The book on relational psychotherapy --- entitled, strangely enough, Relational Psychotherapy (Patricia A. Young the author) --- arrived Friday night, and prof bug is reading through it, prepratory to finishing the two follow-up articles on psychotherapies . . . divided roughly into insight-oriented and cognitive-behavioral therapies, with each of these two major categories divisible in turn into sub-schools. Meanwhile, as further entertainment, here's another divertimento I just posted at the HBO forums on In Treatment for the benefit and delectable pleasure of the frothing in-tizzy girls and guy-girls there: one and all, convinced prof bug is off his rocker.

HBO MEMBERS' FORUM

Some Outraged Lather

"I've been thinking tonight and I've decided that not only is his academic life a fake, but I'll bet that any photo of his wife he may post is really one of those that you get when you first a wallet... the kind of people that only exist with an airbrush. "I'm still sticking with this idea.......he's actually a bloated, balding dishwasher who lives in a trailer park. His wife is toothless and plays the banjo."] DiamondCat

"You know what you are Gordo? A sick indistinguishable phallus symbol in the permant relaxed position. As in flaccid? His brain is flaccid" Orwellian 1984

"Solong, darling, what's going on in this thread? I was away for couple of days, by coming back I found this freak gordongordo troll here jamming all the good posts. Is there a way we can get rid of this nightmare? Solong, I trust you will find a way! One disturbed gordon troll sinking such a good thread...love, 40bee" 40Bee

From Flilppo Rat-Man to Freakish Buggy Guy

Prof Bug Explains Himself

Ouch! Ouch! Gotta hand to you, guys and girls: now that you've caught on to me, I have to fess up --- I'm a hopelessly loose-in-the-bean mental wreck. Want proof?

Then go lickety-split to the latest updated edition of the papers of Sigmund Freud --- lovingly, yea worshipfully, kept fresh up to the day by cult-member disciples --- where you will find, next to one of his most famous case studies, "RatMan", a long case study entitled "Bugged-Out- ProfMan". No need to remind someone like you with your psychiatric genius what ailed poor RatMan . . .. the pioneer freak in psychopathology whose DNA slipped stealthily into my great great grandfather bor in 19th century Vienna at about the time our Tail-Length Rodent Blaze-setter entered analytical history.

Who?

For the benefit of the laymen and lay-women in this forum --- not to mention quite a few Skinnerian behavioral conditioners who carry certified Learning-Theory credentials to treat us all, but who purposefully ignore Freudian case-studies --- it's necessary only to say that Rat-Man, an obsessive type convinced he would be devoured by sewer rats one day, was persuaded by Sigmund in analysis to face manly his rodent-repulsions, dress up in Mickey Mouse guise, jump into the sewers, and spend some quality time with the little four legged guys.

Alas, as Ruby, 1974, and 4Bee obviously know by heart, one lonely slime-covered night Rat-Man was chewing the rag with some alligator pets of his rat friends when who should slither by ---- of course! of course! Mickey's mini-skirted Main-Squeeze, Minnie Mouse herself. Poor RatMan! It was heads-over-heels amour in seconds.

And within seconds, he ran off with Minnie down a connecting sewer where, for 12 hours straight, they sucked and slurped and screwed like bunnies (if you'll pardon the reference to another rodent species). But, but . . . in his passion, Rat-Man had forgotten to bring along more than 16 condoms. For a sex-mad rat, usually enough, no? But not for Minnie; no sir. And so when Minnie --- her brain floating and spinning in a tidal pull of orgasmic bliss after 16 pokes in various orifices--- insisted that such a paltry number was only foreplay for her, and challenged RatMan to show exactly what kind of Real-Man Rat he was, what could he do?

Electrified with renewed passion, the poor RatGuy returned to his screwfest with --- OH OH, unprotected sex!

Poor Poor Rat-Man and His DNA Inherited by Prof Bug

Found dead with slime-ridden plague the next morning by a sewer-crew, RatMan's body was covered up, put in a casket, and sent to UCSB, my university, to be examined by Willy Wankalana, my great great grandfather who was a pioneer specialist in dissecting the DNA of rodents. And wouldn't you know, cutting his finger one day in RatMan dissection, his blood got infected by RatMan's DNA, and the rest if history: down through the ages into the genes of baby gordongordo.

A Sad Sad Story, No? And How Poor Buggy Boy Became Flippo

And not made any happier because I was aware of being off my rocker as early as age 5.

