Brother's Keeper

Read these two articles:

Dreams From My Father, Calls From My Brother

Story that reveals something of Mitt Romney's character

Now, tell me, who would you trust? For anything?

The Frustration Of Trying to Discuss Anything Controversial On The Internet

I had an interesting exchange on a usually-non-political blog I frequent. Going to paste snippets, but not link to or identify the blog, because I really don't think they'd welcome a bunch of incoming political commentary (Hee, hee! I'm pretending people read and are influenced by my blog! I love playing make-believe!).

I was the initial offender, going on what I hoped was a pretty inoffensive political tangent, in response to another post:

I work for a large private company, but with government in some very sensitive capacities, and my experience has taught me to not be too trusting of government in any of its flavors.

At the risk of getting too political, private people who just want to go about their lives are responsible for only very tiny pieces of the world’s misery. To create truly horrific pain and suffering takes a government, and some people who want to “make things better” that are willing to use it.

In the immortal words of noted political philosopher Malcolm Reynolds:

“So now I’m asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this — they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people … better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin’. I aim to misbehave.”

And another philosopher from the same school, River Tam:

“People don’t like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don’t run, don’t walk. We’re in their homes and in their heads and we haven’t the right. We’re meddlesome.”

Damn that was a great movie.

 It wasn't that long before someone made the following comment in reply.

Yeah, I was just thinking earlier today of the miseries inflicted by the big mean boogerheads of government with those clean water acts, and prohibitions on child labor, and limiting the number of rat droppings in my ice cream, and putting roads in the way of anywhere I am to anywhere I want to go, and keeping inspirational pioneers from creating stuff like useful airplanes or microchips or the Internet by going off and funding it themselves, and requiring cars that don’t roll over when you take a turn at more than 15 miles per hour, and making kids learn to read, and prosecuting fraudulent merchants. Not one single bit of this in any way makes the lives of one single person better and yet government goes after it day after day, year after year, as though it were at all possible for people to make society a little less savage.

I replied in turn:

Chill. I didn’t say there were no benefits to government, or that we were better in a state of anarchy. You’re reading a lot into what I said that’s simply not there. George Washington* Cloudbuster said, quoting vague sources, “Government, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a terrible master.” Also, like fire, that doesn’t mean government isn’t necessary and useful. I was simply pointing out that, like fire, government must be treated with extreme caution.

The world isn’t full of black and whites. It’s not “government is great” or “government is terrible.” Not all governments are equal. We are blessed with an exceptionally good one in the U.S., for all its faults. But governments are made up of people, with all their typical flaws. You have to be ever vigilant. No government is immune from abuse and degeneration.

I can’t speak in specifics about my job, but as I type this, I am aware of some very, very disturbing things being done by our own government, usually with the best of intentions (and this isn’t a liberal/conservative thing. This is just a “this is how governments do business” thing). That was what I meant about people wanting to “make things better.” In real life, almost nobody thinks they are the villain. But it’s really not too many steps from “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet” to the horrors of the Stalinist purges or the Great Leap Forward. A lot of well-intentioned people did a lot of terrible things. It’s human nature. The only way to make sure “it can’t happen here” is to keep, every day, making sure it’s not happening here.

 I hope that's taken as a civil response, but, damn, comments like that person's reply really get to me. Not because he's wrong -- I agree with him that government is an invaluable institution that can be a powerful force for good. What really ticks me off is how he takes what I said and completely twists it around to make it seem as if I was saying all government is terrible and does nothing good for anyone.

I don't see how any honest reading of my words can be interpreted that way. It's almost a banality to say that governments are responsible for much of the world's misery. I don't even see how that's controversial. Most of the world does not currently enjoy our form of Constitutional representative republic. Most of the world, even today, suffers under tyranny, oppression and corruption. Caused by their governments.

He's creating an argument by imputing to me beliefs I don't even hold. How can you have a discussion when someone does that to you? It's communicating in bad faith.

It strikes me as supremely naive to respond to a statement that "governments are responsible for much of the world's misery" with a sarcastic "Oh, yeah, right, government never did anything good for anyone!" I imagine this kind of response can only come from someone who lives in a well-governed country.

To me, it smacks of hubris. When you look at the disparities between well-governed nations and poorly-governed nations, between free nations and tyrannies, you have to ask yourself why. Why do we in the U.S. (or Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Iceland, pick your free western nation) have a generally orderly, prosperous society, while people in Somalia and Sudan are hacking their neighbors apart with machetes?

Anything less than a very complex answer risks doing an offense to people in either location. If you believe in the essential equality of man, if you believe that Somalians are not in some way essentially inferior to Swedes or Aussies, then the one conclusion you cannot draw is "It can't happen here." If you took a Swedish baby and raised him by Sudanese in the heart of contested territory, do you believe he would grow up fighting along side the people he grew up with? And if you raise a baby from the Sudan by Swiss in the heart of Zurich, do you believe he'd grow up as intelligent and civilized as any of his neighbors?

