The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

A toutes jambes

S' enfuir a toutes jambes, to flee "with all one's legs," is a French manner of speaking I do not recall seeing before in English.

But Harold Frederic uses it twice in his novella,  The Copperhead.

At one point a character "looks with all her eyes" and at another several "listen with all their ears."

Hmm.

What about dissent in the South?

Southern men who didn't want to fight for slavery?

Or so that others could own slaves?

Reading Copperhead.

Update, 073113, 2013 hrs EDT.

Finished.

Not a novel of ideas,  this novella portrays abolitionists as violent, lawless fanatics and Abner Beech, the Copperhead of the title, as a former pillar of the community ostracized and persecuted for convictions we are told he has, though he voices them only by occasionally damning Lincoln and his supporters as  "nigger worshippers."

We are told that in church,  at least once,  he quoted scripture either to defend slavery or to show the Bible doesn't unequivocally condemn it - the presentation is ambiguous.

Unimpressive as literature,  it's not much as propaganda,  either - though it is that and not much else.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Inca child sacrifice victims were drugged

Exceptionally brave,  self-selected fanatics might go willingly.

Others I have always thought were about as willing as the usual condemned man dragged to a gallows, despite nonsense peddled by anthropologists too confident of nurture,  or contemptuous of nature.

See this.

Bro-choice

Actually,  it is about sex without consequences.

So is pro-choice.

So is contraception.

So is the entire sexual revolution.

The whole point is to enable sexual liberation from the first moment of puberty.

To make marriage entirely voluntary - whatever its shape.

To make pregnancy,  child-birth,  and parenting voluntary.

To make ours, in this respect, the world's first free society.

It is, in its way, a direct attack on the family,  just as the Church and the clericalists and the sociocons say.

Nature, religion,  morality, and the law sentenced all humans, for the crime of sex, to the punishments of marriage and the family.

By defeating nature and throwing off the customary burdens we have freed ourselves from marriage and parenting - and made each of them, separately,  a free choice.

We have in this overthrown the entire history of the race.

Bravo!

Headcount morality

In Jo Nesbo's The Bat, policeman Harry Hole finds the love of his life, talks her into serving as bait for a serial killer,  and is shattered with grief when she becomes a victim - a grief not much compensated when he kills the killer,  successfully stopping his chain of murders thanks to her sacrifice.

First in the series,  the story pretty much sums up Harry's character and entire future.

He will over many books again and again sacrifice everything that and everyone who matters to him to get the bad guy.

Not to mention numerous informants and witnesses with whose lives he will buy such victories.

Would you put the life of your mother,  wife, or child at risk because only that provides the best chance to save many lives by stopping a serial murderer?

Not a chance in Hell I would do that.

Do you approve police putting innocent civilian lives at risk to improve their chances, thus cutting the risks to more numerous, other innocents?

Do you trust the accuracy and honesty of such proferred justifications?

Are you confident they aren't sacrificing innocents,  not to the greater good, but only to success?

The bookshelves and TV schedules are packed with cops who do such things.

Often,  those priorities are presented as personally costly,  even self-destructive,  for the cops.

But the political, public policy question is not raised, presented as annoying or stupid interference in necessary police work,  or dramatically subordinated to the personal losses of the cops making such choices.

Jo Nesbo's novels are no exception.

And they are very good, by the way.

I'm a fan.

American Conservative goes over to the Dark Side

Just days after the president announced his man-crush on Uncle Ho, the mag has published a favorable review of Kill Anything That Moves,  a ferociously anti-American history of the Vietnam War,  that could have been written in Hanoi.

War is Hell.

The very concept of a war crime is a hypocrisy so vast as to be unspeakable.

It is a mainstay of biased,  tendentious propaganda and a fig-leaf for endless victors' revenge.

In the present case, it is the foundation of an attack on America rather shocking in a purportedly conservative publication.

Monday, July 29, 2013

Obama, lying fellow-traveler, hearts Ho

I cannot say how disappointing it is to see this very smart man play dumb to no conceivable good purpose.

Ho's move was pure propaganda aimed at the most stupid with entirely deceptive intent and publicly accepted both then and thereafter by lying or stupid (or both) fellow-travelers, radicals with both eyes well open, and liberals glad of any way to undermine the cold war by downplaying the ugly realities of communism.

Obama was not forced by diplomatic circumstance to reluctantly nod at this canard.

What should he have done when Truong Tan Sang, president of communist Vietnam, handed him that mendacious letter from Ho to the American President, laying claim to both the American and French Revolutions?

He should have burned it on the spot before the man's eyes.

Well, all right.

He should at any rate not have let the brief press conference after the meeting pass without politely mentioning the incident and, also politely, denouncing the letter as a propaganda ploy and a lie.

Instead, he did the exact opposite.

He seized the chance to make this lie his own, flaunting his Bill Ayers side.

In the approving and even enthusiastic words of the President, that he most certainly did not have to say, “Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.”

One has to wonder.

Did he skip the revolutionary festival in Havana the other day only because of scheduling conflicts?


Conservative media are quite reasonably pointing to this as proof of the president's inner radicalism, though one has to wonder why they bother or what they hope to gain by this.

Radosh in WSJ


Still, one fellow writing in NRO, of all places, evidently fell for it, just like a useful idiot of the old days.

The only conceivable defense against the charge he is a complete moron is to plead the ignorance of youth for whom the Vietnam War is an ugly episode of ugly Americanism, thankfully of long ago.


At least some liberals have joined their forebears along with Obama in this offensively stupid lie.


Steve M: It's an objective fact!

A new generation of liberals with the same soft spot for the reds that so many of them had, back in the day.

How many liberals are really "radicals" - that is to say, reds, in disguise?

Obviously, Obama is not the only one.

Exactly this sort of manipulation of US opinion in order to support inflection of US policy in favor of red regimes is what the "crazy right-wing looonatics" meant by "subversion," by the way, during the cold war.

God almighty.

No wonder I voted Republican in 1972.

And did not regret it either during or after Watergate.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

The Lone Ranger

Robbie Collin got it right in The Telegraph.

Aimless, vague, but oddly without seeming too long.

Anti-American,  -Christian,  and -Capitalist,  this frankly but not very angrily indigenista, semi-comic re-telling of the tale of the TV and comic-book hero in which the wife and I liked Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer bashed white people from beginning to end.

