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So, there’s a big controversy about an ad showing the President of J. Crew and her son. It depicts the boy wearing pink toenail polish. The ad says that pink is her son’s favorite color. It wasn’t long before the Conservatives got word of this, and denounced it, in the words of Erin Brown, as ” blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children.”

I wonder if they think playing video games as a character of the opposite sex makes you transgendered, too. I ask because right now I’m playing through the game Fallout: New Vegas again as a female. Last night, I got to the part where Caesar explains his philosophy. (The famed “Hegelian Dialectics” scene.) He says–and I’m paraphrasing here–that the individual must be subordinated to a “single, unifying culture”.

This, in turn, reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s quote: “Classicism is the subordination of the parts to the whole; decadence is the subordination of the whole to the parts.”

Back to the case of the pink toenail advertisement. In essence, the Conservatives are quite upset that the ad because it seems to glorify violating strict gender norms. But why do they care about that, anyway?

The answer, I believe, is that some of the Conservatives care about things like this as means of organizing society. They hold certain ideals of each person’s role in the society according to their gender, among other things. What makes it odd is that half the time, they are complaining of too much government intervention and going on about how individualistic they are. The other half, they’re complaining about things like the wrong people painting their toenails in the wrong colors.

Now, before I get carried away and go calling them hypocrites, I must note that none of them, to my knowledge, have actually called for government intervention to stop unauthorized toenail painting. So, this isn’t a contradiction, exactly. But it is nonetheless odd.

I think it goes back to the “Nationalism/Materialism” thing. The Materialistic side of the Republican party wants to be free to make vast amounts of money. The Nationalistic side, although they pretty much go along with this, don’t always see things that way. They believe people ought to conform to their idealized society.

(Hat Tip to Thingy)

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Yesterday, I learned that it is possible to be so sick–from a common cold, no less–that you do not even have the energy to watch TV or play video games. My younger self would not have believed this to be possible.

Fortunately, I’m feeling better now.

So, how ’bout that Federal budget, eh? Seems we’re all doomed, though the reasons vary depending who you ask.

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Writes Andrew C. McCarthy:

“The energy and the logic on the right wants Big Government dismantled. Very simply, it has been tried for almost 80 years, it does not work, it cannot work — not if you accept that there is a human nature and that it will always assert itself.”

Really, it just “does not work”? Like, at all? So, everything has just been rotten for us since 1933?

Economically speaking, from about 1953 to 1968 was about as good as it got for the USA, or really anywhere in the world. And, of course, “Big Government” did win us a little thing called World War II.

I’m not a big fan of “Big Government”. I think FDR was and is rather overrated as a President. But you can’t just ignore history.

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Conservatives and Libertarians are fond of saying that Liberals put too much faith in the power of “Big Government.” Some of them have even gone so far as to say that Liberals have a religious devotion to the Government, treating it, the claim goes, as a sort of omnipotent deity. (This rather libertarian-minded charge, incidentally, dovetails nicely with the Religious branch of the Conservatives’ deeply-held belief that Liberals are godless, hedonistic decadents.)

As I’ve mentioned before, I myself was once a libertarian, and I will confess that perhaps there is some truth to the claim that liberals believe overmuch in the power of government, though surely the idea that they see Government as God is rather hyperbolic. But that’s an issue for a different post.

For now, I wish to examine rather the conservatives’ view of government. For, if liberals overestimate the government’s power to good, I think the conservatives overestimate its power to do ill, or at least have a misguided view of what a government behaving badly might look like.

Conservatives spend entirely too much time nowadays harping on the theme of alleged tyranny by the U.S. government. It’s a dramatic thing to say, of course, and is surely likely to arouse people’s interest in small-government philosophy. And furthermore, it is certainly a good idea to be constantly vigilant for signs of tyranny. Did not all the tyrannical dictators of history arise because not enough people were wise enough to be on the lookout for the first hints of their plans?

It is my opinion that tyranny, dictatorship, Stalin-esque police states, etc., are the more terrible but (fortunately) far less common type of government failure. The problems the average, law-abiding U.S. citizen is likely to run across when dealing with the government stem not from dictatorial brutality, but instead from the dull inefficiency of a massive bureaucracy.

Now, I do understand why, say, the Tea Party crowd feels a need to talk more about tyranny and less about bureaucracy. Tyrannies are fun to rebel against, bureaucracies are boring. More importantly, the monstrous atrocities committed by tyrants litter the pages of World History, whereas the comparatively banal problems of bureaucracies are the stuff of dull Economics textbooks.

So, perhaps it is inevitable that Tea Party propaganda (to use the word in its neutral, Bernaysian sense) will always rely on the rather dramatic idea of the current Government engaging in Tyrannical and Authoritarian behavior. For propaganda, like humor, relies on exaggeration to make its point.

Nevertheless, I feel it is dangerous–indeed, potentially ruinous to the libertarian streak in the Tea Party–to continually argue against governmental brutality that, while no doubt a thing to be avoided and guarded against, is far less often a problem for the average citizen than is the near omnipresence of inefficient and incapable governmental red-tape.

Bureaucracy is a far less interesting thing to oppose; and is far harder to solve, but I believe that it is the true problem with “Big Government”.

All comments are welcome, and disagreement is encouraged.

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Yet more mistakes by Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. She’s admitted to not reading the Arizona immigration bill, but nevertheless has gone ahead and criticized it. She also cut funding for security for New York’s mass-transit system and then lied about it.

Napolitano has never struck me as an especially competent individual. I strongly feel that she botched the response to the Christmas day attempted bombing–though it was largely merely a PR failure on her part, it suggests a rather high degree of incompetence, and if it were not for extremely good fortune on that day, the consequences of DHS stupidity could have been much more severe.

More than anything–and maybe we can chalk this up to anti-charisma–Napolitano has displayed a rather stunning level of tone-deafness. I’ll tell you up front: I haven’t read the Arizona immigration bill either;  but I still am more than qualified to pass judgment on it. But Napolitano was easily lured into saying something that made her sound less confident and more like a clueless hack–and by John McCain, no less!

Here’s what I’d have said:

 “I am familiar with the law to the extent that I recognize the potential exists for it to be abused for the purpose of infringing upon the rights of citizens.” 

Napolitano’s anti-charisma exacerbates all of her mistakes, of course, but it’s getting harder and harder to see what actual skills she possesses that make her worth the PR headaches she creates.

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This is bizarre. He claims to have been doing this for 70 years.

I assume that it’s some sort of hoax, though it’s hard to see how he’s pulling it off.

On the other hand, if it isn’t a hoax and everyone learned how to do it, the decrease in demand for food would probably cripple the economy, so I figure the Indian government will probably hush it all up,send the guy somewhere secret, and hide all the relevant studies in a giant warehouse; like at the end of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark.