As an anarchist I am drawn to read LRC in the hopes of finding good current events commentary from a non-statist position. However, I find myself growing increasingly frustrated with the site because all too often the authors take stances on pop culture in which they defend and praise depraved celebrities, presenting their nihilism as an example of libertarian thinking or free-market success. I am writing to see whether others share this frustration, and if you might recommend other sites that focus on worthwhile accomplishments from justifiably heroic people who are actually worthy of attention and admiration.
As a few quick examples of my concern:
Remember Balloon Boy? Falcon Heene, a 6-year-old from Colorado, was part of a hoax in which his publicity-seeking father claimed that Falcon was floating around in a homemade helium balloon. This scare caused quite a media stir as many volunteers and government rescue crews acted on what they believed was a true emergency. It turns out the entire fiasco was fake and that Falcon had been hiding safely in his garage during the whole search. The father developed the hoax in the hopes of being offered a reality show. The father claims to believe that humans descended from aliens, and he had previously featured his family on “Wife Swap,” a so-called reality show that caters to deranged families who want to make their private lives a public spectacle. This family, including the children who swear and flip off news cameras, are an exceptionally disgusting display of depravity. Yet LRC posted an article: “In Praise of Hoaxsters: Butler Shaffer on the boy-in-a-balloon family, and other heroes.” It’s hardly HEROIC to beat your mail-order wife, lie to every person in the country who follows the news, expect the authorities to track your non-lost son and therefore expect all the taxpayers to foot the bill for your own lack of integrity, and exploit your kid on national TV and cause him such stress that he vomits as he’s being interviewed by reporters. As far as I’m concerned Balloon Boy’s father is a reprehensible piece of trash who would be quite a dangerous individual in a voluntarist society. He should be ridiculed (or ignored), not held up as a heroic example to emulate because he successfully tricked The State.
Several writers have recently spoken in favor of Charlie Sheen. LRC featured the article “Charlie Sheen’s Heroic Stand Against the Tyrannical Therapy Police.” While I am indeed opposed to the state creating labels for fake mental disorders and committing individuals into hospitals against their will, Charlie Sheen’s resistance to intervention hardly stems from his resistance to tyranny. Just because The State decrees Sheen a lunatic, and The State is bad, does not mean that Sheen is NOT a lunatic. He is, in fact, a cocaine-addicted nihilist. Nothing he does is laudable. He was physically violent toward an ex-wife (indicating that he cannot control himself), he has multiple pornstar girlfriends (indicating that he does not value his life and focuses on meaningless “fun” rather than true accomplishments), and he brags about his self-destructive drug binges (indicating that he lacks self-respect). Anthony Gregory writes of “The Cannibalization of Charlie Sheen.” Sheen is not a victim of cannibalization by the media or the state; he is a worthless druggie who is so deranged and unstable that he thinks he is worth the attention he’s been given. He’s a valueless reprehensible piece of trash. Due to unpreparedness and a horrible stage performance, many “fans” booed his opening night Detroit show and left early. His Chicago show was more well-received and Lew blogged “Charlie Sheen’s One Man Show a Huge Success.” If Sheen is considered a success, I submit that LRC is on the wrong side of the battle. I seek a voluntarist society not to save people like Sheen from government tyranny, but because such a society is the way to allow truly great people to achieve their full potentials.
Today Jeffrey Tucker wrote “Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’: A Libertarian Allegory.” Tucker used to be one of the writers I respected. But in this article he goes so far as to say that “Friday” is “brilliant as a piece of viral art,” and that there is value in the unconventional rhythms (rather than lack of musical ability by a talentless singer whose voice is so tuneless that she needs to rely on AutoTune the entire song-- even when repeating the same monotonous tone over and over). He touts the inane lyrics as being representative of a desire to escape the tyranny of the school week and explore the great freedoms offered by the weekend. He writes, “When she finally announces, elatedly, that ‘I don’t want the weekend to end,’ she is expressing more than just the desire to be permanently relieved of educational tasks; it is a cry for the civic order to recognize the human right of liberty itself.” Is this a joke? I cannot fathom taking it seriously. Black says nothing about great accomplishments that school prohibits her from realizing. She just wants to be “partying partying yeah fun fun fun fun.” She is not a freedom-minded thinker; she is the epitome of a modern teenager who does nothing of substance and spends all of her time Twittering, driving around aimlessly, and seeking short-term meaningless entertainment. (Note: I do not think Black is any worse than your average person—and there are certainly plenty of Hollywood celebrities who are equally as talentless and vapid. I’m just saying she is not the heroic example of libertarianism that Tucker suggests. He could focus on some truly talented YouTube stars like Kurt Hugo Schneider and Sam Tsui, who have achieved success outside of mainstream media, but he ignored them in favor of nonsense.)
Therein lies the problem. There are very few examples of great people in our culture, but they do exist if we look hard enough. Why not praise and promote those truly inspiring and admirable people, rather than portray degenerate nobodies as libertarian heroes? It’s so depressing to read LRC when the subjects the authors cover are just as awful as what one could find on statist media—if not worse. As much as I dislike pop culture, the mainstream does a better job than LRC at their moral evaluation of scum like Mr. Heene and Charlie Sheen. Misconstruing idiocy and mediocrity as free market success leaves me puzzled and disgusted. Does anyone understand what I’m saying or am I just too grumpy and critical? Are there any other libertarian or anarchist sites with a more positive moral slant?
I agree that LRC articles can be pretty far off the mark. Wildly so, at times. That said, Lew posts links to lots of things that he doesn’t himself agree with or that don’t even represent consistent Austrian/libertarian thought but touch on a particular issue from an unusual point of view. I have stopped reading LRC for the last few months, can’t remember why, I was getting irritated with something or other kind of like you are here.
I agree, the balloon boy’s father is not a hero. I don’t agree with Shafer on a lot of things.
I’ve not been following LRC lately so I don’t know the tenor of the commentary on Sheen. That said, I think that Sheen is being taken down for his stance on 9/11 and you should consider that most of the bad things that you “know” about Sheen are not settled fact and, in fact, are being said by people who have a selfish interest in saying bad things about him. That doesn’t mean he’s a good guy and certainly not a beacon of moral uprightness but I highly doubt that Sheen is evil.
I don’t know anything about Black but there’s nothing wrong with wanting to party and have fun. Ideally, that is all we would ever do but the fact of scarcity drives us back to work to produce things for others so we can have a roof over our heads and something to eat.
I agree with you about not confusing moral nihilism with libertarianism. Unfortunately, we live in a world where nearly all the notable examples of libertarian actions are performed by moral nihilists. This is a symptom of the almost total success of the statist meme in the modern psyche. And, yes, it’s depressing.
I doubt you will find any site you agree with 100%
The Rebecca Black article I agree was ridiculous, but he did say at the end he doubts the writer or singer had those thoughts or motivations. Most articles on LRC I enjoy and find informative, some I don’t.
This isn’t LRC, if you have feedback about LRC, email Lew.
It is so tiresome to read all of these anonymous internet nobodies who want every website and every author to express their values, as though their values are any better than those of anyone else.
If you don’t like the content at LRC, stop donating. That assumes any of these axe grinders aren’t free riders in the first place.
"This isn’t LRC, if you have feedback about LRC, email Lew.
It is so tiresome to read all of these anonymous internet nobodies who want every website and every author to express their values, as though their values are any better than those of anyone else.
If you don’t like the content at LRC, stop donating. That assumes any of these axe grinders aren’t free riders in the first place."
There’s another thread with many responses criticizing Glenn Beck. Should those posters also reserve their criticism for emails to Glenn? Correct me if I’m wrong but it seems inconsistent.
Clayton, I can appreciate your post, especially your insight regarding moral nihilism vs. libertarianism. That is a very interesting thought. But I disagree that ideally we’d be partying and not producing. As an Objectivist-leaning person I am convinced that true happiness and contentment come from achievement.
Liberty student, I understand your suggestion to contact LRC directly. I have done so on more than one occasion. My point of posting this on the Mises community is that I believe there is audience overlap between the two sites, and I was seeking input from other readers; I am not able to do so through the LRC site, as it does not have a forum. While you are correct that I should not force others to hold my values, that does not preclude disappointment when I believe the culture is depraved. In regards to your insinuation that no-one’s values are better than others, this sounds like moral relativism and subjectivism. In regards to “If you don’t like the content of LRC, stop donating,” consider your earlier sentence: If “it is so tiresome to read all of these anonymous internet nobodies,” stop reading us. My post was not intended to offend you but to seek hope that people who value life still exist, and I am sorry that you seemed to interpret it as a personal attack and respond as such.
“She is not a freedom-minded thinker; she is the epitome of a modern teenager who does nothing of substance and spends all of her time Twittering, driving around aimlessly, and seeking short-term meaningless entertainment.”
But Tucker never claimed she was a Randite hero. He’s looking at what actually goes on in the video and why it got so many views. Even if we think most of the views are from people who think it’s junk, that doesn’t change the fact that we can observe the thoughts that come out of someone who is locked up in school. It is precisely the fact that their lives are so small and unimaginative that can be traced back to their school experience. Millions and millions of children have that shitty life, and this is a video describing the very simple idea of being free on friday (and gets lots of views). Maybe those two things have to do with each other.
Just because something is not consciously and deeply understood doesn’t mean we can’t read something into it.
