Author: Sahar

Over the last year or so, I’ve been getting this amazing email newsletter from the International Center for Ethics, Justice & Public Life (notice how everything at Brandeis is some sort of center or another? Seriously. Even Volen is the “Volen National Center for Complex Systems”).

Anyways, it kicks ass. As does the Ethics Center website.

Point is, the listserv rocks. But it’s a bitch to be added to. Here’s how you do it:

Send your name, email, and mailing address to

Sample email from the listerv under the fold…
Continue reading “A Cool Brandeis Publication”

Announcing the newest, hottest, rawest, most swashbuckling club on campus.

That’s right. Drinking Liberally.

Long Story short?
Every Thursday. 11pm. Chums. Chill with other liberals.
Also, sign up here to get announcements for parties, movie screenings, and other events we might put on.
Continue reading “Drinking Liberally”

A personal message from Ingrid Schorr, Program Administrator of the Office of the Arts

The Office of the Arts and Student Activities is hosting an all-arts barbecue on the afternoon of September 11. We would like to acknowledge that this is also the anniversary of the 2001 attacks on the United States. Those events affected our community in many different ways; some students were 11 years old at the time; some did not live in the United States. Others lost family members in the attacks, were displaced from their homes, jobs, or schools, or experienced trauma in other ways.

As artists, how might we mark the day at this gathering? I don’t mean to say that the barbecue itself will be a memorial. I would like to find an appropriate and meaningful way to acknowledge the date. We might have a period of silence; a prayer book or other place to write a response; a collaborative gesture such as a song or building a cairn. What do you all think? I welcome your suggestions and leadership.

Student Union University Committee applications are due tomorrow at noon.
(Read our previous coverage about them here)

Being on a committee means you have a real position to act and change campus for the better. Better fill out your application quick.

Brandeis Pluralism Alliance Steering Committee applications are due Sunday at Midnight. Don’t forget those either.

You! Yeah you!

Do you like money?

Do you like giving it away? What if it’s someone else’s money? What if you could give it to kickass people and clubs that you like?

Sounds good, eh? Why don’t you apply to join the Brandeis Pluralism Alliance Steering Committee?

Confused? Here’s what’s going down:

The Brandeis Pluralism Alliance (BPA) invites applications for new members to join the Steering Committee, which is responsible for advising all of the initiative’s community-building activities and for
selecting student and faculty grant recipients for projects addressing issues of identity, pluralism and unity at Brandeis. Applications are due Sunday, September 7, 2008 at midnight, and are available online at www.brandeis.edu/das/programs/bpa.

I’m listening to a DFA NIght School Session right now and they’re talking to a Yale Law professor about Voter Turnout.

Here’s some info:

Follow-up calls to those that have expressed interest work beautifully.
Here’s a refrain we’re hearing a lot this year – the more personal, the more local, the better.

Social Networks, in other words, are key.
“Many local, low-budget campaigns operate as if they were headquartered in a far-away city and parachuted into this local race. Use your friends, your community members, your social networks” they are great social networks!

So the 50 cent version of this two-hour session: “Stay local! Use personal connections! Distant methods like robocalls and lit drops are bleh.”
Continue reading “Voter Turnout – What works and what doesn’t”

It’s weird, isn’t it? The more local an election, the lower the turnout rate. Yet the more local the office, the greater an impact it will have on the lives of electors. The Executive of Monroe County had much more power to advance or retard my fame, my fortunes, and my family than Governor Paterson ever will.

Same goes for Brandeis. Sometimes, the elections and appointments with the lowest buzz are the most important. This is one of those times.

The Student Union is accepting applications for University Committees. This is actually pretty important. Being on a committee may not be as sexy as being Vice President, or Senator at Large, but if passionate people control those commitees, we can push good policy through to the University. I plan on applying, and I hope all readers of Innermost Parts do too.

