Category Archives: libertarianism

UPDATED (4/30) NEW ESSAY And PODCAST: Campus Kids Could Deliver Gaza From The Great & Little Satan

Anti-Semitism, Constitution, Criminal Injustice, Critique, Democrats, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Just War, Justice, libertarianism, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, War

NEW ESSAY is “Campus Kids Could Deliver Gaza From The Great & Little Satan.” It was a main featured on The Unz Review, and it featured on The New American, April, 28, and
The Mises Institute’s Power & Market, April 30.

Excerpt:

American foreign policy is a museum of horrors in which Gaza 2023/2024 is the main exhibit.

It is my conviction that Gaza is much more than just one more American foreign-policy failure, an event and topic to swill around like mouth wash, spit out and move on, once the usual “tsk, tsk” bromides have been disgorged.

Uncle Sam’s usual deathly mixture of ignorance, cruelty and superiority has been exceeded with respect to Gaza. It is my belief that the United States’ open, even-energetic support for genocide is a defining event in the annals of American foreign-policy aberrations—repeatedly and vigorously vetoing UN Security Council resolutions against Israel’s atrocities, justifying Israel’s violations of the law, as well as, alternatively, pretending these violations had never occurred and making like the laws of man and the laws of God don’t apply to Israel.

This American failure is probably qualitatively different from blunders that went before. What the United States has approved in Gaza is the crime of all crimes, appallingly carried out in broad daylight.

Duly, the annihilation of a community and the landmass that supports it has been achieved. The arteries of supplies that sustain this Palestinian society are all but closed. The mass murder of members of the targeted group proceeds apace. Daily. Shamelessly. Before our very eyes. And as I write.

It is the case of the senile (Joe Biden) supporting the criminally insane (Israel).

To press my point: Mass graves are uncovered near the ruins of the Nasser and al-Shifa hospitals. Therein hundreds of Palestinians have been interred, bodies stacked, some handcuffed, others still tethered to medical tubes. The White House’s response amounts to, “Where, what, who, and how can this possibly be? Who could have done this horrible thing? Yes, we, too, want answers right away. Let’s do the forensics. Let’s ask the Israelis to look into it, shall we? See you tomorrow.”

This is not a Whodunit, you feckless, malevolent morons.

The serial killers are known to us. We know who murdered over 34,183 Palestinians and maimed an estimated 77,143. The serial killers loosed on millions of Gazans—their guns at the ready, pointed at the civilians huddled in the southern tip of the Strip—these are friends of ours. …

….THE REST: “Campus Kids Could Deliver Gaza From The Great & Little Satan” is on The Unz Review, The New American, and  The Mises Institute’s Power & Market.

RELATED PODCAST: “What Next After Genocide-By-Proxy & The Murder Of Diplomacy? The Quest For Peace“:

 

NEW BOOK: UPDATE II (3/13): The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy

Argument, Business, Capitalism, Classical Liberalism, Economy, Ethics, Free Markets, Free Speech, Government, Healthcare, libertarianism, Liberty, Logic, Morality, Natural Law, Outsourcing, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Pseudoscience, Reason, Regulation, Republicans, Science, Technology, The State

State ideology and the corporate creed have converged. Between them, they suborn the individual in one way or another ~ilana

Between the State and the Corporation, Homo sapiens has been reduced to a Hobbesian, hedonistic version of homo economicus and a sad iteration of homo solitarius ~ilana

The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy is the first in a series of volumes, to form part of “The Paleolibertarian Guide” (TPG) compendium.

“DEEP TECH,” my preferred term for the high-tech sector, denotes how deeply the head honchos of high-tech have penetrated and poisoned the American public and private sectors. As a coinage, Deep Tech is superior to Big Tech. Drawn from the term “Deep State,” the term “Deep Tech” better captures Big Tech’s overarching, enervating and tentacular reach into state and civil society.

“Deep State,” of course, is no conspiracy. Before the Left turned the term against the Right; it had long since been deployed on the Left and by libertarians to denote the state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally. To all intents and purposes, Deep Tech has become almost as powerful as the State in molding the Little Guy into a right-thinking Global Citizen.

In The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy, I make the case that state ideology and the corporate creed have converged. Between them, they suborn the individual in one way or another. The State no longer merely silhouettes civil and commercial society; but is absorbing it. What’s more, corporate culture, my purview in this volume, has been thoroughly co-opted by the State. Willingly so.

It has become the reflexive habit of corporations, not necessarily malevolently, to work together as well as to collude with government, to snuff out all lineaments of subversion in labor. After all, the progressive ideology is a gospel which these industry leaders never cease to proclaim and act upon. And if you fail to conform to it; they’ll fire you, isolate you, expose you, silence you, cancel you for good. These observations apply across party-lines.

“THE ABERRANT ECONOMY” in this work denotes the attitude of the multinationals toward economic growth. This attitude is today rooted not in healthy, community-based practices stateside and abroad, but in some aberrant economic gigantism. The derogatory diagnosis of economic elephantiasis undergirded by hubris, greed, and devout woke religiosity is warranted, I believe. Acromegaly is a physical deformity. In the human body it is caused by overproduction of certain compounds and is characterized by aberrant enlargement of the structure under discussion.

