I started my blog when I was out of work and looking to fill time. I have mixed feelings about it – should it be just a friendly pet-photos-and-recipes blog, or should I post political rants more often? Sometimes things just make me so mad I need to put my English degree to work. I may start posting more such rants.

Do you ever get to Beantown?

madk

Your partner sounds like my MBA father in her economic viewpoints. He is a decent person at his core but something about the bullshit he learned in biz school he really believes or is loathe to admit that it’s a load of crap. I don’t think he’d ever allow the dystopian scenario that free-market fundamentalism would bring on, he’s been surprised (genuinely I think) by events in the past decade or so to the point of acknowledging that my more left-wing viewpoints may have some merit.

Oh, and just for the record he and my sister are hard-core Obama supporters. I tend to share the ‘meh’ attitude of many here, but they have gone to rallies and such. Fun fact—they were in some footage that was shown on MSNBC for a while.

In any event, Karen has reminded me again that the reason I am creeped out by my partner’s borderline libertarian viewpoint is nothing to do with my partner, who would never see the point of despoiling the commons for short term personal gain, and everything to do with people like Karen, who would never see the point of *not* despoiling the commons for short term personal gain.

My partner, I need to remember more often, when confronted with people who have been fucked by the bad luck fairies, offers to help in distinctly concrete ways. Karen, apparently, walks past while saying “Wow, homeless people, what’s up with that? Why don’t they just move into a home?” My partner may wonder why other people don’t take their homeless friends in while we wait for the economy to sort itself out, but has actually done so in the past. I’m not sure what that viewpoint could be called, but it is a far cry from the sort of tooth-and-claw Randianism that makes me twitch over the very concept of libertarianism.

So, thank you, Karen, and I’m going to be extremely nice to my angel of a partner tonight, because even being a good enough person that you cannot imagine the predators ranged out there is a precious thing that deserves rewarding. Even if I’m glad as fuck that it’s not me personally possessed of that sort of naive-to-the-point-of-twee worldview. And, okay, also because that sort of person desperately needs *some* vices, and hot monkey sex will have to do.

http://gi-trekker.livejournal.com

Not that I expect a wingnut to get that.

Ferengi did not let anything get in the way of profit. So they had no art or higher culture of their own. DS9 also showed how the younger Ferengi were questioning this mindset, through Quark’s son, and Quark was occasionally conflicted himself.

Because they were a leech society; parasitically existing through other cultures. A leech can always get along, so long as there are hosts they do not kill.

But it’s not something that inspires aspiration.

If wingnuts truly were to devolve our society to the dog-eat-dog principles they espouse, don’t they realize they would wind up on the bottom? They are incompetent whiners with few real skills and no guts at all.

Once the serf society the neocons lust after was complete, there would be no need for propagandists and the nepotic wingnut welfare system. They would wind up in the sport fighting pit because they have shown there is no low they will not get under.

It would be Mad Max without the assless chaps.

Shout fire while the theatre is burning down
We used to lock away people like you
Now you can let off a little steam
But stay inside your designated corner
Because the truth is too extreme.

Shout fire while they’re lining up for blocks
To get inside the smoking door
They’ve got a show you wouldn’t believe
A house of cards rising to the sky
And everybody wants to add one more.

Shout fire while the beams and shingles fall
The TV monitors say calm down
Business is thriving and there is no danger
A crisis comes and a crisis goes
But normal life goes on and on.

Shout fire while we’re crawling through the ash
Come on and take a final bow
Now that it’s too late to make a difference
We want to make you an official hero
‘Cause you were so ahead of your time
A testimony to your vision
‘Cause you were so ahead of your time
Yeah you were so ahead of your time
They’re gonna name a street after you
Give you a new oxygen mask too
‘Cause you were so ahead of your time.

Or they would be if they actually, you know, existed and stuff.

It seems to be de rigeur for wingnuts up here to be in love with the idea of male victimization.

As I said above, women who spout this line will always have a home at the National Post.

But its poster boy is a guy called David Warren, an incredibly pompous bloviator who’s a conservative Catholic, divorced and a deadbeat dad who’s been hauled up in court for being in arrears.

When he’s not finger-wagging about decency he writes bitterly about his rapacious ex and the unfairness of having to support his children now that they are both over 18 without ever mentioning that one of those children has Down syndrome.

As I recall, Quark, and sometimes even his schlemiel brother Rom, invariably did the right thing and saved everybody’s ass, in spite of their cowardice, griping and greed.

Ms. Sellick’s point seems to be that if you call an entire group out for their vile behavior, the good ones will feel shame and reform. Hey, that’s what Sadly, No! is all about!

Marginally related point: the biggest single factor in the glibertarian pathology is a deliberate and unshakable confusion of efficiency and efficacy.

Economic efficiency has a very specific definition – a definition that in many fields is so far from acceptable that privatizing them would be monstrous. A good example: the Rumsfeldized military strives to function in as economically efficient a fashion as possible, completely throwing out the general success and humanity (relatively speaking) of the age-old American doctrine of overwhelming force on the say-so of slicked-up money-launderers. The result is a military that never quite does the job even when it’s in top shape, and when things start to go to hell winds up costing even more than a decent establishment would have in the first place.