Confused?
Continue reading “You can haz the power”

Hey everyone. Welcome back to Brandeis. I hope you had an awesome summer. I know I did. But not so awesome that we forgot to write for Innermost Parts! I encourage you to browse our summer archives.
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We have a lot of iniatives, announcements, etc to announce soon and I hope you’re pumped for a new semester.
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But for now, I have one question: How was your summer? And don’t just say “good” or whatever. Tell everyone in style.
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Did you do something to do with Social Justice this summer? Why don’t you tell us about it? Did you clothe the poor? Travel across the world to learn at the feet of tibetan monks? Maybe you had a special epiphany during the summer you’d like to share? Well, for the next few weeks, I’m pleased to announce that we here at Innermost Parts will be eagerly awaiting to read accounts of your (physical, emotional, personal, etc) journeys. Leave a comment to this post with your story or email us and we’ll post the best/most moving stories to the front page. I can’t wait to hear what kickass stuff you guys were up to.

– Wind energy is great, but our third-world quality electric grid can’t make good use of it.
– “is dying
– Gershom Gorenberg is awesome:

Travel is so broadening. It shows you other nations’ narrow-mindedness, so that when you get home you can see your own more clearly.”

– The internet is horribly insecure
– Sage. I need to pick classes still. eww.

Watching the Democratic National Convention with some DFA folks.

This is a night of kickass speeches.

Highlights:
-John Kerry wasn’t wearing a flag pin. Terrist!
-John Kerry calling McCain a flip-flopper.
-Big Dog Clnton talking about how all of America are all from the town called hope.
-Clinton tieing obama into his legacy. (There was a narrative back in the day that Bill was feeling an affinity between obama’s stroy and his own. They said he would be enthusiastically in the tank for obama ifhillary weren’t running. looks like we’re turning ful circle.)
-John Kerry referring to McCain’s “years on this earth”
-Katie Couric referring to ‘Vice president Biden” , and later ‘and here is joe biden” while nancy pelosi walked onstage.
.Biden: “I saw how Barack Obama touched people.” whoops.
And now the #1 best moment so far –
Brandeis Professor Peniel Joseph speaking on PBS. Lev and I were flipping out for a while after that.
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Update:
Thought -Joe biden refers to the tyranny of foreign oil.. Doesnt he mean the grip of all oil.
New thoughts: biden is like the first persn tonight to really focus on national security, despite it being foreign policy night tonight.
double update: holy shit obama just frenched jill biden. (well not really but that was a full on frontal kiss there. whoops.)

…to catch Ben Brandzel.
Today!!
LIve!
Spingold!
7:45!

Key take-away point: “Online Organizing should allow you to create more personal connections, not less”

I asked him about internet organizing on a campus or very local setting. His response? Something along the lines of ‘yes, email etc is very efficient and use it, but if you’re within walking distance of your community, then go meet them in person.”

Interesting.

Other interesting thought: As the internet allows organizations to become less top-down and hierarchical, the rank-and-file is empowered, yes, but it’s also very helpful for the people at the top. Middlemen are more accountable, if someone in the hierarchy is messing up, the head honchos of the organization can now find out.

Last Semester, I had a problem. I wanted to go to SEA or ARC or BLC meeting, but I kept forgetting when the meetings were.I also missed several events because I kept confusing Thursday and Tuesday, or if they were improperly advertised. Silly? Maybe, but I was operating on little sleep and so on,

Well, no more. I’m happy to introduce the Brandeis Activist Calendar, a service provided by InnermostParts.org. If you’re the leader or communications director or so on of a progressive activist club, email me at sahar ((at) innermostparts.org) and I’ll give you access to the calendar so you can add your events and meetings. update: in case it wasn’t clear – the calendar is shown as the “Upcoming Events” widget on the sidebar of Innermost Parts

This will be a great advertising opportunity for clubs and also a valuable resource for all students so I hope everyone takes advantage of this opportunity.

