Politics

An Exemplar of Governance: The United States and Chinese Citizens

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law, Liberty, Politics , ,

I’ve briefly pointed out the penchant of Chinese citizens to look to the US as a role model for governance before. As Dr Foldvary has argued, it’s about governance, not government. Foreign Policy‘s Passport blog takes a look at how the recent government shutdown in Washington is viewed by citizens of the Chinese state:

[…] both China’s state-run and private-but-state-supervised mainstream media outlets have thus far reacted with restraint. Meanwhile, users of the country’s bustling, often candid, often profane social web have found a silver lining in the political paralysis that would surprise many Americans […] In Chinese social media, meanwhile, the government shutdown became an opportunity to criticize the Chinese government […]

Some veiled their critiques. Xu Jilin, a professor of history at East China Normal University in Shanghai, wrote, “The government has shut down, but the country is not in disorder — now that’s what you call a good country where people can live without worry.”

The gridlock itself, decried by most commentators in the U.S., struck many Chinese as a sign of lawfulness. As one user remarked, “A government that can shut down, no matter how big the impact on everyone’s lives, is a good thing. It shows that power can be checked, and the government can’t spend money however it wants.” […] Others took more direct aim at their own government. As one user noted, “Comrades, no need to worry that the same thing will happen in our country!  In any event, delegates in our National People’s Congress [China’s […] legislature] cannot cast dissenting votes, haha.” Another wrote, “I wish China’s government would shut down and let corrupt officials have a taste of it.”

I think these admittedly anecdotal reactions are simply a testament of the age-old, distinctly human problem of confusing society with state. The Chinese people themselves don’t have beef with the US or its people. The American people themselves don’t have beef with Beijing or its people. However, both governments are engaged in a power struggle, and as a result, people suffer. Perhaps the most heartening development can be found in this statement:

The growing connections between China and the United States mean that no issue is strictly domestic for either country.

While some no doubt view the growing interdependence of the two societies with unease, I cannot help but see a future of peace, prosperity and harmony. This does not mean I see an absence of conflict, but only that such conflict will be handled according to rules and procedures that have been laid down in the past and that can be altered so long as it is done so in a manner conducive to yet another round of rule-following and procedures.

Statists applaud death of unarmed mother amidst faked Gov’t shutdown

L. A. Repucci Current Events, History, Law, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , , ,

Bedlam in Goliath.

Commentary by:  L.A. Repucci

Shots were fired in the Capitol today after a lone female fled a checkpoint in her car.  A child was in the woman’s vehicle, now presumably orphaned by law enforcement fatally shooting her dead outside of the black sedan, used to ram a newly-erected ‘Barrycade’ in Washington, DC.

House Majority Leader John Boehner praised the courage of the Fed’s security for gunning down the unarmed woman with an infant on the threshold of the halls of congress.  Shoot-to-kill seems to be increasingly the only tactical response for law enforcement, from the unarmed Tsarnaev brothers now to a weaponless, unstable mother, clearly outside of the vehicle she was driving.

Could ‘shoot-to-kill’ be a federal-level directive aimed at preventing the voice of dissent from surfacing in the media?

Police have yet to confirm rumors that the suspect is Miriam Carey a 34-year-old Stamford (CT) Dental Hygienist with ‘mental health’ issues.  It would seem the political landscape is saturated with partisan rhetoric to the point that the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost in the Capitol faster than ever before.

Ultimate Party Hacker.

The partisan theater that is the current government shutdown has apparently struck a chord with a public increasingly suspicious of government, rather than one party or the other.  The abuse of power and authoritarian statism may have finally hit a pitch pushing the electorate from the customary partisan vitriol to a new, holistic hatred and mistrust of not just a particular government, but of governance in general.

This blog isn’t intended to assign blame to the ham-fisted-yet-impotent GOP or to the openly manipulative Democrat party — there are the usual pundits and party hacks more than willing to play the left-right game on this (and every other issue), and point the finger across the aisle.  In fact, it’s probable that the usual partisan coverage of one national crisis after another likely whipped the woman into the frenzy that resulted in her behavior and subsequent public death-by-firing squad.  Looking at the current national political climate of deepening partisan divides, it would seem this sort of thing is indeed inevitable.

From a libertarian perspective, it is evident that whether the woman is a dyed-in-the-wool leftist or a red-blooded conservative, the simple truth is that it is the false dichotomy of the two party system within the larger construct of a Goliath Government* that is fueling the schism among the current American political zeitgeist.  Libertarian ideals have found more support within the GOP than the Democrat party, but with the political landscape quickly evolving with left-leaning progressives increasingly autocratic and hawkish, and the right continuing to be the party of ‘smaller’ behemothic, socially-oppressive government, libertarian-influenced politicians may need to re-evaluate their alignment with the GOP and assert their own space on the political spectrum.

*The Mars Volta do not endorse this blog, the US Government, or governments anywhere, so far as I know.

