Category Archives: Reason

UPDATE II: Lawrence Lies-A-Lot: Auster’s Lackluster Logic & Terminal Intelectual Dishonesty

Crime, Critique, Gender, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Pseudo-intellectualism, Race, Reason, Ron Paul

Larry Auster has gone to town on me and my latest article, “The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt.” The “man’s” methods are devious. He asserts in the absence of textual proof, and proceeds to draw deductions that fit these assertions and his formulaic theories, irrespective of the text (my own) that these fanciful deductions contradict.

I generally ignore Auster’s periodic, irrational fits of pique, however, this time the “man” has outdone himself for intellectual dishonesty, systematically misrepresenting my positions as a paleolibertarian (classical liberal) who is unusual in her critique of Ron Paul on matters of race, Islam, immigration, you name it. Since my positions are a mouse click away, and easily excerpted from the Ron Paul Articles archive, and the attendant blog archives—I have no choice but to presume that Auster is, again, an incompetent or a malicious and fulminating liar.

Auster’s conclusions are often wrong because they are premised not on reality, objective facts, and first principles, but on a formulaic worldview which he foists on the facts. Backward is Auster for reasoning backwards. Take the overwhelming evidence that Amanda Knox, her paramour and a black man, with whom she likely cavorted as well, all partook in the kinky slaughter of a girl from a good family, who disliked Auster’s favorite little American whore.

The blood evidence was solid (here). But Auster, like the liberal media he abhors, elevated this repulsive product of a liberal upbringing to Madonna because of her … whiteness, thus offering an “if B, then A argument” in her favor—and against physical and circumstantial evidence. If whites and blacks are implicated in the same murder—implicate the black man to the exclusion of the whites, and evidence be damned.

As explained about the man’s method, he reasons not from fact but from a rigid, formulaic worldview.

Barefaced liar—or perhaps a mere incompetent—that he appears to be, Auster provides links to items referenced, but then lies about what the links say, relying, seemingly, on his readers to accept his say-so, rather than read the material to which he links. This is, after all, the Age of the idiot, and Auster is a prime exhibit.

For example, Auster attributes to me an Ann Coulter quote (or funny joke), featured on my blog, and encircled in quotation marks. He writes that “she [me] “suggests that Amanda Knox was saying, like O.J. Simpson, that now that she had been acquitted she was going to look for the ‘real’ killer.” For one, the dour (compromised) Auster mistakes a witticism for a truism, and attributes to me an Ann Coulter example of the first. Is Auster careless and slack in his attempts to misrepresent? Malevolent? Or perhaps both? He certainly is humorless.

For another, Auster, like a lot of liberals, appears to be so taken by the little, loose, manifestly sociopathic (read her diary as did the long-suffering David Jones of the British Mail Online!), narcissistic Knox—that, in all seriousness, he argues her “positions”: the little darling, whines Auster, has never said what Coulter, in jest, attributed to “America’s Angelic O.J.”

Now, as this writer has documented extensively in a book about South Africa, which most conservatives like Auster have ignored—befitting the insular, petty, provincial penmen many of them are—blacks commit crimes disproportionately to their numbers in the population at large. (And Hate crimes, in particular, are a unidirectional affair: black on white.)

But, as should be obvious even to Auster, this general truism is no license to ignore evidence of a collaborative crime committed by a white woman and her accomplices, a black and white man respectively. Drunk with their sexual and social powers, have white, liberal women never been known to act on their inner depravity? Please! Ignoramus Auster might wish to trace the research done on the correlation between violent aggression and the pathological levels of narcissistic self-esteem (un-moored from reality) common among American youngsters.

Next, Auster attacks this statement in “The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt.”:

The hypocrisy in [our intervention in Egypt] is that we Americans do not live under the Athenian democracy seemingly promoted abroad. On the contrary, we the people labor under a highly evolved technocratic, militarized Managerial State, which is far more efficient in encroaching on its citizens than are the tin-pot dictators,who’ve been built-up into mega-monsters in infantile, Disneyfied minds. Given the US’s record-breaking incarceration rates, your average Egyptian under Mubarak or Libyan under Gadhafi was probably less likely than his American counterpart to be jailed, harassed or have a threatening encounter with the state’s emissaries

To that Auster infarcts, writing that,

“So Mercer signs onto the anti-American left’s standard lie that America is more oppressive than Muslim dictatorships, and that, as stated by the despicable Ron Paul, whom she supports, the proof of America’s oppressiveness–of its lack of the sacred libertarian liberty–is that it keeps lots of criminals in prison where they cannot endanger society.”

The “anti-American” pejorative is a standards smear among weak-minded statists, who conflate the American state AND the American people. It is a substitute for substantive argument.

“My larger point” in the quoted article was one of hypocrisy. However, it is well known that the state in these countries is a disorganized affair, and that it is easier to live off the grid in a country where the state is not as organized in its ability to surveil and track down its citizens. Moreover, Auster, a statist, might wish to consult James Burnham’s seminal text, “The Managerial Revolution.”” The concept of the all-controlling American Managerial State is an uncontroversial strand in conservative thinking, not merely in “paleo-libertarian” thought, as Lawrence-lies-a lot asserts.

Finally, a new low. This worm of a man offers his biggest mind fuck vis-a-vis my positions. The “argument” proceeds to deceive as follows: The method in the Auster quote below is to insinuate something nowhere in evidence in my documented positions, and then go on to further offer deductions gleaned from the sly, unsubstantiated insinuation just introduced.

As follows:

“Mercer has not quite gone to the ultimate Ron Paul / liberal lie that America is racist because it imprisons blacks ‘disproportionately.’ [sly insinuation] However, given other recent dismissive statements she’s made about “racialists,” … I would not be surprised if she goes along with that Paul position as well …The whole entry at her blog is worth reading to get an idea of Mercer’s emerging mindset.”

Having made a sly underhanded insinuation about something nowhere apparent in my writing—Auster proceeds to warn his readers to be on the lookout for more in this vein.

Here, however, are my actual appalled comments on, as I put it, “the leftist rant [Paul] delivered in New Hampshire about how drug laws are enforced in the United States, pointing out that black men are incarcerated at disproportionate rates. (‘How many times have you seen the white rich person get the electric chair?” he asked. “If we really want to be concerned with racism…we ought to look at the drug laws.’)”:

“I said on 01.07.12 that, as a rightist I abjure anti-drug laws on the grounds that they are wrong, not racist. The fact that these laws ensnare blacks is because blacks are more likely to violate them by dealing drugs or engaging in violence around commerce in drugs, not necessarily because all cops are racists.
Cops deal with the reality of crime. It is an error—and wrong—to accuse them all of targeting blacks when the latter actually commit more crimes in proportion to their numbers in the population. This is also a losing strategy with rightists. It is akin to aping Obama, who went hell-for-leather at Sgt. James Crowley, calling him a racist for mishandling his pal Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. That strategy helped BHO lose the midterms.”

And here again, under the blog-post “Update” titled “The Homo-eroticism of Left-Liberalism,” I write in even stronger terms about Paul’s racial ramrodding of white America:

“As for Paul’s contention, last night, that blacks suffer most from wars waged. I was almost sick. More lefty nonsense. Try poor white kids from the South, who are also least likely to get into college even when they whip black applicants and rich whites with their test results.
There is nothing worse than a left liberal man—he’ll sell his mother for the little pat on the head from the lefty establishment. He’ll watch his son near death because of black racism, against which he never warned the poor soft boy, yet he will reach out to his son’s killer.
I am beginning to think that left-liberal men who keep scrutinizing themselves for signs of racism against their black accusers, and accuse others like themselves of the same—actually derive a homo-erotic kick of bowing and scraping to those accusers.”

I hold civilized, rational, logical (if spirited) exchange of differences to be a cornerstone of the Western tradition. In this spirit, I have generally been collegial to Auster—approaching him politely and in private over our disagreements, even donating small sums to his often interesting and worthy efforts. In his methods, however, Auster is a disgrace to a tradition he presumes to uphold. (Since he is obviously no gentleman in debate, I fully expect Auster to be quite capable of sharing private mail.)

In future, Lawrence-Lies-A-Lot might want to confine his sub-intelligent, unsubstantiated “critiques” to malevolent mental midgets like himself.

UPDATE I (Feb. 13): To be fair to Auster, an intellectual courtesy one should never expect him to return, I share many of his reservations about the paleo community. For over a decade, I’ve written a quality, consistently hardcore, paleolibertarian column, which no paleo site carries. Not one. This is quite astonishing, if you think of it. It says a great deal about the ossified mindset within this community. Assorted sites will feature, year-in and year-out, the same establishment columns. Or choose young, more malleable mediocrities. But they avoid like the plague the weekly output of a hard-right Jewish woman.

