So you say you like small government and states' rights better?

We get that that's code.

It means - among other things and leaving aside such stuff as white nationalism, white supremacy, white Nativism, fascism, authoritarianism, and populism - that you like crime better than government.

You think that the cure is worse than the disease.

Worse for you, because you're a white male, a plute, a 1 percenter, or a crook.

And if you talk like that you're probably all four.

Just another thing to fear about the virus

If you are hospitalized for it you might have dirt injected into your veins because the orange moron in the White House thinks it's a miracle cure and has bullied the medical establishment into compliance.

Hydroxychloroquine: how an unproven drug became Trump’s coronavirus 'miracle cure'

THE DUCE PICKS HIS GUINEA PIG. Trump: I have asked US pharma CEOs to offer Johnson experimental Covid-19 treatments

Do you suppose Boris is glad of the role?

Why Trump's media allies are turning against Fauci amid the pandemic

The new Laetrile war pits the party of stupidity against the rest of us.

Does Fauci really have no problem with pathetic suckers blowing their savings on useless and perhaps harmful medical scams?

There's as much reason to believe in this stuff as there was to believe in Laetrile, and as much to believe in either as to believe you can cure cancer by eating dog shit.

But Fauci is OK with letting desperate people do that? Really?

And he thinks money and time ought to be spent testing its safety and efficacy?

Fauci Destroys Fox & Friends’ Efforts To Play Coronavirus Doctors And Promote Unproven Drug

Fox & Friends tried – and failed miserably – to push Dr. Anthony Fauci into endorsing the experimental coronavirus treatment Dear Leader Donald Trump is promoting, hydroxychloroquine, along with the suggestion that the lack of its widespread use is to blame (i.e. not Trump) for the growing number of deaths in the U.S.

Early in Fauci’s appearance on Fox & Friends yesterday, a graphic was posted saying a Sermo survey of 6,227 doctors found that 37% found hydroxychloroquine to be “the most effective” COVID-19 treatment.

Cohost Steve Doocy added that “only about 23%” of U.S. doctors prescribe it, “far less than in other countries.” 

He played a clip of (discredited, except on Fox) Dr. Mehmet Oz, who wanted the Friends to ask Fauci about “the Chinese study that we discussed yesterday from Wuhan that reflected statistically significant improvement in recovery from fever, from cough, and in pneumonia as well.”

After gently debunking the preceding bullshit, Fauci said:

We still need to do the kinds of studies that definitively prove whether any intervention, not just this one, any intervention, is truly safe and effective. 

But when you don’t have that information, it’s understandable  - and I grant that it’s understandable - why people may want to take something anyway, even with the slightest hint of it being effective, and I have no problem with that.

People need him to be a voice of sanity and a moral hero, but he's not all that satisfactory at either job.

Responsible medical professionals and genuine scientists were not this soft on stupidity, soft on exploitation of ignorance, or soft on criminal snake-oil peddling when the FDA would not allow the use of Laetrile to treat cancer anywhere in the US, though criminals and indulgent fools demanded both that we be sympathetic toward idiots who wanted to throw away their life savings on quack scams and that the law be relaxed so these boobs could be fleeced right here in the US.

After a lot of wasted time, money, and scientific effort repeatedly proving Laetrile was worthless and even dangerous, legitimate medical researchers finally urged that no more time and resources - time and resources that could be usefully spent on other things - be wasted repeatedly proving bullshit was bullshit.

And still in many state legislatures elements of the Republican Party, in large part a coalition of fraudsters, their mostly libertarian ideological enablers, and their willing victims, were able for a good while to get their way, to the shame of other Americans.

This is the Duce, himself, using a Coronavirus briefing just yesterday to urge surrender to what so totally deserves to be called fake news.

And there is absolutely no telling, in this case as in so many others, whether the revolting public enemy in the White House is truly and sincerely as stupid as he seems or whether it's just his propaganda technique to pretend so.

In a rambling, hostile White House briefing on Saturday, Trump urged Americans worried about the virus to try hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria, arthritis and lupus that has not been extensively tested for other conditions.

“Take it. What do you have to lose?” the president said, suggesting that he might do so himself after asking “my doctors”.

And even in this same story the journos are over-selling Fauci's shamefully weak and timid response as a full-throated and vigorous rejection of bullshit.

Yet this is really all he had to say.

“The data are really just at best suggestive. There have been cases that show there may be an effect and there are others to show there’s no effect.”

And the story immediately quotes somebody else, a doctor not in any way dependent on Trump, doing a better job rejecting this tripe.

But all the same the dismaying truth is that nobody has yet denounced the quack remedy as not only bullshit but harmful bullshit.

