I suppose I agree with a lot of Noam Chomsky’s ideas on foreign policy, but I’m usually put off by the obnoxious way he states them. But I just noticed one line that nails some things I’ve been trying to say for years:
Indeed.As far as I know there are only two forces in the world that are pressing for a clash of civilisations. One is Osama bin Laden and the other is George Bush. Nobody else wants it.
Know what I hate about free markets? The way they make us waste scarce environmental resources.
Wait, did I say free markets? I meant to say Philadelphia labor unions:
That’s my hometown!This city’s hoped-for bragging rights as home of America’s tallest environmentally friendly building could go down the toilet.
In a city where organized labor is a force to be reckoned with, the plumbers union has been raising a stink about a developer’s plans to install 116 waterless, no-flush urinals in what will be Philadelphia’s biggest skyscraper.
Developer Liberty Property Trust says the urinals would save 1.6 million gallons of water a year at the 57-story Comcast Center, expected to open next year.
But the union put out the word it doesn’t like the idea of waterless urinals _ fewer pipes mean less work.
I found the Volokh post I mentioned earlier via Instapundit. If you go scroll down to the previous day’s posts, you find this nugget of wisdom:
Emphasis mine.Looking at those numbers, it appears that the Iraq, Afghanistan wars have resulted in an increase of 885 dead over what could have been expected through normal garrison operations in Bush II’s first term. That is not too bad when you consider that Bush has liberated two countries and fought a prolonged insurgency in both and that America lost over 1,000 dead in taking Vichy French North Africa in 1942 (that was before we even so much as fired a shot at the Germans).
So did we liberate Afghanistan, or did we set up a brutal theocracy? Or is everything good that happens in Afghanistan to Bush’s credit, and everything bad the fault of Islam?
UPDATE: Welcome Sadly No readers. Make yourselves at home. Read some crap. Can I get you a Long Trail?
On the one hand, FEC regulation of weblogs could have horrible consequences for freedom of speech. On the other hand, I really really like when the government regulates stuff.
If you read the comments thread, “Drew” goes even further: “Stoller is a member of the elite. The elite is under threat of regulation. And the elite is doing what it has always done to avoid regulation: it dons the mask of the common folk, falsely claims that the common folk will be subject to this regulation, and demands that the common folk oppose it!”
This is “campaign finance reform".
It’s Not Islamophobia When There Really Is Something To Fear:
The Bush administration has set up a brutal theocracy in Afghanistan, and it’s Islam’s fault.
Another horrifying passage in Upton Sinclair’s flawless refutation of libertarianism, The Jungle is when beef companies voluntarily choose to test their cows for disease! It’s dreadfully unfair to the companies who DON’T subject their beef to the same tests. Jurgis Rudkus longs for a brighter day when companies aren’t allowed to perform these safety tests.
Just think of the anarchic nightmare that might ensue if the government allowed these tests. That’s what libertarians would force upon us!WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Meatpacker John Stewart has sued the U.S. government to provide it with cattle testing kits so his Kansas company can prove to customers, especially in mad cow-leery Japan, that its beef is safe.
Stewart’s firm, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all its slaughter cattle for mad cow disease. Its suit, filed this week in U.S. district court in Washington, would force the Agriculture Department to give it access to test kits for the brain-wasting disease…..
Critics in the cattle industry said Creekstone is trying to hijack food safety regulations for financial advantage. The American Meat Institute, representing meatpackers, said BSE testing almost always is a government function worldwide.
Public health is protected not by mad cow tests, a USDA spokesman said, but by federal rules that ban the use of cattle parts in cattle feed and require the removal from carcasses of older cattle the brains, spinal columns and nervous tissue most at risk of carrying the infective agent for mad cow.
Bob Somerby is almost unreadably hysterical.
In today’s dispatch Somerby cites Ezra Klein’s Ezra new article on Al Gore and Kevin Drum’s link to said article, both of which are extremely pro-Gore in tone, and gets angry at them for…. I’m not quite sure what.
The thrust of Klein’s article (which is worth reading in full) is that Al Gore has reinvented himself by circumventing the mainstream media that fans like Somerby believe sank him in 2000. Somerby’s problem with Klein and Drum is, apparently, that they don’t see those same media problems as precluding a 2008 Gore campaign. But that’s the exact issue they were trying to explore!
In Somerby’s mind, it seems you can’t write anything about Al Gore that goes beyond “The media suck the media suck the media suck the media suck the media suck!!!!!!!!!!111one”
For my part, I agree with Drum that Gore might be the Democrats’ best candidate in 2008. I wouldn’t vote for him in 2000 because, among other things, he’d spent the last eight years in an administration that saw fit to bomb a different country every week. But in 2002 – when doing so got you called a radical and a traitor – he got on the right side of American foreign policy. Hillary Clinton didn’t.
Wow, this is really funny.
It is nearly impossible to make a threat during an Internet flamewar without looking like a complete idiot.
People on both the left and right get all atwitter about everything Christopher Hitchens says, but I think I’m young enough that I missed whatever got them interested. But among an excellent Reason.com feature on libertarian Iraq War supporters, I find him saying this:
So we’re going to make Iraq a war-torn terrorist hellhole but, god dammit, it’s going to be a LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC war-torn terrorist hellhole.The United States and its allies should continue to stand for federal democracy, while making Iraq a killing-field for jihadists and fascists and a training ground for an army that will need to intervene again in other failed state/rogue state contexts.
Mah fellow progressives, now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of the party. I don’t know about you, but I have had it with the D.C. Democrats, had it with the DLC Democrats, had it with every calculating, equivocating, triangulating, straddling, hair-splitting son of a bitch up there, and that includes Hillary Rodham Clinton.
I will not be supporting Senator Clinton because: a) she has no clear stand on the war and b) Terri Schiavo and flag-burning are not issues where you reach out to the other side and try to split the difference.
Except that once Senator Clinton locks up the nomination, Ivins WILL be supporting her. And attacking anyone who does otherwise.
And Senator Clinton knows that.
From Atrios:
I know this stuff isn’t very exciting, but some of the people lining up behind alternative proposals are on the record as saying sites like the Daily Kos need to be regulated as political action committees.
I like to imagine the goo-goo people are on the side of angels, if occasionally misguided, but through this long process I’ve seen enough to make me pretty suspicious.
The FEC may implement rules on Thursday which could kill blogging as we know it. Or not. No one knows what they’ve proposed.
I look forward to the egalitarian paradise that will be created by the elimination of blogs.
…. is that, if you wrote the law, you don’t have to obey it!
I didn’t that Dubai Ports World deal was a huge issue, but Thomas Knapp shows me why I should have cared.
I really wasn’t interested one way or another in Amy Sullivan’s article on the future of evangelicals in US politics. But the vicious responses it drew made me interested.
Whoa!For another, it’s delusional thinking to believe that the reason abortion is such a hot-button issue is because of some desire to help babies: it’s mainly about controlling women and controlling sexuality.
The polling data on abortion is confusing stuff. People want abortion legal for anyone they know who wants one, and illegal for everyone else. Or they want abortion legal when it’s described in nice-sounding terms, and illegal when it’s not.
But clearly there is a huge portion of the population that thinks the illegalization of abortion is at least an idea worth considering. My question, then, is whether ALL of those people really want to control women and control sexuality.
I’ll spare you the boring biographical details, cut to the chase, and say that I know more than a few people who favor banning abortion and who, so far as I can tell, aren’t yearning to bind women’s feet. They actually DO think there’s a child’s life at stake. Really, they do. They’re not just saying that so they can repeal women’s suffrage after the election.
I don’t know what it is about abortion that makes stubborn children out of intelligent people on both sides who can discuss any other political issue, including ones on which children’s lives depend, rationally. On the left you have the people who say that not only should abortion be legal, not only must we pretend there’s a right to abortion in the Constitution, but we can’t even refer to abortion as an undesirable turn of events. (Atrios, I’m looking at you.) On the right, you have people (Papists like me, mostly) who are basically socialists but won’t ever vote for a Democrat because of abortion.
That the former group won’t engage the latter is just dumb.
In an excellent post on bad “policy marriages” Cato’s Will Wilkinson says:
I got called a socialist last month for saying very much the same thing.If I could push a button and divorce houses from schools and work from health care, I would do it. I would prefer generous federal-level education vouchers, and generous federal-level universal insurance coverage over the status-quo. And I don’t like either of those ideas very much.
(I will die in the last ditch, however, to prevent further government involvement in the provision, as opposed to the financing, of education and health care. Whether you can get redistributive taxpayer financing without terrible government provision and control is a question for the ages. Other things equal, you should be opposed to a policy roughly in proportion to the degree that it interferes with price signals.)
