Someone Takes Auster to Task

Someone at Vanity Fair has discovered Lawrence Auster and wrote an article about him that sounds about right.

The Vanity Fair Article quotes a passage from Auster's website about an exchange between Auster and a reader named Mark E. about how black homophobes are the only homophobes not afraid to express their views, and should be embraced by prejudiced whites because they share a hatred of gays:

"I want to add [writes Auster to Mark] that if you are implying that blacks in general can be our ally against the left in saving the west, I think that is folly. The tiny number of blacks who are Western patriots--that is, blacks who love the West and who, as part of that love of the West, at least implicitly accept the West's historic white majority character--will join us without our having to make some special appeal to them of the type that 'conservatives' are always making to 'conservative' blacks and 'conservative' Hispanics, making that appeal to nonwhites the cornerstone of their politics."

That's pretty indicative of Auster's hilariously pig-headed rantings, but my favourite quote from that passage comes from Mark E. himself:

Most blacks I meet are "normal" people (I live in the "inner city") with normal views about things; but the white middle- and upper-middle class suburban educated types are really whacked, especially the women.

White women are the most destructive force in America. The feminizing of America, not what you miscall "liberalism," is the root of all rot.

Even the Righties Know Wolfowitz Is Indefensible

I hardly ever agree with Lawrence Auster as he is a lunatic, but even he sees how corrupt Wolfowitz is.

He quotes Alex Spillius from the New York Sun:
"It has often been said that Mr. Wolfowitz is a brilliant thinker and a terrible manager. His defenders say the current crisis smacks not of nepotism but poor administration and trying too hard to ensure someone he cared for was properly compensated."

To which Auster responds:

"Got that? That’s like saying that John Dillinger’s behavior did not smack of bank robbery but of trying too hard to get his hands on some cash."

Mo' guns, Mo' Problems

Like clockwork, The Crazy People™ are blaming the Viriginia massacre on anti-gun legislation. Virginia has a ban on concealed carried weapons on school campuses which is where all the righties are pointing their fingers. "If the kids at Virginia Tech had been armed and able to defend themselves, this never would have happened!" they say.

And of course, they have a point. Never mind that Virginia has no required waiting period, no required safety course, and not even a requirement that you even have to be a US citizen to buy a gun (which would have prevented this particular incident), the real problem is that all the other students were unarmed.

Think about it, this guy would have been stopped after only the first few killings if someone had been able to shoot back at him. And hey, the September 11th hijackers would have been stopped pretty quick if the airlines didn't have those stupid, commie anti-gun rules that keep you from taking your Glock on the plane with you. If the other passengers had been armed, those guys wouldn't have even made it to the cockpit before someone took them out. Sure you'd have a lot more planes crashing do to all the gun fights that would break out, but at least all the national monuments would be safe. The same is true in the general population. If you just let more people carry guns everywhere, sure there would be a lot more frequent gun use in disputes where fists would otherwise be used, but the enormous increase in small scale shootings would be worth it to prevent the occasional mass murder.

A McLuhanian Tyranny

The Don Imus fiasco is further evidence that what Marshall McLuhan said was right. Who says something coveys a stronger message than what is actually being said.

It is a factual, but still horribly tyrannical phenomenon that who you are, what you look like, etc. will influence how people interpret what you say. The only way to get your message out in way that best allows the message to be the message, is through anonymity, and even then, people will try to read into what you are saying things that aren't really there.

The Trap

I much enjoyed Adam Curtis's documentary The Power of Nightmares, and his newest film, The Trap is even better. The premise is that since the Cold War, the idea of what Isaiah Berlin called "positive freedom," that is, freedom to things, like freedom to housing, food and shelter, things that were supplied by the government in communist countries, has proven to lead to tyranny, because it inevitably undermines "negative freedom", freedom from government interference in a person's life. The goal of the West was guarantee negative freedom by eliminating as much positive freedom as they could, giving things over to market forces and reducing the role of the state in providing for the welfare of the people.

This approach grew out of and fed into a very cynical idea that everybody is out to serve their own interests only and that anybody who says they want power so they can use it for "the public good" is lying and not to be trusted. Game theory, the mathematical system that calculates what strategy any two or more competing forces should adopt to maximize their own advantage, became the new model of how society really behaves. The predictability of society then depended on the assumption that people actually acted only in their own rational self-interest.

There's an interview with the economist James M. Buchanan, who believes that anybody who truly does believe that they should be serving the public good is a "zealot" who must be gotten rid of, because these "zealots" will not act in the predictable way that strictly self-interested people will act. They only system that can be trusted is one that plays off of people's greed and selfishness, and uses those assumed patterns of behavior to establish a predictable order, i.e. market capitalism.

So in the West's current concept of "freedom," we are free to act selfishly, but any deviation from that and any organization or government that asks you to put your energy into something bigger than yourself or your immediate interests is strongly discouraged. Curtis points out that this "is a strange concept of freedom."

I have a few criticisms of this movie. One is that Curtis says that the paranoid, cynical idea that people always act in their own interest is something that came out of the rejection of Soviet Communism. This idea, however, has been around for lot longer. The American system of checks and balances was based on that assumption when it was designed in the 16th century. The other problem I have with this documentary is how he completely leaves out the influence of the religious right. This is a part of society that is asking people to sacrifice themselves for their concept of a greater good (although they too curiously subscribe to the cynical system of market capitalism.)

Overall, though, it was quite good. The conclusion Adam Curtis comes to at the end is that "we have to learn that not all attempts to do what is in the interest of the public good lead to tyranny." Interesting idea.

You can watch it here on YouTube. But be warned, it comes in 23 parts and is three hours long in total.

Morality Above Common Sense

A frequent argument I hear against the legalization of drugs is that "we don't want to endorse that kind of behaviour." This objection to legalization is often raised when all the practical and pragmatic objections have been debunked. You may be able to convince a moralist that drug legalization would allow drugs to be regulated, reducing the money that criminals get from it, and that treating drug addiction like a health problem would reduce drug addiction and save the tax-payers' money by keeping people out of prison who don't need to be there, but they'll still object to it because, "we don't want to endorse drug use, because it is immoral."

For these kinds of moralists, vague principals are more important than a society's actual welfare. They may even know that the War on Drugs is expensive, does little to deter people, bolsters the pockets of criminals and results in more severely drug addicted people, but they don't care. They would rather exacerbate the problems drugs cause than allow people to use them without punishment. Thus is the idiocy of moralism.

Goin' Green

Looks like Canada will get some Green Party MPs soon.

The Liberals have decided not to run any candidates in ridings where Green Party members are running and vice versa.

Jack Layton is predictably pissy about the whole deal.

*Update*

Looks like this is only for one riding, namely Elizabeth May's (the leader of the Green Party) riding.