Category Archives: Libertarianism

"The Biden administration is preparing to scrap aTrump-era rulethat allows medical workers to refuse to provide services that conflict with their religious or moral beliefs," Politico reported Tuesday, citing "three people familiar with the deliberations." The exact scope of the prospective update isn't clear, but the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed it's coming.

In one sense, the change is irrelevant. Introduced in 2019, the rulein question would have denied federal funding to health-care organizations that don't allow staff to opt out of participation in abortions, procedures related to gender transition, assisted suicide, and the like. But it was blocked in federal court before it took effect and so has never been implemented. The Biden administration's "change" would merely confirm the status quo. Moreover, cases where health-care workers are forced to perform services they believe to be immoral (or fired for refusing to do so) seem to be relatively rare. They do happen, but most states already have laws on the books providing at least some conscience protections for medical professionals.

Still, the federal reversal is a step in the wrong direction on two counts. One is a matter of principle: The government technically isn't forcing doctors who believe abortion is murder to perform abortions. This isn't a straightforward mandate, because the doctors can, of course, quit their jobs instead. But federal endorsement of organizational policies that require employees to choose between conscience and livelihood does not exactly evince a civil libertarian spirit. It isn't a clear-cut state violation of freedom of conscience or religious liberty, yet it does give the government's blessing (and dollars) to private rejection of very serious claims of conscience.

Then there's the practical side of things. Politico quotes Jacqueline Ayers of Planned Parenthood, who says the change would "help ensure people can access the health care and information they need when they need it." If this revocation of a rule, again, that never took effect and is already broadly echoed at the state level changes anything, I suspect the opposite would be true.

Were medical professionals widely required to work in violation of their consciences, many would leave their fields, change their specialties, or outright refuse to take on certain patients something doctors, in particular, will always be able to do by citing facially neutral concerns like workload. In the worst case, I can imagine situations where a medical worker forced to act against conscience would deliberately misdiagnose or mistreat a patient, rationalizing that this is the lesser sin.

Compelling any violation of conscience is a very grave proposal. Compelling it of medical staff is uniquely risky, too.

Originally posted here:
The risk in a Biden reversal of medical conscience protections - The Week

Despair, he signed off, serves the regime.

Part of why people have trouble describing this New Right is because its a bunch of people who believe that the system that organizes our society and government, which most of us think of as normal, is actually bizarre and insane. Which naturally makes them look bizarre and insane to people who think this system is normal. Youll hear these people talk about our globalized consumerist society as clown world. Youll often hear the worldview expressed by our media and intellectual class described as the matrix or the Ministry of Truth, as Thiel described it in his opening keynote speech to NatCon. It can be confusing to turn on something like the influential underground podcast Good Ol Boyz and hear a figure like Anton talk to two autodidact Southern gamers about the makeup of the regime, if only because most people reading this probably dont think of America as the kind of place that has a regime at all. But thats because, as many people in this world would argue, weve been so effectively propagandized that we cant see how the system of power around us really works.

This is not a conspiracy theory like QAnon, which presupposes that there are systems of power at work that normal people dont see. This is an idea that the people who work in our systems of power are so obtuse that they cant even see that theyre part of a conspiracy.

The fundamental premise of liberalism, Yarvin told me, is that there is this inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise. He believes that this premise underpins a massive framework of power. My job, as he puts it, is to wake people up from the Truman Show.

We spoke sharing a bench outside in the dark one evening, a few days into the conference. Yarvin is friendly and solicitous in person, despite the fact that he tends to think and talk so fast that he can start unspooling, reworking baroque metaphors to explain ideas to listeners who have heard them many times before.

Strange things can happen when you meet him. Id gotten in touch with him through a mutual friend, a journalist I knew from New York who once had a big magazine assignment to write about him. The piece never came out. They wanted him to say I was really evil and all that, Yarvin told me. He wouldnt do it and pulled the piece. And I thought, Okay, thats a cool guy. This friend has now made a bunch of money in crypto, works on a project Yarvin helped launch to build a decentralized internet, and lives hours out into the desert in Utah, where hell occasionally call in to New Rightish podcasts. He recently had dinner with Thiel and Mastersboth Masters and Vance have raised money by offering donors a chance to dine with Thiel and the candidate.

Yarvin has a pretty condescending view of the mainstream media: Theyre just predators, he has said, who have to make a living attacking people like him. They just need to eat. He doesnt usually deal with mainstream magazines and wrote that hed been ambushed at the last NatCon, in 2019, by a reporter for Harperswhere I also writewho made him out to be a bit of a loon and predicted that the NatCons populist program would soon be stripped of its parts by the corporate-minded Republican establishment.

But the winds are shifting. He told me about how hed gone to read poetry in New York recently, at the Thiel-funded NPC fest. A bunch of lit kids showed up, he said, grinning. I had grown into adulthood in the New York lit-kid world; even a few years ago, there was no question that anything like this could have happened. But now Yarvin is a cult hero to many in the ultrahip crowd that youll often hear referred to as the downtown scene. I dont even think antifa bothered showing up, Yarvin said. What would they do? It was an art party.

Yarvin had asked his new girlfriend, Lydia Laurenson, a 37-year-old founder of a progressive magazine, to vet me. The radical right turn her life had taken created complications.

One of my housemates was likeI dont know if I want Curtis in our house, she told me. And Im like, Okay, that makes sense. I understand why youre saying that.

