Larry Auster has gone to town on me and my latest article, “The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt.” The “man’s” methods are devious. He asserts in the absence of textual proof, and proceeds to draw deductions that fit these assertions and his formulaic theories, irrespective of the text (my own) that these fanciful deductions contradict.
I generally ignore Auster’s periodic, irrational fits of pique, however, this time the “man” has outdone himself for intellectual dishonesty, systematically misrepresenting my positions as a paleolibertarian (classical liberal) who is unusual in her critique of Ron Paul on matters of race, Islam, immigration, you name it. Since my positions are a mouse click away, and easily excerpted from the Ron Paul Articles archive, and the attendant blog archives—I have no choice but to presume that Auster is, again, an incompetent or a malicious and fulminating liar.
Auster’s conclusions are often wrong because they are premised not on reality, objective facts, and first principles, but on a formulaic worldview which he foists on the facts. Backward is Auster for reasoning backwards. Take the overwhelming evidence that Amanda Knox, her paramour and a black man, with whom she likely cavorted as well, all partook in the kinky slaughter of a girl from a good family, who disliked Auster’s favorite little American whore.
The blood evidence was solid (here). But Auster, like the liberal media he abhors, elevated this repulsive product of a liberal upbringing to Madonna because of her … whiteness, thus offering an “if B, then A argument” in her favor—and against physical and circumstantial evidence. If whites and blacks are implicated in the same murder—implicate the black man to the exclusion of the whites, and evidence be damned.
As explained about the man’s method, he reasons not from fact but from a rigid, formulaic worldview.
Barefaced liar—or perhaps a mere incompetent—that he appears to be, Auster provides links to items referenced, but then lies about what the links say, relying, seemingly, on his readers to accept his say-so, rather than read the material to which he links. This is, after all, the Age of the idiot, and Auster is a prime exhibit.
For example, Auster attributes to me an Ann Coulter quote (or funny joke), featured on my blog, and encircled in quotation marks. He writes that “she [me] “suggests that Amanda Knox was saying, like O.J. Simpson, that now that she had been acquitted she was going to look for the ‘real’ killer.” For one, the dour (compromised) Auster mistakes a witticism for a truism, and attributes to me an Ann Coulter example of the first. Is Auster careless and slack in his attempts to misrepresent? Malevolent? Or perhaps both? He certainly is humorless.
For another, Auster, like a lot of liberals, appears to be so taken by the little, loose, manifestly sociopathic (read her diary as did the long-suffering David Jones of the British Mail Online!), narcissistic Knox—that, in all seriousness, he argues her “positions”: the little darling, whines Auster, has never said what Coulter, in jest, attributed to “America’s Angelic O.J.”
Now, as this writer has documented extensively in a book about South Africa, which most conservatives like Auster have ignored—befitting the insular, petty, provincial penmen many of them are—blacks commit crimes disproportionately to their numbers in the population at large. (And Hate crimes, in particular, are a unidirectional affair: black on white.)
But, as should be obvious even to Auster, this general truism is no license to ignore evidence of a collaborative crime committed by a white woman and her accomplices, a black and white man respectively. Drunk with their sexual and social powers, have white, liberal women never been known to act on their inner depravity? Please! Ignoramus Auster might wish to trace the research done on the correlation between violent aggression and the pathological levels of narcissistic self-esteem (un-moored from reality) common among American youngsters.
Next, Auster attacks this statement in “The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt.”:
The hypocrisy in [our intervention in Egypt] is that we Americans do not live under the Athenian democracy seemingly promoted abroad. On the contrary, we the people labor under a highly evolved technocratic, militarized Managerial State, which is far more efficient in encroaching on its citizens than are the tin-pot dictators,who’ve been built-up into mega-monsters in infantile, Disneyfied minds. Given the US’s record-breaking incarceration rates, your average Egyptian under Mubarak or Libyan under Gadhafi was probably less likely than his American counterpart to be jailed, harassed or have a threatening encounter with the state’s emissaries
To that Auster infarcts, writing that,
“So Mercer signs onto the anti-American left’s standard lie that America is more oppressive than Muslim dictatorships, and that, as stated by the despicable Ron Paul, whom she supports, the proof of America’s oppressiveness–of its lack of the sacred libertarian liberty–is that it keeps lots of criminals in prison where they cannot endanger society.”
The “anti-American” pejorative is a standards smear among weak-minded statists, who conflate the American state AND the American people. It is a substitute for substantive argument.
“My larger point” in the quoted article was one of hypocrisy. However, it is well known that the state in these countries is a disorganized affair, and that it is easier to live off the grid in a country where the state is not as organized in its ability to surveil and track down its citizens. Moreover, Auster, a statist, might wish to consult James Burnham’s seminal text, “The Managerial Revolution.”” The concept of the all-controlling American Managerial State is an uncontroversial strand in conservative thinking, not merely in “paleo-libertarian” thought, as Lawrence-lies-a lot asserts.
Finally, a new low. This worm of a man offers his biggest mind fuck vis-a-vis my positions. The “argument” proceeds to deceive as follows: The method in the Auster quote below is to insinuate something nowhere in evidence in my documented positions, and then go on to further offer deductions gleaned from the sly, unsubstantiated insinuation just introduced.
As follows:
“Mercer has not quite gone to the ultimate Ron Paul / liberal lie that America is racist because it imprisons blacks ‘disproportionately.’ [sly insinuation] However, given other recent dismissive statements she’s made about “racialists,” … I would not be surprised if she goes along with that Paul position as well …The whole entry at her blog is worth reading to get an idea of Mercer’s emerging mindset.”
Having made a sly underhanded insinuation about something nowhere apparent in my writing—Auster proceeds to warn his readers to be on the lookout for more in this vein.
Here, however, are my actual appalled comments on, as I put it, “the leftist rant [Paul] delivered in New Hampshire about how drug laws are enforced in the United States, pointing out that black men are incarcerated at disproportionate rates. (‘How many times have you seen the white rich person get the electric chair?” he asked. “If we really want to be concerned with racism…we ought to look at the drug laws.’)”:
“I said on 01.07.12 that, as a rightist I abjure anti-drug laws on the grounds that they are wrong, not racist. The fact that these laws ensnare blacks is because blacks are more likely to violate them by dealing drugs or engaging in violence around commerce in drugs, not necessarily because all cops are racists.
Cops deal with the reality of crime. It is an error—and wrong—to accuse them all of targeting blacks when the latter actually commit more crimes in proportion to their numbers in the population. This is also a losing strategy with rightists. It is akin to aping Obama, who went hell-for-leather at Sgt. James Crowley, calling him a racist for mishandling his pal Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. That strategy helped BHO lose the midterms.”
And here again, under the blog-post “Update” titled “The Homo-eroticism of Left-Liberalism,” I write in even stronger terms about Paul’s racial ramrodding of white America:
“As for Paul’s contention, last night, that blacks suffer most from wars waged. I was almost sick. More lefty nonsense. Try poor white kids from the South, who are also least likely to get into college even when they whip black applicants and rich whites with their test results.
There is nothing worse than a left liberal man—he’ll sell his mother for the little pat on the head from the lefty establishment. He’ll watch his son near death because of black racism, against which he never warned the poor soft boy, yet he will reach out to his son’s killer.
I am beginning to think that left-liberal men who keep scrutinizing themselves for signs of racism against their black accusers, and accuse others like themselves of the same—actually derive a homo-erotic kick of bowing and scraping to those accusers.”
I hold civilized, rational, logical (if spirited) exchange of differences to be a cornerstone of the Western tradition. In this spirit, I have generally been collegial to Auster—approaching him politely and in private over our disagreements, even donating small sums to his often interesting and worthy efforts. In his methods, however, Auster is a disgrace to a tradition he presumes to uphold. (Since he is obviously no gentleman in debate, I fully expect Auster to be quite capable of sharing private mail.)
In future, Lawrence-Lies-A-Lot might want to confine his sub-intelligent, unsubstantiated “critiques” to malevolent mental midgets like himself.
UPDATE I (Feb. 13): To be fair to Auster, an intellectual courtesy one should never expect him to return, I share many of his reservations about the paleo community. For over a decade, I’ve written a quality, consistently hardcore, paleolibertarian column, which no paleo site carries. Not one. This is quite astonishing, if you think of it. It says a great deal about the ossified mindset within this community. Assorted sites will feature, year-in and year-out, the same establishment columns. Or choose young, more malleable mediocrities. But they avoid like the plague the weekly output of a hard-right Jewish woman.
