The Exercise of Vital Powers

Ok, If you want your ideas to be taken seriously don’t have your 4th grader draw the cover.

Yes, America: Freedom To Fascism gives the Michael Moore muckraking-underdog treatment to the kind of delirious conspiracy theories generally associated with mentally ill homeless people screaming at passersby to stop stealing their brainwaves.

From the IRS to the greedy bankers behind the Federal Reserve to The Patriot Act to globalization and multinational corporations, Fascism rails semi-coherently against bogeymen on the left and right, employing public-access production values and a world-changing sense of purpose wildly disproportionate to its paltry resources and amateurish direction. The film somehow manages the formidable task of being far more paranoid and hysterical than even its screaming tabloid-headline title would suggest.(Source: The Onion’s AV Club)

LP’s bi-annual convention was held in Portland over the July 4th weekend, and it’s generated a bit of buzz in the libertarian blogo-sphere. The biggest bit of news is the Libertarian Reform Caucus’s (LRC) successful attempt to gut the LP Platform. However I think other business might have more significance to what I hope will be the sooner rather than later death of the LP.
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Chief Wanna Dubie

This is so pathetic that I just can’t help but share…..

For Immediate Release
05/02/06
Contact: Loretta Nall for Governor Campaign
Phone: 251-650-2271
Cell: 256-625-9599
email: cnall1@charter.net

ALABAMA: GUBERNATORIAL HOPEFUL FLASHES FOR CASH

Thanks to political columnist Bob Ingram, Loretta Nall
is best known lately for two things — both of them on
her chest. “In 55 years of political writing,” Ingram
noted in a recent column about a photo of Nall, “that
was a first for me — a picture in my column of a
woman displaying cleavage … [my mother] wouldn’t
have approved of that picture.”

Nall, a well-known medical marijuana activist and the
Libertarian Party’s 2006 candidate for governor of
Alabama, isn’t one to pass on an opportunity. “When
life hands you lemons, you make lemonade,” she says.
“When God gives you melons … well, let’s not go
there.” But going there she is, with a new fundraising
campaign designed to capitalize on Ingram’s touting of
her attributes. To raise money for ballot access, Nall
is using Flash animations on her campaign web site.
Contributors get a glimpse of the buxom beauty’s
cleavage or waistline — and big donors are promised
an uncensored view of “the biggest boobs in Alabama
politics.”

All’s fair in love, war and politics, says Nall. “I
had to go one of two ways — don a burqa so that maybe
people like Bob Ingram will be willing to talk about
my actual platform instead of my anatomy, or go with
the flow and use dismissive attacks to my advantage. I
don’t back down easily. This is, if you’ll pardon the
expression, tit for tat.”

Nall faces Alabama’s draconian ballot access
restrictions — “the Republicans and Democrats are
scared to death of a fair fight,” she says — and must
submit 42,000 valid signatures to the Secretary of
State by June 6th in order to appear on the ballot
with the Democrat and GOP candidates (who face no such
hurdle). Her “Flash for Cash” campaign is intended to
raise the money required to gather those signatures.

The animations mentioned in this story may be viewed
at:

http://www.lorettanall.com/flash/strippergram.html

Members of the media: For this fundraiser to be
effective, I obviously can’t allow our final
animations to be hyperlinked around the Internet, so
we’ve taken several security measures to prevent this
from happening. However, we’ll be happy to send
non-Internet media sources raw files with the security
measures stripped away. Simply contact
cnall1@charter.net to make the proper arrangements.
While we proudly consider bloggers an important part
of the media, we’re sure you will appreciate why we
aren’t exposing the links. We do hope you’ll link to
this page, though. Feel free to lift any of the
graphics, too.

Words Fail.

Once in a great while does a new idea present itself that triggers a re-evaluation of my fundamental beliefs. did it once. Zell Miller did it and now Lee Harris has done it with his article on Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology

The basic premise of this idea is that most of our efforts to understand 9-11 are flawed. From our more rational point of view we try and see 9-11 as an act of Clausewitzian War (Clausewitz defined war as “politics by other means”). So while we look for the causes and strategy behind the 9-11 attacks, we do so thinking Al Qaeda is like the Imperial Japanese trying to bomb Perl Harbor and force us to submit to their hegemony of the Pacific.

