Category: Politics

“You have become the very thing you swore to destroy.”

-Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Well, it’s been over a year since Trump Virus (TM) made it big in the States, and as the cartoon goes, it would like to dedicate this next song to all the people who never believed in it when it was coming up.
Cause if it wasn’t for all those people, it wouldn’t be as big as it is today.

Even after we developed a workable vaccine distribution program, there’s still at least 25 percent of the population nationwide that refuses to take it, and that’s an average. In some Republican states the numbers are a lot higher, as are coronavirus cases.

Again, Trump himself tried to get his cult to get vaccinated, and that’s one direction from their Leader that they just won’t take.

I saw something recently at the store that explained everything. It was on a box of Pop Tarts. If you are a connoisseur, you would know that while Pop Tarts can be eaten raw, they are supposed to be heated in a toaster, or in extremis, in a microwave. So consider that. I looked at the back of the box, and in large capital letters, it said: “REMOVE FROM FOIL BEFORE HEATING”.

When you have fully pondered the implications of this directive, namely the fact that the food company deemed it necessary in the first place, you will understand why we haven’t beat COVID.

Meanwhile, I don’t know if this is a case of being on brand or just trying to jump on the culture war, but the national Libertarian Party is putting up social media posts and ads saying “Already Against the Next Mandate.”

I have come to the distressing realization that the word libertarian is one of those words that should only be used in air quotes, much like “conservative” or “progressive.”

I mean, last weekend we had to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the 9-11 attack – and you know, it’s distressingly commercial how 9-11 Season seems to keep coming up earlier every year – and it really amazes me how the people who scream and howl and threaten civil war over wearing a mask or getting a vaccine for a temporary situation don’t care so much about the fact 20 years after 9-11, we STILL have a TSA and it’s STILL making us take off our shoes at the airport over airplane hijackings that we learned how to counter maybe a week after the event, when largely thanks to these “patriots”, we are losing a third of the people we lost in the 9-11 hijackings to COVID EVERY DAMN DAY.

You know, the same people losing their minds over Joe Biden mandating employer vaccines through OSHA, saying “he doesn’t have that power!” and all the Liberal Media going, “well, yes he does, cause this is part of OSHA’s charter and it’s been that way for years.” Now, all the actual Libertarians, who don’t assume government’s powers as existing a priori, would be telling you, “uh YEAH, that’s what we’ve been warning about” but apparently this is a huge shock to everybody whose first definition of “libertarian” is “not being a Demonrat.”

I mean, good for you if you’ve finally realized that government doesn’t always (if ever) have your best interest at heart, but strange that you only feel this way about the one mass initiative that is doing something right, and just happens to be the one that the grievance media wants to use to gin up the next round of the culture war.

In the last few decades the libertarian movement was greatly associated with the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, but Rand herself despised the original libertarians, calling them “hippies of the right”. This is why. As I say, Rand as a person had more issues than TIME Magazine, but those personal issues were largely due to her disregarding her own statement: That reality exists objectively (thus the name), independent of emotion and perception and it can only be properly apprehended through reason and examination, not “whim-worship” and emotion. And nobody seems to get that these days, because the only opponents of the normie Democrat system are a Libertarian political party that is not very organized at all and an organized political party that must rely on emotion and whim-worship because its “conservatism” is that much less coherent than it was in previous years. And when, as a natural result of that trend, the movement experiences identity fusion with the most emotional and whim worshiping politician in our history, you can’t just turn on a dime and ask them to suddenly start thinking. When said figure (in his own long term self interest) asks people to get vaccinated, the cognitive dissonance is too great. It’s like Uncle Festus saying you CAN’T get drunk and fuck your cousin.

I don’t think we should need a mandate or government action to take the vaccine. I also don’t think we need a law banning people from sticking forks into wall sockets, but if enough “freedom lovers” decide that’s the best way to own the libs, that might happen.

But then, I told people that joke on a Libertarian Party Facebook page and got pushback on that. I was told, “do you want government to have the power to tell you what you can put in your body?” I said, “there’s this thing called The Law of the Excluded Middle you might want to look up. Also the word ‘sarcasm’.”

Let me see if I can break it down for you, people.

To begin with, viruses are real. Like God, they cannot be perceived with the naked eye. Unlike God, they can be perceived with advanced microscopes, so if you can believe in God, you can believe that viruses are real. Moving on. On a related subject, science is real. And as Neil DeGrasse Tyson was quoted as saying, “the beautiful thing about science is that it exists whether you believe in it or not.”

One aspect of viruses is that they mutate. This is only a matter of time. It is the reason new viruses pop up despite our immunization procedures. It is that much more likely that a virus will mutate if there is no immunization procedure, which we did not have until Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” program, and even then the benefits did not really manifest until after Biden’s inauguration. (Oh, that reminds me of another fact you might not have been aware of: Biden is President.)

This would be happening whether government was restricting public action at all. It is in fact, happening for largely the reason that it hasn’t restricted public action much during the last year of the Trump Organization or the first few months of the Biden Administration. Part of that is because the US actually is a federal system where states have power, as opposed to a ‘unitary’ government like Britain or France, and virus containment policy was not a matter of scientific consensus but a governor’s decision on what would benefit them with their pet voter demographic. Neil DeGrasse Tyson also said in regard to the coronavirus that because virii do not acknowledge state boundaries, this means that not having a national mask mandate or expecting mandates to only be enforced by some governors and not others is “like designating a peeing section of a swimming pool.”

A virus spread can only be contained and reduced if the virus is not given the opportunity to go to new hosts, because since a virus is not actually a life form, it needs the cells of a biological host to infect so that it can replicate itself. Social distancing before the vaccination program was a very imperfect method of preventing the spread, and so is masking, but they are better than nothing, which was what we had last year. Because we had vaccination proceeding nationally we were having state and local governments remove mask and distancing restrictions and were on track to making things controllable, but then people decided to make disease treatment into a political football again at the same time the coronavirus achieved its Delta mutation. (This is from the Greek alphabet where ‘Delta’ is the fourth letter in sequence. We now have scientists warning of Lambda and Mu variants, which are the eleventh and twelfth letters. THAT’s the timetable of mutation and spread we’re dealing with here.) Delta is more effective than base COVID-19 at infecting people even when they are vaccinated, so yes, kids, vaccines are not a cure-all. They are however still better than nothing. In fact, according to the CDC (if you’re one of those gullible sheep who believes experts) ‘breakthrough’ cases among people who have been vaccinated are still a lot less likely to lead to hospitalization. But because the virus continues to spread and mutate, restrictions are coming back, and if you are not vaccinated you do not even have the imperfect defense that the vaccines give you.

In other words:

THE ONLY ENTITY WHOSE FREEDOM YOU ARE EXPANDING IS THE FREEDOM OF THE VIRUS TO SPREAD AND MUTATE, AND BECAUSE OF THAT EVERYONE ELSE STILL HAS TO WEAR A MASK AND WAIT FOR BOOSTER SHOTS, BECAUSE YOU DECIDED NOT TO FOLLOW DIRECTIONS. EVERYONE ELSE IS LESS FREE BECAUSE OF YOUR “FREEDOM”, INCLUDING YOU, BECAUSE YOU ARE THAT MUCH MORE LIKELY TO GET STUCK ON A VENTILATOR IF YOU NEVER GOT THE SHOT. AND I AM PRINTING ALL THIS IN ALL CAPS ON THE OFF CHANCE THAT YOU WILL FIND BIG LETTERS EASIER TO READ.

The 2016 election, in which the two most unpopular and incompetent candidates the duopoly ever presented faced each other, should have demonstrated the bankruptcy of the system and given the Libertarian Party the perfect opportunity to capitalize.

And yet you have somehow managed to combine the feckless incompetence of the Democrats with the childish ideology of the Republicans. Now, if you could combine the popular civil libertarianism of Democrats with the Republicans’ skill at winning the game no matter what, you’d actually be dangerous.

The Libertarian Party still has the best chance to challenge the Republicans if only because the Democrats are the only other popular alternative, but you can’t challenge them by being that much more emotional and stupid than they are. You can’t challenge them by being more “punk rock” than they are. Once you might have been able to present yourself as being anti-establishment, but after Trump, the Republicans pretty much stole that act. The problem there is that too many people define “the establishment” not as the Democratic Party but as the whole concept of a constitutional republic. And given the backlash against Republican childishness, it does not help a smaller fringe party to be even MORE childish and unpopular just to prove how Xtreeem and Edgee we are. At this point you are no longer challenging the Republicans, you are following them. And that’s not going to work.

As I said recently:

“There has been a lot of talk about ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ being thrown around, not only by right-wingers but by leftists who look at them and see ‘liberty’ as a joke. In fact the coronavirus crisis (the crisis being not the virus itself but our response to it) does a lot to demonstrate why we don’t have a more libertarian world or in particular a more libertarian America. In a perfect libertarian world (itself a subjective hypothetical) we would need less laws because people would be educated enough to make decisions for themselves and exercise common sense. We have all the laws we do because people do not have education and common sense. And every time there’s a crisis, government uses that as a pretext to take more and more liberties, and they can do so because people do not exercise common sense.

“Liberty doesn’t just mean rights, it means responsibility. And contra libertarians, it used to be conservatives making that assertion. Liberty means not only taking responsibility for one’s free will but accepting that we need to protect others’ rights. But some people define ‘rights’ as belonging only to them, not even to ‘white people’ but only to white people of a certain tribe and political alignment. And these rights do not imply taking responsibility for one’s own decisions or extending the same right to others.

“Just as their role model demands all the power and none of the responsibility, the cult demands the freedom to do as they please without acknowledging the consequences.”

Libertarianism at base is nothing less than what liberals have been calling “the American experiment” – the idea that We, the People of the former colonies are fit to manage our own affairs without the Parliament in London or the King in his court overriding our priorities. But that assumes we are in fact fit to manage our own affairs. If you want a more libertarian world, you need to demonstrate that you DON’T need a whole bunch of new intrusive laws because you acknowledge common sense ways of living. Coronavirus has made it that much more clear that the reason we have all the laws we do is because common sense ain’t all that common, at least in this country.

That is, if you want to be treated as a rational adult, you first need to start acting like a rational adult. If you want to act like a child who wants everything except responsibility, you should expect to treated like a child: That is, to be pushed around by grownups and told what to do because you are clearly incontinent to make your own decisions. There is a reason that adults don’t let children run around naked and throw their own shit, and it’s that much more obvious when the “shit” in question is a deadly contagious disease.

And I can hear the response even now: “Why CAN’T I run around naked? What do you mean THERE ARE ALREADY LAWS against public nudity? Who says?? That’s just another step towards The Holocaust! Do you want the Democrats to turn this country into SOCIALIST NORTH KOREA?!?!?”

No, I don’t, “freedom lovers”, but if anything is going to make that more likely, it’s you. You are exactly the sort of libertarian that the Left points at to say how useless the movement is and now you’ve made it that much easier for them to brand any dissenters as a public health danger. It would be a lot harder for them if you were not in fact a public health danger. Again, this is exactly how government grows and spreads, because not only are there opportunists in authority taking advantage of a real crisis, other people react to that crisis by making things worse for themselves and others, and that makes the heavy hand of authority that much more popular.

