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“I am sure the information is correct. Some of the candidates such as Jill Stein are going to apply for matching funds so I would think they have to do everything correctly.”
Yeah, I would not be so sure. She got fined before. She (or her people) may think she knows how to not get caught again. Or the same operational errors may lead to recidivism, even if unintended. Don’t ever assume honesty or competence in anything having to do with politics.
In 2006, Friedman ran a longshot and humorous campaign for governor of Texas, managing to earn 12 percent of the vote. “I got my last will and testament worked out,” Friedman said in 2014, in one of his favorite catchphrases. “When I die, I’m going to be cremated and the ashes are to be thrown in Rick Perry’s hair.”
Kinky Friedman, the eccentric country singer-songwriter whose musings, novels, one-liners and quixotic gubernatorial run made him a folk hero, died at age 79 at his home in Texas.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/kinky-friedman-dead-1235047577/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR322pd64QODEmqLzxOxmqNroJj_SRlvgj0i8ahXlXNiu_gxvCu6mEflKNg_aem_TJokTJdmUXkpdpYTcyBt8g
X,
What I’m less confident about is
1) how honest these campaigns are on their public reports to the gub mint >.
I am sure the information is correct. Some of the candidates such as Jill Stein are going to apply for matching funds so I would think they have to do everything correctly.
2) how good or timely they are at tracking their finances
Again, see the answer to question one.
3) how representative May is, or comparable between campaigns, given that they have vastly different start times, speeds, emphases, et c.
I agree with this but what criteria do I use? I decided to start in May because that is when Chase Oliver and Randall Terry received their nominations for president. I thought of using when the candidate announced they were running for president but some of the candidates announced two years ago.
4) Kennedy and Terry had significant commitments – I don’t know if actual donations yet – in, I think, June. I don’t know about any of the others you mentioned.
This is probably true.
5) Kennedy has an associated superpac that’s unaffiliated with the official campaign. I’m not sure about any of the others.
This is true.
6) Oliver, followed by Stein, are the best situated in terms of strength of national and state parties to provide financial and in kind assistance that would not be reflected in those numbers. Kennedy and West have, essentially, no such thing, aside from ballot access from one state parties. Terry is better situated in that respect than de la Cruz. Oliver’s advantage disappears to a negligible level given the disarray, controversy over his nomination, and imo fatal fracturing in his party.
I agree that Oliver and Stein are the best situated in terms of strength because of their respected parties. The divisions in the Libertarian party do hurt Chase’s campaign. Kennedy does not have a backing of any one party but several alternative parties are helping him get on the ballot. And, the Kennedy campaign has sent a media release that Kennedy has raised enough money to fund any ballot drives needed. The amount he has raised year to date is proof Kennedy’s campaign has raised enough to fund ballot drives needed.
I was not going to include money raised by Claudia De La Cruz because she is only on the ballot in four states but I was curious to know much her campaign had raised. When the figures showed she raised more than Chase in May I had to include her.
Thank you. I just checked, and that does work on my android in brave browser
X: Either is fine, but thank you for asking. I also thought that but it looks like the Annual National Meeting is the name for the meeting each year, with the Presidential Nominating Convention being the event that happens during the same timeframe, but only every four years to coincide with the presidential election cycle. I contacted their media team to ask if it was a clerical error that was picked up by several platforms before they caught it or a formal change of date that happened sometime in the past few months.
Actually: I’ve unfortunately been busier than usual with things on the Foundation side but have been playing around in the back-end to see what I can change when I have the chance. I recall you mentioning that it was a mobile-specific issue, so, assuming the site looks the same across all phones, there should now be quicker access to the open thread link in the top dropdown list next to the logo on the mobile version.
JWE,
Any luck on redesign, none, or not enough time to fool with it as you hoped yet?
Jordan/Willow/Jordan Willow – which do you currently prefer, or do you care? – interesting. I suspect, but don’t know, this may have some thing to do with Stein locking up the nomination, plus whatever else they hope to achieve by their convention / nomination / gathering.
Question: are those all the same event? Are you sure?
Maybe the confusion over that is why information has changed? Idk. Do you? Does anyone else here?
Jose: that may well be true. I see no reason to presume you are either misrepresenting or misunderstanding easily verifiable information.
What I’m less confident about is
1) how honest these campaigns are on their public reports to the gub mint
2) how good or timely they are at tracking their finances
3) how representative May is, or comparable between campaigns, given that they have vastly different start times, speeds, emphases, et c.
4) Kennedy and Terry had significant commitments – I don’t know if actual donations yet – in, I think, June. I don’t know about any of the others you mentioned.
5) Kennedy has an associated superpac that’s unaffiliated with the official campaign. I’m not sure about any of the others.
6) Oliver, followed by Stein, are the best situated in terms of strength of national and state parties to provide financial and in kind assistance that would not be reflected in those numbers. Kennedy and West have, essentially, no such thing, aside from ballot access from one state parties. Terry is better situated in that respect than de la Cruz. Oliver’s advantage disappears to a negligible level given the disarray, controversy over his nomination, and imo fatal fracturing in his party.
Does anyone know or realize that the Green Party Presidential Nominating Convention date either changed or was occasionally incorrectly listed on parts of the party website? I see that it’s now listed as August 15 to August 18, but you can find remnants of it as July 11 to July 14 in Google searches and on social media. It’s also currently listed as July on Ballotpedia and certain Wikipedia pages.
I also used the Wayback Machine to look at past archives, and it appears the National Meetings page listed it as July 11 to July 14 as recently as last month. Just a clerical error, perhaps?
Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240514231536/https://www.gp.org/national_meetings
According to the FEC Form 3P amount raised in May 2024 for the top alternative Presidential candidates:
Robert F Kennedy Jr. (I) $2,568,406.27
Jill Stein (G) 398,411.38
Cornell West (I) 61,072.95
Claudia De La Cruz (S&L) 36,656.78
Chase Oliver (L) 24,164.44
Randall Terry (C) 23,680.00
Curious — I did not say that the NAZIs did not run their economy. I said whatever economic interventions fascists did were not directly the result of fascist ideology and that the NAZIs, at least, generally preferred to do it by regulation rather than nationalization. For the businesses that were privatized, that was a move more in the free market direction, relative to outright nationalization.
The claim is only that fascists are not motivated by economics and that they will employ whatever economic system is convenient to them at the moment. That does not mean they ignore the economy. That does not mean that whatever economic intervention they do is socialist. It means that, if they want the economy to produce more guns to fuel a war, they don’t care whether that is accomplished by free market capitalism, highly regulated capitalism, or nationalization. The only thing they care about is that there are more guns. The war might be part of the fascist ideology, but fascist ideology does not dictate the form of the economic system which enables that war. They are simply pragmatic on the economy, only reserving the right to exercise power whenever they wish.
Because fascists have no objection to exercising power over the economy, and because they do need to secure some production for things like war, they inevitably do all end up doing some form of economic intervention. But, not all to the same degree. Mussolini claimed that he controlled 75% of the Italian economy through a state owned enterprise.
There is no part of the fascist ideology which says how an economy ought to be run. How each fascist government ends up running its economy is just a byproduct of their other motivations.
Jim, Nazi Germany is your example of fascists moving an economy, overall, in the direction of less government central planning, as opposed to Weimar Germany or West Germany after them? Did the Bundesrepublik Deutschland move it back towards central planning, albeit not as dramatically as in the East, after the Nazis moved it marginally in a market direction, according to what you’re saying? I’m trying to understand you better.
An interesting retrospective series from Rectenwald about his campaign and the LNC:
https://mrectenwald.substack.com/p/chapter-1
https://mrectenwald.substack.com/p/chapter-2
https://mrectenwald.substack.com/p/chapter-3
https://mrectenwald.substack.com/p/chapter-4
https://mrectenwald.substack.com/p/chapter-5-no-charisma
Especially the first chapter confirming both what everyone already knew and what everyone suspected about ter Maat’s arch-treachery:
“Before the vote, Heise and I talk to Mike ter Maat (MtM) for the third time. MtM was eliminated in round five. Just as Heise had predicted, he was last to come off the board before this one-on-one contest between Chase and me.
[…]
Heise and I had told MtM after rounds three and four that he was going to come off the board soon. MtM denied the prospect, saying a shakeup was in the offing. MtM had promised me no less than three times through the course of the campaign that he’d endorse me when or if he came off the board. That time has come, so we are trying to call in the promise. In fact, in Texas, at the Texas LP convention, MtM emphatically told me that he did NOT want Chase Oliver to be the nominee and would make sure of it.
But now he equivocates. We can’t get him to confirm his commitment.
After some wrangling, he lines up behind a microphone to make an announcement. Before he makes a statement, I walk up to MtM and ask him, point blank: You’re not going to endorse Chase now, are you? He says no while shaking his head as if the idea was preposterous.
He announces in a point of parliamentary procedure that he has accepted the role of vice president with Chase Oliver. If that is not an endorsement, then nothing is.
Meanwhile, MtM’s statement was not a point of parliamentary procedure, but it’s too late. He’s said it already. The election has shifted entirely. This is the endorsement that Heise said would clinch my nomination, but it’s just gone south. MtM also complains that he’s tried to work with Heise and the Mises Caucus (MC), to no avail. I guess he means that he tried to get the caucus’ endorsement, or else to shake them from their exclusive endorsement of me but failed. In other words, MtM suggests that he’s been scorned by the caucus and is now retaliating.”
The Libertarian National Committee voted to elect Patrick Mitchell as its new Assistant Treasurer this week. Notably, Mitchell was not the choice of LNC Treasurer Bill Redpath, who instead requested the national committee to select Chris Minoletti.
Mitchell defeated Minoletti by a vote of 13 to 4. Results are available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yPeQmj1CzHh4gvSZV7ZoDfXOU3kcdgy2/edit?gid=1939582631#gid=1939582631
According to George on Third Party Watch, the software uses base-12 arithmetic, which is why there’s a discrepancy between the names listed and the total number said to be cast.
Nuna – it was the guy you brought up – Gentile – who characterized socialism as having no concern outside of economics. He wasn’t entirely correct. There was that bit about abolishing hierarchies. But, it didn’t really have much to say on the social side of things until Herbert Marcuse came along in the 1950s. At least, in the US. I don’t know when that shift happened in Europe.
Curious – Large economic interventions in the economy aren’t necessarily socialist. It is socialist if it is done for the intended purpose of improving the standards of living of the population. But, an intervention in the economy can be done for other reasons, including for the purposes of fueling a war, enriching an elite, or suppressing some particular nationality.
The NAZIs privatized many companies that had been nationalized by the previous government, preferring regulation rather than ownership. The wikipedia article on the Economy of Nazi Germany quotes Hitler as saying “The basic feature of our economic theory is that we have no theory at all” They just did whatever was pragmatic for their other goals (the war, eradicating undesirables, etc.) According to the article, the reasons the NAZIs privatized the businesses that they did was that they believed that private ownership of business was important for creativity and technological development, cost consciousness, and efficiency, and that government ownership of industry would result in the unwanted preservation of weak businesses. At the same time, they often talked about nationalizing other businesses. They didn’t do it, but it was an option for them. They were flexible, as long as they had the option to impose control whenever they wanted.
Yes, I ignored the utopian socialists. I was trying to distinguish between the socialists of the era that Gentile was speaking about and some of the later deviations.
State socialism has phases. After the government takeover of the economy, phase one is to increase standards of living, which is done by investing in increased production. Once the necessary level of production is accomplished to support desired, but never defined, higher living standards, it switches to phase two, which is to redirect profits away from increasing production and toward support for the people. Pure examples of anything don’t exist in the real world, but China today is pretty state capitalist. Examples of the latter are more limited, but might include Norway’s Government Pension Fund or several other of the countries with state owned oil enterprises, the revenue from which is used either to offset taxes or given directly to the people.
I’m curious about many things, but curiosity has its limits. I’m not curious about that noise; it isn’t any of my concern, and I don’t see how it possibly relates to what I was asking Jim.
Jim, let me see if I can rephrase more simply: are you aware of any regime that you would describe as fascist which was not a big government state when it came to economic intervention? If so, when and where?
I agree that under fascism, any part of the economy must bend knee to govt whenever govt desires it; but when does government ever not desire it, in whole or in part, especially for very long?
