Category Archives: libertarianism

UPDATED: Oy Vey Egypt (Evolution?)

America, Democracy, Elections, Gender, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Media, Middle East

With few exceptions, the American media slobbered mightily over the revolution in Egypt. As a European relative put it: Americans from all political persuasions lack the smarts, the sophistication, and the familiarity with history to be … skeptical.

So, you had the Beltway libertarians joining Anderson Cooper (CNN), Neil Cavuto (Fox News), and Christiane Amanpour (ABC) in spirit at Cairo’s Tahrir Square to celebrate Egypt’s democratic spring; you had America’s female journos rushing to the mainly macho scene to show solidarity with the generic freedom fighters, who, it turned out, doubled up as common-or-garden gropers and rapists.

At the time, this writer wrote about the impossibility of a happy ending “in a country that has become progressively more Islamic since the 1950s.” I added that, “Mubarak’s dictatorial powers were directed, unjustly indubitably, against the Islamic fundamentalists of the Muslim brotherhood.” Unjustly, but probably quite usefully—for now, much to the surprise of the American Idiocracy, Islamic fundamentalists have won 61% of the vote in Egypt’s first democratic election.

“The Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party won 36.6% of the 9.7m ballots cast last week, followed by the Salafist al-Nour Party with 24.4%.” [BBC]

The secular Egyptian Bloc came third in the first round with 13.4% of the vote, followed by the liberal Wafd Party with 7.1% and the moderate Islamist Wasat Party with 4.3%. The Revolution Continues, a group formed by youth activists behind the uprising that ousted Mr Mubarak in February, won 3.5%

“This is about freedom,” said the immensely silly Lara Logan before the freedom fighters piled up on top of her.

Indeed.

UPDATE (Dec. 6): I was waiting for a wise man to point out that the historical parallels between the Muslim world and the West are few. Islam and its people aren’t stuck in the 1950s; they’re stuck in the 7th century. Thanks to Huggs for stating the obvious. In touting the sea-change underway in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world, our moron media interviewed 0.1% of the country’s population, the intelligentsia, to extrapolate to the majority. But there is also the deep stupidity so prevalent in the US whereby under the skin, all human beings are said to be the same.

UPDATE II: Alternative Right Reviews ‘Into The Cannibal’s Pot’ (A Lemming’s Lunacy)

Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Paleoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Race, South-Africa, The West

Writing for Alternative Right.com, “an online magazine of radical traditionalism,” the illustrious Derek Turner, editor of the UK-based Quarterly Review, has reviewed Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa. “Unusually amongst” paleoconservatives, plain conservatives, and left-libertarians, Derek has engaged with the material in the detail and depth his fans have come to expect from him, starting with the distillation of this writer’s paleolibertarianism:

“Ilana Mercer is a well-known controversialist on the American right, who writes a deservedly popular WorldNetDaily column and somehow finds time to maintain both a website and blog.

Her views are probably best described as paleo-libertarian. The book’s provocative title, which probably cost her potential readers, is borrowed from Ayn Rand, but the author tempers capitalist principles with respect for national identities and cultural traditions. Unusually amongst conservatives, she combines Israelophilia and dislike of Islam with trenchant opposition to American military adventurism. Unusually amongst libertarians, she is an outspoken critic of current US immigration policy as subversive of social order as well as fiscal responsibility. She has now turned her sights on her former homeland of South Africa – both for its own sake and because she feels its tenebrous present contains urgent indicators for America.”

Read the complete review, “RSA-USA—Beloved, Benighted Countries,” on AltRight.com.

In it, Derek zeroes in on the book’s salient statistics—the murder, rape, unemployment, food production (or lack thereof), emigration, ratio of taxpayers to tax consumers, etc—that characterize “the nouvelle regime.” Mr. Turner, a most sensitive writer—has also picked up on the things that vex and pain this author: the pathos and paradoxes inherent in Afrikaner—and, by extension, western—identity, “the fraught final days of apartheid,” and “the unresolved tension,” the consequence of “fleeing from a once-beloved country, and leaving behind … fine people, black as well as white, who had not the Mercers’ good fortune of possessing a second passport and remittable funds.”

