Politics

Zimmerman, Martin and Racism in America: Who’s Really Promoting Prejudice?

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

Campaigners chose to make Trayvon Martin the focus for a national discussion of race in America. But it was never going to lead to an enlightened and rational debate. In seeking to personalise the issue and create an emotional tie through Martin’s case, campaigners dodged the significant structural and institutional barriers that give rise to racial inequality. And by portraying racism as something that comes from deep within the hearts of white people (so deep that whites often don’t even realise they’re racist), today’s elitist ‘anti-racist’ outlook makes racial divisions appear hopelessly insurmountable.

This comes from Spiked, an online British publication (h/t Mark Brady). Read the whole thing.

I am a little disappointed in myself for not paying closer attention to this trial. Its importance for understanding American society has just become evident to me over the past few days. For what it’s worth, I think the US is still a deeply racist society. I think there are structural and institutional barriers in place today that prohibit most blacks from having the same support networks as other ethnic groups.

I think that the government is responsible for these structural and institutional imbalances, but also that black leaders are responsible for failing to consider (consider) anything other than statist solutions to the problems that afflict American society. I also think that religion is partly to blame. Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams may go to church on Sundays, but you’d never know it based solely on their arguments.

I’ve got a post on peace coming up shortly. Hopefully it’ll be much clearer than this.

Would A Libertarian Military Be More Lethal?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , ,

This is the question that military attorney David French asks and answers over at National Review:

I’m noticing military libertarianism increasing, not decreasing, among the more politically aware and engaged officers and enlisted […]

Frustration with bureaucracy and deep skepticism of nation-building and foreign entanglements should not be confused with weakness or wishful thinking […] Military libertarians tend to know how savage our enemy is. Moreover, they have no hesitancy to use overwhelming force in defense of the nation. After all, national defense is a core function of government even in a more libertarian state. In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, thoughtful military libertarians tend to advocate something we haven’t really tried in our more than decade-long fight against Islamic jihad — the relatively brief application of truly overwhelming destructive force against identified enemies.

That’s why I wonder if a libertarian military might be more lethal, even on smaller budgets. A trimmed-down bureaucracy, an increased emphasis on the destructive rather than nation-building capabilities of the force under arms, and doctrines designed to inflict maximum (non-nuclear) destruction on enemy forces rather than transforming and democratizing communities — all of this could add up to a more lethal (yet smaller) military.

Indeed. What do you think? I know I’ve made this argument plenty of times before, and it has basically been the standard minarchist line on foreign policy since the Enlightenment, yet somehow this seems to be a new concept for not only libertarians but others as well?

I don’t get it. How have we not been able to communicate this idea more effectively over the years?

I understand that rent seeking plays an important role in our failure, as does the fact that our arguments must compete with demagogues, but I don’t fully see why the libertarian foreign policy argument isn’t more understandable.

One thing that French forgets to mention is that the threat of facing an American military that no longer cares about winning the hearts and minds of its enemies will also contribute to a decline in wars. The inability to connect this implication – that of a more peaceful world – with a leaner, meaner American military force also baffles me.

Here is the relevant reddit thread on the link in question.

Update: Over the next month or so, I’m going to disaggregate a dialogue about foreign policy that I had with Dr Delacroix in 2011. It is different from the earlier dialogue on foreign policy that we held.

The Immigration “Reform” Bill: RINOs, Labor Unions and a Libertarian Alternative

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

Nobody is happy with the current immigration reform package being shoved through Congress at the moment. I don’t know too much about the specifics of the bill, or even about immigration itself (except that immigrants make good drinking buddies), so I’ll just outsource some ideas and arguments I’ve read elsewhere. First up is our very own Jacques Delacroix, an immigrant from France, who writes:

The main objective of the bill is to install in this country an unbeatable Democratic majority for the foreseeable future. The intent is to turn this polity into a one-party system. Everyone assumes, of course, that the electoral benefits of the bill will redound to the Democratic Party. If you don’t believe it, conduct a simple mental experiment: Tell yourself under what circumstances the implementation of the present bill, or of one similar to it, would cause a net increase in the number of Republican voters?

