It’s been a longtime since I’ve nut-picked the comments at Politico, but these are hard to pass up (from the blog piece on Rand I mentioned in the last article):
I’d thought I’d never go along with that kind of thinking. I thought everything should be open to all. I prided myself, only for myself, in doing and voting in such a way as to figure everyone was equal. Now though, I see radical Communists in the White House, I see Presidential friends that tried to blow up the Pentagonand kill cops, I see union goons beating up an elderly black man because they didn’t like his politics, I see a political party that not only supports infanticide,but in addition, supports underage illegal alien teen brothels and a movie director raping a 13 year old, and I begin to think, there sure are a lot of groups I’d hate to hire or hate to live by if I could help it
I do have a question though. Race baiters like Jesse Jackson and Obama’s own Reverend Wright preach a gospel of hatred for the white race. If so many of their flock feel that way, why are they always trying to move into all white neighborhoods?
You liberal clowns are despicable. Obama’s America will look like the Kenyan shanty town where his brother lives if he is not stopped from instituting his radical marxist agenda.
Rand Paul probably isn’t a racist — his reasons for opposing the Civil Rights act are likely intellectual, if misguided. But make no mistake: his position has a lot of appeal to people who are racists.
Update. A very good point from Atrios:
Government regulates – and, of course, provides the necessary conditions for the existence of – private business in all kinds of ways. So when people have a particular concern about, say, the Civil Rights Act, as opposed to, say, parking requirements, it’s reasonable to wonder why.
MikeJ
When do we get the trolls that point out that Democrats were opposed to civil rights back then? They’ll neglect to mention that those dixiecrats all moved to the party that welcomed them, the republicans, but I always look forward to the particularly stupid people race discussions bring out.
stuckinred
See Rosalita, I was right!
some other guy
He may not be racist in thought, but if he’s pushing to allow for discrimination based on race then he’s certainly racist in deed.
smedley
Intellectual, I don’t think so. By conflating freedom of speech with freedom of actions, he is being intellectually dishonest. Who could possibly believe that saying “I am going to kill you” is the same as actually committing murder?
Cat Lady
It’s not just Politico or Kentucky. The comments on boston.com are a cesspool too. Anonymity brings all the turds to the surface.
toujoursdan
First Arizona and now Kentucky. The anger over our demographic changes is turning into a tsunami. Scary and sad.
demo woman
What does MSM media say about this? Did any of the three morning network shows cover this? Is it head lined at the NYTimes? How about the Post?
Lost Left Coaster
Forgive me, DougJ, but I think that this is far from clear. You may be right, his opposition may be “intellectual” in nature, but from where does opposition to parts of the Civil Rights Act truly spring? From where does it usually spring? Anyway, he may not be an open white supremacist or even one consciously in his mind, but if he is so casual about enforcing civil rights in private business, then he is clearly blinded by white privilege and is indeed racist to a certain extent.
Of course, we can never read someone’s thoughts but only look at his or her actions. And the fact is, in the year 2010 Rand Paul is opposed to some critical parts of some of the most important legislation for racial equality this nation has ever seen.
Rosalita
@stuckinred:
regrettably, yes…. and still too early for scotch… ugh
Steve
Well yes. Even though one can construct a perfectly coherent libertarian argument for why the government shouldn’t be involved in policing private discrimination, no one in the business of politics can fail to notice that espousing that argument gets you a lot of supporters. (Or at least it once did… we’ll see about now.)
At the end of the day, winning is the imperative in politics. If there is a winning argument available, someone will adopt it, regardless of what sort of sketchy people are drawn to it. If there’s enough votes available from sketchy people then someone will make a play for it. It’s well-documented that George Wallace started out as a moderate on race (well, moderate by Alabama standards, let’s not go crazy) and only went hardcore segregationist after he realized it was the winning argument.
We’ve reached a point where overt racism is a political loser (I mean actual overt racism, not the liberal definition of overt racism which includes everything). As long as there are plenty of racists in the electorate, or at least people who can be persuaded by racial appeals, you’re going to see politicians go as close to that line as possible without crossing it. By the way, if you remember 1992 you know that pointing out the latent racism isn’t exactly a guaranteed winner either, which is to say that these tactics work.
Rosalita
@Cat Lady:
True, even in Blue CT, the local rag has some really despicable commenters
soonergrunt
Rand Paul is a willing accomplice to evil. It doesn’t matter that he claims or that you might even believe that it’s entirely intellectual and has no emotional component, but ALL of our acts in relation to others have a MORAL component. Anyone who condones or supports racist ideals and goals IS a racist.
smedley
One of the morans at that Politico site thinks Joe Scarborough is a lefty. How can a rational world deal with such people?
QDC
@Lost Left Coaster:
Yeah, I’d say that Paul’s non-racist credentials are looking pretty shaky. He apparently defended his giving the acceptance speech from a country club by noting that golf was no longer exclusive since “Tiger Woods has … brought golf to a lot of the cities.”
I have a simple test: Based on this person’s public statements about race, would you feel comfortable allowing him to interview potential employees for your company, knowing that the applicant pool is diverse?
Would anyone trust Rand Paul to do that?
Edit: Also, the libertarian objection to the CRA is not exactly rocket science. If you oppose the CRA as applied to private business, but can’t clearly and cleanly articulate the libertarian case, that is pretty suspect. It makes me think that you find the outcome of excluding people, rather than the principled argument, intuitively appealing.
Remember November
Hope Rand Paul gets hit by a car…and has to wheelie his chair UP the Capitol steps. Oh nm he’ll have his “colored” driver help him up the stairs to his seat.
Proof that insanity runs in the family and the lowest hanging fruit rots the fastest.
SpotWeld
I recently came across a blog post where someone was recounting his visit a Tea Party Rally in AZ. He’s pretty right wing, and in the first couple of sentences he made sure to snidely mention how there were no skin heads. (He did mention a poster about sending Obama back to Kenya.)
He continued on how normal he thought everyone one, and how Sheriff Joe Arpaio was there throwing in his support for various canidates who were speakers. Nothing was “fringe” you see.. it was all proud americans.
I had to ponder that, and on seeing this blog it clicked.
Those quotes above are a snapshow of what tea partiers think reality it. Let that sink it. It’s not a characture, it’s not an exageration for the sake of humor, it’s not an email that’s been clipped down to nonsense.
It’s a whole and complete nightmareish fever dream that about 20% of American can no longer descern from reality.
El Cid
On this:
Does not giving a flying shit about, say, black people’s civil rights now count as not racist?
‘I’m not a racist, I think blacks are fine, I just think whites ought to have the right to keep them out of businesses and private institutions of any kind, like, I dunno, privately-owned hospitals and privately-owned universities?’
So, if Harvard said ‘No more darkies or Jews,’ well, tough noogies?
Yeah, sounds like a real non-racist to me.
gocart mozart
@Rosalita:
Which one Rosalita? Not the WTBY Fascist Fishwrap?
LikeableInMyOwnWay
By ignoring them.
jibeaux
Even if I were to accept, arguendo, that Rand Paul is not racist and really would shun and criticize businesses that might choose to run a segregated business model in the absence of the Civil Rights Act, one of the things that makes me cra-ha-zy about glibertarians is that, as part of their general pattern of obliviousness and viewing the world in some sort of very pure vacuum, are unable to see that a huge part of the REASON why we have people who are so terribly enlightened about race is because of the effects of….
wait for it…
The Civil Rights Act.
It’s the same kind of thinking that lets ol’ Dan Mitchell (OMG, I am mind melding with Yglesias here as I just checked over there, but I had this thought independently) say that we don’t have to worry about poor kids starving because now they have too many calories, so we need to take away the food stamps and school lunches. I’m sorry, it just does not take a Rhodes scholar to see that the relationship there between kids getting all the calories they need and food stamps and school lunches. It does, apparently, take someone smarter than a wingnut thinktanker.
rickstersherpa
There is a reason why JC has started to call them the “Confederate Party” and started placing the Stars and Bars on the Elephant.
Napoleon
@Steve:
I read recently that he was actually endorced by the NAACP very early in his career when he was running for judge because he was felt to be a fair person and a moderate.
geg6
Completely OT, but this is outrageous:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/05/penn_ag_subpoenas_twitter_a_move_to_silence_critic.php?ref=fpblg
I mean, WTF?
Breezeblock
@Rosalita:
I try to stay clear of the comments section on nj.com because it is a cesspool of hatred, bigotry and ignorance.
It is amazing that anonymity brings out the darkest and ugliest impulses of so many people.
El Cid
I’m not a racist, I just think it’s wrong that domestic terrorists and outside agitators forced South Africa to let the darkies take over the government when it’s not what existing citizens wanted.
MikeJ
@QDC:
How about, “would you feel comfortable telling your in house counsel that this person is going to interview potential employees?”
rickstersherpa
Meanwhile, from Obsidian Wings, since the same topic of anxiety about idenity politics springs the definitioin of some folks as “freedom fighters” and other folks as “terrorrists” for the same act.
IOKIYNAM*
by Eric Martin
Poor Matt Yglesias is perplexed:
Apparently there was a terrorist attack on American soil earlier this week. What’s more, though fortunately nobody was killed in the attack, unlike in the much-hyped Underpants Bomber or Times Square plots, the perpetrator actually managed to build a working bomb [EM: and detonate it!]. But somehow this attack, despite its greater technical sophistication, hasn’t obtained nearly the same level of media attention. And I just can’t figure out why.
Duh, Matt, the answer was sitting right in front of you had you just read the excerpt that you, yourself, provided:
FBI officials in Jacksonville, Fla., say they have found the remnants of a pipe bomb used in a possible hate crime at a mosque during evening prayers.
Along with local police, the FBI launched an investigation after an explosion shook the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida at 9:35 p.m. Monday, when approximately 60 people were inside praying. No one was injured.
Since it was likely a non-Muslim who committed this attack, the bombing, by definition, cannot be “terrorism.” Newsweek’s erudite editors/senior writers told me so – around the time that same crew was putting the final touches on the magazine’s last throes.
It will be interesting to see how the anti-rights Right reacts to the fact that suspects in this bombing could be presented with Miranda warnings, obtain legal counsel, actually get to stand trial (in civilian courts – which is the same as releasing suspects in our backyards!) and, you know, not get tortured and stuff. If not interesting, at least predictable: see, above, re: the definition of “terrorism” and the implicit double standard.
*(It’s OK If You’re Not A Muslim!)
Alex S.
Remember that Ron Paul had a few unclear connections to the extreme right-wing, the campaign contributions from the founder of Stormfront – whose name I forgot – and a few interesting statements. Also keep in mind that the Paulites are the most active political people on the web. Then you get a very toxic mix of nazis, keyboard heroes, addicts and conspiracy theorists.
Actually, I once went on Stormfront.org to see what they think of Paul and I stumbled over a thread about the “next white hope” (against Obama). Ron Paul didn’t do too badly there, but his age was a problem. His son was already mentioned there.
El Cid
I’m not a religious chauvinist bigot, I just want to insult all Hindus and Muslims as part of my TeaTard re-love-ution:
Hey, I removed them from my website — what more do you anti-Christian fashists want?
