Politics « Quotulatiousness

March 6, 2012

Michael Kinsley: Of course it’s insincere

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: Advertising, Conservatism, Offensensitivity, Radio, Sexuality, Women — Nicholas @ 12:25

I don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh and I’m not likely to start listening in the near future, so my concern about “Slutpocalypse” is neither deep nor lasting. Limbaugh used the term “slut” to describe a Georgetown law student who was pleading for free or subsidized birth control. He then was forced to apologize, and the apology was deemed insincere by media commentators far and wide. Michael Kinsley points out that they went about it in the wrong way to garner a sincere apology:

The people who want to drive Rush Limbaugh off the air are not assuaged or persuaded by his apology over the weekend. They say he was not sincere: He only apologized, for calling a Georgetown University law student a “slut” and a “prostitute,” because of pressure from advertisers.

Well, of course he wasn’t sincere. And of course he was only apologizing to pacify advertisers — who were getting pressured to pressure Limbaugh by these very critics. Oh, there might have been a political calculation, too, that he’d gone too far for the good of his ratings or his celebrityhood. But any apology induced in these circumstances is almost by definition insincere. You can’t demand a public recantation and then expect sincerity along with the humble pie. If they wanted a sincere apology, Limbaugh’s critics would have had to defend his right to make these offensive remarks, and then attempt to change his mind using nothing but sweet reason. Go ahead and try.

[. . .]

Of course, the insincerity is on both sides. The pursuers all pretend to be horrified and “saddened” by this unexpected turn of events. In fact, they are delighted. Why not? Their opponent has committed the cardinal political sin: a gaffe.

A gaffe, as someone once said, is when a politician tells the truth. This is a bit imprecise. The term “politician” covers any political actor, certainly including Rush. And the troublesome statement needn’t be the truth, as it certainly wasn’t in this case: more like “the truth about what he or she is really thinking.” The typical gaffe is what they used to call a “Freudian slip.” But, with all due respect to Freud, why should something a politician says by accident — and soon wishes he or she never said, whether true or not — automatically be taken as a better sign of his or her real thinking than something he or she says on purpose?

H/T to Radley Balko for the link.

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This is why I haven’t been covering the robocallpocalypse

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: Conservatism, ElectionWatch, Fraud, Guelph, Ontario — Nicholas @ 10:23

Margaret Wente in the Globe & Mail brings a sense of proportion to the robo-call “crisis” in Canadian politics:

What’s happened to my country? I went away for a couple of weeks and all hell broke loose. I came back to find that someone named Poutine stole the last election. At first I thought this was a typo, that they meant Putin. But no. It turns out that Russia is a shining beacon of democracy compared to Canada. Apparently, our country has been hijacked by “the most comprehensive electoral fraud in our nation’s history” (Pat Martin, NDP critic). Voter suppression — lying, cheating and general chicanery — has driven us into “uncharted waters” (Bob Rae, Liberal Leader).

I certainly don’t wish to make light of voter fraud. But this fraud seems to have been engineered by the Keystone Kops. Not a single voter claims to have been prevented from voting. No ballot boxes appear to have been stuffed. Nobody was fraudulently elected. There weren’t even any hanging chads. Elections Canada says 31,000 Canadians have complained, but the vast majority of these complaints (“somebody called me at 10 p.m.”) seem trivial.

The dirty trickster at the heart of this evil scheme turns out to be someone with the nom de plume of Pierre Poutine (real identity unknown). Mr. Poutine and his henchmen were not personally directed by Stephen Harper but are widely thought to have been channelling him. In Guelph, Ont., they engineered a bunch of robo-calls that directed people to show up at non-existent voting stations. This tactic was evidently intended to discourage people who didn’t support the Conservatives from voting. It was so effective that the Liberal candidate won by a margin of 11 per cent.

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Australia’s “Ministry of Truth” founding document

Filed under: Australia, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: Blogging, Censorship, FreedomOfSpeech, FreedomOfThePress, Internet — Nicholas @ 00:07

A rather alarming report to the Australian government by Ray Finkelstein recommends setting up a News Media Council to exercise control over political speech in the media, both professional (TV, radio, and newspapers) and amateur (bloggers, Facebookers, Twitterers, and other private individuals posting their opinions to the internet). It appears to be directed at climate change sceptics, but the provisions of the proposed body of rules will allow a great deal of control over all political speech:

The historic change to media law would break with tradition by using government funds to replace an industry council that acts on complaints, in a move fiercely opposed by companies as a threat to the freedom of the press.

