Rational Ignorance, Fairy Dust and Pissing Away the Future: Libertarians are Selfish and Stupid

Note: I did nothing to re-post or stop the re-posting of this old thing on my blog. It got to the head of my (short ) list today without any intervention from me. Its author is an adept engineer of the Intergalaxy. Again, I have no objection to this being here because my censoring fiber is thin. J.D. 8/26/14

Hello all,

I thought I’d take up Dr J’s invitation to write something for his blog. This post is largely inspired by the comments thread from his recent post on bombing Syria (for Syrians’ sake, of course) and his latest post on the supposed differences between conservatives and liberals. Ultimately, my goal is to show you how full of shit everybody that participates on this blog really is.

That won’t be hard to do.

Dr J makes the following, factually correct, observation about Leftists (“liberals”):

Conservatives are well informed about liberal programs because they cannot help but be. Few liberals however avoid being pathetically dependent on gross stereotypes of conservatism as a political doctrine. Few even know that it’s a political doctrine based on a well-defined moral stance.

If there is one thing that Leftists are known for, it is being rationally ignorant: the less you know about your opponent, the easier it is to dismiss him as a “right-wing nut job,” a “Korporate Klown,” or a “Teabagger.” The less you know about your opponent, the easier it becomes to swallow the fall of the Berlin Wall and the stagflation of the 1970s. The less you know about your opponent, the easier it is to forgive Barack Obama for his trespasses (see also this post by an economist, Bryan Caplan, on Leftist ignorance of conservative and libertarian arguments).

Conservatives are indeed more well-informed about Leftist programs and Leftist thought, but this is hardly something to be proud of. Being proud of such a fact is like Cuba being proud about the fact that it is not considered to be the worst violator of human rights in the world.

Conservative ignorance – rational and erudite – is just as bad as the Leftist’s, especially when it bumps up against the morally and intellectually superior ideology of libertarianism. Consider two of Dr J’s most recent responses to my vigorous critiques of his bumblesome and ill-informed piece on bombing Syria for Syrians’ sake. Dr J writes:

McHenry is not a member of the “baby-boom generation.” (And, neither am I, for opposite reasons.) And here goes your sociological intuition, again!

Dr J thinks he has delivered a clever blow to my argument, but what he has really demonstrated is an inability to read and comprehend any views that he opposes. If you go back and actually read my argument, you’ll see that I was critiquing the ideals of the Baby Boomer generation. The fact that McHenry sounds like an old man says much – sociologically – about not only the continued irrelevance of Leftism but also the types of people that Baby Boomer liberalism (academics call it ‘corporatism,’ or state-managed capitalism) now attracts.

Dr J doesn’t care about this, of course. Either he cannot grasp my argument, or he grasps it and chooses to ignore it by changing the subject. If it is indeed the latter, then I’ll leave it up Dr J’s readers to Google the relevant logical fallacy.

Speaking of logical fallacies, and riffing off of examples that rely on rational ignorance to satiate the primal desire for power, Dr J also writes, in the same comment thread, the following:

Look in on this blog archive and you will conclude from other exchanges that Brandon is against fighting until those who want to kill us specifically have said so officially and until they are on the Jersey Shore or in Santa Monica with large tanks. Even then, we would have to “declare war” (whatever that means).

This is another great example of rational ignorance at work. If my argument is as simple and stupid as Dr J makes it out to be, how could he possibly be wrong about his views on foreign policy? Who needs “right-wing nut jobs” and “Korporate Klowns” when you have libertarians that make arguments like the one Dr J created (in his mind, all by himself) above?

To Dr J’s readers: can you not spot the gross misrepresentations in the quoted paragraph above? If you seriously cannot spot them, then I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you. I will again leave it up to you, Dr J’s readers, to Google the relevant logical fallacy in the above-quoted passage.

The rational ignorance displayed by conservatives is not always as clever as the two quoted passages above. Sometimes conservatives simply lie. In December of 2011, Dr J wrote the following sentence:

Although the regretted Bin Laden had threatened the US in connection with American military presence in Saudi Arabia, the 9/11 attack took place after the US forces had vacated that country, not as a means to make them move.

This is, of course, patently false. The BBC reported on US troop withdrawal (in 2003) here.  USA Today‘s report is here.  The New York Times has something on it here.  Fox News reported on the 2003 withdrawal here. The bald-faced lie Dr J has told himself, and his readers, is understandable once it is remembered that imperialists want the US to be a global hegemon. If there is a hot girl that I want really badly, and I am butt-ugly, am I going to lie to myself (and, perhaps, to her) in order to squeeze her breasts?

Now I have yet another question I’d like to ask Dr J’s readers: if Dr J relies on straw men, red herrings and outright lies to bolster his arguments in favor of US imperialism, what does that tell you about yourselves when you find yourselves in agreement with his sophistry? Are you a fool? A dunce? A faithful member of the fold?

If imperialist logic relies upon logical fallacies and lies to justify its morality, and you intuitively gravitate towards imperialist arguments, what does that tell you about your intuitions?

None of this is to suggest that conservatives are somehow more immoral than Leftists. When prompted to give his justifications for bombing, killing, maiming and starving Syrians for their own sake, Dr Amburgey, the house liberal of this blog, writes:

But other nation states & groups have intervened. On the side of the Assad regime there is Russia, Iran, & Hezbollah. On the side of the opposition the Gulf states and to some extent Turkey. The intervention on the regime side has, to date, been much more effective.

Indeed. Dr A cares so much about the good name of the United States that he is wondering aloud why our republic is not on such a prestigious list of active states in the conflict. And what a list it is, too: Russia, Hizbollah, Iran, the murderous Gulf states and Turkey. I had, until I read this justification for imperialism, often thought that the old conservative charge of “liberals hating America” to be an ugly rhetorical weapon used during political fights, but otherwise completely empty of substance. Given that Dr A wants the republic to achieve the same high standards of foreign policy set by the human rights violators he cites above, now I am not so sure.

I assume that the al-Qaeda militants Barack Obama is going to arm will first be sprinkled with fairy dust, too, so that they won’t misbehave themselves in the future.

Notice, too, that old liberal canard of fairness in Dr A’s justification for imperialism: “B-b-but Russia and Saudi Arabia are arming Syrian factions…”

James Madison, one of the most underrated libertarian theorists of all time, wrote in 1787, of war, the following:

A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.

While conservatives and liberals continue to conjure up straw men, red herrings and outright lies to bolster their rational ignorance about the domestic and foreign political affairs of the republic, tyrants act.

Less than 1% of the Syrian population has died in a civil war that is being fought between fascists and Islamists domestically, and between fascists and Islamists regionally. Therefore, the United States government should make everything right in the world by bombing one side and arming the other. Washington can accomplish this task in the same manner that it has accomplished all of its other successful tasks over the years: by sprinkling fairy dust over everything it does.

Or, in other words, you are a stupid, selfish meanie if you don’t believe in magic.