The Immorality of voting...and more
A fundraiser for this site and for ifeminists: the audio of the 46-minute lecture "The Immorality of Voting" (mp3) given at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in February. The talk also covers practical and political reasons that underlie nonvoting. If you enjoy or benefit from the presentation, please make a paypal donation at the button on the upper left-hand corner of this site. Permission is not granted to reproduce any of the material in any manner; should you wish to do so, please contact wendy AT wendymcelroy DOT com. Similarly, should you wish to donate by mail, please email.
Sunday 06 July 2008
The Case for Optimism
By Wendy McElroy
[Caveat: the style of a transcribed speech is quite different from that of text written for publication. It is more casual, less edited, more prone to spelling errors. Moreover, the punctuation I use for speeches is aimed at giving flow, rather than grammatical accuracy. Please reprint only with permission and with this caveat attached. Caveat2: I am not as optimistic as I was in 2002 when the speech was delivered and I can no longer recommend the Men's Movement as a reason for optimism...but the talk still reflects me in a good mood and, perhaps, makes some valuable points.]
[Conclusion: .A return to ideology and respect for the common man is essential to libertarianism's success.]
Despite the terrible times in which we live, my talk this evening is about political optimism and -- later on -- I'll be using both libertarian history and feminism as political backdrops to explain why I am optimistic.
But first...these are terrible times. They are especially difficult for people, like us, who treasure peace and freedom.
The following YouTube pretty much captures my response to the mainstream media in general, not just to FOX News. Don't listen only to the on-air outburst by comedian Lee Camp; make sure to listen to the next segment that proves his point. QED to Camp. And note to FOX News...Captain Kirk is a fictional character on a SF TV series. He has NO advice on how to pick up women. Or, if he did, it would be "assume a false identify and get a good writer to script everyone's response to it/you."
It really is getting close to the time when recording industry executives will need to be fitted with straitjackets and kept in padded rooms. Their latest derangement is that radio broadcasting of music is "a form of piracy".
Does no one remember the "payola" scandals? Record companies used to bribe radio stations to air their songs. Now they think that radio stations should be paying them. What's under all this is the simple fact that the recording industry is desperately trying to grab money wherever they see it, whether it makes sense or not.
The National Association of Broadcasters has argued the promotional value of radio; but that seems to have fallen upon -- forgive the phrase -- deaf ears. My modest suggestion is that the NAB should grant the RIAA's wishes, selectively. Thus: as a limited trial of the new royalty system, NAB should select one music group -- let's say, Sony BMG -- and instruct its member stations that they are to stop playing all songs and artists from that group's labels. Other labels will continue to be aired on the old royalty-free system.
Today's addition to the site: a drop down menu for the work-in-progress that is the links section. Access it by clicking on the word Links in the toolbar above. I'm assembling the best sites/sources I find in each category and I am decidedly open to suggestions. Please note: there are gaping holes in the Links. For example, there is (as yet) no category called "libertarianism." That's because I must set aside a serious chunk of time to sort old URLs and confirm they are active,to track down recommended new sites, to write descriptions, etc.
L.Neil Smith's Fourth of July message to those who love freedom.
Excerpt: Once upon a time, it was the government that feared the people, rather than the other way around. Still, as a writer and thinker, I have never wanted to be anything like those ancient Roman political philosophers who, suddenly noticing they had become subjects of a gigantic world empire, whimpered ineffectually for centuries for a return to their Old Republic. They never seemed to notice that their Old Republic contained, as the saying goes, the seeds of its own destruction.
When Doug Casey speaks, I listen. And this is what he advised in the Daily Reckoning on Tuesday:
Reduce your standard of living now (while the situation is still under control), greatly increase your savings (in gold, which is real money) and rig for greatly changed patterns of production, consumption, employment and business for a considerable time.
Substantially the same message, in greater detail, was offerred on MSN Money's Smart Spending blog Wednesday:
You are going to be fired from your job this Friday.
...Right now, start acting as if the above statement is true at all times. Believe constantly that you're just a few days from being fired and then try a few of these new behaviors on for size.
Click through and read the entire MSN post; there's lots of good advice there.
The American Revolution Revisited + reader's comment
Today's featured addition to the site's archive is an article entitled "The American Revolution Revisited."
Excerpt: One of the icons of the libertarian movement is the War for Independence, commonly referred to as the American Revolution. "War is the health of the state," they admit, but somehow the American Revolution is slotted into a different category than all other wars. It was the noble war; it was the war for the libertarian principles of "natural rights" and "no government without the consent of the governed."...But war IS the health of the state, and there is danger in deifying any historical event. Every war involves the massive violation of individual rights and the rapid growth of the state. Although I admire many aspects of the War for Independence, I wish to caution against exempting it from the same criticism that should be leveled at any war.
