Category Archives: Ilana Mercer

Gold Is A Girl’s Best Friend (& bona fide)

Debt, Economy, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Inflation, Liberty, Media, Political Economy, Republicans

Are there any economic Austrians out there who treat gold as a topic for pontification, rather than as a real-life refuge from the irreparable debasement of the dollar?

Surely, if you’re Austrian in economics—namely, you follow the natural laws of economics—your personal financial portfolio, however meager, ought to have included gold well before the spot price settled at $1,869.00? (Which is now unaffordable to us ordinary Americans.)

If devotees of Austrian economics had a support group in every state, here is how I’d introduce myself: “ILANA MERCER, author of ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot,’ and WND.COM’s longest-standing (possibly most predictive), exclusive, libertarian column. Gold-bug since $800.”

So many patriotic Americans continue to waste time and precious money on books and columns offered up by top-dog Republican writers. Invariably, the boosterism and jingoism of these well-to-do gasbags (girls and boys) leads them to talk up US Treasuries (in addition to other foreign policy fatuities) on FoxNews.

If your Republican heroes have jumped on the gold bandwagon, ask them: “When did you become a gold-bug?” Demand proof, because they tend to fib.

Gold is a girl’s best friend and bona fide (although credential are not worth much in the age of the idiot).

HERE’S Peter Schiff on the meaning of the flight to gold.

American Renaissance Review

Democracy, Ilana Mercer, Literature, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, South-Africa

Dr. F. Roger Devlin has reviewed “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” in the August 2011 issue of the American Renaissance. Dr. Devlin’s review is not a critical review, but a contents-driven one. And a good one at that, as he distills the facts of the book at a furious pace. Intelligently so too.

Unlike the many factoids that marred the skewed, diasporic, Jewey emphasis (utterly absent in my book) of Prof. Paul Gottfried’s review of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” (a copy of which was captured here on BAB), Dr. Devlin cleaves to the facts of the book. (Incidentally, rather than correct the Gottfried review so that it vaguely captured “Into the Cannibal’s Pot’s” impetus, the reviewer and editor showed their “courtesy” by simply removing the thing from Taki’s Magazine. My mother used to use the adjective “peruvian” to describe incivility. I believe that word was removed from the dictionary because politically incorrect.)

In any event, unexamined in Dr. Devlin’s review are interwoven points of political philosophy. What do I mean? As a classical liberal, for example, my complaint against apartheid is not that it “disenfranchised” or “denied the majority its democratic rights,” since “citizenship rights, after all, are not natural rights.” Rather,

It is natural rights that the law ought to always and everywhere respect and uphold. In its police state methods—indefinite detention without trial, declarations of a state of emergency—apartheid destroyed the individual defenses of equality before the law, the presumption of innocence, habeas corpus and various other very basic freedoms. That the apartheid regime contravened natural justice by depriving Africans of rights to property and due process is indisputable as it is despicable. Nevertheless, denying people political privileges does not amount to depriving them of natural justice.

(Into the Cannibal’s Pot, 2010, p. 231)

Dr. Devlin’s tack is conciliatory and is perfectly congruent with AR editor Jared Taylor’s surprisingly non-confrontational, data-driven journalism. (I intend to post about Mr. Talyor’s latest book at a later date.)

Perceptively, Dr. Devlin highlights one of the crucial points my book makes about democracy:

A prerequisite for parliamentary democracy is that majority and minority status should be fluid—that the ruling majority party should, at each election, be almost as likely to become a minority as to retain its majority. In a multiracial polity this does not happen. Parties represent racial groups rather than different philosophies of government, and elections become racial headcounts.

You can order this issue of American Renaissance here, where Dr. Devlin’s review is summed up as follows:

“In Into the Cannibal’s Pot, author F. Roger Devlin reviews an important new book by columnist Ilana Mercer entitled Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa. Mrs. Mercer, a South African emigré, has sounded a ‘fire bell in the night’ with her sobering analysis of a once thriving First-World nation that is now descending into the abyss of savagery, genocide, starvation, and hopelessness. Mr. Devlin also summarizes her critique of raw numerical democracy and her effort to set the record straight on the Apartheid system—and most poignantly, her warning to the people of the United States.”