I’ve detailed the shameful episode of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot’s” review by a scion of the movement—from the many factoids to the skewed, diasporic, Jewey emphasis, utterly absent in my book. The review was not about my book, but was likely written to fit the webmaster’s tastes. Yes, paleos have their Court Jews. And this scribe is temperamentally not suited to obedience.
I also discovered a repulsive anti-Semitic strain on a paleo radio show. The host Jewed my book; much to my surprise, I discovered that I ought to have written about how the Jews, single-handedly, caused the demise of the Old South Africa. Presumably, in the same way they stacked the Episcopal Church with homosexuals. The host threw quite a few antisemitic canards at me not least that I was writing for profit (I’ve still not broken even).
UPDATE II (Feb. 16): Banish the thought: American youngsters would never thrill kill.
Take the recent case of Alyssa Bustamante, convicted this month of murdering her 9-year-old neighbor Elizabeth Olten. The crime has been portrayed as a “thrill kill” and doubtless there was an aspect of that to the murder. Bustamante, fifteen years old at the time, set out to murder two children; she had excavated two graves in a nearby woods days in advance. The teen then used her younger sister to lure Elizabeth from the Olten home. At that point Bustamante beat the nine-year-old, stabbed her, slit her throat and carried her corpse off to the woods. An incredible feat of strength for a slight girl of 15.
Where Auster is most challenged in disputing the degree to which Americans are harassed and threatened is his apparent ignorance of the fact that the default response amongst America’s law enforcement agencies is enforcement not contemplative evaluation. Where it is patently obvious that the so-called violation is contrary to English common law, there America’s law enforcement agencies dwell.
Although more and more receptive as I toil away, I often must re-explain that just because we can do something, does not mean that we should do something. It is an obsession with low lying fruit that plagues not only America’s law enforcement agencies, but the entire government apparatus.
It is forgotten how this happens not most often at TSA checkpoints and in deliberations about terrorism, but in thousands of contacts between Americans and local law enforcement agencies each day. The local government apparatus certainly never considers what the possible outcome will be and certainly never considers what role local government should have in one’s life.
Violent crime in America has been trending downward for some years now. Prolly has something to do with that “disproportionate” imprisonment rate for young black males, combined with Three Strikes laws and the like. As for Larry A., I’ve heard he has late stage cancer; hard to think straight when your under chemo.
Auster doesn’t say why Ron Paul is “despicable” (a favorite term of Newt Gingrich and Daffy Duck) and I guess you are borderline despicable although you denounced Ron Paul on the issue of drug and race.
I guess it is interesting to speculate on the relative status of freedom/democracy between the US and other countries. We now have a government that violates the 5th Amendment to confiscate private property for business, violates the 4th Amendment at every airport; photographs and tracks Americans; has held some without due process; has used coercive interrogation; has a President who issues health care “rules” and lightbulb “rules” without Congress and enforces those rules; and a President who makes wars without Congress.
I guess as long as we are free to COMPLAIN about the loss of freedom, that makes us free. I guess that authoritarianism with the right to blog is good enough for Auster and any more vociferous complaining a la Ron Paul is “despicable”.
I really liked your slap-down of Larry Auster. Larry exhibits the worst qualities of a NY Jew: shrillness, hysteria, inability to tolerate criticism of oneself, the State of Israel, and the Jewish people, admiration of such liberal/neocon secular saints as Lincoln.
There’s no paleoconservative or paleolibertarian who hasn’t been insulted, harangued, misquoted, or disparaged by Auster.
Before taking Mr. Auster too seriously, one should remember that Lawrence Auster is an unabashed Conservative. Conservatives and Libertarians are natural enemies. Conservatives and Libertarians only hold free trade and immigration in common and that is not completely correct. I should mention that Neo-cons and left (Neo) Libertarians agree on open borders and managed trade to separate the internal differences and similarities a little better. Conservatives are willing to compromise free trade with government/corporation as free trade. Immigration is iffy too. When I read his article referencing you, I had the definite impression that you were his ‘straw man.’ He used you in his example to spew his hate on all Libertarians. In his dissertation, The Conservative State is all powerful and right; justified by its existence and anyone that impugns the Conservative State is Anti-American. You stepped on his toes and the smear is the only possible retaliation.
Ilana,
I think he is correct about the Knox case. It is obvious that the black petty criminal acted alone and was inept in covering up his tracks. He even used the bathroom.
Knox and her boyfriend were railroaded by incompetent officals who were desparate to convict a ‘bad’ american girl.