In slightly more sophisticated geek-entertainment news, Ali Kokmen, who really ought to be made the head of his own nerd-oriented publishing company or division, with a simply immense salary (because he’s just that good), points out that the Libertarian Futurist Society has just given out its annual Prometheus Awards for libertarian sci-fi.

P.S. I’m not sure what it tells us about io9 readers that their comment threads contain some of the first uses I’ve seen in several months (mercifully) of the beaten-to-death nerd would-be-sophisticate humor-trope of feigning hesitation through the use of constructions such as “Um, not so much.”  I hate with a murderous passion every last living person who is still doing that, and I will not apologize for it, even if they are sad teenage girls with few other outlets for their creativity and opinions.

By contrast, I admit I have on rare occasions made use of “uh” on this blog to feign confusion, but that’s different, and when I do it, it’s cute.

Jonah Goldberg and Matt Kibbe annihilate him in the Reason colloquium linked above. You can also find two former editors in chief of the print version of Reason — and one ex-boss of mine from ABC — among the guests on this weekend’s episode of Freedom Watch, so by all means watch on Saturday or Sunday, on Fox Business Network.

As for Lindsey and his “liberaltarian” mission: it seems to me the liberaltarians, some of whom openly voted for Obama, basically zigged when the nation zagged, ideologically speaking.  But they are allowed to learn and grow, just like the rest of us.  Anyone who still cannot see libertarian potential in the Tea Party movement but can see it in the Democratic Party, though, is about as ideologically blind, albeit in a less dangerous way, as the unrepentant Stalinists of the 1950s.

That thought has to leave someone who wants open borders — or no borders at all, to put it in more anarcho-capitalist, post-nationalist terms — with mixed feelings.  If the fifty states near-simultaneously abandoned DC, like outlying regions of China more or less ignoring Beijing, but did it so they could keep out Mexicans, it would be a strange case of the libertarian movement almost repeating the circa-1980 phase of conservatism, when it was sometimes ambiguous when the concept of “states’ rights” was being unfairly depicted by liberal foes as a veil for racism and when the concept really was just being invoked as a veil for racism.

Not that I’m equating resistance to illegal immigration and Jim Crow.  Rather, I’m saying that in each case, after Arizona, people with motives far removed from property rights can now cloak those motives in anti-centralization talk — even though greater decentralization as an outcome would still be a wonderful thing, much appreciated by many of us who really do have property rights as our main goal (when in doubt, go with diversity — I want the states to be free from DC, and free to experiment, for roughly the same reason I don’t at all mind having a mix of Mexicans, Swedes, Japanese, etc. in the country and don’t even expect them to feel bound by every technicality of our immigration laws any more than the average Tea Partier feels obliged to respect every detail of environmental regulation).

Maybe Spain winning the World Cup will decrease condescending attitudes toward our Spanish-speaking brethren in this hemisphere a bit.  That still leaves countless immigration issues — such as how to handle covertly anti-democratic Islamic radicals who are not actually committing any crime — to be addressed.  And it just so happens that Gerard Perry, who knows his stuff (even when I disagree with him), has started a blog to address those issues, called UnreceivedWidsom.

Having heard him debate immigration and Obamacare at Lolita Bar — and being indebted to him for guiding me to Brooklyn College for the under-attended second iteration of my Ayn Rand declamations this spring — I am confident he’ll have interesting things to say.

But tomorrow something even more revolutionary: Bastille Day!  Regardez-vous!

•In a further weird coincidence, last weekend, I found a copy of former senator Fritz Hollings’ book Making Government Work at the Strand, and, lo and behold, it had not only been autographed by Hollings — but made out to his friend Lou Dobbs. Small world.

•In yet a third media coincidence, mere hours after I criticized the music of Lady Gaga (at last night’s Debate at Lolita Bar, about whether burlesque is art, to which the audience says the answer is yes), I found myself literally trapped in a crowd of gaga Gaga fans around Rockefeller Center, on my way to the nearby News Corp building for work this morning. Cruel irony (which should be her next album title).