I’ve detailed the shameful episode of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot’s” review by a scion of the movement—from the many factoids to the skewed, diasporic, Jewey emphasis, utterly absent in my book. The review was not about my book, but was likely written to fit the webmaster’s tastes. Yes, paleos have their Court Jews. And this scribe is temperamentally not suited to obedience.

I also discovered a repulsive anti-Semitic strain on a paleo radio show. The host Jewed my book; much to my surprise, I discovered that I ought to have written about how the Jews, single-handedly, caused the demise of the Old South Africa. Presumably, in the same way they stacked the Episcopal Church with homosexuals. The host threw quite a few antisemitic canards at me not least that I was writing for profit (I’ve still not broken even).

UPDATE II (Feb. 16): Banish the thought: American youngsters would never thrill kill.

Take the recent case of Alyssa Bustamante, convicted this month of murdering her 9-year-old neighbor Elizabeth Olten. The crime has been portrayed as a “thrill kill” and doubtless there was an aspect of that to the murder. Bustamante, fifteen years old at the time, set out to murder two children; she had excavated two graves in a nearby woods days in advance. The teen then used her younger sister to lure Elizabeth from the Olten home. At that point Bustamante beat the nine-year-old, stabbed her, slit her throat and carried her corpse off to the woods. An incredible feat of strength for a slight girl of 15.

UPDATE III: Closing The Door On Closed, Cloistered American Media

America, Intellectualism, Journalism, libertarianism, Media, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason, Russia

For news coverage, I’ve now converted almost exclusively to RT (on whose website my Paleolibertarian Column features). I recommend that thinking readers do the same. A few days with RT and you will begin to understand just how impoverished American media are (and how valid this writer’s media critique has been over the years); the degree to which broadcasters and journalists have degraded journalism and contributed immeasurably to the deep stupidity, gargantuan arrogance, and short attention spans of their viewers.

Americans are “a silly people in serious times” (Pat Buchanan’s words). Reason, intellectual honesty and curiosity, and standards of decency have been expunged from the national dialogue.

There isn’t a news story that isn’t biased, contaminated with every conceivable error in thinking, from pop psychology, to addiction and self-esteem fallacies, to obsessive, interminable negrophilia.

If you can no longer stomach the bombast in American broadcast media, the vanity panels, the egos in the anchor’s chair who’ve tailored debate and chosen interlocutors to fit their own limitations; if you’ve had it with Anderson Cooper-type journo-activism, the ubiquitous dog and cat stories, the constant stream of feel-good, feminized, soft news vignettes that festoon news and commentary; if you can stand not a moment more of the America über alles, navel-gazing, chauvinistic, delusions of grandeur and of empire promulgated by the self-important American media—I recommend RT.

Yes, there is leftist, even statist, programing at RT, but it doesn’t permeate every news segment like at CNN, where today, White House correspondent Jessica Yelling delivered a how-to for Obama on countering bad press about alternative energy. On RT you’ll find interesting segments complied by critical thinkers who pursue the kind of unorthodox angles I’ve pursued in my columns over the years, but which are absent from the American channels. “Exporting Revolution,” for example, with BAB A List writer Nebojsa Malic. (Related topic: “LaHood Is Still In The Egyptian Hood”)

This morning, as the Idiocracy at MSNBC, FoxNews and CNN counted down to the endorsement of Mitt Romney by the unthinking, crass, and Synophobic Donald Trump, RT’s Capital Account was tracking Ben Bernanke’s defense of “the Federal Reserve’s financial repression of savers on Capitol Hill.” Their words. Jim Rogers was on fire.

Sadly, I no longer watch the loud bluster on Freedom Watch, unless Lew Rockwell, always calms and Rothbardian, graces the show. The volume level, the Paul worship (such aggressive allegiance to any politician creeps me out), and the dueling perspectives political panels (featuring horrible, boring truth deniers like Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne) are pure torture.

Besides, when an anchor introduces his regulars (and boy are they day-in, and day-out fixtures) as “my good friend (Kirstin Powers),” or as “friend of the show,” it smacks of buddy-buddy influence peddling, not of an honest pursuit of ideas. Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate the work done on Freedom Watch to popularize constitutional principles among the masses, but it has become more like the other cable personality centered ego-driven shoutfests. And, of course, the regular robots from Reason Magazine, representing “Libertarianism Lite,” are tiresome.

