I posted the paragraph below on my Facebook page and a long, sometimes contentious, debate broke out. We even had a resident of Boston and a policeman–two different people, by the way–chime in to attack my point of view. Given that it generated so much discussion in that venue, I figured I’d share it here as well.

Armored police vehicles. Tactical teams. Everyone under house arrest. Soldiers and/or other armed enforcers roaming the streets. House-to-house searches. We call it, “Terror in Boston!” In any one of the several places the U.S. has invaded and/or is currently deploying drones, they’d call it, “Tuesday.” Perspective. Stated differently, maybe the “terrorists” won a while back?

Even looking at it now, it strikes me as obvious and uncontroversial. Maybe I’ve spent too much time sniffing the glue of philosophical free thought?

…cross-posted at LRCBlog.

I just came across this wonderful music from Ron Paul fan Tatiana Moroz (iTunes albums).

I’ve blogged previously on peace/liberty-related art: see Justin Gaffrey Peace Art:

I’ve said it before (Peace Art): I love Justin Gaffrey’s paintings, and in particular his peace sign paintings.

See also related posts below:

My Favorite Earrings

Posted by Stephan Kinsella on August 19, 2008 11:09 PM

After winning the gold in the balance beam, Shawn Johnson, the impressive and mature 16-year old from Iowa, was interviewed by Bob Costas. She proudly wore a pair of simple, white “peace” earrings. Good for her! I bet they’ll be for sale soon on her store….

Updates: The interview starts about 8:34 into this video (thanks to Daniel Uffleman). “Proud Iowan” notes here that not only did she wear the peace earrings during the Bob Costas interview, “she flashed a peace sign at the camera after her routine”.

Another LRC’er writes: “She didn’t get all weepy when the national anthem played during the medals ceremony, either. She’s a tough little chica. The whole women’s team was pretty impressive this year, actually.”And one more:

“I was actually going to bug Lew to post something about Johnson’s earrings. As somebody who works with teens her age, there was something that caused me to root for her above others. After seeing those earrings I’m glad I chose her. I might buy my cousin a pair for her 15th birthday although it would probably tick my neocon aunt.

“I confess had it not been for my coworkers constantly bringing them up, I would probably refuse to watch the games believing them to be a tool by elites to promote nationalism. However after watching them, I have a new found respect for the athletes who compete in them regardless of nationality. The games are not bad, but like so many other things, the politicians ruin what should be an amazing spectacle.”

Re: My Favorite Earrings

Posted by Stephan Kinsella on August 20, 2008 11:59 AM

Lew, re Shawn Johnson, her peace earrings, and the Olympics–yes, I quite agree. Everyone is whining about a few special effects that the Chinese used. So what. It’s a good show.

Someone told me that these “peace” earrings are popular among young girls nowadays, with no significance other than a fashion fad to them. Could be. But several things lead me to think Shawn wore them consciously. First, she is no bubblehead: she’s mature and intelligent. Second: she flashed the peace sign after her routine. Third: given the disgraceful censorship of the athletes regarding criticism of things Chinese and political–by both the Chinese and the Americans (”Shawn won’t be able to blog until after the Olympics are over due to the United States Olympic Committee’s rule not allowing athletes to post blogs”)–this may have been her way of protesting–Chinese political crackdowns; Bush-Iraq; Russia-Georgia, etc. Finally, she hawks a large number of necklaces and pendants on her store (and I say GOOD for her–boo to anyone criticizing her for doing this; I say, buy from Shawn!) and could have advertised any one of them by wearing it, but she chose not to display one she is selling, but instead a simple, elegant, visible, crisp-white unadorned peace sign, after she won the gold medal and was being put on international TV. I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt for being pro-peace.

Put Your Hands Up In The Air For Peace!
Posted by Stephan Kinsella on April 3, 2009 01:59 AM

Apropos my entry Peace Art, it occurs to me this site’s slogan is “anti-state, anti-war, pro-market”–which can be boiled down to: “pro-peace.” And I have to recommend this wonderful video and song, “Peace,” by the Luminaries, which premiered at the Elevate Film Festival 2008 (see The Peace Project).

Update:
Mike S writes:

Mr. Kinsella,

I stumbled on your blog post and while I was listening to the song you recommended, I remembered one of my favorite songs from P.O.D. called “Tell Me Why.” It’s a true anti-war/peace song and I believe you might be interested.

***

Another reader emailed me:

Mr. Kinsella,

I wanted to thank you for your LRC blog post with the “Peace” music video, as well as suggest another artist who I feel has been extraordinarily dedicated to the message of peace. Michael Franti has actually travelled to Iraq, Israel, Palestine, and elsewhere in the Middle East and created a documentary called I Know I’m Not Alone on his trip, where he basically travelled all over Iraq, staying with families, playing music on street corners (and even at bars filled with U.S. soldiers, singing a song that goes “You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb it into peace”), and just talking to people about the human cost of war. He also runs an annual Bay Area music festival called Power to the Peaceful. He has many great songs, but one of my favorites (and apparently his most popular music video on Youtube) is called It’s Time To Go Home [see below]. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Keep fighting the good fight,
Casey Worthington

In the past two weeks, both Paul Cantor and I have released new books on television, literature and film.

My new book, Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre is now available on Amazon. The book examines the relationship between the Western genre and the bourgeois liberalism of nineteenth-century America, and looks how at how post-war Westerns, which appealed to a generation of New Deal-loving, Cold War-enamored nationalists, teach us that capitalism is bad and the nation-state is good. It includes a forward by Paul Cantor.

Also newly available is Paul Cantor’s extensive study of television and film, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV. If you read Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (which I reviewed here.) you’ll remember that Cantor can take pretty much any television show, such as Gilligan’s Island, and dissect it using everything from Homer to Shakespeare to Marshall McLuhan, and entertain you while doing it.

In The Invisible Hand, Cantor provides a section on Westerns, and from there goes on to examine South Park, Mars Attacks! and more.

Libertarians are on occasion accused of trying to steal entertainment for their own ends. From The Hunger Games to Shindler’s List to  just every dystopian tale of government run amok, sometimes folks — sometimes even other libertarians! — think we’re trying too hard to stick politics into pop culture where it just doesn’t belong.

But music is a big deal to people, almost as much so as political philosophy. Yet, if you want to put the two together for a soundtrack to state smashing, your choices are limited.  You can either have to pick unsubtle, sugary-sweet ballads about Ron Paul, or you can have punk odes to leftist utopias or country odes to righteous warfare.

Or, you can always pretend Objectivism is the same as libertarianism and go listen to some Rush.

But let’s get a little looser with the definitions. Maybe whatever song makes you feel like smashing the state in whatever way you do everyday, maybe that counts.

Quick quiz, name the country:

-  whose farms produce 20% of the world’s calories
-  who is the leading semiconductor manufacturer and exporter (and this country’s top export industry)
-  whose manufacturing base is the world’s largest
-  who is the largest recipient of FDI and the second largest exporter
-  whose entertainment and culture are pirated, siphoned, copied and continuously consumed globally (go to kat.ph/movies, how many of the top 100 are made in China?)
-  whose labor participation rate is at a 30 year low yet still produces the same amount of economic activity as ever before

Why are some misanthropic analysts throwing the baby out with the bath water when it is clear that the US has not collapsed or will collapse in the near future?

For example, not to single this reader out, but the comment from Mangix in yesterday’s blog post touches on a number of myth’s that are currently popular in some corners of the blogsphere:

so if china doesn’t present a particularly strong growth opportunity, what does?

According to Jim Rogers, capital has slowly been moving from the west to the east and since you can’t have capitalism without capital…

It boggles the mind that anything in the west would have any growth opportunity since most western governments are loaded with billions and trillions dollars of debt.

There are at least three problems with this:

1) Jim Rogers may have been correct with his investment strategies in commodities and agriculture, but his calls and timing regarding East Asia, especially China, have been wholly incorrect.  If someone is continually incorrect with their predictions, why continue listening to them and taking their advice in that domain?

