Quotulatiousness

August 9, 2021

L. Neil Smith – “[P]ut not thy trust in would-be princes”

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith recounts the sad record of US political parties who claim to support causes but uniformly shrink from actual support of those causes or their advocates:

A late newspaper columnist named Sam Francis (ultimately denounced by the left as a racist, of course) once said that America is ruled by an Evil party (the Democrats) and a Stupid party (the Republicans). To “stupid”, I would rush to add “cowardly”: when the GOP finally got a leader with a spine and testicles and guts (extremely rare qualities among Republicans), they were so terrified of of the man that they betrayed and abandoned him. A third political party, the Libertarians, seems determined to be even more spineless, balless, and gutless; they have specialized for years in nominating con-men and crooks for President.

They also don’t seem to know who their friends are, or how to treat them when they’ve found them. A case in point is one Norma Jean Almadovar, a former police officer and professional sex-worker who wanted to advance the Libertarian Party’s cause and recognition. The party that had always claimed it wanted to legalize prostitution was embarrassed to be confronted by the beliefs they claimed to advocate, and froze her out.

Now the once-admirable conservative youth organization Turning Point USA has faced an almost identical “crisis” and has failed almost identically. The Internet pornography-star Brandi Love (look her up), was originally scheduled to speak at their recent convention — against sex-work — but she was suddenly disinvited and chucked out into the cold, just like Norma Jean. Words like “graceless”, “churlish”, petty, “mean”,and “pusillanimous” come immediately to mind. It appears that competition has worked just as Adam Smith predicted. TPUSA is just as cowardlly and stupid as the LP.

Years ago, I took it on myself to write to Norma Jean to tell her how deeply ashamed I was of the Libertarian Party; it was just one of many reasons that I eventually left the party. Now I’m writing this little ditty in the faint hope that Brandi (whose real name is Tracey Lynn Livermore) will see it. I mean to tell her the same thing about Republicans that’s true of the Libertarians. Sorry sweetie, put not thy trust in would-be princes.

There was a movie, some years ago (it was about police corruption; I don’t remember anything else about it), where the phrase “you’ve lost the meaning” recurred several times. The Libertaran Party and the GOP lost whatever meaning they had long, long ago. Unfortunately, the Marxists, Stalinists, and Maoists we’re up against never lose their meaning. To quote another movie (Die Hard) they want to kill you and cook you and eat you. Not necessarily in that order.

June 9, 2021

Charles Stross on Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

Filed under: Books, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In his first blog post in nearly a month, Charlie Stross opines on one of Heinlein’s most polarizing novels:

In the 1930s, Heinlein was a soft socialist — he was considered sufficiently left wing and “unreliable” that he was not recalled for active duty in the US Navy during the Second World War. After he married Virginia Gerstenfeld, his third and last wife, his views gradually shifted to the right — however he tended towards the libertarian right rather than the religious/paleoconservative right. (These distinctions do not mean in 2021 what they might have meant in 1971; today’s libertarian/neo-nazi nexus has mostly emerged in the 21st century, and Heinlein was a vehement opponent of Nazism.) So the surface picture is your stereotype of a socially liberal centrist/soft leftist who moved to the right as he grew older.

But to muddy the waters, Heinlein was always happy to pick up a bonkers ideological shibboleth and run with it in his fiction. He was sufficiently flexible to write from the first person viewpoint of unreliable/misguided narrators, to juxtapose their beliefs against a background that highlighted their weaknesses, and even to end the story with the narrator — but not the reader — unaware of this.