According to Lee Harris, Al Qaeda is not trying to conduct politics by other means. They are acting out a fantasy ideology for themselves. The United States and the West are just the antagonists in their pageant. A fantasy ideology is a set of “political and ideological symbols and tropes used not for political purposes, but entirely for the benefit of furthering a specific personal or collective fantasy.” It is why Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, why Tim McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in front of a federal office building in Oklahoma and why Hitler diverted much needed rail traffic away from the war effort to exterminate the enemy in his fantasy ideology. These were not means to an end, but ends in and of themselves.

The author describes a friend in college who was going to protest the Vietnam War:

And what it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy — a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. By participating in a violent anti-war demonstration, he was in no sense aiming at coercing conformity with his view — for that would still have
been a political objective. Instead, he took his part in order to confirm his ideological fantasy of marching on the right side of history, of feeling himself among the elect few who stood with the angels of historical inevitability. Thus, when he lay down in front of hapless commuters on the bridges over the Potomac, he had no interest in changing the minds of these commuters, no concern over whether they became angry at the protesters or not. They were there merely as props, as so many supernumeraries in his private psychodrama. The protest for him was not politics, but theater; and the significance of his role lay not in the political ends his actions might achieve, but rather in their symbolic value as ritual. In short, he was acting out a fantasy.

I’ve seen this type of thing before. It is the Modus Operandi of the Libertarian Party. My experience is that a majority of LP activists are not interested in conducting politics. They want to act out their fantasy. Their tactics aren’t designed to bring popular opinion into conformance with their views. Their goal is be the revolutionary.

Take for example the 2004 Libertarian Presidential Nominee. Here was an unemployed computer programmer. He didn’t have a driver’s license and hadn’t filed his tax returns in several years. These are not attributes that would endear him to the general public. But that didn’t matter to the convention delegates. They voted for him, not in a rational Clausewitzian fashion, but in acting out their own fantasy ideology of standing up to the Government.

Another example was his “arrest” at the Presidential Debates. This was a pure example of acting out a fantasy. To have had a Clausewitzian effect he would never have issues a press release before hand. It defeated any tactical purpose the arrest would have had, namely to generate press coverage for the campaign.

Now to be fair to the LP, not everyone in that organization is trying to live out their fantasy of being the noble resistance. And both the right and left sides of the political spectrum have their own groups acting out their fantasies. Operation Rescue and the Animal Liberation Front are good examples.

Those who disengage from reality to act out their fantasy ideologies are dangerous to themselves and their cause. Al Qaeda’s actions on 9-11 toppled two Islamic governments and caused a third (Libya) to rennounce its war with the West. Rational people looking to affect change try to distance themselves from the likes of McVeigh, Operation Rescue and the ALF movement. While the opposition uses those groups as a basis for an ad hominem attack. With friends like that you don’t need enemies.

The good news is that Trader Joe’s will be coming to Atlanta. A Midtown and Sandy Springs store will be the first two with ten more to follow. Alas, I’ll still need to fly to CA to get my cheap single malt, as the dunderheads under the Gold Dome don’t’ allow liquor to be sold in places that sell non-liquor.

The bad news is the Patriot Act was renewed.

The sad news is Harry Browne (1996 & 2000 LP Presidential Nominee) has passed. While his foreign policy would have been a disaster and his proposals were out there, he had an eloquence that most in the LP lack. I still find myself using some of his lines to describe the failure of government.

David Friedman has posted yet another unworkable plan for how the Democrat Party can capture the “libertarian vote” away from the GOP.

First off, I don’t disagree about his attack on the GOP, the current leadership in Congress and the White House is anything but limited government. I suspect even their tax-cuts were more an attempt to revitalize the economy and increase revenue that is was an effort to let working Americans keep what they earn.

Friedman’s proposal is that the Democrats should embrace marijuana legalization¹. This plan to “pull the libertarian faction out of the Republican party” won’t work. As was discussed on Catallarchy back in June, libertarians who find themselves identifying with the GOP don’t really care about drug legalization. Republican libertarians tend to be much more socially responsible than Democrat libertarians, or even Libertarian libertarians (ie LP members).

Do I support marijuana legalization? Probably. Is that issue so important to me that I’ll go along with all the other baggage the Democrats bring along: big labor, radical environmentalism, soak-the-rich tax policies and overreaching nanny-state regulations? Hell no.

The War on Drugs is a failure. It doesn’t stop the problem, it raises grave civil liberties concerns, and it costs lives. However ending the WoD does not have to mean legalization – and that is a crucial point the LP and many left leaning libertarians miss.

¹ For every one Libertarian who says the LP isn’t just about drug legalization, there seems to be about four that do something to disprove that notion.