New article

I've got a new article at Strike the Root. Have a look.

You kids, with your Twitter and your rap music and your internal combustion engines...

I've created a Twitter feed for this blog, as well as for other politics-related writing I do on line. My username is superfluousjohn, or you can go to my feed by just clicking here.

Today Bureaucrash, tomorrow the world!

My apologies for my absence from this site. I haven't been idle, however- I'm now one of the regular bloggers on Bureaucrash. It's given me a chance to do some "entry-level" writing on libertarianism, which I haven't really done since college. I'll have something substantial here soon, but in the meantime you can check out my posts on Obama's fear-mongering, the real effects of recent "consumer protection" laws, and the innacuracy of government drug testing.

New article at Lewrockwell.com

It's been a while since I've had something there, but I've got a new article up at lewrockwell.com. I hope you like it.

Strike the Root article

I apologize for the sparseness of posting lately. And now, an embarrassing admission: I had a new article up on Strike the Root two weeks ago, and I neglected to link to it. Here it is.

New Strike the Root article

I've got a new article up at Strike the Root. Have a look.

Science fiction, politics, and horrible, horrible wordplay

Over at my other site, which has been gobbling a lot of my time lately, I've got some thoughts on Utopianism and politics in science fiction that may be of interest.

New article at antiwar.com

I’m happy to say that my first article at Antiwar.com is now up. I’ve been reading the site since its inception, so this is quite satisfying for me. Hope you like it.

(I just looked it up and realized antiwar.com has been around for 12 years. God, do I suddenly feel old. And sleepy. And slightly gassy. But mostly old.)

For any antiwar.com readers visiting this blog, welcome! I’ve put together a collection of some of my favorite past posts for anyone who’s interested. I also maintain a blog about science fiction and related topics, if that interests you. Here are some previous posts about:

The Illinois public smoking ban and its proponents

Musings on the nature of neoconservatism

The depressing decline of Thomas Sowell, here and here

The failure of torture supporters to understand the meaning of basic ethical terms

The destructive nature of the “vital center”, here and here

The psychology of nations at war

The sheer pettiness of the modern statist

The complicity of the Left in the growth of plutocracy

The encroachments and apologists of the Nanny State, here and here

Or, you can just read about the bizarre minutiae of my life here, here, here, and here.

Hope you’ll stick around a while.

New article

Now that I’m done alienating the cosmopolitan libertarians by accusing them of caring more about PC respectability than the carnage wrought by the warfare state, I can move on to dismaying the paleolibertarians by accusing immigration opponents of being unwitting abettors of the police state at home in my first article for The Libertarian Enterprise.

I can only suppose that some deep-seated problem with my self-esteem, no doubt rooted in my unhappy childhood, is suddenly driving me to alienate everyone around me. Coming soon: My downward spiral continues as I disgust the left-libertarians with my impassioned defense of Allan Pinkerton. Don’t miss it!

New article

I've got a new article on police brutality, public indifference, and related phenomena up at Strike the Root.

Hidden ideology

This is long and a bit rambling. You’ve been warned.

A while back, I wrote an article for lewrockwell.com, in which I argued that government education creates social disharmony because it forces people to fight over which views will be taught in the government schools. I was surprised, actually, at how little negative mail I got. I did, however, get upbraided by one reader, who remarked that she had taught in public school for a considerable length of time, and that she and her colleagues had never pushed a particular viewpoint on the children.

I have to say, first, that this certainly clashes with my own experience, in which I got the standard good government center-left view of history. (The Progressives and the New Deal saved us from the evils of laissez-faire, and so on.) Dueling anecdotes won’t get us very far, of course, though I have to say that I don’t think my experience was at all atypical. I would be very surprised if there were large numbers of public schools giving interpretations of history based on public choice theory or the work of Gabriel Kolko.

Second (and this goes to the heart of my original article),I don’t think that value-free, unbiased teaching of history is possible, except with a very basic list of names and dates, with no commentary or interpretation. Even that is likely to express a particular viewpoint or bias, since choosing which events to include and which to exclude from the account requires a judgment on which events are important and ought to influence the student’s view of the world. (In my history classes in public school, for instance, we were taught repeatedly about the Holocaust, but never heard a word about the Ukrainian terror famine or the death toll of the Great Leap Forward. Some atrocities were considered important to know; others were not.)

I am not making some sort of postmodern claim that we can never know anything objectively true about history; rather, I am saying that any historical narrative, even a very accurate one, will inevitably support some views over others. That’s why the problem described in my original article is unsolvable within public schools.

