that she found Pelosi thoroughly unprincipled.

This woman does de facto social work on Santa Rosa’s “welfare block.” (The only neighborhood nickname I like more is the Pork ‘n Beans, the nickname for a housing project in Miami that is a staple on The First 48. As you see, it can be useful to watch too much TV.)  This term apparently isn’t so much an epithet used by disgruntled neighbors as a matter-of-fact name used by its residents. Asked where they live, they consistently say, “I live on the welfare block.” They don’t know their own home addresses or even the nearest intersection. Second-graders from the block can’t spell their own names. When residents invite friends over, they often tell them to go hang out on the welfare block and wait until they show up. Social life with the neighbors is largely an informal affair determined by who happens to show up on the block at the same time. Gang rivals see each other out on the block, head out for a fight, then go back home a few minutes later. The term I favor, however, is “yard,” because this is exactly the sort of thing one hears about in prisons. In no neighborhood where the usual custom is to work outside the home is the standard for social interactions among working-age adults nothing but a series of chance encounters with friends and enemies out on the street.

There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of escaping the welfare block. Going to prison seems to be mainly a matter of changing yards for the time being, of mixing it up with a different set of homies on a different block before returning to the original block and mixing it up again with whomever isn’t off at one of the many big houses at the moment. With luck, if one can call it that, there might even be some continuity of residents between the welfare block and prison, kind of a poor man’s version of having buddies from the neighborhood at boarding school.

The woman who told me this story said that a lot of the adult residents resent her for hanging out with their kids and supposedly being arrogant because she has her life together. These are often the same parents who are too drunk to drive their young children to school functions or medical appointments.

I met this woman on a train that I was taking to San Jose to get a copy of my birth certificate for employment purposes. It was a short-notice, short-turnaround trip. On the train back north to Salem the next night, the crowd seemed dirtier and more disreputable. My main company on the trip back north was a grizzled transient en route to Portland who was dressed like Robin Hood and prone to wax eloquent in some of the most pretentious quasiphilosophical language imaginable about unfortunate rifts in the oneness of humanity. His type is legion on the West Coast hippie circuit. They’re the losers you see hanging out on business district sidewalks in Huntington Beach, Arcata, Ashland, and Portland, usually with a guitar and a puppy, the better to establish street cred as starving artists with poor animals in their care. They are the undeserving poor. They ruin the reputation of the homeless for the majority who aren’t like that and who didn’t choose to be such lowlives, the homeless who try to be discreet, keep themselves clean, and be productive members of society against stacked odds. Some of them aren’t actually homeless, but successfully act the part as their occupation. These include the trustafarian university students who used to panhandle at the Stanford Shopping Center.

Few of these losers, however, speak in the affected English accent that my buddy on the train used. At first I suspected that he was from Continental Europe, since there was something slightly off about his accent for an Englishman, but it was much more English than any continental accent I’d ever heard, and it seemed to change into a slightly American accent from time to time. When I asked where he was from, he very matter-of-factly told me that he had been raised mainly in New Orleans and around the Gulf Coast. After that, I noticed a mild, generic drawl crop up in his speech when he got animated.

Robin Hood was smart for heading to Portland at the start of summer. It may not be consistent with a belief in the oneness of humanity to milk some of America’s most guilt-ridden yuppies for walking-around money, but it’s good business, and as closely as I can tell that’s his line of work.

The Real IRS Problem

Warren Gibson Current Events, Liberty , , , ,

It’s heartening to see distrust and resentment of the IRS building up in the wake of the targeting of tea party groups and such. But let’s not overlook the daily predations of the IRS, small and large, which add up to a mountain of costs borne by citizens – not just monetary costs but also mental anguish and occasionally violent confrontations.

Case in point: your humble servant. This morning I received a notice demanding $8,900 in back taxes. Needless to say that ruined my day even though it took me only five minutes to realize that they made a mistake and I owe them nothing. I have high hopes that this will be resolved quickly but you never know. I mentioned my plight to a friend this morning and he chuckled. He once had a $1,400 claim which he fought for ten years until finally he got to the right person at the IRS who found their mistake in five minutes. Did he get an apology? Restitution or compensation of any kind? Of course not.

