Category Archives: Reason

UPDATE II: OMG! Outrage Of The Week (Cry Me A Rivers)

Media, Political Correctness, Private Property, Racism, Reason, Taxation

The post titled “Every Day An Outrage” alerted readers to the cable-news custom of harping on “items meant to heighten emotions and send hissing viewers to social media to create a buzz.” Heightened emotions are also meant to distract the easily distracted from reason and argument.

I just knew that MSNBC, which has hardly reported on the “conflict that has roiled the country”—Cliven Bundy’s “mutiny against the federal government”—would rectify the failure when Bundy said something racist.

Boy, was I right! Check out the article titled “Nevada Rancher Cliven Bundy Doesn’t Apologize, Repeats Racist Remarks.” It constitutes a sudden turnaround in MSNBC’s previous editorial choice to hardly cover the Cliven-Bundy story. “Bundy’s Blunder,” blares another headline.

MSNBC: These are not newsmen, but truly despicable operatives who are incapable of impartially addressing the issues .

Whatever impolitic and politically unpopular things Mr. Bundy says—nothing changes the natural-law truths propounded upon in the essay, “Why The Land Belongs To Bundy.”

Whatever happened to the the old adage about “sticks and stones” and all that stuff?

UPDATED I (4/25): HAVE RACE WILL TRAVEL. Miraculously, CNN has also “discovered” Cliven Bundy, after reporting not at all about the farmer from Nevada, who is in “mutiny against the federal government.”

The little worm Paul Begala was entertained by Brook Baldwin, for a CNN segment aimed not at reporting about land seizures across the country, but in order to strategically deploy Bundy’s racism against the GOP. In fairness to Bimbo Brook, she’s not working with much. She likely knows no better.

As for the Worm Begala: He calls the man, Bundy, “a deadbeat welfare queen.” If he is serious, he should not be taken seriously.

Bundy is a man who works the land and wishes to keep what is his—for that is what taxes are: private property appropriated at the point of a gun.

Tax withheld is stolen property reclaimed.

UPDATE II: CRY ME A RIVERS. Her humor has become way too PC for me to enjoy as I used to. But at least Joan Rivers is refusing to apologize for a joke she made. I hope she doesn’t buckle.

“I’m a comedienne,” she told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “I know what those girls went through. It was a little, stupid joke. There is nothing to apologize for. I made a joke. That’s what I do. Calm down. Calm [expletive] down. I’m a comedienne. They’re free, so let’s move on.”

What did Joan say?

she made a comparison between her daughter’s guest room and the basement in which Cleveland kidnapping victims Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight and Amanda Berry were bound, raped and tortured for years before their escape.
“Those women in the basement in Cleveland had more room,” quipped Rivers. …

Libertarian Feminists Make A Move On Von Mises

Gender, History, libertarianism, Private Property, Reason, Socialism

“Libertarian Feminists Make A Move On Von Mises” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“As I paged through the dog’s breakfast of an essay titled “The Feminism of Ludwig von Mises,” I found myself wondering:

What does midwifery have to do with Mises? Both find their way into the stream-of-consciousness non sequiturs that is the article. I suppose midwifery is an occupation dominated by women. Mises was an old-fashioned, European economist whose legacy women are attempting to occupy. That must be it!

Incidentally, naming the solipsistic feminists (a redundancy, I know) who’ve made a move on the Austrian-School economist is unnecessary. “Avoid naming names when dealing with marginal characters,” I was once instructed by a veteran journalist, who was responding to a devastating critique I had penned in reply to some self-important, insignificant sorts. Joseph Farah e-mailed one of his lacerating missives: “Good job. But who the hell are these people? Their arguments are of a piece with Yasser Arafat’s. Next time, tackle the Arafat argument instead,” he admonished.

Alas, “The Feminism of Ludwig von Mises” is devoid of argument to tackle. From the fact that Mises taught and mentored capable lady scholars, the FEE.org* feminists have concluded that the Austrian-School economist “actively promoted the interests of women in academia” and “saw women intellectuals in Vienna as an undervalued human resource.” …

… Indeed, it takes a degree of provincialism unique to our country’s feminists to claim that a European gentleman, born in Austria-Hungary in the late 1800s, was one of them—a rib from the feminist fraternity’s ribcage. This writer grew up in Israel at a time when quite a few elderly, highly educated Austrian gentlemen were still around. Grandfather, a master chess player, hung out with these men in Tel-Aviv chess clubs and cafés. Having actually encountered this creature in his natural habitat, I put this to you, gentle reader:

The proposition that Ludwig von Mises was a feminist is an apodictic impossibility. …

… Read on. The complete column is “Libertarian Feminists Make A Move On Von Mises” now on WND.

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The Take Offense Offensive

John McCain, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Reason, Republicans

Yesterday it was Elijah Cummings, today it’s John McCain who took The Offense Offensive on the road.

Like any good lefty, Sen. John McCain has officially taken offense at Young Turk Ted Cruz—but not for slights against his own sanctimonious self. No. Our noble neoconservative is too big for such pettiness. He’s taken up The Take Offense Offensive over slights Bob Dole is alleged to have been dealt by Cruz.

McCain the insufferable:

Sen. John McCain said Friday he doesn’t mind criticism from Sen. Ted Cruz, but he called on the Texas Republican to apologize for comments he made about former Sen. Bob Dole in a speech Thursday.

The Arizona Republican said he spoke with Cruz on the Senate floor after his remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday.

“I spoke to Ted Cruz. He and I have a cordial relationship about this,” McCain said on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on Friday. “He can say what he wants to about me, and he can say anything he wants to, I think, about Mitt [Romney], Mitt’s capable of taking it. But when he throws Bob Dole in there, I wonder if he thinks that Bob Dole stood for principle on that hilltop in Italy when he was so gravely wounded and left part of his body there fighting for our country?”

Cruz made fun of McCain, Romney and Dole’s failed presidential campaigns on Thursday, joking about “President McCain,” “President Romney” and “President Dole” in urging Republicans to stand for their principles and not repeat past mistakes.

McCain said Friday that Cruz should apologize.

Cruz is right. McCain is a distraction.

Analyze This: On ‘The Factor,’ Psychologizing Passes As Analysis

Conservatism, Democrats, English, Foreign Policy, Reason, Republicans, Russia

Bill O’Reilly, star of Fox New, has this Pavlovian response to any suggested comparison between Russian and American military bellicosity: he foams at the mouth. Why is it absolutely verboten, on The Factor, to compare Russia’s “excursion” into Ukraine to America’s naturally illicit and illegal occupations of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, on and on?

You’re in for a treat. In defense of their reflexive rejection of the reasonable, if inaccurate, comparison—for decades the US has been far more aggressive than Russia in its foreign policy—don’t expect argument from Bill, Juan Williams and the gang. What you get is a form of ad hominem, or psychologizing.

President Vladimir Putin, said (today, Monday, March 3) Bill, is a thug. That’s why he can’t be compared to “a good country” like the US. (Childish doesn’t begin to cover this stuff.) Apparently Bush and Obama are never to be called thugs.

Why, Billy? Because they’re American?

The other “argument” for the lack of validity of said comparison was that Putin seeks the recrudescence of the Russian empire (my usage; Bill and the gang did not use that word. Read about Bill’s valiant but botched attempts to promote English). Bill has read Putin’s mind, and knows he wants Russia to be an empire again. Hence we cannot compare the actions on the ground of the two countries.

If ever you doubted that liberals and conservatives are situated on the same foreign-policy continuum, listen to the prescriptions for Ukraine of leftist Juan Williams. On the same silly segment, the Fox News “analyst” recommended that the US freeze the assets of individual Russians, stateside and abroad, expel visiting Russians and stop Russians from traveling to the US, all in retaliation for the presence of Russian forces in Crimea (which is dominated by a Russian-speaking population). Williams, naturally, also wants to see economic sanctions placed on Russia.

Williams is an “analyst” in the same way Bill O’Reilly is a thinker.