Weekly Roundup.
Tam has been keeping an eye on a gunblogger vs gunblogger kerfuffle here. Roberta also talks about it here, and claims she’s an Anarchist, which to me seems like Mother Theresa claiming she’s a hooker. It is reasonably clear to me that Roberta spends all her life being an Entropy warrior, trying to return chaos to order, which is the very antithesis of anarchy. But that’s just my opinion.
Finally, Rod “the Bod” Blowdryavitch has gotten his ass arrested for being a fucktard trying to sell the senate seat recently vacated by the Chosen One.
Shit. It’s only tuesday.
First of all: Whoever is on whatever side of the gun issue, as long as you’re collecting and shooting? Good for you. There’s a reason the Military prefers to train kids, it’s so (for at least as long as their stint) they are compliant and act as a unit. Once you’re over twenty, you don’t walk in lockstep with anyone, and finding someone you agree with about anything is near to impossible. Fight among yourself if you have to, but keep shooting. When the time comes, we’ll all be shoulder to shoulder, if we need to be, and we’ll fight about the details later.
As for Anarchy: The only true piece of civilization we have is the Rule of Law. Without it we’re well and truly fucked, because without Law and it’s enforcement we invariably end up with the Rule of Fucktards.
Anarchy and libertarianism and communism and socialism all rely on one thing, and that is that all the people be onn their best behavior for it all to go swimmingly.
I don’t know about you, but anyone who spends five minutes driving Chicago expressways understands the utter impossibility of any TWO people being on their best behavior for more than two minutes. Oh, yeah, maybe somewhere there are people who get along well together in large groups and don’t bicker or disagree on basic principles, but those people are in a coma, and they arent any use to anyone.
The only way we can do a damned thing as a race is to have a decent set of laws, and people who are trained to enforce them, and people who are trained to prosecute offenders.
The fact that the judicial system we have resembles justice as much as bookworms resemble books, is our own damned fault. We let it happen, and we let government grow to the place it is now. As much as I’d like to flip a switch and get us all back to Thomas Jefferson, we have what we have.
Socialism, Communism, libertarianism, anarchism, are not the answer. They never have been, and they never will be. People just don’t naturally fall into a specific moral ideal that allows these systems to work. The representative republic is about all we have, and in short order, it turns into a clusterfuck. Nobody has figured out an effective way to prune the fucktards off the tree of humanity, and until we do that we’re going to be stuck with ever increasing gumint, and that’s the truth, pppphlltt.
And the proof of this is Blagojevich. Here’s the thing: He would have gotten where he is in any system of government. In most, he would have continued to get away with his bullshit, and never been caught. In our Republic, he managed to attract the eye of a federal investigator, and now he’s going to do time.
Let’s talk, for a moment, about vermin. Where you see one roach, or silverfish, or mouse, or rat, you know there are legion, hiding out of sight, awaiting their moment in the trough. The City of Chicago is the biggest nest of vermin yet uncovered, and Blago is but the stalking horse, thrown under the bus by a literal horde of his fellow vermin. He was installed by his fatherinlaw, and didn’t have anything like the finesse needed to do anything but groom his incredible hairstyle, so he became the scapegoat for the whole Chicago Way.
Mark my word: If Blago starts to open his yap in his defense, he will have an accident. Or he’ll kill himself, with a bizzare suicide note. Watch this space.
Anyway: trying times, at worst, but at best, a time for all of us to reflect on our personal purpose, and prepare for the shitstorm to come.
Also:
There are two additional very interesting possibilities here.
Blago approached Jesse Junior, and, so disgusted that anyone would be so rude as to ask a Jackson to PAY for anything, Jesse is the one who dropped the dime.
OR, Jesse offered to pay the half million, but was outbid.
Maybe, also, Jesse was implicated but will be pulled in to make it seem like he was “part of” the organization investigating Blago.
Three. Three interesting possibilities.
12 comments Og | Uncategorized
I am so damn sorry I was travelling all day yesterday and didn’t hear about this till last night. I kept saying to myself, “Og must be flippin’ ecstatic.”
“Anarchy and libertarianism and communism and socialism all rely on one thing, and that is that all the people be onn their best behavior for it all to go swimmingly.”
That right there is the heart of the matter. Communism (for instance) works just fine in a limited population who have good reason to work together for the common good, like a family or a convent. Throw in a larger population that doesn’t share the bonds of love/duty/whatever makes people work together and it all goes pear-shaped in one heck of a hurry.
And William “Cold Cash” Jefferson lost his seat.
There may be hope yet.
I don’t understand the gunblogger kerfuffle. Could you explain it in one paragraph?
Weet: Some people want to get everyone to vote together to follow the “normal” channels to fixs things here. Others want amn insurrection. Both are right. Both are wrong. My feeling? The more people that keep throwing lead downrange, the better it is for all of us.
“Anarchy and libertarianism and communism and socialism all rely on one thing, and that is that all the people be on their best behavior for it all to go swimmingly.”
As a minarchist, I’d have to say that is true of ALL political ideologies. No matter what system you come up with, there is some lazy/crooked/psycho SOB who is going to try to grab all the power and run everything. The best we can hope for is a bit of one here, a bit of another there, and try to put something together that works decently.
Just my opinion.
Bob, there is no “bit of one or another” that works except free market capitalism, defined by the rule of law, presided over by a duly elected representative republic. it is clearly the meddling in those three pieces of the puzzle that cause the trouble, and yes, that will inevitably happen. but ONLY in a representative republic is it even possible to fix.
Up until the early 1900s US senators were elected by the state legislatures. The states could recall US Senators if they got disgusted enough with them. They passed the 17th Amendment for direct election of US Senators supposedly because all the bun fights and resulting delays in seating the Senators.
Well it now looks like the 17th amendment was pretty much a cure as bad as the disease. The seats can still be bought an you have Senators for life installed by the big city political machines.
I’m wondering how long it will take for someone to figure out how to yank Fitzgerald’s chain if he doesn’t stop with just the governors office. A judicial appointment perhaps or will someone boil his bunny.
I agree with you. These people are as ruthless as mobsters; their lives and careers are at stake, and watch and see if Blag doesn’t take an insanity plea, complete with commitment. Offing him, nowadays with DNA evidence and ever present cameras, isn’t as easy as offing Ruby was in 1963. But they can influence how he behaves with rewards and punishments regarding who he shares a cell with.
I’d like to add a fourth possibility: due to the fact that he started a corruption against his father in law Mel at the beginning of his governorship, I wonder if Mel had a large part in his arrest. He hit Mel and Mel recovered. In the war of politics, if you decide to hit someone, you better kill him politically, else he will heal and exact his revenge.
Oh how I want to see RICO used against the Chicago Machine, and bring down every Swinging Richard involved. And in my perfect world they’d have a screen for a roof in jail, to get rained and snowed upon, and the public can get on the catwalk and pee on them at will. It would be better than sex. You have no f’in idea how I loathe corrupt government, for it is the tool that lets dictatorship masquerade as a representative republic.
oops, I meant corruption investigation against his father in law
When he did that, he lost his protection. Meaning that if Blag had played nice with everyone, he could have gotten away with everything he wanted to do, including selling the Senate seat AND intimidating the Tribune. The story isn’t that he got arrested; the story is that the Machine allowed him to be open to arrest by not erasing his footsteps, to show people what happens when you turn on the Machine.
THAT is the banality of this evil.
Myself I find it interesting that the case suddenly HAD to be broken – just before the trail led to TAO.
I don’t know, Og.
My libertarianism still has a state in it, to enforce contracts and prevent people from murdering or defrauding each-other (or more specifically to deter them with the threat of punishment, by punishing them whenever possible).
It certainly doesn’t require that anyone be on his best behavior – more that they manage, under threat of coercive force (be it fines, prison, death) from doing anything too horrible to anyone else.
(In other words, my libertarianism, in common with even the minarchism of Nozick, and in common with Hayek’s more expansive system, is firmly based on the rule of law and the State as enforcement agent.)
Most of the rest of civil society can manage without the State enforcing it; that’s what shunning and picketing and the like are for, as well as self-interest and religious belief and all the other myriad non-state forces of Civilization.
I tend to forget that the Rothbardites who want anarchy style themselves “libertarian”, because they are, as you notice, completely bollocks.
I would find it more likely to accept libertarianism if every single one I knew didn’t happen to use libertarianism as their magic solution to their addiction of choice. I’m AMAZED at the number of times you see “420!!!” and “libertarian!!!” in the same item.