Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Category: Society

  • It was better back then: communism and nostalgia

    The casual observer would, ehm… observe that late stage communism in Romania was not exactly Utopia. A good percent of the urban population lived in cramped concrete apartment blocks that were not quite heated in winter, water – especially of the hot variety – and electricity were not guaranteed, the lines were enormous for all basic goods, and shortage was the order of the day. Of course the leaders of the proletariat did not live in such conditions. They took over the villas of the pre-communism wealthy or middle class, and built a few more. It is quite understandable. After all, it is hard work, building equality; they deserved a better living standard then the hoi-polloi. Some animals more equal than others, you see.

    Excuse me, what do you have in stock?

    Shortage was the norm and queuing for hours was part of the social fabric. Good stuff, a friendly lefty will tell you. Got out of the house (the house was depressing anyway) socialized, met interesting people. And by interesting I mean hungry and bored. Obesity was less of a problem, the old commie diet works wonders. People had complex social rules for queuing. If you were lucky you found out in advance which store was about to get something. If you noticed a line, you sometimes joined it without actually knowing what it is for; there must be something to buy there. After standing in line you would ask the person in front what they had. In all lines you hoped that whatever was sold would not be finished before your turn. There was a standard shout of “Don’t give too much to one person so there is enough for all”. Anecdotally, in University we would shout that when going by the door of a room where a professor was grading exams.

    If you wanted gas for your car, you had to stay at least overnight in line. Someone had to sleep in the car, otherwise you would lose your spot. Well this meant that least you had a car, which was not easy, so you were in your own fashion a petty bourgeois. If you happen to be caught with more than a few liters of cooking oil or a few kilos of flour, you would be shamed on public TV for the goddamn hoarder and wrecker you were. There is plenty they would say, if not for the hoarders, the greedy ones who do not care for their fellow man.

    The stories are literally endless. Well not literally literally, but as close to it as possible. Also the jokes, though I feel a lot of them are repeated through European communist nations, so I won’t put any here. I was always fascinated as a kid by how the bread you could buy in stores was never fresh, always a day old. Maybe this way people ate less of it. This carried over after communism in a way. I was fairly young back then, but after bread shortage was no longer a thing, I noticed my parent always overbought bread and would usually throw away quite a bit, because there was some residual fear of running out of bread. Buy 3 just in case, we don’t want to run out of bread.

    There was secret police and the fear of nightmarish jail for any dissent. People rarely trusted neighbors, even family, due to fear of them actually being an informant. This fear was not unfounded, after communism it was found that many were in fact informers and many ratted on their brothers and cousins and parents. This created a general atmosphere of distrust among people that I think still persists.

    With all of that, you may wonder, how the hell there is still nostalgia about those times? How are there people who say it was better back then? Well it is not a simple thing. These things rarely are.

    One of the ones that usually accounts for some nostalgia was youth. Back then people were young and healthy and now they are old and sometimes sick. Discomfort was easier on a young body. Hell when I was a university student I would holiday in accommodations I quite turn my nose at now. We were a bunch of young people, had some food to eat and cheap booze to drink, it was all needed. Back in the communist days, there was not much food and crap vodka and wine, but a young couple lets say would need little more. The apartment was cold but they warmed each other, wink wink. Life seemed good enough.

    Another reason would be that radical change is hard on some. Communist life, as it was, was what people grew up with and were used to. The change was maybe too much for some. Further more, human memory is a fickle creature. People may selectively remember the better times, and selectively compare to the worst things the get now.

    Of course, among the stronger reasons it is quite simple. Envy. Basic human envy sprinkled with some resentment here and there. Many did not have it worse back than in absolute terms, but had it the same or better in relative terms to others. Everyone was poor, many poorer than you.

    This especially applies to the less than competent who do not do as well in a society were some level of competence matter. Why should they have less money just because they are less productive? They will say back than everyone had a job. Yes, they did. And most didn’t do much at it. Communism lasted as long as it did because of the few people who did their best out of principal.  My father was one of such. But it was disastrous because these people were a minority.

    A good number of the ones who did the jobs did reasonably well after communism. The others not so much and were nostalgic, it was better back then. They had the same pay for little work as the guy who did all the work. Sometimes more because he spent the time not working mingling, making connections, joining the Party, ratting out colleagues to the secret police, that sort of thing.  My father always refused to join the Communist Party which cost him quite a bit back then. I have to admit, as a kindergartner I was a Falcon of the Fatherland, but never got the chance to be a Pioneer and join the party on account of my age.

    My father is an electronic engineer and worked in a factory that designed and produced industrial automation devices. Back then the workers got better pay than the engineers, more access to holiday accommodations, better apartments and extra rations. So they felt good. After communism when engineer pay rose above worker pay, they had, led by the union, a strike before the factory, screaming we do all the work, we don’t need engineers, fire all the engineers. The competent engineers left the still government owned factory by themselves in time, and it closed down. Before my father left a group of assembly workers asked him respectfully about maybe staying to keep the factory going. He reminded them of their strikes, and they realized their mistake. But it was a bit late for that. Others did not, and took small anticipated pensions and are now fairly poor, bitter and talking about how it was better back then. Even with their current poverty they probably have the same amount of goods, but now there are so many things in stores they cannot afford. Empty stores of communism did not have this effect.

    Off course, a lot of people are much poorer then they would be if an actual free market reform took place instead of the government dominated crony capitalism system we have in this country. Started by Mister Iliescu, may he rot in Hell, who wanted to replace the old system with something called socialism with a human face. Which meant the right people get all the wealth and power, mostly the ones who had it before. Still, the new system did lead to development and allowed some actually get a better life. But it did take some effort.

    I feel sorry in a way for a lot of Romanians, because they were educated in communism and kept that kind of thinking. Many were kept poorer by the system and the government, it was not fully their fault. It never is. Humans do adapt to circumstances. But then again, they voted for the system in great numbers- no vote rigging needed – and expected things to happen by themselves. On the other hand there were plenty of people who did not believe all the communist indoctrination and did change their thinking after ’89. And a lot of them willfully did not and became hateful instead. While in communism they took only the “to each according to his need” part, skipped the work part, and spend time trying to climb the hierarchy while being snitches. So my sorry feelings are ambivalent to say the least. Heartless libertarian such as I am.

  • The Nation Misses The Point on Counterterrorism

    It was brought up in the morning links (h/t: AmSoc), but deserves expanding upon.

    Grande and Mattis

    The Nation is more concerned with making President Trump and his administration look foolish than they are about taking terrorism or counterterrorism seriously. And I have no doubt that Ariana Grande means well, but she’s dead wrong.  Inclusiveness is no strategy to fight terrorism. It is a strategy to offer people an opportunity to assimilate to an enlightened western culture.  Some people will take that opportunity, as evidenced by the millions of Muslims that live peacefully among people of other religions as well as agnostics and atheists throughout the western world.  But some won’t. And you can be as inclusive as you want to be, but that won’t take away their desire to impose their beliefs upon everyone else, often resorting to terrorism when people aren’t receptive.