YellowJournalism
@rickstersherpa: Oh, silly rickster. Don’t you know that those kinds of incidents are isolated and perpetrated by some crazy lunatic with no connections to any conservative movements and/or having no Christian background?(Christians are never terrorists, you know, and there would be no problem with a Christian church being built near the site of a former act of terrorism.)
Legalize
It’s going to be very satisfying getting Conway elected in Kentucky.
LikeableInMyOwnWay
Rand Paul is a crazy stupid lunatic. We knew that the GOP was going to go in that direction, and so here it goes.
The country is not going to follow. I think every Rand Paul that wins a primary is a huge opportunity for Dems.
Let the GOP eat its young and go all the way with the crazy. It works for us, the non crazies, in the long run. And probably even in the short run.
Butch
I’m always taken aback, and baffled, by the veins-bulging-out anger of some of the comments. There’s a local site called Pinecam (the community where I lived is named Pine), with a subsite called “The Study,” for political, um, “arguments.” I can’t go near it because it’s full to the brim of the kind of comments referenced here. I’ve never been clear in what way “you liberals” is supposed to be taken by a liberal as a devastating criticism.
gocart mozart
@geg6:
Move along. Net neutrality is the real fascism. Just ask Glenn Beck.
LikeableInMyOwnWay
How about unmoderating my posts, kids?
Punchy
Intellectual? WTF? Plan to clarify what this generic boilerplate statement is supposed to mean?
Seriously, I want to know how practicing racism in private buisness is caused by “intellectual”-ness.
All ears.
someguy
Scratch a conservative, find a Klansman.
demo woman
Unless it’s on network news, his statements did not happen.
Rosalita
@gocart mozart:
Danbury News-Times….
Mike Furlan
@Lost Left Coaster:
Larison
Strike one.
Paul
Strike two.
El Cid
It was damn unfair of the fedrul gubmit to impose its soshullist tyranny on the ability of the Confederacy to maintain its private economic system.
Kryptik
It still just amazes me just how stupidly idealistic pure Libertarians are, if you take them at face value. And yeah, taken at face value, Rand Paul doesn’t seem personally racist. But goddamned if he’s an enabler.
And as far as comments…good Christ, for people who hate the ‘MSM’, why are all the online comments sections (and too often the physical Letters to the Editors section too) filled to the brim with frothingly angry right-wing assholes?
El Cid
Soshullists are evil dogmatist fools who think you can bring democracy and democratic values into the economy.
Propertarians are principled, noble philosophers who may be just a bit too zealous in their pursuit of what we basically all admire.
And I am not a racist, I just think my local bar ought to be able to keep out the Irish, even though we know they all tend to be drunkards.
Zifnab
But let’s set aside racism and really look at the facts.
There were a lot of Jewish bankers in Germany circa 1932. And the economy did collapse. And who is to say what a country does within the bounds of national sovereignty. And I mean, let’s be real here. Poland was just asking to be invaded. Did you see how that country was dressed?
Oh, wait. We’re talking about the Civil Rights Act. Sorry, I Godwined. Here, let me bust out my copy of the Bell Curve for this one.
There’s always a bullshit excuse for evil, couched in some innocuous ideology. Wanking philosophical doesn’t cut you loose from the consequences of your legislative actions.
cleek
and if Paul does get elected, he’s going to drive the GOP faithful absolutely batty. if he’s really as principled as he tries to portray himself (regardless of the morality of those principles), he’s going to be a hell of an unreliable member of the Senate GOP caucus. if he’s even half as principled, he’ll be a constant thorn in the side of the whip, of the Republican leadership, etc., since he’ll be voting “no” on everything that doesn’t look like a dispensation from Ayn Rand. unless the GOP ends up with 61+, he’ll be constant aggravation. think Lieberman but ten times as stubborn.
the Senate is not the place for an ideological purist. it’s where dithering compromisers go to preen their feathers and collect favors from their donors, while waiting for death.
SpotWeld
From Time’s Swampland blog, Michael Scherer tosses out some older Rand quotes
gocart mozart
@Butch:
Its never “Butch or gm you’re point is wrong and here is why.” but always “You damn elitist limo riding, latte sipping liberals, breathing all the white man’s air. Why don’t you get a f*ckin job!”
Where is my limo goldarnit also.
MikeJ
@Punchy: If you believe property rights are more important than anything else, you can believe that business owners should have the right to manage their property as they see fit, even if those property owners are racists. That does not make the person that believes that racist. It makes them stupid.
Redshift
@SpotWeld:
Aided and abetted by media that constantly paint them as salt-of-the-earth “real Americans” and the cities where the vast majority of Americans live as some sort of fringe.
cleek
@SpotWeld:
the worst comments there are from Ron Paul.
gocart mozart
@Rosalita:
That paper is downright socialamist compared to the wtby rep-am. Fellow Nutmegger.
jrg
Even the liberal Camille Paglia admits that birthers are not racist!
Corner Stone
Man I want to fly Korean Air.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Time to visit the mod list?
Lisa K.
Then, in actual practice, what’s the difference?
Punchy
So Rand is also in favor of aboloshing OSHA and their rules, fire codes, mandatory fire exits/suppression systems, child-labor laws, etc?
Cuz otherwise, I smell a hypocritical racist.
ed
You say he probably isn’t a racist, but consider:
Politician.
Modern Republican.
Kentucky.
Randy gets no benefit of the doubt. If he starts loudly defending Gay Marriage, I’ll start cutting him some slack.
Zifnab
@cleek:
He’s not. Just one more bullshit artist. He’s in the mold of his father, so he’s an unusual flavor of bullshit. But he’ll talk his way around until he can vote however he wants without violating “ideology”. He’ll be a little more high class than “I’m not a Maverick” McCain. But he’ll be the Clarence Thomas vote – going lockstep with the GOP, just for a different stated set of reasons.
El Cid
Ayn Rand was so committed to the power of will and individual freedom that she was really pissed off at how so many people hated that awesome role model of personal freedom, the kidnapper of and dismemberer and murder of a little girl, William Hickman.
“Worse sins and crimes in their own lives” presumably meaning ‘lacking the exciting will to power that got the sicko simpleton and dreadfully awful novelist Ayn Rand off’.
See, she didn’t admire him for slaughtering a little girl for money and fun, she simply admired his Nietschean drive to power, which the evil soshullist cowards condemned him for.
And, hey, it’s not like Hickman attempted to oppress anyone around him by making businesses let darkies in.
Scott de B.
Yglesias was being sarcastic there.
MikeJ
@Punchy: Yeah, he probably is in favour of getting rid of OSHA and fire codes and all the rest.
He’s really that crazy.
Comrade Darkness
These people wouldn’t know what a nationalized bank looked like if it came up and bit their balls off. What a bunch of intentionally disingenuous idiots.
Nationalization is what should have happened. It didn’t, f*ckwads. With nationalization the greedy morons who ran the banks into the ground and then held the entire country hostage until they collected billion dollar bonuses for utter failure, would have had their asses tossed on the street like they should have. THAT would have been nationalization. And it would have made better *business* sense by helping remove moral hazard.
What we have is not sokalism it is kleptocracy, and it is much much worse.
added: sokalism is still a bad word, eh? sigh
Kryptik
@Punchy:
That’s honestly thing. I’m actually pretty sure he would oppose those. Or at the very least hold a lot of sympathy for glibertarians who do advocate the elimination of such things. That’s why I lean toward the idea that he, personally, isn’t racist. But as some have pointed out, his policies would be damned racist in practice, which would make him an enabler even if he wouldn’t accept that responsibility.
Again, the dogmatic slavish worship of the ‘Free Market’ scares me.
Zifnab
@ed:
Or pushing for cuts in military spending. Or defending Roe v Wade. Or voting to close Gitmo. Or calling for the US to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan and close a swath of military bases. Or lifting the government imposed liability caps on BP.
But I won’t hold my breath.
MrBenchley
The Rand Paul “win” is hilarious….
The teabaggers, who spent the past year screaming that health care reform is “fascism,” actually voted for a guy who travels around with his own cadre of armed stormtroopers and got significant support from the American Nazi party…
The teabaggers, who spent the past year screaming that they were common people who wanted an end to politics as usual and smaller government, picked the elite son of a professional politician who’s gotten wealthy on the public tit since the 1970s…
The teabaggers, who spent the past year screaming that they weren’t in any way, shape or form racist (despite all the evidence to the contrary),selected a guy who held his victory celebration at a whites-only country club and is spending today DEFENDING Jim Crow laws….
Rosalita
@gocart mozart:
yeah, I could see that
Face
@Punchy: I’d pay a lot of money to see the Dem candidate ask him this straight up.
“Mr. Rand, since you’re so principled at allowing private buisnesses to do what they want, I have to assume you’d work to abolish all child labor laws and fire codes and smoking bans and handicap parking and……Can you confirm this is your position?”
Dead silence, I’m guessing.
El Cid
@Kryptik: Look, I’m not really a racist — I just want the people who hate other races and who would be in the vast majority whites to be able to keep out of their public business establishments the darkies whom they hate.
gocart mozart
@Punchy:
ding ding
OriGuy
The comment threads on every newspaper’s website are full of racism and wingnuttery, even the San Francisco Chronicle’s. I avoid them except on local issues where someone may have particular knowledge. Even there, you’ll get random bits of hatred.
Oh, and Rand Paul wants to abolish the Americans with Disabilities Act. Kick a disabled vet to the curb today!
Sentient Puddle
Ech, I think a lot of you are totally oversimplifying it to say that this makes Rand Paul racist or whatever. That and I think it misses the more important point. That being that his ideas are totally 100% naive, and wholly unworkable. Private enterprise was simply not going to end the institution of racism in 1964 by simply realizing that it was good business to serve black people. This was a point where the government needed to step in, say “Hey, that shit’s uncool,” and lay down the ground rules.
YellowJournalism
@MikeJ:
I’m curious to see if Paul would defend a restaurant owner’s right to run their kitchen any way they see fit. “Refusal to wash hands is free speech!” Then I would love to see him go eat in one of them.
Dr. Squid
I wasn’t aware that 30’s was elderly.
How do those people remember how to breathe?
El Cid
@Sentient Puddle: I’m not making any mistake or oversimplifying anything. I’m clarifying that it matters actually zero if Paul ‘is’ or ‘isn’t’ a racist.
Who gives a flying shit what’s ‘in his heart’? What kind of weirdo philosophy on public governance is that
JCT
@Kryptik:
Because they can’t say much of this out loud anymore. Online forums and Letters to the Editor are their lifeline.
And the comment above re: Libertarians and their hopeless naivete is spot-on. For most people, the love of Ayn Rand is a youthful dalliance – discarded once we grow up and realize that the world isn’t some utopian vacuum. The reason that Paul weaseling is disingenuous is that we *know* he is aware that his “ideals” are utopian and not sustainable here in the real world. For goodness’ sake the guy is an MD, nothing is less utopian than providing medical care or understanding physiology — it’s nearer to chaos.
He is just simply another “I’ve got mine and the rest of you can fuck off” type. Pretending to be thoughtful. What a crock.
Kryptik
@El Cid:
Yeah, unfortunately, (again, taking him face value, which could and probably is a mistake) it seems like that belief is less out of personal racism, and more out of a stupidly idealistic belief that the ‘Market will take care of everything’ and those institutions that don’t deny service arbitrarily like that would do better and force out those that do. It’s more of that worship of the Free Market bullshit that just doesn’t actually work in practice.
If I saw more proof that he held personally racist views, I’ll change my mind, I admittedly have not followed him enough to pick his brain. But he just seems…remarkably consistent about being another Dogmatic Libertarian that just proves why the hell we actually need government regulation.
MikeJ
@YellowJournalism: You don’t understand. He’s crazy. He would say that yes, you should be able to run your kitchen as you see fit, and if people don’t like it, they won’t go to your restaurant.
This doesn’t mean he’s not racist *too*, merely that his position isn’t per se racist.
El Cid
@Kryptik: My sense is that he’s full of shit, that he isn’t a naive ‘idealist’, and it’s no coincidence that his view of ‘freedom’ allows for the return of white supremacy through non-governmental means.
Why should I care whether or not in his heart he’s ‘really’ a racist or not? I don’t give a shit about his heart or his soul. Why should I? Why would I? Since when did someone’s heart or soul affect the likely outcomes of their policies?
Likewise, why would I give the slightest shit if someone really, really thought in their heart and soul that blowing the shit out of Iraq and killing hundreds of thousands and turning it from a brutal tyranny to a nightmare warlord chaos hell would actually liberate and free them and make them all happy and give them all ponies?
Why should I ever care whether or not people advocating for something harmful and evil as far as public policy really are or aren’t evil in their heart?
Why would anyone ever view this as some relevant standard? Since when did democracy come to be about some leader’s ‘soul’ and ‘heart’?
Nylund
Is there some way one could build a “bot” that picks up on buzzwords in comments and then links it to a fact-checking site? For example, that line about an “elderly black man” and “union” thugs would link the real story about a non-elderly man who first said his elbow got hurt, then said it was his face, then had the injury moved to his back from the supposed beating by the union thug (who, unlike the tea party “victim” actually did end up in the hospital with broken bones).
ChockFullO'Nuts
Mod queue is over a half hour old.
cleek
@Punchy:
right.
logically, he should oppose:
the minimum wage, disability insurance, OSHA, and occupational safety standards in general.
they mine coal in KY, don’t they ?
get him to apply his libertarianism to health and safety rules in a state where coal miners regularly die due to companies which fail to meet safety standards.
if i was his opponent, i’d be ordering the champagne already.
Comrade Dread
Yes, the intellectual argument involves the right of freedom of association. Having the government force people to associate with others they don’t particularly like strikes some libertarians the wrong way.
I can see their point in some cases, but I think the social good and resulting integration and cohesion of various elements of society makes the regulations worth having.
Aside from which, there are exceptions in some obvious cases that make sense (you know, letting a Church require that it’s officers and pastor/priest actually be a member of their religion, etc.)
Actually, most libertarians do oppose the minimum wage.
MrBenchley
@soonergrunt: There’s no difference between Lester Maddox and Rand Paul in fact; the only difference is that the spawn of racist Ron Paul can babble empty sophistry to try to couch his bigotry in philosophical-sounding mumbo-jumbo. But it’s just noise that doesn’t really mask anything except for those averting their gaze.
And so the “future of the Republican party” turns out to be the “Dixiecrats of 1948″….
Butch
@gocart mozart: I have your limo. I was out of chardonnay and brie and needed to borrow it.
El Cid
Some of the South’s segregationist politicians’ best allies were people whose supposed motivation to let them maintain Jim Crow weren’t racism so much as they thought it was too much government meddling to force a region to change policies in a way that the dominant culture didn’t want.
But they weren’t racist. And we need to think about that a lot, because it matters.
FormerSwingVoter
@JCT:
Have you guys ever talked with a libertarian before? They actually believe the bullshit they say. Libertarians really honestly believe that if the government weren’t around, no bad things would happen ever (restaurants with segregated lunch counters would close – no one would eat there).
Libertarianism is the honest-to-god belief that when theory and reality don’t match, it is reality that’s wrong.
cleek
@Comrade Dread:
right. which is why you don’t see a lot of libertarians getting elected.
if his opponent has any brains at all, this race should be over after the first debate.
ErikaF
Rand’s libertarian position is business sense drawn past any reality. It’s a child’s view of the world – of course people and businesses will self correct and do the right thing. After all, the magic market forces them to! Libertarians are the most blindly optimistic and unrealistic of political thinkers – they simply don’t acknowledge the fact that folks can be assholes and you have to make sure their assholyness doesn’t affect your or others. Or that they themselves are the assholes that the rest of the world must be protected from.
Reading the comments on the Houston Chronicle, it seems to me that there’s a steady group of TP/GOP/morons that constantly post. You can count on them chiming in on every political story – whether they read the story or not. And they reinforce each other so that the spiral keeps going down. I am beginning to wonder if the commenters on many of the blogs have been feeding each other for so long that they feel they must keep posting their crap and keep their commenter image going. Since they start out at the bottom, they can’t climb back to a reasonable level. They’ve never learned that you don’t start out at the bottom, you make sure that your opponent ends up there first.
Sorry for the ramble, but it’s kinda nice to be able to talk reasonably on a political blog without having to wear high water boots and total body armor.
jibeaux
@cleek:
I always find it a tough call, the internal debate of “awesome, cakewalk, the other guy is completely, objectively, wacko” vs. “assuming that voters are going to reject objectively bad choices is a sucker’s bet.” I’m going to give it a little more time.
The weird thing to me is, and I know that I’m a pretty analytical person and people en masse are not so much, but that this really isn’t the biggest reason to vote against him. I don’t think we’ll be either re-voting on the Civil Rights Act or traveling back in time to 1964 any time soon. But right now it sure seems like it will have the biggest emotional impact as far as reasons to vote against him.
Karmakin
The Pauls particular brand of vodka in these cases, I think is the ability to maintain the strict pecking order in society. It’s bullying, more or less. So if businesses want to keep that pecking order, they should be allowed to.
It’s not JUST racist. It’s a demand for ye old WASMP to be able to use existing power to maintain social dominance. It’s beyond racist.
Now, there could be ways to make the market work in such a situation. If those who were discriminated against could legally block the door, for example and prevent customers coming in, or other sort of direct action to ruin their business. That’s the free market at work. But no, we have laws to prevent this sort of thing from happening. So no, it’s not a free market. And they don’t want a free market.
They want it situated in such away that the gates are shut, the ladders pulled up and the already powerful can maintain their power.
liberty60
@Comrade Dread:
Like many, I can’t say that Paul’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act on narrow, legal grounds is a sly cover for a hidden racism.
But it points out something striking for me- when you cling to narrow legalisms, that in action allow a monstrous evil, that alone disqualifies him from holding office.
Its like a lawyer using a narrow technicality to allow a serial child rapist go free; the effects of the “principle” are so terrible, that it undermines the high moral ground of standing on “principle”.
We expect elected officials to possess a degree of wisdom that can differentiate between grades of harm, and understand proportion and balance between competing goods and their costs- say, the public good of drunk driving checkpoints versus the harm of an overly powerful police force;
And this is the real danger of the glibertarians- behind the proud declarations of principle lurks the danger that abstract legal provisions are triumphant, regardless of their practical outcomes.
JCT
@FormerSwingVoter:
Yes, unfortunately – I have dealt with these types. And I agree with you here:
It’s just that I have a very hard time believing that an educated person can hew to this 100%. He’s a wealthy, privileged guy. I suppose it’s very easy for him to make these types of arguments given his life experiences, such that they are.
But in the end, they serve *his* interests and thus it is damn hard for me to believe that they are not infused with secondary gain, no matter how ardently he argues his points. Besides, I’m sure it would be very easy to find instances where he doesn’t toe the Libertarian “line” (probably when it gets in his way) — and if you are going to be a chinese menu Libertarian, the whole approach falls apart and exposes you to charges like racism. This is what he is about to run into.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
jibeaux
Our local paper once reported on a libertarian candidate who’d been glad-handing at the state fair. They asked, and naturally he answered, that he did not actually support tax dollars going towards the state fair.
It’s just like reason #467 to not like libertarians: complete joylessness.
artem1s
@QDC:
Wow, that is a mighty fine test.
Zifnab
@Karmakin:
I think you’re looking for “feudalism”. The guy with the gold makes the rules. So if I own a business, and I don’t want to sell my goods to you, I am the final authority. I have the property and you don’t. So suck it.
That’s all libertarianism has ever boiled down to. It’s Democratic plutocracy. Everyone gets a vote the size of his pocket book. Everyone squats over his own little kingdom. And the government’s only job is to keep the peasants from breaking down the castle door, to keep the nobles from slitting each others’ throats in the night, and to clean up the mess that the ruling class leaves behind.
It’s not racism. It’s classism. And you can see it in everything from abolishing universal education to converting to the Gold Standard. Consolidate power under the monied elite. Dominance through declared ownership.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Rand Paul once employed Chris “Hang ‘Em” Hightower as his spokesman.
For seriously? Let’s try a little exercise:
“I think he abhors torture. His support for torturing prisoners is likely intellectual, if misguided.”
Or:
“I don’t think he’s a sexist. His opposition to Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. CT is likely intellectual, if misguided.”
No wait, I’ve got another:
“I don’t think he’s a homophobe. His opposition to equal rights for GLBs is likely intellectual, if misguided.”
Huh. Sticking “intellectual” (and “misguided”) in there doesn’t really work for me. What am I missing?
Lawnguylander
There probably aren’t any liberals at all who would deny that the world is full of racists. But there are a lot who are still willing to grant someone like Rand Paul an intellectual fig leaf when his policy positions are the stuff of a racist’s wet dream. “He’s just intellectually naive.” Fuck that. What is this? Has the racists’ lament that the real racists are the ones who decry racism cowed people into giving them the benefit of the doubt? Please, make it stop.
JGabriel
What the fuck? I just went to HuffPo, and got this:
Jeepers.
Do we get special badges for burning GOPer Senators in effigy?
.
JCT
@JGabriel:
Cool, my freshman year at Cal Reagan was elected and we burned him in effigy at the corner of College and Durant. I think that is worth 2 merit badges.
Huffpo can be very annoying.
Corner Stone
Anybody else see the fluffing Jay Newton-Small gave DeMint?
Here
Lining up a primary against an incumbent D is heresy but DeMint sucking funds from the GOP leadership, and then spending it on purity candidates is reclaiming the brand.
Zifnab
@Lawnguylander:
For some reason, we have the desire to make a distinction between the guy who says, “I encourage beating up that kid who sits in the back of the class”
and the guy who says, “I don’t encourage anything, but they are your fists. You can do whatever you want with them.”
someguy
@Lisa K.:
There’s no difference. He’s objectively a racist bigot.
I think that’s a teabagger-approved syllogism, is it not?
Zifnab
@Corner Stone: Whatever. If the media wants to fluff both sides of the GOP civil war while DeMint and McConnell strangle each other in the middle of mid-term elections season, more power to them.
At least when you get reams of “Democrats Divided!” stories, it encourages the Democrats to stick together. “Everything is fine! Plans are proceeding accordingly!” stories tend to backstop a bad system. And I’ve got no problem with inner turmoil in the GOP to fester and boil.
stuckinred
@JCT: badges? we don need no stinkin badges
scav
Could be interesting if someone would point out that the whole hard-line absolutist defense of companies should be able to do whatever they damn well please includes the right to say Happy Holidays! instead of Merry Christmas.
