Who Is IOZ?

The Ratchet Effect: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Lieberman

2009-11-19T15:26:00.004-05:00

Lieberman. You have to admire his tenacity. He cut himself an admirable deal. Senate leadership lets him run a committee and do whatever he wants, and in exchange, he willingly functions as a convenient scapegoat and target for ineffectual Progressive wrath, as they are constitutionally incapable of understanding that he is not an impediment to the Donk's grand plans, but a primary component. Indeed, if "Republicans apply the torque that turns the thing rightward [and] . . . Democrats are the pawl," then the likes of Lieberman (see also, Ben Nelson, the Blue Dogs, et al) are the teeth on the gear, which is to say, the sharp protrusions against which the Democratic pawl clicks to prevent backsliding. The wheel turns right; the Donk slips in; Lieberman cries "Across this line . . . you do not . . ."; and the Progressive internet goes bonkers and ignores the rest of the machine. Whether health care or the terror war. Doesn't matter. The effect is the same.

Now I am sure that good liberals everywhere will crow about Lieberman's hilariously useless hearings in which various and sundry cable news commentators haul up to Capitol Hill to weight in . . . weightily on Homegrown Terrorism or whatever. But of course everyone's interests are served. The interest of propagating the crackpot nomenclature of Islamofascism and suchlike is advanced. The interest of making the Donk and The Obama appear like reasonable proceduralists is advanced. The interest of giving the Elephant a forum in which to inveigh against the depredations of Political Correctness ("Hello, 1990s? This is Politics calling.") is advanced. Thus ever does the axle turn.

Hope Yet

2009-11-19T11:52:00.001-05:00

As I understand it, Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi have outlawed mammography and made abortion mandatory.

God Shed His Grace On Thee

2009-11-19T11:20:00.000-05:00

Welcome to your country.

The Donkey and the Hippopotamus

2009-11-19T10:23:00.003-05:00

I think I am going to side with Republicans on this one. Mais pourquoi ? Because let us hew to the law of least hypocrisy. If we are going to conduct a show trial, let's conduct a show trial. Regrettably, the Obama administration seems firmly dedicated to the rule that if it can be half-assed, it must be half-assed.

Leave aside the fact that these decisions are pure whim and fancy, based on no discernible principle. Leave aside the Attorney General's boilerplate prosecutorial insistence that a conviction with the maximum sentence is not only desirably, but inevitable. Leave aside all the back and forth about who will or will not have the opportunity to grandsand at trial, whatever form that trial takes. Concentrate instead on the Obama régime's ludicrous insistence that it carry through with a legal process whose outcome has no relevance except insofar as it could provide a superficial rationale for killing the defendant. That's what's at stake; it's all that's at stake. For all its insane bluster and hubris, our government is not comfortable simply putting the guy against a wall and shooting him. So. We go to trial. If convicted and sentenced to anything less than death, he will be imprisoned forever. If acquitted and not sentenced, he will be imprisoned forever. But if sentenced to death, well, see you at the party!

The Bush people appear almost admirable by comparison. Their military tribunals got bogged in a morass of internal power struggles and legal quibbling, but no one in that administration pretended that tribunals were anything other than what they were: an administrative sentencing process for the presumed guilty. Now that is a travesty, but at least it's a honest travesty, and certainly not without historic precedent in this and other countries. Indeed, one might even call it the civilized norm in the broad sweep of history. Meanwhile, in the present, we must endure the endless invocation of justice from those who would traduce the most basic, fundamental principles of legal due process even as they extol them.

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations.

2009-11-18T12:38:00.002-05:00

This morning on the little hourly NPR newsbreak on the classical station, there was a brief piece on Obama-in-China, which after the usual boilerplate signed off by noting that China had rejected proposals for a "Group of Two" because China does not "enter into alliances." So here we are. Obama is deciding how many more troops to send to a colonial outback, while communist China hews to word and spirit of Washington's farewell address. I just can't stop smiling.

Twenty-Twelve-Step

2009-11-17T09:24:00.003-05:00

Well. 2012 is basically the sumnation of everything, a neat package in which Roland Emmerich reenacts Genesis 6-9 in the most hilariously overwrought of all possible ways. What does it say about our society that we can seamlessly create Himalaya-devouring tsunamis with digital magic but putting realistic cracks in the plaster is still beyond Hollywood's set dressers? The end is near, that's what. Anyway, uh, spoilers.

I expected a movie with no plot, but as the reviews have noted, the film suffers from a surfeit of plots. Every character has a back-story-and-a-half, and though it plys the usual American eschatology in which the end of the world plays as the orchestra under the operatic tale of familial reconciliation, there is something gleefully refreshing about the fact that it actually spends a great deal of time with the blended Cusack clan nowhere to be seen.

In the end, the Chinese, at the direction of the rest of the world, have built some big boats. "Arks!" As Oliver Platt says, "Leave it to the Chinese." Only they could build on such a scale. The boats are designed to withstand the force of the world-ending flood, and yet the gear mechanisms that close their doors can be jammed up by a 2" penumatic hose. "We can't engage the engines until we get a hard seal on the door!" cries the captain as they float on collision course toward the North Face of Everest. Did Cusack jam it up in the first place? Will he swim to the rescue? Reader, he will.

With three seconds left before the end, the Noble Black Scientist realizes that the billionaires whose bought admission to the boats he was only moments ago decrying as desperately unfair are going to be left behind to die, and he makes an impassioned plea to save them. Oliver Platt, a chief-of-staff type who's now in charge-ish, reminds him for the ten zillionth time that preserving a nucleus of human subjects is more important than the interest of fairness. This is a reasonable point, and that makes Platt the closest thing to evil, but Emmerich is in a forgiving mood, and no one in the movie is truly bad.

In the end, it turns out that Africa has survived the flood. Africa! Earlier in the film we see a few of the the two-of-every-animal (really!) brought aboard--giraffes, gorillas, rhinos. So, I guess that was a waste of helicopters, eh? I imagine the Africans, upon discovering that they, seemingly alone, have survived the cataclysm, can only respond with a hearty "Fuck yeah!" Until, of course, the boats full of white people show up. "Oh, hell no! Fooled us once, shame on you, but you . . . won't get fooled again!" Or, as my buddy put it on the walk back to the car, "Hello white people. Those are some nice boats. Would you like to see our bullets?"

The Truman Show

2009-11-16T10:55:00.001-05:00

You know, a more effective way to encourage the ends sought by E.J. Dionne would be to legalize patronage.

No. Woo peed on my rug.

2009-11-16T09:33:00.003-05:00

The Krugster really hates those damn Red Chinese.

So picture this: month after month of headlines juxtaposing soaring U.S. trade deficits and Chinese trade surpluses with the suffering of unemployed American workers. If I were the Chinese government, I’d be really worried about that prospect.

Unfortunately, the Chinese don’t seem to get it: rather than face up to the need to change their currency policy, they’ve taken to lecturing the United States, telling us to raise interest rates and curb fiscal deficits — that is, to make our unemployment problem even worse.

Oh, the suffering of America's unemployed. The humanity!

Turnabout is fair play, and after years as a middling economic power enduring lectures from first-world free-traders, let me advance the following: China owes us a lecture or two in return. (And spare us, please, the irony of couching complaints about Chinese pedantry in a schoolmarmish column predicated on the notion that no one on the Central Committee ever took intro to macro.) The Chinese have a manufacturing economy, and the US remains giant net importer of goods. Also, there is the rest of the world: perfectly happy to buy Chinese.

And of course, the Chinese worry that they may shave a point off of growth, down to 7%, perhaps. We should only be so lucky. One quarter with stats like China's at its worst would get The Obama declared dictator-for-life by Mitch McConnell.

Gosford Jumps the Shark

2009-11-13T13:56:00.003-05:00

I mean, I guess so. "Conservatism argues that people with a healthy culture can form a happy society even with a poor structure of laws." That seems awfully idiosyncratic, doesn't it? Also, define "healthy culture." And "happy society." I think that conservativism argues that traditional (for which read: historical) socioeconomic hierarchies, patterns of property ownership, and distributions of labor preserve social order, that order creates harmony, and that the interests of order and harmony outweigh the interests of equity. I think conservativism is incoherent because it is a rump heir to the political defense of the privilege of a landed class that no longer exists. In other words, it appeals to an extinct social order that was largely maintained by limiting the private ownership of property, a system of wide-spread tenancy and dependency, even as so-called conservatives attempt to trasmogrify into a contemporary "free market" ideology in which everyone is a home-owning entrepreneur. The "traditional values" it espouses are at almost complete odds with its economic program, which is why you get such hilarious shit as broadsides against Hollywood decadence and popular music, or even more hilarious economic populism in which heartland morons, the elderly, and the infirm are persuaded to believe that transnational corporatism is the very definition of individual economic liberty. What strikes me most about conservativism is how thoroughly its adherents are convinced that they represent the best hopes of an enduring order when, really, they're already long out of date.

How to Hold an Election

2009-11-13T12:04:00.000-05:00

Carefully, your hands beneath, your arms
outstretched, your spine erect, your eyes cast down,
your mind dead set against its subtle charms,
your lips pursed in a narrow, angry frown,
your tongue prepared to form a bitter speech
denouncing what it was that you embraced
until true reason demonstrated each
belief you’d held deserved to be effaced,
forgone, forsworn, forgotten, then replaced
with what we sought through blowing up to teach,
firm-handed installation of the current taste
in civic social order, free of waste
like native culture, undisputed boon
if openly and freely held. And soon.

Loud Obbs

2009-11-12T13:06:00.003-05:00

Lou Dobbs, the comically overweight cartoon basset hound who saw his career resurrected when his character was recast in the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup, has died at age two hundred and seventy pounds. Interviewed at his residence, Cartoon Network president Jonathan Klein said, "Lou Dobbs was a human being. I don't think anyone would say otherwise."

Dobbs, best known for pronouncing it fry-joals, became a controversial figure due to claims about Mexicans. Barnum "Doc" Stanleyprznykowskinski, a resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Dobbs devotee, summed up many fans' sentiments: "Ya knuh, I worked dahn the mill up till sentty-sicks, but they closed it dahn an at. So, ya knuh, den I gawda job up da hospuhtul. Nah um awna fixt income an at. Nah, dair ain all too many Mexuhcans in da burgh, but, ya knuh, yinz gawda look out fer yinz own, ya knuh?"

Dobbs will be laid in state at a Hoss' Family Restaurant outside of Washington, D.C. His will stipulates that his ashes be blessed by two priests, a rabbi, and the youngest living descendent of Walter Duranty before being scattered over the Rio Grande.

The Peace Race

2009-11-12T11:02:00.004-05:00

Lee-loo. Multipass.

-The Fifth Element

I like that The Obama's "four options" for Afghanistan are all the same option. I like the fact that he has bravely rejected any of the final four options in favor of finding a "compromise," a "hybrid." A fifth option? Barack Obama is calling audibles, yo. He's runnin' the wildcat offense! He's in the empty set. It's a reverse double onside punt fake kick passing lateral play.

These "classified cables" are a pretty hilarious shell game, too, aren't they? Uh, cables? What, uh, what year is this? "Hullo, Op'ratr? I need you to place a call to KLondike 1-2345! On the double! And Op,ratr, make sure you get off the line!"

I like that this man was the putative peace candidate.

It's Nature's Way of Deceiving You

2009-11-11T12:42:00.007-05:00

Technoutopian Greenocrats of the Thomas Friedman variety have this astonishing idea that if you just create a different model of growth, then you can hybridize consumption and conservation. Well, okay, sure. And my adorable little dog loves to eat her own poop.

So. Let us consult the ghost of elementary-school science class. In any system with finite resources, there are limits on growth, even where the resources are replaceable. Herbivores that overgraze will see their populations decline from unsustainable peaks even though the grass grows back. Predators that overhunt will see their populations decline despite the fact that the herd persists and has more calves. These are simple examples but illustrative of the regulatory mechanisms of natural equilibrium. Sometimes growth exceeds resources and there's dieback. Sometimes you get a few good rainy seasons and a glut of good grassland and the population rebounds quickly. Etc. and so forth.

But no system in which there are finite resources supports indefinite growth. The problem with this sort of Aspen-Institute vision of a world of Priuses and Whole-Foods-brand back-yard rainwater cisterns is that it works on the government model of increase: it calls projected future declines in growth cuts. Oh, if only we can slow the increase of . . . With increase, of course, remaining the operative word.

Now I think it may yet be possible for Brazil to find a way to economic prosperity without slashing and burning the rainforests for soy fields. But here is where 3rd-grade science fails. There's more than one vector here, and if Brazil uses less of this, it will use more of that . . . meanwhile, the fucking population continues to explode. To once again harp on a familiar theme, the problem we have is not that there are seven billion people consuming too much, but that there are seven billion people, and counting. I haven't got any proposed solution, but I'll tell you this: solar panels are not. Gonna. Fucking. Do it.

Armistice

2009-11-11T10:14:00.003-05:00

I'll tell you what. I may think the President is a bastard for whatever he's about to do in Afghanistan, but you certainly have to commend the guy for ending the war in and occupation of Iraq.

Sahaslisberger

2009-11-10T10:53:00.002-05:00

Now that was a fine damn game of pigskin. Best kind of hangover.

We tell say ^to ourselves stories stuff in order to because to live of morality

2009-11-10T09:50:00.008-05:00

Now this is a truly bizarre column by David Brooks. It begins by plagiarizing Didion. Indeed, his sub-White-Album White Album crib has the truest mark of plagiarism: it corrupts the original prose because it misses the point. I mean, Brooks is not actually a bad writer. He has a facility with language. He's no Montaigne, lord knows, but he's no Ross Douchehat either. And as a competent if unexciting writer, he could surely have cribbed Didion's famous opening paragraph without a dead giveaway, could have deftly appropriated her insights as his own. But, like many workmanlike yet inferior writers, he gets caught by the desire to write prose commensurable to that which he is trying not to copy, and in doing so clumsily appropriates an idiom even as he lazily seeks to invert its meaning. Brooks:

We’re all born late. We’re born into history that is well under way. We’re born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn’t choose. On top of that, we’re born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can’t control. We’re thrust into social conditions that we detest. Often, we react in ways we regret even while we’re doing them.

But unlike the other animals, people do have a drive to seek coherence and meaning. We have a need to tell ourselves stories that explain it all. We use these stories to supply the metaphysics, without which life seems pointless and empty.

Among all the things we don’t control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to make sense of the world. Individual responsibility is contained in the act of selecting and constantly revising the master narrative we tell about ourselves.

The stories we select help us, in turn, to interpret the world. They guide us to pay attention to certain things and ignore other things. They lead us to see certain things as sacred and other things as disgusting. They are the frameworks that shape our desires and goals. So while story selection may seem vague and intellectual, it’s actually very powerful. The most important power we have is the power to help select the lens through which we see reality.

Yeah, yeah, David Brooks. History is a nightmare from which you are trying to awake. Or, you know, something.

Now it's worth reflecting on what Didion wrote and David copied:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be "interesting" to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

On a merely stylistic level, you can see the effects of the bowdlerization. Brooks can't manage the rhythms, and he quickly runs out of words. "Things . . . other things." Oh, David.

Anyway, Brooks is looking for a "morally or politically serious nation." He wants to replace one totalizing narrative with another. The "conversation" he finds lacking is lacking in his estimation because it has not yet reached his preordained conclusion. The story of mental unbalance is too pat, says Brooks, too easy. We need to substitite . . . oh, how about a categorical? How about, "evil"? Which is neither pat nor easy, of course. Which is serious.

On Didion's side, she is writing about precisely the sort of radical alienation, ennui, and anomie that could, for instance, drive a man to shoot up an army base. Isn't that inconvenient! Meanwhile, someone at the Times should probably ask Davey to rewrite his term paper. By himself this time.

The Feeling of Power

2009-11-09T12:52:00.005-05:00

Now I am going to disagree with Prof Crispy when he writes:

so people do a lot of wrong things. "the west" does a lot of wrong things. it will lob a missile from a predator drone into your wedding, which looks like terrorism. and the evil of such things needs to be described and exposed bit by bit. but the logic is, for all that, utterly different: comprehensible even if wrong etc. both acts might be evil, even equally evil, but they are evil in fundamentally different ways. one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter is just wrong. no one is a freedom fighter in virtue of killing whoever happens to be present, victimizing people without any connection to a cause or comprehensible strategy for pushing it forward.

How does "[lobbing] a missile from a predator drone at a wedding party" serve "a cause or comprehensible strategy for pushing it forward"? I think the plain answer is: it doesn't, really. Or, it does, but not in the way that Crispin's text implies. And I think that no matter how far back you draw, how deftly and capably you examine the stated and unstated intentions of the "state actor" that was the ultimate cause of that predator drone firing that missile at that wedding party, no matter how capably you slice and dice the arguments from humanitarianism or the arguments from self-defense or the argument from economic self-interest (i.e., oil, pipelines, etc.), you end with actual actions, pardon the redundancy, that are "well beyond stupid," incomprehensible on any terms, even their own.

Now there are clearly differences between committing violence by proxy on behalf of the United States of America and committing violence by blowing oneself in the name of Allah and the Prophet and what have you, but I simply do not accept that these events are so fundamentally distinct as to constitute wholly separate teleological categories, which is where I think the Prof's argument inevitably ends up. The US and its allies are pursuing a hopeless mish-mosh of unarticulated and ineffible and wholly fantastic goals: regional hegemony, economic dominance, control of resources, humanitarian assistance, The Womyn!, some semblance of religious pluralism, democratization, universal franchise, freedom, whiskey, sexy. Well, okay. And the American state and its allies have constituted an armed hierearchy that gives orders down a long chain of command, at the end of which a bullet or bomb finds a body. Kaboom! The terrorist who blows himself up in a marketplace is the poor, sorry end of a similar, albeit much shorter, abstraction of violence from its source. So the terrorist does it for Mohammed and the soldier does it for Uncle Sam. So what? In the end, both sow sufficient violence, confusion, terror, and uncertainty that no opposing group can exercise meaningfully universal control.

Consider. What are we doing in Afghanistan? After all the dross has been peeled away, the most comprehensible, consistent, and coherent explanation remains: we are there to deny the Taliban and their allies control. Now it would be wonderful if Hamid Karzai discovered his inner Jeffersonian (well, Hamiltonian, but are we gonna split hairs?), but in the meantime, this is it. Rubber on the road. Deny the Taliban the country. Into the cracks and fissures around this goal flow such minor boons as the pipelines and the Womyn and the occasional stab at democracy. And what are our enemies but a mirror image, enacting violence and sowing chaos and dissension to deny America and its allies control. Into the cracks and fissures around this goal flow such minor boons as . . . It is mere attrition. To whom will the cost become too high first? The differences are all in the economies of scale. To America, it seems more sensible to use robots and missiles. To the Taliban, the terrorist, whomever, it seems more sensible to use people. There are more of them. They are eminently replacable--they can be manufactured with a minimum of infrastructure, you know? There is an old, classic Asimov story about a future society in which the long use of computers has denied man the knowledge of mathematics, until a hobbyist reverse engineers arithematic from the workings of the antique calculators that he builds for fun. The leaders of this society are overjoyed. They have been engaged in a long and costly interstellar war. But computers for missiles are so expensive, whereas a human pilot . . .

Extinction Suite

2009-11-09T10:10:00.005-05:00

The predictable players have come out to lament the insufficiently gaudy remembrance we give to the events of 1989. A relatively measured example:

There will be speeches and celebrations to mark this anniversary, but not as many as the day deserves. (Barack Obama couldn’t even fit a visit to Berlin into his schedule.) By rights, the Ninth of November should be a holiday across the Western world, celebrated with the kind of pomp and spectacle reserved for our own Independence Day.

Does this not strike you as odd? "Our failure to celebrate the downfall of Soviet Communism in the style of Soviet Communists reveals the shallowness of our devotion?" Uh, what?

The other complaint, of course, is that we have likewise failed to reify the monstrousness of Communist crimes, that we must work harder to fetishize the depredations of Lenin and Stalin as we have those of Hitler, so that . . . something. There seems to be a conviction that the ironical wearing of Che tee-shirts or hammer-and-sickle patches suggests some susceptibility in our youths, The Children, Who Are the Future, to the communist menace. Well, to that I say:

Future Bolsheviks.

Perhaps instead of tawdry self-congratulation, we might reflect on implacable nature historical processes. All is vanity. That sort of thing. The end of history. Ha! Are we still talking about that? Even Fukuyama quit worrying about it when someone told him about the Singularity. In the future, we'll all either be robots or dead. My money is on the latter.

The Bill Will Be Killed

2009-11-06T15:49:00.002-05:00

Here stated: Dana Milbank is a pompstrosity. Thus stipulated, this is snappy.

All of these truths I am about to reveal to you . . .

2009-11-06T11:31:00.003-05:00

What's even more hilarious about the mind-state, if I may modestly exaggerate, that La_Rana discovers at The Corner is that the circumlocutions are rationalized as necessity in our so-called politically correct culture. Like, if we say these racist things directly, then we will be accused of racism. But of course the authors at The Corner deny that the racist things they would otherwise say are racist. Which would make the potential accusations false. It's sort of the Conservative Bokononism: all of these racist things I am about to say to you are not racist. Anyway. In order to circumvent and head off accusations of racism, these dudes couch everything in this hilariously perambulatory language, which others read, translate, and then . . . use as a grounds to tell them that they're a bunch of racists. The Corner types then circle back, say, "Well, we never actually said [insert racist thing]," so your accusations are specious, and anywaya, even if we did say [insert racist thing], it would not be racism.

Traumedy

2009-11-06T09:34:00.005-05:00

Apparently there was violence on a military base. Well, my world is turned upside down. Maybe the major just confused the medical center with a wedding party.

A Time Machine. In. My. Closet.

2009-11-05T12:15:00.004-05:00

Upright Citizens Brigade

UCB: Time Machine

www.comedycentral.com

Joke of the Day

Stand-Up Comedy

Free Online Games

Let's review the, uh, financial crisis, shall we? A bunch of rich fucks were like, "ZOMG yinz can't afford them hahzez! We're broak n' at yinzre fahrd!" And then they fired everyone in America. Then Barack Obama was all like, "America, pause, if you don't, pause, allow me, pause, to, pause, give a bizgoogle dollars, pause, to the rich, pause, fucks, pause, who, pause pause, fired you and stole your house, then, pause, you will all, pause, end up sucking, pause, milk, pause, from Rose ah Sharon's, pause, titty, pause, in the barn, pause, because Depression, pause, full stop." So all the rich fucks got a quintillion dollars each and everyone was still fired and now we're supposed to be happy that something worse, unidentifiable in any specific manner, didn't occur, because of Actions Taken.

Locaiton Location Location

2009-11-05T10:51:00.000-05:00

Who moved the Supreme Court?

Caddyshack

2009-11-05T09:20:00.002-05:00

I hear this place is restricted, Wang, so don't tell 'em you're Jewish, okay?

In a post yesterday I accidentally linked an article about Maine's recently defeated gay marriage whatnot, which made no sense, but since I brought it up, I suppose I should say something about it. Also, Mr. Henley finds Renowned Anal-Retentive Crossing Guard and Andrew Sullivan Doppleganger-Clone Rod Dreher opining that Attention Must Be Paid! To Him! Before the fags take over. Which, he admits, they undoubtedly will.

There is really no sense in bemoaning recent setbacks to the ongoing quest for gay marriage, as it is so certain ultimately to succeed. If a bare majority in rural Maine came out to overturn it (while ratifying medical marijuana--stay classy, America!), then the future of its prohibition looks decidedly short. People of my generation and younger simply do not give a shit about faggotry, and if there is a threat to the ultimate extension of gay marriage to the nation as a whole, it is not the Gay, but the Marriage, whose inexorable decline as a social institution we can only cheer and hope to speed along. Indeed, the focus of what now passes for a gay rights movement on the marriage issue is a source of constant consternation to me. How focused we've become on getting into the country club instead burning it to the ground, or, at very least, trashing to pool! I mean, I suppose that in some post-ironic sense it is wonderful that two aging dykes may yet have an opportunity to participate fully in a major proprietary institution of the patriarchy. With free Goldman Sachs stock for all and a unified bourgeois hatred of labor unions, we'll really be getting somewhere.

Deny, Disparage

2009-11-04T13:25:00.004-05:00

What you see in the continuing extension of sovereign immunity to all official and semi-official actors and acts is a reversion to the historic mean in civilizational history. If we are frank, then we can admit that the notion of sovereignty residing in and emenating from the people--being merely embodied by their duly elected, representative government--was out the window, along with the 9th and 10th amendments, about ten minutes before those two long-abandoned adages were even promulgated. Sovereignty resides in the sovereign and in his duly deputized court. Whether you are Mahar Arar, a G-20 protester in Pittsburgh, or a man wrongly imprisoned for decades, you are forbidden from seeking recourse either in the criminal or civil courts. It is not simply that high barriers have been erected so as to prevent the use of lawsuits as political cudgels, but that the acts of government have been placed in a separate category of law, a moral, ethical, and legal universe wholly autonomous and independent of the laws affecting citizen-subjects. Nixon famously suggested (and all subsequent presidents have faithfully ratified) that Presidential fiat makes any action legal. In retrospect this seems an antiquated and almost naively limited claim. In fact, any action taken by the government is by presumption legal unless some higher government official decides otherwise--that is to say, the presumption of legality requires no positive decree on the part of the ruler; it is implicit in all official acts.

Now Libertarians and Constitutionalists and their cute little forest-creature friends will tell you that this traduces the foundational principles of limited government, but to my mind that is rather like saying that the lion's carnivorous nature belies his pacific, Edenic veganism, i.e., it appeals to (all together now!) a past that did not exist. There are practical limitations of government power that change as economies and technologies mature and evolve, but the notion that sacrosanct social compacts govern government is simply a fallacy.