In Starship Troopers Heinlein was again playing unreliable narrator games. On the surface, ST appears to be a war novel loosely based on WW2 (“bugs” are Nazis; “skinnies” are either Italian or Japanese Axis forces), but each element of the subtext relates to the ideological awakening of his protagonist, everyman Johnny Rico (note: not many white American SF writers would have picked a Filipino hero for a novel in the 1950s). And the moral impetus is a discussion of how to exist in a universe populated by existential threats with which peaceful coexistence is impossible. The political framework Heinlein dreamed up for his human population — voting rights as a quid pro quo for military (or civilian public) service — isn’t that far from the early Roman Republic, although in Rico’s eyes it’s presented as something new, a post-war settlement. Heinlein, as opposed to his protagonist, is demonstrating it as a solution to how to run a polity in a state of total war without losing democratic accountability. (Even his presentation of corporal and capital punishment is consistent with the early Roman Republic as a model.) The totalizing nature of the war in ST isn’t at odds with the Roman interpretation: Carthago delenda est, anyone?

It seems to me that using the Roman Republic as a model is exactly the sort of cheat that Heinlein would employ. But then Starship Troopers became the type specimen for an entire subgenre of SF, namely Military-SF. It’s not that MilSF wasn’t written prior to Starship Troopers: merely that ST was compellingly written by the standards of SF circa 1959. And it was published against the creeping onset of the US involvement in the Vietnam War, and the early days of the New Wave in SF, so it was wildly influential beyond its author’s expectations.

The annoying right wing Heinlein Mil-SF stans that came along in later decades — mostly from the 1970s onwards — embraced Starship Troopers as an idealized fascist utopia with the permanent war of All against All that is fundamental to fascist thought. In doing so they missed the point completely. It’s no accident that fascist movements from Mussolini onwards appropriated Roman iconography (such as the Fasces): insecure imperialists often claim legitimacy by claiming they’re restoring an imagined golden age of empire. Indeed, this was the common design language of the British Empire’s architecture, and just about every other European imperialist program of the past millennium. By picking the Roman Republic as a model for a beleagured polity, Heinlein plugged into the underlying mythos of western imperialism. But by doing so he inadvertently obscured the moral lesson he was trying to deliver.

May 2, 2021

QotD: The “I don’t watch sports” bore is even more rare than the Libertarian bore

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations, Sports, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I have always believed that I am the kind of person who doesn’t like sports. I don’t like playing them, and I don’t like watching them. Despite growing up in a sports-friendly household, I don’t think I have ever watched a complete game of professional basketball. I enjoy the over-the-top production values of the Super Bowl, but not football itself. I appreciate baseball as an exercise in the generation of discrete statistical outcomes, but I can’t bring myself to feel any passion about the game. All I know about hockey is that there’s something called the icing rule, which sounds delicious.

Only about 7 percent of American adults don’t watch sports at all. That means that non-sports-watchers are, by some counts, even rarer than libertarians. What I’m trying to say is, I’m fun at parties.

Peter Suderman, “Call of Duty Is the Best Sporting Event in the World”, Reason, 2018-10-19.

March 22, 2021

Happy 75th anniversary to the Foundation for Economic Education

Filed under: Economics, Education, Liberty, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Foundation for Economic Education was founded by Leonard E. Read in 1946:

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the Foundation for Economic Education. As I have benefitted from reading FEE’s literature for nearly two thirds of that time and contributed to it for decades, I feel that it is definitely worth celebrating.

This year is also the 50th anniversary of Then Truth Will Out, by Leonard Read, FEE’s founder, which he wrote involved “An assessment of position on the freedom road after passing the 25th milestone at FEE.”

That sort of compound anniversary — 25th, 50th and 75th rolled into one — suggests that we might profit from a look back at “the freedom road” with Then Truth Will Out.

I think it is one of Read’s best books, as attested to by the fact that four of the chapters in my Apostle of Peace, which discusses what I consider some of his best sustained arguments, derive from it. But in looking at the book now, I have been most struck by its opening chapter, “A Confession of Faith.”

