Kindly Ol’ Ron Paul
I decided to tune out the GOP primary coverage and return to Hockey Night In Canada once it became clear that Ron Paul’s speech would consist of reciting the entire first side of 2112 with extended solos. (I did like the warm-up line about how people accuse his monetary policy of being “too complex,” which can safely be said to have never been said by anybody with the possible exception of Jonah Goldberg.) However, the speech could have been even worse:
I still haven’t seen the source of this thing pinned down, although I might have missed it; the comment threads over at TNCs joint can be, uh, dense.
It’s clearly old; Paul’s hair tells us that much. And I don’t think that giant treason flag behind him is shopped in. Sons/Daughters of Confederate Veterans? Hell, maybe even the NRA? I’d like to know.
The best part? That giant banner at the beginning exhorting those of us ignorant of history to click on to see an ‘important video.’
Whatever the original source is, I suspect it has been flagged as being pro Nazi or something similar because I get a big fat “This video cannot be viewed in your country” when I click (I’m in Germany).
Here’s where the speech was taped, according to a commenter at TNC’s place:
September 30, 2003-This was a day of conference and speakers with vendors tables available during the regular intermissions for the folks for browsing amongst mostly confederate related merchandise which was for sale. These vendors tables also served as meeting points for smaller groups of participants to discuss the serious events before us and to exchange names and addresses.
Wow. The context actually succeeds in making it WORSE.
Thank you, CA. The threads at TNCs place are always informative but frequently exhausting to search through.
What Murc said.
This doesn’t appear to be from the similarly named Southern Historical Association conference. I thought so at first and my heart skipped a beat.
Speaking of the GOP and HNIC is has to drive the right nuts that Don Cherry can’t run here.
Dude, I think I know what you’re getting at, but it’s 2340 here in DC and I’m drunk. However, I for one, welcome our purple suited overlords:
http://cdn.bleacherreport.net/images_root/slides/photos/001/692/707/purplecherry_display_image.jpg?1324228193
The fact that Ron Paul is an open Confederate sympathizer and would have no problem at all repealing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is completely OK because he doesn’t think we should invade Iraq!!!
And if any leading progressive can’t see how fucked up giving Paul any positive coverage is, and I have a few very specific leading progressives in mind, I don’t even know what to say. Actually that’s not true, I have lots to say about that.
Also, gold buggery, which Paul’s ilk see as another means to destroy the social safety net. The see “fiat” currency as a commie plot to finance welfare through deficit spending.
I find it persistently mystifying that some people are so loudly enthusiastic for deflationary monetary policies, which are a burden to economies that really no-one sports. True, they do fall hardest on the poor, and punishing the poor is Libertarian dogma, but you’d think they’d find less disastrous prescriptions to achieve that outcome.
That would require an ability and willingness to get one’s head around complex concepts.
Wingnuts want their policies simple, easy to understand. Anything else hurts their brains.
Also, Paul-style gold buggery isn’t about economic policy. It’s about destroying social welfare programs, which in turn is really about race. When you point out all the negative consequences of a gold standard, they just wave you off as a lying commie.
They do this all the time. They support “A” because it’s a path to getting what they really want, “B”, and if “A” has negative consequences, they either deny or minimize them.
Quite right, but it could be extended. Gold buggery is about disempowering the government generally, both in terms of the welfare state, Keynesian economics in recessions, but also the Federal Reserve.
It’s also the most useful diagnostic tool for sussing out Ron Paul supporters – if you ding them about the gold standard and they revert to “but legalizing pot!” you know you’re dealing with a dudely pseudo-progressive who might actually be shown the error of his ways; if they mention von Mises, they’re one of the hardcore, and you should just walk away.
I’m astonished. No doubt they’re trembling in their shoesies…..
Yes, but only because he’s doing the Samba.
wow, the only thing i can think to say in ron paul’s behalf is that his voice is less horrifying than geddy lee’s. i’d like to think there are more intellectual reasons than geddy lee’s voice that i have always disliked randian libertarianism, but geddy’s screech did make clear the self-centeredness and disregard of others that mars that philosophy.
+1
I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy.