The proposals, issued yesterday by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, also seek to widen the scope of federal oversight to cover print, online, radio and TV within a single regulator for the first time.

Bloggers and other online authors would also be captured by a regime applying to any news site that gets more than 15,000 hits a year, a benchmark labelled “seriously dopey” by one site operator.

The head of the review, former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein, rejected industry warnings against setting up a new regulator under federal law with funding from government.

[. . .]

“News Media Council should have power to require a news media outlet to publish an apology, correction or retraction, or afford a person a right to reply,” the report states. It says this would be enforced through the courts.

The council would absorb the supervision of radio and TV current affairs by Canberra’s existing regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which ran the “cash for comment” investigation into talkback radio over many years.

The council would scrutinise online news sites that get more than 15,000 hits a year, clearing the way for government-funded action against amateur website operators who comment on news and current affairs. Greg Jericho, a prominent Canberra blogger on national politics, said: “The level of 15,000 hits a year, or about 40 hits a day, is seriously dopey.”

Some media executives privately dubbed the News Media Council as a potential “star chamber” because it would not have to give reasons for its decisions, which would not be subject to appeal

There’s a petition site at http://www.freespeechaustralia.com/ for those Australians who’d like to register their opposition to the new council.

Some excerpts from a Menzies House email from Timothy Andrews:

It is clear from the report, in particular paragraphs 4.31-4.42, that silencing climate realists is a major reason for these regulations: it is unashamedly explicit in this (and even uses the dirty trick of using polls from — wait for it — 1966 as evidence the media is pro-climate skeptic, and that — wait for it — only the ABC is unbiased!)

The size and scope of the proposed Super-Regulator is breathtaking. They will have the power to impose a “code of ethics”, force you to print views you don’t agree with as part of a ‘right of reply’, take you to court, and even make you take pieces down! Even personal blogs that get only 40 hits a day will be covered! To make matters worse, the SuperRegulator “would not have to give reasons for its decisions” and the decisions “would not be subject to appeal.” Even climate change websites in other countries like Watt’s Up With That will be covered by this!

[. . .]

11.69 Another aspect of jurisdiction concerns how the News Media Council will exercise its power over all internet publishers. Foreign publishers who have no connection with Australia will be beyond its reach. However, if an internet news publisher has more than a tenuous connection with Australia then carefully drawn legislation would enable the News Media Council to exercise jurisdiction over it.

Well, unless Australia is going to claim jurisdiction over the entire internet, I would imagine it will only prevent Australians from visiting foreign sites. I guess it’s a good thing that they’ve been getting friendlier with China: they can order up their national firewall from the same division of the People’s Liberation Army internet force.

James Delingpole points out that the usual suspects are involved in the process:

You can read the full 400 pages here, if you’re feeling masochistic. But Australian Climate Madness has a pretty good summary of the key issues of concern, starting with Pinkie Finkie’s proposal to create a new super-regulator called the News Media Council [missed a trick there, didn’t he? surely Ministry of Truth would have been more appropriate] which will impose its idea of fairness and balance not only on newspapers but even on blogs with as few hits as 15,000 a year.

But whose idea of fairness and balance?

It’s an astonishing fact that of the 10600 submissions received by the inquiry no fewer than 9600 were boilerplate submissions from left-wing pressure groups, led by Avaaz “a global civic organization launched in January 2007 that promotes activism on issues such as climate change, human rights, poverty and corruption.”

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March 4, 2012

Confused about the Cato takeover threat from the Koch brothers? You’re not alone

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: CatoInstitute, Libertarianism — Nicholas @ 11:40

Brad DeLong rounds up some of what’s being said about the attempt by Charles Koch to take control of the Cato Institute:

Ed Crane on the Koch Brothers:

Charles G. Koch has filed a lawsuit as part of an effort to gain control of the Cato Institute, which he co-founded with me in 1977. While Mr. Koch and entities controlled by him have supported the Cato Institute financially since that time, Mr. Koch and his affiliates have exercised no significant influence over the direction or management of the Cato Institute, or the work done here. Mr. Koch’s actions in Kansas court yesterday represent an effort by him to transform Cato from an independent, nonpartisan research organization into a political entity that might better support his partisan agenda. We view Mr. Koch’s actions as an attempt at a hostile takeover, and intend to fight it vehemently in order to continue as an independent research organization, advocating for Individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace.