•Back to politics: I’m tempted to go on about how convincing the profile of David Brooks in the new New York Magazine (brought to my attention by Gerard Perry) is, given that it emphasizes his almost pathological ideological squishiness, but I think Kyle Smith may have best summed up New York’s summary of the man who summarizes about one new centrist paradigm per week, sometimes two. Not all neocons are bad — and they are too varied to dismiss as Trotskyites or warmongers the way some paleo types do — but Brooks has several of the bad qualities people usually mean when they complain about neocons (I say this as a man who could by some metrics be called a neocon himself and still misses the Reagan coalition — global markets, selective use of the military, morals and Western Civilization good without the specifics disrupting yuppie lifestyles too badly, yadda yadda yadda).

The next-page teases on that New York Mag article are more vicious than the article itself, including this one: “Next: Why he’s been called a ‘spineless Beltway geek.’” (Sidenote: The issue’s cover story is about mounting evidence that having children makes people less happy, though it’s happy people who tend to have children. Which side are you on?)

My own summary of the Brooks mushiness as media phenomenon: DAVID BROOKS IS THE NEW DAVID BRODER.

I’m pro-drug-legalization, atheist, skeptical, gay-tolerating, anarchist yet Constitution-respecting, mostly anti-death-penalty, pro-open-borders, wary of police and military, mostly anti-nationalist, racially tolerant, punk- and avant-garde-admiring, science-loving, abolitionist- and flapper- and beatnik-admiring (I think it’s swell that Hentoff loves jazz), strong-women-preferring, suspicious of fashion and some other major elements of mainstream consumer culture, a lifelong Northeasterner, almost Marxist in my wariness of the shaping of people’s beliefs by institutional incentives, and basically anti-sports.

(Perhaps more shockingly, I’m also dating a woman who likes teachers unions, some gun control, drag queens, Pat Moynihan, military non-intervention, modernist urban planning, the Black Panthers, and green anti-car urban planning — there being essentially no real female conservatives in New York City, apparently. [CORRECTION: Helen says she has become more sympathetic to military intervention and has just renewed her subscription to Commentary -- so here's hoping that in addition to enjoying our drag-like debate about burlesque this coming Thursday, she will enjoy our tentatively-planned August debate about "benign imperialism," a topic partly inspired by Conor Friedersdorf, though he's leaving the imperial city of DC.])

•••

Despite all the above, though, having respect for property rights will damn you in a modern liberal’s eyes every time. Unless amidst the current big-government-debt crisis even many liberals are beginning to learn…?

In any case, I tend to admire principled people, and you can see how people might be principled adherents of property rights, traditions, religious rules, the scientific method, the Constitution, and/or, yes, civil-libertarian procedural rules, all in ways that spoke well of them and helped keep chaos at bay — or, tragically, in ways that made them martinets (in the classic sense of rigidly adhering to rules, such as table etiquette, while forgetting their underlying purpose of improving human life).

I think, though, that property is the rule that solves the most otherwise-chaotic social problems with the most easily-transmissible, most sustainable, and least abusable formula, and there’s a great deal to be said for that (even if that doesn’t say everything there is to be said). May the day yet come, then, when it’s all of us (even Nat Hentoff) vs. Paul Krugman.

Tomorrow, a word about Devo for July Fourth.

“Is Burlesque Art?”

featuring:

•Monty Leman, photographer (with photographs)

VS.

•Michel Evanchik, grumpus

Moderated by Todd Seavey

WHERE: basement level of Lolita Bar at 266 Broome St. at the corner of Allen St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop.

Are participants in burlesque artistes or little better than Montreal-dwelling strippers?  You get to cast the deciding vote at the end of next week’s thrilling discussion.

And coming up later this month: my Book Selection entry about Victorian Norwich, my own old home town as it was in the nineteenth century, complete with riverboat prostitutes, apparently.  Today, by contrast, the town is wholesome (and still Victorian) enough that when a friend who was planning a bachelor party at nearby Foxwoods Casino asked me where he could hire strippers, I had to ask my mom — who knew, oddly enough (you talk to Billy at the Log and Lantern Tavern down at the bottom of the hill, or at least did at the time).  I don’t know why mom knew that, nor why she was quicker than I was to realize that the “papers” we were being offered in Washington Square Park once were rolling papers for leaves of the dreaded marijuana plant.

Mom has also been enjoying Fox Business Network’s Freedom Watch (the show I write for), hosted by Judge Andrew Napolitano, and she watched three out of four airings of the premiere episode (on which Sarah Palin, as you may have heard, admitted that arresting pot smokers should not be a police priority).  Surely you can watch the show at at least one of its four broadcast times: Sat. 10am and 8pm, Sun. 7pm and 11pm (with this week’s having Bob Barr, Gary Johnson, Geraldo Rivera, Steve Horwitz, Peter Schiff, Connie Mack, and other guests).

And, hey, Nat Hentoff likes the show.

I was one of those who was sometimes bothered by his Reason writing, not because he was failing to toe the party line but because I didn’t think he was communicating clearly where he was coming from (even while he seemed to be adamant and intensely sarcastic). In retrospect, he was probably ambiguous with good reason, so to speak.

But it’s not as if it’s a crime to write for a libertarian magazine without being a full-fledged libertarian, nor for that matter a crime to write about conservatives without being a full-fledged conservative, nor (as may be the next, and perhaps most useful, step) to write for liberal publications without being a conventional liberal. Moderation in pursuit of liberty isn’t the worst thing in the world, much as I might prefer everyone be an anarcho-capitalist. And much as I might like it if all legislators became anarcho-capitalists, I realize that writers all being anarcho-capitalists could get boring (at least at this early stage in human history, you understand, before we’ve ended government once and for all and moved on to other topics).

•••

Maybe Dave should become Libertarian Type #11 on this admirably succinct and accurate About.com list (forwarded to me by someone, and my apologies for forgetting who) of Ten Types of Libertarian (to which one could perhaps add “liberaltarians,” if that small movement can’t just be lumped under “classical liberal,” and perhaps add Extropians/transhumanists and their tech-focused ilk as a separate category, though “we are all transhumanists now (or soon, very soon)” and the actual Extropy Institute has apparently closed). I should note again that I tend to err on the side of saying that anyone who thinks a label suits him — and seems to share at least the basics of a political philosophy — is indeed inside the club, terminologically speaking, even if he’s wrong about some things (I’m not now necessarily referring to Dave, who may not call himself a libertarian, but to any people who sincerely insist they’re libertarians yet find themselves being read out of the movement).

In a world where actions can determine life or death but words are often just hot air, I have never had much patience for people who waste time saying “You’re not a real libertarian [or for that matter, conservative or liberal or Marxist or punk or American or Scotsman or what have you]” or “Those so-called libertarians [at AEI, in the Texas statehouse, what have you].” You don’t generally speaking build a coalition — which, like it or not, you’re desperately going to need if you want to have any impact on politics beyond words — by telling everyone they’re disqualified for 600 petty reasons.

Yes, I’ve argued with the “liberaltarians,” but that was about whether they are correct to think Democrats/modern liberals are more useful allies than Republicans/conservatives (an idea surely all but dead after a couple years of Obama spending), not whether their efforts linguistically disqualify them as libertarians (and I should note I routinely use the scare quotes on that term not to suggest that it is absurd but simply to increase the odds that a casual reader will notice that it’s not simply the word “libertarian”). Let me take a moment to thank the “liberaltarians” for making an outreach effort, in fact — and even to thank Kerry Howley for talking to feminists so that I don’t have to.

•••

The only thing that irks me — and it irks me when an Objectivist or a paleolibertarian does it as much as when a “liberaltarian” does it — is when those quirky apostates try to read all the rest of us out of the movement (or claim the rest of us are being inconsistent, whereas you should at least give anarcho-capitalists huge points for consistency, if nothing else), as if the apostates have the authority to declare people clear-cut non-libertarians for, say, being hawks or not sharing the liberal culture agenda or what have you, even if we’re staunch property rights adherents and that position seems to settle at least 99% of libertarian-vs.-non-libertarian policy disputes, from what I’ve seen over two decades of following the movement.