And far from urging with Fauci and these other cowards that its value be tested, responsible professionals ought to be insisting that legitimate researchers don't waste time and resources testing crap on nothing better than the say-so of irresponsible Republican propagandists and profoundly dishonest, criminally immoral politicians like the gang boss in the White House.

It's true. The slightly further and even further left are making the argument.

The Case for Opening Our Borders

Google "open borders" and you'll get hits at leftier sites like this one and even The Nation, just for starters.

So far as I know, the Democrats have not adopted this even as a long-term aspiration, though they are flirting with moves in that direction with their talk of decriminalization of illegal immigration.

CATO and other libertarians support this position, too.

Forget the wall already, it's time for the U.S. to have open borders

The left regards any consequent decline in the standard of living of American workers or Americans relying on Social Security, etc., as a price those Americans are morally obliged to pay in order to be fair, equitable, just, etc. to the people seeking entry.

The argument that American policy ought to serve the interests of Americans strikes cosmopolitan policy wonks whose own positions are not at risk as ignominiously selfish and deeply immoral.

The standard issue right regards all that as a feature, anyway, and not a bug.

Both sides try to downplay those risks, but neither bunch of partisans can be trusted.

Just another case in which powerful forces on both ends of the spectrum are prepared to undermine the position of the American working class in order to better serve the interests of others.

The cosmopolitan left and the Wall Street right agree: American workers are way overpaid and have it way too good.

Including working class retirees.

Chartism, ch 2

The sorts of statistics we hear of every day - rates of saving, unemployment, average wages - none of that was available to Carlyle or anyone else.

Parliament had never troubled itself to ask whether people were saving at all -  C thought that a likely sign of the level of economic distress - , nor whether a "labouring man in this England of ours, who is willing to labour", can find work.

[Correction: information was available about savings accounts, but ordinary people were still in the habit of sticking cash under the bed or in the mattress, and nobody had any way of tracking money lent by individuals to other individuals at interest, says C.]

It had never occurred to Parliament that any of that was in the least their concern, evidently.

A committee of the bourgeoisie for managing their common affairs, Marx might say.

Best not to know or to ask how poor, miserable, or desperate the proletarian masses actually were, eh?

Let facts like that - good for business, handy for capitalists and their well-off dependents - remain quietly in the dark.

None of that is the proper concern of the state, anyway, is it?

The Lockian Proviso?

But the actual convictions of most Americans, as they relate to this and to future generations, are "first come, first served" and "while supplies last".

Otherwise, the actual moral and political convictions of Americans line up best, overall, with libertarianism, possibly limited in varying degrees by traditional Christian sexual morality.

And leaving aside matters to do with race.

There has always been an LGBT right

You don't have to go back to Hitler's brownshirts or Mussolini's blackshirts.

The men among contemporary LGBT's - and the women, come to that - are by no means all pro-abortion, nor are they necessarily pro-feminist.

And the many whites among them are not necessarily happy with the increasing browning of their countries' politics, let alone of their countries' populations.

At least half the LGBTs I personally know, and perhaps most of them who are economically well off anywhere in Christendom/post-Christendom, lean libertarian on sexual lifestyle issues but prioritize their equally libertarian views on the money issues enough to endure the right's waning commitment to legal enforcement of Christian sexual morality.

A considerable number rather famously didn't care a fig about gay marriage until convinced to care by pro-leftist propaganda, and many others still don't.

There is not the least reason in the world for LGBT's to be less supportive of gun rights or the death penalty than the general population.

And some have been notoriously anti-Islamist and anti-Muslim in their politics.

Think not only Andrew Sullivan but Pym Fortuyn or Bruce Bawer, and not just Milo Yiannopoulos.

Or Alice Weidel, if you like.

But The Guardian thinks the LGBT right is getting bigger, or anyway more visible and bold, and could be right.

The troubling ascent of the LGBT right wing

Despite the writer's personal stance, the article does contain real and interesting information about the phenomenon, broadly confirming what I wrote, above.

"Pink washing"?

Cute.

He's really saying this on national TV, despite Harvey, despite Irma

Despite the disasters in Texas and Florida and all across the Caribbean.

Fox's Judge Napolitano (Why is he back?) says federal government has no responsibility to aid in natural disasters in even the least way

Why not?

Because then people would just be encouraged to expect "goodies" from the federal government, the constitution would go down, and we would head straight for socialism - by which he seems to mean complete, or at any rate nearly that, replacement of private ownership and control of the means of production with public.

