Category Archives: Morality

UPDATED: Liberty Vs. Libertinism

Classical Liberalism, Founding Fathers, Hebrew Testament, History, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Morality, Political Philosophy

Is there a name for the error of viewing history through the prism of contemporary moral standards (or sub-standards)? I had hoped that John Stossel would prod his guest, the progressive historian Thaddeus Russell, with his Socratic method of questioning, to tell us why it is that he, Russell, conflates libertinisim with liberty.

Russel’s banal history-from-below has it that we owe our freedoms less to the Founders’ political philosophy, than to the “saloons and speakeasies, brothels and gambling halls, to antiheroes such as drunken workers who created the weekend; prostitutes who set the precedent for women’s liberation, madams who owned land and used guns, and provided cutting-edge of fashion, … criminals who pioneered racial integration, unassimilated immigrants who gave us birth control, and brazen homosexuals who broke open America’s sexual culture.” (HERE.)

Yes, to listen to this progressive historian, the unions, and not the Hebrews, “created” the Sabbath. Actually, the Founders had quite the affinity for the Hebrew Bible—some of them even spoke Hebrew. (Horrors, that would have required a lot of that Puritanical mindset and discipline Russell bashed as regressive on the Stossel segment—as Hebrew is HARD.) They would not have needed “drunken workers” to teach them about the spiritual and ethical significance of some sort of Sabbath.

Walter Block makes clear in “Libertarianism And Libertinism,” that “as a political philosophy, libertarianism says nothing about culture, mores, morality, or ethics. To repeat: It asks only one question, and gives only one answer. It asks, ‘Does the act necessarily involve initiatory invasive violence?’ Libertarianism doesn’t have a position toward “pimping, prostituting, drugging, and other such degenerate behavior,” writes Block.

What then is the precise relationship between the libertarian, qua libertarian, and the libertine? It is simply this. The libertarian is someone who thinks that the libertine should not be incarcerated. He may bitterly oppose libertinism, he can speak out against it, he can organize boycotts to reduce the incidence of such acts. There is only one thing he cannot do, and still remain a libertarian: He cannot advocate, or participate in, the use of force against these people. Why? Because whatever one thinks of their actions, they do not initiate physical force.

Walter attests that he came to regret his earlier “enthusiasm about the virtues of these callings.” “Marriage, children, the passage of two decades, and not a little reflection,” he writes endearingly, “have dramatically changed my views on some of the troublesome issues addressed in this book. My present view with regard to ‘social and sexual perversions’ is that while none should be prohibited by law, I counsel strongly against engaging in any of them.”

Myself, I’m not so much a social conservative as my friend Prof. Block is. Rather, I believe in the paramountcy of privacy. If “civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy,” in Rand’s magnificent words, then sexual exhibitionism – homosexual or heterosexual – is anathema. The heroic and creative inner struggle is what brings out the best in man. My heroes are in the Greek tradition: Silent, stoic, principled yet private. Which means the Founders, and not Russell’s philanderers.

On the Fox Business website, Stossel promised that Russell would tell him “why his beloved founders actually wanted to keep the people docile and timid,” and why “Americans owe really overdue thanks to the libertines – the prostitutes, drunkards, and musicians.” Russel failed to deliver.

It is hardly surprising, or cutting edge history, as Russell would have you believe, that the American Founding Fathers did not favor prostitution, homosexuality, and infidelity. But it is worse than stupid for this progressive historian to cast these men, with their traditional mores, as enemies of progress. It demonstrates why we are losing liberty: Most people don’t even know to what they owe the peace, plenty and prosperity this country was blessed with and now risks losing.

UPDATE (MARCH 12): Robert Glisson, as penance for wasting your money on this progressive’s piss-poor output, you will have to buy a few copies of my new book for handing out (it’s due out on May 10).

