Seavey Does Libertarianism Rockabilly Style

Celebrate July Fourth (at any time) the rockabilly way, by listening to me -- Todd Seavey, author of Libertarianism for Beginners -- interviewed by hosts Johnny Rocket, Heather Nixon, and Curt Nelson on the radio show Johnny Rocket Launch Pad. (From 44 minutes through 56 minutes in is the “lightning round” where you hear how quickly I can answer random questions, all the more reason to have me on your show/stage/campus/panel as well.)

You may also hear Cab Calloway, the Police, the Animals, Stray Cats, and Del Shannon, as I constantly do in my head. And yes, at 40 minutes in you’ll find my notorious and now recurring karaoke rendition of “Rainbow Connection.” I did Kermit for Gavin McInnes and Amy Schumer; it would be unfair not to do him for the legendary Johnny Rocket Launch Pad show.

P.S. Rock and roll addendum: you’ll also find me quoted about the David Bowie song “Oh! You Pretty Things” in this article by Robert Lurie on TheFederalist.

“Essential Hayek” and “Taking a Stand”

•Careful observers will have noticed I have four favorite topics on this blog, basically sci-fi, music, science, and politics.

But having recently watched both Marvel and DC abandon having a coherent fictional universe, stopped hosting events in youthful and indie-rockin’ Williamsburg, begun to suspect that science idolatry could cause people to overlook strange-but-perhaps-real things with which skeptics ought to wrestle or cause them to accept as final some verdicts merely gussied up in the acceptable scientific lingo, and despaired of virtually any mainstream political current leading anywhere good, I need to retool. Online, I will focus on plugging a couple crucial, radical libertarian projects.

•But for a taste, instead, of the economist who is probably the most respectable and mainstream manifestation of libertarianism so far, you might check out Don Boudreaux’s look at Essential Hayek with explanatory videos at that link to augment the print material.

The basic free-market case is needed now, with socialist Bernie Sanders rallying a crowd of nearly 10,000 in Madison, Hillary Clinton pretty openly working for authoritarian foreign governments and no one caring, politicians of both parties serving the Saudis in similar fashion, and a Vox piece (h/t Sonny Bunch) saying the American Revolution was a mistake (in part because we’d have a more redistributive government if we hadn’t left England).

And calling these things bad signs would be considered hilariously unhip these days in some quarters, like being pro-McCarthy a half-century ago. Get with the socialist program, dude! Everyone knows it works great! Look at the cool people running Greece!

•Since I don’t think all that is cool, I’m going to start writing libertarian columns daily for SpliceToday.com on Monday -- and a few months later unveil the book I’m writing, Libertarianism for Beginners.

•What better time to dig deeper and teach the world the whole conventional political spectrum is wrong than now, with the prospect of another Clinton-vs.-Bush election upon us next year? A lot could happen before November 2016, but Clinton’s still safely ahead of Sanders, and all the Republican candidates (if we assume the small Trump launch bump is temporary) are down in the single digits in surveys of Republican voters except Jeb Bush, who is at an anemic but perhaps sufficient 19% or so. We can do better, but only with a change in philosophy.

•You know if I had my way, the paleolibertarian + crunchy con + antiwar candidate to emerge from the Republican primary would be Rand Paul, author of Taking a Stand. While conservatives and libertarians fight over whether he really belongs in the other camp, Paul to his credit is busy reaching out beyond both Republican factions, already building bridges to Democrats and, yes, alienated black voters. He could win the general that way, I think. And he could change world history. Everyone ought to regard him as a sign of real hope.

Incidentally, though he comes from the faction of libertarianism more fond of Mises than Hayek, a faction with more right-wing baggage, he expressed support for South Carolina taking down the Confederate Flag, and his call for privatizing marriage is the correct libertarian response to cultural wrangles like the one that I hope just ended last week. I also respect his silence on the topic as it was being resolved. Politicians should often be silent. Paul is a Christian but knows it’s more important how deep in debt the federal government is than how deeply disturbing some people think certain sexual relationships are.

But principles are more important than individual politicians, whether Rand Paul or Gary Johnson or anyone else, and starting tomorrow, on the Fourth of July, I’ll stick to using the Net to reaffirm those basic principles and steer clear of some of the crazier, pettier wrangles the Net’s gotten so good at fomenting.

Who Watches the “Shmexperts”?

Professors are often idiots (never mind that obscure faux-black professor in the news today: prestigious universities used to give awards to actual Zimbabwean ruler Mugabe, and now it takes literally 35 quadrillion of his regime’s dollars to buy one of ours). And scientists are routinely wrong. And people who claim to know comedy may have no discernible sense of humor.

Yet our world is largely run by those who get anointed “experts” through one bullshit credentialing process or another, such as getting a Ph.D. or writing for the Huffington Post. What is to be done? Below, a helpful book recommendation and a dozen reminders how full-of-it these people are.

1. The increasingly obvious “intellectual gridlock” between dueling right and left pundits is as good a reminder as any that it's time to set aside the old right/left spats and, embarrassing as it may be, fight the hybrid globalist-corporatist-fascist-socialist takeover -- as fellow anarchists.