You see, boo-hoo, I got screwed up in my Oedipal phase when I thought I was supposed to act out my fantasies and actually fuck mom, not just lecherously visualize it with some wet-dream squirts. Fortunately, mom was very understanding. Then too she hated dad . . . an ultra-macho type, actually (truth to tell) the trainer of Arnold Schwarzenegger back in the 1950s and early 1960s; guy always cheating on her, much like David with Gina. Boy, did she teach me a lot! We moved from her blow jobs to simple coitus and then 69 --- well, actually, what with my three-foot height, 34.5 . . . but soon, within weeks, mom assured me that I now qualified for 45.2 in oral sex. Wow! Was I ecstatic!

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

Not to Despair, Buggy Visitors:

Yep, no need to despair or fret. Prof bug, you see, is still busy writing the two follow-up articles in the buggy mini-series that began on April 27, 2008 --- four days ago --- on various kinds of psychotherapies, roughly divided into two major categories: insight-oriented therapies and cognitive-behavioral ones. Most of the two-follows have been written, any delay in posting them due to a recent intrusion: tersely put, in his wanderings around googled cyberspace, the bugged-out prof chanced two days upon a fairly recent book on relational psychotherapy . . . a form of insight-oriented therapy, originally conceived by an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Henry Stack Sullivan in the middle of the 20^th century, and increasingly popular in insight-oriented circles --- psychoanalytical or not.

No need to mention the book's title or author yet. After prof bug read a few of the pages available at Amazon, he ordered a copy; it just arrived; he will read through it tonight --- maybe tomorrow if need be; and see what's what by way of additional material for the two follow-up articles.

In the Meantime, Some Teasing Waggery for Your Enjoyment

Yes, by way of enjoyment and titillation --- and perhaps a little insight into what's going on at the HBO forums --- here's some joshing fictional banter that prof bug banged out in about 40 minutes a day or so ago and posted at one of the threads there. In that new, off-the-wall thread, which was started by one of the brighter Gabriel-Byrne adulators --- with, prof bug quickly adds, some natural writing talent that she's working hard on to improve: hopeful even that she might find a publisher sooner or later --- the posters are supposed to imagine scenes in which that adulator and GB strike up a relationship, sexually charged of course, but not just that, and then these same posters project their half-lecherous, half-infatuated projections of their own libidinal-charged fantasies onto both the original poster and GB.

Oops, prof bug just guffawed several seconds at the whole thing. Can't help it!. Couldn't breathe; had to stop for a good minute or so. Seems silly, no?

And yet . . . well, the girls there are trying hard to work themselves into a fiction-writing mood, and the bugged-out prof not only can't object to that effort, he has been propelled by his pedagogical obsessions to encourage them in their struggle to improve their writing skills.

In short, it'st just the sort of mental-tripping adventure an old lecherous pedant like yours truly can't resist throwing himself into . . . his unconscious tugs, intellectual and cock-wise, leaving him no choice. Hence the daft, half-waggish, half-pornographic story that he left at the thread there for the eroticized GB infatuates to do with it as they wish.

The Setting and the Four Main Characters:

The cognoscenti in the HBO forums --- whether the adulating girl/girls or guy/girls (not to forget the lesbian girl/guys and the bisexuals), with prof bug now down to the last of the dumbo Neanderthal-heteros who haven't been driven off by those still hoping to plunge their faces into GB's fab-ass and, they hope, bazooka-packed pecker --- naturally know who the characters featured in this not quite Nobel prize-winning literary piece are . . . three of them, you see, featured prominently in the HBO In Treatment series, with the fourth, Ms. Tushy-by-the-Poet, obligatory according to the rules set by Flirty-Legstrom. Flirty is the chief writer in that thread, though Tushy writes a lot in other threads, fiction and non-fiction. Both are good natural writers; just need a lot of discipline and hard work, plus encouragement, to become adept professionals . . . like four or five other posters there. They also have to learn how to concentrate their reading on talented short-story writers in the contemporary era, like Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, John Updike, and Flannery O'Connor . . . four names and links to their collected stories that prof bug left in another thread there. Yep: concentrate, read a lot, notice the different styles, and . . . well, prof bug will just quote what he left there in that thread;

These are good stories, a nice start --- all of you posting them have natural talent. Really. It does need to be nurtured and worked on diligently by all of you; and the best way is for you to study carefully some outstanding contemporary short-story writers. Look at all they start their stories; look at their styles --- simple or complex --- and their characters (which are entered into by the writer from what perspective?); the settings, and how they're sketched in; the dialogue as reflecting each character's personality; the plot (which has to be simple compared to a novel), with the characters revealing something important about themselves --- but unable to change fundamentally as is often the case in novels. And the emotionally charged insights and revelations about life you come away with from the stories: whether about one or two individuals or a community or a country or the human condition.

