The battle for the individualist right. I don’t know. I think the last eight years have shown that if you still believe in individualism, you really aren’t part of “the right.”
CBS tech writer throws cold water on online predator hysteria. Too bad it’d take a couple thousand articles like this one to undo the hysteria sown by Chris Hansen.
So this is satire, right? Right?
British pet owners could face jail time for letting their animals get fat.
…and then John McCain selected her as his running mate.
A win for individual rights in the election: Washington state voters approved a doctor-assisted suicide initiative.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 7:08 am by Radley Balko
and is filed under Nanny State.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
TheAgitator.com
Your comment about believing in individualism and not being part of the “right” is one of the stupidest I’ve seen you make. There are plenty of leave-me-alone conservatives out there – one example of many has been the fight against REAL ID. I would guess, judging from comments to previous posts that you have ticked off about half your audience.
Radley, your third (”this is satire”) link points to the same WSJ article as the first (”individualist right”) link.
As evidence of bi-partisanship and good intentions we will quote an inauguration speech and nothing else. Creeeeeeeeeeepy.
We live in times where the line between satire and life is so thin I sometimes can’t tell the difference.
I’ll pretend for the moment that the article isn’t satire.
The closing paragraph is absurd:
“Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty — a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.”
This is “footprints in the sand” sort of ridiculousness.
The way Clinton was treated by the right and the way Bush has been treated by the left and cuckolding libertarians has been despicable. It’s one thing to disagree with a president or criticize a president, but the concerted level of organized disrespect and ridicule we’ve stooped to is shameful.
The world watches and witnesses us behaving this way towards our Presidents and we obtusely sit and wonder why they have no respect for us…
Well …
He implies that Republicans were more worried about Harriet Myers than Democrats. (Not how I remember it.)
He says it was Bush’s failure to retreat in Iraq that enraged liberals and doesn’t mention how we got there in the first place.
No mention of warrentless wiretapping or torture or a huge increase in discretionary spending.
No mention that his first veto was federal funding of stem cell research.
No mention of the massive approval ratings he had before the war in Iraq. No mention of congress approving the Patriot Act and authorizing force in Iraq.
No mention of a historic assault on civil liberties launched by his justice department or of the horrific choices he made in his cabinet – Rumsfeld and Gonzalez will be infamous for a while.
It’s either the most blindingly stupid piece ever written or a brilliant piece of satire that puts the b in subtle.
Damn liberals and their unrealistic exspectations of the challenges King Bush faced.
Every time I read something like the “satire” you linked, I think, “How can anyone possibly be this obtuse?” And then I realize that Mr Bush still has an approval rating of damn near 30%.
And I think to myself, “What a wonderful world.”
My favorite part is that the best examples of “bipartisanship” he can find are Harriet Myers and a line from Bush’s victory speech in 2004.
“The world watches and witnesses us behaving this way towards our Presidents and we obtusely sit and wonder why they have no respect for us…”
Personally, I think giving too much respect and deference to presidents in general has done more harm to this country than the opposite. Eric Alterman’s “When Presidents Lie” (which looks at FDR, JFK, LBJ, Reagan and Bush) is a really good illustration.
Assisted Suicide is one of the places were I diverge from strict libertarian, primarily for self dense reasons. In theory I have not problem with it, but in practice it’s just too easy to slip from ‘I don’t think my life is worth living and I want to die’ to ‘We don’t think you’re useful anymore and are going to kill you’.
I simply don’t trust this society with something like that.
SO, the big win for individual rights this election is that we’re allowed to hire someone to kill us?
Awesome.
Good Point. Generally, I agree that we should always foster a healthy distrust of government. I will concede that Bush and Clinton did stupid things that brought ridicule upon themselves.
But the line has to be drawn somewhere. It wasn’t enough to denigrate President Bush or President Clinton. It soon poured over to their wives and other family members.
I’m not advocating the we don’t make fun of and satire our leaders. I’m just saying that we’ve made political discourse so personal and ugly that it makes even intelligent individuals seem petty and ignorant. I stand by what I stated earlier. It’s shameful.
“This is the price Mr. Bush is paying for trying to work with both Democrats and Republicans.”
That’s some premise! WSJ = The Onion??
The article about British pet owners is very freightening. As much as I fear the American Police State, I thank my lucky stars I do not live in the UK Police State. Not even the People’s Republic of China sends people to jail for fat animals. Although if they did, it’d be a lot worse than British Prison.
I also think there is still a sizable individualist streak in the Republican Party. The neo-cons, the Ann Coulters and Hannity’s, are not the majority in the GOP. They just happened to be the ones in power for the last eight years. The majority make up the leave-me-alone coalition, which is very much alive and well. They just aren’t very vocal because they have real jobs and don’t have the time to be busy-body politcal jerk offs.
Seriously? This guy is worried about us disrespecting the President? Last I looked, he was elected by us to serve us. He isn’t a king who can command respect and reverence by birthright from his servants. My mom used to tell me that she brought me into this world and she could take me out. The same applies to Bush. We put him there and we have a right to say what we really feel. To do otherwise would be un-patriotic and disrespectful to our country.
This is a quote from the first article link “A majority of Americans now want rule by Democrats.” Why do so many people equate the President and Congress as ruling the country? We are not a kingdom. They are not there to rule us but represent us. This kind of attitude is causing the conutry to fall.