    Juan Cole writes:

    Secretary of Defense Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis said in an interview on Sunday that US strategy toward ISIL has moved from attrition to annihilation. Since 2014, he said, the United States has been making it difficult for them to stay in one place, disrupting them and chasing them out of their strongholds (through airstrikes). Now, he said, the new strategy is to surround them and kill them all, to prevent the foreign fighters from returning home to foment more terrorism. He also urged a battle of humiliation against them in cyberspace, depriving them of any mantle of legitimacy. He was unapologetic about the recent Pentagon finding that a US air raid set off explosives in a Mosul apartment building, killing over 100 civilians, and seemed to pledge more reckless airstrikes.

    Certainly there is a case to be made for non-interventionism.  But that’s not the case Ariana Grande is calling for. (If she were, I’d be happy to cheer her on.) She calls for inclusion.  Now tell me, what possible good can come from being “inclusive” toward a regime built on terror? Can we “include” into western culture their belief that women caught without an escort should be stoned to death? Can we “include” into western culture their belief that gay men and women should be tossed to their death from the highest point in town? Can we “include” into western culture the taking of sex slaves when they conquer a city?  And lastly, can we “include” into western culture the celebration of slaughtering innocent people in our cities because we resist the importation of their insane lifestyle? That’s not inclusion. That’s tolerance and acceptance of barbarism.  We, as a society, are better than that.  And while I believe we should remain non-interventionist when it comes to global meddling, once they import that activity to out nations, we should destroy those who would perpetrate those violences with every tool that is constitutionally available to us.

    The strategy of annihilation is sort of like fighting forest fires with gasoline hoses.

    Actually, its not.  An enemy can be annihilated. It can be rooted out and extracted like a cancer. Sure it may pop back up again at a future date, but that doesn’t mean its not worth fighting to eradicate. And its a damn sight better to have tried and failed that to succumb to evil in any form. And I have to say, the strain of any religion that accepts massacring innocent people at a concert for the spread of it, or the killing of any gay person for the spread of it, or the taking of sex slaves and stoning of women not adequately subservient for the spread of it, deserves to be wiped from the face of the earth with all haste possible.

    I will give him partial credit, though. He wrote this:

    George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, in other words, created the exact conditions in that country that were guaranteed to foster terrorism. Washington has never come to terms with its own responsibility for destabilizing the region.

    However, he completely omits the expanded war on terror Obama waged, expanding it to nations Bush never bombed. He fomented rebellion in Libya and Syria, directly leading to the soldiers, and in all likelihood the arms, necessary for ISIS to gain a foothold. He also forgets the overwhelming bipartisan support Bush and Obama both received to wage their wars in parts of the world that posed no threat to us.  I’m sure it was an oversight and not a deliberate attempt to score cheap political points. But it deserves to be mentioned.

    This is real.

    Look, there is no surefire way to prevent terrorism. But once it reaches our shores, the individuals carrying it out deserve to be treated harshly, so long as it is within constitutional limits. And people that are guests here who return to the battlefields of the middle east should be forbidden re-entry. We are under no obligation to “include” their idiocy any longer. Neither does Britain, Germany, Sweden or any other nation that chooses to eject those whose sole purpose is conquest through barbarism.

    If this runs counter to open borders libertarianism, I’ll happily accept the scorn of those friends of mine on this one issue. But open borders can exist at the same time a strong counter-terrorism operation can be waged within the confines of our Constitution. And its time we allowed the warriors to stand up and properly defend us from those who are using “inclusive” appeasement as a means to infect our society with their oppressive, pre-enlightenment form of barbarism.

    **The views in this are mine alone and do not represent the views of other Glibs staff.

  • Reviews You’ll Never Use: Texas Frightmare Weekend

    Greetings one and all, and welcome to an unusual installment of Reviews You’ll Never Use. This week, I shall recount to you, my reluctant audience, my adventures, foibles, and heroic deeds during this past weekend’s Texas Frightmare Weekend. This will follow a slightly different format, with all wordy word words up front and then all the photos at the end. I tried sprinkling them throughout but thought it looked too cluttered. Also, some quirk of the site makes it very difficult to line photos up next to each other when captioned, so they’re just all in a vertical line, which also looks weird. Sorry.

    My favorite weekend of the year. Now I have to bide my time until October, when shit gets real for me again.

    This was TFW’s 12th year, and the convention continues to grow. They’re going to have to change locations again soon, methinks. The Hyatt Regency DFW’s entire bottom floor is a convention center, but on Saturday especially, it’s just wall to wall, to the point it’s barely fun and you can’t move. The logo doesn’t lie, however: this is the southwest’s premier horror convention. People come from all over; in Ted Raimi’s panel, he asked who was from out of state, and fully half the room raised their hands. I spent time standing in various lines with a lovely couple from Montreal, a man who claimed to hail from San Francisco and yet quizzically was not a gayhomofag, and some boisterous fellows from Monterrey, Mexico.

    The wife and I always stay at the hotel from Friday through Sunday, as there is simply too much to see and do for a single day, and it’s much more conducive to drunkenness to be able to just go up to our room, rather than get an Uber back and forth to our house, about half an hour away. Friday night we dedicate to signature hunting and finish that task on Sunday because the lines during Saturday are just unbearable. Also, if you’re reading this, Hyatt, your $15 breakfast buffet is barely passable as food, and a lot of places don’t charge for that shit, particularly when it is of such low quality. Literally, the only good thing is that the bacon is made thick and soggy, just the way I like it. I am not a fan of crisp bacon, and if you are, I hate you, because people like you make restaurants think it is not only acceptable, bur desirable, to make crispy bacon. Seriously dude, fuck you.

    There are always lots of guests, lots of interesting vendors selling interesting things, lots of costumes, panels, and film screenings. There’s a theme party on Friday night, a VIP party for people who pay more on Saturday, and a free Saturday night option of karaoke. I’ll let you peruse the guest list yourself rather than listing them all here, but this year we had quite a good haul of signatures and bought a few fun items. We attended the Friday night theme party (the theme was an Antarctic research post from The Thing), but Saturday I’m afraid we were simply too drunk to participate in any of the other festivities. The Friday night party was crowded but boring, so we broke open the glowstick necklaces laying about and made an art project on the tablecloth. We really only went because the decor and props were done by our friends at Dark Hour haunted house, and it would have been shitty of us not to show up to support people we hang out with. Seriously, we have season passes to this haunt, and had our 10th wedding anniversary there last month.

    Saturday we managed to sit through a midnight screening of Karate Kill, with director Kurando Mitsutake in attendance to field questions afterward. I pointed out to him that the Texas flag was upside down the two times it appeared in his movie, which I’m proud of myself for having caught, it being 2 in the morning and my being drunk. Somebody asked him the budget of the film, and he said he wasn’t supposed to say prior to US distribution, but fuck it, he’d had too much whiskey, and he spilled the beans. Don’t worry, Kurando, I won’t tell. The film was a welcome re-introduction to actress Asami’s titties, which I had seen in previous films. She was in attendance at a TFW a couple of years back, and we got her signature. She was dressed conservatively in traditional Japanese female clothing. I wanted to tell her it was no use since most of us had seen her have fake sex on screen, and seen her boobies, but I suppose it made her feel better. Seriously, check out the movies she’s been in. Read that list and revel in its awesomeness. I have a couple of those movies and may review them in future.