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

With this buggy article on the various kinds of psychotherapy in wide use these days --- especially insight-oriented therapies and their diversity as compared with the large varieties of cognitive-behavioral therapies ---the buggy series on HBO's In Treatment continues to chug along on various tracks . . . some of them aesthetic in destination, some intellectual, and others just plain hilarious.

Meaning What, These Hilarious Tracks?

Well, believe it or not --- just this: crammed with rollicking, hard-to-believe celebrity-worship, these bugged-out data-rails lead directly to the HBO forums on In Treatment, where the posters, virtually one and all, are ultra-horny, in-heat adulators of Gabriel Byrne, the actor who plays the series chief character, Dr. Paul Weston . . . these adulators, note quickly, all either girl-girls in their 30's, 40's, or 50's or guy-girls or girl-guys/guy-girl bisexuals in the same age range. The number of hetero/heteros like prof bug far, far less numerous . . . a tiny assemblage, nothing more: maybe, at most, three or four ---unless a few fellow Neanderthal-humanoids were hiding out in the closet.

Alas, one of these hetero primates was a man full of rage, mainly directed at women or any hetero or girl-girl or girl-guy or bisexual who criticized the slightest buffoonish thing he managed to say.

Eventually, the inevitable happened: the site managers got his number and quickly shut him down.

Trust Me, No Great Loss To Anybody --- Uh-Uh.

No, not at all. Not a loss either to the intellectual levels of the guffaw-a-second posts left by the girl-girls and guy-girls, all without exception swept away by their carnal-infested hots for Gabriel Byrnes' lavishly fantasized bod . . . including, as some of the guy-girl posters noted, his fab-ass. Yeh, lots of stuff about his ass. No, the buggy prof isn't making this up! See the nutbin parody published at this buggy site a few days ago on this fab-ass, big-bazooka-packed fatuities that got both the girl-girls and the guy-girls all worked up in a lather of sexual ardor. Or, to go on, not a loss to the raucous, bursting-with-laughter delight that enthralled prof bug at that site off and on for a few weeks, as, one after another, he read the loony, trembling-with-erotic-expectation-filled posts at the HBO site and, in reply, left several posts of his own. Some of these bugged-out posts wry and bantering; others half-humorously barbed or biting; and yet others clownish digs at the expense of these sex-starved, starry-eyed infatuates in those forums . . . their on-display carnal adulation of GB, as his admirers obsessively refer to him, of crazy-house extravaganza.

Whatever, take it from me --- the whole shenanigan-laden hokum added up to an ongoing madhouse spectacle to behold for those who weren't and aren't in urgent sexual need to fantasize down-and-dirty foreplay followed by kinetically charged orgasmic coupling with Gabriel Byrne. Think prof bug's exaggerating? No sir; not on your life. Want proof? Then just wander over to those online forums --- try, when you do, the most popular thread of all, thousands of slavishly eroticized infatuation entitled "I Could Lick Gabriel Byrne All Over!" --- and you'll have a hard time crediting your eyes . . . at any rate, if you aren't a recent escapee from a padded-cell crazy-house somewhere in Southern California.

Si Monumentum Requiris, Circumspice, no?

"What? Is it possible? " you'll start wondering the instant you log on at the HBO forums. "Ye gawds! " You'll pause, rub your eyes; maybe twice. Won't help. Because look . . . you'll be face to face with the hard evidence: hundreds of women posters, many with college degrees and almost all in their 30's, 40's, and 50's, behaving like teeny-bopping girls at a rock concert flushed with erotic fever and high on pot and booze. "Oh my! Can't be! Is so!"

Still think the bugged-out prof has been exaggerating? Then continue your little mental tripping and read on a few minutes more, nothing longer. No need to.

"Whew! Wow! What a scream!" you'll hear yourself say out loud at the end. "I tell you, buggy guy, you've not been bull-shitting us. No sir; what a riot! I mean . . . hard--- no, no; outright impossible to say who's more in hilarious sexual heat. The screaming mini-boppers I've seen at rock concerts, their eyes bright and excited and squirming their little bottoms with urgent need on their seats . . . anxious as hell to bury their faces in the drugged-out rock-star's jean-covered crotch that he's thrusting and jerking at them up there on stage, the raucous music blaring away. Or --- you pause momentarily, shaking your head at the screwball stuff you're reading . . . or, bluntly put, these physically older but no more mature girls and girl/guys posting their totally in-heat fatuities; and, no less anxious" --- you halt again, overcome with roars of laughter ---"yeah . . . no less anxious as hell to bury their own faces in Byrne's fab-ass and unzipped bazooka-packed pecker.

Or so they say, no hesitation whatever."

Crazy! Crazy! . . . all right! Once again, prof bug has emerged as a candid, no-bullshitting guide to the rife fatuities of contemporary mass culture.

All of Which Brings Us To Today's Buggy Topic

To wit: . . . the different kinds of psychotherapy on tap for those of you who --- too clinically depressed even to laugh at the girl-girls or guy-girls or demoralized by your life's stresses or just bewildered by things --- would benefit from some therapy. Starting with a few transitional comments about Byrne's portrayal as a psychoanalyst and the contrast with his own analyst, who uses a different variant of psychoanalysis. (Note: there will likely be three or four buggy articles on this topic, with the current one just the first installment.)

For all their obsessively bedazzled infatuation with Gabriel Byrnes, the chief character-actor in HBO's In Treatment, not all the female and guy/girl posters in HBO's forums on that drama-series' masterly creative breakthrough have been silly girlish stuff . . . far from it.  Here, by way of a buggy effort to bring some rounder perspective on the intelligence and decency of most of the posters, is what he said just a few hours ago: 

"After my trip to NY, I will reschedule my basic training and try to regain a little bit of my sanity. What am I saying, I am joining the Army Reserve at t 33 1/2, can't be too sane can I?"  --- Taken from a post by PMungle

The bugged out reply:
All Americans who volunteer for service in our military have my instant respect and admiration, and doubly so when they are women. I wish you success in your alternative career --- and your willingness, given the need for our reserve units to move into battle areas around the world, to risk you life for the rest of us. Thank you
........
For decades now, women have shown that they can be the equal of men in any battle situation, even though they are generally not used in front-line combat units. Doesn't matter. In the kinds of warfare we're engaged in --- whether in Iraq or Afghanistan or a dozen other countries or regions --- the battle lines are always fluid, always unpredictable, always shifting with such speed that even a unit of women soldiers (or mixed units) to guard a transport depot or a hospital can suddenly find itself under fire from three or four directions. And always --- without exception, our women soldiers fight with the courage, cool-headedness, and disciplined aggressivity that inspire the respect of their male colleagues up and down the line of command.
......
Even the Israelis --- a tiny population of 5 million Jews and 1.3 million Arab citizens --- have been hesitant until recently to train women soldiers for front-line combat. Until the last couple of years, they have always drafted and trained women for military service, and as in Afghanistan or Iraq, certain support-units have suddenly found themselves in flaring fire-fights. Yet despite the overwhelming superiority of those Arab countries in population that the Israelis have had to fight --- about 400 million Arabs (plus 70 million Iranians) --- the general command has been reluctant to train and introduce women soldiers into front-line units.

Sistas! Half-Gay Sistas! Fellow Bisexuals! and the Two Hetero/Hetero Dumbos in These Forums!

All excited, like the rest of you girls, by my imagery of GB's fantastically shaped ass --- a walking wonder male-backside as reported with joyously trembling revelations yesterday in this thread --- I was up late last night and on the look-out for more hot-stuff news about our little leprechaun darling's assets.

Around about 1:30 in the morning, half-crocked on Irish whiskey and humming Danny Boy obsessively, I was about to give up when, all at once, a new post came in from inner Borneo with tom-tom news that a head-hunter cannibal --- just back from a four-day stint in Manhattan (he sells shrunken heads to a real estate magnet with weird-looking hair, or so Chief Sliceitnicely told our regular Borneo-correspondent)--- had brought back with him some wowee low-down about our little Mick dreamboat.

Guess what? Guess what?

Seems that GB, a jogger, buys only jumbo-size jockstraps when he needs some support for his running on the streets of Brooklyn. Yoweeee! You hear that? The super-size, jumbo-cut jockstraps for our little Big-Pecker Stud-boy.

And get this. According to our Borneo poster, the manager of the sports store where GB shops exclusively reported that in his entire career, three decades log, the store had sold only one other pair of jumbo-size jocks, and that --- get this, girls! hold onto you panties! --- was to Shaq O' Neal back in 1998" .

God, did you hear that everybody, GB's cock is as big as Shaq's!

