Happy Birthday, Tea Party!

Conservative political movement came a long way in a short time

Today, the Tea Party celebrates its second anniversary.

In a very short time it's come a long way, accomplished a lot, and overcome many obstacles in order to do so.

Bolstered by the Tea Party, and set back on a path toward fiscal conservatism -- although not solidly enough for many, including Tea Party luminaries Rand Paul and Ron Paul -- the Republican Party swept through the 2010 midterm elections, taking control of the federal House of Representatives, and of governments at the state and local level.

They also provoked the fear and hatred of the American far-left. Acting on the modus operandi recommended by Spencer Ackerman, the far-left accused the Tea Party of racism. In many cases, they doctored evidence of that alleged racism. In other cases, they resorted to Alinsky-ite "crash the Tea Party" tactics to attempt to demonize the Tea Party by publicizing the outlandish and outrageous behaviour of deliberate provocateurs.

If they received so much as a dime in donations from wealthy benefactors, they were deemed "astroturf". If so much as one legitimate Tea Party protester or organizer made an outrageous remark, it was used to condemn the entire movement. If Tea Party organizers or protesters denied they were racist, it was treated by the movement's opponents as evidence of guilt.

The Tea Party was subjected to the ultimate in left-wing McCarthyite tactics. And it persevered.

The Tea Party restored the Republican Party to honesty, rejuvinating the party and making it competitive again. A party that seemed on the verge of complete collapse instead re-surged to a striking 2010 victory.

More importantly than this, the Tea Party helped reveal the intellectual impotence of the modern left. A movement conceived on the basis of foundational beliefs, it challenged the mythos of leftist progressivism. In the face of a movement touting beliefs the left has seeked to supplant -- modernize, if you will -- the left could come up with no effective response.

It was the pathetic attempts to brand political dissent as racist that revealed the intellectual bankruptcy of the modern left. After the Barck Obama election, precipitated on populist promises of hope and change, the left had nothing left in the tank.

The Tea Party prospered off the outrage provoked by a Democratic Party that came to power with a hidden agenda, dropped its mask, and began to implement that extreme agenda. It put the Democrats on the ropes, and is now a year and a half away from sending the Democrats back to the drawing board altogether.

The Tea Party has come a long way, in a short time, and emerged victorious over the most draconian tactics the far-left has ever deployed without resorting to a violent revolution.

Hopefully, the next two years will be just as successful.

Serenity Now for Utopian Social Planning

This is the 100th Nexus of Assholery post about movies. To date, your not-so humble scribe has written about the political messages in films ranging from Hotel Rwanda to Live Free, Die Hard to The Rainmaker.

These posts may become an even-more regular feature on The Nexus. Stay tuned to see what's next!



When the Fox network made the decision to cancel Firefly, fans of the show -- styling themselves "Browncoats" after the rebels on the series -- decided to wage their own Battle of Serenity.

They won. The result was Serenity, the big-screen adaptation of the show (and, indirectly, Halo ODST, the characters of which were based on the cast of Firefly, and even voice-acted by the actors from the show).

The film picks up where the series left off, with Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) leading the crew of the Serenity on a payroll robbery.

Leading Jane (Adam Baldwin), Zoe (Gina Torres) and the psychic River Tam (Summer Glau), their robbery is interrupted by Reavers, humans driven deranged and cannibalistic.

Reynold's adventures eventually lead him into the sights of an Alliance assassin (Chiwetel Ejiofor) intent on killing River in order to secure any secrets she may have gleaned from Alliance politicians.

As it turns out, the secret River unknowingly possesses is even darker than anyone could have imagined: the secret of the Reavers.

The origin of the reavers relates closely to the underplot of the entire Firefly franchise: a big government "Alliance" that has imposed itself upon outlying worlds outside of its core territories by military force. Their self-proclaimed goal is to improve the lives of all humanity.

Simply put, the Alliance is essentially Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan in space.

The Alliance dabbles in all sorts of utopian experiments as only big government can manage. The one that ranspires on the planet Miranda truly takes the cake.

Planet Miranda is a former Alliance colony that has essentially been erased from history. It also happens to be smack-dab in the middle of territory controlled by the Alliance.

The Alliance secretly dosed their colonists there with a drug that would minimize aggressive impulses. Unfortuantely, it had two sinister side effects. One, shown in a portion of the population, caused them to become suicidally docile. These colonists stopped eating, and essentially just allowed themselves to starve to death.

The other side effect caused a portion of colonists to become far more aggressive than previously imagined. They became the Reavers.

In response to this revelation, Reynolds delivers one of the most stirring libertarian speeches in the history of cinema:

"You all got on this boat for different reasons, but you've all come to the same place. So now I'm asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this: they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave."

Reynolds is determined to see the Alliance's secret exposed to the universe, and so sets off to see Mr Universe (David Krumholtz) in order to make it happen. However, the Alliance assassin is determined to prevent this, and so kills Mr Universe, and prepares to kill Reynolds and his crew.

It's a reminder that when the would-be architects of utopia fail, and the results of their work is instead becomes dystopic, they will do anything to prevent that from becoming public knowledge: even kill.

Serenity may have provided the most succinctly conservative message ever offered by a Hollywood film -- even one made nearly unwillingly by film executives who never understood the value of what they had.

The simple message of Serenity -- beware the so-called progressive masterminds who believe they know what's best for you, better than you do -- holds as true in the modern day as in a fictional and dystopic future.

You Have to Stand For Something

This is the 1000th post written to the Nexus of Assholery. On occasions such as this, your not-so-humble scribe likes to take a few minutes out and write from a more personal perspective.

1000 posts seems like as good a time as any to reflect on what The Nexus is supposed to be. The following is a reflection on precisely that.

Enjoy.

In the increasingly complex and increasingly post-modern world, it can often be hard to decide precisely what one stands for.

Some people are up to the challenge of making this decision. History's greatest figures are known as such because, win or lose, they staked out what they believed in and refused to falter.

Many people aren't as resolute in their beliefs as individuals such as Martin Luther King, Tommy Douglas or Scotty Bowman. The pages of history are equally filled with figures such as Oliver Cromwell, Brian Mulroney and Neville Chamberlain -- individuals who proved flexible in their beliefs to the detriment of many.

Much worse than these people, however, are an even more dangerous group of people. These are the people who believe in nothing, or who in the very least refuse to stand up for their beliefs.

Having nothing to stand for isn't merely an absence of conviction. In it's own way, believing in nothing is a particularly pervasive moral hazard.

For one thing, believing in nothing silences a potentially powerful voice. Many worthy and important causes were achieved because people who may otherwise regard themselves as too powerless or insignificant to be part of something important.

To choose to stand for nothing out of fear of futility is merely one moral hazard of not actually believing in anything.

Another moral hazard reflects the price of a lack of conviction: those who believe in nothing are all the more likely to be ruled by people who do believe in something -- even if what these particular individuals believe in should be judged as abhorrent by any rational or moral person.

A lack of beliefs, by necessity, must flow out of an individual's disinterest in the world around them. Just as those who believe in nothing are likely to be ruled over by individuals who hold beliefs of their own, those who are disinterested are destined to be ruled over by those who are. Sometimes their interests may not reflect what such an individual would want from their life.

A particular moral hazard is that of ad hominem reasoning. Often, ad hominem reasoning is the intellectual refuge of those who have confined themselves within a political ideology so deeply that they cannot separate politics from morality. More importantly, they can't separate the ideas of anyone who might disagree with them from from narrowly-defined notions of immorality.

An ad hominem argument is often explained as attempting to argue that because a particular individual is evil, anything they say is evil. Ad hominem reasoning takes this notion an illogical step further -- it is found deeply entrenched in the thinking of anyone who believes that because their political opponents are evil that anyone who makes them angry must be good.

People suffering from this impediment range from conservatives who recognize Ann Coulter's vitriol for what it is yet defend her because she attacks liberals to liberals who recognized Heather Mallick's invective and defended her merely because she made conservatives angry.

If you were to ask them, these people would insist that they stand for something. Yet when the conservative excuses the abuses perpetrated by Augusto Pinochet or when the liberal excuses the human rights record of countries like Iran it becomes clear that when it matters most these people stand for nothing.

No one who would excuse obvious moral violations by their particular "side" for simple virtue of parochialism should ever be taken seriously.

Sadly, many of those people will be taken seriously -- but largely only by those who already share their empty convictions. At the very least it helps the rest of us to identify those who believe in nothing.

These moral hazards are particularly dangerous because no matter what those who have fallen victim to them may insist, they are chosen. They may not be rationally chosen, but they are chosen nonetheless.

If one decides to undertake the (somehow) overglamourized yet (often) underappreciated vocation -- clearly better described as hobby of being a political blogger, why one is blogging and what one believes in should be closely intertwined.

Few people should blog under the delusion that their blogging will change the world. Even if some the enterprising and courageous bloggers in otherwise-oppressive countries like China, Cuba and Iran bring us valuable dispatches from parts of the world in which change is evidently badly needed, change in those countries appears as far off as ever.

If the prospects of affecting change in such places is so remote, just imagine the prospects of bloggers forcing changes in countries where a (mostly) just status quo has emerged.

Bloggers cannot honestly expect to change the world through blogging. Their blogging may support broader movements of social or political change, and may thus be a factor in such change, but they cannot accomplish it on their own.

The best reason to blog may well be as an expression of what one stands for.

And with the world in the state it's in, one thing is evident: a person has to stand for something. A person has to believe in something. Otherwise they can be expected to fall for anything.

The Change (video)