Is It Simply Ignorance, Or What?

When I was as young as eight years old, my father would occasionally put thirty cents in my hand, and send me off to the corner store with instructions to return to him with a pack of Pall-Mall cigarettes, which I always did, faithfully.

Now, it does not matter to me what anyone on earth might think of this fact in terms of my relationship with my father. That is none of anyone's business. The thing that I am here to point out is its standing as a fact, and, after that: to urge serious consideration of what it means in a very different context, which requires the matter of history in order to get at the point here.

How on earth does it happen that people like Steven Den Beste will actually, seriously, say something like:

"The people of this nation are now more free than they've ever been, and we are closer to fulfilling the philosophical promise of our founding charter than we ever have been."

There is a form to this sort of thing that I see so commonly that it cries out for a name with which to identify it. I haven't worked it out yet, and I am also alert to the prospect that I should mass the data that I have let fly past just beyond any impulse to gather and colate it, but it goes generally like this:

"Women got the vote, and the Civil Rights movement finally redeemed the promise of the Declaration so cynically denied to black people for so long, and these things prove that we're more free than ever before."

I suspect that the credibility of my assertion here -- that there really is this myopic and insidious zero-sum swap of Big Hits for Little Bites going on in current political estimations -- will not find traction in some minds. For any number of reasons, there are people who simply are not going to grasp what's going on here. I know the facts, however. And, in fact, I can cross-check them against every time I had some lying, smeary little commie come at me with the canard that, just because I insist there is no morally defensible rationale for, say, the Departments of Education or Commerce -- or the income tax -- that I therefore advocate a return to 'the good old days' when lynching and burning black people was a cool thing to do.

These dolts, you see, cannot think in terms of principles, and that's one reason why they can't do any better than zero-sum fallacy variations less than a nose's length away from their beady eyes.

Now, I don't keep Den Beste in that same category of conceptual gimps. I really don't. For one good reason: I don't know the man well enough to conclude something like that, and I always try my best not to presume the worst before a sufficient body of fact is in.

What I do not understand, however, is what I've already stated, and the endurance of the mystery bears the repetition: how in the world does he -- or anyone -- come off saying that we're more free than we've ever been before? My god... facts to the precise opposite are so bountiful one almost doesn't know where to begin, but here are two right off the bat, which ought to give any sensible person pause: there was once a time not very long ago when a person could deal in more than ten thousand dollars in cash without apprising the federal government -- or anyone else, because it was nobody's business -- of the deal; and I remember people -- of older generations and gone now -- who would have considered the idea of a "no-knock" search warrant perfectly outrageous and more than a bit horrifying.

There is simply no way in life that a sensible person can consider American culture freer than it ever has been.

Why do people keep saying this?

(BTW: recall that "thirty cents" that I mentioned. It was real silver money. And whatever you do: don't send your eight year old for cigarettes, unless you're ready to parade the finest corrections fashions into court at your arraignment.)

Memory-Hole Watch

I saw this story linked from Grabbe last week, but didn't do my part with it as I should have. Catching up on Colby Cosh, I see the reminder, four days afterward.

It doesn't surprise me that The Wall Street Journal can't stand the heat, any more than it would surprise me that the National Security Agency is removing unclassified files from the National Archives, which doesn't surprise me at all.

There is nothing to see here, citizen. Move along.

Let's Not Get Carried Away

When I first discovered "blogs", I was quite snooty about them. The main thing that I could not understand was all the hue & cry over the form of the thing, as if it were something revolutionary and world-shaking. To me, it was obviously a fad: a fashion trip angled around a form that wasn't doing anything that I hadn't seen for years elsewhere online. To me, the whole central implication of digicom necessarily carried the prospects of instant fact-checking of the so-called "mainstream" media and personal publishing to worldwide audiences.

I've come around to the form of the thing, now, but I maintain that the function is nothing new at all.

And this is why I reject The Professor's time-lining of the essence of the thing. I say that the main element of his analysis is arbitrary: it consists of randomly constraining the span of the action to an "event", like any given war (whether Iraq-coming or Afghanistan in the past year or so).

Here's a pop quiz: what day was it when Dee Dee Myers first begain to change her story about "depression"?

Nobody in the "mainstream" media ever asked this question. That doesn't mean that it was never asked, but you had to be there to see it. You had to be there in order to understand the call for Ambrose Evans-Pritchard to receive the Pulitzer Prize in 1995, and why Mike Osmalov was correct in arguing against that. He had a different candidate, and he was right.

Relatively few people reading these words are going to know what I'm talking about. In that aspect, the point that Glen Reynolds advances is a bit more worthy, because a lot more people are tuned in, now. However, the point must be shaved in favor of the simple fact that many times more people are now connected than in 1995: this fact is what it is, on its own, and has very little to do with blogs as a form. It really won't do for blogs to attempt any special claim of impact simply because they're blogs. This is a big part of the thing that I was troubled about six months ago.

No, Glen: you're behind the times with your cite of the Afghan war.

Michael Rivero had his finger on the pulse of the thing more than seven years ago when he pointed out "the first war in cyberspace".

The thing that you're pointing out was going on long before blogs.