UPDATED: King Tut(u) Not So Terrific

Anti-Semitism, Crime, Ethics, Individual Rights, Judaism & Jews, Morality, Racism, South-Africa

I’m aware of how charming Archbishop Desmond Tutu can be. I once took tea with him. (I mention it briefly in my forthcoming book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”.) I was accompanying my father, Rabbi B. Isaacson, who was friendly with Tutu. (Dad was a well-known anti-apartheid activist.) With my father I also attended the inauguration of Archbishop Tutu in Cape Town.

Speaking about his New York Post article (“Why the Jews?”) to FoxNew’s Geraldo Rivera, Alan Dershowitz seemed to be struggling to reconcile the same Tutu’s so-called anti- Semitism with his heroics during the apartheid era.

I’m aware of the things Tutu has said since he no longer has to make nice with anyone. But, frankly, from the occasion I met with him, I took away that he was fond of my father and respectful of his Jewish faith and scholarship. Still, I have no problem reconciling the smart, suave Tutu I once met, with the man Dershowitz incredulously describes as follows:

Consider widely publicized remarks made by Bishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and the American Medal of Freedom, and a man openly admired and praised by President Obama. He has called the Jews “a peculiar people” and has accused “the Jews” of causing many of the world’s problems. He has railed against “the Jewish Lobby,” comparing its power to that of Hitler and Stalin.
He has said that “the Jews thought they had a monopoly of God: Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings.” He has said that Jews have been “fighting against” and being “opposed to” his God. He has “compared the features of the ancient Holy Temple in Jerusalem to the features of the apartheid system in South Africa.” He has complained that “the Jewish people with their traditions, religion and long history of persecution sometimes appear to have caused a refugee problem among others.” Tutu has minimized the suffering of those murdered in the Holocaust by asserting that “the gas chambers” made for “a neater death” than did apartheid. He has demanded that its victims must “forgive the Nazis for the Holocaust,” while refusing to forgive the “Jewish people” for “persecute[ing] others.”
He has has accused Jews — not Israelis — of exhibiting “an arrogance — the arrogance of power because Jews are a powerful lobby in this land and all kinds of people woo their support.”
Tutu has acknowledged having been frequently accused of being anti-Semitic, to which he has offered two responses: “Tough luck” and “my dentist’s name is Dr. Cohen.”

For one, it took Tutu no time at all to forget about my elderly father in the New South Africa, where the Archbishop is now supreme. The impious Tutu has also never piped up about the ethnic cleansing of rural whites, Afrikaners mostly, from the land in ways that beggar belief. Saint Mandela has also remained mum about these Shaka-Zulu worthy murders.

Tutu’s turnabout makes less sense to prominent liberals like Dershowitz, for whom a moral indifference to the horrible fate of South Africa’s much-maligned ethnic minority is not considered a litmus test for a man’s moral mettle.

UPDATE (Mar. 8): Robert below makes an interesting observation: “Israel was old South Africa’s only friend in the past, now that Tutu’s side has won, why not show his true feelings!”

By extension, this would mean that Tutu conflates Israel and Jews, which lends support to the contention that “the new anti-Semitism consists in the demonization of Israelis (often described as Nazis vis-à-vis the Palestinians) and the delegitimization of the Jewish State. Blaming Israel or the Israeli lobby for America’s foreign policy blunders, and alleging that Israel was founded through systematic ethnic cleansing and land theft are the centerpieces of their campaign.”

UPDATED: Sometimes Anti-Semitism is Just Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism, Ethics, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Middle East, Morality, Uncategorized

The bash-Israel business is booming again. I give you the former CIA operative Michael Scheuer:

My long-held position in opposition to foreign aid, in general, and to Israel, in particular, is no different to Scheuer’s. The same goes for my position in opposition to war with Iran.

I’m aligned ideologically with this man’s non-interventionism. Having said that, Scheuer hates Israel. As I said in “Frankly, My Dear Egyptians, I Don’t Give a Damn,” he believes “poor, little America has been ‘Jewed’ into its foreign-policy follies.”

