There's a temptation for progressives to entertain Ron Paul as a serious alternative to Obama, primarily because Ron Paul is very, very serious about getting rid of a couple of major federal programs that progressives tend to hate: namely, our War on Some People's Terror and our War on Some People Who Use Some Drugs.

The problem, as Ben Adler points out, is that Ron Paul's motivation for opposing these programs has nothing to do with the progressive motivation for opposing them. Most charitably, Paul just cares about limiting federal power. His administration would care little about the impact of federal policies on various populations; it would only care that the government pursued those programs at all. This means that the end of the War on Drugs would come alongside a push to end Medicare and Social Security, a push to end all forms of social welfare, a push to end everything designed to ameliorate the effects of systemic discrimination over past decades and centuries.

Ron Paul doesn't care about equality or social progress, he's just an adorable shrunken grump who has an ideological opposition to the government doing most anything. That opposition has certain incidental benefits, and it's hard not to think of him as a useful tool in achieving long-term political goals.

Less charitably (and, I think, more honestly), Ron Paul by and large only gives a shit about maximizing the freedom of white men. The War on Drugs is problematic not because it helps incarcerate truly ridiculous numbers of young black and Hispanic men, it's problematic because white guys deserve a doobie or some blow after work. The War on Terror is an outward extension of American resources and manpower, but the person whose freedom we care about isn't the little girl disfigured by a drone or the imam whose mosque was destroyed. It's the white guy who works long, hard hours to pay for that war, who would much rather be spending his money on other things, like gold bricks or gold boullion or ads trying to get people to buy his stock of gold.

What that ultimately means, though, is that the shining moments of a Paul presidency would be largely flash. Paul's libertarianism would mean an end to the War on Drugs, but it would also mean an end to enforcement of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, a push toward a future of rampant Tentherism where a state's discriminatory action would be met with a shrug and a casual bon mot about the Fed. 

The appeal of Ron Paul is that he comes off as truly principled. Even when his policies may achieve a goal of racial equalization that he would seem to be otherwise opposed to, you're still assured that he'll advocate for those policies.

That allure, however, masks the dirty secret of his appeal to progressives: we're so sure that he'll pursue the policies that we like, we might be willing to compromise on the other stuff. The problem is, that other stuff is the very core of progressivism. The scant victories a Paul presidency promises are meaningless when they're the curtain hiding the abyss.

Unless, of course, you have a whole lot of gold. At that point, I can't really blame you.

Via GOOD, the New York Observer had an awesome exclusive.  A producer for Greta Van Sustern's show on FOX News was down at Occupy Wall St., trying to get some rambling stoners on tape to embarrass the protesters, and instead ended up interviewing Jesse LaGreca. LaGreca proceeded to dress down FOX news for being a propaganda outlet instead of a news organization, and then basically wiped the pavement with this guy.  At the end, trying to salvage the segment, the producer concedes the point about FOX, but then asks what role Obama plays in all this.

The obvious objective here is to get a protester putting all the blame on Obama, so that can be aired on FOX, but LaGreca wisely doesn't take the bait and instead uses the question to call out the question for being disingenuous by noting that the conservative opposition to Obama is trying to stop him from doing any good in the world. I just wanted to stand up and applaud at that part. The left is getting to a point of Obama-obsession that rivals the right. It's not just the leftists who have convinced themselves the man can't do anything right, though they are a problem. Even the most stalwart Obama supporters have made the situation All About Obama, when in fact there's a much larger problem at hand than the fact that our President is oft-times a weenie. I have many of the same criticisms of Occupy Wall St. as others---while the hippie thing is overblown, I really do wish that there wasn't so much hostility to fellow travelers who look "straight"---but I'm a strong supporter of it for one reason above all other things. It's focusing people's attention where it belongs, on the banks and widespread social inequities. This is a problem that's expanded beyond just the electoral cycles and goes straight back to a larger trend towards the right in this country, a trend that's pushing Republicans to the far right and Democrats to the center. Focusing like a laser on Obama and making this about whether or not he's "betrayed" us fails to shed any real light on the problem.  For good reason, i.e. Americans continue to elect Republicans in large numbers, both parties believe that Americans like the status quo of increasing inequities and corporate control of everything, and so neither party has a reason to change their approach.

Occupy Wall St. is blaming the right people, and pointing out the real problems in our society. It's a start. And LeGreca models the best way to keep our eyes on the prize, by making it about addressing underlying values and systems and not seeing a single politician as the force that will save us all, and then plunging into despair when he makes the rather inevitable compromised decisions that come with the territory of being a politician.

Back from Netroots Nation, and while I'm still a little tired, I'm energized as usual after the conference.  As many of you no doubt know, the pathetic shadow conference Right Online was closer than ever this year.  And by "pathetic shadow conference", I mean it.  Every year, Right Online finds out where Netroots Nation is and schedules near there, because there's something about being conservative that requires being childish and petulant.  This year, it was especially ugly, because the Right Online was closer than ever to Netroots Nation, and they were in fact in the Hilton that many of us---including myself---were staying at.  Which means that the childish, petulant behavior kept spilling over.  And also that I ran into Andrew Breitbart downtown and took a picture of him standing with a friend (with his permission, of course!).  Breitbart showed up at Netroots Nation, which is irritating because while the vast majority of attendees react to such behavior the way you should---with scorn bordering on indifference---a handful of people got provoked and taped themselves yelling stupid shit at him.  Which is what he no doubt hoped would happen, and leave media with the assumption that "both sides" are bad, even though only one side schedules an entire conference for the sole purpose of irritating their opponents.  

False equivalence is particularly a problem when you consider that the one incident that everyone heard about was a Right Online attendee harassing some Netroots attendees.  The main victim of the harassment told her story in a panel about fighting Islamaphobia (which was, by the way, a great panel that I learned a lot from). She was wearing a hijab  while standing outside a bar that was having a Netroots event, talking to some friends, and at least one of her friends was also wearing a hijab, and some dude from a shitty right wing blog rolled up and started to harass her and her friend.  When they told him to kindly fuck off, he started taking their pictures.  (For what purpose, I'm not sure---he seemed to be under the impression that someone could use the photos as some sort of expose of Netroots Nation, or maybe he thought the police would somehow stop free Americans from wearing what they like as they stand around on the streets of Minneapolis.)  At this point, a number of people at the party came to the women's defense, and he was arrested.  Marc and I walked up to the club right as the man was being shoved into a cop car, and I said something about it, since something about the situation seemed like it was more than a drunk-asshole-getting-arrested situation.  Indeed, it was.  And of course, someone got video of much of the confrontation between the man who was harassing the women and the Netroots folks who pushed back. You can see the confrontation (with my Texas buddy Matt Glazer!) starting at 4:30. 

Here is a first person account.  Here's the harasser's online profile, and here is his arrest record. 

I want to highlight that the guy in question is threatening to call Andrew Breitbart, which again I don't completely understand.  Does he think Breitbart has some legal authority to stop people from standing in the streets wearing clothing items he disapproves of?  I suppose I can see how you'd get confused, since all this happened the day Anthony Weiner resigned.  But it's unsettling to see how at least one of Breitbart's fans imbues the man with nearly god-like powers.  I'm inclined to think the guy is bluffing, by the way, and was just hoping the threat of calling the Breitbart cops who would make the women pay for wearing hijabs would make them, I don't know, stop or something. 

Anyway, the incident was understandably upsetting, and some people reacted by organizing a flash mob at the Hilton.  I stood on the second floor and watched it; it was mainly a bunch of people milling around, many in hijabs.  But it worked as intended, getting coverage for the incident and giving the protestors a chance to explain their point of view:

Jesse and I got in the elevator with some protestors after the incident and spoke briefly to them; they were excited and a little scared about everything that happened, but felt like they had made their point. 

Of course, you can predict the right wing reaction, considering that what happened was a woman claiming a man harassed her: immediately hide behind claims that women are liars and not to be believed.  John Hawkins of Right Wing News went straight to that strategy.  Believe it or  not, I was one of the liberal bloggers he was talking to, as was Jesse.  I don't recall if I explained to him that I had seen the guy getting arrested, but you know, if he was so skeptical, he could have asked if we knew anything. By the way, the characterization of Netroots as "90-95% white" is really laughable from someone who was there with Right Online, since when we were talking to him the entire conference was moving from one location to another.  But I wouldn't characterize them as 90-95% white, since that figure is way too low. 

Hopefully, the right wingers won't be as close next year.  While it did provide from some really amusing encounters (liberals are apparently very frightening to ride elevators with!), it's also scary, since there is the unhinged element of conservative activists, and a willingness to make casual death threats, as Melissa Clouthier did on Twitter, when she said, "Bunch of #nn11 folks in the elevator called me the enemy. I reminded that folks on the right pack heat. #ro11."

Slightly old-ish news, but worth talking about: Rand Paul, who calls himself a "libertarian", has revealed that he's more inclined to be the new Joe McCarthy, going on to Sean Hannity's show and saying this:

I’m not for profiling people on the color of their skin, or on their religion, but I would take into account where they’ve been traveling and perhaps, you might have to indirectly take into account whether or not they’ve been going to radical political speeches by religious leaders. It wouldn’t be that they are Islamic. But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that’s really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison.

Paul's getting a lot of attention for blocking the Patriot Act, but we can't judge him on this alone.  He's not for civil liberties.

However, aside from his admirable stance on the Patriot Act, Paul’s record shows he’s hardly the paragon of civil liberties he claims to be, but rather is “indistinguishablefrom the rest of the GOP on national security issues,” noted The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer last year. He’s said he will “always fight” to keep GITMO open; has said “[f]oreign terrorists do not deserve the protections of our Constitution;” and has never taken a strong public stance against torture, staying silent most recently after the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Paul Krugman responded by saying this:

He’s not unusual. There are genuine libertarians out there. But political figures who talk a lot about liberty and freedom invariably turn out to mean the freedom to not pay taxes and discriminate based on race; freedom to hold different ideas and express them, not so much.

I'm somewhat sick of the "genuine libertarians" thing, by the way.  It's about as meaningful as saying, "There are genuine communists out there."  Technically true, pragmatically meaningless.  "Genuine libertarians" are, in my experience, like "whole cloth pro-lifers", the ones who supposedly are in it because they really are pro-life and also oppose war, the death penalty, eating meat, etc., and that it's not about sex and gender for them.  You hear about them---occasionally someone says they've met one---but they are so few on the ground that you can reasonably say that people who consider their number one issue to be the government concealing space aliens from us constitute a more substantial voting bloc.  Most people who identify as libertarian are golf pants--wearing Republican weenies who want you to think they're cooler than the average golf pants-wearing Republican weenie because they like Pearl Jam.  

Anyway, all this was totally predictable, if you believe that women are full human beings who deserve full human rights.  Those of us who take that belief seriously have been pointing out since the get-go that many to most "libertarians" do not support abortion rights, which automatically puts them in opposition to basic human rights.  Rand Paul is a particularly egregious misogynist; he has literally claimed that the right to own a specific kind of lightbulb matters more than the right of a woman to control her fertility, and he did so on the floor of the Senate. Just in case you didn't get the memo, Paul also claimed that his right to avoid flushing the toilet twice when he takes a giant shit is more important than your ability to choose when you have children.  For those of us who take women's claim to be full human beings seriously, this sort of thing is all you need to know about how libertarian "libertarians" are.  

The reason this isn't as obvious to the punditry at large as it is to we feminists who get shoved off in a corner and treated like the ladies' auxiliary is that men still dominate political discourse in this country, and so the facetious claim that libertarians "get" to oppose women's rights because they think abortion is "murder" is taken seriously.  And the reason is that even pro-choice liberal men are often suspectible to the underlying assumption of the "life at conception" argument, which is that it's men and not women who make babies.  Said men disagree intellectually, but emotionally, the belief that men make babies by ejaculating and that the nine months of bodily effort and substantial amount of nutrients and calories expended by women is just so much secretarial work.  (This is, incidentally, why you'll see many thoughtful men get more vehemently pro-choice if their partners give birth; actually witnessing exactly who put the work into making a baby makes the anti-abortion argument seem pathetic and weird if you're a thoughtful feminist.) And so they give the libertarians a pass on their blather about how killing a brainless fetus is a major crime, one perhaps on the level of forcing the delicate hand of Rand Paul to touch the toilet handle twice.  

Of course, if you abandon all emotional investment in patriarchal traditions that give men more biological credit than is observable in nature for baby-making, what is immediately clear is that anti-choice "libertarians" are basically just guys who want rich white guys to have even more power than they do now, and see the government's main role as shoring up that power instead of limiting it.  Everything else that comes pouring out of their mouths after that, including support for a new McCarthyism, is not a surprise.

And on the topic of why we should abandon the word "libertarian" altogether, I give you the latest Bloggingheads with myself in it, and my discourse partner being Michael Doughtery:

Michael, at one point, suggested my views on sexual and personal liberty---I'm all for it, and think that the best way to maximize human happiness is letting consentingn adults make their own decisions about how to fuck and how to order their personal relationships---are "liberatarian".  I don't blame him for using this word; it's out there, and I get why people use it.  But it's an empty word, and it really should be retired.  The word for my beliefs is "liberal" or "progressive".  Or, if you like, "socially liberal".  Liberalism, at its core, is about maximizing freedom, but in a substantive and not glib way like so-called libertarianism is.  We believe in civil liberties, but also other freedoms, such as the "freedom froms" that FDR spoke of: freedom from want, freedom from fear.  Thus, regulating business and supporting labor maximize freedom for the most number of people.  We consider the freedom to have a life outside of work for the working class to be more important than the freedom of the rich to make another buck, for instance. Using "libertarian" to mean "pro-freedom" is misleading; under a libertarian system, the vast majority of people live lives under the corporate bootheel and are not free people at all.  

I have a jumble of thoughts and a lot of other things vying for my attention, and my urge is right now to just give up.  But I think what I have to say matters right now, so I'm going to try.  I'll start with this Saturday, which I spent at a conference about Ellen Willis, a conference built around a posthumous release of her writings on rock music titled Out of the Vinyl Deeps.  Willis wrote about music in the context of her version of radical feminism, which was a pro-pleasure feminism that was highly critical of knee-jerk identity politics which often replace the right wing policing with a left wing one.  Not that Willis was a mindless choice feminist who claimed everything every woman does ever is great because it's her choice.  She just had a keen eye for the difference between legitimate, productive criticisms of genuine oppression and the pointless circular firing squad that erupts on the left when everyone starts to vie for the spot of purest, most noble progressive/feminist/etc.  The intersection of this and rock criticism was her willingness to work out in public why she wasn't going to feel bad about liking certain rock music even if it had misogynist content.  Kathleen Hanna spoke movingly on a panel of how Willis's work helped keep her sane after Riot Grrrl descended into a circular firing squad, or as Hanna put it, a "beauty pageant in reverse" where people were so busy trying to score points that real work in fighting the man had basically been forgotten.

I went home and proceeded to turn off the internet and start really pouring through this book, trying to really grapple with the ideas in it away from the din of the internet.  I haven't finished it, because Bin Laden got killed and that was a distraction---which I'll get back to in a moment---but I did manage to read a mind-blowing essay she wrote on her evolution away from being someone who didn't like punk rock to someone who did.  And she freely admits early on that a strain of internalized aesthetic Stalinism kept her from liking punk at first, because she perceived the dudeliness of the culture that led to an easy misogyny.  But, in a series of events that's too long to recount her but you can read in PDF form here (the essay is called "Beginning To See The Light"), she started to see how punk's form fit very nicely into her desires to poke holes in pretensions and hierarchies and power plays and other bullshit that feeds into our oppressive systems.

I want to quote a couple passages that are relevant.  In this first, she talks about her reaction the Sex Pistols' indisputably misogynist anti-abortion song "Bodies":

It was an outrageous song, yet I could not simply dismiss it with outrage. The extremity of its disgust forced me to admit that I was no strange to such feelings---though unlike Johnny Rotten I recognized that disgust, not the body, was the enemy.  And there lay the paradox: music that boldly and aggressively laid out what the singer wanted, love, hated---as good rock and roll did---challenged me to do the same, and so, even when the content was antiwoman, antisexual, in a sense antihuman, the form encouraged my struggle for liberation.  Similarly, timid music made me feel timid, whatever its ostensible politics.

Earlier, she describes with some irritation how intra-feminist politics made feminist music---and I would argue feminist expression generally---timid:

Years ago Ella Hirst had told me that she thought most female performers did not have a direct line to their emotions, the way men did---they were too busy trying to please.  It seemed to me that too many of the women's-culture people had merely switched from trying to please men to trying to please other women.

She goes on to describe an example:

A couple of years ago I had gone to see the feminist folk-rock group the Deadly Nightshade at a lesbian bar in Boston.  They sang "Honky Tonk Women" with rewritten, nonsexist lyrics.  Someone in the audience sent them an outraged note, attacking them for singing an antiwoman song. The lead singer read the note aloud and nervously and defensively complained that the writer hadn't been listening.  The incident helped me understand why I wasn't enthusiastic about the group.  They did not have the confidence, or the arrogance, to say or feel, "If you don't like it, tough shit."  It was not that I thought performers should be indifferent to the response of their audience.  I just thought that the question they ought to ask was not "How can I make them like me?" but "How can I make them hear me?"

These observations of Willis's echoed through my brain in two very different ways today: one regarding intercine warfare amongst feminist bloggers and one regarding the circular firing squad reaction of liberals who immediately set to shaming and scolding other liberals for celebrating that Bin Laden was killed.  Let's see if I can tease this out a little.

On the first one, what happened was Jill Filipovic issued a long response to the large numbers of humorless joy-killers who  hang out at Feministe, waiting for her to say something they can blow way out of proportion, so as to start a flame war accusing her of insensitivity or having nice things, which she is apparently supposed to feel bad about.  I have no idea what has managed to keep this place relatively free of the joy-killing trolls, though I have a few guesses I won't bother you with here.  Either way, I've always felt bad that Jill gets abused so much by bullies who hide behind feminism, and was glad to see her punch back.

But in the feminist blogosphere, “calling out” has increasingly turned into cannibalism. It’s increasingly turned into a stand-in for actual activism. We have increasingly focused on shutting down voices rather than raising each other up. Pointing at the gap has replaced doing the hard, often thankless work of filling it......

None of which, again, is to say that you should just turn your head if an important topic isn’t being addressed, or if something isn’t being addressed adequately, or if someone fucks up. It is to say that we should all keep the end goal in mind, and communicate accordingly. And none of this is about the Shameless post in particular — it’s about the entirety of this corner of the internet, and how we treat each other, and how there’s this weird sense that we’re all in competition for the Best Feminist prize and that we win by cutting each other down and calling each other out and denouncing anyone who gets more attention than we do.

Best Feminist prize: love it. It's hard to put your finger on when someone crosses the line from issuing a legitimate criticism to when someone is trucking in outrage for the hell of it, but like with obscenity, you know it when you see it. You can just tell when someone is more interested in feeling righteous than doing right, and when they prefer to tear down rather than build up.  Sometimes they prefer it because it's easier.  Sometimes they're bullies and assholes.  Most people I see doing this are genuinely just lazy. They don't want to meet people where they're at.  They don't want to be challenged.  They want clear black and white rules and they want to believe that oppression can be overcome by just policing other liberals endlessly to make sure they don't say words like "lame" or "crazy". They see some of the uglier emotions in people, like bitchiness or morbidity, and they want to silence instead of think about how these emotions can be channeled in the right direction. They want to score points in some game that never ends by mouthing off because you joked that someone is ugly or reacted with irreverence to some cultural event or piece of writing. They hear the Sex Pistols' "Bodies" and want to flip it off rather than grapple with the complex emotions it brings to the fore. 

But they're wrong.  Willis ends her essay "Beginning To See The Light" with this feeling of wanting to be challenged even by stuff that makes us uncomfortable because it falls outside of an easily defined set of rules about what you are and are not allowed to say and be a Good Feminist.  Turn a couple pages and you find Willis in 1997 noting, almost marginally, that this urge of hers ended up being the right one in retrospect.  Instead of abandoning punk rock because of the misogyny, many feminist-minded women were drawn to it because of its anarchist urges.  And they picked up guitars and started to make the music that there hadn't been before.  They started, as Jill suggests, to fill the gaps.  Grappling instead of silencing was more work, but what it created was greater.  It turned into Joan Jett.  It turned into Riot Grrrl.  It turned women into feminists who would have avoided it like the plague if the only path to feminism was a dour one centered around coaching people to watch their mouths instead of open their hearts.  Though Riot Grrrl did descend into a similar clusterfuck, and it similarly caused a lot of people to quit.  The people who survived and went on to make more music that is feminist in spirit and in content were those who decided that they simply were going to not let critics put them in a corner where they valued not-offending over speaking their truths.