By distancing themselves from the GOP, this current crisis could be the moment at which the principles of limited government and personal liberty fix in the minds of the electorate as the sole territory of the libertarian philosophy.  Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul…the nation awaits your voices.  Use this opportunity to point out the stark failure of the current junta to fix problems with the force of statism.  Point out the fact that a ‘government shutdown’ seems to consist of closing parks and monuments that require little if any state management to simply exist as they do, and furloughing non-essential personnel easily replaceable with simple automation and elimination of redundancy.  Draw attention to the fact that of the 700,000-or-so suspended government functionaries are eligible and filing for unemployment benefits, drawing income from the same stolen tax revenues which are used to ‘pay’ them usually — and paying them not to work may be preferable than paying them to do their jobs, if the goal is shrinking the size of the state.  Be sure to reference the 1.2-or-so million bureaucrats that continue to serve the public by stealing their wealth and threatening their lives and safety with the full force of a statist totalitarian regime and a monopoly on violent oppression.

Government employees carrying firearms aren’t furloughed, nor are the three-letter agencies that spy on the public unconstitutionally and ‘appropriate’ our money as taxes.  The IRS isn’t really furloughed, despite reports to the contrary — they are needed (including their 16,000 gun-toting new recruits — yes, IRS agents carry firearms) to run Obamacare as ‘navigators’, who are paid on commission per signup to the new compulsory, unconstitutional insurance law.

In conclusion, if the Authoritarian government continues to fan the partisan flames with more political theater, they can expect a multitude of Miriam Careys to continue to go postal and throw themselves against the bulwark of the evil machine that has wrested liberty away from a free people.  You called down the thunder, politicians — now you will reap what you’ve sown for decades.  US foreign policy has been breeding terrorists for decades, and now it’s domestic policy will begin to do the same.  Maybe it’s time to rethink the ‘shoot-to-kill’ mentality…

Pax Humana,

–L.A. Repucci

Related articles

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.

Cruz Barn Burner: Strawman or Paper Tiger?

L. A. Repucci Current Events, Politics , , , , ,

Commentary

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) burned the barn to the ground with his 21 hour ‘fauxlibuster’ this week on the Senate floor.  Supporters of Cruz’ increasingly libertarian voice relish his statesmanship and clarity, and conversely, no doubt detractors and skeptics dismissed much of the material content addressed due to Cruz’ rhetorical devices, not limited channeling statist icon Darth Vader while lampooning Senator Mike Lee (R-UT).

The usual political hay has already been spun by the  pundits, including Limbaugh and Coulter, providing color commentary and cold shots alike.  Senator Cruz’ profile is quickly rising, and he is being touted as a quill for the young libertarian porcupine within the halls of congress — alongside the likes of Marco Rubio and Rand Paul.  Indeed, Cruz is more than likely positioning himself for a cabinet post in potential Paul campaign 2016, bidding the GOP base against New Jersey’s increasingly progressive Chris Christie.

It is assumed Hillary Clinton will be the ochlocratic candidate.

Rafael Cruz (Ted’s father) makes impassioned appeals to the ideals of Americana-brand liberty for large crowds of supporters, evoking support from the base of the GOP with the family’s brand; scathing indictments of our Republic’s current state, drawing parallels to Bautistas’ fascist, then Castro’s communist Cuba and the horror of living under a totalitarian regime two times over.  Rafael Cruz escaped Castro and fled to the liberty and free markets in Canada, then here in the US, finding success through a technology connection to the petroleum industry — a familiar Horatio Alger-esque tale — Millitary Fascism to Communism and to Corporate Fascism in less than a generation..

…and then there is  Mrs.Heidi Nelson-Cruz, the senator’s wife.  Ted and Heidi met in the Bush White House, while she was working for Condi Rice.  A Claremont-McKenna and Harvard Business grad, Heidi Nelson-Cruz currently works for Goldman-Sachs as a Vice President.

Texas seems to have a GOP senator with strong ties to petroleum, the Bush White House and good ol’ Goldman-Sachs through his wife.  These observations, coupled with the current political landscape may provide insight the origin and intent of the Senator from Texas’ dazzling libertarian all-nighter.

Cruz may need to spend another 21 hours in an attempt to burn down his own straw man — free markets or corporatism?  If his wife works for the self-same Goldman-Sachs that profited from the TARP bailout rammed through the halls of Congress at the tail end of the Bush regime and spilling into the Obama regime; the Goldman-Sachs that boasts both parties’ presidents and cabinets in their pockets going back to (at least) the Clinton administration, would that not be a conflict of interest?  Cruz made open comment about the excellent health insurance provided Heidi’s Vice-Presidency with Goldman-Sachs.  The banking cartel’s involvement in  and subsequent manipulation of the political sphere is a common link between both ends of the popular political spectrum, and to assume that a politician’s libertarian common sense would be immune to the pressures and normalcy bias of the human condition would be naive.

Ted Cruz talks a good game.  He offers the concepts and economic pedigree libertarians have been waiting to hear from a GOP Senator other than Ron Paul, and presents these concepts in a clear and relatable way.  His voting record as a Senator approaches perfection.  Unfortunately, many of the Tea Party Rockstars* who held great promise for the cause of liberty have proven to be paper tigers.  However liberated Ted Cruz’ economic policy could be, the rigor of skepticism cannot be abandoned by liberty-minded citizens just yet.

