evolution

I’m going to need some pipe tobacco pretty soon. Unfortunately, it looks like I’m going to have to turn to online retailers for variety.

One month in, and I haven’t once thought about garroting anyone (especially not myself) with my name badge lanyard.

At other places I’ve worked, I would consider that an accomplishment.

I took on Banksy, and I’m crossing another line in this post.

That’s right — I think “steampunk” is stupid. The world would not be better, cooler, or more fun, or more interesting — at all — if everything was run by steam-powered machines. In fact, all of you morons would not only not get to post on the Internet about loser fetishes like “steampunk”, none of what you take for granted — not your dumbass Apple crap, Twitter-enabled cell phones, none of it — would work without some horribly less-efficient product of fossil fuel to power it. In fact, you, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever known, every item you own or have ever owned, and everything you’ve ever loved would be so coated in coal dust and oil sludge as to look like a West Virginia coal miner after a jaunty 36-hour shift in the shaft followed by a bath in the La Brea tar pit.

Seriously, just stop.

Bill posted the following both on my original post and on his own blog, but he took down the one at his blog, so I’m promoting the comments to the main page. I don’t really have a response or follow-up to these thoughts; but it is worth reading, and it relieves me of the burden of putting up new content. I guess my reaction, such as it is, is to agree totally, and I suppose my post was really a way of saying that I am taking Bill’s advice (before he even offered it!), costs be damned. What follows are Bill’s original comments.

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I read a fantastic book a few years ago* which developed a theme that I immediately stole and have used several times since: the senile ubiquity of modern politics is a symptom that it has reached its apex, like religion did in the 16th Century. On the eve of the Reformation, Europe had for all intents a monolithic religion, Catholicism, which had grown into every area of life, essentially choking off civil society. If you did not hold to the catechism, you were completely shut out of land, school, work - that is assuming you got to keep your head. The church set wages, set up kings and pulled them down, declared when one could work, how much interest one could charge, with whom one could trade, what one had to believe. In short, it strangled the ability of people to better themselves, and Luther was simply a match to a powder keg that had to explode**. A century and innumerable wars later Europe was COMPLETELY different, not just religiously but politically, with an entirely new set of ideologies that allowed for interest, trade, exploration, freedom, and the rise of the Protestant ethic that created the modern west.

It is the same way with modern politics, which infests every area of life - and it’s not just the thousands of silly regulations and the clown courts, as you note it’s that people define themselves - their jobs, their friends, even their families - by their politics, which is like the church was, simply a mechanism to regulate every area of other people’s lives.

And yet it cannot meet the challenge, no matter how much faith people put in it - and like the church, it runs on faith, though we call it “confidence.”. Its highest manifestation, a bureaucratic, “progressive,” economic Ponzi run on fake money and cheap oil, simply cannot make people happier or more fulfilled, and when they lose their faith in it***, God only knows what will replace it, but I expect it will be as foreign to us as a Protestant Europe was to the Catholics of the 15th Century.

I rather laughed when I noted that the last two Republicans I worked for (you noted them together here) both lost in the primaries this year, severing my final links to any partisan officeholder anywhere with the exception of my next-door-neighbor who sits on the township board, which board is responsible for hiring a mower for the local cemeteries and little else. Since I’m not a Republican, I couldn’t vote for either of them anyway. Not that I would have.

I, too, recognized that there is truly not a choice in our late-stage, corporate-capitalist, social democracy. After 15 years in the party - precinct committeeman, chairman of a city party, campaign manager, delegate to the state convention, spokesman for the attorney general - I realized that even if you get someone elected who believes all the right things, the system is far too big for them. It is a perpetual motion machine with guns.

Therefore all that is left to do is live.

Interesting article, though I note it did not mention a couple of even more purposeful segregationist movements, like the Free State Project and whatever that thing was called that was going to have Christians moving to South Carolina.

To be honest, I don’t find them a bit troublesome, mostly because of the progressive bias of modern “moderate” politics, noted in the article as the need to find collective, political solutions to “long-term problems such as the tottering pensions and health-care systems.” That the government should concern itself with your pension and your bad knees is a progressive position to which I don’t hold, therefore radicalism - if it keeps the government from doing things like rationing your health care - protects freedom. America’s biggest danger is not radicalism but the muddled middle, a choice between identical options both looking to regulate your life, or as Tocqueville noted:

For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Those who read my blog and who I meet are often surprised to find that I speak very little of politics IRL. I labor at my job for voluntary taxation, perhaps the only member on my staff who grins rather than grimaces as universities are cut off from state funds - though I never say why. I have a father-in-law who is a newly-converted Democrat (Obama is now going to save us, though six months ago he could not hold a candle to Hillary) who often tries to get me involved in political discussion, but I just listen and nod. At New Year’s parties at Snoop’s house I drink rum and engage in deep discussions about Madden 200x and Magic: the Gathering. I spent today canning beans and spraying bugs, and will spend tomorrow killing stumps and, if I get to it, building a raised bed for my rhubarb. And I’ll check ebay to see if I can get a good price on a gold coin. I’ll say my prayers and hug my foster kids and read a book I found recently on the Druids. I’ll study for my Spanish quiz. I might even blog.

In some ways, I feel like those Romans who retired to their estates to watch the Empire fall - though they are oft criticized for giving up on Rome, it was in retrospect the only rational thing to do: Rome was going to fall anyway. But it is what people used to do before politics, before coercion, became all-in-all. They used [to] spend time with their kids, put something aside for the future, develop themselves and that little piece of the Earth that is in their care for the few short years they have been given.

In short, they used to live.

* I actually reviewed it for the Book-of-the-Month Club, back when people other than Phil Cauthon used to pay me to write.

** Which is to say that Luther and Knox and Zwingli did not cause the Reformation, it HAD to be caused and they were just there.