Hell, probably pound for pound far bigger yet, and for my money, likely unrivalled in the whole history of male evolution. I tell you, I was so excited that I immediately jerked-off and shot my nuts off right onto my pc monitor while continuing to work my moist three fingers around on my clit. Yeah, you heard me right: on my clit. (The secret girls: inherit a huge fortune when you're parents die, fly to Copenhagen, and you can for a cool $2 million come back to good old America with both a pussy and a prick. Believe me, double-whammy fun when you're in the sack. Yowee!) 

.....................

Alas, girls --- I wish I could stop here, but I've got distressing news that I have to get off my chest. Yeah, brace yourselves, it's terrible. Worst than you can imagine.

You see, after several other double-whammy bananas-and-cream stuff, I cleaned off my monitor and spent the rest of the night on my pc looking for more titillating tid-bits about our Irish cock-swinging champion --- Oh, fooking hawt that little urchin is, no? Long live Eire! --- and . . . well, I chanced upon this horrible puking news just being run on the front page of the New York Observer.

Here's the headline:

 PISSED-OFF ACTRESS AND EX-WIFE, ELLEN BESERKIN, SAYS GB WORST FUCK SHE'S EVER HAD!

"Worst sex I ever had in my life," Ms. Ellen Beserkin said in an exclusive interview with our reporter yesterday in her new penthouse on upper Park Avenue. "The guy has, let's face it, a shrunken prick about the size of a 10-year old little boy's. It took him six months even to find my clit, even after I showed it to him where it was at least 223 times. Worse, yeah worse --- his typical sex performance was over in 31 seconds. Wow, what a loser!  I tell you . . . to come, I had to sit him in a chair and climb onto his knee and rub my mound several minutes around his thigh even to get a flicker of pleasure from our, ha! "love-making.

Did that knee-humping help? 

Are you nuts? You know what it's like to try getting off humping a guy who's humming 121 stanzas of Danny Boy?  Gawd! by the fifth one, I was ready to do a Sharon Stone --- you know, get out a straight razaor, slash off the little prick's wee-wee!  Not that lover-boy would have ever noticed.

"Did you ever talk about it frankly with GB?"

"Sure --- you think I'm some kind of retard afraid to to talk to my husband frankly. You remember that hot-wire reach-around session with Al Pacino in Sea of Love? Hell, even that panicked cop who thought I was a serial killer got immediately aroused and forgot his fears as I starting humping his gorgeous butt. So I'd walk up behind that big flop and try the same thing."

"Did it help, that reach-around tactic"

"Are you kidding! GB tries to hide his small-size ding-dong by buying jumbo-size jockstraps and then fills them with two packages of cotton-wadding as he walks or runs around the streets of Brooklyn. When he plays a movie scene or a TV drama that calls for extra-tight jeans, he uses three packages. Don't wanta disappoint the fans, huh! What a wacko-city screwball! Anyway, after a year or so of frustrating bad-bad sex, I got GB to visit the most famous sexology psychiatrist in New York, a Dr. Paul Easton --- an old friend really, well . . . maybe more accurately a former lover when I was starting out in films (and yeah, a pretty good lay). "

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

Guess what follows?  Another wild bug-eyed report on the buggy prof's roaming visit through the weirdo badlands of American mass culture, at any rate as reflected in 90% of the daily posts found in HBO's mass-public forums devoted to In Treatment.  If you'd read the first two reports, all the better.  If not . . . well it's not necessary, but would help, if you take a few minutes and at least glance at the kick-off article for this buggy series that's found at the top of the home-page.  

Who what follows? 

Well, this: two bugged-out posts left recent in those forums unfold their wondrous, laughing-out-loud dismay and disbelief that have been churning away with hilarious intensity in prof bug's mind ever since he registered, logged-in, and thought that soon, in an instant or two, there would be threads galore filled with terse flowing prose and luminous insight into In Treatment's artistic triumphs . . . all that stimulating insight, hopefully a mental prod to prof bug's emotionally charged ruminations about the dramatic series creative breakthroughs, reflecting surely --- surely! surely! --- the thoughtful views of adult men and women who have been immersed in the theater, the arts, film-history, and literature. 

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!  And for several reasons, such . . . . Well, come to think of it, the two posts speak for themselves; no need to elaborate . . .  the-Wonderland trek of a rabid bugged-out sort hard to believe unless you've done what Alice first did and now, to his still disbelieving mind, prof bug --- tumble down a dark tunnel, a rabbit-hole of spiraling madness, and find himself wandering in dizzying world of topsy-turvy irrationality and rollicking logic-gone-fruitcake

FIRST POST, LEFT APRIL 10, 2008

Girls:

Despite the comically manic minds-on-the-fret worries being exhibited here, you have nothing to worry about.  No, not a thing.