Off to catch up on world events …

UPDATE I: Need I say more? Right now, as mainstream American media pretend jobs have materialized out of thin air, you can hear Jeffrey Tucker on RT’s Capital Account, talking about ending the Fed.

UPDATE II: Ann Coulter to Mitt Romeny at a fundraiser, “You owe me and you better be as right-wing a president as I’m telling everybody you’re going to be.’” Schmooze.

But another example of the narrow coterie that makes up the American media elite. Mind you, if the Judge welcomed “My buddy Ann Coulter, good friend of the show,” we’d at least have a few laughs. She’s always sharp and adds information, unlike the banal, boring, never-said-an-original-thing-in-their-lives Colmes and Powers.

UPDATE III: (Feb. 4): Do not distort my words, John D (in Comments). The style issue is minor. In your adulation, you’ve chosen here to do me a disservice by ignoring the repeated substantive comments made over these pixelated pages about the bent of “Freedom Watch.” In particular: 1) The sinecured Left-libertarian bores who’ve take up residence on the show, covered in “Libertarianism Lite.” Reason does not represent American libertarianism (Old Right), nor does it resonate with most Americans. American libertarianism is rightist.

2) As in all the cloistered and closed American programing—and contrary to RT’s which really welcomes many voices, and not only those of pundits and presstitutes who huddle close to Power—the habit on Freedom Watch is to shut out and expunge from the debate the unkosher faction, which is also, again, the libertarianism that most resonates with the American Right at large: paleolibertarianism.

3) In “Fox News And Its Truth Deniers,” I offered a substantive argument against the positively postmodernist “dueling perspectives political panel” perfected on the show. You, John, chose to ignore my case against the “parallel universe” created and paraded as truth, represented by the odious regulars listed: Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne, Alan Colmes, Juan Williams, Kirstin Powers, etc. “The above Fox News fixtures,” I argued, “no more represent truth or promote it than does your average Holocaust denier.”

“By presenting the public with two competing perspectives—you mislead viewers into believing that indeed there are two realities, and that it is up to them to decide which one is more compelling.” This Freedom Watch achieves handily.

Alas, in your blind adulation, John, you have chosen to cast substantive critique as a complaint about style (the latter—the delivery—being bloody horrible). What a shame.

CONTINUED IN THE POST, “More Reasons to Secede from the Pundit Pantheons of CNN, Fox and MSNBC.”

UPDATED: Fired Up Over Firing

Business, Capitalism, Economy, Elections, Free Markets, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Reason, Republicans

As I pointed out weeks ago on an RT broadcast, Newt Gingrich attacked Mitt Romney for what are the prerogatives of private property and the fiduciary duty of a CEO managing private property: firing people or evicting them from private property.

Rush Limbaugh doesn’t quite put it in such uncompromising terms, but he points out today what a feat of unparalleled moronity is the specter of “capitalism being attacked by the Republican” presidential front-runners.” “It’s senseless. It doesn’t make any sense,” gushes Rush.

Establishment conservatives only acknowledge reality once their own kind awakens to it, in this instance, Romeny’s vigorous defense of profits was noticed by Rush due to National Review’s Jay Nordlinger, who has rightly derides Mitt Romeny’s anti-capitalism detractors.

“Over and over, Romney defends and explains capitalism. And he’s supposed to be the RINO and squish in the race?” The one guy out there defending capitalism, the one guy out there trying to explain corporate profits to the Occupy crowd, he’s the squish, he’s the moderate, he’s the guy that we have the problem with? “That’s what I read in the conservative blogosphere, every day. What do you have to do to be a ‘real conservative’? Speak bad English and belch?

[Don’t bother to post here in reply if you are unable to separate this episode from the actors you dislike, and are wont to launch into a, “I hate all establishment conservatives, therefore I, lazily, refuse to address anything they say or do, right or wrong, and demand that you, Ilana, appease my idiocy.]

UPDATE: Paul defends Romney ‘fire’ comment and history at Bain. Good for him.