*** I don’t know whether the fake money or the cheap oil will disappear first, but it matters no more than whether Luther or Hus came along first. We have a powder keg, and there will eventually be a match.

I was trying to find something to link that doesn’t fill me with a deep, burning, and abiding hatred; well, this qualifies. That boy has quite a head of hair on him.

Happy birthday, Toby. It’s a shame your mom and dad moved away before I got to meet you. I still might send you something, though. I’m pretty sure shipping liquor to Pennsylvania is illegal, and you’re not old enough yet to have an FFA. But the time is going to come, say, in a week or two¹ when you’ll want to rebel against your mom and dad, so I’m going to outfit you with a copy of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose… and maybe one of these.

You know, just in case.

1. or at least it will feel like that to them. [↩]

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Taco Bell Volcano Taco.

Am I colorblind, or is that taco shell a bit… pink?

A “NASCAR ALERT”.
Thanks for helping me to know
when to change channels.

I’ve been trying to put a finger on what’s been eating me for lo these many months, and what’s eating many other good people; the thing that I think is the main contributor to this political no-man’s-land in which the rest of us find ourselves.

Political belief, it seems now, is the single largest factor in the determination of a person’s public life — the places you can go, the set of friends you can have, the range of opinions that are acceptable for you to hold, the jobs you can have, and increasingly such things as where you can live or who you can date.

There are, as you might expect, people who are happy with this. To an extent, I have been one of those people. Blogdom has a high concentration of those people. Certain professions have a high concentration of these people.

Others are not. They might have a tendency one way or another, but they feel pulled in different directions depending on the situation, and they are tormented to the point of depression about it. I think this describes me most of the time. They either shut down completely (as I have contemplated doing) or it consumes them, they leave the flamethrowers on, and they become part of the machine (which I have sometimes given in to¹).

Social conservatives in their heyday played the game — the bad-faith accusations, Manicheanism, the shrill partisanship — and played it well, reaching its apex soon after the Lewinsky/Clinton affair and has been in decline² ever since. The “progressives”³ do it as well, and its apex is occurring as we speak. I don’t know that its magnitude is greater (worse?) now; it’s just louder, due to their having a high concentration of like-minded people in the media and the wider availability of said media.

But all of a sudden today — I don’t know whether it was the Côtes-du-Rhône or depressed levels of fighty-fighty-fighter hormones — I’ve begun to reevaluate things. The loss of choice you experience when you live this way is a high price to pay for the small bursts of gratification gained from tribalistic ritual, which is every bit as formulaic and predictable as today’s political commentary, especially that spawned from this medium, the blog. I think that I’ve adjusted upward the price that I’m willing to pay for that loss of freedom and the usually-fleeting satisfaction of kicking people I don’t like in the head.

Some — a larger share in blogdom — are more than happy to pay that price. I’m not. I want to live where I choose, associate with whom I choose, work where I choose (and where my employer will choose to have me, of course), go where I choose, buy what I choose, and write what I choose.

That’s not to say that I won’t have weak moments and kick someone I don’t like in the head anyway. We all do that.

If you want to pay that price and join the mob, be my guest. I don’t.

I’ll probably elaborate on this theme further once I get my thoughts together again.

1. I don’t shrink from these feelings or any other dark part of my personality. I simply feel them and try to get over them quickly. [↩]
2. due to the movement being left in the hands of dunderheads. [↩]
3. I always include this in quotes because among its connotations are “inventive” and “forward-thinking”, and today’s “progressives”, which are basically warmed-over ‘68ers, are neither. [↩]

I drove by Churchill’s in Topeka on the way home from work to see what it was about, but didn’t have time to go in. Anyone know what their selection of pipe tobacco is like?

I’m probably one of ten people in this city that smokes a pipe and prefers it to almost all other forms of low-grade vice (especially cigarettes, which I hate).

Centro Cigars here in Lawrence has turned me on to some good stuff, but they’re a cigar store, and as I said demand in this city is low, so their selection is small. I’m thinking of turning to online retailers. Are there any varieties I should look to try?

update: While we’re dilettanting up the place, let me say that my favorite wine is Cote du Rhone, and that I wish I had another bottle of it right now.

I’m still not voting for Republicans this time, but the pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as the Republican nominee for Vice-President pleases me for one reason and one reason only [italics original, bold mine]:

That point’s metastasizing already, in fact, into an argument that picking Palin actually proves McCain’s contempt for women voters insofar as it shows he thinks they’re automatons who’ll vote on the basis of gender and nothing more. That’s pure garbage — the near-hysterical enthusiasm on the right today proves her appeal goes deeper than her sex — but I’m positively aching at the thought of our nuanced left affecting high dudgeon for the next two months over, of all things, identity politics. You turds invented this game. Don’t cry because you’re suddenly getting beat at it. When Hillary stops making “plantation” references to the GOP on MLK Day, Palin will stop pitching herself to women voters, how’s that?

So there’s the pessimism. Now the praise: Not only is this the most galvanizing pick Maverick could have made, but the thought of watching progressives tie themselves in knots over the next two months trying to square the inevitable attacks on the “bimbo” beauty queen with poor, poor Hillary’s sexist treatment by the media is worth it even if [Republicans] lose.

Bring on the storm. I loathe identity politics and its practitioners. Everybody’s doing it these days, but I think most people¹ realize that it has benefited one side (with some imaginative help from its co-partisans in the media), and like with most one-sided, devastating weapons, total war is the only thing that will cause the weapons to be put away for good.

So bring it on.

On the bright side, we have some brand new opponents to “affirmative action”.

I think this just might make politics fun for me again.

1. with a functioning brain and pair of eyes, which narrows the field quite a bit, I’ll admit. [↩]