Look, I know how that sounds to most people. I mean, just stating the basic facts makes one sound like a sci-fi conspiracy theorist, but, yeah, we actually now live in a world where within about a day (literally) of Sen. Rand Paul singlehandedly putting the brakes on NSA snooping, we found out (A) Obama’s simply ordering the snooping expanded via other routes, especially “near” the border, (B) that for-now-stymied big international trade agreement violates privacy and encourages international data-sharing in various ways, (C) the FBI operates a fleet of small surveillance aircraft perpetually cruising over major cities (do they operate the massive, silent, hovering triangular craft people keep seeing, I wonder?), and (D) China just stole all the U.S. government employees’ data.

As if it weren’t bad enough that the libertarians of New Hampshire were used as a weak argument by local cops for Homeland Security-subsidized armaments, now Reason magazine is being subpoenaed by the Justice Department for (plainly hyperbolic) comments by its online readers in threads on the magazine’s site and in Austria libertarian reporters are literally being watched by Cobra special police operatives at the big annual Bilderberg conference (they’re actually called Cobra).

It’s not my fault reality sounds like paranoia. Who has time to fight all these battles one at a time anymore? Time to reject it all in one fell swoop, I say.

2. On the bright side, paranoia can be entertaining, and I recommend the new USA Network series Mr. Robot, based on the premiere episode they briefly put online. The show airs regularly starting Wednesday, June 24 and depicts an impressively antisocial, spooky, alienated young hacker (instead of the usual charismatic TV-being) being recruited into a left-anarchist cabal that hates society as much as he does but plans to do things about it that he’s not sure he should be part of. I think it’ll be good, and fairly smart.

3. If that’s not punk-rock enough, see the band Mission of Burma with me two weeks from tonight (on June 26) at the Bell House in Brooklyn. These last-minute sloppy appeals for a concert buddy have been working out nicely so far.

4. For a more detailed, book-length sticking of it to “the Man” and all the experts who work for that Man, check out Marc Fitch's Shmexperts when it hits bookstores in November because I’ve been waiting for a book all my adult life that comes right out and says that our high regard for experts, even the ones with actual science degrees and the like, is fundamentally misplaced.

Fitch makes the case, with great humor, that our trust in today’s experts, even when their data is weak and their conclusions wildly overblown, is just another manifestation of that more ancient guide faith, which I’d add is also unreliable. Sometimes everyone is wrong, but no one likes to admit that. And so tomorrow’s papers will likely tell you the “secret to longevity” or (as numerous recent pieces did after some science study or other) the “code for happiness” or some other weakly-supported but eagerly-consumed nonsense.

Fitch sides with the “Average Joe” who suspects the experts are ignorant bigmouths. If enough people read his book, maybe even college graduates will find the courage possessed now only by uneducated bar stool drunks -- to say it’s all bunk. 

5. As noted in my previous blog entry, if all it takes to be regarded as soothsayer is getting a few predictions right, we should all really be getting our futurist insights from Seth MacFarlane, whose show Family Guy, in its complete randomness, seems to keep presaging world events. Maybe everyone should see Ted 2 in a few weeks to help them cope with the increasingly frequent debates over how to define who’s human, female, black, etc.

6. Things are getting postmodern enough to seem as if it all has to fly apart and end soon, so maybe fictional experts at the Onion put it best (h/t Will Pangman).

7. Seriously, though, the problem here is that people are unwilling to admit the good and the bad come packaged together, so they assume someone with one decent insight is brilliant on all subjects. It makes it hard for people to see, for instance, that Elon Musk might be both visionary and a mooch.

8. If the geniuses negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement come up empty thanks to the U.S. Congress, Greece bails on its EU financial obligations, and the bond market falls apart all around the same time, it will be interesting to see who gets blamed for what.

9. It is tempting to think that science is above the fray and offers an escape from all that politicking, but does it really? Witness this litany of distractions and tangents as a columnist attempts to defend abortion without making any real arguments -- particularly that almost dreamlike and irrelevant bit about the kids caring for animals.

And if we’re convinced looking at concrete reality absent ideology yields the “real” answers on such contentious topics, try the clarity and physical specificity of this pro-life tale on for size (just for contrast, mind you -- I’m pretty moderate on the whole topic).

10. The inordinate praise recently heaped on the Faulkner play The Sound and the Fury here in NYC by the Times and Entertainment Weekly is enough to remind us that the intelligentsia actually love being confused, much like cult members, so long as they are tantalized by the suspicion there’s profundity in there somewhere amidst all the crap and distraction, and that it’s profundity with a message they’d still end up agreeing with if they could spot it.

That’s twentieth-century literature in a nutshell.

11. A new Florence + the Machine album came out on June 2, and at least she reaches all the way back to the Middle Ages at times for her chaos and confusion, making it seem a bit more timeless and grand. This number from a prior album makes it pretty blatant.

12. But uncertainty can be managed even if it cannot be fully escaped, and so I am off now to party with Bayesians -- and back next week to muse about whether the ancients mapped an iceless Antarctica, even if the experts understandably ask where all the water would have been at the time. 

7 Habits of the “Too Big to Fail” (and a Lloyd Cole invite)

It’s good to commemorate the past, as people are doing today, but the future matters as well. Time and again, people assume big, old institutions, ostensibly “too big to fail,” will always be around, until they suddenly aren’t. If you want to avoid being startled by history, don’t do these seven things disastrous things:

1. Don’t assume current media-consumption patterns can’t change.

There are more than three TV networks these days. Thus, I was part of a three-week experiment in recording political discussion panels called The Run at BENnetwork.com, and I have no idea what the fully-realized site will look like, but at least at 1 minute into this promo clip, you get to hear a couple seconds of me explaining how humble the ambitions of anti-federal-government activists really are these days.

