Objectivist John Lewis, writing at Principles in Practice, the blog of The Objective Standard:
Conservatives have created a fantasy world of appearance, designed to expropriate the programs of the left while wearing the clothing of American freedom. In the end, the idea of a true alternative to the welfare state and military defeat is hacked up and re-stitched into a chimera. The fact that the left has become a cesspool of nihilism does not change the nature of the conservative reaction, or make this package-deal any real alternative.In my view, if our choice is between two forms of welfare redistribution and military timidity, we would be best off with a president who openly espouses these ideas, and makes no claims to support the opposite. This would not lead to better policies, but it would result in clarity, a point of focus for an opposition, and a better chance for a true alternative to take hold.
Suppose that Gore had been elected in the fall of 2000. The 9/11 attacks would have occurred, but there would have been no confusion about what caused them: democratic weakness, not Republican "offense." Gore would have been forced to look strong, in the face of Republican opposition. Welfare-state spending would be blamed on Democratic welfare-statism, not the Republican "free market." Persecution of businessmen would be blamed on Elliot Spitzer, not the "pro-business" philosophy of Alberto Gonzales.
This is creating quite a debate among Objectivists, because Robert Tracinski of The Intellectual Activist advocates voting for Republicans. I'm a registered Republican and have been for over twenty-five years, but I'm with Peikoff and Lewis on this one. In this context, I'd also recommend C. Bradley Thompson's article, "The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism."
Ian Hamet is back, and being very mysterious about where he's been.
Which was not, apparently, in a Chinese jail, so that's a relief.
A simple exercise in comparison/contrast: could you mark an anniversary in the history of civilization by asking, "What's on your iPod?"
You don't have to, of course. Like Henry Bemis, the poor, befuddled protagonist of the classic Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last," I probably just read too much. Still, certain synchronicities rear their ugly heads:
On October 23, 1983, a smiling young man drove a Mercedes truck into a building and parked there. The building -- at four stories one of the largest at the Beirut International Airport -- housed the 2d Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, and served as the headquarters of the Battalion Landing Team of the American contingent of the Multi-National Force in Lebanon. We know of the smile on the young man's face because of the testimony of the young Marine on duty at the front entrance to the building, who managed to jump out of the way before the truck ran him down.
He was lucky, for once the Mercedes stopped inside the building, devices aboard the truck exploded: the single largest non-nuclear explosion since Nagasaki, according to experts. The explosion destroyed the building and took the lives of 241 American servicemen, almost all of them Marines. The young Marine sentry survived the incident. The smiling young man who drove the truck did not and, for the record, his confederates didn't trust him: the bombs were rigged to detonate by radio.
North of the airport, in west Beirut, the French element of the Multi-National Force was also attacked. Seventy-five Foreign Legionnaires died in that attack.
Quite a debut for a new name on the Middle East scene. They called themselves Hezbollah.
I have stood at both sites. The results were ugly.
On October 23, 2001, in northern California, Apple Computer introduced a new product. The teaser for it, to those tech writers receiving the announcement, was the line, "Hint: It's not a Mac." It wasn't.
It was the iPod.
Apple didn't invent the MP3 player, but then they hadn't invented the personal computer or graphical user interface (GUI) software, either. But they insisted on producing what their own internal culture referred to as "insanely great" products. The Macintosh line of computers, enjoying damn near cult-like loyalty since their introduction in 1984, have been outstanding products, especially since the successful grafting of their elegant GUI onto a version of the Unix operating system. They followed that philosophy with the iPod, which, while not the first digital music player, was functional, tied in well with music downloading software (such as Apple's own iTunes), and was easy to navigate and use.
And it was beautiful.
Quite a debut for a new name in the music business.
Both October 23 efforts took a lot of money and time, patience and practice, courage and creativity to put into effect.
The smiling young Mercedes truck driver of October 23, 1983 had the physical courage to put his life in service to his values. So did his September 11, 2001 spiritual descendants. The Apple employees, agents, contractors, and investors of October 23, 2001 risked their time -- the one unrenewable resource of one's life -- and their energy, their reputations, and their money. That takes considerable courage, too.
