FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: JUNE 23, 2023.

Ghana 1973. Wild! Lots of good music coming out of there still
but the hints of garage rock here especially send me.

Here we go, folks, a couple of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies, and a reminder that a paid subscription (which is absurdly inexpensive) gets you five of these every week. First freebie is about a flight to the sun aboard the Icarus, the billionaires who burned up in it, and whether this is classic American heroism or the fault of Joe Biden. Ha ha, bet you caught on to what it’s really about! 

The OceanGate deathtrap submarine story is so shot through with stupidity that it was hard to choose among variants to satirize. There was, for example, the attempt to turn a crack by the CEO (a libertarian who thought safety rules were for littlebrains, and who perished in the sub-standard sub) about 50ish white guys into proof that the billionaires were killed by multiculturalism. Some exponents were cagey about it -- the end of the Free Beacon story’s URL is “ocean-gate-missing-titanic-submarine-diversity-woke” though the words “diversity” and “woke” appear nowhere in the story – while morons just said out loud stuff like “wokeness killed the people on that submarine.”

But ultimately the big laugh here is on libertarianism. It’s one thing when those guys simply tell their usual billionaire-approved story --  that “liberty” is the one true God, who chooses whether you deserve to be rich or poor, and whose judgment is unquestionable, so you peons shut up and shovel while we eat ortolans. But it’s another thing entirely when libertarians get high on their own supply and fantasize themselves immune to the consequences of their own actions. So long as they enjoy the protection of the powerful, like Sam Alito blubbering that reporters told mean (true) stories about him, even as the world recoils the malefactor may get off scot free; but the laws of nature are harder to bend. I do endorse more of these masters of the universe doing explorers-club stunts – maybe Elon Musk can send a few of them to Mars. 

Speaking of Musk, the other freebie is about the latest instance of celebrity anti-vaxx buffoons demanding an actual scientist debate them. It was interesting to see so many guys on Twitter laboriously simulating Maximum Reasonableness – “it would absolutely advance knowledge to go on [the Joe Rogan podcast]” – and then you look at their feeds and they’re obviously goons. I don’t they’re trying to fool us into thinking they’re reasonable, exactly; I think it’s more like they believe reasonableness is merely a pose (the way they think common decency is a pose, hence the “virtue signaling” insult), so if they affect the manner of a reasonable person/sea-lion it makes them just as reasonable as we are -- which is to say not really but faking it just as well as anyone else can. Modern conservatism is utterly post-truth, and to its adherents all values are fake except loyalty to the cause.