Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I tend to think of neoconservatives as libertarians with a foreign policy, so it surprises me afresh every time the libertarian columnists at LewRockwell.com tear into the neocons, exaggerating the size of the neocon movement and then beating on this oversized strawman.

This week Jim Lobe pops his own blow-up neocon doll in Neocon Collapse in Washington and Baghdad. He admits that no top-level administration officials have been neoconservatives, but somehow still sees neocon shadows behind the throne being routed in the aftermath of recent Iraq scandals. As evidence, he offers a fruitless meeting between some former staffers and Condoleezza Rice - how the mighty have fallen!

I’m assuming most of my readers can’t tell a neoconservative from a paleoconservative - I have trouble myself sometimes, even though I’m familiar with the neocon approach to foreign policy. The Neocon Collapse article doesn’t specify what the fatal neocon mistake was, nor what the “realists” are doing differently now that they are allegedly in power. Instead, Jim Lobe’s rant reads like paranoid ravings about neocons being “a key part” of this and “lead[ing] the charge” for that, placing people “in key positions”, “dominating” this, “push[ing] hardest” for that, having “friends” in the media, “outflank[ing],” “influenc[ing],” “circumvent[ing],” and so on.

When the powers of good push back the neocons, they do so in equally vague terms of “wrest[ing] control of Iraq policy from the Pentagon” (as if Iraq policy were somewhere our elected officials hadn’t put it), and a former staffer making “blistering attacks” against “powerful figures” that the media was “ever cautious about taking on” - figures no one has even heard of.

It takes some writing skill to say “I hate neocons for reasons I’m not telling you” in a thousand words or more. Mr. Lobe didn’t have to drop a hint, but I suspect he couldn’t help himself. Which country in the Middle East has “territorial ambitions”? Is it the one that invaded Iran and Kuwait? Is it the one that invaded Israel and turned Lebanon into a puppet state? Is it the other one that invaded Israel? Or maybe the other other one that invaded Israel? It’s a tough question, but he has an answer.

[Update: I’m not the only one who’s spotted this phenomenon. Backspin links Dore Gold on the ‘neocon conspiracy.’]

On this Memorial Day, Mark Steyn recalls a time when Americans had a sense of proportion. James Lileks always recalls a time when our food was frightening. Gary North recalls a time when Americans hoped to retire in comfort.

I’m two hundred years too young to recall when a man could regret that he had but one life to lose for his country, but I think that when the citizens stop feeling that way the nation is doomed. It’s not necessarily a biological dead end, but it is a political one. I have the feeling tha one of these days I’ll go to sleep in the tattered but recognizable shreds of a latter-day Roman Empire, but I’ll wake up in the Dark Ages.

Health care link of the day: Chest Pain by Mark Steyn

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals was wrong to rule against Ashcroft in his attempt to stop Oregon doctors from prescribing controlled substances in order to kill people. (See the full story at Wired or Reuters.) The federal government has the power under the Controlled Substances Act to regulate (wait for it) controlled substances. This isn’t a grey area like medical marijuana in which the perceived medical need for a drug conflicts with society’s perceived need to keep that drug out of the wrong hands - killing people with barbituates is not a medical use at all. As long as there’s a Controlled Substances Act the feds are well within their rights to (do I hear an echo in here?) control substances.

Should there be a CSA in the first place? Probably not - at this point it seems to be doing more harm than good. In some countries you can go to a pharmacist and get any drug you want, and that seems to work out OK for them. So if the 9th Circuit had struck down the CSA altogether because it was interfering with the natural right of Oregonians to kill one another, I wouldn’t have complained. I’m all for striking down federal laws when they infringe on states’ rights. I’m assuming, for the sake of argument, that Oregonians killing other Oregonians is not a violation of the Constitution itself - though of course Oregonians crossing state lines to kill, say, Idahoans would be a federal issue.

