Mediaboss Marketing

William Shatner at FreedomFest 2017 in Las Vegas Friday night. Credit: Emile Doak/The American Conservative

Is there a free mind? Are our minds free? Are we programmed by something up there to follow our fate? Or are we programmed by Mom and Dad at a very early age? So is there free will? Do we make choices?

So wondered William Shatner during his July 21 speech at the annual Las Vegas convention of libertarians and other free-marketeers called FreedomFest. He urged the audience to stick to its principles, not compromise as he says he did when he directed Star Trek V by giving up on his original vision of having the real God attack the crew with an army of lava men in the films climax.

Compromising principles is a mistake, suggested Shatner. Nobody can tell you what to do. Somewhere inside us is a core.

Is William Shatner a libertarian, you might ask? If not, whats he doing there? Well, it seems more like hes an environmentalist worried about overpopulationand hes a Canadian, of coursebut hes also expressed some populist longings for someone to sweep away the bureaucrats and make American democracy work again. And he avoids commenting on Donald Trump. Maybe call Shatner a frustrated technocratic populist? Sounds like sort of a Reform Party guy to me, leavened by an inevitable Star Trek-veteran love of science and education.

None of this makes him too much weirder than a previous FreedomFest speaker who went on to bigger things, namely Donald Trump. I suppose the question is how big you want the libertarian tent to be. You probably want a tent big enough to let in optimists who still believe we can invent and build things, but not a tent so big that it lets all the carny-barkers inside. A friend of mine in Colorado reports seeing someone flying around downtown Denver with a jetpack a couple weeks ago, so we know futuristic technological progress is officially going strong, but I worry more about unrealistic promises in politics these days.

I noticed some people joking online that theyd love to hear Shatner tell the assembled libertarians to get a life in the fashion of his notorious 1986 Saturday Night Live sketch about obsessive Trekkie conventioneers. I probably would have laughed harder at that joke myself a decade or two ago, when it seemed that the worst thing that could happen to the libertarian movement is that it might get too screechy and radical and alienate mainstream Americans. Everybody relax, I would have thought.

Nowadays, I worry more that in American politics, even the most radical road always leads back to the same mushy centrist middle, with a few highly predictable TV pundits guarding that middle against the emergence of any truly new ideas. So, if Shatner is unlikely to express a precise, coherent philosophical argument, I should at least root for him to leave crowds slightly confused, even if he says something stupid. That can spur thought. It beats sticking to safely-ambiguous, nigh-universal sentiments that are deployed as if to build coalitions but are really used mainly to make the speaker himself seem as non-threatening as possible, often boosting his career without doing much to shore up the hypothetical broader coalition. Absent utopian unanimity, one should root for competition, always.

Im beginning to feel the same way about fictional continuity in Star Trek, to my surprise.

A sci-fi geek, I have been as eager as anyone over the years to see massive fictional continuities like that of the Star Trek universe or the DC Comics universe kept perfectly consistent. Inevitably, though, things fall apart eventually. New writers and new producers like Star Trek/Star Wars director J.J. Abrams come along and cavalierly decide theres a certain scene they want to depict or a character they want to bring back, and out goes the whole timestream as were asked to pretend vast swaths of prior fictional history never happened. I used to think this process was as heartbreaking as watching footage of the old Penn Station being demolished.

But there comes a point when you realize that the hope of maintaining a consistent continuityor a large political coalitionis probably rooted in a misguided optimism. The editors are too busy to care about all the details, and the politicians and most popular pundits are too busy or corrupt to care about philosophical purity. So, then the disappointed idealist starts to root for chaos. Perhaps thats a little of what happened in November 2016.

Let my fellow libertarians fight viciously and devolve into factions (pausing to enjoy the occasional near-meaningless Shatner speech or other entertainment). Like small and decentralized states, the factionalism might afford a better chance for truth to survive out there somewhere than would one bland, homogeneous consensus version of the philosophy with all the rough edges polished and gleaming.

And if the new Star Trek: Discovery TV series comes out this fall and has a throwaway line in it suggesting that this timeline may replace both the Abrams films and all the TV material we know from the 60s and 90s, well, now Im okay with that possibility, too. I am preemptively embracing that anarchic conclusion before the monarchShatnerhas a chance to insult us all again. Let a hundred Omicron Ceti III flowers bloom.

In Vegas terms, until we really hit the jackpot, Im grateful so long as we can keep rolling the dice.

Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners. He writes for SpliceToday.com and can be found on Twitter at @ToddSeavey.

See the rest here:
Is Star Trek Icon William Shatner a Libertarian? - The American Conservative

The Commonwealth of Virginia is set to elect a new governor in November. There are three candidates qualified to be on the ballot but the Republican and Democratic parties are blocking the Libertarian candidate Cliff Hyra from participating.

The voters are entitled to hear from all eligible candidates not just those of the two majority parties. I would like the Bluefield Daily Telegraph and its readers to ask that Mr. Hyra be included in all future debates as the citizens of Virginia need to know all of the options that are available in November.

As three newspapers in Virginia have endorsed this idea as well as this issue being addressed by WVTF-TV in Roanoke as well as Virginia public radio. I think that the Bluefield Daily Telegraph should have the courage to take such a stand.

Greg Gruchacz

Bluefield, Va.