The movie subcribes 100% to the  liberal, UN orthodoxy of the likes of Howard Zinn, today endorsed with delighted cynicism by so many of yesterday's losers and today's enemies of the euro-white powers.

We are a long way from the pro-settler outlook of Drums Along The Mohawk,  The Plainsman, and Stage Coach.

The apologists of Afrikanerdom pretty much had it right.

The behavior of the white tribes in Africa, the Americas, Oceania, and Asia was no worse than that of the natives.

If they sometimes obtained lands by conquest or theft that was no worse than the norm for the region or than the losers had done.

And in every case theirs was the superior civilization, the losers and the displaced being in many cases exactly the savages the euro-whites said they were.

Hollywood used to share that view.

But not for a long time.

Long since, it has changed sides and gone over to the Indians.

All the same, even a white person could enjoy this film, in between repeated slaps in the face.

If it doesn't occur to that white person, between slaps, to wonder about the price whites will increasingly have to pay, now that this attitude is culturally and politically dominant and the pro-white view of all this history has actually become thought-crime.

I have read in several places that an Australian court has ruled that every inch of Australia was the valid property in natural law of the Aborigines - whether of tribes or of the race as a whole I do not know - when the whites arrived.

Hence whatever was occupied or settled without actual purchase - by whites - though from whom may not be clear - was stolen.

Thus far does liberal racism control the moral and political high ground.

One might almost say that,  according to the liberals, and in these parts of the world, a white person has no rights a non-white is bound to respect.

Friday, July 26, 2013

Communism was the most perfect tyranny ever achieved by humans


Admittedly it was not his topic and he was writing to make the point – I am not kidding – that the Republicans are “basically clinically insane.”

That’s the quality of his writing, these days.

The second comment says it’s his best post this year, too, so I suppose you could defend him with the claim he’s been duped by his fans.

Anyway, the B-man wrote in his first paragraph this brief summation of what was wrong with communism.

In the past, the right surely exaggerated the threat of communism, but who would honestly want to live in a communist country? 

It might sound good on paper, but it never worked well in practice. 

So, even if the right did convince itself that there were fifth column communists hiding under every desk, they had a point about the lack of freedom and opportunity in communist systems.

Really?

Which part sounded good on paper?

The stupider-than-religion anarchist utopia at the end of history’s rainbow?

The horrifically destructive planned economies, forced collectivizations, massive resort to slave labor, and slaughter of tens of millions of one’s own people?

The megadeaths from famine?

The constant mass rule of state terrorism?

“Never worked well in practice”?

And you have to love that grudging concession at the end that those crackpot right-wingers with their absurd fears of espionage, agents of influence, and subversion did have a little point, there, about “lack of freedom and opportunity in communist systems.”

After about thirty years of totally wrecking his country with repeated radical insanities and slaughters, Mao died like Tiberius of old age and sexual exhaustion, in bed, smiling, the most successful and thoroughgoing of modern tyrants.

That was communism.

The right did indeed exaggerate the threat of communism to the people of the United States and even the world as a whole.

So did Truman.

So did Kennedy.

So did Johnson.

Our post-WW2 globalism would have been both unnecessary and foolish without communism in the world, and it was just as much unnecessary and foolish even given communism.

But nobody exaggerated its evil.

Most especially not Reagan, whose public declaration that the Soviet Union was an evil empire was greeted with stupid and even vicious guffaws and scoffing from pretty much all across the left.

And it is absolutely true that, even to this day, the left grossly understates - and under-recognizes - the horrors of Marxism.

It is possible this is at least partly because the left today continues, even essentially, a dupe of the moral faith, on which see posts labeled "amoralism."

And in this connection the left is, in particular, permanently beset with guilty rejection of the acts/omissions distinction - or at any rate is wholly unwilling to accept its bearing on crucial questions of politics.

Equally, we could say their problem is disbelieving both that morality is fundamentally a matter of side-constraints on action and that justice is concerned with procedures rather than outcomes.

Or we could say they find utilitarianism far more persuasive than deontological approaches to morals.

In any case we can say they themselves often make clear that, for them, there is little or no moral difference between killing and letting die.

So every preventable death, for example, that is not prevented in capitalist society because medical care is only for those who can pay counts against market capitalism just as much as a peasant killed resisting forced collectivization of agriculture counts against communism.

If indeed it is admitted that the dead peasant, being a counter-revolutionary criminal, counts against communism, at all.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Well, he’s done. For a decade or so, anyway, I’d say.


To this day, Democrats love Bill Clinton.

When women are free to choose

It’s entirely possible that if women are free to avoid domesticity and limit their fecundity to below replacement level they will as a group decide to do just that.

Certainly they are doing it in modern Europe and North America, right now.

I don’t know very much about elsewhere.

It could be that societies in which all or most women are free in these respects will just shrink, perhaps even to a point at which there are too few people to support the diversity of knowledge and skills essential to modern civilization.

Race politics in America and pretend-race politics in Europe currently prevent the whites of Western Europe and America from facing this situation squarely and deciding what, if anything, they want to do about it.

What they are in fact doing by choice of their elites and under the pressure of paralyzing taboos deftly wielded by their political left is importing surplus non-whites from parts of the planet where women do not have such choices, to prevent population decline.

On its face, not an unreasonable option, were it not for the adverse political effects we see in Europe and may yet see in America, due in Europe primarily to religious conflict and in the US, eventually, to racial conflict.

Still, that's the route we're taking and it might work out without too much trouble.

It may never actually happen, but suppose women all over the planet at some point gain the same freedom to reject domesticity and motherhood modern women of European or American society already have.

Very soon, humans will face the need for conscious political choices as to whether and how to perpetuate themselves and their societies.

The family may disappear as a social institution, or at any rate lose its unique role in keeping the species, and our several societies, in existence.

Responsibility for the production and rearing of young may fall in large part to government.

And given technological trends government will be making interesting decisions about the genetic endowments of such young.

You and I won’t live to see it.

But it could happen, eventually.

Afterthought.

In America and Europe, this development is a consequence of advances in reproductive technology the Christian churches have not been able to keep unavailable for general use.

