So Broken. Dude.

I look at the world, there are so many issues, so many issues. Don’t just take regulation and energy and fracking. It’s all in Atlas Shrugged,” all of it. State of Colorado, Rearden Metal, how he made it with some magic kinetic energy.

Link.

P1: Colorado exists.
P2: Rearden Metal exists.
P3: Rearden Metal is magic.
C: Libertarianism?

The neocons have been wailing and gnashing teeth over the abysmal awfulness of the Iran deal. Meanwhile, everyone else says it’s good or, at worst, better than the alternatives. I am a creature of irony so it is hard for me to discuss the situation rationally. I would like to mock the neocons but what is the irony? Dog chases car. Dog catches car. What’s a dog to do? Bite it! So this is dog-bites-car. That’s just neocon nature.

But here’s something a bit ironic, so I’ll pass it on. The most eloquent, pithy assessment I have read on the subject is from Pat Buchanan, gaming out GOP rejection: [click to continue…]

So Jonathan Chait has “responded”:http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/secret-confessions-of-the-anti-anti-pc-crowd.html to his critics, sort of. The core claim:

The story’s critics have repeated their claim that I am personally upset so often, they have come to take it as an obvious fact. (“It’s understandable that Chait, and the many others who agree with him,” writes Amanda Taub faux-sympathetically, “find it so upsetting to be on the receiving end of what he refers to as ‘P.C.’ criticism.”) … If there were a single sentence in the story expressing self-pity, it would be widely quoted by the critics, but no such line can be found. (Belle Waring, unable to find any quotes substantiating her characterization of my views, actually goes so far as to invent her own quotes that supposedly describe my thinking.) Nor is such a sentiment hidden, lurking somewhere outside the text. I don’t feel victimized in any way by political correctness or (as some have alleged, in one strange variant of the charge) by new media, which has been a boon to me. I feel, with regard to my career and my place in American society, things have never been better. The response partly reflects the p.c. culture’s inability to evaluate arguments about identity as abstract arguments rather than reflections of the author’s own identity.

[click to continue…]

“Little boys and girls in ancient Athens grew up wanting to be philosophers.”

That’s not a good first sentence.

Picture this:

The emperor has hipster garb, but underneath he’s just another Commissar Squaresville.

This is such, such a great idea. (So long as you don’t ruin it by casting Obama as Hipster/Squaresville. Sheesh. I’m thinking – I dunno – Travolta for the film.)

Our team of moderate, sensible heroes thinks they’re in yet another scrap with The Hipster Emperor. They know how to handle him! He’s a B-list villain, if there ever was one. But then, the big reveal! It’s actually Commissar Squaresville in disguise (last seen in iss. #57. – ed.)! Much more dangerous! And you can’t fight Commissar Squaresville with the kinds of techniques you would use to fight The Hipster Emperor! They are so very opposite in terms of strengths and weaknesses! Will our heroes recover before the Commissar banishes them, forever, to the Nowheresville Zone, an alternate dimension to which stylistic dissidents are consigned?

And then the final, final reveal: it isn’t the original Commissar Squaresville (who really did die in issue #57.) It’s a new one. In fact, there are thousands! Can our heroes turn the tables in time, banishing the villains themselves to the Nowheresville Zone, thereby keeping the world safe for people who don’t want to be either too hip or too square, but sort of in the middle?

As Steyn wisely observe at the end of this column – which is about the dignity of work – “it’s hard to be visionary if you’re pointing in the wrong direction.”

Timothy Egan is “at it”:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/opinion/egan-the-last-king-of-ireland.html?hp “again”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/04/02/catechism-of-cliches-irish-economic-collapse-edition/ in the New York Times

Oscar Wilde still lounges, louche-like … a river crossed by bridges named for playwrights and patriots … the clamorous clans of Erin … a bittersweet anniversary. Fifty years ago the last king of Ireland, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, came to the land of his great-grandfather Patrick. … delighted a lyrical people with his wit and his one-liners … charmed old ladies, nuns and schoolgirls …750 years of British occupation enforced by hangman’s noose and cannon. … poor island of farmers, shopkeepers and laborers … Hipsters from Google and Facebook flooded pubs in Dublin’s Temple Bar area and danced to traditional music as mournful as it was infectious. … crucifixes are gone from many homes … What remains, in homes and shops and pubs, are pictures of President Kennedy. … But looking back is always productive. Memory is embedded in every square foot of Irish sod.

It’s as if Thomas Friedman had himself decided to “follow the leapin’ leprechaun”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/opinion/01friedman.html, hopping swiftly from one cliche to another. Only worse. I don’t know why it is that NYT editors’ critical faculties desert them every time they see a piece singing of the sweetness and the sorrows of the Auld Sod. But I do wish that they’d stop it.

In a recent post I remarked that MLK is a figure well worth stealing. And NR obliges me with the first sentence of their anniversary editorial. “The civil-rights revolution, like the American revolution, was in a crucial sense conservative.” They do admit a few paragraphs on that, “Too many conservatives and libertarians, including the editors of this magazine, missed all of this at the time.” And then manage to wreck it all again with the next sentence: “They worried about the effects of the civil-rights movement on federalism and limited government. Those principles weren’t wrong, exactly; they were tragically misapplied, given the moral and historical context.” No look into the question of how such a misapplication transpired, since that would not produce gratifying results. After all, if we are talking about what actually worried people, then plainly federalism and limited government were more pretext than motive. The tragedy is that so many people wanted to do the wrong thing, for bad reasons. But they couldn’t say ‘Boo justice!’ So they said stuff about … federalism. There is obviously no point to conservative’s revisiting how they got things wrong without bothering to consider how they got things wrong. But let’s be positive about it. “It is a mark of the success of King’s movement that almost all Americans can now see its necessity.” Yay justice!

I’m sitting down to read Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen [amazon]. I’m planning to agree with it, but the framing is odd. [click to continue…]

Victor Davis Hanson on ‘the meaning of the Inaugural Address’:

Three, the bitter election wars to achieve and maintain a 51–53 percent majority (the noble 99 percent versus the selfish 1 percent, the greens versus the polluters, the young and hip versus the stodgy and uncool, the wisely unarmed versus the redneck assault-weapon owners, women versus the sexists, gays versus the bigots, Latinos versus the nativists, blacks versus the “get over it” spiteful and resentful, the noble public sector versus the “you didn’t build that” profiteers, Colin Powell/Chuck Hagel/reasonable Republicans versus neanderthal House tea-party zealots), in Nixonian fashion have left a lot of bitter divisions that lie just beneath the surface of a thinning veneer.

Now that’s a sentence! Please feel free to award points for style and content.

Is he trying to say that America is divided, because the Democrats (but not the Republicans?) are a partisan force? Or is he trying to say that Democrats are perilously divided against themselves (because they have tried to turn America against Republicans?) Or is he trying to say that there are bitter divisions in the Republican party (because Democrats have found some wedge issues), and as a result the possibility of civil, orderly government/society is threatened? Your guess is as good as mine, I suppose.

In lieu, I presume, of a reply to my previous posts disagreeing with him on Hayek and Judt, Tyler Cowen links to “this post”:http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/05/hayek-on-serfdom-and-welfare-states/#more-2954 by Kevin Vallier on _Bleeding Heart Libertarians_ which frames the debate thusly:

bq. Every once in a while folks in the political corner of the blogosphere start talking about Hayek’s argument in The Road to Serfdom. As Matt Yglesias said Monday, lots of people, conservatives and liberals alike, say that Hayek believed that any welfare state inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Then some people who have actually _read_ Hayek reply that he always supported social insurance, safety nets, public goods provision and many forms of regulation. Then confusion ensues.

bq. … Obviously Farrell and Judt’s claims are over the top due to their use of various “of any sort” “unequivocally” “at all” and “Hitler” modifiers … instead of beating up on them, let’s use our collective annoyed-by-someone-on-the-internet energy in a constructive fashion: to see what we can learn about Hayek’s real arguments against socialism and the welfare state. … Caldwell concludes, rightly, that Hayek was right about this. But he points out that Hayek’s criticism of the welfare state is subtler and involves two claims. The first problem with the welfare state is that it is a philosophically slippery target. … when Farrell reads this, he concludes that Hayek basically made the same claims about the welfare state and socialism, namely that both institutions will lead, eventually, to totalitarianism, even if the socialism gets us there sooner than the welfare state. … In my last post, I pointed out that _even the later Hayek_ defended a universal basic income … Thus, Hayek supported what we typically call a welfare state throughout his career. … In my view, then, Hayek’s target is not “the welfare state” as such, that is, not a social insurance or safety net state, but rather a _state based on a robust conception of distributive justice applied to its economic components_ … Hayek’s critique of the welfare state simply falls out of his broader conception of the legal order of a free people. … So let’s distinguish between two kinds of welfare states: the welfare state of law and the welfare state of administration. Hayek’s preferred welfare state is limited by his insistence that the law be regulated by clear, public, general principles rather than administrative bodies.

bq. Hayek opposes the welfare state of administration. … But the second problem with the welfare state of administration is that it contains an internal dynamic that pushes in a socialist direction. … Of course, this is not totalitarianism by any means. For one thing, if citizens affirm even modest economic freedoms (as most members of liberal democracies do), then they will resist this accretion effect before things get too bad. And that’s the pattern we see: even in Scandinavian countries, people resist regulation due to their concerns about efficiency and, yes, concerns about property rights (sometimes more effectively than we supposedly libertarian Americans). …

bq. Hayek overplayed his hand by arguing that the tinkerer’s welfare state will inevitably lead to totalitarianism, but not by much. The most free and economically successful liberal democracies hybridize welfare states of law and welfare states of administration. They’re hybrids largely due to the fact that most citizens of liberal democracies endorse elements of both liberalism and socialism. But if citizens of liberal democracies gave up liberalism entirely and stopped minding regulation so much, then I think the dynamic of the administrator’s welfare state would lead to significant authoritarianism that, while not totalitarian, would be uncomfortably close.

[click to continue…]

Jonah Goldberg finds further confirmation of his views (the whole liberal fascist thing – you remember) in a 1932 Atlantic article. I must admit, I braced myself before clicking, expecting to learn that, yes, someone argued, back then, that Hitler was just FDR on stilts, or FDR was mere Hitler-lite. Turns out the author in question made the familiar and sensible point that Hitler wasn’t a socialist in any leftist sense, pace Goldberg.

But it’s true: ‘Nazi’ is short for ‘National Socialist’. So there’s that.

Any spat between Alain de Botton and Richard Dawkins is one where I’m kind of rooting for both of them to lose. On the other hand, Dawkins has some genuine achievements to his name and has written some pretty decent books, so there’s some compensation when he acts like an arse, whereas in de Botton’s case ….

De Botton’s latest plans (h/t Alex):

bq. to build a £1m “temple for atheists” among the international banks and medieval church spires of the City of London have sparked a clash between two of Britain’s most prominent non-believers. The philosopher and writer Alain de Botton is proposing to build a 46-metre (151ft) tower to celebrate a “new atheism” as an antidote to what he describes as Professor Richard Dawkins’s “aggressive” and “destructive” approach to non-belief. Rather than attack religion, De Botton said he wants to borrow the idea of awe-inspiring buildings that give people a better sense of perspective on life.

Not a runner, I think. Though there’s at least one happy precedent: Auguste Comte’s Chapel of Humanity, which Maria blogged about in 2003.

Oi, this is so dumb and irritating that I pretty seriously considered not writing about it at all, in part because I worry the comments thread will develop a fetor of glib ev-psych nonsense. Uplift the human race, people, and surprise me with your intelligent thoughtfulness and concern for the feelings of other commenters. Who, I would like you to note, are actual human beings. Ya Rly!

Moving on, Slate has proffered for your attention an article by one Mark Regnerus, if that is his name. It is entitled thusly: “Sex is Cheap: Why Young Men Have the Upper Hand in Bed, Even When They’re Failing in Life.” I’m actually concerned that the stupid is going to burn my screen, and that readers of the article should perhaps be provided with an old-timey screensaver to avoid this. Flying toasters, say.
[click to continue…]

This excellent article from Mother Jones’ Beth Schwartzapfel details how a guilty rapist tried repeatedly to confess to a crime of which another man had been convicted, only to succeed after the innocent man had died. The ensuing exoneration was so complete that then-Governor Rick Perry had to issue a pardon to the dead man, not something Texas governors are generally inclined to do. Rick Perry’s faith in Texas’ system, however, remains serenely unshaken.

A string of devastating stories has put Texas justice, in particular, under a cloud. In addition to Cole’s postmortem exoneration and the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, chronicled in The New Yorker in 2009, there is also the case of Anthony Graves, who served 18 years for a gruesome murder while the true killer confessed again and again. Graves was finally freed in 2010 following a Texas Monthly exposé.

Cole, Willingham, and Graves were all convicted under prior Texas governors. But Perry has done little to improve the state’s criminal-justice system, which has almost a million people in its grip. In 2001, he vetoed a bill banning the execution of the mentally disabled. In 2003, he cut the prison system’s budget by $230 million, slashing education programs, drug treatment, and food; when an independent auditor warned that was untenable, Perry cut the auditor’s office too. In 2007, his administration backed a bill making some child sex offenders eligible for the death penalty. While Perry has signed legislative reforms covering eyewitness identification and access to DNA testing, the system still offers scant options for the many people imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.

Radley Balko’s blog The Agitator remains an indispensable source of information on cases like these, as well as the uncountable cases in which the War on [Some People Who Use Some Kinds] of Drugs* has metastasized into a cancer that gets untrained local law enforcement rolling out in surplus military gear to perform ill-advised and pointless SWAT-style raids. (With tanks. No, really.) And shoot everybody’s dog when they get there. And maybe their grandmother. Seriously, don’t read the blog if you don’t want to hear about the cops shooting someone’s dog every goddamn day. His recent coverage of the OWS movement has been…how shall I say this…not all I would have hoped from a lover of liberty, but no one’s obliged to agree with me all the time, and it’s not as though it’s rendered the blog unreadable or something.
*Courtesy of Lawyers, Guns and Money. Like Sadly No!, we are aware of all internet traditions.

Matt Yglesias “notes Tim Lee’s editing rule”:http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/08/11/293442/breakfast-links-august-11-2011/ that you should never use the prefix ‘cyber’ unless you’re William Gibson. A cyber-rule aptly illustrated in the cyber-breach by “this particular cyber-contribution to cyber-knowledge”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/opinion/23iht-edbremmer23.html from Ian Bremmer and Parag Khanna.

bq. Cyberteeth bared

bq. 2010 was the year that removed all doubt that cybersecurity is now a geopolitical problem. … Yet WikiLeaks was far from the only big cyberstory in 2010. … We also learned that cyberattacks are no longer simply a weapon for petty criminals and teenagers. …In fact, WikiLeaks showed that a cyber-villain can prove just as elusive and decentralized as Al Qaeda. … Julian Assange, will probably have many days in court. If he is prosecuted in the United States, some will cast him as the world’s first cybermartyr. … will defend that freedom with more acts of cyberrevenge. … In the past, corporate willingness to provide the U.S. government with sensitive data hasn’t been hugely consequential for these firms, because they didn’t yet face a powerful cyberenemy capable of launching sophisticated attacks.

In fairness to the authors, they can’t be blamed for the “Cyberteeth” headline, which one can only imagine was a subtle act of revenge by whichever poor misfortunate bastard of a sub-editor had the grim task of polishing this cyberturd. The rest is all theirs though.