“An adult woman, however loathsome, either owns herself and everything inside her or doesn’t. You can’t ‘own’ yourself with the exception of your uterus or in conjunction with other busybodies.”–ilana
As I see it, libertarianism (the conservative kind) offers the fairest position to both sides, who are stuck, peering at one another above the parapets …
An adult woman, however loathsome, either owns herself and everything inside her or doesn’t. You can’t ‘own’ yourself with the exception of your uterus or in conjunction with other busybodies.” (From the upcoming companion column.) I don’t see how you get away from that reality. David is sympathetic, but worries that Moloch worship has taken hold.
He believes that life is sacred and protecting it is important. David and ilana agree that the conservative movement makes a mistake by overly focusing on abortion.
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That the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) finally delivered a decision returning and restoring power to the states on this one issue, abortion, is as it should be. If her state outlaws abortion; a woman can still board a Greyhound bus to get the procedure elsewhere.
The ethical elegance of the libertarian argument has been reiterated before in this space:
“Women have the right to screw and scrape out their insides to their heart’s content.”
Trojans, Trivora or a termination: An Americans woman has the right to purchase contraception, abortifacients and abortions, provided … she pays for them. For like herself, America is packed with many other sovereign individuals. Some of these individuals do not approve of the products and procedures mentioned. Americans who oppose contraception, abortifacients and abortion must be similarly respected in their rights of self-ownership.
Taxpayers who oppose these products and procedures ought to have an equal right to dispense of what is theirs—their property—in accordance with the dictates of their conscience. America’s adult women may terminate their pregnancies (to the exclusion of late-term infanticide).
What America’s manifestly silly sex does not have the right to do is to rope other, presumably free Americans into supplying them with or paying for their reproductive choices. The rights of self-ownership and freedom of conscience apply to all Americans.
Late-term abortion, generally, must always be outlawed (I realize I owe you argument, yet have provided only assertion. My apologies; you’ll have to wait). One could argue that, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the deciding case brought before the SCOTUS, did concern late-term abortion, with the state of Mississippi banning abortion after 15 weeks:
The Jackson clinic and one of its doctors sued Mississippi officials in federal court, saying the state’s law was unconstitutional.
A federal district court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the clinic, blocking Mississippi’s law. But the state appealed to the Supreme Court, which put the case on its docket.
Call it real federalism—on this one vexing issue—although, any reluctant state taxpayers will still be on the hook for such services. And , federalism has hardly been revived. Powers have never been more concentrated in the Federal Frankenstein, which has never been more intractable and tyrannical.
Have we not just lived through three years in which the Pharma State has consolidated power as never before? On pain of taking the Covid jab, the state has de facto established license to shutter a subject’s business, deny him freedom of movement, quarantine, fire, and separate him from loved ones. Sorry: Abortion does not rate a mention on a serious country’s scale of priorities.
Law is force. Outlawing abortion, in the midst of a true crime wave, and a systemic breakdown in ordered liberty, implies the creation of a new category of criminal, consisting of the abortion seeking “spiteful mutants” and their healthcare aids, to be jailed for the commission of an abortion.
Another pesky detail: However much one disdains abortion, one can’t get away from self-ownership. You have no right to take custody of another’s body. A woman, however loathsome, either owns herself and everything in her or doesn’t. You can’t “own” yourself in conjunction with other busybodies.
The piss-poor quality of the now-overturned Roe V. Wade jurisprudence has never been in question. Wrote a perspicacious reader: “There were 50 state laws on abortion until the Republican-appointed Harry Blackmun decided to merge the musings of his Mayo Clinic physician buddies and the vaguely written 14th Amendment into a stream-of-consciousness halachic decision known as Roe v. Wade. Since then, 55% of black pregnancies get aborted compared to a third of Hispanics and 11% of white.”
These statistics are significant in the context of crime. John J. Donohue and Steven D. Levitt (2001) had established that “the legalization of abortion, in the early 1970s, played an important role in the crime drop of the 1990s.” Ceteris paribus, “legalized abortion will account for persistent declines of 1% a year in crime over the next two decades.”
Reversal of the trend is inevitable.
Myself, I don’t have sticky fingers and have no desire to control another’s uterus. Let progressive women—especially the fulminating fiends rioting across the country—suction their wombs for all I care. As evolutionary psychologist Ed Dutton has suggested, “Some people voluntarily resigning from the gene pool is a good thing.”