    One of the commenters, it may have been Suthen, mentioned The Legend of Boggy Creek once before. Well they had a screening of a 2016 sequel, Boggy Creek Monster, but unfortunately it had an early (8 pm) start time, and I was still getting blasted at the bar. But just know that it’s out there, waiting for you to see it : )

    I only caught three panels this year: first was The Thing, which featured Keith David, Wilford Brimley, the guy who played Windows, and the cinematographer. Turns out Brimley is a hilarious dirty old codger with a lot of crusty old man stories, which is awesome. I also got his signature this year, and you’ll never guess the photo. The dude actually had an 8×10 of an old Quaker Oates advert featuring him. I couldn’t believe he’d be that cool. So of course that’s the one I got signed.

    The second panel was Suspiria. This was the big one. Dario Argento doesn’t make it to stateside cons very often, and often cancels appearances. We had him, Stefania Casini, Udo Kier, Barbara Magnolfi, and, one of the founding members of Goblin, Claudio Simonetti. Dario’s limited English made it difficult for him to articulate complex thoughts, and Barbara and Claudio had to step in to translate for him increasingly as the panel wore on. The most interesting audience question, to me, was a person who asked the great director what he thought of the current generation of Italian horror directors. Argento responded that there was no current generation; just a bunch of retards mindlessly mimicking the giallo masters (specifically himself, Bava, and Fulci). Claudio chimed in his agreement with that assessment. They all thought Italian cinema had one glorious moment in the sun, and then decided it would retire as champion and never do anything innovative ever again.

    Also, it turns out that while my full name is a common enough one to Italians, my nickname is a purely English diminutive. The first two Eye-ties I had sign things stumbled over it, and they spelled it out in block lettering, before adding my wife’s name in more natural-looking handwriting. It looks like we just crudely added my name onto all the photos after the fact. So for the last two pasta-eaters, I just gave them the Italian version of my name.

    They were all hilariously stereotypically Italian. Overly expressive, waving their arms about as their spoke, everything was Brava! this, and Grazie! that, with several of them telling us in the audience that they loved us and each other a thousand times over the course of the panel, and while speaking with them while getting autographs. I did get the guy from Goblin to sign one of their LPs, which is better than a photo I think.

    The last panel I went to was Ted Raimi’s. He didn’t have a moderator for some reason, so spent the whole time engaging the audience, running about, and is one of those guys who is always, “on.” When I asked my question, he asked me what was on my shirt. Of course, it was a Warhammer reference, so I had to explain to him in one sentence about the Skaven. I had two other people in the audience whoop in support of the Great Horned Rat. The audience respectfully (mostly) stuck to questions about him and his career, rather than only asking about Bruce Campbell and Ted’s famous brother.

    We also secured Keith David’s signature, Amanda Bearse (she was there for the Fright Night panel), Ric Flair (why was here there? Who knows. But he did write, “Woooo!” under his name when he signed the photo, so I’m happy), and Michael Berryman. Mr. Berryman, as you may not know, has had to overcome tremendous physical obstacles in his life to become a successful actor, and he gathered all of us in line around his table to tell us stories of perseverance and positivity. He invited anyone who has a positive image, video, or story to post it on his Facebook page, so I’m relaying the good word to all of you.

    We also got Chris Sarandon this year, of course as Prince Humperdink. He’s a humble guy if you talk to him. Or at least he says humble things. He claimed to not know whether any of his characters will stand the test of time. I think Humperdink is already pretty well there. He’s also much smaller in person than you’d think from seeing him in Princess Bride or Fright Night.

    We also picked up Dee Wallace, who has been in so many classic films (E.T., The Howling, Critters, Cujo, et al) that she was kind enough to have a photo montage of them all, to keep me from having to chose. Rounding out the list was Ken Page, voice of Oogie Boogie in Nightmare Before Christmas.

    There were a few others that are repeat guests, so we had snagged their signatures in previous years. Udo Kier, Meg Foster, Malcolm McDowell, and Tom Savini all fell into that bucket.

    A lot of the cast from Bates Motel was there and had huge lines, but I don’t watch that show so who gives a shit.

    Oh and last but not least, Misfits guitarist Doyle was there, looking menacing and still with a great devillock. Except he probably wouldn’t want me to associate him with the Misfits, because I heard from several others that I spoke to while waiting in different lines that he just talked trash about the band, about how it was entirely his talent that drove them, Danzig is lucky that Doyle made his career, etc. Seemed kind of bitter. Oh well. Looks like the kind of guy Warty would like.

    Ultimately it was a sad drive back to the casa on Sunday, as this, our big weekend of the year had come and gone. I love the experience, and my wife gamely tags along. There’s a wonderful buzz in the air, and you’re surrounded by people who dress like you, think like you, act like you, who understand every one of your obscure references, and who are just as passionate about the Dark as you are. The whole thing is a shrine dedicated to group worship of Death, in His manifestation on film. I get to spend a whole three days walking around with people who have fake intestines spilling out, fake eyes hanging by plastic nerves, t-shirts with catchy pictures and slogans, neon hair styled every which way, tattoos like you wouldn’t believe. Not to mention the occasional sluttily dressed hot chick, to compete with the fatties that seem to make up half of the female contingent of horror fandom. This is our fourth year, and we’re already looking forward to the next go-round.

    Alright, some words about the photos. A lot of the guests charge extra for a photo op with the signature. I don’t care about any of you that much, so sadly many of the people I got to meet, I don’t have photos of. At first, I tried creep-shotting them, but my complete lack of skill with phone cameras, combined with the crowds, soon showed me the folly of this approach. So there aren’t as many pics of celebrities (or in some cases, “celebrities”), as I would have liked. This leads me to my next point: most of the photos are of very poor quality. What you see below probably doubles the number of photos I’ve ever taken in my life. I have never had any desire to visually document anything for any reason except insurance purposes, and so never take pictures, and have no facility with this. I don’t even have a picture of my wife. Why would I? I know what she looks like, and it’s not anybody else’s goddamn business. Nothing grinds my gears more than people who have photos of their own family. It tells me that either, 1) you frequently forget what they look like, or worse 2) you think I give a damn what they look like. Protip: I don’t. Anyway, I’ve never taken pictures at any previous TFW, and only did this year to have content for the site, so they’re terrible. The only time that sucked is when William Sadler looked genuinely deflated that we didn’t want a photo with him after getting his signature a few years back. If I mentioned meeting a guest up above, but don’t have a photo of them below, it’s because they upcharged for it. The only creep shot I kept was of Argento since I promised that one. You can see from how bad it is why I deleted the other attempts. Most all of these were taken late Friday night or Sunday afternoon. I had a lot more from Saturday, but the crowds were just too thick and the pics were all even worse than the ones you see below. You’ll also notice I stand somewhat awkwardly – I have some chronic lower back pain from a pretty bad motorcycle accident a few years back, so I have to stand pretty ram-rod straight if I’m going to be on my feet all day to mitigate it. Just thought I’d address it before somebody else brings it up because I agree, it looks weird. Anyway, you have been warned.

    Our art project at the Friday night party. Several of our friends noticed this and stopped by our table to take part. The staff kept giving us the stink-eye, but hey, you work in the service industry, so fuck you.

     

    Some kind of Alien Freddy family, who the fuck knows.

     

    One of the many fantastic shirts available for sale. I thought about buying this and having Brimley sign it, but couldn’t resist the Quaker Oats poster instead.

     

    People dressed like the ice necromancers from Game of Thrones. Actually I think the littler one is one of those green people who grew the tree up Max von Sydow’s ass.

