Too Many Broads in the Peace Movement, Apparently

Antiwar.com’s Don’t F*ck Me Up With Peace and Love? brought my attention to this piece from American Conservative, “Solving Non-Interventionism’s Tough-Guy Problem.” George Hawley writes:

The tendency to categorize everything into dichotomous categories is a major problem with contemporary American political thought. One idea that unfortunately survived the 60s is that only limp-wristed hippies care about peace, and if you don’t want to be lumped with those indolent, unshaven wusses, you should make it a point to support whatever you think they hate. My suspicion is that a great percentage of the GOP’s voters think very little about American foreign policy, but instinctively believe that only America-hating wimps are against America’s wars, whereas Real Men “support our troops.” These people don’t really care about Iraqi or Afghani civilians, and consider stoically accepting American casualties a sign of “American Grit.” This does not mean they cannot be persuaded by non-interventionist arguments, but doing so will require a message stripped of all traces of humanitarian, we-are-the-world gobbledygook.

Oh my God. Being antiwar is too gay, is it? Next I suppose Real Men will stop wanting to get married, since they hear that’s what the gays want to do now.

Americans have not always associated peace with poltroonery. As far as I know, few people argued that the America First Committee was primarily motivated by spinelessness. Still, since the 60s, the anti-war movement has unfortunately been associated with “Flower Power” and other sissy slogans. Anyone serious about reviving an older, pre-hippy anti-war tradition and making it a major political force would be wise to eschew all rhetoric that conforms to this unfortunate stereotype.

Get all those old queens out of the antiwar movement. Understood.

Lamenting the suffering created by harsh economic sanctions and bombing campaigns is a good way for non-interventionist right-wingers to suck up to their leftist friends and colleagues, but so what? The people moved by such arguments are already anti-war. Building a powerful anti-war coalition on the Right will require an entirely different rhetoric. At all costs it must avoid sounding like Code Pink.

Again, oh my God. At a time when mainstream feminists openly support pro-war candidates and troop surges, we’re supposed to believe that the peace movement is too soft and feminine and humanitarian? We can take the antiwar sentiments of leftist colleagues for granted when, as amply documented by Arthur Silber, the American Left has largely abandoned a principled antiwar stance? I don’t know about you, but whenever I try sharing with leftists my opposition to tyranny and war, they largely hear “I hate roads,” or “I want to deprive the poor of healthcare.” Little things, like a million Iraqi dead, are just one of the unfortunate side effects of a system primarily designed to build pretty parks and pathways. Find me a leftist who thinks culpability for America’s aggressive interventions doesn’t begin and end with Bush II, and you can take a well-earned vacation.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about recruitment tactics lately, and I’ll be sure to keep the “harness contempt of women and gays” tactic in my toolbox. You can actually build a pretty broad coalition with that one. Even feminists don’t shy away from using it.

Quick! Someone Give Me A Billion Dollars to Fight Racism!

What? Don’t you trust me? ARE YOU FOR RACISM? Is that what this is about? Gee, I never would have thought it of you. Then again, I did see you using last Sunday’s NYT to line the budgie cage. We all know what that means. (I also noticed that you didn’t even read Krugman’s column, with accompanying nods, chuckles and sighs, before Petey pooped on it. I oughta turn you in.)

It’s actually a combo of the Boston Globe, the NYT, and a Shakira interview that happens to be triggering me this morning. But let’s start with the Globe:

In health bill, billions for parks, paths

WASHINGTON – Sweeping healthcare legislation working its way through Congress is more than an effort to provide insurance to millions of Americans without coverage. Tucked within is a provision that could provide billions of dollars for walking paths, streetlights, jungle gyms, and even farmers’ markets.

The add-ons – characterized as part of a broad effort to improve the nation’s health “infrastructure” – appear in House and Senate versions of the bill.

Critics argue the provision is a thinly disguised effort to insert pork-barrel spending into a bill that has been widely portrayed to the public as dealing with expanding health coverage and cutting medical costs. A leading critic, Senator Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, ridicules the local projects, asking: “How can Democrats justify the wasteful spending in this bill?”