In fact there are a couple of recent articles (both in New York Magazine) indicating that this anti-Democrat virtue signaling might actually be helping the Democrats. One September 10 article quoted a previous article in The Atlantic on the California recall effort, and then says more generally, “Democrats also are aware that the ranks of the fearful and possibly angry vaccinated include a disproportionate percentage of seniors and college-educated people, who are the most likely to vote in non-presidential elections like the California recall or next year’s national midterms. It’s not safe to assume that all vaccinated people will embrace mandates (which is where these predictions of this being a 75-25 winning proposition for Biden come from), but it’s not unreasonable to think that on balance it represents smart politics for a president who’d rather be talking about fighting COVID-19 than about not fighting the Taliban or about Democrats fighting with each other over his domestic agenda.”

This leads to a Sunday article reviewing the current status of California’s ballot initiative to recall Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who was never all that popular to begin with, but the recall effort didn’t really get serious until what the article describes as “a series of slapstick-quality self-owns” like Newsom appearing maskless at a fancy restaurant when mask restrictions were still on. Once the petition for recall got enough votes, the referendum started to gain more attention as right-wing talk show host Larry Elder entered the race as a Republican. Elder is fairly famous in talk radio, but if you didn’t already know who he was, don’t worry, liberal outlets like New York Magazine will be happy to tell you. “Shortly after Elder got in the race this summer, Newsom’s political consultants sat the governor down with a highlight reel of the radio host’s most offensive claims. A sampling: Systemic racism is “a lie”; employers should be able to fire women who get pregnant; the women who marched against Trump in 2017 were too unattractive to be sexually assaulted. “What the fuck?” Newsom said, according to someone who was there. “Is this serious?” Soon Politico reported that Elder’s ex-fiancée had accused him of waving a gun at her while high. “I say he’s even more extreme than Trump,” Newsom now routinely tells supporters. It’s worked. By the end of August, Newsom had reeled in huge donations from unions, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. Netflix’s Reed Hastings has donated more to Newsom than most of his opponents have raised in total, while producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Priscilla Chan, and Connie Ballmer aren’t far behind.”

The result: “Polls that showed “keep” and “remove” voters almost evenly split in August, thanks to liberal apathy and right-wing fury, have now widened to a comfortable 13-point margin in Newsom’s favor, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average.” The article implies that a lot of the turnaround is because of the two different factions’ approach to the virus, not to mention other things: “And yet Newsom, in the final stretch, has now allowed that there’s something to the idea with the politics of COVID blending into Republican power grabs blending into a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment around the country. “You see what’s happening in Florida! You see what’s happening in Texas! We have to give those ballots back in!” he said on an early-September Zoom call with LGBTQ+ activists. “Forgive me for being intense about this, but, man, this is real! This recall is real!”

If there is anyone who epitomizes limousine liberalism and its clueless, statist approach to the virus more than Nancy Pelosi, it would be Newsom. And he might win this recall because the presented alternative, one of the most prominent “small l libertarian” right-wingers out there, is perceived as being even worse.

In this Cold Civil War between left-wing faith in government and right-wing “liberty”, each side is handicapped by its own disadvantages, namely deserved unpopularity that will only increase as everyone becomes more polarized. Thus the fight will end up being won not on a positive level, with one side proving the worth of its arguments, but on a totally negative level with one side losing because its malice, incompetence and compulsion to alienate the general public ends up pissing off more voters than the other team. Well, I guess we know who’s winning that fight.

“I bear true and an existing witness to this barrel of monkeys.

A self proclaimed immoral success, Perfected by each whereof

Individually deadly and equally so

And spread about the surrendered troops,

For even thousands of miles will not tear apart their communication, or the lack thereof.

Vultures, liars, thieves, each proclaim their innocence

In no suggestion or rhyme, your weapon is contained in the wrecking of the keeping the desired effect.

The breaking of the spirit thwarts the whole being.

Your weapon is guilt, your weapon is guilt, your weapon is guilt.

Guilt.”

-Alice in Chains, “Sludge Factory”

It’s almost time for Congress to go into its annual August recess. If you need to ask why Washington must have a recess in August, you have obviously never visited Washington in August.

Before that can happen, there’s a couple of bits they have to get out of the way. Tuesday they finally started the “1-6” investigation in the House of Representatives, which in its first day gave us the surprising news that the people who attempted to kill black police officers while storming the Capitol were racist, giving MSNBC the opportunity to play the N-Word more times than an episode of The Dave Chappelle Show. The investigation started no thanks to House Republican “leader” Kevin McCarthy, who last week attempted to throw House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a curve by announcing his Party’s picks for the investigation panel would include Gentleman Gym Jordan (BR-Ohio) and a couple others who voted not to certify the 2020 Electoral College results, in effect endorsing the January 6 attack on the process. When Pelosi said she wouldn’t let the election-deniers on the panel, McCarthy said he was withdrawing all Republicans from consideration, including the ones who did vote to certify the election. Basically McCarthy’s posture was that if he can’t get his way and troll the committee with joke picks, then he’s going to take his ball and go home. The joke’s on him, cause he has no ball.

The Democrats, as the party in charge this Congress, offered a “9-11 style” bipartisan commission on January 6, but this was under the impression immediately after the event that Republicans, who were threatened by the attack too, would be willing to investigate it. They are not, for the same reason that Osama bin Laden would not have cooperated with the 9-11 commission, because he knew what they would find. The only threat McCarthy could make was to withdraw his party’s endorsement and thus the appearance of bipartisanship. But having already given up on bipartisanship, and conceding his Party’s identification with the rioters, McCarthy had only the pretense of legitimacy in the debate, and since everyone knew it was not sincere, he gained nothing by refusing to cooperate.

And in what is allegedly not a related event, Democrats in the Senate are having trouble passing a $600 billion dollar infrastructure bill, which apparently cannot be passed as a simple-majority budget bill because West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin (of course) wanted it done on a bipartisan basis. Which of course requires negotiating with Republicans, who since Bill Clinton have decided that giving Democrats any help doesn’t help them.

It also didn’t help that Donald Trump, He Be King Dick Who Got Biggest Of All Dicks, ordered his subordinate microdicks in what used to be a political party to not cooperate with the Democrats.

