Like most people, I get all caught up in petty day-to-day issues. Even when discussing politics, I tend to rant and rave about the many petty tyrannies of the nanny state. A report that Glenn linked recently reminded me of how petty tyrants love to dismiss objections to their petty tyrannies.
Look how petty Republicans are, making hay over light bulbs! (For instance, check out the Washington Post’s Stephen Stromberg being impatient with Republicans for being “still riled up about light bulbs,”or Gail Collins exuding some good New York Times-style disdain for the rubes in the provinces:
Of all the controversies now raging in Washington, the one I find most endearing is the fight over federal regulation of light bulb efficiency….. Hysteria over the government taking away our right to buy inefficient light bulbs has been sweeping through certain segments of the Republican Party….
It’s a great tactic for those wanting more state power: pass regulations controlling piddling details of people’s lives, and when anyone complains about these restraints, mock them for worrying about such piddling details.
But petty tyranny matters. It matters on a moral level, because it’s simply wrong to take away people’s freedom for no good reason — whether you’re acting through government or not. Petty tyranny has mattered in the past because our world’s worst tyrants used incrementalism as a way of eroding the will and smoothing the road toward totalitarianism. I don’t think the light bulb law is a lurch towards Stalinism here, but all these petty tyrannies wear away our individualism, and make us more servile souls.
There’s more, including an absolutely infuriating story about government theft at gunpoint (supervised by a despicable lying bureaucrat) of a modest neighborhood’s much-loved basketball hoops.
But yes, how petty it is to complain about the many petty tyrannies of the innumerable petty tyrants who run our lives! I often feel like a very petty person for doing so. After all, all tyranny is petty, because individuals do not matter. Only the greater good — as defined as the tyrants — matters. As their tyrannies come down to using of the power of the state to make an individual do something, what happens to that one individual becomes petty. So whenever I whine about government-enforced light bulb control, mandatory spay and neuter programs, red-light cameras, TSA searches, SWAT Team raids, food controls, invasions of medical privacy, and the like, I can be seen as petty by those who look at the broad picture of building a better world.
But the larger point here is that I’m so caught up in my pettiness that I honestly didn’t know about a new government plan to kill everyone in America:
Radio host Alex Jones flew into a rage Tuesday over the so-called “super committee” created during recent debt ceiling negotiations, warning it would be used to seize all privately owned firearms in an “orgy of mass murder and death.”
“Hey, hey, here’s the deal,” Jones told a caller. “We’re just approaching the event horizon, the orgy of mass murder and death.”
“They’ve got the helicopters loaded — the Sunshine Project got the documents — with the airborne Ebola to spray on us. I mean, they actually got the documents that they got helicopters with knockout gas and lethal weapons parked at bases everywhere to kill everybody in America.”
“They’ve got robot helicopters with airborne Ebola and nerve gas waiting in spray quadrants to kill everybody!” he screamed. “That’s who runs America. OK? Total psychopathic, 110-percent mack daddy murderers!”
Hey, seen in the context of the above, worrying about light bulbs and the rest of it really is petty! If I believed that they really were planning to kill us all, I would have to, like, reprioritize.
I try to be thorough, so I checked out the currently defunct Sunshine Project’s website. I could find nothing about the robot helicopters with airborne Ebola there. Only a 2007 report alleging sloppy handling of Ebola at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Darn!
I hate it when exciting things fail to pan out.
How dare Alex Jones distract me from my petty war!
MORE: Speaking of petty tyranny, how about a SWAT Team raid on a private organic food co-op accused of selling (gasp!) raw milk?
If they can wage war on drugs, they why not war on milk?
Besides, didn’t most drug addicts start with milk?
If you think that what you consume is your business, you’re being petty!
AFTERTHOUGHT: I know it’s petty to complain about SWAT Team raids on sellers of raw milk, but the priorities worry me. See, it’s obvious from looking at the above video that the targets of these frenzied and heavy-handed law enforcement tactics are basically middle class Americans. Yeah, maybe they’re a little bit kooky, and a little bit bohemian for liking raw milk (something I would not drink, btw), but they seem to know what they’re doing, and they’re getting screwed royally on federal technicalities of the sort books have been written. Bad as that is, if we couple that with the fact that illegal immigrants from Mexico can break the laws with impunity and never be prosecuted, once again, I am forced to ask whether law enforcement is increasingly being directed at the generally law-abiding classes. (By that I mean people who can be relied on to show up in court, pay their fines, serve their prison terms without making trouble for guards, and above all, not throw up and leave lice in nice clean police cars….)
What language do our rulers understand? Tar and feathers?
Seriously, I don’t advocate revolution, but how do you get these people to listen?
Comments
7 responses to “Distraction from petty tyranny”
Yeah they definitely try to pull the “petty” card on the light bulb thing. I wrote a post recently about how I reluctantly started to become a light bulb hoarder. I mean, I thought, hey, maybe these regulations won’t be so bad, and the fancy new bulbs coming out will save me money and everything, right? But CFL bulbs still suck and there aren’t even any 40W-equivalent LEDs yet in Wal-mart, much less 60W+, with less than 6 months to go til the 100W are the first to get crushed by the falling standards. The bigger-watt equivalents that do exist are only available in specialty stores or online for prices that don’t pay for themselves yet. So it’s either hoard incandescents or go CFL for now. But no, we’re supposed to be happy that they’re forcing us to save money in the long run by forcing us to buy an inferior product…
Grover Norquist is also riled up the about the light bulb issue. I heard him talking about it on ABC Sunday Morning last week. He also wants to get rid of fuel economy standards for cars. This seems to be part of a campaign to get rid of all laws designed to reduce U.S. energy consumption. In the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. exported oil. By the time of the Arab oil embargo in 1973, we were importing 1/3 of the oil we use. We now import over 2/3. Our growing dependency on foreign is a real problem.
Yes, our dependence on foreign oil is a real problem. And the real solution is to produce our own oil, which we are perfectly capable of doing. It’s about time we start!
Well of course you couldn’t find the documents at “The Sunshine Project.” Some sooper-secret government agency monitors Alex Jones’s show, and hacked the Project’s website and removed the documents. I can’t believe you were surprised by their absence.
TMLutas 1 day ago in reply to Kristian Holvoet
A slash and burn review of all job killing legislation to legalize as many jobs as possible. Stop harassing the hair braiders, the fish pedicurists, the jitney drivers. Get rid of the medallion systems, the kentucky egg license, and other nonsense that has no real health or safety benefit. Let people work without worrying about the bureaucrats stopping them from getting stuff done.
A comment from:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/another-european-domino/243101/
[…] is an infringement on everyone’s property rights. Naturally, the ruling class would call such complaints “petty.” They think the feds have the right to regulate everything, including how farm animals should be […]
[…] that was just one little itty bitty (yes, even “petty“) tyrannical piece of legislation, buried though it was in thousands of pages of unreadable […]