[The author’s inner-conflict and sense of privacy have, obviously, resulted in some confusion. To clarify: My (WASP) husband, the consummate individualist, was the force of nature that yanked me away from South Africa. I had wanted to remain in that country; my husband could not wait to get out. He was right. He suffers no survivor’s guilt; his wife does, which is what our perceptive reviewer has picked-up.]

Mr. Turner also knows how to make a South African smile by throwing in a fitting Afrikaans bon mot: “the most verkrampte variety of bigot.”

Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa is available from Amazon.

UPDATE I: “She does not offer any SA solutions,” writes Derek. I believe there are no quick-fix “solutions,” as we in the West like them served. But in the final chapter, “Conclusion: Saving South Africans S.O.S.,” the propositions of emigration and secession are explored. (“Look Inside” the book.) And, in particular, emigration under the refugee program is spelled out, with reference to the value of an influx of Afrikaner farmers to the US, in the context of the economic depression: To go by Austrian analysis, farming is one of the nascent industries that is expected to thrive.

“South Africa’s commercial farmers are among the best in the world, if not the best. They have to contend with a plethora of problems—the vagaries of the weather, constant drought, rising taxes on everything from the rain on their trees to municipal levies (for which they receive nothing), and excessively high toll road costs. South Africa’s land tenure laws make it difficult to dismiss workers, let alone remove these workers from their properties, and they are besieged by land invasions and squatters. They are the victims of crop and stock theft, more murders per capita of their group than any other community on earth. They are burnt out, their fences are destroyed, and they are intimidated to the point where many have abandoned their farms.12
Despite a life of graft and grief, most persist and persevere. These are just the kind of men and women whom America, once a frontier nation, needs on its road to ‘financial sobriety.'”

[Page 249.]

Immigration will probably fail to “save South Africans S.O.S.,” not because I have not offered up such a solution—I have—but because of the ill-will and malevolence infesting Western powers, including the American government, whichever the party.

Granted, my exploration of secession is theoretical, rather than a pragmatic. This is because, as I state somewhere in that chapter, it is not for those of us who are safely ensconced in the West to draw up the boundaries of a viable (not landlocked) Anglo-Afrikaner state in that part of the world. The reader should note, moreover, that the kind of solution that would comport with a respect for individual liberties, and the sanctity of life and property are unlikely because of the lemming’s lunacy evinced by left-liberals, both in that country and without it. These are the suicidal sorts who infest the institutions of state and civil society—they are unwilling to entertain the manifest evils of democracy, especially in societies riven by race. This reality is spelled out in the book.

UPDATE II (Nov. 29): Here is an example of the liberal lemming’s lunacy of which I wrote above. Read EUSEBIUS MCKAISER’s “When the Walls Come Down,” published (approvingly) in the New York Times. A South African liberal, MCKAISER’s bit of whimsy offers no analysis, only lamentation over the reality dictated by crime in South Africa.

What can one do when left-liberals, who believe in crying and turning the other cheek, are at the helm? I speak to these philosophical problems in the book. More about this repulsive mindset, pervasive across the West, in “Sacrificing Kids To PC Pietism.”

Edifying or Stupefying?

Business, Economy, Free Speech, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Media, Propaganda

Omitted from the suspects lined-up in my WND column, “Fox News And Its Truth Deniers,” was U.S. Representative for New York’s 15th congressional district, Charlie Rangel. A more repulsive character to make himself at home on the “dueling perspectives political panel” would be hard to come by. A moral vacuum would open up, says Rangel, if the streets are swept clean of the Occupy Wall Street human and other detritus. Rangel apparently thinks that blocking access to the subway and disrupting business, which is what’s afoot, amounts to speech. Is this the opposite of edifying or what?