Even offering multiple interpretations does not solve the problem, because even the choice of which competing views to air is not a neutral one. Since there is a finite amount of time in the school day, you must judge which viewpoints and theories are deserving of consideration, and which are not. You must anoint some interpretations as legitimate or reasonable, and implicitly denigrate others. Even if we had school administrators and teachers who had no agenda, beliefs, or prejudices, this problem would not go away. And in practice, of course, we are quite far from that situation.

So, I doubt very strongly that what the writer said was true, because she claims the impossible. However, I also don’t think she’s willfully lying; that is, I think it very likely that she truly believes that she taught an unbiased, value-free history to her students, not based on any particular doctrine. I suspect the same is also true of journalists, to name another group that often expresses obvious pro-big government bias while claiming objectivity.

The reason is simple: I think that many people who profess the center-left/corporate liberal viewpoint that dominates public education and mainstream journalism don’t know they’re expressing a particular ideology. They’ve spent so much time surrounded by that particular viewpoint, going back to childhood, that it no longer seems like a particular viewpoint based on claims that may be questionable- it’s simply The Way Things Are.

Consider how statists of this type often talk. It is very common among “vital center” types to claim that their own views are somehow free of any sort of ideological slant. (Barack Obama is especially fond of talking about “getting past/beyond” ideology.) The views of others are based on ideology or political doctrines; their own are somehow self-evident, arising directly from the facts without any mediation by normative beliefs or philosophical views about government. One example: when smoking bans are debated, opposition to smoking bans if often painted as ideological or based on doctrinaire political philosophy, whereas support of smoking bans is purely a matter of “science”, without any ideological element. Believing that controlling smoking on private property is not a legitimate function of government is “ideological,” but believing that it is a legitimate function somehow isn’t. And in general, the belief that it is acceptable for the state to control vast swathes of people’s lives is not ideological or the expression of a particular philosophy-it’s just being pragmatic!- but principled opposition to government control in any given area is.

(There’s also conservative strain of this kind of arguing, which I’ll get to in a different post, both to keep length under control and because it takes different forms.)

To some extent, of course, this is rhetoric, a way to seem more reasonable than your opponent. But I don’t think it’s all done cynically; I think a lot of liberals and centrists really believe that their policy views are somehow ideology-free.

New article up

I have a new article up at lewrockwell.com. Feels good to be back at it again.

New stuff

I have a new article up at lewrockwell.com.

I've got several things up at my other site, including a review of Peter F. Hamilton's Mindstar Rising. Check it out.

New stuff

I've got new articles at Strike the Root and lewrockwell.com. The premise of the latter is rather inflammatory, but I stand by it.

Meanwhile, over at my other blog, I've got a review of Gridlinked by Neal Asher. (New and slightly improved from the old version I posted a few months back.)

New article

I've got a new article at Strike the Root. Hope you like it. Meanwhile, over at my other blog, I've got some stuff on the late Gordon R. Dickson.

New stuff

Apologies for the dearth of new posts lately; now that I've got my new laptop and the holidays are coming to a close, that situation should improve. Meanwhile, I hope you'll check out my new article at lewrockwell.com.

I'm also happy to say that work on my other blog has proceeded at a good pace, with reviews of Larry Niven, Poul Anderson (who is of particular libertarian interest), and some thoughts on science fiction at the movies. If that sounds interesting, please have a look.

New articles up

I've got two new articles online today: one at Strike the Root, and another one at lewrockwell.com. Hope you like them.

New article

I've got a new article up at lewrockwell.com.

New Article At Strike the Root

I've got a new article, entitled The Art of Libertarian Persuasion, up at Strike the Root. It continues some the ideas I've been writing about here at The Superfluous Man.
I'd like to thank Roderick Long of Austro-Athenian Empire and the Mises Institute and Kevin Carson of Mutalist Blog, whose work was highly influential on me while writing this article. If you found my article interesting, give them a look.

New article, and a welcome

I am proud to say that my first article at lewrockwell.com has been published. If you've come here for the first time from the link on my article, welcome to The Superfluous Man, my blog about libertarianism, science fiction, and anything else that catches my interest. Here's a few past posts of mine that I hope are of interest:

My introduction

My post on the nature of neoconservatism

Some thoughts on big business, big government, and the inconsistent means and ends of the statist left

A post on the Libertarian Reform Caucus, libertarian strategy, and my case for "purism"

For science fiction fans, my review of Neal Asher's Gridlinked

More good stuff coming up soon, so I hope you'll stick around.