     

    This is my good friend’s daughter, who also works at Dark Hour haunted house. The character is from something called Five Nights at Freddy’s, which is bizarrely *not* a Nightmare on Elm Street property. The robot hand is actually battery powered and articulates. This was on Saturday, but thankfully since I was assisting I was able to get the shot before general admission opened, after which she was swarmed the rest of the day.

     

    One of the set pieces created by Dark Hour haunted house for The Thing theme party on Friday night. You can’t tell in this shot, but it glows from within and pulsates. It’s the kennel dog-monster thing. They also had the head spider thing, of course, but I wasn’t able to get a good shot of it.

     

    Yes, they set up a tattoo area, so you can immortalize your weekend with a flash tattoo. The dude is from LA, which he advertises prominently on his banner. I guess that makes it trendier somehow. Fuck people who live in SoCal.

     

    The Suspiria panel. From left to right: douchebag moderator; Barbara Magnolfi, Stefania Casini; Udo Kier, Dario Argento, and Claudio Simonetti.

     

    Great t-shirt. If you don’t know what A Serbian Film is, kiss your wife and children while you still have your innocence and watch it. Or just read the summary and see why it’s awesome to have a shirt that says this.

     

    My buddy Alex belting out Country Roads on the accordion wearing his normal flayed human face mask and utilikilt. He is the owner/operator of Reindeer Manor haunted house, which is quite good. His lovely wife is also possibly the best dessert baker I’ve ever met.

     

    My wife really wanted the crocheted nosferatu because it’s unique. I thought he looked lonely, so bought him a plush Godzilla to play with. The day we got home our fucking mastiff chewed up the vampire’s head. He is currently out with some old woman for repairs.

     

    Great Americana melting pot moment. You can’t see the mom as she’s off-camera to the right, but she was in full Muslim woman-be-gone hidey dress, but with a grin plastered on her face as her kids took pictures with all the various monsters and seemed to be having a great time. Good feelz all around. Welcome to the States, young horror fans.

     

    MacReady and dog-monster wife at The Thing theme party on Friday night.

     

    This guy makes weird shit out of bones. This is a Little Shop of Horrors homage that cost like $1,100. The mouth is a big turtle shell.

     

    Great horror themed kids shirts for sale. Spawn of the Dead, I Don’t OBEY My Parents, Escape from School, and The Monster Squad Founding Member. We bought a few for the nephews.

     

    Myself and mystery woman with Stefania Casini.

     

    Myself and that damned mystery woman who kept following me around with Barbara Magnolfi.

     

    Myself and mystery woman with Keith David. She’s wearing a t-shirt that’s a reference from Monster Squad, I’m wearing probably my favorite shirt: Skeletor trying to drink wine from the bottle but it’s just pouring through his bottom jaw and running down his chest. I think this may be the only other shot here from Saturday.

     

    Myself and mystery woman with Claudio Simonetti. We got him to sign a limited numbered Goblin LP, which now I have to buy a record frame for.

     

    Myself and mystery woman with Dee Wallace. She was a real sweetheart; besides Meg Foster, probably the single nicest lady I’ve met at this con. Look at her IMDB link up above, she’s been in a lot of great horror films, and I was excited to get to meet her.

     

    It’s hard to tell in this shot, but this guy dressed like Groot has an axe in his back for some reason. He did awesomely only speak through a voice box built into the helmet that just said, “I am Groot”. Kids loved it.

     

    Another great t-shirt for sale that I bought for my buddy who couldn’t make it this year.

     

    If this is the cover to your movie, if this is the box art and that is the name of your films, I will buy them, no questions asked. It’s like heaven for a person like me; there are tables and tables covered in this kind of shit.

     

    I doubt the efficacy of these gas masks.

     

    Dude and chick dressed like at the beginning of the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

     

    This was just laying on a table as a centerpiece in the middle of one of the rooms, as decoration. Because this is the kind of thing that counts as decoration at Texas Frightmare Weekend, which is why I love it so.

     

    Creep-shot of Dario Argento. He’s signing an endless array of rare large posters brought by the people directly in front of me in line, a nice couple from Montreal. The dude put me to *shame* in obscure low-budget horror knowledge, and that ain’t easy to do.

     

    Cinco de Skeletor. Plus it was a black dude, which is super weird, because 1) there’s like a dozen black dudes at this convention, total, and 2) they sure as fuck don’t dress up.

     

    Chick dressed as Chucky. Child’s Play and Fright Night director Tom Holland was in attendance, but unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to meet him/get signature.

     

    Part of what I love about conventions. You find the weirdest shit. This one guy had a whole series of little painted Chinese porcelain figurines, that just came in orange boxes that said “Myths and Legends Series” and labeled, “God of Luck”, or “God of Prosperity”, etc. No other info. He said a customer traded them to him at his physical shop, which he accepted because he thought to sell them at DragonCon, but no such luck. So we picked up the God of Luck and put him on our shrine to Guan Di once we got back to the house. Just a nutty little piece of the universe.

     

    Prom Night Carrie.

     

    Beetlejuice when he has the spikes sticking out of him. I’d hate to try and navigate a crowded con with… protrusions like that.

  • Separation of college and sex

    I’ve just finished The Campus Rape Frenzy, by K. C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr. The subtitle – The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities – should dash any false hopes that this book is a STEVE SMITH adventure. It’s about how the federal government forced – or probably the right word is egged on – colleges to provide inadequate hearings for male students accused of sexual misconduct.

    The usual scenario is that Bob

    Can you think of a dirty joke I should have put here?

    and Betty

    According to Google Translate, "coed" is Welsh for "trees"
    Drive safely, indeed

    two hypothetical students at Hypothetical U, both drink a lot of booze, then get together and have sex.

    She's a moonshiner's daughter but I love her still
    Here’s a picture of the booze

    Later, sometimes much later, Betty decides that she was raped and, after failing to persuade the real-world judicial system of the reality of the crime (or neglecting to report the alleged crime to the real-world judicial system at all), takes the case to the campus “justice” system.

    In the name of being Tough on Rapists, the federal government – invoking the anti-sex-discrimination statute, Title IX – has encouraged the campus SJWs who were already pressing for making campus “courts” accuser-friendly. The campus “judges” are students, administrators and faculty who have been trained to view accusers sympathetically and to be on the lookout for those predatory rapists responsible for 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 coeds getting sexually assaulted. These “judges” are warned that the idea of large numbers of false accusations is a myth, and “only” 2%-8% of accused men are actually innocent. These statistics are phony, as the authors show.

    Never mind, though – combined with the “judges’” training is their ability to ignore many traditional due-process restraints on their power, restraints which might allow the accused man to throw a wrench or two in the accusation. The “courts” can put the defendant on trial on really short notice, they can limit his right to cross-examine the accuser, invoke the assistance of a lawyer, or present evidence in his own favor (there’s a lot of cases where the texts the “victim” sent at the time of the “rape” are not consistent with the behavior of the victim of such a crime, but the “judges” aren’t always interested in seeing these texts).

    Sometimes the trial is conducted by one person hired by the college to conduct and investigation and reach a verdict, without holding a full-dress hearing in front of both parties as in traditional Anglo-American trials. The judge/investigator just interviews the witnesses, gives the accused a (perhaps incomplete) summary of what the witnesses said, and then reaches a verdict.

