Give Me Liberty Give You Chains
Filed Under Big Ideas, Porchy, Rant | Leave a Comment
I know I’ve said it before but I’m going to say it again. Very few people really want liberty. Very few people really want to live in a world of unrelenting dog-eat-doggedness. Very few people want to live in a world where our own futility of action forces us to watch the people we care about suffer through short lives of agony and die painful deaths. Very few of us want to deal with the consequences of only the physically strong succeeding. Very few of us want to deal with the uncontrolled noises, smells, and other by-products of our neighbors’ behaviors.
Some people have thought through the consequences of true liberty which, in the aggregate, sounds more like anarchy–which is not freedom at all but rather an unnatural prison of unchecked competition that rewards the most conniving among us.
If you are such a person, then fine, this post is not about you, but I will take a moment to say that you must obviously agree to allow me to vehemently fight against the consequences of that thing,that horrible thing you are fighting for.
I do want taxes. I do want government. I do want constraint on man’s lowest impulses. I want laws against murder and property theft. I want protection from well-armed enemies of the land I choose to live in. But in wanting laws against those things I know I create a land of criminal internment camps, which I also do not want. So I want the nation to collectively participate in activities that lessen the criminal impulse. I want public education, and feed the poor programs, and treatment for drug and alcohol abuse.
It isn’t an easy compromise trying to come up with an institutional balance between liberty and law, but that doesn’t mean we should just give up. Those that advocate absolute liberty (of which there are just a few) are wrong. Those that advocate abolition of choice (of which there are a few) are also wrong.
Leftwingers accuse those on the right of abandoning the social project or acting as fascists, respectively. These are both strawmen that avoid dealing with what rightists actually want.
Rightwingers accuse those on the left of playing Stalin or of wanton Epucirianism. These too, are strawmen that rightist can attack without actually dealing with want leftists want, their reasons for wanting those things, and the manner in which they hope to achieve them.
The truth is, and I know I won’t be shaking up any paradigms here, is that both sides want a world where people choose to act just like them and they hope, through exercising their power, that’s what they’ll get. People who already act like that support them, and people who don’t, oppose them. For people who already act like the people in power, the people in power are promoting a world of liberty—a world that rewards them for acting the way they already act and prevents people from stopping them from acting the way they already act.
The other side is proposing a world that would constrain them and prevent the arrival of future allies in their struggle to act as they want.
It’s one thing to get up in arms about a law that actually prevents you from doing something you want to do (or think that people should be able to do) and another to act like a law that would prevent a world where less people did that thing are the same thing.
Take drinking alcohol for example. I am pro- alcohol. And I’m even more pro-The Freedom to Drink Alcohol. But I also recognize that there are social costs to drinking alcohol. Not that I like taking a purely econometric view of life, but it is hard to deny the numbers. Car accidents and casual violence are two problems that share a strong correlative connection to drinking. Problem drinking often leads to missed days at work or school, job loss, broken marriages, and child or spousal abuse. Even light casual drinking can lead to impaired judgment that can aid someone getting someplace they wouldn’t be if they were more rational.
The proper response to this is not to just ban alcohol. Not only has that experiment already been unsuccessfully attempted, there’s no strong evidence that doing so would curtail the worst of the problems associated with drinking and would probably give rise to even worse social problems.
But I’m not opposed, on principle, to legislation that attempts to create a world where fewer people drink problematically. That’s not to say that I also, on principle support all anti-problem drinking legislation. Some legislation that is ostensibly aimed at problem drinking unfairly punishes all drinkers. And some legislation aimed at problem drinking is just flat ineffective.
But what I am not doing is caging my arguments against any legislation in terms of “Liberty.” I do not think that everyone should drink as much as they want to all the time. Not just because of the aforementioned “social costs” but also because I would be endangered myself living in such a world, as would the people I love and work with. I want sensible controls that look after the public welfare. Call it “paternalism” if that rocks your boat.
Given my cynical view of Man, it’s weird to me that I’m so often accused of being a lefty idealist who doesn’t deal with the “realities of the world.”
I know a good blog post on this subject would actually involve a link to a specific story to which to attach this rant, which would serve to give it context but the root is sort of cumulative right now. Specifically buried in the comments sections of NRO blogs and in the comments to newspaper stories about the bar raids in Pennsylvania last week.
I took a (Korzybskian) Semantics class in high school that taught me to be aware of Glittering Generalities and “truth, justice, and The American Way” was one our examples. I always knew that “liberty” was too but 9 years of post-9/11 hackery and the rise of the Tea Party has forced me to a place where the word “liberty” grates on my ears. And before I’m accused of hating “liberty” just know I literally have the word tattooed on my body. I don’t hate liberty. I hate overuse and abuse of the word and a lack of recognition that there is a difference between freedom and anarchy. In a world where everyone can do what they want, no one can.
This post is tagged as rant. Keep that in mind before commenting.
Obama’s Chicago Thugs
Filed Under Barack Obama, Domestic Politics, Indiana, Politics, Porchy | 5 Comments
One of the tropes I see dragged out frequently in the rightwing blogosphere is that “the White House,” or “DC” or “the national government” is now, thanks to Obama, “overrun with Chicago thugs.”
It is true that Obama is from Chicago. It is also true that Chicago has a less than shining political record. And, since it’s a Democratic city, the political operatives of the Windy City that have the most power are Democrats.
Even here in Indianapolis when we talk of congressman from the Region (the six counties that make up the northwestern corner of the state but mostly just Lake County) and all the cities therein that are basically suburbs of Chicago: Gary, East Chicago, Whiting, Hammond, etc., we often mention their political prowess as having developed under the “Old West-style politics” that anecdotally dominates Chicago.