At best, at the very best, the admission of ten million formerly illegal immigrants and of their dependents would have no effect on American electoral politics. There is no scenario whereas it would help the conservative cause.

New immigrants vote Democrat. Immigrants from societies with authoritarian traditions vote Left unless their societies have gone through violent purging convulsions such as happened in “communist” Eastern Europe in the nineties. The idea that the government should leave people alone is a sophisticated one. It does not grow naturally out of the experience of oppression.

Indeed. Is this analysis wrong? If so, feel free to elaborate why you think so in the ‘comments’ section. I highly recommend reading the whole thing. Angelo Codevilla, an immigrant from Italy (and one of Dr Delacroix’s fellow academics), also elaborates on the bill:

Beginning in the 1960s, increasingly dandified native youths shunned agricultural and service jobs. So did the new legal immigrants. This made room for a growing number of laborers from Mexico who came and went freely and seasonally across a basically un-patrolled 2000 mile border. These were not “immigrants,” but rather mostly young men who yearned to get back to their families. They did not come to stay, much less take part in American politics. America came to rely on them to the point that, were a magic wand to eliminate them, whole industries would stop, including California agriculture.

US labor unions however, supported by the Democratic Party, pressed the US government to restrict this illegal flow. While until the 1980s, the US-Mexican border was patrolled by fewer than 1000 agents – nearly all at a handful of crossing points – that number has grown to some 25,000 in our time. As the border began to tighten, making it impossible for the Mexicans to come and go, many brought their families and stayed put in the US between work seasons […]

The controversy over illegal immigration did not touch the core of the immigration problem, namely the Immigration Act of 1965 and our burgeoning welfare system. Nor did it deal with the fact that the illegal flow of Mexicans was really about labor, not immigration, because most Mexican “illegals” had not come with the intention of staying. A well-crafted guest-worker program would give most of them what they want most [emphasis mine – bc].

Hence the “illegal immigration problem” is an artifact of the US political system: The Democratic Party wants the Mexicans as voters, the labor unions want the Mexicans as members rather than as competitors, and the Chamber of Commerce wants them for as low a wage as it can enforce.

Codevilla has much, much more here. Codevilla attributes the US immigration system to the corporate state, but I am unsure if Dr Delacroix feels the same way.

Delacroix’s piece, like Codevilla’s, also brings attention to an alternative guest worker program. Delacroix, in an article for the Independent Review, points out that the guest worker program has worked extremely well in the pre-central bank European Union (I am unsure if this is still the case).

A guest worker program would eliminate the political implications associated with “illegal immigration reform” and, as a result, enhance the economic benefits of seasonal labor flows coming from Mexico. The Cato Institute has recently come out with a policy report detailing how a guest worker program might be implemented. As I’ve stated before, the Cato Institute is one of three think tanks I actually trust (the other two being Brookings and Hoover).

About the time I did grassroots campaigning for a high-end gigolo

muricaderp Politics, Religion

That’s an impertinent way to refer to the Secretary of State. I’d certainly be ashen with embarrassment upon writing such a thing if I were the kind of whinging supplicant who gives a damn about the etiquette of not holding the contemptible in open contempt. If I should be embarrassed by anything, it should be by the fact that a boorish, condescending, socially climbing arriviste with no discernible grasp on American culture beyond Route 128 is my country’s chief diplomat.

Now, is there anything wrong with being a gigolo? That’s a backhanded question to ask, but one that’s still worth asking. It isn’t wrong the way the guys I profiled last night are wrong, so I’ll let other people Godwinize this debate. (And they will. The concern trolls always do.) Getting head-up about some posh bugger having gotten that way by marrying a condiment heiress would normally be a true First World Problem, but John Kerry made his marriage the people’s business by inflicting himself on his nation, as New England’s posh inevitably do. That crowd gravitates to “public service” like flies to a cow pie. Would that they were merely indolent. My position is that the sugar lifestyle in any capacity (momma, daddy or baby) is awfully gauche and in no way admirable. I just feel a certain uneasiness with the idea of paying or being paid for such services in increments longer than a few hours. It comes a bit too close to indenture for my taste. As I see it, sugaring is something that should be done on a woodlot come spring, but needless to say, that takes a different kind of New Englander.

