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 — ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point: Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo: Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1. Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...

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