Category Archives: Democracy

Sober Up About The Arab Spring

“Romanticism is man’s revolt against reason,” wrote the great classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises. Minds ravaged by the rot of romanticism were everywhere on display in mainstream media’s coverage of the “unfinished revolutions of the new Middle East.”

But not only mainstream. The same wishful thinking infected the garden-variety, left-libertarian column. To wit:

“A long-oppressed people finally rises up and braves tanks, secret police thugs, and the inertia of routine humiliation to say: ‘Enough’!”

Tunisia received a more sober analysis from the same source. Still, an analysis that uncouples cultural and religious factors from the events on the ground is bound to end in a disconnect. (“Ah, how the hell did we get from A to B?”)

The missing link: “Democracy was not sprung as Athena was from her father’s head.” Not every person who longs to breathe free is willing to let the other guy breathe (or walk around with a head on his shoulders, for that matter).

Sentimental gushing about THE ARAB UPRISING notwithstanding, those of us who’ve lived in the region have remained skeptical and disinterested, befitting the non-interventionist mindset.

John R. Bradley’s AFTER THE ARAB SPRING, reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, will sober up the dreamer in no time:

Consider Tunisia, a small, literate country where abortion is legal and sex education taught in a world-class education system, all thanks to Habib Bourguiba, who led the fight for independence from France and ruled “with an iron fist” for thirty years. The still-beloved Bourguiba held power by limiting political freedoms but granting social ones and raising middle-class living standards.
Here was a “Muslim authoritarian country” that got it right. It might have continued, had Bourguiba’s successor, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, been less greedy and arrogant, his wife less ostentatious and her family less thuggish and opportunistic. Tunisians objected, but what did they get? Bradley paints a sinister portrait of Rashid Ghannouchi, leader of the Islamist Ennahda party and head of Tunisia’s elected interim government. When Ghannouchi states “we want a system based on coalitions since only this will protect us from tyranny”, Bradley hears “a power sharing deal”, where liberals have some say in the economy while the Islamists “pursue [their] social agenda of Islamizing Tunisian society from below … [eradicating] the country’s secular inheritance [and] dragging Tunisia, chanting and ululating, back to the Middle Ages”. Far from empowering the people, the Jasmine Revolution was “the dumbest most selfdefeating uprising in history” and the Arab Spring a dismal failure that “socially and economically has put back countries like Tunisia, Yemen and Syria by decades”.

UPDATE II: Clint Eastwood Keeps it Local, Lively and … Liberty-Oriented

Democracy, Film, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Political Correctness, Private Property, Propaganda

If it were Yoko Onanism who jousted in public with a (symbolic) empty chair, the left would call it performance art.

Clint Eastwood is not a member of the pack animals on the left. For this reason, he has become the focus of terribly unkind cuts, following the “12-minute discourse” he delivered at the Republican National Convention.

In response to the rabid responses to his Empty Chair routine—and characteristically—Eastwood spoke first not to the country’s moron menagerie, but to a local, award-winning, libertarian-leaning newspaper, The Carmel Pine Cone.

Seceding from the palsied haters is classic Clint Eastwood.

More interesting than the rather quotidian details Eastwood furnished in the interview is the background of the TCPC’s editor. PAUL MILLER was clearly entrenched in the establishment (CBS and NBC), before breaking away to focus on “the [local] struggle between property rights and environmental regulations, the machinations of the California Coastal Commission, and on the epidemic of ADA lawsuits against small businesses.”

The vaunted vote Miller has exposed too for the farce it is “in a series of reports, ‘Voter Fraud: Simple as 1, 2, 3,’ [which] involved registering a fictitious person to vote. That story was featured on the CBS News program, ’60 Minutes,’ on November 1, 1998.”

Yes, there are a LOT of people here in the US who vote for a living—for dibs on the livelihood of those who work for a living—a topic CBS will not be exploring anytime soon, and certainly not before the election.

Anyhow, to hate Clint Eastwood is to hate the best of America. I begrudge Eastwood only two things: The first is “Invictus,” a “reverential biopic” about the sainted Nelson Mandela.