Cannibal Kindle Copy

Ilana Mercer, South-Africa, Technology

To all the Kindle customers of “Into The Cannibal’s Pot,”

Amazon assures me that the newly formatted, splendid Kindle copy that I worked to upload is now available. The errors of the previous copy have been corrected.

Kindle Direct Publishing informs me that, “Any customer who purchases [“Into The Cannibal’s Pot”] for the first time will get the revised edition.” And that their “technical team is working towards automating the process,” whereby “customers who have already purchased a Kindle book can automatically download the revised content.”

Amazon will also attempt to notifying customers who previously purchased a less-than-optimal Kindle copy of my book that a well-formatted copy is now online.

The “Search Inside the Book” feature for both The Cannibal’s ebook (Kindle) and hardcopy should be activated shortly.

Best to all,

ilana

UPDATED: ‘Libertarian Top 50 Sites’ ‘Misses’ Mercer

Barely A Blog, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Israel, libertarianism, Media, Political Philosophy

DBKP’s list featuring the “Libertarian Top 50 Sites” has “missed” Barely a Blog (BAB), which is ranked 188,158th on Alexa, globally. That would make BAB number 28 (or thereabouts) on this list of 50. Not bad for a one-woman operation, helped a little by regular monetary and epistolary contributions (to the Comments Section).

Also left-off the DBKP “Libertarian Top 50 Sites” was IlanaMercer.com, which has been up since 2000. (This golden oldie against the invasion of Iraq was written in 2002, which was when many “top-rated” Beltway libertarians were whooping it up for Bush’s war and bubble economy.)

A ranking of 202,294th on Alexa should make IlanaMercer.com, also on the ascendancy, 31 on the list of 50 top libertarian sites.

That’s if it had been ranked; it was not.

IlanaMercer.com archives the “Return to Reason” column. “Return to Reason” is WorldNetDaily’s longest-standing, exclusive libertarian column.

The DBKP Report was apprised of these omissions (the relevant emails are: ginnavive@gmail.com & mondoreb@gmail.com). Still, it has no excuse. Perhaps the list privileges members of the “Libertarian Lite” community, which likes to pretend paleolibertarians are not part of the genus libertarian? I doubt it, as my good pal Vox Day is a paleolibertarian (who questions free trade, no less), and his Vox Popoli weblog has, I’m pleased to report, been listed.

The author of IlanaMercer.com and Barely a Blog has never sought what one wag called “the warm smell of the herd.” However, the problem with those who think they can wish-away an individual’s substantial, indubitably classical liberal, output (this work included) is this: One day not so far away, they’ll look bad. Maybe even a little malevolent. Their credibility is at stake, not my 14 years of writing in the cause of liberty.

Many thanks to my many readers for making the two sites, maintained single-handedly by myself, so popular.

TTFN (Ta-ta for now).

UPDATE (Aug. 10): Darn, Neboja (see comment below), you’ve alerted me to the fact that I gave publicity to the DBKP self-appointed outfit. However, this conduct is emblematic and all-pervasive when it comes to my work; so what I said above needed to be said: “One day not so far away, [a lot of people] will look bad. Maybe even a little malevolent.”

If this utterly independent public intellectual cared one bit about the various tribal establishments—libertarian or other, as the dynamics of all these factions are comparable—she would be sitting on the phone NOW, replying to a couple of recent inquiries from the producer of a major libertarian television talent. (A polite, appreciative email that provided a contact # was plenty good enough for me.)

Even some of my readers, so mired in the idea that what the herd does matters to me—and in general—think that because B (Mercer’s not on TV), she has to be A (a B-talent). Of course, reasoning backward is an error. However, I like RT, as they seem truly interested in ideas. In this RT segment, I was asked about the Freedom Fest (to which I had never been invited, naturally, like I care), where a couple of neophytes had been asked to expatiate about the vexing topic of Israel. That, when this Jewish, ex-Israeli, libertarian woman has been writing cogent libertarian tracts about Israel for over a decade, one of which was even solicited by the Paul Campaign (before said Campaign was apprised by an establishmentarians, presumably, against the practice of using Mercer).

My Israel tracts have always departed from the tinny, robotic, anti-Israel, hackneyed lines you hear from the paleo- and libertarian Regulars. Yet these columns are fiercely American-centered, patriotic, and belong squarely in the American classical liberal tradition.