P.S. The coolest thing about google calendar is how easy it is to share. So you can export it to iCal format (for use on other calendar apps) with this link. You can also get the calendar as an rss feed.
Lastly, it’s really easy to share google calendars with other google account users, so send me an email and we’ll “share” the Brandeis Acitivist calendar with you.

I’m at Hyde Park, the ancestral home of the Roosevelt Family. Don’t have much time to write, but I’d like to pass on some messaging tips:

“No one ever lost a race because their message was too strong.”

Your message is your core argument and strategic communication.

Your message is not a slogan. “Change you can believe in” is not a message.

A message isn’t a list of issues. “I will fix healthcare and the environment and also give tax cuts” isn’t a message.

The first test of messaging:

It must be Credible, Concise, Relevant, and Compelling. Note: Credible implies that you shouldn’t really cite facts and figures. If you say “foreign workers are paid 12 cents an hour and that’s bad,” someone could be like “oh really? Where did you get that statistic. Gosh’ and derail your argument whereas if you say “The workers making our clothing are being exploited unfairly”, that’s pretty credible (most everyone knows it’s true and it also gets your point across.

The second test of messaging:

It must take the form of Problem -> Solution -> Action.

Messaging takes time. If you come up with your message in 5 minutes you probably haven’t thought it through much.

“Obama will us his running mate! Text Vp to 62262”

Welcome the brave new world of youth politics. With texting costs ridiculously high in the US, however, one might wonder why would Obama spend the money to send millions of text messages for seems to be a sort of campaigning gimmick. Let’s explore.

You might know that the Student Union is sponsoring a large voter registration drive this upcoming semester. You might also know that Loki and I have both signed up to direct this whole effort. We’ll have different clubs competing to see who can register the most people, possibly a large scoreboard showing which clubs are ahead, maybe flash the names of the latest student to register, etc.

If you go out registering voters, on campus, off campus, in Ohio, wherever, please don’t forget to get their cell phone numbers and email addresses, if possible. Now, intuitively this makes sense, right? If you get someone’s contact info then you can email/text them on election day to remind them to actually go out and vote. Well, Garrett M. Graff, a former Webmaster for Howard Dean, just wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times explaining the world of text-the-vote:

But announcing Mr. Obama’s running mate by text message has little to do with proclaiming the selection and everything to do with getting out the vote on Election Day in November. The move should add thousands — and more likely tens or hundreds of thousands — of cellphone numbers to what is already one of the most detailed political databases ever created.

A study conducted during the 2006 elections showed that text-message reminders helped increase turnout among new voters by four percentage points, at a cost of only $1.56 per vote — much cheaper than the $20 or $30 per vote that the offline work of door-to-door canvassing or phone banking costs.

Let’s take a look at this study, shall we? Believe it or not, texting is really cheap. Here’s the relevant passage:

Canvassing is more effective than text messaging on a person-by-person basis, but the contact rate during canvassing is much lower than that for text messaging. When considering the treatment-on-treated effect, text messaging is twice as effective as three physical mailings (Gerber and Green 2000), and about as effective as a professional, quality phone call made in the week before Election Day.

So texting is cheap and effective, but not as effective or cheap as face-to-face contact. Then again, texting can reach a lot of people faster than canvassing can.

In general, one thing to realize is that cell phone numbers are very valuable to campaigns. Cell phones can’t be robocalled or polled. The Yellow Pages and Election Boards don’t have them. In order to get on a cell phone texting list, you have to opt in by texting to a specific number yourself.
Continue reading “idk, my bff jill?”

This is part two of a series that aims to take a look at the fall 2002 state of the union address by then-president Ben Brandzel. Hopefully, by going through each section and comparing it to the situation today, we can have a more nuanced look at the present situation at Brandeis, as well as learn from the past hopefully.

What I’m trying to do is go through this speech and summarize each section, after which comes some analysis. We’re doing sections 6-10 now, and then going back to section 4 and concluding thoughts in the upcoming part three post.

