EFFin’ Unsound

– posted by thehim

Following Crackpiper’s (a.k.a. The Piper) trail of stupidity in the comment threads of HorsesAss over the past few months has been one of the greatest studies in self-delusion I’ve witnessed in the decade-plus I’ve been discussing politics online. What makes Mr. St. Clair so interesting is that his idiocy is certainly not from a lack of potential in any way. He can actually be a very sharp person at times. But while all of our favorite subjects are driven by fears that completely override them, Crackpiper’s political outlook comes from a unique kind of fear.

As I mentioned in Part 1, his political outlook comes more from an overriding fear of responsibility than it does anything else. The world today faces a number of problems, whether it’s dealing with a global economy, climate change, our massive prison population, or unrest in the Middle East - but Crackpiper has no interest in being pragmatic about these problems and getting results. In many of these cases, his fear is that the solutions to these problems will prove that we sometimes need responsible collective action to get results. He fears anything that challenges his belief that the responsible path is always to assume that government will be irresponsible, and that leaving individuals to solve these problems themselves will yield the optimum result. That way, no matter what goes wrong in the world, demanding government inaction will always been seen as “responsible.” It’s the perfect cop-out for the irresponsible.

Despite having somewhat different roots than some of the other loons we make fun of here, his political outlook still tends to end up in the same place where many fear-based authoritarians end up. It is fueled by a sense that government must “maintain a moral order” as a way of protecting its citizens. Providing justice for people is secondary to establishing rules for dictating their behavior. In his mind, this desire for a nanny state is seen as the main “responsibility” of government, but the way he demands it be used leads to a number of irresponsible outcomes. In his mind, he’s fighting for smaller government, but in reality, his recipe always ends up with bigger government. In his mind, he’s found the path to more freedom, but in reality his ideas lead to a situation where people have less control over their own decisions. Despite clearly being smart enough to avoid such an outcome, his political outlook devolves into a contradiction. He tries to be both an extreme individualist and a nanny stater all at once.

Here are a few recent examples of how Crackpiper’s built-in contradictions have led him to some truly bad arguments.

Prohibition and Regulation are the Same Thing

In response to a comment discussing privately-owned liquor stores, Crackpiper completely loses touch with reality:

Yours isn’t an argument for keeping liquor stores out of private hands, it’s one for a return to prohibition! Since it’s either stumblebum drunks who lust for a quart of Ol’ Yakima Rock & Rye, or sociopaths attracted to tills filled with the lucre of stumblebum drunks, the obvious answer would be to…outlaw the source of the stumblebummery thus eviscerating its commensurate cash/sociopath magnet nature.

Well, actually it wasn’t a call for prohibition (you can see the comment from rhp6033 that he’s replying to here). And of all the stupid things Crackpiper has said, I doubt he will ever say anything as dumb as what he just said right there: that moving to alcohol prohibition would eviscerate the greed and debauchery that surrounds it. Of course, this belief again stems from his mistaken notion that government can impose “order.” In his more sober moments, Crackpiper understands that alcohol prohibition was a failure, but he’s completely unable to truly absorb the lessons of this because it will undermine almost everything else he’s managed to convince himself about what government can and should do. In his mind, banning alcohol should work much better than trusting government to regulate it, even though the opposite has clearly been proven true in practice. As a result, his best recourse is simply to accuse those of proposing the responsible solution of actually arguing for the irresponsible one.

But he’s only just beginning here:

Until then, state monopolies on stuff like booze only enhance the hypocrisy of the state. We bitch that not enough public money is spent on recovery services all the while we make money selling that which fuels the need for recovery services. About as stupid as funding healthcare services with cigarette taxes. Only a liberal mind would come up with something so oxymoronic.

The term oxymoronic is only the beginning of what Crackpiper fails to understand here. He’s still arguing from the long-discredited perspective that government “promotes” something simply by controlling its distribution. It’s the same bad logic that the government uses when saying that decriminalizing medical marijuana will “promote” its use among teens (marijuana usage rates in states with medical marijuana laws have actually gone down in recent years). I do tend to agree that the rationale for controlling the distribution of liquor may be outdated, but he’s taking the argument in the opposition direction, beyond the abyss and into an area where contradictions abound.

Here’s a plan: outlaw booze and tobacco instead of condemning them on the one hand while financing treatment for the reasonable and foreseeable consequences of their use and abuse on the other. If both are so bad - such public health menaces - then it’s in the public interest to ban them outright and forever.

