1. A day after Obama’s
ISIS strategy speech, it’s a bit like we’re at war with both sides in Syria
now. That’s more than a little like a great bit in Woody Allen’s Bananas in which it’s revealed by U.S.
soldiers facing a foreign government that “The CIA is not taking any chances
this time. Half of us are for, half of us against!”
2. I was hoping former (Clinton) CIA director R.
James Woolsey would address fishy situations resembling that from the
organization’s history when I saw him speak two nights ago, but he mainly
talked about the dangers of EMP weapons and oil dependency -- also important
topics, to be sure.
3. My position, not quite captured in the rhetoric of any
political faction even among my fellow libertarians, is neither that the CIA and other military/intelligence functions of
the government are necessary nor that
they are wholly destructive but rather that I’d be willing to take the risk of doing without them given all the
risks they generate and given our ability to cope in other ways (even
privately) with the threats they combat.
You could chalk this up to my increasing (or just increasingly
explicit) anarchism, but given that
even most of what passes for “anarchism” in this world is a sad history of mob
incitements, anti-capitalism, traffic-blocking protests, and occasional
pointless bombings, I’m increasingly inclined to feel I should lump the
anarchists in with the government and
other forms of organized violence. Intellectual honesty sometimes entails
admitting how truly alone you are (not that there aren’t a few other nice anarcho-capitalists
out there, growing in number).
That in some sense makes me more radical than the
anarchists, but (at the risk of baking in some conspiracy theory as well) it
might be best to think of me as just someone wanting to roll back most of the
radicalism and many of the mainstream institutions of the past 130 years or so
-- a sort of reverse-Progressive who now thinks that the ugly intertwining of
big government, corporations, banks, militaries, and the external threats those institutions oppose (from small
criminal gangs to large international ones) was a half-planned mistake caused
by the central-planning mania of the Progressive Era, a big knot of cronyism
and inefficiency (deeper and more complex than right and left) that needs to be
plucked apart.
Rand Paul, for all his flaws, certainly comes close to being
the anti-Hillary Clinton by this quirky metric, and she comes close to being
the awful culmination of the incestuous 130-year trend that now worries me so,
crony capitalism, militarism, and all.
It’s interesting that for all the current talk of war, even
hawkish John Bolton is with me to some extent on this: He said without
hesitation on The Independents
recently that he’d vote for Rand Paul over Hillary Clinton if it comes to that.
That won’t surprise most on the left, but it’s a relief to some like me who
suspect that half the neoconservatives are preparing their Hillary-endorsing
columns even now in case Paul is nominated by the GOP in 2016 (even as some
libertarians condemn Paul as a neocon -- it’s hard to keep everyone happy).
Kristol and a few like him may be the real impediments to a new quasi-libertarian
consensus on the right at this point.
Progressivism, meanwhile, marches on and is the impulse
behind things like the current effort to alter the Constitution to overturn Citizens United, an effort rooted in the
Wilsonian reformist idea that the wise central authority should prevent
unwelcome, chaotic, outside influences “interfering” with the smooth, rational
administration of elections. The impulse sounds like democracy but might as
well eliminate voters as the next step, since they’ve been known to have
chaotic, partisan interests themselves.
4. Weapons
manufacturers win regardless of whether the U.S. military, our authoritarian
overseas allies, our authoritarian overseas former
allies, or terrorists and drug gangs are in the ascendant. And that may explain
a great deal, as the Marxists have always alleged. Hey, it’s OK to admit things
are terrible on all sides. That is often the first step toward improvement.
5. It’s also OK sometimes to admit (A) you have no idea
what’s going on and (B) you have no strategy for dealing with it. Obama was
criticized for saying as much about ISIS a few days ago -- though that admission
of confusion may have been more honest than last night’s speech. And I have to applaud
the book UFOs:
Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record by Leslie Kean for saying as much about
UFOs, a topic that I’ve been embarrassing everyone by mentioning repeatedly
recently, despite three (ongoing, I swear!) decades of being a hardcore
skeptic/atheist about everything.
Skepticism is not a rigid list of things that can and cannot
possibly exist, after all, but a methodology -- and I expect it will remain the
correct methodology until
the end of time even as we learn about things we
didn’t realize existed. Skepticism is the simple demand for good evidence
before believing something. There are so many outlandish, baseless claims about
UFOs that it’s pretty reasonable for a casual skeptic to dismiss the entire
area of inquiry, and nearly all skeptics do. But Kean in this book drily,
rationally sticks to that small handful of cases you sometimes hear about that
are well documented, most with simultaneous multiple independent high-quality
witnesses, radar sightings, and clear records of events.
The result is that we end up not with a lurid tale of
abductions, conspiracies, ancient skygods, interstellar empires, or prophetic
dreams about the environment but mainly with a (far more convincing and still
unsettling) picture of simple glowing or metallic-looking objects of unknown
origin appearing to buzz planes or buildings and move in ways that planes probably
can’t (including sudden acceleration from hovering to extremely high speeds, or
sudden right-angle turns). It is a tale told not by idiots or wide-eyed,
terror-struck yokels but by highly articulate military and commercial airline
pilots and other seemingly competent people, relating somewhat boring -- yet not readily conventionally
explicable -- events.
