Category Archives: Ethics

Asia: Turning Exotic Species Into Meals, Pets And Snake Oil Potions

America, Asia, Culture, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, The West

It’s a tragic truth, but wild life will go the way of Western culture. By that I mean that when the West is no longer; wild life, now on the wane, will likely die out, too.

“Asia’s appetite for endangered species is” insatiable, warns The Economist.

In Indonesia, if not for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), “an American NGO, which helps bring half of all cases of wildlife crime to court,” there would be no convictions and hence no deterrent to the orgiastic culling, poaching, trafficking:

… The Indonesian island straddles the boundary between Asiatic and Australian species—and boasts an extraordinary number of species found nowhere else. But the market also symbolises how Asia’s amazing biodiversity is under threat. Most of the species on sale in Tomohon have seen populations crash because of overhunting (habitat destruction has played a part too). Fewer than 6,000 crested macaques now inhabit the forests. The cuscus hangs on by its fingertips—or its curling, prehensile tail. …

… Trade in wild birds is supposedly circumscribed. Yet the ferries are crammed with them: Indonesian soldiers returning from a tour in Papua typically pack a few wild cockatoos or lories to sell. One in five urban households in Indonesia keeps birds. Bitung feeds Java’s huge bird markets. The port is also a shipment point on a bird-smuggling route to the Philippines and then to China, Taiwan, even Europe. Crooked officials enable the racket. …

… As for the tiger, in China and Vietnam its bones and penis feature in traditional medicine, while tiger fangs and claws are emblems of status and power. Fewer than 4,000 tigers survive in the wild. The pressure from poachers is severe, especially in India. The parts of over 1,700 tigers have been seized since 2000. …

… Owing to Asian demand for horns, the number of rhinos poached in South Africa leapt from 13 in 2007 to 1,028 last year. The new frontline is South America. A jaguar’s four fangs, ten claws, pelt and genitalia sell for $20,000 in Asia. Between 2013 and 2016 authorities in Bolivia seized 380 jaguar fangs.

South Africa auctions permits to hunt a few rhinos each year, with the proceeds supposed to fund conservation. This has provided cover for poachers. One Thai smuggler used prostitutes to pose as legal trophy hunters; the dead beasts’ horns ended up in Asia. Schemes to farm animals, which some said would undercut incentives to poach, have proved equally harmful. Lion parts from South African farms are sold in Asia as a cheaper substitute for tiger, or passed off as tiger—either way, stimulating demand. The farming of tigers in China, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam provides cover for the trafficking of wild tiger parts. Meanwhile, wild animals retain their cachet—consumers of rhino horn believe the wild rhino grazes only on medicinal plants.

THE REST: “Asia’s appetite for endangered species is relentless.”

Alan Dershowitz Vs. The Fanatic Richard Painter

Democrats, Donald Trump, Ethics, History, Law, Morality, Neoconservatism, Republicans

He’s a sharp mind that has stood up for The Law throughout, and remained above the filthy political fray we’re in: He’s Alan Dershowitz.

Dershowitz has stood up to the shill, Sean Hannity, too.

Now, Professor Dershowitz goes up against Richard Painter, whom I’ve described as the quintessential Yankee, in a 2017 post titled “The Face of a Fanatic, Or A Modern-Day Radical Republican”:

Richard Painter, a modern-day Radical Republican by any other name, has the same crazed look worn by the original Radical Republican, the fanatic Thaddeus Stevens.

The context (as in who the Radical Republicans were) is in my column, “The Radical Republicans: The Antifa of 1865.”

UPDATED: Thanks, POTUS, For Breaking-Up The Annual Correspondents’ Circle Jerk. AGAIN.

Celebrity, Donald Trump, Ethics, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media

Last year, the column, “Thanks, POTUS, For Breaking Up The Annual Correspondent’s Circle Jerk,” was featured on the Daily Caller. It’s as relevant as ever. Nothing has changed about the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. This year, you can read it on IlanaMercer.com:

As a newly elected president, Donald Trump was quick to take one of Washington’s institutional pillars down a peg. By snubbing the 2017 annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD), the president deflated what should have been more appropriately called the Sycophants’ Supper. Would that it was the last such supper. For now, the POTUS’s slap to this gathering of sycophants this past weekend will have to do.

Like nothing else, the annual Correspondents’ Dinner is a mark of a corrupt politics. It’s a sickening specter, where some of the most pretentious, worthless people in the country—in politics, journalism and entertainment—convene to revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the rest of us in Rome’s provinces.

Those gathered at the Annual Correspondents’ Dinner, or its Christmas party, are not the country’s natural aristocracy, but its authentic Idiocracy. No matter how poor their predictive powers, no matter how many times they get it wrong—in war and in peace—the presstitutes always find time for this orgy of self-praise …

… READ THE REST OF “Thanks, POTUS, For Breaking Up The Annual Correspondent’s Circle Jerk.“

UPDATED:

“Knock it; you got to get that baby out of there.” “Comedian” #MichelleWolf on doing abortion “right.” Fine. You’re pro-choice. But must you rejoice in abortion? Pathetic female.
One smart quip in the filth spewed by Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents Dinner is about Rachel Maddow: “She’s the Peter Pan of news, but instead of never growing old, she never gets to the point.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJlWGO5XHPk

UPDATE II (10/9/018): About ‘Sea Changes,’ A Magnificent Immigration Novel (And The Mercer ‘MeToo’ Moment)

Britain, Culture, English, Ethics, Europe, Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, Intellectualism, Literature

My friend, British author Derek Turner, will have to forgive me. This discursive post, my second about his superb novel, Sea Changes (here’s the first), begins with … me. I guess women are having a reckoning of sorts. Mine is quite a bit different. But I, too, have had a “Me Too” moment, albeit intellectual, not sexual (true traditionalists consider the latter a private matter).