I’m not sure I agree that state socialism is traditional socialism – it’s probably a heresy away from traditional utopian or anarchocommunal socialism, if anything – but supposing even that I’m wrong on that point, how can a thing be divided into itself and something else? You write that state socialism is divided into state socialism and stare capitalism. That is, at a minimum, confusin,g wouldn’t you agree? Please give several real world examples of each, maybe?
I’m further confused by what you say after that point, but let’s see if we can establish clear mutual understanding up to it before getting into that, shall we?
Maybe Gene Berkman or anyone else here who I haven’t specifically asked to refrain can explain this to me better?
And you all just happen to use the same E-mail, post around the same time, have the same stunted vocabulary, pick the same hackneyed phrases, choose the same figures of speech and share the same subconscious preferences for sentence structure… If you put even half as much effort in keeping your personas separate and distinct, as you are putting into prolonging your humiliation, then you wouldn’t have gotten called out in the first place.
You can post under as many different names as you like, I don’t care. But saying you have to go and then continuing under a different name is cringe. And pretending that you are different people and agreeing with yourself to make it seem like their is any support for your lunacy is even worse, because it’s not only cringe but also dishonest.
Look at yourself in the mirror and think about what you are doing with your life. Because this is just pathetic.
Nuna, the gravatar is simply generated by using the presumably nonexistent email address [email protected], and has nothing to do with who we are.
Some people here use that fake email address, which is a riff on the suggestion in the box. I’m not sure why you would possibly think that’s any of your business, but please don’t mistake that for a question I’m not asking, and don’t want to ask, even out of curiosity.
I wasn’t addressing you, which was in fact a conscious choice. I’d like to go back to not addressing you, and would appreciate the same courtesy.
Jim, thanks for your answer. I’ll think further on how, whether, or when to inquire further.
It was in fact the great George Parkin Grant, who accurately defined “ideology” (not just socialism) as surrogate religion masquerading as philosophy (not science):
“It must be insisted, however, that this long consensus about political good, and the resulting poverty of thought, did much to inoculate the English from those theoretical viruses which have plagued continental Europeans. The very weakness of philosophical life protected them from its modern extremities.
The fact that the English received modern political thought in an early form from Hobbes and Locke, and continued to be generally content with that form, meant that they were free from the much more explicit modernity which arose first in France and later in Germany. Their very confidence in their liberalism saved them from taking seriously the traditions which proceeded either from Rousseau or from Nietzsche. The were for example saved from such a manifestation of those political philosophies as ideology.
Clearly one of the uniquely modern phenomena has been ideologies, either of the ‘left’ or of the ‘right’. Ideology is here defined as surrogate religion masquerading as philosophy. All forms of it have been destructive of social moderation. Its modern appearance has been chiefly caused by confusion concerning the related but distinct roles which religion and philosophy play in good societies. This confusion originated above all in the false formulation of these roles made during the French and German enlightenments. The fact that the dominant English political philosophy came from a period before those enlightenments has helped till recently in insulating the English from this virus.
As illustration, the greater prestige given to scholars and artists in the German world has often resulted in an ideological politics in that country. Hitler was after all an ideologue who conceived himself as the artist in politics. The very disinterest in philosophy among the English has saved them in the past from that lack of moderation which is inherent in modern political philosophy and technology.
(As in the previous paragraph I have ridiculed Sir Karl Popper’s political thought, it is necessary to say that what is good in his writing is just his trust in the strength of English liberalism to combat the plague of ideology. Foolishly he has combined this trust with an inability to distinguish ideology from philosophy. This is above all evident in his crass writing about Plato.)”
Gary Alvstad stepped down as Region 4 Alternate Representative on the Libertarian National Committee on Monday. Following his resignation, the Libertarian Party of California, which makes up the entirety of the fourth region, appointed former LNC member Adrian F. Malagon to fill the vacancy.
Link: https://groups.google.com/g/lnc-business-list-public/c/U4bCb5EEK7o
Not only are you conflating socialism with Marxism, but you are also misrepresenting it as a purely economic system rather than of a complete system of governance that besides the fiscal also includes political, social, ideological, etc.