Hmm, the pork is “tucked within.” How cozy. A veritable pig in a blanket—of legislation. And I wonder why we’re all so inured to statism. Anyway, where’s my billion? I want to fight racism. Seriously. It’s all for a good cause, right? I mean, supposedly racism hurts people’s health, too; I just wanna contribute to building the “health infrastructure.” But I bet all you selfish bastards, who no doubt vote Republican, are going to tell me that you’re not gonna give me that billion. I’ve got to work for it, or raise, it or something.

Ok, fine. I don’t get a billion. Can I at least get half-a-mil for my farmer’s market? I think we’ve got limes coming in. Or lemons. Hard to say. They’re green, at any rate. Green is good, right? Paul Krugman seems to think so (Save the Frogs! Or something—it’s a little unclear), so I know it must be true.

I’m a little braindead of late, so please forgive my slowness of thought. But if poverty is correlated with negative health outcomes, while wealth is associated with better health, then…wouldn’t it be better to let people keep their money? (I mean, compound interest, anyone? Taxes aren’t returned to you, nor do they pay interest. Bet if you could sock away half your income, even at rates that barely outpace inflation, you’d be doing better in a hurry.) Of course, cutting taxes while keeping spending at its current level, or increasing it, is insane, or so I understand. (By the way, isn’t it just a little insane to propose spending increases at a time like this? Are people really more worried about “bike paths” than keeping food on the table?* Is anyone but the privileged concerned about bike paths?) So maybe we could start with cutting subsidies to corn growers and start bringing down the concentration of high-fructose corn syrup in our food. According to current Evidence and Science and Studies**—which are being trotted out to justify the boondoggles listed in the Globe article—HFCS is strongly linked to obesity and diabetes. Now will someone please give me a taxpayer-funded mansion for pointing that out? NO? God. What a bunch of anti-health tightwads you are. I bet you also hate roads.

*Right, I know. The solution, as ever, is to tax the rich more and the poor less. Not that I favor taxing the poor more, but gouging “the rich,” nebulously defined, can have unintended consequences. For one thing, whole tabloid industries would dry up if we drove the Hiltons out of the country through excessive taxation. Hey, somebody’s got to think about the important issues.

**We all know that study results are never superseded or disproved or distorted or just plain false to begin with, so it’s totally justifiable to use force to make people comply with their recommendations. That’s never had bad outcomes before, particularly in public health.

Original Thinking

Permit me a little whining: why does everyone ask the same questions, and act as if they’re the first to ever think of such objections? Here’s a few examples:

1. Let’s end the War on Drugs! But won’t everyone become an addict?

Answer: Yes. You’re right. Everyone is going to become an addict if currently prohibited drugs are legalized. No doubt your granny is going to start shooting up heroin the day it becomes legal. Next:

1. Taxation is theft. Our tax money is taken against our will, at a rate of approximately half our incomes, and wasted on all sorts of failed projects without our consent. (Though the state is remarkably competent when it comes to killing foreigners.) But what about roads?

Answer: You’re right, I clearly don’t like roads, and neither does anyone else who protests war and torture and wasteful spending. The other libertarians and I are going to use our untaxed jillions to float in hovercrafts and look down and laugh at all you sweaty plebes plowing your dirt paths. I’m glad we talked about this.

1. Seasteading—the idea of living on floating platforms and ships in the ocean—is a novel approach to starting new governments, or just to life in general. But won’t you be raped and killed by pirates?

Answer: I’m glad you asked. Of course, rapists and murderers can only be found in the oceans—that’s why life is so peaceful on the mainland, rendering police forces largely redundant. No wonder the cops themselves must turn to assault, to keep things interesting. Much like you, we are more worried about the relatively sparse, unorganized, ragtag pirate outfits roaming the world’s oceans (but mostly concentrated around notoriously unstable countries) than we are about the governments boasting well-funded armies and navies, some of whose members are apparently skilled purveyors of torture. Let’s hang out at the Rainbow Lounge deep in the mainland, where it’s safe.