But since there is a CSA, the good people of Oregon should obey it like the rest of us. The CSA need pose no problems for their assisted-suicide laws - barbituates are far from the only method of killing your fellow Oregonian. Obviously these people need to read more murder myteries, or at least more history. Socrates did the dirty deed without a prescription, and Roman ladies had a graceful way with a scalpel that anyone can imitate, regardless of age, health, or medical degree. The Conquistadores wiped out a continent with common household germs. More humane modern methods include the guillotine, the electric chair, and starving the patient to death. A creative physician has a million ways to kill without violating the CSA.

In fact, there’s no reason to involve a physician at all. Assisted suicide is a contradiction in terms - it’s not suicide unless you do it without assistance. If Oregonians want to legalize suicide, they should just go ahead and do it. None of the rest of us will complain that there are fewer Oregonians as a result, I promise. Suicide is an unprosecutable crime, anyway. Now I admit that it might take a little forethought and reading to find a painless method of offing oneself, but since the idea of euthanasia is to put terminally-ill people out of their unbearable pain, really they only need to find a method at or beneath their current level of pain.

The right to kill yourself is an inalienable right in that you’re the only one who can exercise it, and - mankind being as frail as we are - no one can stop you. Unless you’re incarcerated, it’s relatively simple to do yourself in. (Residing in a hospital full of sharp scalpels and federally controlled substances doesn’t count as incarceration.) So this business about assisting suicides is nonsense - that’s just killing people. Needing an accomplice to commit suicide is a sure sign you’re not serious about the death thing. Being an accomplice to someone else’s death is killing (though not necessarily murder), and it’s wrong if you’re a physician. Physicians should do no harm.

But the formerly good people of Oregon are still welcome to go around killing one another if they want, so long as they don’t involve physicians. I recommend a new profession to handle the situation, one analogous to Nurse Practitioners: Death Practitioners. Since there isn’t enough euthanasia business to support my DP’s (yet), I think they should have a sideline doing abortions. Abortion isn’t a complicated procedure - back in the 70’s women used to vacuum each other’s uteri for fun - and there’s no reason for physicians to be doing it. If a complication results of course a doctor should be called in, but physicians should do no harm.

In short, if you want someone killed - yourself, your terminally ill relative, or your fetus - you should kill them yourself. Don’t look to the medical profession to sanitize your acts…or your laws.

Pics of the day: Mike Hollihan’s Kerry Mockery collection. (I especially liked “Positions may change without notice” and “Our Modern Janus.”)
Lit of the day: those of the opposite ideological persuasion may prefer The Bushiad and the Idyossey - political humor in blank verse.

I found Mozart Was a Red: A Morality Play in One Act by Murray N. Rothbard at LewRockwell.com and was duly amused. Even if you’re not familiar with the cult of Ayn Rand’s personality, this one-act play is fun in a general cult-of-personality way.

I’ve also been reading Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, a very unauthorized biography of L. Ron Hubbard. Two of the sites where I was reading it are 404 at the moment (Operation Clambake and Nots.org), whether because of legal action by the Scientologists or simple server problems remains to be seen. (Scientologists go to more extraordinary lengths to keep the mythos of their founding personality alive than Objectivists do.) You can find a copy of BFM at Religio.de. It’s long (I’m still not done) but enthralling - truth really is stranger than fiction.

[Spam in a can.]

Classical Values is an interesting blog that explains the sudden rise in support for gay marriage as a sort of Libertarian trickle-down effect. That is, the heterosexual majority isn’t concerned about equal rights for homosexuals per se, but in greater tolerance in general, which will somehow translate into greater tolerance for themselves as well.

It’s interesting, but I don’t think it’s the real story. He cites two other possibilities - that the majority loves homosexuals, or they hate the conservatives who object to homosexuality. If hatred of the Religious Right were behind the opinion polls, I think there would have been more of a flap over the partial birth abortion bill. Only one possibility is left: love of homosexuals.

I don’t know where it comes from, or how long it will last, but that seems to be the underlying explanation of the blogosphere’s affair with gay marriage. I see sympathy for gay marriage as analogous to sympathy for the AIDS cause. I’m fascinated by the latter to this day - that a sexually-transmitted disease that’s nothing more than the syphilis epidemic of our day was perceived not as a self-inflicted, preventable disease but as a tragedy on the order of juvenile leukemia is just boggling - unless people are fond of the victims. (If you think people care about the African victims of AIDS, take a look at the Malaria Clock. Malaria is preventable and treatable, yet the carnage goes on unnoted.)