To paraphrase … darn, who was it again? Voegelin? Hayek? Snow? … I’ll add a comment when I think of it … Anyway, to paraphrase them: socialism is ersatz religion masquerading as science, without any of the appeal of either. It is not merely a centrally planned economy and class ownership of the means of production.
Curious – You are correct that fascism doesn’t ignore the economy. But that was not my claim (or rather, Gentile’s claim). Gentile said that fascism wasn’t motivated by economics. It was motivated by holiness and heroism. Fascism, by their interpretation of things, was the will of the nation put into government, with a dictator interpreting the will of the people and acting to fulfill their will. That will of the nation, again, being motivated by holiness and heroism. The government, through the dictator’s commands and in accord with the will of the nation, would subordinate the economy – and all other aspects of life – to the government in order to fulfill the will of the nation.
A fascist government could privatize one company, expropriate another, and leave a third nominally private but subject to extraordinary regulation. There is no fascist system of economics, other than that any part of the economy must bend knee to the government anytime the government desires it, which might not always be the case.
Traditional socialism, that is, state socialism, can be divided into state socialism and state capitalism. In both cases the government directly runs the entire economy. Sometimes that is accomplished in stages rather than all at once, but with controlling the entire economy as the end goal. The difference between state socialism and state capitalism is only that, with state capitalism, the profits from running the economy are reinvested into the economy to increase production and thereby increase standards of living. When standards of living are elevated to some never-defined point, the state will switch to state socialism and the profits, rather than being reinvested to increase production, will instead be distributed to the people.
The more modern socialists (setting aside the Herbert Marcuse split) have come to realize that direct government control of the economy is universally a disaster, so they allow private companies to operate and generate profits, with the intention to tax the profits away and redistribute them.
Socialism is directly motivated by economics. Fascism’s control over economics is an indirect byproduct of its motivations.
I’m just CURIOUS, are you ACTUALLY going to pretend to be another different person yet again, when the REALITY of the situation is so transparent? Why bother? Do you know the odds against randomly generating the same gravatar twice, let alone three times?
Jim,
Fascism doesn’t ignore the economy. I don’t see a night watchman state as compatible with fascism. Do you? Well, maybe: government reduced to only tax collection , military, police, courts, and prisons – but a very aggressive, large expenditure on each, extremely strict law enforcement and aggressive foreign policy?. But then the fascist state needs to arm and equip its military and legal-judicial branches, and can it rely on unfettered capitalism to be good enough?
It still has to propagandize, so I suppose it will need educational, arts/cultural and other such branches. It needs to be all up in the business of any other means of social organisations – family, religion, sports, charities, business leagues, trade unions , etc, etc. Pretty soon you’re back to big government fascism like every country I can think of that was ever considered fascist. Do you know counterexamples?
I don’t think fascism is usually socialist in the sense of government directly owning most major means of production, but it comes close, kind of like social democratic or democratic socialist economics, very mixed economy. Am I wrong? Obviously, different approaches to civil rights and liberties, pluralism, diversity, etc.
Paradoxically, anarchofascism seems less implausible than night watchman state fascism. It’s basically just tribal warfare abandonment of civilization. Again, any disagreement there?
Yeah, I’m not sure where you got that from. Gentile said that socialism was entirely about economics and that fascism had no economic motivation at all. Fascism was all about holiness and heroism, both of which were completely off the socialist radar.
Ergo, Gentile argues that fascism, i.e. Italian socialism, is a more enlightened product of Marxist socialism, which is mired by the fixation on class-struggle, “scientific” materialism and the negation of national identity.
“Such a conception of life makes Fascism the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism, the doctrine of historic materialism which would explain the history of mankind in terms of the class struggle and by changes in the processes and instruments of production, to the exclusion of all else.