Laurenson had been a well-known blogger and activist in the BDSM scene back when Yarvin was the central early figure in a world of neo-reactionary writers, publishing his poetry and political theory on the Blogger site under the name Mencius Moldbug.

As Moldbug, Yarvin wrote about race-based IQ differences, and in an early post, titled Why I Am Not a White Nationalist, he defended reading and linking to white nationalist writing. He told me hed pursued those early writings in a spirit of open inquiry, though Yarvin also openly acknowledged in the post that some of his readers seemed to be white nationalists. Some of Yarvins writing from then is so radically right wing that it almost has to be read to be believed, like the time he critiqued the attacks by the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivikwho killed 77 people, including dozens of children at a youth campnot on the grounds that terrorism is wrong but because the killings wouldnt do anything effective to overthrow what Yarvin called Norways communist government. He argued that Nelson Mandela, once head of the military wing of the African National Congress, had endorsed terror tactics and political murder against opponents, and said anyone who claimed St. Mandela was more innocent than Breivik might have a mother youd like to fuck.

Hes tempered himself in middle agehe now says he has a rule never to say anything unnecessarily controversial, or go out of my way to be provocative for no reason. Many liberals who hear him talk would probably question how strictly he follows this rule, but even in his Moldbug days, most of his controversial writings were couched in thickets of irony and metaphor, a mode of speech that younger podcasters and Twitter personalities on the highly online right have adopteda way to avoid getting kicked off tech platforms or having their words quoted by liberal journalists.

He considers himself a reactionary, not just a conservativehe thinks it is impossible for an Ivy Leagueeducated person to really be a conservative. He has consistently argued that conservatives waste their time and political energy on fights over issues like gay marriage or critical race theory, because liberal ideology holds sway in the important institutions of prestige media and academiaan intertwined nexus he calls the Cathedral. He developed a theory to explain the fact that America has lost its so-called state capacity, his explanation for why it so often seems that it is not actually capable of governing anymore: The power of the executive branch has slowly devolved to an oligarchy of the educated who care more about competing for status within the system than they do about Americas national interest.

One man raised his hand to ask how Masters planned to DRAIN THE SWAMP. He gave me a sly look. Well, one of my friends has this acronym he calls RAGE, he said. Retire All Government Employees.

No one directs this system, and hardly anyone who participates in it believes that its a system at all. Someone like me who has made a career of writing about militias and extremist groups might go about my work thinking that all I do is try to tell important stories and honestly describe political upheaval. But within the Cathedral, the best way for me to get big assignments and win attention is to identify and attack what seem like threats against the established order, which includes nationalists, antigovernment types, or people who refuse to obey the opinions of the Cathedrals experts on issues like vaccine mandates, in as alarming a way as I possibly can. This cycle becomes self-reinforcing and has been sent into hyperdrive by Twitter and Facebook, because the stuff that compels people to click on articles or share clips of a professor tends to affirm their worldview, or frighten them, or both at the same time. The more attention you gain in the Cathedral system, the more you can influence opinion and government policy. Journalists and academics and thinkers of any kind now live in a desperate race for attentionand in Yarvins view, this is all really a never-ending bid for influence, serving the interests of our oligarchical regime. So I may think I write for a living. But to Yarvin, what I actually do is more like a weird combination of intelligence-gathering and propagandizing. Which is why no one I was talking to at NatCon really thought it would be possible for me to write a fair piece about them.

More here:
What Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and Others Are Learning From Curtis Yarvin and the New Right - Vanity Fair

Mr. Musk has objected when politicians have tried to characterize his views as in sync with their own, insisting that he would rather leave politics to others, despite ample evidence on Twitter to the contrary. When Mr. Abbott last year defended a strict anti-abortion law that made the procedure virtually illegal in Texas by citing Mr. Musks support Elon consistently tells me that he likes the social policies in the state of Texas, the governor said Mr. Musk pushed back.

In general, I believe government should rarely impose its will upon the people, and, when doing so, should aspire to maximize their cumulative happiness, he responded on Twitter. That said, I would prefer to stay out of politics.

If thats the case, he often cant seem to help himself. He heckles political figures who have taken a position he disagrees with or who have seemingly slighted him. Mr. Musks response to Senator Elizabeth Warren after she said that he should pay more in income taxes was, Please dont call the manager on me, Senator Karen.

After one of Mr. Musks Twitter fans pointed out that President Biden had not congratulated SpaceX for the successful completion of a private spaceflight last fall, Mr. Musk hit back with a jab reminiscent of Mr. Trumps derisive nickname Sleepy Joe.

Hes still sleeping, he replied. Several days later, he criticized the Biden administration as not the friendliest and accused it of being controlled by labor unions. These comments came just a few weeks after his insistence that he preferred to stay out of politics.

Few issues have raised his ire as much as the coronavirus restrictions, which impeded Teslas manufacturing operations in California and nudged him closer to his decision last year to move the companys headquarters to Texas. That move, however, was very much symbolic since Tesla still has its main manufacturing plant in the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Fremont, Calif., and a large office in Palo Alto.

Over the course of the pandemic, Mr. Musks outbursts flared dramatically as he lashed out at state and local governments over stay-at-home orders. He initially defied local regulations that shut down his Tesla factory in Fremont. He described the lockdowns as forcibly imprisoning people in their homes and posted a libertarian-tinged rallying cry to Twitter: FREE AMERICA NOW. He threatened to sue Alameda County for the shutdowns before relenting.

Here is the original post:
The Elusive Politics of Elon Musk - The New York Times

Candidates file to run for governor of Oklahoma

Some of the candidates hoping to win the 2022 governor's race spoke after filing at the Oklahoma state Capitol.

