Psychopolitik 2.0

If anyone is wondering why I gripe about polls and the absence of context for the responses, here’s an example:

In the past few days, there’ve been a couple polls about oil, one asking who to “blame” for high gas prices & one a straight yes/no about offshore drilling.  The responses say little on their own, but combined the cognitive dissonance is so thick that, well, see for yourselves…

As the nation struggles to meet its energy needs, a majority of Americans think offshore drilling for oil and natural gas is a good idea, according to according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released Wednesday.

The poll, which surveyed more than 500 adults by phone in July, found that 69% of respondents support the idea of offshore drilling, while 30% opposed it. In June, 73% were in favor of offshore drilling.

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Americans see big oil companies and overseas oil producers as the top culprits responsible for high gas prices, according to a poll released Thursday.

Based on telephone interviews with more than 1,000 adult Americans conducted in July, the CNN/Opinion Research poll found that 68% of respondents think U.S. oil companies are a major cause behind high gas prices. (emphasis mine)

Amazing.  I would think that if you think the problem is US oil companies, then it would logically follow that you don’t believe it matters whether they can drill offshore or not.  Guess not…

Luckily these type of phone polls are gradually becoming anachronisms thanks to VoIP, people with cell phones and no landlines, and Do Not Call lists, because the thought that enough people can seriously hold BOTH of these opinions at once to not just be a blip scares me.

Curiosity re: that Tennessee church shooting:

A Powell man sits alone in a jail cell following a fatal shotgun rampage in a church prompted by a hatred of liberalism and Democratic leaders who have hamstrung the nation’s war on terror, records show.

Jim David Adkisson is charged with one count of first-degree murder. He is being held in the Knox County Detention Facility in lieu of $1 million bond.

But more charges await the 58-year-old man who authorities say has been frustrated by a lack of employment, a reduction of his food-stamp benefits and what he perceived as the liberal ruination of the United States.  (emphasis mine)

Years of pissing on restraint out of political expediency, and they get called traitors anyway, and ironically get blamed for some guy deciding because of the “liberal” boogeyman supposedly undermining his “War on Terruh” and cutting his food stamps (…WTF?) that this is as good a time as any to commit a terrorist act.  Let that bounce around in the noggin for a bit…

This kind of thing reminds me of how those “stranger danger” talks to kids way back when were shown to have backfired because their conception of a stranger tended to be some mythical giant, ugly, drooling monster.  I wonder what people like this would do if asked to draw a picture of a “liberal”.

Not surprised: Scrabulous, a Scrabble-ish game popular on Facebook, got stopped by Hasbro.

SERIOUSLY not surprised: some dude in PC Magazine argues that Scrabulous cheapened the value of Scrabble, thus yanking it was justified.

Surprised:…people still play Scrabble?  Shit, who deliberately played it in the first place?  Only board game I ever thought was fun was Monopoly, and that’s because my cousins and me regularly made up our own rules to it (example: y’know that “free parking” space?  One time we had an idea for a toll players paid every time they went around the board without landing on that, and whoever did land on it got the money collected from it).  Yeah, I know, weird of someone like me playing that game, but whatever.  Anyway, the other games generally sucked ass.  Then again, as an adult anything is interesting with shots.

This is a thought I was toying with concerning anti-state philosophy and its prospects.  Feel free to say whatever in response:

To put the idea as bluntly as possible, I think at times we talk over folks heads, to the detriment of the long term goal.  This is not to say that deeper philosophical concepts should be abandoned, no.  After all, even the most surface level person lives by some sort of code, as action with no reason is a mark of insanity.  What I mean is that while keeping our eyes firmly on the ball, as I see it there is room for a tactic bent more towards direct meat-and-potatoes issues.

