Category Archives: libertarianism

UPDATED: The Price Of Independence: Typical Anecdote (Patrons Anon)

Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Journalism, libertarianism, Liberty, Media

The front-page’s “Be-a-Patron” post has been updated with an anecdote that gives a sense of what writing outside the accepted orthodoxy is like. It’ll also give you a laugh.

I am forever being peppered with patronizing notes from readers—hardly patrons, for a patron is “one that supports, protects, or champions; a sponsor or benefactor.” This persistent condescension (usually from older, authoritarian males, some in position of influence) necessitates that I remind reality bound readers of the following: The age of the Internet guarantees the futility of energetic efforts to marginalize myself and others, who like me, write outside the orthodoxy. In my case, for almost two decades.

A recent exercise helped me to appreciate just how much the libertarian establishment, much like its mainstream cohort—and in desperation to sustain its sinecured monopoly over the marketplace of ideas—will forever opt for the “statist quo” (to use a Jeff Tuckerism), in the face of popular trends to the contrary.

I was asked to attend a workshop and deliver an address at a local chapter of a property rights organization. Closer to the time, however, I was informed that I had been dropped in favor of an individual from a well-heeled think tank. You see, this writer is an independent, one-woman band, whose fidelity is to the truth alone. As such, or so I was told, I lacked name recognition. Since I had never heard of the individual who was to fill my much-smaller shoes, I did a few Internet searches. I discovered that the group had opted for establishment, not for name recognition.

GOOGLE threw up 245,000 results for the establishmentarian to my name’s 1,310,000 results.
FACEBOOK had me at 2870 Friends. Mr. Establishment was stuck at … 4.
MY BOOK’S FACEBOOK FAN PAGE garnered 394 Likes; Mr. Establishment’s Author Page had all of 25 Likes. Amazon was as dismally populated.
TWITTER: Mr. Name Recognition had 67 followers to my modest 498.
WND & RT, as mentioned, carry my weekly column. They rank, respectively, 2,943 and 1,280 on the WWW by Alexa, the premier website ranking site. I presume that Mr. Establishment produces the occasional ponderous, desiccated, extremely well-concealed position paper. If so, he does it on a site that ranks 47,094th on Alexa.

How long can these Beltway based think tanks and their patrons delude themselves about their reach or appeal? They excite as much passion as a wet blanket during the perennial, Washington State power outage.

ALL IN ALL, patrons are preferable to the patronizing. I thank my patrons—you know who you are.

(A message to Myron: As you know, kvetch, kvetch, I maintain all my websites and social-media forums; do all the data imputing, Comments Section editing and posting, and necessary site backups, in addition to the daily articles and blog writing. I’ll spare you details of the cleaning, cooking, house and parrot upkeep—to say nothing of the 12 mile per-week running habit. This is just to say that I promise to post on BAB images of our fabulous get-together and donor’s dinner. You are and have been a pal and a patron for years. You and your daughter are a delight.)

UPDATE (Feb. 10): Myron: I didn’t mention your lovely daughter’s name—and not because I forgot it in my dotage. Rather, this animated fabulous girl might be tainted or endangered for her association with you and me. (I’m being funny, of course.)

UPDATE III: Closing The Door On Closed, Cloistered American Media

America, Intellectualism, Journalism, libertarianism, Media, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason, Russia

For news coverage, I’ve now converted almost exclusively to RT (on whose website my Paleolibertarian Column features). I recommend that thinking readers do the same. A few days with RT and you will begin to understand just how impoverished American media are (and how valid this writer’s media critique has been over the years); the degree to which broadcasters and journalists have degraded journalism and contributed immeasurably to the deep stupidity, gargantuan arrogance, and short attention spans of their viewers.

Americans are “a silly people in serious times” (Pat Buchanan’s words). Reason, intellectual honesty and curiosity, and standards of decency have been expunged from the national dialogue.

There isn’t a news story that isn’t biased, contaminated with every conceivable error in thinking, from pop psychology, to addiction and self-esteem fallacies, to obsessive, interminable negrophilia.

If you can no longer stomach the bombast in American broadcast media, the vanity panels, the egos in the anchor’s chair who’ve tailored debate and chosen interlocutors to fit their own limitations; if you’ve had it with Anderson Cooper-type journo-activism, the ubiquitous dog and cat stories, the constant stream of feel-good, feminized, soft news vignettes that festoon news and commentary; if you can stand not a moment more of the America über alles, navel-gazing, chauvinistic, delusions of grandeur and of empire promulgated by the self-important American media—I recommend RT.

