Category Archives: The State

Update II: Warning: Postal Worker Coming to A Clinic Near You (The Race Rot)

Affirmative Action, Debt, Economy, Film, Political Correctness, Race, Regulation, Socialism, The State

This week’s column, “Warning: Postal Worker Coming to A Clinic Near You,” is too lyrical for my liking. Nevertheless, if I’ve learned anything as a writer, it is the power of a personal story.

So do read about the latest incident in “a seven-year saga” at my local branch of the United States Postal Service.

The incident “was no more than a sadistic display of power, honed in a state monopoly, where captive ‘customers’ are pinned down like butterflies by ‘service providers.’ The discretion left to such petty tyrants is wide—fear of being fired minimal, if non-existent.”

“Just you wait until a postal worker of this caliber, subject to the same disincentives, is in charge of determining whether to schedule your emergency CAT Scan (or maybe not). You don’t wish to set that cat among the poor pigeons. These will be the very beasts rising out of the sea of statism unleashed by a government-controlled healthcare system.”

To get a glimpse of President Camacho’s post office, read “Warning: Postal Worker Coming to A Clinic Near You,” now up on WND.COM, and on Taki’s Magazine every weekend.

Update I (Sept. 4): Presumably, everyone who reads this blog has watched “Idiocracy.” It’s compulsory. I mention in “Warning: Postal Worker Coming to A Clinic Near You,” that the dialogue with “sour-Asian-lady-who-speaks-in-tongues” and “rude-African-American-guy” was precisely the kind of dialogue Joe Bauers, the protagonist in Mike Judge’s superb satire “Idiocracy,” had conducted with the “‘tarded” doctor character. Here’s a snippet (make sure to click on the sound clips for full effect):

Doctor (Justin Long): “Hey, how’s it hang, ese?”
Doctor: “Well, don’t wanna sound like a d-ck or nothin’, but, uh, it says on your chart that you’re bleeped up. Uh, you talk like a fag, and your sh-t’s all retarded. What I do is just like, like, you know… like, you know what I mean? Like– (chuckles)”
Joe: “No, I’m serious here.”
Doctor: “Don’t worry, scrot. Now, there are plenty of ‘tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was ‘tarded.” She’s a pilot now.
Joe: “I need for you to be serious for a second here, okay? I need help.”
Doctor: “There’s that fag talk we talked about.”

Update II (Sept. 5): THE RACE ROT. Before I address Mr. Davis’ fabulous letter, hereunder, which also rejects the “bigot” epithet another reader attached to me, check the column on Taki’s Magazine, where Richard Spencer, the young, hip (and dashing) editor posted a picture of the “‘tard” doc, screaming when he discovers Joe is an “unscannable.” I can’t get enough of “Idiocracy.”

Back to the cast in the column. “Sour-Asian-lady-who-speaks-in-tongues”: Yes, too many native Americans speak bad English, but not all speak in tongues. Ignoring her “heritage” would have made the column forced, artificial and phony.

Next: “Who ya gonna call? Ghost Busters!” Indeed, who did I call on to rescue me from the Asian service clerk? The African-American gentleman. At least I thought he was one. I asked sourpuss to call him because he had struck me on a previous session in the “coven” as standing head-and-shoulders above the rest in his pleasant, professional demeanor (and he was certainly buff). He turned out to be a “‘tard.”

Had I been concerned with race—or even prone to thinking in such terms—I would have mentioned that the “feral female PO devotee” who accosted me on my way out was white. Or that the sweet young woman who took the initiative and rescued me was Hispanic.

I did neither. When you tell a story, some facts contribute to the narrative; others don’t. If anything, shying away from these descriptions rings false and racist. I wrote spontaneously. I was plotting neither a PC or an un-PC piece.

I’m an individualist. However, I have also said the following in this interview with Dr. David Yeagley:

“Broad statements about aggregate group characteristics, provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, are not incorrect. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decision in their daily lives as to where to invest scarce and precious resources—to wit, one’s life and property—based on probabilities and generalities.”

So while I treat each and every person on his merit, I do not shy away from speaking openly about demographic data.

I once lamented that, “We used to be able to joke about stereotypes without shrieking, ‘racism, Anti-Semitism,’ ‘Occidentalism,’ ‘Orientalism,’ ‘Eurocentrism,’ and that, “There is some truth to them.”