Bill E Pilgrim
This is hilarious.
They don’t feel pity, remorse, or fear, and they will never, ever stop.
The Salahis seem to have escalated to the kamikaze Scotsman school of gate crashing.
Cain
What is your rational against the Americans with Disability Act? I mean really? Too fucking bad if you broke your leg the day before and there is a fire at work but there is no way to get out because there is only stairs? Or you’re confined in a wheel chair and can’t get out? Too fucking bad? WTF? That’s some crazy shit.
Sadly most people don’t think of disability until we ourselves have it and then realize it is quite a different world. I hope he breaks a leg and then ask him if he still agrees that the ADA is a bad thing.
If you’re against all regulations, you’re really against capitalism. No more standard screw sizes, wall sizes and all that shit. There is a reason why we have government regulation it is so we have a solid platform to do business. THis libertarian crap is so much bullshit.
cain
Comrade Dread
@liberty60:
Not only that, but again, I think the value of the CRA beyond trying to address and remedy the historic racism that many citizens faced in their everyday lives, is that it tries to promote a more cohesive society.
Are there absurd applications of the law? Probably. But overall, I think the United States is a much more stable and orderly society than it used to be because the government requires businesses to treat all customers and prospective employees from various races and creeds equally.
Blurring those divisions and making people see themselves and each other as citizens is good for society and the resultant impact on individual’s freedom is negligible.
bemused
Libertarians are even more of a mixed bag than liberals. Libertarian beliefs gallop all over the place depending on which libertarian you talk to. Rand Paul really tried hard not to answer or couldn’t answer Rachel on the lunch counter scenario. Libertarians love their theoretic ideologies but can’t be bothered with thinking through how their agendas would actually play out in the real world. To Libertarians like Rand, that’s just minutiae, meh to Rachel & others who reasonably want him to expand & clarify on his viewpoints. Dammit, how dare anyone rain on my ideological parade with questions on processes & end results.
bemused
@bemused:
Republicans also, too.
scav
oooorrr, maybe we could get them on camera defending the Chinese lead toys and toxic drywall manufacturers against the evil and oppressive govt. regulators. And isn’t all that prissy regulation of visas and work-permits and fences along the border getting in the way of Free-Market sanctioned labor mobility?
Karmakin
@Zifnab: Yeah. Feudalism. That’s the word.
Actually, if you want to know what the ultra-conservative/glibertarian goal is..
The old idea of the Company town
As someone who lives in a place that was for a while a company town, This is what they want. They want a return to what essentially is debt slavery.
suzanne
I could accept the argument that the DB’s beliefs are “intellectual”, if I ever ONCE saw him or any of the other glibertarian douches marching in a Pride parade, or paying poor students’ tuition so they could go to private school, or fighting against racism/sexism/classism/homophobia/ableism in *any* way. I can accept that they want laws and morality to be separate, IF THEY EVER TALKED ABOUT MORALITY.
But since I’ve never seen a libertarian have the slightest interest in anyone apart from themselves or their rich white dude friends, I continue to think they’re full of bullshit.
So I fall in the “Rand Paul is a racist motherfucker” camp.
Martin
I can’t bring myself to read Reason with any regularity, but what is the libertarian line toward corporations? Those exist at the will of the government and are granted (theoretically) at the prejudice of the government. Do libertarians oppose big government’s corporate system and rules?
Lawnguylander
@Zifnab:
Yeah, it’s like that but I don’t see anyone who isn’t himself an asshole giving the second asshole in your analogy the benefit of the doubt. But plenty of non-assholes are willing to avoid the obvious conclusions about the likes of Rand Paul and I don’t understand why.
Comrade Luke
Because I have nowhere else to put it:
Nun Excommunicated For Allowing Abortion
I’m sure Sullivan supports this courageous decision by the Catholic church.
Cat Lady
@Rosalita:
Ha! I knew it. I’ve been telling people for years that the biggest redneck I’ve ever met was at a gas station in Danbury, and I’ve been through some pretty remote places. The banjo boy in Deliverance was MENSA compared to that sorry soul.
Martin
FWIW, I don’t think Paul is a racist, I think he just doesn’t care if he lives in a country full of racists and doesn’t mind enabling them to be racists. It’s not a big improvement in character, but I think it’s more accurate.
Sloegin
Part and parcel of the glibertarian schools of thought. Business should be able to do whatever the fuck they want. Free men making rational transactions. What could possibly be wrong with that?
It’s pure undistilled Randian pink elephants and fluffy rainbows. Political philosophy completely disconnected from what the rest of us call daily reality. Want to completely derail a libertarian party gathering? Start arguing about who owns the sidewalks.
Myself, I was a small town conservative, who read Atlas Shrugged in college… and was enthralled with it for a few months. Then got my first job in the big city, and daily had to hop over the sleeping homeless on the way to work.
I grew up to everyday reality fairly quickly after that.
Bill E Pilgrim
Huh?
Meaning that racists are racists for only emotional reasons? Or something?
I wonder if you were trying to say that his objection had to do with being anti-government rather than anti-African American or etc.
Which is a whole other debate. However claiming that someone isn’t racist because his views about race and discrimination come from the intellect seems fairly absurd.
Sentient Puddle
@El Cid: OK, but you’re still letting the rhetoric overshadow the more important point. Argue that the shit doesn’t work. If you skip ahead to “this ends up being racist even if he says he’s not,” then it devolves into “Democrats call Rand Paul racist,” and you end up with something like Godwin.
CMcC
We should never forget that today’s Republican Party, based on the so-called “southern strategy,” grows out of the fact that Barry Goldwater (the Repub nominee in 1964) and Ronald Reagan (his surrogate and spokesman) both opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Uloborus
I personally think the acid test here is simple: Would he find it perfectly acceptable for a black-owned business of any size or level of power to exclude whites? Personally, I think he’d be fine with it.
Now, everyone’s immediately going to go ‘But that ignores reality!’ Yes, it does. He’s a LIBERTARIAN. Social inequities simply do not exist in his mind. They’re a lie made up by liberals. Everyone is exactly as successful as they deserve to be. This is a way, way, way more important reason to oppose him than mere racism. And notice how it makes him, a rich person, better than the rest of us?
In the Libertarian mind rules like this are absolutely unnecessary. If the people as a whole didn’t like them, they’d exercise their personal power all together, and the group as a whole would ensure that it doesn’t happen. For some reason they don’t get that this has happened, and it’s a process called ‘government’.
kommrade reproductive vigor
God forbid anyone ask him to reconcile this:
With those endorsements from Concerned Women of America and James Dobson.
Martin
@Comrade Luke: Sully wrote about it a few days ago and noted how quickly the church is willing to cut a nun loose for saving the mothers life, but how hard the church will work to keep pedophiles in the ranks.
Sully said that he was conflicted on the abortion issue after his run of abortion stories.
Silver
Better yet, ask Rand Paul is anyone should be able to throw out the prefix “Dr.” in front of their name and start practicing as an ophthalmologist, without any standards for training or competency.
After all, the market will sort out the bad eye docs, right? And if a few people go blind, well, they should have done their homework.
BenA
I just think for the most part Libertarians are immature people. They really just never make the next step in development…
No one who has any knowledge of superfund sites or has a relative who developed cancer because of what some small manufactuer was dumping in their backyard before we actually had decent enivromental protection laws can honestly take a Libertarian seriously.
Fergus Wooster
Keep in mind, the private property arguments deployed against the Civil Rights Act are often a dog whistle for the real agenda. It’s not suitable in polite society to deploy the same federalist arguments against the anti-lynching provisions of the CRA.
Remember, the only reason there were criminal prosecutions against the Mississippi Burning perps was that the CRA made it possible to try them for deprivation of civil rights, as the state would never have indicted or convicted for murder.
It’s as much about federal meddlin’ in states’ right to beat and murder their minorities as meddlin’ with businesses allowing minorities to enter, IMHO.
Lawnguylander
@Sentient Puddle:
It’s not like Godwining at all to point out that a racist is a racist. Very few people are like Hitler and very many people are racists. Like Rand Paul.
Fergus Wooster
I’d love to hear Rand Paul explain that he deplores racism, and of course condemns murder, but that anti-lynching laws are federal overstepping.
Please please, somebody ask him.
Zifnab
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
Unless those citizens are Terrorists(tm)* in which case all bets are off.
* The term terrorist need not be applied to anyone actually convicted of terrorism. Terrorism definitions may change state to state, county to county, or cable news network to cable news network. The term “terrorist” is patented by the Grand Old Party and is prohibited from use by competitors. Please consult your local right wing radio host before determining what constitutes a “terrorist” in your area.
LD50
@cleek:
I disagree. I think if he gets elected, he’ll vote strict GOP party line 98% of the time.
RS
Here’s the problem with this sort of position-
Paul’s position seems to be-
government discrimination = bad; private discrimination = ok
(or more precisely I guess, the government can decide for itself that it will not discriminate, but cannot make the decision for private businesses).
I just don’t see any way that this can be a tenable position. Any attempt to enforce the right to discriminate becomes a government action, which Paul agrees cannot be discriminatory. So you could ban blacks from your restaurant, but you couldn’t call the cops to make them leave, you couldn’t succeed in any sort of claim against them in a court (because a decision in your favor would amount to government action in a discriminatory manner, which everyone agrees it can’t do), and you couldn’t beat them up because then they’d sue you and you wouldn’t be able to use your right to discriminate as a defense.
Just doesn’t make sense.
Unless he thinks the government should enforce a private individual’s right to discriminate, which would mean, yea, racist.
sneezy
@bemused:
“Libertarians love their theoretic ideologies but can’t be bothered with thinking through how their agendas would actually play out in the real world.”
I don’t believe for one minute that Paul hasn’t thought this through. I think he supports the idea of business owners being allowed to discriminate based on race because he thinks that discriminating based on race is just fine. And I further think that when he says that he personally finds racism abhorrent, he’s lying through his teeth.
Rosalita
@Cat Lady:
LOLZ! You know, I grew up here but for a period of about abou 20 years lived in other parts of the country. I’ve seen the biggest buffoons here since I’ve come back home.
kay
@Uloborus:
That’s not the acid test. This is: would he find it perfectly acceptable for the state to enforce the ban on white people entering that business? Can’t have a right without an enforcement mechanism. What if a white person defies the ban, and enters? Who does Rand Paul call? The police.
And police power is reserved for the State.
He’s just crossed his own line, into institutionalized racism.
Now the state’s in there, and not in an inconsequential way. State-sanctioned and enforced racial prejudice.
Sentient Puddle
@Lawnguylander: I said something like Godwin. Not that it is Godwin. That nuance shouldn’t be that hard to pick up on.
maus
@RS: Both Pauls’ positions are also that racism is “collectivist” and nobody in America is “collectivist” but dem commies. All others are rugged individualists. I mean, it’s impossible to think that someone might be fired or not hired because they’re black! The free market is colorblind! Why? Because I say so! And if, by magical error someone owns a and operates a racist business, it is both their freedom to do so, and they may see the error of their ways through the magical hand of the magical free market. Refusing to let someone operate a racist business is SLAVERY.
unghhhhhhh
@LD50: I don’t see any sign of this “independent streak” either. He’s far more conventional and predictable than his father.
maus
@kay:
And his response to that would be, as expected, “states’ rights!”