A diagnosis of economic acromegalia in Deep Tech is warranted ~ilana

The economic acromegalia or giantism diagnosed here in Deep Tech is one that manages to trample individual rights and other elementary decencies. Let us thus not confuse the metastatic multinational, motivated mostly by stratospheric wealth and a woke worldview—itself a gutter-like philosophy—with a business propelled by the good old-fashioned profit motive, whose growth is sustained by individuals and families tethered to corporeal communities, as opposed to colonies of imported laborers. Individuals, families, living in authentic, organic communities: These misty attachments are anathema to, and enemy of, the multinational’s clubby elites.

I underscore, as if in red ink, and deconstruct in detail how the awfulness of the COVID years, in particular, was underwritten by giant government, Big Pharma, and its latest malignant offshoot, the COVID Cartel—Disease X ad infinitum, if you will—in informal cahoots with social media. Again, a state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally.

Just how control is achieved—more reflexively than conspiratorially—I demonstrate by taking the reader through the COVID years, when “Agency And State Capture” were consolidated. I show how and why the Grand Old Party, Republicans, will always be missing in action on matters of individual and constitutional rights. On all matters, actually:

The overtone window alludes to a range of ideas once considered unthinkable, but now normalized. With their flaccid, crushingly stupid responses to most situations—Republicans have helped to normalize tyranny ~ilana

And I touch on the deformed foundations of the American Third-Party run healthcare system, down to how Deep Pharma’s patent privileges subvert market-based profits and free market medicine. Fault Deep Pharma, I counsel, not China.

In fact, not mere jobs, but “the very stuff of life is outsourced” by High-Tech, which loathes a labor market. (Chapter 7.) After reading “Homeless In The Homeland” (Chapter 6), the most heartbreaking of the book’s chapters, the reader will understand not only how “High-Tech Compounds Homelessness,” but that “homelessness in the United States is both physical and metaphysical”:

When your home belongs to The World; it’s everybody’s home, and nobody’s home, not even yours, which means you could find yourself homeless ~ilana

Ultimately, the sundering of cherished natural and constitutional rights by entities whose market penetration and capitalization equal those of many countries combined is why a solution is urgent.

Free-traders such as myself contend that it is worse than corrosive for big, powerful business to usher in a mind-controlling creed which they enforce against the Little Guy—on pain of social and financial demise—so that his speech is confined to politically correct, do-or-die guiding lodestars, the kind that sap and leach away the individual’s native power. Such an immoral drive ought to have miscarried a long time ago. A solution is provided in Chapter 9, “Dispatching Deep Tech; Enforcing Natural Rights.”

In the “Epilogue: On Globalism & Giving,” I round up by juxtaposing global integration with regionalism and localism, and spotlighting the last inspirational capitalist heroes of international standing. I hope to leave the readers with thoughts about charity, grace and what distinguishes The Good Giver from the Showy Giver.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK

Analytical thinking precedes empiricism and is at the root of solid thought as well as good science ~ilana

The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy, as mentioned, is the first in a series of volumes, to form part of The Paleolibertarian Guide (TPG) compendium. The TPG’s polemical impetus is analytical in nature. The framework of this and future works in the series will systematically demonstrate that analytical thinking precedes empiricism and is at the root of solid thought as well as good science—and liberty itself.

To wit, certain propositions in life need no “empirical evidence” for their validation. If anything, the constant insistence on scientism is in itself evidence of a deep corruption of reason. While solid empirical data are never to be dismissed, these are supplemental to a solid philosophy of science.

Derived from the Aristotelian method, the method I follow, Austrian-School thinking, is based in the laws of reason. To the extent that research contradicts reason, to that extent research is rubbish. The idea that science without the philosophy of science is nonsense comes alive for readers in Chapter 2: “COVID’s Cartel Of Cretins,” where, vivid and fun examples of a priori truths are provided.

THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON of this volume and those to follow is how to repatriate thinking outsourced to the expert class. For, these days, the simplest of logical deductions often appear to evade the ordinary man or woman.

The cognitive class, a managerial malignancy now glommed onto the Managerial State, will often cloak itself in the raiment of “science” and is instrumental in generating consensus. The insidious Expert Class that shapes and manages perceptions about public affairs I see as an extension of James Burnham’s Managerial State.

New Yorker James Burnham (1905-1987) began his intellectual odyssey as a Trotskyist before abjuring Marxism altogether and becoming a passionate anticommunist. He coined the phrase “managerial revolution,” which was extremely influential in the 1940s, and which served as the title of his bestselling book, one that had a marked impact on Orwell’s philosophy.

Lilliputian Man now finds himself pinned down like a butterfly, incapable or unwilling to derive and arrive at the truth without outsourcing his thinking to some authority or another. Restore we must the ancient philosophical notion whereby some things are simply axiomatically true (or false, for that matter), for it has profound ramifications for liberty.

A free-thinking people does not outsource thinking—the very business of life—to anyone.

 

 

UPDATE (2/25/024): Who knows what this means? Still, a nice category in which to be No. 1, in New Releases however fleetingly: Ethics & Morality.

