What bothers me about FCC Chief Julius Genachowski is not that he supports Boston ...

... but that anybody thinks the FCC has ANY say at all in what someone says on a live mic in a baseball stadium ...

Comments

Yeah, an expletive hardly seems worth the trouble and out of bounds for government involvement. What bothers me about baseball games occurs prior to every game: playing the national anthem. The custom is to rise during the national anthem to show allegiance with the nation--a nation I and others can't feel allegiance to when it drops drones on weddings and houses where it is known children are present, a nation that uses my tax dollars for hegemonic purposes and privileging the interests of wealthy elites and large corporations against the interests of the working class. Why should and I and others even have to make a political statement and risk reprisal from a patriotic nutcase by refusing to stand at a baseball game? (And don't forget that quite often local tax dollars were used to build that stadium.) Furthermore, the expectation and risk of reprisal serves as coercive force that is just as effective in its influence as direct coercive methods used by explicit totalitarian regimes at similar events. The coercive control of the USA government has reached a level of sophistication and subtlety unmatched by explicit totalitarian regimes because the government instigated and can now rely on patriotic control being enforced culturally and not explicitly by the government.

April 23, 2013 at 8:34 AM

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

Search This Blog