As Patrick Henry, liberty lover and skeptic of government, famously remarked of the Constitutional Convention, I smell a rat…and hope on the bones of Lysander Spooner for our Republic’s sake, that I am wrong about the Senator from Texas.

*Rockstar Brand Tea flavored energy beverage is not endorsed by publisher or any so-called Tea Party Rockstars.

Qui Bono,

L.A. Repucci

A close encounter with a black hole of church/state derp

muricaderp Current Events, Politics, Religion

Some collisions of civic and religious forms of asshattery are just that powerful. Many approach the fray, but few who enter it ever leave. The stupid, it sucks. Literally. It’s a black hole. Abandon all brain ye who enter here.

Amazingly, this stuff is almost mainstream. Speakers who spout this kind of garbage at official events under the auspices of the Republican Party, one of the two major US political parties, are not banned from future events on grounds of moral turpitude, mental defect, or general embarrassment. They’re hardly even marginalized, except in rare cases of exceedingly clumsy language, as Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin can attest. The real sin for which the GOP’s kingmakers tried to bully Akin into falling on his sword wasn’t misogyny, but undue candor. Basically, dude fucked up the talking points pretty severely. It takes a special person to make Claire McCaskill, mediocrity of Blue Dog mediocrities, look like a beacon of principle. Todd Akin, authority on women who probably wanted it because they didn’t psychosomatically shut off their wombs while being raped, had what it took for Claire McCaskill to point at his train wreck of a platform and shut that whole thing down.

I totally heard a bird of Akin’s feather squawk at the nation on “Christian” radio this afternoon. He was a bit subtler than Akin, after a fashion. Akin was foolish enough to accuse women, a majority electoral demographic with above-average turnout rates, of being a bunch of tarts who enjoy the illegitimate kind of rape. Today’s speaker, whom I’ll introduce in due time, had the good sense to go after illegal immigrants, a constituency that by definition is disenfranchised. A cohort of foreigners working in a country under dodgy circumstances after having evaded normal immigration channels rarely has its host country’s sympathy. It’s the kind of demographic that a savvy asshat scapegoats if he doesn’t want to get beaten in his next electoral campaign by a charisma-challenged triangulator.

But what I heard on the radio today wasn’t just any screed against illegal immigration; it was a screed against illegal immigration in the name of Holy Scripture. Pretty brazen stuff.

Usually, when I get vulgar ideas in my head, I try not to justify them with scriptural references. If I muse about Tijuana’s de minimis regulatory approach to massage parlors and its huge potential client base, it isn’t because I learned about any of that from the Book of Leviticus. (Leviticus is merely an exhaustive list of licentious suggestions framed as prohibitions). Rather, it’s because I am, in Disraeli’s parlance, ape and angel, or, as Robin Thicke would have it, an animal.

In other words, a TJ massage parlor isn’t religion, but business. Similarly, immigration policy isn’t religion, but civics, although business interests certainly like to infest the debate, the better to concern-troll it. Business, civics, religion: these are nonoverlapping magisteria.

Not on the Bott Radio Network, they aren’t. I tuned in while I was on the road between Fresno and Merced this afternoon, just in time to hear some dude with a thoroughly neutral accent and affect calmly but sanctimoniously intone about illegal immigration and the Bible. Hoo boy.

I had no idea who this guy was, but I was transfixed. The biblethumping was exquisite. Defenders of illegal immigration, he told us (I paraphrase), often cite scriptural references to being a friend to the foreigner. What they don’t realize is that that there are three Hebrew words for foreigner, two of them referring to foreigners who have permission, and this scriptural reference in Leviticus refers to foreigners with permission, not those without permission. This was why Moses made a special effort to lead the Israelites around a kingdom that was blocking their way to the Promised Land, so that they wouldn’t illegally stray into its territory. (Forgive us our trespasses? Eh, never mind. And maybe the detour had something to do with not getting massacred? Again, never mind.) Furthermore, calls for amnesty ignore the Apostle Peter’s exhortation to submit to civil authority, which includes immigration authorities. Besides, if we provide amnesty to all illegal immigrants, how is that fair to the illegal immigrants who are waiting in line to be legalized under the current process? (Huh? He actually said something like that.) Now, people can have different opinions about illegal immigration (passive-aggressive-smarmy much?), but they shouldn’t use the Bible to defend the amnesty bill currently before the Congress. It just isn’t in there. It isn’t biblical.

It wasn’t until the end of this ridiculous authoritarian pastiche that I heard who was behind it: “I’m Kris Kobach, and this has been Kobach’s Commentaries.” The crazy had just gone into overdrive. I’d heard of Kobach before, usually in reference to his being an extremist Republican kook, and here he was carrying on about illegal immigration and the unfairness of amnesty on an aggressively “Christian” “family” radio station in the name of the Word of God.

Notice that he concern-trolled illegal immigrants who had allegedly found their way into some regularization process (despite having entered and worked in the United States illegally) and were waiting their turn in line, because WAAAAHHHH FAIRNESS. I was baffled by whom exactly he was trying to describe, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the story was some kind of hard-right nativist myth.

To be clear, Kris Kobach does not give a damn about the welfare of illegal immigrants for the duration of their presence in the United States. He is a professional immigration policy troll who has worked in multiple states to litigate against policies benefiting illegal immigrants and to draft legislation to hound them out by any means necessary. He has also been involved in Voter ID campaigns, again on grounds of “fairness,” the fairness including vile arguments that if one can’t buy Sudafed without a government ID, one shouldn’t be able to vote without one. The obvious purpose of Voter ID laws is to disenfranchise the poor, i.e., mainly blacks, because they vote heavily Democratic.

Kobach has the evil, classic right-wing conception of fairness as a zero-sum commodity that is cheapened if someone else somewhere got more of it than you got or got it more promptly. By his reasoning, if all the prisoners are released in a mass pardon, this is unfair to the old lifers, and the lifers should be seething with resentment that the younguns got more time off than they did. If the 3:45 train is delayed by mechanical problems and its passengers are transferred to the 4:45 train, they should all be angry and resentful that they had to spend an extra hour in the depot because TEH FAIRNESS. If the layabouts who showed up in the vineyard an hour before sundown are paid the same amount for their work as the diligent squares who showed up at daybreak, the squares should be resentful–hey, that’s not what Jesus said, now, is it? Yeah, we’re Christians, so let’s ignore that buzzkill, what’s-his-name….

Basically, if there’s any kind of dysfunctional or cruel policy that finally gets fixed, but only after one has spent years trying to navigate the former, broken system, one should be angry at anyone who didn’t have to put up with just as much grief for just as long. If you were waiting in a checkout line at Safeway for half an hour only to see people in a nearby line get through in ten minutes because the backup cashier finally arrived, maybe you should go deck the backup cashier and hurl eggs and canned goods at his customers, you know, just as a matter of equity. That would even things out for you and everyone else who got in line before the backup cashier arrived, right? It might be a good idea to brandish a can in front of the lead cashier, too, in case she calls all available associates to checkout and lets some lucky bastard get through in five minutes.

That, folks, is hardline Republican policy in a nutshell: everyone will be reduced to the most degraded level of existence that I, resentful shit, have ever had to endure. Kris Kobach has words of encouragement for the whole barrel full of crabs.

Oh, and he’s the sitting Kansas Secretary of State. What’s the matter with Kansas, indeed. Once the spiritual home and nerve center of grange socialism, and now this. It’s a long way down.

By the way, I have very serious, visceral objections to current immigration policy in the United States. It’s a systemically corrupt clusterfuck, one that keeps many immigrants perennially in limbo, under constant threat of detention, deportation and separation from their families, and allows unethical employers (especially farmers) to run their recruitment and personnel operations as criminal cartel rackets. It badly needs to be reformed. The problem is that people like Kris Kobach will happily trash civil society in the process if they’re given free rein.

Good God, y’all.

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. 

Oh hell yes, Philadelphians being racist, corrupt and belligerent again

muricaderp Current Events, Law, Politics , , , , , ,

Of course this happened in Philadelphia. It’s a derpfest: an immigrant from Uganda running a dive bar and getting behind on his taxes, yuppies moving into the neighborhood and then expressing shock, shock! that there’s a dive bar in their part of West Philadelphia, probably some selective law and code enforcement, and accusations of racism.

No party to this mess is holy. Just look at who they are: Noel “I want to pay my taxes if I have the money” Karasanyi; a bunch of whiny SWPL agitators who colonized Karasanyi’s neighborhood on the bizarre expectation that, being in West Philadelphia, it would be clean and orderly; the Philadelphia Police, Streets, Licenses and Inspections, and Revenue Departments; the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board and its investigative arm in the State Police. The Karasanyi bar empire is a tar baby; all who touch it will be licking sticky off their fingers for years to come, and it will be just as pretty a sight as the New 3rd World Lounge. This is high quality, multilevel sleaze in one of America’s most delightfully vulgar cities.

My guess is that racism is only one of two major components to this donnybrook. The race of Karasanyi’s clientele must put the white neighbors on edge, but they’d be awfully sore about the local Irish bruisers if they had instead colonized White Kensington and found themselves trying to abate their dive bars. I know some raunchy Irish girls from the Northeast, and believe me, they are NOT bashful about pissing in the streets. It’s just one of those things that seems reasonable and expedient at the time, kind of like decking one’s boyfriend because he was being a lying cheating douchebag again. These things are a lot more reliable than access to toilets in Philadelphia’s rundown neighborhoods, but let’s not dwell on structural contributors to the filth. It’s obviously less gross when bougies do that kind of thing in Old City and Manayunk. For they, and as a consequence their favorite clubs, have lots of money, a solvent much more universal than urine.

This Karasanyi/Spruce Hill Association spat isn’t just about racial fears and animosities. It’s also about abatement of the poors. The Spruce Hill activists bought into a very depressed and dilapidated housing market in a very poor neighborhood, knowing full well that their new property was in the midst of a miles-wide swath of decay and dysfunction stretching into the suburbs (Karasanyi’s current hometown, Yeadon, is pretty crappy itself), and now they’re sore that Karasanyi’s dive bars are getting in the way of their efforts to inflate their real estate prices. If anyone in that part of the roaring forties had adverse possession of the neighborhood, it was Karasanyi and his clients. They were there first. The Johnny-come-lately SWPL aren’t happy about this, but colonists never are happy when there are natives squatting on their land.