In accordance with this logic, I should point out that the floating resort ship known as the Residensea, occupied perhaps exclusively by the extremely wealthy, has been hijacked numerous times, with its well-off residents held ransom over and over by men with eyepatches and parrots. The women have all been repeatedly ravished, even—especially—the heroin-addled grannies. (Fortunately all pirates resemble Johnny Depp, and women are okay with rape as long as their attacker is attractive.) At least there are no filthy roads out there in the water.

All right, I’m powering down the Snark Machine for now. I think I’m just bitter because I can’t attend FreedomFest and jingle my moneybags (all advocates of free markets carry these everywhere.) Oops, the machine’s off now.

Cops Do Not Serve Gays, or Anyone Else

I found Rad Geek’s recent post on worldwide incidents of police brutality to be almost unreadably grim, and did not make it all the way through on my first attempt. Then, just when I thought it was safe to get back on the internet, I stumbled upon the following in Dan Savage’s column today:

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY: The police in Fort Worth, Texas, marked the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion by raiding a gay bar called the Rainbow Lounge. One of the men arrested, Chad Gibson, was so brutally assaulted by the police that, as of this writing, he remains hospitalized with a life-threatening brain injury.

Police Chief Jeff Halstead claims that the men at the Rainbow Lounge made lewd advances toward his officers and specifically accused Gibson, a slight 26-year-old, of groping one of his cops. This preposterous claim is contradicted by eyewitness accounts and photographic evidence.

We can’t let the police in Fort Worth use the Gay Panic Defense (”That fag touched me, so of course I beat him nearly to death!”) to excuse this brutal violation of the civil rights of Fort Worth’s gay community. If you’re on Facebook, please show your support by joining the Rainbow Lounge Raid group (www.tinyurl.com/lavecu). And please e-mail or call the mayor of Fort Worth—Mike Moncrief, 817-392-6118, mike.moncrief@fortworthgov.org—and demand a full investigation into the raid on the Rainbow Lounge.

The Facebook group has quite a following already, with 10,439 members as of this writing. I presume it is in part because the combination of homophobia and police brutality is politically explosive, especially among the younger, socially networked set. And I hope some justice comes of it, though I am quite skeptical. It is difficult enough to get justice for members of politically mainstream groups, much less marginalized ones that are losing all kinds of battles. I mean, there’s a movie coming out tomorrow that satirizes them (along with lots of other groups, to be sure, but I do see how gay men would laugh at Bruno one way while straight men laugh at him in another.)

Of course, the cheap homophobia evident in what Savage calls the Gay Panic Defense is laughable. But many of the victims on Rad Geek’s list don’t have their own Facebook group and were also abused on the flimsiest of pretexts. Here’s just one:

Northern Territory police pulled a former journalist named Greg Plasto off the street and forced him into the hospital for a mental health assessment because they thought he was acting strangely, in their arbitrary judgment, which apparently is good enough to put you in a psychoprison these days; after he had been forced to wait nearly two hours in an ambulance, he got up and said he wanted to go outside. Rather than asking him why he wanted to go outside, or just letting him get up and walk around, a gang of up to six cops tackled Plasto, who, again, had not been accused of any crime at all, then wrestled him to the ground, smashed his head into the ground, and held him down on the ground for four minutes while he turned blue and smothered to death. The coroner who reviewed the case says that the problem is that police need better training.

Then there’s the drunken, injured ER patient who went on the attack (according to his attacker):

In Chicago, Officer William Cozzi, a 15-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, was caught on video handcuffing a stabbing victim to a wheelchair, in the hospital emergency room, and beating him with a sap. He was called into the emergency room help the man out after he had been stabbed by a female companion. But his victim was drunk, and Cozzi was busy Investigating, so he got frustrated at the alleged beneficiary of this investigation, and decided to deal with his frustration by shackling the man to a wheelchair and beating him with a sap. Then he made up some complete lies for his police report about his victim having attacked him and hospital workers. After the video came out, Cozzi plead guilty to misdemeanor charges and got 18 months of probation.

To sum up, the police are not only dangerous to gays. As with the battle over gay marriage, however, I think there will be a focus on homophobia as the sole issue, rather than that of unchecked state power to destroy individual rights. This is not to say that homophobia isn’t an issue; it’s to say that marginalized groups are all the more vulnerable to abuse in an inherently corrupt system.