Scheuer’s hatred for “Israel” and AIPAC (The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) has led him to erroneously conflate the existential realities that confront regular Israelis with the mission of AIPAC (whatever that may be). That’s unforgivable. Most Israelis (and most American Jews) have never heard of AIPAC and the neocons. They just want to live out their lives without being pelted with Qassam rockets from Gaza (where many of them once grew export-quality flowers and vegetables. Gaza now hothouses Jihadis, oops, freedom fighters).

Damn: the stupid Jews are always building things. Why can’t they throw stones like the Egyptians on the studio screen flickering behind Mr. Scheuer. (His host ought to have juxtaposed images of Tel Aviv and Cairo for better effect.) Scheuer, naturally, has never bemoaned the Muslim lobby and the billions we throw at countries who return us the favor with bombs.

“Lobby,” writes a Times Literary Supplement reader in a letter-to-the-editor, “is attached, these days, in a derogatory way, almost exclusively to Jews and their characteristic, so some like to think, habit of seeking/buying/cajoling favors—such as not being murdered—by dubious tricks.” (TLS January 14, 2011)

UPDATE: My own writing is passionately patriotic, but never partisan. I’m pro-Israel, if highly critical of that country. I opposed Israel’s latest attempt to level Lebanon with the same logic and loyalty to principle with which I fought the American war against the Iraqis (starting on Sept 19, 2002). In certain rightist circles, however, a robotic anti-Israel stance is de rigueur.

Thus, over the years—and in the course of writing distinctly patriotic columns such as my latest—I have been both subtly and openly assailed for being a fifth columnist; a person with dual loyalties, a “binational.” I’ve realized that the people who levy such scurrilous accusations against me of all people will never see my work or my words and the flak I’ve taken for unpopular position, which where in the interest of my countrymen, but not its pols and pundits. All they see is a Jew and the attendant stereotypes that attach. For example, in the fact that I’ve lived on three continents, such individuals see a confirmation of the stereotype of a shiftless Jew.

F-ck ’em.

The fulminating Scheuer later went up against Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. During this particular Fox Business segment, Scheuer referred to Shmuley with contempt as “that fellow.” It’s fair to say that the rabbi, with whom I vehemently disagreed, came out on top. Why? Because the rabbi treated his interlocutor with respect. As George Will once wrote, “manners are the practice of a virtue. The virtue is called civility, a word related—as a foundation is related to a house—to the word civilization.”

In anti-Semitic circles, Freud has very sinister connotations. Certainly not much store should be put on his theories about human nature. However, I’ve read Freud’s original works, and see him as an immensely creative and imaginative writer. When Freud was once quizzed about his incessant cigar smoking, he humorously chose to sidestep what was, according to the very theory he invented, a manifestation of his own oral fixation. He replied: “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

And sometimes, anti-Semitism is just anti-Semitism.

Pawlenty Palooza

Elections, Ethics, Free Markets, Morality, Politics, Taxation

How is it that in an atmosphere infused with empty prattle about transforming ethics in Washington—as if Sodom and Gomorrah could change without cataclysmic intervention—nobody says a thing about the procession of politicos who use their office to promote themselves and their products? Pelosi abused her abusive political position to flog a best-selling book about … herself. Republican Tim Pawlenty is after the same unjust deserts.

The main title of the former Minnesota governor’s new book is insufferably titled “Courage to Stand.” Pawlenty, I presume, is referring to his own indomitable grit. In a book studded with references to faith and the Almighty, you’d think there’d be some space for humility.

It goes without saying that the man is positioning himself for 2012.

In any event, politicians—all public servants—should be put on a very tight leash and prohibited from exploiting their already exploitative positions for yet more profit. Then again, you know that I believe government workers should be disqualified from voting. For one thing, they don’t pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. (Taxpayers pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy). For another, they are in the position to vote themselves higher and higher wages.

Which they do.

Why do you think “Oink Sector” salaries are double that of productive-sector wages? Market forces?

No; It’s the vote. The vermin have voted themselves the kind of raises you don’t see in the private economy, where productivity—output per unit of labor—dictates pay.

MORE about the Intrepid One HERE.