The Rude Pundit nails it again:
- Barack Obama must be an anarcho-syndicalist because he believes in the power of unions.
- Barack Obama must be a Whig because he believes in the government’s role in building infrastructure and education.
- Barack Obama must be a Gaullist because he believes in regulating banks.
- Barack Obama must be a neo-Aristotelianist because he was a community organizer.
- Barack Obama must be a Dadaist because cow.
While the comment of a Talking Points Memo commenter about Palin and the GOP dropping over $150,000.00 of campaign funds on her cloths and bling is amusing, “If Sarah Palin’s $150,000 wardrobe had a life of its own, it would get a tax cut from a President Obama,” it misses the big picture.
We have to remember that she also accepted per deim payments intended for away from home expenses for times when she was at home, which should have the IRS coming after her, and her bilking the state out of over $21,000.00 for travel expenses for her children.
This is not about Sarah Palin. It is rather about movement conservatism, of which Sarah Palin is, at least until after election day, a sterling example.
Movement conservatism is by its nature corrupt.
Basically, these people read too much Ayn Rand, or more accurately they took it too seriously, because any amount or Ayn being read is too much.
Because of this these people believe that the government, and government service to be inherently evil, and so they enter into service to do what they believe to be evil.
The only reason for them to enter government service is money and power, and they believe that they are owed these little bits of corruption, whether it be Palin’s per deim or Stevens’ house renovations, because they are doing something so awful.
Mustang Bobby at Shakesville asks a question for all of us:
With the dizzying pace of the election and the economic crisis, it seems appropriate to ask: Did you ever get the feeling that the world was a Marx Brothers movie and you were Margaret Dumont?
The answer is, of course, yes.
The punch line is the same as for the joke that starts, “What do you call 100 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?” (Answer at bottom of post)
The head of the Indian operations of Graziano Transmissioni, Lalit Kishore Choudhary, was beaten to death by employees he had sacked.
I have said on a number of occasions that if you want to go postal, go after upper management first, and it seems that these employees were of a like mind.
The quotes regarding this, show just how callous people are:
A spokesman for the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry said: “Such a heinous act is bound to sully India’s image among overseas investors.”
That is an unbelievably cold statement. Some dude got beaten to death, and the only comment is, “It’s bad for business.”
Of course, being the Times of London, they are wringing their hands over this, and note the violence at the location selected by Tata for a factory to manufacture its ultra cheap Nano, but refuse to mention the fact that the land in question was stolen from the peasant farmers who had worked it for hundreds of years.
Meanwhile India’s Labor Minister has apologized for saying that the murder of Choudhary should, “serve as a warning” to managers to treat workers compassionately.”
He was right the first time.
If you want to read a more full throated, and more eloquent endorsement of actions that might make senior executives think twice, you need to go no further than Exiled Online
Live by heartless officialese, die by heartless officialese plus a hammer upside the skull. Nothing could be fairer than that. Proceed with the mob beatifications as soon as we get their names. And somebody find that f@#$-you-Mr.-Cheney guy’s name too while you’re at it. Something about the politeness of the “Mr.” right after the “f@#$ you” really enchants us. This is a guy who understands the importance of human dignity. No doubt, with a little encouragement, he could put together a nice mob.
Damn good writing, and you should read the rest right now.
In conclusion, the philosophical foundation driving our current system is that the “entrepreneurial class” should be able to operate without any external limits on their behavior, and that they should operate without conscience or empathy, and this is a psychotic world view.
As to the riddle at the beginning of the page? The answer, of course, is “A Good Start.”
Titled The End of Leverage. Money quote:
An enormous hoax has been perpetrated on global financial markets during the past 10 years. An American economy based on opening containers from China and selling the contents at Wal-Mart, or trading houses back and forth, provides scant profitability. Where the underlying profitability of the American economy was poor, financial engineering managed to transform thin profits into apparently fat ones through the magic of leverage.
This paragraph illustrates why I am such a bear.
In 1929, the US was an energy exporter, and the most robust manufacturer in the world.
Today, it’s all arbitrage with other people’s money….We have nothing left to fall back on.
Go read it.
Nouriel Roubini makes a very very good point in his essay American Un-Beauty: The Crisis of the Suburbian (McMansions and Gas-Guzzling SUVs) Way of Life:
The result was that the U.S. invested too much – especially in the last eight years – in building its stock of wasteful larger and larger homes and housing capital and of larger and larger private motor vehicles (whose effect on the productivity of labor is zero) and has not invested enough in the accumulation of productive physical capital (equipment, machinery, etc.) that leads to an increase in the productivity of labor and increases long run economic growth.
Basically, the as a society no longer invests in productivity, it invests in consumption (and I would add arbitrage to the mix), which means that in a world where increasing productivity is the path to greater standards of living, the United States is not even in the game.
In a Democracy, the cure for a dimwit, sociopath king is not a hip, smart king who pledges to snake our overflowing toilets after he assumes the throne.
In a Democracy, we cannot allow there to be a throne in the first place.
Obama deserves condemnation for his FISA capitulation for this reason.
Go read the whole article, along with his masterful use of photoshop.
Seriously, Francis Fukuyama’s endorsement of Barack Obama is something akin to the Union of Bullfighters endorsing the ASPCA.
Fukuyama was one of the signers of the infamous PNAC letter, which called for Clinton to invade Iraq and spread democracy through the middle east in 1998, so this is just whack.
From Thers of Whiskey Fire:
Movement conservatism started off as a racket. Movement conservatism has always been about exacerbating and then profiting from existing cultural, social, and economic resentments. There was never any fall from an original ideological Eden. The corruption was there from the start. Packer is quite right to emphasize how the political and popular success of movement conservatism owes everything to its legitimization of a politics of resentment that arose in the 1960s. Movement conservatism has nothing without Hatred of the Liberal, a point reinforced not least by the image with which Joyner chooses to adorn his post.
Actually, if you look at Bill Buckley’s pro segregation essays in the 1950s, the promulgation of hate for political power starts about a decade earlier.
It got its start from hating FDR, and folks like Buckley patted themselves on the back for being able to put a pseudo intellectual gloss on hate and greed.
He basically declared that he was no longer a film critic when he outed the ending of “Million Dollar Baby” because there was a right wing jihad against it, and now is declaring that he is no longer a member of the civilized world by declaring that the US is simply genetically superior in speaking glowingly the articles put forward by Peter C. Whybrow and John D. Gartner.
This is the cultural Darwinism that had as its crowning achievement the slaughter of over a million in the Congo at the turn of the last century, and the pseudo science sold as eugenics that achieved popularity between the wars that led to the Holocaust.
America is simply genetically superior, according to Medved, which doubtless sells well to the readership of Townhall.com, though those same readers would consider Medved untermenschen, of course.
The Fed has decided that it will begin to examine ways of dealing with asset bubbles.
This contradicts with Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan’s dictum that, “it was in practice impossible to identify bubbles before they burst, and attempts to prick them by raising rates were likely to do more harm than good.”
Another well deserved nail in the coffin of Ayn Rand’s buddy’s reputation.
Paul Krugman admits that he reads the cartoons first in the New Yorker, and cartoons like this is why.
So, we had an incident in the past couple of days in Sadr City, according to the western press, at least the New York Times, we had:
The ugly daily fight for ground in the poor Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City unfolded Saturday at a small mosque next door to a hospital, damaging the hospital and a number of its ambulances, and near a group of children who were wounded as they gathered tin cans to sell for salvage.
So, according to US military reports, dutifully reported by the Times, we have bombed a Mosque and damaged a hospital in the process, and that’s the best spin that they can put on this.
Compare this to the foreign coverage, though:
Twenty patients and workers in al-Sadr Hospital were wounded and 49 civilian and ambulance vehicles were damaged when U.S. warplanes opened fire at the hospital on Saturday, a health official said.
Even with the best possible spin, we have an atrocity (whether it’s a violation of the law of war is another matter). We bombed a mosque, a house of worship, and we did so with so many, or such large, munitions that we damaged the hospital next door, and somehow this will lead us to win this war?
Since WWII, the US military has had a fetish about applying air power to win wars.
And now, in the campaign in Iraq, we are again relying on air power in ways that will, in the long run, cost more American lives, by moving the populace to supporting our opponents.
So says Harold Bloom, a professor of humanities and English at Yale, in response to an interview about the increasing number of grants from various titans of industry making grants requiring the study of, or chairs in, the studies of the works of Ayn Rand.
I would have to agree. I took an elective course in high school, Philosophy of Literature, and as a part of an extra credit assignment, I read, The Virtue of Selfishness, which I found to be less comprehensible, and more poorly written than Emmanuel Kant.
I’ve come to realize that in addition to piss-poor writing, it was incomprehensible because it was piss-poor thinking.
I recognized it as bullsh#@ as a 16 year old, and it was painful enough that I wanted nothing to do with her fiction.
Full disclosure, to the degree that I place myself in a philosophical school, and I try not to, I find it a waste of time, I consider myself to be a Jewish Existentialist Utilitarian with a rather Deist view of the universe.
As Daniel at Crooked Timber notes:
Although the Ayn Rand Institute is quoted as being basically approving of the trend, I think that a decent case can be made to the effect that the article is wrong to say that “While Rand, an advocate of free markets, would support a university’s getting paid to teach her works”. This is essentially a bribe to the university and as far as I can see, taking a bribe to compromise your own vision of an undergraduate reading list doesn’t fit in particularly well with Rand’s particular ethics of self-reliance and independent thought. I don’t even really think that having a university professorship endowed by a charitable foundation is particularly consistent Objectivism but there you go.
I’m a bit more cynical though.
She was a self parody in life, and now her philosophy is a self parody.
FWIW, the Chronicle of Higher Ed has some names and programs their report.
There is not a single instance of political discourse in the history of this nation in which the participants did not want to simply kick their opponent in the balls.
So now, the New York Times finally notices that the rest of the industrial world is beating our brains out in boradband.
It’s very simple. If you don’t regulate in a market with high barriers to entry, it is more profitable for the incumbent to work on keeping, and raising, those barriers to entry. It’s more profitable than attempting to build a better cheaper product.
The US have given thousands in subsidies to the incumbent telcos, and done nothing by way of regulation, and as a result we have 2nd rate service (hi Comcast users):
Ms. Reding emphasized her determination to encourage greater competition in the market and to give regulators the power to force “functional separation” — obliging the owners of telecommunications networks to free the networks from their operating divisions.
Word up on Ms. Reding.
He is unhappy because people are blaming him for the upcoming catastrophe.
As I’ve said before, the idea that the noble entrepreneur must be allowed to innovate, no matter how many people it hurts, is simply delusional Randroid bull#$it.
Ayn Rand was a person to whom great evil was done, by a thoroughly evil and corrupt, much like Leo Strauss. Rand by the Bolsheviks, Strauss by the Nazis.
Their response was to create, and aggressively promote their own personal sort of evil, and both have proved, and will continue to prove disastrous.
Speaking as an Existentialist Jew, and yes they are compatible, when you create philosophies in which people are made unpeople, and in which the concept of personal responsibility for the world one creates is an anathema, you create another template for evil.
Of course, you could read his article in the Financial Times, but there may be some side effects:
I read an interest review of Greenspan’s Bubbles by William A. Fleckenstein:
… He sets out to deflate Alan Greenspan’s reputation by parsing Greenspan’s own comments during his tenure as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve. His conclusion?
“Greenspan bailed out the world’s largest equity bubble with the world’s largest real-estate bubble,” he writes. “That combination easily equates to the biggest orgy of speculation and debt creation the United States (and the world) has ever seen.”
Bernanke was left to sweep up after the debauch while Greenspan rewrote history in The Age of Turbulence.
I’m not sure that there is a whole bunch to learn from his book, so I’ll wait until it hits the library.
What I find interesting, and well deserved, is that Greenspan will find himself increasingly reviled in the final years of his life.
In a very real way, this is more than a repudiation of Greenspan, but it is also a repudiation of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.
The fact that Greenspan endorsed the worst excesses of the market for ordinary people, but rushed to bail out the “noble entrepreneur”, is a direct consequence of his experience of Ayn Rand’s acolytes.
So Hillary has an interview with Newsweek.com, and she says:
It doesn’t look bleak at all. I have a very close race with Senator Obama. There are elected delegates, caucus delegates and superdelegates, all for different reasons, and they’re all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose. Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to. This is a very carefully constructed process that goes back years, and we’re going to follow the process.
And the Obama campaign goes into full whine mode.
Hello, clue here….She is not trying to get delegates to change their votes. She’s trying to make you whine about it so you look weak.
Seriously, if the Obama campaign cannot stand up to Clinton, they have no chance at all against McCain and the Republithug attack machine.
This is embarrassing, seriously. There are any number of responses that are strong, whining about playing hardball when specifically allowed by the rules does not make one look strong, or transformational.
It makes you look like a bunch of punks.
Barack Obama’s campaign sounds more and more like has a glass jaw. Does they shave, or use Windex?
You are being punk’d.