Yes, there is leftist, even statist, programing at RT, but it doesn’t permeate every news segment like at CNN, where today, White House correspondent Jessica Yelling delivered a how-to for Obama on countering bad press about alternative energy. On RT you’ll find interesting segments complied by critical thinkers who pursue the kind of unorthodox angles I’ve pursued in my columns over the years, but which are absent from the American channels. “Exporting Revolution,” for example, with BAB A List writer Nebojsa Malic. (Related topic: “LaHood Is Still In The Egyptian Hood”)

This morning, as the Idiocracy at MSNBC, FoxNews and CNN counted down to the endorsement of Mitt Romney by the unthinking, crass, and Synophobic Donald Trump, RT’s Capital Account was tracking Ben Bernanke’s defense of “the Federal Reserve’s financial repression of savers on Capitol Hill.” Their words. Jim Rogers was on fire.

Sadly, I no longer watch the loud bluster on Freedom Watch, unless Lew Rockwell, always calms and Rothbardian, graces the show. The volume level, the Paul worship (such aggressive allegiance to any politician creeps me out), and the dueling perspectives political panels (featuring horrible, boring truth deniers like Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne) are pure torture.

Besides, when an anchor introduces his regulars (and boy are they day-in, and day-out fixtures) as “my good friend (Kirstin Powers),” or as “friend of the show,” it smacks of buddy-buddy influence peddling, not of an honest pursuit of ideas. Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate the work done on Freedom Watch to popularize constitutional principles among the masses, but it has become more like the other cable personality centered ego-driven shoutfests. And, of course, the regular robots from Reason Magazine, representing “Libertarianism Lite,” are tiresome.

Off to catch up on world events …

UPDATE I: Need I say more? Right now, as mainstream American media pretend jobs have materialized out of thin air, you can hear Jeffrey Tucker on RT’s Capital Account, talking about ending the Fed.

UPDATE II: Ann Coulter to Mitt Romeny at a fundraiser, “You owe me and you better be as right-wing a president as I’m telling everybody you’re going to be.’” Schmooze.

But another example of the narrow coterie that makes up the American media elite. Mind you, if the Judge welcomed “My buddy Ann Coulter, good friend of the show,” we’d at least have a few laughs. She’s always sharp and adds information, unlike the banal, boring, never-said-an-original-thing-in-their-lives Colmes and Powers.

UPDATE III: (Feb. 4): Do not distort my words, John D (in Comments). The style issue is minor. In your adulation, you’ve chosen here to do me a disservice by ignoring the repeated substantive comments made over these pixelated pages about the bent of “Freedom Watch.” In particular: 1) The sinecured Left-libertarian bores who’ve take up residence on the show, covered in “Libertarianism Lite.” Reason does not represent American libertarianism (Old Right), nor does it resonate with most Americans. American libertarianism is rightist.

2) As in all the cloistered and closed American programing—and contrary to RT’s which really welcomes many voices, and not only those of pundits and presstitutes who huddle close to Power—the habit on Freedom Watch is to shut out and expunge from the debate the unkosher faction, which is also, again, the libertarianism that most resonates with the American Right at large: paleolibertarianism.

3) In “Fox News And Its Truth Deniers,” I offered a substantive argument against the positively postmodernist “dueling perspectives political panel” perfected on the show. You, John, chose to ignore my case against the “parallel universe” created and paraded as truth, represented by the odious regulars listed: Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne, Alan Colmes, Juan Williams, Kirstin Powers, etc. “The above Fox News fixtures,” I argued, “no more represent truth or promote it than does your average Holocaust denier.”

“By presenting the public with two competing perspectives—you mislead viewers into believing that indeed there are two realities, and that it is up to them to decide which one is more compelling.” This Freedom Watch achieves handily.

Alas, in your blind adulation, John, you have chosen to cast substantive critique as a complaint about style (the latter—the delivery—being bloody horrible). What a shame.

CONTINUED IN THE POST, “More Reasons to Secede from the Pundit Pantheons of CNN, Fox and MSNBC.”

UPDATE II: Diane (Sawyer) in Disneyland (The Homo-eroticism of Left-Liberalism)

Crime, Drug War, Family, Homosexuality, Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Military, Paleoconservatism, Race, Racism, Religion, Republicans, Ron Paul

Watching Diane Sawyer struggle to come up with a remotely coherent question to the Republican presidential front-runners in Manchester, New Hampshire, was a reminder of the ABC “news” network’s close ties to the Walt Disney Company. What a gushing imbecile is Sawyer.

Here are some impressions off the top of my head, since, naturally, transcripts are not available from ABC:

Ron Paul was hardly approached on any matter. He ought to have certainly butted in on the proper perspective on marriage, gay or other. Leave it up to the churches and synagogues to decide who to marry. The state has no place solemnizing any marriage, gay or other.

Mitt Romney thinks that state infrastructure projects are different in their economic “stimulative” effects to other state spending. And he says he understands the economy? (He merely understands economics better than Barack.) The funds for both kinds of projects come from the same source: taxes, or deficit spending. I’d like to know how certain state spending generates plenty, and how these smart Republican statists can calibrate these finer points.

