Help Us Rick Perry, You're Our Only Hope

Rick Perry has been making motions to run for president for a long time now, probably because he will, and probably because he's literally the only hope the GOP has.

With the constant flow of controversy following Bachmann,  Romneny, et al. Perry has everything the GOP wants in a nice package, he's well liked by his own party, has a decent personality, is adequately right-wing, extremely religious (read: Christian) but more importantly, Rick Perry can handle himself in the more "liberal media".

Notice this interview with Jon Stewart where Rick Perry defends "flexible permits" a method of avoiding regulations in the Clean Air Act, along with low corporate taxes, lax regulations, lawsuit caps and a union busting public education which attracted numerous companies (or "job creation") in a literal race to the bottom (the bottom being Texas).

Stewart, while pointing out that Perry's argument is the same for outsourcing to India (low taxes, cheap labor etc.) didn't even notice how all the things he mentioned are actually awful and was caught off guard with "Would you rather live in Texas or India?" making Stewart trip up and forget his point. 

That's the magic of Rick Perry, he can make terrible right-wing policies seem sensible and jokingly cast aside criticism without looking like an asshole (even while he's supposed to get grilled by liberals). He is what the Republican party disparately needs, the only candidate that can attract both the base and a fair bit of the general electorate.

Shocker: Slavery is a Conservative Idea

What with the recent controversy over Michelle Bachmann signing the the anti-marriage equality pledge that talked about slavery, I think it's worth pointing out that the idea of preserving slavery is inherently conservative.  

Now I'm not saying conservatives want to reinstate slavery but it's a basic axiom that being conservative means you want to "conserve" something, and the more conservative someone is the more likely they conserve archaic institutions like segregation and slavery.

Recently I got into an argument about this and found a New York Times editorial from 1860 which actually lays out this argument and decries how conservatives tried to defend slavery:

It is a curious phenomenon of our own day and nation that all opinions favorable to Slavery should be regarded as "conservative" and "practical," while those opposed to it should be stigmatized as the "utopian" and "theoretical" excesses of a "false philanthropy," and their expression denounced by the application to it of that dread political ban-word, "agitation." The advocates of Slavery seem to be aiming to combine in defence of their cause all the calm and solid dignity of recognized opinions with the fierce impetuosity of a new-found propaganda.  

- New York Times editorial, 1860

This editorial attacks the notion that slavery is "'the normal condition of society'" and thus should be preserved by conservatives. It's also striking to see the red-baiting that existed in the 1800s with "agitation". 

My guess is conservatives know this full well and have been drilling obscure counter arguments into peoples heads like "liberals want to increase welfare and make people slaves to government," which not only isn't true but ignores how it was literally a "conservative" notion to want to keep slavery. 

The other tactic is to ignore how Republicans were the liberal party in 1860 while Democrats were the conservatives and just drill "Republicans ended slavery" into people heads.

Oh and lets not forget this gem:

You know, Martin Luther King Jr., the guy who was a self-described "democratic socialist" who said "something is wrong with capitalism" and that "there must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism."

Brilliant.

A Useless Study Into Libertarian Morality

So through the magic of googling "Libertarian morality" I came across a study which observes what are said to be the "moral foundations" of humanity and looks at how conservatives and liberals-and now libertarians- identify with these foundations.

The problem is when you actually break it down, it's a poll which looks at random attributes and how conservatives, liberals etc. identify with them. How do we know that these arbitrary traits are in fact the "moral foundations" of society? I don't know but apparently the guy who made the test does. 

Jonathan Haidt, the maker of the test expains his theory in this Ted talk:

Actually the real purpose of the test was to include libertarians and to show they have some sort of coherent morality and aren't just "amoral calculating rationalists" as Reason magazine puts it. So how did they prove it? Well the study found that libertarians scored low on all the traits that make up the "moral foundations" of society which of course proves...well actually it doesn't prove anything, in fact, it might just prove that libertarians don't have any moral foundation. 

So to remedy this problem the researchers realized there was an awful "liberal bias" in the test by not including Liberty as one of the foundations because...it's liberal to hate liberty? And apparently these "moral foundations" are so malleable that suddenly the Five Moral Foundations™ became six?

