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This week, we’re all over the place. First, Fouad Ajami joins to discuss the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war. Was it worth it? Fouad says yes. Tell us what you think in the comments. Then Obama in Israel, Pat Caddell on the scourge of political consultants, Peter Robinson outs himself as an unabashed Rick Santorum supporter, and a crackling conversation on the role of video games in the coarsening of society.
Music from this week’s show:
Angry Birds Theme by Pomplamoose
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I’m surprised what a bunch of centralizing, crypto-fascist statists you all are. No one pointed out that the issues of public expression and private morality became problematic when the SCotUS ginned up the Incorporation Doctrine. Before that, the First Amendment applied to Congress. Now it applies to every grade-school principal.
I don’t buy the liberal garbage pieties about no one is qualified to decide what I think or read or look at. The people who intone them–I mean you, Rob and James–apparently feel qualified to decide what I and my family are exposed to. If you want to indulge in that filth/sludge, drive to the next township or county, the way you might have to in order to buy BBs (no ammo sold here) or beer. Or move there . . . good riddance!
Well, that’s the way the Founders set it up, but under our Progressive regime, when the nursery school teacher tries to keep pee-pee and poo-poo jokes out of the class newspaper, it becomes a Federal case.
Edited 23 minutes ago
I’m not sure I like the way the early reviews are running.
I will say that I like fiery Peter Robinson. That is clearly the most animated I have ever seen or heard you when you and Rob were going back and forth.
I am afraid however, that arguments in favor of censorship are unlikely to resonate in 2013.
During the podcast, I tried to estimate how many video game killings I have committed over my 31 years on this earth, and I am reasonably certain the number must be measured in the tens of millions. That’s really not an exaggeration.
To date my real life kill count remains zero.
A very entertaining podcast – would that we might hear more such spontaneous, lively disagreements between our esteemed hosts.
And for a man who has spent his career channeling the opinions of others, Peter is most engaging when speaking his own mind: a well-reasoned, passionate, but impeccably polite debater (Rob, on the other hand…).
More, please.
Glad you enjoyed it, Frank and Mendel – it was great fun, and yes, I’d like more of that, too.
As a grown man, I don’t need “protection”.
I Stand With Rick (and Peter Robinson)!
Lets remember boys that Mitt Romney got 2 million less votes than John McCain did, and Obama got 9 million less than he did in 2008. Peter’s theory is not totally insane, I believe that conservatives and evangelicals did not come out to vote for Romney because he was not a conservative, and would have rallied behind someone like Santorum. McCain got the votes he did because of Palin. So There is a possibility that if the republicans had nominated a conservative that he would have won. Especially since a conservative that would have went after Obama on Obamacare and Benghazi.I’m with you Peter.
I find it curious (and repetitive) that conservatives that are supposedly for limited government object to limitations on the right to bear arms but call for censorship of pornography and — of all things — video games, as if there were even the remotest connection between these two things in the first place.
Why is that curious? Conservatives aren’t synonymous with libertarians, and public morality has traditionally been a legitimate basis on which to exercise the police power. One could view pornography/graphic video games as more corrosive of public morality than lawful possession of firearms and hence make that distinction regarding criminal enforcement.
Edited in 0 minutes
Rick Santorum brings all of the social conservative values, with almost none of the conservative economic principles that unite across the entire party.
Yeah, that would have gone over great.
It’s curious because firearms are actually dangerous if used improperly. Whereas, especially for video games, there is zero evidence that playing video games, even violent first-person shooter/simulation video games, leads to violent behavior. Correlation is not cause and effect.
And, as I said, there is further zero connection between pornography and video games. (Peter invoked pornography as an analog to video games as something he wants to ban, but that doesn’t mean it follows or had anything to do with what he was arguing.)
So you are of the opinion certain forms of entertainment cause a general societal decay. And since that general decay can have abstract effects on other members of society who are not consuming said entertainment, the later group should be able to use the police power of government to enforce codes of behavior over the consumption of this entertainment?