Now that Letterman’s gone, someone should probably hire me to be the stiff-yet-funny voice of America, like a Conan O’Brien but with politics. Or at least join me and other political nerds in seeing Rand Paul tomorrow (Tuesday, May 26, doors 7pm) at the Strand (third floor, rare books room, admission with purchase of his book Taking a Stand).

2. Don’t assume that familiar financial institutions will -- or should -- always be there.

If Rand Paul succeeds in his heroic almost-one-man effort to alter the PATRIOT ACT and stop the NSA from listening in on everyone, we will still have to explain how Andrew Ross Sorkin was able to transcribe so many verbatim comments from financial bigwigs during the initial financial crisis.

Maybe we should just grant him some poetic license, but in any case he presents what is purportedly a detailed, surprisingly intimate, and accurate picture of what the major players were doing, saying, sweating, and thinking during the 2008 meltdown on Wall Street in his hefty tome (some might call it “too big to read” -- ha ha!) Too Big to Fail, written just a couple years later (h/t Malinda Boothe).

The main lesson I draw is that what was regarded as the most apocalyptic outcome by the financial bigwigs -- and by politicians of both parties, and by most pundits and activists -- is the outcome that should have been allowed to happen, namely all of these giant, entitled, government-subsidized, bailed-out, cozy, crony, Federal-Reserve-watching, legalese-enshrouded, and, yes, regulated institutions being allowed to crash and die so that better ones might flourish.

That option would have meant intense short-term pain, and the other option was the protracted pain you’re still feeling seven years later and will probably feel more intensely in the near future thanks to the same rich imbeciles. Welcome to Plan B. On a related note...

3. Don’t just applaud “success” regardless of how that success came about.

Winning isn’t everything, no, not even in meritocratic America, and winning in the wrong way can create a bad precedent for future action. Honor soldiers but don’t excuse war crimes. Applaud CIA cleverness but don’t endorse their torture and terror tactics, not to mention their stealthy subversion of the democracy that pays their bills. You have to wonder what the elites are up to when we aren’t looking.

Admit it, even if you’re a gay leftist, wouldn't you have been a little creeped out back when Robert Gates was CIA director for Bush the Elder if I told you that someday he’d not only be Secretary of Defense for both Bush the Younger and Obama but would then go on to run the Boy Scouts and make nearly his first move the allowing, at long last, of gay Scoutmasters? Admit it, you would. (I say this as a Bowie-idolizing atheist who lives in NYC, you understand.)

And you’d fear Hillary Clinton’s Libya and lucrative foundation-donation shenanigans if she were a Republican, too. Well, at least if she makes it to the White House, I can probably look forward to her being under perpetual indictment while she’s ruling us. (Better to ditch the entire military/intelligence/police complex and do the inexpensive and more limited job of self-defense yourself, though, I suspect.)

4. Don’t assume the project they gave you is the one that matters in the long run.

It appears my friend Joann’s brother, Joseph Kahn, is a director who wants to do big sci-fi or superhero movies at some point (and nearly directed a movie version of Neuromancer, a cyberpunk project which seems somehow apt for a high-tech Texan nerd descended from Korean immigrants). He has already given the world a popular unauthorized Power Rangers short and an indie time-travel comedy.

But just because “the man” says Kahn’s real job is directing cool rock videos like the one for U2’s “Elevation” or odd, heavily studio-managed projects like the motorcycle adventure Torque doesn’t mean he can’t sneak in (awesome) comics/sci-fi material in surprising places, possibly laying groundwork for the future. Thus that striking new Taylor Swift video he directed.

The more years I spend in NYC, the more convinced I am that the future is often built by people who, say, find a way to convince the higher-ups that an elaborate puppet musical was just what they always wanted for their new ad campaign (because it is the thing the underling has been dying to pour his heart into since childhood, and it’s finally actually going to work out this time).

5. Never assume any current trend will continue, be it crime, sex, culture, temperatures, or anything else.

Speaking of rock videos, I have a zillion opinions about 80s rock videos and several about 00s rock videos, as you know, but now that I’m unyoung, my main reaction to 90s rock videos is that they were the most disturbing ones, and I’m not sure why. I mean, it can’t simply be that things always keep getting grosser and more perverse because, I’m telling you, things look tamer now than they did twenty years ago in that area.

Here’s “Push It” by Garbage, which I never saw back in the day but is fairly typical. But there was a lot of similarly twisted stuff from Bowie, Nirvana, and almost everyone else then. Every video would be a Satanic mass-child-sacrifice by now if aesthetics really just kept moving in one direction (not that I’m knocking Garbage, and I wouldn’t want to piss off the lead singer, who is of course a liquid-metal Terminator to boot).

6. Don’t forget about death.

B.B. King, R.I.P.

7. Don’t forget that time flies.

Approximately yesterday, I started setting the VCR to tape Letterman’s new show, Late Night, on NBC so I could watch it in the morning before discussing it with smart nerdy humorous friends at school who are doing the same thing. And then suddenly it’s fucking 2015. What the hell happened?

I remember complaining that it was getting a bit stale around the time of the “Late Night ’87” jokes, and I was worried, seemingly moments ago, that the CBS transition made him a bit more “Vegas” and arrogant, but then somehow three decades had gone by while I was still adjusting to it all and now he’s retired. Blink of an eye, man. Treasure things while you’ve got them and don’t let people shame you for the indulgence.

