Tribe of Individualists

After noting dissent among libertarians in the second of yesterday’s entries, I should note that I really don’t place that much value on tribal unity or team loyalty per se — except in so far as they’re necessary (a) to achieve some goal more important than the issues that divide or (b) to demonstrate one’s capacity to make peace and avoid needless conflict. I don’t normally think of sticking with the team even when it’s wrong as a virtue, though (and would rather get at the truth than maintain a phony united front).

The whole point of justice is to treat like cases alike — rather than saying, for instance, “When my tribe murders, it’s OK because we are inherently glorious, and when the other tribe makes great art, it does not count as beautiful because I dislike anything they do.” We should be distrustful of any “philosophy” that encourages, say, always siding with women, always siding with the poor, always siding with whites, always assuming the truth of certain favored texts, etc.

Justice aims to be global, impartial, and objective, even if practical limitations argue for great deference to local customs, etiquette, and knowledge — and for avoiding imperial ambitions. Rather than sticking up for one’s own neighborhood, nation, workers’ local, class, or family, the thinking — and moral — person’s first duty, before all else and before any specific policy or ethical disputes are examined, is to step back and attempt to survey things more objectively. Loyalty/disloyalty, then, is not per se a good heuristic for spotting wrongdoing.

The comparable error among the abstract/globalist thinkers would be “sticking to one’s principles” even when the evidence mounts that they lead to disaster or are simply inadequate for certain tasks. The left and right both do it, albeit in slightly different ways: I’d say the left and liberals refuse to rethink their ideas, convinced they’re already quite refined and sophisticated, while people on the right tend to think in a deliberately obtuse fashion that keeps things from getting too complicated in the first place.

In either form, though, stubbornness is not a virtue (though endurance and consistency often are). It’s bad enough people are biased, partisan, stubborn, bullying, and self-righteous without declaring all those things inherently virtuous. Time and again, though, you’ll hear people say with admiration things like “That guy doesn’t back down,” the sort of attribute useful for picking your lawyer, perhaps, but not for getting to the truth — useful for defending your “side” but not necessarily for being on the correct side in the first place. (And I’m increasingly convinced that people’s loyalty to certain principles or teams is so strong that they care more about these things than about producing good outcomes — not really an argument against utilitarianism but another reason to adopt a pessimistic “futilitarianism” when it comes to predicting humanity’s chances for happiness.)

With all that in mind, let’s take a moment in tomorrow’s entry to mark the arrival of Blasphemy Day.

Ron Paul vs. Bernanke vs. Reason vs. Friedman

It’s delightful to see Ron Paul’s book End the Fed in the top ten on the New York Times bestseller list.  I have to confess I thought criticism of the Federal Reserve, while warranted, was probably one of Paul’s fringiest issues back when his presidential campaign started in 2007, but now it looks like one of the his most mainstream and relevant.

What’s a bit weirder — and ought to cause more division among libertarians — is the fact that Paul, like a recent article from Reason by Penn Bullock, faults Fed chairman Ben Bernanke not for being in thrall to pro-spending Keynes but for being in thrall to money-printing Milton Friedman, of all people — since Friedman argued that an overly tight monetary policy may have worsened the Crash that led to the Great Depression.  We certainly aren’t repeating that mistake now.

(An economist friend of mine swears Friedman would have been skeptical of any attempts to hastily alter Fed policy to cope with short-term crises, but Friedman may nonetheless inadvertently have contributed to the current establishment view that we can print our way out of disaster after all.  Perhaps he is a “father of global misery,” as the left likes to say.)

Adding to the odd mixing of the usual teams, Bruce Bartlett and some other free-marketeers have been sympathetically reevaluating John Maynard Keynes (now of all times!), arguing that aside from his spend-in-a-downturn philosophy, he was actually quite the limited-government buff, seeing little role for government in normal economic times.  Meanwhile, Jeffrey Friedman, no relation to Milton, has been sparring with usually market-friendly Richard Posner over whether Posner has become too pro-Keynes (a fear shared by economist Don Boudreaux).  These are confusing times, plainly, and perhaps we should be as wary of mapping simple ideology onto them as some of us were of letting ideologues (of any stripe) deduce proper foreign policy from basic principles after 9/11.