The second is that he made too few Dirty Harry films.

UPDATE: Readers can be fabulous. Writes “RandHaf” under “Top Comments,” following Yoko’s Onanism:

wtf is wrong with this cunt
RandHaf 2 weeks ago 27

Why, wasn’t she giving voice to modern-day ennui?

UPDATE I (Sept. 9): Gran Torino is hackneyed rubbish. I had never intended to watch it. It came on today, and I, well, sat. What schmaltz.

Eastwood is also guilty of making on-screen love to Meryl Creep, but that I most certainly did skip. (I never watch chick flicks.)

UPDATE II (9/10): Gran Torino is packed with PC cliches, which, quite stupidly, seem to confirm the un-PC, unmentioned truths, such as what do-or-die diversity does to neighborhoods and neighborliness.

And worse: No wonder older, white men can’t get work! Have all you older white men considered how the protagonist is portrayed in this film?! Why, he has to die for his sins before gaining the respect he deserved from the get-go.

The only realistic lesson once can take away from Gran Torino, a horridly PC effort, is that you don’t owe your relatives a dime if they treat you like dirt. I liked that message (because I’m generally a sucker).

UPDATED: Mindless Response To Mine Massacre (In South Africa)

Crime, Democracy, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Race, Racism, South-Africa, The West

“Mindless Response To Mine Massacre” in South Africa is the current column, now on RT. Here’s an excerpt:

“… You’d have had to experience the onrush of a riled-up African crowd to comprehend the terror among these frightened, likely incompetent, cops entrusted with defending mine operators and other staff still at the site. The last would have endured hours, if not days, of menacing chanting, singing, stomping, all amplified through loudspeakers.

Likewise, the besieged police at Sharpeville [in 1960] would have been petrified, as the ‘unarmed’ mob brandishing pangas, spears and sticks, advanced on their isolated outpost and breached the station’s fence, at the eponymous African township.

In both instances, the cops—white and black, then and now, right or wrong—fought to stay alive.

The media mob has already cut some slack to the black cops who were assailed at Marikana by 3000 miners. The frightened, outnumbered fellows at Sharpeville, who confronted 5,000 to 7,000 frenzied protesters: They’ve been condemned for eternity.

Sharpeville’s ‘villains’ had also attempted to control the crowds with tear gas and batons before that fateful shooting.

Why not ask 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis what a tribe armed with indigenous weapons is capable of doing to a despised, helpless ‘Other’?

Ask the same of some 4000 white South Africans farmers, who once helped feed the continent.

Or, closer to home, let an all-American lass, Amy Elizabeth Biehl, tell you how furious her white skin and good intentions made an ‘unarmed’ crowd, back in Cape Town of 1993.

Silly me. Question those Tutsis—whose blood turned the Kigara River red—all you like, but they will not reply. For they were torn asunder or macheteed by their longtime Hutu neighbors.

Ask the late Ms. Biehl about her ordeal, but she too has been silenced—stabbed and stoned, by an ‘unarmed’ mob with murder on its mind.

As to the 4000 (and counting) Boers—they’re dead and buried too. Interred in the land they had farmed for centuries; culled like springbok on a hunting safari by the same, disarming, inadvertent enemies of peace and prosperity.

In a world awash in floating fiat currency, demand for platinum will remain consistent and predictably high, even as production plummets in one of platinum’s prime producers, South Africa.

That’s guaranteed.

The miners of Marikana told Time magazine that they would not return to work until their wages were doubled (poor productivity be damned). Any scab who stepped in to do ‘their’ jobs would be eliminated. Or so they promised.

And that’s one other thing you can take to the bank. …”

Read the rest of “Mindless Response To Mine Massacre.” It’s now on RT.

Also available from WND or from Amazon is the prophetic “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid.”

Read the editorial reviews.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY:

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UPDATE (9/1/012): JD Hicks@Jdhickspi encapsulates the realities to which my column speaks (on Twitter):

“@IlanaMercer @RT_com Great perspective.most people have never experienced the existential,visceral threat of an agitated hostile mob.”

