Rand Paul and the Libertarian Wrong

Rand Paul, senate hopeful for Kentucky, made a fool of himself with remarks about the 1964 Civil Rights Act and racism and affirmative action et cetera et cetera so on and so forth. If Kentucky votes him into office, they get what they deserve. There was a brief moment when I thought Ron Paul was worthy of some respect—he seemed willing to speak truth to power. I found that I disagreed with him on specifics, but it is useful (and rare) to have someone doing the Emperor’s New Suit schtick. However, anyone who names a child after an ideological demagogue has some serious problems with reality. (To be clear, Rand, under the circumstances, can only refer to Ayn Rand, the patron non-saint of the Libertarian Movement.) Rand’s pronouncements about the rights of business owners to deny service to anyone they see fit is perfectly consistent with Randian philosophy and politics. Basically, it says that the person whose name is on the title owns what the title describes outright and has, by dint of absolute moral dictate, dictatorial command over said property and ought to be allowed to do with it what they wish. Without explanation to anyone and certainly without anyone else’s permission. Sounds good, doesn’t it? I mean, you worked for it, you sweated, earned the means of acquisition, put your name and fortune on the line to own it, worked to make it do what you intended, you should therefore enjoy all rights and privileges in the say of what to do with it. Your home, your rules. There’s a feel-good quid pro quo to it that appeals a basic sense of fairness, suggests a rough equivalence between work and risk and rights. This is fundamental to Ayn Rand’s whole premise, that the creator, the mind behind creation, the one who brings something into existence is the one who has the only natural say in what that thing so created can and will do and who it shall serve. For an avowed atheist, Rand had a very mythic, godlike attitude toward life. And I suppose if you could somehow make the case that a single individual did indeed create something from whole cloth and by virtue of his or her singular efforts sustained it and drove it and made it successful, there might be a good and valid point to this view. But is that ever the case? Rand’s famous tome, Atlas Shrugged, makes the argument that the movers and shakers, the people who Do, are absolutely vital to the world. Nothing would exist without them and if they should withdraw their talent and genius and effort, the world would come to a halt. She makes the case for the Indispensible Man. And in the novel (for those of you who have not read it), a man named John Galt, fed up with the growing People’s Movements around the world, which he sees as essentially parasitic, calls a strike of the truly important people. He convinces the men and women who truly matter to leave the world, retire, disappear, and when they have all left, it seems no one can do what they did, and everything falls apart. The final image shows them emerging from their high-tech hideaway to assume command as the true and rightful aristocracy of ability. It is, in her narrative, a very small group. [More . . . ]

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You didn’t get mad when . . .

This straight-forward list packs a wallop, in my opinion. It seems like that Tea-party advocates aren't really mad about "government" and they aren't really mad about government incompetence. If I had to make my best guess, I'd say that they are mad that they are losing their country to "them." Who is "them"? All of those people that the Tea Party people have come to see as different than they are. Outsiders. People who look differently and talk differently and dress differently. I don't think of it as racism, though Tea Party people tend to be noticeably race-conscious. But they are also mad about those who belong to the wrong religions and those who come from the wrong countries. But how odd that they think that they are part of the same ingroup as the rich guys who are screwing them. Maybe it's that skin color thing after all . . . They are feeling like they they don't control the country anymore--and they are throwing a huge tantrum. This is what I suspect.

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A Graphical History of the Vaccine Brouhaha

I got this Stumble from our own Hank over on FaceBook. A concise and accurate look at the origins of the currently imagined link between autism and vaccines. The Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield

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What’s In A Label?

Conservative. Liberal. We act as if we know what these labels mean. Conservatives are traditionalists, fiscally opposed to anything that smacks of gambling, private, often religious, and pedantic on what they consider “appropriate” in either government or personal conduct. Liberals, on the other hand, are often taken for progressive, willing to spend social capital to repair perceived problems, tolerant, agnostic if not atheist, and overly-concerned with a definition of justice that ought to be all-encompassing rather than what they perceive as sinecure for the privileged. Well. Over on Facebook I posted a brief quote (my own) to boil down the actual underlying distinctions. Conservatives are those who don’t like what other people are doing, Liberals are those who don’t like what other people are doing to other people. It was meant to be taken as humorous. But I’m not being entirely flip here. When you look at it, and try to define the common factor in much that passes for conservative posteuring—of any country, any background, anywhere—it always comes down to one group trying to stop another group from Doing Things We Don’t Approve. I heard a news report this morning (on NPR—I unabashedly don’t pay attention to any other news source, I find them all utterly biased) from Pakistan about the university scene there, and one bit caught my attention—at a campus in Punjabi, conservative students who find men and women sitting too close together interfere and move them apart. At a game of Truth or Dare, conservative students pulled participants out and beat them. How does this apply here? Well, here’s a clip from P.Z. Meyers’ Pharyngula to illustrate: Rising Sun School in Maryland has the standard default take-it-for-granted attitude that Christianity is just fine — there’s the usual well-funded and usually teacher-promoted evangelical groups, like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes — and when one student tried to form a club for non-religious students…well, you can guess what happened.

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Steven Pinker on the American culture war

Marilyn Westfall of the Humanist Network News recently had an engaging chat with cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. The conversation first focused on why the north and the south differ so strongly on thing such as textbooks:

HNN: You've written a great deal on the impact of the political left and right in the United States. How does the political division figure into the debate over textbooks and especially the teaching of evolution? SP: Partly it really is a culture war. The country does have two cultures: the European Enlightenment and the Culture of Honor. The Scots-Irish settled into a lot of the South and West. What came of this was two different paths to civilization. One path was civilized by the law and government and the king, and the other by self-help justice, avenging wrongs and insults with the help of your own manly honor. They co-exist in one country, but they are different cultures. The civilizing force in the West came first from the church. A lot of the Western cowboy towns were first civilized by the women and the church--in cahoots. Churches have the talismanic role as the source of morals and decency and civilization. But part of the division is just sheer oppositionalism: if the liberals say x, we'll say y. Part of it is also an emotional affiliation with the church, and some of it is a disengagement from the wider world.
The conversation eventually turned to atheism. Why do so many people despise "atheists"?
[Atheism evokes] a very primitive emotional reaction in the minds of many people. Many people simply equate it with immorality, which is why I think they tell pollsters that atheists are people they distrust the most. Often when there is a disliked word--a word with a negative connotation--people find a euphemism, that's why what used to [be called] garbage then became sanitation and now its environmental services. And likewise atheism is constantly reaching for the untainted euphemism. Secularist, freethinker, humanist, bright and so on. I think each one is going to get infected in turn until the societal attitude changes. Atheism is merely absence of belief.

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