No one listens to the Millerites or Harold Camping anymore, so why pay heed to Rogers & Co.?  Because it feels good?  Perhaps you are an apocaholic.

2) China has strict capital controls that prevent capital from flowing East to West.  If these were relaxed, domestic savers would now have alternatives to park their funds.  Currently Chinese savers have few choices: place the funds in state-owned banks whose repressed interest rates sit below CPI and/or purchase investment properties and hope to rent them out (though many of these properties remain dormant for years).  Also, look at China’s FDI.  As an investor why would you risk sending your capital to a country whose means of production is owned by the state?

3)  Presidents, the Supreme Court, drones, OWS, Tea Partiers, carbs, conspiracies, chupacabras and autotune are all easy scapegoats.  But it is also your responsibility as a potential entrepreneur to think of new growth opportunities in whichever country you live in (regardless of “East” or “West”).   Sure 56% of start-ups fail in their first 5 years, sure you might dislike the political environment in whatever domicile you live in, but there are probably still opportunities if you are creative.  Stop blaming the state, stop blaming political parties and “gridlock,” you alone can invent the future and become so rich that tax rates just make you blush.

Mark DeWeaver, who I interviewed here, has found opportunities in the most unlikeliest of places: Iraq.  Here is the official webpage of the Iraq Stock Exchange.  Here is a wiki entry about it.  Here is a story about it on Bloomberg (which is still blocked here in China).

One last note

Just because there have been riots in Greece and Spain in the past year, it does not follow that there will be a future, global societal collapse such as those continuously prophesied by doomsday radio-hosts and the hyperbolic (sic) blogosphere… who make a living off of preaching gloom.

Nor does it follow from such a collapse, that some wise libertarian-minded order will rise from the ashes.  This is a weird teenage eschatological fantasy.  Not once in history have “the masses” - hoi polloi – become instantly enlightened with agorism and libertarian thought following a “collapse.”   In fact, the last time a grand civilization collapsed we had 1000 years of Dark Ages.  Brutish and miserable.  Why would anyone want that to happen again?

And there is little evidence to suggest that gold/silver owners would be kings.  It is all a non sequitur.  More than likely, they would be the first ones <insert morbid death>.  Plus, if you dislike your USD so much, feel free to donate them to TLS.

See also: cryptography realists by XKCD.

One of the videos that has taken the internets by storm comes way of South Korea, called Gangnam Style.  The Atlantic has a fantastic overview of its back-history and why it is so popular both in the Hermit Kingdom and globally.

Here is a copy via Youku (Youtube is blocked out here).

It has racked up more than 274 million views and its success is in part not just because of the subtle parodies of the posh Korean gu of Gangnam, but because its creator, Psy, waived all copyrights.  This (in)action thus paved the way for remixing and covers (among other creations).  The Guardian has more details:

The video also contains the seeds of its own reconstruction – which goes a long way to explain its success. The dance moves are simple enough to mimic and easily copied scenarios – such as the elevator scene – call out to be aped. Psy has produced a video that is born to spawn and has further facilitated this by waiving his copyright. This stands in high contrast to many western hip-hop stars who have been slow to relinquish control of their “intellectual” property in the same way (take Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind, for example, which quickly generated a host of YouTube tributes that were quickly removed by EMI).

See also: Against Intellectual Property (pdf) by Stephan Kinsella.

Update:  Be sure to also read Mike Masnick’s detailed post over at TechDirt  and Evan Osnos’s excellent piece from The New Yorker, Why China Lacks Gangnam Style

I have never understood the popular infatuation with Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary who instigated socialist revolts in three countries, or why people would want to wear clothing emblazoned with his face.  The man was a mass murderer, after all, and the architect (along with Fidel Castro) of the communist police state that rules Cuba to this day.  Unless one believes murder, wealth seizure and destruction, and the abrogation of civil liberties are justified means to political ends, why would anyone want to celebrate a person who engaged in all of these atrocities?

