Psychopolitik 2.0

Do read the whole thing, wouldja? Follow the links too.

Even back when I was only surface-level on libertarianism, the ways that people like Spangler & Kevin Carson had described a free-market was rather close to what I defined one as. The common assumption is that “capitalism” — as people refer to the free-market who haven’t climbed into the world of Libertarian Class Theory yet — inherently means an economy run entirely by walking corporate stereotypes as if the world has become the movie Wall Street. In reality, a free-market would be one that was legally neutral between different structures of market exchange — whether a completely worker-controlled syndicalist collective or a common business wouldn’t matter, may the best salesmen win.

At one time I had focused my reading on historical economics, analysis of markets before the modern political era. Everywhere there was a free-market, I noticed two things: the trappings of it looked virtually nothing like what the average person today thinks is a free-market, & many of the actors formed in a way that the uninformed would consider “socialist” nowadays. To say this differed from the picture portrayed in public schools to this day would be an understatement.

I used to constantly argue with leftists that under the political order that I advocated they’d be free to organize however the hell they wanted. Now I realize why they argued otherwise: neither one of us at the time knew who we were really dealing with. In the long run, within the sphere of a Rothbardian lasseiz-faire setup, libertarians & anti-state socialists would have no further reason to argue with each other, as the tools to violate either of us wouldn’t be available.

tags: Libertarianism]]>

but that all goes away now:

The Senate confirmed Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court on Tuesday by a vote of 58-42, a day after an attempt by some Democratic senators to block his nomination fizzled. Alito, who will be the court’s 110th justice, will be sworn into office across the street from the Capitol at the Supreme Court, just hours before President Bush’s State of the Union address.

So now there’s two Bush Jr picks on the Supreme Court. One an authority-freak in a crunchy nerd exterior, the other the type of person who’s shockingly comfortable with lying to be accepted — in all likelihood, an indication he’ll be worse than anyone thought. We can count these two as automatic votes against Padilla when his case comes up, bet money on that.

On that, this Senate gets an F.

Where was the grilling on constitutional interpretation? How come only one person asked how far the power of the executive goes? If there are going to even be confirmation hearings, then the entire process should be taken advantage of as a rare opportunity to get the public thinking about the Constitution. It should be an ongoing conversation between us & our Senators & the nominee, not yet another shallow media circus with a blatantly obvious partisan outcome.

The Republicans — w/ Chafee the lone exception — gave every indication that they were going to support Alito no matter what, simply because he was the pick of their boy. The Democrats that opposed him had an opportunity to give a concrete, constitutional, non-partisan reason that could’ve swayed people to urge their Senators to side with them, and they didn’t. Sad day for representative government…

tags: Alito, Samuel+Alito, US+Constitution, Supreme+Court, US+Senate, Democratic+Party, Republican+Party]]>

nails it:

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tomorrow night, the president of the United States will address a divided government and a weary nation. In so doing, he’ll attempt to make the case that the state of the union is sound, that his administration’s policies have made it so, and that the continuation and extension of those policies is essential for the good of the country. The nominal opposition party, in the person of one of its more “moderate” orators, will respond with respectful disagreement.

Neither the president’s speech nor the nominal opposition’s response will truthfully address the true condition of the republic.

Neither the president nor the nominal opposition will offer bold solutions to the nation’s vexing problems.

Neither the president nor the nominal opposition will own up to their respective responsibility for creating or perpetuating those problems….

This is why I don’t do live-blogging of these kind of things. My patience for BS is so short that after awhile I’d just post *insert blatant lie here* and be done with it.

Honestly, what’s the point of the State of the Union address? It doesn’t serve to inform anyone, it’s been yet another political soapbox since forever ago, there’s zero honesty about anything & no one watches it anyway. Of the few people who actually think it’s worth watching, none of them are going to come away with any different thoughts afterwards than they had beforehand. I would call it intellectual masturbation, except that’d be an insult to both words.