  1. Perhaps the clearest way to identify one’s politico-economic position — at least in broad outline — is to reveal his idea of the ideal, that is, what he means by civilization or by a civilized people.
  2. To me, civilization can mean nothing less than a society of civilized people. So how is a civilized person to be identified?
  3. A civilized person, according to my ideal, must recognize that man is at once a social and an individualistic being.
  4. Thus, he must not only be self-responsible but, at the same time, understand that he owes to others no infringements on their rights.
  5. In a word, the truly civilized person is a devotee of freedom; he opposes all man-concocted restraints against the release of creative human energy.
  6. The civilized person realizes how incorrect it is to think of freedom as synonymous with unrestrained action.
  7. Freedom does not and cannot include any action, regardless of sponsorship, which lessens the freedom of a single human being. To argue contrarily is to claim that freedom can be composed of freedom negations, patently absurd.
  8. Unrestraint carried to the point of impairing the freedom of others is the exercise of license, not freedom. To minimize the exercise of license is to maximize the area of freedom.
  9. In order to achieve this ideal, it is necessary that there be an agency of society — representative of the social side of man — which codifies the thou-shalt-nots, the taboos, the destructive actions and enforces their observation.
  10. The fact that society’s agency — government — has a historical record of getting out of hand, of becoming destructive itself, only testifies to how far from civilized we are. It does not warrant discarding the idea of the ideal; it does not justify anarchy.

December 7, 2020

QotD: American politics as “the playoffs”

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Like other Americans, however, many libertarians think of political parties like sports teams. They want their own team to root for and cannot root for the other teams. Voting Libertarian gives them psychological satisfaction, while in the aggregate diminishing their political impact.

Libertarians should stop thinking of parties as teams and think of them instead as the playoffs. In NFL football terms, The Democrats are the AFC and the Republicans the NFC. To get into the Superbowl, you have to survive the season and the playoffs in your respective conference. In effect, Libertarians want to form their own league which no one but themselves is interested in watching. And they assure themselves of never making the playoffs much less the Superbowl.

Randy Barnett, “Parties Are Not Sports Teams — Parties are the Playoffs”, The Volokh Conspiracy, 2005-02-24

July 11, 2020

The “Puritan Moment” of The Current Year

Filed under: Britain, History, Liberty, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Nigel Jones on the long history of struggle between British puritans and libertarians:

Portrayal of the burning of copies of William Pynchon’s book The Meritous Price of Our Redemption by early colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who saw his book as heresy; it was the first-ever banned book in the New World and only 4 original copies are known to survive today.
Engraving by F.T. Merrill in The History of Springfield for the Young by Charles Barrows, 1921.

Behind the wave of Wokeism that has swept and is now swamping Anglo-American Culture, is a pattern that has recurred throughout British History since the early 17th century. This is the pendulum that regularly swings between periods of joyful Libertarianism and purse lipped Puritanism.

Puritanism takes its name from the Calvinist religious movement that arose during the Protestant Reformation, partly in reaction to the explosive cultural Renaissance of the Elizabethan era – the age of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ralegh and John Donne.

The Puritans exported their austere doctrines to America aboard the Mayflower, where they eventually became one of the building blocks of the USA, and briefly achieved political power in England after the Civil War in the forbidding guise of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth.

We all have a mental picture of the Puritans in action. Sombrely dressed in black and grey, smashing the statues of saints, preaching their varied versions of the scriptures, and policing and banning anything when they suspected people of enjoying themselves, from Christmas festivities, to theatres, to fornicating for pleasure rather than reproduction. The Puritans endeavoured to dictate what people could think, speak and write. If this rings any bells with Wokeism, that is surely not coincidental.

There was an inevitable vengeful reaction to this po-faced culture of control and repression, and it soon came with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. King Charles II exemplified in his own libidinous person, with his myriad mistresses and tribe of illegitimate children, the loose culture of license that spread out from his court like a stain. This was the easy going Age of Lord Rochester and Nell Gwynn, so disapprovingly, if hypocritically, frowned on in the diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. More darkly, the Puritan Regicides who had beheaded Charles’s father were hung, drawn and quartered along with Cromwell’s exhumed corpse.