And if you missed the final minutes of his finale because the show ran long, here’s the amazing closing montage to the Foo Fighters’ “Everlong” (h/t Jeffrey Wendt).

Since time flies, I have also of course neglected to find a companion to see Lloyd Cole in concert this Saturday (May 30, 7pm) at Brooklyn’s Bell House. So let me know if you want to be my guest. It could be your last chance to see a human perform rock before the cyborgs get all the gigs. Seriously. Assume nothing. 

“The Problem of Political Authority”: a dozen anarchist thoughts (Huemer me)

1. Camilo Gomez informs me there’s a dinky Democratic Freedom Caucus within the Democratic Party (including one member of the St. Louis County Council). That’s odd enough, but the weirdest part may be that (according to Wikipedia) the group is partly Georgist, not just libertarian, aiming to move toward taxing only land.

That’s not a totally crazy idea, since industrious latecomers have almost no way of producing new land, and retention of land across generations has been the root of much of the inequity in history, but the idea has been marginal since its heyday in the mid-nineteenth century.

2. Jacob Levy doesn’t frame himself as an anarchist, but, as I blogged earlier, I think he made a valuable contribution to debates about anarcho-capitalism in his book Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom by observing that (despite some self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalists still managing to favor immigration restrictions), an-caps should be the last people to accept such restrictions -- not merely because they are usually (though not always) enforced by government but because, even in a world without government, it would be frightening if (nearly) an-cap communities couldn’t be escaped if you hated the one you were in and the neighbors didn’t like you.

The old dorm-room-philosophy nightmare scenario of someone buying all the land around you and then just letting you starve, not something that I think a libertarian normally need worry is terribly likely, takes at least a small leap closer to reality if you have no option for egress.

And the Georgists may give us other reasons not to be quite as hardcore about land as we might be about all other physical objects. I’m happy to err on the an-cap side until a nightmare scenario arises and then just refuse to prosecute people for trespassing, though (long story short, sorry).

(Of course, the border-protecting variety of an-cap -- many of them fans of Ron Paul -- might argue that societies are more obliged to let people emigrate than to immigrate, but I take the open-borders position anyway, largely just because I don’t like any precedent for giving government more power as a reward for its prior failings. If you’re a state, you don’t get border-enforcement powers as a reward for having welfare powers, and so on, just as you don’t get the right to wage a drug war or regulate people’s diets just because you were stupid enough to federally subsidize healthcare for addicts, etc.)

3. If all that sounds insane, you really ought to read Michael Huemer’s anarcho-capitalist philosophy book The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey (the first chapter of which can be read here). I may not agree with him on every detail, but anarcho-capitalist books are so rare, it’s a minor miracle by my standards to see a new tome on the topic enter the canon (and it seems to be popular, by political-philosophy standards!).

He cuts through all the messy, ornate current policy debates and gets back to the basic question, for starters, of how you react to someone showing up at your door and giving you orders.

4. As if my allies aren’t few enough, I incorrectly called Bryan Caplan, a fellow open-borders anarcho-capitalist, an economic Austrian once, when he objected to my condemnation of smoking (back when I worked at ACSH, the science group that recently sparred with the quacky Dr. Oz). He explains why he isn’t one at length here.

5. I know at least one Ayn Rand-style egoist who dismisses Huemer for not being an egoist, so it’s hard to keep everyone from fighting even within the tiny an-cap faction.

6. Venture beyond the anarcho-capitalist circle into the broader libertarian movement, though, and everything starts going to hell pretty quickly, especially these days, when you get mushiness like the BleedingHeartLibertarians site sticking up for hip young singer Dorian Electra despite her appearing to have become a socialist or something.

Heaven forbid I should criticize her intellectual explorations. Not like government’s expanding while people yack about philosophy and pooh-pooh property rights or anything.

7. But musically, the Feelies are more my speed -- so let me know if you wanna be my guest at this Saturday’s Brooklyn performance by the band.

8. It’s not all about philosophy, and I have also recently enjoyed two mystery-story-filled issues of Thuglit, which I discovered simply because I wandered into Shade Bar to say hello to my favorite goth bartender, but it was a Sunday night, when the mystery story readings occur.

9. For even greater violence and “anarchy” in the most negative (and perhaps naïve) sense, my money’s on this Friday’s Mad Max: Fury Road, though. Amidst superhero- and wookiee-filled hoopla, I humbly predict it will be the best movie of the year.

10. For real-world violence and fear, it’s not anarchism you look to these days but government, and you’ll find plenty of it on May 24 if you join Gloria Steinem, who will lead a women’s march across the DMZ from North Korea. I assume there will be no North Korean women with the option of staying in the South. (But read more on the North’s vision of itself in Michael Malice’s Dear Reader.)

11. You can find out whether our own country takes a step back from statism on June 1, when Congress is due to renew the PATRIOT ACT despite part of it being found unconstitutional by a federal court.

12. And remember, these are the sorts of things you can hear me talk about this Thursday between 6 and 8pm Eastern at this RadioFreeBrooklyn link (by clicking Listen Live) on Jim Melloan’s Truth & Freedom show.

(It’ll be more relaxed and Todd-focused than my daily BENnetwork.com appearances on The Run, but watch those, too.)

