Category Archives: Media

UPDATED: The Philosophy of Liberty (The Claims Of Kids)

Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, libertarianism, Liberty, Media, Objectivism

Accolades are owed to a team that has rendered the philosophy of liberty in the simplest, purest of ways, to better popularize it. Ken Schoolland distilled liberty in words, and Lux Lucre (a very Randian label, given that lucre means money or profits) produced the animation. Watch it. Read it.

“The philosophy of liberty is based on the principle of self-ownership. You own your life. To deny this is to imply that another person has a higher claim on your life than you do. No other person, or group of persons, owns your life nor do you own the lives of others. You exist in time: future, present, and past. This is manifest in life, liberty, and the product of your life and liberty. The exercise of choices over life and liberty is your prosperity. To lose your life is to lose your future. To lose your liberty is to lose your present. And to lose the product of your life and liberty is to lose the portion of your past that produced it.
A product of your life and liberty is your property. Property is the fruit of your labour, the product of your time, energy, and talents. It is that part of nature that you turn to valuable use. And it is the property of others that is given to you by voluntary exchange and mutual consent. Two people who exchange property voluntarily are both better off or they wouldn’t do it. Only they may rightfully make that decision for themselves.
At times some people use force or fraud to take from others without wilful, voluntary consent. Normally, the initiation of force to take life is murder, to take liberty is slavery, and to take property is theft. It is the same whether these actions are done by one person acting alone, by the many acting against a few, or even by officials with fine hats and fancy titles.
You have the right to protect your own life, liberty, and justly acquired property from the forceful aggression of others. So you may rightfully ask others to help protect you. But you do not have a right to initiate force against the life, liberty, or property of others. Thus, you have no right to designate some person to initiate force against others on your behalf.
You have a right to seek leaders for yourself, but would have no right to impose rulers on others. No matter how officials are selected, they are only human beings and they have no rights or claims that are higher than those of any other human beings. Regardless of the imaginative labels for their behaviour or the numbers of people encouraging them, officials have no right to murder, to enslave, or to steal. You cannot give them any rights that you do not have yourself.
Since you own your life, you are responsible for your life. You do not rent your life from others who demand your obedience. Nor are you a slave to others who demand your sacrifice.
You choose your own goals based on your own values. Success and failure are both the necessary incentives to learn and to grow.
Your action on behalf of others, or their action on behalf of you, is only virtuous when it is derived from voluntary, mutual consent. For virtue can only exist when there is free choice.
This is the basis of a truly free society. It is not only the most practical and humanitarian foundation for human action; it is also the most ethical.
Problems that arise from the initiation of force by government have a solution. The solution is for people of the world to stop asking officials to initiate force on their behalf. Evil does not arise only from evil people, but also from good people who tolerate the initiation of force as a means to their own ends. In this manner, good people have empowered evil throughout history.
Having confidence in a free society is to focus on the process of discovery in the marketplace of values rather than to focus on some imposed vision or goal. Using governmental force to impose a vision on others is intellectual sloth and typically results in unintended, perverse consequences. Achieving a free society requires courage to think, to talk, and to act – especially when it is easier to do nothing.”

UPDATE (June 6): THE CLAIMS OF KIDS. Great points as always, Myron (in Comments). We here at BAB have an interest, not a claim, in your sticking around. Your commitment to your daughter, of course, is voluntary, although I recall participating in long, theoretical, libertarian discussion threads as to whether our children have a legal claim on us. In other words: should you be jailed if you secede from taking care of them? A fascinating, but futile, debate.

UPDATE II: Killer Words & Kill Lists (Inclusivity Is The Word)

Barack Obama, Constitution, Homeland Security, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Liberty, Media, Terrorism

The Surveillance State has metastasized under Barack Obama. Bush must be proud. Released under a freedom of information request are lists of humdrum words and phrases used by Department of Homeland Security “analysts” in patrolling “the internet and searching for domestic and external threats.”

Examples are “death, looting, riot, threat, radiation” and many more.

I wonder if keywords that appear in reports about the keywords are scanned too by big brother THE FUCKER?