The consequences of similar efforts against family planning in the undeveloped world have been described less daintily by Kevin Myers, an Irish columnist who was banished from the ossified, idiotic media:
The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a low IQ, AK 47-bearing moron, siring children whenever the whim takes him, and blaming the world because he is uneducated, poor and left behind. … Somalia [is] another fine land of violent, AK 47-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts, and housing pirates of the ocean. Indeed [in Africa], we now have almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive, illiterate indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world …
American Woman: A reminder to conservatives who want these medusas to be mamas: Babies begotten by such hos will likely be a lot like their feral mothers, who are NOT in God’s image. These gorgons are howling at the gods for being so in-and-out ugly. A medal to the man who gets on top of such putrid flesh for his jollies. Women who behave worse than primates in estrus are not mother material.
Dallas women TWERKING for abortions. WTF
“Shakin dat a** so we can kill our babies, proud to be a hoe and not to be a ladies” pic.twitter.com/tyTCEbDXhr
Russia will have to intrude into NATO territory to feed its people in Kaliningrad. NATO, doing Uncle Sam’s bidding, could then invoke its Article 5 obligation to, one and all, galvanize against Russia.
On July 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia pursuant to the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, thus effectively starting the First World War.
This is the case because Russia will have to intrude into NATO territory to feed its people in Kaliningrad. NATO members, doing Uncle Sam’s bidding, could then invoke their Article 5 obligation to, one and all, galvanize against Russia.
Ahead of the new Lithuanian transit ban taking effect, the state railways service was reportedly awaiting final word from the European Commission on enforcing it:
The cargo unit of Lithuania’s state railways service set out details of the ban in a letter to clients following “clarification” from the European Commission on the mechanism for applying the sanctions.
Previously, Lithuanian Deputy Foreign Minister Mantas Adomenas said the ministry was waiting for “clarification from the European Commission on applying European sanctions to Kaliningrad cargo transit.”
Brussels then ruled that “sanctioned goods and cargo should still be prohibited even if they travel from one part of Russia to another but through EU territory,” according to Rueters/Rferl.
In Moscow’s eyes, this is tantamount to laying economic siege to part of Russia’s sovereign territory and one million of its citizens. When the EU first proposed the blockage of goods as part of the last major sanctions package in early April, Kremlin officials warned of war given Moscow would have to “break the blockade” for the sake if its citizens.
“Murray, from what I can tell, is the latest manifestation of what Tom Wolfe once labeled ‘The Mid-Atlantic Man,’ i.e., the foppish Englishman who makes a generous living off the Americans he’s bamboozled into thinking he’s brilliant.” ~Juvenal Early
By Juvenal Early
So, what in the Sam Hill is going on over at Chronicles Magazine?
The June issue features back-page gossip columnist (and reputed Moneybags) Taki extolling the virtues of his friend Douglas Murray’s latest book, The War on the West (another unoriginal title to add to the Murray canon; here’s the first, also extolled by Chronicles).
Though math geek John Derbyshire lamented the book’s lack of numbers and graphs, and said it had nothing new to offer, Taki terms it a “dozey.” I assume he meant doozy; dozey sounds like a nighttime sleep-aid.
But, but, but. Wasn’t it only back in January that Murray called outChroniclesWunderkind Pedro Gonzalez for anti-semitism? And haven’t there been a dearth of Gonzalez appearances in the last few months on Tucker Carlson Tonight? And didn’t Chronicles call out the heavy peashooters in counterattack to the bitchy Brit? In short, hadn’t Murray’s name become persona non grata in the halls of the Charlemagne Institute (publisher of Chronicles)?
Let me back up a little and give some context.
It starts with Tucker, where else? If you were following his show with any degree of regularity over the past few years, you no doubt became acquainted with Douglas Murray and Pedro Gonzalez, two of Tuck’s go-to guys, when it comes to having opinions on politics and culture. Tucker has even anointed them (unjustly we think) as public intellectuals in extended gingham-shirt interviews on his FoxNation streaming show.
Pedro writes for several outlets, principally for Chronicles, where he’s an editor and also their current Wonder Boy. Though not without talent, he has a track record of expropriating the ideas of others without giving them credit.
Murray, from what I can tell, is the latest manifestation of what Tom Wolfe once labeled “The Mid-Atlantic Man,” i.e., the foppish Englishman who makes a generous living off the Americans he’s bamboozled into thinking he’s brilliant. With aspirations to be the latest Roger Scruton, if not Michael Oakeshott, Doug’s ended up being “Con-Oink’s” House Poofter. Not bad work, if you can get it. Seems like all the Fox hosts are calling on him now. Barely-a-Blog and the “Hard Truth” Podcast have both devoted column space and air time to Murray’s sins. (Also here and here.)