UPADATE III: Fox News And Its Truth Deniers (Left-Libertarianism)

Business, Economy, Founding Fathers, History, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Media, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, Ron Paul, Socialism

The following is excerpted from “Fox News And Its Truth Deniers,” now on WND.COM:

“The dueling perspectives political panel is compatible with the aims of CNN, MSNBC, and the other progressive broadcasters. Here is how it works: You invite a member of the Republican establishment; often a RINO—preferably a bimbo—to do battle with a lefty from similar circles. The sides are ideologically so close, that, in all likelihood, the panelists hang out after the show.

This format is positively postmodernist. Why? Because, 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.

The one parallel universe is represented on Fox Business by the likes of Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne, and others. …

The philosophical filth spewed by such characters – almost nightly on freedom-promoting programing, no less – is that government can spend and lend to good effect; that it can tax without discouraging and disrupting production; and that our overlords in D.C. can regulate “better” (read energy-squandering) industries into being by steering capital and labor away from bad (energy-efficient) industries (oil and gas). …

The truth is that truth is immutable, never relative. The little truth there is in mainstream media should not be diluted or presented by its adherents as dueling with untruth.

The above Fox News fixtures no more represent truth or promote it than does your average Holocaust denier.

With an exception: Libraries have long since engaged in a robust debate as to how to classify Holocaust-denying literature. While admirably advocating for unfettered free access, Professor of Library Services John A. Drobnicki has suggested moving Holocaust denial out of the History section in US libraries and closer to the ‘Bigfoot books,’ so that Holocaust denial’s Dewey Decimal designation is with ‘hoax materials.’

Indeed, hacks are not historians. Although the dueling-perspectives panel format would suggest it is—the economic bunk spewed by the likes of Skinner, Heldman, Dowdell, Jeffers, Sibila, and Erika Payne is no version of the truth, but a perversion of it.” …

The complete column, “Fox News And Its Truth Deniers,” is now on WND.COM. Read it.

My book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon. (Don’t forget those reviews; they help.)

A Kindle copy is also on sale.

Barnes and Noble is always well-stocked and ships within 24 hours.

Still better, shipping is free and prompt if you purchase Into the Cannibal’s Pot from The Publisher. Inquire about an Xmas special on bulk buys.

UPDATE I (Nov. 18): MSNBC has just inaugurated the nauseating “NOW,” which utilizes the dueling-perspectives panel discussed in my WND column to great effect. Here is the little RINO Lolita S. E. Cupp making a weak case for the right of a man to hire a lawyer, in a pathologically litigious country, which jails more individuals than any other: the USA. By “a weak case,” the hallmark of an establishment Republican (or whatever one chooses to dub this political species), I mean that grimaces, gestures, and a paraphrasing of the host replace serious argument. In particular, earlier in the debate, Cupp picked up on a catchy phrase the host had used, and repeated it again and again (“precipice politics) in order to conceal her vacuity. In the loud talking (for it wasn’t intelligent debate) about the Super Committee, Naomi Wolf was the only individual to zero in on the issue of a soviet-style politburo making decisions in a so-called representative democracy. (Wolf didn’t put it this way, but she made the point effectively. And, of course, the US was supposed to be a republic, not a mobocracy.) Otherwise, everything is all very friendly and flirty.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

UPDATE II: Via Facebook: What uncharacteristic intellectual pettiness it is to zero in on a trivial convention used in the column, instead of addressing the issue of natural law and reality, also the core of the column. This is what the column is about. However, maybe some here disagree that “truth is immutable, never relative.” And that “the little truth there is in mainstream media should not be diluted or presented by its adherents as dueling with untruth.”

UPDATE III: LEFT-LIBERTARIANISM. To the “there is nothing wrong with Judge and Stossel” crowd: ‘Cmon: They are the best we have, but there is plenty wrong. They are left-libertarians. For a while, Paul was teetering there too, but was pulled back from the brink by the conservatism of the his base, the majority of whom do not think that, at 1 million a year, the US needs more immigration and that anchor babies are dictated by the Constitution.