Addison Kliewer, Oklahoman

Four years ago, a relatively unknown Tulsa businessman with no political experience jumped into the governor's race with little fanfare and an unlikelypathto victory.

Now, Gov. Kevin Stitt, 49,must fend off sevenchallengers to win a second term in office.

With the political playing field set after last week's candidate filing period, threeRepublicans,twoDemocrats, one Libertarian and one independentare vying to unseat the first-term Republican governor.

Most of Stitt'schallengers have come out swinging with criticism of the incumbent.

More:Trump-era EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt joins race to replace Jim Inhofe in U.S. Senate

But in an interview Wednesday, Stitt seemedunperturbed by his field of challengers.

Four years ago, there were 10 Republicans in the gubernatorial primary, he said.

"The more the merrier," Stitt said. "Let's have honest conversations about our past experience and how we want to lead the state."

In the June 28 Republican primary, Stitt will face Joel Kintsel, 46, Mark Sherwood, 57, and Moira McCabe, 40.

The winner of the primary will face either Democratic state schools Superintendent Joy Hofmeister, 57, or former Democratic Sen. Connie Johnson, 69, in the November general election. Former state Sen. Ervin Yen, 67, an independent,and Libertarian Natalie Bruno, 37, also will be on the general election ballot.

The director of the Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs, Kintsel recently took a leave of absence to launch his first bid for public office. He also is a a lieutenant colonel in the Oklahoma Air National Guard.

Kintsel said he first started contemplating running for governor after seeing Stitt's "abuse" toward Oklahoma's Native American tribes.

"We're all Oklahomans, we're all part of the same family," Kintsel said."I'm not from a tribal background, but I will treat all Oklahomans with civility, and respect."

Kintsel has alleged the Stitt administration is rife with corruption and cronyism. In a recent interview, he alleged the Office of Management and Enterprise Services is steering state contracts to specific contractors.

He also saidthe Oklahoma Tourism and Recreation Department's contracts with Swadley'sBar-B-Q to operate restaurants at some state parks are suspect. The contracts have come under scrutiny from state lawmakers and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.

More: Was Swadley's state parks deal with Oklahoma too lucrative? We dive into records

In response, Stitt, who referred to Kintsel as a career bureaucrat, said he's not a fan ofname calling.

Stitt said he's not afraid to fight bureaucracy and special interest groups. He also touted his calls for audits of various state agencies, including the State Department of Education.

"A good CEO welcomes transparency," Stitt said. "That's why I've been asking for audits all over state government. We're trying to expose anything that's going on that'snot right forall fourmillion Oklahomans."

If elected, Kintsel said he would focus on public safety and improving the state's roads and bridges, although he expressed opposition toa controversial turnpike expansion in Norman that's part of the $5 billion ACCESS Oklahoma plan backed by Stitt.

Kintsel also said he plans to focus on courting support from veterans and their families.

"I have a different vision for Oklahoma," he said."It's one that's based on values, integrityfirst, service before self, excellence inall we do. Those are the values that I've lived under in the military."

Sherwood, a minister, retired police officer and naturopathic doctorwho owns a Tulsa wellness-based medical practice, is challenging Stitt from the far right.

He has criticized the governor for closing"nonessential" businesses at the start of the pandemic and said Stitt, who just signed a near-total abortion ban into law, hasn't gone far enough to abolish abortion.

McCabe is a stay-at-home mom who supports the Second Amendment, opposes abortion and has vowed to stand against federal overreach.

Although Hofmeister was a registeredRepublican up until early October, she's already the likely frontrunner in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. She's been highly critical of Stitt since launching her campaign.

Like millions of our neighbors, I am guided by faith, family, and the commonsense Oklahoma values Ive taught my four kids," she said in a statement. "But there doesnt seem to be much common sense guiding our state right now.

"Instead of working together, our governor stirs up division, pitting neighbor against neighbor. He prizes politics over people and his own self-interest over the public good."

The first Democrat to jump into the governor's race, Johnson has touted her progressive bona fides on the campaign trail. She is a longtime proponent of legalizing cannabis and has pushed for Oklahoma to abolish the death penalty.

Johnsonran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018 and for U.S. Senate in 2014.

My policy positions are clear, and I've been transparent about them my entire career," Johnson said."My entire life basically is built on Democratic values that that I hold dear."

Former state Sen. Ervin Yen, who is challenging Stitt as an independent, continued lastweek his criticism of the governor's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.An anesthesiologist and former Republican, Yen used to represent Oklahoma Cityin the state Senate.

He said Oklahoma is a top 10 state for COVID-19 cases because "our terrible vaccination rate and our state governments lack of proclaiming a statewide maskmandate ever."

'We never made that investment': Oklahoma mass release report prompts call for program funding

While most governors imposed temporary mask mandates when COVID-19 cases spiked, Stitt never imposed a statewide mask requirement.

Bruno said it's important for Oklahomans to have a third-party option this election cycle.

She also criticized the governor's rocky relationship with the tribes, and said she would have vetoed legislation to make it a felony to perform most abortions.

"I really feel like the current establishment, the current parties aren't putting forth good quality candidates that we can vote for," said the Edmond Libertarian. "We need more options."

Staff writers Ben Felder and Chris Casteel contributed to this report.

See original here:
'The more the merrier': Who looks to unseat Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt in 2022 election? - Oklahoman.com

A periodic update about the 2022 campaign for public office.

