How to Rid the World of Those Insufferable Hipsters

A Bulgarian couple recently stayed with me in Sydney, and somehow we found ourselves talking about Australian hipsters. This quickly brought up the question: Does Bulgaria have hipsters? If so, what are they like? Well, as it turns out, they are pretty much the same. With most of modern life well documented on the internet trends spread across continents faster than ever. Bulgarian hipsters, and that fact that the “hipster” word is still so widely used, reminded me of this unpublished piece I wrote a few years ago. So I thought I’d finally publish it. It’s a little outdated, which has its own sense of irony, but I should really finish more of the things I start… so here goes:

I thought it would stop by now but it hasn’t. I thought there was enough self-awareness going around that people would catch on. But since that doesn’t seem to be the case, because people are still posting stories like this http://valleywag.gawker.com/douchebags-like-you-are-ruining-san-francisco-512645164  I feel this needs to be addressed. There is a longstanding war between the hipsters and those who dislike the hipsters, we’ll call them anti-hipsters, which ought to be settled once and for all. The combatants of this war have changed many times but the core issue is the same, one group of people, the anti-hipsters, doesn’t like the other, the hipsters, because the hipsters think they are cooler than they actually are.

Love Will Pay the Bills

In 2009 I heard a song called "Summer Cat" by a band called Billie the Vision and the Dancers. It was used in a commercial for a Spanish beer that someone posted on Facebook and I thought it was pretty catchy. So I looked up the band and listened to more of their songs. Though a bit silly at times, with some literal lyrics I couldn’t relate to, I found them entertaining and made it to the website of their record label which I borrowed to title this post: Love Will Pay the Bills. I was surprised to find that it was also the record company’s motto. Each of the band’s four albums were available to download for free, in their entirety, for me to keep and play on any device with no licensing restrictions. In return they asked only for donations and did so without annoying popups or adding me to a mailing list where they would continually ask for more. They gave no recommended contribution amount and there was no impression they would try to make me feel guilty if I never paid them anything. I thought it was incredible that they would so naively trust their fans, and the public at large, to provide the financial support required to continue to pursue lives as musicians without any requirement for them to do so. So I took a minute, thought about how much value the music had brought to my life, and how much it would continue to bring now that I had four albums downloaded, and gave them $20. I felt very happy about the exchange.

Reflections on Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

I have been interested in reading Rand for a while now, primarily because she is so frequently mentioned as a source of inspirational ideology… most commonly by modern libertarians and other people whose views I mostly oppose. So I wanted to read her work myself in order to understand her philosophy and then completely pick it apart. I was expecting to be angry at several points during the read, which I was. I was certainly not expecting to be impressed or inspired in any way, which surprisingly, I also was. I expected to come away from reading this book feeling justified in my mostly ignorant dislike of Rand, but the more predominant feeling was a severe dislike of those who I believe have grossly misinterpreted her ideas. Despite this, for all the effort Rand went to legitimize her philosophy as a solution for personal and social governance, I have nonetheless concluded, like many others before, that even though some of it is slightly interesting, her philosophy is riddled with shortcomings and oversimplifications of reality leaving it completely devoid of application to modern policy and governance. Here is a summary of my findings and reactions from the read:

Brief Plot Summary in My Own Condescending Words

Due to a rise of government corruption and communist ideas about redistribution of resources and labor, a group of principled stunning over-achievers, led by John Galt, who consider themselves to be the “motor” of the world decide to abandon their roles as society’s innovators and job creators, to avoid having their abilities exploited and the fruits of their labor redistributed to the lazy and thoughtless, bringing society to a grinding halt.

Public Interest Over Ayn Rand Objectivism

Individualistic selfish thinking doesn’t have a place in government policy because the policies that a government makes are not and never were intended to benefit an individual. They should be made with the public interest in mind and little else. And public interest, by its definition is not about one person, but rather people as they are, many individuals in one jurisdiction interacting with each other.

In today’s US political debates, however, public interest frequently seems to have fallen off the map, in many cases in favor of obviously biased propaganda, but in many others toward the focus on one individual or one situation.  Modern debate has “Joe the Plumber” examples of one guy not liking a situation and that is enough to tear down a whole taxation policy which could make millions of people better off. This appears to be because, as frustrating as it is, these individual allegorical stories resonate with the public better than logical debate. Which appears to be supported by the fact that I know who Joe the Plumber is. Fuck Joe the Plumber. Not the actual guy, I don’t really care about him either way (though I probably disagree with him on most important things). But fuck Joe the Plumber the political tool used to dumb down the conversation and move debate away from public interest. His interest is not public interest. If a policy is good for the public at large, that is all that matters and as long as we are transparent in how we get to that policy and we openly weigh competing interests against each other, there really shouldn’t be a problem. And if there is, it means there is something we have overlooked, or circumstances have evolved, perhaps differently than anticipated, and now we must look again and determine the current state of public interest on this issue.

Libertarians, especially the Ayn Rand objectivist types, essentially deny that there is such a thing as public interest, or that multiple people matter. But I have to ask: If only the individual matters, then why is there a government in the first place? Can’t we just make that person accountable to keep track of their own rights? The flat obvious response is a definitive “No”. The objective reality (if we’re debating government policy anyway) is that people cohabitate in the same spaces and must interact with each other. This is where the limits of self-interested personal philosophies become exposed and this is the reason that Ayn Rand’s objectivism doesn’t really fit with reality. 

Donald Sterling and Free Speech

Can we clear a few things up here? Great. The penalties handed out by NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to Clippers owner Donald Sterling for his unarguably racist comments which were recorded and then published was not a violation of Mr Sterling’s right to free speech.

The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law…” (my emphasis added, obviously). The NBA is private organization with its own constitution and governance. The punishment delivered was within the terms of that league constitution which all members, including players, owners, and employees of the organization must abide. There is not going to be an FBI investigation and a federal criminal trial over this issue, because the Department of Justice does not care.

There are anti-discrimination laws on the books, which do grant rights in certain activities of private organizations (e.g. employment law) and therefore come somewhere near this issue. However, the freedom to say racist things is not a protected trait, unlike ethnicity, age, sex, religion, etc. For those (Libertarians?) saying “I thought this was America?” and “What happened to free speech?” they are just conveying how little they know about the law and the US Constitution (or being a Libertarian for that matter).

Ultimately, Mr. Sterling’s comments were an expression of opinion, a form of protected speech, which on its own, I don’t believe teeters into the realm of hate speech. But while speech like Mr. Sterling’s is not illegal, it can certainly get you into trouble. It’s the same reason that a country club can kick you out if you don’t wear white clothes, or the Boy Scouts of American can kick you out if you’re gay. In the NBA, you can be kicked out for being racist, especially in 2014.