I am not so sure that this is a brilliant Machiavellian strategy so much as Trump’s usual reactive emotion when the grownups are doing something serious without him in the room: “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAA nobody’s payin’ ATTENTION t’ MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”

But as I keep saying, not like it really matters, cause even when the Crybaby Caudillo does the right thing – like getting the COVID vaccine and telling other people to do so – it’s with a lot less emphasis than when he tells people to do the wrong thing, cause he is at least as much follower as leader. Trump is the leader of the former Party of Lincoln because he is what they want. He personifies the attitude they already had even before he became a presidential candidate.

To a very limited extent, very far back in time, this intransigence was understandable. If you saw much of American history after FDR (after Wilson, really) as less “progress” and more an entropic slide towards more and more statism and unnecessary government controls, even compromise that gained some of your goals was a defeat in that the other side got further toward what they wanted, especially since victory by gradualism is an explicit strategy of democratic socialists.

But even if you favor socialism over evil “selfishness”, the real problem with the Right these days (including a lot of libertarianism, sadly) is that reliance on talk show hosts as intellectual role models has rotted their former reputation in philosophy. This was made that much worse by the fact that radio hosts and their descendants on basic cable were able to monetize politics, and that meant telling people what they wanted to hear, not the hard facts. They never put their ideas up for test and debate; rather Republicans used “safe” districts to maintain their place in national government, and since certain seats were safe, primaries were really a contest of the biggest whacko ideologue. This created a party where appraisal of facts was not only not a priority, it was actually unwelcome. This was BEFORE Trump. The Right got lazy, basically. So Trump is just the logical extension of that. He can tell the redcaps to hate science and hate eggheads and not cooperate with the Beltway establishment. That’s what they want to do. If he tried to push people towards vaccinating to stop the Delta virus, that wouldn’t be popular, and you can’t be a leader if you don’t follow the crowd.

The stubbornness of the NotDemocrats is not a Randian refusal to compromise with evil. It is a five-year-old who refuses to have peas for dinner. (And yes, liberals, there IS a difference, not that Republicans care to acknowledge it.)

Regarding the infrastructure bill, Jonathan Chait wrote in New York Magazine, “As it turns out, the (bill’s) sheer size creates a kind of protection by reducing Biden’s agenda to a single vote. Some moderate Democrats from conservative states or districts might wish to position themselves to the administration’s right, but none of them can afford to let Biden’s presidency come crashing down in Congress. Perhaps the most important clue to the president’s fate came from Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in Congress, who said in January, “We’re going to make Joe Biden successful.” The worst possible outcome for any Democrat — the opening that will let the Republican Party back into power — would be for their party to be seen as having failed at governing. They can and will negotiate the parameters, but the only leverage they hold is mutually assured destruction.”
Which is of course the same reason Republicans have to stick together: to make Joe Biden unsuccessful. Which is basically the same motive as making Barack Obama unsuccessful. Blame the other party for not being able to keep its promises (eliding the role you had in that result) and say that you’ll do a better job if you get elected to Congress. The problem of course is that they did that with Obama, it didn’t work, they tried it again and that time it did work (cause Obama’s successor was Hillary Clinton) but then Republicans had to spend the next four years proving they would do a better job than Obama Democrats, and absolutely failed. Not that Trump’s (sorta) fiscal conservative policy didn’t have real benefits for the economy, which was the main reason he had as much popularity with serious people as he did, but the crash in face-to-face business thanks to Trump Virus (TM) followed by the rapid recovery of the Wall Street sector made it clear to a lot of people that Wall Street is not the entire economy and should not be treated as such. This also means that middle class Americans are becoming less sympathetic to the idea that whatever is good for Big Business is automatically good for them and should be promoted at their expense.

What is happening is that each party is doing what makes sense for them, and many Democrats (namely Joe Manchin) can’t understand that what makes sense for Republicans is not what Democrats think makes sense for the country, and they ought to give up assuming good faith from them, since Republicans have already decided to assume the worst about Democrats. The two ruling factions have been a state of cold war (not competition) for a while, and Democrats are finally starting to realize it.

The architects of duopoly are now becoming victims of the system they sought to create. Democrats have painted themselves in a corner with duopoly – however much they claim they need two parties to have a political debate, it’s not something they really seem to believe. Well, now they’ve gotten their wish because now all of the centrist non-progressives are basically on their side, but that means, as with the Affordable Care Act, that all political debate is within the Democratic Party, because Republicans refuse to offer any ideas. And that means that despite their technical majority in numbers, Democrats can’t get anything done because they aren’t one movement, they’re just a coalition of NotRepublicans. The altruist-socialist Left that claims to be the real Democratic Party has never really been a majority of public opinion, and if I do find myself voting with the “progressives” more, that’s only because the last two years of Trump Virus (TM) has made it clear that this country’s lack of support systems is an outright national security issue that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. (And if those leftists sneer that the virus proves people can’t be trusted to do the right thing without being forced, it also proves that government can’t make them do the right thing, either.)

Meanwhile, if it seems odd that Republicans are only enacting the Trump agenda of voter suppression and vote nullification after he lost (as opposed to succumbing to his demands in the moment, like he wanted) it’s because the aftermath of January 6 has made two things clear: However much the sensible Republicans wished Trump would go away after Biden’s inauguration, the “base” will not give up Trump no matter what, and the factors that caused Republicans to lose the suburbs and critical Electoral College battles will only get worse as sane people realize that electing Republicans would mean electing Trump and electing Trump would mean January 6 every damn day. It was all the Party could do to get swing states with white people and Hispanics and now they have to worry that not even a majority of white people are on board anymore.