This is not a David Horowitz-style political conversion tale. Indeed, I campaigned for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid, and I did so in an inhospitable jurisdiction: Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, whose electorate was voting for Republicans two to one back then. To this day, I see no shame in that game.

There should be shame in it, but I beheld the man’s competition, and I blanched. A lukewarm Nantucket Catholic ketchup gigolo with a penchant for windsurfing and a schmucky trial lawyer with a powerful head of political hair made for an objectively awful slate, one that called into question the sanity of the party nominating them. It would have been brilliant to vote against that rotten duo, had their opponents not been a dry drunk hereditary boy king and his regent Dr. Strangelove.

In the latter case, we were dealing with a party that wasn’t just insane, but also depraved. The Democratic Party was being strangled by myopic, tone-deaf BoBo status whores, the same facepalmably witless cohort that has lately been smearing Edward Snowden for being a high school dropout. As pathetic as that was, the Republican Party was being strangled by a rogue’s gallery of dangerous authoritarians: theocrats, sex scolds, capital punishment fetishists, prison brutality fetishists, boot-in-the-ass jingoists, martial law enthusiasts, ad nauseam. Nor was there any need to be bashful about doing a mix-and-match at the crazy buffet: the more kinds of religious-nationalistic atavism, the better.

As choices of poison went, it was an easy one. This wasn’t so much a choice between the gas chamber and the electric chair as it was between either following the neighborhood serial murderer into his basement or spending the evening being high-hatted by the local gentry at an estate party. George W. Bush strikes me as someone who spent his childhood performing vivisections on cats. It’s a subjective gut feeling: nothing provable, and probably not the case, but I can’t shake it, either. Many Americans, especially ones who vote in the Republican primaries, looked at him and saw a pious Christian. What, you ask, was Jesus of Nazareth’s relationship to the death penalty? Never mind that. W is a Bible-believing man of God who doesn’t make fun of Christians for attending snake-handling churches.

Oh, you say he did make fun of pious Christians behind their backs? It can’t be. David Kuo must have been a red diaper baby liberal atheist to say such a thing.

What the Democrats have is a communication problem. As a rule, the electorate isn’t so much alienated by their policies as by their personas. The opposite is generally true of public attitudes towards the GOP. I suspect that if equally effective communicators from the Left and the Right squared off, the Right would get creamed.

Libertarians have a communication problem, too, albeit of a different sort, mostly of a tin foil hat variety. This is how Pennsylvania ended up with Ken Krawchuk burning a five dollar bill on stage to demonstrate the worthlessness of fiat money, Mike Fisher sanctimoniously accusing him of criminally defacing US currency, and Ed Rendell, a slimeball, as governor.

Again, though, the communication problems bedeviling Democrats go beyond rhetoric. They have style problems, too. As befits every posh New Englander, more than a few of them have problems involving watersports. Maybe the other kind of watersports, too, but definitely the kind openly practiced around Nantucket. Just the other day, John Kerry was caught out on his yacht while shit hit the fan in Egypt. A major but tenuous Arab constitutional republic was disintegrating, and that fool was out fooling around on a rich person’s boat. It must be that when you’re an international gigolo, it’s always time for a cool change.

Notice that Republicans don’t get caught pulling that kind of shit. George W. Bush clearing brush on his ranch is a trustfunder’s form of recreation, but at the most superficial level, the level that counts in American politics, it doesn’t look bad at all. It’s the kind of thing that any red-blooded American man might do, especially if he has a late-model pickup and eleventy thousand acres of personal backyard. Republicans know that this sort of thing really resonates with inattentive goobers, and they do it skillfully. Dick Cheney may shoot people in the face when he goes hunting, but he doesn’t look like a pandering doofus from the city the way John Kerry does in a hunting coat.