What does this have to do with Osama Bin Laden?  Well, I saw a similar kind of thing going on with the reaction of many on the left who were made uncomfortable when others reacted not with a Christian-tinged sobriety, but with partying in the streets or crass jokes on Twitter.  They told us to shut up and quiet down and act with more "dignity", aka all this WASP shit that I'm so done with that I think I was born done with it.  When I see piety crop up so rapidly, my number one urge is to stick a clown nose on it, but I did try to respond at Double X more thoughtfully.  My feeling is that elation is a reaction that is understandable, and instead of trying to squelch it, we should try to understand it.  And by understanding it, we can use this feeling for our purposes, to demand an end to the war now that we've accomplished this goal. In other words, to listen to the Sex Pistols and instaed of turning it off in disgust, to think, "How can I use this and make something greater out of it?"

If feminists had abandoned punk rock, it would have degenerated into a stew of misogynist bile. By engaging it and channeling it, feminists were able to turn it into a feminist art form.  I see the jubiliant reaction to Bin Laden's death the same way.  Liberals can decide it's shameful to enjoy it, and shame each other out of it.  That will mean the only people who engage in it will be conservatives, meaning that it will, beyond a shadow of a doubt, turn into a bloodthirsty call for more scalps.

Or we could engage it.  We could take this form---this relief, this ecstasy---and own it.  We can say, "YAY WE WON, LET'S BRING 'EM HOME!" We have a choice: Do we want to feel righteous and pure, or do we want to have a part in shaping what happens next with all this energy?

I've noted before that I'm done with words like "problematic" that serve not to illuminate or deepen understanding, but to create unease and get people to shy away from dealing with the complexities.  I'm also done with a liberalism that prioritizes point-scoring over grappling.  And with liberalism that is always on the look out for people having too much fun or being messy or complex.  Not that I'm going to give up criticizing or saying harsh things, as I did with my post mocking the American tradition of the proposal.  In fact, I would say that these insights are probably going to make my world more complex, my choices harder and more oriented towards the gray.  But that's a task I'm willing to take on and hope others are willing to join.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this situation where firefighters let a man’s house burn to the ground (killing multiple pets, which was what ended up really upsetting my soft heart at the end of day, since animals don’t know from the weird political loopholes that create situations like this) because he didn’t pay a $75 fee.  What’s fascinating about this is how the blogosphere fell on the story, and also how predictable it was—-liberals were outraged and conservatives were smug to downright gleeful.  Everyone rationalized their reaction by treating this like a referendum on the morality of privatizing government.  Right wingers thought it was an awesome display of their moral weight that they’d sooner let a man’s house burn to the ground than let him get a service for free, and liberals pointed out how morally bankrupt that is. 

The one problem with it, which something Marc pointed out to me when we were talking about it? 

This has nothing to do with libertarian “philosophy”, privatization, or any other right wing enthusiasm. In fact, if we’re talking strictly philosophical differences, liberals should be the ones pointing out that if you don’t pay taxes, services will not be rendered.  This man’s house burning to the ground is a stark demonstration of what would happen to everyone if right wingers got their way and taxes became a thing of the past. And in general, liberals could point out that what happened to Gene Craddick and his family is an illustration of the problems that erupt when a bunch of Americans think they’re too good to obey the social contract, and build miles upon miles of exurbs with gated communities, gates that symbolically shield them from either having to rub shoulders with people they don’t consider Real Americans, or pay taxes so that we can all have public goods, like fire departments.  Not that this is exactly what happened in this case—-I’m not making any statements about Craddick’s political beliefs or why he lived in a place where you had to pay $75 a year so the fire department would haul so far out to put your house out.  But as exurban, low tax areas grow, the kind of arrangement that led this horrible situation is probably going happen more and more.  (And Obion County does seem to fit the profile.)  Liberals could have used this situation to ask ourselves hard questions, like, “If people really are going to go out of their way to avoid paying into the tax base, shouldn’t their access to services be revoked?  If one party opts out of the social contract, do the rest of us still have to take care of them?”

After all, the fire department in this case isn’t actually a privatized fire department.  It’s a public one.  For the areas it traditionally serves, the South Fulton Fire Department doesn’t require a $75 fee from residents, because they’re paid for out of taxes.  The reason they serve anyone in the outlying Obion County areas is because South Fulton is actually being generous in allowing people to opt in for a fee.  They do this even though the county actually looked at the possibility of creating a tax-funded fire department, and chose not to do so.

The county has declined to provide fire services for a long time, it’s been a lively issue for a long time, and they know perfectly well that local cities won’t always respond to their fires. Courtesy of the world wide web, for example, here’s “A Presentation Regarding The Establishment And Implementation of a County-Wide Fire Department,”  dated March 18, 2008, describing exactly how fire services work in the County of Obion. Also included in this document: a plan to create an Obion County Fire Department by merging the services of the various municipal fire departments in the county along with a plan to raise about half a million dollars to fund it. Revenue would come from either a 0.13 cent property tax increase, a fee on electric meters, or a flat subscription fee.

The county commissioners of Obion County apparently decided against this plan. Didn’t want to increase taxes, I suppose. As a result, Gene Cranick’s house burned down.