View post:
Let the Libertarian candidate have a say - Bluefield Daily Telegraph

July 25 at 5:37 PM

Again, the establishment political parties have used their influence with the bar association to reduce participation in the electoral process, this time in Virginia.The Posts July 22 Metro article Libertarian candidate not invited to debate reported that the Virginia Bar Association found a reason to exclude the Libertarian gubernatorial candidate from debating the Democratic and Republican candidates. Any thoughtful person knows the real reason for making this decision: There are only downsides to the major-party candidates having to debate a person who will clearly demonstrate that they do not and cannot have much to offer the voters.

Given the recent presidential race between major candidates with extremely high unfavorable ratings, I would think the Virginia Bar Association would be interested in supporting all reasonable opportunities to provide alternative information and candidates to the Virginia (and in three years, the national) electorate.

David Griggs, Columbia

Continued here:
The real reason the Libertarian gubernatorial candidate was shut out of a debate - Washington Post

The history of Koch-style libertarian economics is steeped in racism.

The intellectual theorists of white race privilege recognized that such head-on confrontations wouldnt protect the old Jim Crow order for long. The problem was democracy itself: American opinion was turning against Southern racism.

Democracy often comes down to honest math. After the 1965 passage of the federal Voting Rights Act, 20th century America seemed to be on a path toward the democratic ideal of one person, one vote. Yet the 21st century has seen enormous reversals of this hard-won progress. Not only have two oligarchic GOP presidents been elected without the popular vote, but crude efforts to suppress ballot access at all levels have become commonplace.

What set the machinery of formal democracy lurching backward so dramatically? InDemocracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America, Nancy MacLean traces the origins to the backlash against Brownv. Board of Education. White supremacists vowed massive resistance, with Virginias Prince Edward County going so far as to shutter its entire public school system for several years.

But the intellectual theorists of white race privilege recognized that such head-on confrontations wouldnt protect the old Jim Crow order for long. The problem was democracy itself: American opinion was turning against Southern racism.

Thats where the intellectual antihero of MacLeans book, James Buchanan, comes in. A Tennessee-born free-market fundamentalist who chaired the economics department at the University of Virginia (UVA), Buchanan launched a new center of political economy at the school in 1956 to break the powerful grip [of ] collectivist ideology.

In 1959, the fire-breathing libertarian theorists at UVA thrust themselves into the heart of Virginias desegregation battle by proposing a now-familiar libertarian ploy: privatization of the states public schools. The proposal elevated racial discrimination into a neutral-sounding quest for economic efficiency. The market would see to inequalities via the logic of parent choice; it was simply a matter of letting the chips fall where they may.

This was unalloyed bullshit, of course. Given the generations-old imbalance of wealth and power between the races, any laissez-faire approach to compliance with Brown would inevitably reinforce racial inequalities. The state assembly eventually voted down the radical plan, but as MacLean notes, the underlying logic has since burrowed into nearly every facet of our madly privatizing public lifefrom the Flint water crisis to the attacks on Wisconsins public unionsin a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and local level, back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation.

A major force behind this transformation was the libertarian true believer, oil baron and megafunder Charles Koch. When Buchanan launched another hard-right institute at George Mason University, then a backwater suburban commuter school, in 1982, Kochs largesse helped bulk it up into a conservative intellectual bulwark. Buchanan and his Mason cohorts minted a new generation of ideological foot soldiers who led the libertarian Right in a steady antidemocratic and oligarchic drift.

After Buchanan had a falling out with Koch in 1998, the hack libertarian economist Tyler Cowen kept hammering away at the Buchananite gospel from his perch atop George Masons Koch-funded Mercatus Institute. The freest countriesin the laissez-faire sensehave not generally been democratic, Cowen wrote in a 2000 essay, citing as exemplars of freedom Augusto Pinochets Chile (whose plutocratic constitution was essentially ghostwritten by Buchanan), Singapore and Hong Kong. The hard truth, therefore, is that if American political institutions render market-oriented reforms too difficult to achieve, then perhaps these institutions should be changed.

For starters, Cowen suggests, the weakening of the checks and balances in the U.S. constitutional order would increase the chance of a very good out-come. What constitutes a very good outcome? Nothing less than a wholesale rewriting of the social contract, with worthy individuals elevating themselves up the social ladder and the less fortunate consigned to shantytowns. Get ready, he counsels.

As well we should. One way would be to use MacLeans excellent expos to help mobilize an energized small-D democratic electorate. Its long past time to smite the libertarian Right with a kind of math that cant be bought.

We're launching a new In These Times magazine to take on Trump and build the Left. Are you in?

Continue reading here:
The White-Supremacist Roots of America's Libertarian Right - In These Times

Duke University historian Nancy MacLean's new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, combines conspiracy theories, accusations of racism, and dire warnings about a libertarian plot to create an American oligarchy. It's a historical story that's a "product of [MacLean's] imagination," with a reading of sources that's "hostile and tendentious to the point of pure error," as Reason's Brian Doherty put in a review we published last week.

In today's podcast, Doherty joins Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Andrew Heaton to discuss how MacLean fundamentally misunderstands her subject matter; this year's Freedom Fest (an annual convention for libertarians in Las Vegas that just wrapped up); conservative-leaning libertarians vs. left-leaning libertarians; the constitutional ramifications of Donald Trump potentially pardoning himself; and whether or not we're living in the panopticon.

Subscribe, rate, and review the Reason Podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Don't miss a single Reason podcast! (Archive here.)

Subscribe at iTunes.

Follow us at SoundCloud.

Subscribe at YouTube.

Like us on Facebook.

Follow us on Twitter.

Visit link:
Nancy MacLean's Libertarian Conspiracy Theory [Podcast] - Reason (blog)