mushinnoshin

KN@PPSTER: State of the Union: A preemptive response

Sigh.

Every time I start to find myself shifting towards the left, it seems that all I have to do is spend time with some of ‘em to bring me back. Dropping in on the Cumberland Greens Bioregional Council yesterday turned out to be a surefire way of bringing out my inner Cartman — c’mon guys, if you really care so much about the environment, how ’bout you start by TAKING A FUCKING SHOWER. Oh, the funk…

savoring this time
thrilled and frightened, as we find
that yes, we reflect

OK, I guess I’m officially an addict. I was going to skip tonight’s Nashville Symphony performance, and catch the beginning of the Samurai Film Fest at the Belcourt instead — but I’m weak, I just can’t resist. Anyway the films will still be there Sunday… how often does Mozart turn 250?

Speaking of which, NPR has some good material on the subject.

Of course, the symphony is also performing tomorrow night, but I’m already booked to see Recent Tragic Events, which looks like an intriguing TN Rep production.

Well, I’m off!

I don’t know how many blurbs I’ve read criticizing Google over the China incident, accusing them of breaking the no-evil rule and so forth. This is just silly.

Google is not preventing anyone in China from accessing any part of the internet, they are voluntarily self-censoring the search results that they produce. And they are being completely transparent about it. No one’s rights have been violated.

Certainly I wish Google had chosen to stand up to the Chinese government. Hell, I wish that government hadn’t put them in the position to begin with. But they haven’t “done evil”.

Huck threw out a challenge contending that there really are no libertarians, essentially that libs should just pick a side and be done with it, and this sparked some debate on NIT. Recognizing first of all that he was mostly just trying to stir up the hornets, I’m still going to have to disagree — sort of.

Right off the bat we need to throw out the silly “libertarian” vs “Libertarian” convention. Both versions have been used to mean different things and alternately the same thing, and besides which, there are more than two states in play. I think we need to look at multiple “levels” of libertarian, so we’re going to need an array.

libertarian[0]

At the zero level are those who usually like to say “I’m small-l libertarian and a big R-Republican” (which of course confuses me — are they not also small-r republicans, don’t they believe in the republican form of government?). Generally these are folks who were raised Republican but learned some social tolerance along the way (though they still nurse an inexplicable fear of the ACLU). Maybe they’ve read some Ayn Rand, and the scholars among them have probably read some Hayek or Mises, or may even be full blown Austrian school economists.

I start them at zero, rather than one, mostly because that’s just what programmers do. But there is some double meaning there, as I wonder just how much value they add to the libertarian movement. I mean if you’re willing to vote for warmongers and religious nutcases just to get an extra hundred bucks in your tax refund… still I suppose one must crawl before walking.

Theoretically this category would also include those who were raised as Democrats, but don’t like giving up half their income to the government any more than conservatives. However while I’m sure there are many such people out there, they don’t generally refer to themselves as libertarian. They might refer to themselves simply as “civil libertarians”, but here they refer more to the ACLU than the libertarian movement.

libertarian[1]

libertarian[0] moves up to libertarian[1] when they finally give up on the D’s and R’s and actually join the LP.

libertarian[2]

After some time in the LP and greatly expanding one’s range of influences, you [usually] move up to level 2, where you begin to understand the nuanced differences between right-wing economics (corporate mercantilism) and true free enterprise. This of course includes rejecting ordinary corporate welfare, but also realizing that the corporate charter itself is welfare, and also recognizing that unions — so long as they are not proscribed into law — are a natural and important part of the free market, among other things.

As an aside, we were very fortunate in 2004 to finally have an almost fully level 2 libertarian presidential candidate. It was a tremendous step forward.

libertarian[3]

Spend enough time as a level 2 libertarian, and you start to ask some questions about land. I’m going to need a lot more space than I have here to pontificate on this subject, I’ll just say if you’ve gotten that far, welcome to level 3.

libertarian[4]

At level 4 you’ve been comfortably geolibertarian for a while. You’ve realized how radically every issue changes when looked at through that lens. You’ve been trying to work within the right-leaning framework of the LP, hoping to see it shift back towards true libertarianism, but finally seeing it as futile. At this point you either give up on political parties, start spreading your votes around (always vote for the challenger, etc), or become a Freedom Democrat.