But his reference to "goodies" reveals it's really the distributive egalitarianism typical not only of socialism but of social democracy and indeed our own capitalist progressivism that he sees as a real threat and objects to, rather than public ownership of the means of production, a ludicrous bogey for which there is no significant support in America among the classe politique or the people at large.

All the same, that's his story and he's sticking to it.

It's the story of the entire conservative movement, and has been for decades, at least, front-men that they are for the bottomless greed, unsurpassable arrogance, and shameless mendacity of the American plutocracy.

He and his like would have us believe they there is nothing to be learned from the fact that over a century of progressivism has not created a constituency for anything remotely like socialization of most or all of the economy in America.

He would have us think that more than a century of the US not plunging headlong to the bottom of that alleged but not at all real slippery slope means nothing to him and should mean nothing to us.

He is just that full of shit, and doesn't believe what he's saying any more than Ronald Reagan did when he said creation of Medicare in 1965 would result in a rapid descent to full-on Communism in America.

Still not happening.

Thank goodness.

Ron Chusid urges his readers to vote for a minor party this year

The five percent solution

Voting for Clinton is essentially a vote for war, while Trump has shown no coherent understanding of the issues and the results, of his election are quite unpredictable. 

Voting for one of them will only perpetuate the problem.

. . . .

The best solution is to vote third party. 

Historically third parties have been among the most effective ways to force the major parties to listen to outside views. 

In the twentieth century, Democrats often adopted progressive positions to avoid losing votes to third parties of the left.  

Without that pressure, we are seeing the Democratic Party move steadily toward the right.

This year, only third party candidates such as Jill Stein of the Green Party and Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party have shown any interest in issues such as reducing foreign interventionism, curtailing the surveillance state, or ending the drug war.

. . . .

This isn’t about whether a third party candidate can win as there are huge benefits for a third party to reach 5 percent, which is possibly achievable even if victory is not this year. 

It isn’t even about whether you want Jill Stein or Gary Johnson specifically to be president. 

Neither will be, and the vote is really for their party platforms and to influence the direction of politics in the future.

He says Hillary is a sociocon, which is a gross falsehood.

He says she is a neocon and will not put a stop to America's 15 years of war against Jihaders by just stopping it.

Then so is Obama, and so is Bernie Sanders, and so is every politician who refuses to just walk away as the cancer of Jihad eats up ever more of the Muslim world and increasingly threatens all the rest of us, or walk away from our integration with NATO, our alliances in the Pacific, and our commitment to non-proliferation.

And anyway I don't want the Democrats to be more like the Greens in ideology or agenda.

Nor like the Libertarians.

Later today, the wife and I will drive to the rec center and vote for Hillary Clinton and the straight Democratic ticket.

Yes, high time

Libertarian VP Candidate Weld speaks up for Hillary Clinton

Fmr. Gov. and Libertarian party vice presidential candidate for president William Weld defended Hillary Clinton in an interview with Rachel Maddow. 

Weld, ignoring fundraising attempts by his running mate at the top of the ticket, Gary Johnson, said it is "high time" somebody defends the Democratic nominee for president and he is here to vouch for her.

Still, Rachel didn't quite get what she was asking for.

Nice, though.

MADDOW: 

I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t tell a person in North Carolina or Ohio to vote for Hillary Clinton if the choice they were making was between giving the Libertarian Party 5% or potentially electing Donald Trump because you guys don’t have a chance against Donald Trump and she does and if they vote for you they would be helping to elect Donald Trump. 

The Libertarian Party hasn’t treated you great if they’re putting out statements that you disagree with over your name even now, one week before the election.

 I can’t imagine that your loyalty to them is stronger than your fear of Trump as a President.

WELD: 

Well I’m here vouching for Mrs. Clinton and I think it’s high time somebody did and I’m doing it based on my personal experience with her and I think she deserves to have people vouch for her other than members of the Democratic National Committee so I’m here to do that.

The increasing rejection of democracy by the right wing radicals of the American so-called "conservative" movement

The Right Is Giving Up on Democracy

Suspicion of the democratic system is driven by the fear that white Christian America is facing demographic doom.

Sure, but it was already openly out there in Romney's time that it was takers getting to vote that made it impossible to abolish entitlements and the Welfare State, and roll back progressivism all the way to McKinley's time.

And there are far more white takers than nonwhite, my friends.

It is a right wing commonplace in America today, it is very dogma, that it is illegitimate corruption for the masses to vote for economic and social policies that favor their interests, but personal and civic virtue for the plutes and anyone they can hoodwink into it to vote for policies that favor the rich and the mighty.