The complexity of the tax code is often cited as a significant drag on the economy, in terms of time spent gathering information and preparing returns, money paid to tax preparers and tax attorneys, etc.  But there are lots of other bad effects.  No one understands the tax code in its entirety and most IRS agents understand little of it — or worse, what they often think they understand is wrong.  Nor do taxpayers understand it.  This opens the door for errors, misunderstanding, cheating and consequent confrontations, anguish, time and money wasted, and sometimes violence.

If we have to have an income tax (which I’m unwilling to concede), let’s have a simple flat tax and do away with, if not the inherent coercion of any tax, at least the enormous expense and anguish that are part and parcel of the current insane system.

Libertarian Countries and Libertarian Societies

Fred Foldvary Current Events, Liberty , , , , , , , ,

by Fred Foldvary

Michael Lind in the 4 June 2012 salon.com in his article “The question libertarians just can’t answer,” asked, “Why are there no libertarian countries?”  One answer is simply that there are very few pure libertarians. But another answer is that most folks are libertarian enough that they establish libertarian societies, by which I mean not just organized clubs but also informal social gatherings and happenings.

The essential libertarian proposition is “live and let live.”  In a libertarian society, there are no restrictions on peaceful and honest human action.  Most people believe that it is morally wrong to coercively harm others, and they have been brought up to have some sympathy for others, so that they don’t want to hurt others.  Therefore most gatherings such as concerts, athletic events, and street traffic is peaceful. Thus much of the world operates in a libertarian way, without governmental direction. If you host a party in your house, you seldom need a government official there to keep the peace.

This social libertarianism has limits, as those who do not conform to cultural standards such as dress codes would encounter some intolerance.  Nevertheless, there is an almost universal agreement that assault and theft are evil, and a widespread aversion to such anti-social behavior.  When most folks are pro-social in their behavior, they demonstrate a wide and deep level of libertarianism.

Why does the US government impose restrictions such as prohibiting trade with Cuba?  Most Americans probably favor free trade with Cuba. But a minority special interest opposes trade with Cuba and has the political clout to stop it. So the basic reason why the US does not have full freedom is the inherent dysfunction of our system of selecting the chiefs of state. That system is mass democracy.  The failures of mass democracy have been documented and analyzed by the branch of economics called “public choice.”

The two basic reasons why there are no libertarian countries are:

1. Very few people understand or even know about the ethics, economics, and governance of pure liberty.  Pure freedom is not taught in schools, and it is not in the predominant culture.

2. Mass democracy enables special interests to skew policy that favors a few at the expense of the many.

However, the general concept of “freedom” and “liberty” is universally admired.  People have a genetic dislike of being controlled. But their moral views have been skewed by thinking their religious and cultural views are universal.  Ignorance is therefore the ultimate reason why libertarianism is not more widespread.

In another essay on 13 June 2013 Lind says, “Grow up, Libertarians!”  It shows that Lind does not know the meaning of the word “freedom.”  He writes that fighting evil requires limiting the “freedom of employers to buy and sell slaves.”  He has a physical definition of “freedom,” rather than the ethical meaning of there being no restrictions other than on coercive harm to others.  The ownership of a slave is not ethical freedom.

He then says that libertarians propose “the replacement of all taxes by a single regressive flat tax that would fall on low-income workers.” Anyone who advocates such as tax is not a pure libertarian. Lind confuses libertarianism with conservativism.

Michael Lind concludes with the statement, “libertarianism as a philosophy is superficial, juvenile nonsense.” Wow – perhaps he has never read freedom philosophers such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and John Hospers. We need a serious explanation of why the basic libertarian idea – live and let live – is superficial nonsense.

There seems to be a simple explanation for Lind’s views on libertarianism – he simply does not understand it.

Logical Fallacies in the Press

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Politics , , ,

Hank blogs about yet another hit job on libertarianism in the press, this time coming from some hack named Michael Lind in Salon. Unfortunately, the whole thing is based upon a logical fallacy that is buried in the seventh paragraph of the piece. Lind wonders aloud:

But think about this for a moment. If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world?