Here’s why I say that this spat isn’t just about race. Some family friends who lived in East Falls at the time were involved in a prolonged effort to abate their own local nuisance bar, the Four Horsemen. As far as I know, every party to the fight over the Four Horsemen was white, except for Michael Nutter. Nutter was drawn in because he was then the city councilor representing East Falls. Ed Rendell and Arlen Specter were drawn in as powerful politicians who happened to live just up the hill, in a much nicer part of East Falls. All three of them came down on the Four Horsemen and demanded that its owner clean house so that its customers weren’t spilling out at 2:30 am, yelling obscenities at the top of their lungs, leaving trash all over the neighborhood, kicking in the windows of strangers’ cars because they were mad at their girlfriends, that kind of thing. Nutter, Rendell, Specter and the PLCB couldn’t do anything about Lunchbox, the dimwitted neighbor kid who stumbled into cars all the time when he played football in the streets, but they were able to scare some sense into the Four Horsemen, and into its protectors in the Philadelphia Police Department’s 39th District.

Kind of. Your activist friends never had as much fun with “intersectionality” as the 39th District did when its notoriously crooked cops were hired to moonlight at a bar named after four of their former colleagues who had been drummed out of the department for official corruption and brutality. The real Four Horsemen were some of the PPD’s worst. These guys were so bad that they went to prison for police misconduct, and were subsequently honored with their very own dive bar.

One of the police commanders who was assigned to the 39th District in the midst of this mess, a Captain Glenn, tried to nip the snitching against the Four Horsemen in the bud by using a Neighborhood Watch volunteer contact information sheet to call one of our family friends at home and harass him for bringing state authorities into the fray. It seems that Captain Glenn wasn’t so much in the pocket of the Four Horsemen as he was annoyed by the barrage of correspondence from and meetings with people more powerful than he over a nuisance bar. So he got this friend of ours on the phone and menacingly told him, “I’m getting heat from above, and I do not like getting heat from above.”

Our friend put the Captain in his place: “You listen to me: I’m a lieutenant in the United States Army, and you DO NOT talk to a lieutenant in the United States Army that way!” The commanding officer of one of the city’s dirtiest police districts was reduced to gibberish by a guy he was trying to intimidate over the phone. Philadelphia is a city of piss and vinegar.

Vinegar in its citizens’ blood.

Piss in its subway concourses.

There’s Something to be Said for Consistency, but…

henrymoore Current Events, Politics , , , , , , ,

It’s not the hypocrisy of (anti/pro) war (Republican/Democratic) party hacks that I mind. For at least that means they are on the right side 50% of the time, which is better than being on the wrong side 100% of the time. No, what I hate is when this hypocrisy goes unnoticed, unexposed, and unchallenged. During Obama’s first term, the hypocrisy was that of the suddenly pro-war Democrats. And for his second term, it is that of the suddenly anti-war Republicans. How hard is it to simply have a standard? One that does not depend on the context of what letter happens to be next to the name of the puppet pretending to wield power for a period of 4 to 8 years. I am personally grateful for the amount of people on both sides of the aisle who don’t think it necessary or just to waltz (whether to bombard or to occupy) into Syria on a moment’s notice. But watch most of these anti-anything-Obama-does Republicans turn on a dime when it’s Iran’s turn to face our wrath. Then watch the Democrats squirm as they try to figure out their own position.

What are your thoughts? Would it be better if people just stuck to their position, even if it was awful, or if they waffled and on occasion did something right? Both in general and as it relates to the two parties and military intervention.

I picked crops under the hot sun all day this Labor Day. What did you do this Labor Day? Do work!

muricaderp Economics, Politics

Actually, it depends on your definitions of “all day” and “hot sun.” I overslept my alarm by nearly an hour and a half and called it quits in time to go hiking on one of the woodlots above Corvallis, and as humid as it was, Philadelphia it ain’t. But even though my poundage for the day was off by nearly half from Saturday, the bees having been all up in my fruit, I managed to bring in about 33.25 pounds more blueberries today than did any of the useless eaters who keep plastering my Facebook feed with pictures from Orlando and Sea Isle City. One of these people is mortally embarrassed that I’ve become a poor who does stoop labor, since his friends should all be doing prestigious things that reflect well on him for associating with individuals of fine breeding. He’s always pestering his fellow yuppies to buy his life insurance products, the fine chap.

I could become an earnestly sanctimonious prick about these things, and there’d be some equity in the proposition (all too much, really), but instead, I’ll note that I’m really lucky to have found another paid job less than two months after my last paid job descended into a fugue of lumpenproletarian officiousness and treachery. This fugue started my first day on the job; fun times in wine country. My current job on the blueberry farm is the polar opposite. It’s a contender for the best job I’ve ever had, the farm manager is a contender for the best boss I’ve ever had, and I have not had to deal with any asshats. None. It’s like I was sucked through a wormhole into a Jeffersonian utopia that would make even old Tom himself think he’d been taken on a gnarly acid trip.