Notices about public campaign appearances in the Sauk Valley should be sent to news@saukvalley.com. The news and notes will run periodically during the election season.

The Lee County Electoral Board unanimously voted April 12 to deny all objections against three Lee County Board members running for re-election.

Dixon resident Jennifer Lawson made formal election objections to County Board District 1 Republican incumbents Mike Koppien, Chris Norberg and Jim Schielein, arguing that they should be stricken from the June 28 primary ballot because their nomination papers were held together using paper clips.

Attorney Tim Zollinger, appointed by the Electoral Baord to oversee objection hearings and file a report to the board, made recommendations that all three objections be denied because the objector failed to meet her burden of proof. Both sides were given the opportunity to issue exceptions to the recommendations, and none were filed.

The Libertarian Party announced its slate, which includes Carbondale resident Gabriel Nelson as a candidate for state treasure the same office sought by statehouse Deputy Republican Leader Tom Demmer of Dixon and incumbent Democrat Michael Frerichs, office-holder since 2019.

Nelson was last a candidate for the U.S. House in 2020, running against Raja Krishnamoorthi, Democrat from Schaumburg, for the 8th District seat, which represents parts of Cook, DuPage, and Kane counties. Nelson founded the Southern Illinois Libertarian Party in 2014 and has since had public relations duties with the Libertarian party.

Yes, he was. The stop on Tuesday was not political, but within the duties of his office. Frerichs visited Smoked on Third and talked to workers about their enrollment in the state retirement savings plan, Secure Choice.

Petitioning began Wednesday for third-party candidates. Independent or new-party candidates must gather 25,000 valid signatures to get on the ballot.

The other announced Libertarian candidates are Deirdre N. McCloskey for state comptroller, Daniel K. Robin for attorney general, John Phillips for lieutenant governor, Scott Schluter for governor and ... Jesse White for Secretary of State.

Photos of Libertarian Jesse White and Democrat Jesse White.

Just to be clear, the Libertarian candidate for secretary of state isnt the same person as Jesse Clark White, the 87-year-old Democrat who has held that office since 1999 but is not seeking re-election.

Steve Suess, the chairman of the Libertarian Party, told the Springfield State Journal Register its a total coincidence their candidate has the same name. The party is not trying to defraud voters and that its Jesse White is a serious candidate, he added.

Libertarians espouse the the right to life, liberty of speech and action and the right to property. As policy, this is expressed as the need for greatly reduced regulation and taxation, promotion of civil liberties including freedom of association and sexual freedom, gun rights and self defense and the elimination of state welfare and most business regulation.

The party has eight office-holders statewide, including River Valley Library District board trustee Brody Anderson in Port Byron and Paw Paw village President John Prentice. The Stateline Libertarians of northern Illinois meet monthly at Big Os in the Hollow in Freeport.

In 2020, the Libertarian presidential ticket got 65,544 votes, about 1.1% of the electorate.

Meet and greet for Mike Lewis, Republican candidate for Whiteside County sheriff, 8:30 a.m., As Kitchen, Rock Falls.

Read more:
Campaign Notebook: Keeping tabs on paper clips and the two Jesse Whites - Shaw Local News Network

Those are the 26 words that created the internet, says Jeff Kosseff, an associate professor of cybersecurity law at the United States Naval Academy, who wrote a book with that title that came out in 2019. The fruitful words come from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That brief passage fueled the growth of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook by protecting them from lawsuits over content posted by users of their platforms.

Nearly three decades later, conservatives and liberals are equally unhappy with Section 230, but for opposite reasons, says Mary Anne Franks, a professor at University of Miami School of Law.

Liberals, for the most part, dont like those 26 words because they feel they have permitted the platforms to host and even promote hate speech, unfounded conspiracy theories, racism and other objectionable content that attracts eyeballs and makes money.

Conservatives and libertarians, for the most part, dislike the next section, which protects the platforms when they take down objectionable material. It says the platforms cant be held civilly liable if in good faith they remove content they deem obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected. The conservatives and libertarians argue that platforms such as Twitter are using Section 230 to suppress their freedom of expression.

Now comes Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, with an offer to buy Twitter at a valuation of about $43 billion. (The company on Friday moved to make it more difficult for any single investor to amass a large stake.)

Its difficult to know anything for sure about Musk, but if he does buy Twitter its a good bet hell reduce content moderation. I think its very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech, Musk said Thursday at a TED conference. He might also end the permanent suspension of former President Donald Trump, which was imposed after the invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But no matter how smart and rich he is, Musk cant rid the web of the problems that Section 230 was meant to address. It would be crazy, and counterproductive, for Musk to end all content moderation. Twitter would soon fill up with not-quite-illegal sexual material, deceptive sales pitches, trolls and other garbage that would drive away users and wreck Twitters market and consumer value.

No platform can reasonably promise unadulterated free speech. Trumps faltering Truth Social platform, which claims to be a big tent, threatens to ban users whose contributions are, borrowing from Section 230, obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, violent, harassing, libelous, slanderous, or otherwise objectionable. (Otherwise objectionable is a capacious phrase.)

So a Musk-owned Twitter would still ban content it would just ban less of it. I can imagine more tweets falsely claiming that the Capitol invasion was a media invention or a false-flag operation. Franks, the law professor, speculates as others have that Twitter under Musk would actually be more likely to restrict content that angered one particular person Musk himself. Likewise, Trumps Truth Social platform is unlikely to become a home for critics of Trump.