It starts to look as though “the extraterrestrial
hypothesis,” as a Belgian government report officially put it after a wave of sightings
of apparent black triangular craft there in 1989/1990, shouldn’t be dogmatically
ruled out at the start. Kean admirably and explicitly says that even if you
accept the strange apparent facts of the cases she and her fellow contributors
to the volume recount, we just don’t know.
Perhaps (just a random hunch of mine) the atmosphere has a
much greater capacity to produce ball-lightning-like phenomena than we
currently realize (we do keep discovering odd new luminous meteorological and
geophysical phenomena up there), and perhaps there is some sort of magnetic
tendency for these things to be drawn to and then repelled by airplanes while
interfering with their electronic instruments.
On the other hand, maybe you reach a point where
explanations like that, while comfortingly non-paranormal, are themselves such
a stretch that it’d be more plausible to say, “You know what, I think maybe we’re just being buzzed by some
simple extraterrestrial drones. Maybe instead of invasions or grand messages of
peace, they just do low-budget research surveys sometimes -- much the way we do.”
Regardless, “I don’t know” are the three most beautiful
words in the English language, and I think they are far too rarely used (those
three words clearly make many people so uncomfortable that they can’t even
cognitively process them as an answer to a question, which is a frequent source
of confusion in workplace and philosophical conversations). This attitude might
technically make me “agnostic” rather than “atheist” at heart, but like
“anarchist,” perhaps neither of these terms quite captures what I mean. Good
skeptics always leave a little room for doubt, in short (and therein may yet be
room for the hardcore skeptic and believer camps of old to mingle productively).
And it’s not as if I’m saying all the accounts in the Kean
book, while surprisingly well-documented, are flawless. The chapter on the
widely reported Belgian wave, for instance, goes on for a full page about the
value of a “black triangle” photograph that has been admitted to be a (rather
simple) hoax by the Belgian photographer since the publication of Kean’s book
in 2011. It’s tempting as a parsimony-seeking skeptic to let a few small errors
like that invalidate the whole subject area. And yet...
6. Speaking of official reports on strange technology and
possible biological oddities, I only just learned (after seeing it a third time
while it’s still in one last theatre in Manhattan) that X-Men: Days of Future Past
shows comics writers Chris Claremont and Len Wein listening to Trask’s address
to Congress about the mutant menace -- and shows four cloaked horsemen on
the hill behind the young Apocalypse as those crowds chant “En Sabah Nur” in
the post-credits sequence.
And the magnificent trailer, if you go back and watch it
again, suggests they must have cut from the final film a sassy bit where Wolverine
conferred with Mystique, presumably futilely, probably prior to breaking out Magneto (reason to buy the DVD?). Perhaps
they decided during editing that it made no sense for Wolverine to talk to her
without taking her down, since she’s the real danger in the film.
In other Marvel news, I only just learned that on Nick
Fury’s (empty) grave in Captain America:
The Winter Soldier, it says “The path of the righteous man... Ezekiel
25:17.” I feel hipper knowing that, even though the Tarantino reference is
twenty, yes twenty, years old now. (And if, as rumored, the next Captain
America movie, in 2016, turns out to be Captain
America: Civil War, that pivotal and rather libertarian plot from the
comics will by then be ten years old itself. Time flies.)
7. Skeptical as I may be about the efficacy of the U.S.
military/intelligence/police complex, the skeptical movement itself, and of
course S.H.I.E.L.D., none of that should be mistaken for complacency about the
menace of radical Muslims abroad and
in Western countries. In fact, even Muslim commentators in the Muslim world
apparently think Western Muslims are trouble a-brewing,
interestingly, though the foreign commentators and domestic radicals alike seem
to agree on wanting America destroyed, alas.
8. Francois-Rene Dang-Vu Ban Rideau points to this video hinting that
“What Normal Muslims Think” may unfortunately
still be radical.
9. Bill Maher,
for all his flaws, recently talked
rings around host Charlie Rose about the evils of Islam, a reminder not
only that secularism is better than Islam but that liberal comedy is often better
than liberal elite journalism.
10. Yet the UK (while
it lasts) gets
upset about newspapers even reporting inconvenient facts like some killers
there being converts to Islam (h/t Sean Dougherty).
11. It all leaves me with growing respect for sweeping yet gentle forms of radicalism,
like pacifism and even those goofy anti-gang activists who say things like
“Incrase da peace yo.” Violence,
whether from bands of twelve people or 100 million, is our real problem as a
species. May as well attack it very directly.
•For contrast, please enjoy a mild Unitarian’s
hitchhiking travels, as Matt
Brandenbrugh gets interviewed by Gerard Perry and me about his road trip to a
libertarian film festival.
And a reminder: you can ask
us -- including guest commentator Lap Gong Leong -- questions
here for possible answering in future podcasts. The next one or two we record
will be about Atlas Shrugged (the
film trilogy version of which concludes tomorrow), Scotland’s independence referendum
(what would Scottish anarchist Grant Morrison do?), and more.
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