Verbally and visually, Republicans know how to stay on message. Authoritarians make great communicators.

Mealy-mouthed moral relativism won’t carry the day. I’m amazed that it even carried Pennsylvania in 2004. Left-liberal, conservative, or libertarian, regardless of the angle of attack, the only way to take on authoritarians is with some principles. There is evil in this world. It exists. Newsday may be too sheepish to print the pictures, but it’s true: SATIN LIVES.

Our closing hymns today, both written by the truest son of the Guyland, will be a celebration of how not to make a political disaster of one’s boating habit and a survey of the activities of the major American political parties. Go in peace, gigolos.

Around the Web: Rumpy Pumpy

muricaderp Liberty, Links, Politics

Just one link tonight, since I have to be onsite at a vineyard in less than five hours for work tomorrow.

Here it is, in all its sharp English glory. What does Mark Steyn find so compelling about an almost unheard-0f British politician named Nigel Farage? Here’s a taste:

The wobbly boozer turned out to be the steady hand at the tiller UKIP needed. He was elected (via proportional representation) to the European Parliament, which for the aspiring Brit politician is Siberia with an expense account. Then, in 2010, Farage became a global Internet sensation by raining on the EU’s most ridiculous parade — the inaugural appearance by the first supposed “President of Europe,” not a popularly elected or even parliamentarily accountable figure but just another backroom deal by the commissars of Eutopia. The new “President” was revealed to be, after the usual Franco-German stitch-up, a fellow from Belgium called Herman van Rompuy. “Who are you?” demanded Farage from his seat in the European Parliament during President van Rompuy’s address thereto. “No one in Europe has ever heard of you.” Which was quite true. One day, Mr. van Rompuy was an obscure Belgian, the next he was an obscure Belgian with a business card reading “President of Europe.” But, as is his wont, Nigel warmed to his theme and told President van Rompuy that he had “the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.” A few days later, having conferred in their inner sanctum, the Eurocrats ordered Farage to make a public apology. So he did — to low-grade bank clerks for having been so ill-mannered as to compare them to President van Rompuy. He was then fined 2,980 euros (about $4,000) for his impertinence, since when he has referred to the European president as Rumpy-Pumpy, a British synonym for a bloody good shag.

I have to say, I like the guy. Nigel Farage is why we need Englishmen in Congress. But please no Belgians.

I’d round out this piece with some topical porn links or other suitable rudeness (autoerotic asphyxiation figures in Steyn’s piece), but I have  to be up before dawn. I’m the Help these days.

On the plus side of the ledger, the site where I’m working tomorrow is beautiful, and the grapes don’t talk back.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Zionism’s Colonial Roots

Brandon Christensen History, Politics , , , , , ,

Today, Benjamin Netanyahu is seen widely as a leader of the Right (although in comparison with Avigdor Lieberman and others who have held office in Israel lately, Netanyahu could look moderate), and Israeli politics have long been categorized in terms of Left and Right, with the Revisionists cast as right-wing no-goodniks. That was so from the 1930s: with the rise of fascism, it became quite common to characterize Jabotinsky as a fascist, a word widely used by his Zionist foes. Rabbi Stephen Wise, a prominent liberal Jewish American of his day, called Revisionism “a species of fascism,” while David Ben-Gurion—the leader of the Labor Zionists in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in British Palestine) and then a founding father and first prime minister of Israel—referred to his foe privately as “Vladimir Hitler,” which didn’t leave much to the imagination. And to be sure, while Jabo called himself a free-market liberal with anarchist leanings, the oratory of Revisionism—“in blood and fire will Judea rise again”—and the visual rhetoric—the Betarim in their brown shirts marching and saluting—had alarming contemporary resonances.

