Psychopolitik 2.0

Nora O’Donnell (pretty much), a moment ago to Dennis Kucinich in reference to his response to this: “50,000 is still too many troops in Iraq?  You’re dissatisfied?  HOW DARE YOU CRITICIZE OUR GLORIOUS COMMANDER IN CHIEF, YOU HIPPIE LEFTIST COMMIE ELF!!!”

I think in changing the channel that moment I clicked so fast it created a sonic boom.

P.S.: What about the bases?  And the mercenaries? “I’ll pull out, I promise” followed by staying halfway in doesn’t work.

You may have noticed that on the rare occasion when I do deal with race as a topic, I like to question the definition of “white”.  That isn’t just snark, obviously, but some may be distracted by the humor.  For those people, here’s Tim Wise on the subject, absolutely 100% snark free:

Props for pointing this out.

Disclaimer: this is not to say in any way whatsoever that I support Tim’s views on anything else, or his proposed solutions.  It’s not like I collect his works or anything, he just happens to thrive at acknowledging with blunt force & anger that which I’ve come to see as tragi-comic in my own dark, wrong planet way.

Noticed the following on Reason’s website.  Click the thumbnail:

Somehow I doubt that’s the optimal audience to aim at for that ad…

Will Wilkinson, again:

I think I need to put up a post announcing that anyone who seems to think that the U.S. government is not in fact limited by the Constitution will be summarily ignored. The fact that it does not set the limits you want or that the document is not interpreted in the way you think is most valid, has no bearing on whether the government is in fact limited.

This basically means the US government is “limited” only by what it has not attempted yet.  It’s not a matter of “if they do not do exactly what I want they are not limited”, I’ve actually in the past acknowledged that there are things they don’t do that they COULD according to the Constitution.  The problem is that, other than overwhelming public anger  — which is a rare occurrence these days thanks to our tendency to remain fat & happy as long as we have our pills & reality TV — there is no reliable indicator of crossing the line.  It used to be that people who wanted the government to do certain things against the Constitution would advocate amendments to it (i.e.: prohibition of alcohol).  Nowadays they’ve wised up, and instead of claiming the Constitution needs to be amended, they just insinuate the power they want into it.  Want to hold people without charges?  Just declare them “enemy combatants”, and conveniently ignore that even if there were an argument for treating people differently — which there is NOT — it wouldn’t suggest indefinite incarceration, but summary execution, going by the logic of the types that endorse it (think about it: if these people are so dangerous that merely trying them in a fair court is too risky to Teh Security Of The Fatherland, why are they still alive?).

A true “limit” on government would be something that is unavoidable, a line that would render the entire system null & void if crossed.  Populist rage is undependable for this purpose, and tends to actually lean towards irrational short term comfort rather than liberty, peace & a decentralized order.  Draw a line that triggers a reset, or there is no limit beyond their capacity to ignore the piece of paper.  Structure defined in the Constitution is formalism routinely perverted to excuse self-serving power grabs, provided that the ones yanking it are clever enough to figure out an argument that doesn’t sound bullshit until it’s too late.

If the limits really did their fucking job, then there’d be features of the current State that’d be rendered impossible to enforce.  Instead, only the 3rd doesn’t get wiped away, because they have no reason to stick military personnel in your house. Why bother when they can instead hold up laws that encourage the militarization of your friendly neighborhood policeman (Will can read Balko for proof of this)?

This is why I advocate in the long run for no government.  As for my previous statement to Will that he isn’t looking far enough Left for allies, I take that back.  Anyone that would accept the limit of the US government purely on the existence of the Constitution is a prime example of the old saying about book smarts vs street smarts: while you insist it says what it says and there’s no crossing it, the people actually in control of this political system laugh & ask “WTF are you going to do about it?”.

Semantic Nitpickery We Can Believe In:

The Obama administration, which says it doesn’t want to nationalize U.S. banks, may find itself taking another step in that direction if it converts the government’s preferred shares in Citigroup Inc. into common equity to help the firm withstand losses.

Citigroup and rival Bank of America Corp., beaten down in New York trading last week on U.S.-takeover speculation, are among more than 20 lenders that could wind up majority-owned by the government if such conversions took place. Executives at New York-based Citigroup have discussed the change as a way to quell concerns about capital adequacy while heading off all-out nationalization, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The executives are promoting it themselves.  That should say about all you need to know about the idea.

U.S. regulators led by the Treasury Department announced today that the government stands ready to take bigger bank stakes in the form of shares that “would be converted only as needed over time.” To analysts including Paul Miller of Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group Inc., nationalization of some of the nation’s largest lenders appears well under way. The government already holds $52 billion of preferred shares in Citigroup, five times the bank’s market value as of Feb. 20.