Jonathan Adler on the Koch Brothers:

The Volokh Conspiracy » Koch v. Cato: Cato’s Crane and Cato Chairman Bob Levy charge the [Kochs’ law]suit is about transforming Cato into a less independent and more political (if not also more partisan) institution…. Many libertarian-leaning organizations receive money from the Kochs and their foundations and are attacked on this basis. Such attacks can be deflected, as financial support is not the same thing as control. But if the Koch brothers themselves represent the controlling majority of an organization’s board, that organization is, by definition, a Koch-run enterprise…. They will forevermore characterize the Cato Institute as “Koch-controlled” — and, as a legal matter, they will be correct…. [A]ny benefit from whatever changes they could make will be outweighed to the permanent damage to Cato’s reputation caused by turning it into a de facto Koch subsidiary. In short, they will have destroyed the Cato Institute to save it.

Update: Jason Kuznicki on the internal side of the debate at Cato:

When I learned that the Kochs were suing Cato, I’m sorry to say that one of the first things I felt was vindication. I’d been saying for years that Cato was essentially an independent shop. The suit makes no sense unless I was right all along.

I’ve worked at Cato for five and a half years. In that time I have never seen a single decision made in consideration of the Koch brothers’ wishes. Cato has always appeared to be run by two people: its president, Ed Crane, and its executive vice president, David Boaz. It was like that when I was hired, and it’s like that now.

Even they don’t call all the shots, either; plenty of things get published that they actually disagree with, including some of my stuff. The people who spin elaborate fantasies about the Kochs acting as our puppet masters were, and are, dead wrong. They’ve been wrong since at least the early 90s, if not earlier. I’ve been saying so for years. Now the whole Cato Institute is in open revolt against the Kochs, a revolt that grew up with astonishing speed.

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Passenger rail as the ultimate political luxury good?

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Railways — Tags: NewMexico, PublicTransit, Subsidies, Taxes — Nicholas @ 00:14

A post at Coyote Blog from last month looks at the eye-popping financial arrangements keeping the New Mexico “Railrunner” passenger service in operation:

Of course, as is typical, the Republic article had absolutely no information on costs or revenues, as for some reason the media has adopted an attitude that such things don’t matter for rail projects — all that matters is finding a few people to interview who “like it.” So I attempted to run some numbers based on some guesses from other similar rail lines, and made an educated guess that it had revenues of about $1.8 million and operating costs of at least $20 million, excluding capital charges. I got a lot of grief for making up numbers — surely it could not be that bad. Hang on for a few paragraphs, because we are going to see that its actually worse.

The equipment used in the New Mexico Railrunner operation looks remarkably similar to what GO Transit runs in the GTA:

Click to see original image at Coyote Blog

Anyway, I got interested in checking back on the line to see how it was doing. I actually respected them somewhat for not running mid-day trains that would lose money, but my guess is that only running a few trains a day made the initial capital costs of the line unsustainable. After all, high fixed cost projects like rail require that one run the hell out of them to cover the original capital costs.

As it turns out, I no longer have to guess at revenues and expenses, they now seem to have crept into the public domain. Here is a recent article from the Albuquerque Journal. Initially, my eye was attracted to an excerpt that said the line was $4 million in the black.

[. . .]

Now it looks like taxes are covering over half the rail’s costs. But this implies that perhaps $10 million might be coming from users, right? Nope, keep reading all the way down to paragraph 11

The Rail Runner collects about $3.2 million a year in fares and has an annual operating budget of about $23.6 million. That does not include about $41.7 million a year in debt service on the bonds — a figure that include eventual balloon payments.

So it turns out that I was actually pretty close, particularly since my guess was four years ago and they have had some ridership increases and fare increases since.