@Uloborus: Of course he’d be fine with that. White privilege doesn’t fit in very cleanly to the libertarian “everyone is equal because we deem it so, not because of context” narrative.
stonetools
African-American here.
I don’t know if Ron Paul is racist in his heart, and I don’t care. For me , it’s enough to point out that he is buttf**k stupid, and shouldn’t be anywhere near a policy-making position in the US government.
My preferred line of attack? First question: ” Do you believe in coal mining safety regulation, Or do you believe that private mine owners should run their business as they see fit, regardless of worker safety?” The libertarian answer to this would give many a white blue collar worker pause, even if they agree with RP’s analysis of the CRA.
Next, we move on to whether he supports the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Rural Electrification Program, or the Interstate Highway Administration.
Once he’s on the ropes, you show him your hay-maker: ” Do you believe the Social Security Act should be repealed?” ( All libertarians do).
He’ll be finished, without even debating the race issue. Let’s destroy the guy in the most efficient way possible. Come on, Democrats, let’s be smart about this.
Martin
@Uloborus: I don’t think he is oblivious to social inequities. He suggested that if a business denied a certain class of customer that he and others like him would refuse to use the business and the market would sort the whole thing out.
That sounds great in theory, but it didn’t stop entire communities from looking the other way when blacks were lynched in the south. Even for things that were clearly illegal it was impossible to get communities to oppose the illegal act. Getting them to boycott a whites-only business is laughable. The only reason actions like that work now is because the CRA pushed things so far along that it’s sufficiently socially unacceptable to do and because there’s legislation to back you up if you complain.
The free market that would deny classes of the citizenry would have the power under the same lack of laws to punish anyone that went against them. Libertarians either don’t get that or don’t care.
Corner Stone
@Zifnab: Yes, I agree there is a SSDD feel to it all. And a little “meh”.
But I found it interesting that the man who declared “Obama’s Waterloo” is essentially being praised, and no mention of really anything critical in there.
Gregory
@JCT:
Or dismissed immediately because a world that depends on a perpetual motion machine to function is more of a fantasy than one, in Kung Fu Monkey’s immortal phrase, that involves orcs.
Comrade Dread
@Silver:
The hard core (anarcho-capitalist) libertarian response would be that voluntary licensing organizations (guilds) would rise up with their own requirements for membership, and this would give people assurances that the physician in question met these requirements.
Because it’s not hard to fake a certificate, or create a licensing organization that wasn’t worth sh**.
There’s a lot of nice theory, but rarely have the practical applications been thought out. There seems to be this pervasive idealism amongst the hard core libertarians that while they acknowledge corruption, lying, and short term stupid thinking exists in humanity, they seem to think that handing everyone ultimate freedom will cause people to act perfectly rationally.
It’s one of the reasons why I’ve moved more toward a left-libertarian position. People trend toward evil and they need laws to restrain their darker impulses.
LD50
Yup. He’ll be so jazzed at be a real-life Senator and everything, that he’ll content himself with the fact that GOP doctrine agrees with 75% of his libertarian ideology, and just conveniently ignore the rest. Besides, if he ever tries to press those issues where Ayn Rand and the GOP part ways, the party will remind him that he’ll lose all his committee chairs and get an office next to the basement furnace. Within 2 days he’ll be indistinguishable from Tom Coburn.
Stooleo
I love this post by John Scalzi, who sums up libertarians thusly.
Uloborus
@kay:
Hmmm? Oh, you’ve just caught him out, absolutely. But you’ve caught him out on Libertarianism, not racism! You are absolutely correct that there are glaring inconsistencies, even hypocricies, in his definition of what is an acceptable difference between government and private actions. The only question is what level those hypocricies occur on. He might feel that it isn’t acceptable for the police to enforce this request, and perfectly acceptable for the company to hire thugs to beat up or kill anyone who breaks the rule.
Seriously, Libertarianism makes racism look downright pleasant. Except they have this weird candy coating to it. They love the Robber Baron era, and things like company towns and 16 hour work days and child labor were somehow going to be fixed *any minute now* until the government messed things up by fixing them.
MattR
@maus:
I was recently wondering what would have happened to our country if we had stuck to the conservative vision of the federal government with respect to states’ rights. My guess is that we would not be the “leader of the free world”
Lawnguylander
@Sentient Puddle:
And I’m saying it’s not even close to being like pulling a Godwin. Being a racist is commonplace but being Hitler isn’t. If you mean that accusing someone of being a racist has about the same effect on a debate as calling him Hitler (actually in the case of someone like Breitbart, worse) then I agree with you.
Sentient Puddle
@Comrade Dread: I’d say that there’s a practical example that, while not fitting exactly the example you gave, demonstrates that the philosophy doesn’t work: the financial ratings agencies.
Corner Stone
Has anyone heard anything about Jesse Jackson Sr suffering a stroke lately? Just saw a clip of him on MSNBC and he did not seem like I remember him.
Of course, he is dang near 70 now so no longer the “upstart” of 10 years ago he once was.
kay
@maus:
I don’t live in Kentucky, but this is a fatal flaw, as far as I’m concerned. He has never considered, not once, what happens after his idea is adopted. Unlike the people who actually had to grapple with it.
He abhors “institutionalized racism” but I got news for him, without the government reaching private actors we had institutionalized racism. It was the whole point. The federal government can easily write an order to outlaw discrimination, and they can enforce it, as to the state. That was 10% of the battle. The easy part.
They ran up against problems because they were enforcing racism. I wasn’t there, but I sure as shit saw pictures of that exact thing happening. We all did, except the members of the Paul family, I guess.
His own dogma doesn’t even make sense. He’s spouting these words and he has never given the slightest thought to what they mean. No historical context, no real-world application, he didn’t even follow this thought out ten feet, to the next question, and he’s an adult. A sixth grader would ask the next question. Not Rand Paul.
moja31
intellectual reasons for opposing the civil rights act? seriously?
it’s good to know it’s not really bigotry if you can find a way to dress it up as intellectualism. sorry, but in my book supporting other people’s right to discriminate, is just as good as actively discriminating yourself. but i forgot that we live in a world where it’s far more outrageous to point out someone’s bigotry, than for that person to be a bigot in the first place.
Uloborus
@Martin:
I dunno. It sounds to me like you just said that he thinks social inequities are an illusion, that nobody’s actually held back by their circumstances. That he is, in fact, blind to that possibility and believes that things like community lynchings simply wouldn’t happen if the government got out of the way.
Jay C
Shorter Rand Paul:
“I’m not a racist; I hate racism: but having any State agency actually DO anything against racism violates my “libertarian” principles, so there!”
What.
A.
Crock.
Of.
Reeking.
Shit.
Martin
@kay: Since he’s pro gun rights, I think we know what his enforcement mechanism would be. He’d declare the black/jew/gay/liberal to be a trespasser and would be within his rights to open fire. The state still respects trespassing, correct?
bloodstar
First things first, Rand Paul is less Libertarian and more a Constitutionalist. So lumping him in with libertarians is a bit of a stretch I think.
Second thing, You’re all so busy slamming down libertarianism for being unrealistic and idealistic, but I would argue with you that *any* form of governing philosophy would be just as unrealistic and idealistic when taken to it’s purest form.
Look, I’m a libertarian, and I know there are some serious issues with real world application of libertarianism. The biggest thing that libertarians miss is that corporations (and in particular for profit ones) do NOT have your best interest in mind. Sure, some of the smarter ones will know that keeping their employees happy will attract smarter and better ones, but most of the time the drive for more profit means they’ll do whatever they can to screw over everyone, cut corners, and otherwise endanger anyone.
As a libertarian, I oppose drug testing by employers or any governing of activity by employers during time that I’m not at work. In other words, if it doesn’t affect work or performance why would they care? Same thing with credit checks as a condition of employment. I mean, what’s next, DNA testing by corporations as a condition of employment?
Yeah, I’m libertarian but the government has the role of playing referee and keeping corporations in check. which is ironic, but at least in theory I can vote governments out, you really can’t vote corporations out.
There are a ton of flavors of libertarianism, just as there are a ton of flavors of liberalism, and I’m willing to bet there are a lot of flavors of conservatism. if you start taking the extreme positions held by one faction of a party and claiming they’re with that group follows it or scold them for not kicking those people out then you’re going to have a very small group that will happily agree with you in your echo chamber.
Michael
@Uloborus:
My favorite part was about how white Southern Christians were going to get around to allowing their black neighbors to eventually participate in the economic and political processes of their own communities at some point, and all that building goodwill got crushed by tyrannical Federal jackboots which crammed all this equality onto an innocent populace. Just like they were going to get around to eventually ending slavery, they were then going to eventually end segregation.
Bonus points go to anybody who can identify for me the courageous, morally upright, virtuous Southern Christian Conservative in this lunch counter picture.
http://images.wisconsinhistory.org/700099990281/9999004618-l.jpg
Uloborus
@moja31:
No, no. We’re saying that he’s bigoted against poor people and people without political or social power. He doesn’t actually care what color their skin is. A lot of his policies screw over whites almost as hard as blacks, and he’d shake a black man’s hand who held whites in economic bondage and call him ‘brother’.
Yes, in the real world blacks aren’t in a position to do that and most of his policies hurt them worse than whites. He doesn’t live in the real world.
EDIT: Minor correction. We don’t know he’s not a racist by this argument. We’re just perfectly willing to accept he’s a completely different kind of dangerous asshole.
Drive By Wisdom
You have obviously never talked to a libertarian. Libertarians do not believe in the magical unicorns that you do. They understand that the world is not perfect, and they believe that People, not government, are the agent of change.
You all keep talking about lunch counters. Let me teach you some history. The Civil Rights Act did not bring equality to the lunch counter. Some very brave folks did that. The world changed because of them, not because of your namby-pamby government-regulation-is-the-solution-to-all-my-problems fantasies.
It is not a kind of courage you will ever understand, but at least you should try not to be so disengenous about it.
Sentient Puddle
@Lawnguylander:
That’s more what I’m getting at. Letting the debate fall into whether or not Democrats are right in saying that Rand Paul is racist is a trap.
There’s a lot more to his philosophy than racism, a lot more to dig into, and a lot more to criticize him on than just focusing on the racial aspects. It seems stupid to me to ignore all these things to instead focus on the thing that makes you look like a sleazebag for arguing in the first place.
Lurking Canadian
@kay: I should preface by saying that I do NOT agree with Paul, but that doesn’t end the argument.
If you ask one of these people, eventually they will tell you that they do not recognize a difference between a table in a restaurant and a table in somebody’s dining room. Both are “private property”.
If I show up uninvited for dinner at your house, you can call the cops to drag me out. It doesn’t matter if the reason you want me gone is my skin colour, or the fact that I ran over your dog with my car, or the fact that you’ve never seen me before. The cops are not commenting on your decision, they are just enforcing your property rights. Paul would say it is exactly the same for a restaurant. It’s a delusion, but typically an internally consistent one.
To me, the REAL acid test is that people like Paul don’t think there should be ANY government services. All his blather about “public institutions shouldn’t discriminate” is bullshit, since he doesn’t think there should be any in the first place.