So, when Murray wrote his hit piece on Bari Weiss’s Substack page, maybe he didn’t know that he was castigating a fellow Tucker-bro. Or maybe he did, and that’s the whole point. It’s dog eat dog in what currently passes for America’s conservative intellectual battlefield.
Enter Taki and his literal PR job on behalf of Douglas Murray. Taki’s June 2022 “Under the Black Flag” column begins: “Douglas Murray’s book The War on the West has just been published, and it’s a dozey [sic]. He is a friend and fellow columnist in the London Spectator, the oldest magazine in the English-speaking world.”
What are we to think? Maybe it’s a sign of health that a polemical magazine offers differing opinions. Or maybe it was just an oversight that it made it to print. Or maybe the deep pockets of which Taki’s always reminding us had something to do with it. By all reports, Chronicles has survived hand-to-mouth since Leopold Tyrmand founded it. Maybe they’re not anxious to upset an important patron. Just spitballing here.
As for Taki’s literary output, it is gossip, you know, albeit, high-class gossip, as the brilliant writer and jet-set doyenne Barbara Amiel says in her memoirs. (Hmm. Pot. Kettle. Black?) He was, she said, maybe capable of better things: “…really, had he put his mind to it, he could have been a significant writer.” Certainly, he was always invoking his heroes—Hemingway and Mailer come to mind—enough that you knew he had more than a passing acquaintance with the best writers of the 20th Century. You get the idea that he aspired to that level.
But perhaps all that money and all those yachts and all those women and all that tennis and all that judo and all that vodka sapped his talent, left him with no more than his platform at the Spectator—or wherever else he could find an eager publisher.
Indeed, the proper term for what Taki became might be writer manqué.
So where did he come by his affinity for Murray?
Well, if you’ve aspired to greatness, but fallen short, the next best thing is to find yourself in the company of the best available option. Which is often just a flavor of the month, like Dougie-boy. For Murray’s part, I imagine he likes having someone colorful picking-up the checks.
As previously mentioned, Taki is always reminding us of his colorfulness and his ability to pick-up checks. Then there’s the fortune, yachts, the houses, the women—the “candyfloss,” in the words of Barbara Amiel (before she turned around and squandered her talent on Conrad and the high-life).
Yes, money, Taki does have. He’s been telling us for well over 40 years how much better his life is than ours. He’ll get down and slum with the people, now and then, but don’t try to insinuate yourself into his world. A friend was once at conference featuring Taki. He was part of a group that surrounded Taki at a cocktail reception. Taki was holding forth on Gstaad, the ski retreat in Switzerland where he owns a house. My friend, upper middle class, well-read, well-traveled, a first-rate financial analyst, mentioned that he’d been in Gstaad recently, and had been very impressed with the place’s beauty. Taki sized him up, and replied dismissively: “you were never in Gstaad.” Why’d he do that? Push comes to shove, he’s probably just a snob at heart
And he’s just the kind of white whale a bloke like Murray dreams of hooking. Murray’s a punch-down kinda guy, or at least that’s the impression I have. He’ll suck up to who he has to, but I can’t see him sharing a pint with Joe Sixpack. A custom fit for the Greek Boy? Snobs of a feather? Just asking.
When Juvenal approached me about the above piece, I applauded his instincts. Taki is, after all, quoted in Into The Cannibal’s Pot (p.18), enthusing over South Africa being “the greatest triumph of chatter over machine-gun clatter. It’s not perfect, and crime is at an all-time high in South African cities,” babbled Taki, “but at least the massacres are a thing of the past and life goes on much better than before.”
The loss of my homeland lauded … The Nasionale Party trashed by the so-called Smart Set.
Once upon a time, the epistolary fluff ensconced at The American Conservative was detonated daily by the “pugnacious” Lawrence Auster. When Auster died, a void opened up. The “typically shapeless pieces” coming out of paleoconservative quarters, at once “weird and solipsistic”—Auster’s delicious descriptions—have escaped scrutiny. Going by the pen name “Juvenal Early,” a disillusioned former donor to Chronicles has stepped up to clear the same “shapeless” thickets once hacked down to size by Lawrence Auster.
Enjoy.
ilana