Well anyways, libertarians scored highest on liberty showing they really love freedom and that tweaking arbitrary traits in a personality test can prove anything.      

Man Is An Ignoble Savage: The Moral Journey of Stanley Kubrick

I thought this would be fun, to compare my theory of libertarian and authoritarian morality with the moral development of the famed (and one of my favorite) film directors, Stanley Kubrick.

In his films, Kubrick went from a from having a Rousseauistic view of the innately good human being corrupted by society (the Libertarian morality) to openly attacking Rousseau and taking on a more pessimistic which some have likened to "fascist" (the Authoritarian morality)

Paths of Glory (1957) - Libertarian

This is one of the clearest examples of Kubrick seeing the innately good human being corrupted by society. In film, a group of World War I fighters are forced to go on a suicide mission so a general can get one more star. It's probably one of the best vindications of war there is, but above all, it portrays the soldiers as a good people who are cogs of an unjust war. 

In fact, it even went on to mock the central tenets of Authoritarian morality, the idea that people are evil and need to be disciplined to become good:

 "You see colonel, troops are like children, and just as a child wants his father to be firm, troops crave discipline, and one way to ensure discipline is to shoot a man now and again."                                                      "Do you sincerey believe the things you've just said?"

Dr. Strangelove (1967) -"Realist"

In many ways, Strangelove was the beginning of Kubrick's lurch towards authoritarian thinking. In a more "realist" approach, Strangelove sees human beings as the ultimate masters of the institutions they built, not the other way around. In the film, a crazed general gave out the signal for a plane to nuke the Soviet Union while a frantic US government tries to stop it.

The film is a clear vindication of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and many of the institutions that make it possible for this catastrophe to happen, but it also tarnishes the idea of institutions having fail-safe mechanisms to prevent a crazed general or sinister President etc. from unleashing Armageddon. Thus, it puts people and institutions on a mostly level playing field, with people being slightly more important.

A Clockwork Orange (1971) - Authoritarian

With Clockwork Orange comes Kubrick's full turn into a near-fascist. In the film, Alex is a criminal who, with his gang of 'Droogs', go around raping, looting and causing chaos. What's odd is that this life of crime is mostly a secret, and that at home he is a seemingly normal young adult with decent parents and a nice house and environment to grow up in. Thus, the movie conceives of someone who is "born evil" and as the film later demonstrates, must be conditioned to become a good person.

The film's saving grace is that it views the conditioning that was put onto Alex as a worse and more dehumanizing crime than the many committed by Alex. Although as the film contends, there wouldn't be a need such authoritarian measures if people behaved.    

With this film his views would be known, Kubrick would go on to say:

"Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved—that about sums it up...any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure."

He would later add that "The idea that social restraints are all bad is based on a utopian and unrealistic vision of man." When accused of being a fascist, Kubrick rejected it but went on to say:

Rousseau's romantic fallacy that it is society which corrupts man, not man who corrupts society, places a flattering gauze between ourselves and reality. This view...is solid box office but, in the end, such a self-inflating illusion leads to despair. 

Kubrick's friend would later characterize his beleif of democracy as a "a noble failed experiment along our evolutionary way, brought low by base instincts, money and self-interest and stupidity... He thought the best system might be under a benign despot, though he had little belief that such a man could be found."

How did Kubrick end up from promoting Rousseau's ideals to openly attacking them? I don't know but I know his other movies are more mixed.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) - Libertarian?

The big surprise came with one of Kubrick's last works, Full Metal Jacket. Despite fears that "[t]he political left will call Kubrick a fascist," it's now considered a classic anti-war film although Kubrick said that wasn't the intention. In the film various young soldiers are enlisted into the marines and go through a brutal process of training and hazing, one of soldiers eventually going crazy and committing a murder-suicide. It then picks up in urban Vietnam through the Tet-offensive and afterwards.   


In many ways, the film mirrors Paths of Glory including the Rousseauian themes of people being corrupted by society (unlike Kubrick's earlier quotes). In fact, the idea of people having to be indoctrinated in order to fight in the war, and the obvious negative portrayal of this process, is in many ways akin to what Kubrick derides. 

Ultimately, Kubrick went on a huge journey from Libertarian to Authoritarian and possibly back.