Psychopolitik 2.0

Shorter Brandon Berg: “Y’know, the State murdering ideological enemies is cool sometimes”

The libertarian consensus on Pinochet seems to be that, while he may have done some good by turning Chile away from the path down which it was headed under Allende, killing 3,000 people and torturing many more was inexcusable. I’m not entirely sure I agree with this.

…WTF?

First of all, the “libertarian consensus” can’t possibly be that Pinochet did “some good”, because the idea behind Pinochets regime was that economic freedom (which was NOT what he put in place; simply tossing regulations isn’t enough, the power structure created by previous political corruption needed to be dismantled) & political freedom were two different things.  Also, US interference (whether you believe we were directly responsible for the coup or not, we did have a hand in Chile) in a nation that posed no threat to us flies in the face of the non-aggression principle.  Allende’s behavior was no excuse.

I’m not going to offer a defense of Pinochet or his regime, largely because I don’t really know the details of what he did or the circumstances he faced. Maybe he really was an unprincipled thug. Probably. But it is my understanding that the vast majority of his victims were targeted for their involvement in revolutionary socialist movements, and I can imagine circumstances under which state-sponsored persecution of revolutionary socialists would be justified. (emphasis mine)

“Circumstances“?  Plural?  Gee, I can only think of one: when those revolutionary socialists conspire to kill people.  Note that in a case like that, the state sponsorship of such would be unnecesary: you don’t have to be their ideological opposite or even interested in the question at all to oppose murder.

The logic here suggests that it is OK for a government to eliminate its opponents simply for being opponents.  Following that train of thought, a rabid enough authoritarian could argue that, say, all radical libertarians should be rounded up and put before firing squads.  One thing we tend to point out in the US is how far beyond what the founders had in mind the US government has gone, suggesting that they’d have wanted another revolution a long time ago, it is not far-fetched that someone might think “well, they could attempt it at any moment” (even though it’d be dumb for them to think it).

Living in the United States in 2006, it’s easy to say that people should not be persecuted for their involvement in fringe political movements. And for us, that’s probably the right position to take. We can afford to, because they pose no real threat. But in an unstable political environment, where there is a very real danger of revolution, the answers aren’t so clear.

Revolution in an unstable political environment is a “danger”?  Usually if a nation is unstable it’s for a reason, people don’t willy-nilly decide “hey, let’s overthrow the government today, it’ll be a hoot!”.

Brandon has it backwards anyway.  Fringe movements don’t pose a threat because they aren’t persecuted, they can’t portray their lack of power to people on the fence about it as being due to them being actively stamped out. If the government holds down a group, it sends a message to people that they’re threatened by what that group is saying, for some people that’s enough to sway their view of it.

I would’ve expected this shit on Samizdata or QandO, sheesh…

After an unjustifiable invasion, an almost comedically peculiar trial, & a miniscule appeal process, Saddam Hussein has been hung. The crime he was punished for was ordering murders & torture of citizens of a Shiite town in collective retaliation for an assassination attempt back in 1982.

What isn’t mentioned is what Saddam himself tried to frequently point out during the trial: At the time, the US was aiding his atrocities. Detailed proof, derived from official government documents, is — for now — freely available here.

A picture says a thousand words though…

Functionally, this is a bump in the road on what seems like a neverending farce. There will be more deaths in Iraq, but there would’ve been anyway; this doesn’t mean the current regime won’t do the same thing, and reports suggest they already are, only exception being it’s not official action; the odds for liberty & stability in Iraq are unchanged from yesterday. This is nothing more than a splashy reminder that for a sickeningly long time the official policy of the United States has been to support whatever scum is on hand provided the ones in charge think there’s the slightest “national interest” served by it.

So much as whispering what I just put here in person gets you called a nutjob, and no “mainstream” reporting on the execution will mention the background to the crime. Meanwhile, the advocates of the worldview that led to this whole fucking debacle from the beginning are considered champions of freedom, even by the people selected from the chattering classes as the loyal opposition.