Thor Halvorssen, founder of the Human Rights Foundation, doesn’t understand it either, and in an open letter to Urban Outfitters published on Huffington Post this week, he questions the company’s reasons for offering Che-themed merchandise:

Although Guevara’s image has appeared on countless items for consumption over the last few decades as a symbol of change for the better, Guevara’s actual record is that of a brutal tyrant who suppressed individual freedom in Cuba and murdered those who challenged his worldview.

Guevara undoubtedly played a key role in the overthrow of the dictatorial Batista regime in January of 1959. However, despite promises of a new democratic government, within a few months he and Fidel Castro had designed and installed a full-blown police state that deprived the overwhelming majority of Cuban citizens of democracy and human rights.

From 1959 to 1960, the new government carried out summary executions of at least 1,118 people by firing squad. Guevara himself presided over the notorious La Cabaña prison, where hundreds of the executions took place. For comparison’s sake, the Batista regime was responsible for 747 noncombatant deaths between 1952 and 1959. The Cuban revolution under the direction of Guevara also saw the rise of forced labor camps which gave way a few years later to full-scale concentration camps. These were filled with dissidents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and anyone else who had committed “crimes” against the new moral revolution.

Note: it appears that Urban Outfitters no longer carries the poster that prompted Halvorssen’s letter.

It’s not just Urban Outfitters, of course; many companies over the decades have offered Che’s mug on everything from key chains to jackets to backpacks, snapped up primarily by college kids who dig the rebellious motif, or by hipsters who appreciate the irony of a leftist revolutionary icon being used to enrich filthy capitalist pigs.  Either way, Halvorssen’s letter is a welcome reality check.

Just so long as they don’t start selling Obama T-shirts.

The more I think about it, the less respect I have for the trite, and supposedly pragmatic, attack some people make on tattoos. It goes something like this: “How will that look when you’re 80?”

Basically, who gives a rat’s ass?

My suspicion is that by the time one gets to 80 years old, other areas of concern–like pooping regularly without help and figuring out whence that scratchy hair in strange places came–will dominate. You won’t be worried about whether or not your Celtic Cross still looks just as good as it used to!

A relative recently asked me why China (and for that matter the old USSR) does so well at the Olympics?  The same relative pointed out just how fast China rose through the ranks over the past five Summer Olympics yet India hasn’t done anything like it, so it is not necessarily attributable to population size.

And even if the US comes out on top in nominal terms this year, if you take the Medal / Athlete average (ratio), I suspect that even if doping accusations prove true (or false), China will probably do a bit better on this ratio (e.g., there are 380 athletes from China and 530 from the US yet as of this writing the two teams are equal with 23 medals a piece).

Why?

There are multiple reasons, including the fact that this kind of public event becomes a “face project” (mian zi gong chen) in which Chinese policy makers love to project the “success” of their system and hence spend oodles of money funding them (in contrast, in Canada and the US nearly all of the leagues/teams are supported financially through private companies/donations/sponsorships).

So to answer the question, no, the US does not need a ministry of sport.  Or any ministry for that matter.  Like their Soviet cousins, at some point the Chinese socialist state will run out of other peoples money too and then the athletes that are subsidized will no longer have the advantages afforded to them by the state.  In the event that US and Western sport programs are still decentralized and private, they will rise once again to the top.

[Special thanks to: Brian Martinez, Stephan Kinsella and Severin]

The question to The New York Times ethicist was whether it is ethical to watch NFL games given the large number of brain injuries being incurred by the players.   Ariel Kaminer asks Malcolm Gladwell to weigh in, given Gladwell’s authorship of an extensive piece for The New Yorker “Offensive Play: How different are dogfighting and football?” and his love of the game.

According to Kaminer, Gladwell compares football fans to fans of gladiator events. “Specifically because of the activity on the field that’s central to the game and a huge part of my pleasure, some percentage of people are going to die prematurely,” he said. “Quite prematurely.” Fan pleasure provides coaches and owners a clear reason to encourage riskier behavior, which in turn fuels fans to cheer more loudly, and so on.

However, it’s not just football fans cheering for blood.  “The Hunger Games” has brought in $251 million at the box office in just two weeks.  The local theater is showing the movie 14 times a day and I can vouch that the 3:25 screening on Saturday was nearly full.

Americans evidently have no problem dragging their youngsters out to see a film depicting two dozen kids savagely fighting to the death all for the amusement of garishly-dressed and made-up adults occupying a mythical capitol city.  The hunger games is a two-week party for those inhabiting the capitol with endless feasts, cocktailing, and wagering on who will be the last child standing.

The 12 to 18 year olds are drafted by lottery to participate and every minute of the proceedings are televised to every nook and cranny of Panem—as in panem et circenses, Latin for bread and circuses.  The districts may be poor, but there are massive Jumbotron screens available to watch the death match, 24 hours a day.

Most of these kids are poor and while a few from some districts train their whole young lives and then volunteer for the event, most are unprepared for the gory mayhem.   As punishment for rebelling against the capitol and losing the ensuing wars, each district offers up a boy and girl as tribute to fight to the death.

Of course these children are made out to be heroes as they are whisked off to the capitol to “bring honor to their districts.”  They get help with training and make-up and are provided the incentive to be charming so as to attract sponsors—who help throughout the competition.  Think Survivor meets American Idol.  They live the life of luxury for a few, short days and then are thrown into the competition to be killed.

While the kids fight for their lives, the government’s game master creates hazards and arbitrarily changes the rules, attempting to create the desired outcome.    The Panem control room plays a hi-tech form of chess–or maybe its closer to the Pentagon ordering drones be deployed from Indian Springs, Nevada to blow up insurgents in Afghanistan.   The actions are so removed from the killing that it seems like just a game—except for those who lose their lives and their families.

For sure “The Hunger Games” portrays a totalitarian government that doesn’t seem to be too great a leap from post-Patriot Act America.   And the film’s heroine is easy to root for as she overcomes countless obstacles.

But while there is gushing about the film being libertarian, it’s hard to make that case.  The state is overwhelming and despotic when the film starts and remains that way when it ends.  Nothing changes.  Our heroine doesn’t take her bow and arrow, go on strike, and start Hunger Gulch.  The people in the districts are still starving—although now they have something to cheer about.  The government isn’t overthrown.  Capitalism doesn’t take root, creating wonderful goods and services.

What happens is, the heroic Katniss plays Panem’s game and wins: Because for the moment, it suits the government’s purposes for her to come out on top.  And because she does, the game’s master is punished—by death.    Although the homefolks in District 12 greet her with wild cheers, there is no real sense of triumph.  She merely survived—and there is a sense that’s temporary.

Reportedly the book trilogy is all the rage amongst middle and high school aged kids.  This is viewed as a positive development and no one is worrying about whether it’s ethical or not.  Raven Clabough writes for The New American

At least in book form, it apparently has the ability to bring families together. Karin Westman, an English professor at Kansas State University who teaches this series as well as others such as Harry Potter, contends that The Hunger Games as well as the rest of the books in the trilogy are “powerful for families to share because it relates to so many primal issues such as sibling loyalty and family survival.”

Yet, in his very next sentence Clabough cautions parents not to bring small children to the movie because of the “graphic and brutal violence.”

“The Hunger Games” is not a transformative movie, but merely a reflection of America’s attitude.  The latest “The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast” sees the movie as a sign that the stock market is ready to resume its post-2000 decline.  The folks at EWFF point out the market turned in 2000 when Survivor took over as the nation’s most popular show from Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

Just as Survivor signaled the bearish cultural changes to come in the decade of the 2000s, The Hunger Games foreshadows the next phase.  With themes of alienation, “high-stakes consequences,” government control, violence and death, the movie points to a cornucopia of bear market fare.

Meanwhile, a couple weeks ago the BusinessWire reported that Charles Schwab “released new data showing that active traders are turning more bullish and plan to invest most of their tax refunds in the stock market.”

“May the odds be ever in your favor.”