Category Archives: Individual Rights

UPDATE II (12/21/021): NEW COLUMN: Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech (Part 3)

Free Speech, Individual Rights, Justice, Labor, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Republicans, Technology, The Courts, THE ELITES

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NEW COLUMN: “Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech,” is now on WND.COM, The Unz Review, CNSNews, and The New American.

This column is Part 3 of a 3-part series. Read Part 1, “Big Tech’s Financial Terrorism And Social Excommunication” and Part 2, “Justice Thomas’ Solution to Big Tech’s Social And Financial Excommunication.”

An excerpt:

It is inarguable that by financially crippling and socially segregating, and banishing politically irksome people and enterprises—the Big Tech cartel is flouting the spirit, if not the strict letter, of the Civil Rights Act.

For how do you make a living if your banking options are increasingly curtailed and constantly threatened, and your ability to electronically communicate with clients is likewise circumscribed?

Do you go back to a barter economy (a book for some bread)? Do you go underground? Cultivate home-based industries? Do you keep afloat by word of mouth? Go door-to-door? Return to stamping envelopes? How can you, when your client base is purely electronic?

Telling an individual he can’t open a bank account on account of the beliefs and opinions swirling in his head teeters on informing your innocent victim he might not be able to make a living, as do other, politically more polite Americans, and despite his innocence: Our only “offenses” as dissidents are thought crimes, namely, speaking, or typing or wafting into the air unpopular, impolite words.

“[I]n assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power,” Justice Clarence Thomas has argued, “what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today’s digital platforms, nothing is.”

To paraphrase this Supreme Court jurist: Sure, there are alternatives to The Big Tech, but these make a mockery of the outcast. It would hardly be hyperbole, in driving home Justice Thomas’s point about comparability, to put it thus:

With respect to financial de-platforming, barring someone from PayPal is like prohibiting a passenger from crossing the English Channel by high-speed train, via ferry and by means of 90 percent of airplanes. “Have at it sucker.”

By Deep Tech decree, some Americans are worth more than others, based not on their actions, but on the voiced thoughts in their heads. This cannot stand.

The letter of the law needs changing. Do it.

Civil Rights Act

Thus, the preferred remedy to Deep Tech depredations would build upon existing Civil Rights Act jurisprudence.

As a reality-oriented conservative libertarian, I inhabit and theorize in the real world. From the conservative-libertarian’s perspective, Barry Goldwater got it right. Civil Rights law is an ass, for it infringes on property rights. But the onus is on flaccid Republican lawmakers to ensure that that ass can be ridden by all equally (with apologies to adorable, much-abused donkeys for the cruel metaphor).

These are existing laws that are already enforced. I see no reason to reject the application of civil rights solutions to wicked, woke bullies because existing laws that’ll never be repealed go against my core beliefs. What is libertarianism? The art of losing in life because of a slavish devotion to theoretical purity? …

… NEW COLUMN, “Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech,” can be read now on WND.COM, The Unz Review, CNSNews, and The New American.

UPDATED (10/26/021) I:

UPDATE II (12/21/021) II: “Berenson v. Twitter“:

Twitter is indisputably a messenger service. A longstanding California law regulates messenger services as “common carriers.” This means that they must accept all messages they receive. Twitter thus must accept all tweets it receives. It has no First Amendment rights to refuse them on the basis that it does not agree with them.
A federal law commonly called Section 230 “preempts” the California law, giving Twitter the right to reject tweets or ban users. (Whether that right is universal or whether Twitter must act in “good faith” in restricting service is a separate question; whether Twitter acted in “good faith” in this case is still another question. But put those issues aside for the moment.)
Section 230 is what enables Twitter to claim a First Amendment privilege that supersedes the California law and restrict my own First Amendment right to speak; thus federal courts have the right to review 230 on First Amendment grounds.

MORE.

America Doesn’t Know Shiite From Shinola: Iran (Shia) Worries About Afghanistan Insanity (Sunni)

English, Individual Rights, Iran, Islam, John McCain, Terrorism, The West

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The title for this blog post comes from a 2014 column, “Don’t Know Shiite From Shinola,” in which I write that America is “a mulish military power which doesn’t know Shiite from Shinola.” The original expression is 100% American: “Doesn’t know shit from Shinola“:

Shinola was a brand of shoe polish previously manufactured in the USA. The alliteration of the expression ‘doesn’t know shit from Shinola’ partly explains the derivation. Also, without putting too fine a point on it, the two things named in the expression could possibly be confused. However, only one of them would be good to apply to your shoes and only particularly dim people could be expected to muddle them up.

To continue the theme of the previous blog post, “Afghanistan And Its Neighbors; China And Those Uyghurs,” you’re not considered properly American unless you’re carping about “Iran, Iran, Iran.” The John McCain version is, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”


For merely asking, “When last did Iran commit terrorism against the US?,” Tucker Carlson was attacked viciously by Mark Levin. Carlson, however, was on the money. As I chronicled in this 2017 blog post: “Iranians Killed ZERO Americans In Terrorist Attacks In U.S. Between 1975 -2015.”

Iran is neighbor to Afghanistan, sharing a long border with it. And, “Iran … has a more tortured relationship with the Taliban. Its leaders are certainly delighted to see the Great Satan, America, abandon its bases next door.”

As always, The Economist offers informed analysis in, “Afghanistan’s neighbours are preparing for life with the Taliban”:

“Shia Muslims … view their own Islamic revolution as a modernising movement.” After all, “Women can study, work and hold office in Iran, so long as they veil.” Yes, Iranians “look askance at the Taliban’s hidebound Sunni fanaticism.”

