UPDATED (10/13): ‘Liberal Brains Are Pickled In The Formaldehyde Of Identity Politics’

Barack Obama, Democrats, History, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, War

Writing about the death of the liberal anti-war sensibility and movement, brilliant old-school liberal John Pilger notes that nothing penetrates those “liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics. Commodified and market-tested ‘diversity’ is the new liberal brand. …”

The Killing of History:

… Europe is threatened again with becoming a military training ground for nuclear weapons. We must raise our voice against this.”

But not in America. The thousands who turned out for Senator Bernie Sanders’ “revolution” in last year’s presidential campaign are collectively mute on these dangers. That most of America’s violence across the world has been perpetrated not by Republicans, or mutants like Trump, but by liberal Democrats, remains a taboo.

Barack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record, including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama’s overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led Nato forces on Russia’s western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941.

Obama’s “pivot to Asia” in 2011 signalled the transfer of the majority of America’s naval and air forces to Asia and the Pacific for no purpose other than to confront and provoke China. The Nobel Peace Laureate’s worldwide campaign of assassinations is arguably the most extensive campaign of terrorism since 9/11.

What is known in the US as “the left” has effectively allied with the darkest recesses of institutional power, notably the Pentagon and the CIA, to see off a peace deal between Trump and Vladimir Putin and to reinstate Russia as an enemy, on the basis of no evidence of its alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The true scandal is the insidious assumption of power by sinister war-making vested interests for which no American voted. The rapid ascendancy of the Pentagon and the surveillance agencies under Obama represented an historic shift of power in Washington. Daniel Ellsberg rightly called it a coup. The three generals running Trump are its witness. …

MORE.

Still, this Rightist thanks the liberal ladies of Code Pink for stepping into—and filling—the antiwar void, left and right. The traditional antiwar Right was magnificent during Genghis Bush’s rule. Is it MIA for Trump? As to the intrepid ladies in pink: many of them are mature. Perhaps that’s the reason they have the focus Pilger laments as lost.

UPDATE I (10/13) :

POTUS is picking a fight with the mighty Iranian Revolutionary Guard: Is America alone allowed to have Special Forces?

And indeed, North Korea has since said precisely this:

UPDATE II: How has that bellicosity worked out with North Korea, Mr. president? Dennis Rodman would do better.

North Korea is not ruling out diplomacy, but “before we can engage in diplomacy with the Trump administration, we want to send a clear message that the DPRK has a reliable defensive and offensive capability to counter any aggression from the United States,” the official said.

CNN: “North Korea rejects diplomacy with US for now, source says.

UPDATED (10/12): Everyone Has Property Rights, Whether They Know it or Not

America, Classical Liberalism, Critique, History, Individual Rights, libertarianism, Natural Law, Objectivism, Private Property

A NEW ESSAY, “Everyone Has Property Rights, Whether They Know it or Not,” is on Mises Wire.

The Indian tribesman’s claim to his ancient stomping grounds can’t be reduced to a title search at the deeds office. That’s the stuff of the positive law. And this was the point I took away from a conversation, circa 2000, with Mr. Property Rights himself, Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Dr. Hoppe argued unassailably—does he argue any other way?—that if Amerindians had repeatedly traversed, for their livelihood, the same hunting, fishing and foraging grounds, they would have, in effect, homesteaded these, making them their own. Another apodictic profundity deduced from that conversation: The strict Lockean stipulation, whereby to make property one’s own, one must transform it to Western standards, is not convincing.

In an article marking Columbus Day—the day Conservatism Inc. beats up on what remains of America’s First People—Ryan McMaken debunked Ayn Rand’s specious claim that aboriginal Americans “did not have the concept of property or property rights.” This was Rand’s ruse for justifying Europeans’ disregard for the homesteading rights of the First Nations. “[T]he Indian tribes had no right to the land they lived on because” they were primitive and nomadic.

Hoppean Homesteading

Cultural supremacy is no argument for the dispossession of a Lesser Other. To libertarians, Lockean—or, rather Hoppean—homesteading is sacrosanct. He who believes he has a right to another man’s property ought to produce proof that he is its rightful owner. “As the old legal adage goes, ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law,’ as it is the best evidence of legitimate title. The burden of proof rests squarely with the person attempting to relieve another of present property titles.” (Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, p. 276.)

However, even if we allow that “the tribes and individual Indians had no concept of property,” which McMaken nicely refutes—it doesn’t follow that dispossessing them of their land would have been justified. From the fact that a man or a community of men lacks the intellectual wherewithal or cultural and philosophical framework to conceive of these rights—it doesn’t follow that he has no such rights, or that he has forfeited them. Not if one adheres to the ancient doctrine of natural rights. If American Indians had no attachment to the land, they would not have died defending their territories.

Neither does the fact the First Nations formed communal living arrangements invalidate land ownership claims, as McMaken elucidates. Think of the Kibbutz. Kibbutzim in Israel instantiate the principles of voluntary socialism. As such, they are perfectly fine living arrangements, where leadership is empowered as custodian of the resource and from which members can freely secede. You can’t rob the commune of its assets just because members elect to live communally. …

… READ THE REST. Everyone Has Property Rights, Whether They Know it or Not” is on Mises Wire.

UPDATE (10/12)Facebook Thread.

Those who are unfamiliar with the methods of praxeology and deductive reasoning will twist into pretzels to find fault with this essay. Maybe read the ancients (not the neocons) on natural rights.critiquing neocons on natural rights is a straw man.

They’ve Incited War With Russia, Now The UniParty Is Worried About … ‘World War III’

Democrats, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Republicans, Russia, War

Republican Senator Bob Corker is worried that President Trump is “reckless enough to stumble [sic] the country into a nuclear war.” This from the two War Parties who’ve not stopped egging Trump on about Russia, fomenting American aggression against that potential partner. The president wanted—was willing—to make peace with Russian; the UniParty would have none of it. Now DemoPublicans are worried.

President Trump has failed miserably in forging forward with peace vis-a-vis Russia and sending out competent spokespersons to explain that campaign promise and the attendant policy of diplomacy and American First.

… Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview on Sunday that President Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”

In an extraordinary rebuke of a president of his own party, Mr. Corker said he was alarmed about a president who acts “like he’s doing ‘The Apprentice’ or something.”

“He concerns me,” Mr. Corker added. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”

Mr. Corker’s comments capped a remarkable day of sulfurous insults between the president and the Tennessee senator — a powerful, if lame-duck, lawmaker, whose support will be critical to the president on tax reform and the fate of the Iran nuclear deal. …

MORE: “Bob Corker Says Trump’s Recklessness Threatens ‘World War III’.”

… In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, Mr. Corker responded to a series of Twitter attacks on him by Mr. Trump. He said that the president was running the White House like it was “a reality show” and with bellicose threats that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.” Mr. Corker added that “every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him.”

Other Republican lawmakers, while privately nodding their heads, remained conspicuously silent on Monday morning, and many Senate Republicans no doubt were relieved not to be in session this week in Washington, where they would be intercepted in the hallways of the Capitol by reporters asking them to comment on Mr. Corker’s remarks. …

… Mr. Corker expressed concern shortly after the inauguration that Mr. Trump was a “wrecking ball” to American foreign policy but he largely tempered his criticism in hopes of helping to steer the nation’s first president to serve without any political or military background.

By last week, that hope was clearly gone. As Mr. Tillerson publicly denied he was considering resignation without denying that he had once called the president a “moron” — he let a spokeswoman deny it later — Mr. Corker volunteered that the secretary of state and two other officials were the only thing that “separate our country from chaos.”

Mr. Trump responded over the weekend by calling Mr. Corker “a negative voice” who “didn’t have the guts to run” for another term. Mr. Corker fired back on Twitter by saying “the White House has become an adult care center” and “someone obviously missed their shift.” He followed up with the Times interview. …

MORE: “Corker’s Blast at Trump Has Other Republicans Nodding in Agreement.”

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UPDATED (10/23/017): Girlfriend Of Vegas Killer Denies Knowing. AND EVERYBODY BELIEVES HER!!

Crime, Government, Homeland Security, Law, Political Correctness, Terrorism

Well then, the girlfriend of the Las Vegas killer Stephen Paddock says she didn’t know he was planning the massacre, then it must be true, right?

Likewise Noor Salman, Omar Mateen’s wife, also denied knowing anything was afoot with her her cherub of a husband: all those weapons and that bad attitude. Please. Mateen even told the FBI about his orientation as an aspiring terrorist. The FBI thought he was kinda cute.

At the time, Attorney General Loretta Lynch (confirmed by Republican lickspittles) stepped up to assure the public that federal authorities were scouring their contacts with Mateen, and those around him, to ferret out whether they’d missed anything. When grilled about Mateen’s wife, a key figure in the investigation and a possible co-conspirator, Lynch replied that Noor Salman was … missing.

I guess we have all the proof we need of Marilou Danley’s innocence: Her sisters went on Australian TV and wept a lot. And she returned to the US from vacation. Oh, an Australian TV anchor said she was “just a good woman.”

The End. Proof positive. QED (quod erat demonstrandum).

Does the FBI, preoccupied with setting up elaborate plots to entrap idiots, ever lean hard on a suspect?

UPDATE (10/23):

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