Snowflakes in Hell

Mr. Completely refinished his own grips.  Looks pretty good!

The latest bit of Pants Shitting Hysterics comes to us from The National Parks Conservation Assocation:

Originally written in the 1930s to prevent wildlife poaching, the parks’ firearms regulation was carefully revised during the Reagan Administration to be as narrowly restrictive as possible, while also assisting park personnel to prevent unlawful killing of wildlife. NPCA believes the current regulations strike an appropriate balance between the rights of individuals to possess firearms under state and federal laws and hunt in areas of the National Park System where it is permitted, and the safety of national park visitors and wildlife. NPCA will express its views in the public comment period, but highlighted a few of them today.

Park safety and enjoyment: We believe that enabling individuals to carry loaded guns in national parks will alarm families visiting the parks, and heighten the possibility for deadly visitor conflicts.

It doesn’t seem alarm families anywhere else that have laws allowing licensed individuals to carry firearms.  Why are the National Parks any different?  Why should they be different?

Hat tip to Of Arms and the Law

Roberta X has a pretty good post up that makes the case against John McCain.  She says:

The choice between Democrats and Republicans is the choice between the noose and slow poison and the “hold your nose and pick McCain”[3] school of thought takes comfort in at least having time to dash off a few more Letters To The Editor before the end. Buncombe!

I don’t think she’s necessarily wrong here.  This may be exactly what’s happening.  Our constitutional republic may very well be death spiraling into an inevitable sea of Social Democracy, and there might not be enough people left who would rather be free than be taken care of.  I do not think it’s inevitable, however.  If we do want to reverse it, there are some thing small l libertarians are going to need to accept.

1. We’re a minority.  When you get down to it, we’re all a minority.  Very few people’s political views can have a nice neat label placed over them.  When you’re a minority, you can only exert political power in coalition with other interests, which means, necessarily, you’ll never get a candidate that’s perfect in every way, and most of the time you probably won’t get a candidate that’s even perfect in most ways.
2. The system of government set up under our constitution makes two party domination all but inevitable.  We are not a parliamentary system with proportional representation, so coalition building in our Republic happens outside of the government, in the political parties.  Groups have been known to enter and leave the coalition, often to start third parties, but these have always been short lived, and have often meant the political death for the components that followed.   Paleoconservatism walked out of the Republican coalition with Pat Buchannan, and haven’t been heard from since.  Third party politics is the political wilderness in our system of government.  Some people like it there.  I can’t say I blame them, because it can be more fulfilling than always having to compromise with other interests in a coalition, but has the Libertarian Party been able to make either of the two parties reconsider the War on Drugs, or get anyone elected who could possibly have any effect on it?  You can’t keep blaming other people because they won’t get on board.  At some point you have to look inward and start to ask if maybe you’re doing something wrong.

It’s worth pointing out that I’m still, according to my state, registered as a Libertarian.  I have been for the past 10 years, just about.  My flirtation with the LP didn’t last long, after I realized that Libertarians weren’t about creating a political movement, but instead were mostly interested in making sure people who weren’t sufficiently pure remained outside of their “movement”.  They couldn’t see how people who were 70% with Libertarians might be able to work with them to help advance the 70% of their agenda they might be able to agree on.   It was 100%, or nothing, and if you couldn’t accept that, well, you’re not a real libertarian are you?

Sometime around 2002, I started to realize that I don’t have much room to complain about the state of things, because I’ve basically not been participating in the process that ends up giving us the candidates we all end up having to vote, or not vote for.  I didn’t vote in primaries, I didn’t donate money to candidates I liked, and I didn’t do anything to try to help candidates I liked get nominated or elected.  I just bitched about the choices I had to make in the end.  In my adult life, starting with voting for George H.W. Bush over Bill Clinton, I have never felt good about anyone I’ve ever pulled the lever for.  I didn’t feel good about voting for Harry Browne in 2000, because even by that time I had come to realize the Libertarian Party was mostly full of shit.   I didn’t feel good about voting for Dole, George W. Bush, and I won’t feel good about voting for John McCain.  I’ve never not pulled the lever for Arlen Specter, because although I’ve despised him, I’ve despised every person that’s ever run against him even more.

I decided this election year that I’d do things differently.  Despite very early misgivings, I donated to Fred Thompson’s campaign.  Those hopes were quickly dashed as the campaign season started.  Fred was too late getting in, and was early getting out.  Living in Pennsylvania, there’s not too much else I can do.  Our race doesn’t come around until April, so we’re irrelevant.

I’m starting to understand the wisdom of former House Speaker Tip O’Neil, who famously qipped “All politics is local.”  If liberty minded people want candidates who more closely represent them, they have to work to front those kinds of people at the local level first, and get them elected.  National political leaders most often start small, and this is certainly an area I’ve been deficient, and am looking for ways to remedy, without having to become a party hack that supports the party no matter what.

Libertarians have to understand that politics is not primarily a process of principles and ideas.  It is more closely likened to a strategy game, than to a debating society.  In a game, you will not always win.  There will sometimes be periods when you lose. There will sometimes be periods when you might appear to be losing, but suddently see an opportunity to execute a strategy your opponent won’t see coming.  Sometimes winning will require you making risky moves,  Sometimes your opponent yesterday will be a friend tomorrow.  The real risk for libertarians is that a lot of people who start playing this game forget the reason they started, and they find themselves playing for the sake of playing.  That describes a lot of politicians in power today.

Every libertarian knows what their overall goal is; a lot more “leave me the hell alone” and a lot less of the typical shit we’ve seen from government since the progressives took over most of the institutions.  To that end, we need to pick a handful of issues that we can push in the mainstream today, that advance the cause of a more limited government.  It will require slaughtering an awful lot of sacred cows, and I know enough about how libertarians think to know they won’t want to do that.  So the mainstream will keep ignoring us, and will keep nominating socialists, and people like John McCain.  We’ll choose to see all of our issues and concerns addressed or none of them.  We may quite likely end up spiraling into the sea of Social Democracy, but I’ve never met a libertarian who is serious about doing something to stop it.  They insist on pushing a button to get the plane flying perfectly off onto the right heading and at the right altitude, rather than applying a little left rudder here, and right aleron there, in order to methodically get the plane out of the spiral, and onto a truer heading.  I do think we have to start fixing this soon, because the sea is starting to get pretty big in the cockpit window.  Some suggest just letting the plane crash, because what doesn’t kill us will just make us stronger.  I tend to think it’ll just make us dead, and I’m not ready to accept that the idea of limited, constitutional government has no traction left in main stream politics.