Category Archives: The State

GOP Punditry And Politicians Keep Tinkering Around The Gulag’s Edges

Conservatism, Private Property, Republicans, Technology, The State

On the Republican game reserve, things continue as usual. As I was driving to my running turf, I tuned into radio mouth Jason Rantz, out of Washington State—who is also being mysteriously promoted by Tucker Carlson.

Gov. Jay Inslee won 58% of the vote. If you are among the business owners who voted for this chap—then you can’t expect any sympathy, now, can you?

Rantz was pondering how to improve the lot of business in Washington State, following the latest internment, courtesy of Gov. Inslee. Jason also beats on breast a lot about the lot of  Seattle’s residents, who voted overwhelmingly to continue to live in a city that resembles Mogadishu (on Lake Washington).

The tinkering the GOP is ever poised to partake in amounts to tweaking the Gulag: better barbed wire, less of a jolt from the electrified fence, and so on. No exhortation to rise up… No sense of justice, just tit-for-tat politicking.

More of the wishy-washy swamp crap for which we’ve come to loathe GOP punditry: Rantz says let’s have a bit of give-and-take with Great, Crooked Tech. Richard Spencer advocates the only true American solution: Make Tech a completely free-speech zone.

The occasion for the windy punditry: The Tech crooks appeared on The Hill to make fun of the country’s comical representatives.

Even Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is occasionally right:

When you have companies that have the power of governments, have more power than traditional media outlets, something has to give.

The next Tech vexation I find particualry egregious. By Deep Tech’s doing, some are serfs in American society; others are free.

To wit, Why is it legal for PayPal to prevent law-abiding individuals from transacting financially, but it’s illegal for a small business owner to refuse to bake a cake for someone? Civil Rights law is an ass, but, GOP, see that it is at least applied evenly, for heaven’s sake!

UPDATE II (11/4): NEW ON YouTube: Donald Trump Will Crush ANTIFA. VOTE!

Donald Trump, Founding Fathers, South-Africa, The State, War

“On a personal note: POTUS is why I became an American Woman. I naturalized because of Donald J. Trump.

I thought that were I to post a short, heartfelt video, you’d be more forgiving of my running election interference for the Russians. (FakeNews phonies: I’m being highly cynical. In other words, I’m joking, you dour dummies.)

Naturally, I had always been down with the founding documents and the Founding Fathers. But because of Uncle Sam’s depredation and unjust wars, I wasn’t feeling it.

Until … Trump.   https://www.ilanamercer.com/the-trump-revolution/

If I were I black commentator, I have no doubt that this bit of information, divulged first here, would have generated greater interest in our conservative circles.

In any case, and very plainly, I urge you to consider my support for POTUS, in the context of my capacity as a longtime writer against war and against the state and for ordered liberty – a writer who also wrote a 2011 book about the demise of South Africa, due to forces not dissimilar to those undermining America.

I anatomized that destruction of my homeland South Africa in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” so I know that this election is the tipping point for America. Those of us who lost a homeland recognize it. …”

WATCH THIS SHORT MESSAGE AND VOTE!

*****

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s currently on Gab, YouTube, Twitter & LinkedIn, but has been banned by Facebook.

UPDATE I (11/3): Waiting.

UPDATE II (11/4): The wait is turning sad.
Thanks to kind readers, who felt what I felt—yet still took the time to kindly and generously make me feel welcome …  

Dear Ilana,

I am not normally one to send “fan letters” and fawn all over people,
so I consider this quick note just an affirmation of your writing. I
have been a regular reader of yours for a few years now. I enjoy and
look forward to your insights, your intelligent discourse, and your
humor. All attributes that are sorely lacking on a grand scale in so
much of what is dumped out there as news, or truth, or thought.

Two points: First, your use of language is thrilling and
thought-provoking in this day and age of click-bait and “right  thinking”. Thank you!

Second, I want to congratulate you for becoming a naturalized
American citizen, and welcome you. I see that as a positive action
motivated by optimism and healthy pride.  And even though being a US
citizen offers so many possibilities and opportunities, I believe
what you bring to the table is of greater value.

With respect, and my regards,

Kevin H.

Retired M/Sgt Illinois State Police, historian, certified NRA
instructor & CMP RSO

 

FAKE NEWS’ New Frontier: Against Any Efficient Reallocation Of Resources

Argument, Classical Liberalism, COVID-19, Democrats, Economy, Government, Natural Law, Propaganda, The State

The deeply silly Washington post has one of its anti-Trump “scoops”: ICE special response teams were freed up to respond to the June riots, ongoing. OMG! You wouldn’t want to optimize the people’s resources to save their resources, now would you?

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used a flight charter service reserved for the transportation of detainees to move tactical teams to Washington, D.C., to help quell protests on June 2 in the capital, according to a report by The Washington Post.
To justify the flights, ICE transported immigration detainees from facilities in Arizona and Florida to its Farmville, Va., immigration jail, a current and former official told the publication.

Skim and consider the natural law: Is it not naturally licit for personnel who serve the people to be moved around so that they may better serve the people in another, more-urgent capacity?

At issue here are state rules: Why do state rules prohibit efficient allocation of resources? Because that’s the very definition of the state: Perversely inefficient allocation of scarce resources.

As to COVID: I, too, am concerned with COVID-19 spread, but COVID-prevention protocols have nothing to do with freeing up Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deal with riots. These are two separate issues, conveniently conflated here.

Outsourcing Life To The Expert Class: The Menace Of The Managerial Class

COVID-19, Family, Government, Outsourcing, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The State

In James Burnham’s Managerial State, explains , “political power moves away from … institutions like Congress and toward the executive bureaucracy … The effect is the reduction of nonmanagerial political institutions to increasingly nominal status. Forms of ‘constitutionalism’ may still be permitted to exist, but the managerial elite does not derive its power or legitimacy from them. It can, therefore, easily manipulate or simply ignore these institutions while pursuing its own ends.”

The managerial elite has given us our dysfunctional, atomistic, fragmented society, where traditional support systems no longer exist. To pick up the slack we have the Expert Class.

In a way, the insidious Expert Class that shapes and manages perceptions about public affairs is an extension of the Managerial State. The expert class tends to remove moral and medical decisions from individuals, families, and communities of faith by medicalizing problems of living.

Once, big-on-the-military actor James Wood got word about a veteran who was about to shoot himself in some remote location. So he galvanized the … experts. He got him “help.” He outsourced the problem.

Most people need community, not therapy.

The reason people are desperate and depressed is not because they don’t have a suicide hotline’s number handy or an AA support group buddy; but because they are bereft of family and community.

This simplest of logical deductions we are no longer even able to arrive at without outsourcing thinking to the generators of empirical evidence, the expert class.

Here is that “doh!” factor, confirmed by The Economist in, “A pandemic of psychological pain: How to reduce the mental trauma of covid-19″:

Humans are resilient. Those who experience trauma mostly cope. When their homes are destroyed by earthquakes, they rebuild them and carry on. Even the mass bombing of cities in the second world war did not break civilian morale. Nonetheless, the world should take the collective mental damage of covid-19 seriously. Steps to reduce it cost little, and can benefit not only individuals but also society more broadly.

Research into previous disasters suggests that survivors’ long-term mental health depends more on “perceived support” than “received support”. In other words, donations of money or food matter less than the feeling that you can turn to your neighbours for help. Such help is typically offered spontaneously, but governments can also chip in. France, for example, sets up “medical and psychological emergency units” after terrorist attacks and other disasters. These try to minimise the long-term mental-health consequences of such events by offering immediate walk-in psychological support near the site of the disaster. Several cities in France have reactivated this “two-tent model”, one for medical care and the other for mental care, to help people cope with the toll of the virus.

Some people draw comfort from the fact that they are not alone—millions are facing the same tribulations at the same time. But the pandemic also presents unusual challenges. No one knows when it will end. Social distancing makes it harder to reconnect with others, a step in recovering from trauma. And the economic shock of covid-19 has undermined mental-health services everywhere, but especially in poor countries.

The most important measures will be local. A priority should be bringing people together by, say, expanding internet access. Mutual-aid networks (eg, WhatsApp groups to deliver groceries to the elderly), which tend to peter out once the initial disaster subsides, should instead be formalised and focused on the most vulnerable. Mental-health professionals should connect patients to such services, and train more lay folk as counsellors. In Zimbabwe, well before the pandemic, hundreds of grandmothers were taught how to provide talk therapy on village benches to depressed neighbours who could not afford to visit a distant clinic. Such innovations can work elsewhere, too.