Category Archives: Reason

UPDATE IV: Ann Coulter Is Sally-Come-Lately To Mass Immigration Vexation, But She’s Still Splendid

Ann Coulter, Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, Reason

As I’ve written before, Ann Coulter has been late to blossom politically (otherwise she’s very pretty). Having avoided the immigration vexation until recently, Ms. Coulter has realized the need to become a single-issue powerhouse NOW, so as to make up for her past, politically correct driven neglect.

Sean Hannity cowered in the corner, tonight (June 20, 2013), preferring to cleave to a “gaffe President Obama made in Ireland.” Not Ms. Coulter. As Mediaite (?) puts it, “Coulter quickly shifted to immigration reform, ‘the most important issue facing our nation’ right now.'”

“But before the Obama bashing could go much further, Coulter quickly [more like masterfully] pivoted to immigration. She said that a lot of TV hosts are misleading the public on the bill, and slammed Republicans supporting immigration reform for using the same ‘silly’ arguments and ‘lies’ the Democrats are to justify the bill’s passage. Hannity couldn’t fathom why securing the border first is such a controversial idea in the first place.”

Coulter declared that the Democrats only want reform ‘“because it will help them electorally,” and smacked down the “idiot argument” that Hispanics will somehow “hate Republicans more” if this doesn’t pass. …
Coulter concluded that the Republicans cannot take up any bill that even mentions immigration until the Senate is majority-Republican. She sent a direct message to anyone with a Republican representative who backs the reform bill: “Punish them, voters.”

More regaling than the humdrum report above was watching Ms. Coulter point out that Irish doctors and engineers listening to Hussein’s silly speeches are not favored immigration candidates under Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration bill.

It’s easy to forgive Annie-come-lately for years of silence when she invokes her trademark power syllogisms. For example, likening the silly liberal “argumentation” regarding “de facto amnesty” thus:

“We have de facto amnesty for murderers in America as thousands of murderer are not caught. Do we grant them amnesty?”

Splendid.

By the way, there is someone who has been covering “The Immigration Scene” forever.

Click “Immigration “ on the Articles Search, for four pages of columns going back to 1/30/2002. Some of us are consistent and consistently correct.

UPDATED I (June 20): James Huggins (on Facebook): Ms. Coulter is spot on but a decade late. That’s a big and calculated “mistake.” Unless you recognize how PC she’s been—you cannot appreciate how professionally suicidal the folks at VDARE, NumbersUSA, Michelle Malkin, and yours truly have been all along.

UPDATE II (6/22): From Facebook thread, again: I mean, James Huggins—and you should know what I mean by now—that Ann Coulter could have effected change a long time ago. You and I know she’s smart enough to have done what she’s doing now, back WHEN IT COUNTED. She’s jumping into the immigration debate now, when it no longer matters. We’ve passed the tipping point. “The D-Bomb Has Dropped.” Ultimately, the woman does what’s safe. There is nothing dangerous or admirable about that.

UPDATE III: Immigration Reform Bill: Full text. Try making sense of this bit of proposed legislation. It ought to be forbidden to write, much less pass, a bill written in such impenetrable legalese.

UPDATE IV: Jack Kerwick:

Whether border security attracts or alienates voters is of no consequence: a country’s borders must be secured. It is conditional upon nothing other than the relationship that obtains between a citizenry and its government.

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UPDATED: No Amanda-Knox Accolades For Jodi Arias (The Arias Appeal)

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, Reason

Fortunately for justice, the jurors sitting in judgement of Jodi Arias, a morally solipsistic and self-adoring sociopath (who sang, did tantric yoga, giggled and chanted to herself sotto voce, alone in the interrogation room), were not required to grapple with circumstantial evidence, which demands a level of abstraction in thinking that jurors in the Age of the Idiot are incapable of.

Because there was never any question about Arias’ culpability, she was found guilty of first degree murder. Hers is, moreover, a foolproof case for the death penalty.

Arias’ jurors stood out for the hundreds of wordy and worthless questions they had posed to this defendant. For a while I even worried that the woman who butchered boyfriend Travis Alexander in his home would get off lightly with second-degree murder.

Anything seemed possible after Casey Anthony.