Recall that even Romney, an alleged moderate of the Republican Party, was channeling that right wing radical, Ayn Rand, as does everyone today who is devoted to what fraudulently calls itself the American conservative movement.

The idea is out there and has been for many decades that when democracy goes so far as to allow the masses to lock in progressivism it has gone too far, it is illegitimate, it is an intolerable corruption.

That right wing idea, foolish, cruel, stupid, and not at all conservative, widespread even among the soi-disant conservative masses who themselves are ordinary people, has been undermining not only elite but public faith in democracy for many, many decades.

That Iron Man of the right of his age and place, Bismark, knew the proper conservative move was adopt much of the agenda of the Social Democrats in order to maintain stability and retain the loyalty and obedience of the masses to his creation, the German Empire of the Hohenzollern dynasty.

That arch right-winger so beloved of Ayn Rand, Aristotle, taught a lesson she ignored, and a point echoed by that idol of libertarians, John Stuart Mill, that the mixed state is best, and must necessarily allow for enough democracy for the great body of the people to protect themselves from the arrogance, cruelty, selfishness, and greed of the rich, and thus ensure a necessary condition for any durable social order.

Even that theorist of absolutism and monarchy, Thomas Hobbes, was crystal clear that when the rich are so grasping and pitiless as to refuse to others any adequate portion of what they have, however far in excess of genuine need, they provoke crime, disorder, rebellion, and what he thought the greatest of evils, civil war, thus making themselves the enemies of peace and putting themselves in direct conflict with the first law of nature, that we are to seek peace, and pursue it.

On the other hand, few are the ordinary people of America who can be convinced to vote to sink themselves for the benefit of the rich, when the question is put quite like that.

More can be brought to boil themselves in oil if it is put to them that the Democrats, the Party of the People, are in fact the party of their enemies, global economic elites and vast swarms of hate-driven nonwhites.

And that is what the entire deceptively labeled "conservative movement" has been doing for many, many years, now, both the Wall Street wing of the WSJ and The National Review and the paleocon wing of Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, and the fringe elements of both.

It is imperative to understand that these people and their movement are not conservatives.

They have all along been very clear they want to abolish in America rather than fund Obamacare, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, the Department of Education, the EPA, the vast establishment of public education, and all the other measures and establishments, whether regulatory or redistributive, commonly taken by progressive governments around the world to ensure that democratic capitalism is possible by ensuring that capitalism does not become so rapacious, so cruel, and so vicious that it is acceptable to no one but the capitalists, themselves, and the gunmen they must hire to shoot the people down.

They understand fully that our political system is too democratic to make that project at all plausible.

Increasingly, the project is more important to them than democracy.

Suspicion of the democratic system is so pervasive on the right because it’s driven by the fear that white Christian America is facing demographic doom. 

The evidence is right there in the election results: Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, and if current polling trends hold, the GOP will be batting one for seven when the results come in on November 8. 

Thanks to gerrymandering, Republicans may hold on to a U.S. House majority for a while, and they’ll remain competitive in state capitols in the near future. 

But a whites-only party can’t win national elections. 

And over time, the GOP’s congressional and state fortresses will crumble if the party doesn’t change dramatically. 

Or if the democratic system doesn’t change dramatically. 

As conservative writer Byron York noted in the Washington Examiner in May, there’s been an upsurge on the right of calls for “a test for voting, limited-participation elections, condemnations of democracy in general.” 

The anti-democratic measures have been taken up with especial fervor by anti-Trump writers like David Harsanyi, Jonah Goldberg, and Keven D. Williamson, all frequent contributors to The National Review.

Go ahead and read the whole of Jeet Heer's piece.

An eye-opener, truly.

His only and central mistake is to see too much of race where what fundamentally moves most of the elites and their mouthpieces of the right is a refusal to accept a capitalist regime in which social harmony and order are bought by throttling the greed of the haves for the sake of the have-nots.

What? Atlas Shrugged?

That boring, insipid, perverse tripe is his favorite novel?

Not Les Miserables or The Grapes of Wrath?

And they made him Speaker of the House?

Well, it wasn't The Turner Diaries, anyway.

It is not a surprise for a gay man to be hostile to women

Peter Thiel faces Silicon Valley backlash after pledging $1.25m to Trump

This guy seems to be serious.

And what do you know?

Another conservative - this one a libertarian plutocrat, quelle surprise - who thinks the massive and unshakable rejection of his politics by the voters proves there's something wrong with democracy.

The minor parties in the US are pretend parties for pretend candidates

What to watch at CNN's Libertarian town hall

People who know perfectly well from the outset of their campaigns all the way to the end that the chance of them actually getting to the Oval Office is effectively nil are pretend candidates, running at the top of the pretend tickets of pretend parties.