Part of an ancient “Me Too” aphorism by the great Rabbi Hillel says this:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

So, here I go.

Over the 20 years in which I’ve out-written most weekly columnists of my philosophical stripe, only a handful of individuals on the Old Right have publicly expressed respect for- and intellectual honesty about my work. Mr. Turner, the gentleman under review, for one. Another is a younger newcomer, the wonderful Jack Kerwick, a man with a moral compass. Still another is Ron Unz, the first publisher (other than the ever fearless WND) on the hard right to feature my weekly column, without any censure or reservation. (Some of the old chaps won’t even follow me on Twitter, or pretend I don’t exist. Shame. Poor things. Reality bites.) The last, for now, is Tom DiLorenzo, a friend forever. Bill Scott, crusader against police brutality, is a gem of a friend, too. In this company is my friend, philosopher and author Chris Matthew Sciabarra, who is a different animal. As an Objectivist, he has a debt of gratitude to a woman.

Check the comments on the Unz Review. The same readers who prostrate themselves to the male writers (fluffy, wordy waffling from the old boys, notwithstanding) hate on Mercer, who happens to be the only featured female columnist on the Unz Review. As I surmised, this is Small Man syndrome.

Bring it.

Yes, the Mercer column is outré, but its quality, philosophical consistency and powers of prediction ought to have secured it a regular slot, given its fiercely anti-war stance, on prominent libertarian and paleoconservative sites.

On the bright side, the attitude to my work over 20 years from these quarters has been the best proof of its quality. In this context, I am reminded of another gifted Brit (Derek Turner is English), comedian Alexei Sayle. When asked what he does when he watches a really talented, young satirist performing, Sayle replied with brutal self-deprecation: “I go back stage and tell him he’ll never make it.”

On the other hand, the German Right doesn’t seem to have an intellectual-honesty issue when it comes to my work. They have generally sought me out (the Mercer column was a regular on Junge Freiheit). And in a justly glowing review of Derek’s book, Sea Changes, an Alt-Right reviewer says this:

“Ilana Mercer, author of a book on Trump and renowned conservative intellectual, praised Sea Changes for its analysis of the prospects for the West and the necessity of defence.”

The German writer quotes a section of my fabulous advance praise. I excerpt the rest, because amidst billowing verbiage from others, I believe I succinctly captured the novel’s essence best (alas, the Mercer blurb, predictably, didn’t make it onto Amazon):

“Well written, meticulously researched and thought out, Sea Changes, Derek Turner’s first novel, succeeds mightily in bringing to life the prototypical players in the Western tragedy that is mass migration. The reader becomes intimately au fait with the many, oft-unwitting actors in this doomed stand-off: small-town conservative folks vs. progressive city slickers; salt-of-the-earth countrymen against smug, self-satisfied left-liberals. Ever present are the ruthless traffickers in human misery: both media and smugglers. Like it or not, the dice are loaded. In this epic battle, the scrappy scofflaws and their stakeholders triumph; the locals lose.”

Back to the German reviewer:

“What Jean Raspail started with Camp of the Saints and Michel Houellebecq continued with Submission has now been carried forward. The latest novel to hit the German market borrows from both of these books and carries them forward. Sea Changes by Derek Turner is now available for purchase. The novel provides an overview of events and inside them the story of the long, slow suicide of a European nation. Whether England, France or Germany, the situation is the same. The problem is ‘refugees’ and their quite understandable search for a better life. The theme of the book is how a truly arrogant elite ignore reality because it is obsessed by ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’. The novel shows the reality of the unchallenged multiculturalist establishment. ….”

[SNIP]

Another aspect about Derek’s book that I liked a lot (it went unnoticed by other “male” reviewers): Sea Changes is manly in that Derek packed it with details about masonry, weaponry and history. The book is technically dense. I like that. Other nerds will enjoy that aspect, too.

Sea Changes by Derek Turner is available on Amazon.

UPDATE I (3/12/018): Lookie here. I found Mercer male hounding from 2006: “How Sexist Are Libertarian Men?”

UPDATE II (10/9/018):

From my response to a set of interview questions from, presumably, a millennial, you can figure out the attitude toward me. Just plain ignorance? Who knows? However, I venture he would not have addressed a male he wished to interview in the same manner:

Your questions are better addressed to a YouTube fresh face or some young (and fleeting) social-media sensation. There are v. few paleolibertarians around today in the US. Most all began their work, for the most, over a decade after me. Few can claim my philosophical consistency (have wavered on immigration, Israel, etc.). Glad to look at your revised questions when you get your bearings.