The root problem, as I mentioned before, is that Crackpiper believes that government, by the mere fact that it tolerates a behavior, is actually promoting it. This is exactly the final destination you expect from someone who believes that government’s job is to “maintain order.” And it’s the kind of logic you expect to hear from someone who doesn’t understand the different roles of church and state and why it was so important to our founding fathers to keep them separate.

It’s been shown time and time again that government has very limited influence over people’s personal moral choices and their own responsibility. Alcohol prohibition was only one example of this, although it’s one that many of us think of first. But despite knowing that, Crackpiper is still arguing against public outlays towards alcohol treatment by saying that it would be in the public interest to just return to alcohol prohibition. The reality when it comes to drugs of all types (whether currently legal or illegal) is that every dollar spent on treatment as opposed to putting someone in jail saves taxpayers money. But this calculation is incomprehensible for Crackpiper, and as a result, he ends up screaming “small government” in the pursuit of an end that leaves us with much bigger government (but his fragile psyche intact).

If we’re unwilling to do that, then maybe it’s time for adult behavior, assumption of the risk. If you either wish to smoke or drink or engage in the sale of smokes or drinks, then be warned: the reasonable, foreseeable, logical, probable and inevitable consequences thereof are your problem, not mine.

And in the end, as expected, we come back to the root of Crackpiper’s political outlook - irresponsibility. While I don’t think that government should be rewarding people who make bad decisions, the costs to society from activities like smoking and drinking are real and need to be dealt with (and as we also clearly know, prohibitions create their own set of problems). As much as it’s tempting to think we can simply let those people suffer for their choices, that’s clearly impossible to do. Does a person who smoked and worked in a coal mine deserve public assistance to be treated for their lung cancer? Does a war veteran who becomes addicted to pain medications prescribed to him not deserve treatment if that develops into an addiction? What about people with poor diets?

The only responsible solution is to accept that most people are going to do unhealthy things, but still recognize that no one actually wants to become sick or addicted to drugs, so we do what we can to help the less fortunate. This solution is the most responsible one from a societal standpoint, but Crackpiper’s solution is to do nothing, which is the perfect plan of action for someone not smart enough to imagine potential scenarios where they’d actually be affected by this lack of action.

Time to stop the enabling and hypocrisy. Besides…state liquor stores are a gouge! When every Safeway and Albertson’s in California has Johnny Walker Black for $2 to $3 bucks a bottle cheaper than up here, you know you’re getting ripped off!

There are two different rationales for levying taxes on things like liquor. One good, one bad. Levying taxes on liquor in order to cover the costs of treatment and other alcohol-related illnesses to the state makes perfect sense. Levying taxes on liquor as a way to make it unaffordable is not. While it will likely drive down the consumption of liquor among more moderate drinkers, it will do nothing to reduce consumption among the segment of the population those types of taxes are truly aimed at - alcoholics. As far as I know, Washington State’s liquor taxes go towards related health care costs and are not artificially high as an attempt to curb alcoholism. I could be wrong.

Think of it: Washington State promotes gambling and it promotes drinking. Why not make it the perfect trifecta and have it go into the bordello business? After all, right now the state’s doing a pretty good job of screwing us, so isn’t it about time it returned the favor?

I’m all for it. Although you’ll notice once again that Crackpiper goes back to the false notion that government promotes something by regulating it (although I recognize that the state lottery is an exception to that).

I’m sure the HA Happy Hooligans, social pariahs they seem to be, would appreciate an alternative to their usual pursuits.

That’s ok. I think I’ll stick to my current pursuit of pointing out how much of a retard you are.

Reality’s Well-Known Liberal Bias

One of the funniest arguments Crackpiper has made recently was in defense of the new website called Conservapedia. Conservapedia was established as an answer to Wikipedia, mainly because to the distress of numerous wingnuts, Wikipedia was demonstrating (as Stephen Colbert famously noted) that reality has a well-known liberal bias. After a post where I showed that 9 of the 10 most heavily trafficked Conservapedia pages had to deal with homosexuality, all strongly asserting that homosexuality is an immoral choice rather than a natural part of the human condition, the following comment appeared:

Most all of those references, Lee, cite scholarly and medical articles and data, so what’s your point?