Since everybody knows the whole thing is a costume party, a tongue-in-cheek, Halloween, or a Star Trek convention, nobody cares and everyone knows it is utterly irrelevant to ask whether the candidates are in the least ready for the job.

Any jackass who can bray can run, no foul/no harm, and a good laugh is had by all.

But the minor parties do have one serious function in the American system, giving voters totally alienated from or enraged at "the system" a way to lodge a recognizable protest vote that signals, by their choice of pretend party or candidate, what sort of America they would rather have than the one we actually do have, the America loved, desired, or at any rate preferred by the vast and often silent majorities of the center.

Trump, a man totally unsuited for the actual job, is a pretend candidate who took over the Republican Party, itself already halfway to being a pretend party by its utter loathing of the real America, and has put America in real danger of having a clown move into the White House.

Trump should have run frankly as a protest candidate on a minor party - say, the Reform Party - ticket, as the original of whom he is an epigone did in the election of 2000.

That same original had before then run in the primaries of the Republican Party, but in those days the party did not yet so thoroughly and exclusively represent the furious alienation of ignorant hillbillies and white rust-belt failures, so he was twice repudiated by the GOP.

Buchananism gone wild

Imagine a Trump victory.

Imagine Il Duce shut down immigration altogether, allowing only a trickle of Jewish or Christian European whites.

Foreign bleating and domestic unrest inspired by the left and its client minorities would be the worst consequences.

Who refuses to deal with the Saudis, the Japanese, or anyone else who refuses immigration or otherwise rejects anything threatening to racial, cultural, or religious identity?

Threats of worse are liberal or libertarian lies, or reflections of our rulers' fears of our increasingly and already diverse population.

Still, and though this is not the worst that might happen with a Trump presidency, it's not a desirable future.

What's the worst?

Putin invades the Baltic states, Scandinavians back off from NATO and seek rapprochement with Russia.

China takes all the disputed islands.

North Korea lobs missiles at the South and, reading that Trump wants no part of another Korean War, invades.

Japan makes building nukes in a hurry its top military priority and, seeking accommodations with China and Russia, suggests to a very willing Trump it's time for US forces to leave Okinawa.

Both Iran and Saudi Arabia announce nuclear weapons programs and Trump shrugs.

Somebody in Pakistan provides the makings for radiological weapons to ISIS and Homeland Security, hearing chatter, justifiably freaks.

Consequences of Buchananism.

Even MSNBC is talking about this

Gary Johnson's Libertarian candidacy.

A Fox poll shows him getting 10% of the vote, but not enabling a Democratic victory.

Trump still wins in that three way race.

But an even more radical version of Wall Street conservatism would get a lot of publicity, in some measure diminishing any tendency of Trump's candidacy or even a Trump victory to make the GOP less of a radical right tool of counter-revolution against Big Government, entitlements, and a century of progressivism.

At a guess, the folks at Reasonmag and CATO consider this added publicity for the pure strain of their ideological virus a good thing.

Civil liberties surenchère

First they came for the iPhones.

Ron Paul is a crank.

It's one thing to refuse without a warrant or other lawful compulsion.

But to insist on an absolute right like this is stupid.

Libertarians want plutocrats and corporations to be stronger than the government in everything that matters.

Let them die

The capitalist, free market, libertarian, Republican solution to hunger, homelessness, and disease among the poor will simply be extended to the class of permanently unemployed humans created by successful robotics.

If that gets to be everyone it won't matter.

An unemployed capitalist is rolling in dough.

The robot economy that he owns produces goods and services exclusively for him.

An unemployed prole is dog food for the capitalist's poodle.

AI 'could leave half of world unemployed'

All that until the revolt of the machines, the big day when the robots wipe out their capitalist owners.

Trumbo

An extremely sympathetic Andrea Mitchell helped Brian Cranston and the movie's author damn utterly the anti-communism of the Blacklist years.

What at the time was only the line of the Communist Party has since become dogma enforced by PC.

The rise of libertarianism has played a supporting role, too, selling retrospective anti-anti-communism to America.

Conservatives vs Libertarians vs Liberals

A priority for social conservatives is using law and government policy to encourage if not actually require marriage and strengthen the family, with reproduction and parental child-rearing understood as the latter's chief though not only tasks.

Historically, that concern has always been fundamental to any recognizable conservatism sans phrase, anywhere in the civilized world.

Libertarians gladly sacrifice individual liberty to property and the market while liberals sacrifice it to claims of racial, social, and sexual justice.

But neither is willing to sacrifice it in any serious degree to this conservative aim.