Links

Around the Web: PoliSci edition

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links, Politics

Libertarianism is often associated with the discipline of economics, but here at the consortium we try to bring a variety of libertarian-ish views to the table. Here are a few political science blogs that I frequent:

  1. Crooked Timber. This blog is largely considered to be the standard-bearer for political science blogs. Recommended.
  2. Pileus blog. This is the polisci blog with the hardest libertarian slant, although I still haven’t found any anarchocapitalists lurking about.
  3. Mischiefs of Faction. This is a new blog and I really like what I’ve read so far.
  4. Duck of Minerva. International relations blog. IR is not explicitly associated with political science, of course, but in traditional undergraduate programs it often falls under the polisci rubric.
  5. The Monkey Cage. “Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.” – H.L. Mencken.
  6. The Reality-Based Community. A humble blog composed of mostly political scientists, but it has some economists and lawyers on board as well.

Political science, of course, is one of the many disciplines that is fairly hostile to libertarianism, although most political scientists I’ve studied under have still been liberals. This is in contradiction to other scholarly disciplines like anthropology and sociology – as well as all of the humanities disciplines – which still embrace classical and post-Marxist arguments in their undergraduate programs.

There are a ton of blogs around the web that are manned by consortiums of political scientists, but these six can be counted on to be fairly balanced and well thought-out most of the time. I learn from them every time I visit.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , ,

I don’t know if I can echo Andrew’s prodigious output, but here’s my own reading list for the weekend:

  1. Modesto Junior College, bureaucracy and censorship: Haughty arrogance edition. Ken White explains Weber’s ‘iron cage’
  2. Liberty after Lehman Brothers: What have we learned? Peter Boettke muses about the infamous bailouts
  3. Who were the anti-Federalists, and why do they still matter? Trevor Burrus of the Cato Institute explains
  4. The Christian Exodus. Another disaster in the Middle East

PS I just got in to Santa Cruz. Wish me luck!

Around the Web: Harvest moon over Uranus

muricaderp Economics, Law, Links

Why? Because it’s Friday. My workweek this week happens to start (and hopefully not also end) on Saturday, a circumstance that would totally blow the minds of drive-time radio hosts across the land. Nevertheless, for everybody else, it’s Friday, one of the great days of Lenten fasting at the opposite time of the year, or so we’re instructed, but statistically a day to puke in gutters from Manayunk to the Gaslamp Quarter just like we did last week. Let’s get vulgar.

1. Books are good. Books are edifying. Books encourage us to slow down, focus, develop an attention span longer than that inculcated by lolcat videos, hone our intellects, and increase our funds of knowledge. Books like Boris the Shitting Buffalo.

The same author also maintains a blog, and Good Lord of the High Plains Hunt, the man is shrill. By his reckoning, picking crops commercially apparently isn’t enough to offset the great deficit of manliness that I incur by not being totally head-up about gubbyment taking my money to give food stamps to freeloaders, like the freeloaders who worked alongside me in a bee-infested blueberry patch earlier this month. I and my SNAP-addled colleagues all failed Aaron Clarey’s great manosphere political shit test, although it probably stood to reason for the two women in our group.

As it happens, I heard about Clarey through:

2. Roosh, a STEM dropout who makes a living, or pretends to make a living, by writing about his sex life, or maybe his imagined sex life, crowd-sourcing the sexual attractiveness of random women by posting their photographs on Twitter, deploying sexual slurs against ideological adversaries, and defending crashing long-term at his dad’s place when he isn’t traveling the world bedding its hotties.

A couple of fine self-serious chaps, I say.

3. More proof that any attempt to describe Charles Carreon will fall short of the glory of Charles Carreon:

In a 30-minute phone interview with Ars on Wednesday, Carreon lamented that, as a result of this entire sordid affair, his professional reputation has been damaged—or as he calls it, “rapeutated.” In fact, Carreon has a colorful website at Rapeutation.com that includes an elaborate chart with a new, long, and extensive list of all the so-called “rapeutationists,” including yours truly and two more Ars staffers. If you’d like to see a picture of Carreon’s critics—including an Ars Technica writer—spewing fecal matter out of their mouths, that too can be accommodated.

Quoth the avowed Buddhist:

“It’s an insoluble problem,” he continued. “It’s is not remediable. As long as you keep punching ‘Charles Carreon’ into Google, there’s just more stories about this nonsense. How can anyone get their message through? I’ve written hundreds of works. You can’t find them. Is that helpful? No. Now it’s difficult for prospective clients to see that I’m a relatively erudite person. Since then, some Amazon reviews of my books have, in bad faith, been given one star—I don’t sell many books anymore. Now it’s highly unlikely that anyone would say that Charles Carreon is a pretty bright guy.”

In the third person, no less. Carreon’s Buddhism isn’t compelling him to let go of his desires by making a concerted effort to pay the judgment already secured against him by his rapeutationists, but realize that he’s from Arizona (because, pursuant to his poetry, you don’t mess with the man from Tucson) by way of Ashland, Oregon, a city whose religious syncretism has never been the self-effacing kind. (Don’t ask me for details. I’ll be up all night if you do.)

4. Quick! Find the most efficient way to aggregate all manosphere tropes in a single essay!

4A. Miley Cyrus as symptom and cause of third-wave feminism.

Alternate explanation: Miley Cyrus, daughter of Billy Ray “Achy Breaky Heart” Cyrus, as vector of second-generation suck.

4B. Our boy Roosh again, in his capacity as patron of the preceding Return of Kings doubleheader:

Women and homosexuals are prohibited from commenting here. They will be immediately banned.

Oh yeah, a no homo manstuff pledge. This guy is as manly as Ted Haggard. And if his demeanor is any indication, he would have us believe that kings, he being among them, are effete, condescending, endlessly intoning about stupid hobbyhorses, and hyperlecherous misogynists.

Come to think of it, it’s served the Kennedy family well enough. God save the King from his flying, driving and skiing habits, or not.

Why Roe v. Wade isn’t nearly as relevant as you’d like if you’re a grating ideological drone

muricaderp Current Events, History, Law, Liberty, Links, Politics, Religion

Titles like that are why I don’t cater to ideologues, except to troll them. One side swears that the least regulation of women’s access to abortion throughout their pregnancies is the work of the bastard love child of Anthony Comstock and Jack the Ripper, the other side swears that women’s lawful recourse to abortion as individuals under the post-Roe regime is tantamount to the gas chambers of Birkenau (often with helpful illustrations of the Nazi genocide infrastructure), and the silent majority has another pint of Franzia, since any other response would be futile. 

How does one even try to reconcile competing, irreconcilable policy interests? How can the self-determination of women facing unwanted pregnancies be squared with the welfare of the babies they are carrying or the demographic health of society? Maybe by attaching felony penalties to Godwin’s Law (everything else is already a federal felony, after all). If nothing else, we can remember that even in times of darkest derp, demographic statistics abide, although maybe not so much in the debate about abortion itself, because that frothy milkshake brings all the braying nuts to the yard.

To wit, from a Nazi-allusion-free article not about abortion at the Demo Memo: 

Baby Bust Update: 8% Birth Decline

 
According to preliminary estimates for 2012, the baby bust continues but the decline is slowing. The nation’s 2012 fertility rate was 63.0 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, the lowest on record and 9.4 percent below the 2007 high of 69.5. The fertility rate of women under age 30 is at a record low, but the rate among women aged 30 to 34 climbed slightly between 2011 and 2012 as those who had been postponing childbearing played catchup.

Overall, 3,952,937 babies were born in 2012. This was 8.4 percent below the 4,316,233 born in the peak birth year of 2007. So far, the Great Recession baby bust is not as deep as the 10.7 percent Great Depression bust, and it’s not likely to reach that level because the decline is slowing. For some perspective, keep in mind that the decline in births from the peak year of the baby boom in 1957 to the trough year of the baby bust (Generation X) in 1973 was a much larger 27 percent.

Did you notice that? It was subtle. In the course of not yelling about misogynistic sex scolds or murdered babies, Cheryl Russell mentioned that dreadful watershed year of 1973. That was the year in which American women started killing their own flesh and blood en masse with the government’s blessing and disposing of it as medical waste, except for the part about their finally starting the next year to carry more babies to term after nearly a generation of deliberate barrenness. 

It appears that what Roe really did as a policy (in contrast to its excellent service as a lodestone for acrimonious derp unto ages of ages) was to regularize a common medical procedure that had proven impossible to eliminate, even with criminal penalties. There aren’t reliable records of abortions in most states for several decades prior to Roe because no prudent physician would have documented a procedure that could have subjected him and his patient to felony prosecution. As birth records from 1957 show, sex was invented at some point prior to 1973, and for purposes of demographic analysis, it’s reasonable to assume that a constant, and very high, percentage of women of childbearing age was sexually active. That’s why Russell used data on live births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44.

These are rough bounds, but they’re accurate enough for demographic purposes. In demographic terms, the celibate minority of adults is static, mere background noise obstructing the thumpy signal of the rumpy-pumpy. The clerical celibates (sic?), of course, are especially noisy. The vulgar truth is that you and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals, although personally, I prefer Nature documentaries, and I find bears to have the most dignified and heartwarming mating practices this side of the quaking aspen. 

That paragraph was kind of gross. So is pretty much the entire debate on abortion in the United States since 1973. It takes a special kind of person to insist that late third-trimester abortions present no ethical or existential concerns and are totally cool. It takes a really special kind of person to march down the National Mall with a sign showing a photograph of a fetus next to one of Dachau. Centrists do not enjoy hanging out with such people. Bring out the grrrrrrlll power wimminz in shoddy crew cuts and Randall Terry with a gas chamber picture, and the substantial portion of the silent majority that doesn’t have a prurient interest in the macabre spectacle, the people who should be asserting themselves as policy stakeholders, shrink into the woodwork at warp speed. 

To a great extent, this four-decade abortion shouting match is a major front in the war between K-strategic libertines and r-strategic authoritarians for the demographic soul of the nation. Neither of these factions should be given a voice as stakeholders in the childbearing decisions of individuals. Granting legitimacy to either faction as an arbiter of individuals’ reproductive decisions is collectivist madness.

Both sides have developed a habit of becoming insufferable concern trolls. The barren libertine left concern-trolls women who genuinely want to raise families on the basis that they aren’t devoting enough time and energy to the stuff of feminist liberation. The authoritarian breeder right concern-trolls poor, defenseless babies, and at its shrillest extremes unimplanted embryos, with no thought to the gruesomeness of the alternative means of population control that eventually will assert themselves: consistently some combination of war, disease and famine. (If they think American women’s attitudes towards their infants in utero are amoral, they should consider a famine afflicting a burgeoning population. A failed wheat crop never cares.)

Neither extreme really wants competent individuals to make their own free, informed decisions, because have it all/children are annoying and le hard/baby murder!/invading proliferative Muslim hordes. Do it in the name of Carrie Bradshaw, or do it in the name of Charles Martel, but whatever you do, don’t make your own decision; make ours. 

The Eagle wept. 

More gringos who won’t do farm work unless they’re told where there’s farm work

muricaderp Economics, Links ,

I’ve got mail:

Andrew,

We will let you know within two days whether or not we can use you.  We’ve had an overwhelming response.  Thank you for your interest.

This “overwhelming response” was to a help wanted ad, in English, for grape pickers in San Luis Obispo County. The ad was posted less than 72 hours ago.

I’m sure that by the Farm Bureau’s reckoning, no individuals authorized to work in the United States applied for this position. While I was driving to San Luis Obispo yesterday to interview for another job, I listened to a broadcast by an outfit called Family Radio on which the Executive Director of the Fresno County Farm Bureau, Ryan Jacobsen, intoned about how Fresno County’s farmers just can’t find enough native-born help to get all their field work done. Of course they can’t; they never advertise for it.

If these gigs in San Luis Obispo fall completely through, I’m of a mind to go back to Fresno, track Jacobsen down, and tell him, “Hey, I heard you say on the radio that you’re shorthanded. Are you hiring about now?” I’m mostly kidding about this, but not entirely. It’s usually Tea Party cranks who passive-aggressively apply for farm jobs, and if I were a farm manager, I wouldn’t be enthusiastic about hiring a crew of underqualified, out-of-shape ideological blowhards who enjoy wearing tricorner hats. On the other hand, I’m not a self-appointed latter-day Patrick Henry, but a humble farmhand with several seasons’ experience with wine grapes, and I dare say I’m not the only such gringo.

My pseudoapologies for humblebragging.

I keep harping on the dearth of farm help wanted ads only because Farm Bureau officials and their elected representatives (apparently not my elected representatives) keep harping on the shortage of farmhands. I could have given materially the same speech that Jacobsen gave about farm labor “shortages” and immigration “reform” yesterday. There’s a certain comforting Kabuki ritualization to it, an unctuousness that is weirdly majestic in its predictability and brazen repetition of tiresome bullshit. As a Catholic, I appreciate liturgies.

What I start to wonder is whether Jacobsen and his colleagues actually, sincerely believe their own bullshit. I doubt that Dianne Feinstein does in her capacity as their lackey; I’d be surprised if any sincerity on her part outlived Harvey Milk by a decade and a half. Jacobsen gave off a very different vibe; for what the distinction is worth, he seemed not to be an indecent man, but a decent man making indecent arguments. The labor shortage has become rote learning in the San Joaquin Valley farm country by this point. It takes a lot of effort to unlearn the indoctrination, and a lot of courage to publicly repudiate it.

Some people go deep enough into the bullshit holding tank to stop noticing the fumes. They don’t notice that the fumes are making them loopy. It happened to members of the US intelligence community (sic) in the 1950′s. Recently declassified papers show high-ranking intelligence officials using the same crude redbaiting language in private correspondence that they used in public statements. They weren’t throwing red meat to the goobers and then retiring to snicker about how they had pulled a fast one on the Bircher freaks. They actually believed their own factually challenged Comintern hysteria. I have no reason to believe that Ryan Jacobsen is nuts, but I also have no reason to believe that he’s using any kind of critical thinking about the farm labor supply in his home county. That’s the kind of thing that would aggravate the neighbors, if nothing else, and I figure that, as a Farm Bureau officer, he’s politically savvy enough not to play around with anything that looks like a third rail.

Because there are never enough gringos to get the farm work done. Except when there are too many of us.

Editorial Duties

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Links

Hello all,

I apologize for my lack of posts lately. I’ve been busy getting ready for my big move from LA to Santa Cruz. I’m also writing one last paper for school (it’s due on Friday).

I hoped you liked the article that Dr Machan generously provided for the blog. If so, you may be in for a bit of a surprise; stay tuned!

I’ve got some stuff I’d like to pull from the ‘comments’ section and riff off of in a little bit, so look for that beginning next week. I know Andrew is keeping everybody on their toes, and Rick is currently getting settled down in Texas. Don’t know where the heck Hank is at.

A little bit of libertarianism from the young. A little bit of libertarianism from the wise. This is turning into one hell of a blog (if I do say so myself).

Toward A Selfish Left

Against Symbolic Killing

Another White Whine from apple country

muricaderp Economics, Links

Here’s an excellent example of West Coast planters whining about how it’s so terribly impossible to hire a good picking crew these days. It’s that classic outtake from the Gospels, the Parable of the Many Apples and the Few Pickers. Quoth the Wall Street Journal’s Joel Millman:

PASCO, Wash.—Washington state is enjoying the second-biggest apple crop in its history, but farmers warn they may have to leave up to one-quarter of their bounty to rot, because there aren’t enough pickers.

“I’m down 40% from the labor I need,” said Steve Nunley, manager of a 3,000-acre apple orchard for Pride Packing Co. in Wapato, Wash. Mr. Nunley said he has 200 pickers right now, but needs close to 400. He has increased pay to $24 for every 1,000-pound bin of Gala apples they pick, compared with $18 last year. Even so, he expects to have to let tons of fruit fall unpicked this season.

That works out to $48 a ton, or 2.4 cents per pound, up from a whopping 1.8 cents. For comparison, the minimum piece rate that I was paid as a blueberry picker last week was 40 cents per pound. Last Saturday, I and at least two other pickers were given a ten-cent bonus for the day because we were picking fruit of such consistently high-quality that it barely had to be sorted. Blueberries are more expensive than apples at retail, but certainly not by a factor of sixteen.

In many orchards (the exceptions being those that have been planted with dwarf trees), these single-digit piece rates are what pickers receive for maneuvering sacks weighing dozens of pounds down ladders propped up haphazardly against trees under dappled lighting. It’s inherently dangerous work. Blueberry harvests simply do not pose remotely similar risks of repetitive stress injuries, sprains, bone fractures, or death.

It stands to reason, then, that the labor pool takes dishwashing jobs if it can’t get a premium for piece rate jobs that hopefully won’t make them throw out their backs or get concussions when they fall off ladders:

In a standoff, growers say they can’t afford to raise wages further, and workers decline to work for what they’re being offered.

“We could lose 25% [of the crop]. Or it could be much worse,” said Jeff Rippon, farm manager of Chiawana Orchards in Yakima, Wash. Mr. Rippon’s 300 acres have enough apples on them to yield nearly 10 million pounds of fruit, if he had enough hands to bring them in. He said he needs about 150 full-time pickers to get the crop in, but right now has only 60.

“Pickers pull up, they ask what you’re paying. If they like what you’re offering, they stay. If they don’t, they’re gone,” said manager Martin Estrada of Monkey Ridge Ranch, a huge apple plantation on the Snake River.

Do tell, Mrs. O’Hara. Say, how are you managing with all the Reconstruction they’re doing these days? I must say, that General Sherman is quite a character!

It’s the curse of hiring freemen. If they don’t like an underpaid job that may get them dead or crippled under a pile of apples, they may end up taking other jobs, leaving the poor crew boss to futilely painting another “se buscan trabajadores” sign on a piece of scrap plywood. Free association is such a buzzkill when it’s the help that does the free associating. Maybe there are alternatives:

The state faced similar labor shortages last year, when growers persuaded Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire to declare a labor emergency, which allowed farms to hire prisoners to bring in the harvest. For example, about a hundred convicts from a minimum-security facility fanned out among orchards in the Wenatchee Valley. But growers aren’t currently seeking to hire prisoners, who pick far fewer apples a day than immigrant laborers do.

Or maybe not. In the Old South, if I’m not mistaken, one of the polite terms for this part of the workforce was “recalcitrant slaves.” (The impolite terms were utterly evil.) Much effort and manpower was devoted to intimidating and punishing these slackers and saboteurs, often with heinous brute force. Today, the prison population in the United States is disproportionately comprised of the descendants of these slaves. Think of it: the State of Washington deploying black small-time offenders from Seattle and Tacoma into white-owned apple plantations at a fraction of minimum wage, not in 1880 or 1950, but in 2011. What’s more, this was authorized by a Democratic governor who was widely regarded as substantially left of center. It’s barely conceivable that these crews were not blacker than the overall population of Washington State. It’s no joke that we haven’t moved as far beyond slavery and Jim Crow as decent Americans would wish.

Apparently the Wall Street Journal likes to bury its ledes:

Farm operators elsewhere in the U.S. have said they face shortages of workers, sometimes because of new state immigration laws that have driven pickers from fields and groves. Some academic researchers say it is hard to quantify an actual labor shortage in U.S. agriculture, in part because there is so little evidence of a decline in production.

Philip L. Martin of the University of California, Davis, said overall U.S. production of fruits and vegetables has remained stable in recent years. Moreover, he said, farm-labor wages have remained flat or even declined. “You would think that wages would go up” if workers were in short supply, he explained.

Yeah, I would think so, too.

I’d also think that Craigslist would be plastered with help-wanted ads for fruit and vegetable pickers. I certainly wish it were. As it is, I can count the number of current ads for pickers on the Willamette Valley boards on my middle finger. It’s a job picking squash at minimum wage that I quit mid-shift on the first day because the manners of the crew bosses verged on what I would expect of Arkansas prison trusties. I expected it to be worse than the blueberry job, but not that much worse. There are worse jobs yet in agriculture, to be sure, but at heart I really do not care to be a moral relativist.

Finally, let’s have a couple of brief words from labor:

United Farm Workers organizer Jorge Antonio Valenzuela, who represents pickers in the Northwest, said “there is no shortage” at farms that pay “correctly.”

….Not far away, outside a church in Pasco, a migrant from Mexico’s Michoacán state, 47-year-old José Carranza, said he planned to skip the fruit harvest this year. Mr. Carranza believes he can do better in construction work, which is picking up.

“Growers offer $20 per bin around here,” he said. “It’s just not enough.”

What? What about the $28 per bin–$28 an hour for the hotshot pickers–that all the growers were offering several paragraphs above? And what about the one bin per hour that the hotshots are supposedly able to pick? Management said it was so.

Whom are we to believe: the growers, who told a reporter about the generous raises they were offering, or this Carranza fellow, what with his sour grapes about the pay being shit? My guess is that Carranza is getting old and worn-out from having picked too many apples in his day, so if the growers are lucky I’ll be generous and split the difference for an average rate of $24 per bin. Honestly, that’s a wildly liberal guess. And this is for a line of work that, pursued as a full-time, permanent career, shortens life expectancies by over a decade.

There is a LOT of bullshit in this business. It’s endless. This article was published last year, in 2012, but the same complaints are made year after year, about crop after crop. It’s a perennial bitchfest about how there’s no one to pick all the crops and that it is therefore of utmost importance to admit even more foreign peasants until this nonexistent labor shortage is no more, the welfare of these peasants and of the communities where they work be damned.

That’s one gnarly old bush that overwinters just fine.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , ,
  1. Guidelines on writing a philosophy paper (or any kind of paper!)
  2. Sen, Nozick and “Breaking Bad”
  3. On David Graeber’s “bullshit jobs”
  4. Math in Economics: Useful and Over-used
  5. The Problem with Delhi’s Rich Kids
  6. Straussian civil wars: It’s East coast versus West

Racial murder and dereliction of duty by the press

muricaderp Current Events, Links

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.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , ,
  1. 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)
  2. Compton as the Bellwether for Urban America; interesting article from a graduate student at UCSD
  3. Rand Paul is no “isolationist,” contrary to the opinion of the ill-informed
  4. Liberty’s lost decade; the Economist decides that enough is enough
  5. 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

muricaderp Economics, Links, Politics

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.

Little House of Horrors on the Prairie

muricaderp Economics, History, Links

For once, I relay a sick tale that might be about Dennis Rader but in fact is not. Rather, it is about:

a picture of the costs and risks of isolation that never made it into the book series: A baby brother who died at 9 months. A miserable year working and living in an Iowa tavern. A pair of innkeepers who murdered guests and buried them out back. Another pioneer couple who boarded with them during the Long Winter whose attitudes were far more whining than stoic.

Oh beautiful, for specious skies, for amber waves of historical revisionism, for purple prose, volume upon volume of it, above the goober-planted plain. I think I’ll continue to let other people read the Little House on the Prairie series and report back. I never had high expectations for it, but neither did I have any idea that it was so widely regarded, in extreme cases even by publishers, as hackneyed, propagandistic dreck. The back story, though, is quite the maudlin treasury of Randian tropes. Rule of thumb; if it’s derogatory and it’s been said about libertarians, it was probably both lived and said by Laura Ingalls Wilder, her daughter, and her daughter’s lawyer. Read it and smirk.

Around the Web: The (tits and) ass end of the internet

muricaderp Links

I’ve discussed T&A in these pages before, and I surely will again.

There are websites that discuss sex with taste, manners, morals, that kind of thing. Then there are the kind that I’m about to profile. Some of this stuff is dark, dark enough that Geraldo will wear his sunglasses at night. This is one link dump, however, in which the most gratuitous bit of weirdness will be the least disturbing. Geraldo may not be entirely right, but as we’ll discover shortly, he isn’t as wrong as the kind of people who lead cults of mushheaded feminist ideologues and undersexed shut-ins.

Speaking of tits, I’m just about to link to some: probably not ones that you’d like to see, but if that was one of the search terms that brought you here, you might want to refine your search terms for specificity.

Selfies are wrong. You, too, will look like a damn fool preening at a mirror with a flat phone in hand, and equally a fool for having a forearm awkwardly extended in front of your self-portraits at popular tourist sites because you were too witless or bashful or something to ask anyone else to take your picture. On the other hand, when one is drunk and Geraldo Rivera at 2:30 am, there may not be anyone else present to take one’s nude self-portrait and post it to Twitter. Truth be told, if you have any more taste than I have, you probably don’t want to look at the result, but in consideration of the libertarian ethos on this site, I’ll let individual readers make their own decisions about viewing the masterpiece, on the understanding that they have been given fair warning and consequently bear full responsibility for any psychic damage.

In fairness, notwithstanding his rocking the Transitions Lenses and nothing else, much as Eliot Spitzer loved him some socks, Geraldo’s selfie isn’t nearly as weird as Anthony Weiner’s adventures in the Carlos Danger Zone. Geraldo had a certain confidence, even badassery, about him that Weiner inevitably lacked. Crucially, he also posted his self-portrait publicly instead of addressing it to specific female recipients, the better to freak them the hell out by being an overly familiar weasel.

Of course he’s from Long Island.

Why do I say such a thing about a place that I haven’t even visited? Because its reputation precedes it. #TeshTips: They raise ‘em right on the Guyland. Well, not always. And this. But(t) some names you just can’t beat. 

But let’s move off that terminal moraine while there’s still hope, and find us some even weirder stuff.

Here, Ken White responds to an accusation from Vox that he is a bully of other, slightly less creepy men and a “white-knighting gamma.” In this context, gamma is one of the letter designations used by “game” bloggers to shoehorn men (and, rarely, women) into fixed categories dictating their sexual attractiveness. To these bloggers, anyone below an alpha, or more charitably, anyone below a greater beta, is a loser who will never bed a woman unless she has run out of options and is forced to grudgingly settle for a member of the supplicating dregs of manhood. It’s a crude, paranoid worldview, and one that, judging from comment traffic on these blogs, is disturbingly resonant for a lot of people. It’s a nice pat explanation for why they’re losing out sexually, although the viciousness and crudity of the prevailing jargon on these sites can’t help socialize these guys to the point that women will start finding them attractive. Actually, I know for a fact that it is pernicious: one of the people I follow on Facebook is a dweeb who routinely alienates others by using the same kind of language because he finds it amusing and is too clueless and puffed-up to know when to hold his damn peace.

Vox also has some odd things to say about Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner, among them, that Clinton isn’t handsome and that Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, is a lesbian whom he won over “through traditional Gamma acts of service.” Don’t worry if it doesn’t make any sense.

Next, we have an avowedly Christian mother who unabashedly uses a lexicon that includes “carousel-riding slut” and “whore,” the latter used as a slur with no regard to whether the target has ever used her sexuality in a mercenary fashion. Sunshine Mary’s often understated writing style minimizes the extent to which she’s a shrill Chicken Little authoritarian. The context of the “slut” reference in the second link above was an article in the Daily Mail about a woman who spent fifty years pining after the irresistibly aloof man who took her virginity, the premise being that the woman in question is typical of all women everywhere. Because the UK doesn’t have a gutter press that seeks out the most grotesque people in my country, too, so that it might luridly give their weight in stone. (The last article has been put behind a paywall since I first found it, but I haven’t forgotten about that lady’s custom truck. Or the stone measurements, because my Scotch battle ax of a great-grandmother was always weighed in stone.)

The disappointing truth is that anything less than thirty-stone dysfunction is too boring for the British gutter press. Just because you don’t read about it in the Sun doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Its absence from the tabloids will, however, limit its capacity to influence game bloggers towards something resembling sobriety and away from mouth-frothing idiocy on the basis of cherry-picked examples of lurid brokenness. Women who don’t get ruined into their old age and unto divorce by dormitory Lotharios are so boring.

The Daily Mail story about the woman forever ruined by teh Alpha Fux was originally dredged out of the English gutter and aired in the international manosphere by Chateau Heartiste. CH is more or less what would have happened to Richard Nixon had he become a professional cockhound instead of going to law school: brilliant, but clinically paranoid and all kinds of wrong. The biggest problem, as I’ve alluded to, is that weird guys with limited social stimulation read this sort of moral rot and become fully infected, with no defenses against the evil. I often feel that I should wash my mouth out with soap after reading some of the stuff on CH, and there’s no way that I’m at the socially stunted or socially isolated extreme of its readership. Extrapolating the reactions of the really hard cases is a sad thought experiment; many of those guys, I’m sure, go forth and earnestly regurgitate in public what they’ve read on sites like Chateau Heartiste, not fully grasping that it’s sick shit that they found in a weird cul-de-sac of the information superhighway.

Some of the greatest treats on CH are comments from Great Books for Men, who has parlayed his membership in the Chateau peanut gallery into his own blog. GBFM has been compared to James Joyce, but I think he’s much more readable. He’s a minor literary genius who specializes in strings of neologisms, most often about Ben Bernanke and anal sex.

At the opposite extreme from the manosphere, after a superficial fashion, is Hugo Schwyzer, professor of history and gender studies at Pasadena City College, “male feminist,” and grand lodestone of internet derp. For those who can’t get enough humblebragging from weirdos, he’s a blogger, too. His shtick is to abjectly self-flagellate for being a horndog, dramatically exit stage, then return for some more abject self-flagellation and pornographic luridness.

Even before his most recent quasi-downfall, Schwyzer had some eccentric takes on sex. Here, for example, he earnestly extolled the social benefits derived from straight men submitting to anal stimulation from their girlfriends.  Do we need Larry “Wide Stance” Craig to stand up and call bullshit? Maybe:

Want to make straight men better in bed — and better feminist allies? The path may be simple: fuck them up the ass. According to one brand new book, the path to making men more compassionate, appreciative and playful may be straight through their butts.

In The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure: Erotic Exploration for Men and Their Partners, Charlie Glickman and Aislinn Emirzian make the case that straight “men who get into anal penetration are among the most secure in their masculinity: because they’ve examined themselves, faced their fears.” Despite the title of the book, the authors make the case that the payoff for prostate play — specifically by a woman using a dildo or other toy — isn’t just pleasure. It’s liberation from the masculine straitjacket, with happy consequences that extend well outside the bedroom.

I feel for men who enjoy their butt play without the politics that Schwyzer and his ilk insist on accreting to the practice.

That’s far from Schwyzer’s career low. This eruption of craven flattery of sophomoric drama queens and inchoate anger was definitely worse:

Remind Girls They Have the Right to Want Sexual Attention From a Select Few.
When harassers are confronted on their behavior, they often offer the same classic defense: “she wouldn’t dress that way if she didn’t want attention.” Of course young people want attention — often sexual attention. Very few (if any) want that attention indiscriminately from every post-pubescent male with a pulse. “We always behave as if it’s a really selfish, dangerous and ultimately naïve way for girls to dress revealingly,” Clementine Ford wrote in an email. “A young woman isn’t allowed to dictate what attention she wants, because that’s her making a judgment on the kind of men she deems good enough for her.”

The virgin/slut dichotomy has long meant that a young woman is given two choices: have sex with no one, or give it up to everyone. One key way to fight slut-shaming is to reiterate that girls have the right to want to turn on whom they want to turn on – and still be treated with respect and care by those whom they don’t. That’s only an unreasonable expectation in a culture that expects very little from men.

In that case, I hereby demand sexual attention from my own select few, specifically, Christine O’Donnell, Mariska Hargitay, and Sarah Palin. I shouldn’t be getting attention only from Betty White types just because I’m chubby, balding and an underemployed farm laborer. Actually, a really cute barista in Orange County had a thing for me a couple of months ago, but that’s no excuse for Mariska Hargitay’s failure to force herself on me. Mariska, you’re pwetty!

I have to agree with Schwyzer’s critics that he’s a moral cretin. I don’t mind if he has Charlie Sheen-style three-ways, but he really should stop trying to atone for his horndog lifestyle by belittling other men and encouraging women to be immature, irresponsible and entitled. He is exactly what Vox accused Ken White of being. Apparently it actually helps him get laid, but it’s a scummy way to go about it.

Finally, I’ve written some other stuff about sex here and here. Not the most dignified stuff, perhaps, but my efforts at self-promotion are a bit more dignified than Schwyzer’s, and you’ll never see a selfie of me in Transitions Lenses. I’ve never owned a pair.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links
  1. Why Are Some People So Smart? The Answer Could Spawn a Generation of Superbabies
  2. Bayes, Stereotyping Muslims and Rare Events. Especially pertinent given our discussions here at the consortium over Islam’s mythical penchant for violence.
  3. The (Mormon) Church You Doubt, The (Mormon) Church You Love
  4. When The Beautiful Game Turns Ugly: A journey into the world of Italy’s racist soccer thugs
  5. A Conservative Nightmare: In China and Iran, Western values are bringing about real change
  6. From the Comments: Longtime reader –Rick has a thoughtful take (as usual) on American foreign policy

Around the Web: The Failure of Detroit and the Demagogue of Vienna

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History, Links, Politics , , , , ,
  1. Ilya Somin argues that Detroit’s aggressive use of eminent domain needs to be incorporated into any discussion of Detroit’s failure (be sure to read through the ‘comments’ section, too).
  2. Richard Wolff blames “capitalism” for Detroit’s failure. No seriously.
  3. Historian Andrei Znamenski has a great piece in the Independent Review on the political life of Karl Lueger, a socialist who became mayor of Vienna in the late 19th century.

Ultimately, I think that Detroit’s failure can be chalked up to bad fiscal policy, cronyism (at the local, regional and federal levels) and freer trade (which lets me drive a high-quality Toyota rather than some clunker from Detroit).

Lueger was an advocate of social justice and consequently of national socialism. Znamenski found that he had a profound influence on the thinking of an impressionable young artist living in Vienna at the time.