UPDATE II (3/13/024): I’m buoyed to report that today, March 3, The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy is No. 31 in the category of “Best Sellers in Philosophy Criticism.”

NEW COLUMN: Conservatives & Liberals Aligned With Greedy Developers & Multinationals Against The Homeless

Conservatism, Globalism, IMMIGRATION, Labor, libertarianism, Political Economy, Private Property

The hotter the housing market, the higher the homelessness ~ilana

The egalitarians have appropriated the anti-zoning argument. They now malign single-family neighborhoods in favor of promoting density, which is—wouldn’t you know it?—more expensive and thus more lucrative. It also jibes with the progressive climate agenda to corral as many people possible into rent-a-bed, pod-living arrangements. ~ilana

NEW COLUMN is “Conservatives & Liberals Aligned With Greedy Developers & Multinationals Against The Homeless.” It is currently featured on The New American, WND.COM, The UNZ Review, where the column led the page, and Townhall.com.

Now on IlanaMercer.com:  https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/03/conservatives-liberals-aligned-greedy-developers-multinationals-homeless/

Excerpt:

Trust the late, much-missed Anthony Bourdain, the Kerouac of cooking, to blurt out the truth when nobody else would as to the root causes of homelessness. Other than libeling the poor as mental drug addicts, the rest—conservatives and liberals in cahoots—call for denser development (as greedy developers lick their chops), and certainly none of those dreamy picket fences for the poor.

It is … more edifying to survey the special interests currently involved in the anti-zoning debate. Tellingly, these are the grubby interests of the developers, the realtors and the municipalities, hunkering after more property taxes. All are, inadvertently, protesting the idea of the “Single-family home that offers people a chance at traditional, white-picket fence home-ownership.”

Development fiends all hunger for the revenues that come from “dense housing,” namely “any housing that’s attached to another unit, often in taller buildings: apartments, condos, town homes, row houses.”

Against this background, it seems clear that the egalitarians have appropriated the anti-zoning argument. They now malign single-family neighborhoods in favor of promoting density, which is—wouldn’t you know it?—more expensive and thus more lucrative. Dense living also jibes with the progressive climate agenda to corral as many people possible into rent-a-bed, pod-living arrangements.

… READ NEW COLUMN here “Conservatives & Liberals Aligned With Greedy Developers & Multinationals Against The Homeless.” It is currently featured on The New American, WND.COM, The UNZ Review and Townhall.com

Now on IlanaMercer.com, where you can also get up to speed by reading Part I: https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/03/slandering-homeless-mass-immigration-not-mental-disease-addiction/

 

UPDATE III (7/4/022): NEW COLUMN: Should Deranged, Moronic Females Really Be Procreating?

Abortion, Argument, Conservatism, Constitution, COVID-19, Crime, Gender, Government, libertarianism, Morality, Paleoconservatism, Sex, Taxation

New column is, “Should Deranged, Moronic Females Really Be Procreating?” It’s featured on WND.COM and was the feature article on The Unz Review.

Excerpt:

The ethical elegance of the libertarian argument was voiced before in this space:

However much one disdains abortion, one can’t get away from the matter of self-ownership. You simply have no right to take custody of an adult’s body. An adult woman, however loathsome, either owns herself and everything inside her or doesn’t. You can’t “own” yourself with the exception of your uterus or in conjunction with other busybodies.

Thus, theoretically, “Women have the right to screw and scrape out their insides to their heart’s content.” With a proviso: Americans who oppose abortion must be similarly respected in their rights of self-ownership. Taxpayers who oppose the procedure ought to have an equal right to dispense of what is theirs—their property—in accordance with the dictates of their conscience.

Trojans, Trivora or termination: An American woman has the right to purchase contraception, abortifacients and abortions, provided … she pays for them. For like herself, America is packed with many other sovereign individuals, some of whom do not approve of these products and procedures.

So, while adult women ought to be able to terminate their pregnancies—always to the exclusion of late-term infanticide—what America’s manifestly silly sex does not have the right to do is to rope conscientious objectors into supplying them with or paying for their reproductive choices. The rights of self-ownership and freedom of conscience ought to apply on both sides of the abortion debate.

Late-term abortion, generally, must always be outlawed. (I realize, dear reader, that I owe you argument, not assertion, which, alas, is what I’ve provided.) One could argue that, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the deciding case brought before the SCOTUS, did concern late-term abortion, with the state of Mississippi banning abortion after 15 weeks, pursuant to which, “The Jackson clinic and one of its doctors sued Mississippi officials in federal court, saying the state’s law was unconstitutional. A federal district court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the clinic, blocking Mississippi’s law. But the state appealed to the Supreme Court, which put the case on its docket.” …

… MORE. New column is, “Should Deranged, Moronic Females Really Be Procreating?” It’s on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

Abelard Lindsey writes: “This article makes clear that conservatives can be as off in la-la land as the liberal-left.”

Writes @Lisalazuli on GETTR: “@ILANAMercer, “You tackled the abortion issue very bravely, this is the most sane [sic] opinion I’ve heard.”