To read part one, click here.
To read a copy of the speech, click here.

To read the annotation and analysis, click “read the rest…”

Continue reading “Looking back six years ago (part two)”

In the first day of my 8th grade social studies class, our teacher, Mr. Durkee, put up a poster of Michael Jordan in the act of making a slam dunk. We couldn’t tell whether Mr. Jordan was going up or falling down, Mr. Durkee told us, just by looking at the picture. We had to understand history in order to predict the future or whatever.

Now, first of all, that piece of advice did not need to take up three days of class time. Secondly, if you looked at his shoelaces, you could tell that Michael was clearly on the descent of his jump.

That said, there’s value in that perspective. To that end, let’s take a magical history tour and review the Fall 2002 State of the Union address, given by noted Brandeis Alumn and all-around kickass person, Ben Brandzel.

The Fall 2002 State of the Union address is hosted on the Student Union Website. I’m going to be referring to it quite a lot, so make sure you keep it open in another tab or something.

Why are we focusing on this address in particular? Simple. This speech has been floating around the Brandeis Progressive Community for ages now. It should have a bigger audience. Also, if you’ll follow me below the fold, I think you’ll agree with me that ther eare many parallels between the time of that speech and right now. Let’s see what has changed (or hasn’t) in the course of six years…

Hey, I just realized something. Fall 2002 was when I started 8th grade. So this speech was given at around the same time as I was in Durkee’s class. Weird.

This is Part ONE of the analysis of the speech.

Continue reading “Looking back six years ago (part 1)”

It’s been quite a long time since I made good on my promise to confront the Senior Senator from Michigan with homemade signs and a heartfelt plea. It was perhaps the first time I’ve met with someone of such power, and certainly the first time I did so alone.

Mr. Levin met with a bunch of people – probably adminstrators and suchlike – in a room on the third floor of the Shapiro Campus Center. A room, mind you, with a fully glass wall facing into the hallway. I had the bright idea of writing “Sen. Levin please protect the constitution” and “stop the FISA sellout” and so on on huge pieces of paper (procured from the student union office) and plastering them right against that glass wall, so that he could read them.

Let be clear on how bootleg the whole arrangement was. Once I got his attention, I pulled out a marker and wrote another message on the backs of one of those earlier messages and posted *that* on the glass wall. No real planning, no real coordination.

Well, it turns out that due to lighting and so on he couldn’t actually *read* anything I was saying but I guess I captured his attention long enough to be invited inside to state my case.

So here I am, with little sleep and preparedness and so on, trying to argue with a US Senator to get him to vote a certain way on a pretty important bill. I don’t remember the whole conversation (it was pretty brief and I was probably incoherent with terror) but I do remember one exchange that went something like this:

Carl Levin: You really feel deeply about this issue?

Me: Yes I do, and several of my friends feel the same way. We hope that you’ll not only vote against this bill but also join Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold’s filibuster against it. We’re tired of spineless Democrats in Congress.
Carl Levin: Spineless? Do you really think we’re spineless? Like on what?
Me: (Flabberghasted and at a loss for what do say) Well there’s the War. SCHIP. Everything really.
Carl Levin: Hm.. Well in any case I doubt it’ll come to a filibuster
Me: Um… yes it will.
Carl Levin: Well thank you very much young lad out you go.

And that was that. Turns out that Carl Levin not only voted the right way on the FISA bill of February but also on the bill of July (which eventually did get passed into law). So that’s hopeful.

So what can we learn from this encounter?

Continue reading “Carl Levin – A Retrospective”

There has been some progress from Beacon Hill (the State Capitol) on the Election Reform front since Adam last reported on it. Good! The lowdown is this: the State Leg adjourned before they could take either proposal all the way to being signed by the Governor, which is bad. The good thing is that each piece of legislation moved forward.