It literally becomes possible, under strict libertarian rules, to commit “blameless” genocide. Just have all the grocers in town stop selling food to the wrong people. Then have all the private toll roads out of town refuse access to the wrong people, so they have nowhere else to go. Then wait. Hey, nobody killed anybody! They were just exercising their property rights! Why do you hate freedom?
stuckinred
@Drive By Wisdom: How do you know what someone else understands?
BC
@Sentient Puddle: Rand Paul isn’t thinking through the ramifications of what he proposes (which is okay, since the chances of his fantasy coming true is slim and none). Regulations level the playing field for everyone in the same business so that no one is at a competitive disadvantage for providing services to everyone. Say there wasn’t the Americans with Disabilities Act – then no business could provide access because that would put them at a competitive disadvantage. Sane business people understand this and agree to it.
Zifnab
@Corner Stone: DeMint will pay a political price for his hubris. It just won’t be through the Washington Beltway media.
You’ll hear “Obama’s Waterloo” as the rallying cry at DKos fund raisers and on Daily Show and tossed up as a joke in YouTube videos. Frankly, that’s where it’ll matter more.
maus
@Drive By Wisdom:
A series of “very brave folks” would continue being murdered if it were not for government enforcement of the civil rights act. Thank you for that “history”, I obviously had no idea that civil rights activists existed before they had any protections, and can’t wait to be instructed on how the Civil Rights Act only makes racism worse because…
kay
@Martin:
Yeah, except then he’d have to go to a court, and we’re right back to “state sanctioned racism”. We all decided, after much agonizing wringing of hands and 200 years and a Civil War that we wouldn’t be going that route, because we always ended up that same place.
I’d love to be a libertarian because their proclamations are so incredibly simple.
They must spend a good part of each day wondering what all the fuss is about. Everything’s easy! If you never, ever think past Step One.
dj spellchecka
surprised to read that no one might see rand’s opposition to the cra as trolling for votes….as cmc pointed out upthread, goldwater voted against the act in 64 while running for president and, in return, won [without trying] four states in the deep south….the first republcan to do that since the civil war….from there came the southern strategy as nixon then reagan said “hey, we CAN do business there.”
Sentient Puddle
@BC: Yes, and this is the kind of stuff that we need to drive the debate towards. There’s a gold mine of these kinds of implications of his proposal, and it’s nowhere near as contentious as saying “Rand Paul is racist.”
More of this, please.
bemused
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
Rand was all over the tv last night. He was even on Joy Behar’s show. Rand’s civil rights statements do seem to have actually gotten some msm scrutiny & quickly too. He’s quite extreme so even msm had to depart from their usual unquestioning acceptance of “because I said so” answers from conservative politicians. Poor baby seems exasperated, almost shocked that he even has to explain his views more clearly.
@Sloegin:
Asking who owns the sidewalks is a great question. How do they try to respond to that? I’d love to hear their answers.
RS
@Drive By Wisdom:
The fact that the government stopped taking them to jail for sitting at lunch counters definitely helped.
QDC
@Drive By Wisdom:
Drive By, troll better dammit! Your fore-trolls here have set the bar high, and this type of tepid trolling isn’t going to get anyone riled up. I mean, tossing insults? Really? This is a blog where the proprietor regularly berates the commentariat; it’s what we come here for.
So you’d better dig down deep, troll your heart out and hope for the best. It won’t be easy, but we’re pulling for you.
maus
@RS: But it takes courage to be arrested over and over! Don’t you want to encourage that good old time courage! The kind where States have the right to ignore the murders of courageous protestors who are filled with courage. That’s the independent non-collectivist spirit! There’s no magical unicorns, just the invisible hand of the free market at work!
QDC
Also, OT, but Ezra has a post that is Balloon Juice bait if I’ve ever seen it. A taste:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/05/ye_olde_senate.html
kay
@Uloborus:
I don’t really believe that anymore. If you “give” people unenforceable rights, or insist the state enforce racism (and you have to) then you’re a racist.
The state actually concluded the same thing. They couldn’t enforce private racist decrees, or, ya know, they’re in it. Whoops! Turn around! Find another way!
I don’t really believe in theoretical liberty, but I’m admittedly not an abstract person, like the Paul Family, who live in some la-la land.
LD50
@Drive By Wisdom:
Golly. Who would have guessed that libertarians manage to hide their true beliefs so well when they post on the internet?
Well, on your recommendation we’ll stop judging libertarians by what they say RIGHT NOW!
So I guess from your logic, that civil rights workers must have *opposed* the Civil Rights Act, eh?
Care to share with us why YOU think the CRA was such an awful, nanny-state evil?
Cat Lady
@Lurking Canadian:
How can that be reconciled with his anti-abortion stand? How does one make the coherent argument that the government’s interest in the life of the fetus supercedes one’s interest in one’s own right to the ultimate in private property – one’s own body? He wants the government to convey personhood on a fetus which requires nullifying the personhood of a woman. I wanted Rachel to ask him about that.
maus
@bemused:
But, will that just push their tolerance over? I don’t see a huge swing-back to rationality, just a fleeting moment of shame.
Tsulagi
From watching a clip of him being interviewed by Maddow, I’d say he’s a free market absolutist. Unconditionally convinced that a totally unregulated free market, like God, will sort it all out later.
Using the restaurant example, no need for fire codes. If enough customers are charbroiled when exposed, sparking electrical wires ignite leaking gas lines to ranges, patronage numbers will naturally decline.
Same with onerous health/sanitation regs. Get rid of them and the jackbooted health inspectors. Later If that restaurant doesn’t have enough e-coli survivors, likely they will close their doors.
See, as with racial discrimination, a completely unrestricted free market solves everything.
cleek
generations of brave folks tried to break through segregation, and got themselves lynched for their efforts. it’s not like black people in the 60s suddenly got the bright idea to stand up for themselves. the force of law was necessary to ensure that, eventually, the brave folks who tried it wouldn’t get killed.
Zifnab
@BC:
Well, you’d likely have “niche” businesses that catered to the disabled. But that would generate a surcharge on service. What the policy would really amount to is disabled people paying a premium for service to circumvent their disability.
Some people are cool with that. Those people are referred to as “dicks”.
Gregory
@RS:
Of course — it’s a dog whistle against affirmative action.
Uloborus
Drive By Wisdom just demonstrated a serious hole in Libertarian logic I referred to earlier. Yes, brave people stood up and defeated overt discrimination. By getting a law passed. This is, more or less, a democracy. Government *is* the action of the people. It can go wrong, the people can be stupid, it can be hijacked – but basically when the people want to intervene, that process is called ‘government’.
Mike in NC
If nothing else, DeMented knows a thing or two about sucking.
LD50
@cleek:
Perhaps Drive By Wisdom’s position is that if the evil nanny state hadn’t interfered, the free market would have righted itself, and after another 60 or 80 years people would have stopped being lynched.
bemused
@sneezy:
Yes. I didn’t say it but I think it follows that people who can’t be bothered to think about real consequences of policies to other people, their communities, states or the country really don’t give a rat’s ass about any of the above.
flukebucket
@Drive By Wisdom:
they believe that People, not government, are the agent of change.
When I read that I could not help but think that government is of the people by the people for the people.
People is government and government is people.
Or something like that.
JM
Please, teach us some more. You’re the funniest thing I’ve read all day.
Zifnab
@cleek: Not to mention, it was those same brave folks that fought for and brought about the Civil Rights Act. If you think LBJ just scribbled the bill on a napkin over a lunch break, you’re nuts.
The African American community had a heavy hand in shaping the legislation as it was written. This wasn’t some White Man’s Gift to the downtrodden negro. The Civil Rights Act was the product of the labor of millions.
bemused
@maus:
I’m not holding my breath either.
El Cid
@Sentient Puddle:
I don’t care how someone spins my words. First off, I’m not the spokesman for the Democratic Party, so I’m just going to say what makes sense.
Second, it’s not “devolving” into calling Rand Paul racist — I do not give a shit whether or not Rand Paul is racist.
I don’t know if Dick Cheney considered himself a racist when he called for Nelson Mandela to remain jailed as a terrorist so that he and Ronald Reagan’s buddies running the apartheid South African government, which they were fine running as a fascist, racist regime until it took its own sweet time becoming a real democracy, or maybe never did.
I don’t care if Ronald Reagan assumed he cared for every single Guatemalan baby and was protecting us from a Martian invasion when he was paying and assisting Guatemalan generals to carry out a genocide against hundreds of thousands of Mayans.
‘I’m not racist against Mayans, but I don’t give a shit if the generals I’m hiring, paying, arming, training and protecting are slaughtering an ethnic group by the hundreds of thousands?’
If it’s important to you in a particular argument to stress that this was part of Cheney’s or Reagan’s anti-communist outlook, fine, do so — but I don’t care if someone feels offended that I’ve called Dick Cheney or Ronald Reagan “racist”.
I don’t care if someone thinks I’ve “Godwinned” (you know, Godwin isn’t a law preventing you from mentioning racism or fascism when it applies, such as Reagan hiring Guatemalan fascists to wipe out their Mayan population and getting trained to do so by literal Argentinian Nazis). Who gives a shit if in the American mainstream of political discussion these obvious characterizations are considered outside the bounds of sane discussion? I’m not advising Obama or a local candidate for the city council what to say — that’s not some sort of job imposed upon me to maintain a constant vigil that my rhetoric is aligned with safe statements for a party or candidate to make.
I’m not caught up in anything and I’m under no obligation, zero obligation, to go out of my way and give Rand Paul some sort of magic benefit of the doubt.
Rosalita
@QDC:
at least he pumps his own gas; McCain couldn’t
El Cid
@Zifnab:
And the result of a decades-long movement of resistance, and also one of the most brilliant, planned legal strategies in history, that of Charles Hamilton Houston to take down “separate but equal”.
FormerSwingVoter
@Uloborus:
No no no no no. You’re getting it all wrong. Libertarianism shows us that “creating a law” is the purest form of evil in the world, because of… um, reasons, I guess. And as the great historian Drive By just taught us just now, the Civil Rights Act didn’t do anything at all and probably caused lots of harm, because it was a law and no law has ever done anything good because laws are bad. People protested against racism, then all the racists said “Hey, you’re right, blacks are people too” without the government doing anything at all and everyone lived happily ever after until superman ultragod John Galt left and the entire world burned to the ground. The End.
aimai
@kay:
Yes, this a thousand times this. Also,I’d like to point out that at this very moment we are seeing a gedankenexperiment along these lines–the quotes at the top of the blog post, the “nutpicked” reveal a deep right wing anxiety that, to quote Flannery O’Conner, “the bottom rail is on the top” and that areas of government and society that were previously white are now black–with all the reverse racism and exclusion and discrimination that might now accompany that. If Obama were a tenth the revolutionary black guy they like to pretend and he tried to pass laws permitting an all black white house, or an all black google/restaurant/any other important business to discriminate on the basis of race to whom would the white libertarians turn? Why, to the government and federal law, of course. The Randian line that they are totally ok with being discriminated against by private business exists only in the hypothetical. These are the very same guys who, when they got old enough to need it, demanded that businesses not be permitted to discriminate on the basis of age. When their ox is gored, or they think its going to be, its going to be back to mommy state for protection in the blink of an eye.
aimai
El Cid
And, of course, the Southern Strategy wasn’t that Republicans were racist — they just wanted the votes of Southern racists. It’s way, way, way different, and superior, to some jackass who says he hates n******, right?