I know him, and he does!
You’re my fact-ckecing cos.
Neil Peart wrote the lyrics. I’m not sure how sold Geddy is on the ideology.
If you look and sound enough like a college professor, someone is willing (and if they agree with you, wanting) to believe you.
I’ve long held to the theory that George Will owes his career to his ability to look like people’s idea of an intellectual.
Odd how so many people are unable to hear the dog whistles when Paul is honking away but they are loud and clear when the grinch blows them.
Those are not dog whistles, they are air raid sirens. I grew up in the South in the 50s and 60s and I know dog whistles. Paul is not even trying to hide it.
I’m just saying that when you advocate race war at home instead of foreign wars the people praising your foreign policy are missing the point.
What’s the over/under on a Paul thread these days, anyway? 115 comments or so?
We should start running pools.
Too easy to cheat.
Well thats why, clearly …. may as well get practice at being Republicans
I don’t get it. What particular parts of that were so horrifying?
The argument that the outcome of the Civil War was a reduction in liberty?
As opposed to the greatest expansion of human liberty in American history?
Quick, tell me something about what happened to three rich white people!
I just don’t see that argument made.
Did you watch the video? He’s pretty damned explicit in saying exactly that.
Expecting Ron Paul fans to honestly assess what Ron Paul says is pretty much hopeless, no matter how obvious Ron Paul’s words might be.
Particularly pro-secessionist neo-confederate fanboys.
Expecting the Paulbots to have even a passing familiarity with reality or facts is a foo’s errand. They live in a delusional fantasy world where they are all Nietzschean Uber-Menschen instead of the hopeless schlubs they really are.
“Explicit” implies that you can provide quotes.
And let me rephrase, where is the part where Paul explains that the Civil War involved a reduction in liberty, as opposed to a great expansion in liberty?
Is everyone obliged to ignore the costs the Civil War had on liberty?
Everyone who discusses the Civil War and liberty is obliged to treat the elimination of slavery as the central truth to be discussed.
Everyone who discusses the Civil War and liberty is obliged to treat the changes in government structure that were part and parcel of how slavery was eliminated as, first and foremost, major factors in bringing about the greatest expansion of human liberty in American history.
To Ron Paul fans, liberty of darkies doesn’t count. But they’re not racist. Really.
Since they don’t dress in Klan robes – why, I hear Ron Paul was once quite kind to an individual black patient he had – then obviously they can’t be racist.
This is because racism is purely an individual, interpersonal phenomenon, with no institutional facets altogether.
Yet no one is obliged to think that the abridgments of liberty “that were part and parcel of how slavery was eliminated” need be continued.
It is also quite plain that Paul believes that there were other manners by which slavery could have ended in the US, and that those taken were not part and parcel of how slavery was eliminated.
He is negligent of his history in not acknowledging how Confederate leaders didn’t really want anything to do with that either.
Actually, anyone who takes the concept of liberty seriously is very much obliged to think that such phenomena as the imposition of federal power to enforce legal equality against the wishes of Southern states – whether we’re talking about Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Act, or the enforcement of Brown vs. Board – need be continued after the war, and down to the present day.
Which means that anyone who takes seriously the liberty of other Americans needs to support federal powers and resources that are capable of being so deployed.
The second part of your sentence doesn’t follow from the first.
If I shot a rabbit who was raiding my garden, and Ron Paul opines that I could have just put up chicken wire, it remains the case that shooting the rabbit was part and parcel of how my garden was protected.
Anon, I’ll grant you this: it is certainly legitimate to discuss whether certain federal powers that came out of the Civil War function today as a net drag on liberty.
However, criticizing those powers in the context of the Civil War itself, and using those criticisms to draw the conclusion that the Civil War itself was a net drag on liberty, requires one to ignore the greatest expansion of human liberty in our country’s history, and it’s difficult not to notice that the people who do this are all white people, and the liberty they ignore accrued to black people.
It’s especially difficult to do this when the person making the argument is standing in front of the segregationist flag, and has the Ron Paul newsletter in his background.