What triggered me to mention this was a thought I had in response to one of the many political ads flittering about on TV.  One of the ads in circulation is about health insurance — specifically, advocating a nationalized form of it — and I ended up saying to myself “wait a minute…the fight over that is government takeover vs the status quo?  WTF, what about anti-state, anti-centralization views?  What do we have to say about this?”.  While there have been mentions of issues like this by the anti-state Left (for example: this Roderick Long piece, albeit from 1993), it seems like there isn’t much in the way of hitting home on them.   In effect, we’re ceding ground on these to statists.

I recall a past argument I had with one of the more open elitists out there.  His view was that I was somehow unrealistic, in that I was arguing for freedom while most people only cared about where their next meal was coming from or the roof over their head — security, in other words.  Obviously this is a false choice, but how many people know that?

Now, before anyone starts warming up their rock-throwing arms, I am not — I repeat, NOT!!! — saying that this should in any way subordinate the big picture, or that ethical principle should be bumped out in favor of utilitarianism.  This is more about positioning to ease skepticism, and introduce localized, non-state solutions for typical concerns.  To more explicitly show where my head is at, take my response to Brad Spangler when he asked about whether to cover the mortgage crisis on his blog (emphasis added):

If only because a larger point about statism can be made through it.

I actually agree with Niccolo on this. People are already skeptical & pissed off, they’re open to new ideas*. The degree of political involvement behind the current messes in housing & finance would shock most people, point it out in a way they can internalize and the status quo discredits itself.

(* – new to them I mean.)

It is inherently easier to undermine statism when its negative effects are more obvious.  Explain the problem, and encourage people to avoid the snap appeal to central authority.  Think of it as a recruiting method.

Why didn’t I try this sooner?

Randomly fucking up incoming audio is sooooooo much fun.  Here’s a couple examples of what I did with it in the few minutes immediately after downloading from above:

Example #1: A glitched-up “Amen” edit.  If you’ve been under a rock for some years, no need to fret about what I mean by that term, just listen.

Example #2: TR-808 ran through the ringer.

I could do this all day…

Somewhere, an Israeli hawk is spanking the monkey to this:

U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama said on Wednesday a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a “grave threat” to the world.

Obama told reporters during a visit to Israel that if elected, he would take “no options off the table” in dealing with the Iran issue and said tougher sanctions could be imposed.

“A nuclear Iran would pose a grave threat and the world must prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Obama told reporters after visiting the Israeli town of Sderot, which lies close to the border with the Hamas-run Gaza Strip. (emphasis mine)

Sound familiar?  It should…

In a stern warning to Iran, President Bush said “all options are on the table” if the Iranians refuse to comply with international demands to halt their nuclear program, pointedly noting he has already used force to protect U.S. security.

For the few partyarchs who bother to read this site sharpening their pitchforks at this comparison, it’s not like he’s alone in agreement with this.  Your 2nd and 3rd options said the same thing.

Honestly, whenever some winger tries to paint Obama as if he’s an uber-leftist it’s a struggle to not laugh maniacally.

On a serious note, what has happened thanks to the constant drumbeat of war & the psychological footing crammed down our throats is that within “mainstream” politics the center has been dragged right.  Since the “mainstream” right-wing position is essentially that Ahmadinejad is a violent version of the Underpants Gnomes (step 1: build nukes, step 2: ????, step 3: profit!), the quasi-officially sanctioned Middle view is “yeah, they’re nuts, and we might have to destroy them, but let’s talk a little more first”.

As for the view that, since Iran can’t fire a missile and hit the US, and handing off a nuke to a 3rd party would be both too risky and nationally suicidal (Iran would be blasted into glass before lunch the same day, folks), this is a regional matter more than likely neutralized by the fact that Israel has retaliation strike capability out the wazoo?  Oh, that’s just crazy lefty hippie talk.  Never mind that many of the people holding this view aren’t leftists of any stripe.