Republicans have basically painted themselves in a corner with duopoly: they survived mainly by suppressing any competition for the not-Democrat vote, just as Democrats suppress any competition for the not-Republican vote. And just as Democrats scare their people into voting for them on the premise that if they don’t, America is going to become a fascist hellhole, Republicans scare their people into thinking if Democrats win, America will become a socialist hellhole. But Republicans were starting to gain the advantage in that, one, Republican presidencies may have been disagreeable to liberals but were not Hell on Earth to the rest of us, and two, the Democrats’ main constituencies were sick of waiting for that party to keep their promises, and despite outnumbering Republicans on paper, didn’t vote in enough numbers to throw Republican governments out. Meanwhile Republicans did have voter loyalty because their main constituencies were convinced that the evil Demonrats were going to have all the white babies aborted and then turn them gay. The difference is that Democrats are starting to listen to people outside their inner circle and are trying to get a majority of votes, and however haphazardly, are starting to do so. Republicans however are only listening to their biggest fanatics, which is how we got Trump, who may not have believed in all the birther-Tea Party-Q nonsense at first, but told the suckers what they wanted to hear, to such an extent that he bought into it. Basically, Trump is to lying what Al Pacino in Scarface was to cocaine: He used to just be a dealer then he became his own biggest customer.

And just as Trump single-handedly killed Atlantic City by putting his casinos in competition with each other so that they cannibalized each others’ business, he eventually created a situation where his continued lying and incompetence meant that his fortunes as president were at odds with his Party’s generally strong performance in the 2020 elections. The short term results of that became clear as Trump sabotaged his own Party in the Georgia US Senate runoffs by saying that his loss could only happen cause the system was rigged, therefore the whole thing was rigged, by implication meaning the same system by which other Republicans won. In that runoff, the dynamic started to reverse: Now that people besides leftists saw America as turning into a fascist hellhole, it was the Democrats who were turning out to vote no matter what, and it was Republican constituencies who stayed home cause they felt like they were being lied to. And then the day after Kelly Loeffler lost her Georgia Senate seat, the Congress had to certify the Electoral College result, so Trump, his family and his stooges came out to the mob of thugs who’d been organizing for weeks and implied that it sure would be a shame if Mike Pence and the other Republicans didn’t throw out that whole “Electoral College” thing and declare God-Emperor Trump our immortal Lord and Savior. And for some reason the guys who had been bitching about the election online for two months, coordinated over social media, and came to DC with zip ties, riot gear and scaffolding for a hanging suddenly decided to get violent.

And as amazing as Democrats find it that the senior Republicans haven’t run Trump out of their Party by now, if not voting with them on impeachment (given that he tried to KILL them and all), you have to look at it from their side. I’m sure Mitch McConnell would want to make sure Trump can’t run for President again, even if he wasn’t going to let his perfect little boy get convicted on impeachment, but Mitch knows that if the Party did what it should have done a while ago – kicked out Trump and any other politician who supports his lies – then all the registered Republicans who believe those lies will quit voting Republican and either stay home or vote for whatever clown car of a political organization Trump wants to put together. At that point, Republicans might still have a few places where they could win, but most of the places where their seats are safe are only safe because of Trumpniks. Kicking out Trump would mean the end of the Republicans as a competitive national party, and if Republicans won’t openly admit this, Democrats are too polite to bring it up. In any case, Republicans are clearly less afraid of a permanent dictatorship of Trumpism than a permanent dictatorship of the Democratic Party, because in effect, that is what abandoning Trump would accomplish.

However much I might not want a one-party state, even under the Democrats, I still have to ask Republicans: whose fault is that? Your whole attitude is “You HAVE to vote for us, no matter how horrible we are, cause you don’t want those OTHER people taking over, do you??” Dudes, ask yourselves: How well did that work for Hillary Clinton?

Because going into the 2022 elections, the question is not whether Republican strategy makes sense for their priorities but whether their priorities are good strategy. In his orders to the troops, Trump said, “Don’t do the infrastructure deal, wait until after we get proper election results in 2022 or otherwise (Hmm?), and regain a strong negotiating stance”. Now, given the strength of Republican performance in November 2020, and the usual weakness of the president’s party in a midterm elections, Republicans would have reason to believe that they can just hold out and be “strong” and end up getting what they want if they just wait out the election cycle. It’s what they’re inclined to do anyway. But then again there was every reason to believe the incumbent US Senators of Georgia would win their runoffs and keep Mitch McConnell as Majority Leader. And then somebody had to open his mouth and cause problems. And THEN January 6 happened.

To say that this “conservative” movement is evil would be true, but it avoids the point. Because whether you want to admit this or not, Americans like evil. We like Nazis. We like Confederates. We like rooting for the Empire in Star Wars and the Klingons in Star Trek.

But to paraphrase General Patton, one thing Americans absolutely will not tolerate is a loser.

And while real Christians might have been waiting over 2000 years for Christ to come back to life and regain dominion over the universe, I don’t think even Republicans can afford to give Cheeto Jesus that much benefit of the doubt.

“We’ve got to rise above the need for cops and laws”

-Dead Kennedys, “The Stars and Stripes of Corruption”

The Fox News website said that last week, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire “ignited a social media firestorm” when its Twitter account posted: “Legalize child labor. Children will learn more on a job site than in public school.”

First let me say: I actually agree with this. But that is not an endorsement of child labor so much as my assessment of the public school system.

Now, the text of the article indicated that the LP position had a little more nuance: “”Our proposal is that the minimum age requirement be lowered to 16 without school superintendent approval, if a child is homeschooled, this option is difficult for them,” (party chair) Jarvis said. “We also propose that if a minor has graduated high school or obtained a GED, they have already proven themselves and should not be required to obtain permission to be employed. The law in [New Hampshire] currently prohibits these individuals from seeking employment without a signed written document from a parent on file.”