Kosseff, of the Naval Academy, said conservatives and libertarians are making a mistake to call for ending Section 230 because they dont like the protections it gives to platforms that they feel discriminate against them. If they didnt have legal immunity, the platforms would most likely play it safe by banning even more content to avoid being sued, he said.

Meanwhile, the mostly Democratic lawmakers who want tighter controls on content have fallen short. The Safe Tech Act sponsored by Democratic Senators Mark Warner of Virginia, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota would remove immunity from paid material on social platforms and expose them to lawsuits based on civil, human rights and antitrust law, among other things. It hasnt reached the Senate floor.

And a law proposed and ultimately signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, to prohibit social media sites from barring any content from political candidates was blocked by a federal judge last year.

Matt Stoller, a foe of Big Tech and monopolies in general, wrote Thursday that Section 230 should be done away with entirely so the platforms become fully responsible for all content posted on them.

Thats a big step and probably unlikely.

For now, the fight over what to do about Twitter and other platforms is at a stalemate. Whether or not its owned by Musk, Twitter cant overcome the deep divisions and mistrust in society, said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. It can turn the content moderation up and please liberals or turn it down and please conservatives and libertarians, but theres no place on that slider that will make all the partisans happy, he said.

The New York Times

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Peter Coy - The Law That Shaped the Internet Presents a Question for Elon Musk - Asharq Al-awsat - English

Scratch a libertarian and you will find a prude. It's a truth beautifully illustrated in the season finale of "Minx," HBO's breezy-yet-sharp comedy about a fictional '70s-era magazine that combines Ms.-stylefeminist editorial with dicks-out Blueboy-esque nude male centerfolds. The show's two "shock jock" characters, Willy (Eric Edelstein) and Franco (Samm Levine), use their airtime titillating drive-time listeners with stories about how much they love sex and partying. But Willy's wife Wanda (Allison Tolman) gets her hands on a copy of "Minx" and decides to stand up for her own right to enjoy her life, instead wasting her time giving her husband joyless hand jobs between serving him meals. Suddenly the libertarians aren't so pro-liberty anymore.

The politics of equality are useless, unless joined with a politics of pleasure.

Instead, the shock jocks interview Bridget Westbury (Amy Landecker), a Phyllis Schlafly-esque city councilwoman to announce a new partnership combining "men's rights" with this religious right-tinged war on pornography. With the studio's prominent nude painting of woman looming over the scene, the councilwoman rants about how she plans to clean up San Fernando Valley, and the two men eagerly join in with the anti-porn sentiment they discovered the second they found out that women have sexual fantasies, too. The whole scene is very reminiscient ofDonald Trump smirking next to a smug Amy Coney Barrett, the "libertine" and the Bible-thumper joining forces to crush the hope of women's liberation.

RELATED:Stop feeding Joe Rogan's trolls: Progressives must reclaim the politics of pleasure

It's a hilarious satire of the sort of men who vote Trump and listen to Joe Rogan, and like to imagine they're "pro-freedom," despite having political views that stifle the much more real freedom struggles of women and LGBTQ people.

Amy Landecker in "Minx" (Photograph by Katrina Marcinowski / HBO Max)But this bit also serves a larger, more pointed message aimed directly at the American left, which needs to hear it more than ever: The politics of equality are useless, unless joined with a politics of pleasure. "Give me bread, but give me roses, too" was a feminist slogan in the early 20th century, but it resonates across the 1970s and today for a reason. People aren't moved by dry political treatises about justice. What moves people is imagining what a better life would be like. That means talking about pleasure.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

And on "Minx," that means talking about dicks. "Minx" is primarily the story of the unsubtly named Joyce Prigger (Opehlia Lovibond), a feminist Vassar grad who reluctantly agrees to helm a male nudie magazine for porn publisher Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson). Joyce wants to publish a rather strident feminist magazine originally called "Matriarchy Awakens" but finds, understandably, no one in "respectable" publishing is willing to bet on such an obvious money-loser. But Doug is willing to back her with his company Bottom Dollar. He believes women want to see pictures of sexy naked men and he hopes padding the porn with more high-minded writing will make it an easier sell on the newsstand. Joyce hates the idea of porn and finds the whole subject of sexual pleasure uncomfortable. Still, she goes along, because otherwise, she's never selling her magazine.

Sexy photos are more than just the sugar that helps the feminist medicine go down.

What Joyce soon finds out, with the help of her sister (Lennon Parham) and Bottom Dollar employees Bambi Jessica Lowe) and Richie (Oscar Montoya), is that sexy photos are more than just the sugar that helps the feminist medicine go down. On the contrary, pleasure is central to the feminist project. One reason that sexism chafes so hard is that it deprives women of their right to pursue happiness. But if women don't even know what happiness could look like, it's hard to convince them to fight against the forces that keep them from having it.

Ophelia Lovibond, Lennon Parham, Jessica Lowe, Oscar Montoya and Idara Victor in "Minx" (Photograph by Katrina Marcinowski / HBO Max)

As I've written about before, in recent years, progressives seem to have forgotten about the importance of pleasure. Much of the discourse on the left has taken on a hectoring tone, focused on pressuring people to give up stuff they enjoy, rather than imagining all the new joys that await us if we can liberate ourselves. The pandemic bears much of the blame, of course. The right wing resistance to emergency measures like social distancing and mask-wearing caused far too many on the left to start seeing these misery-inducing behaviors as moral signifiers instead of temporary inconveniences. Truth told, however, the turn to the grim on the left had started well before the pandemic, fueled by the way that social media rewards self-righteous posturing and the politics of showy self-sacrifice over the politics of pleasure.

RELATED:Why "Bridgerton" probably won't make Benedict queer (but should)

It's been especially troubling for me, as I came up as a late third wave feminist and was part of the early aughts explosion of feminist blogging. We early feminist bloggers married the transgressive politics of pleasure to our demands for equality. We didn't just say rape was bad. We had pro-pleasure actions like Slutwalk. We argued that the ever-present threat of rape constrains women from enjoying their lives, by preventing us from doing everything from taking early morning jogs to having late night sexual adventures. We didn't just talk about reproductive rights in terms of coat hangers and young mothers damned to poverty. We talked about how contraception and abortion allowed women to having fun dating and to experiment sexually, instead of being tied down to the first guy you ever slept with.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

"Minx" is set in the '70s, but very clearly speaking to the social dynamics of our time. The joyless progressivism one finds on Twitter is reimagined on the show as a New York City dinner party. Joyce's pretentious Manhattanite friends sneer at her little porn magazine and trot out ignorant assumptions about how Bottom Dollar employees must be a bunch of lost souls and losers. That's probably not how people talked at dinner parties then, but is very reminscient of lefty social media now, with its focus on over-the-top trauma talk and tendency to treat fun as an embarrassing waste of time. Joyce ends up sneaking out to have a drink and make out with a cute guy at a bar. In a sign of how much she's grown, she refuses to apologize for wanting to have a good time. She doesn't even try to justify it by calling it "self-care."

Ophelia Lovibond and Taylor Zakhar Perez in "Minx" (Photograph by Katrina Marcinowski / HBO Max)

As "Minx" cleverly demonstrates, this kind of pleasure-centered feminism has real power. If nothing else, it exposes how the supposed "libertarian" right is no such thing. Evensupposed hedonists like Trump are happy to pass all sorts of draconianrestrictions on sexual freedoms and even free speech, just to keep women and LGBTQ people from enjoying the pleasures that come from equality.

As "Minx" cleverly demonstrates, this kind of pleasure-centered feminism has real power.

Unfortunately, all the grimness on the left these days has served Trump and his acolytes well, allowing them to portray themselves as the "fun" ones opposed to "cancel culture." This, even though Republicans are trying to cancel your sex life, your ability to read what you want, and now even Oreos and Disneyland. The right's is a mean and narrow view of pleasure, mostly about cheap insults and lame trolling. Even figures like Joe Rogan only appeal as some counterpoint to the supposed scolds of the left, but don't really have much on offer in terms of actual fun, especially for anyone who isn't a cis straight guy.

"Minx," in keeping with its pro-pleasure ideas, is a fun show, with lots of laughs and plenty of genuinely sexy stuff. (Though the comically fake penises are a rare misfire.) Freedom is a great idea in the abstract, but to make it worth fighting for, you have to remind people what it looks like in practice. On "Minx," that's lots and lots of dicks. But it can be anything you want, as long as you give yourself permission to enjoy it.

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"Minx" is a breezy good time reminding the left to reclaim the lost politics of pleasure - Salon

Throughout the Trump era it was a frequent theme of liberal commentary that their political party represented a clear American majority, thwarted by our antidemocratic institutions and condemned to live under the rule of the conservative minority.

In the political context of 2016-20, this belief was overstated. Yes, Donald Trump won the presidential election of 2016 with a minority of the popular vote. But more Americans voted for Republican congressional candidates than Democratic congressional candidates, and more Americans voted for right-of-center candidates for president including the Libertarian vote than voted for Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein. In strictly majoritarian terms, liberalism deserved to lose in 2016, even if Trump did not necessarily deserve to win.

And Republican structural advantages, while real, did not then prevent Democrats from reclaiming the House of Representatives in 2018 and the presidency in 2020 and Senate in 2021. These victories extended the pattern of 21st century American politics, which has featured significant swings every few cycles, not the entrenchment of either partys power.

The political landscape after 2024, however, might look more like liberalisms depictions of its Trump-era plight. According to calculations by liberalisms Cassandra, David Shor, the convergence of an unfavorable Senate map for Democrats with their pre-existing Electoral College and Senate disadvantages could easily produce a scenario where the party wins 50 percent of the congressional popular vote, 51 percent of the presidential vote and ends up losing the White House and staring down a nearly filibuster-proof Republican advantage in the Senate.

Thats a scenario for liberal horror, but its not one that conservatives should welcome either. In recent years, as their advantages in both institutions have increased, conservatives have defended institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College with variations of the argument that the United States is a democratic republic, not a pure democracy.

These arguments carry less weight, however, the more consistently undemocratic the systems overall results become. (They would fall apart completely in the scenario sought by Donald Trump and some of his allies after 2020, where state legislatures simply substitute their preferences for the voters in their states.)

The Electoral Colleges legitimacy can stand up if an occasional 49-47 percent popular vote result goes the other way; likewise the Senates legitimacy if it tilts a bit toward one party but changes hands consistently.

But a scenario where one party has sustained governing power while lacking majoritarian support is a recipe for delegitimization and reasonable disillusionment, which no clever conservative column about the constitutional significance of state sovereignty would adequately address.

From the Republican Partys perspective, the best way to avoid this future where the nature of conservative victories undercuts the perceived legitimacy of conservative governance is to stop being content with the advantages granted by the system and try harder to win majorities outright.

