Category Archives: Individual Rights

UPDATED: Rush Limbaugh Pimps Principles (& No One Understands RIGHTS from Wrongs!)

Conservatism, Constitution, Feminism, Gender, Individual Rights, Intelligence, Republicans

In the proud history of conservative serial stupidity, Rush Limbaugh’s latest faux pas takes the cake. An issue concerning constitutional principles fell into his large lap. But the conservative movement’s self-aggrandizing, insufferably pompous Mouth, pimped it.

A privileged Georgetown University law school student named Sandra Fluke was permitted to make the case before a “nonofficial congressional committee” as to why the state should compel the insurance industry to provide sisters with birth-control pills. (Some committee members were in tears listening to this cloistered cow tell of women turning away from the pharmacy counter for lack of funds. Go to the Republic of Biafra for a taste of deprivation, Fluke!)

This flaccid fool was supremely repulsive in her perverse conviction that a woman’s “reproductive rights” were the responsibility of other taxpayer. Fluke is a testament to the destructive role of women in our politics, forever petitioning to expand the power of the state at the expense of individual rights. (Read a corrective about natural rights, here.)

Recall, Limbaugh once launched a sneering assault on a deformed Michael J. Fox, aping Fox’s Parkinson’s-induced spasms, instead of critiquing Fox for petitioning Congress for unconstitutional favors, just like Fluke.

When it came to Fluke, Limbaugh flunked as badly. He began thus:

“What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex — what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.”

Limbaugh then said, “ok, so she’s not a slut. She’s round-heeled.” “Round-heeled” is an old-fashioned term for promiscuity.

This is entertaining, but besides the point.

But here is where the middle-aged, so-called conservative loses it, sounding like a lusty old voyeur:

“So Miss Fluke, if we are going to … pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

Game. Set. Match, Sandra Fluke. Limbaugh not only lost the argument to this inconsequential woman, but he also helped anoint a future Democratic, feminist, front-woman and leader.

Conservatives have a hard time with first principles; perhaps they don’t have any. Thus, they can never win an argument with a liberal, for all they have in their intellectual arsenal is a Benthamite utilitarianism (except that Jeremy Bentham was really smart).

Why are conservatives Addicted to That Rush?

UPDATE (March 3): No One Understands RIGHTS from Wrongs! Your point is not the point either, Robert Glisson. The point is that conservatives and liberals alike do not have any mandate to promote responsibility vis-a-vis the legislator. The Fluke female can screw herself silly; quit preaching to her! People are sick and tired of conservatives in their bedroom and liberals in all the other rooms. The only point here is that no taxpayer, coerced by Congress, should be compelled to pay for Fluke’s personal choices, good or bad. I give up on anyone understanding what a natural right means. I do, however, get why people are Addicted to that Rush, who is not “more often right than wrong,” but is both insufferably self-righteous and wrong.

Justice Ginsburg And You: 2 Peas In A Pod?

Classical Liberalism, Constitution, Founding Fathers, Individual Rights

The following is excerpted from my latest column, “Justice Ginsburg And You: 2 Peas In A Pod?”:

“I would not look to the US constitution,” said US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in an interview with Al-Hayat TV. “If I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012, I might look at the constitution of South Africa, Canada … and the European Convention on Human Rights.”

Al-Hayat’s correspondent had solicited Ginsburg’s advice on drafting the Egyptian constitution.

Go easy on Ginsburg; she’s a lot like you. She shares a disdain for America’s founding document with millions, maybe even a majority, of her countrymen. The US Constitution is flouted daily by the people’s representatives, and has been amended and reinterpreted to the point of no return.

The governing documents that excite Bader Ginsburg’s admiration are documents of positive rights. The American Constitution is by-and-large a charter of negative liberties, as the president once described it derisively.

A positive right is state-manufactured, usually at the behest of political majorities. Rights to a job, water, clothes, food, education and medical care are examples. Some of the European covenants canvassed by Bader consider “freely chosen” desirable work as a human right. Ditto adequate “rest and leisure.”

