Psychopolitik 2.0

During an attempted home invasion robbery, someone shot Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor.  He died the other day from his wounds.  Watching NFL Live, a moment ago ESPN’s NFL analyst John Clayton took this as a cue to talk about the NFL possibly directing anti-gun PR to its players, attempting to draw a link between Tank Johnson’s weapons charges & Taylor’s death.

One problem with that: Sean was shot while trying to defend himself with a machete.

To Sean, R.I.P., we’ll miss you.  To John, go fuck yourself.

I want this shirt.  Really I do.

Also, if you ever see a pack of this at your local liquor store (not gas station, LIQUOR store), get it.  ‘Tis friggin wonderful.

In response to my comment here, concerning support for Ron Paul by white supremacists, one responded with a post exclaiming “Make no mistake, racism is VERY libertarian!“.  Ugh…

Eh, I’m bored & this seems amusing, so I’ll bite.  Taking it point by point.:

Racism was opposed by socialists and communists because it was what they hated along with the discrimination based on wealth. Those who have no respect for property have no respect for how it is distributed, thus they find racial preferences the same as capitalistic greed.

He stumbles from the jump, since there’ve been examples of self-described socialists & communists being racist themselves, from mere expressions of hate to (in the case of communist heads of state) actually attempting purges.  Hell, Marx himself was a raving bigot!

As for respect for property, opinions differ even among libertarians, as the closer one agrees with Locke on what makes property legitimate the more of current holdings that come into question.  Murray Rothbard at one time took this to a conclusion that, though based on the strictest defense of property rights, sounds like an anarcho-Left revolutionary platform; Kevin Carson proposes using it as just that.  Just because statists criticize the advantage of some doesn’t mean that advantage was earned.

The government should defend the rights of every human being from being hurt, harmed, but it should not protect people from being laughed at, rejected from buying goods or obtaining housing.

Of course, as an anarchist I’d argue the government can’t do this because it inherently violates those rights anyway, but going with the immediate term I don’t see the conflict here.  The only reason it currently does those things is because enough people saw a power imbalance and really didn’t know what else to do about it.  My own feeling is that we sacrificed long-term liberty & handicapped the drive for self-sufficiency for a desire of immediate results, and while our lives HAVE improved since then the damage is still there.

Why is it ok for black people to sing about killing police and white people, but not ok to have white power bands sing about stomping Jews and lynching blacks?

It’s actually not OK in either case, if by OK he means “socially acceptable”.  The amount that do this is minuscule, despite the fuss whenever one comes out.  That said, the 1st example happens more often because of the power imbalance mentioned above: whites have had plenty of opportunities to act out these fantasies over the years, whereas the lack of restraint on the part of blacks is relatively recent.  If the tables had been turned, and blacks went to Europe & enslaved whites, then followed that up by systematically holding them at 2nd class status, who knows what white musicians would’ve been saying by now?  Every action has a reaction, whether we like it or not.

This is not to say it’s justified, only why it is the way it is.

It is ridiculous how today “You’re a racist” is the code word for “You’re a criminal worse than murderers and child molesters” (Am I alone?).

Condemnation of racism in public is not — NOT!! — equivalent to desire to criminalize it.  Anyone saying they would approve of making it a crime is just fanning the flames they think they’re trying to put out.

Remind yourself, it was not racists who got us into the war, it was not racists who introduced the USA PATRIOT Act, it was not racists who want to tax us more by the day, it was not racists who want to do away with the Constitution this country was founded on, it certainly was not racists who want NSA wiretapping or the National ID card.

Admitted racists?  No.  Yet it’s not hard to read between the lines when it comes to the constant fear-mongering these days.  The foundation of it all is that there’s an alien “other” so devious they can destroy our society on a whim, and this “other” is overwhelmingly made up of people darker than the majority of the US.  The political elite don’t have to spell it out, there’s enough among us that fill in the blanks themselves.

It was racists who killed the British tyrants to give us this country

Point being?

it was racists who killed Indians to roll the red carpet we step on today.

That much is obvious, considering they, um, killed the natives for their land.  They shouldn’t have, I am not going to praise armed robbery, no matter how long ago it was.

Can you honestly love this country’s traditions, values, and selfish individualism and oppose racism as form of thought and speech completely?

Yup.  If not, then what’s that say about “tradition”?

To reverse the old (pseudo-)quote, I will defend to the death your right to say whatever the hell you want, but that doesn’t mean I agree with it.

Shorter Mike Huckabee: “The 9th & 10th Amendments make Jesus cry, so away with them”:

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee rejects letting states decide whether to allow abortions, claiming the right to life is a moral issue not subject to multiple interpretations.

“It’s the logic of the Civil War,” Huckabee said Sunday, comparing abortion rights to slavery. “If morality is the point here, and if it’s right or wrong, not just a political question, then you can’t have 50 different versions of what’s right and what’s wrong.”

“For those of us for whom this is a moral question, you can’t simply have 50 different versions of what’s right,” he said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

The former Arkansas governor, who has drawn within striking distance of Mitt Romney in Iowa’s leadoff presidential caucuses, said he was taken aback by the National Right to Life Committee’s recent endorsement of Fred Thompson, the ex-Tennessee senator. (emphasis mine)

This is what never made sense about the weasel words about overturning Roe v. Wade. The same people that said they wanted to do that, always ended up in the same breath characterizing abortion as an absolute unacceptable evil, begging the question of why (since we’re talking about statists here, who think “I think it’s wrong” or “a plurality of people don’t like it” is reason enough for something to be illegal) they weren’t just openly saying “ban it”. Of course, the answer to that was a half-hearted attempt at not completely alienating everyone else. Mike Huckabee’s remark is a media-friendly translation of the religious right letting out a collective “fuck it”.