You cant expect a political party to simply cede its advantages: There will never be a bipartisan constitutional amendment to abolish the Senate, on any timeline you care to imagine. But you can expect a political party to show a little more electoral ambition than the G.O.P. has done of late to seek to win more elections the way that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won them, rather than being content to keep it close and put their hopes in lucky breaks.

Especially in the current climate, which looks dire for the Democrats, the Republicans have an opportunity to make the Electoral College complaint moot, for a time at least, by simply taking plausible positions, nominating plausible candidates and winning majorities outright.

That means rejecting the politics of voter-fraud paranoia as, hopefully, Republican primary voters will do by choosing Brian Kemp over David Perdue in the Georgia gubernatorial primary.

It means rejecting the attempts to return to the libertarian makers versus takers politics of Tea Party era, currently manifested in Florida Senator Rick Scotts recent manifesto suggesting tax increases for the working class basically the right-wing equivalent of defund the police in terms of its political toxicity.

And it means and I fear this is beyond the G.O.P.s capacities nominating someone other than Donald Trump in 2024.

A Republican Party that managed to win popular majorities might still see its Senate or Electoral College majorities magnified by its structural advantages. But such magnification is a normal feature of many democratic systems, not just our own. Its very different from losing the popular vote consistently and yet being handed power anyway.

As for what the Democrats should do about their disadvantages well, thats a longer discussion, but two quick points for now.

First, to the extent the party wants to focus on structural answers to its structural challenges, it needs clarity about what kind of electoral reforms would actually accomplish something. Thats been lacking in the Biden era, where liberal reformers wasted considerable time and energy on voting bills that didnt pass and also werent likely to help the party much had they been actually pushed through.

A different reform idea, statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, wouldnt have happened in this period either, but its much more responsive to the actual challenges confronting Democrats in the Senate. So if youre a liberal activist or a legislator planning for the next brief window when your party holds power, pushing for an expanded Senate seems like a more reasonable long ball to try to train your team to throw.

Second, to the extent that theres a Democratic path back to greater parity in the Senate and Electoral College without structural reform, it probably requires the development of an explicit faction within the party dedicated to winning back two kinds of voters culturally conservative Latinos and working-class whites who were part of Barack Obamas coalition but have drifted rightward since.

That faction would have two missions: To hew to a poll-tested agenda on economic policy (not just the business-friendly agenda supported by many centrist Democrats) and to constantly find ways to distinguish itself from organized progressivism the foundations, the activists, the academics on cultural and social issues. And crucially, not in the tactical style favored by analysts like Shor, but in the language of principle: Rightward-drifting voters would need to know that this faction actually believes in its own moderation, its own attacks on progressive shibboleths, and that its members will remain a thorn in progressivisms side even once they reach Washington.

Right now the Democrats have scattered politicians, from West Virginia to New York City, who somewhat fit this mold. But they dont have an agenda for them to coalesce around, a group of donors ready to fund them, a set of intellectuals ready to embrace them as their own.

Necessity, however, is the mother of invention, and necessity may impose itself upon the Democratic Party soon enough.

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Opinion | Will Democrats Soon Be Locked Out of Power? - The New York Times

On this Monday's Reason Roundtable, with Katherine Mangu-Ward out, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Fiona Harrigan discuss the latest on the war in Ukraine and the ongoing Disney "groomer" panic.

1:37: Ukraine update: What the U.S. should and shouldn't do in Ukraine

19:27: The great "groomer" debate.

38:01: Weekly Listener Question: "Can a tent be too big? I understand the definition of libertarianism is fluid, but there has to be limits to that. Any time someone tries to nail down a few ideas, it's always countered with them saying "no true Scotsman fallacy" or "libertarianism is the goal, but we need to be pragmatic in the short term". All of this, however, is a convoluted way for me to say the LP of NH, the Mises Caucus, and last week's Roundtable emailer are not libertarian and should stop using the word. DeSantinistas, Trumpers, pro-Putin trad cons, and all right-wing reactionaries need to be disavowed and loudly."

This week's links:

"The Case for Pursuing the Issue of Russian War Crimes in Ukraine - Even Though Putin is Highly Unlikely to Ever be Tried and Punished" by Ilya Somin

"From Iraq to Ukraine, the American Press Loves a War" by Fiona Harrigan

"Ukraine Crisis: U.S. Must Use Restraint" by Nick Gillespie

"'Equity,' 'Multiculturalism,' and 'Racial Prejudice,' Among Concepts That Could Be Banned in Schools by Wisconsin Bill" by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

"40 Years of Free Minds and Free Markets" by Brian Doherty

"Goodnight, Moonshot" by Matt Welch

Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

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The Real War in Ukraine and the Culture War in Florida - Reason

The "sifting and winnowing" plaque at UW-Madison.

Its not so much about electing the right politicians or trying to force voters farther to the left than they think they want to go. Beating voters over the head with policy details doesnt work much, either. The voters are clueless: polls show that a majority actually wanted the majority of what was in Bidens Build Back Better agenda, and, yet, Bidens approval rating is in the tank and most voters dont know what he tried to do for them. They are complaining about the economy and, yet, the stock market is better than ever. Nobody is conveying the message to voters that stock performance and the average persons quality of life are largely unrelated, but it probably doesnt matter much, anyway.

Most voters have to be able to feel their way to democracy; it cant be an intellectual thing. Its about institutions. Its about having a sophisticated system for democracy. Its about supplementing the inherent weakness of liberal democratic constitutionalism with rigorous civic practice and wholehearted patriotic appeal.