I’ll be the first to admit that it can sometimes be difficult to find the truth on the internet. Sites like Wikipedia tend to work because those who are interested in telling the truth are generally more motivated than those who are motivated to lie. But when it comes to homosexuality, this axiom tends to get stood on its head. With a topic like that, where cultural traditions and human fears get overly involved, a large number of people are capable of believing in complete bullshit, even establishing a self-referencing ring of pseudoscience to mask the reality. When it comes to homosexuality, anyone who is curious about whether or not it’s a choice can do one very simple thing to verify it:

Ask a gay person. They’ll tell you it’s not a choice. Case closed.

That conservatives are to be condemned because they’re unwilling to willy-nilly accept homosexuality? Well, they’re not alone in an unwillingness to roll over on this issue.

And we go back to one of the major precepts of Crackpiper’s delusion. If enough people believe a lie, it earns the right to be considered the truth.

While gays and lesbians are certainly entitled to all the rights of citizenship, they’re not entitled to additional ones because of their sexual orientation.

And few have ever asked for any. Anti-discrimination laws should work in every direction, and marriage should be available to anyone who wants to grow old with the person they love.

Mock all you want, but it only shows how little you get out from the cocoon of your decidedly left of center POV. In the mainstream outside the Seattle City Limits, it’s different than you think.

One of the cornerstones of irresponsibility is believing what you want to believe, rather than believing what’s true. People who want to believe in bullshit will take comfort in the fact that others believe in that bullshit with them. And here you see exactly the roots of Conservapedia: my very simple factual statement that homosexuality is not a choice is derided by Crackpiper as a “decidedly left of center POV,” and the counterpoint is deemed valid solely because many people believe it.

Islamo-Fascism makes me Wet the Bed

It’s a tough call which of Crackpiper’s idiocies is more amusing to me - his inability to comprehend the reasons why drug prohibitions fail, or his inability to comprehend why the Iraq War and Bush’s Middle East policies are failing. I have a long post upcoming that deals with some of the parallels between the two, but like most Americans, any irrational fears they may have about their gay co-workers are nothing compared to the irrational fears they have about people from the Middle East. What may be one of the most fascinating aspects of the wingnut mind is that while so many of them believe that homosexuality is a choice, even though it’s not, so many of them treat anti-American Islamic fundamentalism as if it’s not a choice, even though it is.

Islamo-facism resonates in the Middle East in large measure because it’s a way to project upon someone else responsibility and causation for misery.

Of course, Crackpiper is certainly correct here…well, if his use of the very silly term of “Islamo-fascism” is overlooked. Authoritarian movements of all types maintain themselves by finding an external scapegoat that every ill of the world gets blamed on. The desire to impose Sharia Law upon communities across the globe is a scary and threatening authoritarian movement, but it’s also one whose power and support base is often exaggerated by the western press. Just as numerous Arab regimes regularly blame Israel for their own failures to modernize and better the lives of their citizens, we’re now seeing the expected increase in those blaming people in the Middle East for the massive rise in anti-Americanism, rather than laying the blame where it belongs.

Like Hitler blaming the Jews for Germany’s woes, the bin Laden’s of the world blame America and the West for the shortcomings inherent in a culture that’s still stuck in the Middle Ages.

And while a responsible person would look at the intense rise of anti-Americanism around the world and draw certain logical conclusions from it, Crackpiper never does. To him, it’s not a choice being made based upon people’s real-life circumstances. And so, just like the Germans of the 1930s and the Arabs of the 1990s, the inability to self-reflect sets in, and others are continually blamed for the actions of those to which they were loyal. The strength of both of these movements functions like a market. Even though it does involve propaganda and a certain amount of brainwashing, it’s ultimately a choice that people make. People aren’t born radicals or terrorists, they simply arrive at a point in their lives where their fears and insecurities become so great that they decide to “sell” their intellectual independence to a particular movement. Crackpiper has long arrived at this point, dancing the same dance as those he condemns.

A number of European countries are now fighting back against the debasing of their cultures and politics that both sympathize with bin Laden, et al, and serve as breeding grounds for terrorists and violence.

The increase in Islamic radicalism in Europe was one of the easily foreseeable outcomes of the Iraq War. Many Middle Easterners who live in Europe still have strong ties to their home countries. But while Crackpiper is able to comprehend how the presence of large numbers of Middle Easterners in Europe concerns people that their culture is being threatened, he just doesn’t have the intellectual rigor to understand how it’s happening in reverse in the Middle East as well - and by a culture that everyone there knows has committed genocides in the past. People in the Middle East feel that their culture and their livelihoods are being threatened in just the same way, which is in turn what intensifies what’s happening in Europe.