Enabled by these advances, the sexual revolution has at every step required and powered liberation from the ability of the Christian clergy to control the law and through it the sexual lives of moderns of both sexes, and in particular of women.

In other parts of the world, this aspect of the sexual revolution will go differently as its progress is resisted by other religions or cultural factors, not all of which will be equally challenged by these changes and not all of which would be equally able to resist if they wanted to.

And that makes me wonder, in particular, about the case of China, where society and state face the opposite problem, the people still being for whatever reasons culturally committed to a level of fecundity causing population growth when that is not at all wanted.

One of those things that make you want to live another hundred years, or so, just to see how it all plays out.

Monday, July 22, 2013

When death is we are not

So says Epicurus, explaining why death is nothing to us.

But no modern materialist accepts that.

The broken toaster - or computer - still exists, as does the dead man.

But his central point seems right, anyway, that life on the whole and consciousness in particular cease when we die.

The dead have no pain, do not suffer, have no regrets, feel no loss, etc.

In traditional societies in which souls are believed in it is said of the dead that they "are gone."

Those skeptical that there was anywhere to go tend to say they are no more, that they no longer exist.

But if we think of life and consciousness as properties - or perhaps better as activities or functions, or congeries of activities and/or functions - of our bodies and our nervous systems we will think that he who has died has stopped, and not that he has gone somewhere or ceased to exist.

Like a computer that has crashed or some other sort of machine that, for whatever reason and whether permanently or not, has stopped working.

Eventually, as medical science progresses, we may find ourselves able to resuscitate - the temptation to say "reanimate" will pass - the dead in more and more circumstances, after greater delays and worse damage.

We may see this start to happen long before medical science, or genetics, or what-you-will has progressed to the point of, say, as much as doubling the human life-span - assuming we are ever able to very much stretch out our duration.

At first, many in our culture will want to simply change the medical definition of death so as not to face the truth: it will have become possible for someone to die, be clearly and indisputably dead for some length of time, and then be raised from the dead.

The very same person in the very same body, so to speak, not still alive but undeniably alive again.

Admitting any such thing would fly in the face of specific beliefs that have been integral to Christianity since its beginning.

Religions that teach reincarnation will find such a development less of a shock to their traditions and dogmas.

They will just decide it's a case of reincarnation of the same soul in the same body.

But Christianity?

Another hammer blow to its popular credibility from advancing science.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Votes for Women

Thomas Pegram, Battling Demon Rum, page 75.

"By 1900 nearly every state had enacted measures requiring public schools to teach children that alcohol was a poison, using textbooks screened by the WCTU."

The Women's Christian Temperance Union.

In 1881 they had committed to what their propaganda referred to as "the home-protection ballot" to empower women to protect home and family - to prevent their men drinking - through Prohibition, local, state, and national.

In angry opposition to the evil influence of "foreign infidels" - Catholic immigrants - they had proposed, in 1876, to defend the Sabbath and The Bible in public schools.

Pegram, page 70.

The religion of the public schools at the time was rather generically Protestant,  using The King James Bible and the Protestant versions of The Lord's Prayer and The Ten Commandments, to the great distress of Catholic immigrants and their clergy.

The WCTU meant to keep and strengthen Protestant control.

America's German families commonly visited beer gardens of a Sunday afternoon, to the profound moral outrage of the good American women of the WCTU.

They meant to put a stop to that.

WCTU propaganda for the home-protection ballot also prominently featured the need for much more serious action, everywhere, to suppress prostitution.

The drive for women's suffrage was in every respect both a libertarian nightmare and a war on men.

By the way, Google the Thurber cartoon, "Home."

Saturday, July 20, 2013

The un-Bourbon

Bastille 1789 French whiskey.

Smooth,  soft,  and really mild.

More so than some Irish whiskey in the same price range.

A very pleasant surprise.

Unless it's maybe too soft?

Nah.

The cost of righteousness

From the dawn of the 19th Century right into the 20th, previous great revivals were replaced in America by vast, successive waves of terrible, righteous, Protestant reform.

Those familiar with paleocon and libertarian views will know that neither slavery nor racism brought on the crisis of secession, the North's horrific war to crush the Confederacy and conquer the South, the devastation of Reconstruction, or the lingering hatred of Southern whites for the North.

All that was the gift to America of intransigent abolitionism.

Much against the will of America's Catholic immigrants, Protestant fanaticism in others of its aspects condemned America to Prohibition and forced us twice to save the world and democracy from the accursed Hun.

Not to mention votes for women, brought to us by Suffragettes who loathed Catholic, hyphenated Americans.

The Holocaust of their aborted babies has been the most notable contribution to American life of the political empowerment of women, after Prohibition.

That and other facets of female rejection of home, family, and motherhood.

Was America that bad from the start?

Judging by relevant books, Lincoln's suppression of dissent was a more thorough attack on the constitution,  American freedom,  and American democracy than Wilson's.

In their different ways,  he and FDR might have tied.

That does not mean Wilson was a fine fellow.

Has it always been like that in America?

We have only glorious histories of our revolution - not quite to the point,  anyway - and few of 1812.

In 1917, Mencken collected a diary and notes from his recent sojourn as a reporter in Germany and burried them in his back yard in Baltimore, lest they be used to his harm.

Moderately pro-German,  his dispatches had attacked British propaganda and vigorously resisted the efforts of Brits and their American sympathizers to drag America into the war.

His mail was opened, his house was searched,  and the feds once tried to frame him.

He lost his column and went prudent while Debs, for example,  went to jail for publicly urging young men to evade the draft.

"Mencken,  The American Iconoclast," Marion Elizabeth Rodgers.

Well,  it didn't go like that during the Vietnam War,  anyway.

Friday, July 19, 2013

Did he wonder, I wonder?


He is very far from being a stupid man.

So he should realize full well why he and other black men so often encounter mistrust among whites.

Jesse Jackson even said in public he is made nervous by the threat posed by other by black men.

So where’s the understanding for how whites feel, and of the long and unfortunate history that explains why they feel that way?

It’s clear the president was pretty torn up by all this, and part of his problem is that, fundamentally, he buys the black tale of grievance.

Remember the Gates case?

He bought it and he was just entirely wrong. 

But who can complain he does not try hard to be, or at least appear, a fair man and a good and true president for all Americans, in spite of that?