Big Media have discovered what “BHO: Uncle Sam’s Assassin” revealed quite some time ago: Obama is a serial killer. “The POTUS’s growing fleet of armed Predators and Reapers is operated by both the CIA and the Military’s Joint Special Operations Command, each, evidently, with its own Kill List, and all under, ‘a complicated web of overlapping authorities.’”

The New York Times has framed the assassinations-sans-due-process pursued by the president with zeal as something the Great Man has had to do despite moral misgivings.

“‘How old are these people?'” asked the Great Man. (Or so his stage managers claimed.) “If they are starting to use children,” he said of Al Qaeda, “we are moving into a whole different phase.”

This, as he perused pictures of teenagers (“terrorists”) whose time was up.

The NYT, whose time in print is also drawing near, notes that the “the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture“ “has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary and the president’s own deep reserve.”

Reserve? “Deep reserve”? Obama should have no problem eliminating his latest 17-year-old Kill-List targets. He already killed an innocent teen in Yemen without blinking. The boy was Anwar “Al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver.”

In contrast to the NYT, Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” doesn’t finesse the facts: “President Obama personally oversees a ‘kill list’ containing the names and photos of individuals targeted for assassination in the secret U.S. drone war. According to the Times, Obama signs off on every targeted killing in Yemen and Somalia and the more complex or risky strikes in Pakistan.”

UPDATE I: In an editorial the NYT tries to redeem itself, conceding that, “The logic, such as it is, is that people who hang around places where Qaeda operatives hang around must be up to no good. That’s the sort of approach that led to the false imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis, including the ones tortured at Abu Ghraib. Mr. Obama used to denounce that kind of thinking.”

UPDATE II (June 1): INCLUSIVITY IS THE WORD. Via RT:

…there’s also been some dispute over the way civilian casualties are counted. The CIA often counts able-bodied males, military-age males who are killed in strikes as militants, unless they have concrete evidence to sort of prove them innocent, and some folks at the State Department and elsewhere have questioned that kind of a process.”

Everybody Is Talking About Not Talking About You Know Who

Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections, Media, Religion, Republicans

The Stupid Party (Republicans) appears to have outsmarted the Evil Party (Democrats), for once.

Don’t you love how Democrats, especially, are talking non-stop about the imperative of all decent people in the nation not to talk about the unmentionable, ungodly Reverend Jeremiah Wright?

I love it. It’s out of a Kathy Griffin skit. (I once adored that woman, until she went and let her lefty self all hang out. She’s still wickedly un-PC.)

Over their mass-media megaphone, Democrats have ordered The Nation not to mention Barack Obama’s spiritual mentor. In the process, we get to talk non-stop about Obama and his pox of a pastor, a man who is as American as Idi Amin was, no matter how you slice it.

Blending In With The Girls

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Conservatism, Hollywood, Intellectualism, Media, Pop-Culture

BARACK OBAMA IS. So says one of Bill O’Reilly’s resident junk-science experts. For once, Bill’s body language bimbo makes sense. In demeanor (and dentition), Obama is one of the girls. He’s blending in, said Tonya Reiman, down to the way he crosses his legs, lady like.

O’Reilly, who devotes a large part of the program to recounting his many appearances on mindless forums like The View—and is among the conservatives who considers batty Bawbawa Walters worth courting—pointed out that he seldom crosses his (very long) legs when he visits the ladies. And he always leans in aggressively.

No doubt, O’Reilly, who is über-manly, has swagger. Obama, more of a metrosexual, saunters.

Rex Murphy, easily Canada’s finest political writer, has furnished us with the best description of the Bill O’Reilly Show: “the Shangri-La of Socratic disinterest.”

O’Reilly is intellectually incurious, chronically so. For scary, however, nothing beats a president who knows the ins-and-outs of the Kardashians, the most rear-ended reality stars on American TV.

BHO has more than once demonstrated—and made excuses for—how closely he watches a family that is repulsive, freaky, morally rudderless, inappropriately sexual and depraved. In the past, he had also entertained the big-boned sister (please don’t me make Google her name) and her basketball husband at the White House.

UNRELATED UPDATE: To Nick: BAB is a low- or close-to-no-budget operation, written and “programed” by me, with the help of donations from a few generous readers. Unless our fortunes change here—not least that this scribe is no longer the sole “programer”—we’ll have to make do with the BAB format as it stands, I’m afraid.