The Libertarianism ushered in by the Restoration had a much longer run than the initial rule of Puritanism had enjoyed. It lasted through the Georgian Age of the 18th century, culminating in the decadence of the Regency bucks and Queen Victoria’s “wicked uncles”. Puritanism made its comeback with the accession of Victoria herself, with her eponymous reign infamous for its crinolines, covered piano legs, cruel persecution of that supreme Libertarian Oscar Wilde, and its massive hypocrisy – a constant adjunct of Puritanism when it comes up against the incontrovertible facts of life and human nature.

Neatly coinciding with the reign of Victoria’s despised eldest son, Libertarianism returned in the portly shape of Edward VII in the opening decade of the 20th century to which he gave his name. As during the Restoration, the ruling elite again set the tone of the Edwardian era with their shooting and hunting, their discreet adultery at country house weekends, and their lavish clubs and parties.

April 27, 2020

QotD: H.L. Mencken’s literary theory

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As for me, my literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one main idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth. Take away this right, and none other is worth a hoot; nor, indeed, can any other long exist. Debauched by that notion, it follows necessarily that I can be only an indifferent citizen of a democratic state, for democracy is grounded upon the instinct of inferior men to herd themselves in large masses, and its principal manifestation is their bitter opposition to all free thought. In the United States, in fact, I am commonly regarded as a violent anti-patriot. But this is simply because most of the ideas upon which American patriotism bases itself seem to me to be obviously sentimental and nonsensical — that is, they have, for me at least, no intelligible relation to the visible facts. I do not object to patriotism when it is logically defensible. On the contrary, I respect it as a necessary corollary to the undeniable inequality of races and people. Its converse, internationalism, appears to me to be almost insane. What an internationalist says, stripping it of rhetoric, is simply that a lion is no more than a large rat.

H.L. Mencken, “Private Reflections”, The Smart Set, 1922-12.

April 15, 2020

QotD: The limited utility of the “left-right” scale in political debate

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Categorizing a political position according to some simple left-right scale of values leaves something to be desired. Political views cover such a wide variety of issues that it is impossible to describe adequately any one person merely by identifying where he sits on a lone horizontal line.

Use of the single left-right scale makes impossible a satisfactory description of libertarian (and classical-liberal) attitudes toward government. Libertarians oppose not only government direction of economic affairs, but also government meddling in the personal lives of peaceful people. Does this opposition make libertarians “rightists” (because they promote free enterprise) or “leftists” (because they oppose government meddling in people’s private affairs)? As a communications tool, the left-right distinction suffers acute anemia.

Nevertheless, despite widespread dissatisfaction with the familiar left-right — “liberal-conservative” — lingo, such use continues. One reason for its durability is convenience. Never mind that all-important nuances are ignored when describing someone as being, say, “to the right of Richard Nixon” or “to the left of Lyndon Johnson”. The description takes only seconds and doesn’t tax the attention of nightly news audiences.

Don Boudreaux, “Coercivists and Voluntarists”, The Freeman, 1997-08-01.

February 24, 2020

QotD: Not the village, not the family … the individual

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Liberals say, “It takes a village” to make a society great and strong.

The conservatives reply, “No, it does not take a village; it takes a family.”

Both sides are wrong. It takes an individual. It takes an individual to accomplish even modest goals. It takes a special kind of individual to accomplish great things. More often than not, individuals accomplish what they do in spite of the family, or in spite of the village.

It takes an individual to think, conceptualize, plan, and create. It takes an individual to rise above mediocrity, fear, and toward new discoveries.

“Families” do not work, study, and make a living. Individuals do. “Villages” do not discover electricity, or cure terrible diseases. Individuals do. Families and villages are not mystical entities. The are comprised of individuals. It is the brightest, and most creative, of those individuals upon whom the family and village depend.