And we wonder why the world thinks we’re batshit insane…

1) As a fellow musician and a lifelong admirer of his work, I felt the most appropriate tribute to James Brown was to make a funky track dedicated to him & keeping up what he gave the world. That track is on my Soundclick page here. Nothing I could’ve said would’ve expressed it any better than that.

2) Ford’s purpose as president pretty much began and ended with pardoning Nixon. As for his recently-revealed criticism of the Iraq invasion, that was over three years too late to be of benefit. He seemed like a decent enough person (for a politician, that is), and I didn’t wish ill on him, but to be honest I just don’t see the big deal here. Feel free to yell at me about this if you want…

Continuing with the “On Faith” columns on the WaPo site, Cal Thomas had this to say:

I know some atheists who are pro-life (though they have an inadequate base for being so). That’s because if God is not the Author of life, then we are evolutionary accidents who may treat each other as we please.

Yeah, sure, what say we ask all those dead Iraqi civilians how “pro-life” they think you & your cohorts are?

I personally think organized religion as we know it is a sham, a convenient tool of elites passed down through the ages for use as a pacifier. At its best, it encourages complacency with ones life status; at its worst, it becomes a just-add-water excuse for mass murder. However, I do not treat individual religious people with derision simply for being religious, nor do I think in the abstract they are “defective”. Depending on their ACTIONS, they may actually be wonderful people regardless of their embrace of religion.

From the comments to a column about the stigma against open atheism and/or secularism in politics on the Washington Post website, here’s an example of the type that goes right into the “asshole” column:

I believe atheists themselves should be respected - as human beings created in God’s image, they are as valuable as the rest of us are and we can hope that they will eventually come around. However, I have seen no evidence that atheism itself is a respectable belief system. Rather, it is a deficiency. Maybe the person is missing a gene or has a mutated chromosome or something along those lines (and not, I should add, an evolved one - as evolution remember is to tend toward the positive).
-Brad (emphasis mine)

Now, this isn’t a “religious right” type. He states that he feels overemphasis on religion in politics is what got us Dubya, opposed the Great Iraqi Snipe Hunt from the start, and actually says quite obviously that, unlike the bible-thumper class, he sees no inherent contradiction between a deity and evolution. All this makes the view all the more repulsive: it’s as if in the 60’s a white person had said “I’m fine with blacks being around, but melanin is a mutation” right after giving a standard progressive schpeil for the time.

Funny thing about this is, the idea that religious belief is genetic was advanced by someone on “the other side”. In “The God Part of the Brain“, Matthew Alper argued that the human brain had a spiritual sector, and that its original purpose was as an evolution-provided psychological shield of sorts, allowing mankind a break from being reminded of its impending death every second. Far from being a bizarro-Brad on this, he left open the question of its modern-day usefulness — though his criticism of manmade religion in the book was willfully misinterpreted as “hehe, stupid theists”. Either way, Brad isn’t saying anything new here.

IMO, that theory that spirituality has a section in our brains was already proven way back when peyote started being used for religious ceremonies by many of the indigenous people of what’s now the US & Mexico. It’s even backed up more recently by studies I’ve seen showing that psychedelic drugs can trigger spiritual sensations. Common sense says if deliberately messing with your brain does this then something in there has to have that role.

Yet contrary to popular belief, spirutality and religion are not the exact same thing. One can believe that there are things beyond our usual comprehension, things that if we were to witness them would get a reaction of intense childlike wonder, without following a religion. I should know, I’m in those ranks*. That shows that rejection of religion is not a genetic defect, because everyone has that part of their brain — even us heathens. The assumption that because someone does not go to a building at least once a week wearing uncomfortable clothing and sing/chant/talk about stories thousands of years old they have something wrong with them, THAT is a defect.
(* - I don’t profess to be able to know all that is out there, or that reality in its entirety is only what we see on a regular basis. I personally feel it reasonable to believe there is something out there greater than us, the difference is that I see as contradictory the belief among theists that something can simultaneously be above you and understandable enough to know what the hell he/she/it wants from you, if anything. I go about my life as if there is no god because I see no point in picking one from all the options: it’s like playing Powerball with an infinate amount of numbers that can be drawn. Obviously, 99.999% of the time it is much quicker for me to say “I’m an atheist” or “I’m agnostic” than to explain this in public.)