This is a basic logical fallacy known as (in Latin) argumentum a silentio, or an argument from silence. An argument from silence is a conclusion drawn based on the absence of evidence. Logical fallacies coming from the enemies of freedom are not always to be ignored, and Hank did us all a service by trying to earnestly straighten out Lind’s fallacious reasoning, but at the same time, we know from careful research that most arguments are based off of dishonesty, plain and simple.

Here is the upside, though: as Dr Gibson points out, the fact that the press is even paying attention to libertarian arguments suggests that more savagery from the Left is coming our way. Given that the Left is morally and ideologically bankrupt, this should serve as some small comfort to those of us who yearn for a less paternalistic and condescending society.

Addendum (6/6): Will Wilkinson has more over at Democracy in America. Tom Woods chimes in as well.

Why are there no “Libertarian Countries”?

henrymoore Liberty , , , , , ,

So asks Michael Lind in Salon yesterday.

My answer to the question would be:

A libertarian state (he says “country”) is a contradiction in terms. Duh! Some states/countries are certainly more libertarian than others, and the Salon piece even acknowledges that, but the state itself is the reason there are no pure “libertarian countries”. It need not have anything to do with anarchism as even limited government advocates view the state as a necessary evil, and its nature as eventually and inevitably corruptive of all that exists within its prerogatives.

If Mr. Lind simply wants an example of a geographic area that is entirely libertarian, sans state, he would first need to acknowledge that no such place can exist within or as part of a state. But since every country in the world is a state, there are no such places. Even if there were, they wouldn’t count according to Mr. Lind, because they would not fit his definition of country. Notice how he discounts several contestants, having already failed to say what he thinks a libertarian country would look like: Continue reading →

Capitalism: Making Lives Miserable Since at least the Late 18th Century

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History, Liberty , , , ,

Brad Plumer of The Washington Post has a great post up on 31 different charts “that will destroy your faith in humanity.” Here was one of my favorites:

After reading through the charts, come back and let me know what you think of them. For more optimistic garbage, be sure to check this out.

A note on compulsory IRS linedancing

muricaderp Current Events, Economics, Liberty

As a matter of course, I ignore the anti-government donnybrooks that consume Fox News, such as the recent furor over the IRS’s eccentric “conferences.” To my own surprise, I’m not inspired to do this out of any animosity towards Fox; although I find maybe half or two thirds of the politics that it promotes noxious, I enjoy watching it from time to time, and I have come to find it less frequently revolting than CNN, whose pomposity and sleights of hand tend to drive me up a wall. Rather, my reasons for ignoring Fox’s causes du jour are, first, that I just don’t have time to follow its donnybrooks on top of all the more important things that I’m trying to cram into my life, and second, that I find Fox’s signal-to-noise ratio too erratic to take its pronouncements at face value. In practice, this means that I usually insist on hearing corroboration from a significantly less shrill source before believing that Fox isn’t blowing its reports completely out of proportion for partisan and business advantage. Ronald Reagan called this approach “trust, but verify,” but by any honest appraisal it’s a form of distrust.

My corroborating source confirming the seriousness of this IRS linedancing/Star Trek role play idiocy is my mom. By her own admission she’s a hardcore leftist. What she is not, however, is a worshiper of bureaucracy. She spent too much time working for the Veterans Administration, an agency whose dysfunction she can describe in much greater detail and much more cynically than I can, to assume that the IRS is not run by the objectively deranged. So when my mom mentioned to me in a recent phone conversation that the IRS had gotten egg on its face over these ridiculous training seminars, I figured that whatever Fox had to say about the scandal, no matter how shrill, had some merit.

Having now watched Greta van Susteren’s coverage of these training exercises, I agree with her and with my mom that they were absolutely ridiculous and should never have been undertaken. The IRS has clearly delegated responsibility for its employee training to a bunch of useless nutcases. Governments that spend their money on stuff like that are troubled.

Where I disagree with van Susteren is on her insistence that these junkets stand out as wastes of taxpayer money. As a matter of principle, it’s certainly improper to misallocate tens of millions of dollars on ridiculous staff training exercises at posh resorts, but the sums in question ($52 million or so) are chump change in the context of federal spending. Preventing these particular instances of featherbedding and cronyism would have done nothing to appreciably improve the federal treasury’s prudence and solvency. There’s just too much systemic fiscal laxity and corruption for the prevention or redress of these really juicy scandals to make a real difference. The real improvements have to come from concerted, systematic reform. The Inspectors General responsible for curbing this kind of waste are important internal watchdogs, but by its very nature their work has to be done incrementally, often at a pace that seems glacial because the rot is so pervasive. In any event, they’ll be cleaning out the Augean Stables until such a time as the underlying cultures at their agencies start undergoing genuine reform. In a very real way, we’re stuck dealing with the hearts of men, and doing so in a country where the systemic corruption extends far beyond the public sector. I honestly don’t see how systemic reform is viable as long as so many Americans so sincerely believe in hustling, and in being hustled, rather than in plain dealing.

At rock bottom, I believe, it’s a matter of what Vaclav Havel called living in truth. I’d love to see an American leader of Havel’s prominence spread that message with such clarity, but I don’t expect to come across one, especially given the chronic tendency of so many Americans to reject reasonable politicians of goodwill in favor of abject demagogues of the lowest character imaginable this side of the genocidal.

Clearly, one of the factors that drives this deference to openly sadistic leaders is servility. There’s a powerful cognitive dissonance between the rhetoric of American freedom and independence and the reality of a population hesitant to challenge even its most ridiculous and pointless degradation at the hands of its superiors. This is how we’ve ended up with our proliferation of idiotic, disingenuous corporate “teambuilding” exercises, motivational posters and videos, and rude, bumptious, grandiose, incompetent managers. We let them get away with it. Walmart employees in Germany responded to mandatory motivational rallies by fleeing to the restrooms and calling their union reps. They recognized petty tyranny and had too much self-respect to submit to it; American workers generally don’t.

That’s the buried lede in the IRS “conference” scandal. These “training” seminars and the videos made of them had nothing to do with the employees’ job duties, and they must have caused sentient employees who were unwillingly drawn into the fray great annoyance, if not also discomfort. Extraneous seminars of the sort, although rarely extreme enough to involve Star Trek costumes, are so ubiquitous in American corporate and bureaucratic life that they’re widely regarded as unremarkable.

Submitting to such degradation under duress is not a hallmark of a free people. There are certainly extenuating circumstances for doing so, in fact, usually powerful ones, given the abusive dynamics at workplaces where management inflicts this sort of thing on subordinates, but meek, servile submission to this sort of belittling idiocy is not honorable. The proper response is to tell the instructor, “You’re a moron, this is bullshit, and I’m getting a gin and tonic.”

Istanbul: The Protests

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Politics, Religion , , , , , , ,

A moderately Islamist government has been in power in Turkey for about 10 years now. Over the weekend it faced its first stern test. One brave Turkish blogger has decided to reach out to the rest of the world:

No newspaper, no television channel was there to report the protest. It was a complete media black out.

But the police arrived with water cannon vehicles and pepper spray.  They chased the crowds out of the park.

In the evening of May 31st the number of protesters multiplied. So did the number of police forces around the park. Meanwhile local government of Istanbul shut down all the ways leading up to Taksim square where the Gezi Park is located. The metro was shut down, ferries were cancelled, roads were blocked.

Yet more and more people made their way up to the center of the city by walking.

They came from all around Istanbul. They came from all different backgrounds, different ideologies, different religions. They all gathered to prevent the demolition of something bigger than the park:

The right to live as honorable citizens of this country.

Read the rest. Hurriyet, one of Turkey’s best media outlets, has been doing an excellent job covering events after the fact. Their English-language site is here, and I recommend reading the site on a daily basis (even after the violence is over).

Here is my two cents: the Erdogan government (the Islamist one) put one too many straws upon the camel’s back. Ankara simply took too many liberties when it came to regulating the cultural and material life of the Turkish people. Too many blasphemy laws and too many clothing restrictions, coupled with too poor an economic performance made these protests inevitable. The harsh crackdown on an otherwise free people ensured violence and larger protests.

By the way, Turkey’s first post-Ottoman government, headed by the ardent secularist and Europhile, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, also insisted on regulating the cultural and material lives of Turkish citizens, so Islam has nothing to do with this (check out our many discussions we’ve had here on the blog on this).

Rather, the “authoritarianism lite” of the Turkish state has more to do with its status as a post-colonial imperial state and a Cold War pawn than it does with any inherent cultural traits of the Turkish people or of the Islamic faith.

Around the web: class, work, and a call for the totalitarian oppression of servants

muricaderp Economics, Law, Liberty, Links, Politics

In the course of a recent internet search for “lazy millennials,” “entitled millennials,” “milliennial brats,” and the like (call it an effort at self-diagnosis, if you wish), I came across one of the most biting and clearheaded blogs I’ve found to date covering work and the workplace. Normally, everything that I find on these subjects in any medium is some combination of banal, derivative, sycophantic, foolish, and intellectually dishonest. Perhaps this is in part because, although I disclose this at some risk to my credibility, I follow John Tesh on Pinterest (but mainly to enjoy him ironically and hipster-like; he, and Wilford Brimley, are my PBR). Tesh, however, does not set the lower bound for workplace advice; browsing workplace-themed blogs at random or the book section of any office supply chain is weirder and more disgusting. Michael O. Church, then, is a welcome relief from the endless drivel, and a fine writer and political thinker to boot.

One of Church’s favorite concepts is “libertarian socialism.” Outwardly, this may sound as ridiculous as the UK being governed by a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, but what he proposes, a government safety net beneath a dynamic private sector, is exactly what most Western governments have attempted, with varying degrees of success, since the Second World War. Church’s proposal avoids by a wide margin the sclerosis of command economies (which, in extreme instances such as North Korea’s, causes an outright death spiral), but it also renders moot the sclerosis of large, ossified corporations, with their legions of marginal-to-useless bureaucrats, layers of political intrigue, and penchant for regulatory capture. His model is for an advanced sort of Jeffersonian yeomanry as an alternative to, and eventually a replacement for, the Hamiltonian model that predominates today. Here’s one of his critiques of the current system: Continue reading →

Update on the “tunnel people”

muricaderp Liberty

The “tunnel people” of Las Vegas were featured on Inside Edition last night (5/28). Yes, it’s an atrocious show on the whole, the breathlessness of the field reporting was unnecessary, and someone should have fact-checked the report closely enough to keep the reporter from erroneously referring to the storm drains as sewers, but even so, it was a surprisingly well-done piece. Inside Edition’s liaison in the storm drains was a photojournalist who had covered them previously and whose commentary was intelligent and decorous. More impressive was the footage of a young man hauling a number of his possessions, including a guitar, through another couple’s living space, which occupied the entire width of their drain between his quarters and the nearest exit to the outside world. This footage conveyed the difficulty of living in the storm drains and the resourcefulness of the residents with a power that still shots would have trouble equaling. The report was half-cocked at times, but it was exactly the kind of serious journalism that should be broadcast more often.  

This is especially true of television broadcasts, which reach an audience that for various reasons simply cannot be reached in writing. Reform becomes much easier and more viable when one is able to get through not only to an engaged minority, but also to the lazy and the disengaged. Merely presenting more or less honest, accurate reporting in lieu of propaganda and sensational tripe is an incremental improvement. It’s one less piece of rubbish distorting the senses of the citizenry.

The effects are subtle, perhaps even imperceptible, but they’re meaningful because their aggregate effects are huge. Nicolae Ceaucescu, for example, tried to propagandize his subjects about the evils of American capitalism by liberally broadcasting Dallas on Romanian state television, but instead he ended up confirming his subjects’ suspicions that he was mismanaging their country to the point of penury, and that he and his wife were why they couldn’t have nice things of the sort enjoyed by scheming Texans. Had he been less tone-deaf, he might have broadcast that other Inside Edition classic from last night, an update on the boy who divorced his parents. 

I knew I had reasons for only watching that crap by accident. 

Adventures in Christian Vulgaria

muricaderp Liberty, Religion

A couple of weeks ago, my dad and I were in a hotel elevator with a group of conference-goers when, within twenty seconds of the door closing, one of the latter gents said, “I thought the whole point of this conference was not to play with ourselves.” His comment was apropos of a discussion about who was responsible for pushing the elevator buttons for the rest of us, but not  apropos by much. My dad and I laughed at this witty commentary somewhat more sheepishly than the other eight or so passengers, some of whom reacted with ostentatious gusto. Neither of us considered thinly veiled references to masturbation appropriate to the circumstances, but there were only two of us.

I didn’t have nearly enough presence of mind at the time, but I realize in retrospect that the equitable and salutary response would have been to promptly ask: “Dude, what the fuck?” That earthy, worldly query would have struck precisely the right tone. By most likely provoking a frenzied protestation of hurt Christian fee-fees, it would have offered me a timely opportunity to note that it was not I who had just raised the specter of masturbation in front of strangers in a crowded elevator. To adopt the parlance of the present company, it would have been edifying, a word, if not the Word, to strengthen a Christian man in his Walk.

The religious angle to this episode is bizarre but fascinating. The goofiness, subtle overfamiliarity, and faux self-deprecation with which these men approached the world was circumstantial evidence for their being Christian fellas after God’s heart, but I glanced down long enough to see the smoking gun: a study guide for “Every Man’s Battle.” Continue reading →

Liberalization in India, and NOT Just in Markets

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty , , ,

Shikha Dalmia, of Reason, has a new piece up in the Wall Street Journal on India’s harassment problem:

I’ve never met an Indian woman—rich or poor, upper or lower caste, pretty or homely, young or middle-age—who hasn’t been harassed […] Unlike rape and sex-selective abortion, which represent a genuine devaluing of women, sexual harassment in India is, I believe, an expression not of the power of Indian men but of their helplessness. It’s a pathetic attempt to have a sexual encounter, no matter how meaningless and evanescent. Its real cause is free-floating male libido with no socially acceptable outlet.

India’s sexual mores and institutions are rooted in a pastoral past, when people died before 50, so marriages between minors were the norm. Families in villages would betroth their children, at birth sometimes, and have a formal ceremony after both attained puberty, when the girl went to live with her husband’s family. This arrangement, now banned, had many horrendous downsides, but it produced an organic harmony between the sexual needs of individuals and the social expectations of monogamy and chastity […]

What would work [for easing India’s harassment problem]? Nothing short of transforming India’s puritanical culture and giving men and women more freedom to forge sexually mature relationships outside of marriage.

Read the whole thing. I don’t know how much good liberalizing India’s sexual mores would be without first more liberalization in markets. I often think of the US’s own problems when it comes to the sexual revolution of the 1960s: more STDs, more unplanned, unwanted pregnancies, and more costs associated with public health. Another downside was the attempt, by certain feminists, to destroy the very libido of men that Dalmia recommends liberalizing. The attempts by these authoritarians can still be felt today, especially in American universities (see Ken Masugi’s thoughtful piece on this problem).

La mauvaise foi

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty , , , ,

Le mensonge adulte me fascine depuis longtemps. Le mensonge collectif m’intrigue particulièrement. La mauvaise foi de tout un groupe, toute une caste ne cesse de m’étonner. Pourtant, Jean-Paul Sartre l’avait bien analysée (avant d’en donner lui-même des exemples inoubliables).

Je commente quelquefois sur ce blog l’indifférence aux faits que je rencontre souvent dans les medias français. (Voir: “Un Menteur bien français”) Un ami parisien, avocat et réalisateur talentueux de documentaires (avec beaucoup de coeur) m’écrit sa colère sur le même sujet. Mon ami se place à gauche (à mon avis, seulement, “l’option défaut” – une autre histoire) tandis que je suis un conservateur “anglo-saxon” classique (pas nationaliste, pas gaulliste, pas religieux). Voici, ci-dessous, son texte retouché seulement un petit peu pour protéger quelques susceptibilités particulières. L’écriture y est celle qu’on trouve dans un courriel (“maille” en Franglais) expédié rapidement a un ami. – JD

Parlant des journalistes français en général:

En attendant aussi, je pense que la journaliste (de la télévision), Madame X, comme 90% des journalistes (français en tout cas) sont bien trop fainéants pour faire leur travail. En l’occurrence vérifier l’information, ce qui est le B-A BA de leur métier.

..et en plus ( ceci allant souvent avec cela), ils sont d’une incroyable prétention (suffisance, arrogance, plein d’autres mots me viennent à l’esprit les concernant).

Sur plusieurs sujets, j’ai moi-même fait l’expérience de leur nullité.

Par exemple, sans doute as-tu suivi l’affaire Cahuzac, ce ministre du budget qui a planqué du fric ã l’étranger et qui a nié jusqu’au bout, quitte à mentir de la tribune de l’Assemblée Nationale.

Un seul journal, sur le web, Mediapart a sorti l’info. Son patron Edwy Plenel a été traîné dans la boue par tous les autres journalistes et, notamment, les stars de la télé. Pourtant Edwy Plenel n’avait qu’un mot à la bouche à leur adresse: “faites votre travail”.

Autre exemple beaucoup plus grave encore: l’affaire Al Dura, du nom de ce gamin qui se serait fait buter dans les bras de son père par l’armée israélienne, pris dans des tirs croisés à un carrefour de Gaza. Il se trouve que le seul mec, au départ, et qui se bat seul depuis plus de 10 ans, pour expliquer au monde que c’est une mise en scène, est l’ami d’un ami, Philippe Karsenty. Un jour je suis allé l’écouter, il faisait une conférence sur le sujet. Il a montré les rushes qu’il avait réussi à soutirer à France 2, la seule chaîne qui ait, à l’époque, diffusé ces images. Et là, on voyait comment les faits avaient été mis en scène par les Palestiniens et comment l’enfant bougeait à la fin des rushes; comment surtout, on le voyait prendre dans sa poche un bout de tissu rouge, le placer au niveau de sa poitrine et faire le mort. Je t’assure que ces images, que j’ai vu, sont incroyables.

Le journaliste de france 2 est une sommité, Charles Enderlin. Ce jour là, il n’était pas sur place. Il a fait fait confiance à l’un des cameramen avec lesquels il a l’habitude de travailler, un Palestinien. Et il s’est fait manipuler. France 2 a soutenu, soutient, son journaliste. À intenté toute une série de procès à mon pote… Qui les a tous gagnés. Pourtant impossible d’obtenir de mea culpa de la chaîne qui continue les procédures.

Et, impossible, pour moi, d’aider ce mec depuis toute ces années. Ma nana, de 2005 à 2010, était est grand reporter au Nouvel Obs (dont Jean Daniel a pris l’initiative de lancer une pétition de soutien à Charles Enderlin).  Je lui ai proposés plusieurs fois de rencontrer Karsenty. NIET. À la fin, je crois que le commencement de la fin,avec elle, date d’une engueulade à ce sujet: “Karsenty était un psychopathe à moitié facho, un abruti qui avait le malheur d’être très à droite, maire adjoint de Neuilly, proche de Sarkozy, et moi un imbécile qui ne méritait pas d’autre explication de son refus”. À un point, citant un de nos copains communs, grand Reporter à Telerama, elle s’est exclamée qu’il avait fait une super enquête qui prouvait ses dires que Karsenty était un taré.

Je me suis procuré l’article du copain dans Telerama… Pas
une fois la parole n’était donné à Karsenty. Alors, j’ai demandé a ce dernier… Et tu t’en doutes déjà, inutile de prolonger le suspense, jamais il n’a rencontré le grand reporter de Telerama qui l’a pourtant assassiné dans son article.

Pire encore sur ce même sujet. J’en ai parlé à mon amie Annick Cojean. Je l’adore et elle est sûrement une des journalistes françaises les plus respectée par ses pairs en France ( grand reporter au Monde, prix Albert Londres et présidente de ce prix), comme dans le monde ( elle est l’auteure de ce best seller mondial, “les proies” en français, sur le harem de khadafi et traduits en plusieurs langues). Elle m’a expliqué qu’une journaliste, également prix Albert Londres, Catherine Gentile, de TF1, avait expliqué au conseil d’administration du prix, qu’elle connaissait vraiment bien Enderlin, que c’était un très grand journaliste et qu’il ne pouvait pas avoir été manipulé et que le cas échéant, il aurait fait acte de contrition. Et, en plus, dixit, “elle avait tout checké, le gosse était bien mort dans les conditions que l’on sait. Elle avait fait l’enquête”.