Because . . . well because, fellow worry-warts, you post first of all with pseudonyms on this site.  Yes? No? Maybe?  And so even if I were to quote you fully, literally, there'd be no liable involved . . . and quite simply, if I may be simple and to the point, no one could possibly identify you in real life.

And secondly --- assuming you could stop your [i]The-Sky-Falling-In Chicken-Little histrionics[/i] a moment and actually you your noodle --- I have not identified anyone by pseudonym on the web site except 4Bee . . . a name, let us face it, only Wasps, Hornets, and Honey-bees could ever identify as a real hymenopterous insect of the superfamily Apoidea and hence make him buzz-buzz in alarm like --- well, like little Chicken-Littles caught up in a self-made frenzy of alarm.

And thirdly, amid your sudden flare-ups of panic and confusion, why should you be more worried about being cited --- if I did cite you directly --- on the buggy web site than the HBO web site?  True, the buggy site --- which one time was getting 6000 hits a day (almost exclusively from academics, grad students --- will likely display your frenzied mini-bopper carnal-fantasies to more eyes than HBO's forums are getting; but then no one need worry that he or she or she/he or he/see or she/she or --- like me --- the dumbo Neanderthal hetero/hetero here (all three of us!) is being quoted at all, only paraphrased . . . and at that briefly/.

........

Got it girls?  Guy/girls?  Girl/guys?   Guy/Guys --- oops, leaves only two others besides me in these forums.  And, lest I have neglected the bi-sexuals  . . . Girl-guys/Guy-girls?

Your rushes of emotionally delirious agitation are . . . well, let's just say overwrought and over-done, and be done with it.

Still, your jolting fired-up worries actually reveals unconsciously a flicker or two of reason for optimism --- I mean, anyway, among the few adults in these forums who aren't just in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and (God help us) maybe 70s and 80s, chronically speaking, but are more or less matched by mental development and emotional maturity.

The transformation of these forums --- whatever the intent of HBO and its management here --- into shameless, backfence blather is what struck me, dumbfounded, full of disbelief, within the first hour or two of my stumbling by accident onto this site back in late February. Yesterday, as I took time off from superficial stuff like (in my consulting mood) what can be done to deal with sectarian militias struggling violently for control somewhere we're involved in, I found Hot4-Gordo posting about a dozen times at the top of each thread. So frustrated was she not to find her gossipy chatterbox chums on line, she-he? asked out loud: Jeez, where is anyone?

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

This, the 4^th buggy article in a series on Libertarian and Free-Market thought shifts course to deal with the naïve, simpleminded views that prevail in those circles about three related things crucial to their mutually entangling philosophical views about free-trade:

• How a wide-ranging free-trade system, never mind a global one, is supposed to arise. The prevailing Libertarian view is that it will arise spontaneously, through state-negotiations, provided state leaders are rational and understand the joint gains in economic efficiency and consumption that such as system entails.

As you'll see, there is an ingenuous premise here: a misguided confusion between "absolute" and "relative" economic and technological gains in free trade.  Absolute gains refer to the improvement in the economic well-being of any one territorial state (or country), compared to the economic status quo before the free-trade system emerges.  Relative gains refer to the how these gains across countries are divided.  Mainstream economics, to be blunt, is concerned strictly with "absolute" gains or improvement in any one country's economic performance.

• How such a far-flung free-trade system can be maintained, in the face of turbulent technological and economic change, not to mention shifting distributions in the balance of power among great powers that such change invariably entails in the long-run.

Bluntly said again, such turbulent change will likely shift the relative power balance --- economic, technological, and military --- among great powers or aspiring states to that status.  They will also likely shift the balance noticeably among regional powers: think, for instance, of the huge power of tiny Israel --- with 6 million people, 1 million of which are the only Arabs living in a democratic society --- as opposed to 350 million Arabs and 70 million Iranians, thanks to the enormous human skills and vast technological lead of Israeli Jews. 

Libertarian thought --- which goes back to 19^th century liberal views about free-trade --- simply ignores these jolting changes and recurring upheavals in the balance of global and region power.  Focused strictly on absolute economic gains, it assumes that rational statesmen will always seek to maintain a free trade system that has improved their individual countries' economic performance.

• And thirdly, on top of all these naïve assumptions, Libertarian and most mainstream economics predict that the spread of free-market logic across state-boundaries will make war increasingly costly among mutually entangled, interdependent states. Sooner or later, on this Libertarian logic, power politics will fade under pressure of such joint-gains interdependence and bring about universal peace among the free-trade member-states.