Why the love? It’s probably an American thing - we tend to like our neighbors no matter how odd they are, whereas in certain other countries going against the flow is sufficient grounds for a lynching.

[This entry brought to you by spam in a can.]

Today’s belated entry is a random link from my current collection: Why Men Follow Masters. The article meanders, but one bit struck me - this quote from Lysander Spooner about voting:

[H]e is allowed one voice out of millions in deciding what he may do with his own person and his own property, and […] he is permitted to have the same voice in robbing, enslaving, and murdering others, that others have in robbing, enslaving, and murdering himself.

So if you’re in one of those states that Just Don’t Count towards the Democratic (or any other) primaries, there’s no reason to feel guilty for not showing up at the polls. The farce will go on without you, as will the robbing, enslaving, and murdering.

Some links for Veronica - the rest of you can just move along…

• Alien Song download page (I Will Survive)
• The Misadventures of Hello Cthulhu - unfortunately not as funny as it sounds
• Identical quadruplet calves
• elgooG
• PerversionTracker to switch to “All Sushi” format
• The Right to Read, a story
• The classic game of xbill has been ported to the Mac as MacBill - stop Bill Gates from installing Windows everywhere!

Mac menu of the day: Menu Calendar

The entry title comes from this USA Today article about offshoring in which a guy forced to train his offshore replacement said, “You feel like you’re the guy wearing the red shirt on Star Trek. It’s a very unpleasant situation. It’s unfair. These people appeared, and they’d sit and shadow us and watch what we do.”

Note the utter disregard for human dignity, never mind the economy of the US (or of whatever country sells its jobs overseas). Oh for the robber barons of old, who had the decency to bring the overseas labor into the country before exploiting it…

Corporations are completely immoral entities, so the only way to stop them is to boycott the ones that go offshore. Technically, I guess that means I should be boycotting Earthlink, but I don’t know of a nice local ISP to replace them.

I saw this article on CNN yesterday, but I didn’t mention it because it was just too eerie. Today, however, Mark Steyn said precisely what I was thinking in his column: that the Spanish people just let al Qaeda elect their government for them.

That’s not what I intended to blog about today. I’d found a cool quote by Bertrand Russell:

No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behaviour to sin; he does not say, “You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.” He attempts to find out what is wrong and to set it right.

Unlike Russell, I wasn’t going to claim that sin is a wholly pernicious idea. The trouble is that people insist on moralizing issues that are not moral in nature. They don’t scold their cats or their cars, but they will scold corporations, political parties or entire nations - and yet your dog has more of a moral sense than the average corporation.

So I will not scold Spain. Spain is not a moral agent but a symptom that Europe still hasn’t gotten over WWI. Looking around today, we find ourselves in a nightmare house where the clocks all stopped on the eve of an unthinkable disaster. It is 1928 all over again. –The Roots of European Appeasement by David Gelernter, September 2002. Here’s some more:

As the Second World War and its aftermath fade, they reveal a “new world order” that is strangely familiar–amazingly like the Western world of the 1920s, with its love of self-determination and loathing of imperialism and war, its liberal Germany, shrunken Russia, and map of Europe crammed with small states, with America’s indifference to Europe and Europe’s disdain for America, with Europe’s casual, endemic anti-Semitism, her politically, financially, and masochistically rewarding fascination with Muslim states who despise her, and her undertone of self-hatred and guilt.

On this day in 1938, German troops entered Austria. At our comfortable distance here in the US, the Anschluß is most familiar to us in its musical form from The Sound of Music, where the impression is that the good Captain will not live under fascism.

The truth is that Austria was already fascist in 1938; it was only the flag with the spider on it (in musical terms) that changed. The issue was sovereignty, not freedom - nationalism, not Naziism. [The reader may insert the obvious comments about the EU here.] In musicals, at least, nationalism is still a virtue.