On Hardball a few minutes ago, heard roughly the following from Chris Matthews re: Obama’s trip to Iraq:

“The republicans have to be worried looking at this.  Americans are finally being greeted as liberators in Iraq, but it’s Obama!  Y’know, thinking back to other countries we’ve saved there hasn’t been much appreciation there either.  There were people in France back in WW2 that wouldn’t even wave to the US troops that swept out the Nazis…”

Oh Chris, I’m sure there are thousands of Iraqis who’d love nothing more than to tell you how they feel about being “liberated”, but you’d have to get a Ouija board to ask them.

-Trivia question no one seems to ask: Who invented pole dancing?  “Exotic dancing” itself has been around forever, with variations from burlesque to belly-dancing, but it doesn’t seem clear who first thought “maybe if we put a pole on stage…”.

-I’ve always felt the stereotype of old drivers going too slow was an odd one.  Technically, due to their age they have less time left, so they should really be in more of a hurry.  Imagine if old folks were the speed demons and young people drove at crawl speed…

-A few days ago was getting syrup for waffles, noticed something amusing: other than the all-natural maple kind (which was beyond my budget, sadly), they all had as their main ingredient high-fructose corn syrup…except for the diet kind.  Yet the label on the low-cal syrup said in prominent letters “sugar free!”.  It is sugar-free, but so are all the other ones.  Times like this I get the feeling a day will come where the only thing at the grocery store that doesn’t have high-fructose corn syrup in it will be the bottles labeled “corn syrup”.

-I wonder how popular the iPhone is with drug dealers…

-This came to mind while watching Anderson Silva whoop ass last Saturday: these are human beings we’re talking about, and people tend to have excess gases in them, so it’s inevitable that somewhere along the line someone has been punched in the face such that they fart as they go down.  Hell, when it comes to the ground holds, there’s probably at least ONE MMA’er that deliberately eats gassy food before the fight for a silent but deadly advantage in their ground game, or at least has tried it.

With the panic over rising oil prices, the hijinks just don’t stop:

House Republicans on Thursday killed a Democratic plan designed to spur drilling on already available federal lands in Alaska, the West and the western Gulf of Mexico.

Republicans scoffed that the Drill Act — imposing a tougher “use it or lose it” rule on leases already held by oil companies — would do little to boost exploration. They renewed their demand to open up the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the eastern Gulf of Mexico to exploration.

The bill won a 244-173 majority, but still failed because it did not get a two-thirds margin under rules requiring a supermajority vote. (emphasis mine)

On a purely common sense basis, the rush to bring back offshore drilling falls flat.  There’s already tons of space where the oil companies have leases that they aren’t using.  Reason they aren’t using that land already is, given reasonable expectation prices will continue to go up, that oil is worth more to them in the ground than out of it, so they’d rather wait.  But clearly the story doesn’t end there…

Note that this is “federal” land being discussed, land that the government claims ownership of.  Knowing that the State cannot hold a legitimate property claim, the Democratic proposal is highly ironic: “use that land we shouldn’t have in the first place or we’ll take it back!”.  Though it probably wasn’t realized, they are in effect endorsing a Lockean interpretation of property — establishment comes through application of labor.  Thus, as long as the oil companies do not, well, drill for oil on the land, their claim to it voids itself.  Yet, at the same time, the government ownership is void already because of how they would come across such ownership in the first place!  We have two groups arguing over something neither should have, like a den of thieves coming to blows over how to distribute the gains.

That said, rather than stopping at Locke, let’s follow the logic and take up “occupancy and use” as the definition.  Now who rightfully controls the land?  The people that live on it and use it (or in the case of uninhabitable space, live near it).

Where this formulation leads is enlightening, particularly in just how far such consistency is from what has become accepted wisdom: the oil companies would be asking the people on or near these lands whether they could drill on them.  Now, I’m not assuming that everyone knows a lot about the economics behind oil, but given the status quo I think it’s safe to say getting a better deal would be inevitable.  At the least, cutting out the government middle man and having a higher likelihood of serious consideration of environmental impact would be a huge improvement already.

It’s too bad I don’t believe in Hell, because I’d like to believe the nonsensical sado-masochistic motherfucker who invented the necktie was burning there.

Don’t ask.