Open Threads

“Dow 36000”, 2 million tea baggers, “The 5000 Year Leap”…what is it with wingers and big numbers?

Law of large numbersPost + Comments (28)

Winger Tim Graham on WaPo’s Swayze obit (via Steve Benen):

[T]oday’s Adam Bernstein obituary for Patrick Swayze begins obviously by noting his big hits “Ghost” and “Dirty Dancing,” but doesn’t get to “Red Dawn” until paragraph 23. Even then, Bernstein wrongly suggests he had a supporting role.

[…]

There are clearly no fortysomething Reaganites working in the Washington Post newsroom.

You can’t spoof this stuff.

Wolverines!Post + Comments (175)

There have been rumblings about Dubya’s lack of conservative bona fides, but Byron York has made it official:

• Bush doesn’t believe in a “conservative movement”.
• Bush wasn’t fiscally conservative.

How long til they start describing Bush as “liberal”?

Better yet, how long til Fox starts putting a “D” under his name when they show his picture?

It’s official — Bush wasn’t a conservative!Post + Comments (96)

Brian Doherty of Reason has a fairly reasonable reply to Jon Chait’s review of Ayn Rand biographies:

Chait might be aware that he isn’t really jousting with Rand per se with all this material–he’s explicitly arguing with the likes of Stuart Varney, Greg Mankiw, unnamed stereotypical arrogant “rich people,” and Irving Kristol. But by spending so much of an essay ostensibly about Rand on these points, he’s misleading his readers about what Rand thought and why.

As much I hate to admit it, this is not such a bad point. Whatever one thinks of Rand — and I don’t think much of her work — it probably isn’t fair to condemn her on the basis of today’s glibertarian foolishness. I never like it when people link Nietzsche with Nazism, and that’s not so different.

I never thought I’d read this in a libertarian magazine, though:

All that has little to do with what Rand had to say and why she said it. She believed that it was morally wrong to take from people their just property at the point of a gun. “Gentlemen, leave your guns outside!” was one of her summations of her political philosophy…

I just hope she wasn’t talking about town halls!

Update. On further reflection, I agree that Doherty is not all that accurate in his assessment of Chait’s piece. I also agree that Rand’s actual philosophy is even more terrifying than what today’s glibertarians spout. Nevertheless, I don’t think we should blame Ayn Rand for Glenn Reynolds and Nick Gillespie.

Reason on RandPost + Comments (73)

Leafing through a review of a biography of Ayn Rand, I came across this:

She wrote of one of the protagonists of her stories that “he does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people”; and she meant this as praise.

It reminded me of something JK quoted in the comments:

“Those who have known him [Cheney] over the years remain astounded by what they describe as his almost autistic indifference to the thoughts and feelings of others. ‘He has the least interest in human beings of anyone I have ever met,’ says John Perry Barlow, his former supporter. Cheney’s freshman-year roommate, Steve Billings, agrees: ‘If I could ask Dick one question, I’d ask him how he could be so unempathetic.’”

It makes me wonder if this is part of why the word “empathy” was such a red flag for wingnuts during the Sotomayor confirmation. It also makes me wonder if “RULE OF LAW!” is less about respect for the law than about lack of sympathy. Likewise, with torture: it doesn’t matter if it yields results or not, what matters is that it shows a commendably conservative lack of empathy and compassion for other human beings.

Is that, in the end, what defines modern conservativism? An almost autistic sociopathic indifference to the thoughts and feelings of others?

I’m being serious here and I’d be curious to know if conservatives would object to this characterization. I’ll bet that many wouldn’t, if this were described more charitably.

No compassionPost + Comments (221)