Let’s Go Fisking: ‘The Stories I Enjoyed Most in Last Week’s Sunday New York Times’
13th July 2013
Tim O’Reilly is not a Voice of the Crust but he plays one on the Internet.
The Crustian clichés I enjoyed most in this article:
‘The Sunday Times is a gathering of fascinating minds reflecting on the issues of the moment; it’s a conversation well worth being a part of.’ (In fact, the Sunday Times is a gathering of politically-correct chattering-class locksteppery that is well worth ignoring; you won’t miss anything important.)
‘While I think there is a lot to like in Obamacare, I totally agree that we could do way better if we scrapped the current system in favor of more profound change.’ (In fact, there is nothing to like in Obamacare, being a hideous amalgam of semi-socialist bureaucratic jobbery bolted onto the existing dysfunctional system that in turn arose in response to fascist price controls instituted during Roosevelt’s war. The profound change we need is for everybody to pay for his own health care/health insurance and make the cost tax-deductible, as now happens with employers. But they’ll never do that, because it allows people their own choice, instead of making them dependent on the choices of government employees and vote-purchasing megacompanies.)
‘Too bad politicians are so lacking in courage, and have such a hard time actually enacting sensible policies!’ (In fact, our political system is set up neither to reward politicians for courage nor to encourage them to actually enact sensible policies, but to keep them in power as they walk the high wire of voting block politics.)
‘I have a big interest in reforming corporate governance.’ (Of course, ‘reforming corporate governance’ means saying to a corporation ‘do it my way rather than your way’ and making ‘corporate governance’ even more divorced from economics and under the thumb of politics than it already is.)
‘There is a myth that public corporations are managed for the benefit of their shareholders; the reality is that they are most often managed for the benefit of insiders.’ (The ‘progressive’ problem with that is that the wrong insiders are in control; they’d be much happier if it were their insiders. AlGore is the poster child here, with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama carrying his train.)
‘We need fresh approaches to making our world more livable.’ (In fact, we need a return to the old approaches that worked; the fresh approaches that have been made since Teddy Roosevelt have invariably made things worse.)
‘Has “Caucasian” lost its meaning?’ (In fact, it never had a meaning; like ‘Aryan’ and ‘capitalist’, it was created by people with a political agenda who wanted to sound scientific.)
‘It’s bizarre origin will quickly convince you that this euphemism for “white” exists to make racism a little less obvious.’ (More politically-correct I’m-white-but-I-hate-white-people-please-don’t-beat-me-uppery from someone who, given the choice, still wouldn’t choose to be non-white, but will forevermore wring his hands until they bleed about it nevertheless. ‘White’ doesn’t need a ‘euphemism’ except for people who regard being ‘white’ as sinful per se; the technical term for such people is ‘racist’.)
‘As they used to say, “How many times do we have to make the rubble bounce?”’ (Until it stops moving on its own. One of the flaws of democracy is that it give people with slogans for brains as much input into the political process as rational adults who bother to inform themselves on a subject. The reason we have ‘overkill’ on nuclear weapons is the undoubted truth that [a] nothing every works first-time-every-time and [b] this isn’t an area in which we can afford to skimp.)