12 Thoughts More or Less Inspired by Roger Hodge’s “The Mendacity of Hope”

OK, since Facebook can (and does) easily degenerate into bickering or meaningless posts about porn, cats, superheroes, the war between the sexes/races, food, and jiu-jitsu, I now present slightly deeper looks, once a week here on the blog, at books. Really. Albeit it briefly.

1. If you want live, in-person debate, though, The Nation and the New America Foundation are co-hosting a panel discussion tonight (RSVP here to join me in the audience) featuring my friend Sam Goldman, about the rather abstract and very highbrow question of whether we have exhausted old cultural ideas and are in desperate need of new ones, as Gramsci warned ninety years ago.

The talk is tonight at 6:30-8:15pm at the New America Foundation (199 Lafayette St. in Soho in Manhattan), but I now realize it’s also in the same building as the newly-opened Central Perk coffee shop, inspired by Friends. So you see the irony.

(Meanwhile, the discussion of the future of trashy pulp literature going on over at Half King bar at 505 W. 23rd at 7pm doesn’t look Half Bad, either, but I can't be in two places at the same time, as far as you know.)

2. But maybe you don’t see the irony in the cultural exhaustion/Central Perk juxtaposition.

Liberals, especially in NYC, tend to claim conservatives are the ones who can’t see irony – but, man, just watch what happens if, for example, a Republican politician, attempting to make the simple point that wolves are dangerous, says that releasing wolves in some congressional districts would decrease the number of homeless (I trust you see the point of his joke).

Watch, behold, see – as liberals with PhDs or media-analyst columnist gigs fall all over themselves to interpret the remark utterly literally for us all: HE WANTS TO USE WOLVES TO KILL THE HOMELESS!! THIS IS WHAT REPUBLICANS THINK!! Yet the liberals want me to think Grandma’s the stupid one for not knowing Colbert’s a comedian, right? Liberals love to imagine all their foes are ignoramuses. Makes the imagined fight easier. No more of that arrogance, please.

3. But speaking of old pop culture: yes, it’s the twenty-freaking-fifth anniversary of the Peter Murphy single “Cuts You Up” (the album was the very end of ’89 but the single March ’90) and Social Distortion’s “Story of My Life.”

4. Over roughly that same span of time, both liberals and conservatives have had a generation in which to imagine that their own ideology might become dominant in the post-communist world. Understandably, when conservatives aren’t getting their way, they tend to assume liberals are exultant and winning – and vice versa. The truth, which I think is rapidly becoming more apparent to more people, is that no one with any principles or philosophical integrity is getting his way in politics.

Stop imagining a pendulum, stop imagining a seesaw. Certainly stop imagining a dialectic. Now just picture a gigantic, miles-high revolving door – and passing through it, powerbrokers who don’t give a sweet goddam whether their next big gig is in a corporate boardroom, a well-connected non-profit, their own lucrative PR shop, a wasteful domestic arm of big government, or the Pentagon. They will still rule and you will not.

That is roughly the creepy, deeply disillusioning world described by Roger Hodge in his 2010 critique of President Obama (and others) called The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism. I enjoy (and not in a sadistic way, mind you) reading these occasional reminders that the left is just as unhappy about how things work as anyone on the right or among libertarians, or for that matter among all those ostensibly-pragmatic moderates who wish people would set aside their differences and yadda yadda yadda.

Sure, Obama has done things like veto Keystone, the bastard, but see him – and his vast array of large, familiar corporate donors – through Hodge’s idealistic eyes and he still looks like (and is) just a slightly different flavor of deal-making statist/corporate tool. The long list of banks and hedge funds and mega-corporations who made Obama’s campaigns possible, as Hodge shows, doesn’t sound much different than the one you’d expect to see for his Republican opponents, aside from the labor unions.

Not coincidentally, Hodge’s lament sounds a great deal like that of his fellow former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham in the book The Wish for Kings, both men being evidence that there is still a real Jeffersonian streak on the left with which libertarians like me can sympathize – people who recognize that America seemed destined for some mix of freedom and/or egalitarianism but at some point during its arguing over those ideals got duped into turning over both the cash and the levers of political power to a ruling elite who don’t actually give a damn about any of those topics.

The sooner we admit it (and by my reckoning we’re almost exactly one century overdue), the better.

5. Obama still has his uses, and though I may not gush about the novelty of a biracial president the way the left does, I recognize that is something that goes in the plus column and teaches some people a valuable lesson. Furthermore, apparently psychologists have done studies showing it really is commonplace, whether you like it or not, for biracial people to be considered more attractive than others (sorry, you can’t argue with instinct, whatever its evolutionary roots might be).

Thus, I am probably not the only one who kinda wants to have sex with both these twin sisters now (simultaneously, obviously). Perhaps it’s some sign of instinctual seeking of novel gene-mixing opportunities. Really, there are scientists studying that sort of thing. Or it just means I came of age when Lisa Bonet and Sheilah E were on TV a lot.

6. But speaking of hybridization, lest I sound unable to overcome the right/left divide alluded to above, let me say, as I sometimes do, that Occupy is not so far wrong. You can’t read the Hodge book (written on the very eve of Occupy’s creation) and doubt that anger directed at corporate-government collusion and bailouts is warranted.

Hell, I’ll go farther than that, though. Despite my frequent criticism of left-anarchist (and math-hater) David Graeber, I would be delighted, like him and many of my fellow anarchists, to see a global “Jubilee” declared in which debts and past legal rules were erased and we began anew – if the prevailing post-Jubilee legal rule (privately enforced, of course, in this hypothetical world without government) were respect for property rights.

