Category Archives: libertarianism

Speak To Race In The Case Of Ria Van Straaten, Or Forever Hold Your Peace

Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Media, Paleolibertarianism, Political Correctness, Race, Racism, South-Africa

Without addressing the racial angle, the story about the cruel trick played on 87-year-old South African pensioner Ria van Straaten is meaningless. If you’ve reported (as has The Raw Story), shared or provided commentary sans racial context as to how this frail, legally blind elderly Afrikaner was forced to sing for her meager supper, by ANC black state officials—you should speak up now or forever hold your peace.

In other words, shut up if honesty is not your journalistic policy.

Of course, the heroic South African journalist Adriana Stuijt has never made this mistake. As is her custom, she fearlessly reports the unvarnished facts. “[B]lack-state officials laughed uproariously as the old white woman sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in a trembling voice.” The “frail elderly Afrikaner woman, Ria van Straaten, 87, [was] forced to ‘sing for her R1200 pension’ over [a] PA-system at [a] government-agency in Newcastle, 2013-04-10, … before they would hand over her R1200 old-age pension.”

On doesn’t expect much by way of politically unpalatable honestly from The Huffington Post, MSN.COM, or UPI.

Ignorant invertebrates all.

To the libertarians, however, who take feeble intellectual refuge in merely implicating and condemning the abstract entity of the state I say: “grow a backbone.”

The endemic evil of the state is a necessary but insufficient explanation for the joy black affirmative appointees take in socking it to whites in post-apartheid South Africa, a place where full-on racial hatred is a state religion.

Add the sweltering heat to the dangers of a sadistically, racist bureaucracy—and claiming a pension at the social security office is a dangerous excursion for old, white South Africans.

Unscrambling Libertarian Scripts

Feminism, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Intellectualism, Intelligence, libertarianism, Liberty, Paleolibertarianism, Politics, Ron Paul

Here I answer my pal Myron Pauli, who, while a fierce individualist, all too often falls into the blasé libertarian, collective group-think, whereby only Ron Paul escapes blame for his imperfections (such as the incessant noodling about Congress’s need to declare war—as if the imprimatur of cockroaches turns unjust wars into just ones—or calling a focus on immigration in tough economic times a function of xenophobia; cleaving to the left’s tack on so-called endemic racism, being a career politician, on and on).

Myron’s Facebook comment below is a response to this week’s WND column, where I very specifically home in on Maggie Thatcher’s manifest individualism and cerebral acuity, not her policies.

Writes Myron Robert Pauli:

As a libertarian nerd, I will often claim that the most beneficial people are often anonymous innovators who come up with a medical or device breakthrough to benefit the world (who invented the thermostat?)…. – on the other hand, politicians are mostly parasitic – the best benign politicians like Thatcher are the ones who foil the MALIGNANT designs of the Footes, Galtieris, and Brezhnevs. Hence, she was a Giantess in a field of pygmies (of course, she might have accomplished more had she stayed in chemistry or took over her father’s store- a great lady nonetheless).

MY REPLY: Thatcher was no pigmy, however which way you slice it. Be it in her role in a laboratory, bringing us one step closer to the delights of soft-serve ice-cream (the left denies her involvement, naturally), or smashing the unions and keeping the England she loved out of the EU.

You are repeating the usual libertarian echo chamber/mantra: Apply a single analysis to each politician other than Ron Paul, of course, whose every indiscretion is ignored, and every endeavor, even parasitic, is elevated.

The independent, unaffiliated writer should fight for intellectual virtue against the Idicoracy and the mediocrity. Without those intellectual standards, there can be no liberty. For those attributes, Mrs Thatcher is to be lauded. It is careless to dismiss these gifts of hers so rare in the populace and the people, for these attributes were enormously influential at the time.

Pundit-cum-philospher Jack Kerwick once observed how virtually impossible it is to reduce the size of the state. As a practical matter, it is well-nigh impossible to choke the modern, Western managerial state without a coup, or without shedding blood, as Thomas Jefferson advised.

Let’s see the brave theoreticians, confined to their safe theoretical perimeters, waffling into the ether, accomplish what Mrs. Thatcher accomplished: smash the unions, defend Britain from Brussels, privatize so many of Britain’s Sovietized industries, prohibit subsidies to industry, on and on.

Was she flawed? Most assuredly. (As a longtime antiwar libertarian, I’d be the first to say so.) But even more flawed are those who dismiss her with the pat libertarian analysis of, “Oh, she didn’t achieve a market anarchy. I can go back to snoozing, rather than apply my intellect to an assessment of what she did do.”

More crucially, and that was the focus of “Margaret Thatcher: An Individualist, Not A Feminist”: Any woman who thought and spoke as she did is inspiring because so rare and getting rarer by the day.

“Big hair, an overbite, Botox and mind-numbing banalities”: that’s the contemporary role model of womanhood that infests TV.

Updates to the original Margaret Thatcher blog post are here.

Obama Is Reminded Of His Eunuch-In-Chief Responsibilities

Conservatism, Feminism, Gender, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Sex

Like any good Democrat, gaseous ANA NAVARRO REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST and her GOP sister strategists were upfront and in your face on the matter of Barack Obama’s comments about California Attorney General Kamala Harris, whom the president had described as “brilliant, dedicated, and tough,” but also “the best-looking attorney general in the country.”