Even so, 2016 Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson went on record saying, “I’m sorry, but no. This isn’t what libertarianism means to millions of Americans – pushing a disturbing and out of touch stance on child labor is entirely detached from what people need in America today. This does not advance liberty, or help change people’s opinions”. Jiletta Jarvis supported his right to an opinion even though she said “I know that there was an emotional reaction to his criticism and we are working internally on that issue.” Personally I think they should take Johnson more seriously. I mean, he’s the leading expert on how to make libertarianism look bad by taking a public position with absolutely no knowledge of the subject.

As far as the “working internally” on the emotional reactions, this whole thing seems to be just one example of an extremely confusing mini-civil war, where other state parties of the national Libertarian Party are having their say, where Jarvis asserts that “I have watched secret plots occurring” and new members wish to discredit the Party and use the same tactics to take over the Republican Party. The LPNH Executive Committee, or “Mises Caucus” (Twitter page ‘Temporarily the home of the @LPNH Executive and Communications committees’) published a tweet from the Connecticut Party saying “There was no convention … that disaffiliated the original LPNH… Jilletta Jarvis’ actions were not authorized by any noticed meeting under any set of bylaws… Our Regional Representative is ORDERED, DIRECTED and COMMANDED TO BRING A MOTION TO THE LNC FOR THE REMOVAL OF THE CHAIR”.

Now here’s the real fucking joke: Nobody else knows this. There are a few newspaper websites covering the story, but you’d have to know to look for them. The only reason I even bring it up is because I know any time I try to advocate for libertarianism against authority, some smart aleck liberal is gonna look up that LPNH child-labor tweet and go “Yeh whaddya thinka THIS, Mr. Glibertarian? Ha? Ha? HA? Oh, I almost forgot: SOMALIA!!!”

Nobody else is gonna CARE, because it doesn’t matter. For all the impact you actually have, the Libertarian Party may as well be a bunch of SciFi geeks arguing over whether the Millennium Falcon could beat the USS Enterprise, and on that score, the Millennium Falcon is to the Enterprise what your uncle’s 1970 VW stoner van is to a modern US Navy guided missile cruiser, the Falcon is using a point-to-point hyperdrive jump system when the Enterprise can operate at faster-than-light warp speed, and in any case, neither of them are real and at the end of the day you’re just debating the minutiae of fictional fantasy BULLSHIT.

Not that fantasy and science fiction are bad. Take the cellphone. A ubiquitous convenience of modern life. A lot of Star Trek fans would say it was inspired by the flip-communicators the Enterprise crew used in the Original Series. I always thought it was derived from Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone. But in any case, it used to be fiction, and now it’s reality. That’s the difference between supernatural fantasy and science fiction, science fiction shows you that there is a path between desire and reality. But you still have to create that path. You still have to have organization and planning and marketing to get the cellphone to be other than just a cool idea or a project in your friend’s basement. And you also have to acknowledge that some cool ideas are more feasible in the present than others. Our science does not yet allow us a feasible path to cold fusion, the atmospheric conversion engine, or immortality technology, let alone a social system that makes government obsolete. And here’s the thing, we’re that much LESS likely to get there if we disregard what science we do have cause the coronavirus or the vaccine or both are some kind of government conspiracy to control the masses. If you know how many people have already died and you don’t want to get vaccinated cause “FREEDOM” then the Science Fiction future you’re most likely to advance is the one where chimpanzees and gorillas on horseback oversee naked humans in labor camps because We, the People have chosen to become inarticulate apes.

Now, any professional libertarian-hater would be telling you all of this and already has, but I AM a libertarian. If you’re a libertarian who thinks I’m NOT one cause I think we should be practical and reform the government we already have rather than pretend it doesn’t exist, well, who cares? Your premise is, “libertarianism means you can’t label me or tell me what to do.” Right back at you, guy.

And why would I still call myself a (L)ibertarian, especially after this shit? Sadly, it’s the same reason I still called myself a Libertarian in 2016 – as sad as the LP is, the Party of Trump is that much worse. As for the Democrats, I already reconciled myself to the practical reality of having to vote Democratic because the greater evil is not simply disagreeable but an active threat to national security. That doesn’t change the fact that while the Democrats may be the only party with any relation to reality, sometimes it’s hard to tell. At times they seem that much more smug and naive in their assumptions about the world than the Libertarians, and it’s that much more irritating because they claim to know better. They’re constantly telling us all the wonderful stuff that they’re going to do now that they’re in charge, and constantly crying about how they can’t do any of it because the Republican bullies are taking their lunch money every day, and only a few of them have figured out that they need to stop wringing their hands and fight back.

According to a 2021 Gallup poll (that President Biden referred to this week) only 25 percent of voters identify as Republican and only 30 percent identified as Democrats. Now, when you add independents who lean to one faction or the other for practical reasons, you have slightly less than half of polled voters (49%) identifying as Democrat or Democrat-leaning, but only 40 percent of people are Republican or lean Republican. Do the math and that’s a 9 percent gap in favor of the Democratic coalition. But this also means you have 19 percent of voters as “left” independents and 15 percent as “right” independents and when you do that math, that total is 34 percent. So we have reached a point at which the largest group of voters, over a third, might not agree on anything else, but agree they can’t align with the duopoly.

But when someone in the Libertarian Party seriously pushes an idea like child labor, that is to the libs what “Drag Queen Story Hour” is to the conservatives: Waving the freak flag in front of Middle Americans that we might have otherwise been able to persuade.

There was this one guy discussing the subject on YouTube who lamented the situation insofar as libertarians almost don’t want to be taken seriously. They do have some real critiques, such as, that our government is too powerful and unaccountable, or our civilian police are too militarized. He also said that what usually happens when he debates a libertarian is that they’re capable of a cogent argument for about 72 seconds, then they go off into the Ether. That clip also led to the usual dopey, sneering arguments like “libertarians are just Republicans who like pot.” It’s a lot harder to argue the point when libertarians concede it. A lot of them seem to be more exercised about taxes and COVID regulations than the fact that a large segment of the society is more oppressed than white people were under COVID, and have been for decades if not centuries.

