Hello, hip world!
Tags: conservative, meta, New hotness, news watch
Inaugural post? What to say? Mission statement? Explanation? A post like any other? How about all three?
Welcome to Conservative Hipster. Now hosted at http://hipamcon.wordpress.com/, soon to be hosted at http://conservativehipster.com/, I’m planning on making this my personal blog of musings on music, culture, philosophy, and politics. It stems from an idea I had while posting here, when I realized that making others know that conservatives come in all shapes and colours, even in a hipster variety that cares about the shape and colour of the typeface on ones shirts, is an important endeavor.
Why Conservative Hipster? Well, while if you asked me about specific issues you wouldn’t assume I’m a conservative (Political Compass has me pegged far in the libertarian camp), my stance on many issues comes from having a fairly conservative view on philosophy and life. I’m definitely not what is typically thought of when one things “conservative” in America. An atheist, pro-ACLU, socialist apologist? Don’t I belong on the left? Well, probably not. But we’ll see.
And finally, I wanted to draw attention to this little nugget, gained from TPM*: According to Johan Goldberg in the LA Times, Obama wants to bring back slavery in the U.S. Sound silly? It is. Some hard-core rights-based libertarians might agree with him, but I think it’s pretty obvious the choice one has in working for a scholarship that Black American slaves did not have. What’s more, and this is important when discussing slavery and involentary servitude, under this plan one is not owned by the government. That’s a very important distinction to be made when discussing American slavery and making ridiculous analogies to it: if one isn’t property now, then it’s nothing like slavery was. However, this isn’t my point. My point comes form this paragraph:
Perhaps thanks to the JFK cult, which sees the refrain “Ask not what your country can do for you …” as an all-purpose writ for social meddling, even the idealistic hipster crowd is on board. Devotees of Rolling Stone and MTV, who normally preen like cats in a pool of sunshine over their alleged libertarianism when the issue is sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, see nothing wrong, and everything right, with involuntary servitude — as long as we just call it “voluntary.”
Um, confusion of terms much? First, last I checked no hipster would be caught dead reading the Rolling Stone or watching MTV (unless we’re doing it ironically). Secondly, I think he means “libertine”, not “libertarian”. Libertarianism does require some amount of economic conservatism. Finally, this isn’t involuntary servitude. No one is asking you to take money from the government. This is one of the large points of libertarianism: as long as no one is forcing me to buy more X or live like Y, then I’m OK, and I’m happy if they’re an option for others. No one is forcing me to accept money from the government to go to school, and I don’t see why teaching kids to work for their money and not expect (government) handouts for free is a bad thing. It sounds damn good to me. Now if we could just teach them to get off my lawn!
*You’ll find, as time goes on, that I read a lot of news sources on the right and left. I’ll eventually have a post on this very thing.
7 Responses to 'Hello, hip world!'
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on 9 July, 2008 on 3:51
I’ll add you in the morning — all I can say now is that you’d better be hosting your own blog with wordpress.org once you get your domain set up properly, or all libertarian and/or computer cred is gone.
Nice layout!
on 9 July, 2008 on 3:58
I’ll probably be using either Typo or byteflow, depending on whether I can convince my friend/host to install Ruby on Rails or Django on his server. But yes, Libertarian Computer Indie cred will be restored shortly.
on 9 July, 2008 on 4:04
Listen, you hipster, you hipsters all do hip things and entertain yourselves with hip media, including “MTV” and “Rolling Stone Magazine”. So don’t you be a hipster snob, you hipster.
Anyway, forgive me if I misread the article in my skim-through but it looks like they’re not making anyone “work for their money”, but making schools make kids work for their [the school's] money. This is completely different, and doesn’t fit so neatly into the libertarian-former-Randian ethic. “Rights-based libertarianism” aside, and the idea that even without a conception of absolute rights a government still shouldn’t be compelling college age kids to spend 100 hours a year of their time (which really is a lot) on service, while there’s a chance that some people will do their service and be drawn into the culture of it, most people are going to resent being forced to do it, much less forced to spend 50-100 hours a year doing it. Yes, you’ll get results (if the result you want is some free sidewalk cleaning), but it won’t help the culture and it’s a dubious application of state authority.
on 9 July, 2008 on 4:20
To call it the schools’ money would be quite a stretch. It’s federal financial aid.
And yeah, I’ll admit that 100 hours is a long time; over two weeks of full-time work. However, I don’t think that the idea, regardless of execution, is fundamentally without merit. There are already strings attached to accepting the money, and to teach people that money, even from the government, don’t come free, is a good thing.
How do you feel about states which forgive the state-funded student loans for those students who come back and teach in the state after school (Alaska was talking about doing this for a while). Is this Bad as well, or is there something that makes it OK? Sure, you can’t even get the grant money without working the service hours, but the market provides solutions in the forms of private and federal loans.
on 9 July, 2008 on 16:58
Wait, socialist apologist? /Really/?
Oh sweetheart.
on 9 July, 2008 on 17:48
We’re playing linguistic games now. I was talking the school’s money in the same way that someone (yourself included) talks about your money when you say “work for your money”.
As for your Alaska example, if the State is giving loans then it can do what it want with incentives to reduce those loans. The problem isn’t with that, or with teaching the lesson that “money doesn’t come free”, which is obviously good. The problem is that the incentives are so indirect as to be nigh meaningless for the student. The Alaskan teacher has choice over whether to come back to Alaska to receive the loan benefits. The only choice a student has is whether or not to go to a college that has mandatory service – maybe (because if it’s federal dollars at stake, something tells me not many good schools will turn the service down).
It’s kind of like the federal government using federal highway funds to impose the 21 drinking age. Yes, a state can choose to reject the funds and piss off their electorate, or people could choose to move to Europe where it’s 18, but that doesn’t make the law any less ridiculous. In other words, we can debate both the merits of the proposal and the merits of the tactics, and we shouldn’t conflate the two.
on 11 July, 2008 on 3:44
Consider yourself added to my RSS aggregator.
Welcome to the Mafia.