People Who Don't Know What They're Talking About

I find that in this life there are a lot of people who don't know what they are talking about, or at the very least have no grasp on the consequences of their ideas. Of course, we can't help but start out with talking about politics. Animal rights people are the first thing on my mind. I honestly don't get these people. Obviously they don't know much about animals and how they operate and are attributing human features to them. I think that animal rights fanatics are a bunch of people who read Watership Down or Peter Rabbit when they were kids and never figured out that it wasnt't true. To them animals are fluffy little people with equal rights to humans. However, to the sane person animal rights are the result of giving antropromorphic traits to beasts.

This whole animal rights thing gets me going into its direct relative; the anti-hunting movement. People who hate hunting obviously don't know what they are talking about, but this does not surprise me. Anti-hunters often live out in big cities like San Francisco and New York and simply don't understand how "rednecks" can shoot a living animal. Well, I don't hunt but I live around some of those "rednecks" who love hunting and I am glad they do. In my state we have a huge problem with car-deer crashes and animals coming up and eating crops. People die every year from crashing into deer in rural areas. People in San Francisco have never experienced that because they have never seen a deer standing in the middle of the road. They also don't seem to get that hunting controls the population of animals, and if nobody hunted animals would reproduce out of control and then guess what? There wouldn't be enough food and more of them would die than they would if not for hunting. Entire populations of animals in particular animals have died this way, it is no fantasy.

Now as for the environment, I also don't understand why it is always urban liberals who think they know everything about how the environment. Not to say all environmentalists are liberals or that all liberals live in urban areas, but they tend to correlate. They favor environmental laws that crush people in rural areas, farmers and landowners in particular, knowing nothing about the impact. The same goes for industry. They often believe that they know everything about the environment and pollution but they don't. They also don't know how badly radical environmental policies hurt the economy. What we need is balance, not reckless waste or radical environmentalism, and unfortunately it seems that few have reached that balance. The liberal urban environmentalist also often looks down on those with less "eco-conscious" lifestyles than they. Of course, they don't get that a lot of people can't afford this, which is unfortunate because liberals are always trumpeting the cause of poor people.

The same ignorance that affects animal rightsers, radical environmentalists, also affects the economic left. They see something as "unfair" and demand it be banned, restricted, or more programs be created. Often the left is too generous and has no idea the costs that it actually takes business to operate. They think everybody can be paid $40,000 a year with benefits and that if they aren't it is because businessmen are "greedy." Maybe they are, but in most cases they can't afford to pay that much; and even if the figure was an exaggeration it still doesn't mean that the left is constantly badgering businessmen to pay workers more, which is great except it will bankrupt many small businesses. Now as for the even more radical left, the socialists, I don't get a lot of them either. A lot of the self-proclaimed socialists and communists out there are middle class college students (most of whom will grow out of the phase). They don't know how bad their lives would be under socialism, or more importantly how virtually everything they have comes from capitalism. Their egg-brained radicalism has blinded them to reality, which is why most socialists are impossible to talk to. Now they may preach about how they are part of the "proletariat" lower class but the truth is that most socialists are middle class intellectual types, because the lower class is generally not "awakened" to political philosophy, let alone socialism. Go ask your average welfare recipient or member of the working poor to explain socialism, Karl Marx, or any of that and they won't be able to tell you. They are too concerned about putting food on the table. Your average left-wing college student (or indoctrinating professors) on the other hand...

Now you might think I'm just being hard on the left, but I'm not. There are also imbeciles on the right, and they're next. We will begin with the right-wing mythmaking machine. These are the people who alleged that Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster, which is an incident long forgotten in the minds of most, but not to politicos. You see, one of Clinton's aides killed himself and right-wing talk radio claimed that Clinton ordered his murder to cover up his alleged crimes (which themselves were loosely defined). A decade and a half later these same people claimed that Barack Obama was a Muslim taught in a radical Muslim school. Well it is true that his father was a lapsed Muslim, the Obama did live in the Muslim country of Indonesia, but that does not make him a radical Muslim. The man didn't care about religion for most of his early life and later became a Christian. Only a truly ignorant person would believe that a man could rise through politics while secretly being a radical Muslim and not be exposed. The way the press is it would be impossile. And then there is the allegations that he is a communist. I don't know how truly left-wing Obama is in his heart, but I doubt he is a communist. And if he was a communist or radical Muslim and tried to get his agenda enacted, he would be stopped. If he popped up one day and announced he was a radical Muslim communist he would be voted out of office and anything he achieved to those ends repealed. Leave the poor man's character alone and actually debate him on policy. To me this makes the right look absurd, and whether rightly or wrongly, that they have no good ideas and would rather focus on character assassination.

And now we come to the subject of ideas. The right-wing doesn't seem to have any. They seem to only focus on why Democrats are bad and not on why they are right. This is true particularly in the economic arena, where they gave up any hope of "fiscal conservatism" with the Bush years. Maybe if they want to get it back they need to pursue an aggressive, principled alternative to Democratic policies in the next election cycles. At least principle. At least they can do that for me. As for the social arena, and the makeup of the right itself, I just don't get it. They seem to think they can appeal to the older generation endlessly and forsake younger voters. Don't they get how foolish this is? In order to appeal to younger voters they need to do two things; first, recognize that most young people do not share the social attitudes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, second, get away from this fixation on Ronald Reagan. All I hear from the right is Ronald Reagan this, Ronald Reagan that. Don't they get that young voters don't remember Ronald Reagan? Don't they get that Ronald Reagan, no matter how good or bad he was, was President in a completely different time and as a result trying to translate anything Ronald Reagan did, said, or was to this day and age is like trying to compare apples to oranges. Don't they realize that they will never lead unless they have leaders, instead of defining themselves by how much they are like a dead guy they need a new embodiment of the conservative movement. Sometimes I think I should do them a favor and quit being libertarian and give it to them, because even I as an unknown guy could probably put their movement back on the map more than any of them have!

And now for my own movement; the libertarians! Oh yes, it would be unfair to bash liberals and conservatives alone without doing some in-house criticism. A few pointers. You can be radical and principled without all the radical symbolism. Quit waving around these Constitutions, Gadsden flags, and thinking you can get away without paying income taxes. Income taxes are bad, but you should focus on why they are bad instead of trying to say that it isn't actually a law. I think of Irwin Schiff for instance. The bottom line is that a lot of the hardline revolutionary talk and tactics puts people off, and so does constantly living in the Revolutionary War and quoting dead men. We need to focus on modern times. Secondly, we need to quit cavorting with the darlings of the far-left and far-right. People like Alexander Cockburn on the left and Pat Buchanan on the right do not do us any favor when libertarians pander to these types. We need to define ourselves as a dinstinct movement instead of trying to draw in the anti-Obama left and courting paleocons. What we need is to turn them to libertarianism instead of turning libertarianism toward them. Now, if you think I am only critiqueing radicals, I am not done. I also have a beef with the "moderates" over at places like Reason. We can't turn libertarianism into a utilitarian doctrine. It never has been. It never will be. We need to retain our radical, principled beliefs while shoving off from revolutionary and off-putting rhetoric. The trouble is we have two camps, those who think that by ditching the radical talk we ditch our radical principles and those who believe that in order to ditch the hardline rhetoric we must ditch our principles. They are all false choices! Just look at the yahoos we are facing! And we still are virtually nothing on the political scene? Come on people!