One enterprise resulted in the creation of yet more wealth and values, the other in the destruction of wealth and value. Beauty and ugliness.
That says a lot, right there, and in fact, in the context of this discussion it says everything. Everything. We are not engaged in a war of civilizations, as some would have it, for one side of this conflict abandoned civilization a long time ago.
It was Islamic scholars, yes, who preserved for us the invaluable works of Aristotle and Averroes, and from them we have the word "algebra," the idea of the number zero, and even the Hindu-Arabic number system itself, with its all-important concept of positional notation (which made possible easy calculations, accounting, and, ultimately, capitalism).
But I have mentioned that to students of mine in the Middle East, that "Hindu-Arabic" number system, and Saudis and Egyptians both mocked me for using that term. The numerals aren't exactly the same, you see, so it's ridiculous to draw any comparison at all (I invite you to judge that one for yourself). The term "concrete-bound" comes to mind.
What's on my iPod, then? This October 23, 2006, I find Maria Callas. Beethoven. The Rolling Stones. Language lessons: French, Russian, Arabic, Norwegian. Podcasts. Music created with GarageBand software, on my own Mac. More Beethoven. What's on your iPod?
Meanwhile the descendants of those who gave us the zero, who gave us algebra, who gave us the very numbers we use every day, now put their emphasis on censoring what they don't like. I was told, when I lived in Saudi Arabia, that cable television was illegal because it was difficult or impossible to censor such services. The skyline of Jeddah was therefore punctuated by satellite dishes everywhere. Some critics there -- as also here, in the United States -- call them ugly, ignoring those words of Keats:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Wonder how they feel about iPods.
From an October 19, 2006 release at Leonard Peikoff's web site:
Q: In view of the constant parade of jackassery which is Washington, is there any point in voting for candidates of either entrenched party? Throwing out the incumbents "for a change" is to me an idea based on the philosophy that my head will stop hurting if I bang it on the opposite wall.
A: How you cast your vote in the coming election is important, even if the two parties are both rotten. In essence, the Democrats stand for socialism, or at least some ambling steps in its direction; the Republicans stand for religion, particularly evangelical Christianity, and are taking ambitious strides to give it political power.
Socialism—a fad of the last few centuries—has had its day; it has been almost universally rejected for decades. Leftists are no longer the passionate collectivists of the 30s, but usually avowed anti-ideologists, who bewail the futility of all systems. Religion, by contrast—the destroyer of man since time immemorial—is not fading; on the contrary, it is now the only philosophic movement rapidly and righteously rising to take over the government.
Given the choice between a rotten, enfeebled, despairing killer, and a rotten, ever stronger, and ambitious killer, it is immoral to vote for the latter, and equally immoral to refrain from voting at all because “both are bad.”
The survival of this country will not be determined by the degree to which the government, simply by inertia, imposes taxes, entitlements, controls, etc., although such impositions will be harmful (and all of them and worse will be embraced or pioneered by conservatives, as Bush has shown). What does determine the survival of this country is not political concretes, but fundamental philosophy. And in this area the only real threat to the country now, the only political evil comparable to or even greater than the threat once posed by Soviet Communism, is religion and the Party which is its home and sponsor.
The most urgent political task now is to topple the Republicans from power, if possible in the House and the Senate. This entails voting consistently Democratic, even if the opponent is a “good” Republican.
In my judgment, anyone who votes Republican or abstains from voting in this election has no understanding of the practical role of philosophy in man’s actual life—which means that he does not understand the philosophy of Objectivism, except perhaps as a rationalistic system detached from the world.
If you hate the Left so much that you feel more comfortable with the Right, you are unwittingly helping to push the U.S. toward disaster, i.e., theocracy, not in 50 years, but, frighteningly, much sooner.
On this day in 1957, Atlas Shrugged was published.
On this day in 1973, Ludwig von Mises died.
What can we learn from this knowledge? Almost certainly nothing. But in week of a North Korean nuclear test, the fallout of yet another dreary Congressional scandal (in the midst of yet another dreary election cycle, no less), and "warnings" that the people of Afghanistan are poised to become even more pro-Talibanish than they already are, it is a welcome tonic to think on what Mises and Rand did with the written word. What did they do? Mises wrote some on economics, and Rand penned a novel about the world going to hell in a handbasket.
There's a bit more to it than that.
Mises, of course, built on the Mengerian side of the marginal revolution of the 1870s and dealt with the question of what money actually is (The Theory of Money and Credit, why economic calculation under socialism is impossible (Socialism), and why almost all professors and intellectuals hate capitalism and property (The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality). His attempt at writing a general treatise on economics resulted in what Nathaniel Branden, writing in The Objectivist Newsletter, praised as a defense of western civilization itself.
Mises also put a well-aimed boot in the ass of those conservatives who preach that government should be run like a business (Bureaucracy). Given that the nature of government is intervention and coercion, he cautions, we most emphatically do not want government agencies functioning more like business. And he shows us why. But such conservatives would have to read Bureaucracy to find that argument, they would have to read, digest, and think -- which they are unlikely to do. Like liberals, they prefer to use the term "bureaucrats" as a pejorative, all the while creating legions more of them.
Ayn Rand invited her readers to think about the nature of individualism -- and she had so many readers that the book became a bestseller and a Hollywood motion picture. It's also interesting to think that, of the five major characters in The Fountainhead, only Dominique Francon doesn't have a section of the book named for her. And that book, Rand tells us on October 10, 1957, was only an overture to Atlas Shrugged.
From the destruction of the Rio Norte Line (and the progress of the John Galt Line) to the famous speech on the moral nature of money (compare those observations to what Mises wrote in The Theory of Money and Credit) to the differing economic results achieved in Colorado as opposed to Connecticut, to government interventions creating further problems resulting in yet more government intervention, again and again, seemingly without end... it becomes clear that Rand learned much from Mises.
But Rand's book is a novel, not a monograph: the economics has to support -- not be -- the story, and therefore needs to be shown, in imagery and in actions. Think, then, of the Manhattan described early in the book, in which we are introduced to a prosperous street, which street we know is prosperous because no more than one window in four is broken. Think of that great oak tree from the Taggart estate, the destruction of which haunts Eddie Willers. Remember that map, with rail lines perceived as arteries. Think of encountering Starnesville, Wisconsin and its inhabitants. Or of the first run on the John Galt Line. Of that dark club favored by James Taggart and Orren Boyle, and their shock when, upon leaving it, they encounter the brightness of daylight. Think of the evasions and finger-pointing leading up to the Taggart Tunnel disaster. Think of Ragnar Danneskjöld risking everything to reveal himself briefly to Henry Rearden -- and of handing Rearden a gold bar as a symbol of the wealth which had been, over the years, confiscated from him in the form of income taxes. Think of Rearden dropping that bar when he realizes that his only defender is a thief. Think of Rearden describing Danneskjöld, when confronted by police, as his "bodyguard." Think of your own search, over the years, for the Concerto of Deliverance. Consider how powerful those images are in your own mind, which of these was the first to bring a tear to your eye -- and then consider those who claim that Rand possessed no literary talent.
Think, too, of Francisco d'Anconia, a man so ruthless he makes Sam Spade or Liam Devlin or Javert look almost indecisive.
If The Fountainhead was an overture, then Atlas Shrugged was a dramatized theme and multiple variations with a triumphant resolution. I hold that if Ayn Rand had come up with nothing more than her definition of logic as the art of non-contradictory identification, that alone would have been enough to guarantee her immortality. And that definition appears, not in an academic journal, but in a best-selling novel.
But she did come up with more. She came up with with Dagny Taggart and the John Galt Line, with James Taggart and the Starnes siblings, with Ragnar Danneskjöld and Wesley Mouch and Richard Halley and Ellis Wyatt.
And with Francisco.
Mises doesn't promise that reading him will make us rich. Hell, he promised his wife-to-be that if she married him she'd never have money. He does show what money is, though, and what it means to civilization and to each man within a civilization. Ayn Rand demonstrates the nature of knowledge and morality, and the relationship between the two. She doesn't guarantee immunity against error. She does indicate how best to proceed against error.