    It almost gets to be like the old joke of the judge who didn’t want to hear the other side because hearing both sides tended to confuse him.

    The judge tends to jump to conclusions
    All rise for His Honor

    The bottom line is Bob is branded a rapist and suspended or expelled. It’s kind of hard for him to get another college to accept him, and many employers, seeing that the guy was branded a rapist, will be like “don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

    So if Bob or his family has enough money he can sue, and maybe win or maybe lose. But any victory, while it benefits Bob, doesn’t necessarily benefit the next guy who comes along accused of rape in the Kampus Kangaroo Kourt.

    And if there actually was a rape? In that case only the real-world justice system can impose the prison sentence needed to keep the rapist away from the public for term of years. Throwing an actual rapist out of college and out onto the streets seems a tad lenient, and not entirely safe.

    It looks like the inmates in this cell block only got a C in not-raping.
    You want to teach rapists not to rape? Send them to one of these educational institutions.

    Johnson and Taylor have all sorts of perfectly sensible ideas for reform, but I want to focus on one idea they reject.

    Johnson and Taylor indicate that it might be desirable to discourage students from getting drunk and screwing. This might annoy Jimmy Buffett (NSFW), as well as the “don’t blame the victim – teach rapists not to rape” crowd. But such discouragement is a good idea as far as it goes. Rape accusations flourish, as a practical matter, in vaguely-remembered encounters which may be regretted once sober, adding to which is how easy it is (according to university regulations) for alcohol to make consent to sex irrelevant. And current dogma means that if both Bob and Betty are drunk when they have sex, Bob is raping Betty but not vice versa. How colleges reconcile this doctrine with Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination is unclear, but that’s how the system operates.

    But Johnson and Taylor don’t go all the way (so to speak). They frown on drunken sex, but they scoff at the idea of discouraging student sex in general. They acknowledge that, given the kind of cases which lead to these “he said/she said” controversies, a good survival strategy might be “celibacy,” but the authors dismiss this as a “nonstarter[]” which “few will find appealing.” College students in the past – often from necessity – often managed not to rut like bunnies while pursuing their studies, but I suppose the idea is that we’re a more sophisticated, liberated, non-taboo-having, healthier people today.

    "Or-gy! Or-gy! Or-gy!"
    “I hate going to these orgies – so many thank-you notes to write afterwards.” /old joke

    What if colleges simply stopped encouraging student sex? That could make moot the question of how to handle drunken hookups by their students.

    Don’t mistake my meaning – I am speaking of the separation of college and sex, not the abolition of sex itself, although of course as you know abolishing sex is the ultimate objective of the Catholic conspiracy.

    Colleges can only do so much, and training the horniness out of its students is something which is beyond their capacity. But that doesn’t mean a college should provide boinking facilities for its students. No using dorms as sleepover facilities, fraternity would-be orgies, etc.

    When I worked as a student dormitory assistant, checking students into and out of their rooms, I felt like the clerk at a sleazy hotel. My job wasn’t to keep the guys out of the girls’ rooms or vice versa, but to make sure they left their student IDs at my office before going upstairs for their…whatever it was they did (probably not canasta).

    Just doing my job
    I was also the piano player

    Did colleges put up with this sort of thing in the past? No – although students weren’t any less horny than today. College education wasn’t as near-universal as now, you needed some money or enough talent to get a scholarship, but if you had one of these qualifications there were plenty of institutions to choose from. But generally, the colleges at least made an effort to keep the students on the straight and narrow.

    Mandatory chapel. Curfews. If the college admitted women (not a given), then there was separation between the sexes, and social events needed chaperones.

    Actually, I don't know if nuns actually chaperoned college dances, this is poetic license, people.
    “Don’t mind me, you kids just have fun.”

    Most students wouldn’t put up with that today. But that’s all right, most students don’t need to be at a modern residential college.

    We’re in a situation where colleges and universities ought to downsize anyway. A four-year sojourn at a residential college (often involving indebtedness and fairly sketchy post-college plans for promptly paying off that indebtedness) is not an essential part of every young person’s life, if it ever was.

    There are some career paths which may require studying at a residential college, some career paths which may call for online education (dropping by the local public library for proctored exams), and some career paths which may call for a good high school education (where it can be found) and/or an apprenticeship.

    And there are some people who may still go in for a liberal arts education as defined by Cardinal Newman – learning for its own sake, including the things associated with being a learned person, including theology, the “queen of the sciences.”

    Upholding the Cardinal virtues
    Blessed John Henry Newman

    In each of these situations, the college can separate itself from enabling its students’ sex lives.

    If a student is working on his or her online degree while holding down a job, then their college life and social life will run on separate tracks, for the most part, or if they get together with other students it will be off campus and they’ll have signed all sorts of forms that the college won’t be liable for broken hearts, broken bones, disease, death, etc., resulting from independently developing relationships with other students.

    Or if students are taking one of those intensive courses of study which requires a residential program, they should be warned to do their foolishness (if any) while they’re off campus.

    And at least in theory, nontraditional-age students supplementing their education, often online or through occasional visits to campus for class purposes, will have homes of their own and any kinkiness they do will be in those homes (and they should ask their spouses first, if any).

    And for those few liberal-arts residential colleges which survive the coming shakeup of higher education – those colleges should be unashamedly elitist, recruiting students who are actually committed to a course of study, with socializing with the other sex limited to chaperoned activities like in earlier times.

    (If a young man and woman meet at a residential college (or before going) and decide to get married, then of course after their marriage the college should put them in married-student housing.)

    I guess the one downside to my scheme would be that it would force the SJW “student life” bureaucrats to get other work.

    "As long as you're looking, can you find [insert name of unpopular sports player]'s talent?"
    Look carefully, and you might be able to see the violin on which I am playing “My Heart Bleeds for You”

  • Overheard in the Grocery Store

    Checker to Older Couple: Can you believe what they are doing to Obamacare?! I wish they would go after the Affordable Care Act instead!

    Older Woman: Sweetie, it’s the same thing.

    Checker: What? It can’t be! There are so many things I love in Obamacare and so many things I hate in the Affordable Care Act!

    Older Man: Welcome to the world of legislation and politics!

    Checker *shaking her head*: It just can’t be the same law.

    Older Woman to Older Man: Bless her heart.

  • Socialized Sports: A Microcosm of a Diseased Ideology

    There are a thousand examples that could be used to show the rot caused by the invidious tenets of socialism in our sports these days. The most illustrative, in my opinion, is that of IndyCar. For the first 75 years of the Indianapolis 500, the race and the supporting series were based on a free-market-style “run what you brung” model, resulting in a rich and storied tradition. Stories of turbine cars, diesels, close finishes, and 1000 HP rocketships on wheels echo through from the past. Before NASCAR, the various iterations of Indycar (CART, USAC, AAA, etc.) were king in the United States. Until the late 90s, IndyCar was a half-step behind Formula 1 for international popularity.

    Today, IndyCar is circling the drain. They had a race in Phoenix last weekend with 7,000 attendees and a few hundred thousand, at most, watching on TV. Why such a precipitous drop from rivaling F1 to now being on the brink of failure? Beyond the basic ineptitude and competitive failures that doom any venture, the problem can be summed up in one word: socialism.