You do of course realize, that the atheist argument is that the Bible is a destructive document that poisons the minds of ordinary people. Since they too can sight abstract ways in which society is diminished by the existence of religious texts, the obvious implication of your logic, is that if the atheists ever achieve a majority in the government, that they are well within their rights to censor it for the public’s good.
Beautiful.
This line of thinking also leaves you with no grounds to oppose something such as the individual mandate of Obamacare.
Some people not having insurance, really does have the tangible effect of sticking the rest of us with much of the bill for their medical care.
Do you believe that this sort of abstract, indirect harm, is sufficient grounds for the government to declare that no one is free to choose what products he will buy?
I give you that Rick Santorum was not the best messenger, but may have a chance if he could have hashed out his message better, and the press would have fillet him but we will never be able to prove a hypothetical. but this trodding gently on social issues has its draw backs. There are a lot of conservatives who will not compromise on some of the social issues because of moral conviction, and if the Republican Party thinks they can throw those issues out and still win they are mistaken.
I’m with Peter in my belief that Santorum would have been the best man for the job (leaving aside questions about elect-ability). The American crisis today is moral and spiritual from which our other problems flow. Dick Nixon once made the comment that during the Great Depression America was materially poor, but spiritually rich. And that by the Vietnam era America had become the opposite. Nixon’s comment applies today in spades.
Do you really think that government is the mechanism to rely on for fixing a deficit of morality?
I’m merely articulating plausible arguments, not necessarily my own opinions. It’s what lawyers do.
But as to your example regarding the coercive atheists: of course it’s plausible. Yet, will conservatives abstaining from using the police power to maintain public morality really preclude the opposition from doing so once they have enough public support? It’s arguable that the libertarian mindset leads to a one-way ratchet in which progressives will always use the state to achieve their ends and to shape the culture while conservatives just maintain state neutrality while they’re in power. That’s counterproductive.
You do of course realize, that the atheist argument is that the Bible is a destructive document that poisons the minds of ordinary people. Since they too can sight abstract ways in which society is diminished by the existence of religious texts, the obvious implication of your logic, is that if the atheists ever achieve a majority in the government, that they are well within their rights to censor it for the public’s good.
Beautiful. ·24 minutes ago
Actually, in the final count Romney received 981,853 more votes than McCain did. Obama’s total was 3,589,971 fewer than his count in 2008.
The goal is to create a society where the government cannot be used by either group to enforce their preferences. The libertarian mindset is centered around finding ways to achieve this goal.
Banging our heads against the wall trying to censor people’s private activities is counter-productive.
The Dystopian future (present?) put into motion by the Baby Boomers like me and mentioned by Lileks at the end of the podcast was the subject of the movie “Idiocracy” directed by Mike Judge of “Beavis and Butthead” fame. The movie did nothing at the box office but continues be referenced as a cautionary tale of the end game of declining moral standards, manners, and intelligence.
Carol Platt Liebau weighs in.
Bah, humbug! The Golden Age of Hollywood?
Check out the IMDB Top 250. The highest ranking movie which can be legitimately so characterised is Casablanca at #25 (Twelve Angry Men was from 1957, when Hayes was already being chipped away). There are 22 non-GAoH Hollywood movies above it, including nine that would definitely not have been permitted under Hayes (the two Godfather movies, Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, Shawshank Redemption etc).
Meanwhile, Peter, think through your logic on those HBO TV shows. They’d have been more effective with less swearing. I don’t know the shows, but I do think that swearing is more effective if rarely deployed.
Nonetheless, can you suggest a legal regime that allows swearing in artistically appropriate amounts, but not inappropriate ones?
I know the usual answer: a censorship board that looks at each production and makes a judgement. And which way will that judgement drift and swing? Towards permissiveness? Or censoriousness?