Well, there is no such thing as “true happiness” over against “false happiness” unless you want to follow a theological tack that we were created by a divine person with specific criteria for happiness, true happiness (worshipping and praising God), which can be counterfeited by the appearance of happiness, false happiness (drinking, gambling, cavorting, etc.)
I agree that most of us have an in-built desire to feel productive and, therefore, derive some happiness just from laboring and seeing the fruit of our labor (thereby reducing the disutility of labor). However, for all but a minority of workaholics, labor does, in fact, have disutility. This means that we only exchange away our leisure in order to labor so that we can again enjoy our remaining leisure more comfortably. The ideal life, in my mind, would be relaxing and socializing with people 90% of the time and working 10% of the time doing something I absolutely love to do - this would give me the satisfaction of leisure most of the time and the satisfaction of engaging in useful employment doing something I love and which gives me a sense of achievement.
Libertystudent, LRC and LvMI are basically two in the same. The same people who go there go here, so talking about LRC is relevant.
1., OP, Shaffer’s post was kind of a wandering, rambly article that didn’t really explain his views very well. All I took away from it was that governments engage in “hoaxes” and he was irritated with their double standard. But he mentioned the role that “hoaxsters” play in society without explaining why it is a good thing in any detail, so I can’t draw any solid conclusions from it.
In some weird way, I have kind of been on Charlie Sheen’s side. Of course I think he’s definitely gone a little loony, but as long as he doesn’t hurt anybody, I can appreciate his candidness and his tendency to shake up the culture. While he’s nutty, it’s refreshing in an odd way.
Tucker pointed out, as you mentioned, that none of these themes were explicit in the video. It is hilariously bad, but the point remains: Kids think school is boring and they would rather not be there, yet they are forced to be there. If a teenager wants to party and be free, I don’t care. Obviously a bit of self-induced misanthropy sets in when I look at the state of our culture (especially the teenage culture that I emerged from a few years ago), but tweens are being stashed away into education camps that kill creativity. You say she’s not a “freedom-minded thinker,” but she doesn’t have to be in order for the theme to seep into the lyrics implicity (obviously she didn’t write the song or anything).
In all though, I don’t mean to come off as an apologist for LRC. There are a lot of stupid things said on that Web site. Laurence Vance and David Kramer come to mind off the bat.
No, they are not. LRC is Lew’s personal, for-profit venture, while LvMI is an educational institution run by Doug French and Jeff Tucker. From what I have seen, Lew has minimal involvement in LvMI and focuses on LRC.
However, I find myself growing increasingly frustrated with the site because all too often the authors take stances on pop culture in which they defend and praise depraved celebrities, presenting their nihilism as an example of libertarian thinking or free-market success.
Beh, I don’t mind these people at all. Some of them are stupid, but many of them (Sheen, for example) are just enjoying themselves how they can. Hedonism for the win.
I don’t pay much attention to trivial stories like the ones you’ve described, AtlasRises, so I cannot give a good analysis of them, but I understand your disagreements.
For example, I have read David Kramer’s LRC blog posts for awhile without commenting on them. His last one changed that. He called New York City police officers Nazis. While standing on a street corner, he saw a police car which he calls a “Nazimobile” that used its siren to pass through a red light so it did not have to wait like other people. He knew this because “Halfway down the block he shuts off his siren AND the flashing lights.” He concluded, “I guess I should have gotten the Nazi’s license plate number so I could report him to his “brother” Nazis. (Yeah, right.)”
Double standards and abuse of power does not make one a Nazi. I have no problem with criticizing the behavior Kramer saw, but to equate abuse of power with a racist, totalitarian, genocidal movement is an exaggeration. Just because a police officer is not a 100% libertarian does not make the officer a Nazi.
Judge Billy Murphy said (either here or here) that police complaints have resulted in the removal of police officers from duty.
In earlier posts Kramer has referenced a banking conspiracy consisting of the Rockefellers and Rothschilds. I have never seen him provide evidence for this. If there is evidence, I want to see it.
Double standards and abuse of power does not make one a Nazi. I have no problem with criticizing the behavior Kramer saw, but to equate abuse of power with a racist, totalitarian, genocidal movement is an exaggeration. Just because a police officer is not a 100% libertarian does not make the officer a Nazi.
In the long run, and to the world at large, social democracy is worse than Nazism. Nazism burns itself out and folds; SD warps people in deep cultural ways, controls their minds on a scale undreamt of by Hitler and channels the relatively freer economy into global ideological crusades. I’d much rather live next to bankrupt fascists than rich lefties.
Eric, I don’t think it is idiotic. Did you read it? I’m not asking you in a condescending tone, but once you read it, you’ll get Tucker’s point. There’s a bit of psychoanalyzing going on, but it’s not anything that is far-fetched. It was a horrible pop song, but the themes are expressed implicity. It’s more commentary on what goes on in the video rather than describing it as an intentional allegory.