At the end of the day, riders are paying $3.2 million of the total $65.3 million annual cost. Again, I repeat my reaction from four years ago to hearing that riders really loved the train. Of course they do — taxpayers (read: non-riders) are subsidizing 95.1% of the service they get. I wonder if they paid the full cost of the train ride — ie if their ticket prices were increased 20x — how they would feel about the service?

If all of that wasn’t enough, the financing arrangement has a nasty sting in the tail: in the mid 2020’s, the state will owe two separate payments of over $200 million. Enjoy the subsidized rides now, folks … the payment comes due just in time for your kids to face as they graduate.

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March 3, 2012

Rex Murphy: Conservatives going through rough period in parliament

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: Conservatism, ElectionWatch, Parliament, Scandal, StephenHarper — Nicholas @ 12:00

Writing in the National Post, Rex Murphy considers much of the federal government’s current set of problems are either self-inflicted or made worse by their “browbeating style and defensive righteousness”:

I agree with the point Andrew Coyne made in these pages earlier, that the Conservatives (I’m paraphrasing) have situated themselves to fit these types of accusations. Their browbeating style and defensive righteousness to almost every challenge, or serious question, is a hallmark. That attitude offers them little shield when, as on occasion they must be, they are ill-done by. They play tough and hard and close to the boards, and when a story that fits that broad category, like robocalls, is pushed upon them, it seems to fit. In other words, their brittle style has a cost.

The headlines detailing opposition outrage over robocalls is just the latest instalment of the Conservatives losing all control of what might be called their agenda. They blundered Old Age Security. On Internet surveillance, they surely blundered the “with us or the child pornographers” messaging. And now they’ve been hauled off whatever road they might want to be on by a “scandal” from an election nine months ago. Since the House opened, it’s been one mess after another.

Naturally, the opposition parties are at some advantage in all of this, but not quite as much as they might figure. No one is going to look back on the last week, or the last month, and remember big speeches on the big questions — either energy policy, the country’s fiscal health, or foreign affairs. Instead, it’s been the usual rattle of stones in a tin can that passes for Question Period.

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March 2, 2012

Gary Johnson profiled in the Huffington Post

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: ElectionWatch, GaryJohnson, Libertarianism — Nicholas @ 11:22

Joel Sucher meets Gary Johnson:

At 59, Gary Johnson still projects the energetic aura of an athlete. But these days, the two-time Republican governor of New Mexico and imminent Libertarian Party Presidential candidate has the rumpled look of someone who spends too much time in Starbucks hunched over a laptop. At a sandwich shop near Rockefeller Center where we met for an interview last week, he talks with a quiet kind of energy: non-intimidating; a bit self-effacing, but sincere.

His voice is not mellifluous like Obama’s; his style is nothing like Mitt’s trying-too-hard; and his rhetoric is far from Santorum’s coarse and unbalanced rambling. Johnson’s speech lacks the “uhs,” “y’knows” or similar pauses that usually indicate a bad case of public overthink.

No, Johnson speaks with the conviction of a true believer, one convinced that abandoning the Republican Party for a run as a Libertarian will sow seeds that will take root — if not this year, then perhaps in 2016.

The preening and posturing of Romney and Santorum, looking to score at the socially conservative beauty contest, are anathema to Johnson. He wants to stick close to Libertarian core values, and if that means butting heads with former Libertarian Party presidential candidate (1988) Ron Paul, so be it.

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February 28, 2012

The palpable disappointment of discovering there isn’t a vast “denier” conspiracy

Filed under: Environment, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: ClimateChange, ConspiracyTheories, Corporations, FakeNews, GlobalWarming, Regulation — Nicholas @ 10:45

Ben Pile discusses the huge letdown for environmental activists that the Heartland Institute revelations merely revealed that there isn’t a huge, shadowy conspiracy to discredit them:

When internal documents from a libertarian think tank — the Heartland Institute, known for its sceptical views on climate change — were published on the internet recently, climate-change activists around the world were elated. The leak seemed to reveal the existence of a conspiracy to distort science and impede political progress on solving climate change, just as activists had claimed. But the celebrations turned sour when one of the documents turned out to be fake, and the remainder turned out to reveal nothing remarkable. Rather than telling us anything about organised ‘climate-change denial’, this silly affair reveals much more about environmentalists.

One of the endlessly recurring themes of the environmental narrative is — in the words of the man at the centre of the ‘Fakegate’ mess, water and climate researcher Peter Gleick — that an ‘anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated’ effort exists ‘to cast doubt on climate science’, and ‘muddy public understanding about climate science and policy’. According to this mythology, right-leaning think tanks are funded by big energy companies that are keen to protect their profits from environmental regulation.

There are two problems for environmentalists convinced by this mythology.

The first is that it has never been plausible. Large corporations do not suffer from regulation. They are simply able to pass costs on to the consumer. Moreover, regulation creates firm ground on which to base longer-term strategic decisions about capital investments. And finally, regulation creates opportunities for companies that are able to mobilise resources to enter new markets. Wind farms, for example, are not cottage industries. Regulation suits larger companies.

The second problem for environmentalists has been to demonstrate that the myth is anything more than a myth. An ongoing Greenpeace project launched in 2004, for instance, aimed to provide a ‘database of information on the corporate-funded anti-environmental movement’. However, the sums of money involved were paltry. According to Greenpeace, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the most vilified organisations, had received just $2million from Exxon between 1998 and 2005. Yet between 1994 and 2005, total donations to Greenpeace amounted to over $2 billion. According to the greens’ conspiratorial narrative, a handful of conservative think tanks with relatively small resources were seemingly able to undo the campaigning of a host of huge international environmental NGOs, national governments, international agencies, and yes, corporate interests, whose combined resources were many, many thousands of times greater.

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Occupy London has become an open-air asylum

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: Criticism, London, OccupyMovement, Protest — Nicholas @ 10:16

Brendan O’Neill in the Telegraph on the state of the Occupy London protests:

Even though I am an absolutist with it comes to the right to protest, I couldn’t help feeling relieved when a court decided this week that the Occupy camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral should sling its hook. For what started life as a middle-class shantytown packed with self-righteous haters of the rich — an annoying spectacle, yes, but hardly the end of world — has in recent weeks descended into something far more degenerate. Occupy London is now effectively a holding camp for the mentally ill, a space where the psychologically afflicted and deeply troubled can gather to eat, drink and be un-merry. And to have such a makeshift lunatic asylum on the steps of St Paul’s is not good for London nor for the inhabitants of the camp, who clearly need somewhere better to go.

On the five occasions I have visited Occupy London, I have noticed a steady decline in the calibre of the campers. To begin with, the inhabitants were mostly young, with red cheeks and purple hair, talking utter rubbish, of course, but not unpleasant to look at. Before long, that contingent seemed to disappear, to be replaced by straggly-haired conspiracy theorists banging on about 7/7 and the chemicals in our food. Now the camp has the distinct whiff of rotting food and decaying socks, and its dwellers are all sad-eyed and pathetic, many of them old, confused, and clearly too fond of booze. “GET TAE F**K!” one of them was shouting, at absolutely no one, the last time I was there.

[. . .]

All those commentators who wrote glowing reports about the camp a few months back, who took their organically fed children on day trips to visit it, who slammed anyone who criticised it and said we didn’t understand its “historic momentum” or “strategic function”, are now nowhere to be seen. That’s not surprising. What they giddily described as a turning point in radical politics has turned out to be more like a modern-day Bedlam, where respectable people on their way to work peer with increasingly wide-eyed bemusement at the strange, mumbling folk inside this unhygienic and collapsing institution.

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Did Greece get bailed out or did it default? A little from column A and a bit from column B

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Greece, Politics — Tags: Banking, Budget, Debt, EU — Nicholas @ 09:56

Detlev Schlichter explains what happened in the “big fat Greek bailout”:

Greece was bailed out for the second time in four months. Or did it default? Well, a bit of both, I guess.

All bondholders are equal. But some are more equal than others. If you are the ECB, your Greek bonds were exchanged, par for par, for new Greek bonds, and you can go on pretending that they are worth their principal amount. You won’t have to report a loss for now. But if you are a ‘private’ entity — and that is a rather loosely used term these days as it includes the banking industry which is either now partially owned by the state or to a considerable degree dependent on ongoing support from the lender-of-last resort — more than half your Greek investment was wiped out. So Greece defaulted. But as you ‘agreed’ to the ‘haircut’ it was in fact a ‘voluntary restructuring’, although you really had no choice.