Once again, his failure to grasp this dual dynamic sends him down the same path as those whose examples were cited in the beginning of this comment. In the end, all he has to fall back on is this last comment, a demonstration of his own confusion over why the pieces don’t fit together:

Remember, the 19 of 9/11 weren’t oppressed types, they were middle-class, well educated, and motivated by a fanatical hatred of anything that wasn’t exactly like themselves. Save, that is, for strippers and booze in Florida gentlemen’s clubs, something they seemed to have a bizarre proclivity toward.

This paragraph is one of the most spectacular ones that I’ve seen Crackpiper write. Somehow, it feels like a proper conclusion to him, even though it perfectly highlights the incongruity at the heart of his various misunderstandings. The first thing that he doesn’t understand is that whether or not someone feels oppressed is a state of mind - a choice. Someone who’s poor or destitute is more likely to make that choice, but it can happen to anyone. And as Crackpiper correctly points out, the 9/11 hijackers were people with a certain level of education and resources that would disqualify them from being considered destitute by any stretch. But he uses that fact to reach a conclusion that makes no sense - that the 9/11 hijackers never made conscious choices to go down the paths they went down.

The second thing he doesn’t understand is that what motivates them isn’t a “fanatical hatred of anything that isn’t exactly like” themselves. What motivates them is a feeling of powerlessness, of impotence. It’s a feeling that one’s liberty is being taken from them. Again, he understands that poverty isn’t a prerequisite for radicalism, but he falsely concludes that one of the outcomes of radicalism is actually its root cause.

In the end, he reveals the contradiction that proves his own formulations completely wrong. He mentions how two of the 9/11 hijackers visited a strip club, which he sees as a “bizarre proclivity.” But if he was right that these men were driven by a fanatical hatred of our culture, they’d be plotting to shut down the strip club rather than enjoying the view. They were not. They were driven by a feeling of powerless, of impotence, which many a man also finds a cure for by surrounding themselves with naked women who can be controlled by money.

Crackpiper has no interest in dealing with the contradiction he finds here because, like the followers of all authoritarian movements before him, he will tolerate any level of cognitive dissonance to maintain the firm belief that those he follows are never wrong. In the months before the Iraq War, I saw such a large number of people who not only fervently supported the invasion, but eagerly looked forward to the day when they could say “I told you so” to the doubters. Some of them have likely learned something from what happened, but the more hardcore authoritarians have just crawled further into their dementia.

Instead of recognizing that the invasion was a boon for Islamic radicalism and ratcheted up the tension throughout Europe and the rest of the world, they’ve completely shut down their minds. Instead of admitting what is obvious, that sending our Army to conquer and occupy a nation in the heart of the Middle East that hadn’t attacked us has generated a massive increase in feelings of powerless - and therefore radicalism - in the region, they cope by pretending that we’re fighting a finite set of terrorist automatons who have to be freed from their evil masters. By taking this view, none of it is Bush’s fault, or the fault of those who so passionately supported the war that fueled this rise.

He’s made the choice to be irresponsible…because in his mind he’s made it the responsible thing to do.

I Can Tell People Which Lives are Sacred, But PETA Can’t

The last topic in this edition of the Crackpiper Chronicles is one that always yields passionate arguments from all sides - abortion. A lot of people probably assume that my libertarian leanings were originally driven by the drug war. They were not. Even before college, when I was still very ignorant about the reality of drugs and the drug war, other issues led me on the path to understanding how our liberty can be threatened by religion and other faith-based beliefs within government. One of those issues was abortion. As a 16-year-old, I even got a letter published in the Philadelphia Inquirer criticizing those who twisted the meaning of the word “life” in an attempt to limit the freedom of others. 16 years later, I’ve now officially heard it all.

In the comments of this post on Jonah Goldberg’s ridiculous new book, Crackpiper made the following claim:

The purpose of government should be to zealously protect and maximize individual liberty and freedom, not subplant them all in the name of some amorphous “collective good” defined by…government.

Of course, this apparent condemnation of the anti-choice mentality was merely words, as he would soon demonstrate five comments later:

Liberals don’t mind snuffing the unborn and the aged and infirm all in the name of convenience, an attitude disturbingly close to that of the extremes of ethnic cleansing done in the same name.

