Category Archives: The West

Why We In The West Care So For Animals (Or Should)

Argument, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Justice, Law, Morality, Reason, The West

Writes HENRY STEPHENSON, of O’Fallon, Illinois:

… Laws protecting animals are perfectly justifiable, not because [animals] have rights, but because we value their welfare and are repulsed by acts of cruelty against them. Upholding such laws does not require the cascade of nonsense that would ensue from pretending that animals have moral or legal standing.

HENRY STEPHENSON,
O’Fallon, Illinois

I would put it thus:

We care for animals and codify that care in law, not because animals have human rights, but because of our own humanity.

The Economist (Letters, Jan 12th 2019)

Or, as Schopenhauer mused:

NEW COLUMN: It’s Not ‘Identity Politics,’ It’s Anti-White Politics

Crime, Cultural Marxism, Education, Multiculturalism, Race, The West

NEW COLUMN is “It’s Not ‘Identity Politics,’ It’s Anti-White Politics.” It’s now on WND.COM, the Unz Review and Townhall.com (slightly abridged).

An excerpt:

Every time a manifestly racist, anti-white event goes down, which is frequently, conservative media call it “identity politics.” “The left is playing identity politics.”

Whatever is convulsing the country; it’s not identity politics. For, blacks are not being pitted against Hispanics. Hispanics are not being sicced on Asians, and Ameri-Indians aren’t being urged to attack the groups just mentioned. Rather, they’re all piling on honky. Hence, anti-white politics or animus.

The ire of the multicultural multitudes is directed exclusively at whites and their putative privilege. Anti-whitism is becoming endemic and systemic.

Take “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett. Smollett deceived the country and the Chicago Police Department about having fallen prey to a hate crime, which, it transpired, he had crudely orchestrated.

The Chicago Police Department superintendent expressed the requisite righteous indignation that a black man (Smollett) would desecrate symbols of black oppression in the process of framing innocent Others. (A noose had been purchased at Smollett’s behest.)

Nobody, Superintendent Eddie Johnson included, said sorry to the accused group, whose reputation had been sullied: “Trump supporters or white persons.”

“Trump supporters” is indeed a proxy for “white persons.” The conflation of “white” and “Trump supporter” was made, for one, by an anti-white, anti-Trump, professional agitator: Trevor Noah of the “Daily Show.” Noah is neither funny nor very bright, but he is right, in this instance.

Conservatives, for their part, persist in skirting the white-animus issue. The Smollett libel fit the “progressive narrative,” they intoned. (Overuse has made the “narrative” noun a bad cliché.)

It was a right vs. left matter, insisted others.

Smollett was sick in the head, came another obfuscation. What would public expiation and excuse-making be without the rotten habit of diseasing misbehavior?! His antics might still make him a big-time actor, but Smollett is a small-time crook, a common criminal of low character. To disease immorality is a corruption of traditional conservative thinking.

We have here a politicization of crime, reasoned other compromising conservatives.

Come again? What is the hate-crime category if not a politicization of crime? With the hate crime designation, we are essentially saying that a murder committed with racial malice is worse than one committed without it. Is that a normative call or a political one? I’d say the latter.

Some conservatives remarked that the Smollett affair occurred against the backdrop of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). Is TDS not a proxy for the white-hot hatred of whites?

Four minutes and 13 seconds in, a video filmed at the Washington State Evergreen College gives way to softly hissed, but deranged, diatribes by faculty. Theirs is unadulterated, anti-white agitprop. Yet the TV host who screened this pedagogic incitement chuckles lightheartedly about secondary, lesser issues like victimhood chic. Never once is the thing called what is it:

Incessant and dangerous incitement to hate innocent whites for their alleged pigmental privilege. …

READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “It’s Not ‘Identity Politics,’ It’s Anti-White Politics,” is now on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

Related: Euphemizing the hatred of whites:

Tucker Carlson: “Where does identity politics lead”?

Global Support For Globalism As Opposed To Populism

Democracy, Globalism, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Political Economy, The West, UN

The Economist has cause to celebrate:

“Majority of World Population Supports Globalism, Survey Finds.”

It would appear that, “The global public favors cooperation between nations, thinks immigration is a good thing and believes climate scientists, according to a poll of 10,000 people in every region of the world.”

The key likely lies in the term “global public.”

These policies mentioned benefit the world’s poor and the poor are in a majority of billions.