It’s worth briefly noting how Thomas Jefferson’s labor theories compared to his labor practices. My current employer is Jefferson’s ideal made manifest, the kind of family-run, community-oriented operation that would make Alexander Hamilton of a mind to bulldoze the joint and deed the property over to industrialists. Jefferson’s actual managerial practices, of course, involved regimentation and centralization of a sort not too different from what Alexander Hamilton advised, but in the form of a brutal system of race-based slavery, enforced with a campaign of threats and beatings that Jefferson oversaw with a zeal that privately alarmed his friends. This nightmare he bequeathed to his country as a major part of its patrimony. We still haven’t gotten completely over it. Perhaps we never will.

On the West Coast, the most prolific offshoot of this plantation sociology is something that I call Mexican Jim Crow, since I don’t think any more restrained moniker adequately conveys its iniquity. Honestly, I’m surprised and somewhat relieved that relations between Mexicans and Gringos in Western farming districts aren’t much worse than they are. The racism underpinning this arrangement isn’t official, but in some places it might as well be. I find it worrisome that there’s a greater language barrier between the planter and peasant classes on the West Coast than there usually was between planters and slaves in the Antebellum South, since Southerners spoke mutually intelligible dialects of English in most places. A couple of months ago I found myself in the midst of an unwieldy workplace donnybrook that would have either been preventable or easily nipped in the bud had everyone present spoken a common language. In extreme cases, this language barrier results in de facto impunity for workplace sexual assaults committed by field managers against line employees. It is a very bad state of affairs.

The planter class wants to keep things this way. I don’t know what the dynamics are like at the county level, but at the state level in California (and probably other states) and at the national level the planters have a stranglehold on the major farming trade groups. That’s why the Farm Bureau always has a bee in its bonnet about immigration reform. It’s amazing to see major growers go on the record in newspaper and trade journal articles about how they’re 40% short on pickers for time-critical harvests, are running months late on pruning jobs that are considered industry-standard, etc., and then see not a word from the same growers on help wanted websites or on roadsides near their farms. One of the growers who’s engaged in this monkey business has several hundred acres of blueberries half an hour north of where I’m currently staying. There’s no way the farm labor contractors in their regions are running help wanted ads to take up the slack, either. Few of them are running ads at all. Believe me, I’ve checked. The growers and contractors who do run ads usually run them on state unemployment office job boards (Washington State’s is particularly laden), probably because the only Gringos who check these sites are ones who were told to do so by their case workers or probation officers. That way, the planters end up getting a lukewarm response from slackers and dregs who didn’t want farm jobs in the first place, and once these Gringos all wash out they can tell the authorities that they really, really need their Mexicans. One farm in Washington went a step further by flying a new crew in from Thailand and firing its entire existing crew of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, many of them career employees. Unless the initial ruling was reversed on appeal, this company remains in fairly hot water with the authorities over this stunt.

As far as I can tell, the much-bemoaned shortage of farm workers is mainly a shortage of two specific kinds of farm workers: at the lowest level, meek, servile, disposable, easily intimidated grunts, and, at the higher skill levels, those who can be hired by word of mouth through some foreman’s cousin’s barber’s nephew five miles past the end of the blacktop in outermost Michoacan. With Mexico’s economy improving while its birthrate plummets, even in poor rural areas, it should come as no surprise that it’s getting harder to staff farms entirely through the intimidation of illegal immigrant roustabouts and six degrees of whoever happens to currently be on staff.

As a farm worker, I heartily approve of this turn of events. Expect to hear more White Whines about it from a planter near you in coming years.

Erik Loomis has more on these topics. Does he ever. Ralph Durst and his cousin weren’t just planters; they were psychopaths.

One final social control before I go to bed: Tomorrow is the day after Labor Day, so no more white clothes for the rest of the season. You wouldn’t want to be the gauche fool who wears white into the fall. This is a fitting social convention, especially for anyone in the business of making or selling clothes in any of the many colors that are not white. On the other hand, join me in the blueberry patch and they won’t be white for long.

Path Dependency and the Republican Party

Michael Adamson Current Events, Politics , , , , , , , , , , ,

Let’s apply path dependency to the plight of the national Republican Party and see where it takes us:

Writing in Fortune in the run-up to the 1962 congressional elections, Max Ways asked, “Is Republicanism a Losing Cause?” Arguing at the height of JFK’s popularity that there was nothing wrong with the party’s two main convictions, namely that individual liberty is best served by a strong, yet limited, federal government, and that “market capitalism is a beneficent force in the world,” Ways insisted that Republicans would never “reinvigorate their party so long as they let the Democrats set the terms of battle.”

After a drubbing in the 1964 election, the party was able to set the terms of battle as America’s cities burned and the war in Vietnam headlined the evening news. In Ronald Reagan, the party’s reinvigoration was complete. His ability to communicate the party’s convictions and win elections suggested that Republican dominance of the White House might be sustained. It wasn’t. But even in the aftermath of defeat, in 1992, the party could take solace in Bill Clinton’s declaration that the era of Big Government was over. Perhaps the party had truly won the battle of ideas.

But now the Republican Party has come full circle, and is again in crisis, having suffered defeat in the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections. As was the case in 1962, there is no end to prescriptions for saving the GOP. To the accumulating heap of advice, I add this to the pile: Consider path dependency before formulating policy, conducting politics, and making appeals to voters.