Labor unions and public radio are examples of civic institutions for democracy. Universities and public schools are also supposed to educate citizens for democracy. That was the original hope of progressive thinkers like John Dewey, anyway. But, as we see every day, education for democracy is not working. The system and the vision have failed. Liberal democracy is in crisis today the world over. The four most prestigious democracy rankings in the West are in agreement that democracy and freedom have been declining globally for fifteen years and counting: Freedom House in Washington DC; The Economist Intelligence Units Democracy Index in London; and, two from Sweden, V-Dem Institute and International IDEA.

We need a better system for democracy and splitting hairs over the design of the US Constitution misses the point entirely. The answer to the problem of democracy has to be in the civic realm, not in tweaking the power relations between branches of government and elected representatives, or even the campaign process. Furthermore, democracy wont work without economic incentives: the promise of democracy is wedded to the hope for prosperity. Witness, for example, how The Atlanticthe most prestigious magazine in the countryrecently hosted a rewriting of the Constitution by three groups, progressives, libertarians, and conservatives.

Progressives and conservatives want different versions of judicial supremacy, wherein the Supreme Court has final say over the Constitution and trump-power over the other branches, but they have no answer to the problem of a politicized court. They also want Congress to function more like James Madison intended it to, with less faction and more deliberation for the common good, but they dont know how to make that happen. By contrast, libertarians want a system bordering on confederacyhence, their love of originalism, but theres no point going backward in history. There was never a point in history when life was magically easy and good, or when capitalism was the way it should be, or some other such nonsense.

Theres obviously no reconciling these three groups at the level of the existing government; it must be done in the civic realm with what academics call civic constitutionalism. While the balance of powers is an essential constitutional feature, that balance is based on brute power clashes (realpolitik) between branches and political parties. Weve also discovered that theres no separation of powers whenone party controls all three branches, and Congress is perpetually gridlocked, besides. Its not surprising that this system has never worked very well for defining and legislating Madisons desired common good. For one thing, the common good is an ideal to aim at that requires a more delicate system of rational conversation than the brute power struggle of Congress or the three branches can typically provide.

The common good is also a moving target: it evolves with time and with capitalismitself an evolutionary system that the libertarians crude, Newtonian system of divided powers cannot adapt to. Furthermore, while federalism, another right-wing favorite, has its place, it needs to be subservient to the national interest as a whole, to the common good. Alexander Hamilton understood this point far better than Madison or anyone else did at the time.

In considering these points, it becomes clear that the Constitution is designed for realpolitik, whereas the ideal of the common good requires something like an ideal constitution to be debated and deliberated upon in the civic realm. After all, isnt that what government of, by, and for the people implies? Citizens, businesses, unions, and NGOs alike need a democratic system that enables them to debate and communicate on the ideal policies that determine the common good. An ideal constitution would be, in effect, a Wikipedia version or working definition of the common gooda document very different from the original Constitution. An ideal constitution needs to be open-sourced and available to the entire society. This seems to be the implication of the academic term civic constitutionalism, which is as-yet only vaguely understood. And, when the common good is defined publicly and communicated to the public with true standpoint diversity between progressives, libertarians, and conservatives, that would be the standard or measure by which citizens can hold their state and federal governments accountable.

For, in order to have accountability, there must be a standard of accountability, an ideal by which to judge the representative accuracy of government. We currently have no such thing. The realism of Madisons Constitution needs to be balanced, therefore, with the idealism of true democratic deliberation and civic unity focused on a Peoples Constitution. It turns out that James Madison needed Alexander Hamilton more than he could ever have admitted, but neither of them could have foreseen that the three branches of government would need a further balance, check, and guiding ideal in the civic sphere.

Does this sound implausible? Too good to be true? Not so; such a system was partly built already at the turn of the twentieth century in Wisconsin. It was called, naturally, the Wisconsin Idea: a rudimentary democratic operating system. Tony Evers, the current governor of Wisconsin, just called for a revival of the Wisconsin Idea as a way to boost rural prosperity (By contrast, the former governor, Scott Walker, tried to erase the WI Idea from the University of Wisconsins mission statement. Read The Fall of Wisconsin by Dan Kaufman for the full story on that). Rural prosperitysounds like something voters supposedly want, doesnt it? Like Bidens BBB agenda. They want it and, yet, they dont recognize it when they see it.

A democratic operating system must make it easier for voters to govern themselves and to figure out what they all have in common, thus boosting levels of social trust, unity, and confidence in government. This is the only way to get the government accountability the right supposedly wants. Confederacy only leads to kleptocracy and an infinite regress of fragmentation. Thats why, if it werent for Alexander Hamiltons relentless push for national unity and a government powerful enough to protect it, we wouldnt have a country at all today. The only way to reconcile the ongoing clash between Hamiltonian nationalism and Madisonian checks, balances, and federalism, is through a sophisticated system of civic constitutionalism.

If you like what I wrote here, Ive got a lot more coming, but I need time to write and Im trying to raise the money to do an SJD and a PhD back-to-back at UW-Madison. I want to go back to school to overhaul the Wisconsin Idea and outline the plan for a new type of university, since I think the prevailing liberal arts model is outdated. So, while Tony Evers called for a revival of the Wisconsin Idea, nobody knows how to do it better than I do. Fund me and Ill prove it. The video of me above is visible on my GoFundMe campaign, which I will probably switch over to startsomegood.com in a month or more. The campaign title is Second American Revolution Needed.

Thanks for reading.

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Do Democracy: Remake the Wisconsin Idea - Daily Kos