Looks like Jabba the Cat will be staying indoors from now on…
The “predator” article is badly written and misleading – how do you compare an absolute number (6,522 killed by young drivers) to a ratio (2 out of 1500 surveyed were victims of online predators)? A single Web search by the author would have clarified things. The 2000 census showed there are 80,000,000 Americans between the ages of 5 and 24, so there would be roughly 12,000,000 who are 13, 14, or 15 years old – Chris Hansen’s “victim demographic”, more or less. 1500 is a small sample size for a low-frequency effect, but if you run with it then 16,000 teenagers in that age group have been victimized, significantly more than any of the other “scary numbers” quoted in the article. Not an epidemic, but maybe those moms are right to worry…
Thanks for the article about online predators. I haven’t had that good of a laugh in a long time. I love how the author accepts the accident figures from NHTSA (MADD mouth piece) and then refuses to accept the figures about online predators from a Crimes Against Children Research Center survey. If he really looked into it, he would probably find that both statistics are plain BS. My sister is the computer expert for a District Attorney’s office and she says that the statistics about online predators are meant to throw a panic into people so that they re-elect Law enforcement officials. The throw around the number of arrests that they have made, but won’t say anything about the number of convictions they get.
The ‘online predator’ article is trying to downplay the dangers of online predators, but it sure does lie with statistics to upplay the dangers of teens drunk driving.
So 16 to 20 year olds were involved in accidents that caused 6552 deaths in a year. Not ’caused’, not ‘were driving when’, just were involved in. Probably caused many. Might have been asleep in the back seat, or riding the bike that got hit. And no mention of sobriety. So far, no relation to teens drunk driving.
And then, no more than 1528 15 to 20 year olds had 0.08+ BAC when they were ‘involved in’ a traffic fatality. Sounds like damn low numbers to me, given the number of teens that have the potential of involvement in these accidents.
Individualists are neither right nor left. WE ARE ABOVE ALL THAT.
Marching to my own drum for more than 5 decades!
Remember: Never call an elected person or a hireling, a leader. We the People hire THEM as our servants. When I was young everyone of them was known as a public servant.
The President is the Head Butler of the US. Don’t believe me? Check out the approx. 10 powers he has as per Article II.
“…puts the b in subtle.”
Consider that yoinked!
“John Sununu was as good a senator as a libertarian is likely to find outside of the energy belt but he lost on something else. ”
What was being a douchebag, Alex?
“Like the president said in his 2004 victory speech, “We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us”"
Wait, the Constitution is binding?
Is it really a win for individual rights when you can now commit suicide in Washington, but only with the state’s permission?
“I think the last eight years have shown that if you still believe in individualism, you really aren’t part of ‘the right.”
Unlike a few of the other commenters, I think you’re right on the money with that one. I believe you could count the number of classical liberals in the GOP on one hand quite easily. At this point, I think the party is actually on its death bed. But right now I ‘m busy trying to encourage my fellow (Democratic-leaning) liberals to get back in touch with the ideas of classical liberalism, so I can’t worry about the GOP. I don’t think American liberals need to slavishly follow the lead of European Social Democrats. Jeffersonian Democracy anyone?
Satire. JFC. What a dupe of the con.
BBC Radio 4 had a recent show about their RSPCA’s overactive prosecutors.
Yes, you read right. They have their *own* prosecutors.
One of the cases was of a woman with an old dog with a digestive problem that didn’t respond to treatment. The RSPCA complained about the dog’s condition. She explained the medical problem, but they kept coming back. The RSPCA even dropped food in the dog’s enclosure, but the food was of kinds that aggravated the dog’s problem, leading to diarrhea, etc. And they wouldn’t stop leaving food.
Finally, they seized the dog. After two years of legal squabbles in court, the RSPCA was forced to reveal its records of the dog’s care. Turned out they’d had no better luck with the dog’s digestive problem.
And, the owner found out that the dog had died months earlier, so being in court to get the dog back was pointless. And the remains had gone ‘missing’ (probably thrown away).
And after all this, the RSPCA’s spokesdrone would not even admit the possibility that the dog had been seized in error.
They also talked about a guy who provides homes and rehab for many animals of all kinds, and had done so out of his own pocket for years and years, who was brought up on charges after he fell into a depression and was unable to maintain things as was necessary. The RSPCA seized a bunch of animals, and then spent far more money on their upkeep and on the litigation than the man needed to fix his facility up. They could have helped him out, helped the animals, and saved money, but for their lust for prosecution.
Every time I go to the UK I catch some MP talking up some new incredibly asinine Nanny-state bill. My favorites were the bill to ban kitchen knives with points, and one making it illegal to swat a child on the bottom in public. I don’t know if they ever become law, but part of the shock value is how the BBC reporter on the story always seems to take the politicians line and doesn’t really question the need for this ludicrous legislation.
I thought this was a pretty good response to the “Poor Bush” op-ed.
“Unfourtunately the RSPCA seem to have lost track of what they were originally formed to do, their prosecutions department seem more interested in generating publicity at any cost, some of the cases where they have prosecuted recently are more than dubious. They seem to totally ignore animal lovers where a fast £ can be made through donations generated by media exposure.The RSPCA are calling for pets to not be sold in petshops ! Schools not to keep animals ! Go around killing holy cows ! prosecuting pensioners, the disabled, elderly and School Children (the more high profile the case the more revenue from media coverage)To cap this they are one of the richest charities in the UK, yet still ask for our money when they have over £100 million in assets, they then spend it prosecuting some unfourtunate 15 year old cat lover !They totally flout and ignore the law of the land where it suits them, basically impersonate Police Officers and will trespass at will whenever it suits them. They should be stopped from mounting prosecutions due to the conflict of interest, or at least ought to be controlled by the CPS or some other safegaurd to ensure fair process.”
“But the line has to be drawn somewhere. It wasn’t enough to denigrate President Bush or President Clinton. It soon poured over to their wives and other family members.”
Well, I guess I’d agree with this, but if the price of having an opposition party, press and electorate that asked tough questions when a president announced we needed to invade some third world country, I think the nasty insults that the president’s family would receive would be an okay price to pay.