It took 12 idiots 11 hours to decide to exonerate the (ALLEGEDLY) filicidal Casey Anthony, who was found “not guilty of first-degree murder and the other most serious charges against her in the 2008 death of her 2-year-old daughter,” Caylee Marie Anthony. (CNN)

The evidence was overwhelming, if circumstantial (as in most murder cases). The prosecution presented the more intelligent, rational sequence of events, where motive, opportunity, and evidence all stacked-up against the sociopathic Casey Anthony.

In the Age of the Idiot, the average individual seldom reads; he knows only what he sees. If he can’t picture something, he certainly cannot think about it in the abstract. We all “know, “from watching, CSI, that if a crime doesn’t happen as depicted in such series—where ample samples of DNA and incriminating footage always materialize —you must acquit.

Even though there was no YouTube of Travis Alexander torture, it was impossible not to picture what the poor man endured before expiring in agony. RIP.

UPDATE (8/5): THE ARIAS APPEAL. You know me. Unlike the misleading Mouths you watch on TV, or listen to on radio, year-in; year-out—I am brutally honest. With myself too. Amanda Knox is of low moral character. She’s a histrionic phony, and it comes across clearly in her victory interviews. I know it in every fiber of my being.

Jodi Arias, on the other hand, has the absolute ability to fool me. She is a softly spoken, highly intelligent woman, who speaks grammatically—and most certainly not in the staccato, truncated tart tones of the average American woman. (Good use of adjectives too …) Arias thinks on her feet and comes across as a refined lady.

This is scary. When I listen to the interview she gave a Fox New affiliate, I can’t help … feeling for Jodi Arias.

UPDATED: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Recognize No Evil (But Rationalize It)

America, Constitution, Founding Fathers, Homeland Security, Private Property, Reason, Terrorism, The State

The specter of residents of the suburb of Watertown, in the Greater Boston area, being forcibly turned out of their homes and stared down by SWAT teams is not likely to disturb your average American. Said the great Roman statesman Cicero: “Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.”

Perpetual children, Americas don’t know squat about their constitution, its philosophical origins, and why the framers, who were sophisticated thinkers, put certain provisions in place.

Of those Americans who vaguely compute something about a Fourth Amendment—“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects”—most still believe that blatant violations of these sacred protections are probably justified, and visited only on “terrorists.”

In other words, if an authority figure violates the Fourth Amendment—you average, pliant American will simply surmise that it’s likely OK.

In addition, liberty as it was codified by the founding generation demands a rational mind. Being both childish and sentimental in the extreme, Americans shun rational thought. It thus becomes impossible to think clearly about liberty.

This isn’t it:

MORE.

UPDATE (4/26): Locked-down Bostonians rationalize tyranny:

Where is the outrage that the Powers That Are in Boston essentially made prisoners of an entire city? On what grounds and by what authority does any municipal government presume to place every citizen of a major United States city on house arrest? In the afterglow of the successful capture of the remaining Boston Marathon bombing suspect, alleged Islamist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the people celebrating in the streets that Tsarnaev was taken alive (ironically, only because the “lockdown” was lifted and the property owner in whose boat Tsarnaev was hiding could finally go outside and check his yard) ought to be asking themselves what they have to be happy about. They are beta testers of the New Freedom, which looks a lot like the Old Oppression. At whim, your government may order you to remain in your home, and if you dare disobey, they will point guns at you, essentially threatening to murder you.

UPDATE III: Margaret Thatcher: An Individualist, Not A Feminist (Republican Teletwits R Feminists)

Britain, EU, Europe, Feminism, Human Accomplishment, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Reason

“Margaret Thatcher: An Individualist, Not A Feminist” is the new column, now on WND. Here is an excerpt. Read the rest on WND:

“Feminism is a form of collectivism. The sludge of feminist thought was as foreign to Margaret Thatcher’s supple mind as originality is in the collective consciousness of Dana Perino and Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Big hair, an overbite, botox and mind-numbing banalities: These best describe the female hosts on Fox News’ ‘The Five,’ a current-affairs panel, on which Lady Thatcher’s achievements were being claimed for womanhood.