So far (some stuff is still in transit, or at relatives’ houses) I got a hoodie & 2 hats w/ Jimi Hendrix on ‘em, some money, and a jumbo George Foreman grill.

Your turn…

Something even I didn’t know: the legal fight over the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska still hasn’t been concluded.  Today, some bad news:

A U.S. appeals court on Friday lowered the punitive damages owed by Exxon Mobil Corp. because of the Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska to $2.5 billion from $4.5 billion.

The San Francisco-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said in its ruling that it sliced the penalty almost in half in light of U.S. Supreme Court decisions on punitive damages.

The punitive damage ruling — originally $5 billion in 1994 — has been the subject of a decade-long legal battle between the oil giant and 32,000 fishermen, Alaska natives and property owners who were awarded the damages for the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.

Now I know some are thinking “why are you complaining?  They still have 2.5 billion to pay, how much is enough?”.  I’d refer those people to the definition of “punitive damages”, courtesy of Findlaw (the direct URL wouldn’t work if copied, so it’s not here):

punitive damages
: damages awarded in cases of serious or malicious wrongdoing to punish or deter the wrongdoer or deter others from behaving similarly.

“To punish or DETER”.  For a simple example, say I’m your neighbor and I (unintentionally, though recklessly — assume I was drunk or something) toss a brick through your window & it hits one of your kids in the head.  You sue me and win.  You get awarded not only compensatory damages (i.e.: enough money to fix your window & pay the doctor bill from that huge lump on your kids head), but punitive damages; the intent of those damages is to say to anyone else who would do what I did — playfully toss objects while drunk — that if they harm anyone it will cost them a painful amount.

In the case of the Exxon Valdez spill, their conduct that led to the oil spill was found to have been reckless, & the punitive damage amount was $5 billion; it is now half that.  So the question is, is this amount enough to deter ExxonMobil and other oil companies from slacking on safety in transport?

Here’s a link to some of their financial info, straight from the source.  You tell me…

When I saw this my first thought was “hell yeah!”

A one-time Texas drug agent described by his former boss as perhaps the best narcotics officer in the country plans to market a how-to video on concealing drugs and fooling police.

Barry Cooper, who has worked for small police departments in East Texas, plans to launch a Web site next week where he will sell his video, “Never Get Busted Again,” the Tyler Morning Telegraph reported in its online edition Thursday.

A promotional video says Cooper will show viewers how to “conceal their stash,” “avoid narcotics profiling” and “fool canines every time.”

Cooper, who said he favors the legalization of marijuana, made the video in part because he believes the nation’s fight against drugs is a waste of resources. Busting marijuana users fills up prisons with nonviolent offenders, he said.

“My main motivation in all of this is to teach Americans their civil liberties and what drives me in this is injustice and unfairness in our system,” Cooper told the newspaper.

I agree with his boss, dude is the best narcotics officer — because he was smart enough to realize his job shouldn’t have existed in the first place.  Good luck, Barry…

Yeah, I’m still here.  I just hadn’t felt I had anything to say the past few days.  At the moment I do, and have a couple things in progress, gimme a bit…

“Support the American Farmer –  buy weed”:

U.S. growers produce nearly $35 billion worth of marijuana annually, making the illegal drug the country’s largest cash crop, bigger than corn and wheat combined, an advocate of medical marijuana use said in a study released on Monday.

The report, conducted by Jon Gettman, a public policy analyst and former head of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, also concluded that five U.S. states produce more than $1 billion worth of marijuana apiece: California, Tennessee, Kentucky, Hawaii and Washington.

California’s production alone was about $13.8 billion, according to Gettman, who waged an unsuccessful six-year legal battle to force the government to remove marijuana from a list of drugs deemed to have no medical value.

…and that’s with the government deliberately trying to sabotage the entire industry, from growing to distribution to retail.

I dunno which that says more about, the popularity of marijuana despite its illogical legal status here, or the relative futility of US agribusiness in “traditional” crops despite subsidies out the wazoo.