Category Archives: Argument

UPDATED (7/10): LinkedIn: Stanton Peele On ILANA And Addiction

Argument, Classical Liberalism, Drug War, Healthcare, Ilana Mercer, Intellectualism, The Therapuetic State

Thank you, Stanton Peele, PhD., for an inspired LinkedIn review. We represent an era of intellectuals in which left and right had so much in common, Stanton being a 1960s liberal; myself a 19th Century classical liberal.

“Ilana Mercer is the most independent thinker of the 21st century — she was that in the 20th. She saw a path that we didn’t follow away from myths of mental illness and incorrigible international conflict. But we have instead followed the roads she eschewed while she, the Cheshire Cat watched grimacing and catcalling our missteps. Need I say we require her insights more than ever?”~ STANTON PEELE, PhD., J.D., best-selling author, addiction expert (review on LinkedIn)

Dr. Peele is the only theorist and clinician I’ve ever respected on the vexing matter of addiction–now a thriving industry with poor outcomes, increasingly, if reflexively, vested in maintaining dysfunction.

I recognized Stanton for the outstanding thinker he is when I read and wrote about his seminal and best work, “Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control .”

Calgary Herald readers were irate, at the time. The same readers (whom I loved) were as annoyed when I wrote about ADHD, in 1999. Boy, are people vested in a  medical diagnosis for legitimizing and authenticating all aspects of The Self. I continue to hold Dr. Peele as the best thinker on the subject. Like myself, he has mentored (knowingly and unknowingly) followers who have adopted his thinking.

Some mentions are here:

“Addictions Are About Behavior, Not Disease” (June 22, 2000)

Medical Mumbo Jumbo Does Not Explain Addiction” (June 29, 2000)

Charlie Sheen’s Out of the AA ‘Troll Hole’” (March 4, 2011)

Addicted To The Drug War” is a wide-ranging libertarian think piece written originally for the Mises Institute in 2001. A section, “ADDICTION: VICE OR DISEASE?” is inspired by Stanton Peele’s work.

MORE on the drug war.

MORE on the Therapeutic State and Industry (almost indistinguishable).

UPDATE (7/10): In reply to the Comment:  I do not know any thinker, other than those who followed the pioneers I’m citing here, who questioned philosophical fundamentals of mental disease and addiction, as Dr. Peele does and as my sweet, kind friend, the genius Thomas Szasz (RIP) did in his monumental works. (R.D Laing was a loon):

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2012/09/im-sad-not-libya-israel-9-11/

I’ve not looking for exposes; I’m looking for analytical truth to bolster the empirical. That’s my method; it’s theirs. Dr. Szasz was the pioneering genius. His books were prescribed at my South African alma mater. Now it has reverted to the anti-intellectual American drek, namely that of diseasing all aspects of behavior.

“Broken Brains” (2002)

UPDATE III (7/4/022): NEW COLUMN: Should Deranged, Moronic Females Really Be Procreating?

Abortion, Argument, Conservatism, Constitution, COVID-19, Crime, Gender, Government, libertarianism, Morality, Paleoconservatism, Sex, Taxation

New column is, “Should Deranged, Moronic Females Really Be Procreating?” It’s featured on WND.COM and was the feature article on The Unz Review.

Excerpt:

The ethical elegance of the libertarian argument was voiced before in this space:

However much one disdains abortion, one can’t get away from the matter of self-ownership. You simply have no right to take custody of an adult’s body. An adult woman, however loathsome, either owns herself and everything inside her or doesn’t. You can’t “own” yourself with the exception of your uterus or in conjunction with other busybodies.

Thus, theoretically, “Women have the right to screw and scrape out their insides to their heart’s content.” With a proviso: Americans who oppose abortion must be similarly respected in their rights of self-ownership. Taxpayers who oppose the procedure ought to have an equal right to dispense of what is theirs—their property—in accordance with the dictates of their conscience.

Trojans, Trivora or termination: An American woman has the right to purchase contraception, abortifacients and abortions, provided … she pays for them. For like herself, America is packed with many other sovereign individuals, some of whom do not approve of these products and procedures.

So, while adult women ought to be able to terminate their pregnancies—always to the exclusion of late-term infanticide—what America’s manifestly silly sex does not have the right to do is to rope conscientious objectors into supplying them with or paying for their reproductive choices. The rights of self-ownership and freedom of conscience ought to apply on both sides of the abortion debate.

Late-term abortion, generally, must always be outlawed. (I realize, dear reader, that I owe you argument, not assertion, which, alas, is what I’ve provided.) One could argue that, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the deciding case brought before the SCOTUS, did concern late-term abortion, with the state of Mississippi banning abortion after 15 weeks, pursuant to which, “The Jackson clinic and one of its doctors sued Mississippi officials in federal court, saying the state’s law was unconstitutional. A federal district court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the clinic, blocking Mississippi’s law. But the state appealed to the Supreme Court, which put the case on its docket.” …

… MORE. New column is, “Should Deranged, Moronic Females Really Be Procreating?” It’s on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

Abelard Lindsey writes: “This article makes clear that conservatives can be as off in la-la land as the liberal-left.”

Writes @Lisalazuli on GETTR: “@ILANAMercer, “You tackled the abortion issue very bravely, this is the most sane [sic] opinion I’ve heard.”

NOT Mother Material: Women Who Behave Worse Than Primates In Estrus

Abortion, Africa, Argument, Constitution, COVID-19, Crime, Democrats, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Federalism, Law, Republicans, Sex

That the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) finally delivered a decision returning and restoring power to the states on this one issue, abortion, is as it should be. If her state outlaws abortion; a woman can still board a Greyhound bus to get the procedure elsewhere.

The ethical elegance of the libertarian argument has been reiterated before in this space:

“Women have the right to screw and scrape out their insides to their heart’s content.”

Trojans, Trivora or a termination: An Americans woman has the right to purchase contraception, abortifacients and abortions, provided … she pays for them. For like herself, America is packed with many other sovereign individuals. Some of these individuals do not approve of the products and procedures mentioned. Americans who oppose contraception, abortifacients and abortion must be similarly respected in their rights of self-ownership.

Taxpayers who oppose these products and procedures ought to have an equal right to dispense of what is theirs—their property—in accordance with the dictates of their conscience. America’s adult women may terminate their pregnancies (to the exclusion of late-term infanticide).

What America’s manifestly silly sex does not have the right to do is to rope other, presumably free Americans into supplying them with or paying for their reproductive choices. The rights of self-ownership and freedom of conscience apply to all Americans.

Late-term abortion, generally, must always be outlawed (I realize I owe you argument, yet have provided only assertion. My apologies; you’ll have to wait).  One could argue that, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the deciding case brought before the SCOTUS, did concern late-term abortion, with the state of Mississippi banning abortion after 15 weeks:

The Jackson clinic and one of its doctors sued Mississippi officials in federal court, saying the state’s law was unconstitutional.
A federal district court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the clinic, blocking Mississippi’s law. But the state appealed to the Supreme Court, which put the case on its docket.

Call it real federalism—on this one vexing issue—although, any reluctant state taxpayers will still be on the hook for such services. And , federalism has hardly been revived. Powers have never been more concentrated in the Federal Frankenstein, which has never been more intractable and tyrannical.

Have we not just lived through three years in which the Pharma State has consolidated power as never before? On pain of taking the Covid jab, the state has de facto established license to shutter a subject’s business, deny him freedom of movement, quarantine, fire, and separate him from loved ones. Sorry: Abortion does not rate a mention on a serious country’s scale of priorities.

Law is force. Outlawing abortion, in the midst of a true crime wave, and a systemic breakdown in ordered liberty, implies the creation of a new category of criminal, consisting of the abortion seeking “spiteful mutants” and their healthcare aids, to be jailed for the commission of an abortion.

Another pesky detail: However much one disdains abortion, one can’t get away from self-ownership. You have no right to take custody of another’s body. A woman, however loathsome, either owns herself and everything in her or doesn’t. You can’t “own” yourself in conjunction with other busybodies.

The piss-poor quality of the now-overturned Roe V. Wade jurisprudence has never been in question. Wrote a perspicacious reader: “There were 50 state laws on abortion until the Republican-appointed Harry Blackmun decided to merge the musings of his Mayo Clinic physician buddies and the vaguely written 14th Amendment into a stream-of-consciousness halachic decision known as Roe v. Wade. Since then, 55% of black pregnancies get aborted compared to a third of Hispanics and 11% of white.”

These statistics are significant in the context of crime. John J. Donohue and Steven D. Levitt (2001) had established that “the legalization of abortion, in the early 1970s, played an important role in the crime drop of the 1990s.” Ceteris paribus, “legalized abortion will account for persistent declines of 1% a year in crime over the next two decades.”

Reversal of the trend is inevitable.

Myself, I don’t have sticky fingers and have no desire to control another’s uterus. Let progressive women—especially the fulminating fiends rioting across the country—suction their wombs for all I care. As evolutionary psychologist Ed Dutton has suggested, “Some people voluntarily resigning from the gene pool is a good thing.”

The consequences of similar efforts against family planning in the undeveloped world have been described less daintily by Kevin Myers, an Irish columnist who was banished from the ossified, idiotic media:

The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a low IQ, AK 47-bearing moron, siring children whenever the whim takes him, and blaming the world because he is uneducated, poor and left behind. … Somalia [is] another fine land of violent, AK 47-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts, and housing pirates of the ocean. Indeed [in Africa], we now have almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive, illiterate indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world …

American Woman: A reminder to conservatives who want these medusas to be mamas: Babies begotten by such hos will likely be a lot like their feral mothers, who are NOT in God’s image. These gorgons are howling at the gods for being so in-and-out ugly. A medal to the man who gets on top of such putrid flesh for his jollies. Women who behave worse than primates in estrus are not mother material.

NEW COLUMN: 2-Party Pox: The Republicans Suck AND The Democrats Want To Kill You

Argument, Conservatism, Democrats, Government, Morality, Politics, Republicans, The South

NEW COLUMN IS “2-Party Pox: The Republicans Suck AND The Democrats Want To Kill You“. It is currently featured on WND.COM, The Unz Review and The New American.

Excerpt:

The Republican Party has never stood up for you, will never stand up for you and is not going to do what it takes. Past is prologue.

As Dr. Boyd Cathey has observed, the “party which never conserves anything” had been exposed as such as far back as 1875. “The great Southern author, Robert Lewis Dabney, writing a decade after the end of the War Between the States … expressed presciently this tendency of dominant, post-war Northern conservatism”:

The history of the Republican Party is “that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.”

A point of philosophy arises. From the progressive perspective, society—civil and state—are what shape the human being and account for his conduct. To the extent our world is filled with perverts, grifters, and deviants—they were propelled into misbehavior by societal forces often beyond their control. Or, so goes progressive-style social determinism.

Libertarians, for their part, also often err on the side of a structurally similar social determinism. The State, their reasoning goes, accounts, for the most, for deviance in society. Remove the State and you remove the incentives for people to behave badly.

This Hebrew takes the biblical view tested by time. It is that, as stated in Genesis 8:21 (with thanks to my editors), the instinct of man is evil from his youth. (Or, wackily mistranslated: “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”) …

READ THE REST. New column is “2-Party Pox: The Republicans Suck AND The Democrats Want To Kill You“. It is currently featured on WND.COM, The Unz Review and The New American.