Here. Thanks, Bean!
(Bean also pointed out the most awful — in a couple of senses of the word — headline ever, from — of course — the New York Post.)
Oh, and as long as I’m posting stuff Bean sent me, check out this TV commercial for AOL, which is either hilarious if you get the references, or completely bewildering.
Feel free to post whatever you’d like (including links to your own stuff) in this thread.
The ad for AOL is hilarious. Although, I suspect working in a convenience store has its days like that.
Okay, I’ll admit it: I laughed. Still, it’s sad to see that kind of headline in a major newspaper – even a lunatic-fringe like the NYPost. I expect that kind of crap on Fark, where there are no taboos for humour and it’s never “too soon”, but not from an ostensibly serious publication.
It’s too bad that Ike never actually got busted for beating Tina. Her story pretty much ended his career, but he never got actually officially punished.
Has anyone seen this quote from Giuliani yet? “Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.” Source
I used to be of the “Giuiliani is one of the more sane Republicans and wouldn’t be so bad as president” school of thought. No more. Scarier than Bush is a strong statement, but that was 1984ish.
This quote, from the same speech, is revealing as well: “You have free speech so I can be heard.”
I’m not sure I agree with that assessment. Having looked at the speech, his remarks seem pretty reasonable, and highly relevant. Giuliani is simply correct that free society requires respect for law and lawful authority.
Flip it around and ask about a society where people aren’t prepared to delegate authority. A society where people don’t willingly obey the laws and don’t freely submit is either a society with no norms and rules, or else a society where these are imposed by force. I would say that the former is impossible, and the second is less free than a society of voluntary compliance.
Is Giuliani saying anything so different from Lincoln’s lyceum address?
A society, any society, has to have some level of respect for “law and order” and to delegate some power to authority or, rather, various authorities which provide checks and balances on each other. But that’s not what freedom or a free society is all about. Freedom is about limiting the role of authority and law and order, not enhancing it. Freedom is about ceding power to authority only conditionally and only if the authority proves itself to be worthy of trust. Not about blind loyalty and surrender of rights, as Giuliani implies. Or, rather, explicitly states.
Even if what he said were technically true, it’s not what I want to hear from a politician anyway. Bush’s statement “there should be limits to freedom” is right too on some level, but still not something I want to hear the president saying, because he’s probably not talking about the right to swing your arm ending at his nose, but rather your right to satirize ending at his ego.
I don’t know the lyceum address in particular, but Lincoln, for all that he is one of the “good guys” of history, was a bit of a facist and crossed the line into authoritarianism more than once. For a “good cause” of course.
I think the problem with Giuliani’s remarks is that he was talking about freedom. Freedom is not about authority. Civilization is about authority. Protecting freedom requires authority. But freedom itself is the direct opposite of authority.
At any rate, if he becomes the next president, then Rupert Murdoch will have fully cemented his power as King of America.
More excerpts from Giuliani’s speech, because I’m in a bad mood:
“Schools exist in America and have always existed to train responsible citizens of the United States of America.”
Not for educating children or even teaching them to be responsible citizens of the world, but for training them to be good little Americans who will follow authority properly. In the interests of “freedom” of course.
“We constantly present the false impression that government can solve problems that government in America was designed not to solve.”
I think he probably meant (and maybe even said–it could be a bad transcription)…not designed to solve. I suppose it is possible that the founders set up the government specifically to ensure that some problems would never be solved, but I’m not sure why they would. Or why Giuliani would think that they would. Plus, if the government can’t solve problems…ANY problems…why the heck are we supposed to give it power? Is the “authority” he’s talking about some extra-governmental organization?
“Religion has less influence than it did 30 or 40 years ago.”
This is a problem? Influencial religions are causing one or two problems here and there in the world…as religion has in the US when it has had influence. As it does now. Whether more or less than in 1967-1977 I don’t know. Does Giuliani even realize what 30-40 years ago was? He seems to be trying to invoke the 1950s: 50 years ago. I’d like to think that the person running the country could at least add.
“You have free speech so I can be heard. ”
Not so that you can speak or so that you can be heard, but so that I can be heard. Interesting statement: does Giuliani believe that free speech only applies to him?
“We’re going to come through this when we realize that it’s all about, ultimately, individual responsibility”
Then what was alll that about power? If it’s all about individual responsibility then we don’t need to be ceding power to authority at all–in fact, doing so is making things worse.