Having recently got my cable back on, I admit, I’ve looked at a little bit of the punditry about it. It’s amusing to me, I laugh more during some of that crap than during 80% of the standup they show on Comedy Central. These people get paid to act like it’s this earth-shattering event, like depending on what Bush’s speechwriters have scrawled on those sheets of paper in front of him things’ll start workin out, approaching it from every angle except one that even remotely makes sense.

See, any discussion that gets aired in the mainstream can only disagree on a narrow set of variables, no one is taken seriously who questions the entire structure. It’s like playing blackjack at gunpoint: you can hit, or you can stay, getting up isn’t your call.

For more on why the SOTU is meaningless, see Tim West.

tags: US+politics, Bush]]>

science backs that up, and more:

Emory University psychologist Drew Westen put self-identified Democratic and Republican partisans in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about various candidates. Both groups were quick to spot inconsistency and hypocrisy — but only in candidates they opposed.

When presented with negative information about the candidates they liked, partisans of all stripes found ways to discount it, Westen said. When the unpalatable information was rejected, furthermore, the brain scans showed that volunteers gave themselves feel-good pats — the scans showed that “reward centers” in volunteers’ brains were activated. The psychologist observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information had curious parallels with drug addiction as addicts also reward themselves for wrong-headed behavior. (emphasis mine)

I’d always suspected that there was some sort of chemical/psychological benefit to denying unpleasant truths. Something about the tone of voice, the body language, it suggested that they were somehow having bursts of happiness as they denied everything.

tags: US+politics, Democratic+Party, Republican+Party, psychology]]>

this without cringing. Apparently some people are so resigned to partisan politics that they swear up and down everyone is donkey or elephant…

What’s worse is the tired implication that libertarians are just pot-smoking republicans. If this post had more tact behind it I would assume that their experience with libertarianism was solely of the questionable-at-the-least “Neo-” variety, but I doubt he even looked that far.

The following is for “Huck”:

That post just shows how deep fatalism has sunk in. If the status-quo is so tight that the only choices are both crap, the proper response is to junk the entire status-quo itself. The last time I voted was in 2000, for a straight Libertarian ticket. Having come to the conclusion that politics itself is the problem, I have not bothered since.

IMO, eventually a true libertarian realizes that what they’re calling for is the abolition of Politics As We Know It. In the short term, they may lean towards a party for strategic reasons — for example, I’m not a democrat myself but I find the republican party to be even worse, so I generally focus my rage at the GOP — but in the long run what would be success to a serious libertarian would be unrecognizeable for anyone used to the current way of politics.

Imagine virtually everything that politicians do being voided out, and politics becoming irrelevant, and then you’ll have an idea of what libertarianism is. We are gradual revolutionaries if anything.

tags: Libertarian]]>

Earlier today I spoke with a neighbor of mine. Just chit-chatting, nothing important. Then I recalled something I saw on my way to work one day: Apparently next to a new factory that was built in my town there’s a sign w/ some propaganda from the Department of Commerce, complete w/ Bush’s name on it. I made a throwaway joke about it — “wtf, he think he’s Trump now or somethin’? We gonna see Bush Towers?”, then segued into roughly the following exchange:

Me: “speaking of Bush, you heard any of that stuff about him wire-tappin people without a warrant?”
Him: “…I, uh…huh? Naw I hadn’t”
Me: “shortly after 9/11 he signed an order creatin this surveillance program, where they tap domestic communications that go out of the country. They don’t bother to get warrants for it”
Him: “Well, damn…”
Me: “Based on how him & his folks been defendin’ the program, it sounds like the reason they didn’t get warrants is that rather than spy how the average Joe might think of it — you suspect someone of something & tap THAT person — they’re doing a broad, largely random sweep for info, sayin ‘eh, we’ll sort through this later’.
Him: “that don’t sound right”
Me: “not only is it illegal, it’s unconstitutional to wire-tap citizens without a warrant. They just ignored it”

Just as we were finishing up, someone nearby who was listening in, who far as I could tell was probably a “conservative” (this one was a middle-aged white guy, & I live in a very-red area of a red-state: odds are that guy voted for Bush) said “I didn’t know that either, that’s a shock” in a tone of voice like he felt betrayed.