The reason that refusing to raise your own fire department and instead relying on the generosity of your neighbors who do pay taxes is not a “libertarian” solution is because you’re basically leeching off people who do take responsibility as good citizens and kick in.  The $75 annual fee is all good and well, but it relies on someone else actually putting the cash up front to have a fire department.  So the complaints from right wingers about how people who actually pay taxes are “jerks, freeloaders, and ingrates” are exactly ass-backward.  Right wingers who create massive tax shelters for themselves and then expect to opt in to what the taxpayers have built for a nominal fee that they can pretend is “libertarian”?  They’re the ones not pulling their weight.  I’m guessing in an area where a .13% property tax increase (that’s .13%, not 13%) is considered too onerous of a burden for the John Galts of Tennessee to pay, you have a lot of people who also think they’re too good to pay the $75 annual fee, expecting the fire department paid by non-Galt non-freeloaders (turned by the magic of Glenn Beck into the bad guys with their hands out) would help them anyway.  No wonder the firefighters of South Fulton got fed up and decided to make an example out of someone.  Gene Craddick appears to have been the perfect target for their ire, since he had already had one fire that they put out, even though he hadn’t paid his fee.

If we’re talking strictly philosophy, then this should be a situation where liberals are—-like I’m basically doing—-decrying the freeloading of those who basically claim they’re too good for taxes, but throw a shit fit when services aren’t provided.  This situation is the ugly result of the attitude that leads a bunch of Medicare recipients to claim they oppose socialized welfare.  Or how red states that have voted themselves low taxes get away with it because they get more than their fair share of the federal piggy.  A bunch of wingnuts priding themselves on how “John Galt” they are requires a lot of financial indulgence from those of us who pay our taxes without complaint, because we actually remember that fire fighters, construction workers, and cops need to get paid.

Right wingers like to pretend that this is a good example of some perfect Ayn Rand utopia where even the fire department is privatized, but in reality, it would be costing WAY more than $75 a year to the white flighters to get in on a private fire department.  This pittance fee is a yet another example of how the people who think they’re so self-sufficient are being subsidized by the people they hate and who they won’t help back.  Sprawling exurbs that allow people to engage in both white flight and flight from higher taxes are only possible because they build on the infrastructure built up by the federal taxes that wingnuts protest and the city taxes that the white flighters think they’re too good to pay. 

Despite the fact that this is a pitch-perfect example of why liberals are right, though, you find liberals are the ones who are upset about this and conservatives are far more likely to be basking in the pain of the Craddick family.  Why is this?

My theory: because libertarianism is, as it always has been, nothing more but a pseudo-intellectual gloss painted on straight up assholery to make it seem shinier than it is. 

I’ll add that if Gene Craddick had come out all full wingnut about this, indignant that the “liberal elite” refused to help him, conservatives probably would have defended him to the death.  Instead, he chalked this up to an innocent mistake (the kind that actually having a more traditional tax structure would have made impossible), and so they felt good about being vicious assholes about his monumental loss.  I just hope the county takes this as a lesson, passes their teeny-weeny tax raise, and gets some firefighters so this doesn’t happen to anyone else.

Andrew Breitbart has offered $100,000 for the entire archive of JournoList, which is totally awesome, because I would really love to see him shell out that much money to be completely disappointed.

As a testament to just how enthrallingly conspiratorial JournoList was, I at this moment have over 500 unread JList threads in my GMail.  This is not because the people on it were boring or unintelligent, but because I tended not to open requests for contact information for people I didn’t know, or look at job postings for jobs I couldn’t take, or get into baseball threads, or read a lot of the article/post pimping that took place. 

But really, what this is about is that the list, unseen, is a fertile ground for the imaginings of nutjobs.  Breitbart finds it the “holy grail of liberal media bias”; PowerLine wants to find the “collusion” that occurred on the list, because what it makes sense for 400 independent professional writers to do is to explicitly make blood pacts over and over again about not covering stories; Gateway Pundit and his commenters have decided that it was mainly Keith Olbermann and Katie Couric conspiring with each other, and wouldn’t mind destroying the lives of every person on the list; Dan Riehl reveals that he pissily quit a righty listserv because he got his fee-fees hurt, but it was totally different because that listserv was strictly dedicated to its mission; IowaHawk has decided that it was a listserv of 14-year-old girls, because liberals are so gay.

The secret power of JournoList is not in anything it did - as Ezra points out, it was too large to accomplish any of the secret and terrible things it’s alleged to be behind - but instead that the right has so internalized its own narratives of victimization and righteousness that the very act of people in the same industry talking to each other is a betrayal not just of their professional responsibility, but of the very principles of America itself.

Breitbart, if he ever got the archive (which is doubtful), would almost certainly use it to ruin someone’s career.  Not because that person said anything that was career ruining, but because he or she committed the grave sin of being liberal.  The conservative response to JList is largely about fear of the unknown, the same way an insecure significant other tries to break into their partner’s e-mail to make sure no cheating is occurring, or a little brother steals his older sister’s diary only to find out she’s mainly making lists of which colleges she’s thinking of applying to and constantly redoing the math to see when she can afford the used Honda Civic she’s had her eye on.

JournoList is far less interesting and far less influential than any conservative critic thinks.  But because it involves those they despise doing things they can’t see, it is prima facie evidence of every terrible thing they’ve ever thought about liberals and journalists.  This isn’t to even mention the irony of Breitbart using unseen (and, let’s be honest, nonexistent) evidence for an assertion he desperately wants to believe about liberal media collusion after spending months bitching about not being able to find video of black Representatives being called niggers.

