RAG Perspective: An American Pro-Liberty Conservative: Post #5477 M: Norberg's New & Improved: The Credit Card; Socialism in Africa; Judge Napolitano

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

Post #5477 M: Norberg's New & Improved: The Credit Card; Socialism in Africa; Judge Napolitano

Quote of the Day

For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.

For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.

For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.

For beautiful hair, let a child run his or her fingers through it once a day.

For poise, walk with the knowledge that you'll never walk alone.

Audrey Hepburn

I'm Dropping My Tom Woods Feed

This has been coming for a while; I've mentioned some differences I've had with Woods in past posts, including my most recent essay. Since our initial Facebook kerfuffle over his cheap shots at Romney, we've had sporadic email exchanges, mostly polite, not a rehash of the Romney thing. I don't know if he even realizes I'm that Facebook guy, if he even remembers it. I think he probably has hundreds of kerfuffles with progressive and other trolls on an ongoing basis. He is well known because of a high-ranking podcast with thousands of episodes, numerous best-selling books. I haven't published a book, no podcast, no publications in the liberty literature, a limited number of largely unknown followers on Twitter or the blog, maybe a handful of emails with "name libertarians" with terse replies, no substantive dialogs. I don't think Woods wants to give me free publicity.

Woods has been obsessed with COVID over the past couple of years. And part of his shtich is name dropping sympathetic scientists from elite universities. He also came down with a case of COVID-19 pneumonia. He's been heavily lionizing FL Gov. DeSantis. He's been gleefully with other anti-vaxxers playing up any issues with vaccine resiliency and the like. For some time now, he's been arguing kids don't need vaccines. I think my growing annoyance is showing up in more recent journal posts where I generally haven't been debating politics. Also, I was disappointed in his recent lecture on the "Ron Paul Revolution" which I thought would deal with Paul's ideological legacy. To a limited degree he did but it was replete with anecdotal, more personal references, and there must have been have a half dozen insulting references to Romney and Pawlenty.

So today in response to one of his email rants, I unloaded with a list of terse rebuttals to his talking points. Quite frankly it was cathartic and a thing of beauty. I think one of his points dealt with social media censorship. He responded almost immediately with a cryptic insult and an email subscription cancellation. Hypocritical asshole. But we libertarians believe in freedom of association.

I may in a future post republish a version of my email. but I normally impose a cooling off period. But I'm canceling coverage of Woods' content for at least the next few months, if not permanently. Actually I was only sampling maybe 2-3 episodes a week, maybe a little more recently given the need for fresh content. I don't mind disagreeing with content, but the content hasn't been up to my standards, and I don't see the point in promoting his content.

Norberg's New & Improved: The Credit Card

I have a fondness for this topic; my first major job after my academic career failed was a marketing research company who did a lot of business with credit card issuers; in fact I went down to Brazil twice in 1995 on a work assignment at the biggest card issuer in South America.