    In the early 90s, CART (as IndyCar was called at the time) was king. Names like Unser, Andretti, and Foyt were touring North America, racing custom built race cars in front of packed stands. The Indy 500 would have 350k+ on hand for the annual culmination of a monthslong celebration of speed. Most years, certain qualifying days would have well over 100k people on hand. In 1994, the fastest qualifying speed was a hair over 228 MPH. Today, almost 25 years later, the cars do the same speed, the crowds are down and the hallowed Month of May has become a week and a half.

    Then, in response to escalating costs and a perceived shift away from the small-town American dirt track racers to foreign racers in the F1 minor leagues, the owners of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway started the IRL, which based its operating model on a top-down financing of the racing efforts of smaller teams. There are a bunch of other factors in the decadal decline of IndyCar, including a split into two series, series-wide emphasis on safety over speed, and the rise of NASCAR, but the biggest factor was the susceptibility to the allure of socialism.

    In the attempt to contain costs and attract smaller teams, the IRL and, later, IndyCar continued with two core principles that will sound familiar to all of you who are versed in the language of the socialist. First, IndyCar established a phonebook’s worth of technical regulations meant to curtail engineering costs. This resulted in the last 10+ years being run with a single allowable chassis each year. They have allowed limited competition in the engine, suspension, and aerodynamics, but the days of building your own mousetrap are over. Second, IndyCar established what’s called the “Leader’s Circle,” which is an alternative to the traditional purse system. Instead of the winner getting a zillion dollars and last place going home with a pittance, anybody who runs a certain percentage of the annual schedule is paid a salary for each full-time race car run, and winners are given a nominal sum as a prize.

    As can be easily predicted by those of us familiar with the stories of Soviet Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, IndyCar has been suffering from poor racing, fewer teams, fewer race cars, and an utter collapse of the fanbase. Besides a single day per year burning off 75 years of tradition, American Open-Wheel Racing is on life support. Of course, these are “bad economic times” and “motorsports is on a decline” and “we can’t afford competition.” The excuses have been flying since 1996 when they first headed down this path. Every half-hearted, feeble attempt to introduce a market influence is quickly undone. The toe in the water is withdrawn as soon as they realize it’s wet.

    The path to success is simple and quite obvious. Undoing 25 years of stupid will hurt, but, as Venezuela is figuring out right now, the pain is inevitable. IndyCar will wither into nothing unless it reintroduces the competitive spirit of the free market into the sport. The excuses of the boot-lickers in the sport are all based on some nugget of truth, but IndyCar isn’t failing because motorsports are unpopular or because the economy is bad. IndyCar is failing because socialism is more than just painful to live under, it’s also painful to watch.

    It’s sad to see such a great tradition go down in flame, but these days even our sports act as a cautionary tale against socialism and all its variants.

     

  • Anarchy is the Communism of the Right

    Time to piss off a bunch of anarchists! Hopefully, you’ll take it in stride and disembowel me in the comments.

    Anarchy is quite the opposite of Communism when it comes to political structure and social order. However, when it comes to the relation of these ideas to their respective political segments, Anarchy is the Communism of the Right (or if that’s too harsh for your sensibilities, it’s the Communism of the Libertarian movement). How so? There are three major similarities: 1) The likelihood of long-term, stable implementation, 2) the resultant social order, and 3) the big lie that must be believed in order to accept the philosophy.

    Stable Implementation

    We’re very quick to trot out the old cliche that Communism has failed every time it was tried. When the accusation is turned back to us, we quickly disavow Somalia and begin thinking through history for a good example. However, the search through history ends very differently when looking for a successful minarchy versus a successful voluntaryist society. There are certainly successful examples of both, but the difference is in scale. History is rife with examples of empires controlling a city or region with a small military presence and a minimal government. Sure, the occupiers tended to plunder the occupied lands, but in comparison to today, such plunder would be considered libertopian. Anarchic societies are comparatively rare and quite fleeting. Usually, they are either quite small and isolated (nomadic tribes), or extremely volatile (territorial California). In essence, an anarchy does not have what is required for a stable society: protection from conquerors, safety from bad actors, and normalization of trade.

    As much as we all wish the world worked more like theory, it usually doesn’t. This is because we ignore or misestimate some of the factors that significantly affect the result. Such is how it is in a voluntaryist society. These societies are unstable for many reasons, especially because they are bad at protecting their citizens from conquerors and from bad actors. With limited recourse available, regulating and normalizing trade is outside the reach of an anarchic society of any real size. As such, any anarchic society would necessarily subdivide into small tribes with an extreme distrust of outsiders. It’s hard to imagine the amount of devastation that would be required to create these small anarchic tribes in the modern world. The sheer population density of modern cities would render it impossible sans cataclysm.

    Resultant social order

    Communism requires the deaths of millions in order to be properly implemented. In essence, instinctual self-preservation needs to be beaten and bred out of a populace before they are able to accept communism. The New Soviet Man was always a generation away because the commies could never kill off that self-preservation instinct that is endemic to all nature. The resultant social order was extremely distorted and self-focused. When staying alive meant selling out the next guy, the next guy ended up in the gulag and you slept soundly that night.

    Similarly, anarchy requires massive upheaval to be implemented, and the resultant social order has invariably been harsh, unjust, and lacking in technological growth. Despite the immense gold reserves in mid-19th century California, it was a horrible place for many of the adventurers looking for a boon. Although there was a nominal military government in place, it was wholly unable to police the vast expanse of California territory. In cities like Los Angeles, Monterey, and San Francisco, murders in the streets were common. Theft, fraud and violence were daily hazards. There was such a vacuum of power that vigilance committees were formed on a regular basis, enacting their form of justice, usually politically based and manipulated such that the leaders were enriched at the expense of the citizenry. Rather than the idyllic picture of small virtuous tribes scattered across the countryside or the progressive image of a futuristic city filled with happy prostitutes, heroin vending machines, and no taxes, the history of California shows a dystopian mix of these two images. There were small islands of virtuous, justice-seeking families floating in an ocean of rights-violating horror.

    Much like the communists’ aggression borne out of survival, the bad actors aggressed against citizens. However, unlike the communists, the bad actors were aggressive because they could get away with it.

    The Big Lie

    Acceptance of communism requires belief in a faulty premise. Namely, the premise that individuals do not have agency. Government is greater than the individual and thus can appropriate the property and labor of its citizens. Much of the horrific nature of communism derives from this faulty premise.

    Likewise, acceptance of anarchy also requires belief in a faulty premise that there is no valid authority over an individual.  In reality, people are quite unstable when completely given over to their own devices. Both outside conquerors and the less savory elements of society show the results of solely individual authority: the complete inability of society to protect citizens from outside conquerors,  make citizens safe from bad actors, and normalize trade.

    We can always have discussions of what level authority we rightfully have over one another, and, in extension, what authority society and its civil government legitimately have over us. However, the idea that the individual is not subject to any authority (whether legitimate or not, virtuous or not), results in similar absurdities like when the government is fully authoritative. Might makes right. Exploitation over altruism. Vulnerability in the face of outside threats.

  • Focus on the Family – A Cultural Rumination

    I’ve gone back and forth on how to format this article. It’s hard to stay on one single topic when talking about the cultural erosion of the importance of family. As such, I’ve written and deleted this article a couple times, simply because it turns into a rant against elements of our culture. It wouldn’t be a good read. This is my final attempt, and I’m keeping it short and focused.