The alternative, whether it looks like a monarch or a mob, will always be some form of collectivism running roughshod over the individual, and left-anarchists aren’t the real friends of the individual (and the individual’s freedom) until they acknowledge that hurdle – and admit that it’s a very practical one, not just some metaphysical restriction arbitrarily foisted on the world by Ayn Rand or closet fascists.

Think of me, in my willingness to contemplate a change that radical but very wary of replicating the last hundred years of Progressive corporate-state collusion, as a sort of double-secret backwards – but also inverted – Progressive, if you will. Quite philosophically straightforward, really.

Or at least, the old leftist guy seated next to me on the bus to Connecticut while I was reading Mendacity of Hope seemed to think there might be common ground. That’s a start. I’ll build from there.

And lest my fellow libertarians ever feel as if the whole apparatus of the state is on the left’s side, do keep in mind the FBI won’t even tell the public who it was who was reportedly plotting to kill Occupy leaders a while back. There does come a point when the regime cares less about the radicals’ rightward or leftward desires than about making sure radicalism in general is contained, whether by means internal or external to the radical movements, and the boat is thus unrocked.

7. If you don’t believe the elite can dispense with all its apparent internal divisions when there is money and power at stake, how exactly do you explain media tycoon Chris Ruddy, originally famous for spreading those 90s conspiracy theories about Vince Foster being murdered, donating $1 million to Vince Foster’s ex-bosses the Clintons via their increasingly-infamous foundation? Well, maybe he’s hoping if he pays them enough, they won’t kill him.

8. Closer to home and on a less grandiose scale, libertarian-leaning NYC Councilman Dan Halloran got sentenced to ten years for what amounts to soliciting bribes. You may recall that in addition to being a rare Republican councilman here, he’s also a Norse-style neopagan – and sadly, it now appears he may be in the joint by the time Thor is on the big screen again.

A left-leaning, hippie-style neopagan in Austin, TX warned me the neopagan community was worried Halloran would embarrass them eventually. I know the feeling. Here’s hoping he gets out one day soon, though, and still achieves his dream of becoming a scuba instructor.

9. The new fashion in radicalism seems to be p.c. etiquette-enforcement on steroids, something I think will ultimately just prove annoying to the right, largely useless to the left, and baffling to the general population.

We now live in a society so left-wing and brain-addled by that specific metric that (as Justin Stoddard notes) people do things like produce videos condemning an evil man for taking up two subway seats (and thus abusing his supposed privilege) even while there is visibly a woman nearby in the same video taking up three subway seats and blocking the aisle. Can’t let the evidence of your own eyes get in the way of a liberal narrative, after all. Smash that patriarchy.

Meanwhile, if you use your video skills to expose real corruption, as journalist James O’Keefe has repeatedly done, your reward for your efforts is getting confronted by leftists like this.

10. There would seem to be ample opportunity for libertarians to weigh in about all the ways in which America is now insane, but libertarians aren’t very adept at connecting with public sentiment or riding the zeitgeist, mostly just at sounding half-assed and sold-out.

If you’re like me, you’d largely forgotten the Libertarian Party (a mere subset of the larger movement) exists since the rise of Rand Paul and other libertarians to prominence within the Republican Party, but some idiot at the Libertarian Party’s official Facebook page made a grab for relevance with a post calling for “No more Bushes, Pauls, or Clintons,” as though Rand’s dad Ron Paul spent his days in Congress being just another money-grubbing dynastic statist.

If I was uncertain before, now I know I can guiltlessly ignore the LP, and I don’t expect to mention them again. The search for better ways continues.

11. There are times when it seems as if the only way to predict what government will do is to assume that it is neither right nor left, neither pro-radical nor pro-establishment but simply consistently wrong and dangerous. How else does one explain things like the Department of Justice hiring a man who said Ayaan Hirsi Ali deserves to die? Whose side is the government on, exactly, if one still insists on asking questions like that?

One has to suspect chaos and violence, of any stripe, just sound like a good idea to the government.

12. And yet even the establishment gets something right once in a while, usually on the rare occasions it engages in self-criticism. With that in mind, by the week after next, I’ll take a look at a great book by the chief national correspondent of the New York Times, I kid you not: Mark Leibovich’s DC-dissecting, nausea- and laughter-inducing overview This Town. 

“Dear Reader” Author Michael Malice Inspires, Etc.

1. I only blogged one day in February – and will stick to just doing weekly book reviews here for the next four months – so to compensate and smooth the transition, let’s start March with thirty-one brief thoughts (read one per day if you like, to make it last longer!) – with half of the thoughts below inspired by my friend Michael Malice, author of Dear Reader (those thoughts indicated with a parenthetical “M!” because, well, it would just be weird to leave you wondering which ones).

2. First, I declare March a “MONTH OF DECADENCE” on this blog, during which I’m blogging about books on political excess in North Korea, in the Obama administration, and in Washington, DC in general.

3. This should set the tone nicely for the four months of book reviews, which, I’m warning you now, will all relate, directly or indirectly, to libertarianism.

4. Indeed, those will be my only blog entries until overhauling this site and my general online presence for grander purposes, in a few months.

5. If you happen to be a libertarian moneybags who thinks the four months of book-blogging sounds like a cause worthy of subsidy, by all means contact me. I do not pretend to have set up an “institute” for this or anything, but the rent must be paid nonetheless, and the ghostwriting only goes so far.