Once these needs are recognized as rights, they become state-enforceable, legal claims against other, less-valued members of society (“the rich”). Someone who hasn’t had a vacation, or has not reached his career apogee, gets to collect on such claims.

In the case of natural rights—the only founding truths the nation’s fathers could have conceived of, given their classical liberal philosophical framework—the duty is merely a mitts-off duty. My right to life means you must not murder me. My right to liberty means you dare not enslave me. My right to property means you can’t take what’s mine—not 35 percent of it, or 15 percent. Nada. And you have no right to stop me from taking the necessary acquisitive action for my survival, so long as I, in turn, respect the same restrictions.

As an instantiation of a constitutional democracy governed in accordance with state-minted rights, take the new South Africa, where almost everyone knows someone who has been raped, robbed, hijacked, murdered, or all of the above, in violation of natural law.

Not that you’d know it, but the poor South Africans enjoy a constitutional right to live free of all forms of violence, “public” or “private” in origin. Section 12 of their progressive constitution guarantees the “Freedom and Security of the Person.” Clearly “progressive” doesn’t necessarily spell progress, as nowhere does this wordy but worthless document state whether South Africans may actually defend this most precious of rights.

If anything, self-defense can be an offense in progressive South Africa. …

Knowing what you now know about the South African Constitution—what is it do you suppose Ginsburg dislikes about one of the greatest documents of political philosophy?

From all accounts, it is that the US Constitution is principally a charter of negative liberties. …”

Read the complete column, “Justice Ginsburg And You: 2 Peas In A Pod?”

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “Tweet” and “Share” the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT and “Return To Reason” on WND.

Money: Mitt’s Mark of Cain

Individual Rights, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality, Private Property, Socialism, Taxation

Mitt Romney is a marked man in socialist-minded America. Over the past two years, he paid a “mere” 15 percent on $42.7 million, “because his income was derived almost entirely from capital gains and dividends from his extensive portfolio of investments.”

Of this $42.5 million fortune made over the past two years, seven million was given to charity. More than Mitt paid in taxes. Of that generosity mainstream morons disapprove because Romney’s charities tend to be Mormon related.

Contrast Mr. and Mrs. Romney to the miserly Joe Biden and his lefty wife. The latter gave between 0.1% and 0.3% of their income to charity. Not exactly the two tithes the Romneys spare for the poor.

There is a lot wrong with Mitt’s political philosophy. There is not a lot wrong with Mitt the Man.

UPDATED: The Despot’s Bag of Tricks

Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Justice, Law, Liberty, Military, Terrorism, The State

In apartheid South Africa, denial of due process very often took the form of detention without trial. But, as I observed in Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, the South-African model of detention-without-trial is slowly becoming a fixture of the American legal landscape.

Via the Tenth Amendment Center:

Congress just passed, and the President just signed, a bill that gives legal authority to the President to kidnap and perpetually imprison persons, including American citizens, without the benefit of due process. …

The relevant sections of the bill are 1021 and 1022.

* Section 1021 asserts the President’s authority to arrest suspected (not convicted) terrorists and gives him the option to choose whether or not they even get a trial, and if so, what kind of trial.

* Section 1022 requires that a certain class of terrorist get no trial. Instead they must be held in military prisons, for as long as this President, or any future President desires.

SECTION 1021

Section 1021 is very expansive in its reach. It “includ[es] any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”

* Who is “any person?”
* What is a “belligerent act?”
* What is “direct support?”

One could be safe in assuming these words mean whatever a creatively-minded prosecutor, a flexible judge, and an ignorant jury define them to mean — EXCEPT THAT, UNDER THIS ACT, ONE MIGHT NEVER GET AS FAR AS A COURT HEARING.

These terms will be defined by the bureaucrats in power.

Note who the bill’s co-sponsor is: McMussolini.

UPDATE: RT: “He will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law.”

These harsh words come courtesy of the executive director of the ACLU, formerly a supporter of the president but also just one of the many dissenters who have since grown disillusioned with an administration tarnished by unfulfilled campaign promises and continuous constitutional violations.