“We’re already in the nationalization phase,” Miller said today on Bloomberg Television. “We already own a chunk of Citigroup and Bank of America. The problem is that the government is dancing around this nationalization issue. They do not want to do it.” (emphasis mine)

Ownership, to the average person, naturally implies full control.  This is why, for an unrelated example, people balk at restrictions on what they can do with music they’ve purchased: if they don’t have control then WTF did they just pay for?   In the case of Citigroup, they’ve already sunk so much of our money into it that they have more than the company is worth on the table — yet this is not government ownership somehow.

This fence-sitting, despite the image, is not an effort to avoid a huge structural leap.  If Citigroup (and, by extension, any other of the megabanks) were viable as a private institution it would not need government favors.  Calling its condition “nationalized” or not makes no difference, since as we all know the point is keeping it up.  This is because the alternative — the State no longer promoting centralization of finance, and such institutions going the way of the dinosaur as a result — is inconvenient to think about.

BTW: for any mainstream liberals reading this, I’d hope you could realize by my other posts that I think this whole bailout song and dance is a moot point (since the real problem is structural, and “solved” would mean the entire economic system as we know it were scrapped and reset), and not think that criticism of your point means anyone on the “other” side makes sense in comparison.  Right-wing insistence on screaming “socialism!” at measures that clearly serve to maintain as much of the corporate status quo as possible shows they’re looking at the Overton Window in reverse.  No self-respecting socialist would think Citigroup worth the effort.

For once, the Explainer piece on Slate refers to something of serious curiosity: the significance of beheading.  My suspicion had generally bounced between a twist on “the eyes are the window to the soul” (thus, supposedly being able to watch it leave the body when you chop off the whole head) and simple expression of rage.  Considering the tendency towards violence of humanity, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some past civilization/army/group of random nutjobs that cut off a limb & beat the person to death with it like in Mortal Kombat.  Shit, Midway had to get the idea somewhere…

Here’s a quote by someone else referring to the “liberaltarian” stuff:

What would we do without the so-called conservative “dogmatic aversion to statism”? For starters, we might actually start restraining the power of the central state and breaking up its collusion with concentrated wealth. In other words, we might start combating etatisme. Of course, that’s the point–in practice, most people who call themselves conservatives do not have a “dogmatic aversion to statism,” and when it comes to war and finance they are often defenders of an activist, centralized state.

I TinyURL’d the link so you can’t cheat by hovering over it.  Try to guess who said it.

Whoever the fuck the GM of the Hornets is, he needs to be fired immediately.

That is all.

Is there any particular reason why when talking about Roland Burris, MSNBC keeps putting up a picture of him that looks like it was taken 20 years ago?

To Will Wilkinson: The problem is there aren’t many liberals to begin with.  By “liberal”, I mean the card-carrying ACLU types, not your average Democratic voter.  Hell, if anything, since you’re a state minimalist & not an anarchist, you’re more of a liberal than most of the people that the Right & the MSM assume are liberals.  If someone has political power, chances are they have no coherent philosophy beyond self-aggrandizement at the expense of others.  IMO you’re not looking far enough Left, but whatever, do you.

To Goldberg: your words mean zilch when the actions are so blatantly opposite.  Sure there were a few conservatives that broke with mainstream orthodoxy, but the common thread is having ZERO influence on those points.  When the occasional column is up on you guys’ website about decriminalizing marijuana that gets conveniently ignored, meanwhile the war mongering & “traditional values” crap gets eaten up like it’s the tastiest fried chicken known to man.  The reason no one discussing modern conservatism makes cavaets about difference between philosophy & practice is because there is no philosophy left to speak of.  That the closest many outsiders get to discerning one consists of a mash of garden variety hypocrisy, religious zealotry, & a hard-on for authority at all costs should say a lot to you, none of it good.

Concerning the topic itself, of liberal-libertarian fusion: As someone who disagrees with the view that hitting statist rock bottom is a plus for libertarianism in the long run, I don’t see a problem in the short term with the occasional team-up on terms of agreement, as long as we keep our eye on the ball.  However, that’s not fusionism, it’s ideological interest-group politics.

This is all academic though, really.  Very few people think of politics through any sort of coherent philosophy, the tendency to portray them as if everyone does is because if it’s admitted that most are simply in it for immediate personal gain regardless of who they have to step on then the talking heads out there are without a job.

Edit: one more thing… Such an alliance is seen as feasible because it can be said that libertarians (radical libertarians, not the pot-smoking-republican types) and liberals agree on the ends but not the means.  Remembering that people capable of obtaining political power admit by their actions that they disagree on means AND ends pretty much make this moot in practice though.  IMO, even if you aren’t an anarchist, you’re still better off undermining the government than you are going by-the-book to shift it.