Category Archives: Paleolibertarianism

Judge Napolitano’s Left-Libertarian Confusion

libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Race

Recently, on TV, Judge Andrew Napolitano sort of walked back his earlier assertion that in Ferguson we saw “the error and perversion of the grand jury,” and a “toxic mixture of a black underclass and a white power structure and the corrupt advantages people on the make and people on the take can exploit from it.”

Napolitano’s early position:

In Ferguson, the law enforcement case is far more straightforward than the racial complexities. A white cop put 10 bullets into the body of an unarmed black youth with whom he was wrestling for control of his gun … The tragedy is the result of the governmental use of race as a basis for decision-making. When cops are hired because they are white, when police suspect criminal behavior on the part of youth because the youth is black …

His is a hot mess of a column.

Napolitano’s later reversal:

Napolitano drew a stark distinction between the Garner case and that of Michael Brown, in which there was a “struggle for the gun.” Instead, he said, “This is a case of a poor, sorry individual doing nothing more than selling untaxed cigarettes and as a result of government intervention, he’s dead.”

Perhaps Napolitano has taken to reading more coherent libertarians, who can draw distinctions free of crappy postmodern, inorganic theorizing?

In any event, that’s left-libertarianism for you: In-thrall to lefty constructs like “power structure,” “white privilege”—the left-libertarian’s tinny, rigid adherence to bogus theory is often foisted on facts that don’t fit. The result: a mass of contradictions their adulating readers, in the habit of celebrity worship, fail to pick up.

Don’t Conflate The Michael Brown And Eric Garner Cases

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Paleolibertarianism, Race, Racism

Not only the “basics of anatomy and breathing,” in the words of the New York Times’ editorial board, were flouted in “taking down” of Eric Garner, who was doing nothing naturally illicit when he was tackled and placed in the chokehold that killed him.

Flouted too was the humanity, empathy and the most primitive, basic intelligence in dealing with a man who was struggling to breathe. As a mother of an asthmatic, I know that you do not mess with a person’s oxygen supply. Garner’s manner of death, by the way, conjures the manner in which the fragile Carol Anne Gotbaum (a petite 45-year-old, who weighed 105 pounds) met an untimely demise. Gotbaum was likely asphyxiated in Phoenix’s Sky Harbor by a few corpulent cops.

That said, here are the salient factors to bear in mind:

* The cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner: never the twain shall meet. On the facts, the incidents are entirely different. This the tape of Eric Garner’s last moments shows in abundance. The evidence of police wrongdoing there is incontrovertible. Evidence shows exactly the opposite in the case of Brown.

* Garner was a victim of the police (not so Brown). But racism? Nonsense on stilts! Racism is the cudgel with which the “Racism-Industrial-Complex” hits whitey about the head to keep sissified WASPs in line. For the most, the masses marching against the Garner homicide are, as interviews demonstrate, so dumb, they can’t much articulate why they are marching.

* Cops are equal opportunity offenders: They aggress against whites more or less equally, factoring into account the disproportionate representation of blacks among the population of law-breakers. (Except that whites don’t march.) Warns John Lott:

If you’re going to correctly compare the rates at which police kill black and white male teenagers, you have to compare teenage crime rates. You can’t just compare crime rates among the entire black and white populations. The rate that these teenagers commit murder, not including rape and other less serious crimes, also provides a somewhat better measure of the perceived threat that they might pose to police.
Among blacks, teenage crime is much more prevalent. Based on the most recent available FBI crime numbers, black male teenagers were nine times more likely to commit murder than were their white counterparts. That’s right, nine times, and the gap in these urban areas is undoubtedly even larger.
After adjusting for murder rates, black male teenagers are still killed by the police 2.3 times as often as whites. This is a considerable difference — but again, over-representation of urban areas in the data set could be a big part of the explanation.

* Whites practice universalism. They march against injustice, real or perceived, perpetrated against blacks. Not so blacks. Blacks are the quintessential tribal racialists.

* Laws that criminalize naturally licit trade kill. Garner was selling his own loose cigarettes on a street corner. (He had just “helped to break up a fight on [that] busy street in Staten Island.” ) Such items are contraband in the City:

Last January, the city passed stronger penalties for selling loosies and other illegal cigarettes and in early July, reports the Daily News. The NYPD’s Chief of Department, Philip Banks, specifically called for crackdowns on loosie sales in Staten Island. “Among the specific public complaints of illegal activity in that area included the sale of untaxed cigarettes as well as open (alcohol) container and marijuana use and sale offenses,” an NYPD spokesman told the News.

MORE.

Had Garner’s conduct not been criminalized by the criminals of today’s Tammany Hall, he’d be alive.