And her hell-in-a-handbasket story had what we all seek, what I hope and have reason to believe Mises and Rand both found: a happy ending.
As I type this on Sunday evening, 2127 Mountain Time: According to the Washington Post, North Korea's official news agency is claiming that the country has conducted its first nuclear weapons test.
Associated Press story here.
Classical guitarist and Texan Maud Laforest can be heard on France Musique this Saturday, October 14, at 1300 CEST.
Info at www.radiofrance.fr/chaines/france-musiques/direct.
Now, can someone tell me what the hell "CEST" is supposed to mean to real people?
You can hear her performing as half of Duo Transatlantique here.">here
I use a great news aggregator for the Mac, Net NewsWire Lite, and I'm really thinking of upgrading to the full version for $29.95. But that's not the only way to get news: radio and newspapers will be around for a long time to come.
Doc Searls has some ideas, at his blog, about how public radio should face its challenges. I especially liked two of his points:
Second, quit copying commercial broadcasters. This means, a) relying more on listener relationships and contributions than on "underwriting" that amounts to advertising, and b) simplifiying complex websites that ape the worst of what commercial broacasters (and, for that matter, newspapers) do — which is put up craploads of internal links that trap the user in a maze and exposes them to advertising along the way. Look into River of News approaches to what the station is doing. Think about how people listening to radio in cars also have mobile phones and iPods. Add that up.
Third, face the fact that everything you broadcast will, and should, be available on an a la carte basis to everybody in the world, eventually. Then support making that happen. Then make it possible for listeners downloading individual podcasts of those items to pay for them on a voluntary basis. Concentrate on making this stuff valuable, not scarce.
If I can listen to Friday Night Blues, for example, on my laptop in a hotel room when I'm not in El Paso, then that's a cool thing. If I'm in the same room on a Saturday morning and can't find the local NPR station, or the reception is lousy or whatever, then once again it's back to the KTEP-FM site for their streaming audio. Why shouldn't I be able to download that program and listen to it later? They could encourage payment for such services by offering it free for a limited time only, or they could be pure evil capitalist running dogs and offer the service for the lowest possible fee at which they could still make a profit.
Which, itself, brings me to another point: public radio people could learn that words like "property" and "capitalism" and "profit" aren't codewords for "screw the masses, the business of Amerikkka is Big Business," "we hate the niggers," and "a woman's place is in the kitchen." Really, they're not. They have dictionary definitions and everything.
Searls also has a few words for newspapers as well. He says a few things that need to be pounded into the heads of editors and publishers from sea to shining sea, such as getting rid of paywalls and registration crap. But he also mentions something that I've thought about:
Second, start featuring archived stuff on the paper's website. Link back to as many of your archives as you can. Get writers in the habit of sourcing and linking to archival editorial. This will give search engine spiders paths to wander back in those archives as well. Result: more readers, more authority, more respect, higher PageRank and higher-level results in searches. In fact, it would be a good idea to have one page on the paper's website that has links (or links to links, in an outline) back to every archived item.
and this one, also having to do with links:
Third, link outside the paper. Encourage reporters and editors to write linky text. This will encourage reciprocity on the part of readers and writers who appreciate the social gesture that a link also performs. Over time this will bring back enormous benefits through increased visits, higher respect, more authority and the rest of it.
as well as this one:
Fourth, start following, and linking to, local bloggers and even competing papers (such as the local arts weeklies). You're not the only game in town anymore, and haven't been for some time. Instead you're the biggest fish in your pond's ecosystem. Learn to get along and support each other, and everybody will benefit.
And I really agree with him here:
Eighth, uncomplicate your webistes. I can't find a single newspaper that doesn't have a slow-loading, hard-to-navigate, crapped-up home page. These things are aversive, confusing and often useless beyond endurance. Simplify the damn things. Quit trying to "drive traffic" into a maze where every link leads to another route through of the same mess. You have readers trying to learn something, not cars looking for places to park. And please, get rid of those lame registration systems. Quit trying to wring dollars out of every click. I guarantee you'll sell more advertising to more advertisers reaching more readers if you take down the barricades and (again) link outward more. And you'll save all kinds of time and hassle.
Are you reading this, El Paso Times?
