From RR

• Now the US Navy’s submarines can have the same problems the rest of the forces do: breakdown of discipline (pregnancies, double standards — it’s easier for a woman to cry her way out of an enlistment), more broken marriages (already a problem in the services and another morale-killer with the above) and inefficiency (using five people to do what four normal men can) which aboard a warship, especially a sub, can be deadly. Hmm. Both sexes in a small space for months at a time: duh. Hearing West Pointer Brian Mitchell discuss this in person 11 years ago convinced me. I’m for peace but not pacifist and don’t want egalitarian nonsense anywhere including compromising the legitimate mission of the military (see above on five doing what four can).
• Do school vouchers pass the anarcho-libertarian test? The slippery slope here is the lesson of Notre Dame and other formerly RC colleges which have ‘taken the soup’ (assimilated; sold out to the larger culture): once you hand over control from the bishop to the state to get subsidies (long a goal of the RC schools, still under the bishops... founded to get away from the state and its de facto Protestantism), the state calls the shots on the content. Then there’s the problem nothing to do with the state of the clergy slinking off and joining the enemy.
• Peckerwood populism (part II) or being patronised by prats on the right. Stop the race-baiting! I read Steve Sailer but my answer’s not the anti-immigration and Nazi race laws his fans obviously use his conclusions to back up. One high standard for all and never mind race — no racial quotas or double standards. The right thing to do whether or not his theories are true. Sidebar: One of Joshua’s great insights: if only the populist right had dropped this, the New Left got over their brattiness and the two sides around the year I was born sat down and talked to each other (George Wallace minus race meets the SDS’s Carl Oglesby, with Murray Rothbard and Frank Chodorov hosting/moderating), we would have stopped being played by the state and the pols and the destructive cultural ’60s as commonly understood never would have happened. (But the palæos have a point that the root of the last problem went back to the ’50s and earlier. Much of the older generation was as clueless as the kids.)
• Married to the state. In 1947, with the baby boom in its infancy and few disposed to hearing of family crisis, Harvard sociologist Carle Zimmerman saw the long-term reality: the family had been deteriorating since the Renaissance and was nearing the point of no return. Whenever the family shows signs of dysfunction, Zimmerman observed, “the state helps to break it up.” As all-round nice bloke Ringo Starr says, everything government touches turns to crap. They ought to put that on posters and not ‘Imagine’ (an evil song).
• Obama and Afghanistan. The establishment left have more blood on their hands historically than the right so this should surprise no-one. Maybe like Madeleine Albright (God have mercy on her) on killing Iraqis under Clinton’s watch he thinks it’s worth it to push his version of American hegemony.

Labels: history, libertarianism, politics