Basically, it sounds like he just mumbled a bunch of keywords and Republican feel-good sound bites: individual responsibility! freedom! authority! family! religion! without saying much of anything. Except that he believes in centralization of power and authoritarianism.
“Citizen of the world” is not a phrase that the right uses with approval. I suspect that in Giuliani’s view, there’s no such thing as a true citizen of the world, since the world isn’t a political community in which one can have citizenship. Being a citizen of the world is about as meaningful as being a citizen of the Pacific time-zone.
I think nobody disputes that the schools should educate — but education presupposes a curriculum, and I think “responsible citizen” is a very reasonable target for a curriculum. Responsible citizens, after all, aren’t robots, and are well enough educated to look after themselves, and to take responsibility for their political opinions.
I think individual responsibility precisely means that we accept upon ourselves the obligation to behave decently — and cede a measure of authority to society to determine what that means. And I don’t think individual responsibility and free society are in any way opposed.
Think of zoning laws, and labor restrictions, and health and safety regulation. These do not make us less free, because we consented to them. However, they do impose moral restrictions on us. In a tyranny, law is simply the will of the leader, and has no moral force. In a free society, I think law and lawful authority do have moral force, although of course not unlimited moral force.
Are doctors made less free by voluntarily pledging the Hippocratic oath? By having medical boards scrutinize their conduct?
It’s possible, likely even, that the founders set up the Federal Government specifically to ensure that some problems would never be solved by the Federal Government.
In fact, doesn’t the Tenth Amendment specify this explicitly?
I think nobody disputes that the schools should educate —
Giuliani is. His statement was that schools exist “to TRAIN responsible citizens.” I emphasized “train” because there is a difference between training and teaching or educating. A person can be taught how to be a responsible citizen of a democracy, but they can not be trained to do it. If he had made this statement in a private conversation and it had gotten picked up by the media somehow, I’d discount it as a poor choice of words. But political speeches aren’t spontaneous and the words are carefully chosen. So I assume he meant train, not teach.
but education presupposes a curriculum, and I think “responsible citizen” is a very reasonable target for a curriculum.
As a target, arguably. As THE target, no. The primary goal of schools should be educating, not propagandizing, no matter how much we like the propaganda that they are promoting.
In fact, doesn’t the Tenth Amendment specify this explicitly?
The text of the
19th10th amendment is as follows: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”Powers not explicitly given to the federal government by the constitution are supposed to be retained by either the states or the people. I can see no way in which this prohibits the federal government (or state governments) from solving any problem, it simply limits its means. Which is really the opposite of Giuliani’s slavery=freedom statement.
BTW: As far as I know, no court case has ever successfully invoked the 10th amendment. It got thrown in there because one of the founders was afraid that listing certain rights might imply that the others were not retained by the people (or states). He was, as it turned out, quite right. But the amendment didn’t help.
Think of zoning laws, and labor restrictions, and health and safety regulation. These do not make us less free, because we consented to them. However, they do impose moral restrictions on us.
Are these the things that make us free? Because the statement was that “Freedom is about authority”. If he’d said that it is necessary for a free society to delegate power to authority in order for things to get done and the society to work, I’d think that this wasn’t necessarily what I want my presidential candidate to be saying but that it was a self-evidently true statement. Sort of like Bush’s “limits to freedom” statement. But the idea that giving power to authority is the thing that makes for a free society is just silly. On some level, every society, free or not, allows its leaders to have authority. This is not the distinction that makes a society free. On the contrary, the limitations on leaders, the transparency of the process by which leaders are chosen and given power, and the ability of the population to change its leaders if they find their behavior objectionable are part of what makes for a free society. Not the fact of having leaders with power.
the idea that giving power to authority is the thing that makes for a free society is just silly
Not really.
If you don’t give power to authority, then authority has no ability to maintain order and protect the weak from the strong. If there is no public order, and the strong prey on the weak, you don’t have a free society. The strong are free to prey, and the weak are free to be victimized, but your society itself is a nightmare.
By “freedom”, Giuliani means “liberty under law”. “Law” can be cops and courts or it can be social councils or peer enforcement, but without some social checks on absolute freedom (usually provided by government), we have anarchy. Anarchy, paradoxically enough, does not provide much freedom to many people.
I would have said that the fundamental difference between a free and an unfree society isn’t how much power the leaders have, but is precisely whether we gave it to them, or whether they merely took it by force.