Michael J. Hurd, “It Takes An Individual”, Capitalism Magazine, 2005-08-11.

February 13, 2020

QotD: Libertarianism

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

I make here the case for a modern and humane version of what is often called “libertarianism.” It is not right wing, reactionary, or some very scary creature out of dark money. It stands in the middle of the road – recently a dangerous place to stand – being tolerant and optimistic and respectful. It’s true liberal, that is, anti-statist, opposing the impulse of people to push other people around. It’s not “I’ve got mine,” or “Let’s be cruel.” Nor is it “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you, by force of arms if necessary.” It’s “I respect your dignity and am willing to listen, really listen, helping you when you wish, on your own terms.” When people grasp it, most like it. Give it a try.

Dierdre Nansen McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How true Liberal values produce a freer, more equal, properous world for all, 2019.

February 11, 2020

Leaving the Left – Part 9: PJ O’Rourke

Filed under: Books, Economics, Humour, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Economics in the Media
Published 18 Aug 2016

“When I got my first paycheck I found that I netted $82.27 after federal income tax, state income tax, city income tax, Social Security, union dues, and pension fund contribution. I was a communist. I had protested for communism. I had rioted for communism. Then I got a capitalist job and found out we had communism already.”
– The Baby Boom, PJ O’Rourke

Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government

Full Interview with Peter Robinson
https://youtu.be/keJYIkxbieg

February 5, 2020

Free speech and social media

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill says that even people who say racist things should not be censored on social media:

Katie Hopkins is a racist. Anyone who hadn’t already gleaned that from her dalliances with the vile race-baiters of Generation Identity types or her use of the word “cockroaches” in a column about immigrants will surely see it now following the speech she made at a phoney awards ceremony in Prague. Internet pranksters invited Hopkins to accept the Campaign to Unite the Nation Trophy (CUNT), during which Hopkins made a speech filled with racist epithets. She mocked Pakistani speech patterns. She compared Asians to epileptics. She described Muslims as retards who rape their mothers. She said that if you shout “Mohammed” in a British playground, thousands of “fucking” kids will come running, and “you don’t want any of them”. Vile, hateful stuff.

And yet Hopkins should not be banned. She should not be thrown off social media. Censorship is not the right solution to any problem, including prejudicial or hateful commentary. Last week, Hopkins, to the delight of the illiberal liberals who make up the commentariat and cultural elite in the UK, had her Twitter account suspended. Reportedly at the behest of Countdown host and campaigner against anti-Semitism Rachel Riley, and the chief exec of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, Imran Ahmed, Twitter erased all of Hopkins’ tweets and prevented her from accessing her account. People are celebrating this as a victory of decency over hatred; in truth, it is a victory of corporate power over freedom of speech.

[…]

That’s the thing: once you empower Twitter and other capitalist-founded platforms to decree who may speak and who may not, you are green-lighting a sweeping, global system of censorship. Both right-wing libertarians and left-wing radicals, ironically, say the same thing in response to this concern. They say, “Well, Twitter and the rest are private companies, so surely they have the right to say who can and cannot use their services”. It is predictable that the myopic libertarian right would so cavalierly elevate powerful corporations’ property rights over the free-speech rights of individuals – but to hear leftists do that is alarming. Clearly, their woke intolerance, their urge to censor everyone they disagree with, has now gone so far that they will happily empower unaccountable capitalists over ordinary people and give a nod of approval to the corporate control of public discussion.

And then there is the more difficult part of this discussion. Even if Hopkins had said genuinely racist things on Twitter – as she did in her Prague speech and has also done elsewhere – still she should not be censored. One of the many great things about freedom of speech is that it allows us to see what people really think. And that is empowering. It means that the rest of us – the potential audience to an individual’s speech – can use our intelligence and our principle to counter that speech, to criticise it, to ridicule it, to prove it wrong. Freedom of speech doesn’t only empower the speaker. It also empowers the audience. It allows us to exercise our moral judgement. Censorship, in contrast – whether it’s state censorship or corporate censorship – is fundamentally infantilising. It insults us and demeans us by blocking words and images on our behalf, as if we were children. It weakens our moral muscles and intellectual savvy by discouraging us from ever thinking for ourselves. Well, why should we, when wise people in government or Silicon Valley will think for us?