Read the rest, it’s very good throughout.

Internal Revenue Service Even Handed After All

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , ,

Liberal commentators in all media and even on this blog have been eager to announce that the IRS was an equal opportunity offender between Left and Conservative groups and that, therefore, there is not much of a (new) scandal attached to the IRS.

Peggy Noonan resets the clock in her column of Wall Street Journal of 6/29/13. (All boldings below come from me.)

According to a House Ways and Means Committee source , only seven (7) cases of the 298 cases flagged by the IRS for extra scrutiny appear to represent progressive causes. Not one of the seven was subjected to harassment and abuse. Of the seven, only two were sent follow-up questionnaires after their application for tax-exempt status was received […] And all seven saw their applications approved […]

The “source” was not identified by name. Want to bet it does not exist?

[…] Russel George, the Treasury Inspector General whose audit broke open the scandal answered Rep. Sander Levin’s charge that the audit had ignored the targeting of progressives (by the IRS, bolding and comment mine) […]

The evidence showed conservative groups were singled out by the IRS, not liberal groups. While some progressive groups may have ended up on a BOLO list, the IRS did not target them. We did not find evidence that the criteria you (Rep. Levin), labeled “Progressive” were used by the IRS to select potential political cases during the 2010 to 2013 time frame we audited. One hundred per cent of the groups with “Tea Party,” “Patriot,” or “9/12″ in their names were given extra scrutiny.

Soon, very soon, the Internal Revenue Service will withdraw its apology for misdeeds it gave about two weeks ago precisely for persecuting, treating unfairly conservative-sounding groups. Right?

I wish the liberal deniers on this matter were cunning and twisted rather than something else. It’s easier to deal with conscious dishonesty than with the alternative. Many 1932 Germans were also not twisted, not consciously dishonest; they just would not see the evidence of their eyes.

Snowden and Me

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , ,

Much unnecessary hoopla about Mr Snowden. Much conspiracy theorizing on conservative radio (but not on Rush Limbaugh).

I think things are pretty much the way they look. He has not worked for the Chinese or anyone. Not much that is very new has been revealed. The new things for some people on this blog is that Mr Obama is just as bad (OK, almost as bad ) as Mr Bush. N. S. !

Mr Snowden is almost certainly not guilty of spying: You have to spy for somebody or for something.

Personally, I think he is probably guilty of violating some contract or other that he signed. That’s worth a year in Club Fed with Bernie (what’s his name again?)

Personally, I did not like the blank surveillance cover and the data mining before. I still don’t. I don’t like big government and I don’t like big government doing big things. What’s so hard to understand?

There is one thing I learned again that  I already knew: College is overrated. Mr Snowden, the high-school dropout was earning $200,00 a year, in Hawaii. Of course, he was working for the Fed. Government.

Update: Booz -Allen says that no, he must be bragging, it was only $120,000. That’s before bonuses, of course.

Around the web: other civil libertarian perspectives on privacy

muricaderp Links, Politics , , , ,

1) Scroll back through Umair Haque’s Twitter feed to June 10 for a series of salty, pointed critiques of David Brooks’ recent hatchet job-cum-subsidiarity Jeremiad.

2) Three essays from Jacob Bacharach:

A) “Peeping Thomism,” an accidentally timely call for, among other things, hiring managers to grow up and cut out their censoriousness about stuff that their applicants post on social media: “But, says the Director of Human Resources and the Career Counselor, social media is public; you’re putting it out there. Yes, well, then I’m sure you won’t mind if I join you guys at happy hour with this flip-cam and a stenographer. Privacy isn’t the responsibility of individuals to squirrel away secrets; it’s the decency of individuals to leave other’s lives alone.”

B) A calm but firm call for his own demographic to stop falsely denigrating the less educated (Bacharach is a novelist by trade).

C) On David Brooks, his “conservatism,” and the amazing entitlement of certain posh people.