But it is also true that the national government is very, very large and I just don’t see a large cultural shift toward anything more sinister than what was there just a little over a year ago.
Allow me to be a little more specific. What makes “Chicago politics” “Chicago politics” is that it is an exceptionally aggressive type of political hardball played over turf that ,to outsiders, is inconsequential. Sometimes it gets personal. It is rarely nice. Niceties are so out of the question that someone trying to convince you they were on your side are just as likely to slap you in public as give you a gift—a gift essentially being the tool-in-trade of the backstabber.
That description of the stereotype should serve.
So what makes it “Chicago politics” is that it’s DC politics played at the Chicago level; and even for that Chicago is not unique. New York’s Tammany Hall, for example was not only known for the same kind of Machiavellian maneuvering that marks “Chicago politics;” there is an actual physical connection as politicos that honed their craft under Boss Tweed wound up in the Midwestern commercial center. New Orleans is another example. So is Las Vegas.
Indeed, what all these places have in common is that they are not DC and yet they participate in very DC-style politics.
Moreover, each of the famously corrupt cities mentioned here, and I could add Hoboken to the mix, are not even their states’ capitol cities, but they are commercial centers for each of their states. They are each old mafia capitals. Do Philadelphia and Kansas City have reputations for “Kansas City” thugs and “Philadelphia thugs?”
It seems to me that Obama, if he really did flood DC with “Chicago thugs,” doing so merely meant he came equipped with his own DC-style thugs rather than having to find locals to serve that function for him.
Is there a good argument to be made why I should support one regional brand of thuggery over another that I’m missing?
And what if, however unlikely it may be, but what if Chicago sends up a presidential candidate. Certainly their thugs will be far worse than the entrenched thugs they defeated on their way up. Should we just discount that guy’s potential presidential bid because of our fear he will bring “ur-Chicago Thugs” with him to DC?
How is any political group that controls the monopoly on violence not a thug of some sort, whether they are from Chicago or a “nice” place, like Iowa?
Or does “Chicago thug” mean something else to those that are using it? The Republican Party has its own thugs. Nixon, Goldwater, Cheney, Rove, and the Bushes are testament to a particular form of southwestern dirty politics which more deserves the “Old West” moniker than Chicago style politics has (which shares more with mid-19th century New York).
Of course the real problem here is that Republicans like Republican thugs and Democrats like Democratic thugs. So the “Chicago” here, as I alluded to earlier, is really just a stand-in for “Democratic” since Chicago is a Democratic town.
So Rahmbo is bad but The Hammer was good. Good story, but I’m not buying.
Twitter Round Up
Filed Under MetaBlogging, Porchy, TwitterRoundup | Leave a Comment
Here’s the stories I tweeted this week (follow me @Porchy)
- Colts raise ticket prices (IBJ)
- Hostettler polls well against Ellsworth (CQ Politics)
- Informative Chatroulette Pie chart (also see below) (My heart’s in accra)
- Things to know about political polling (and reporting thereof) (CQ Politics)
- Talk of Mitch Daniels 2012 increases (NYTimes-Pro; Post-Pro; New Yorker-Con)
- Ellsworth more conservative than Bayh (TPM)
- Bunning was enthusiastically Pro deficit spending before he was enthusiastically against it (Yglesias)
- Bunning’s strategy seems to have been Step 1: Be anti worker, Step 2: Give up his integrity for nothing (NPR)
- Paul Broun (R-GA) compares Obama to Snooki (MSNBC)
- Tom Friedman takes pro-billionair advice from billionaire (Yglesias)
- Texas really knows how to pick’em (Ezra Klein)
- Liar says he’s psychic, SEC just calls him criminal (NPR)
- It’s unclear if teen unemployment was aggravated by minimum wage increases. (Nyhan)
What are the causes of T-Shirt WAR!!!!!!?
Filed Under Porchy, Random | Leave a Comment
One of these bad things matters more
Filed Under Domestic Politics, In the News, Politics, Porchy | Leave a Comment
It’s not often we get a chance to do real head-to-head comparisons of Republican and Democratic sexual malfeasance. But here’s Democrat (NY) Eric Massa retiring presumably because he has health problems (possibly related to a pre-existing cancer) but possibly because he “sexually harassed” a staffer.
Now we don’t know what “sexually harassed” means yet. Massa is implying that perhaps his staffer is some sort of effete dilettante who doesn’t like the macho sailor talk that Massa spews about. But, for the sake of our way-to-soon hypothetical let’s assume this rumored sexual harassment is more akin to the alleged Clarence Thomas pubic-hair-on-the-beverage variety.
Then there’s Republican state senator Roy Ashburn who was pulled over while drunk driving on his way…somewhere…after leaving gay club Faces, “Sacramento’s premier GLBTI Nightclub since 1985.” <An update is saying he may not have been at this club at all, so just put this up there with my hypothetical about Massa.>
Measuring these two things head on is complicated and how you determine if one is worse than another is highly subjective. If Massa was repeatedly asking his male staffer on a date and perhaps pinching him on the ass and was making him feel violated, scared, uncomfortable etc, that would be very, very bad.
And, even though he didn’t kill anybody, Ashburn’s weaving between lanes constituted a potentially fatal threat to anybody sharing the road with him that night.
Ashburn’s closeted sexual preferences don’t matter at all.
Except that Ashburn, in addition to endangering the citizens he serves, is also one of California’s anti-gay bigots. So there you have it. Massa may be a jerk. But Ashburn’s a life-threatening hypocrite who campaigns on his self-reported perfectly magnetized Moral Compass.
Man alive! If you’re gay, just be gay. Stop taking your self-loathing to the capitol.
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