What is interesting is that dumbo Dana Bash—a CNN reporter whose love for Obama is second only to Jessica Yellin’s, another CNN pack animal—spun the Paul response as strategic, rather than principled. She’s not even an “analyst,” for what that title’s worth at CNN, yet she’s parsing a Paul response for markets (a thing she has no grasp of) as a response for politics. Yellin is now, as I write, yelling with excitement because, naming anonymous sources (isn’t that a no-no in Journalism, unless a matter of life-and-death?), she has had confirmation from her Man’s camp (BHO), that Romney has unraveled in the past 48 hours. Weird. Didn’t he just win a New Hampshire Primary?

UPDATE III: Cain Crossed the Character Line (Classic Coulter)

Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Politics, Propaganda, Race, Racism, Reason, Rights

“What’s Herman Cain being accused of?” Brent Bozell asked CNN contributor Roland Martin. Bozell is the publisher of NewsBusters and heads the Media Research Center.

Here’s Herman Cain’s central conceit: He has lived as an individual. He has failed to make racial grievance the center and focus of his life. He seems incapable of picking at those old racial scabs. He has no suppurating racial sores. He does not identify as a black man, he is just an American man (with all the frailties and foibles that entails).

During the Civil Rights Movement, which has usurped all else in the annals of America, the craven Cain was … working.

“I just kept going to school, doing what I was supposed to do, and stayed out of trouble.” OMIGOD. Look where this pragmatic, goal-oriented work ethic has landed him.

Bloody Google spits up all the malign stuff, first. And the HuffPo and MSNBC won’t even do journalism, and tell us what Cain was doing with his “lazyass.”

Cain was, however, being a little too kind when he suggested that “African-Americans in this country had been brainwashed over the years into supporting Democrats.”

The decision to support the Democratic platform of pillage politics and perpetual welfare is also a personal one. Still, Cain has been maligned for daring to even suggest the black community thinks as a collective.

In short, for speaking the truth.

Ann Coulter: “To become a black Republican, you don’t just roll into it. You’re not going with the flow. You have fought against probably your family members, probably your neighbors, you have thought everything out and that’s why we have very impressive blacks in our party.”

“Google Maxine Waters, Cynthia McKinney, John Conyers, and then Google Allen West, Michael Steele or Herman Cain. … Our [blacks] are more impressive. There’s no question about it,” Coulter told retard Joy Behar.

A little crude, but probably correct, if you take away Michael Steele.

UPDATE I: In response to the thread on my Facebook Wall: It has to be obvious that libertarians do not agree with Cain or West on political philosophy. But both these men remain relatively impressive individuals. You should know by now that I’m no tinny ideologue. My comment obtains. Coulter makes a reasonable point. She’s a Republican mouthpiece, but she is not dumb (as CB claims). Gary Johnson may be allied with most of my political views, but, golly, is he weird or what?! Bordering on creepy.

UPDATE II (Nov. 3): CLASSIC COULTER. Sigh. Here’s a newsflash about the commentary at BAB and IlanaMercer.com. Just because I don’t support Cain’s candidacy and rickety political plank; and despite the fact that I’ve written enough about La Coulter’s establishment persona and positions—it does not follow that I will refrain from commenting about the Zeitgeist; the culture, the PC strictures it imposes and the interactions between the components of the media-military-congressional-industrial complex.

If you wanna read bloodless (generally left-libertarian) political analysis (yawn), you know were to go.

Anyhoo: There’s a lot to laugh about in Coulter’s latest column. I dislike the rude “our blacks” crap. But I like speech; the freer the better. (And we already know that most American pundettes are crass and unladylike, so what’s new? At least Coulter is not stupid too):

The surge in conservative support for Herman Cain confuses the Democrats’ story line, which is that Republicans hate Obama because he’s black. … Cain is twice as black as Obama. (Possible Obama campaign slogan: “Too Black!”)
This is why the liberal website Politico ran with a story on Cain that had everything – a powerful black man, a Republican presidential candidate, the hint of sexuality – except facts. … If the details helped liberals, we’d have the details.
To have been accused of sexual harassment in the 1990s is like having been accused of molesting children at preschools in the 1980s or accused of being a witch in Massachusetts in the 1690s.

Coulter nails it!

UPDATE III: Actually, SB, my Gary Johnson aversion has nothing to do with “optics”; GJ can’t stop talking about himself. Ron Paul talks liberty. Steve Jobs was charming and suave. This guy is about his own goofy self.