If it weren’t for the insistence of shoving a rigid set of morals down everyones throats, then I wouldn’t be in the uncomfortable position of having to DEFEND a legal concept that I actually hold skepticism about myself. As someone who feels that true democracy requires radical decentralization to the point where whether a government even exists is an open question — to eventually be answered by “no” — the issue with Roe v Wade isn’t the decision itself but the authority suggested in it. I agree with them on the base yes/no about it, as I’m pro-choice, yet I prefer a society where people who don’t like abortion simply band together and proceed to not have one. As with any other “wedge issue”, the politics behind it turn a difference of opinion into yet another all-against-all war.

BTW: the comparison to slavery is not only biologically & historically nuts (blacks were thought of to be less than human in the sense of animals, not of “pre-persons”), but as it in effect downplays slavery by attempting to play UP abortion, strikes me as at least subtly bigoted. Whether or not something that spends a decent chunk of time being microscopic & cannot yet live outside of its host is equivalent to you or me is in no way whatsoever as obvious as whether or not ones skin color makes them less human. The latter has no scientific basis for any dispute.

A recent post on the ridiculous response to a poll on torture had the title “Is reading comprehension in the U.S. REALLY that bad?“.  Now, according to this article, if it isn’t then it’s going to be very soon:

Americans are reading less and their reading proficiency is declining at troubling rates, according to a report that the National Endowment for the Arts will issue today. The trend is particularly strong among older teens and young adults, and if it is not reversed, the NEA report suggests, it will have a profound negative effect on the nation’s economic and civic future.

“This is really alarming data,” said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. “Luckily, we still have an opportunity to address it, but if we wait 10, 20 years, I think it may be too late.” […]

The story the numbers tell, Gioia said, can be summed up in about four sentences:

“We are doing a better job of teaching kids to read in elementary school. But once they enter adolescence, they fall victim to a general culture which does not encourage or reinforce reading. Because these people then read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they do more poorly in school, in the job market and in civic life.”

And people wonder why when it comes to casual culture I break out the philosophical blowtorch on 90% of it…

Ok, say the subject at hand is oil…

One can argue that there’s no value in it until it is discovered, brought up from the ground, and converted for human use. Thus, the value of it came from the labor required to make it useful.

Now, with that in mind, look at who tends to get the wealth from oil. Speculators, those with political connections, and corrupt, unrepresentative politicians. The US knows this all too well, oil vis-a-vis the dollar being the key to the clusterfuck we’re currently embroiled in. It is typical for people in the US concerned about this to say the following:

Our oil habit not only makes us dependent on some creepy suppliers, but we look like fools as we work nonstop to hand over our earnings to those who are rich by an accident of sitting atop oil someone else found and developed.

Makes sense. Problem is, that’s a quote from Victor Davis Hanson, a staunch supporter of the foreign policy status quo of “if you can’t get what you want, bomb everything”. He has taken this logic, and used it to slip in the suggestion that the US is somehow entitled to the natural resources of other countries. Somehow I doubt that’s what David Ricardo meant…

Props.

Why do shows like Late Edition, Meet the Press & the like, after statements from recently retired or resigned military personnel — which tend to be skeptical of the war in Iraq — invite on current military personnel, who are barred as a term of their service from publicly criticizing official policy?

Jim at U.O. linked to yet another one of those prez candidate matchers, this one by ABC News. Out of sheer boredom, I gave it a whirl, and was greeted by the following pic of what it thought would be my three best bets.  Click on the thumbnail for detail.

I’m not in the least bit superficial.  Also, I’ve known for the longest that the mainstream media doesn’t say squat without a “script” some sort of storyline complete with stereotypes of people.  On top of that, I’ve had obvious philosophical reasons for years to where I don’t vote at all anyway.  But I gotta be honest: that pic made me chuckle.  G’night.

CNN did a poll recently, angling for views re: the use of water-boarding.  The result was, well…awkward:

A majority of Americans consider waterboarding a form of torture, but some of those say it’s OK for the U.S. government to use the technique, according to a poll released Tuesday.

Asked whether they think waterboarding is a form of torture, more than two-thirds of respondents, or 69 percent, said yes; 29 percent said no.

Asked whether they think the U.S. government should be allowed to use the procedure to try to get information from terrorists, 58 percent said no; 40 percent said yes.

So, with the overlap in responses, that means some people acknowledge that water-boarding is torture AND think it should be embraced as a tactic.  They’re willing for the US to toss any claim whatsoever to moral high ground, radicalize even more people, and probably end up being fed false info just so the agony would stop.  I disagree about as strongly as one can, but at least they’re honest.

Oh, wait a minute, I forgot something.   Here’s that last line of the excerpt again:

Asked whether they think the U.S. government should be allowed to use the procedure to try to get information from suspected terrorists, 58 percent said no; 40 percent said yes. (emphasis mine)

“Suspected”.  That means they’re thought to be terrorists, which they may or may not be.  The possibility of innocence is fast becoming a quaint concept these days, as if simply being held by the government means you’re guilty and deserve everything you get.  Who do we have to thank for that?  Clearly the overlap group in the poll, the reactionary nutjobs with delusions of “hippie unamerican commie libruls” in their head, believing anyone who’s anti water-boarding thinks if Bin Laden himself were captured he should be given a cup of coffee & a comfortable chair to sit in for a cozy little chat.

Between Obama & Richardson, whichever one doesn’t make it when the primary voting actually starts should be picked to be the running mate of the other one.  Three reasons why:

-A ticket made up of two minorities would send a message in and of itself.

-They’d help each others vulnerabilities.  Richardson keeps going on about experience, & Obama gets worries about his, so…

-Dave Chappelle’s bit about a black president having a latino behind him as “insurance” would turn from joke to prophecy.  I admit that’s the real reason I even give a shit.