ANA NAVARRO, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST:

I think he did the right thing by apologizing. Whether he offended Kamala Harris or not, he did offend some women. This is a sensitive issue for women. A lot of times, women are put through a double standard when it comes to their looks — professional women — that men are not. So as we fight for equality, it is an important issue. Also, Wolf, he’s the president of the United States. And like it or not, the president of the United States gets a higher level of scrutiny than just about anybody else. And I also think there’s some sort of double standard when it comes to President Obama. I can tell you that I had a conversation this morning with the attorney general of Florida, Pam Bondi. Forty-four years old, long, blonde hair.
And I said to Pam Bondi who was a very strong supporter of Mitt Romney, what would have happened if Mitt Romney, during the campaign, had told you just how attractive you were. And she said, you know what? All hell would have broken loose. I completely agree with her. So, I think he acted correctly by apologizing. It was the right thing to do.

Ridiculous. American women pride themselves on rejecting the biological realities of being female. The natural banter and sexual tension between men and women has thus given way to a frigid political script. Scary.

So too do these confused women expect to strut around half naked in the workplace. Let a man dare to so much as glance their way, or treat them dismissively for their brazenness–and the ladies run to Human Resources screaming discrimination.

CNN and the other cable and news nitworks have been extremely crafty in crafting the meta-message—for some time the networks have been presenting to the public regular Republican commentators who’re left-liberals in all but name.

ANA NAVARRO REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST (said in one breath) is an example. This Republican identity politics activist helped drive out the cantankerous and interesting old-timer John Sununu, openly offering up his old, white maleness as grounds for exclusion from national discourse.

The Navarro woman may not be as stupid as sister S. E. Cupp (“Another Mouth in the Republican Fellatio Machine”), Dana Perino (“the Heidi Klum of the commentariat”) or Margaret Hoover, but like them she is incapable of committing the sin of an original thought. And she will both follow and enforce the political correct scripts on feminism, multiculturalism, immigration, foreign policy, economy, while proclaiming her independence from the rooftops.

UPDATE II: Desperately Seeking Immigrants Who Qualify For Welfare (In Other Words, ‘Undocumented Democrats’)

Ethics, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Welfare

“Desperately Seeking Immigrants Who Qualify For Welfare” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“Number 69, number 69,” called an officer of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Number 78, yours truly, was sitting in line at the ASC (the Application Support Center), in Washington State. I was there to renew my green card, the much-coveted US permanent residency permit.

The woman to my left was clutching note number 69. Despite having been summoned time and again, she stayed put. She did not understand English. Like her, the room was packed with applicants who were talking in tongues.

Although a longtime champion of American freedoms, I have decided, for now, against accepting US citizenship, for which a green-card holder is illegible after five years.

Uncle Sam’s foot-soldiers assault me whenever I take to the unfriendly skies. And should I leave the US, after taking the Oath of Citizenship—IRS agents will fulfill their oath of office and hunt me down.

As the chorus lyrics to that haunting rock classic by the Eagles goes, “You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave!” In the evocative words to “Hotel California,” Americans who try “running for the door,” soon discover that they “are all just prisoners here …”

Prisoners of Uncle Sam’s device.

If he can tolerate TSA assaults as he departs the country, a US citizen who chooses to live and work overseas cannot escape the Internal Revenue Service. The United States is perhaps the only country “to tax its citizens on income earned while they’re living abroad.”

Although the government’s citizenship stamp of approval is meaningless, there are risks in rejecting it.

While a US citizen cannot be denied entry whenever he leaves the country and returns home; a green-card holder is essentially asking for permission to re-enter. This, as millions of members in a favored outlaw fraternity stroll across the southern border, giving border patrol the finger (as the other finger dials the ACLU).

Besides, have you ever heard a member of America’s low-brow glitterati and literati advocate for immigrants who are not poor, not brown, and not uneducated? I have not—with the exception of Tucker Carlson, a libertarian-leaning rightist. …”

The complete column is, “Desperately Seeking Immigrants Who Qualify For Welfare.” Read it on WND.

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UPDATE I: Jay Leno on “Undocumented Democrats”:

“And in a groundbreaking move, the Associated Press, the largest news gathering outlet in the world, will no longer use the term ‘illegal immigrant.’ That is out. No longer ‘illegal immigrant.’ They will now use the phrase ‘undocumented Democrat.’ That is the newest – ‘undocumented Democrat.’ ”

UPDATE II (4/5): About “Non-Sycophantic Libertarians,” Todd writes on WND’s Comments:

I’m with you and Tucker on the immigration issue. I don’t know if this is still the case, but it wasn’t that long ago that if you wanted to immigrate to Australia, you had to show proof that you either a) had enough assets to support yourself long term or b) possessed a
skill that was needed there. That would never happen here though..it makes too much sense.
Sometimes it takes a non-citizen to offer real perspective on what it is to be an American, not to mention shining light on some of our more dopey policies (Daniel Hannon is another who comes to mind in that regard). I actually don’t blame you at all for not taking the plunge and becoming a citizen, especially in these times (I’ve heard that even if you
renounce your citizenship the IRS could STILL come after you).
It’s nice to hear some sound perspective from a non-sycophantic libertarian (unfortunately sycophants come in all stripes, including some who cloak themselves in logic and reason). You do make remarkable sense. There’s not enough of that going around.