20th Century Liberal Developments

This faith in the peace-transforming nature of free-market logic regionally and globally is rooted in late 18^th century and 19^th century liberal thought, itself an offshoot of the European and American Enlightenment --- a belief in human progress, growing wealth, and peace on earth thanks to the ever greater mushrooming of human reason and understanding.  In the early 20^th century, two additions were added to this traditional liberal thought by Woodrow Wilson, the culminating political thinker of the international side of liberal thought.

 The first: the need for democratic polities of a fully transparent sort to spread among the great and mid-level powers of the world ---- which transformation might require the use of military power by the US and other powerful solidly democratic states.  And secondly, as an essential adjunct --- the way military power should be wielded --- the creation of a League of Nations that subordinates the use of unilateral military force by states to a collective security system. 

Introductory Comments 

If you've read the first two articles in this buggy series, you should be well situated to grasp the twists and turns of today's argument. 

 Divided into two major parts, it explores for the first time the basic philosophical premises of mainstream Libertarian thought --- not just about economics and free-markets, but how the good "society" is organized.  Agreed: any reference to "society" is thoroughly suspect in Libertarian outlook: little more than a commonly used linguistic term that is, at bottom, when analyzed, fully befuddled and mystifying . . . as though a collectivity actually has some independent anchoring in substantive reality above and beyond the self-seeking individuals who create and sustain any "group" coalition for specific, strictly pragmatic interests. No matter.  We'll delve deeply into the ontology and methodological individualism of Libertarian thought later today. 

For the time being, simply note what should be self-evident about the best sort of "country" organized along Libertarian lines: in principle, unfettered free-market capitalism and very limited government . . . the more limited, the better. 

Today's Argument Unfolds in Two Parts 

Part One explores some of the key philosophical ideas of Libertarian thought, including the ontological assumption just mentioned that self-seeking, fully rational individuals with inherent rights to property and free choices about their lives are the only social agents who are anchored solidly in substantive reality.  It follows that such abstract aggregates like the "nation-state" and "patriotism" --- not to mention the shared rights and alleged "duties" of "citizens" in a "country" like the "United States" toward one another --- are all convenient linguistic fictions, nothing more.   

Why the quotation marks around these terms? 

As just noted, to avoid the mistakes of self-deluded muddle-heads who think that these aggregates amount to something substantively real.  They aren't.  How could they be? 

On the Libertarian view, you see, they're only convenient utilitarian coalitions, formed, strictly and solely, by self-contained individuals to serve their separate egocentric purposes --- but non-Libertarians, in their simple-minded ways, assume that these derivative off-shoot groups are something more than just the handy, instrumental by-products of individual social-agents with overlapping interests; in particular, self-deceived, unable to penetrate the linguistic confusion caused by these spin-off "group" aggregates, all these uninitiated ingénues invariably misinterpret and reify these ad hoc "group-alliances".  They think, to put the point plainly, that these mutually advantageous associations are rooted in some irreducible reality in their own right.  Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Think that garbled and silly stuff, and pow! intellectual disaster is bound to follow . . . a dangerous opening, be assured, for the guileful propaganda of collectivist ideologues that will eventually undermine individual rights and freedom. 

No need to say anything more at this point.  The argument as it advances in this initial should be fairly easy to follow, whether you agree with it or not.

Part Two continues the analysis, but with a twist.  It probes at length a very recent example of standard-model Libertarian thought . . . this time about free-trade and why an American citizen who prefers buying goods made by strangers in Detroit than made by strangers in Mexico or Japan or elsewhere is, at bottom --- get this --- nothing less than a racist.  And take account of this odd thing: the fellow invoking this harsh term isn't some off-the-wall kook, rather a prominent Libertarian economist highly regarded in all mainstream Libertarian circles and by his fellow economists.  Prof bug's aim here is to use this example to highlight some of the intellectual pitfalls and dogmatic rigidities of Libertarian thought, some of which, as you will see, the buggy guy has admitted to find attractive.

PART ONE: WHAT IS LIBERTARIANISM?

Libertarians, As It Happens, Are Only One of Several Movements
 in American Conservatism

At Least Four Different Intellectual Tendencies Exist

Libertarians, as it happens, are only one  of several intellectual movements with grass-roots followings in American Conservatism these days.  No surprise really.  In effect, Conservatism operates politically as an umbrella term: at least four large distinctive groups, each with its own intellectual theorists and mass grass-roots support, fall under that term's heading.  At times, for all their philosophical differences, these various factional groups coexist fairly effectively.  At other times, their relationship is far more strained and marked by irreconcilable policy positions.  Sometimes, as at present, it is full of frictions and mutual backbiting and recriminations as to what is genuinely Conservative or not. 

The names of these diverse factional movements: Libertarians, Traditional Conservatism of, say, the William Buckley National Review sort, Moral Majority Christians, and NeoConservatives . . . the latter former Liberals who were and remain appalled by the radical cultural changes in American life spawned by the 1960s, by widespread anti-Americanism on the radical left and in universities, the corollary left-wing hostility to American power and behavior in the world, and by constantly failed social policies to intervene in American life that go back to the 1960s as well. 

Focus First on Their Commonalities That Keep the Republican Party from Splintering Apart

Philosophically, what these four distinctive factions have in common derives from a shared ideological hostility, several decades old by now, to socialist and left-wing Liberal philosophies about the different roles of government and free markets in American life. 

• For many of them, these differences go back to the New Deal era of Roosevelt policies of the Great Depression in the 1930s and, on a theoretical level, to all versions of Keynesian economics. For other Conservatives, their rejections extend back to the mid-1960s and the breakthrough influence of Senator Barry Goldwater and his rejection, vocally and vividly expressed in his failed presidential campaign of 1964, of all compromises with the economic and social policies not just of FDR, Truman, JFK, and Lyndon Johnson on the Democratic side, but also to the coming-to-terms compromises with them of the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations.  Yet another new Conservative breakthrough-movement didn't emerge until the late 1970s and early 1980s among Evangelical Christians, increasingly appalled by the cultural changes wrought after 1968 in American life, almost all of which were at odds with traditional American beliefs and moral codes, themselves partly religious in inspiration --- above all, what can be called rightly the Protestant Ethos and, whether in its religious or secular versions, individualism, self-reliance, and a strong sense of personal responsibility for your life and social behavior.

There are, as it happens a couple of corollary philosophical antagonisms that almost all Republicans generally share that keeps their strained coalition from shattering apart

• A common hostility to all redistributive egalitarian policies that the Democratic Party has embraced and implemented since 1930s and, more specifically, since the Great Society era of the 1960s.  This powerful, principle-based aversion, observe quickly in passing, flourishes everywhere in Republican ranks no matter how limited virtually all Democratic policies have been in social and economic matters have been, at any rate compared with almost all other industrial democracies . . . especially in the advanced regulatory- and welfare-states found all over the West European continent. 
• Another mutually agreed upon hostility to their partisan Liberal opponents also goes back to the 1960s.  In a word, even among many Libertarians, the various Conservative movements in Republican ranks have combined to launch a sustained counter-attack against the radical cultural changes in American life that came out of the 1960s --- above all, to be specific, launched against the politically correct dogmas and identity politics that have become powerfully entrenched in American universities since the late 1960s as well as in the mass media and entertainment industries, and that have spilled over into wider American life in diverse ways: most of all, in declining respect for institutionalized authority, in over sexual behavior, and in growing secular hostility to traditional religious mores . . . not to forget over anti-Americanism expressed by the radical left.  As we'll see, not all Libertarians are unhappy with each of these changes --- especially in sexual matters. But they do not usually push their opposition to a rupture-point with the other Republican movements, if only because all Libertarians are appalled by identity-politics and politically correct dogmatism in university life and in the media.

Politically, too, it goes without saying, all this shared intellectual hostility shows up especially in national elections.  As a practical matter, despite their mutual differences and their frequent factional attacks on one another, all Republicans tend to rally and . . .

• Vote for their party's candidates, whether or not the different factions like, say, the presidential candidate or the party's platforms.  Even then, less unity shows up for the local candidates on the Congressional level.   

Otherwise, Though, Clear Philosophical and Activist Political   . . .

 . . . tendencies separate these different Conservative movements.  The upshot is a loosely united, often unstable, and frequently bickering political party.  If it weren't for these shared basic hostilities to the enemies on the Left, the contemporary Republican Party would probably splinter apart.   And even with these common enemies, the party would probably disintegrate into different political parties if the US had an electoral system similar to West European ones, as, say, in Germany where the political right encompasses Christian Democrats, Christian Socialists (Bavaria), some neo-Nazis (fortunately small in number), and the centrist Free Democratic Liberal Party . . . the latter a swing party of libertarian tendencies, usually in coalition with the Social Democrats on the left or Christian Democrats (and their Bavarian wing) on the right.  Or, again, as in France where four or five different political parties, each with their own leadership, form a loose coalition for national elections and expect to share posts in any government, but otherwise coexist very uneasily with one another.

McCain vs. the Die-Hard Right