California’s Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger famously promised to “blow up” the boxes of a bloated government in Sacramento—and then not much happened. At the national level, Republicans have been promising to repeal, dissolve, and defund laws, agencies, and programs since the 1930s, with little overall success, notwithstanding the odd victory here and there. The yearning to begin anew may be alluring, but there ain’t no going back.

In rhetoric, Republican Party leaders still call for ratcheting back Leviathan, at least on the economic front. Yet, just as Governor Schwarzenegger did, they falter when it comes to actually blowing up the boxes of government. Republicans make poor revolutionaries. At the same time, they seem to have eschewed democratic politics as a means to their ends. Perhaps, in their view, playing politics would constitute an exercise in making “socialism” more efficient, in which they allegedly hold no interest. But by failing to reconcile ideas and ideals with path dependent history, the party is becoming ever more out of touch.

Gaining an appreciation for path dependency may help the party connect with voters: a prerequisite to articulating effectively a vision of a political economy based on individual liberty, limited government, and market capitalism. After all, if no one is listening, it doesn’t really matter what you might be saying.

Another problem: It’s rather difficult to figure out what the Republican Party stands for these days. Since the 1980s, its calls for racheting back Big Government have been long on promising a return to some ideal state and short on mapping a pragmatic path toward reining in the actually existing state. Interestingly, the rhetoric heats up when the party is out of power, casting doubt on the sincerity of those spouting it. When they have occupied the Oval Office, Republicans have had no less a penchant increasing the size and scope of government than the Democrats they accuse of being enthusiasts for socialism. The Bush administration used the crisis of 9/11 to increase government surveillance of private citizens and expand Washington’s interventions overseas. The crisis of the Great Recession served as occasion to bail out Wall Street. Indeed, in economic terms, Republicanism has come full circle, not from the free soil, free labor, and free men days of Lincoln, but from the Gilded Age. Where the rubber hits the road, that is, in terms of implementation, there is little evidence that the Republican Party holds individual liberty, limited government, and market capitalism as core convictions. But let’s stipulate, for the sake of this post, that Republicanism at its core remains grounded in the two main convictions identified by Mr. Ways.

So how might a consideration of path dependency help to right the listing Republican ship?

In a previous post, I applauded Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson for their effective deployment of path dependency in Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. They showed that “critical junctures” that disrupt the existing political and economic balance in society launch nations down their respective dependent paths. And once embarked on a dependent path, the weight of history makes it extremely difficult for a nation to change course.

In America, as Robert Higgs has shown, two world wars, with a great depression sandwiched in between, constituted the critical junctures—or critical episodes, as he calls them—that resulted in an immense expansion in the scale and scope of the U.S. government. With the passage of time, the American people have accepted most aspects of Leviathan—especially when it comes to social insurance—as the norm. In Higg’s view, there is no going back because the federal government’s responses to successive crises engendered a sea shift in ideology among the people. Writing in 1987, Higgs doubted that the Reagan Revolution would live up to its billing. And he was spot on.

For an intraparty conversation on the appropriate scale and scope of government to be productive and persuasive, it ought to begin with coming to terms with the state as it “really is” and reflecting on how it came to be (including the many contributions of all postwar Republican administrations to expanding said state).

Take Social Security. Opposed on the Right, it was passed in a form that didn’t please the Left. But over the years, Social Security expanded in scope and size under Democratic and Republican administrations alike. It’s now been around for more than 75 years. Talk of entitlement reform as Baby Boomers age, at least in terms of assessing, funding, and perhaps adjusting future liabilities? Absolutely. But apocalyptic talk of Social Security’s impending bankruptcy as prelude to overhauling this mainstay of middle-class entitlements surely has lost more votes than it has gained. And to what end? Leaving aside the question of individual liberty, replacing mandated contributions to a government plan with mandated contributions to private ones introduces risk for which future retirees seemingly have no appetite. Path dependency does not mean that all doors to reform are shut for all time. But Republicans have little hope of blowing up this box.

So, what to do? First, acquire a deep appreciation for the path dependencies embedded in America’s laws, regulations, policies, and political institutions. Use the exercise to identify potentially winning issues that align with core convictions, as stipulated. Then embrace the democratic process as a platform from which to win hearts and minds and accomplish realistic goals.

From the Comments: American Politics without the Romance

Brandon Christensen Comments, Politics , , , , ,

Longtime reader (and prolific blogger in his own right) –Rick riffs off of the Obama administration’s latest attempt to flaunt the rule of law:

Many of the tactics being used by Democrats and President Obama, today, derive from past tactics approved by Republican majorities and Republican Presidents who sought to avoid the difficult role of governing properly by seeking work around exceptions to the Constitution by reassigning or allowing the usurpation of powers between branches or though Constitutional amendments on requirements that stood as roadblocks.

So, neither party is better or more moral than the other in this regard.

Read the whole thing. Upon second thought, I probably should have titled this post “politics without romance” and just omitted the “American” part of it. In fact, you can pretty much use –Rick’s comment to explain every social conflict imaginable if you just make sure that the words ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ are replaceable by any faction and the word ‘Constitution’ is interchangeable with the word ‘power.’