Katie Hopkins should be reinstated on Twitter. Not because she has anything of value to say, but for these three reasons. 1) Everyone, even objectionable people, must have the right to express themselves. That is the entire nature of freedom of speech. If we limit free speech, for any reason whatsoever, then it isn’t free speech at all. It is licensed speech, something gifted to us by officialdom or capitalism so long as we say things they find acceptable. 2) We, the audience, must have the right to hear all ideas and to decide for ourselves if they are good or bad. Anything else is just pure, foul paternalism that turns us from thinking citizens into overgrown children who must be protected from difficult ideas. 3) Corporate censorship is as bad as state censorship. Calling on powerful people or rich people to police the parameters of acceptable thought, and to expel anyone who says something bad, is a catastrophically erroneous thing to do. Trust people, not power; prefer freedom over control.

February 2, 2020

QotD: The role of government, as seen by fans of government

Filed under: Government, History, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It seems to me that many people believe that we human beings left undirected by a sovereign power are either inert blobs, capable of achieving nothing, or unintelligent and brutal barbarians destined only to rob, rape, plunder, and kill each other until and unless a sovereign power restrains us and directs our energies onto more productive avenues. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was believed that the beneficent sovereign power must be monarchial; in the 19th, 20th, and (so far) 21st centuries it is believed that the beneficent sovereign power must be “the People,” usually in the form of democratic majorities. We moderns applaud ourselves for having discarded our ancestors’ unenlightened attachment to monarchy and for our having replaced that attachment with an attachment to majoritarian nationalist democracy. We moderns do not understand that our attachment to nationalist sovereignty itself is a far more dangerous superstition than is an attachment to a variety of sovereignty other than majoritarian nationalist democracy.

Don Boudreaux, “Bonus Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2017-11-25.

January 12, 2020

Neil Peart, RIP

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I was very saddened to see the news, but it explains why the band retired:

Rush in concert, Milan 2004.
Photo by Enrico Frangi, via Wikimedia Commons

Neil Peart, the virtuoso drummer and lyricist for Rush, died Tuesday, January 7th, in Santa Monica, California, at age 67, according to Elliot Mintz, a family spokesperson. The cause was brain cancer, which Peart had been quietly battling for three-and-a-half years. A representative for the band confirmed the news to Rolling Stone.

Peart was one of rock’s greatest drummers, with a flamboyant yet precise style that paid homage to his hero, the Who’s Keith Moon, while expanding the technical and imaginative possibilities of his instrument. He joined singer-bassist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson in Rush in 1974, and his musicianship and literate, philosophical lyrics — which initially drew on Ayn Rand and science fiction, and later became more personal and emotive — helped make the trio one of the classic-rock era’s essential bands. His drum fills on songs like “Tom Sawyer” were pop hooks in their own right, each one an indelible mini-composition; his lengthy drum solos, carefully constructed and packed with drama, were highlights of every Rush concert.

In a statement released Friday afternoon, Lee and Lifeson called Peart their “friend, soul brother and bandmate over 45 years,” and said he had been “incredibly brave” in his battle with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. “We ask that friends, fans, and media alike understandably respect the family’s need for privacy and peace at this extremely painful and difficult time,” Lee and Lifeson wrote. “Those wishing to express their condolences can choose a cancer research group or charity of their choice and make a donation in Neil Peart’s name. Rest in peace, brother.”

A rigorous autodidact, Peart was also the author of numerous books, beginning with 1996’s The Masked Rider: Cycling in West Africa, which chronicled a 1988 bicycle tour in Cameroon — in that memoir, he recalled an impromptu hand-drum performance that drew an entire village to watch.