To be fair to the pair from ‘The Five,’ a procession of equally vacuous panelists, plonked on other God-awful, dual-perspective chat forums—now multiplying on TV—had all rattled on about Margaret Thatcher qua woman.

The solipsistic sorority known as feminism was alien to Mrs. Thatcher, who was a methodological individualist, if ever there was one. The ‘Iron Lady’ would have had nothing but contempt for the mediocrities claiming her achievements for their communal sisterhood.

The causes of the late Mrs. Thatcher—who served as the United Kingdom’s prime minister from 1979 to 1990, and passed away this week—were those of “individual men and women” and their families.

As Lady Thatcher famously averred, feminism was poison. ‘No! No! No!’ The Lady was not for feminism. Within parliament, Prime Minister Thatcher had disavowed “little sir echo’s” acquiescence to the colossal collective of the European superstate. From without parliament, she would have extended the same scorn to little miss echo’s campaigns for gender-driven sectional interests.

The force of Mrs. Thatcher’s thinking and leadership flowed from a fierce independence of mind that precluded an affinity for the black hole of feminist thought—the collapse of which becomes increasingly likely as its center of gravity grows heavier. (Yes, women—especially feminists—risk vanishing into self-centeredness and self-preoccupation.) A bona fide feminist at the Guardian got it right. Mrs. Thatcher, she fumed, had no empathy for woman-centric whining, preferring the company of men.

Such was Lady Thatcher’s individualism that she even hand-bagged Thomas Jefferson for what she perceived as his flawed expression of the American Mind …”

The complete column, “Margaret Thatcher: An Individualist, Not A Feminist,” is on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATE I: No To The EU. It says a lot about collectivism’s historic, unstoppable momentum that Margaret Thatcher was ousted as prime minister of Britain, in 1990, because of one of her most prophetic and patriotic insights: that against the European superstate. She famously insisted that, “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”

UPDATE II: Libertarians will and should continue to debate whether Margaret Thatcher truly reduced overall government outlays. While economic growth outpaced government growth during the Thatcher years, as The Spectator’s Jonathan Jones observed, “Government spending actually rose by 17.6 percent in real terms under Thatcher.”
We might, in addition to all else, ponder why, given the privatization Thatcher accomplished—National Freight, steel, gas, telecoms and water—Mrs. Thatcher failed to tackle Britain’s National Health Service. Alas, there is so much one woman can do. To ignore her towering intellect and her patriotism, so unusual today among the Anglo-American traitor class, is worse than stupid.

UPDATE III: “Milton on Maggie.”

UPDATE IV (4/12): The Republican Teletwits are Feminists. Jeff P writes:

Ilana,
Very well written piece capturing so many of the essentials of Lady Thatcher. However as regards the two ladies of The Five, I didn’t at all sense that they were/are leftist feminist supporters and am of the belief or at least the impression that they would agree with your statements about Lady Thatcher vs liberal feminism. I do want to tell you however, that I believe you do the quality of your essay a disservice with the ad hominems of “botox, big hair, and overbite.” I think it is within bounds to draw the analogy of the feminist sludge to Thatcher’s supple mind as originality to the collective consciousness of Perino and Guilfoyle. Just my thoughts.

Sincerely,
Jeff P.

Reply:

Dear J.,

Never said they were leftist; but they are neocon-Republican feminists. Which, I suppose, is left, in my book. All Republican TV tarts (bar Malkin and Coulter who are serious commentators, but are not invited on panels b/c too smart for their hosts) are feminist lightweights. Think about what individualism versus feminism involves. The constructs deployed by the many Dana Perinos and Kimberly Guilfoyles, festooning panels all over the networks, are invariably gender-centric.
The two were incapable of addressing Mrs. Thatcher’s thinking, other than to chirp on about her contribution to making them feel better as women; brightening their prospects as females. Well, she should not have, because Mrs. Thatcher was nothing like them.
In any case, their discourse is feminist, not individualist.
As to the bite. Writing has to be biting and sharp, not boring and agreeable. If you back up the bite with facts, and I do my best—then one should have some fun. Those two broads are thick. Why are they there speaking to the nation? Why are all these panels bedecked with such silly sorts? Because these women will never say anything remotely provocative or original. Never have, never will.

Here is another one.