Hatefilled

There have been a flurry of attempts to paint Treyvon Martin as a thug in an attempt to justify his mindless  murder. Here's one example from the fetid pen of Robert VerBruggen of the NRO. Here's another line of attack from the same horrid little man, Martin was winning a fistfight Zimmerman initiated for no good reason therefore he had to shoot the 17 year-old, about whom who knew nothing other than he was black, kid.

It really is beneath contempt.  Purveyors of the first line of attack seeks to dehumanize Martin by painting him as the kind of criminal we can do without. Advocates of the second would have you believe that a cretinous, authoritarian racist who defied police orders and not only followed but confronted a kid who had done nothing wrong but be black was forced to kill the kid because, as it turns out, cretinous, authoritarian racists aren't, in fact, the Batman nor yet even Robin.

Obviously the VerBruggens of the world aren't interested in making sense of the event or working to avoid it recurrence.  Why? Who really knows.  It may be that they are horrid little men and women bent on making the world less salubrious. Or it could be that they see the tactics deployed by the neoliberals for the past 30 odd years have created a world they want to inhabit, i.e., where violence or its threat is endemic, where inequality reigns, and where opportunity is a function of genealogy -- which is another way of saying the rich get richer and the poor starve.

One thing we can know for a fact is that there is no way to square the current reality with the promise of morning in America.


UPDATE:
It seems that Trayvon Martin called 911; one suspects this ends badly for Zimmerman and the brigade of horrors.

via.

Trust Not

In North Carolina a Republican law maker wants to bring back public hangings for "murderers" as well as "abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers." Not that the maniacs are all robotic sociopaths but just enough of them to keep me voting for the lesser of two evils.

Trust

Over to Crooked Timber there is a post on abortion that makes the point that banning certain kinds of abortions takes the moral choice out of a woman's hands and is a sign that many don't trust women to  make the correct moral choice because of women's well know penchant for making frivolous decisions to have abortions. There are, as of right now, around 600 comments most of them are titanically silly. Many of the comments try to link the idea of trust to other laws about, say, drunk driving. Leaving aside the fact that we know that there are, right this second, tens of thousands of drunks driving cars and we don't know of any similar number of women having frivolous abortions. Indeed, we might know of a number approaching zero.

Ask your self if society has undertaken to ban drunk driving in similar fashion. Sure, in the recent past police have cracked down on drunk driving and the limits for blood alcohol have declined. But still all the necessary ingredients for drunk driving are readily available. Alcohol we can but everywhere, including gas stations and drive through liquor stores. In Missouri I once watched a guy walk into the gas station pay for his gas and buy a cherry coke and an airplane bottle of vodka, chug some of the cherry coke, dump the vodka in and clamber into his car and drive off.

If we took banning drunk driving, a real problem, as seriously as banning those (fictive) frivolous abortions because they bother some subset of our fellow citizens we would offer our fellow citizens the choice between owning a car and having a drink. In this scenario, once you buy a car you are forbidden to buy any alcohol ever and even forbidden to have alcohol in the home situation. If you don't own a car but rent any vehicle for the period of its rental you are forbidden buying alcohol.

There are, obviously, a number of positive outcomes here. More people would use public transportation, bicycles, or shanks mare to get from point a to point b. This would result in an increase in spending on mass transit within and between cities. Trains, trolley cars, and related etc would become the preferred modes of transportation, with car rentals filling the lacuna. Fewer people would move miles from where they work and, consequently, the downtowns of a many cities would blossom.  Freed from the onerous cost of vehicle ownership, people would have more money to spend on fun things, like alcohol and food. The world in general would be a better place.

Yet for some reason we trust motorists, a deranged and dangerous lot, to make the right choice and not drive drunk. Why  then can we not extend to our fellow citizens, who are women, the same right to chose and only punish those cases were the abortion is properly deemed frivolous. Could it be that we don't trust women?

Remember the Years Before 1933?

Like all concerned Americans, I prefer to ignore events outside of these United States and when I do pay attention, I like to make risible comkparisons between those events and the Nazis. Because, well, it's easy. We all know that the probably senile Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor despite the Nazis' declining electoral share and despite Hindenburg's refusal to do the same thing somewhat earlier. Thus did Wiemar become an ex-parrot.

We all know that the Nazis represented the culmination of the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe in the in the wake of WWI and, consequently, were the not the vanguard but the tail end of the rights anti-democratic counter revolutionary impulses. Hitler's rise was not the cause of democracy's demise but rather the result of far-too many dunderheads acquiescing to strangling in its crib because, after all, some kind of a third-way technocratically-inclined charismatic visionary (I know its contradictory, that's part of what the acquiescers dunderheads)  ought properly lead the path backward to the future.

As I have mentioned recently that there are solid reasons to worry about the Hungarians' dominate political party once again slaying the democratic dragon in the name of nationalism and the need for authoritarianism. I would argue that the recent spate of technocratisme in Greece and Italy and the well-know neoliberal distrust of democracy, what with people being unwilling to let corporations rule the world, gives the maniacs in Hungary some cover.

If you read the most recent Krugman hosted discussion of events there, you can find links to the constitution and with a little work you can find a link to the Hungarian national anthem. Or go here and see the response of all right-thinking, which is to say the left and liberal Hungarians,  people have to say about it. The constitution reads like a declaration of war on the contemptable corruption of this modern age and the anthem sounds like a the kind of bully-boy whining I'd expect from those who would deal death to the democratic experiment.

It's easy to become distracted by the antics of the mantic swine cavorting in the cool Iowan summer; but, we ought remember that the common foes for all concerned Americans are the authoritarians and the neoliberals.