Depends what you consider abridgements of liberty, isn’t it? The suspension of habeus corpus and other emergency measures ended following the war. What remained were Federal measures to protect the rights of American citizens from state and private oppression.
And as people have said again and again, Lincoln tried a peaceful means of emancipation – he got turned down, repeatedly. The Confederacy chose to go to the wall rather than give up slavery.
Let’s start with a simple question, one that Paul gets fundamentally wrong: Who were the aggressors in the Civil War? Who started the damned thing?
Granted, the governor of South Carolina could have let a foreign gun battery dominate the entrance of Charleston harbor indefinitely.
“Foreign”. And Paul-bearers wonder why people make fun of them.
In fairness, those words (or any others) do not actually mean what they think they do.
You know, with so many people incorrectly using the phrase “begging the question”, it’s almost a treat to have an occasion to use it in sensu stricto.
Exactly. The legitimacy of Confederate expropriation of Federal forts and aggression towards Fort Sumter is completely rolled up in your opinion on the justification of secession. If you believe South Carolina was justified in separating itself from the Union, the reinforcing of Fort Sumter looks like occupation. If you don’t believe SC was justified, then the firing on Fort Sumter looks like rebellious aggression.
Why is it not “begging the question” to state that South Carolina started the war by firing on federals?
No, it’s not. Federal property remains federal property regardless. If the South wanted a legal divorce, not the violent robbery of its spouse, then the disposition of federal property needed a legal solution, not a violent one.
But that’s not what the South wanted.
Exactly. What should have happened there is that SC negotiate terms under which the northern federal government surrendered their fort. They didn’t even attempt it which tells you all you need to know.
Theft is ok so long as you’re a slave-owner since you’re already stealing labor anyway. Or something like that.
Exactly. Even if you grant the legality of secession, which we don’t, the seizure of Federal armories throughout the South was casus belli.
Because they were voluntarily part of the United States and subject to the the US Constitution and Congress, by their own choice? Dumbshite.
Not only that; they’d already tried out the Articles of Confederation and found them wanting. Accepting any interpretation of the Constitution that holds the relationship between the states and the federal government to be the same as that under the Articles demands explicitly rejecting history and rational thought.
And as someone usually has to point out in these debates, the preamble to the Articles describes it as an instrument for “perpetual Union.” Given that the Constitution was intended to *strengthen* the Union, it would be difficult to imagine how that could be achieved without dropping the assumption that the Union would remain “perpetual.”
And because the Constitution is an expression of the sovereign power of “We the People of the United States,”–it’s not a treaty of alliancee among a group of sovereign states. It says so, right in the preamble.
South Carolina doesn’t particularly belong to South Carolinians–it belongs to the whole People of the United States, that came together to form one country.
Yes! This, a thousand times this.
Always baffles me when people talk about sovereign states without thinking about who created those states.
The people are sovereign, and as you say, the whole people.
“The South was on the right side of the issue in the civil war”, perhaps?
He was explaining the position of Lysander Spooner (who he obviously agrees with) who was an abolishonist. The entire point of that was to separate the idea of slavery from the idea of secession.
Paul quite clearly does not agree with the institution of slavery, but does agree with the concept of legal secession.
“Paul quite clearly does not agree with the institution of slavery,”
Even granting that that’s true, his conception of “states rights” leads him to the position that he supports the right of a state to maintain the institution of slavery if they so choose, and the federal government has no legitimate claim in telling them otherwise.
And therefore we should treat decentralization, secession, and state’s rights arguments today as slavery apologetics?
When you’re making them while standing in front of a Confederate flag, talking to neo-Confederates, we sure as hell should.
Brien, you should be ashamed for taking Ron Paul’s words in context.
Or at least, and quite explicitly, pro-segregationist apologetics, as Paul has openly stated his opposition to the Civil Rights Act.
Private citizens screwing a minority = liberty. The elected government protecting minority citizens’ rights = jack-booted fascism. Right?
When they are deployed by people who explicitly endorse policy measures that are racist, in the context of freeing states to pursue those policies without interference?
Damn right we should.