So what’s at level 5? I suppose I’ll tell you when I get there : )

RSSCalendar.com seems like an early step towards something I’ve been wanting to see for a good while, but I’m too lazy to do anything about myself.

Except I don’t think this method is really worth fooling with; what I forsee is organizations publicizing their own calendars, while our desktop organizers (Evolution, Outlook, etc), know how to act as a specialized feed reader and incorporate the subscribed org’s events into our regular calendar.

Perhaps if the Evolution and/or kOrganizer folks lead the way, everyone else might follow?

Continuing meme; however I have no ipod, so I used mp3kult to load the library on my htpc into MySQL and ran some queries. However I haven’t finished ripping all my cd’s to mp3 (I just did “R” this weekend), plus I’ve got 3 or 4 gigs of downloads that I haven’t moved into the library yet.

Total Songs:
2,419

Sort by Title, First and Last:

• ======= – Final
• Zyclon B – Leatherstrip

Sort By Time, Shortest and Longest:

• Absolute Elsewhere – Coil (0:02)
• Musica #1 – Osso Exotico (59:06)

Sort By Album, First and Last:

• 10 Notes on a Summer’s Day – Crass
• Zoolook – Jean-Michel Jarre

Sort By Artist, First and Last:

• Above the Law
• Webber, Andrew Lloyd *

*If all my cd’s were loaded, I *think* this would be “Zao”

Top five played:
[No data]

Find the following words. How many songs:

• Sex: 6
• Death: 16
• Love: 41
• You: 71
• Home: 2
• Boy: 10
• Girl: 8

On the subject of Democrats, mad props to Jim Cooper for introducing HR 4254: Corporate Entitlement Reform Act of 2005. I don’t think it goes nearly far enough but it’s a great start.

Could be very handy also for finding out where Republicans really stand on reducing government. Who wants to bet most of them will be reluctant to sign?

Alternet has an interesting article on Why Hillary Won’t Save Us.

The article begins very well, pointing out the uselessness of Ms. Clinton, and calling back on the courage of Gene McCarthy — basically saying the same things that Libertarians, Greens, and Naderites, all of whom wanted to support a good democrat ticket to oppose Bush, were saying about Kerry 2 years ago.

Unfortunately the author then launches into a tirade of support for universal health care and other socialistic causes. She claims the majority of Americans support these ideas — I’m not certain whether she’s referencing a lie, a damn lie, or a statistic, but I know I’ve never seen majoritarian support for these positions.

My anecdotal experience has matched what Rasmussen found in a year 2000 poll — there is no clear *majority* for any one ideology (the largest group, at 32%, are centrists), but the largest segment with a clear ideology are libertarians (at 16%, verses 13% liberal and 7% conservative). This of course is not to say there is a groundswell of support for the radical positions of the Libertarian Party, but that more people support a basic direction of social liberalism + fiscal conservatism than support either the left or right wings overall. Or to phrase it still more as an anecdote, I think most people are looking for exactly the sort of leadership that Jackson Miller describes.

Which is why it is so heart wrenching to see progressives continually pulling the rug out from under the civil libertarians with these fiscal issues. A democratic party that focused hard on the social side of the platform — antiwar, pro 1st & 4th ammendment, gay rights, etc — while not embracing fiscal conservatism, just moderate, sensible fiscal policy — could gain a lot of traction and maybe reverse some of the Orwellian directions the country has been taking.

Freedom Democrats is one organization hoping to effect this type of shift, and I for one am keeping a hopeful eye on them. Unfortunately I fear too many democrats may be getting horribly inverted advice and the party may just go from bad to worse.