But that just gets to the point that the problem is not the stupid leftist caricature. The problem, as with their caricature of the former Republican Party, is when right-wingers obsessively seek to live up to and exceed the caricature. Because a lot of these guys are living on social media and think that the main aspiration of life is to be a cartoon. This is why both libertarians and “conservatives” will promote child labor, or reducing the voter franchise or some other innovation from the 19^th Century, cause they’re trying to show their punk rock edge.

And that just gets to the point that you’ve already got one party in government that is actively against government and has written itself out of any idea of what they want to do when they get a majority, that thinks asking what voters want is too much of a compromise of the ideal, that as a result, they’re losing voters left and right, and as a result of that, act like majority rule is communist. I am again reminded of that one time where Thomas Massie, a Republican Congressman who claimed to be libertarian when that was still sorta cool with his team, said: “But then when I went to Iowa (in 2016) I saw that the same people that had voted for Ron Paul weren’t voting for Rand Paul, they were voting for Donald Trump. And the same thing happened in Kentucky, the people who were my voters ended up voting for Donald Trump in the primary. And so I was in a funk because how could these people let us down? How could they go from being libertarian ideologues to voting for Donald Trump? And then I realized what it was: They weren’t voting for the libertarian in the race, they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race when they voted for me and Rand and Ron earlier. So Trump just won, you know, that category, but dumped the ideological baggage.”

If all you have to offer is being the craziest son of a bitch in the race, you can’t compete with what the Party of Trump is now. THEY STOLE YOUR ACT.

Maybe try writing some new material?

With what we have misruling the country, there is plenty of room for alternatives. There is plenty of opportunity for Libertarians to take advantage. Which is why it pisses me off that they refuse to do so.

I am sick and tired of my Party and my movement being taken as a joke.

But apparently you’re not.

So maybe I’m getting sick of you.

“No advocate of reason can claim the right to establish HIS version of a good society, if such society includes the initiation of force against dissenters in ANY issue. No advocate of the free mind can claim the right to force the minds of others.”
-Ayn Rand, Letters of Ayn Rand

One will note that I called my last post “The Once And Future Libertarian” without doing much to advocate for libertarianism or the Libertarian Party. That’s because, having gone over what’s still wrong with the duopoly, and why simply assimilating into the Democrat Collective is not sufficient to solve this country’s problems, it requires a bit more analysis as to why going libertarian is a good idea. Especially these days.

Since one of the major issues in the news the last few weeks is Texas. What specifically about Texas? The whole thing. First, while the winter storms of February were intense for most of the country, it was only in Texas that the weather caused both power and water to go out across the state, since lack of power also caused the systems heating (and cleaning) the water lines to freeze. And that, it turned out, was because a, the Texas power grid is separate from the rest of the area around it, and b, the state didn’t protect that power grid by winterizing the equipment. And of course, now people are getting charged four-digit power bills for that period, because Texas utilities were allowed to charge customers “what the market will bear.” One company, Griddy, had actually warned customers to leave. The first time I’d heard about that story, I thought they were telling people to leave Texas, which is good advice regardless of the weather.

And then on March 2 Texas Governor Greg Abbott (three guesses as to what party he is, and the first three don’t count) publicly announced, as though it were something to be proud of, that he was lifting all COVID-19 restrictions in the state “100 percent.” This was exactly at the point that vaccines were about to roll out, but before the sectors of labor most likely to require contact with the public, such as medical and service workers, were vaccinated. Which sort of defeats the purpose of acting like the pandemic is over.

How is a right-winger, especially a libertarian, going to say that lack of restrictions is necessarily going to lead to good results? You can’t. Which leads to the second lesson I want to impart to the Right. To recall, “The first thing that right-wingers (Republican or Libertarian) have to learn is that the Left is going to call them a bunch of heartless ogres and witches whether they earn the reputation or not. Which is what makes it imperative NOT to earn it.” The second lesson is that the reason we have as much government as we do is that someone saw a need for it, as I’ve also said before. Since the kind of disaster that we’ve seen in Texas can happen if you just let the private sector do as it will, this makes it possible to enact heavy regulations under the impression they’re actually going to help people. I say, “under the impression” because that’s not usually how it works, and that’s really not the reason we have the bureaucracy that we do. In fact, much of the regulation we have is specifically intended to protect the businesses ostensibly being regulated, and is written on their behalf, sometimes actually BY them.

Believe it or not, the best explanation of this point I’ve seen is from leftists on social media.

Here is an example of what would happen if we treated the local pizzeria like we treated health care: https://www.facebook.com/james.gillen.969/posts/3737875906261472?notif_id=1614799095747641&notif_t=feedback_reaction_generic&ref=notif

And then there’s this: (https://www.facebook.com/kirstin.hamaker/posts/3784372801624524)

I wasn’t able to see anything else referring to this tweetstorm on my Internet searches, so I just posted the link.

Even if you see the need for regulations of the dairy industry (in this case) or the corn syrup industry, or whatever, the regulations we have are designed not only to benefit giant industries but to corner out smaller farmers and producers that not only would do things in a more capitalist, competitive way, but would also behave more ethically and follow the regulations and practices that the liberals and socialists actually want.

And in regard to the particular crisis, before Greg Abbott was Texas Governor, he was the state Attorney General, and had taken the (Republican) state government’s position against the Obama Administration that it should be able to operate its power grid independently and not have to enact the winterization procedures that everybody else did. Now he’s calling on the utilities to do so, even as politicians are telling us we need to rescue the people stuck with bills from unregulated companies. The Texas Tribune article: “Lawmakers have demanded that the utility commission roll back its decision to allow the huge rate increases, or suggested cobbling together some package of emergency waivers or relief money to buffer Texans’ from the high bills.