If you believe so, then whatever a man can be driven to in the Sudan, he can be driven to in Delaware, if things in Delaware were allowed to degenerate enough. What I am saying here is not that the U.S. is in incipient danger of collapse, but that the impulses that drive us all are the same. The corrupt, murderous warlords in the Sudan are not a different species of people than accountants in Baltimore.

The tendency toward greed, corruption, envy, tribal and familial allegience, they're all right here in the U.S. suburbs. We hold them at bay with our culture, our upbringing, the institutions of civil society. But civil society can be weakened. It can succumb to baser impulses if bad people get the reins of power.

But freedom can also be undone by higher aspirations, when an ideal is deemed so important that any means is acceptable to achieve it. That's the barbarism of the educated. The Marxists of the 20th century had the best of intentions -- the ideals of Marxism are admirable, if wrong-headed -- but time after time, in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, they committed horrors in the name of those ideals and created nightmare states, some of which persist to this day as blights on the face of the world. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Guevera, Pol Pot, these were not stupid or uneducated men. They were brilliant, idealistic leaders who believed so fiercely in their collectivist ideology that they were willing to commit countless horrors against the individual.

We keep the same thing from happening in western nations only so long as we recognize that the state is the servant of the citizen, not his master, that the individual is supreme over the state, not vice versa, that the state exists to protect individuals, to allow them to pursue their own interests, and that individuals should not be squelched in the pursuit of the state's interests.

* An alert reader pointed out that this is one of the apocryphal quotations that apparently cannot be reliably traced back to George Washington.

Shocking News! Athletic Women Are Sexy! NBC Notices!

Article at Jezebel.com:

Someone at NBC Apparently Approved This Creepy, Porny Video of Female Olympians

They're so offended by the video that they link to it. Go view it for yourself. Sexy, sexy olympic girls. This is bad, why? I know, I guess I'm just too much of a Neanderthal to understand why healthy sexuality is a bad thing. Wait, I'm the conservative -- I thought I was the one that was supposed to be a prude. I'm so confused.

So when Miranda Kerr poses nude for Harper's Bazaar is it OK to find that sexy? What are the rules? Men are only allowed to find women sexy in clearly defined "sexy zones?"

Media Bias: There's No Doubt About This Publication's Opinions

A recent CNET article appeared in its "news" section, which you might think is different than the "Op-Ed" section, but not as far as I can tell. They throw all sorts of opinion blogs like Technically Incorrect, the source of this article, into their news section.

Man orders flat screen on Amazon, gets assault rifle

Subhead: Customer who ordered a fine high-definition TV on Amazon opens the box to discover that the third-party merchant has sent him a highly defined murder weapon.

Well, we're not past the headlines before we've got multiple distortions and misrepresentations.

1. "Assault rifle" It's not an assault rifle. It's a semi-automatic rifle, just like any other. It would have to be capable of fully automatic fire to be an assault rifle. It's scary and black, though, so apparently that excuses them from using correct terminology.
2. "Highly defined?" What does that even mean? I think it means that it's a very high-end expensive rifle, which it is. Exactly the type of weapon that is almost never used by criminals. You don't need a rifle that costs more than $1700 to just kill people. This type of rifle attracts competition shooters, hunters and collectors. Not gang-bangers and psychos.
3. "Murder weapon." By this definition, all my guns are murder weapons, I guess, because they leave out the fact that for a weapon to be a "murder weapon" it has to be involved in a, you know, "murder."

The misrepresentations and editorial opinions continue in the body of the article.

"I cannot imagine who might be doing the choosing when ordering one of these things. I can only hope it would be someone with the appropriate qualifications and mental equilibrium."

How can I read that as anything other than liberal panty-wetting? Please, guy, grow a pair of balls. I hereby revoke your man-card for being unable to think of firearms ownership without getting the vapors. I certainly hope that last time the author bought a car -- more than a ton of steel that can barrel down a street killing everything in its path -- that the authorities made sure he had the appropriate "mental equilibrium." What? They let even felons and former mental patients drive in this country? Oh my God! Whatever shall we do?

"Some might imagine that this is one more example of how this gun thing seems far too easy in the U.S."

Again, we take the boundary between news and commentary and piss all over it. Throw in a complete lack of attention to the relevant facts, for good measure.

The use of "some" is particularly sweet. Columnists use "some" when they mean, "I" and maybe one or two of their friends. Sad, sad, metrosexual, pussy friends, in this case.

Given that it's already illegal to ship a firearm to someone who does not possess a federal firearms dealer license, and given that D.C. already has perhaps the most repressive, restrictive firearms ownership policies in the nation, what exactly is the author suggesting be done? The company that shipped the rifle is probably already liable for some serious charges. If a law exists, and people break it (even unintentionally, as this obviously was), is that a reason for more laws? Hey, we have laws against murder, but people still murder. Let's make a new double-plus bad murder law! We'll make it illegal to even think about murder! That'll stop'em!