There’s an argument to be made for federalism, but generally speaking decentralized state power has been used to oppress disfavored minorities and centralized federal power has been used to expand their liberty and protect. There are of course exceptions to this (the feds have a pretty shitty record on crushing strikers, although their record on this is STILL better than the state one) but anyone who wants to argue for decentralization and state’s rights has the burden of proof for how that won’t lead to, say, the southern states that still have miscegenation clauses in their constitutions enforcing them.
And anyone who wants to argue for unilateral legal secession has to argue how a nation-state like that could actually function.
And anyone who wants to argue for unilateral legal secession has to argue how a nation-state like that could actually function.
It couldn’t. That’s the point. Every state a failed state.
Yup. If you allow unilateral legal secession you have a treaty among nation states, not a singular state.
Right. And this gets us to the meat of things; like Goldwater in 1964, you cannot completely ignore the consequences of one’s political stances, claiming to be a pure Kantian principal-driven politician. Just as Goldwater knew what he was doing when he went into the South, threw his arms around Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, and gave speeches to roaring crowds about the evils of the Civil Rights Act, Paul can’t stand in front of a flag of treason in defense of slavery and claim that secession was justified without knowing what that signifies.
Moreover, given the evidence of his newsletters, given his long association with the John Birch Society and Stormfront, at what point can we drop the pretense that Ron Paul doesn’t get the racial implications of what he’s doing?
The entire point of that was to separate the idea of slavery from the idea of secession.
And our point is that it’s foolish to separate “states’ rights” rhetoric from the ends for which the rhetoric is generally used to cover for. As Joe says, when these arguments are being made in front of a symbol of treason in defense of slavery that was later repurposed as a symbol of lawlessness in defense of apartheid this should be pretty obvious.
Yes, but ignoring the blatantly obvious is what libertarians and other Paulbots are best at.
I’ve been thinking about this. I don’t agree with the importation of the word “apartheid” to describe Southern racial oppression.
Apartheid was about setting up society so that white people could live without black people in their lives.
Slavery and then segregation were about setting up society so that white people could have subordinate black people in their lives.
Apartheid was about maintaining distance, separation. Slavery and segregation were about managing proximity and interaction.
I don’t think this is accurate. Apartheid enforced residential segregation, pass systems, etc. but there was daily interaction between the “races.” This article focuses on domestic workers in white households but starts as follows: “Even during the height of apartheid in the 1960s and 1970s … Africans and Whites continued to encounter one other frequently and regularly. Workplaces, shops, government offices and city streets were a few of the places [they would meet], albeit on vastly different social terms.”
I will grant that the ideal society envisioned by the architects of apartheid may have been complete daily separation.
Most importantly, the South African economy was dependent on cheap black labor, including domestic servants for most middle class and affluent white households. They were constantly in contact and interacting, but blacks could not live in the places where they worked.
Eh. Apartheid was about maintaining certain kinds of distance and separation; black domestic help and black agricultural and mining workers were needed, and apartheid maintained that kind of contact, while preventing those workers from settling their families in the cities and other white enclaves.
It’s a bit more advanced than Southern Jim Crow was, but it’s a difference of degree not kind.
Agreed.
Anyone who agrees with the concept of legal secession should be ashamed of what the Confederate states pulled in 1860-1861, then. There is a legal method by which the Union can be dismantled. They chose not to avail themselves of it. And when you chose to undertake violent, illegal dismemberment of your nation-state, you had damn well better have moral justification.
And the Confederacy did not. Full stop.
And even leaving aside the grotesque immorality of the underlying cause, it’s worth nothing that the South didn’t unilaterally secede in response to any actual action on the part of the federal government, but because they lost an election contested fairly on terms they had consented to.
That’s absolutely worth noting, Scott, but I actually think you’re cutting the South too much slack there, rhetorically. If you leave aside the morality of the underlying cause, it is NOT hard to come up with a scenario in which, after losing an election contested fairly on terms you consent to, it’s justified to resort to extralegal action.