Just like Ronald Reagan’s campaign launch in Philadelphia Mississippi and caterwauling about “states’ rights” and having to denounce the endorsement he had received from the KKK and talking about all the black Cadillac driving welfare queens and ‘young bucks’ buying steaks didn’t make him in any way racist, because in his heart he loved the darkies — he just wanted to wink and nod to appeal to Southern racists.
Uloborus
@bloodstar:
By the way, I actually feel a certain compassion for you, as I do for people like Larison. I’d argue with you about your positions, too – I argue with a lot of the people here. But what we’re basically saying is that you’re the only guy not wearing makeup in the clown car, and you’re not driving.
Gregory
Jackasses like Rand Paul fail to recognize — deliberately, I suspect — that rights come into conflict all the damn time, and the role of government is precisely to mediate those conflicts.
What Paul is complaining about is that the Federal Government holds that property rights don’t trump other people’s civil rights.
When my right to breathe unpolluted air, eat uncontaminated food or drink unpoisoned water is concerned, I for one sure as hell don’t want the Invisible Hand of the Magical Free Market Pony deciding things.
Bill Section 147
@Dr. Squid: Also “goons” and “beating” IIRC the altercation fell short on these accounts as well.
The same people who watched that “beating” were all aghast that any reasonable person could fault the cops in the Rodney King arrest. That wasn’t a beating…he lived. Didn’t he? And…he did sass that cop after-all.
Martin
@Uloborus: No, I think his view is that if we collectively believe that racism is wrong, that we as individuals will right that wrong through the free market. It’s bullshit, because it that were true, we wouldn’t have needed the CRA in the first place, but he’s part of the ‘free market will solve all our problems’ population. There’s such a bounty of evidence that it’s full of shit yet they persist to believe it’s true. We don’t need to work any harder to explain their viewpoints.
Maus
@178
Libertarians are the biggest passive-aggressive bitches, I swear. It’s always “oh, I could have done that… If BIG FED would have just given me the chance! Now these poor, misunderstood creatures hate blacks, all because of BIG FED. If given another hundred years of uncontrolled dominance, they may not have held such quiet anger! The problem with race relations in this country is obviously the iron shackles of the CRA, not my poor, poor rugged individualists.
So yeah, while I’m pleased at the negative reception Rand’s getting, when is someone going to question what new elements the Teabag revolution has to offer as opposed to the usual GOP goals? I doubt they’re going to outright make the connection in this context, maybe the most we can hope is to get a Michael Steele quote on his opinions on overthrowing the CRA.
Gregory
@aimai:
Hence my earlier point that Paul’s kvetching about “institutional racism” is a dog whistle against affirmative action.
Paul may not be racist — I don’t care, really — but his rhetoric is racist to the bone, right out of the late Lee Atwater’s playbook.
El Cid
@Gregory: Hey, Lee Atwater wasn’t a racist, and that’s what’s important here. What Lee Atwater did, which was to script a party agenda and campaign to appeal to racists, doesn’t matter. What matters is that his philosophy was to elect Republicans so they could defend against communism and protect freedom. See?
Stooleo
Rand Paul’s walk back. Sort of. Be warned, Politico link.
Zifnab
@Drive By Wisdom:
Don’t be thick, DBW. When you start out with peaceful protests that are broken up time and again by violent response, it’s the libertarian that believes the magical unicorn will ride in and make the situation better.
Without government imposed regulation, drafted and voted on by representatives of the people, you can’t have peaceful protests. What you CAN have is the kind of riots and militant movements that sprang up repeatedly during the 60s as the less patient civil rights activists stopped waiting to get bit by police dogs or sprayed with fire hoses.
Without civil action you get civil war. Go check a history book on Ireland or South Africa or Industrialized America right before the labor movement in the 20s or – hell – take a page from the current state of Greece. Each is the product of years of government fiddling while citizen dissent grew.
Gregory
@El Cid:
Rand Paul is doing the same thing, of course. And it’s working.
Zifnab
@Maus: Always an intriguing question. If rugged individualism and personal integrity and the iron determination of one man is so awe inspiring, why don’t Libertarians ever win elections?
I mean, shit, those tough-as-nails sons of bitches should be marching up to Washington and taking all those sweet Senate gigs. We should have a Libertarian President, no problem.
All the libertarians have to do is band together and function collectively to achieve the common goal of… oh wait. I think I may have found the problem.
me
@Stooleo: So in a choice between standing up for (albeit dumb) principles and getting elected, he chose to get elected.
Cat Lady
/Rand Paul quote
Except for women’s individual rights, where you should all sit down and STFU and let the federal government force you to have an unwanted baby, at which point the government should disappear out of your life leaving you to suffer all of the negative consequences with no recourse to any government assistance, slut.
/Rand Paul ideology
Midnight Marauder
@Gregory:
It’s one of the strangest and most misguided defenses I’ve ever seen; it’s like nuance taken to some kind of illogical extreme. “Sure, the policies that you enabled, actively championed, and created–in addition to the politicians and causes you supported–were decidedly discriminatory and putatively racist in their effect. But because you were just trying to defend the Free Market, then we can overlook all the horribly racist things you enabled!”
Let me tell you something. If you rhetoric is racist, if your playbook is racist, if your spokesperson is a racist, then it doesn’t matter if you yourself are a racist. As long as you actively support and associate yourself with such “respectable” company, then that is all I need to know about you.
Citizen Alan
@Drive By Wisdom:
Not to disparage the courage of civil rights protesters for whom I have the utmost respect, but “the world changed” and African-Americans won “equality at the lunch counter” at the precise moment that the federal government gave them the right to sue the pants off restaurant owners who refused their business on account of race. So you can kindly stick your ruminations about what “courage” means as it applies to libertarianism where the sun don’t shine.
FormerSwingVoter
@Drive By Wisdom:
Yes, it did. That was the whole point.
Gravity does not make things fall up instead of down if you say so on the internet.
Bill Section 147
@flukebucket: Libertarians always seem to disremember that we voted for these hacks who represent us in this republic, love ’em or hate ’em, they were elected and we chose these rules and regulations and we made the federal institutions that we complain about. We are the government with all of its idiocy and flaws. But at the end of the day we the people did do it.
We the people elected and directed the people who wrote and enforced the Civil Rights Act.
Libertarians want all of the benefits of society but they do not want to carry the load. They seem to think that government exists because of private interests fund it or make it possible but the opposite is true. Without a government there would be no private business or private property. As soon as you start going there the Libertarians start back tracking. All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what has the government ever done for us?
hal
Why not? Oh that’s right. He’s a Libertarian. The political equivalent to “lots of my friends are black.”
stuckinred
@FormerSwingVoter: ya’ll still engaged with this schmuck?
JGabriel
Rand Paul announces:
Frankly, I’d gotten that impression from his previous statement:
But I’m glad Paul clarified, since that statement wasn’t exactly unambiguous.
So, I guess that means Paul will be a sort of status quo Republican with respect to Civil Rights: won’t support further action, but won’t support repeal either. That said, I doubt he’ll be doing any outreach to the black community, or be very supportive of any GOP efforts to do outreach to minority and immigrant groups in general.
As of now, he’s certainly not doing anything to ameliorate the general perception of the GOP as racially insensitive.
.
Bill Section 147
@Zifnab: In a nutshell you have put it.
soonergrunt
@El Cid:
This is snark, right?
Because as I pointed out earlier, one who supports racist goals and ideals is pretty fairly described as a racist.
Gregory
@Midnight Marauder:
Word.
At least Atwater repented on his deathbed.
Bill Section 147
@JGabriel: But if it came up for a vote tomorrow…well, I’m not a racist.
Gregory
@Bill Section 147:
Remember, they’re Rugged Individualists!
Nimm
@FormerSwingVoter:
Yep. While I’m sympathetic to some libertarian positions, much of their positions are doomed to fail because they get the cause and effect relationship backwards. If you want to change people’s opinions about a subject (say, whether it’s OK not to serve people of a certain skin color in a restaurant), you are not going to make much progress just talking to them. You will make much better progress by changing their behavior. For better or for worse, people don’t like cognitive dissonance, so if they are behaving a certain way, there is a good chance their attitudes will change to justify or support their behavior.
Put more simply, attitudes follow actions, but not so much the other way around.
The fact that overt bigotry has become (mostly) unacceptable is almost certainly because of the laws we passed that changed behavior. And as long as behavior drives attitudes, rather than the other way around, libertarianism will remain better suited for dorm lounge talks, than the real world.
JGabriel
@Zifnab:
To put it less humorously and more analytically, American politics frequently features a tension between the ideals of rugged individualism and communitarianism. Even conservatives, as much as they fail in practice, will at least pay heed rhetorically to the idea of communities helping their own, although “their own” tends to take on a more tribal aspect.
Libertarians, on the other hand, completely disregard the communitarian strain (in both senses of the word), which makes it difficult to impossible for them to conceive of government working to promote a “more perfect union”.
.
maus
@Gregory:
Claimed to. Boogie Man recalls that the friend-given bible he claimed to cherish and use constantly during his “time of faith” went unopened. His entire personality was an act to the very end.
Gregory
@JGabriel quoting Rand Paul:
That’s a dog whistle against Affirmative Action, right there.
Citizen Alan
@Bill Section 147:
The government gives us wine? Where do I sign up?
Citizen Alan
@Gregory:
Most people who know they’re going to Hell will at least attempt to do so.
geg6
@Drive By Wisdom:
Go fuck yourself, libertarian asshole.
The people at those lunch counters created the political impetus to bring about the CRA, which ended any need for anyone else to be risking their lives to sit at a lunch counter.
Since my mother actually was one of the people who participated in such actions in the Jim Crow South and since she and her comrades in action saw the CRA as the crowning achievement of their efforts, I really think you should just shut up about what was done there, why it was done, and what its effects were.
Maybe you should read some goddam history and try to understand it when you do. Because it’s pretty obvious to me that you haven’t and you don’t.
El Cid
@soonergrunt: It is (was) snark.
Cacti
The Jim Crow/Segregation is probably the greatest argument that exists for regulation. At times, nothing short of federal intervention is necessary to correct grievous wrongs at the societal and institutional level.
The mystical powers of the “free market” did nothing to rectify racial discrimination. On the contrary, it perpetuated the system. Because, at the end of the day, the market doesn’t exist in a vaccuum. It is run by humans and subject to all manner of prejudice from its human operators. And if human prejudice effectively shuts off entire classes of citizens from being market participants, it’s not much of a “free market” now, is it?
Corner Stone
@soonergrunt: Hey. Meant to ask you earlier. How are the latest tornadas treatin you and your’n?
Corner Stone
@El Cid: It was really wicked snark. Because I thought for a while about the meta of thinking about how much we needed to think about it.
Stroszek
@Drive By Wisdom: Your comment only makes sense if you believe the government is some magical, alien entity operating apart from human endeavor as opposed to an institution consisting of people tasked by other people with protecting said change. In other words, your comment is a perfect expression of the fucking idiotic fairy tale mythology that underlies the libertarian mindset.
You see, progressives understand that the world isn’t perfect… which is why we don’t rely on magical mass-transformations of the human spirit to protect individuals from the assholes among us.