Oh well, off to convince Wolf Blitzer to call Bobby Jindal a droopy-faced shitbag.  And then to have lots of gay sex with him while watching Dear John.  Channing Tatum is such a dreamy hunk of man-meat. 

God, I want JList back…

Did you know that liberals are big dumbs about economics?  I’ll bet you didn’t, because you’re too busy reading Paul Krugman talk about how we will solve the recession by hunting leprechauns, ya big dumb!

Well, George Mason professor of economics Daniel Klein surveyed people and found the shocking truth: liberals are really bad at agreeing with poorly worded questions that would otherwise prove how brilliant they are if they weren’t liberals.

Consider one of the economic propositions in the December 2008 poll: “Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable.” People were asked if they: 1) strongly agree; 2) somewhat agree; 3) somewhat disagree; 4) strongly disagree; 5) are not sure.

Basic economics acknowledges that whatever redeeming features a restriction may have, it increases the cost of production and exchange, making goods and services less affordable. There may be exceptions to the general case, but they would be atypical.

Therefore, we counted as incorrect responses of “somewhat disagree” and “strongly disagree.” This treatment gives leeway for those who think the question is ambiguous or half right and half wrong. They would likely answer “not sure,” which we do not count as incorrect.

So, if you asked me a question that made a broad, sweeping proposition that seemed mainly right, or mostly right, or pretty right with some big caveats, I’d probably say “somewhat disagree”.  For instance, a development restriction that said you had to build apartments for rent instead of condos for sale would likely result in cheaper, more accessible housing.  A development restriction that said every house had to comply with very strict and expensive building standards would likely make the housing more expensive.  This isn’t rocket science, it’s basic analysis of any statement that’s too broad.

(There’s also the question of the difference between “somewhat agree” and “somewhat disagree” - they’re basically the same answer, differentiated solely by where your starting point is in the analysis of the statement.)

Of course, because “regulation bad” is something that pleasurably soils the Dockers of conservatives and libertarians, they’re going to answer overwhelmingly with one of the “agrees” and liberals are more likely to answer with one of the “disagrees”:

In this case, percentage of conservatives answering incorrectly was 22.3%, very conservatives 17.6% and libertarians 15.7%. But the percentage of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly was 67.6% and liberals 60.1%. The pattern was not an anomaly.

Let’s look at other questions in the survey:

The other questions were: 1) Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services (unenlightened answer: disagree). 2) Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago (unenlightened answer: disagree). 3) Rent control leads to housing shortages (unenlightened answer: disagree). 4) A company with the largest market share is a monopoly (unenlightened answer: agree). 5) Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited (unenlightened answer: agree). 6) Free trade leads to unemployment (unenlightened answer: agree). 7) Minimum wage laws raise unemployment (unenlightened answer: disagree).

So, basically, if you make sweeping statements that take complex economic patterns and boil them down to ten words or less, and you then voice any reservations about the contentions they make, you’re a fucking moron. 

Americans in the first three categories do reasonably well. But the left has trouble squaring economic thinking with their political psychology, morals and aesthetics.

The main problem here is that this isn’t economic thinking - this is economic catchphrasing.  Are some Third World workers working for American companies overseas being exploited?  Yes.  Unquestionably.  This isn’t a matter of accepting broad economic theory or not, this is a matter of starting from a series of assumptions purposely designed to tweak liberals and then calling liberals dumb for voicing the accurate reservations you knew they were going to have. 

The odd part is in questions like the living standard question - although our overall standard of living has risen over the past 30 years, the recession has caused that standard to take a huge hit, sending some people back decades.  (And yes, that’s an article from the very newspaper Klein’s column was published in.  He did not notice this because he is so very dumb.)

If this is the new standard of judging economic literacy, I’m just going to go to a Young Republican rally and ask if tax cuts solve economic downturns.  Everyone who agrees will be labeled a total dunce and be recommended for removal from the gene pool.  Can I be a professor of economics now, please?

We’re already getting the world-weary sighing about how we need to move on from the Rand Paul thing—-and don’t worry, it’s the weekend and we will—-but I do feel the obsession over it that sprouted up needs a defender.  Rachel Maddow did an excellent job on this front.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

But I’d also like to take the time to talk about Rand Paul, teabaggers, and why libertarianism matters despite being unbelievably childish as a philosophy.  I think a lot of media people tend to think of libertarians mostly as a tiny minority of overprivileged twits who are relatively harmless with the power fantasies of what unbelievable sci-fi badasses they would be if the government just got rid of OSHA.  But the folks who write for Reason and work for the Cato Institute aren’t really representative of libertarianism as it actually exists in most of the U.S. Because self-identified libertarians are a tiny minority doesn’t mean that libertarian thought doesn’t enjoy widespread popularity amongst conservative Republicans.  Indeed, libertarianism is the primary intellectual justification in this country for resistance to most social justice movements.  (I use the term “intellectual” loosely here, but you know what I mean.)  It is also the primary intellectual justification for unchecked corporate power that leads to disasters like our collapsed economy and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  And I would argue that the existence of the Republican party today depends largely on people who are invested in the latter exploiting people invested in the former for support and votes.  And that’s why libertarianism is extremely fucked up and concern about it isn’t a distraction.  Most people who spout libertarian arguments are self-identified Republicans, and most of them have extremely conservative views on race and gender.

I thought I’d break down my examination into some major points.