6. This emphasis on books is partly meant as an antidote to the last few years of social media seemingly leading to ever-shorter attention spans and ever-shorter tempers. I will aim for more contemplation and less arguing.

7. Since tribalism leads to shorter fuses, the less-frequent blogging will also continue my trend toward de-emphasizing the right/left divide.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not buying into the glib and recurring claim that all such philosophical labels are meaningless – and the distinction will inevitably still crop up for a long time to come – but if one opposes, say, the welfare state, imperialism, taxation, rape, cop militarization, violent street gangs, affirmative action, terrorists, anti-prostitution laws, domestic spying, the drug war, bank and corporate bailouts, and alternative energy subsidies, maybe sorting those items into two separate columns before denouncing all of them is an exercise that does more to prolong intra-statist conflict than to promote anti-statism.

You can still sort them if you like. I don’t think it’s very productive, and it took me years to realize how strongly people prefer the sorting to the (more important) opposing.

8. Permit me, for old time’s sake, though, to take some last-minute pleasure in seeing that at the most recent Intelligence Squared U.S. debate here in NYC, about whether liberalism stifles speech on campus, the conservative (so to speak) view won one of the most decisive victories I’ve ever seen reported from one of those debates, with the crowd swinging from only 1/3 before the debate believing liberalism stifles to 2/3 believing it after the debate.

Impressive – and as it happens, Jerry Mayer, who was a Republican back when we were at Brown but is left-leaning now that he’s a political science professor at George Mason, was on the losing side, while my fellow libertarian Greg Lukianoff from the group FIRE was on the winning team.

9. The two preceding comments were an admission, always dangerous in a political context, that my thinking has changed a bit over time – which reminds me of a far more trivial, practical complaint I have left over from the past few years immersed in social media.

Almost as annoying as sites (often for restaurants or big concerts) that don’t get you quickly and easily on the front page to the very-basic “Where is it? When?” info (and in the case of NYC events, “What’s the damn cross street?!”) are online articles with no dates on them – and group blogs written in the first person that don’t indicate who the hell is writing the entries. We want information, Internet.

10. The book I mentioned at the outset, Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il, is not only a masterful depiction of what the strange, authoritarian North Korean regime probably looks like to its leaders, it is an impressively unsettling blend of funny and dark. The basic formula behind the book’s creation, and something you won’t quite get from any other book in existence, was a trip by author Malice to North Korea and a trip back home to the U.S. with arms full of their propaganda.

What happens when you use (often ludicrous and overblown) propaganda deadpan, as if it’s all completely accurate, to build the first-person story of leader Kim’s life (the one in between the founding grandfather and the current ruling grandson, for those who can’t keep track)? Will the result make you more sympathetic to the regime than ever? More horrified by it? A little of both?

You’ll have to read it and see, then perhaps have students buy a hundred copies for the college class on political rhetoric that you teach, if you do. I suspect Kim’s longing to see a rainbow in one scene also owes a little something to that Mr. Burns biography from an early episode of The Simpsons, but that can be covered in a different class.

Malice says one thing that made him keen to visit North Korea was his own birth in Soviet-era Ukraine and his parents’ memories of living under Communist totalitarianism. Such things are not mere history in North Korea, though it is a thing unto itself. (M!)

11. One nice thing about dealing with Eastern European immigrants in the U.S. is that they haven’t forgotten socialism kills, the way many in the West are rapidly forgetting whatever little they learned back in 1989 on that topic.

Here in New York, the state that’s ranked dead last for freedom due to taxes and regulations, you’re surrounded by leftists all the time, so you almost start to believe you’re the only person who remembers that communism killed 100 million people last century. After all, here the Mayor’s a “social democrat” with old Sandinista ties, and 70% of New York voters still voted for him.

Ah, but then you talk to an Eastern European – especially one who notices the rhetoric coming out of the mouths of socialist college professors (and socialistic U.S. presidents) is very similar to what they heard back in the old country – and you realize that not all has yet been forgotten, and not all hope yet dimmed. Thank goodness for immigrants. (M!)

12. Malice also taught me that early language orientation overseas may mean you have one more shade of “blue” in your bedsheets than native English speakers notice. This neurolinguistic topic is hot lately, of course, and the most drastic observation born of the recent talk is probably the revelation that the ancients had no “blue” at all! (M!)

13. On the other hand, I suspect there are limits to Ukrainian wisdom, not only because of that whole civil war thing going on over there but because a Ukrainian did this on a bridge. (M!)

14. As a former software expert, Malice was admirably cautious while others were leaping to conclusions last year about whether it was actually North Korea that was responsible for that Sony hack purportedly inspired by the Rogen/Franco spy comedy The Interview. Stay skeptical. (M!)

15. If you’re really wary of governments manipulating the Net, though, please stay skeptical about “Net neutrality” while you’re at it. Once government starts setting prices, it’s in charge. (M!)

16. Verizon’s parodic Morse code reaction to the old-fashioned Net neutrality regs was a nice, Uber-like example of companies’ willingness – which is by necessity growing in some quarters – to admit they‘re at odds with government. This nation could use a lot more open defiance.

17. Speaking of wacky spy caper movies, the trailer for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. sure resembles the one for Rian Johnson’s Brothers Bloom, if you ask me. Nothing wrong with that.

18. The cold-blooded, predictable stasis of the Cold War seems almost gentlemanly at times compared to likely-Islamist attackers killing an American “skeptic” blogger with machetes in Bangladesh (h/t Michael De Dora). What a clear confession they are not on the side of reason.

