Ilana Mercer, Ilana On Radio & TV, IlanaMercer.com, libertarianism, Liberty, Media
I’ll be on RT, the global Russian television news network, tomorrow Thursday, July 13, to discuss “Libertarianism Lite.” The segment is the daily newscast with Kristine Frazao. It airs at 4:00PM Eastern Time (1:00 PM Pacific).
Do click to “Like” the YouTube clip of the segment later, even if this scribe (who is not your typical SE Cupp-like circus animal) bungles it up.
RT, its hosts and producers, is the real deal when it comes to out-of-mainstream thinking.
Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, libertarianism, Natural Law
Of course, “Caylee’s Law,” Radley Balko points out, is a horrible idea. Stupid too. However, to neglect real evidence because one is against the death penalty is as horrible and stupid, if not more so. These are separate issues.
Alan Dershowitz has been arguing that the Casey Anthony verdict is an embodiment of “our legal system.” In making this case, Dershowitz alludes, curiously, to the positive law, not to any natural-law aspect of the American legal system, or to this woman’s prosecution.
To support his view of the impetus of America’s legal system, Dershowitz (on Huckabee), for example, touted the Exclusionary Rule as exemplifying his view of the impetus of America’s legal system. (I say “curiously,” because libertarians seem not to be distinguishing positive- from negative-law arguments in support of the jury’s innocent ruling.)
The Exclusionary Rule is a technicality tarted up as a real right. Hardly libertarian—at least not if one is a proponent of the natural law.
In the same vein, a procedural violation of the Fourth Amendment, say, an improper search, can get evidence of guilt—-a bloodied knife or a smoking gun—-barred from being presented at trial. Fail to Mirandize a murderer properly, and his confession will be tossed out. Such procedural defaults are very often used to suppress immutable physical facts, thus serving to subvert the spirit of the law and natural justice.
More minted “rights” are “consular rights.” A procedural default such as the failure to apprise a defendant of his consular contacts is never a violation of a natural right. “Consular rights” are of a piece with Miranda rights and the Exclusionary Rule. Again, these are technicalities tarted up as real rights.
Might these gaps of understanding between libertarians touch on the distinction, in our multi-factioned movement, between the hardcore, life-liberty-property classical liberal, and civil libertarianism and “libertarianism lite”?
Dershowitz is a civil libertarian who once conflated the natural law with the law of the jungle.
Classical Liberalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Political Philosophy, Pop-Culture, Terrorism, The Zeitgeist
From “Libertarianism Lite,” on WND.COM: “A certain establishment-endorsed libertarianism is currently being touted on the Fox News and Business channels as the only legitimate brand of libertarianism. This life-style libertarianism, or libertarianism-lite, as I call it, tends to conflate libertinism with liberty, and appeals to hippies of all ages, provided they remain juveniles forever.
As I noted, when defending Ron Paul, in 2008, from attacks by the same libertarians,
Beltway libertarians … are moved in mysterious ways by gaping borders, gay marriage, multiculturalism, cloning, and all else “cool and cosmopolitan.” Judging by Reason Magazine’s “35 Heroes of Freedom,” “cool and cosmopolitan” encompasses William Burroughs, a drug addled, Beat-Generation wife killer, whose “work is mostly gibberish and his literary influence baleful.” … Madonna Reason has exalted for, as they put it, leading “MTV’s glorious parade of freaks, gender-benders, and weirdos who helped broaden the palette of acceptable cultural identities and destroy whatever vestiges of repressive mainstream sensibilities still remained.” That sounds like the unscrambled, strange dialect spoken by a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies. [Or is it “Wimmin’s Studies”?]
Much as the Left does, libertarians-lite divine, in the country’s founding documents, all kinds of exhortations to let it all hang out. …”
The complete column is “Libertarianism Lite,” now on WND.COM.
UPDATE (July 9): SMALL L, PLEASE. Guys: We’re talking small “l” libertarianism. Capital “L” Libertarainism refers to the Libertarian political Party.
My new book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon.
Please note that you can purchase the lower-cost Kindle copy of “The Cannibal” without having to own a Kindle – all you need is a PC. This hyperlink describes the free Amazon software application for the PC. So you do not require a gadget to read the book on Kindle.
The print copy is available from the Publisher too. Hurry: Publisher is currently offering free shipping, including to our readers in South Africa. To purchase, click on the “Buy From StairwayPress” Button.
A good way to help this work’s mission is to post your reviews to Amazon. Us talking among ourselves will do nothing to raise awareness of the issues covered in depth and in detail in the book. And you don’t have to have purchased the book from Amazon to review it on the site.
Man up!
Ann Coulter, Bush, Debt, Economy, Federalism, John McCain, libertarianism, Republicans
My WND colleague Vox Day wants to know “where was Miss Coulter when the McCain-Palin ticket suspended its Republican presidential campaign to help the Bush administration collude with the Democratic Senate to ram TARP down the throats of a protesting American public?”
“Cowering frauds,” writes Vox—with reference to Ann Coulter’s term for libertarians who do not want a department of marriage affairs to be added to the Federal Frankenstein in enforcing morality—“is a term that is best reserved for Republicans, who preach fiscal responsibility while repeatedly raising the debt ceiling, who talk about the importance of respecting the law while permitting Wall Street to openly violate it at will, and who claim to advocate personal freedom while staunchly supporting a futile Prohibition that saw three times more Americans arrested for drugs last year than were arrested in 1980.”
Check the WND archives for the two months leading up to the 2008 presidential election. Miss Coulter was too busy cheering on the Red Faction of the bifactional ruling party in a futile attempt to elect John McCain to bother speaking out against the Republican elite’s rejection of economic reality, small government principles, the U.S. Constitution and the American people. On the other hand, WorldNetDaily’s two libertarians, Ilana Mercer and myself, wrote no less than 10 columns attacking TARP and the treacherous Bush bailouts during those two months. When viewed from this perspective, Ann Coulter calling libertarians ‘”cowardly frauds” looks rather like Anthony Weiner calling Pope Benedict XVI a perverted exhibitionist.