[. . .]

I guess we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Greece’s economic model is fundamentally unsustainable, whichever way you cut it. Greece has been living beyond its means for a long time, and has managed to do so by flying under air-cover of the EMU project and with the tailwind of cheap credit and easy money. Spending by the Greek state accounts for more than half of registered economic activity, and a third of the workforce is employed by the public sector. ‘Activities’ are being subsumed under the heading of ‘Greek GDP’ that nobody would voluntarily pay for, that are to a large degree wasteful, and that are simply unaffordable under anything but the most bizarrely generous credit conditions, i.e. precisely those that Greece enjoyed from 2001 to 2008. Easy money has been used to paper over grave economic imbalances. Some of what is generously labelled ‘GDP’ should be discontinued — and fast.

To even suggest that such an economic model would be manageable if Greece, a country with about three quarters of the population of metropolitan Los Angeles but with less than half of L.A.’s GDP, only had its own paper currency and could inflate and devalue to its heart’s content, is economically illiterate. No country ever prospered by running budget deficits funded by the printing press or by creating domestic inflation. Devaluing your currency may give your exporters a shot in the arm — for about five minutes. But it scares your domestic savers away for years to come and severely diminishes your ability to keep or attract capital, the backbone of any sustainable economic model. To even try and attempt to ‘inflate away’ a debt load worth 160 percent of a generously calculated GDP would cause economic damage of gigantic proportion. One must have swallowed the Keynesian mythology of deficit-spending whole to believe that the country could borrow and print itself out of this mess. A proper default on its existing debt and rebuilding from a lower base — but with a hard currency — are the better options.

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February 26, 2012

The Freeman: An open letter to statists everywhere

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: NannyState, Rights, Taxes — Nicholas @ 12:09

In a posting from twelve years ago, Lawrence W. Reed has some questions he’d like statists to answer:

You clever guys are always coming up with new schemes for government to do this or that, to address this issue or solve that problem, or fill some need somewhere. You get us limited-government people bogged down in the minutiae of how your proposed programs are likely to work (or not work), and while we’re doing the technical homework you seldom do, you demonize us as heartless number crunchers who don’t care about people.

Sometimes we all get so caught up in the particulars that we ignore the big picture. I propose that we step back for a moment. Put aside your endless list of things for government to do and focus on the whole package. I need some thoughtful answers to some questions that maybe, just maybe, you’ve never thought much about because you’ve been too wrapped up in the program du jour.

At the start of the 1900s, government at all levels in America claimed about 5 percent of personal income. A hundred years later, it takes more than 40 percent — up by a factor of eight. So my first questions to you are these: Why is this not enough? How much do you want? Fifty percent? Seventy percent? Do you want all of it? To what extent do you believe a person is entitled to what he (or she) has earned?

[. . .]

This raises a whole series of related questions about how you see the nature of government and what you’ve learned, if anything, from our collective experiences with it. I see the ideal government as America’s founders did — in Washington’s words, a “dangerous servant” employing legalized force for the purpose of preserving individual liberties. As such, it is charged with deterring violence and fraud and keeping itself small, limited, and efficient. How can you profess allegiance to peace and nonviolence and at the same time call for so much forcible redistribution?

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Disaster preparedness, Wyoming style

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: Absurd, AirForce, Army, Carriers, Wyoming — Nicholas @ 08:56

Wyoming legislators are serious about their state being prepared for disaster:

State representatives on Friday advanced legislation to launch a study into what Wyoming should do in the event of a complete economic or political collapse in the United States.

House Bill 85 passed on first reading by a voice vote. It would create a state-run government continuity task force, which would study and prepare Wyoming for potential catastrophes, from disruptions in food and energy supplies to a complete meltdown of the federal government.

The task force would look at the feasibility of Wyoming issuing its own alternative currency, if needed. And House members approved an amendment Friday by state Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, to have the task force also examine conditions under which Wyoming would need to implement its own military draft, raise a standing army, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier.

H/T to Hit & Run where they comment with just the right level of absurdity: “The aircraft carrier is a nice touch. I suppose if it’s a big enough disaster, Wyoming might become a coastal state.”

Update, 29 February: Sadly the bill failed on third reading, so Wyoming won’t be pursuing its own aircraft carrier:

It appears that, on reflection, the Wyoming House of Representatives has decided the risk of invasion by its neighbors is remote enough that it can do without its own armed forces for now, and in particular does not need to consider whether an aircraft carrier might come in handy. I was informed, I think by Rep. Brown himself, that the bill was “defeated on third reading and exists no more.”

[. . .]

Rep. Brown was not a sponsor of the bill, although he does seem to have voted for it on the first reading; he later offered the aircraft-carrier amendment, and then voted against the whole thing today. So, although he hasn’t confirmed it yet, it does look like he may be one of those relatively rare legislators with both a sense of humor and the will to express it in a piece of legislation (which he knew would be deleted). It’s nice to be able to get humor out of a legislature this way for once.

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February 24, 2012

“[T]hose who pass for our leaders are largely anti-democratic, elitist and have little compunction about intruding into our private lives”

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: Criticism, Democracy, NannyState, Privacy, Technocracy — Nicholas @ 10:21

Daniel Ben-Ami at spiked! recommends reading Robert H Frank’s The Darwin Economy: not because it’s well-written (he says it’s not) but because it exposes the mindset of our would-be tyrants.

Everyone interested in contemporary society should read Robert H Frank’s The Darwin Economy or a book like it. It is not that it is amazingly astute or beautifully written. It is neither. But it does give readers an exceedingly important perspective: an inside view of how the current generation of politician-technocrats thinks.

Identifying some of the key themes of contemporary political debate is easy enough. A glance at the media reveals that those who pass for our leaders are largely anti-democratic, elitist and have little compunction about intruding into our private lives. Working out how they reach the conclusions they do, understanding the internal logic or their approach, is more difficult.

In many ways, economics is the discipline best suited to the technocratic mindset. This has nothing to do with its traditional subject matter. It is not about debating how to produce goods and services or how to distribute them. Instead, it relates to how economics has emerged as an approach that distances itself from democratic politics and provides little room for human agency.

[. . .]

Finally, the narrow vision embodied in technocratic approaches leads to a blinkered approach to problem-solving. For example, most economists discuss tackling climate change in terms of the optimum design of a market for carbon trading. There is little critical debate about the nature of the threat the world is facing or of the range of possible solutions. One alternative to tinkering with the demand for carbon might be to have a huge programme for building nuclear reactors. Such an initiative would also have the advantage of helping to tackle a vital but often forgotten problem: the need for massive amounts of additional energy to fuel economic development.

The technocratic approach to policymaking has become immensely influential and pernicious. Although it is often expressed in terms of economic arguments, it has an impact across the whole range of social life. It is anti-democratic, anti-political and anti-human. To counter the rise of technocracy, it is necessary to delve deep into how its arch-exponents think.

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ESR’s open letter to Chris Dodd

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: Censorship, ESR, Google, Internet, NannyState — Nicholas @ 09:18

Chris Dodd is apparently trying to get some kind of compromise or accommodation with the firms of Silicon Valley. ESR explains that this is not likely to yield the kind of returns he’s expecting:

Mr. Dodd, I hear you’ve just given a speech in which you said “Hollywood is pro-technology and pro-Internet.” It seems you’re looking for interlocutors among the coalition that defeated SOPA and PIPA, and are looking for some politically feasible compromise that will do something against the problem of Internet piracy as you believe you understand it.

There isn’t any one person who can answer your concerns. But I can speak for one element of the coalition that blocked those two bills; the technologists. I’m not talking about Google or the technology companies, mind you — I’m talking about the actual engineers who built the Internet and keep it running, who write the software you rely on every day of your life in the 21st century.

[. . .]

The difference matters because the businesspeople rely on us to do the actual technical work — and since the rise of the Internet, if we don’t like where a firm’s strategy is going, it tends not to get there. Wise bosses have learned to accommodate us as much as possible and pick the few fights they must have with their engineering talent very, very carefully. Google, in particular, got its huge market capitalization by being better at managing this symbiosis than anyone else.

I can best introduce you to our concerns by quoting another of our philosopher/elders, John Gilmore. He said: “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

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