I got the phrase “politics without romance,” by the way, from Nobel laureate James Buchanan.

A Problem with Political Authority

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law, Politics , , , , , ,

As a libertarian with deep anarchist leanings, I have plenty of problems with political authority myself. Nevertheless, I find the society in which I live to be libertarian enough, and that any deviation from the rules and procedures in place can be considered to be a threat to my freedom. With this being said, the Wall Street Journal has a great editorial out on the Obama administration’s increasingly authoritarian and cavalier approach to the political process. What I like best about this editorial is that it focuses on one of the Obama administration’s less well-known attempts at consolidating power: that of granting regulators powers that they don’t actually have. Observe:

In re: Aiken County is another episode in the political soap opera about spent-fuel storage at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, an Energy Department project that requires the approval of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission […] Yucca has since been infamously stop-and-go amid opposition from the green lobby and not-in-my-backyard Nevadans and Californians. This particular application was submitted to the NRC in June 2008.

Mr. Obama promised to kill Yucca as a candidate and the Energy Department tried to yank the license application after his election. But an NRC safety board made up of administrative judges ruled unanimously that this was illegal unless Congress passed a law authorizing it. Mr. Obama then teamed up with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada to stack the NRC with anti-Yucca appointees.

Although Congress appropriated money to conduct the review, the NRC flat-out refused, in violation of the three-year statutory deadline.

The explanation continues:

A federal court is stating, overtly, that federal regulators are behaving as if they are a law unto themselves. Judge A. Raymond Randolph notes in a concurrence that former NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, who has since resigned, “orchestrated a systematic campaign of noncompliance.” If Mr. Jaczko worked on Wall Street he’d be indicted.

Judge Kavanaugh then offers some remedial legal education in “basic constitutional principles” for the President who used to be a constitutional law professor. Under Article II and Supreme Court precedents, the President must enforce mandates when Congress appropriates money, as well as abide by prohibitions. If he objects on constitutional grounds, he may decline to enforce a statute until the case is adjudicated in the courts. “But the President may not decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections,” writes the court.

That is especially notable given that ObamaCare’s employer-insurance requirement and other provisions are precisely such unambiguous statutory mandates, with hard start dates […] All of this highlights that Mr. Obama is not merely redefining this or that statute as he goes but also the architecture of the U.S. political system.

Indeed. Dr Delacroix has suspected the Obama administration of authoritarianism from the beginning, and it looks as if time has proved him right (which is a good thing for him, given his penchant for missing the mark in foreign affairs). Stay tuned. This blog is just warming up.

A Libertarian Moment in the US?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , , , , , , ,

I think you’re seeing a growth of self-conscious libertarianism. The end of the Bush years and the beginning of the Obama years really lit a fire under the always-simmering small-government attitudes in America. The TARP, the bailouts, the stimulus, Obamacare, all of that sort of inspired the Tea Party. Meanwhile, you’ve simultaneously got libertarian movements going on in regard to gay marriage and marijuana. And I’ll tell you something else that I think is always there. The national media were convinced that we would be getting a gun-control bill this year, that surely the Newtown shooting would overcome the general American belief in the Second Amendment right to bear arms. And then they pushed on the string and it didn’t go anywhere. Support for gun control is lower today than it was 10 or 15 years ago. I think that’s another sign of America’s innate libertarianism.

This is from David Boaz, who is being interviewed by Molly Ball for the Atlantic. Read the whole interview. There is stuff on Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Marxism, the politics of welfare and some recent SCOTUS rulings.

There is a lot to be pessimistic about, but I can see a more libertarian US in 15 or 20 years, provided we do something about ObamaCare and Social Security. One thing we must be very vigilant about is the inevitable push for a more isolated society. Protectionist tendencies are probably going to get stronger if the economy continues to perform as dismally as it has been, and protectionism is the bane of prosperity and cooperation.

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.

A Cheaper, Stronger Army?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , , ,

How can this be so? Doesn’t a “strong defense” for a hegemonic power necessarily entail a large military budget and the capacity to police potential rivals?

Of course not. I’ve argued as much here before (numerous times), but it appears that more and more people on the American Right are beginning to come around to my view. The latest example comes from an op-ed by a conglomerate of retired and still-serving military officers in the pages of the National Interest.

It appears that only neoconservatives (former Democrats) and most Democrats still cling to the notion that our military needs to be large in order to be strong. I don’t agree with everything the op-ed recommends. I think the Army should be liquidated entirely and that the special forces components of the Army should be shuffled into the other branches of the military. There is no need to occupy foreign lands these days and hence no need for an Army.

Nevertheless, it is very refreshing to see members of the military embrace the inevitable and start proposing solutions that deal with budget cuts and the post-Cold War world.

Update: what is very interesting to note is that the various Right-wings in states that depend on American protection are very opposed to notion of a leaner, meaner American military. The notion that Right-wings tend to be a bit more nationalistic than their counterparts on the Left is, it would appear, a rather superficial one. After all, how can one really be more chauvinist in his social beliefs when he actively calls for another polity to protect his lands?