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I like the Helen Keller and Hitler jokes. The others don’t come close to my definition of fucking hilarious, but you can’t please everyone all the time.

For a brief tangent, let me see if I get this straight: I go off the reservation and report back with some observations about how and why specific libertarian hobbyhorses backfire in flyover country; Aresen first insists that he was joking about Everest and I was too dense to get it, but then describes his real-life entanglements with disability activists over horse trails; I become the resident humor-impaired whipping boy, to be reeducated with a combination of scolding and off-color and Kindergarten-appropriate jokes. Did I miss something?

FYI, I put in a good word for Gilbert Gottfried on this blog a few months ago and contributed to the Osama porn post, so it’s a stretch to argue that my MO is to appoint myself chief scold and arbiter of good taste in humor. In this case, however, I seem to have entered an intellectual Twilight Zone.

I realize that I’ll inevitably end up in the firing line by acting as a de facto devil’s advocate, and I’m fine with that. I also have a thick enough skin to deal with people going overboard against me in an internet forum. In any event the standard fare on Agitator threads is head and shoulders more civil and intelligent than that on many blogs; I’m a regular commenter on one that devolves into fucktard battles every week. Still, it’s worth repeating that the dogmatism and poor logic that routinely surface around here are not, as a matter of course, a way to win friends and influence people. I’m just sayin’.

The nationalities of a company’s stockholders don’t affect its country of incorporation. No matter how large a percentage of BP stock is owned by Americans, BP is a British company. It is not an American company, nor will it be one unless it incorporates in the US.

BP’s stockholders were not Ken Salazar’s target; the losses that they incurred from lower share prices and canceled dividends were collateral damage. Salazar’s targets were the staff responsible for maintaining safety and environmental standards on BP’s American projects in accordance with American laws and regulations. Given that that BP’s reckless disregard for site safety had just killed eleven American workers and was causing an uncontrolled gusher to spew oil onto American beaches and bayous, subordinating environmental and safety oversight to the interests of shareholders would have been twisted, no matter how many American investors stood to lose money.

The fact that I have willing adversaries in this debate doesn’t bear particularly good witness to the motives and ethics of the libertarian base. That’s a harsh assessment, but let me just say that I’ve voted for quite a few Libertarian Party and small-L libertarian candidates, so I’m a lot easier to win over than many people. Shilling for moneyed interests, whether real or perceived, doesn’t go over well with most voters.

It’s just something to consider the next time a libertarian’s dark horse candidacy goes nowhere.

Rand Paul is one of the most libertarian members of Congress today. He adheres much more closely to the Libertarian Party platform than to the GOP platform, especially on civil liberties. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that he’s a RINO, but his strain of Republicanism is one that the current base devotes a lot effort to purging from the party.

As far as his Tea Party endorsement is concerned, I don’t know what the hell to make of a movement that started with Rick Santelli’s on-air rant about irresponsible borrowers, went apeshit over Sarah Palin, brought out hordes of entitlement beneficiaries to scream about the evils of socialism, and endorsed Rand Paul. The only common thread that I’ve seen is a bunch of pissed off voters who consider themselves Republicans. Some of the people behind the scenes are pretty devious and a lot of vicious elements have taken shelter under the big tent, but every indication I’ve seen is that the Tea Party’s platform is nebulous and the movement is too ad hoc and focused on immediate electoral victories to impose the litmus tests normally involved in partisan politics.

You and and I both know they had possession from well before 48.

If you don’t know that you are just another troll.

Thanks. The phrasing is mine but the talking point itself is from at least the early 80s. Likely earlier.

Radical settlers did take part of Mexico for the white man, part of it is called Texas.

You are correct, but there’s a few rather notable differences. Texans of US and Mexican origin drove the Texas Revolution in 1836. Texas was as much a land grab by the US as it was a secession from Mexico.

(Especially as Mexico only became independent from Spain about 15 years prior.)

The US was hardly of one mind on the Mex-Am war started 10 years later. The Whigs (soon to become the Repubs) were furious about the body count and expense.

Mexicans don’t refer to it as the Mexican-American War they refer to it as American Invasion of Mexico

Oh yeah, unlike Israel, once the dust cleared we paid (not much) for the land as part of the peace deal.

Lots more to it, but history is always messy.

Boyd,

Thanks for remembering her name and circumstances…

If our soldiers safely ensconced in tanks and APCs routinely shot young boys for throwing rocks at their occupiers…(Not to mention unarmed reporters and human-rights NGO workers who attempt to report these abuses.)

To be fair, sometimes they crush them with their tanks. There’s your “restraint”, Adam: Rachel Corrie.

If that was a joke that I didn’t get, go ahead and call me a humorless ass.

No, Andrew Roth. I will not call you an ass. You need love and learning right now, not name calling. Let’s start with an easy one:
1. Hitler’s favorite joke:
Hitler: My dog has no nose.
SS Guard: How does he smell, boss?
Hitler: Terrible.

Next lesson:
2. What’s brown and sticky? A stick.

Third and final lesson for today:
3. What did one snowman say to the other? I smell carrots.

I hope this has been helpful because these are all fucking hilarious.

Screw it. Here’s another one:
Why can’t Helen Keller drive? She’s a woman.

“If said radical settlers publicly decried that they were going to take Mexico for the white man, because an 1800+ year old religious text is somehow a legal real-estate document…”

Intrade CEO dies while climbing Mt. Everest

Did intrade have odds on this?

