Category Archives: Political Philosophy

UPDATED: Dhimmis Seek ‘Dignified’ Burial For Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Carrion For A Hungry French Vulture?)

America, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, EU, Europe, Islam, Jihad, Morality, Political Philosophy, Russia, Terrorism

His relatives refuse to give the Boston butcher a Muslim burial, so–what do you know?—Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s dhimmi victims are obliging. Apparently interring the dead is another one of those inviolable American values. And not only that, but giving this detritus of humanity a burial that comports with his faith is an obligation as well. All nonsensical, if not plain immoral. Incinerating Tsarnaev’s remains is the moral thing to do. (I was going to write that cremation was a “perfectly American” thing to do here, but I am unsure if we act as a moral people would any longer.) Cremation conserves resources and leaves (almost) nothing behind.

Via Fox News:

Peter Stefan, owner of Graham Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlor, agreed to handle the funeral arrangements. He told Fox News:

“They can protest, but what do you do? In this country, we bury the dead.” Stefan said everybody deserves a dignified burial service no matter the circumstances of their death and said he is prepared for protests. But he added that arrangements have yet to be worked out, and finding a final resting plot for the body – which Islamic law says must not be cremated – could prove difficult.

UPDATE (May 5): Carrion For A Hungry French Vulture? Speaking of the detritus of humanity, philosophically, at least: The French are a people whose revolution was a precursor to the Karl-Marx inspired Russian Revolution and the Nazi menaces. During the Reign of Terror, and by popular demand, thousands of the country’s best and brightest—clergy, the aristocracy, and the educated—were guillotined in assembly-lines. This was a dress rehearsal for the industrialized, mass killing of the Communists and Nazis.

Fast forward to France of 2013. Due to EU central planners’ rulings, the vultures of France (the good kind; the birdies) are without carrion. The poor animals are starving. They did what they do best: clean up after human beings. And now French farmers, who can’t survive sans state subsidies (but expect vultures to), want to eradicate the Griffon vultures.

Cut vulture some slack. Can we not send a certain slab of putrefying flesh to poor these scavengers?

Fisker, Tesla: Fisting* The Paying Public

Bush, Business, Fascism, Government, Intelligence, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Regulation, Sex, Socialism, Taxation, Technology

Last night we dined at a local eatery in our Washington State town. Parked outside the restaurant was the electric commie car, the Tesla Roadster.

Well of course, the pinkos who proliferate and rule my state are as dumb as they are dastardly.

DUMB because they fail to understand that, “Whether a vehicle is propelled by hydrogen-powered fuel cells or electricity, both electricity and hydrogen don’t magically materialize in the vehicle. They must first be generated. Be it coal, natural gas, nuclear or a hydroelectric dam, these cars are only as clean as the original source of energy that generated the vim that powers them.”

Other than to increase the consumption of gas, because people drive more in them, state-sponsorship of so-called fuel-efficient cars is a grand exercise in compulsory misallocation and waste of capital. It proves that the development of technologies is best left to the market, not to environmental bureaucracies. The electric car is a marvelous metaphor for the legislator’s attempt to shackle the ‘wayward’ consumer. Purchase one, and your best bet is to avoid straying too far from the socket in your garage, or, alternatively, drive with a very long extension cord, lest your vehicle turn into something not nearly as useful as Cinderella’s pumpkin at midnight. The benefits to the consumer are few, much less to the environment, unless a steady discharge of lead, cadmium, and nickel—the byproducts of batteries—is a blessing in disguise.

[“Commie Cars”]

DASTARDLY because the immoral pinko has no qualms about forcefully taking from taxpaying Americans to give to favored state-sponsored interests, like Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive.

The first “received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy.”

Here, Republicans deserve to be reminded to hang their heads in shame. “The Department of Energy loan program was created in 2007 during the George Bush administration,” for the purpose of manufacturing the equivalent of the USSR’s “People’s Car.”

The second “has received $193 million of a $529 million Energy Department loan … Fisker Automotive — the electric-car maker that was granted a half-billion-dollar federal loan and on Friday dismissed about 75 percent of its remaining workforce — is purportedly facing a lawsuit from the same firm that sued the government-funded Solyndra company …Fisker laid off 160 of its roughly 210 employees Friday morning from its Anaheim, Calif., location.” (Fox News April 06, 2013.)

Don’t look to GOOGLE to serve you news straight up either. News about the bankruptcy or lack of viability of these subsidiaries of the state does not pop up first in related searches.

Writing in the Mises Institute’s indispensable Free Market, PETER G. KLEIN partially explains the dynamics that underpin these examples of American fascism (state-corporate collaborations). “Partially,” because Dr. Klein omits the private-property variable and philosophical fulcrum. (And the editor of TFM does Dr.Klein a disservice by giving the essay a title that is unexplained in the text: What on earth is “Tang”? Writers/editors should never assume their readers know what they’re talking about.) Explains Klein:

Today, when we look at private companies like Google,
Apple, and Facebook and marvel at their innovations, we
should remember that these companies are constantly
subject to market tests, and that the goods and services
they innovate must be accepted by consumers to be profitable. When they succeed, we know that they are creating value for society because consumers have chosen their products and services over others.
The goods and services produced by the Rand Corporation and the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation do not face any kind of market test. The goods and services they produce are valuable to the directors, and
members of Congress, and to the researchers themselves
who are on the payroll, but the value of this research is
determined arbitrarily.

Tesla and Fisker “produce” for the dim-witted Hollywood and D.C. elites, whom YOU are forced to finance. That’s it.

Fisker and Tesla are fisting* the paying public.

***

* Disclaimer: The reason I know about this practice is because I used to volunteer as an HIV/AIDS counselor in South Africa. Filthy and perverted, it’s an appropriate metaphor for robbery by state and special-interests.

UPDATED: Thankful For BBC World News (Bang-Up Job On Same-Sex Marriage & More)

Bush, Family, Gender, Journalism, libertarianism, Media, Political Philosophy

Federalism, the right of individual states to decide, a case that should not have been brought before the Supreme Court of the United States for adjudication—these points of political philosophy should inform the American media’s reports on the case currently before the SCOTUS. They don’t! For such fleshed-out and nuanced reporting on California’s ban on same-sex nuptials, watch BBC World News.

BBC News’ Washington correspondent Jonny Dymond does a bang up job of not only answering every What, Where, When, Why and How journalists are obliged to address in a lede—but of providing a substantial level of abstraction and analysis, after discharging his duties as a correspondent.

All this without a hint of opinion. From his American counterparts expect the furrowed brow, the tsk-tsk, the clucking, the pouting and the noggin nodding—all to convey that the idiot anchor is on the side of the angels at all times, on all issues.

That’s when America’s news men and women aren’t openly opining.

I’m thankful for the much-maligned broadcaster. In general, BBC World News is a refuge from the anti-intellectualism and plain piss-poor news reportage you find on CNN, Fox News, Fox Business, MSNBC, and most other American cable and news networks.

UPDATE: Ideally, government should divorce itself from the nuptial business, heterosexual and homosexual. Ideally, religious institutions ought to act as the ministers of marriage. If marriage were thus privatized, conservatives would have to accept that some liberal churches and synagogues (the mullahs would resist) would wed homosexuals.

Exorcize The Neocon Within! (You Know You Are A Neocon If…)

Feminism, Foreign Policy, Gender, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Paleolibertarianism, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Race, Reason, Republicans

Wear your amulets to ward off the neocons; they have us surrounded. Old Right, peace-loving classical liberals—to the extent we still exist—are never safe from accusations of appeasement (not wanting to kill innocents abroad), racism (believing in the right of the individual to associate and dissociate at will—once known as the right of private property), and lack of patriotism (wishing to see Rome’s military and marching camps downsized considerably).

Jack Kerwick provides a wonderfully exhaustive list in case you are in need of exorcism. I particularly appreciate the following more subtle points:

You talk tirelessly of individual responsibility even as you affirm political determinism when it comes to black Americans and Middle Eastern Muslims. All of the ills that plague black Americans you chalk up to the poisonous policies of the Democratic Party while all of the problems of which the Muslim world is ridden you attribute to its lack of “democracy.”
Even though Hispanics voted for Barack Obama by over 70 percent in November, and blacks voted for him by over 90 percent, you insist that the only reason for this is that Republicans have failed to “reach out” to these groups. If only their members knew what the Republican Party could do for them (more political determinism), you imply, they would flock to the GOP, for blacks, and particularly Hispanics, are “natural conservatives.”
You make claims regarding the “natural conservatism” of Hispanics and Hispanic immigrants that you would never think to make about Muslims—even though, by many measures, Muslims are far more “conservative” than Hispanics and white Americans alike.

I would add that neocons, led by their fairly stupid eye candy on the idiot’s lantern—S. E. Cupp (“Another Mouth in the Republican Fellatio Machine”) and Dana Perino (“the Heidi Klum of the commentariat”) come to mind, or just mediocre minds like that of Andrea Tarantula—all argue from feminism. Their gender based commentary is that of the left, with a difference: They claim that the GOP is the natural home of women—just as it is the party of black and Hispanic homies.

Glass ceilings, 70 cents to a man’s dollar: These are the stock “arguments” made by skimpily clad (usually single and childless) Republican/neoliberal women on TV.

The Republican Party’s operatives seldom challenge the pay inequality folderol. The Daily Caller’s take on gender reflects the mindset of your typical Republican toots; it enforces the Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber perspectives we’ve come to expect from the Democrats and the Republicans, respectively. The correspondent protested Nancy Pelosi’s pay equity protest, staged in Washington, D.C. the other day.
In the typical tit-for-tat, rudderless case the Republicans excel at making, this reporter condemned Pelosi—but not for her bogus theory of pay inequality, but for her hypocrisy. To wit: “…a report in the Washington Free Beacon … revealed that women working for Senate Democrats in 2011 had an average salary of $60,877, whereas male staffers made about $6,500 more. Pelosi chose not to condemn the Democratic senators,’ complained the Daily Caller’s cub (female) reporter.
Implicit in this accusation is that the wage discrepancy reported spoke to the widely accepted conspiracy to suppress women’s wages. Had this reporter been capable of argument, this is what she’d say: “We commend you, Mrs. Pelosi, for not practicing the nonsense you preach and, paying your staffers in accordance with their productivity” (a term you can’t honestly apply to the wealth-consuming government worker, but which we will, for the sake of argument). …

Yes, Republican twits and turncoats have even joined the war on older, white men.