Democratic governments are meant to advance the welfare of their citizens, chiefly, but they don’t.

Created by democratic governments, globalist organizations give billions of poor a lien on the assets (including the patrimony) of their citizens. These globalist orgs do so through unrepresentative global organizations-–UN, EU, WTO, IMF, WB, OECD, UN-Habitat, on and on.

In democracies (and their international offshoots), everything is up for grabs. In exchange for power, wealth is forcibly distributed by taking from one and giving to the other—from rich to poor; from North to South.

Democracy is when everything is up for grabs without constitutional limits. Globalism is an extension of that—what can we smart citizens of the world do with your funds and patrimony, little peon. Globalism is democracy on a global scale.

 

NEW COLUMN: Wage Walls, Not Wars

Abortion, Addiction, Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, Law, libertarianism, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, The West, War, War on Drugs

NEW COLUMN IS “Wage Walls, Not Wars.” This “Big League Politics” Interview about paleolibertarianism is now on WND and the Unz Review.

Excerpt:

BIG LEAGUE POLITICS: Being a preeminent paleolibertarian thinker today, how would you define paleolibertarianism and how does it differ from standard paleoconservatism?

ILANA MERCER: First, let’s define libertarianism. libertarianism is concerned with the ethics of the use of force. Nothing more. This, and this alone, is the ambit of libertarian law.

All libertarians must respect the non-aggression axiom. It means that libertarians don’t initiate aggression against non-aggressors, not even if it’s “for their own good,” as neoconservatives like to cast America’s recreational wars of choice. If someone claims to be a libertarian and also supports the proxy bombing of Yemen, or supported the war in Iraq; he is not a libertarian, plain and simple.

As to paleolibertarianism, in particular, and this is my take, so some will disagree. It’s how I’ve applied certain principles week-in, week-out, for almost two decades. In my definition, a paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the just-mentioned libertarian non-aggression principle, by which all decent people should live, will crumble. It won’t endure.

Ironically, paleoconservatives have no issue grasping the cultural and civilizational dimensions of ordered liberty—namely that the libertarian non-aggression principle is peculiar to the West and won’t survive once western civilization is no more. Which is why, for paleoconservatives, immigration restrictionism is a no-brainer.

By the way, the statement is not meant to be culturally chauvinistic. There are indigenous tribal people (say, in Brazil) who’re peaceful and pastoral. I mourn their culture’s near-extinction, as well.  Where such extinction has been brought about by the West’s chauvinism—it must be condemned.

In any event, paleoconservatives would typically grasp that libertarian principles would not endure in certain cultures. Libertarians, on the other hand, have had a hard time linking civilizational issues with the libertarian axiom of non-aggression. What do I mean? Libertarians will chant, “Free markets, free minds, the free movement of people.” Let’s have ‘em all.

They don’t always explain how these principles are to endure once Western societies are overrun by individuals from cultures which don’t uphold these principles. (From the fact that our own societies are turning out liberty hating individuals—it doesn’t follow we should import more.)

On the other hand, paleoconservatives are far less focused on the state as an evil actor and often appear more concerned with culture wars: gay marriage, cannabis, pornography, abortion. The paleolibertarian rejects any attempts by the state to legislate around the issues of:

Abortion: Completely defund it is our position.

Gay marriage: Solemnize your marriage in private churches, please.

Drugs: Legalize them and stop the hemispheric Drug War.

Wage walls, not wars.

As a creedal paleolibertarian, I see the road to freedom, primarily, in beating back The State, so that individuals can regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire, and, generally, associate at will.

Foreign policy—specifically, no meddling in the affairs of other countries!—is the be all and end all of both paleoconservatism and paleolibertarianism. Don’t let any of the radio or TV personalities fool you.  If he or she liked, justified or rationalized Bush’s Middle-Eastern wars or Trump’s dabbling in Niger—he or she is no paleolibertarian. (Tucker Carlson is a fabulous paleoconservative.)

Both variants are for small government and big society. Again, more so than the paleoconservative, the paleolibertarian is radical in his anti-state position, sometimes even advocating a stateless society.

BIG LEAGUE POLITICS: In what ways does your political thought differ from CATO institute libertarianism? …

…  READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN IS “Wage Walls, Not Wars.” The interview is now on WND and the Unz Review. It was conducted by correspondent Seth Segal for Big League Politics. A version was published on Nov. 23, 2018.