Really?

[james_davis_nicoll]

"leftist SF critic James Nicoll"? Leftist?

Comments

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Was it that weirdo whose nym reflects an apparent desire to turn the US back to the days of Jim Crow, illegal contraception, and the Federal hounding of homosexuals to suicide (all in the name of small government, of course)?

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

http://ricketyclick.com/blog/index.php/2012/04/23/a-bucket-of-air/

And hmm, refugee50s LJ profile does in fact link there. So you're right!

*peruses*. Conspiratorial paranoia, democracy-hating (I like "Obama may suspend elections" followed by "Democracy looks like mob rule"), destroying pigs as casus belli for a Second Civil War...

But perhaps he misses other elements of the 1950s, like rapid economic growth with 70% top income tax rate and massive government investment in infrastructure?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Really? That was just a guess, or in fact, a bait. Which he took.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link, by the way! He's utterly hilarious.

[eyelessgame.livejournal.com]

What were the odds? :) In a way it's reassuring to see so much of it concentrated in one person, rather than being more spread. But he's only the instantiation of a narrow-sliver Venn diagram overlap, for which the circle that is not "people who will comment on the politics of James Nicoll" is distressingly large.

Re "Obama may suspend elections": way back in the socialist hellhole of the 1990s, I had a rabid Clinton-hating cow orker, who said at one point "The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't elect a president in 2000."

Unfortunately I had lost all contact with him (he had moved to Idaho, what were the odds?) by 2000, or I would have looked him up and expressed my admiration for his precognitive abilities.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

To be fair, I ran across a few liberals who were genuinely afraid that Bush Jr. would cancel the 2008 election and declare himself President-For-Life.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I had... some worries in 2004. Not very serious ones, and they weren't about the president canceling the election, they were airport-thriller conspiracy scenarios about staged terrorist attacks. Having the Democratic Convention in your town will do that.

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

Bush had briefly talked in 2004 about possibly having to suspend that election on account of terrorists, so I think he was the source of those worries four years later.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

This suspiciously smells of someone who, having not gotten enough out of trolling James' journal, took it to another website in a deliberate effort to escalate.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I find the "genuine thanks" explanation plausible.

[refugee50s.livejournal.com]

Actually, it originally referred to my avie, which I've always thought made me look like a refugee. I tried for just "refugee", but that was already taken.

As for the rest:

"Jim Crow"? Rather, a conviction that regardless of skin color, competent human beings do not need the federal government to protect them or to care for them.

"Illegal contraception"? Rather, a conviction that women are competent not only to manage their reproductive health, but even to defend themselves with deadly force. That they are free to choose caliber, not just abortion. And that in both cases, it's no business of the federal government.

"Hounding homosexuals to suicide"? Rather, that one's sexual orientation is nobody's business but their own and their partner's. Especially not the federal government's.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I've never seen the word 'avie' before, but I guess you mean your icon/userpic. Which yes, could look like a refugee.

All the rest comes from your name's implication that you're a refugee from the 1950s and miss the features of that time.

And BTW, ending Jim Crow took the intervention of the federal government, to end the force of tyrannical state governments.

[refugee50s.livejournal.com]

Yes, my avatar.

"ending Jim Crow took the intervention of the federal government"

But the Feds then went far, far beyond that.

[avram]

Rather, a conviction that regardless of skin color, competent human beings do not need the federal government to protect them or to care for them.

So you'd shut down the entire federal military?

[refugee50s.livejournal.com]

"So you'd shut down the entire federal military?"

To the degree that the military is being used to control the intimate details of citizens' lives in the name of Their Own Damn Good, Whether They Want It Or Not, yes, down to the last cartridge, the last pitchfork, the last stick and rock.

Fortunately, they're pretty much sticking to defending our national sovereignty against our foreign enemies. (I'm not pleased with some of the things their Commanders-in-Chief have ordered, but so far, it's mostly outside our borders.)

[avram]

But when they're "defending our national sovereignty against our foreign enemies", isn't that a form of protection or care, which is exactly what you said competent human beings didn't need the federal gov't to do?

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Rather, a conviction that regardless of skin color, competent human beings do not need the federal government to protect them or to care for them.

Really? You HONESTLY, hand on heart and all that, believe this statement to be true?

I like to think of myself as a fairly competent human being but one of the things I REALLY like about living in a Western Democracy is the whole rule of law thing and the fact that people with guns are probably not going to arrive on the back of a truck and take my stuff(*)... which has happened to friends of my wife's where they lived.

Likewise, I'm well educated, I run a business and yet there are whole books written on the subjects I don't know enough about.

(*) - No, taxes are not the same thing, sorry.

[refugee50s.livejournal.com]

Fair point.

The military protects us from threats outside our borders. I have no problem with that, as long as they do not engage in "law enforcement" inside our borders. I'll also note that I'm not best pleased with the military being used for so-called "nation-building", but that's a hugely complex problem outside the scope of this conversation.

I like having police and courts and jails, as long as they're limited to actual crimes that directly injure specific victims, things like fraud, theft, robbery, assault and battery, rape, and murder. Yes, yes, traffic laws, fine, so that we all know what to expect from our fellow drivers, but that's about it for mala prohibita.

In particular, I'm not willing to give up my right and responsibility to protect myself and mine. See the Principles of Policing attributed to Bobby Peel, especially number seven, which I'll summarize as, "The police are the people and the people are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen."

Let me say it again: "duties which are incumbent upon every citizen." When the people do not pursue those duties themselves, a deadly contempt arises between the keepers and the kept.

What I am mostly objecting to, though, is a "nanny state" that tries to protect us or care for us like children, that assumes we cannot manage on our own, at all, that tries to make everything perfectly fair and safe.

I strongly object to the government directing how we should live in every tiniest detail "for our own good", especially when the lawmakers and those who enforce the laws act as if the laws don't apply to them, or interfere in matters they know nothing of, and that do not affect them directly.

I know, we can argue about the implementation details forever, but again, I think this thread is not the place for that.

I hope this makes my position clearer.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I'm not willing to give up my right and responsibility to protect myself and mine

I'm not aware that you have.

And this is the crux of the issue for me. When I hear somebody on the right, and it's usually the right, mutter 'nanny state' or 'right to protect myself' I usually see somebody who doesn't understand the law or places property (things) above people.

The later leads to cases like this (http://www.ajc.com/news/couple-held-at-gunpoint-1423138.html)...

The reason Bobbie Peel came up with those rules is because to operate a city of a million people you needed to empower some of the citizens differently to the rest otherwise things would fall apart.

If only we had a process by which we could change and review the powers of the government and government agencies... say every four or five years eh?

Except you don't much like that either do you, because it gets laws passed that you don't understand or like. To which I will reply. Just because something doesn't apply to you, it doesn't mean it isn't needed.

Health and Safety and Environmental laws don't exist because a bunch of commies in government passed them. Laws like the Clean Air Act of 1953 (UK) was passed by Winston Churchill because people were literally dying in the streets of London from Carbon Monoxide poisoning...

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

The thing about people defending themselves and protecting their own interests is that they're biased in their own favor. The ideal is Tit For Tat; the reality is two feuding parties who both believe they're in the right because they remember facts differently, and the result in a 'state of nature' is really high violence rates, like double digits of the men dying of violence. One thing even a basic state does is provide a disinterested third-party judge, less likely to get things wrong. Of course sometimes there's systematic bias there, as with nobility vs. commoners, but on the whole states provide a lot more peace than do-it-yourself justice.