Rad Geek concludes that the problem is indeed systemic:

So if the courts don’t police the police, who does?

The answer is, of course, that most of the time, nobody does. Other arms of the government hardly ever hold government police accountable for abuse because they fob off responsibility to the discretion of their legally-privileged-and-immunized enforcers. The government police hardly ever hold other government police accountable for abuse because they have no incentive to restrain the conduct of their fellow government cops, and a distinct professional interest in giving their colleagues as much latitude as possible in the exercise of unchecked power over their chosen targets. And nobody outside of government can hold police accountable for abuse, because government refuses to recognize the right of any independent person or association to sit in judgment of its own actions, and so has legally declared the State and all its agents accountable to none save God alone. And if you want to know why, week after week, you see the same pattern of rampant, relentless, unchecked, unaccountable, unrepentant, overwhelming and intense violence, committed by government cops against people who are obviously harmless, helpless, or defenseless, in the defense of police prerogatives and inflicted against the very people who they are allegedly being privileged and paid to Serve and Protect — well, that’s pretty much why.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Chad Gibson was clearly helpless, and may have been made so for life. And he won’t be the last.

Why Can’t Feminists Figure Out That War Isn’t the Answer?

The Feminist Majority Foundation is at it again:

Why Is a Leading Feminist Organization Lending Its Name to Support Escalation in Afghanistan? | Reproductive Justice and Gender | AlterNet

I realize that blog titles like “Frau Hitler” are inflammatory, but I just can’t say strongly enough how incredibly disgusted I am with the way Western feminists uncritically lent support to the warmonger Hillary Clinton and then to the only slightly less bellicose Barack Obama, who has since proven that he was no peace candidate.

Anyway, from the article:

Here are the facts: After the invasion, Americans received reports that newly liberated women had cast off their burquas and gone back to work. Those reports were mythmaking and propaganda. Aside from a small number of women in Kabul, life for Afghan women since the fall of the Taliban has remained the same or become much worse.

Under the Taliban, women were confined to their homes. They were not allowed to work or attend school. They were poor and without rights. They had no access to clean water or medical care, and they were forced into marriages, often as children.

Today, women in the vast majority of Afghanistan live in precisely the same conditions, with one notable difference: they are surrounded by war. The conflict outside their doorsteps endangers their lives and those of their families. It does not bring them rights in the household or in public, and it confines them even further to the prison of their own homes. Military escalation is just going to bring more tragedy to the women of Afghanistan.

…[W]e are told that the U.S. cannot leave Afghanistan because of what will happen to women if they go. Let us be clear: Women are being gang raped, brutalized and killed in Afghanistan. Forced marriages continue, and more women than ever are being forced into prostitution — often to meet the demand of foreign troops.

The U.S. presence in Afghanistan is doing nothing to protect Afghan women. The level of self-immolation among women was never as high as it is now. When there is no justice for women, they find no other way out but suicide.

I have said before that the only principled feminist stance is an antiwar one.  This has nothing to do with the cultural stereotyping of women as meek, passive creatures and everything to do with the disproportionate impact that aggressive interventions abroad have on women.

More Ad Hominem-ity

Hmpf.  I don’t think I like this.  (I’m sure Caplan will lose sleep over that.)

Why Are the Neurotic Anti-Market?, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

People high in Stability realize that, objectively speaking, life in First World countries is good and getting better all the time.  As long as government leaves well enough alone, our problems will take care of themselves.

People low in Stability, on the other hand, habitually blow minor problems out of proportion.  Even when they live in First World countries, they manage to convince themselves that the sky is falling.  Their typically neurotic response is to beg for Big Brother to save them from their largely imaginary problems.  When government solutions don’t work out, they misinterpret it as further proof that life is hopeless – not that their “solutions” were ill-conceived.

I’m plenty neurotic and I’m not anti-market; besides, libertarians in general are maladjusted (ie neurotic) compared to the rest of society almost by definition.  This sentiment also smacks of what C.S. Lewis called Bulverism.  Ideas can’t be proven or disproved based on the personal qualities of the ones who hold them:

In reality, of course, either the doctrines of the capitalists are false, or the doctrines of the Communists, or both; but you can only find out the rights and wrongs by reasoning – never by being rude about your opponent’s psychology.

Okay, I’ll backtrack:  I don’t totally disagree with Caplan.  Richard Florida’s book Who’s Your City takes the novel approach of trying to categorize states and cities along the lines of the Big Five personality traits, and the populations of the big left-leaning cities apparently score high on Openness and Neuroticism.  Still, the problem is that calling a liberal “neurotic” is generally not the best recruitment tactic, even if it does make me smirk.

What Anti-Immigration Libertarians Have in Common with Everyone Else

Oh hello. I’m still here. Reading ur blogz. I particularly appreciated Rad Geek’s debate with Vin Suprynowicz, which RG had the presence of mind to preserve in its entirety. It is amusing in part because non-libertarians often complain of ad hominem attacks and caricaturing of the left and right by libertarians: Suprynowicz amply demonstrates that libertarians call each other names quite a bit too. In Libertarians Against Property Rights and Freedom of Association, Unabridged Edition, we see that Suprynowicz wrote on June 16 2009:

Yes, if there were no tax-funded “commons,” and none of us were numbered or taxed, the arrival of a million strangers seeking work would do me little harm, provided they maintained reasonable sanitary safeguards. When “Rad Geek,” hiding in the shadows of anonymity, has managed to accomplish goals to which courageous Libertarians have been unable to win over even 5 percent of our casually socialist neighbors in 40 years of effort, I hope he’ll let us know.

Meantime, since he wants to speak in hypotheticals, let’s pretend “Rad Geek” is a landlord or an employer, telling all applicants who speak poor English, “I’m not going to rent to you or offer you a job, because I think you may be an illegal immigrant and I don’t want to become an accessory to your crime.” Do you think our brave federal bureaucrats will congratulate him and back him to the hilt, demanding the applicant prove he or she is here legally?

Those employers and landlords soon find themselves in an Alice-and-Wonderland world, threatened with fines by the EEOC and other alphabet bureaucracies, you simpering innocent. “Presumably my boss and landlord are willing?” Go talk to a few of them, before you go presuming too much, you ivory-tower twit.

I applaud Rad Geek for stepping into the fray and battling it out with an anti-immigration libertarian. I’m already so overwhelmed by the conservative pro-war and anti-immigration folks that I get psychologically fried at the idea of having to explain, to a freakin’ libertarian, that if the government fouls up whenever it intervenes in the domestic economy, that the problem gets infinitely worse when you hand them extra guns and tax funds.

RG addresses Suprynowicz’s central concern here, basically that of mooching:

But in any case, if you are going to blame the people who reclaim government-seized money, rather than the government that seizes the money in the first place, then you do realize, don’t you, that illegal immigrants aren’t special in any particular way on this count? That you could use this argument just as easily to justify government force against just about anyone — government-enforced population control (since children receive big tax subsidies for education, healthcare, etc.), internal passports (since immigrants from poorer states tend to move to richer states and take advantage of the more plentiful welfare benefits), summarily jailing and exiling everyone over the age of 65 (seeing how they mooch of[f] Social Security and Medicare, usually far in excess of what they paid in when they were working), or any other collectivist horror you might dream up.

I think RG gets to the heart of the matter here: whenever you have a government program that rations inefficiently, you inevitably start thinking people are the problem, rather than the program itself. We see this over and over and over. There is overfishing due to the tragedy of the commons/lack of private property rights in the oceans—hence women should stop having babies. (No, seriously. Someone wrote this. As a rebuttal.) For our socialist programs that allow some to mooch off the many, we scapegoat illegal immigrants, or whoever else is easily at hand, preferably a vulnerable, unpopular group. For now we’d laugh, I hope, if someone proposed that we fix public schooling by reducing the number of children who are born. Unfortunately, people take seriously the notion that we can solve our immigration problems by persecuting the immigrants. And, as we’ve already seen in single-payer healthcare systems abroad, those over 65 often receive especially substandard care, and I’m sure the idea of withholding services from those who are already “too old” will gain increasing traction here as healthcare goes down the socialist tubes. Again, “old people” will be the problem, not Medicare itself.