I don’t like letting conversations with southern apologists to start talking about abstract legal concepts, because that’s their preferred ground and they are EXPERT wrigglers if given any room in which to do so. I hammer on a single theme; the South launched a pre-emptive illegal war for the express purpose of maintaining and expanding a slave system. This forms a closed system; they can either argue the cause was moral (easily refuted) that it wasn’t about slavery (easily refuted) or go after the ‘illegal’ part, where they WANT you to get bogged in obtuse Constitutional arguments, but you can instead turn it straight back around to the moral issue any time you want.
I’d say that the complete failure to understand the implications of “governments are instituted among men and they derive their just powers from the consent of the governed” for the legitimacy of a slave-based government is final proof that Ron Paul is a very stupid man.
I’d say that the complete failure to understand the implications of “governments are instituted among men and they derive their just powers from the consent of the governed” for the legitimacy of a slave-based government is final proof that Ron Paul [and his followers] are
is avery stupidmanpeople.You missed part.
I can not disagree with your edit.
Say, Mal, what do you think about Ron Paul’s argument that we were too quick to embrace war, and that slavery could and should have been ended without such state-organized violence?
Do you think it’s grossly unfair to accuse him of supporting slavery (or of not actually opposing it in any meaningful way, or of giving solace to people who did support it) just because he didn’t like the use of warfare to solve it?
Well, I would note that peace involves an active working for justice, rather than simply a lack of (state) violence. Anybody who thinks that ignoring the problem of South Carolina was a viable solution is woefully ignorant of the trajectories of slave societies.
Paul does not even advocate against state violence, only against some kinds of federal violence. He is perfectly happy with the individual states and municipalities inflicting violence on their residents (which also happened under slavery which was enforced by state violence).
Maybe it is the fact that I did not sleep last night, but I read the question as trying to posit an equivalence between Ron Paul and Quakers on abolition.
Beating down Ron Paul is like stuffing the paranoid schizophrenic nerdy kid with Tourette’s in his seventh grade gym locker. If there was ever a case to be made for FEMA forced relocation and reeducation camps, Paul and his followers are it.
Better to have them out roaming the hallways at middle school than put in the basement where they can play with their matches unseen.
Signing the NADA, thereby being able to permanently arrest and detain American citizens at any time, doesn’t matter. Neither does the assassination of an American citizen and his family. Nope, what matters is your views on Fort Sumter.
That’s the REAL issue this election.
You forgot the public option.
You’d think a Representative against such a measure could be bothered to vote against it.
You are wrong. These are weighty matters that are cause for great concern.
You are wrong again.
You are wrong again.
You can just cut and paste that for everything he writes, including his name.
Actually, until I saw him up in the Roe thread, I was giving mike the benefit of the doubt vis a vis being a troll.
Now I know! And I can move on from substantive engagement to critiquing his technique.
(His technique is actually pretty good, by the way. He made an enormous strategic misstep by revealing himself, but otherwise? Solid.)
I disagree. That particular technique is so trite that it has an honored spot on nearly every troll bingo card on the interwebs.
Cannot even spell NDAA!
Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
I was going to proudly bring over to EW’s at some point my Mom’s remark that it was too bad that Paul was a bigot because so many of the things he said were right on. But at least he gave aid and comfort to bigots in a way much more prolonged than having Donnie McClurkin sing at a campaign event.
Not posting about football anywhere. Not today.
To the paultards who might still be around, this link to TNC’s follow-up post might be instructive (not that they would be convinced by anything there, but at least it would provide more things for them to be in denial about. The post (and especially the comment thread) pretty much conclusively proves that 1)Dr. Paul doesn’t know shit about what led up to the civil war or who actually started it; 2)Dr. Paul’s claim that slavery could have ended in the South without war pretty much flies in the face of all available evidence; and 3)the idea that other western hemisphere countries were able to get rid of slavery without war or significant violence is bullshit, and 4)that the abolition of slavery by England has no parallel whatsoever to any possible end to the Peculiar Institution in the American South.
I report that last night, Murray State at SIU-E was on national television, in the form of ESPN-U. My college graduation was in that gym. You move to Division I for things like this–not necessarily anything to do with the students. If I hadn’t gotten a kick out of this, I wouldn’t be posting it.
I’ve only ever been to Carbondale. What’s Edwardsville like?