I’m happy about today’s open regime. In 1932 Tod Browning’s movie Freaks was banned in many places, including Australia. That lasted 40 years. These days it is rated ‘PG’ and is in 12 top cinema lists.
During the podcast, I tried to estimate how many video game killings I have committed over my 31 years on this earth, and I am reasonably certain the number must be measured in the tens of millions. That’s really not an exaggeration.
To date my real life kill count remains zero. ·2 hours ago
Thanks for the kind words, Frank. Re video games, I’ve been mulling it over. I started talking about censorship largely to be provocative–and judging my the comments here, I certainly did provoke some folks–but it seems obvious that video games represent a vast supply of innocent entertainment and only a tiny threat, if even that, to public safety. In other words, even in my most provocative moods I’d be unable to find grounds for censoring video games.
But pornography? We’d want to study long and hard about the right places to draw the lines, but I’d have no problem with censoring a great deal of the garbage on the Internet–and I mean a very great deal of it.
Reasonable?
Then there’s the matter of evidence. Peter, I’m bit of an ideologue in the sense of supporting freedom even if it has negative consequences. But I might be open to being persuaded … if you can make a case based on strong evidence that, say, video games contribute to these crimes.
We do know such crimes pre-existed video games. Have they gone up (on a per capita basis — no cheating please!) since video games appeared? Unlikely. In the US major crime has declined on this basis since a peak in around 1990, around the time that first person shooters were becoming mature. Hey, maybe a proportion of potential homicidal maniacs sublimated their impulses into dismembering people made of nothing more that pixels on a screen?
Perhaps eliminating a steady flow of new games will result in said potential murderers becoming bored and turning away from their screens and looking afresh at a real world of real targets.
We just don’t know! And most of the people who look into such things seem to have agendas, pro or anti, which makes their conclusions worrisome.
When in doubt, err on the side of liberty.
Edited 1 hour ago
Careful there, Raptus. No conservative I know believes the right to bear arms is unlimited. The right to drive tanks? The right to own chemical weapons? Nope.
Just so, freedom of speech. Political speech, speech that conveys thought–that is indeed sacred. But censorship of illicit or coarse or pornographic materials was a commonplace at the time of the founding–and, for that matter, remained a taken-for-granted aspect of public life right up until the Warren Court.
(Note that there’s another way of making the same point: namely, to say that “arms” are non-military weapons–that is, to define arms as the kind of small-scale, personal weapons that are undoubtedly constitutional. But the result–that Americans may bear certain kinds of weapons but not others–remains the same.)
Others in these comments have raised the issue of the availability of pornography and violent video games contributing to a general decline in the culture which may made more likely such horrific things as the murder of little children.
Again, what is the evidence? These things are damned hard to work out. Has the culture declined? If it has, is it due to greater permissiveness on these fronts, or due to educationalists’ insistence that positive encouragement is the only permissible strategy? Or one of a hundred other progressive social policies to which we have unfortunately been subjected? How to disentangle all these things?
When in doubt, err on the side of liberty.
Reasonable?
It depends on the extent to which we are talking about. The idea that XXX sites might be forced to use a separate domain as you discussed on the podcast, or rules added that prevent sites from sending unsolicited e-mails containing objectionable material are all within the bounds of reason.
Putting aside the arguments of liberty for a moment, what are the relative chances of success in government effort to censor pornography? Will we create a bureau of decency, who trolls the internet all day looking for violations? How in the world would you enforce this in a practical sense?
So yes there are reasonable steps you could take that I wouldn’t actively oppose. But I think the line must be drawn at the denial of access. If American’s want smut, there going to get it, and it would be unwise to create another bureaucracy to try and prevent it.
Amen
Peter thinks Rick Santorum could have won?
I didn’t know they legalized marijuana in California too.
Right, like Rob Long who admitted that he might not have been able to vote for Santorum.
Rob, were you one of the voices during the election deriding social conservatives contemplating sitting out the election because Romney wasn’t conservative enough?