•••

On the bright side, the current bailouts, for all their evils, have produced reactions that for the most part suggest that, regardless of practice, we all sort of know in theory that free markets have by now won the everyday microeconomic battle — and that the main remaining struggle is convincing people that markets can handle big systemic problems, whether financial or climatological.  I think they can and that government just makes it harder for them to do so — but a bit more on that (and on Jeffrey Friedman’s view of the question) in a few days, during my October “Month of Utopia” blog entries.

And if a whole month of Utopia sounds unconservative, well, perhaps the financial crisis is a good reminder that even on fiscal matters I am in some sense radical — rather than passively accepting that the existing order and institutions are can’t-fail works of timeless genius, as they sometimes turn out not to be.

On a far simpler libertarian note, though, here’s a heartwarming story from Richmond, VA about a libertarian strip club owner sparring with Obama supporters, and you have to love his sheer lack of diplomacy — and use of the word “ignoramus” — a tactic Americans may be ready for, and for which libertarians are well suited, after too many years of sugarcoated bullshit.

A Pause for Dingleberries

I didn’t quite get around to writing the entry I intended on Bernanke and Keynes having pro-market supporters, but here in the interim is a link to the fascinating Wiktionary page on the word “dingleberry,”* which has some surprising uses.

*Come to think of it, I suppose I should dedicate this lexicographical blog entry to the late William Safire.

Liberals vs. Anti-Nazis

Have you noticed that (after decades of calling people fascists) the liberal elite has now decided not only that you can’t analogize them to the Nazis (or they’ll criticize you as much as they did Liberal Fascism author Jonah Goldberg), which is fair enough, but that you basically can’t analogize anything to the Nazis anymore?

At some point, in a sudden and unfair about-face, it became a smug liberal-intellectual game to declare an argument over (and overheated) the moment a Nazi analogy appears, as Mike Godwin has noted one inevitably does eventually. Well, that’s fine when you’re trying to stop a teenager from declaring his high school’s anti-nudity policy “fascist,” but I think this anti-analogy push has now reached the point that liberals think you can’t even use the Nazis in real cases of strong historical parallelism.

Don’t be surprised, for instance, if you find yourself saying, cautiously and without venom, something like, “I think the mass-murderers in that totalitarian country could have imagined themselves to be justified, though that’s mind-boggling, but then, even the Nazis relied upon a sense of victimhood, the ‘stab in the back,’ to rationalize their subsequent — ” and suddenly having some pinhead leap in and say, “Sorry, but you have totally invalidated your own argument by mentioning the Nazis! Mike Godwin’s rule of Nazi analogies!! Godwin’s rule! Godwin’s rule! I win! Gold star for me! Gold star and a free trip to camp! Duuuhhh…”

And then they drool. Yes, they actually drool. I’ve seen it happen, though I’m not saying the drooling per se invalidates their point. I would not be that petty.

Where’s the good Godwin — by which I mean authority-hating original anarchist writer William Godwin (husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley) — when you need him? Fighting fascism on all sides if he were alive today, I’ll bet. So there.

Andy Richter Rules Wolf Blitzer, Thundercats Rule Viral Marketing

Three TV-related thoughts:

•Thanks to the omnipresence of t-shirts and the like bearing the Thundercats symbol — that black tiger profile on a red background — the viral marketing campaign for the inevitable eventual live-action movie is going to be very, very easy to pull off, as the grinning producers probably already know.

•My thanks to Paul Taylor for pointing out to me Andy Richter’s recent triumph over a fumbling and weak Wolf Blitzer on celebrity Jeopardy, an important victory for comedy-loving nerds.

•And given Leno’s move to 10pm and Conan’s to 11:30, I wonder if NBC’s lineup in 2029 will look something like this:

4PM: Leno in the Afternoon

6PM: Dinner with Conan

7PM: Evening Report with Jimmy Fallon

8PM: Daily with Carson Daly

9PM: After Sunset with Andy Samberg

10PM: Michael Cera: Special Victims Unit

11PM: Every Night Live

Midnight: Late Night with David Letterman Classics

1AM: Dateline NBC

2AM: The Chevy Chase Show

Tiki Bar, "Dive Bar," and Randomized Decemberists

I think I’ll be at Otto’s Shrunken Head tonight for their 60s garage rock night, since bachelor-partying George Fishman likes that stuff (as do a couple of my favorite conservative women, as it happens).

My own tastes appear to have a new name: I can’t help noticing that DevilsNight.com — the online station that I’ve long said seems to have exactly the same music mix you find in all the faux-dive bars in recent years (punk, rockabilly, Johnny Cash, Pixies, etc.) — now explicitly calls itself a “dive bar” station. It’s as if it were all as coorindated as Starbucks somehow even while looking like shabby, decentralized anarchy.

DevilsNight is using the slogan “The best dive-bar juke box you’ve heard in your life.” It’s fascinating to me how this ostensibly rough-and-random set of culture products — punk, old country music, tattoos, Bettie Page haircuts, darkness — became a coherent marketing demographic. But it works (even for wussy New Wave fans like me).

This past Saturday, I witnessed another — more jubilant — example of musical controlled randomness, since the great Decemberists performance I saw was structured around a completely randomized set list, each of their song titles written on big ping pong balls in a drum — which was churned (and its results bombastically and very amusingly announced) by none other than alternative rocker John Wesley Harding, who said (convincingly) that the band had called him up only that day to fulfill this odd role. The band almost refused to submit to the hand of fate during the encore, when the churning bin of chance happened to cough up: a five-song suite called “The Tain.” But they did it — and “Perfect Crime” to boot.

Harding himself is best remembered (at least by me, back in college) for his rather Aristotelian song “(Why Do You Do What You Do When the Things That You Do Hurt) the Person Your Are?” A good question for the immoral rabble.

Protests Violent and Otherwise

It’s been a hectic week — but one in which I encountered some signs of hope:

•Whiteout wasn’t as bad as I’d been led to expect — nothing momentous, but a decent little thriller.

•Walking downtown to watch it last night, I saw thousands of Iranian-descended people protesting against the Iranian regime, with posters saying things like “Freedom yes, Islamic no,” a tad clearer global-freedom-movement message than even some libertarians have been willing to read into the recent protests against the regime.

•This in turn made me wonder if, despite all my recent pessimism about the state of the world (given the debt, the galloping advance of unscientific regulations under Obama, etc.), we might just look back and say the positive trends at the end of this decade were obvious: the Tea Party protests, the town hall protests, the opposition to socialized medicine, the embrace of social networking even for political ends, and so on.

•Disturbing as the murder of that Kentucky census worker was (perhaps simply for being a “fed,” perhaps for stumbling on pot growers, depending on how badly one wants to leap to right-bashing conclusions about the whole thing), I’m pleased to see there are still plenty of more-clever, less-violent protests against government out there — like the one staged by the makers of the impending documentary Not Evil, Just Wrong this past Monday, amidst a big U.N. climate conference here in NYC. The video has gotten some 2,000 hits in about one day, they tell me.

Culturally Tone-Deaf Ideologues

Michael Moore, whose Capitalism documentary goes into limited release today, may be wrong about many things, but he still does a fairly good job, most of the time, of sounding like an aw-shucks regular-Joe populist.

Once in a while, of course, he lets the mask slip and shows an astonishing fondness for Cuba or what have you, but most of the time he manages to stick to the message that he’s just a patriotic, ordinary American fed up with how the country has gone astray from its noble founding principles — though those principles had little to do with the socialism for which he clearly longs.  (In this, he’s not so different from Sander Hicks, the increasingly populist-sounding Marxist turned conspiracy theorist who won our Debate at Lolita Bar this month.)