19. That doesn’t mean our every intervention abroad in the name of stopping such people will be beneficial, though, and it’s nice that Sen. Rand Paul got an enthusiastic response at this year’s CPAC in part by reminding the crowd that a government chronically inept in its domestic activities will likely be inept in its foreign adventures as well.

20. There will be those antiwar types who, by contrast, feel no sympathy for Netanyahu as he makes his address to Congress Tuesday morning, but surely even the most ardent anti-interventionist will at least agree (as I trust Rand Paul does) that intervening against Israel, as Obama reportedly threatened to do (if there is any basis at all to that story), would be even more insane than attacking Iran.

Libertarians can recognize Israel’s right to self-defense and, say, still defend Muslims from harassment by Tea Party-ish anti-Muslims if need be, as apparently libertarians did in Texas (h/t Meredith Kapushion and Gary Chartier). There’s no contradiction there.

21. Speaking of war zones, to me the most amusing thing to come out of David Corn and others picking apart Bill O’Reilly’s exaggerations about his travels (even if some of the criticisms might be hairsplitting) were reports that witnesses placed O’Reilly in Dallas at a time when he claimed to be across the country visiting a suicidal associate of Lee Harvey Oswald. That phrasing almost makes it sound as if O’Reilly had something to do with the JFK assassination besides writing a book about it! Trust no one.

22. Back in North Korea, they would probably say it’s time for O’Reilly to engage in remorseful self-criticism at a weekly mandatory struggle session – and we almost have those here now anyway, except they usually consist of children apologizing to classmates for being privileged, or to the Earth for letting their parents drive cars. (M!)

23. The law doesn’t quite mandate such behavior yet – but neither was (fascistic) former mayor Giuliani wrong in saying (socialistic) Obama grew up influenced by communists, and like (ex-Sandinista) Mayor de Blasio, Obama still got elected, so who knows what the future will bring? (M!)

24. Oh, how far we’ve come since the days of Hamilton, who is often lauded by Malice (to the consternation of many libertarians who view Hamilton as the big-government guy amidst America’s Founders). Hamilton is the subject of a fantastic rap musical soon to move from Off-Broadway to Broadway. There really were laughs, tears, catchy numbers, and real historical lessons learned. (M!)

25. Malice’s musical tastes usually lean, like mine, more toward the New Wave and indie, though – leading to things like his near-obsession years ago with the obscure “cowpunk” band Rubber Rodeo.

But his is a diverse mental world, and to find out what’s on his mind lately, seek him out in venues like the Fox Business Network show Kennedy or on the site ThoughtCatalog, for which he wrote this piece denouncing the social awkwardness of Lyft. Remember, just because it’s created by the admirable free market doesn’t mean it’s not embarrassing. This simple rule applies to most things in America, actually. (M!)

26. Often playing the mischievous badboy, Malice sometimes sounds as if he’d be delighted if his enemies killed themselves, but it’s probably more scary that the people who actually encourage others to commit suicide send warm glowy tweets like these. Now that’s sociopathic! (M!)

27. And if you’re a conservative and conclude that what Malice needs is religion, note this article he pointed out about a prominent leftist coming out as Christian, namely Wonkette founder Ana Marie Cox – an alarming reminder that religion is pretty useless as a predictor of political ideology, and thus perhaps useless in general. (M!)

28. Despite North Korea having its own brand of politicized quasi-religion, with all sorts of supernatural powers ascribed to the ruling Kims, Malice often reminds people that that country is no mere zany joke. The populace is routinely starved, terrorized, and imprisoned, while we bicker over political trivialities in other parts of the world or laugh at North Korean leaders’ haircuts. (M!)

29. And after all, there are other cultures in East Asia to look to for comedy purposes (h/t Charles Hope). (M!)

30. In other authoritarian news, from the land of Malice’s birth, Putin is oddly loved by some – leading, I notice, to some of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ fans being convinced it must have been the U.S. (and/or the Jews) who killed opposition politician Nemtsov, leaving his Ukrainian girlfriend behind.

As with the 9/11 “truthers,” I’m not sure how one combats the odd mental tick that leads people to think that any time someone appears to be killed by his enemies, it must instead have been his allies who did it. Stranger things happen, certainly, but how does it become people’s circuitous, counter-intuitive default assumption, even in the absence of any evidence?

What would the reasoning process look like if these people wrote mystery novels? “Eliminate the thoroughly possible for no reason at all, my good Watson, and the wildly unexpected is then your best bet.” I don’t think that’s quite what Holmes said. (M!)

31. Obama, and perhaps Putin, cannot even retain the love of this twelve year-old black child, nor can the child retain his access to Facebook after the site’s overlords inexplicably locked him out of his account following his (mild) anti-Obama, pro-Giuliani comments.

And I’m not just going back to Democrat-bashing when I say Obama really can be bad in corporate and socialist, imperialist and Islamist-sympathizing ways all at the same time. Every president, Republicans included, has to be a bit of a hodgepodge, after all, with consistent principles mostly getting in their way (at least senators and representatives have a smaller, more homogeneous district to please and thus might almost attain consistency).

And speaking of Hodge and Obama, next time let’s take a look at the former’s book about the latter, which indeed criticizes Obama’s corporate tendencies from the left. (Things will be a bit more focused and essay-like from here on out, I promise.)