Très bien. Ai-je dit.  Puis: “Avait-elle rencontré Karsenty”? Renseignements pris par Annick… Tu te doutes de la réponse, Non évidemment.

Annick voulait-elle le rencontrer… Tu te doutes de la réponse ( quoique quelque peu embarrassée).

Et pourquoi, je te raconte tout ça? Et bien, parce qu’enfin, Israël bouge et a décidé de publier les rapports sur l’enquête que l’emmerdeur de Karsenty l’a contrainte de mener et qui conclut que l’enfant n’est très certainement pas mort comme le montrent les images de France 2 et que Karsenty a très certainement raison.

Si tu veux, je t’envoie le lien de l’article. Ça me fait plaisir pour Karsenty…. qui a été traîné dans la boue depuis toute ces années. J’espère qu’on va, enfin, le prendre au sérieux et vérifier ce qu’il avance. Dommage qu’il ne soit pas journaliste… Il serait sûrement le prochain lauréat du prix… Albert Londres!

Commentaires?

The Obama Administration: RIP

Warren Gibson Current Events, Liberty, Politics

OK, that pronouncement is a bit premature. But if the Republicans hold the House next year as seems likely, it’s a done deal. Just keeping track of all the attacks on the administration has become quite a chore. And quite a few of those attacks are coming from Obama’s base of support.

  • The press is howling about the Justice Department’s heavy-handed subpoena of journalists’ phone records. “A fishing expedition for sources and an effort to fend off whistleblowers” is how the New York Times editorial board describes it. This issue isn’t going away any time soon.
  • Then there’s Guantanamo, the closing of which was to be Obama’s first priority upon taking office in 2009. Thus New York Times commentator Joe Nocera:  “The president could have jumped through the hoops Congress now requires and continued moving prisoners out of Guantánamo. But he didn’t. Instead, he froze all transfers, including 56 men from Yemen who had been ‘cleared’ for transfer by a national security commission that Obama himself established. The government, the commission essentially said, has no national security interest in holding these men. Yet Obama continued to let them rot in that Cuban hell. And you wonder why they are on a hunger strike?”
  • Some unions are mad at Obama as Brandon Christensen pointed out on this blog, where he quotes one union’s demand: “repeal or complete reform” of Obamacare.
  • The IRS scandal may have a shorter half-life. The Times correctly points out that Presidential use of the IRS to bludgeon political enemies goes back at least to Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. Still, it’s heartening to see the Tea Party rejuvenated, with street protests and blogs pointing out that thuggish behavior is a long-standing and probably irremediable attribute of the IRS.
  • Waiting in the wings is Dodd-Frank. This financial “reform” act is mostly not yet in effect because the agencies are trying to figure out how to write the rules that will actually put into practice the clear-as-mud intent of the law. It’s a near-certainty that this law has fixed nothing and that another financial crisis will hit, possibly before Obama leaves office.  Already we see signs of bubbles in the housing and stock markets.

“This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer,” said Will Rogers. Three years of gridlock, if we’re fortunate enough to get it, should hide away the hammer, at least for a time, from both Congress and the President.

Reading Hayek in Beijing

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty , , , , , , ,

That’s the subject of a fascinating account of life in China through the eyes of a dissident in this last week’s Wall Street Journal. An excerpt:

Put another way, the conventional notion that the modern Chinese system combines political authoritarianism with economic liberalism is mistaken: A more accurate description of the recipe is dictatorship and cronyism, with the results showing up in rampant corruption, environmental degradation and wide inequalities between the politically well-connected and everyone else. “There are two major forms of hatred” in China today, Mr. Yang explains. “Hatred toward the rich; hatred toward the powerful, the officials.” As often as not they are one and the same.

There is more, too: Continue reading →