Category Archives: Ethics

UPDATED (1/5/019): NEW COLUMN: Will CDC Trace Polio-Like Outbreak, Or Just Shout ‘Racism’?

Ethics, Family, Government, Healthcare, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Kids

NEW COLUMN IS  “Will CDC Trace Polio-Like Outbreak, Or Just Shout ‘Racism’?” It’s currently on WND, The Unz Review, Townhall.com and American Greatness. An excerpt:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used to trace outbreaks to Patient Zero, the index case—the first patient to get, then transmit, a disease. Is this government agency doing due diligence in the cases of the polio-like paralysis infecting hundreds of America’s kids?

By the dictionary’s telling, epidemiology is “the branch of medicine that deals with the study of the causes, distribution, and control of disease in populations.”

By WND’s telling, “the diagnosis of the first cases of AFM, acute flaccid myelitis, in 2014,” coincided with the dispersal of thousands of Central American children among U.S. school children. More conspicuous at that time “was an outbreak of a deadly respiratory illness” that put hundreds of America’s children in intensive care. “Both types of symptoms can probably be caused by enterovirus D68, which happens to be endemic in Central America,” opines Dr. Jane Orient.

Are the state’s epidemiologists—whose job it is to trace and terminate outbreaks of contagious diseases—following these connections?

An outbreak necessitates the tracing of “Patient Zero,” the “single individual who bears the unknowing responsibility for having introduced the disease” to a certain population.

The same taxpayer-funded medical sleuths impressively tracked down the index case in the AIDS epidemic in North America. As documented in the late Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On, he was Gaetan Dugas, a dashing, promiscuous, Canadian flight attendant, who had had approximately 1,000 sexual partners.

Although the CDC has provided a perfunctory status-update of its AFM Investigation, the  agency’s mention of a possible genetic etiology for Poliomyelitis, a dreadful, highly infectious viral disease, is bizarre. It reads like a cop-out.

What next? Like the legendary Lancet has done, can we expect the CDC to diagnose “right-wing politics” with folly and fervency for daring to correlate “migration to infection”?

Lest you worried that “the nation’s health protection agency” was putting America First, the CDC boasts of making strides, between January 2017 and September 2018, “Toward Poliomyelitis Eradication”—in Pakistan. (I guess CDC could argue that lots of Pakistanis will end up in the U.S., “looking for a better life.”)

In any event, along for the ride with the thousands of migrants poised to pour into the U.S. from Central America is a healthy array of microbes: measles, Chagas disease, hepatitis and much more. Diversity, baby.

According to Tijuana’s Health Department, via Fox News, 60 percent of the migrants currently encamped on the U.S. border carry respiratory infections. There are, moreover, confirmed cases of tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, chickenpox, and skin infections galore, in addition to lice—these “serve as vectors of diseases like typhus.”  …

… READ THE REST.  NEW COLUMN,  “Will CDC Trace Polio-Like Outbreak, Or Just Shout ‘Racism’?,” is currently on WNDThe Unz Review, Townhall.com and American Greatness

UPDATED (1/5/019):

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen: “These aren’t my facts, these are the facts.”

Comments Off on UPDATED (1/5/019): NEW COLUMN: Will CDC Trace Polio-Like Outbreak, Or Just Shout ‘Racism’?

‘Read My Lips: I’ll Build The Wall’

Bush, Donald Trump, Ethics, IMMIGRATION, Politics, Taxation, The State

“Read my lips: no new taxes.”

That pledge was the centerpiece of Bush’s acceptance address, written by speechwriter Peggy Noonan, for his party’s nomination at the 1988 Republican National Convention.

[Time magazine]

What will President Trump’s political epitaph be?

“Read My Lips: I’ll Build The Wall.”

RELATED:

Amid the slush of sentimentality over the death of George H. Bush, nobody in media made mention of where “W” (shrub Jr.) had been when he bid farewell to his father.

The State, remember, is not The People. The interests the dead pursued, for the most, were not those of ordinary Americans.

Maybe Israel can help?

The invisible Wall:

UPDATED (2/22): Environmentalists Betray The Cause: How Mass Immigration Affects The Land & The Critters

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, IMMIGRATION

Environmentalists have become traitors to a cause we should all care about: our environment, the resources it provides and the creatures and critters who depend on these for survival. They used to care. No more.

Environmental groups, in particular, “the Center for Biological Diversity, the Animal Legal Defense Fund and Defenders of Wildlife,” claim, in multiple lawsuits, that “construction operations [of The Border Wall] would harm plants, rare wildlife habitats, threatened coastal birds like the snowy plover and California gnatcatcher, and other species such as fairy shrimp and the Quino checkerspot butterfly.”

To the contrary, migrants pouring over the borders into the habitats these idiots claim to care about are doing great damage. But the situation is far more dire.

“Destruction of this country’s social fabric has never bothered environmentalists. But what of its environmental resources? At the current rate of immigration, 40 percent of America’s lakes and streams are no longer fishable or swimmable. What will be their fate in the middle of the century?”

In California, a school will have to be built every day in perpetuity to keep up with the unremitting influx. Urban sprawl, traffic congestion, overcrowding, pollution, and rural land loss—there isn’t a community in the US that’ll escape the social and environmental despoliation witnessed in California and Florida.

READ ON: “The Gore Gospel: Act Globally; Trash Locally”

AND:

In 2004, Time magazine described in detail how illegal aliens rushing the southern border commit property crimes and despoil the environment:
When the crowds cross the ranches along and near the border, they discard backpacks, empty Gatorade and water bottles and soiled clothes. They turn the land into a vast latrine, leaving behind revolting mounds of personal refuse and enough discarded plastic bags to stock a Wal-Mart. Night after night, they cut fences intended to hold in cattle and horses. Cows that eat the bags must often be killed because the plastic becomes lodged between the first and second stomachs. The immigrants steal vehicles and saddles. They poison dogs to quiet them. The illegal traffic is so heavy that some ranchers, because of the disruptions and noise, get very little sleep at night.

Yes, Time Magazine has also betrayed the countryside and the critters.

MORE in “That Spot Of Bother On The Border.”

UPDATED (2/22): Arizona Border Trash: Destruction of land and critters b/c of mass migration. Any mention of that in @AOC’s New Green Deal? By anyone on the Left?

Comments Off on UPDATED (2/22): Environmentalists Betray The Cause: How Mass Immigration Affects The Land & The Critters

UPDATED IV (4/4/019): Did Stefan Molyneux Fail To Properly Credit Ideas From My Book, ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot’?

Energy, Ethics, History, Ilana Mercer, Intellectualism, Logic, Morality, South-Africa

The implication in this Southern Poverty Law Center article is indeed that, in a 2015 video, vlogger Stefan Molyneux liberally used the material from my book, “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa,” published in 2011.

The authors at SPLC hate me just as much, so they don’t care to harp on unethical use of material they had traced to me (“Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa”), if there was any. Still, their facts imply that no attribution was made or  direct credit given to me for a Molyneux podcast based on the rather idiosyncratic ideas that came from a chapter in Cannibal titled “APARTHEID IN BLACK AND WHITE: A Strategy for Survival” (pp. 65-70).

Writes the Southern Poverty Law Center:

In 2015 Molyneux published a video wherein he quoted an unnamed historian who claimed that “Apartheid wasn’t an expression of racism but concern over the survival of the white population.” The source for this quote is Ilana Mercer, a paleolibertarian writer and pro-Trump activist. Mercer’s 2011 book, which forms the basis for Molyneux’s YouTube video, is entitled “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.” The tome received a glowing review from Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance website. “Apartheid was never based on a theory of racial supremacy; rather, it was a survival strategy for the badly outnumbered Boers,” the review reads. This is a mirror image of Molyneux’s sleight of hand: a decontextualized racism is deemed immoral but it is argued that Apartheid makes sense. The real message Molyneux and Taylor are delivering to their audiences is that the application of racial discrimination in South Africa was essential to ensure white survival (read: dominance) and that force and laws should be applied to keep different races apart.

Of course, the ideas in my chapter, “APARTHEID IN BLACK AND WHITE: A Strategy for Survival” (pp. 65-70), are not quite those expressed by the second-handers.

In any event, one gets accustomed to such lowly practices in this business. But if this is indeed true, and Stefan Molyneux had failed to fully credit this author for ideas that are nearly verbatim from “APARTHEID IN BLACK AND WHITE: A Strategy for Survival” (pp. 65-70)—then this is a new low.

Citing one’s sources is the very essence of ethical thinking and writing. If you don’t, you can’t claim to be an ethical thinker, much less a thinker. You lose all credibility.