Swamped for decades with destitute refugees and cheap heroin from Afghanistan, Iran is also worried about a new influx, particularly of Hazaras, a Shia ethnic minority that the Taliban have viciously persecuted in the past.

“With little leverage over the Taliban and no liking for the tottering government in Kabul, Iran is likely instead to lend support to local Afghan militias in the border region, which recently beat off a Taliban assault on the city of Herat.”

What do you know? When compared with the Sunni Islam (Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism), a faction of Islam with whose practitioners the West feels much more simpatico—Shia Islam (Iran’s poison of choice) is more enlightened. Yet America and Israel side with Saudi Arabia, the epitome of Sunni insanity. Go figure. And the title says it all:

America Doesn’t Know Shiite From Shinola.

Thoughts from Twitter:

We invade and then centralize:

Totally tribal: This would sound like a brand name to our idiots, but it’s how Afghans think and feel.

Our fight for democracy is not necessarily theirs.

 

*Image courtesy LinkedIn

UPDATED (8/23): Afghanistan And Its Neighbors; China And Those Uyghurs

America, China, Foreign Policy, Globalism, Individual Rights, Islam, Jihad, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda

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“The Uyghurs, the Uyghurs; China is oppressing the Uyghurs. Our values, our values; being an American means you must fret about the Uyghurs. You hear me, hillbilly? In fact, you can’t be an American unless you worry about the Uyghurs.” (Watch me!)

That’s the bobble heads on TV. As dumb as fuck, bereft of any deep, historical or geopolitical insights—they mouth shallow talking points, extracted from Wokipedia.

These TV twits and twats are used to telling their receptive, equally “knowledgeable” audiences that China has “thrown a million Uyghurs into prison camps.”

True (not that it’s any of our business).

What the dummies on the idiot’s lantern don’t tell you is that, “Uyghurs count among thousands of foreign jihadists active in Afghanistan, mostly enlisted in Taliban ranks.”

I’m not saying China is justified in interning a Jihad-prone population living in its midst, but neither are the overlords of the West (see “Our Overlords Who Art in D.C (2010)”, if you want to know how “overlords” drifted into such popular use) justified in jailing January 6 protesters  without due process, allowing the banning of innocent, law-abiding citizens from the banking establishments, threatening those who defend their homes with incarceration, on and on.

And it is about American dissidents that I care.

While menstrual America frets over “the images, the images, oh the images (“the children, the children)” coming out of Afghanistan; the grown-ups (or the men) in the region, whose countries abut Afghanistan, have gotten together to ensure that Jihad doesn’t spill over into their countries. It’s called acting in the national interest.

Excellent analysis in “Afghanistan’s neighbours are preparing for life with the Taliban: Regional powers are not looking forward to it. But they cannot agree on what to do about it.”

UPDATE (8/23): “What Beijing has offered the Taliban so far is an open hand and a hint of legitimacy. In late July, China invited some Taliban leaders to meet Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing. It was a significantly public gesture to demonstrate goodwill toward the insurgent group. In exchange, Taliban leaders pledged to leave Chinese interests in Afghanistan alone and not to harbor any anti-China extremist groups.” (NPR)

Sounds like China has a modest foreign policy. Striking not a military blow, but an agreement. If only…

*Images courtesy The Economist

NEW COLUMN: Justice Thomas’ Solution to Big Tech’s Social And Financial Excommunication

Argument, Economy, Individual Rights, Technology, The State

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NEW COLUMN IS “Justice Thomas’ Solution to Big Tech’s Social And Financial Excommunication.”

The column is currently on WND.COM, The Unz Review, Townhall.com, The New American and CNSNews.com.

The column is Part 2 of a 3-part series. Read Part 1, “Big Tech’s Financial Terrorism And Social Excommunication.”

An excerpt:

… Fox News personality Tucker Carlson has vowed to stay chipper. This is not sufficient a solution from so powerful a persona as Mr. Carlson.

The requisite and fitting noblesse oblige comes from Justice Clarence Thomas.

As one of the few public intellectuals to grasp the gravity of social and financial excommunication by Deep Tech (to denote Big Tech’s enmeshment with The State), and for proposing a way to prohibit wicked social and financial ouster of innocents—Justice Thomas is my hero.

To blabber on about simply finding alternative outlets to Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, PayPal and other banking facilities is asinine verging on the criminal. Coming from political representatives, such advice ought to guarantee loss of face, even political expulsion.

The ordinary guy or girl (check) is told to go up against economic and political entities whose revenues exceed the GDP of quite a number of G20 nations combined.

“It changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole means for distributing speech or information,” inveighs Justice Thomas:

“A person could always choose to avoid the toll bridge or train and instead swim the Charles River or hike the Oregon Trail. But in assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today’s digital platforms, nothing is.”

I’d go further. It would hardly be hyperbole, in driving home Justice Thomas’s ingenious point, to put it thus:

With respect to financial de-platforming, barring someone from PayPal is like prohibiting a passenger from crossing the English Channel by high-speed train, via ferry and by means of 90 percent of airplanes.

“Sure, some options remain for you to explore, you hapless loser. Go to it!” …

… READ THE REST on WND.COM, The Unz Review, Townhall.com, The New American and CNSNews.com.

Next Week: Part 3, “Mercer & Mystery Man’s Big-Tech Solutions.”