I mean, I sort of understand where Suprynowicz is coming from. I really do. (Oops, can you tell that I’ve reread Catcher in the Rye recently?) That is because collectivist thinking is so seductive and so pervasive, even if you’re an otherwise hardboiled libertarian. It’s really hard not to think of the state as some sort of gated community writ large, where you pay your dues in exchange for getting public roads and stuff. As far as I can tell, anyway, this is an extremely prevalent mindset that is used to justify all sorts of abominations. Sometimes the money gets used for things you don’t like, such as keeping foreigners out, or for not keeping enough foreigners out. But for all that so many are anti-market, there is an implicit understanding of taxes as a kind of membership fee for a big crazy gym called the state, which just happens to have waterboarding machines out back. It’s pretty easy to preoccupy everyone with worrying about how to keep people from sneaking in and using the water fountain.

I’ve probably stopped making sense a while ago, but in closing I’ll say that this is why I have issues with identifying government as an industry in any sense. It just makes it sound so much more benign than it really is, and adds to the confusion that citizens have in seeing themselves as shareholders or club members of a sort.

Glad We Straightened out Iraq and Afghanistan

These sources have a left-socialist slant, but I think this information is nonetheless valuable. The Vision of Humanity’s
Global Peace Index finds Iraq at the very bottom, just below—give you three guesses!—Afghanistan. From the Guardian:

Despite the much-vaunted progress on security, Iraq remained bottom of the list, below Afghanistan, Somalia and Israel, which found itself listed as more dangerous than Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the top, the usual Nordic suspects clustered below New Zealand: Denmark, Norway and Iceland came second, third and fourth, followed by Austria and then Sweden.

How does the U.S. place on this list? Well, apparently you can’t export violence without some robust production at home:

The United States has clawed its way up six places to 83rd – still weighed down by two foreign wars, a high prison population and the general availability of guns.

I’ll just ignore that little jab about arms—though it calls the methodology of the whole survey into question. (For instance, did they count the “high availability of knives” in Great Britain?)

The Global Peace Index is new, but I’m sure a little research would reveal how Iraq and Afghanistan might have ranked before we went in there and mucked things up. Clearly you cannot bomb a country into peace. I’m sure that was never the intention, but that’s how it was sold—and bought—by so many.

In Passing, I’d Like to Mention the Seasteading Institute

This is great. I hope I’m not putting too negative a spin on things, but I kind of love how the New York Times did an entire profile about an artist, Mary Mattingly, who wants to DIY a barge to live on—and who probably has not outgrown a dumpster-diving ethic—while begrudging a paragraph to the Seasteading Institute. I will similarly prioritize the description of the barge, known as the “Waterpod.” (Cute name. I bet they’ll be hearing from Steve Jobs’ intellectual property lawyers. Or at least endure ceaseless “Waterworld” comparisons.) From the article, “A Fluid Definition of Self-Sufficiency” (h/t Patri Friedman):

[The Waterpod is] an independent project Ms. Mattingly dreamed up three years ago to explore the possibility of creating a self-sufficient community on the water — a kind of aquatic version of the Biosphere 2 complex built in the Arizona desert in the 1980s — that might offer an alternative to living on land in the future, if “our resources on land grow scarcer and sea levels rise,” she said.

Next week, if construction is completed on schedule — something that seems in question, given how much work is left — she and three other artists will begin living on the barge for five months, docking at various locations in the five boroughs, where it will be open to the public, beginning with South Street Seaport.

The project, which has been financed with private donations and grants, is intended to be self-sustaining: food will be grown onboard, some of it in hydroponic gardens; drinking water derived from purified rainwater; electricity generated through a mix of solar, wind and bicycle power; and waste recycled into compost.