It’s also so unmanly—and oh so very common. Yuk.

UPDATE I (11/27):

As was said, “Citing one’s sources is the very essence of ethical thinking and writing. If you don’t, you can’t claim to be an ethical thinker, much less a thinker. You lose ALL credibility.”

Ever wonder why Stefan Molyneux, and many men on the so-called hard right (some of whom came well after me), have never asked me (one of the few people who knows the ins-and-outs of apartheid South Africa) on their shows to speak to matters South African (or to any other matters)?

A LOT OF men are simply uncomfortable with certain women. (Hint: Young blondes showcase them better and are easier to best.) As a result, libertarian men (or mini-men) end up mouthing crass, historically wrong, right-wing talking points, on their shows, about my birth place. Coming from libertarians, this laxness is a disgrace.

At least credit your sources if you don’t want to engage the writer! Before Into the Cannibal’s Pot, nobody spoke about South Africa in any meaningful way in the US, other than the praiseworthy WND reporters, and one or two others liberally credited in my book. You see, I cite my sources (primary and secondary) religiously. Again, many of the johnny-come-lately sorts whom the Mini-Men aforementioned (or hinted at) interview on their limited shows speak a load of right-wing crap about South Africa.

Still and all, some ideas are too idiosyncratic to be generic—which is the case with a hell of a lot of what’s in Into the Cannibal’s Pot.

UPDATE II (11/28): “The Art of the Ego: Review of Stefan Molyneux’s Stupid Book”

If you can get past the author’s redundant liberal preening (it sullies a solid piece), Alexander Douglas makes short work of Stefan Molyneux’s short-on-logic book.

… Molyneux’s first few chapters outline some basic principles of logic. His explanation of ‘logic’ is as terrible as you might expect from someone with neither qualifications nor natural talent (see this review). Molyneux is one of these people who thinks that (barely) being able to do the First Figure Syllogism is ‘knowing logic’?—?the logical equivalent of the Astonishing Human Calculator who can add single-digit numbers in mere seconds or Sir Andrew Aguecheek who can speak languages without book. The really telling thing, however, is how Molyneux deals with his own ignorance. …

… Here is what he says about abduction, for example … Now, many people don’t know what abduction is. Nothing wrong with that. And you might find yourself in an exam, where you’re asked to define abduction, and maybe you missed that lecture, or you drifted off, or you just can’t remember. Then you might just write some bullshit, hoping to get a few marks. Perfectly acceptable behaviour. But if you’re writing a book on reasoning, and you remember that abduction is a form of reasoning but you can’t quite remember what it is?—?can you imagine in that circumstance just writing down some bullshit and hoping to get a few marks? Wouldn’t you just google it or something? Imagine being so devoid of intellectual humility. …

… It does help to show that, while logicians have no claim to be any better at informal reasoning than anyone else, there is such a thing as being godawful at informal reasoning. I’m not sure I knew that before looking at this book. But Molyneux is as bad at reasoning as he seems to be at everything else. Yet somehow, through some Dunning-Kruger pathology, he seems to regard himself as good enough to educate others. He is desperately in need of education himself, although I wouldn’t blame you if you preferred to put him ‘through the fist’ (“There are only two ways to resolve disagreements: through The Argument, or through the fist”). …

Myself, I’ve never been able to get through anything Molyneux writes. Other libertarians, systematic thinkers all, have said the same. My favorite, David Gordon, calls Molyneux’s arguments “often preposterously bad.”

“A (Tiny!) Bit More on Molyneux,” also by Alexander Douglas, delves into the problems of logic.

UPDATE III (11/29/018): On crap output and arrogant overreach. As someone who labors over every sentence she puts out (to the best of my abilities, which are respectable but far from infallible), these points, as made by a professional logician, are good.

Alas, and as noted by Tocqueville in the 19th century and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, conformity of thought and anti-intellectualism are powerfully prevalent among Americans (the kind who follow Stefan Molyneux type Svengalis) .

Molyneux on logic just humiliates himself. And frankly it’s irritating to have spent years of hard study trying to master some elementary logic and then have some pontificating fraud claim the right to lecture others without doing any work at all

An Open Letter on Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux” By Alexander Douglas.

UPDATE IV (4/4/019):

Comments Off on UPDATED IV (4/4/019): Did Stefan Molyneux Fail To Properly Credit Ideas From My Book, ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot’?