Values

One of the unfortunately unquestioned aspects of the argument that folks Paul aren’t racists so much as strict ideologues is it buys into the assumption that the ideologies we support and values we hold just exist, as if they were assigned to us randomly at birth.  This doesn’t actually comport well with reality.  Most people’s values derive from their ideas of what the world should be like.  A common exercise with activists in trying to get them to clarify what their values are and how to fight for them is to have them picture the world they want.  What they picture can be used to figure out what they value.  (For instance, I picture a world where people are unrestrained by prejudice to live full and meaningful lives.) Therefore, if their values just so happen to create a world marked by racial segregation and most wealth being held in the hands of the few, and most of the people who benefit from these values are people who look like those who hold them, then it’s a safe assumption that they chose their values to achieve these ends. 

Which isn’t to say that people can’t make mistakes, or incorrectly think that value X will lead to result Y.  However, when presented with historical evidence that their assumptions—-in this case that free enterprise would automatically desegregate—-are incorrect, if they persist in arguing otherwise, they are being willfully ignorant. 

The commerce clause

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Mrs. Instapundit writes about the terrible, awful story of poor Jeff Goldstein, who is a calm, rational person who was called one of the most terrible names imaginable just for stating his opinion!

I often feel bad for those on the right such as Jeff Goldstein who try to make sense of someone on the left who treats them with disdain and disgust. Goldstein received an email from an old creative writing professor recently saying that he was disturbed by Goldstein’s writings and wanted Goldstein to remove his name from his “about page.” When Goldstein called Brian Kiteley, the professor, up on the phone for clarification, Kiteley called him names:

So I dialed him up and he answered. When I told him who was calling, he let out a forced “laugh” — I presume to show his bemused exasperation with my gall at having contacted him — and, when pressed, he called me a “jerk”.

No.  NO.  NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Never mind that Jeff Goldstein is a grown ass man who actually does jerky things on a fairly regular basis.  And never mind that “jerk” is about as milquetoast an insult as you can get without quoting Victorian-era riposte about family lineage.  Our sobby man-child is hurt, and hurt because he would never say mean or bad things about a person he’d disagree with.  And certainly would never keep someone on his site who ran pictures of Obama dressed as an African tribal king.  Alas, I digress from the awful victimization of good-hearted conservatives.

Initially, Goldstein says he was hurt by his professor’s intolerant attitude, but then, his hurt rightly turned to anger. This professor tolerated free speech only for liberal ideas. But shouldn’t we all have the right to free speech? Apparently, only if it’s left-leaning. And one would think a creative writing professor might be above this. But the problem is, he may have a blind spot when it comes to those on the right.

Whaaaaaa?  He asked Goldstein to remove his name from a page because he didn’t want to be associated with Goldstein.  Free speech doesn’t mean mandatory approval of ideas.  I personally think Jeff Goldstein writes the internet version of splattered pig feces on a wall, but it doesn’t mean I don’t tolerate his writing of his unremitting crap - it just means that I don’t like it.  There is no justification, no constitutional background, no anything for saying that you should be protected from people disliking what you say.  To argue otherwise is the ultimate form of narcissism.

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From an Althouse commenter, officially the dumbest thing that can or will be said about Ted Kennedy’s death:

And another thing - would he have lived to 77 had he been forced to use Obama(doesn’t)Care? No way - he was an old fart with a terminal illness. Take a pill, go home and die. Not that that’s a bad thing, in his case.

I’ll believe that socialized medicine is a good thing when billionaire senators are required to use it.

Everyone over age 65 is enrolled in the socialized health insurance program called Medicare.  The countries with the highest cancer survival rates all have some form of socialized health insurance or care for the elderly.  Ergo, this may be the dumbest fucking thing that’s ever been said. 

Well done, sir.  It is a new land-speed record. 

I think I wrote about the research that’s been done showing that having a daughter moves politicians to the left on issues regarding women’s health and well-being, but now there’s research extrapolating this trend to the larger population on political persuasion, not just on “women’s issues”.  Andrew Gelman quotes the research paper by Andrew J. Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee that says:

We document evidence that having daughters leads people to be more sympathetic to left-wing parties. Giving birth to sons, by contrast, seems to make people more likely to vote for a right-wing party. Our data, which are primarily from Great Britain, are longitudinal. We also report corroborative results for a German panel. Access to longitudinal information gives us the opportunity—one denied to previous researchers—to observe people both before and after they have a new child of any particular gender.

This is the sort of thing that shows why I don’t think feminism is or should be treated as a sub-topic under the main topic “general liberalism”.  Gender is a fundamental aspect of politics, and it’s impossible to separate people’s feelings and anxieties about gender from the reasons they vote this way or that.  Specifically, one’s tendency to be a right winger is quite dependent on whether or not someone is into phallic worship, coupled with a strong fear of castration. Digby has an amusing post about how the new meme is that not only will Obama confiscate your gun-based phallic substitutions, but also your gas-guzzling phallic substitutions. 

I knew the wingnuts were having a meltdown over a non-existent threat to take away their guns, but I hadn’t heard they were freaking out because the government was going to take their hummers.

Why don’t they just admit they are afraid Democrats are going to confiscate their dicks and be done with it?

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The Corner is mocking a group of liberal bloggers and journalists writing on a list (allegedly) about how smart they are because I think my head just fucking exploded sorry I got some in your coffee.