It wasn't always this way. Until the mid-60s you could get firearms shipped directly to your home from sources as homey as the Sears Catalog. Nobody has ever presented any credible (or incredible?) evidence that forbidding that caused any reduction at all in the crime rate. In fact, crime rates rose steeply in the late sixties and seventies. I won't assert there's a causation there, though -- that would be the kind of sloppy thinking that they seem to like at CNET.

Springsteen

There's an article in The New Republic about Springsteen. The main thrust is what a tired, fake old poser Springsteen has become.

I wanted to reply on the site, but you have to subscribe to TNR, and I'm not enthusiastic about sending them my money. So I'll satisfy myself here.

Springsteen was always a poser.

I was born in Trenton NJ and lived in NJ from 5th grade through high school (and breaks though college). I lived and hung out in the neighborhoods Springsteen writes about in his best songs. I was in high school in central Jersey from 78-82. Freehold High School, where he went, was in the same district as me. We played football against them. I hung out on the boardwalks of Asbury Park and Long Branch -- home of the Stone Pony. I lived not far from Highway 9 and I suppose I must have been "Sprung from cages out on highway 9" more times than I can count. For a loose enough definition of "cages."

Far from being "a death trap, a suicide rap," central Jersey was a pretty awesome place to be a teenager. There was so much that was fun and interesting to do. Beyond the boardwalks and other local amusements (even a cursory listing would soon get out of hand), you're sandwiched between two of the most interesting cities in the U.S: NYC and Philly. C'mon, if you couldn't find opportunities for yourself, you weren't trying. Springsteen sure managed to get filthy rich despite the soul-killing horror of central Jersey!

There was always something more than a little pretentious, more than a little fake about Springsteen to my ears then, and to my friends. He was at the height of his fame, living in a mansion, driving fancy cars, and pretending he had it so hard. It was all utter bullshit. Living there, it was fun to get all pumped up on "Born to Run" or "Badlands" but nobody with a drop of self-awareness could claim life as a teenager in central New Jersey was really some sort of ruthless purgatory of broken hopes and dreams that we needed to escape.

Sure, yeah, there are broken dreams and hard stories everywhere, but it they weren't the default, and Bruce sure wasn't living them. He was a fake then, and a fake now. He sings about the tribulations of soldiers and working men, but when he was up before the draft board he acted crazy and uncooperative enough -- refusing to take the tests, playing up an old concussion he'd had -- to get a 4F. Way to be the tough guy, Bruce.

One of the comments on the article asserts that "Death to My Hometown" is "the best protest song that's been written maybe in 40 years." Seriously?

Oscar Wilde once said: "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."

To paraphrase him, you'd have to be a fool to listen to Springsteen warbling about how "the robber barons ...  ate the flesh of everything they’ve found" without laughing. What overwrought, intellectually infantile tripe.

For The Record: Italian Judge Maurizio Fumo Has No Balls

'No Balls' Now Illegal To Say To A Man In Italy, Court Rules

It's pretty certain the judge who made the ruling and the plaintiff both have no balls. Because if you're a man with any balls, almost by definition, you don't go running to the government to whine that someone told you that you have no balls.

Pointing Out Just How Far Left Obama Has Gone

Today in Bloomberg, Josh Barro writes Why ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Resonates


There's a passage that demonstrates just how far to the left Obama is moving. The West Wing was a doggedly liberal show that idolized a fictional Democratic President. But in a season two episode:

The president’s speech calls to mind a second-season West Wing episode, in which speechwriter Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) explains to the staff of some liberal house members why he won’t insert a line in President Bartlet’s upcoming speech. They want the president to attack Republican tax cut proposals as financing “private jets and swimming pools” for the wealthy. As Seaborn argues:

Henry, last fall, every time your boss got on the stump and said, "It's time for the rich to pay their fair share," I hid under a couch and changed my name. I left Gage Whitney making $400,000 a year, which means I paid twenty-seven times the national average in income tax. I paid my fair share, and the fair share of twenty-six other people. And I'm happy to 'cause that's the only way it's gonna work, and it's in my best interest that everybody be able to go to schools and drive on roads, but I don't get twenty-seven votes on Election Day. The fire department doesn't come to my house twenty-seven times faster and the water doesn't come out of my faucet twenty-seven times hotter. The top one percent of wage earners in this country pay for twenty-two percent of this country. Let's not call them names while they're doing it, is all I'm saying.

When Barack Obama has made an argument for progressive taxation that even Aaron Sorkin finds distasteful, he has erred.

"Private jets and swimming pools" are literally the Obama administration's talking points! Obama's mocking of peoples' achievements and his unswerving collectivism show his true colors. He must go.