El Cid
@Corner Stone: That’s what happens when you’re pretty sure that you know what the important things to think about are, but you also see all sorts of influential people assuring you that what’s really important is this other thing, which you’re not convinced of, but a lot of people just go along. After all, if all the important people are focusing on something, we ought to too, right?
JGabriel
@Cacti:
Exactly. That’s where Paul fails. But that myopism is shared by most of the GOP. I may be wrong, but I don’t think Paul is very far outside the Republican mainstream here.
Which is one of many reasons why I’m a Democrat.
.
maus
@Cacti:
Personal choice is freedom. BIG FED forcing a business owner to do anything is “slavery”.
@JGabriel:
Wait, how are you gleaning that he doesn’t support the repeal of the CRA? When did he ever say that? Because everything else he’s spoken about indicates that yes, he does support a full repeal.
Hrm
You piece of shit, it’s obviously not “settled” if you keep bringing it up as objectively harmful.
Corner Stone
@El Cid: Yes. I’ve thought about this, and I think that the thinking that it’s important has led some to think that was what should be thought about. And debated.
But I’m thinking differently. I think.
Corner Stone
@Gregory:
And the Devil still ate him up. May She be praised!
El Cid
@Corner Stone: Hmmm. That’s something to think about.
Midnight Marauder
@maus:
Well, now that his extremely impractical worldview is being exposed for what it actually is, it would appear that his stance has shifted:
Chuck Butcher
I think Libertarianism is as popular as it is (immaterial really) because it provides a fig leaf for so many behaviors. I’d say that rather than racism, the first two in standing are greed and selfishness followed by classism. I’d put racism behind those at least, nearly as fallout of the ones preceding it. Support of those stances provides the framework for racism so they’ll naturally attract that element.
The collision of reality and the magical thinking of Libertarianism has been pretty well covered above. That collision is what makes someone like Paul a de facto racist despite his disclaimers. I have no idea what his emotional reaction is, which is what some are claiming, I do know that the policies claimed by Libertarianism result in racism.
I don’t know the politics of KY well enough to know what particular approach would work best there. From the CD I live in I can say that calling racist rather than pointing out the results would result in liberals being tagged with playing the race card and solidify support from those who’d shy away from consequences rather than tags.
“So if you’d like (x,y,&z) to happen then you’d want to vote for Rand Paul (R). If you don’t want to be (*poisoned, etc) at a restaraunt or … I’m your guy.”
I have a hunch this would apply to KY as well. There are plenty of people whose racism is far from overt, who’d deny it adamently while in fact practicing it without making the leap to seeing it. You can laugh and point at these folks, but they are voters and their numbers are a lot bigger than inconsiderable. Ignoring the effect of politicking on them is real risky in an election.
Corner Stone
@El Cid: I thought so.
El Cid
@Chuck Butcher: Remember, leftists are crazy and dangerous idealists, while propertarians are principled Americans seeking freedom.
NickM
@FormerSwingVoter: Here’s the libertarian history of the period:
1. Protesters sit in at segregated lunch counters.
2. ????
3. Desegregation!
zzyzx
My favorite experience with libertarianism is when someone on the free state project message board said that it was wrong to regulate nuclear weapons and the neighbors should just trust someone who wants to have them.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Here’s wiki’s summary:
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Pub.L. 88-352, 78 Stat. 241, enacted July 2, 1964) was a landmark piece of legislation in the United States that outlawed unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public (“public accommodations.”)
Here’s one from the National Archives’ website:
To review just in case the spin is making you dizzy:
1. Paul believes every business that doesn’t receive public funding should be allowed to discrimintate.
2. He filthy bastard who thinks anyone with half a brain will buy “Whoopsie, my interpretation of this law was a bit off, silly me!” Alternatively, he’s an arrogant douche who stepped in it badly over the law and didn’t bother to do any research. I’m inclined to go with filthy bastard. For intellectual reasons.
jl
Late to this thread, and sorry in advance that I do not having the quotes handy. But, as long as the teabaggers are worrying about what our venerated founders thought, Adams, Madison, Jefferson and Hamilton were all realists about how a free society had to be structured in order to work. In Madison’s wording (from memory), there had to be enough ‘mutual sympathy’ among members of socieity so that each person had confidence he could associate with others as a legal equal, and would be treated fairly.
I do not see how that can happen in a society where people emit cheap talk about how racial discrimination is bad and immoral, but, given racial prejudice, business people who offer services to the general public can discriminate on the basis of race.
The solution for each of these founders was different. Jefferson’s and Madison’s inner racist led them to conclude it could not be done in mixed racial popualtion so there had to be some method of building separate societies where each group could build its own free socieity with everyone being treated as equals (and I think they thought that could only work for African-Americans if they went back to Africa). Hamiltion saw enforcing such a norm as a role for government intervention, and he was active in helping African-Americans to vote (and got some rocks thrown at him on one election for his trouble in getting African-American voters to the polls).
Not sure what Washington thought, but through his deeds, he set all the slave he could free at his death, and took the trouble to set up what amounted to a private affirmative action program for them to prepare them for independent life. So I mark Washington closer to Hamilton than the Madison or Jefferson.
But I do not think any of them would be optimistic that a free society built on Rand’s noble and very theoretical principles would work.
John Adams may have coined the term ‘idiotology’ to describe ideology unmoored to any earthly reality. What we see with Rand Paul’s statements is true idiotology at work, IMO.
El Cid
@NickM: Reagan called his support of South Africa’s apartheid regime (particularly assistance in its invasions of and war against Mozambique and Angola) by calling it “constructive engagement”, and clearly that’s how Lincoln should have dealt with the Confederacy.
JGabriel
@maus:
From this statement by Paul:
Maybe he’s being disingenuous, but that’s where I “gleaned” it from.
I’m just pointing out that his stance on Civil Rights isn’t that far from the GOP mainstream; it’s as much an indictment of the GOP as it is a defense of Paul – whose views I don’t support in any way.
.
Uloborus
@Chuck Butcher:
I grew up in Kentucky and currently live there again. Kentucky is dominated by ignorant, insular hillbillies. So pick whatever approach appeals to that. Racism probably won’t help OR hurt him here. Talking about government being bad will help, but when he gets specific about cutting social safety nets people will get upset.
Also, is he going to adress local concerns? Conway, like, is into how to create jobs and stuff.
Chuck Butcher
@El Cid:
Unless voters are infuriated using angry language freaks the “middle.” What a politician says versus what supporters say may have only a core idea in common. Rep Greg Walden (OR2-R) stayed completely away from the kind of rhetoric you’re using even though somewhere around 30% of the voters agreed with it, he needed the same voters I’m talking about.
(I don’t know that I’d have managed to provoke him into it, but he wasn’t the least threatened by the nominee)
geg6
And, Doug? I have to take issue (very late in the thread) with you even giving this asshole with the stupidest name on earth any sort of a pass on whether or not he’s a racist.
I don’t know how much you know about Ron and Rand Paul, but surely you read Digby and she’s been writing about this for…well, forever. Here’s some information about Daddy:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/whos-his-daddy-looking-back-at-paul.html
As for Rand, that scamp:
http://www.bluebluegrass.com/2010/03/30/rand-paul-the-tea-party-and-the-militia-groups/
If you Google Rand or Ron Paul and militias, you get a zillion hits. So between the militia loving and the sucking up to the Birchers done by both the father and the son, I think it’s not a stretch at all to definitively say that Rand Paul is most assuredly a racist.
No question about it.
matoko_chan
AllahP an’ Cap’n Ed all stoked about Rand leading Conway…….but alas…..its just Rasmussen Statisticts.
maus
@JGabriel: Thanks, I eventually found it. While he doesn’t believe it should be repealed outright, he seems to believe we should be able to ignore the protections against business discrimination put in place. It’s hard to figure out what exactly he believes when he’s talking out of both sides of the mouth.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Then I think we should give businesses this offer: If they choose to discriminate on the bases of race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation, then the government will not interfere in any of the other dealings that the company might have, such as contract disputes or patent or copyright claims, nor will the government hire them in any way.
El Cid
@Chuck Butcher: Again, I’m not running for office, I’m not advising what politicians should or shouldn’t say, nor should I restrain my rhetoric to what would work in either circumstance. I wouldn’t dare suggest that particular politicians take up my ideas or rhetoric, but I also wouldn’t ever confine myself to such a standard.
Chuck Butcher
@Uloborus: KY as a state is a different place than NE OR and E OR in general. That is why I’m careful to preface with a disclaimer but I do have a hunch I’m not too far off. (OR2) isn’t most places but it is larger than KY in area and damned rural. We do have out Teabaggery contingent and they actually marched about 30 people through town 4/15. Out in the “sticks” we do have our Constitutionalists – they’re teabaggers on steroids and can make Libertarians look reasonable.
Michael
Daddy talks about the evils of “forced integration” in 2004. Rosa Parks was uppity.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul188.html
Bill Section 147
@Citizen Alan: I didn’t think I had to insert the part about how what is called wine is actually wine thanks to the government. Without government any concoction I declared wine would be sold as wine. If it was Kool-Aid with Everclear or Aquanet mixed in I could call it wine. Eventually my customers would catch on and they would stop buying it at the higher prices. So I would keep lowering my price until I liquidated my stock.
As a capitalist I would of course plow my wine profits back gated neighborhoods, goods and services for the blind and halt and into security and clean-up services to get drunks, blind and halt off the streets surrounding your gated neighborhood.
Then I would invest those profits in rinsing and repeating.
maus
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
In the “truly free market” none of this is necessary, of course.
@Michael:
lol, that’s not even getting into all the outright racist crap Lew Rockwell ghost-wrote for Paul’s survivalist papers.
Corner Stone
@Bill Section 147:
This is pretty tasty actually. Speaking as an Everclear conno-sewer, I’m happy to report it goes well with many available potables.
Chuck Butcher
@El Cid: Sure as hell the Conway campaign isn’t going to pay any attention to my comment on BJ. They also haven’t called me asking for anything – money or advice. It is the political approach I’d take and I think it would work. I think there’s a chance people expecting a “RACISM!” approach might be disappointed for that reason.
maus
@Bill Section 147: Their argument is that private wine-certification agencies would pop up, because UL is a successful “private agency” and certainly not endorsed and monitored by Big Fed. And also these certification bodies would be impossible to infiltrate by the devious and malicious, because business is all about trust, honesty, and it’s impossible for someone to poison their customers knowingly, because that’s just bad business! Surely they would never sicken or kill any their customers (especially with no Federal repercussions), because who would they sell to if the customers were dead? blpphhhhhhh.
moja31
@hal:
This. Dressing it up as in the terms of political philosophy doesn’t make it any better.
soonergrunt
@Corner Stone: I have a fence to repair. I fixed it after last week’s blow. It’s down again. 4×4 posts snapped like toothpicks. Tomorrow I’m putting in aluminum tubes with concrete cores.
mclaren
What’s the problem? The guy sounds exactly like a Balloon Juice commenter. He’d fit right in here. I got called on my “Marxist ramblings” here for suggesting that we raise the top tax bracket on the rich back to what it was in 1958, during the Eisenhower administration.
Apparently Ike was a Marxist.
Who knew?
jake the snake
@mclaren:
Just ask the John Birch Society, they knew.