De Civitate II

Politics.

• You know when people say we should privatize everything? Yeah, you actually get Libertarians extending it to military, police, and firefighting. Now there are two answers to that; the first is simply to remind them that those powers being in private hands is the determining characteristic of a Dark Age, in history, and a Failed State, in the modern world. See also 6th-century Europe, 15th-century Romania, and modern Congo, Somalia, Sudan, and parts of Uganda.
  
  And the other is, "We are a nation of laws, and not of men." America only exists as a state, and an ideology; the only alternative definitions of this country are racist, or at least nativist. Now a part of that ideology is the state knowing its place, but then again, the patriotic sentiments, throughout most of human history, were often expressed in love for a monarch or chieftain—but that virtually never meant his powers were not sharply limited.


• Similarly, space travel. The people who say we should privatize space very frequently do not understand what space travel entails; and of those who do, many are actively opposed to humans extending their sphere of influence beyond the Flatlander Hole (if I might use Belter slang for Earth's gravity well).
  
  Actually, though personally I wouldn't be averse to the Air Force taking a more active role (lots of civilian technologies began in the military, and the Soviet space program was always a branch of the Armiya), I don't think space development, expansion, and please God colonization, would be either private- or public-sector. Nope, it'd be both, intertwined in a manner we've been taught to consider indecent. After all, the only known way to make a large scale colonial venture pay is for it to be on a mercantilist basis. Indeed, I suspect all those environmental and overpopulation scares, as cited by gents like Heppenhoffer and O'Neill, are, at least partly, failed attempts at an alternative.
  
  So Whedon may not actually have been wrong about China being dominant in his future; they're the only unabashed mercantilists left (lots of other countries, admittedly, are simply a bit more demure about it). Fortunately he gets no credit for that, since everyone and his aunt's poodle has been predicting China would be a major power in space since, oh, Heinlein.


• It's not directly political, but you know that whole "like a boss" meme (and yes, 'meme', in the interwebs sense, not the Dickie-Dawkins-doesn't-know-shit-about-epistemology sense)? You know, how something that's sweet, or badass, or perhaps capable of rendering an argument invalid, is "like a boss"?
  
  Someone really needs to make one of those things with Nazi Schutzstaffel guys in their snazzy uniforms. Not remotely to approve of Nazism (other than its fashion sense), but because the SS's uniforms were produced by the Hugo Boss clothing company.
  
  Yes I am a Decadent, asserting the unmorality of art, when it comes to puns. I make no apologies.


• On a more serious note, you know the shitsquirt Norway shooter, Anders Breivik? Well has anyone pointed out that his claim to be a "modern Knight Templar" takes a severe hit when you remember that it was the Templars who first definitively ruled that infidel non-combatants came under the Peace of God? Most Christians had already held that opinion, of course, but the Rule of the Templars was the first to prescribe it as a formal ROE. Even non-Templar Crusaders only ever attacked civilians when their discipline went to hell; they were the first army in history that even tried to integrate humanitarianism into their tactics.
  
  Also, dude, what self-respecting—let alone ultra-nationalist—Norwegian invokes the Templars? The closest thing Norwegians ever saw to the Templars were the Teutonic Knights, the splinter order that had pretty much just become the Holy Roman Emperor's leg-breakers by a few decades after their founding. Norwegians, among others, were targeted by the Northern "Crusade" (no more a real Crusade than the Spanish "Inquisition" was a real Inquisition), and the Teutonic Knights were the elite of the Imperial army.


• Does anyone else think that when you specifically say you're using "fascism" in the restricted (correct) sense, to refer exclusively to the policies and ideas of Mussolini and the Italian fascisti, the other person is out of bounds for acting like you used it in the general (retarded) sense, i.e. "ill-considered synonym for totalitarian"? And by "out of bounds" I mean "actively militating against the concept of universal human worth".
  
  No? Maybe it's just me.


• Similarly, when people discuss economics, you will very frequently get the idea that opponents of the welfare state want the poor to die in the gutter, or that advocates of tax-cuts don't even understand that the state needs revenue to function. Plainly, they do not even know that economic conservatives believe their policies are better for the poor, and have a theory called the Laffer curve that says lower taxes actually result in increased revenues (the theory is the increase in investing will result in more wealth to tax, even at a lower rate). Now I am not saying that either of those positions is not open to debate—I am a bit skeptical of the Laffer curve myself, although as a guy who's studied judo it seems a lot less like "voodoo economics" to me—but they do not even debate them. Their whole object, to quote Chesterton, is to charge out of earshot.
  
  Admittedly, the right bears some of the blame, since they tolerate Rand (who says, in essence, that the poor deserve to die in the gutter), and sundry Libertarians who actually do say that lower taxes would starve the government ("and a good thing too", the idiots add). Just because you have a big tent doesn't mean you need to keep the circus freaks around, guys.


• Finally, does anyone at MSNBC understand that their new slogan—"Lean Forward"—can be arrived at by looking up "progressive slant" in the thesaurus? Are they maybe actually going for that?