Full article accessed by clicking here or by reading the 'extended text'.
Reader's comment -- D.G. writes, I'd add another to the list [within my original article]:
Rebellious American colonists had been developing and deploying nonviolent conflict tactics such as boycotts, tax resistance, noncooperation with state institutions (and their replacement with parallel non-state institutions) before the *war* part of the revolution began. These techniques were remarkably successful at gaining the demands of the colonists.
I'm not enough of an expert on revolution-era history to be able to say for sure one way or the other, but some say that the "hot" war with Britain was wholly unnecessary to gain de facto independence and local representative control. That a set of impatient, short-sighted, violent people (e.g. Sam Adams) kept up violent provocations until war became inevitable.
"The true history of the American revolution" (Fisher) was an eye-opener for me in this regard.
Anyway, in this telling, we ended up with a General at the top of a government hierarchy who then ended up with a big phallic monument in a city full of imposing government buildings named after him and his face on the dollar and -- I kid you not -- a painting called "the Apotheosis of Washington" painted on the inside of the Capitol dome that shows Washington on a throne surrounded by pagan gods ascending into heaven. (see: http://sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=17Feb07#item3 ) And we got a centralized government that worships war to an amazing extent.
What we could have had was a model of bottom-up, nonviolent people power, and its success against the world's most powerful empire, that would have inspired the world years before Gandhi used much the same set of tactics against the same foe.
Although it is on my list of places to visit, I have not yet been to Quebec City. It was 400 years ago today that "the first permanent non-native settlement in North America" was established. Happy birthday!
Update: The news source I quoted is wrong. Thanks to H.Rearden on our forum, I now know that the first permanent non-native settlement in North America was St. Augustine, founded on Sept. 8, 1565. The first permanent English settlement in North America, Jamestown, was founded on May 14, 1607.
I don't like quoting the famous line from Henry VI, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." It is not because of my aversion to violence nor a general fondness for lawyers. Indeed, I like to think of Shakespeare as setting a trend for future generations of lawyer jokes...(The line is spoken in a comic relief scene by a villaneous character named Dick The Butcher.) I avoid the quote because I think it has been widely misinterpreted -- a victim of revisionist history written largely by lawyers themselves. Consider the revisionism offered by the book Thinking Like a Lawyer. Its author Kenneth J. Vandevelde claims that Shakespeare's real meaning was, "the surest way to chaos and tyranny even then was to remove the guardians of independent thinking." Accoridng to Vandevelde, those "guardians", of course, are lawyers.
NOT! To reach such a tortured interpretation, you'd have to ignore salient factors as the constant bashing of lawyers that runs through Shakespeare's plays. (For an accurate interpretation, click on the NOT! above.)
The quote came to mind this morning upon reading a news item entitled "For divorce lawyers, slump in economy can boost business" and a commentary on it written by Ned Holstein of the excellent Fathers and Families site. The commentary entitled "Guess Who's Not So Worried About the Economy?" opens, Skyrocketing food and gas prices…foreclosures and a credit crisis…small businesses struggling to hold onto paying customers…just some of the recession worries shared by millions of Americans. But perhaps not everyone — as reported in last week's Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly: "For divorce lawyers, slump in economy can boost business."
Ned does a fine job of analyzing the news item and leaves no need for my two cents worth. For example, Ned explains,
We've been hearing bad news about General Motors for months. Just Tuesday we learned that GM's sales were down 18% from the previous year. Yesterday I read this:
shares of General Motors (GM, news, msgs) shares slumped below $10 today -- a level not seen since 1954.
...GM closed down 15.1% to $9.98 after Merrill Lynch analyst John Murphy said the company might need to raise up to $15 billion in new capital to get through 2008 and 2009. The company insisted it had enough to cash to get through 2008 and could sell assets and make other moves in 2009.
Bankruptcy is "not impossible" if the U.S. auto market continues to slump, wrote Murphy, who has a good track record covering automobile companies. A GM bankruptcy would put all labor contracts at risk and take years to resolve and could cause problems for thousands of suppliers.
There's a real vote of confidence: they've got enough cash for the next six months, and they can sell assets and "make other moves" to stay afloat for twelve more. The punchline, however, is this:
Murphy cut GM to "underperform" from "buy"
Sales down, stock down, six months' cash left, flirting with bankruptcy, and that's "underperform"? (And last week GM was a "buy"?) What on earth does it take to get a "sell" rating from this guy?