Even if you believe there’s never been anything better for economic efficiency than the free market (a belief that isn’t substantiated by fact, but hey), you don’t want economic efficiency triumphing over allocative or social efficiency – or general efficacy – when it comes to vital services.

This is a difficult point to convey to these people, partially because they like to play ignorant at inopportune times. ‘Vital’, for your average glibbie, means ’serving me’. Cutting costs at hospitals by floating rumors in Wopanese that doctors are stealing organs is Efficiency in Action; their cleaning lady spraying the house with bargain-basement nerve agents and killing their labradoodle would be an atrocity worthy of the electric chair. Restricting her right to accuse the Ferengi of making up the Holocaust is a crime against freedom; allowing Muslims to worship freely in the privacy of their own home is an execrable betrayal of civilization.

The only particularly effective answer to this gordian knot of logic and bullshit is, per Alexander, slicing them open and laughing maniacally. Sadly, civilization has taken a steep nose-dive since those heady days; they won’t even let you wear an elephant’s head as a crown any longer, let alone carve a bloody swath from Thrace to Bactria.

If you are looking to maximize efficiency, yes. Actually, it would make more sense to take a fraction of the lawyer’s income in taxes and use it to fund social services. Volunteering isn’t about getting the most money to poor people, it is about recognizing that we all gain by pitching in to help each other out. When I used to go to the food bank, professionals and church groups would be working alongside homeless people who were actually hired to do the same job. Physical labor and human interaction has it’s own value. Jane Addams was onto something when she said that charity isn’t just about the rich reaching down to help the poor, but all groups reaching across the divide and learning from each other.

If that is too mushy feel-good, you can blame it on my coffee buzz.

The funny part is that many conservatives consider your second point to be a vital part of any well-run welfare system. Can’t just blindly hand out money to people; you’ve got to look ‘em in the eye, know who’s who, and do your best to make them feel as bad as possible about needing to come to the food bank.

I do like the consequences of her idea about food banks. Giving a product away creates demand for that product, even if it’s something basic like food. Presumably that’s true for health care as well, and giving it away makes more people sick. I’m sure Karen would agree that subsidizing or reducing the price of a product increases demand too, which means that (by her “logic,” at least) all forms of health insurance, whether government-sponsored or otherwise, increase demand for health care. Thus, logically speaking, we can cure all illnesses if we make health care so expensive that nobody can afford it!

There are three possibilities about the televised portrayal of Ferengis: it might be true for all Ferengis, it might be false for all Ferengis or it might be true for some Ferengis and false for others.

You’ll love this three-parter:

1. All those minorities really are dirty/lazy/deceitful/immoral/smelly/evil/criminal/stupid etc. BUT since our culture is the greatest in the whole entire universes we need to protect hate speech so that

humans could tell Ferengis what we disapprove of and what we consider acceptable, Ferengis could change their conduct.

That’s right. We need to be able to tell those blacks Mexicans Injuns Islamofascists Jews Irish Sub-continentals Gooks Chinks Pakis Ferengi that they need to shape up and fly right, and gosh darn it, they will. Hey newsflash for Karen Selick, I appreciate that your new to this planet Earth, but humans disapprove of racism – it’s just not considered acceptable. Now shape up and fly right.

2. Hollywood’s at fault. Actually, that’s a lot stronger than her actual argument:

If no earthling ever articulates the lies we have all swallowed, Ferengis will never have the opportunity to rebut them.

Umm, yeah. FFS – This is so stupid I’m having trouble addressing it at all. I mean holy shit, hate speech should be allowed so that the targets of the hate speech can tell the lynch mob that the demagogues are lying? WTF &interrobang;

3. The magical synthesis of 1 and 2.

No doubt after the falsehoods have been thoroughly rebutted and the bad Ferengis have reformed, there will still be the occasional recalcitrant bigot who would irrationally continue to hate Ferengis. But that’s when freedom of speech will be the most valuable of all. Ferengis will want to avoid dealing with such irrational individuals even more than the bigots want to avoid Ferengis. And so will other righteous humans. Let the bigots identify themselves, and let them suffer the consequences.

So yeah, hate speech legalized so that other cultures can take on “our values”, and demagogues can be shown to be liars. I don’t know what world she lives in, apparently one where hate-mongers and race-baiters are shunned by society instead of being given columns in national newspapers and their own shows on FOX News and CNN.

Hell, the fact that many of the people involved in making Star Trek were Jewish just makes that more likely – no one’s better at anti-Semitism than the Jews, after all.

Well, I do think Hitler managed to top them.

That aside, my father (a lawyer who was raised Jewish) immediately identified the Ferengi as a Jewish stereotype. Nor did he reject it: in fact, he occasionally refers to some of his nastier clients and opponents as “Ferengi.” His notion, for whatever it’s worth, is that the Ferengi were designed as something of an in-joke among the writers. Since they’re in Hollywood, the writers probably spent a good bit of time dealing with Ferengi-like people, and parodying them as ridiculous aliens was a way to blow off some steam.

I don’t particularly endorse this, in part because I know that some rather nasty people would be all too happy to agree, but there it is.