The National Popular Vote bill was ratified by the State Senate, and, having been previously approved by the house, must be sent to the Governors desk (by a separate vote, since MA is strange like that) when both chambers get back into session. The National Popular Vote bill, you’d recall, would give all of MA’s electoral college vote to the winner of the national popular vote, but only if enough states also passed the bill so that  >270 electoral college votes would be covered by this pact.

The Election Day Registration legislation was also approved by the Senate. Now it must move to the State House. Some members of the House are opposing it on fiscal grounds. They think that letting more people vote would cost too much. These people don’t have their priorities straight.

All in all, good news everyone.

Hey all. So I realize I haven’t posted much lately. That’s because my body decided to punish me for all the sleep I was missing over the last week or so. Too bad.

Point is, I’m slowly rejoining humanity / blogging. Deal with it.

There seems to be a big divide here between people here for themselves and those here for organizations.

There also seems to be a (related?) divide between the idealistic grassroots and cynical operatives. And many “big name bloggers” seem to be operatives. I was talking to one the other day, and we had a very interesting exchange:

Him: You know, our first success as the netroots was not electing Howard Dean as chair of the DNC, but it was in fact Ben Chandler (a blue dog). People seem to think the netroots is ideological, but we’re not.

Me: Then what is the netroots if not ideological?

HIm: Partisan..

Continue reading “Thoughts on NN so far”

I’ve packed my bags, said my goodbyes, and took off. That’s right, I’m sitting in an atlanta airport right now,on my way to Austin, Texas, and the Netroots Nation convention. Woot.

So if you see anything on the agenda you’d like me to check out, or have a qestion you want to ask me, or whatever, feel free to drop me a line / leave a comment.

Check this website for the next few days as I relatemy adventuresto oyu, the Brandeis community, using the magical powers of the world-wide-series-of-tubes

Some bad news and some good news from the good folks at Blue Mass Group.

Bad news: Apparently the Massachusetts ballot initiative banning greyhound/dog racing was challenged in court by the owner of one the racetracks here in MA.

Good news: The Mass. State Supreme Court threw out his legal objections to the initiative, so it can go forward on the ballot.

David at BMG summarizes:

All in all, a big win for the proponents of banning dog racing. The question will appear on the ballot. If it passes, the most that could happen is that Carney & Co. win a regulatory takings case, pursuant to which they would recover from the state the diminution in the value of their property caused by the law. And, especially in light of the SJC’s language emphasizing that dog racing “is a heavily regulated industry that only exists by virtue of legislatively created narrow exceptions to common-law and statutory bans,” there is no guarantee that they would win that case.

Huh? To further simplify: the racetrack owner sued, in part, claiming that getting rid of racing licenses was like getting rid of his private property, so he’s entitled to compensation. The Court slapped him down. And then they let the initiative to go ballot.

To conclude: Yay!

Got some crucial info in the mail. The Mass. State Senate is about to vote on bills regarding Election Day Registration and the National Popular Vote. This is pretty exciting.

Election Day Registration is pretty much what it sounds like. You get to register to vote on Election Day. This is a good idea for several reasons.It’s great for students. I could have voted in the 2007 elections if only we had Election Day Registration (EDR from now on), for one thing. Overall, EDR helps counteract people’s confusion over where they’re registered, where to vote from, etc.

In any case, it’s silly to have an arbitrary cut-off date for when people can register to vote for the next election.

The National Popular Vote initiative says that MA will award it’s electors to the winner of the general election popular vote – but only if 270 electoral votes worth of states agree to do so as well. So it’s a way to have the winner of the popular vote win the election, but without a constitutional amendment. You can read more about the merits of the NPV by reading Hendrik Hertzberg on the matter. In fact, people in general would be served by reading Hendrik Hertzberg.