I think he pretty definitely doesn't want to queer the deal for future black aspirants to the White House or high public office in general, as he certainly would if he wound up sounding too much like Rev. Wright giving one of his sermons, screaming to his congregation, "God damn America!"

And might Republicans wish to provoke him to ruin what's left of his presidency and seriously wound the Democrats for years to come with such an outburst?

And might white racists want him to lose his head publicly precisely in hopes it would queer the deal?

Oh, yes.

There are lots of people who have made it as clear as day they want him to fail as spectacularly as possible.

Update.  07202013.

Just to be clear,  there are none so blind as those who will not see.

Everyone knows perfectly well the blacks of America, and maybe the world,  have earned the mistrust and disesteem of all, including each other, but especially of whites. 

No fact about race is more glaring or less admitted.

Obama comes close to recognizing this, himself, in these remarks, but seems not quite able to, instead showing a veiled glimpse of his rancor toward whites.

Who is more certain to blame others than the man painfully conscious of his own fault? 

Full of hatred, finding little or nothing within white Americans deserving of blame, unconcerned with actual truth, America's blacks scream in all our faces, "Your ancestors enslaved mine!"

Among the best, like President Obama,  the screams are muted or silent,  but nonetheless real.

Jonah goes there. The scoop on Big Al.



Has his own show on MSNBC, too.

What would you think if David Duke had a show on MSNBC?

Words to ponder?


Pat writes,

Though blacks are outnumbered 5-to-1 in the population by whites, they commit eight times as many crimes against whites as the reverse.

By those 2007 numbers, a black male was 40 times as likely to assault a white person as the reverse.

If interracial crime is the ugliest manifestation of racism, what does this tell us about where racism really resides — in America?

On the other hand, surely interracial crime is at least partly just crime.

Which, of course, may have been his point.

Or maybe not.

What hatred is more voluble, more open, more  self-assured,  more loud and insistent,  or more violent than the hatred of blacks in America for whites? 

What have women done with the vote?


The point of democracy is to empower the people to defend themselves against the elites who actually run everything, and ensure their interests are in some measure served.

Within the context of modern capitalism, it is chiefly to enable progressive interference with the free market in order to safeguard workers, consumers, and the public as a whole.

But that is already accomplished as far as may be by universal manhood suffrage.

What does the political enfranchisement of women, as voters and office-holders, contribute?

Well, for what have women used their power?

First and foremost, for upper and middle class women to claw their way out of the home and into the whole host of middle and upper-class positions in the economy, government, and academia.

Women of the lower orders were always condemned to hard labor, anyway, just like their husbands.

That is,women's power has been used to enable upper and middle class women to escape the roles of homemaker and wife so far as possible, and of mother as well, consistent – for those making this choice – with actually having children and “raising” them through heavy reliance on surrogates or pushing off half the job onto Dad.

Hence their insistence on contraception, abortion completely at their own option, coerced child support in case they don’t choose abortion and don’t choose to marry, and so on.

And they have since the earliest days of the suffrage movement interfered endlessly with the freedom of men, always to serve their sisterhood interests, ordinarily dressed up as virtue and propagandized as the minimal demand of moral decency.

The best example being the temperance movement throughout its history, from the earliest days at the beginning of the 19th Century right up through the great fiasco of Prohibition.

On the up side, it is often thought that women, being less bellicose as a group than men, exercise a moderating influence with respect to foreign affairs.

And that could be true.

The argument is also sometimes made that, historically, to the extent that women as a group have been literally confined to the home, half the talent of the human race for anything requiring talent has been wasted in housekeeping and baby-sitting.

So many female Einsteins changing diapers.

So many Madame Curies dusting under the beds.

But the housekeeping and baby-sitting still need doing and so far as we can't all push it off onto recent immigrants - usually also women - then shifting the burden redistributes the wastage from being entirely on the wife to being shared in some measure between her and her husband, at no net gain to society.

Of course, what has actually happened is that women, given the option, have stopped having anything like as many children as their stay-at-home mothers and grandmothers did, so there is now a bit less housekeeping to do, and a lot less baby-sitting.

When women stayed home they had enough children to not only replace themselves and their men but even to generate overall population growth, even in a world of much greater risks than we face today.

When women get out of the home, if they can, they just have a lot fewer children.

That is what women have done with their political enfranchisement.

On the other hand, it was really advances in reproductive technology that enabled all this.

So it might all have happened even if women had not got the vote.

Or a lot of it, anyway.

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Why it’s just not worth your time


The news.

Politics.

Whatever.

Not really a hard question, Laura.



Oh, yeah.

He dodged both times.

I think he is libertarian enough to hold that, in principle, private persons and clubs and businesses have a natural right to discriminate and he would much prefer actual governments honor that right, along with all natural rights.

I think his belief in natural rights is mistaken (see posts labeled “amoralism”) and his preference, in consequence, baseless.

And I think it’s his view that the 14th Amendment does not actually empower the federal congress to legislate against such discrimination.

I think he is right.

On the other hand, Rachel’s scare scenario that the country would return to the regime of public and private segregation that existed back in the day, given the chance, is silly.

Times have changed and this is not the America, and we are not the American people, of 1950.

All the same, it might be best not to risk it.

A multi-racial or ethnic or religious society known for tensions should not risk needless exacerbation.

Anyway, Laura on the blog asks, “If government can't regulate restaurants with regard to discrimination, can it regulate them with regard to food safety?”

Well, yes.

The basis of the former – the federal prohibition on discrimination – is an incorrect interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

The basis of the latter is the congressional power to regulate interstate commerce and the state’s own power to regulate intrastate commerce.

(So far as I know, it’s local authorities under state mandate that inspect and issue permits to restaurants, while federal authorities check out the meat, for example, for safety.)

Not really a hard question.

She also asks, “Does Paul care more about the principle of free speech on a Jim Crow sign than the free travel of African Americans?”

And I have no idea.

I don’t know that he was asked that by anyone during any interview.

Absolutely senseless



Not a peep from the red state loons who endlessly denounce Obama for not being uber-Zionist enough.

This is insane.

It will add strength to efforts to change the UN in such a way as to disempower the Security Council or hand it over to our enemies, an alleged need to make the organization more globally majoritarian and democratic (!) being, no doubt, the excuse.

And yet this is no more than both parties, dominated by Zionism, insist upon.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

What conservatism is about. And maybe liberalism, too.



Kurt Schlichter explains, “It's about winning this war against progressivism[.]”

And that’s why no white working class American with an ounce of sense would ever vote Republican again in our lifetimes.

Progressivism is about protecting the public from devastation by free market capitalism.

And that most certainly includes the entire, and not only the white, working class.

So why does the propaganda of the left do its level best to beat the white working class senseless with endless attacks for racism, angry blasts against a “war on women,” and enraged or contemptuous references to the Republicans as “the white people’s party”?

You tell white people that loudly enough and angrily enough and often enough and they will believe you.

Is it that the leftists think they pick up more in non-white votes than they lose in white votes, doing this?

Or is this just really what they want and who they are?

Have they chosen, out of fidelity to their real selves, to conduct American party politics as a race war against white people, by other means?

And don’t tell me that they’re mostly white, please.

Vampire familiars.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

With people like these, why bother to have a trial, at all?


Race, race, race.

My God, these people are awful.

The three stooges


Not one of the three really wants to dump the filibuster and go to majority rule.

Not one.

Remember Crown Heights?


It is a very revealing story.

Jews may not much like blacks, but this was a pogrom.

And what does that say about who really hates whom?

And, yes, the same lesson applies to the broader context of black hatred for whites of all kinds in America.

This whole fiasco has continued the constant drumbeat of race-baiting propaganda intended by the left to make white Americans objects of fear and loathing to everyone else.

And to further push whites - except for the familiars with vampire glyphs tattooed on their necks - toward the GOP and draw non-whites, besotted with hate, into the Democratic Party.

Why Holder needs to butt out, and why he won’t



But see my comment.

Comment

The filibuster



Kill it anyway.

It will help American social democracy more than it hurts.

It will probably help resist clericalism rather than advance it, on the whole.

I don't think we need to be protected from democracy as much as we used to.

Monday, July 15, 2013

Liberals, Democrats, and race


The liberal media this morning are race-bating this outcome of the Zimmerman trial to beat the band, nurturing grievance, mistrust, and hatred in order to keep non-whites, and especially blacks, voting Democratic.

It's all to the good, in their eyes, if this also further motivates non-whites of all sorts in the same direction.

Isn't nurturing racial hatred as an electoral strategy - all the white screaming it's the other guys who are doing that, of course (and they are, too) - just a wee but irresponsible?

Sure.

Banned on two


Common Dreams, a site owned and operated by a mix of professional and radical leftists, has banned me.

That’s two sites that have banned me, both liberal.

There is a third liberal site that banned me in the past when I wrote under a different pseudonym.

No conservative site has banned me, yet, though I have certainly provoked much ire at several that I regularly visit.

Imagine that.

Friday, July 12, 2013

Lincoln vs the Copperheads

Comparing what Lincoln did to what Johnson and Nixon did about opponents of their wars, it is impossible not to admire their restraint.

Likewise Wilson and FDR and Truman.

Why don't liberals despise Lincoln as a grotesque tyrant?

He made Nixon and the others look like fanatics for civil liberties.

Even Wilson, with his massive suppression of dissent.

And what about his enthusiastic support for Sherman's style of war, shooting prisoners in reprisal when civilians - or irregulars - killed his soldiers and destroying all in his path - roads,  buildings,  crops,  bridges - on his way to the sea?

Because Lincoln ended slavery,  though he did not set out to do that,  and though  he opposed votes and equal rights for blacks in America, toyed with deportation,  and seems never to have abandoned white supremacy.

And because he saved the union and with it America's rise to globalism?

Ah, yes.

The empire of liberty.

Reading Hummel's history of the Civil War.

The DOJ and the Zimmerman case


According to this story, the DOJ helped bring about the context of public outrage in which, as we knew at the time, it forced Florida and local authorities into this trial.

And if Holder was part of that who doubts Obama was?

In a few, relatively small ways, the president’s hostility toward and mistrust of whites has shown, during his presidency, from time to time.

The only big way they have shown was in his long and very personal association with Jeremiah Wright, close buddy of Louis Farrakhan, before he threw the man under the bus during his 2008 campaign.

His interventions and those of Holder, public and cloaked, in the Zimmerman/Martin affair are among those smaller ways.

It is possible he has been much more a leftist, and much more a race man, than we have realized, all along.

He is, after all, very smart.

And he may simply have decided, long ago, to do as much as he could expect, realistically, to do as a politician.

And he may have decided that meant looking a lot more moderate, and a lot less a race man, than he is in his heart of hearts.

Blacks in America have worn masks among whites for centuries, after all.

Of course, we ought not to be deceived by appearances.

It is possible, after all, to  railroad a guilty man.

Zimmerman,  I mean. 

The Republicans are dying out? Phooey.


Don’t believe the idiotic noise.

They are doing fine at the state level.

They control the house and have the Democrats under control in the senate.

They lost 2 presidentials in a row, but so what?

The unafraid conservatives are the ones who see straight.

It’s a damned shame, of course.

But the line that they are doomed, demographically or otherwise, is just eyewash.

And so is this.

The GOP misfires on food stamps.

Never take advice from your enemies.

And never accept their assessment of what's wrong with you.

The politics of hate



Yesterday and this morning I have seen predictions of a Zimmerman acquittal at several blogs.

This morning at one liberal site I have seen comments calling for riots in that event, and for someone to kill Zimmerman.

That is a site that regularly paints conservatives and Republicans as driven by hatred of non-whites and women.

Not unusual, of course, for a liberal site.

And that is all this whole Zimmerman/Martin affair has been about from the start.

A liberal hate fest, from first to last.

And an Afro-American hate fest led in large part by the likes of Al Sharpton, too.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

About that Zimmerman case



She really doesn’t care whether liberals like her.

Or the kinds of black people they encourage in hostility toward whites, either.

Read about the White case.

She writes, with evident fury at liberal racism,

So, yes, this case probably would be very different if Zimmerman and Martin’s races were reversed.

It is only when the victim is black that we must have a show trial, a million-dollar reward paid to the victim’s parents and the threat of riots.