Liberty Magazine's Tim Slagle deserves credit for seeing this one coming in time to hit the July issue (Reflections, p.12), and for doing the math. In the last week or two, do-gooders of every political persuasion have started bleating "bring back the 55 MPH speed limit" to save gasoline. No one stops to count how much this damnfool proposal costs the drivers. To quote Slagle:
The [Associated Press] article states that slowing a car from 70 to 60 miles per hour will give you a 2 to 3% gain in efficiency. That paltry benefit is precisely the reason Americans refuse to slow down. It is simple economics; if gas costs $3.33 a gallon, a 3% savings amounts to around a dime a gallon. If your car burns gas at a rate of three gallons an hour, [e.g., 60 mph at 20 mpg*] the 30 cents you save by driving 10 mph slower will take ten minutes out of your life. Very few people in America are willing to sell their time for three cents a minute.
Yet bureaucrats and busybodies have no compunction about demanding that every driver give up a slice of his time in the name of some vague public good. It's not enough that they can slow down -- and I'll bet that none of them currently do -- but everyone else must be forced to live their preferred lifestyle.
Here's an idea: leave the speed limit alone. Those that want to conserve gas can slow down. Those who think their time is worth more than $1.80 an hour -- or $2.20 an hour, at $4.08 a gallon -- can opt to drive faster and pay a bit more. That's freedom of choice.
__________ * In one of life's little ironies, those virtuous souls who own high-mileage automobiles will be compensated less for slowing down.
I rarely reprint in full news stories from the mainstream media but this one is compelling and requires no commentary. This, from the ABA Journal (July 1):
A drug possession trial in Los Angeles ended abruptly after dramatic courtroom developments. When a surprise videotape of the defendant's arrest was played in court Friday by the defense, it contradicted the testimony of two arresting police officers, who are now the focus of a new investigation.
On Monday, after prosecutors had a chance to review the videotape, which was taken by a surveillance camera at a nearby building, they acknowledged it was not consistent with the officers' sworn testimony, the Los Angeles Times reports. Superior Court Judge Monica Bachner then dismissed the cocaine possession case against Guillermo Alarcon Jr., 29, who works at a grocery store.
A police internal affairs investigation has now been launched against the two officers, who reportedly said in testimony that they chased Alarcon into an alley by his Hollywood apartment building and saw him throw away an object that turned out to be cocaine. However, the videotape shows it took a team of police more than 20 minutes to find the cocaine, which a defense lawyer says wasn't Alarcon's. Additionally, at one point an officer apparently tells another to "be creative" when writing the arrest report.
Deputy Public Defender Victor Acevedo, who represented Alarcon, said the case was "completely trumped up," apparently during courtroom comments to Bachner, according to the newspaper. "They have two officers who came into court and blatantly lied and planted evidence," he told the judge yesterday.
Many thanks to WolfmanMac for the following article (exclusive to this blog and ifeminists.net) which asks the question, "Do you really want men prosecuted for their thoughts? " (Note: the author invites your feedback, including requests to reprint, at tom911katATyahooDOTcom)
Lynch Mobs, Stones and Glass Houses
It has been observed that the primary difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits. Unfortunately, the same can be said for the difference between justice and injustice, for the amount of justice we can expect on this earth is surely finite, while injustice continues to reach new lows. One can only hope that the public would begin to note the frequency with which such injustice is given its imprimatur under the guise of “protecting women and children.”
On June 10th of this year The Sacramento Bee reported on the arrest and prosecution of one of its own. Mr. Gilbert Chan, described as a “veteran reporter,” was off duty attending a cheerleading competition. There he “was caught by University of California, Davis, police on Feb. 3 while surreptitiously videotaping [the] …competition on campus.” As a result of the arrest, “Chan pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of invasion of privacy” as well as “to a felony charge of possession of child pornography. The tape focused on the buttocks and other parts of clothed cheerleaders. The cheerleaders were under 18.”
So, here we have a man who attended a competition that was, to all appearances, open to the public. There, cheerleaders cavorted about while clad in the costumes for which they are famous, in full and public view of all and sundry. Mr. Chan videotaped them, as presumably so did others in attendance. The elements of Mr. Chan’s “crime” appear to be two-fold – he was taping them “surreptitiously,” and focusing on their naughty parts as he did so.
Friend and decades-long libertarian Kent Hastings was assaulted last night while walking in a neighborhod in Southern California (his state of residence is Nevada). Kant's story -- related with typical anarchistic aplomb -- is reprinted in full and taken below from the commentary section of Wally Conger's blog Out Of Step. (FYI, Kent is a longterm associate of the now-deceased Samuel E. Konkin III, co-author with Brad Linaweaver of the alternate history novel Anarquia and the film editor/associate producer on J. Neil Schulman's movie Lady Magdalene's.)
