Category Archives: Racism

George Floyd’s Cause Of Death: Clear. Chauvin’s Criminal Intention: Harder To Prove.

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, Race, Racism

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“In the case of Mr. Derek Chauvin, a mindset of depraved indifference seems to jibe with the video of George Floyd’s expiration.” (From “Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!“)

Judging from the known facts, …  the chilling video recording in which Floyd expired slowly as he pleaded for air… Floyd begged to breathe. But the knee on his neck—“subdual restraint and neck compression,” in medical terms—was sustained for fully eight minutes and 46 seconds, causing “cardiopulmonary arrest.”

There are laws against what transpired between former Officer Derek Chauvin and Mr. Floyd.

And the law’s ambit is not to decide whether the offending officer is a correct-thinking individual, but whether Mr. Chauvin had committed a crime.

About Officer Chauvin’s mindset, the most the law is supposed to divine is mens rea—criminal intention: Was the officer whose knee pressed on Floyd’s neck acting with a guilty mind or not?

For fact-finding is the essence of the law. The law is not an abstract ideal of imagined social justice, that exists to salve sensitive souls. …

Considerations to tease apart are in, “Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!”

Comments from readers can be followed on this blog post: “UPDATED (8/22/): NEW COLUMN: Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!”

Derek Chauvin’s trial is live, on USA Today.

UPDATED (3/27): NEW COLUMN: America’s Radical, Foreign-Policy Alinskyites Destroyed South Africa!

Cultural Marxism, Foreign Policy, Political Philosophy, Race, Racism, South-Africa

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NEW COLUMN is “America’s Radical, Foreign-Policy Alinskyites Destroyed South Africa!” It is currently on WND.COM, the Unz Review, CNSNews, “Americans Should Recall How Foreign-Policy Alinskyites Destroyed South Africa.”

And, newly on the great Townhall.com.

Excerpt:

Certain national-conservative governments in East Europe should be natural allies to conservative policy makers, stateside, if such unicorns existed.

Vladimir Putin’s, for example.

Before his death, from the safety of exile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of Russia’s bravest and most brilliant sons, praised Putin’s efforts to revive Russia’s traditional Christian and moral heritage. For example:

In October 2010, it was announced that The Gulag Archipelago would become required reading for all Russian high-school students. In a meeting with Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Mr. Putin described The Gulag Archipelago as ‘essential reading’: ‘Without the knowledge of that book, we would lack a full understanding of our country and it would be difficult for us to think about the future.’ …
If [only] the same could be said of the high schools of the United States. (Via The Imaginative Conservative.)

The Russian president patiently tolerates America’s demented, anti-Russia monomania. And, as America sinks into the quicksands of Cultural Marxism, Putin’s inclinations are decidedly reactionary and traditionalist.

He prohibited sexual evangelizing by LGBTQ activists. He comes down squarely on the side of the Russian Orthodox church, such as when vandals, the Pussy Riot whores, obscenely desecrated the cathedral of Christ the Savior. The Russian leader has also welcomed as refugees persecuted white South Africans, where America’s successive governments won’t even officially acknowledge that they’re under threat of extermination. Also, policies to stimulate Russian birthrates have been put in place by the conservative leader.

Hungary is oh-so happy in its homogeneity and wants to keep it. But not if Washington can help it. Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s motto is, “Procreation, not immigration.” Orban plumps for closed borders, and pro-Western, Christian, Hungarian-families-first policies. Yet his ongoing campaign against George Soros, an agitator for global government, was met by Donald Trump’s State Department with a stern rebuke to … Hungary claiming that its anti-Soros law will cost the country dearly.

Americans on the Right could only dream that, like Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic—the US would “shut its border to Islamic migrants to keep potential terrorists out.”

America: A Notion, Not A Nation

Perplexing as it may seem, American foreign policy has been informed less by what Samuel P. Huntington termed civilizational consciousness, than by the idea of the propositional nation. America, to her governing neoconservative and left-liberal elites, is not a nation but a notion, a community of disparate peoples coalescing around an abstract, highly manipulable, state-sanctioned ideology. Democracy, for one.

Yet to Russell Kirk, the father of American conservatism, and an old-school conservative—as well as, arguably, to the founders of the nation themselves—society was a community of souls, joining the dead, the living, and those yet unborn. It cohered through what Aristotle called friendship and what Christians call love of neighbor, facilitated by a shared language, literature, history, habits and heroes.

These factors, taken together, constitute the glue that binds the nation.

By contrast, the rather flimsy whimsy that is the American “creedal nation” is, ostensibly, united in “a common commitment to a set of ideas and ideals.” If anything, when expressed by the historical majority, the natural affinity for one’s tribe—a connection to kith, kin and culture—is deemed inauthentic, xenophobic, and racist, unless asserted by non-Occidentals.

… READ ON … NEW COLUMN is “America’s Radical, Foreign-Policy Alinskyites Destroyed South Africa!” It is currently on WND.COM, the Unz Review, CNSNews, “Americans Should Recall How Foreign-Policy Alinskyites Destroyed South Africa.”

And, newly on the great Townhall.com.

UPDATED (3/27): People are getting it. Conservative press is doing wonders in radically questioning past dogma.

Readers at Townhall.com:

Avatar
Joanna Darcy • 18 hours ago •

Thanks for this profound column which pushed me to ponder America’s image abroad, as well as our own obvious moral decline. I have shared it with an Afrikaner relation & I await his views.

LYNN BRADLEY • 18 hours ago

A very intelligent piece. Thank you.

 

 

NEW ON YouTube: David Vance In Conversation With ilana mercer

Argument, Britain, Conservatism, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Race, Racism, The West

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Interested interviewers: I am laconic, not loquacious.—ilana mercer

A YouTube CHAT With UK’s illustrious and debonair David Vance: The lads (David and his producer) treated me so very kindly. (As in welcoming and mannered, rather than like other requests constantly received from ego-bound interviewers, concerned with rambling with me about their own views, which, being laconic, not loquacious, I cannot do.) We laughed hard, sharing that Sir Humphrey Appleby sense of humor.

The topics: The Systemic Racism irrational rot, deconstructed in columns, and my latest on the wussification of the West, as manifested in the book-burning Seuss saga and the conservative response thereto.

Hint: We both argue process—the right of freemen to think, speak and write impolite thoughts. We refuse to debate the content of those thought, because that would be conceding the Left’s Argument, as conservatives habitually do.

I was delighted to be asked by David to come on more regularly.

 

 

UPDATE III (4/9): NEW COLUMN: The Wussification Of The West: Will We Ban Shakespeare For Othello And Shylock?

Argument, Comedy & Humor, Conservatism, Education, English, Free Speech, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Literature, Race, Racism, The West

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The The Argument from Freedom means arguing process, not content.–ilana

NEW COLUMN IS either “The Wussification Of The West: Will We Ban Shakespeare For Othello And Shylock?” Or, “How Tucker Could Have Crushed His Dr. Seuss Segment,” currently on WND.COM, the Unz Review,  Townhall.com.

“How Tucker Could Have Crushed His Dr. Seuss Segment” is on CNS.News, too.

And American Renaissance, where the conversation is lively.

And, the great American Greatness, the voice of next-generation conservatism.

Watch a video version of this column on YouTube.

And excerpt:

… Tucker’s mistake was his contents-driven defense of these kiddie books:

“Dr. Seuss was not a racist. He was an evangelist against bigotry,” pleaded Tucker. “He wrote an entire shelf of books against racism, and not in a subtle way. They were clearly, explicitly against racism. That was the whole point of writing them, to teach children not to be racist.”

Yawn.

Even if Dr. Seuss was the pedagogic, sanctimonious bore Tucker makes him out to be—actual racism in the targeted literature should be a peripheral issue, or no issue at all.

The Argument from Freedom means arguing process, not content.

Whether he intended it or not, the premise of Tucker’s defense of Dr. Seuss is that if we do detect “legitimate” racism in literature—there is a case for banning it. (Now, Tucker might not have meant it that way, but, this is what the structure of his argument portends.)

By contrast, freedom makes the case for an unfettered free market in ideas, good and bad. Freedom argues for politically impolite books to be published and read freely.

Banning books, moreover, assumes a lack of choice and agency among individual human beings. It’s also predicated on a higher authority that decides for the rest of us which cultural products are fit for our consumption.

The Argument from Freedom means arguing not over the contents of Mein Kampf or McElligot’s Pool, but for their publication irrespective of their content.

Which is why I say freedom’s argument is an argument from process, and not content.

Mein Kampf, and any offensive literature, needs to be available in a free society to free men and women who want it. And not because of history; so that we don’t forget it or repeat it (blah, blah, blah, as I heard it enunciated by Seattle’s radio mouth, Jason Rantz, the other day).

Alas, in the face of the cancellation of people and publications, cancelled conservatives just keep these logically weak and, frankly, loser mea culpas coming. Like the Argument from Hitler, which is a kind of “WhatAboutism”:

“Amazon and eBay sell Mein Kampf, why not Dr. Seuss? I want what Hitler got, Amazon and eBay. Me too. Boo-hoo.”

Tweeted “Musil Protégé”: “Conservatives [inadvertently] condone presentism. As Audrey says in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan: ‘Has it ever occurred to you that our world judged by the standards of Jane Austen’s time would (look ridiculous)?’”

Most great literature doesn’t meet the sub-intelligent standards of the woke illiterati, who control the intellectual means of production—the schools (primary, secondary, tertiary), the press, publishing houses, think tanks, Deep Tech and the Deep State. …

…NEW COLUMN IS either “The Wussification Of The West: Will We Ban Shakespeare For Othello And Shylock?” Or, “How Tucker Could Have Crushed His Dr. Seuss Segment,” currently on WND.COM, the Unz Review and Townhall.com.

“How Tucker Could Have Crushed His Dr. Seuss Segment” is on CNS.News and American Renaissance as well.

Watch a video version of this column on YouTube.

UPDATE II (3/16): Facebook: 
Ray McClendon:

I’m a big Tucker fan too Ilana. Your article pointing out his arguments along with others who made the same argument give rise to mixed emotions. On the one hand, he (and they) are not wrong. There is some validity to their logic. After all, truth is often multifaceted. Plus, we’re all on the same side fighting side by side as allies in a common cause. On the other hand, you perform a great service when you point out there are far more substantive, powerful, and relevant arguments to be made, reminding me of that axiom, “Great minds may think alike, but greater minds think alone.” It’s why you’ve always been in a class by yourself. Thank you…

Ilana Mercer

No! I point to he fact that the argument from racism is irreverent if one is arguing classical liberal freedoms. Tucker, whom I love, was arguing from the leftist premise. The End. No argument. You can both love Tucker, and agree he presented a weak case for freedom. I do. That’s not wrong.

UPDATE III (4/9): When Adult humor is allowed:

Ed Powell: “You are my favorite African-American.”
Me: “That’s good ‘adult humor’. I am an African-American Jew.”
MrSweetaz: “@ILANAMERCER, LOL, Hitler wouldn’t have known what the hell to do with you.”
Me: “I think he would.”