Careful observers will note that I don’t read people out of the movement even when I strongly disagree with them, so long as they are mostly sticking to some version of the core principles, some version that usually results in the same sorts of answers the strict property adherents arrive at. I’d be comfortable with open borders, but far be it from me to tell the vast number of anti-illegal-immigration folks who’ve entered the movement in the past three years that they aren’t libertarians. I can still think they’re wrong on that issue — or at least that it’s ambiguous — without denying that they want to abolish most of the government, shore up property rights, let the market decide things, etc. They’re libertarians, even if they’re not just like me (almost no one is).

Sidenote: The “libertarian socialists” on that About.com list are a special case — they aren’t really raising any tribal boundary questions at all, since they’re simply using the word “libertarian” in the European, Marxist sense, making it a mere homonym with the movement I’m part of — albeit with some real historical ties, if you go back to nineteenth-century anarchists, who all hated the aristocracy and in most cases (especially among Georgists) landlords. Either English-speaking or Continental-style libertarians could rightly say they wish the other group would stop using the word, but they aren’t really fighting for the soul of a single philosophical movement.

In philosophy class (my model for how everything should work, alas), if two people get bogged down in an argument over two different possible meanings of a term, they don’t just keep screaming at each other, they eventually define their terms more clearly and use conventions such as referring to one position as, say, “utility 1” and the other as “utility 2.” Solves a lot of problems — but some people would rather find out if semantic battles can be fought to the death.

(And speaking of utilitarianism, my underlying moral philosophy, I keep thinking that there are declining marginal returns to infighting — not to mention battles over where to eat that take so long that everyone would have been happier going to that first Chinese place we passed, etc.)

•••

Anyone tempted to excommunicate everyone else should keep in mind that even if every free-market fan and center-right activist on the planet were working in concert, we might still be outnumbered by statists and might still lose this fight. With populist/popular versions of the libertarian impulse breaking out, such as the Tea Party movement, with the inevitable mutations/simplifications in the philosophy that entails, now is no time to tell everyone that they should shut up and return to their homes unless, say, they’re 100% pro-cloning.

We need all hands on deck, much sooner than I’d anticipated. I was content with gradualism and (paradoxical as it may sound) with picky infighting when it seemed like the final showdown between markets and unsustainable welfare states was decades or even centuries in the future. But it looks like the final battle may be right now, and it’s no time to excommunicate the guy in the trench next to you, be he Republican, feminist, copyright-abolisher, evangelical, single-taxer, or “Rawlsekian.”

(That word, as awkward as “liberaltarian” and used by the same crowd, may actually apply to me, ironically, since I’d be comfortable with “conditional” laws that decreed a Hayek-style free market except in the event that there was an unattended-to crisis among the worst-off, such as starvation not handled by charity, in which case, perhaps, a temporary tax and public food provision kicked in — indeed, that would surely be an easier sell than the come-Hell-or-high-water approach, and the conditional taxes, I hope, would never prove necessary. We are not so different, really.)

P.S. For us libertarians, it was fun to see both a Reason guy (Weigel) and a Mises Institute guy (William Grigg, writing about cops tasering an eighty-six year-old woman) linked on Drudge yesterday, whatever the circumstances.

(The legalization is good news, I suppose, though probably not something I can work into the script of the next episode of Freedom Watch, which all of you with Fox Business Network [Channel 43 on Time Warner Cable in Manhattan] should be watching Saturdays at 10am and 8pm, Sundays 7pm and 11pm.  This weekend brings Barry Goldwater Jr., more Ron Paul, and a colonel who says McChrystal was describing the situation in Afghanistan too positively, among other things.)

Despite my loyalty to the bitter end of the X-Files experience, I am of course a skeptic, so I was pleased to hear that there is a skeptical-sounding thriller coming out with Sigourney Weaver as a debunker up against a famous “psychic” who’s coming out of retirement.  It’s Hollywood, so she may end up fighting aliens again by the end (not unlike Scully), but like X-Files, perhaps this film, Red Lights, will at least work in some real skeptical arguments.

On the other hand, I’m also pleased to see that a stage version of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, about a demon tempting humans, is being performed for at least one more month at Westside Theatre (407 W. 43rd Street).  But then, aren’t all theatre people tools of Satan?  That Stephanie Courtney woman in the Progressive Insurance ads, for example, is plainly possessed, like most improv comedy troupe folks.