For good or ill, the complicated but universally-irking financial crisis/bailout(s) is probably the perfect time for this sort of squabbling over what populism means.

As Moore said in his onstage interview by Tina Brown after the premier of Capitalism at Lincoln Center on Monday night, both the left and right will be trying to extend a hand in the days ahead to the very angry people at the bottom of the social ladder, offering competing explanations for their woes (and those explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive, I should add, given the undeniable fact that government has colluded with supposed titans of finance to pour bailout money into the maws of rich institutions — something that perhaps ought to bring about ideological synthesis instead of just ideological competition, but that would take a lot more work than fighting does).

Much as one might prefer elite, high-minded political-philosophical dialogue that does not pander to the masses at all, this would be an unwise time to be a culturally tone-deaf ideologue.  The public is paying a bit more attention than usual and may be in a mood to absorb some new political narratives, if they’re pitched correctly.  I hope libertarians won’t prove culturally tone-deaf in the days ahead, whether deaf in the right ear or the left.

Last Night Moore, Tomorrow Rucka, in the End Cameron

I don’t know which will have been more depressing, last night’s communistic Michael Moore documentary or the reportedly-lame adaptation of Greg Rucka’s comic book Whiteout, which I’ll probably see tomorrow night.

But I think I know what movie this year will have cost far more money — and is, I think, destined to lose far more than either of them: James Cameron’s Avatar, which, as I mentioned once before, looked like a fairly mundane jungle-cartoon adventure from the teaser footage, despite it being in expensive, cutting-edge CGI in IMAX 3D.

Indeed, reading between the lines of this article about Avatar seeming a bit too much like another recent film, you get the distinct impression that all the films mentioned in the article are so banal they need never have been made.

Documentarians and Idiots

I’m scheduled to see Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story tonight, but other documentarians are already in the streets here in New York City, where the libertarian makers of the anti-green film Not Evil, Just Wrong were shooting a scene at the site of a carbon-rationing conference, while nearby minions — at least a dozen of them, it appeared — of the antiglobalization pranksters called the Yes Men (or allies of them) were distributing fake (non-jokey-looking and thus likely lawsuit-worthy) New York Posts denouncing climate change.

But more about all that in other venues (I hope). Here, let me just note that Oliver Stone also has an anti-capitalist documentary coming out this year, lauding Hugo Chavez (not to mention a financial-crisis-related sequel to Wall Street coming out next year). And lest we take Stone too seriously, let’s stop to remember that this was his first film: Seizure, featuring a homicidal Herve Villechaize.

This is, of course, only the second-weirdest Herve Villechaize film, though, since he was also in The Forbidden Zone, the black and white early-80s film inspired by 1920s cartoons, featuring him as the king of the Sixth Dimension and Oingo Boingo as Satan and his Cab Calloway-singing lackeys. (And frankly, the original, grittier TV-movie version of Fantasy Island was a tad stranger than the subsequent series, too, with a more badass Mr. Roarke willing to fire a rifle at a man whose fantasy was to be hunted. Despite what the series later implied, he was no angel in the beginning.)

But for real horror, I recommend making a film — whether fictionalized or documentary — about this terrifying real-life incident, and its name must of course be: Horrorcore.

Warding Off the Stupid

Tomorrow, I’m scheduled to see an advance screening of Michael Moore’s no doubt inflammatory and ludicrous new documentary Capitalism: A Love Story. But of course, one ought to gauge ideas by their best and most nuanced defenders, not by their most clownish ones. Sometimes, like a lot of people, I feel guilty about even paying attention to Michael Moore — not to mention distractions like LOLCats, sci-fi movies, pundits, and until recently comic books.

But where does one go for brainier culture fare? The site ALDaily.com (Arts & Letters Daily) is some solace. But here’s the weird thing. Much as I love that site, I worry that I might be deluding myself (like a PBS subscriber) if I think I’m really getting a near-random influx of new ideas from it.