So call your/our Senator, you know the drill.
For Brandeis’ State Senator:

STATE SENATOR SUSAN C. FARGO

State House
Room 504
Boston, MA 02133
Telephone: (617) 722-1572
Party Affiliation – DEMOCRAT
State House E-Mail Address: Susan.Fargo@state.ma.us

Call! Call now! (Well, at the time of writing it’s 11:20 PM. In which case I mean “Call during a reasonable time!”)
Continue reading “Election Reform in Massachusetts? We can do more than hope.”

I know this is a bit different than what I normally write about, but this is my blog, and I get to do what I want! I wrote this on Sunday, by the way.

I just finished talking to my good friend Sahar Oz. Sahar is the former teen coordinator of the Jewish Federation of Rochester (since then he’s gone on to bigger and better things. We miss him!). He’s also of that elite class of people known as “people Sahar Massachi looks up to”.

Calling him a role model is but a banal and crude trivialization of the place he holds in my constellation of personal mentors and heroes.

His dad also died the other day.

Lights off in my apartment, cell phone clutched to my ear, I restlessly paced my apartment today, hearing his anguished voice spill out stories of his father. His father who, despite being the very picture of health, the sort of person who takes 20 mile bike rides, hikes, and so forth, passing away due to a minor heart attack.

Shocking. Painful. And there was nothing I could do but listen.

Naturally, I have to start thinking of my own father. I am jealous of Sahar’s relationship with his dad. It seemed to be such a close, loving one. Don’t get me wrong, I love my dad and he loves me. But it’s for us t0 be emotionally intimate. I don’t know why. We both want to be closer.

I think a lot of it is the language barrier. More and more, either his English is getting worse or I can tolerate it less. Maybe both.

He’s also getting a bit deafer, so he can’t hear me well and often I don’t speak loudly enough for him.

I think neither I nor he nor anyone else realizes how much this little thing affects me to the core.

People build mythologies of their parents as superheroes, and are inevitably disappointed when they turn out to be merely human. Yet, my parents are super. I can’t believe how well a job they’ve done. When they talk about unconditional love, *they mean it*.

So my conception of my parents as heroes may have faded, but it’s still there. They really are quite amazing. Which is why physical weakness on my dad’s part is so scary.

Fuck, I barely know my dad at all, ok? He never talks about his past. He’s home less than my mother is – as he has to, you know, work – so by the time he got home, I’d always be doing my homework.

Hell, how much do I know about my mother?

I’ve always thought this: I really wish I knew how to spend more time with my parents in a non-awkward, fun way.

Maybe I should start thinking this: Let me start cooking up those fun ways, rather than wait for them to fall out of the sky.

You know, I really got to know Sahar Oz (Soz, as I call him) through a trip to Poland. Turns out that during that trip, he made sure to call his father and discuss all that he’d seen. Every night. Despite a nightly allotment of 6 hours of sleep a day.

Maybe that’s what family ties are all about? Reaching towards your kin in times of need, rather than internalizing your problems, or going to friends you met 6 months ago when you first got to campus.

I never once cried in Poland. Surrounded by desolation, echoes of hate and death, a legacy of ashes. Never cried once. When I talked to Soz about it, he said not to worry. “One day in the future, maybe a week, maybe a month,” he said, “it’ll all come rushing back to you. On that day, you’ll finally let it all out.”

That day still hasn’t come. I think I’ve cried just once since then. Just once, and then once again today. Once again today, for as I heard Soz’s voice break up over and over again, in his determined recital of anecdotes, mementos, symbols, trivia and metaphors that constitute the memories of his father, he doesn’t know it, but I was crying with him.

You’ll notice from our site revamp that our new mission statement includes this nugget –

It is our intention to both explore the meaning of social justice and hold both students and faculty to their commitment to that set of values.

With that in mind – what does Social Justice mean to you?

Hey all. We’re doing some behind-the-scenes tweaks to the site, and in that process we’ve also revamped the About us page.

We’ve also changed our mission statement and so forth.

Check it out.

photo by Kamarin Lee

So apparently this happened a while ago, but we missed out on reporting it. Students Crossing Boundaries, the group that took on Jimmy Carter’s challenge and traveled (pretty much exclusively) to the Palestinian Territories, released their report.