“That the vicissitudes of economic life – discoveries of raw materials, new technical processes, and scientific inventions – have their importance, no one denies; but that they suffice to explain human history to the exclusion of other factors is absurd. Fascism believes now and always in sanctity and heroism, that is to say in acts in which no economic motive – remote or immediate – is at work. Having denied historic materialism, which sees in men mere puppets on the surface of history, appearing and disappearing on the crest of the waves while in the depths the real directing forces move and work, Fascism also denies the immutable and irreparable character of the class struggle which is the natural outcome of this economic conception of history; above all it denies that the class struggle is the preponderating agent in social transformations. Having thus struck a blow at socialism in the two main points of its doctrine, all that remains of it is the sentimental aspiration, old as humanity itself-toward social relations in which the sufferings and sorrows of the humbler folk will be alleviated. But here again Fascism rejects the economic interpretation of felicity as something to be secured socialistically, almost automatically, at a given stage of economic evolution when all will be assured a maximum of material comfort. Fascism denies the materialistic conception of happiness as a possibility, and abandons it to the economists of the mid-eighteenth century. This means that Fascism denies the equation: well-being = happiness, which sees in men mere animals, content when they can feed and fatten, thus reducing them to a vegetative existence pure and simple.” – Giovanni Gentile
Yes, I do “got you there” – if you’ll pardon the ebonic syntax – unless you would like to claim in writing that you think you know more about socialism and fascism than Giovanni Gentile and Georges Sorel?
Oh, you got me there, with something akin to “Democrats are the party of racists,” just as much as you think you got Reality and others on the Colorado LP thread. I’m crushed. I don’t know if have the ability to overcome Nuña’s Weltanschauung as Will and Idea.
Oh, you got me there, just as much as you think you got Reality and others on the Colorado LP thread. I’m crushed. I don’t know if have the ability to overcome Nuña’s Weltanschauung as Will and Idea.
Given that national socialism is socialism, Der Stürmer is far-left. Which means it should be right up your alley, Gadfly. As for me, I prefer factual reporting like LifeSite and Tsargrad over propaganda.
Ahh, another counterfactual entry in the No True Scotsman Unabridged:
“New York Post” = “leftist gutter rag.”
Would Der Stürmer be OK?
Standard Post trash . Murdoch, like Pecker, has a symbiotic relationship with Trump, and serves as a propaganda platform. The obvious goal here is to steer right center libertarianish undecided voters away from LP and towards GOP. SOME of the criticisms were correct, but hardly news. The sourcing was laughable. Supermarket tabloid level stuff.
On the contrary, for such a leftist gutter rag as the NYP, it is a pretty decent article.
Sure, it isn’t critical enough of Oliver and Johnson, and isn’t critical of Jorgensen at all; it cites a statist who thinks mandated drivers licenses are a good thing, and a libertine who places more importance on pragmatism than on morality; and worst of all, it follows Trump’s fallacy of blaming the outcomes of socialism on anarchists. But what can you expect from the ‘Murican equivalent of The Sun?
The first 1/3 and the image-inserts are relatively well-chosen and, for people who aren’t following minor parties as closely as IPR readers, give a fair overview of the current situation – much better than all the puff-pieces celebrating either Trump getting booed or Trump mocking his hosts at the LNC.
Riffing on Seebeck, that article is also schizophrenic in that it first attacks Oliver, but then, later talks about “pragmatism” in a positive way, which directly contradicts the first half.
And, also, right, not a single last name, nor any indication if these people were interviewed by Schlott or if, instead, she just did some rando grabs from various social media.
Sadly, from my political POV, some of the Twitter accounts she links to are by people I follow on Twitter. That said, contra folks like Noah Berlatsky, IMO, “horseshoe theory” is a real thing, and the last five years have only shown that to be more and more the case. https://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2020/05/coronavirus-and-horseshoe-theory.html
Well, that article was pure garbage, not really accurate, poorly proofread, and not telling of actual names.
Then again, it’s the New York Post, one of Rupert Murdoch’s rags.
Earlier this week, the New York Post published an opinion piece featuring several Libertarian Party members who criticized the selection of Chase Oliver as its 2024 presidential candidate, arguing that his positions on certain issues have alienated right-leaning libertarians from supporting the party. The piece further compares Oliver to previous nominees, such as Jo Jorgensen in 2020 and Gary Johnson in 2016, highlighting their own respective controversies and perceived flaws, among other examples.
Link: https://nypost.com/2024/06/10/opinion/im-a-libertarian-but-the-party-has-turned-into-a-joke/