UPDATE III (4/27): Land Confiscation? Fuhgeddaboudit! More Myth-Making About South Africa. This Time From The Economist

Africa, Crime, Individual Rights, Media, Multiculturalism, Private Property, Propaganda, Socialism, South-Africa

Here they go again. The know-nothing, groupie media.

South Africa’s President, Cyril Ramaphosa, has only just announced he’ll proceed apace with land confiscation. But no sooner than a new South African tyrant shows his true colors, than old idiots show theirs. The Economist ignores—or is unprepared to wrestle with the meaning of—the despicable promise made by the new president. Instead, they get down to the business of perpetuating the myth of a multicultural, peaceful country bequeathed by Saint Mandela, and subverted by one man alone: Jacob Zuma.

But the reality is that, “In Africa, You Oust A Tyrant, Not Tyranny”:

The seductive narrative about the ANC’s new boss, Cyril Ramaphosa, gets this much right: There is nothing new about the meaningless game of musical chairs enacted throughout Africa like clockwork. The Big Man is overthrown or demoted; another Alpha Male jockeys his way into his predecessor’s position and asserts his primacy over the people and their property.

The delusions via The Economist:

Mr Ramaphosa steps into the presidency he will be able to tap a deep well of goodwill that he earned in his previous careers, as a trade unionist and then as a businessman. In less than two months since Mr Ramaphosa became head of the party, South Africa’s currency rose to its strongest level against the dollar in almost three years. The prospect of his presidency has already inspired some of the optimism that greeted that of Nelson Mandela, who was elected president in 1994 and who had wanted Mr Ramaphosa to be his successor.

After Mr Ramaphosa lost out to Thabo Mbeki, who was elected president in 1999, he told friends he would not be outfoxed again. His record as a negotiator, leading the ANC side in talks to end apartheid, had already marked him as patient and prudent, and he put both attributes to use in his long struggle to supplant Mr Zuma. Optimistic South Africans speculate that he may pick up Mandela’s mantle.

UPDATE I (3/12):

Right to self-defense?

Right to life?

And the carnage continues:

Socialism is the default position of the evil and the envious. And thus of most of humanity. Socialism is a secondary issue in South-African politics. It’s dumb to reduce race hatred etched on thousands of mutilated bodies to … Stalinism:

Joel Pollak:

Complete convergence of liberalism & conservatism on South Africa:

Handing over commercial farms to subsistence “farmers”:

Refugees:

It was on the cards. Always:

Didn’t have to “predict” land theft. The ANC was candid. They promised it.

UPDATE II (3/26):


Peter Dutton:


And always, RIP:

UPDATE III (4/5-018): Crime beloved country.

UPDATE IV (4/27): Ramaphosa is off to England, where his Highness will get the royal treatment.

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UPDATED (4/5): South Africa Land Theft: Crappy Constitution All But Allows It

Africa, Communism, Constitution, Free Speech, Private Property, South-Africa

NEW COLUMN: “South Africa Land Theft: Constitution All But Allows It” is the current column, now on Townhall.com. Unabridged version can be read on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

An excerpt:

Up until, or on the day, a predictable calamity unfolds in South Africa, you still find Western media insisting that,

* No, there’s no racial component to the butchering of thousands of white rural folks in ways that would make Shaka Zulu proud.
* No, the mutilated, tortured bodies of Boer and British men, women and children aren’t evidence of racial hatred, but a mere artifact of good old crime. No hate crimes. No crimes against humanity. Move along. Let the carnage play on.

And the latest:

To listen to leftist, counterfactual, ahistoric pabulum served up by most in media, a decision by South Africa’s Parliament to smooth the way for an expropriation without compensation of private property came out of … nowhere.

It just so happened—pure fluke!—that the permanently entrenched, racialist parties in parliament used their thumping majorities to vote for legalizing state theft from a politically powerless minority. Didn’t see that coming!

And still they beat on breast: How did the mythical land of Nelson Mandela turn into Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”?

How did that country’s “vaunted” constitution yield to “the horror, the horror” of land theft?

Easily, even seamlessly—as I’ve been warning since the 2011 publication of “Into the cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa,” which provided the analytical edifice for what’s unfolding. You can pile more murders, more state corruption, more horror atop the same analytical foundation; but, distilled to bare bones, the truth about South Africa remains unchanged.

One of Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidential campaign promises was to finally get down to the business of the people: stealing private property. Since replacing Jacob Zuma as president, Ramaphosa has openly endeavored to “speed up the transfer of land from white to black owners after his inauguration two weeks ago.” Yet, this inherently aggressive, coercive act was studiously finessed by the news cartel.

Before Ramaphosa, Zuma, too, had “called on parliament to change South Africa’s Constitution to allow the expropriation of white-owned land without compensation.”

Unlike so many celebrity journos involved, both men know that said constitution is no bulwark against state expropriation. Or, against any “public” or private violence, for that matter. As a protector of individual rights to life, liberty and property, the thing is worse than useless—a wordy and worthless document.

Take Section 12 of this progressive constitution. It enshrines the “Freedom and Security of the Person.” Isn’t it comforting to know that in a country where almost everyone knows someone who has been raped, robbed, hijacked, murdered, or all of the above—the individual has a right to live free of all those forms of violence?

Here’s the rub …

… READ THE REST.  “South Africa Land Theft: Constitution All But Allows It” is now on Townhall.com. Read the long version on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

UPDATE (4/5): Free Speech? Not under the SA Constitution.

Why Libertarians Should Shrug-Off Memo Mania

Democrats, Donald Trump, Iraq, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Republicans

A NEW ESSAY, “Why Libertarians Should Shrug-Off Memo Mania,” is at the Mises Institute’s Power and Market blog. An excerpt:

First came the Republican memo, courtesy of the Republican House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes. Their memo detailed the surveillance abuses against one Carter Page, enabled by a kangaroo court which was strengthened immeasurably by the old Republican-Party boss, George Bush.