On Michael Brown, Libertarians Line-Up Like Mainstream

Crime, libertarianism, Media, Paleolibertarianism

With the exception of Professor Walter E. Block, libertarians, lite and hard-core, have lined-up like a monolith—much as mainstream media has—on the side of conspiracy and counteract, in the matter of Michael Brown’s shooting by Darren Wilson. (At least Reason.com has been willing to entertain differences of opinion.) Broad patterns of police transgression exist. However, each “cop killing” must be decided on the merits of the facts. Regrettably, this libertarian column had also expressed the opinion that Brown was the victim of “murder-by-cop.” I was wrong and have corrected myself.

Mentor and friend Walter Block did not fall in lockstep. Here’s the lovely comment received after the publication of “Ferguson: Thankful for Founding Fathers’ Legal Legacy”:

Dear Ilana:

Yet another eloquent, beautifully argued, magnificently written article, greatly informed by a libertarian sense of justice. Congratulations once again.

Best regards,

Walter

Walter E. Block, Ph.D.
Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics
Joseph A. Butt, S.J. College of Business
Loyola University New Orleans

UPDATED: ‘At Peace’ In War

Iraq, Just War, libertarianism, Military, Paleolibertarianism

He’s a fine man (inside and out), which is why it is numbingly absurd, if predictable, for a CNN correspondent to have drawn a moral equivalence between Jordan Matson’s mission and that of 100 or so other Americans, who’ve flocked to fight alongside the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

You see, Matson is an American soldier fighting, voluntarily, with the Kurds against ISIS. And he is not part of Rome’s tax-funded Army’s. Rather, after praying “about what to do for a month or two,” Matson resolved to help the Kurds: “For me, it’s for the Kurdish people,” Matson told CNN.

Matson is “from Sturtevant, Wisconsin, a ‘mom and pop town’ as he described it, with just a few restaurants and three gas stations. He worked the third shift at a food packaging company,” before enlisting with the Popular Protection Unit (YPG), “a Kurdish militia set up to protect the Kurdish areas” from ISIS.

Unless they are pacifists—a quality as odious as militarism—libertarians ought to have no issue with Matson: He is risking his own life, doing what he believes in, is fighting a Just War, and is not funded by the American taxpayer.

Although there is no doubt that this man would rush to the aid of his “little platoons” in America—Edmund Burke’s description of a man’s social mainstay, his family, friends, coreligionists, coworkers—there is, seemingly, no place for Matson in an increasingly feminized, manliness-averse, honor-free America:

“Civilian life just wasn’t for me. The normal 9-to-5, I just wasn’t comfortable with it,” he said.

As to why there is no moral equivalence between Matson and ISIS enlistees:

* Matson is a Christian who prays to the G-d of the Hebrews and the Christians. Some of us think that Islam is problematic and that “ISIS is Islam.”
* Matson does not behead, rape, enslave anyone, much less innocent civilians.
* Matson is not fighting an expansionist aggressive war, his is a defensive war against an aggressor.
* Matson is on the side of the only people that has made good on their sovereignty; are westernized and are profoundly pro-American (G-d only knows why).

UPDATE (10/28): Tinny libertarianism, again. From the Facebook thread:

Myron Robert Pauli: Funny thing but I said about the various neocons like Krauthammer and Kristol that they ought to put their $$ where their mouths are and lead volunteers to fight rather than commit a collective national effort. Jordan Matson decided to do as an individual fight against some international evil that he personally cares about – fine for him. It is the policy of forcibly dragging the nation as a whole into imperial efforts that I object to.

Ilana Mercer: Myron Robert Pauli, so ISIS is just some amorphous “international evil.” Don’t lapse again into tinny, “lite libertarianism.”

Myron Robert Pauli: ???? ???? ISIS has not attacked the US. They have attacked Kurds, Shiites, or opposing Sunnis in Syria and Iraq which, last time I check, are not in the US – which makes them external – now perhaps I should have used the word external instead of international. But a non-interventionist policy for a limited-government republic would not “go around searching for monsters to destroy” (John Quincy Adams). So maybe we have a disconnect but I am not sure what you call “lite libertarianism” here – people overseas have the responsibility to defend themselves against the scumbags that attack them but we don’t have an obligation to help them (and it usually is counterproductive when we “help”) but if some individual wishes to help, that is probably fine.

Ilana Mercer WTF, Myron Robert Pauli: From the fact that ISIS has not attacked the US, it does not follow that one is morally neutral as individuals to their deeds against other innocents. We went over this “argument” when I wrote “Masada on Mount Sinjar.” By your “argument,” no individual had the right to mess with the Germans who murdered close on 6 million Jews and others.