Courtesy of Carloshasanax:
How do you hide money from a teabagger? Put it under the health food.
What has a beer gut and looks good in red? A teabagger on fire.
Why wasn’t Jesus born at a teabagger rally? Because they couldn’t find three wise men.
How many teabaggers does it take to change a lightbulb. None: teabaggers never change.
Teabaggers: the last minority you’re allowed to insult. So go ahead, enjoy.
They talked about the same stupid post by the same stupid guy over on Unfogged as well and one commenter, A White Bear hit precisely why Caplan’s post was not just dumb, but offensive:
Whether a society is just or not should not depend on separating one group out and saying that if we can argue somehow that white straight women weren’t oppressed, then a majority of people aren’t oppressed. But (a) he doesn’t even acknowledge that some women are, in fact, Jewish, black, or gay, and (b) this kind of shit has been going on forever, trying to get white straight women to be collaborators in continuing an oppressive society. The white straight bourgeois part of the feminist movement is mostly about waking up one day and going, “I was told I was a beautiful princess and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!” What T-shirt?, sez all other women everywhere.
Now it’s certainly true that socialists and communists and their fellow travellers can spent endless hours discussing theoretical matters that have little or no relevance to our current political situation. To normal people, the debate about e.g. whether or not the Soviet Union was a state capitalist society or a degenerated workers state must seem not only pointless, but slightly offensive in how it neglects the real truths of Stalinist oppression. But at least these discussions, no matter how ritualistic they’ve become over the years, can serve some purpose in analysing where the 1917 revolution went wrong and how to prevent that next time. Can the same be said about the debate currently raging in libertarian circles about whether or not the 1880s should be considered the closest any society has come to a libertarian utopia?
I mean, for any sane non-libertarian person the 1880s, with its oppression of anybody other than white, protestant, heterosexual males, is not exactly a good era to want to emulate, even if it is slightly better than libertarianism’s previous utopia, the 1850s. It should be a given even for libertarians that, though there is genuine reason for concern, 21st century America is much freer for a majority of its inhabitants than the 1880s ever was, simply due to the fact that non-white, protestant heterosexual males are no longer considered second rank citizens under law. But apparently for libertarians this is not so obvious.
Crooked Timber has two nice posts up about the handwringing in libertarian circles on this subject: adventures in libertarian blindspots and the more libertarianism thread.
Those are great reads, especially the comment threads, but it’s the third post on the subject where it gets silly, as CT reports on one Bryan Caplan trying to partially rescue this libertarian utopis by arguing that actually, women were too free in the 1880s and what freedoms they didn’t have weren’t important anyway:
In what ways, then, were American women in 1880 less free than men? Most non-libertarians will naturally answer that women couldn’t vote. But from a libertarian point of view, voting is at most instrumentally valuable.
This is stupid enough on its own, especially when you consider that voting is only one part of political participation, but it gets worse. Caplan continues his post by considering the legal position of women in the 1880s, concentrating solely on his own limited understanding of the law at that time, as researched via Wikipedia and explaining why this doesn’t mean women were less free then. He acknowledges that women who married lost their legal standing as a person in her own right, but argues a) that women who wanted to could get exceptions to this rule if their future husbands consented, b) people expected this “division of labour” as he calls it anyway, so didn’t care about its unfairness, c) this traditional understanding “made a lot of sense” back then anyway and d) ” the letter of the law rarely makes a difference in marriage” anyway. No wonder he concludes:
I know that my qualified defense of coverture isn’t going to make libertarians more popular with modern audiences. Still, truth comes first. Women of the Gilded Age were very poor compared to women today. But from a libertarian standpoint, they were freer than they are on Sex and the City.
One wonders if women were so free why feminism ever got started…
Caplan focuses monomanically on political/legal theory as if by parsing this you can decide people are free without taking into consideration the whole reality of the society in which they live. If some women could keep control of their finances that means all women were free and the failure of the vast majority of women to do so is their own personal fault. This is of course a logical consequence from believing in libertarianism, which at its core maintains that in the absence of governmental interference, anything an individual does is of their own free choice and which does not recognise any non-governmental pressures. Now of course most libertarians are bright enough to not quite believe it, know enough history to know that people do not need governments to oppress each other and hence are slightly more pragmatic in their beliefs. But a post like this, which is actually taken serious by other libertarians, is good in re-exposing this reality that libertarianism at its core only makes sense if you’re a bright twelve year old sociapath.
People used to say that the media weren’t really right wing, but were just sucking up to Bush because they worship power and success. But if that were true, we should be seeing them sucking up to Obama and the Democrats now. They aren’t. Instead, what we’re seeing on TV these days is more of the same: President McCain, and President Boehner, and President Lindsey Graham, and President Snowe, and President Gingrich, and a couple of dozen other Republican Presidents. The slant has scarcely changed at all.
One of the reasons I gave up on America is the feebleness of the Democratic and liberal response to the increasingly conservative slant of the media. We’re long past the time when it made sense to be surprised by anything they do, and we should understand by now that they know what they’re doing and are going to keep on doing it. Squeals of rage about their egregious dishonesty, incompetence, and nastiness just make them laugh.
Coincidently, over at SEK’s place, Rich Puchalsky says something similar about engaging winguts:
What really tires me out about these posts is how strenuously you argue against whatever nonsense you’re writing about. Look, you say, I will painstakingly trace back through the process and show that it is constitutional at every stage! It’s like a rigorous, logical proof, following from simple first principles, that a shit-throwing monkey should not in fact throw shit at people.
John says liberals should stop being surprised at the media being rightwing, Rich says they should stop being surprised about lying wingnuts. Both have a point. The liberal blogosphere has long had a problem with realising that rightwing bias and wingnut lying are not abberations that can be corrected through reasoned debate, that they continue to occur because they’re profitable. Wingnut makes for good copy, while rightwing commentary is rewarded by advertisers where leftwing commentary is not. This is not a new development and those who object to Chomsky teaching them this, should take a look at A. J. Liebling, showing the same influences at work twenty years earlier. Hell, the same dynamics were already at work in the original yellow press.
Both socialists and anarchists have long known that you cannot ask for change, you need to force change on your opponents one way or another. Liberals, unlike rightwingers have failed to internalise this message because they’ve been in charge for so long and had had teh real left to fight their battles for them. Now that they find themselves cast out as well, it’s high time they learned it.
Or, how we must learn to stop worrying and start loving our fellow lefty bloggers:
Which is not to say that the left can’t learn from the right. Some of the bigger left-of-Labour blogs have much higher traffic than specifically Labour-identified ones, but there are still bad old leftist habits. One thing that’s impressive about the Tory bloggers is that, though they have disagreements, they don’t escalate into nuclear polemic – they do recognise each other as being on basically the same side – and also, they link to each other assiduously. Compare that with the far-left blogs, where in some particular cases, a mixture of sectarian dogmatism and personality clashes leads to long-running feuds, and in one or two cases putatively socialist blogs that do little except run furious denunciations of other socialists.
I’m not that familiar with the toffosphere, but I wonder how much of that supposed unity isn’t an optical illusion. From what I’ve seen of the American wingnut sphere there as a high degree of lockstep as well as long as their “movement” was on the ascent — once the Repubs started to lose the rats started to bite each other. Furthermore, much of their unity was also centrally directed, with much of the traffic being vertical, top to bottom rather than horizontal between equal(ish) partners/blogs. If you get your talking points from the RNC, disseminated via the bigger blogs & mainstream media, then reinforced by the smaller blogs linking back (and being linked to as examples of “grassroots outrage”), it’s no wonder there’s a greater degree of communality amongst rightwing blogs.
But even before the lost presidential and congressional elections there were schisms. There has always been the paleoconservative, libertarian and isolationist right (Pat Robinson, antiwar.com, Jim Henley, etc), subjected to almost as much wingnut hatred as the socalled liberal left for their anti Iraq war stance. Then there were the high profile apostates like Balloon Juice or Andrew Sullivan, once part of the wingnut right until they sobered up (latest example: Little Green Footballs). And currently we have the Teabagger/Palin fanatics trying to purge the unbelievers and vice versa. So much of what makes the rightwing blogs look so united is a ruthless attack of anybody on their side who doesn’t adhere to orthodoxy. So I’m skeptical about how nice the Tories really are towards each other and how much of it is –at least for the moment– enforced from above.
All of which doesn’t take away from some of the more self destructive tendencies of the non-Labour left, it’s true…