George Will against Muslim theocracy



And just a few days ago he wrote a long article in which he admitted his agnosticism but dwelt at length on how excellent has been the influence of Christianity on US politics and how grateful we all ought to be for that.

And here he again distorts reality in his attacks on liberals just as enthusiastically as he did in that article.

Was it not GW and his team who insisted on democracy in the Palestinian Authority with Islamist results they promptly regretted?

Was it not the Republican neocons who insisted they would support him in bringing democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq at the point of a bayonet?

Indeed, to any country in the world run by people GW or his White House cronies judged to be “evil doers,” as I recall.

Even as liberals in general opposed that idiotic adventurism.

Not all, no.

Not by any means.

There is such a thing, after all, as a neocon liberal, like Joe Lieberman or Hillary Clinton.

But most of those who were not office-holders at the time opposed it.

Odd that Will, who in that same other article admits he does not believe in natural rights, here lavishes praise on Lincoln for fighting the Civil War to vindicate them.

No neo-Confederate, he.

KOS is full of racist, sexist liars who attack white people, men, and especially white men, especially if they are Christians



So I looked and I looked, and I found nothing to justify her claim.

In fact, she was just making it up.

The team at KOS is irrevocably committed to race-baiting attacks on the Republican Party and anyone who opposes their immigration view.

Actually, they’re pretty much committed to racist attacks on whites and sexist attacks on men and feminazi attacks on both, all the time.

I was banned from that site for saying so, too.

Against consequentialism



Or maybe just against short-sighted consequentialism.

Considering anything less than all the consequences is short-sighted.

And good luck trying that.

Josh Marshal to the universe: If you disagree with me you’re a racist!


Not for the first time, Josh tells us how he really feels on the legal and constitutional questions raised by the Civil War.

The idea that there is a ideological divide or set of philosophical questions or priorities that makes some libertarians embrace the Confederacy and secession and despise Abraham Lincoln while others do not is, to put it generously, nonsense.

Neo-Conderates [sic], pro-secessionists, whatever else you want to call them are varying hues of white supremacists or to put it even more simply, racists.

That’s not an accusation. 

It’s simply identifying them as a distinct political strain in American politics.

Do they embrace the Confederacy and despise Lincoln?

Perhaps they do.

Or perhaps not.

Are they, in fact, white supremacists or racists?

And is that supposed to discredit their claims about the constitution, the law, and Civil War?

Hitler built the autobahn and was the patron of the Volkswagen, so Eisenhower was a Nazi and so is your kid who just bought a new Bug, I guess.

There’s a libertarian war over the Civil War?

The libertarians - not without exception, of course - tend to view the constitution as though the incorporation doctrine had been true since 1776 and Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics really had been written into the constitution.

And not in the 14th Amendment but from the beginning.

The neo-Confederates, as a rule, completely reject incorporation, even now, and think states originally had and still have legitimate powers no libertarian could love - powers perhaps eschewed by their own constitutions, but not denied by the federal one.

And nobody doubts that Lincoln violated the constitution massively during the course of the Civil War.

So what?


What does it say about contemporary politics in general and liberal politics in particular that people think departures from Civil War Unionist dogma about the War Between the States call for “policing”?

Rachel Weiner, who seems to regret the libertarians aren't very good at "policing," nevertheless is far more sensitive to nuance that JM seems.

She appears ready, for example, to recognize that one might hold a critical view of Lincoln and his war without endorsing or in any way legitimating the cause of the South.

She writes,

There are contrarians who criticize Lincoln’s use of federal power and argue that the South had a right to secede — but have no love for slavery or the Confederacy.

Libertarians are anti-war and in favor of market-based solutions, and some argue that even though slavery was abominable, it would have ended for economic reasons with far less bloodshed if the North had allowed the South to secede.

“Though I think Lincoln was the worst tyrant in U.S. history and his war was illegal, immoral, unconstitutional,  I do not think the [Confederacy] was some quasi-libertarian bastion of freedom or justified,” said Stephan Kinsella.

“The real enemy is, as always, the State — whether it be the USA or the [Confederate States of America].” 

On the other hand, JM is not really contradicting her, is he?

She says these guys are not pro-slavery or pro-Confederacy.

He says they are racist and white supremacist.

They could, of course, both be right, on those points.

Lincoln,  himself,  was a racist and a white supremacist. 

And yet, as I said, one can like Volkswagens and the Interstate system without being a Nazi.

Update.

"Neo-Confederate," by the way, covers people who are not libertarians, at all, as well as some who are, if it refers to anyone who thinks secession was not unconstitutional, opposes Lincoln's choice for war, and believes Lincoln violated the constitution quite vigorously in his conduct of the Civil War.

Paleocons, generally.

Think of Pat Buchanan and Justin Raimondo.

And even that's not all of them.

If that's a neo-Confederate then I am one, too.

And I am no kind of libertarian or conservative.

By that I mean I expect I would have opposed the war, at the time, had I been one of the Northern whites whose taxes would pay for it and who might even be coerced into fighting it.

Of course, had I been a black slave at the time, I would have seen things in a different light.

However much one disapproves being coerced into altruistic sacrifice for others, one is always grateful for altruistic sacrifice toward oneself.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

The true spirit of do-gooding. So, what’s the plan for marijuana? Crack cocaine, ultimately?



Decriminalize it but then tax it insanely?

Ah, a triumph of personal liberty over the Nanny State, then.

And the truth is those taxes are not there to discourage smoking because of the adverse health effects.

The legal trend is for states to tax harmless e-smoking just as heavily where there is not the least intention to discourage use of the product.

Far from that!

It’s about capitalizing on addiction instead of letting all the profits go to the producers.

And doing it in order to give non-addict taxpayers a respite.

It’s just the non-addict majority screwing over the addict minority.

Political hatred is bad for the country and bad for your blood pressure



Back in the day, the Nixon haters seemed to me to be crackpots.

And I confess actual hatred seemed to me to be a bit much in regard to Reagan, as well.

As for GW, same story.

The ferocity of liberal/Democratic hatred of these leading, successful Republicans just astounded me.

As does the hatred of the right for President Obama.

Though the hypocrisy of the left in professing shock at its virulence is not actually amusing.

The GOP can play the race card, too.

Usually it's Democrats trying to alienate non-whites from the GOP and its favored policies.

Here the GOP tries to alienate non-whites from the Dems.

Lies, distortions, and outrageous appeals


Don’t be misled by lies, distortions, and outrageous appeals to the lowest and most anti-social of human passions.

Sometimes the liberal/Democratic propaganda for their view on item X is so repulsive that after imbibing it for a while I find myself edging toward the conservative/Republican view of X.

But then I surf conservative sites for a while to get an eyeful of their lies, distortions, and outrageous appeals to the lowest and most anti-social of human passions in connection with X.

And that reminds me the propaganda is not what actually matters.

Then, sometimes, I demand an accounting from myself.

I root about inside my head to find out whether there is actually any sensible reason – sensible to me, that is – why I should care about X, one way or the other.

And whether the balance of such reasons favors the position of either party.

Being an atheist and an amoralist, any reasons I might find would be neither religious, moral, nor even political so far as these last – political reasons – suppose the existence of natural, human, or moral rights, or rest on judgments concerning justice.

But there are plenty of other sorts of reasons to care about politics, anyway.

In like manner, when the government imposes something upon us undemocratically, unconstitutionally, or both, to the cheers of some and the sneers of others, one has to ask how objectionable it is that the position, if preferable, was thus imposed.

Large and crucial parts of America’s social democracy, for instance, and it’s progressive, regulatory state are, on a fair reading, unconstitutional.

It may be that it would be well to fix that by passing appropriate amendments to the constitution.

But should I then prefer those things had never been created, or that they be abolished until such amendments actually are passed?

Would you expect an American black, convinced that Brown was wrong and that something a lot like the libertarian/paleocon view of the US constitution is right, to want to see Jim Crow and American Apartheid restored pending suitable amendment of the constitution?

Would you expect him to look back at the civil rights revolution of the 20th Century with regret, so far as it relied on anti-democratic and even unconstitutional government actions?

Too, ordinary people are generally safer from the power of the few under democracy than otherwise, but this does not mean that in each and every case what the people want, or what their legislative creatures want, is really what’s best for all or most ordinary folks, or for us or those near and dear to us in particular.

Think of how religious or racial attitudes of the many can be, sometimes, more dangerous than those of the few for minorities or persons not of the relevant religion.

And for that matter, given the actual contents of our existing constitution and the actual nature of our legislatures, there can be no general presumption that either the constitution or the laws as we find them in force right now actually reflect what our people mostly prefer, or even what they would prefer were they relevantly informed.

Nor can there be a presumption that the people, in case they do not approve the law or the constitution in some regard, could do a single bloody thing about it.

Hence, that some measure is imposed unconstitutionally or undemocratically does not mean it is contrary to the preference of the people, anyway.

And it is usually partisan eyewash to suppose it does.

Republican partisan eyewash.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Are children property?


OK, children have a right to education.

But that's only a legal right, at best, and not even a constitutional right, since there are no natural or moral rights.

See posts labeled "amoralism."

Anyway, why can’t the parents provide it?

And saying kids have a right to education that might conflict with bad parenting is quite different from saying the community “owns” kids and the parents don’t.

Creepy, is right.

Lately, the president has gone on public record complaining that church associated schools are divisive.

Getting ready for a real hum-dinger of a free exercise battle?

PS.

I find nothing in the constitution about education at all, or warranting federal action in that area or interference in state or local action in that area.

The word "education" does not appear in that document, anywhere.

Nor the word "school."

And yet there is a federal department of education, there are federally guaranteed and regulated loans, there is federal aid to education, and there are federal mandated testing and other standards.

Apart from the service academies, there are no federal schools, that I know of.

The idea of a right to education – moral, natural, or legal – seems to have arisen only in the 19th Century and makes no appearance in the Articles of Confederation, the US Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence.

I don’t know about the constitutions of the US states, either of that era or today.

The Pennsylvania constitution today requires provision of public education but does not seem anywhere to mention a right to education.

Other states may do the same.



It appears that as late as 1973 the Supremes insisted the constitution does not guarantee any such alleged right, either against federal or state authorities.

A right to education does occur in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and various other documents emanating from supra- or inter-national authorities, according to Wikipedia.

I am not aware of any federal court ever claiming the US, either the general government or the states, is bound by the UN Declaration or any of these other documents.

There have been public schools operated at the state level, here and there, among the US states, since even before the American Revolution.

But they were far from universally available and even elementary education was not compulsory in all of America until the early 20th Century.

In fact, this is another theater of the culture war, with secularist liberals seeking to control the education of the young at all levels, relying more and more on federal power, money, and regulation.

It appears hostility to the very existence of parochial or church affiliated or church run schools, at any level, is spreading among them and more and more openly avowed.

Will more people drink?



Maybe they should.

It’s good for you, and I don’t just mean Guinness.

In moderation, of course.

My PCP says two drinks a day.

Any less and you don’t get the benefit.

Any more and your blood pressure starts to climb.

Anyway, talk about the Nanny State.

Jeez.

Where is Mencken when you need him?

I seem to recall an initiative years ago to abolish the Liquor Control Board and privatize all liquor sales.

Age restrictions would be unchanged.

I don't recall why, but the Pennsylvania left was full bore against privatization.

Not sure if it was because ordinary clerks have it tough compared to unionized, well-benefited employees of the LCB, but I think it was.

Exactly the wrong kind of support for union labor.

Heart in the right place? Is that enough?



Ian Millhiser writes,

More than a decade ago, the Supreme Court held that “death is not a suitable punishment for a mentally retarded criminal.”

It has never been all that clear to me whether a punishment counts as unconstitutional only if it is both cruel and unusual.

Or is either alone prohibited by the 8th Amendment?

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

I guess both, or they would have written "or" instead of "and," with the result that change of punishment practices, away from corporal toward fines and imprisonment or toward more humane methods of execution, for instance, would be banned. 

But, anyway, what does the 8th Amendment have to do with the states?

I don't think this liberal fiction passes the test.

Would an amendment giving it a legitimate constitutional basis be passed?

I could be wrong, but I think not.

Pat Buchanan would be a fine spokesman for realism and non-intervention in US foreign policy, but for . . .



. . . his bland refusal to see that not only were the two world wars no business of ours, but so was the cold war.

Still, his main point is right.

Trying to make the world safe for democracy is a fool’s errand and a waste of blood and treasure.

Unless, of course, it’s our own democracy whose safety is at stake, and it’s not.

PS.

His party, of course, these days is even more interventionist and adventurist than the Democrats, as he has repeatedly written, himself.

He was not shy in pointing out, when it mattered, that both McCain and Romney were more bellicose than Obama and the neocons were and are stronger in the Republican Party than among the Democrats.

There is no liberal analogue to The National Review, utterly devoted to "American exceptionalism" and the endless wars it calls for, according to them.

Or The Weekly Standard, which takes the same silly view.

I’ll hold my breath and turn blue if you don’t give me what I want



Looks gross, but nobody says it’s painful unless you get into a fight when they insert the tube.

Or you could let them die of starvation, and that's a really nasty way to go.

But I'll bet that's not the option the left is thinking of.

Monday, July 8, 2013

One good turn deserves another


Given the Republican record of successful class war in the states,  recently,  and their Gerrymandering, the voter ID campaigns, and their other efforts to suppress the Democratic vote, one has to consider the Democratic campaign for immigration reform, aimed at beefing up the Democratic lead among voters nationally and maybe flipping some major states from red to blue, as tit for tat.

And an imperative necessity, too, despite the downside effect on low end wages and the weakening position of whites in the demographic mix.

Right along with other efforts to expand the population of Democratic voters, like allowing the franchise to felons.

Home truths are these.

Of the duopoly, the Democrats are the less bellicose party and the more favorable to the little guy against the plutocracy and their stooges.

I and my loved ones are little guys.

I and my wife will be 65 at our next birthdays.

At 67, we will need every cent of our earned benefits, unless the Republicans win another battle and push the retirement age up, again.

We will need all the help we can get.

Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men


Jeffrey Hummel has written the best short book on the Civil War focusing on political,  legal,  and constitutional issues.

He reports that early in 1861 when only 7 states had seceded Lincoln endorsed a plan to win the South back into the union with an unamendable amendment guaranteeing slavery against federal interference, forever.

The South rejected the offer.

To keep Maryland in line he occupied the state,  declared martial law, suspended habeas corpus,  replaced the government with a federal,  unionist puppet based on rigged elections after arresting legislators opposed to him and, when Chief Justice Taney demanded habeas corpus, the law, and the courts be respected he ignored the man and ordered his subordinates to do the same.

Taney castigated him vigorously.

Lincoln wrote out orders for his arrest,  but never went so far as to execute the warrant.

Is this supposed to be part of the "enslaving free men" mentioned in the title?

Somehow using "enslaving" metaphorically in a title making reference to emancipation of actual slaves just seems inappropriate.

The contrast between actual slavery and whatever abuse the metaphor refers to is, 99 times out of a hundred, so glaring the metaphor seems childish and silly.

Libertarians whining about being taxed for purposes their ideology does not approve often angrily shout people so taxed are slaves.

Ayn Rand used to drivel on in that way, too.

But if you think you are a slave just because you live under a regime you disapprove of let someone make you one for real and then you will learn the difference!

George Will: an atheist of the right



Tendentious, deceptive, even mendacious.

Squash America to make Africa thrive



And how does a president have anything remotely like the authority to do either without congress acting?

Or has congress already simply transferred its power of legislation and decision in this area to him, much as it transferred its authority to decide on war to GW, back in the day.

A move Obama deplored and Hillary applauded, even during the primaries of 2008.

Nobody in government and nobody on the professional left is stupid enough to think cuts in American emissions will stop global warming while emissions burgeon elsewhere in the world.

All we are doing is, in a small way, limiting the adverse impact of all that carbon dioxide others are releasing into the atmosphere.

The effect the left really wants is this.

By starving the American economy of coal and helping others gorge on it, we are further crippling our economy and impoverishing our country, creating additional advantages for products manufactured elsewhere over those made here, sold in an American market opened wide by a succession of Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Free trade Democrats can insist that policy is about “a level playing field” for competition among the world’s producers and, yes, workers.

But this sort of energy policy intentionally and deliberately advantages foreign producers and economies in global competition with our own.

And that means it advantages their workers over ours.

Arguments this is “fair” are like arguments that fast, trained runners should be hamstrung to give fatties who can barely walk a “fair” chance in a marathon.

Imagine Attila the Hun made to look like Santa Claus


So this military coup against an elected government is OK?



Wonder what he thought of Pinochet.

Or was he even born then?

And why is he suddenly buying into the idea that a coup could not possibly have occurred without a US OK?

Doesn’t seem like the US has had all that much to say about what goes on in the region, lately, to me.

Things happen and the US reacts.

Or “leads from behind,” if you like.

Where left and right wing anti-Americans meet



Even if they don’t catch and punish him his saga has to be pretty discouraging to other lunatic fringies.

And does it now turn out he’s actually a right wing extremist mixing together in his head every anti-government stupidity typical of that end of the spectrum?

Just the guy to suck in The Guardian, Greenwald – or to be suckered and sucked in by them – , the radical left, the professional left, and at least half the liberal squawkers on the internet.

He even looks a little like Tim McVeigh, doesn’t he?

Skip Ms. Steelman’s conspiracy theory stuff.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Susan Jacoby, feminazi


She is a brilliant writer and an excellent historian.

Her best book was Freethinkers.

And her heart is in the right place on class issues.

But she is as unprincipled and dishonest about the constitution as any liberal.

And she is an ardent warrior in the feminist war on men, declaiming against compulsory motherhood imposed by men in the days of compulsory parenthood imposed by religion and conservative,  clericalist politicians.

Which would include today, come to that,  if they could manage it.

Still,  she is honest as the day is long about the contempt of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others of her ilk for black,  Chinese,  and immigrant men who had the vote when she didn't.

And her malice.

The PUMA phenomenon showed not everyone has got past that.

Reading her biography of Robert Ingersoll,  The Great Agnostic.

Women got the vote during the Progressive Era because the drys knew they would vote overwhelmingly for Prohibition. 

Much as 11 million illegal aliens may be amnestied and given a short road to the vote because they will mostly vote for Democrats and Republicans are fools.

Nobody is as Machiavellian as an activist with a cause.

"By any means necessary" is their universal creed.