Category Archives: Reason

UPDATED (10/14): No Notes, No Nonsense: The Genius Of Amy Coney Barrett

Argument, Constitution, Democracy, Federalism, Intelligence, Law, Reason, The Courts

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After hysterical preludes, Amy Klobuchar, the senator from Minnesota, questioned Amy Coney Barrett. I feared Barret’s tart tones—the American woman’s gravelly, vocal fry of a voice—would drive one to distraction, but she’s brilliant. Barrett looks disarmingly sweet and girly, but her replies are gloriously pointed and cerebral.

Advisory opinions are prohibited on the Court, Judge Coney Barrett teaches, as she explains a “concrete” as opposed to a “procedural” or “abstract” injury to the plaintiff. Her duty, as she sees it, is to address “concrete” wrongs, only, and in accordance with democratically-enacted law.

To the question of, “Why fight the Affordable Care Act, Amy Coney Barrett answered: “Ask the litigants. I don’t know.” Genius, because her replies are meta: They nail down the role of the SCOTUS in the federal scheme.

No doubt, Amy Coney Barrett will be the best mind on the SCOTUS! Her analytical reasoning—construction of an argument, the way she seals it logically, her preference for higher-order, principle- and process-oriented thinking, makes Kagan, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts, Alito and Breyer pale by comparison. (Roberts is oriented toward administrative thinking; he has the mind of a functionary of the managerial State. As I pointed out in 2005, “Roberts is flummoxed by first-principle quandaries,” whereas first principles is Coney Barrett’s thing.)

For obvious reasons, Sonia Sotomayor was left off my just-cited list of SCOTUS justices whom Amy Coney Barrett easily usurps. An affirmative action baby (her term for herself), Sotomayor was advised to read children’s classics and basic grammar books during her summers, to get up to speed on her English skills at Princeton University. READ.

UPDATE (10/14):

Lots of cringe-worthy cliches and schmaltz came with the “quizzing” by Joni Ernst of Amy Coney Barrett. On being a mom, advice to young girls, exercise, role models. There is not daylight between Republican and liberal women, when it comes to this mushy drivel.

NEW COLUMN UPDATED (9/25): Critical Race Theory Robs And Rapes Reality

Argument, Criminal Injustice, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Justice, Law, Logic, Political Philosophy, Race, Racism, Reason

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NEW COLUMN is “Critical Race Theory Robs And Rapes Reality.” It appeared on Townhall.com, WorldNetDaily.com, The Unz Review, Newsroom For American And European Based Citizens, and is now featured on American Greatness.

It is the fourth and last in deconstructing the pernicious construct that is racism.

Your Anti-Critical Race Theory Analytical Ammunition:
1. ‘Systemic Racism’ Or Systemic Rubbish?
2. Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!’?
3. “Ethnocidal ‘Critical Race Theory’ Is Upon Us Like White On Rice”
4. “Critical Race Theory Theory Robs And Rapes Reality”

An excerpt:

Inciting racial hatred against whites is all in a day’s work on CNN. It devolves into a more festive affair when a celebrity like DL Hughley joins the network’s conga-line of cretins.

In a July segment, the comedian, author of Surrender, White People!, regaled those CNN viewers of a masochistic mindset, by comparing “racism” to COVID-19.

Whitey, belched Hughley—who used to be witty and is now a drag—can be an asymptomatic carrier of racism. Just because you haven’t done anything racist, doesn’t mean you aren’t racist.

Pay no attention to the COVID-race comparison. It’s the Left’s lowbrow idea of an intellectual quip. Be mindful, however, of the “guilty if you do, guilty if you don’t” pop-jurisprudence. Collectively convicting an entire racial group for metaphysical crimes is the cornerstone of the Critical Race Theory.

Flouting Western judicial philosophy, Critical Race Theory says you are a racist without having committed racism, which is like being a murderer, robber or rapist without having murdered, robbed or raped.

How does that jurisprudence strike you?

It strikes the reasonable, fair-minded member of society as “less than human, less than coherent, less than sane.”

SYMBOLISM INSTEAD OF REALISM

Deconstructed, racism, as deployed by Critical Race racists, is purely a metaphysical affair. It doesn’t survive contact with reality, relying for its validation on a loose relationship with the real world.

You might say Critical Race Theory is anchored in symbolism and not realism.

Ditto Critical Race Feminism, a subspecies of Critical Race Theory, the symbolic nature of which I had traced in a 2001, Ottawa Citizen column:

Women’s studies courses and English departments have long been littered with [postmodernism’s] lumpen jargon. There, text is routinely deconstructed and shred. Subjected to this academic acid, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and T. S. Eliot are whittled down to no more than ruling-class oppressors, their artistry reduced to the bare bones of alleged power relationships in society. All this glumness is due to a theory, no more, and one based on a partial and insular view of history [and reality].