I can see how this is way more newsworthy than the Seasteading Institute, which is taking a sustained, serious, pragmatic approach to the exact same endeavor. You know, the place that’s been around for over a year now, with a half-mil in funding from a prominent investor, that’s drawn up prototypes and designs and has an actual staff:

The Waterpod isn’t the only project exploring water-based living. Last year, Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer, co-founded the Seasteading Institute, based in Palo Alto, Calif., which is developing a floating home based on the design of an oil rig, with $500,000 in financing from Peter Thiel, a PayPal founder. Mr. Friedman, who said he sees the ocean as “a new frontier for pioneers to try things out,” plans to have a single-family prototype built next year, and has set a goal of housing 100,000 people in the next 25 years.

I mean, it’s easy to see how Friedman’s project can hardly compare with trendy buzzwords like compost* and bartering. 100,000 people. Silicon Valley. Yawn. These are five Brooklyn artists we’re talking about! They probably have really cool tats! And hand-knit Obama dog shirts to sell on Etsy! Ok, sorry, I’ll stop.

Anyway, even the NYT seemed a bit sardonic near the end:

Ms. Mattingly has been growing tomatoes and onions on her windowsill (as have other crew members), but they won’t be ripe by next week, and she acknowledged the possibility that the onboard gardens and the eggs laid by the chickens won’t provide enough food to feed four people for five months.

“We worked out a deal with the Union Square Greenmarket, where we’re going to barter for food,” she said. She hadn’t yet figured out what to offer in exchange. But she didn’t seem particularly troubled by that, or by the fact that supplementing the food supply meant that their community wouldn’t actually be self-sustaining.

I’m sorry for the snark, and I get that this is a local interest piece, and I’m glad that the Institute was at least mentioned. I’m just always amazed by what mainstream media considers newsworthy. Dare I suspect that there’s political bias at work? These artists are motivated by widely fashionable concerns about resource depletion and global warming, hence the worry about “sea levels rising” and being able to stay afloat if they do. (Really, I’m surprised more global warming alarmists aren’t hitching rafts to their fixies already.) The libertarian motives of the Seasteading Institute were not discussed even in passing, presumably because the very mention would have caused most NYT readers to drop their papers with a scream of horror.

Anyway, I do hope these folks get their barge going. The homestead-on-the-sea movement has enough bad PR from its spotty track record, and the NYT piece certainly came off as a bit pessimistic. I have higher hopes for the Institute, however.

A final plug: read Friedman and Wayne Gramlich’s book on seasteading that actually researches the issues of self-sustainability, etc.

*Note: I’m not actually opposed to compost, and the Institute isn’t either.

On Rich White Men

The Metafiler post on Seasteading is predictably irritating. It’s true that many libertarians are indeed rich white men, or at least relatively affluent. If that were the only criterion, however, then Karl Marx would be the mascot of the pro-liberty movement. Too many critics to mention have already pointed out the irony of affluent whites advocating socialism. (Think of intellectual lightweights like F.A. Hayek and Dostoyevsky.)

If nothing else, at least rich white libertarians who say that you should keep your money are being more honest. Frankly, it’s kind of sickening to see some guy at a cushy corporate job, whose income is in the 99^th percentile globally, go on and on about supposedly greedy libertarians and how everyone should be more generous. (I’d wager that this description fits a disproportionate number of Metafilter commenters.) But, of course, as some studies have shown, it’s actually the more conservative-minded who tend to be more generous.

People like to name-drop Ayn Rand as a sort of shorthand for unrestricted greed and the rejection of altruism. I think she elicits such volatile reactions because she actually dared to write about what most people practice but are loath to preach. Nobody—and I mean nobody, not even Mother Theresa—actually “lives for others.” It’s not physically possible to live for someone else, unless you’re hooked up to someone like some kind of life-support machine. Besides, this generation in particular (well, roughly generations X, Y and Z) seems downright allergic to terms like individual liberty and individual rights, but their own practices tell a different story: they’re unable to invest in anything besides their education and work lives (by extension, their own advancement and fulfillment) and are increasingly resistant to forming the most fundamental personal relationships and families, to a perhaps unprecedented extent in human history. Yet, ironically, this is the generation most likely to identify as “socialist,” understood as being invested in the well-being of others.

I’ll write more about this later. Just got really tired of hearing about libertarianism being confused, once more, with license, and hearing it condemned by people who are already leading licentious lives.