One trail in Pennsylvania that I used to bike pretty often, the rail trail between Elizabethtown and Lebanon, has a dual-use section with packed gravel on one margin and loose dirt on the other. It isn’t very difficult or expensive to accommodate competing stakeholders as long as no one wages war on other factions.

Regarding the other examples of slippery legal slopes that you provided, I’m with you on everything but seat belt laws. Your inclusion of seat belt laws on a list of unconscionable infringements on human liberty supports my thesis that libertarians marginalize themselves by calling attention to otherworldly hobbyhorses.

My point wasn’t that no thought should be given to Social Security’s solvency. The trust fund is clearly facing a combined demographic and economic pinch. My point was that Paul (and other Republicans) shouldn’t propose anything foolish like privatization or abolition. Despite its flaws, SS is an unusually reliable pension scheme that keeps a lot of people from spending their old age in abject poverty. I have no doubt that with proper stewardship it will continue to provide a significant safety net for generations to come.

The private alternatives that have been touted to replace SS are much, much riskier. Some are practically swindles that will inevitably cause decent but ignorant people to be beggared by investment advisors. I own stocks and have an IRA, and I’m a pretty savvy investor, but I’ve taken some haircuts. Less savvy investors lured into high-risk instruments have a huge risk of being wiped out.

I have several relatives who would be well and truly screwed over if they weren’t vested in a pension such as Social Security. They’ve either pissed away their other retirement funds, in one case liquidating a 401(k), or sunk them into failing businesses. Waxing eloquent about individual financial freedom and responsibility in order to get people to move their retirement funds from a low-risk fund to higher-risk funds, as the GOP did under Bush II, is a pretty low move in my book.

These pension matters help answer Libby’s question a few weeks ago about what libertarians propose doing for society’s fuck-ups. Time and time again, the answer is not a hell of a lot, which is one reason that I end up raining on the small-government parade. What should be done for the improvident or the easily swindled when they inevitably fall through the cracks? There are no panaceas, but Social Security is a good start, and the alternatives are pretty grim. In a dog-eat-dog world, somebody always ends up being the meat.

The “un-American” comment in question was one that Paul made in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon blowout. The context:

Ken Salazar, May 2, 2010: “Our job basically is to keep the boot on the neck of British Petroleum.”

Rand Paul, May 21, 2010: “What I don’t like from the president’s administration is this sort of, ‘I’ll put my boot heel on the throat of BP. I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37273085/ns/politics-decision_2010/t/rand-paul-obama-bp-criticism-un-american/

A project directed by a British company (BP) with a Swiss-incorporated major subcontractor (Transocean) was executed with such reckless disregard for workplace safety that eleven Americans were killed and the remaining workers on site narrowly escaped an inferno with their lives. In response, the Secretary of the Interior used strong language to indicate that he intended to make BP improve its safety practices so that Americans wouldn’t be killed by its recklessness in the future. Rand Paul reacted to the episode by complaining that officials with responsibility for regulating a sector that had recently suffered a mass casualty explosion weren’t showing enough deference to business interests. If he wasn’t a corporate shill, he certainly sounded like one.

Let’s say that I kill eleven people when the gunpowder factory that I’m running in my apartment blows up. Is it un-American to promise to put a boot on my neck so that I’m not allowed to do anything of the sort again? Of course not. What BP did was tantamount to running a gunpowder factory in a residential building. Its drillers were scared to death of the subsurface conditions in which they were being forced to work, but their bosses didn’t care. There was nothing inherently immoral about their line of work, but they just didn’t care about making sure that they went about it in a safe place and manner.

The question here isn’t one of hobbling businesses with needless red tape. It’s of making sure that businesses operate in a manner that doesn’t get people killed or maimed. Frankly, some private businesses are unwilling to regulate themselves to that end and need to be compelled not to endanger human life. I can’t imagine any nongovernmental mechanism for regulating such callous syndicates.

Incidentally, Wikipedia reports that Transocean has a long history of incorporation in tax shelters where it has had no real operations, first in Delaware, then in the Cayman Islands and most recently in Switzerland. Regardless of the overall propriety or impropriety of tax evasion by means of paper incorporation, it sure as hell isn’t patriotic.

And @Bergman (#67) that clever propaganda coup “was coined in 1879 by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in a pamphlet called, ‘The Victory of Germandom over Jewry’. Using ideas of race and nationalism, Marr argued that Jews had become the first major power in the West. He accused them of being liberals, a people without roots who had Judaized Germans beyond salvation. In 1879 Marr founded the ‘League for Anti-Semitism’.” (From Wikipedia, quoting Moshe Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Anti-Semitism.
It’s one of those words whose meaning cannot be demonstrated from its etymology. Sorry, just isn’t so. There are plenty of other words that have acquired a well understood, precise meaning that is different from what they may have originally meant, or should logically mean.

Let us follow that analogy for awhile with some more (but not all) of the story…

If we were blockading Chihuahua, Sonora, and Baja Norte so the residents had to get essential supplies via illegal tunnels…

If our soldiers safely ensconced in tanks and APCs routinely shot young boys for throwing rocks at their occupiers…(Not to mention unarmed reporters and human-rights NGO workers who attempt to report these abuses.)

If our radicals were building unauthorized settlements in said Mexican states…

If said radical settlers publicly decried that they were going to take Mexico for the white man, because an 1800+ year old religious text is somehow a legal real-estate document…

If our government restricted naturalized Mexican-Americans’ rights and privileges by virtue of their origin and/or religion…

If our government were just taking whatever parts of those Mexican states it saw fit for a fence…

Which side is showing restraint again?