UPDATED: Don’t Be Fooled By Campaign Foreplay

BAB's A List, Debt, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Propaganda, Republicans, War

Don’t be fooled by campaign foreplay, counsels Barely a Blog contributor Myron Pauli, Ph.D., the country is going to be screwed for the next 4 years regardless of who wins the November race.

Over $4 billion will be spent to influence 400,000 swing voters in 6 swing states who are undecided between the champion of the White Churchgoing Party, Mitt, and the champion of the Party of the Secular and the Minorities, Barack. Ten thousand dollars a person to influence mostly ignorant voters. Although both candidates support health care mandates and endless no-win wars, billions must be spent on the façade that it is important to vote for one of these big government parties. The money will be handled by spin doctors, which is a term that also refers to Atomic Physics.
In fact, Atomic Physics seems an apt way to view this whole election process. Romney and Obama are both electrons in outer orbits circling far away from a nucleus (the Constitution) and rarely do their wavefunctions actually overlap with the Constitution. They do, however, obey a political form of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. In the Uncertainty Principle, one can know where an electron is somewhat or where the electron is heading, but not both of them exactly.
With Romney, we basically know what sort of person he is – Mormon Venture Capitalist. However, there is hardly any idea what he stands for. His flip-flops are legendary. He can even change within the course of minutes. These rapid-phase oscillations are known in Atomic Physics by the term Zitterbewegung. Romney’s ideological twisting may be the first macroscopic sighting of Zitterbewegung. Perhaps this is part of a larger phenomena whereby supporting a party which claims that supporting the American Dream Downpayment Act, the Prescription Drug Plan, the Leave No Child Behind Act, and the Transportation Security Administration counts as being for small government.
On the other hand, Obama has been generally a consistent supporter of the Hollywood-Academia-Politically-Correct-Left but we have little idea who this Teleprompter-Zelig is as a person. Is he atheist or Christian or Muslim? Is he black or white or mulatto or Asian or post-racial? Is he American or Indonesian or Kenyan? Partisan or above political squabbling? Much of this ambiguity is part of Obama’s own making – in short, he is the primordial “Birther.” Nevertheless, if one votes for the “Party of Peace,” you are going to ensure more presidential undeclared wars
While it really takes a Large Hardon Collider to tell these two apart, the voters will instead be subjected to a great debate, where things hinge on important issues like sweaty unshaven Nixon, or Ford freeing Poland, or Reagan cracking jokes, or Dukakis’ apathy over his wife being violated. Instead of worrying about the impending financial collapse of the economy, Fox News can crown Romney the “winner” of the debate while MSNBC declares Obama the “winner” and the spin doctors search out every possible “gaffe” to magnify into cosmic significance.
The reality is that both candidates are identical particles, and choosing between them is as likely to change things as a Soviet citizen deciding between Brezhnev And Kosygin Regrettably, there is a correlation between having more people voting and the rise of government and the decline of economic freedom and growth as Ilana Mercer demonstrates in her excellent book.
Well, I know which side I stand on – mine. As a true swing voter, I will go for the first candidate who hands me my $10,000. No sense of my wasting a vote for free on Gary Johnson, when I can line up with a “mainstream” statist and pocket $10,000. Show me the money, and I am all yours – Barack or Mitt! Save 3 hours of your life and just watch the 10 minute debate summary here.

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

UPDATE (Aug. 19): Facebook Thread. Robbie makes a good point. These automatic intonations about Romney’s past, absent further analysis, run to lazy. My fear is not that MR will flip-flop. That’s such a trite angle. And Romney might have learned his lesson. (Also, Myron’s links are old.) What I do believe is that Romney lacks a good (Austrian, even Chicago) understanding of the economy. The fact that this comprehension is better than BHO’s means squat. MR, moreover, does not understand freedom, and will take us to war, for sure. As I put it, “Mitt’s Foreign Policy Is Obama’s With A Daisy Cutter On Top: Unbridled, Bellicose American Exceptionalism.”