    TW: I’m probably gonna piss a lot of people off. SLDs apply here as they do anywhere else. I support your right to raise your children as you wish, no matter the cumulative cultural damage I think may result.

    The most disheartening and soon-to-be-fatal flaw of modern Western culture is the disdain for the family. (I’m completely ignoring homosexual and other “alternative” families for this analysis; they’re statistical noise when it comes to culture as a whole). This “disdain” can be seen in many contexts, including: 1) Replacing traditional family roles with outside intervention, 2) Subsidizing family failures, 3) Transforming old stigmas into laudatory praise, and 4) Portraying family negatively. I’ll quickly expose my biases and then treat each of these quickly. Any more than a quick treatment starts to turn into a rant.

    My biases are simple. I’m a complementarian, meaning that I believe women are generally better at/more inclined to certain things and men are generally better at/more inclined to certain other things. This generalization is, by no means, a straitjacket but more of a descriptive observation of people as a whole. I’m also a believer in the ideal family being a supportive, lasting, tightknit family, one that passes morals, traditions, and beliefs from generation to generation. Much of the “disdain” I see is in opposition to the generational information transfer in this ideal family.

    Replacing Traditional Family Roles

    This primarily falls into two categories: government as Santa, and “it takes a village.”  To see the biggest indicator of how much government and other outsiders have taken over traditional family roles, simply do a time audit of a child in a typical American household. Out of the 15 or so hours little Johnny is awake, how many do his parents actually have any sort of influence? Maybe an hour? He spends 7 or 8 in school, 1 or 2 in extracurriculars and on the bus, 1 or 2 doing homework, and 2 or 3 watching TV/playing video games. Besides the odd homework check or multiplayer CoD game (ha! who am I kidding??), Mommy and Daddy hardly even talk to Johnny. Then Mommy and Daddy wonder why Johnny doesn’t carry on their morals, traditions, and values when he becomes an adult. Johnny’s primary influences are leftist-feminist teachers, Lord of the Flies peer influence, and the Internet. Two income households put kids into this cycle at a few months old, and there’s never a break.

    Subsidizing failure

    This could be an article in-and-of itself. Suffice it to say that economic incentives matter, and, according to Thomas Sowell, the average black family was better off 100 years after slavery than after 30 years of welfare. Paying people because their family is broken incentivizes other struggling families to break as well. You get more of what you incentivize, and you get less of what you penalize. We’ve spent 50 years subsidizing broken families out of some naive sense of compassion. Of course, government shouldn’t pile on when families come apart at the seams, but the safety net should be a net (SLDs apply), not a pillowtop mattress.

    Stigma to “Strong”

    The cultural mantra that “different is good” completely ignores the thousands of years of trial and error that has built the traditions that the postmodern left is now tearing down. Again, this isn’t a straitjacket, but there’s a difference between approaching single parent households as parents making the best of a bad situation versus approaching them as no worse than two parent households. There’s a difference between a first marriage, a second marriage, and a fifth marriage. In attempting to build up people (primarily women) in bad situations, culture has made the traditional family passe. Being a single mom is “strong” and “brave.” Being a housewife is “backward” and “sad.”

    Portraying the Family Negatively

    This goes hand-in-hand with the “strong,” “brave,” broken family trope. Feminists have undercut the family as an oppressive structure since the 30s. Culture has followed along, making men into uninterested, idiotic fathers. Mothers (and children) have supernatural wisdom, but fathers are morons. Not surprisingly, people follow the cultural model, resulting in disinterested fathers having children only because their wife begged for it to “save the marriage.” The end result has been the MGTOW movement, which, despite the nugget of truth regarding the gender-based cultural unbalance, exacerbates the problem by tossing the entire family out with the feminist bathwater.

    I’m a little bit proud that I’ve finally gotten this article finished. This is a difficult article to write up in spare time because it could be a 10 part, 50 page monstrosity. However, I think I conveyed the pamphlet version of the argument. I agree with the Distributists in that family is the core unit of society, and I think it makes this cultural erosion of the traditional family hugely self defeating. When culture erodes its own foundation, it doesn’t last.

  • Ritual. Uniformity. Ceremony. Sacrifice. Brotherhood.

    By: Anon Anon

    A group of grown men stand around in an otherwise empty schoolhouse.  Out in public, you wouldn’t be able to spot them as cohorts.  They rarely wear their uniforms out in public, and they come from every walk of life.  Some have dirty hands and torn dungarees.  Some have meticulous spectacles and Italian loafers.  In here, standing under a trifecta of flags, standing in the anonymity of their uniforms, this paramilitary squad happily show off enough pins, dangly medals, and patches to make a third world dictator lift an eyebrow.

    Once everything is in place, the youth squad is led in.  The boys have their own uniforms.  They are a little bit different from the men’s.  But a little bit the same, too.  The men stand ready when the youth come in.  Patriarchal traditions are passed on best when men present a united front, and these men look prepared and competent.  

    Ritual.  Uniformity.  Ceremony.  Sacrifice.  Brotherhood.

    These are ideas that have always motivated boys, sometimes to gleeful bloodshed.  Knowing this, these are the ideas that these men use to mold the minds of the youth.  The ceremony starts.  The rituals begin.  A flag is saluted, allegiance is pledged, prayers are invoked, oaths are repeated.  Next, a new round of indecipherable pins are given to select youth who have shown sufficient vigor.  The youth are split by age and led apart.  Small cliques are easier to control than large groups.

    What authoritarian Hellhole is this?  A Hitler Youth rally?  A Southeast Asian secret police meeting? Some African boy-army training?  No, this is America.  Trump’s America.  And it is happening right under your noses.

    It’s your local Cub Scouts.  Please buy popcorn.

    Today, I am one of those men.  A few decades ago, I was one of those boys.  Somewhere in between I picked up Heinlein, filed my first income tax return, and decided I was going to teach myself economics by reading the stilted English of a few peculiar Austrian authors.

    How’s that for some cognitive dissonance?  Paramilitarist on the streets, libertarian between the sheets.  I was raised Catholic, so I know how to hold two mutually exclusive ideas in my head at the same time.

    But really, there isn’t any dissonance.  Scouting as a youth was good for me.  Scouting was something I chose to do.  When I said the pledge every week, it was because I chose to.  When I humped a backpack through a downpour with my best friends, it was because I chose to.  When I connected with the other scouts and made a community, it was because I chose to.  When I had a personal crisis and leaned on my Scoutmasters, the way any boy should lean on his father, it’s because I chose to.  

    And those Scoutmasters made a choice to be the man in my life when I needed it.  The father that Mother Nature gave me wasn’t good for much more than introducing me to occult rock and teaching me the value of cynicism.  A boy should have more than that out of a father.  Fortunately, I had a very peculiar volunteer community that gave me what I needed.

    Then I went to college and grad school.  I focused on me, not a community.  That’s OK.  That’s what college is for.  My engineering classes hammered home some libertarian facts – bridges fall if you design them wrong and no one can argue them back up.  An A really is an A.  At the same time, my autodidactic education was directed more to some classic libertarian past times.  I read Rothbard and Hayek and Smith and Rand.  I made friends with progressives for the first time.  I learned that I wasn’t really a political conservative after all.  I started voting strategically in local elections and writing in “Fuck You” for national elections.  I rolled my eyes at the pledge and stayed silent when they played the National Anthem at hockey games.

