Shannon Love

Hmmm, Leftists or Fire Ants?

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Comments from a post on NJ Governor Christie buying air time to lure Illinois businesses to NJ.

Margaret Price: Governor Perry has been doing this to California businesses, which are pouring into Texas faster than the illegals from Mexico. And we’ve got better weather than New Jersey.
 
mochalite: I agree that Texas has a better business climate, but overall climate? It’s HOT there most of the time and you have fire ants!
 
sclemens: I’d choose fire ants over blood-sucking liberals any day of the week. Fire ants show their true colors all the time and don’t try to convince you they are stinging you for your own good.
 
Will the last one out of California please turn out the compact fluorescent light.

Yep, you always know where you stand with fire ants. It might be their one virtue.

“The Man is Hiding the Stash” Fallacy

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At Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez says of the Marxist Piven’s philosophy:

The problem with Piven’s theory is that events in Europe have shown those “major economic reforms” to be unsustainable, if not actually ruinous. However, she appears to believe that the European crisis is only apparent, being the result of the Man hiding the Stash. Find that stash and things become sustainable again.

I think this fallacy deserves its own name because I think this is the central economic fallacy of leftists in general. Whether we are talking about unions, public workers, redistributionists, etc., there is always the implicit idea that somewhere there is this big pile of money that the rich business people are hoarding away like a squirrel with its winter store of nuts. Leftists tell everyone that all problems can be solved if we just use the force of the state to threaten the squirrels to give up their nuts.

The problem is that rich people don’t own a lot of nuts, they own nut producing trees, i.e., rich people don’t have a stash of cash, they own assets that can, if managed properly, produce a stream of income. Worse, for the leftists, those assets usually provide jobs for the majority of the population, so you really can’t alter their use too much. If you cut the tree down to get the nuts, what are going to eat next year?

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Tyranny of the Naive

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Well, yipee. Obama supports revoking the infamous 1099 requirement of ObamaCare. I think the question we should ask now is: What the hell were they thinking when they inserted it in the bill in the first place?

The requirement imposed such a huge burden on both businesses and the IRS that many wondered if either the private or public sector even had the information technology to process all the paperwork. Why wasn’t the incredible overhead imposed by the requirement immediately obvious to those who created it? Why didn’t the originators stop and ask, “Hey, is requiring every business to file a form for every purchase or sale over $600 even feasible?” Even if they didn’t care about the overhead and economic consequences, the political consequences should have given them pause.

I think they simply didn’t understand the consequences because they were too naive about the realities of business, government administration and large-scale information management. I’m not saying the originators are stupid, no doubt they’re all Ivy League overachievers, but I’m willing to bet that none of them has any real-world experience outside of academics, activism or politics. They can’t start with an abstract idea like the 1099 requirement and intuitively extrapolate to the real-world consequences.

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Leftists’ Eliminationist Fantasy

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Via Althouse comes a review for a play, The Last Supper, with a revealing premise. The play is based on a movie of the same name. Wikipedia summarizes the movie:

The Last Supper is a 1995 film directed by Stacy Title. It stars Cameron Diaz, Ron Eldard, Annabeth Gish, Jonathan Penner and Courtney B. Vance as five liberal graduate school students who invite a string of right-wing extremists whose political views they disagree with to dinner in order to murder them.

Here’s a video of the trailer:

This is obviously a comedy and one that uses a long-established plot premise: the protagonist gets hooked on murdering obnoxious people. (Feel free to offer examples in the comments. Dexter comes immediately to mind for me.) This plot premise works because we the audience can empathize on some level with wanting to do away with all the people who make us angry. The plot creates a fantasy in which we get to harmlessly indulge our darker impulses. It is that fantasy of lashing out that makes these types of works attractive on an emotional level. In most works with this premise, the murderer kills people universally despised. Dexter kills murderers and who cannot empathize with that urge?

What makes The Last Supper so disturbing in the contemporary context is both murder victims, non-leftists, and the intended audience, leftists. It is clearly a leftist’s murder fantasy.

Wikipedia describes the victims:

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You’d Think They’d Have Said Something

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Does this guy sound like a leftists?

Indeed, Brezik seems to have inhaled just about every noxious vapor in the left-wing miasma: environmental extremism, radical Islam, anti-capitalism, anti-Zionism and Christophobia, among others.
 
In his “About Me” box on Facebook, Brezik listed as his favorite quotation one from progressive poster boy, Che Guevara. The quote begins “Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism” and gets more belligerent from there.
 
On his wall postings, Brezik ranted, “How are we the radical(s) (left) to confront the NEW RIGHT, if we avoid confrontation all together?”
 
As good as his word, Brezik’s marched on Toronto in June 2010 to protest the G20 Summit, where he was arrested, charged, and deported. “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,” he boasted.

Guess what he did. Go ahead guess.

Okay, I’ll tell you.

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