To properly place the oppressiveness of all critical theory in perspective, a young man followed-up that column by writing me a personalized tale of desperation. He had the misfortune of drawing a skyscraper in art class. His creation was alighted on by his professor-cum-oppressor and right away called out for being a phallic symbol, offensive to womenfolk, meant as a symbolic assertion of his dominance qua male.

Where is reality in all this white noise? Nowhere. This nonsense exists solely in the heads of demented distaff and their house-broken, white, liberal, male accomplices. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN is “Racist Theory Robs And Rapes Reality.” It appeared on Townhall.com, WorldNetDaily.com, The Unz Review, Newsroom For American And European Based Citizens. It is currently featured on American Greatness.

UPDATED (9/25):

Dr.C. Fhandrich appeals to ‘dunderheads’ who dog this column, but fail to read it:

Dr.C. Fhandrich says:
September 21, 2020 at 3:21 pm GMT • 100 Words   ?

The absolute DUNDERHEADEDNESS, of millions of whites is evident in the fact that this brilliant little essay, which concerns the welfare and safety of whites in the very nation they founded, has to now had a mere 8 comments. What is it with so many “whites”? Too busy playing “paintball warrior”?Too busy debating what form of crack you should try? Too much in pain from taking the “knee” too often???

UPDATED (8/22/): NEW COLUMN: Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!

Conservatism, Free Speech, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Paleoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Race, Racism, Reason

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NEW COLUMN IS “Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!” It featured on Townhall.com, WND.COM, the Unz Review, and Newsroom For American and European-Based Citizens.

It is currently a feature on American Greatness:

“Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!” It is the second in a series deconstructing the racism construct. For the first, there is also a quick YouTube primer.

Excerpt:

Racism consists of a mindset or a worldview that boils down to impolite and impolitic thoughts and words written, spoken, preached, or tweeted.

If that’s all racism is, you ask, then what was the knee on George Floyd’s neck? Was that not racism?

No, it was not.

Judging from the known facts, the knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck was a knee on a man’s neck. That’s all that can be inferred from 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.

If “racism” looks like a felony crime, then it ought to be prosecuted as nothing but a crime and debated as such. In the case of Mr. Chauvin, a mindset of depraved indifference seems to jibe with the video.

This is not to refute the reality of racially motivated crimes. These most certainly occur. It is only to refute the legal and ethical validity of a racist mindset in the prosecution of a crime.

Surely, a life taken because of racial or antisemitic animus is not worth more than life lost to spousal battery or to a home invasion.

The law, then, must mete justice, in accordance with the rules of evidence, proportionality and due process. Other than intent, references to the attendant thoughts that accompanied the commission of a crime should be irrelevant—be they racist, sexist, ageist or anti-Semitic.

Ultimately, those thoughts are known only to the perp.

To make matters worse, legions of libertarians and conservatives have joined the progressive establishment in the habit of sniffing out and purging racists, as though they were criminals.

Sniffing out thought or speech criminals is a no-no for any and all self-respecting classical conservative and libertarian. We should never persecute or prosecute thought “criminals” for utterances not to our liking (unless these threaten or portend violence). …

… READ THE REST. LATEST COLUMN IS currently a feature on American Greatness:

UPDATE (8/22/20):

Loup-Bouc:

Fine article, Ms. Mercer. Unlike all other Unz Review authors who have addressed the Floyd case, you apprehend accurately/correctly much of the pertinent law. ..I observe that you have written a fine article. Brava.

Mark Humphrey says:
August 22, 2020 at 1:51 am GMT   ?

This essay is the clearest and most effective explanation as to why racism and other bad ideas are not criminal. Of the numerous Mercer essays I have read, this is the best. Thank you.

 

 

NEW ON YouTube: ‘Systemic Racism Or Systemic Rubbish?’

Logic, Race, Racism, Reason

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NEW ON YouTube: “Systemic Racism Or Systemic Rubbish?” By ilana mercer:

I’ve embarked on a series of columns deconstructing the term racism, systemic or other. The first is “Systemic Racism Or Systemic Rubbish?” You can imagine on what side I fall.

Essentially, the “systemic racism” refrain is a meaningless abstraction. Has anyone cast the nebulous racism expression in vaguely measurable, quantifiable terms? I didn’t think so!

Until you have done this work, “racism”—systemic or other—remains nothing but thought crime:

Impolite and impolitic thoughts, spoken, written, preached, tweeted, or whatever.

Thought crimes are nobody’s business in a free society. …

MORE:

“Systemic Racism’ Or Systemic Rubbish?”
“Racial Violence Isn’t a One Way Street”