A mere nine minutes after claiming that the role of government is to “zealously protect and maximize individual liberty and freedom” for some “collective good,” he then demands that government define a “collective good” that limits the individual liberty of pregnant women (and the terminally ill). Of course, in his mind, he can equate legalized abortion to ethnic cleansing. Why? Because 16 years after I wrote that letter to the editor, people still bastardize the meaning of the words in the abortion debate in order to confuse people as to what we’re actually dealing with. And as a result, people who think they oppose fascism can - less than ten minutes later - use its logic to make their point.

As I like to do with breaking down anti-choice arguments, I like to make people deal with the first uncomfortable parallel:

Killing fetuses is not the same as killing ‘people’ Crackpiper. By your logic, hunting would have to made illegal.

He replies:

Even for you, Lee, this is an absurdly nihlistic statement. A fetus isn’t the same as a quail or squirrel. If left un-aborted - read that un-killed - a human fetus is eventually birthed as an infant.

Despite the fact that this is terrible logic (if it’s a crime because it prevents humans from being born, then celibacy should be illegal), Crackpiper opens himself up to one of his most impressive hypocrisies.

A lot of people, when they’re first confronted with the thought of having to deal with life as a scientific, rather than emotional or spiritual topic, do exactly what Crackpiper did right here. They accuse the person making the argument of being heartless. And while I find no fault with religions which place a sanctity on particular lives, it’s still not justification for defining a “collective good” in greater society that makes the life of a fetus more valuable than the lives of other sentient creatures like dogs, cats, horses, etc. In fact, the root of everything I believe, and much of what the founding fathers of this country fought for, is based upon the fact that religions should not have that power or be used in that way.

Both scientifically and logically, one cannot equate the qualities of a fetal life with the qualities of a born human life. The value that we all place on our lives comes from our appreciation of being independent creatures and our desire for survival. A fetus has no sense of independence or even an awareness of the world around it. It is a life, but it’s simply among the billions of other lives across the globe that we have no valid justification for placing the same value under the law that we place on human lives.

The resulting hypocrisy is that a group like PETA can very easily make the same argument that Crackpiper is making, but instead for protecting the lives of animals. And like Crackpiper, they can try to define a “collective good” which makes everything from hunting to eating red meat illegal. Faced with this contradiction, what’s Crackpiper’s response? To believe in complete bullshit:

Abortion is the ultimate child abuse. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the proliferation of both abortions and cases of child abuse aren’t intrinsically linked. We’ve become a culture blase about the death of children.

It was not hard for me to find evidence that experts on child abuse believe that our greater awareness of it has actually driven the incidence down even as the number of reported cases have gone up. I’d even be willing to bet that this is a trend that Crackpiper has even complained about, in the context of liberals disapproving of spanking, for instance. But regardless of how many hypocrisies he ends up embracing, he will never question the gut feelings that tell him that making abortion illegal is neither infringing on one’s individual liberty nor the kind of amorphous “collective good” that is the path to fascism.

After several commenters starting pointing out how hypocritical he was being in this thread, he continued to implode:

Abortion is the killing of an innocent human being. I believe in protecting inocent human beings, hence I’m pro-life. That abortion has a societal consequence of desensitizing the culture toward the death of and harm toward children is also a reason to loath it. But my first and foremost concern is the protection of the innocent.

Who speaks for the unborn? Who rises to protect their freedom and liberty?

I do, for one, and I make no bones about it. Abortion kills children, and that’s wrong.

And I once again pointed out to him, what’s stopping PETA from making that same argument in order to curtail one’s liberty to hunt deer? He didn’t - and still doesn’t - have an answer for it, only excuses, emotion-based arguments, imaginary evidence, and his own mistaken belief that he is a wise man among fools, rather than the village idiot. He wallows in his many hypocrisies, oblivious and afraid. Screaming about personal liberty while demanding a nanny state, accusing others of using deflection to justify radicalism while he himself deflects to justify radicalism, and being completely unable to accept basic facts, demanding scientific proof when it suits him and rejecting science completely when it does not. He is the perfect tool of the right wing - brainless and heartless, but within a subset of like-minded fools who’ve been conditioned to believe that their brainlessness and heartlessness is superior, and that their willingness to be irresponsible with the problems we face is a form of responsibility. He is, in short, the perfect model of hypocritical douchebaggery that people like Karl Rove set out to create.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 11:07 am and is filed under TheHim. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.