There are people out there that could turn the tide….if they only knew what was in the water.

tags: US+politics, Bush, Privacy, US+Constitution, war+on+terror]]>

hand down an instant death sentence — for sports betting.

Yeah, a SWAT team member can’t handle his gun, yet we’re supposed to remain unarmed & trust our friendly neighborhood policemen. I think not.

tags: police+misconduct]]>

this is (roughly) what democracy looks like:

The radical Islamic group Hamas won 76 seats in voting for the first Palestinian parliament in a decade, election officials announced Thursday evening, giving it a decisive majority in the 132-member body and the right to form the next government. The long-ruling Fatah movement won 43 seats.

So, after the past few years of pushing for the region to embrace the trappings of democracy — in the case of Iraq, by force — we have an Iraqi government that is friendly to Iran & a palestinian authority that’s about to be run by Hamas. Nice.

Plain and simple: democracy without liberalism is just a majoritarian rubber-stamp to atrocity. This is what happens when we intervene in a culture we know nothing about, they zag when we expect a zig. Far as I’ve been able to tell, they think the problem with their society is that it’s somehow not “islamic” enough. The elite that run things use their faith as a shield for their own gluttony & ignorance. Thus, when they have an opportunity to change, they just veer wildly the opposite direction, having not thought about any other alternatives — the elite trying at least rhetorically to make peace? Vote for the ones calling for war! Past government was Arab Stalinists? Push for mullahs!

I think the most interesting thing about these outcomes is that, in a way, they kinda resemble us. We’ve been seeing things in polarizing terms & over-emphasizing religion too as of late. Of course, we have the cushion of past examples to point to, which is why for all the trouble we’ve brought about the sky isn’t falling. We have a secular root-politic of natural rights that we can cite when the skies go dark, what do they have?

tags: Hamas, Israel, Palestine, foreign+policy, democracy]]>

No suprises here…

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines on Tuesday to narrowly approve President George W. Bush’s nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, moving the 55-year-old conservative a step closer to confirmation by the full Republican-led Senate.

With 10 Republicans voting yes and eight Democrats voting no, the committee sent the nomination to the 100-member Senate. The full chamber is to begin debate on Wednesday, with a confirmation vote, also largely along party lines, expected as early as the end of this week….

The committee’s vote on Alito marked the first time it had approved a Supreme Court nominee strictly along party lines since Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s successful nomination of Louis Brandeis in 1916, a spokesman said.

He’s approved along party lines, & about to be confirmed 56-44 (Ben Nelson said he’d vote for him). How dull…

If the process is going to be politicized like it has been, then appointments shouldn’t be for life. There is a huge difference between independant judges ruling on the original intent of the Constitution with no regard for party identification & people given lifetime jobs with a wink & a nod that they’ll approve of whatever the party that got them there wants.

Update @ 12:57pm EST: make that 57-43, Tim Johnson just flipped.

tags: Alito, Samuel+Alito, Supreme+Court, US+Constitution, US+Senate]]>

age verification thing…

The Justice Department is pressuring Google to turn over records on millions of searches to bolster a law it claims will help shield kids from Internet porn. Google is resisting on grounds the request would identify users, expose trade secrets, and impose an undue burden. Even if privacy isn’t at risk, as Justice claims, Google recognizes that the request risks diminishing customer trust–and with that, market share.

Justice is out to prove the Child Online Protection Act, which requires sexually explicit sites to verify that visitors are of legal age, doesn’t violate the Constitution. COPA was enacted in 1998 but suspended that same year after a suit by the American Civil Liberties Union. (emphasis mine)

Hmm….last I recall, the sites that did that already (there are some) did so by asking for a credit card number or similar. Translation: fraud enabling info.

Anyone who actually supports this garbage, ask yourselves whether the tradeoff of the government watching your kids for you in yet another way balances out with essentially endorsing identity theft & credit-card fraud.

tags: Bush, Privacy, Google, Censorship, ACLU, identity-theft]]>