Progress Report and Ancient Myths (and more Todd radio)

•Obama being ousted is not in fact our highest priority. 

This point was implicit in my joking comments on Facebook and Twitter yesterday about the importance of voting for Johnson (now running as a Libertarian) if the Republican option turns out to be Santorum.  The long-term goal is a happy, free, prosperous human race, and while Obama is undeniably an impediment to that goal, he’s not the only one. 

Maximizing the Libertarian vote this year, even if only to spread awareness of liberty as an option, might do more (long-term) to knock down some of the other impediments than merely replacing Obama with a Romney or a Santorum, especially since it means a fresh start for Republican presidential hopefuls (possibly including Rand Paul) in 2016 instead of 2020. 

•The chance to replace Obama with Ron Paul this year would be a different story, but more blogging about Paul tomorrow (when I am also scheduled to appear on the 5:06pm block of Alan Nathan’s radio show, audible here, by the way).

•Don’t get me wrong, an actual small-government conservative would make a difference worth voting for in November.  Civilization is being destroyed before our eyes by dimwits like the ones who gleefully posted that Lawrence O’Donnell picture all over Facebook recently that was accompanied by a list of accomplishments ostensibly achieved by the big-government left, almost all of them historically inaccurate or misunderstood in some way.  (And O’Donnell briefly mocked me on his show in 2010, so you know he’s bad people.)

•We could use Republicans who sounded more like Peter Schiff in his response to Obama’s State of the Union. 

•For that matter, lest you think that as a Paul fan I must be a culturally-far-right conspiracy theorist: I think we’d actually be better off listening to a (literal) gay Bilderberger like Peter Thiel than to most mainstream Republicans (Thiel’s Kindle book The Blueprint, co-written with Garry Kasparov and Max Levchin, lays out some ideas for economic renewal).

•On a related note, now that the show FreedomWatch, for which I used to work, is canceled, I think one of my most amusing memories from it will be the time I

mentioned to a young co-worker that some of the Ron Paul fans are paranoid about the Bilderberg conferences, to which she said, with furrowed brow: “They think the world is ruled by Build-a-Bear?”  Ah, if only.

•Charles C. Johnson noted that Thiel is interview by Francis Fukuyama here.  Fukuyama himself is no real friend of progress, to my mind (he thought we’d reached the “end of history” even before 1989, after all).  He is so strongly opposed to biotech that when I asked him a question about biotech during a Reason/Spiked-Online conference ten years ago, he grimly intoned that the future would not be the thing of my utilitarian dreams but rather a nightmare world of genetically-enhanced masters and artificially-spawned “monkey men” servants.  He’s scary. 

•Speaking of Kindle and technology, it’s amazing to think how much we relied on verbal rumors prior to the days when people could check things on Google (for all the admitted problems with Net rumors).

I was reminded of that on the night of January 6, when I overheard a girl about ten or so in a pizza place saying, “and I heard that one time they got off the bus coming back from sleepaway camp, and they thought they were in the wrong place – but their parents moved while they were away and didn’t tell them because they didn’t want them to get upset!”  TERRIFYING TALES OF CHILDHOOD!

And grown-ups’ lives pretty much revolved around similar stories – which may or may not have been true – as recently as the 90s.  Think of all the party conversation you used to have – but no longer do, I hope – that got no more authoritative than “Well, I heard once that there was some guy who said that [some movie star or someone] was seen in [some implausible place] doing [something terrifying violating all known social taboos], but it was all hushed up by [some faceless bureaucratic authority or other, or Satan].”  The world may not be flat, but in ways both good and bad, it is getting a great deal more transparent.