    I thought I was an individualist.  I knew how to shoot and do laundry and cook and all those things Heinlein said to do except that bit about the sonnet.  Sure, most of those skills I learned in scouting.  But that was behind me.  It was a ghost of a memory that only rattled a few chains when I used those skills.  I had a small handful of good, deep, solid friendships with people who didn’t agree with me on anything political.  I was my own man, living in the city but apart from any real community.  I knew I was standing on my own beliefs and I didn’t need anyone with me.  I was a libertarian.  I was a lone wolf.

    What a jackass.

    After school, I moved to a new city, took up a new job, and got to know a few people.  A very few people.  I mostly lived my life alone with just my wife and later a cat and two small humans.  I spent all my time in my apartment or in the office.  I didn’t spend much time with anyone else.  I barely knew anyone I didn’t work with.  Which is OK, because I’m an individualist, I told myself.  Over, and over, and over again.  I almost believed it.

    A few years go by, the oldest kid comes home from his government school with a blue and gold flier.  “I wanna do this,” he says.  Three years later, and I’m running the kid’s Cub Scout Pack.  I struggled for all of seven minutes trying to decide if putting on the uniform, saying a pledge, and reciting an oath would constitute turning my back on everything I have come to believe.  

    No, you jackass.

    Seems like *someone* has an unfair advantage here…

    You are a big hairless ape and God made you to function in a community.  Didn’t you say you read your Hayek and Smith?  And really, this is the ideal libertarian community.  There’s no government thug making me say the pledge.  There’s no qualified immunity that attaches when I put on my uniform.  There’s a couple dozen families that set aside two or three hours every week to come together to form a community.  Arts, crafts, and watered-down juice mix are also often involved.

    We say our oath because we want to.  And it is an oath to ourselves, not to some outside authority figure that lords over us by an accident of birth.  We say a pledge to a flag of an imperfect country that, warts and all, is still the greatest engine for freedom devised by man.  We don’t pledge to land or a nobility.  We have a law, and the only enforcement mechanism is our reputation with our peers.  We work together to make a wooden cars and to make a community and to make our youth better men some day.

    For me, that’s as libertarian as it gets.  Forget the lone wolf crap.

  • The Derponomicon: Part 6

    You’re traveling into area that’s next to a place that’s beside a location.
    The sort of place that might contain a monster or some sort of magic mirror.
    These are just some examples.
    It could also be something really, really stupid.

    At the rest stop ahead, a poorly stocked vending machine, a few wobbly picnic benches, a plaque to commemorate the Great Cabbage Fart Panic of 1909 placed by the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks, and….
    THE DERPONOMICON!

    Picture if you will a man whose head is so far up his ass he could give himself a colon exam by opening his eyes. Enter one nameless prog. Here’s what he had to say about an exchange between anti-Jihad activist David Horowitz and a Muslim college student who admitted she favored the annihilation of Jews:

    First of all, I am pretty sure the woman asking the question is a plant, probably the speaker payed to be there to sensationalize his issues with Muslims. It’s highly doubtful anyone would be that open about their anti-semitism, particularly on a college campus. The assertion here is that this somehow represents the sentiments of all American Muslims or Muslims in general. You know, kind of like anti-semites insist all Jews own the banks and are money grubbing shiesters that need to be stopped. Or how the Westboro Baptists are glad soldiers die because God hates fags. Holding up extremists of any type as representative of an entire group worthy of condemnation, is no different that what the extremists are doing in the first place. In essence, extremists use an extreme minority within a group, to justify condemnation of that entire group. Someone using this video to justify their disdain and distrust of Muslims, is literally no different than posting an article about a black murderer or rapist and using it as an example to justify your hatred of black people. It is the same as equating the Westboro Baptists or Pat Robertson to ALL Christians. It’s like equating Anders Breivik and Wade Michael Page to ALL conservatives. By pointing out extreme examples as justification for bigotry, you are in essence fitting the definition of an extremist. And I am sure you will say I do that all the time….but my intent is exactly that, to show conservatives what it’s like to be lumped in and judged by your craziest extremists. And very rarely do I ever hear a conservative denounce these extremists amongst them, only deflect, defend, deny. Never do I hear “That guy is an as shoe and doesn’t represent my views.” It’s always “But Al Sharptown said this…..or Reverend Wright said that….” As a born Jew, living in am orthodox Jewish neighborhood, I can admit that just about 99% of the Jewish faith is based on their persecution. Literally nearly every holiday and every story in the Old Testament is about the Jews overcoming someone trying to exterminate them. So I wouldn’t doubt for a second, that this guy would have a plant say these things at his lecture to further his agenda.

    A baseless accusation of dishonesty. At least this is a different excuse. More deflection and Tu Quoqe.

    “It’s highly doubtful anyone would be that open about their anti-semitism, particularly on a college campus.”

    Man, that line gets funnier every time I read it.

    Next: his response to this video of how the mainstream media tries to deflect attention from the link between Islamic teachings and terrorism

    Where do you find these future mall shooters videos exactly? …..Yes Islam seemingly has more extremists than most religions, particularly in other countries where fundamentalist religious zealots control the laws and government, exactly how the religious zealots in THIS country would like to. The problem of course, is that in THIS country, Islamic fundamentalists are not a major issue. You are about ten times more likely to be murdered by a cop, than a Muslim terrorist. The rights obsession with Islam and creeping Sharia law makes about as much sense as equating all Christians to the Westboro Baptists. ALL religions and ALL groups have their extremist crazies, and at the top of the list of threats to national security and terrorist plots, white supremacist Christian militia groups outnumber Islamic fundamentalist t going threats nearly 10 to 1. I am more terrified of a truck full of bearded rednecks on some country back road than I am of a brown guy on a plane. In fact Muslims are much more likely to be attacked or murdered by Christian supremacists in this country than the other way around. Anders Breivik and Wade Michael Page are perfect examples of what all the recent anti-Islam rhetoric produces and it is Muslims, not Christians that are now in the line of fire. White Christian supremacists have infiltrated nearly every level of our government and are as we speak introducing, writing, and passing legislation that has a real effect on the public, a power that Muslims of any stature will NEVER have in this country. Meanwhile we have Christians homophobic, racist, sexist, religiously intolerant zealots in positions of power decrying Islam for being homophobic, sexist, racist, and religiously intolerant. The truth of the matter is no matter what the religion, religious extremists are dangerous to everyone, but in this country the most effective a day dangerous ones are most certainly NOT of the brown persuasion.

    Deflection, Tu Quoqe, and then the race card. It’s a regular derp sundae.

    “Yes Islam seemingly has more extremists than most religions, particularly in other countries where fundamentalist religious zealots control the laws and government, exactly how the religious zealots in THIS country would like to.”

    Contrast of religious fundamentalists

    This is a real masterpiece here: conflating violent Muslims fundamentalists with non-violent Christian fundamentalists and what Muslim terrorists actually do with what Christian fundamentalists might (read: wouldn’t) do.

    “Islam seemingly has more extremists than most religions…”

    But it’s all an illusion! Pay no attention to those dead French cartoonists behind the curtain!