Indignant Desert Birds

Village Idiots picketing fallen soldiers’ funerals…Yeah, I’m talking to you! Do you know WHY you are allowed to do that? BECAUSE THE DEAD SOLDIER YOU ARE TRASHING, GAVE HIS OR HER LIFE SO YOU WOULD HAVE THE FREEDOM TO EXPRESS YOUR STUPIDITY! Feel free to copy and post-I did because I wasn’t afraid to express my undying gratitude to every single service person past, present and future. GOD BLESS OUR SOLDIERS!

I’ve seen this a lot. It sort of offends me. Let me explain why:

70 years ago, the Nazis and the Japanese wanted to murder us. Curtailing our freedom of expression was a minor, minor thing. 95 years ago, Pancho Villa wanted to.. I’m actually not sure what he wanted to do. But it had more to do with murdering us than taking away our rights to criticize a government.

199 years ago, the British actually _did_ make a serious attempt at conquering America, and… today citizens of various Commonwealth nations enjoy a very broad and expansive freedom of expression.

No, the biggest threat to free expression faced by Americans is from our own government. That is a threat against which the military cannot and must not stand. If our military were to take arms, and our soldiers were to die in opposition to policies enacted by our elected officials… America would be in a great deal of trouble.

There is, however, one organization which can protect the rights of Americans to free expression. No only can they protect us, but they _do_ protect us. Every day the ACLU stands vigil over every attempt to curtail free speech. The military stand as proud protectors of our physical bodies, and they do a magnificent job. It is the ACLU, however who guard America’s spirit.

I have contributed to their work. Have you?

Tags: free speech, liberal, politics, war by Punning Pundit
No Comments »

Wisconsin Labor Rally – Madison, WI – Saturday, Feb 26 2011 from ubiquity75 on Vimeo.

One of the more important conversations I had in my college career went something like:

Professor: So really, a paper is just an answer to a question
Me: So how do you generate questions
Professor: that’s the hard part.

The trick to writing a good paper is to think of a question no one has ever before answered, and then answer it. And you need to anticipate every possible objection– questions about your methodology, data, etc– and answer those, too. Want to tear a paper apart? The trick to that is not to attack the methodology, but to attack the thing I just glossed over in the “etc”*. Attacking the basic assumptions made by a thought process is the the most fundamental method of determining the strength of that thought process.

So: how big should government be? This isn’t the fundamental question, obviously. The fundamental question is “what is government”. Wikipedia provides a pretty good answer: “governments are the means through which state power is employed”. Employing state power sounds… unpleasant. So that brings up the next question “why would we want that?”

The very short version is this: government exists in order to facilitate positive-sum interactions, in cases where humans tend to default to negative-sum interactions.

There are a whole host of goods and services for which it is cheaper to buy them in bulk, or there are positive or negative externalities associated with their presence or absence**. It is almost always easier for government to set up rules for private organizations to provide those goods and services, but once we have a fabulous coercive mechanism in place, there is a temptation to use that mechanism to provide for some of those goods and services.

Once citizens decide to use the coercive power of the State to do things like pay for children to learn things, or keep unemployed people from starving to death, or keep old people from dying in the gutters, or create and maintain a system for removing excrement from our homes and transporting it elsewhere, or any of a thousand other things, we need to pay people to do these things, and (with some oversight and performance metrics ) get out of their way.

Vague talk about “shrinking government” doesn’t really enter into this equation. The question is “which services are we collectively over-paying for?” It may even be “which programs should we cease being responsible for collectively?” The question, in other words, isn’t about size, it’s about efficiency.

I don’t like paying taxes either. I don’t like paying for anything, but the people who create the goods and services I want would like some recompense for their labor. It doesn’t really matter if I’m paying a private organization or a public one– I’ve still got to pay for services rendered.

*see what I did there?
**Yeah, I’m repeating stuff I said yesterday

Tags: human rights, liberal, politics by Punning Pundit
No Comments »

As I understand it, conservatives think that it is silly to talk with Iran until Iran A) stops supporting Hammas B) gives up it’s nuclear ambition C) stops repressing its own people. Doing anything about point C) would violate the priciples of the treaty of Westphalia, so I assume this is mere saber rattling.

As for the rest: my understanding is that these are the points to be negotiated. Which means setting them as preconditions indicates that certain parts of our governing class really do not wish to meet at all– outside the field of honor. This, of course, makes them wildly out of touch with most Americans:

.

Seems like talking with people we don’t like in an attempt to settle our differences is a political winner. Who knew?

Tags: conservative, liberal, politics by Punning Pundit
6 Comments »