You can read it here.

This is an emotionally charged issue. For me especially.

Despite that, I encourage everyone to read the report. You don’t have to agree with it. However, I think it’s incumbent on all of us to give props to the self-organizing, intrepid group of Brandeis students who set up this journey and who took the time to write their honest, heartfelt, and sometimes painful accounts.

Welcome to another edition of “Brandeis people in the news.”

On the same week that Brandeis Professor Peniel Joseph is on PBS Newshour, talking about historic role of the vice-presidency (and pointing out that Al Gore was the best VP ever) , we have Brandeis rising sophomore Nathan J. Robinson writing in the Huffington Post: “What it’s like to watch FOX News for 24 Straight Hours”.

Just out of his freshman year of college, and already writing for the HuffPost? Kudos. Kudos to both.

My favorite bits?

As I slowly rouse myself, the first words I hear are of a Blonde FOX Lady saying this:

“It’s hard to talk about climate change without talking about compact fluorescent lightbulbs, soon to be forced on you by the government. But could they KILL you?”

It was not shaping up to be a good day.

…

The worst thing about FOX is not its bias, but the “panic mode” that it seems to live in. Everything is a catastrophe. Immigrants will get you. Lightbulbs will get you. Wildfires will get you. Jesse Jackson will cut your nuts off.

Hahaha.

Update –

Congrats to David Pepose on writing an article that made it to the front page of the New York Sun.

As a society, we’re very afraid, aren’t we? If you listen to our “leaders” (since when did elected representatives turn into leaders, I wonder), we should be cowering in our beds.

Fear of Gays, fear of Blacks, fear of Browns, fear of Athiests, fear of Arabs, fear of terrorists, fear of immigrants, fear of inner cities, fear of drugs, fear of the future, fear of “the other”.

Fear of the poor has replaced compassion for the poor.

Progressives believe in freedoms. Like, for example, freedom from fear:

The “civil libertarian” and “liberal” views on rights, the NSA, PATRIOT act, etc, are identical.

Same with economic libertarians and “conservatives”. (They call themselves conservatives, but they’re actually reactionaries – they want to drag the US back to the Coolidge / Harding days, rather than real conservatives, who instead simply want to consolidate and improve what we’ve got)

Economically, what distinguishes libertarians from right-wing fat cats? And why are libertarians so obsessed with “freedom from government” rather than freedom from corporate power?

When I talk to libertarians, they often trot out anecdotes about zoning laws, licensing laws for florists, etc for examples of government abusing its power to help firms seek rent. This is petty-bourgeois territory. Liberals are against that too. Where libertarians and liberals break is not over obvious/basic examples of corruption, but rather on the big stuff. Social Security. Single Payer Health Care.

I’d argue that Social Security is a proven success story and Universal Health Care is not only a moral issue but pretty strikingly better policy than what we have now.

Of course that’s a rather broad generalization of a diverse economic philosophy. I was just thinking to myself, though. Libertarians who embrace sane economic policy are pretty much liberals.

That’s not to say we can’t work together, though. I have a lot of respect for people so passionate about defending against the Imperial State. Two fists in the face of Empire! Right on.

He is wrapped in an enormous coat, way too thick for the sweltering heat. Then again, that coat will serve him well in the wintry months; how else can he carry it until then? If he had a house to store his coat in, he wouldn’t need be here, after all, with his back to the steel and coffee / spit-and-polish of a Starbucks.

If he had a house in which to store his coat, he wouldn’t be hunched over a trash can, peering quizzically at a paper and grease time capsule from hours ago. Throw out the ketchup packet, and success! A small victory over the garbageman. Curly fries served cold, an artifact of a lifestyle different but not too far-off from his own. (For after all, he’ll never excavate grey poupon over swordfish from these ruins.)

Continue reading “Best Served Cold”