Peart never stopped believing in the possibilities of rock (“a gift beyond price,” he called it in Rush’s 1980 track “The Spirit of Radio”) and despised what he saw as over-commercialization of the music industry and dumbed-down artists he saw as “panderers.” “It’s about being your own hero,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015. “I set out to never betray the values that 16-year-old had, to never sell out, to never bow to the man. A compromise is what I can never accept.”

Update: At AIER Peter C. Earle pays tribute to Peart’s life and work.

The announcement of the death of Rush drummer Neil Peart came as a tremendous shock. Having only retired about four years ago, so many fans of Rush (myself included) had convinced ourselves that this was a temporary hiatus, and that in a year or two – eventually, at any rate – there would be an announcement of a new album, a short tour, or some other project. Surely musicians of their virtuosity and passion couldn’t stay away from the studio or stage for long. But now we know we were wrong, and we know why.

It was revealed that Neil had been battling a brain tumor for over three years. Characteristically, he, his family, and friends (among the closest of whom, Rush vocalist/bass player Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson) upheld his desire for privacy. I haven’t done the math as to whether Neil’s illness was likely a causative factor in the decision to retire, or whether it seems to have come along not long after the decision to retire.

[…]

In his role as the lyricist of Rush, Peart took on such topics as pernicious nationalism (“Territories”), mass hysteria (“Witch Hunt”), the division between constructive and destructive belief (“Faithless”), the fall of Communism (“Heresy”), conflict and power (“The Trees”), the horrors of totalitarian rule (“2112,” “Red Sector A”) and many allusions to individual liberty (“Tom Sawyer,” “Anthem,” “The Analog Kid,” “Finding My Way,” “Caravan”). He did so via lyrics which artfully and passionately evinced those sentiments; sentiments which early on suggested Objectivist perspectives, but over time developed into what he called “Bleeding Heart” libertarianism:

    I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal – because I’m an idealist. Paul Theroux’s definition of a cynic is a disappointed idealist. So as you go through past your twenties, your idealism is going to be disappointed many many times. And so, I’ve brought my view and also – I’ve just realized this – Libertarianism as I understood it was very good and pure and we’re all going to be successful and generous to the less fortunate and it was, to me, not dark or cynical. But then I soon saw, of course, the way that it gets twisted by the flaws of humanity. And that’s when I evolve now into … a bleeding heart Libertarian. That’ll do.

Neil, through his lyrics, managed to do what so many lyricists and writers – even, perhaps especially, so many libertarian intellectuals – fail to do: make liberty neither an alien fixture, a flat slogan, or a utopian slog. It is a way of thinking and living, and one which not only doesn’t ignore, but embraces the flaws and frailty of humanity, tempering realism with hope and optimism.

December 24, 2019

Remy: “The First Noel” (Ballot Access Parody)

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published 23 Dec 2019

Remy is creeped out by restrictive ballot access measures. Also by Prince Andrew.

——————
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Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.

—————-

Written and performed by Remy.
Produced and edited by Austin Bragg.
Music tracks and mastering by Ben Karlstrom.

LYRICS:

The first Noel I heard early one day
As I tried to run as a new candidate
My cheeks were wetter than Prince Andrew’s shirt
When the man spoke to me and he told me these words:

No “L,” no “L”
No “L,” no “L”
No room for me on the ballot, oh well

I looked up a party wherein
I could join but was told “There’s no room at the inn”
No bed to lay and I heard “take a hike”
Like the time I bought my wife an exercise bike

No “L,” no “L”
No “L,” no “L”
No room for me in the parties, oh well

My wish this year is to feel content
At the ballot and not—to be frank—incensed
Must it be so hard to boot folks we don’t like
But they claim it is lawful and I think that’s right, but …

No “L,” no “L”
No “L,” no “L”
Seriously, how creepy is Prince Andrew?

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