“We cannot allow someone to exploit a market when they were the ones responsible for the dire consequences in the first place,” said state Rep. Brooks Landgraf, R-Odessa.”

If only they could have guessed that such consequences were possible.

I opened with that particular Ayn Rand quote because it could be interpreted for more than one purpose. With COVID, for instance, is it “initiation of force against dissenters” if the state government imposes laws restricting people’s freedom of action, for example, mandating masks, to stop the spread of the pandemic?

Well, let’s look at it another way. If a storm takes out an old bridge and the state has to put up barriers until a crew can be sent and they have to put up a sign saying “BRIDGE OUT”, is that a restriction of your right to use the roadway? You could interpret it that way. You could just blow past the barrier, go “FUCK you I won’t do what ya tell me” and cross the bridge, at which point, it won’t be the government that’s restricting your freedom. It’ll be gravity.

Pretty much the same point can be made with regard to coronavirus restrictions. We didn’t have to have them, and not every state does. Deciding that your state is “free” of coronavirus restrictions doesn’t make the state free of coronavirus. Plus which, in a lot of cases during the early reaction to COVID-19, private businesses were quicker to create social distancing rules than government, and in the current situation, a lot of places in Texas have announced in the wake of the governor’s decision that they will still mandate pandemic rules, at least for their own employees. (In the case of airlines, they are operating under federal restrictions.) Now surely right-wing followers of Ayn Rand will respect a business owner’s right to dictate the use of their space? Well, we know the answer to that question.

In the Dallas Morning News article, the CEO for the Texas Association of Business said in response to Abbott’s announcement that “The association believes businesses understand the protocols needed to ‘function safely’ and that ‘Texas companies will operate responsibly’.” But if we could trust businesses to operate responsibly, you wouldn’t have the situation you do in Texas with the power grid and the other utilities. At the same time, like I said, businesses on the whole have been more responsible about pandemic restrictions than certain state governments or American Presidents. As I say, it is possible for two different things to be true at the same time. On a case by case level, I can trust people to do the right thing, but not as a rule. There has to be a default standard. THAT’s why you have a government.

But what if the local government is less responsible than the public at large? Ay, there’s the rub.

Part of the problem is that invocations of “freedom” versus “socialism” are not only dodging common sense, they’re using deceptive political labels. The most officially socialist country in the world is the “People’s” Republic of China, which is no less socialist in its desire to have one party control all aspects of the country, they just figured after a few decades of Leninist/Maoist ideology that they wouldn’t get to run it for much longer if the masses were starving and near revolt. So they incorporated just enough capitalism, under strict controls, to keep the structure going. So you have one country that apes a leftist ideology but really has a bunch of guys in business suits in control.

Meanwhile here you have a bunch of professional Christians and ostensible conservatives who want to preserve a nationalist and capitalist system but are finding themselves increasingly unpopular – since after a few decades of ideology the masses are starting to starve – so in order for the guys in business suits to stay in control, they increasingly ape the posture of a one-party socialist regime that among other things says that only people the ruling party deems “patriots” can get to run for a local government. Where have I heard that one before?

That would be the danger to the American experiment even if the Republican faction of the duopoly were competent. As it is, the real danger from a right-wing (or non-socialist) standpoint is that the only alternative presented against the Democrats is a bunch of bad-faith culture war initiatives that are not taken seriously and really are not intended to be taken seriously. Now, if you’re to believe the polls, three out of four Americans approve the $1.9 trillion “Rescue Plan” passed by Congress and signed by President Biden March 11, including at least half of Republicans. The actual Republican Party isn’t even trying to compete with that, even though they still have the numbers to do so. Instead they’re using their media to read Green Eggs and Ham.

So from a right-wing standpoint, the longer these guys are the official NotDemocrat Party, the less likely it is there will be any serious resistance to genuinely bad left-wing ideas, especially when the Party of Trump took the real bipartisan concerns about “the swamp” and used them to promote incompetence, corruption and spite. The only opposition to an open borders policy is internment camps and separating families. The only plan for balancing our trade deficit was a tariff war with China that simply let them expand their trade with everyone else without benefiting us, and shutting down some of our retailers in the process.

And from a left-wing standpoint, a “conservative” party that doesn’t even try to represent its voters is just there. Like a lump. Or an obstacle. They are serving literally no purpose in the government other than to make the Democrats negotiate everything amongst their “progressive” and centrist wings. That does serve the moderating function that a multi-party system would otherwise create, but again that merely emphasizes the twin points that the more the Democrats are expected to absorb every voter and faction that is NotRepublican, the more they have to do everything themselves, for people who are not their natural constituency (if they even have one), because the Republican Party is worse than useless.

If you expect politics to get anywhere and you expect elections to be taken seriously, the Democrats are going to need competition. Do you seriously want that competition to be the Republican Party?

So that’s why I’m going back to the Libertarian Party. There needs to be something else. And please don’t tell me their ideas are horrible and they can’t be taken seriously. You HAVE one faction of the duopoly that has truly horrible ideas that shouldn’t be taken seriously, and yet are. The matter, bluntly, is whether the ideas have any support, and it looks like Republicans are starting to lose that support. Which leads to my third lesson for Libertarians in particular. We’re already against government. But assuming we DO want to get elected, we have to take government seriously. You’ve already got the people who are against government IN government and making a mess of it. You’ve already got the Merry Pranksters. As long as they’re there, they’re going to be making the Right worse and the country as a whole worse. It can’t be that hard to present a constructive alternative to them. You just have to be the grownups in the room, and the fact that Libertarians can be the grownups compared to Republicans shows where we are now. This is a real opportunity that I think must be taken.

Mind you, I will probably be voting Democrat in several elections simply because the Libertarian Party doesn’t post candidates for those races. But you have to start somewhere. I already know there’s no point in trying to change anyone’s mind in the Republican Party, and there’s really no point in trying to sway Democrats either.

I want to have a party for the rest of us.