Hey, Fred Hiatt and the gang rouse themselves from their slumber to write a decent editorial calling on Congress to repeal the ban on gays in the military. Good for them. But of course what’s missing from it is the acknowledgement that George Bush will not call for it and the Republicans who control Congress will not do it. The editorial would be a lot more honest if they appended “…but, sadly, the sociopathic Republican bigots who run the administration and Congress are as likely to do this as they are anything that might actually be good for the country.”
Right, and imagine if a Democrat had written an editorial in the 1990’s calling for an end to the death penalty or the drug war, both of which have seriously racist consequences, and appended “…but, sadly, the sociopathic Democratic bigots who run the administration and Congress are as likely to do this as they are anything that might actually be good for the country.”
I’m pretty sure she’d make “wanker of the day", if it had existed then.
I bet somebody less lazy than me could write a good blog post by comparing recent right-wing blog posts about Iraq to excerpts from Atlas Shrugged in which the evil looter characters (who all have names like Snivelly McPoopeater) freak out about how their great collectivist plans are failing, blaming everyone but themselves.
I’m not about to go buy it, though. I don’t know if my car can handle the weight of 1200 pages.
After I wrote this post I remembered something else I should have linked. Max Sawicky:
When an economist agrees with your dismissal of economic issues, you’re probably right. Likewise, I’d vote for an antiwar socialist before I’d vote for a pro-war libertarian.The unfortunate problem for Hillary, who has the nomination in ‘08 so locked up it isn’t funny, is that there is no middle ground. If she extends her centrist performance to some kind of failure-is-not-an-option position, she follows in Hubert Humphrey’s footsteps and ensures the participation of a peace candidate. Democrats can only hope that her center leanings are aimed at insulating her from advocating withdrawal.
An independent peace candidacy that sinks Hillary might not be the worst outcome. Support for the war will consume politicians, with the result that control of Congress could shift. The more public rejection of pro-war advocacy, regardless of the source of that advocacy, the sooner the U.S. will get out, and the less likely it will get in somewhere else. At this point in time, that is the preeminent national priority.
I’d vote for an anti-war libertarian before I’d vote for a pro-war Democrat.
This is exactly what I worry about.
California’s Senate is considering a bill that would, to put it most charitably, attempt to import Canada’s healthcare system. In other words, outlaw all private provision of healthcare.
Ezra Klein, whose series The Health of Nations should be required reading for politicians who want to meddle in this stuff (although they mostly can’t be bothered to read their own meddling legislation) says it best:
Canada, however, is not a good health care system. Not compared to France, to Germany, to Japan or to Sweden. Health care is not a finite resource, so outlawing private dollars from any role in the market is a bit silly. So long as you’re gonna make money, I can’t think of a much more logical place to spend it than medical treatment.
I’ve said before that I’m not totally opposed to government provision of healthcare, but I AM totally opposed to banning private alternatives.
Wow, the BBC World Service is taking this Gary Glitter business really seriously. Every time I turn it on, they’re talking about it. Is he really that big a deal in Britain?
And the American conservative movement’s fatal flaw as a party of limited government always has been and always will be nationalism. Pick an expansion of government power - a war; a highway system; a surveillance program - and if you can somehow associate it with killing foreigners you can peel away enough “limited-government conservatives” to get your way. Organs and people from National Review to Robert Heinlein to Barry Goldwater have tried to be nationalists AND at least operationally libertarian; in every case, the nationalism has won out. That’s why Republican criticism of Clinton’s Kosovo adventure ultimately didn’t amount to much….
I love France so much I can’t bear to part with an inch of it, Shakespeare has Henry V say. And I love the Republican Party so much I can’t wait to see it in opposition again.
Over at chez Sawicky, Josh Bivens has an informative rundown of the differences between the center-left and left economic schools of thought in mainstream American policy circles. He’s firmly on the left side but he’s fair to the other.
What I conclude from this debate is that I don’t care much about economics.
We’re in a war that constitutes America’s worst policy blunder in decades. We’re heading for at least one more, possibly several. We lock up a higher percentage of our population than any other country you wouldn’t be ashamed to be compared with, mostly for nonviolent offenses. Our federal government consistently equips our local police forces with military-grade weaponry, with disastrous consequences. Our own laws are broken by every level of our own government day in and day out. Most of these policies are supported wholeheartedly by the mainstream wings of our two major parties.
Anyone who will do anything about those issues has my vote, regardless of economic policy. I can’t possibly imagine choosing a candidate on the basis of “primary vs. secondary distribution interventions". It’s small potatoes.
Powered by WordPress