On the contrary, if you read it long enough — especially if you just scan a few months worth of their little teaser descriptions of the linked articles — you start to notice certain familiar figures recurring with such regularity — Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Nietzsche, Orwell — that the familiarity almost becomes a soothing lullaby after a while, like knowing classical music radio stations will be playing the same composers ad infinitum.

Like the strange attractors in chaos theory, ALDaily will keep somehow leading you back to read one more surprisingly scandalous thing about the biography of some ostensibly staid writer from the nineteenth century, hear one more argument from cognitive science or behavioral economics for people being stupider (or smarter) than they appear, and enjoy one more strained metaphor from chaos theory written by a former English major. I guess there are worse mental fates.

Another Nerd Superpower: Audio

Tyler Cowen’s recent writing about the virtues of mild autism included reference to autistic people being better than most at detecting subtle changes in sounds (though not necessarily their emotional implications). I was reminded by this of (a) the suspicion I no doubt share with a lot of people lately that someday there’ll be an even broader “autism-Asperger’s-nerd” spectrum, since so many of the attributes of mildly autistic people mentioned in descriptions like Cowen’s seem to be shared by, well, the sorts of people who like to hear Cowen describe things and (b) my own pretty good ear, if I do say so myself, for spotting the fact that “This version of the song must be a slightly different recording” or “That background singer must be the New Order guy.”

In karaoke, this power can be used to recall — and do a “good impression” of — a song’s vocal inflections even when I don’t actually have what a real singer would call range or, y’know, talent. I think my Eric Burdon’s getting pretty good in that limited sense, which is helpful, since “House of the Rising Sun” can be a crowd-pleaser. On the downside, you won’t likely badger me into attempting a song I don’t have a pretty good feel for.

I’m not an “audiophile” in the technical sense of being obsessed with good sound systems — aside from becoming quietly outraged at concerts every once in a while when I’m reminded for the hundredth time that after decades of rock concerts, they still haven’t fully mastered the whole avoiding-feedback problem or the audible-vocals problem (concert organizers also have an odd love of shining incredibly bright spotlights directly in the audience’s eyes, which you’d think by now someone would have told them is unpleasant). And even with the nerd hearing skills I claimed to have in the previous paragraph, I would estimate I have been able to discern only about half the “between-songs patter” I’ve heard rock stars mumble over the years, though I trust Cy Curnin is saying something cryptic yet interesting, judging by the tone of his voice. Generally, though, I feel like if I can hear the melody and the vocals and there isn’t offensive static, my technological needs are met — Hell, half my music’s on audiotape just because it was the most flexible medium when I was a teen.

As it happens, Jacob Levy, whose recommendation of the band Arrogant Worms I noted yesterday, also forwarded what he calls “the strange story of what happens to a kid with Daredevil’s powers” (Daredevil being a blind superhero with super-hearing). It is a reminder that nerd/autistic powers should be used for good and can be terrible when used for evil.

P.S. If the no doubt nerd-filled audience at the Decemberists tonight notice Colin Meloy deviating in any way from his usual, distinctive (and nerdy) vocal inflections, I assume there will be a riot.

Odd Rock of Ages

If all goes according to plan, I see the Decemberists tomorrow night, see the new documentary about the Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello sometime in the next few days, and then one week from tonight go to the tiki bar Otto’s Shrunken Head for their monthly 60s garage rock night and/or their Saturday psychobilly event (the Otto outing being for the bachelor party of visiting Washingtonian George Fishman, a friend of my childhood pal Paul Taylor and soon the husband of my former ACSH co-worker Tiffany Dovey).

In some ways, I remain a New Wave guy at heart, of course, but Montreal-dwelling Jacob Levy points out this New Wave parody, “Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah,” by the Canadian novelty act Arrogant Worms, which is almost enough to make one embarrassed about New Wave. Then again, it reminds me just the tiniest bit of the more recent (blatantly Morrissey-influenced) song “Take Me to the Riot” by the far more serious Montreal band Stars — coincidence, or is this what combined New Wave and Canadian influences sound like in the 00s?

Reading for the Articles, Not the Sex

Michele Carlo, Janice “Girlbomb” Erlbaum, Rev. Jen Miller, and others are reading at Belleville Lounge in Park Slope at 7:30 tonight (at Fifth Ave. and 5th St. in Brooklyn; F, M, or R to the 9th St./4th Ave. stop). I’ve seen the three named writers all read/declaim before (two of them as Lolita Bar debaters among other things) but never quite seen all three on the same stage, so I plan to go — and I wish to state for the record I’m not just going because the ostensible theme is sex.

Indeed, frankly, I often find it embarrassing how frequently the topic is sex at hip New York media events — and I almost mean professionally embarrassing more than viscerally embarrassing, as in “I can’t believe we’re reduced to this as a topic again” (but none of the aforementioned women have sex as their sole or even primary professional focus, so I know they have range and trust they will do a good job).

•Likewise, I have long found it sad that independent and arty film, which constantly touts itself as more daring than Hollywood — since Hollywood is focused on sex and violence — tends to end up simply doing stories that involve slightly more disturbing sex and violence. Read the Wikipedia entry about Kids writer and Gummo writer/director Harmony Korine and tell me it doesn’t suggest to you a deliberate reaching of the bottom of the barrel (Kyle Smith recently blogged that he has no intention of seeing Korine’s upcoming film Trash-Humpers because “I am a professional film critic, not a masochist”).

•I worry a bit about the filter mechanisms at work that lead me to have at least five sex columnists on my official (somewhat dated, in more than one sense) list of Acquaintances, and I didn’t even know Rev. Jen was doing Nerve sex columns or a book on nerd sex when I compiled that list.

•I am very skeptical of anyone who picks feminism as a primary philosophical orientation, gender issues as a major, or sex as the theme for their museum, since (despite the fact that important things can be said on all these topics) doing so will always strike me as a bit reductive, sort of like looking around at the wide horizon and thinking, “What shall I explore? Science? The vast and tumultuous economy? History in all its complexity? No, wait! What’s this down here, away from the horizon? My own genitals! What could be more important? I’ve found my calling!”

(I feel a similar sadness — and it really is sadness rather than annoyance, anger, fear, or political animosity — when I hear that a smart black student has made it to college and decided to study being black. There’s just something unimaginative about it.)

•Similarly, I have never felt more sorry for bisexual women, I think, than when one expressed concern to me that I wouldn’t be able to communicate with her well without a grounding in queer theory. If people need a college course to communicate with you, something is wrong, and not necessarily with them.

One acquaintance who I didn’t think I knew well enough to put on the Acquaintances page, by the way, is Amy Sohn (a Brown alum and New York Press alum) who, as it happens, has moved on from writing mainly about sex to writing a new novel about the local culture in Park Slope, the area where tonight’s reading takes place. I’m sure her new book touches on sex (because it’s still Amy Sohn), but in some ways you couldn’t find a more fitting, unsexy locale for your transition to writing about less-sexual topics. Park Slope’s dominant constituencies seem to be lesbians, very p.c. liberals, and babies, and those are three groups that tend in practice not to create sexy vibes (much as we all love lesbians in theory, obviously). Let us just hope they don’t ruin things tonight. And maybe I’ll win the sexiest outfit prize. I’m overdue in that regard for some reason.

Student with Samurai Sword Slays Intruder

I hope the left won’t react to this story with a call for a samurai sword ban to combat the “climate of sword violence” in Baltimore. We can’t know the details with certainty, but for me, all political and economic thinking basically starts with whether you recognize our right to fight intruders. That’s a right not only older than modern political philosophy but arguably a right that pre-existed homo sapiens. Dogs intuitively grasped and defended that right for us millennia before anti-gun types started concocting arguments against it. And dogs are often right.