Long Live Jack Kevorkian

America, Fascism, Government, Individual Rights, Justice, Law, libertarianism, Liberty, Natural Law, Religion, The State

IN HIS OWN WORDS. Jack Kevorkian is a free man. And that makes him better than most: “The law can only stop a person from exercising a right”;”You cannot transgress a natural right”; “Religion puts your mind in a straitjacket”; “Maybe Michael Jackson craved [anesthetics] so much, the doctor administered them to keep him quiet. The patient got what he wanted”; “America is not the country you think it is. How free are you? You are as free as the law lets you be, and America is the greatest law factory in the world“; “We have a lot of traits of fascism in this country; Ayn Rand predicted it”; “Are we done as a country? We’re done as a free country, yes”; “Most people are enslaved sheep. They cry to the government, ‘Do something for me.'”
Bar one, I agree with all the aforementioned. Jack Kevorkian may be ideologically confused, but he is free and fiercely courageous.

Paglia’s Statist Prattle

Barack Obama, Democrats, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-intellectualism, The State

Camille Paglia is the scrappy Democrat adored by conservatives. On politics, she conceals heavy-duty statism behind the fig leaf of libertarianism. In the realm of art and culture, she substitutes symbolism for substantive assessment. Remember her clapped out claptrap about the significance of drag-queen iconography? What she knows about music is positively dangerous; she has conceptualized of Madonna—who is unable to sing or compose a warble worth hearing—as “an authentic, creative artist”? The Paglia prattle about the mismanaged sexuality of well-worn, ugly monsters like Britney Spears, here, was as worn and uninteresting as anything Gloria Steinem has ever mustered.

This month’s canned performance, “Obama’s healthcare horror,” can be followed from the conservative, Drudge newssite. (The “edgy” stuff about nude depictions is supposed to give this bit of banality a cutting-edge feel. Please! How original do you have to be to admit that Sharon Stone takes a good picture?)

Here’s a quick précis of the essay that instantiates Paglia’s hallmark statism and proclivity for the stylistic over the substantive:

• She voted for Obama so that he could repair the country’s IMAGE overseas. She’s pleased with that choice.
• She has complaints as far as his domestic policy, but they concern strategy rather than philosophy.
• A case in point: “healthcare reform,” which she thinks is the most important thing confronting dying America. It, of course, has been merely mishandled.
• The once beloved House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is no longer in Camille’s good books.
• Congress is “chaotic, rapacious, and solipsistic”; Obama is usually “sober and deliberative.”
• It is the State’s responsibility to see to it that an individual in “a major crisis,” or “earning at or below a median income,” has healthcare.
• More tired odes to the 1960s and the Democratic Party as a relic of that great era.
• Poor Camille is disillusioned. She never saw it coming: “I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic Party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.”
• Camille beats on breast because her “party is drifting toward a soulless collectivism.” Pray tell, Ms. Paglia, what would a soulful collectivism look like?
• Obamby failed to engender an “in-depth analysis, buttressed by documentary evidence, of waste, fraud and profiteering in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries.” Another one of Ms. Paglia’s contradictory spasms; big pharma/business bad; big Obama good.
• On the Gates Case; she has nothing new to say that has not already been said by Pat Buchanan and this column.
• “The basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First, do no harm.” That was said by your host first.

(The same goes for Paglia’s eventual evaluation of the blogosphere; it came well after mine and only echoed what I had said in “The Importance of Boundaries.”)

THERE ARE A FEW paragraphs that are poignant. For instance: “The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.”

Overall, you’re better off watching the pictures linked, instead.

That Oh-So Original Argument From Hitler

Democrats, Fascism, History, Republicans, Socialism, The State

The Argument From Hitler (TAFH) is so tired. Come to think of it, tired is a good word for the Republicans. Funny guy and host of Fox News’ late-night laugh “Red Eye” drives home the ludicrous nature of the TAFH by sealing his Gregalogues thus: “If you don’t agree with me, you’re worse than Hitler.” But then Rush Limbaugh is not smart enough to poke fun at himself. Economically, fascism and socialism are evil twins. The Republicans have more of the first in them; the Democrats more of the last. Both parties are made up of consummate statists. Ultimately Rush’s weary TAFH shuts off a more serious deconstruction of Democratic ideology. In any case, here goes Rush:

“Now what are the similarities between the Democrat Party of today and the Nazi party in Germany? Well, the Nazis were against big business. They hated big business and, of course, we all know that they were opposed to Jewish capitalism. They were insanely, irrationally against pollution. They were for two years mandatory voluntary service to Germany. They had a whole bunch of make-work projects to keep people working one of which was the Autobahn.

They were against cruelty and vivisection of animals but in the radical sense of devaluing human life, they banned smoking. They were totally against that. They were for abortion and euthanasia of the undesirables as we all know and they were for cradle-to-grave nationalized health care. I have always bristled when I hear people claim that conservatism gets close to Naziism. It is liberalism that’s the closest you can get to Naziism and socialism. It’s all bundled up under the socialist banner. There are far more similarities between Nancy Pelosi and Adolf Hitler than between these people showing up at town halls to protest a Hitler-like policy that’s being heralded by a Hitler-like logo.”