3) From Karen Garcia, a week-in-review summary of the PRISM bombshell. Garcia is a top-notch blogger whose archives I’ve been combing since discovering a link in one of her comments on Brooks’ “unmediated man” column. Other essays especially worth reading, on tangential but related topics, include her back story about Cornwall-on-Hudson homeboy David Petraeus and her evisceration of the covert classism of the Obamas’ 2012 Christmas message to the nation.

Impeach James Clapper

muricaderp Politics , , ,

It’s very simple. The Director of National Intelligence needs to go. He lied to Congress about the NSA’s totalitarian PRISM program. That’s as serious and subversive a lie as can be told to Congress about any topic. It’s exactly the kind of official misconduct that the impeachment process was established to check and punish.

I encourage those of you who agree that Clapper should be impeached to reblog what I’ve written, either verbatim or modified as you see fit. So far, there has been a strong and encouraging grassroots response to the White House petition to pardon Edward Snowden, a fair amount of it from latent civil libertarians who have been shocked into engagement by the egregiousness of what Snowden has exposed. A campaign to impeach Clapper, whom Snowden’s leaks have exposed as a liar, would dovetail perfectly with the one to pardon Snowden. Clapper has already provoked a number of members of Congress with his lie about PRISM, so timely pressure from constituents could be what it takes either to pressure him out of office or to get him formally removed.

A couple of side notes on the official reaction to PRISM (the metadata, if you will):

1) Rudy Giuliani offered a cretinously jingoistic defense of Clapper in an interview with Greta Van Susteren last night (6/11), premised largely on Clapper’s distinguished service as a military officer, the underlying ethics being that we dasn’t criticize the troops. It’s worth noting that by that standard Edward Snowden would also be shielded from all criticism, although perhaps less fully shielded since Clapper had the patriotism not to truncate his military career by breaking both legs in a special forces training accident. It goes without saying, but shouldn’t, that one doesn’t hear this sort of defense offered on Bradley Manning’s behalf, and not just because he’s a young grunt. Nor does one hear it made in defense of Robert Bales or Nidal Hasan, except perhaps by their defense attorneys, because it would sound absolutely absurd to say such a thing about someone under court-martial for mass murder. I submit that it’s no less absurd or evil when said about a spook who has been caught lying to Congress about a totalitarian eavesdropping program.

The interview got weirder than that. When Van Susteren confronted Giuliani with a chronology of Clapper’s evasions, Giuliani suddenly changed tack and accused Clapper of being a loose cannon for not having formulaically stated that he could not answer the question or offered to answer it in closed-door session. By mayoral fiat, an esteemed officer and gentleman was turned into a blithering fool who didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. This makes the notion of Giuliani as some sort of mobster at least look plausible.

2) This vile mashup of pop psychology, pop sociology, generational smears, class snobbery, and milquetoast despotism is bad even by David Brooks’ usual standards.

Logical Fallacies in the Press

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Politics , , ,

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

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

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

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

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

Istanbul: The Protests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The right to live as honorable citizens of this country.

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

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

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

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

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

muricaderp Economics, Law, Liberty, Links, Politics

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

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

The Obama Administration: RIP

Warren Gibson Current Events, Liberty, Politics

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

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

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

ObamaCare Snark

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law, Politics , ,

Oh, the delicious irony. From Yahoo! news:

Unions backed the health care legislation because they expected it to curb inflation in health coverage, reduce the number of uninsured Americans and level the playing field for companies that were already providing quality benefits. While unions knew there were lingering issues after the law passed, they believed those could be fixed through rulemaking.

But last month, the union representing roofers issued a statement calling for “repeal or complete reform” of the health care law. Kinsey Robinson, president of the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers, complained that labor’s concerns over the health care law “have not been addressed, or in some instances, totally ignored.”

“In the rush to achieve its passage, many of the act’s provisions were not fully conceived, resulting in unintended consequences that are inconsistent with the promise that those who were satisfied with their employer-sponsored coverage could keep it,” Robinson said.

Well no shit Sherlock. There is more: Continue reading →