Category Archives: Argument

Suleimani: America Is Judge, Jury And Executioner; Decides Who Lives, Who Dies

America, Argument, Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iraq, Republicans

“Suleimani deserved to die.” That’s the consensus on Fox News. It’s also how assorted commentators on the channel prefaced their “positions” on the killing of this Iranian.

Major General Qassim Suleimani was assassinated by a US drone air strike at the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP).

Even the great Tucker Carlson—the only mainstream hope for us Old Right, America First, anti-war sorts—framed the taking out of Suleimani as the killing of a bad guy by good guys:

“There are an awful lot of bad people in this world. We can’t kill them all, it’s not our job.”

However you finesse it, the premise of Tucker’s statement is that the American government, and the cognoscenti who live in symbiosis with it, get to adjudicate who’s bad and who’s good in the world. The debate is never over right or wrong, but over whether our universal American Judges should or shouldn’t act on their immutably just moral calls.

Even Tucker, whose antiwar sentiments are laudable, conceded that this Suleimani guy probably needed killing, which is the same thing Iraqis old enough to remember America’s destruction of Iraq, circa 2003, would say about President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld.

So who’s right? Or must we accept that it is up to the United States government and its ruling elites to determine who lives and who dies around the world.

The atavistic argument—“Suleimani deserved to die”—made on Fox News holds true only if you believe that the US is the repository of an international and universal code of law and is deputized to uphold this code of law.

This primitive argument is true ONLY if you believe the US government is universal judge, jury and executioner, deciding who may live and who must die the world over.

As to whether the US government has a right to eliminate a state actor by declaring him a “terrorist”:

Like it or not, Suleimani was an Iranian state actor, the equivalent of our Special Operations Commander.

We would not tolerate Iranians designating America’s Special Operations Commander, Gen. Richard D. Clarke, as a terrorist, although they may have plenty reasons to do so.

Our Special Operations forces and their command encroach on the Iranian neighborhood much more so than Iranians and their special forces encroach on American territory.

If Iranians took out America’s Special Operations Commander somewhere in North America—we would definitely consider it an act of war by Iran.

* Image courtesy BBC News.

UPDATED (9/30/019): Mises Institute in Seattle: Why American Democracy Fails

America, Ancient History, Argument, Democracy, Ilana Mercer, Intelligence

I spoke at the Mises Institute’s annual gathering in Bellevue, Washington, Saturday, September 14.

I was asked to address the dumbing down inherent in democracy.  The title of my presentation was “How Democracy Made Us Dumb,” or “Democracy As Idiocracy.”

Indeed, the greatest thinkers (before Hans-Hermann Hoppe)—the Athenian philosophers—distrusted democracy. The Athenian thinkers held that democracy “distrusts ability and has a reverence for numbers over knowledge.” The Founders agreed.

Thinking in opposition to democracy is part of our heritage, yet you won’t hear a critique of democracy in mainstream circles, conservative or liberal.

Many thanks to Jeff Diest for his introduction—and for including me in this well-attended event. Liberty still flickers in Washington State.

The podcast is up. A YouTube is to follow.

UPDATE (9/30/019): YouTube of “How Democracy Made Us Dumb.”

The ‘Demographic Decline’ Argument For Mass Immigration

Argument, IMMIGRATION, The West, Welfare

The “demographic decline” argument, in the context of the immigration S.O.S, has been used as an excuse to swamp—and weaken—native European populations. From the fact that a nation isn’t breeding to some state-set, desired level—it doesn’t follow that said nation “deserves” to be swamped with better breeders.

Mark Steyn used to be a proponent of this non-argument. I dissected his fallacy in “Beck, Wilders, and His Boosters’ Blind Spot”:

I am told that I don’t understand Mr. Steyn of the dooms-day demographics. So I listened to his “End of Europe” lectures, in which he vividly describes the multitudes of Muslims going forth to North America and Western Europe to be fruitful and multiply and push for Islam. Their Pan-Islamist identity trumps their new assumed identity. Because of numbers, Mark asserts, History is on the march in the Muslim direction. By 2030 much of what we think of as the developed world will be part of the Muslim world.

Here Steyn hits a brick wall. Other than making babies at home and total war abroad, he proposes nothing much at all. Oh yes, if you’re not already fighting (futilely, in my opinion) in Iraq and Afghanistan, you can show your marbles by publishing offensive cartoons, making rightwing movies, and writing right-wing text.

The “One-Man Global Content Provider” is wrong. Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital — people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy.

Declining birth rates?and their antidote; the mass immigration imperative?are the excuses statists make for persevering with immigration policies that are guaranteed to destroy western civil society and shore up the State.

If, as Wilders and Steyn contend, “Islam is a problematic religion; every school of Islam is basically at its core jihadist; and the religion is much closer to a conventional imperial project than to a faith” ? its religionists must be kept out. State-engineered mass immigration must be halted.

Yes, postmodernism, political correctness, and relativism hobble the West. Post-colonialism, however, affords it the opportunity to redraw the frontiers at the borders. This is the Wilders project. It has yet to be embraced fully by his American boosters. As Steyn has openly conceded, “For a notorious blowhard, I can go a bit cryptic or (according to taste) wimpy when invited to confront that particular subject head on.

When he cops to being “wimpy,” Steyn means on immigration. He and others are latecomers to the immigration S.O.S.

‘Identity Politics’: A Term Conservatives Use To MASK Anti-Whiteness

Ann Coulter, Argument, Conservatism, Critique, Race, Racism, Republicans

Stephen W. Carson asks an interesting question on Twitter (would that intellectual curiosity abounded), relating to the column, “It’s Not ‘Identity Politics,’ It’s Anti-White Politics”:

I would appreciate your perspective though.
Do you agree that “identity politics” is a thing?
If so, what patterns have you seen in “identity politics”?

9:44 AM – 22 May 2019

Hi, @RadicalLib: I believe the term “identity politics, which originated in academia, has become a cliche, and is also now nonsensical. It is used mainly by humdrum conservatives. Why do they use it? Probably because they, consciously or unconsciously, do not want to come to terms with the fact that our politics are almost exclusively anti-white, not anti-Other more exotic identities.

It’s also considered politically incorrect or “racist” to argue that there is a dangerous, anti-white sentiment among the cohort Ann Coulter has termed “our cultural overlords.” (“It might be of some concern to the rapidly diminishing white population,” she wrote, “that our cultural overlords are so tormented by ‘whiteness.'”)

Media conservatives refuse to cop to “anti-white politics,” for fear of being called racist.

Also, most Cons are mere maze rats. Not smart, they adopt Party positions without much thought; align along the positional grooves.

But “anti-white politics” it is. Here’s what Cons do as a method:

They to pretend that it’s all about Democratic politics. Dems are dividing us, the Cons screech. Thus do the Cons virtue-signal their position as seekers of national unity. We’re all in this together.  No we’re not. As I wrote in the above column,

It’s not Identity Politics; it’s anti-white politics. For, blacks are not being pitted against Hispanics. Hispanics aren’t being sicced on Asians & Ameri-Indians aren’t being urged to attack the groups just mentioned. Rather, they’re all piling on honky.

A similar tack, taken, incidentally, by both radio talker Tammy Bruce and author J.  D. Vance on the Tucker Carlson Show, is to pivot away from race and anti-white hatred. To those who cleave closely to the contour of an argument, the pivot will seem inorganic. But to the Republican maze rat it’s rote.

To wit, Bruce was quizzed about Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke’s apology over “whiteness.” Tammy B. was expected to answer as to why men like Beto keep apologizing. (She ought to have begun by pointing out that Black men don’t apologize for existing.) Instead, Tammy pivoted from whiteness (the thing that informed O’Rourke’s apology) to … wait for this: “Humanity.”

It’s a Democrat thing, asserted Bruce, to apologize for the sins of humanity. Climate change, for instance. (At that point in the show, I scratched my head and wondered how she got from A to B.)

Incidentally, the questions posed to Beto by Republican Meghan McCain (the great philosopher) and her Republican sisters, were indistinguishable from the questions with which any black, lady Democrat would harangue the meek Beto: “Atone for your privilege, your sexism … if you were a woman, you’d not get away with being so audaciously Beto, blah, blah.”)

No. Our politics are brutally anti-white. I Wrote a book about what will come of this—and the perils of not naming the Beast. 

A RECENT RELATED ARTICLE is:  “The Demonization Of Whites By Mrs. Bill Gates & Other Dangerous Idiots.“