Mitt’s Synophobia certainly tracks with that of the atavistic idiot Donald Trump.

Sadly, Sinophobia is sanctioned among American opinion makers. The dislike for China falls within the realm of perfectly respectable economic theory. Accordingly, the Chinese have levered themselves out of poverty not through industry, frugality, and ambition, but by manipulating their money and stealing American intellectual property.

All these asses were apoplectic about Obama’s proposed tokenistic cuts to the sacred military-industrial-complex. By the CATO institute’s assessment, “the Pentagon’s new strategy justifies a minor defense budget cut. The Obama administration wants to grow military spending at a pace slightly less than projected inflation for a decade.”

The US’s military budget is six times that of China. Obama’s proposed “pared-down military” would still leave us with the largest military in the world (and some of the most porous national borders too).

The federalization of marriage and whether Ron Paul would make a third party run: In terms of the debate’s level of abstraction, these topics were all poor Diane could cope with. When matters constitutional were discussed for a little too long, Disney’s Diane protested the flight into abstraction.

This was possibly the worst debate so far.

UPDATE I: CTV ON PAUL’S “LEFTIST RANT.” You won’t find the Paul excerpt below on ABC, which moderated the New Hampshire debate, last night. After all, for ABC, a “leftist rant” is a righteous rant. Canada’s CTV, however, has both excerpted and editorialized about what, in my opinion, was Paul’s misguided, if not unusual, lurch to the Left in calling American cops racists:

Paul also praised civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. when asked about 20-year-old newsletters published under his name containing racist and homophobic themes.
“One of my heroes is Martin Luther King, because he practiced the libertarian policy of peaceful resistance,” Paul said.
He then went on a positively leftist rant about how drug laws are enforced in the United States, pointing out that black men are incarcerated at disproportionate rates.
“How many times have you seen the white rich person get the electric chair?” he asked. “If we really want to be concerned with racism…we ought to look at the drug laws.”

A rightist like myself abjures anti-drug laws on the grounds that they are wrong, not racist. The fact that these laws ensnare blacks is because blacks are more likely to violate them by dealing drugs or engaging in violence around commerce in drugs, not necessarily because all cops are racists.

Cops deal with the reality of crime. It is an error—and wrong—to accuse them all of targeting blacks when the latter actually commit more crimes in proportion to their numbers in the population. This is also a losing strategy with rightists. It is akin to aping Obama, who went hell-for-leather at Sgt. James Crowley, calling him a racist for mishandling his pal Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. That strategy helped BHO lose the midterms.

UPDATE II: The Homo-eroticism of Left-Liberalism.

Myron, your list below is hardly an exhaustive list of why the arrest racial differential is what it is. List of priors, perhaps? As for Paul’s contention, last night, that blacks suffer most from wars waged. I was almost sick. More lefty nonsense. Try poor white kids from the South, who are also least likely to get into college even when they whip black applicants and rich whites with their test results.

There is nothing worse than a left liberal man—he’ll sell his mother for the little pat on the head from the lefty establishment. He’ll watch his son near death because of black racism, against which he never warned the poor soft boy, yet he will reach out to his son’s killer.

I am beginning to think that left-liberal men who keep scrutinizing themselves for signs of racism against their black accusers, and accuse others like themselves of the same—actually derive a homo-erotic kick of bowing and scraping to those accusers.

You guys have read my book, and yet you still believe in the myth of white privilege?! There really is no cure for obsequious left-liberalism. I recommend reading The Cannibal again, although that is not punishment, and one should be punished for lapping up left-liberal nonsense.

Paul In Black, White & Pink

Gender, libertarianism, Liberty, Multiculturalism, Political Philosophy, Race, Republicans, Ron Paul

A December 2011 poll (16-18), taken by CNN/ORC, reveals that Ron Paul’s favorability among non-whites mirrors that of other GOPers. Hence, the fantasy that minorities will flock to liberty is just that, a fantasy.

While Barack Obama takes 72- and 57 percent respectively of the non-white and female vote, Ron Paul gets 25 and 41 percent of the same constituency. All the oozing over young Paul supporters aside, these numbers are yet more evidence that females and young voters lean left-liberal and are thus a hindrance to liberty: Obama garners the support of 53% of voters aged 18 to 34, to Paul’s 47%.

What was said in “RIP GOP” obtains: As the GOP goes, so goes the libertarian movement. Smug, self-satisfied left-libertarians like to dream that their constituency is differently derived, but the demographic facts are straightforward. The upshot of continued, unfettered, mass immigration—as it is currently practiced and preached by American central planners—is the triumph of tribalism, pillage politics, and left-liberalism.