Mike Taht observes:
It's amazing, this internet thingie. Two incautious clicks and you never know where you'll wind up. As it happens, I wound up at this long blog entry where a guy is talking about the vital need to elect a Democrat:
That's the sort of reasoning that brought us the imperial presidency of George Bush. It's short-sighted thinking, folks. Go down that road and you'll get somebody worse than Bush, and he'll be in your own party.
If you have ideals, and there's a candidate who you trust to try and implement them (big if, it's never happened to me) then support that candidate. But eschew (please!) the deadly conceit that "Any old fascist at all would be better than the dickhead we've got now." There's always a worse power-abusing bastard around the next corner, and next time he could be a Democrat.
I'm going to excerpt a rant from the comments on this post over at Electrolite. I don't necessarily agree with the whole rant or even the whole excerpt, but it's a good rant. If you ever sense some anger, dismay, or bitterness while reading this blog, it's coming from some of the same places this rant is coming from. And, in any case, a good rant is an art form that needs no excuse:
...
We have become Lucas' Empire, and, for that matter, Reagan's Empire of Evil. We are The Bad Guys, the Black Hats, the ones that our own mythos tells us must inevitably fall if freedom is to flourish and mankind is to survive.
My country has become vile and insufferable. We have concentration camps and unlawful, illegal imprisonment for thousands if not millions based only on their nation of origin. We invade whoever the hell we want to invade, kill whoever we want to kill, lock up whoever we want to lock up. We deny basic health care not only to our citizens by the millions but to our own soldiery by denying the deadly side effects of our weaponry. Our government is steadily and very calculatedly stripping away a little more of our basic freedoms every day, and using that steady decrease of civil liberties not to keep us safe, but to make certain of the current junta's continuing power base. The current junta is using its power not to protect the citizenry or make our lives better, but to keep the vast majority of us in grinding, miserable poverty-stricken wage slavery, to support the idle decadence of a tiny sub-fraction of the overall population.
America is slowly but surely turning into every dystopia every really depressing science fiction writer ever wrote about, and we're working hard to export our own increasingly disfunctional culture to the four corners of the globe.
And I, the not so good German, keep waiting for the Homeland Security troopers to come take me away...
It's a lefty crowd over at Electrolite, but it's always worth a visit. The blog, and the frequent commenters, generally have a pretty clear sense that the Ashcroftian wing of the current administration is ugly in a bad-faith neofascist kind of way. And the discussion thereof tends to be a cut above the hate-filled rhetoric that characterizes a lot of public discourse by left and right alike these days. Plus it's a science fiction crowd, so the discussion is informed by a basic optimism that's absent from much of modern leftism.
Every now and then, however, there's a jarring reminder that these people are no friends of liberty. Rather, they simply dislike the current uses to which state power is being put. Today's its this cautiously laudatory post about how the Bush administration has misused its new antiterrorism authorities to the detriment of a right wing South American would-be dictator. I'm sure the guy is a shit and all, but is he a terrorist? The linked article doesn't so accuse him.
My first reaction was "See? Just like we predicted, the Bushies are abusing their so-called emergency powers." The linked post, however, expresses approval. Apparently the fact that the government has abusive powers is not a problem; the problem is that the government is (neo)conservative and generally doesn't (except for this time) abuse the right people.
Feh.
I don't talk politics much in real life, because invariably the conversation comes down to some version of the following challenge:
"But but but but...in your anarchist utopia, if we didn't have government, how would we accomplish [insert random social policy preference here]?"
And I'm no longer willing to take up the burden of that argument. For me, it's not about the utilitarian arguments over whether robbing people of their goods at gunpoint, and/or imprisoning them the same way, somehow yields the greatest good for the greatest number. Even if that were true (which I don't believe for an instant) it doesn't matter to me. It's irrelevant.
I've got a moral horror of the basic calculus, the calculus in which the end (public roads, free health care, well-fed cops, you name it) justify the means (taxation-at-gunpoint, imprisonment-for-failure-to-obey, death-by-firearms if you resist either one). Civilized people don't enslave and murder, so we stop that first, and then we figure out what to do to be as happy as we can from there. I don't want to hear arguments that start "Well, I'm gonna keep enslaving and murdering until you tell me how I can get what I want without doing it."
You think government is "necessary"? Fine. Then when arguing with me, it's your conversational burden to convince me that the end does justify the means, and that's gonna be quite a burden, considering that I reject the philosophical doctrine that evil deeds can be excused by good intentions or good results.
After all the buildup, the purpose of this blog post is to link to a trivial little detail that highlights the fact that governments are, first and foremost, thieving enterprises. No, they aren't out to help people, they are out to harvest cash from enslaved "citizens." Here's evidence of a local government that actually tinkered with the timing of its traffic lights to make the streets less safe, so they could harvest more dollars in traffic fines.
Government is armed robbery. That's what governments do. And it's the only thing that all governments have in common.
The Alaska legislature spent the whole session wrangling about what flavor of new tax would be most conducive to the health and welfare of Alaskans. All the while, without so much as a whisper of public discussion, they were passing this new bill that mostly repeals the criminal law against carrying a concealed weapon.
And then today the governor signed it. Which makes Alaska only one of two states where you can carry concealed without a permit.
I love it when a law goes away....
Over on Making Light there has been a long discussion in the comments about the Guantanamo Death Camp story. Of interest has been the repeated suggestion (there and in other threads about this story elsewhere) that this is really nothing new, just a slight twist on our current penal system with its available death penalty. Thus, the story goes, talking up this story and using the inflammatory "death camp" language is just noisy fear-mongering. Interestingly, this sort of response cuts across political lines, coming both from lefties (who consider the current system abhorrent) and righties (who don't think it's so bad.) But in neither case do many people seem willing to accept that there's something new and different about the proposed setup at Guantanamo (assuming the story's for real).
I remain convinced that the proposal is new and different, and that if it's real (or even a real trial balloon) we are exploring new-to-the-US territories of atrocity.
The difference, really, is the combination of utter lack of due process with secrecy. Of these two, secrecy is the newest; the US has a long history of absolutism in rejecting secret judicial process. On due process grounds we are more shakey; there are serious grounds to question the death penalty processes that are traditional in the US. Even so, the flaws there lie more with the prejudices of the participants (judges, juries, prosecutors, etc.) than with the design of the process. Most people put to death in the US are killed after what Blackstone himself would recognize as a full, if not necessarily fair, trial. What's new about the treatment of so-called "unlawful combatants" is that great care is being taken to prevent them from getting even the trappings of justice. (And no, an administrative tribunal conducted by unaccountable military bureaucrats, in secret, does not count even as "trappings.")
A distinction without a difference? I don't think so. For all its faults, due process conducted in the public eye tends to yield results that are broadly in line with what the people want. Texas executes a lot of people, but at the end of the day that's what the people of Texas mostly seem to want, so it's not surprising, nor should it horrify a true democrat. (It horrifies me, but I'm an anarchist precisely because of the moral horror inherent in majority rule, or rule of any other sort for that matter.)
What's most horrifying about the Guantanamo Death Camp proposal is that it's designed to function despite any broad opposition the people may have. That's the feature that prompts justified comparisons with facilities run by repressive dictatorships.