Bush II had fortified the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and the Stupid Party greased the skids for the expansion of FISA infractions. Following Barack Obama’s lead, Republicans have reauthorized the controversial Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which has resulted in the “incidental” collection of the communications of American citizens, and likely served as an impetus for prosecutions.

Enter Rep. Adam Schiff, Democrat from California. He and the other Democrats on the House intelligence committee have now presented their distillation of the counter case, namely that the “FISA warrant and repeated renewals to conduct temporary surveillance of Carter Page” were all justified. Well of course.

Media eminences—Republican Mark Steyn, for instance—have accused the Democrats of assaulting the rule of law. The libertarian, however, might wish to avoid wading into an intra-party fracas. Why intra-party? Because the Democrats and the Republicans of DC share most of their political DNA.

Am I saying libertarians have no dog in the fight over whether “Hillary Clinton and the DNC funded the [dodgy] dossier that was a basis for the Department of Justice’s FISA application”?

Do we not care that the “venerated” FBI “had abused its surveillance authority and relied improperly on politically motivated sources—namely former British spy Christopher Steele who had been paid by Fusion GPS, a private intelligence firm hired first by conservative underwriters and then retained by Democrats during the 2016 campaign”?

Precisely.

Put it this way: What libertarians should care about is that the “America’s political police”—the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its malignant offshoots—is being thoroughly discredited by its most enthusiastic advocates. This is of a piece with the creative destruction generated, inadvertently, by Donald Trump.

Moreover, the meta-perspective argued for here relies on a recognition that America is regularly convulsed by episodes of mass, hysterical contagion.

What is “hysterical contagion”?

Sociologists explain it as the spread of symptoms of an illness among a group, absent any physiological disease. It provides a way of coping with a situation that cannot be handled with the usual coping mechanism.

Arguably, the Trump-Russia “collusion,” “obstruction of justice” probe and the attendant frenzied behavior and belief-system it has engendered meets the definition of mass hysteria. With an exception: This particular form of mass madness involves a meme, a story-line that catches on and sticks. In particular, it is the emotional pitch with which the Trump-Russia collusion group-think is delivered, day in and day out, that has gripped and inflamed irrational, febrile minds. …

… READ THE REST.  “Why Libertarians Should Shrug-Off Memo Mania” is at the Mises Institute’s Power and Market blog.

And at the Ron Paul Institute.

 

 

 

UPDATED (4/5/018): The Teachers’ Pets Of Douglas High Can’t Think Straight

Constitution, Crime, Education, Family, Government, GUNS, The State

THE NEW COLUMN IS “The Teacher’s Pets Of Douglas High Can’t Think Straight.” It’s now on WND.com. Or, if you prefer fewer pop-ups, on the one and only Unz Review.

An excerpt:

“In America,” observed as Oscar Wilde, “the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.”

So it is with the activist kids who’ve emerged from the Parkland, Florida, school massacre of February 14th, in which 17 of their own were murdered.

Each one sounds like the proverbial teacher’s pet, groomed to take a monolithic message to the media.

Like their educators, these one-track minds “don’t impress me much.” The National Rifle Association (NRA) they invariably frame as big, bad and greedy; government as not big enough, generally good and certainly benign.

There are, indubitably, good arguments to be made against the NRA. The kids—who managed to be, for the most, rude, ungrammatical, sanctimonious and smarmy—failed to muster them.

Trained pets that they are, the dogged media kids of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High seemed capable of focusing only on the one causal factor to the exclusion of all others: guns, their legal purveyors and their law-abiding owners.

The students who were front-and-center on the idiot’s lantern were unwilling to hold the shyster sheriff, Scott Israel, and his notoriously iffy Broward County department, responsible for—there is no way to finesse it—enabling, indulging, even grooming killer Nikolas Cruz over years. To students, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office (BSO) was blameless. Lackluster logic led them to the NRA alone.

One young media darling told of his love of Civics classes. This, while refusing to consider the state’s role in what were systemic and systematic failures.

Reliably derelict and criminally negligent, Sheriff Israel and his Broward County law enforcement didn’t “slip-up.” As a matter of progressive policies and philosophy, sheriff and officers had decided against protecting the people they had sworn to protect.

The BSO has been practicing the progressive penal abolition and restorative justice models of crime “prevention.” Yet our auditioning activists have refused to do their basic civic duty: hold this branch of government accountable for its end of the civic compact.

Out of the mouths of babes we hear that officer Scot Petersen and his compadres—they milled about outside Douglas High, while inside children were being riddled by bullets—were mere NRA scapegoats.

Almost unanimously unmoved were the kids by the fact the BSO had received 45 desperate calls over years, detailing homicidal threats made by the killer and violent, deviant altercations in which he was embroiled. Thirty-nine times had the Broward Sheriff’s officers visited the Cruz home in seven years. A critical mass of criminality and pathology was discounted by law-enforcement in ways at once callous, stupid and depravedly indifferent.

The one civic-minded kid could recite the purpose of a bicameral legislature, but cared not a bit about the imperative of government to protect life, liberty and property. Or, about the role of the Second Amendment in mitigating the effects of such a dangerous government. Likewise was the FBI given a pass for being  every bit as criminally culpable as the Broward County sheriff and his lawful crime syndicate.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is a repeat offender. …

… READ THE REST. “The Teacher’s Pets Of Douglas High Can’t Think Straight” is now on WND.com. Or, the Unz Review.

UPDATE (4/5/018):

How about “Che Guava”? (?As opposed “Guevara.”)

The kids are creepy:

Tucker The Great exposes the cult of the kid:

And dumb: