UPDATED: ‘At Peace’ In War

Iraq, Just War, libertarianism, Military, Paleolibertarianism

He’s a fine man (inside and out), which is why it is numbingly absurd, if predictable, for a CNN correspondent to have drawn a moral equivalence between Jordan Matson’s mission and that of 100 or so other Americans, who’ve flocked to fight alongside the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

You see, Matson is an American soldier fighting, voluntarily, with the Kurds against ISIS. And he is not part of Rome’s tax-funded Army’s. Rather, after praying “about what to do for a month or two,” Matson resolved to help the Kurds: “For me, it’s for the Kurdish people,” Matson told CNN.

Matson is “from Sturtevant, Wisconsin, a ‘mom and pop town’ as he described it, with just a few restaurants and three gas stations. He worked the third shift at a food packaging company,” before enlisting with the Popular Protection Unit (YPG), “a Kurdish militia set up to protect the Kurdish areas” from ISIS.

Unless they are pacifists—a quality as odious as militarism—libertarians ought to have no issue with Matson: He is risking his own life, doing what he believes in, is fighting a Just War, and is not funded by the American taxpayer.

Although there is no doubt that this man would rush to the aid of his “little platoons” in America—Edmund Burke’s description of a man’s social mainstay, his family, friends, coreligionists, coworkers—there is, seemingly, no place for Matson in an increasingly feminized, manliness-averse, honor-free America:

“Civilian life just wasn’t for me. The normal 9-to-5, I just wasn’t comfortable with it,” he said.

As to why there is no moral equivalence between Matson and ISIS enlistees:

* Matson is a Christian who prays to the G-d of the Hebrews and the Christians. Some of us think that Islam is problematic and that “ISIS is Islam.”
* Matson does not behead, rape, enslave anyone, much less innocent civilians.
* Matson is not fighting an expansionist aggressive war, his is a defensive war against an aggressor.
* Matson is on the side of the only people that has made good on their sovereignty; are westernized and are profoundly pro-American (G-d only knows why).

UPDATE (10/28): Tinny libertarianism, again. From the Facebook thread:

Myron Robert Pauli: Funny thing but I said about the various neocons like Krauthammer and Kristol that they ought to put their $$ where their mouths are and lead volunteers to fight rather than commit a collective national effort. Jordan Matson decided to do as an individual fight against some international evil that he personally cares about – fine for him. It is the policy of forcibly dragging the nation as a whole into imperial efforts that I object to.

Ilana Mercer: Myron Robert Pauli, so ISIS is just some amorphous “international evil.” Don’t lapse again into tinny, “lite libertarianism.”

Myron Robert Pauli: ???? ???? ISIS has not attacked the US. They have attacked Kurds, Shiites, or opposing Sunnis in Syria and Iraq which, last time I check, are not in the US – which makes them external – now perhaps I should have used the word external instead of international. But a non-interventionist policy for a limited-government republic would not “go around searching for monsters to destroy” (John Quincy Adams). So maybe we have a disconnect but I am not sure what you call “lite libertarianism” here – people overseas have the responsibility to defend themselves against the scumbags that attack them but we don’t have an obligation to help them (and it usually is counterproductive when we “help”) but if some individual wishes to help, that is probably fine.

Ilana Mercer WTF, Myron Robert Pauli: From the fact that ISIS has not attacked the US, it does not follow that one is morally neutral as individuals to their deeds against other innocents. We went over this “argument” when I wrote “Masada on Mount Sinjar.” By your “argument,” no individual had the right to mess with the Germans who murdered close on 6 million Jews and others.

New Jersey and New York Move To Protect Citizens

Barack Obama, Federalism, Government, Healthcare, States' Rights

The federal behemoth rises on its hind legs whenever a state stands up for its 10th Amendment constitutional rights: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Barack Obama went to war against Arizona when the plucky governor of that state enforced immigration laws to protect her citizens. The same Strongman is trying to strong-arm New Jersey and New York leadership for taking defensive measures to protect their citizens from possible infection with Ebola, a disease that, as Jonah Goldberg put it, “liquifies your insides.”

No sooner had the Cuomo and Christie administrations announced “a new mandatory quarantine policy” for “medical workers who had contact with Ebola patients in West Africa”—than Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s resolve began to crumble. Via The New York Times:

Facing fierce resistance from the White House and medical experts to a strict new mandatory quarantine policy … after urging calm on Thursday night, then joining Mr. Christie to highlight the risks of lax policy on Friday, Mr. Cuomo on Sunday night appeared to try to dial back his rhetoric and stake out a middle ground.

MORE.

My guess is that Christie’s decision on Ebola precautions will bolster the governor’s sagging approval numbers.

Democrat-Rigged ‘Democracy’

Democracy, Democrats, GUNS, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

“Make sure it doesn’t happen in your state next,” warns Michelle Malkin, in “Rocky Mountain Heist,” a documentary in which the columnist puts her trademark shoe-leather journalistic sleuthing to work in exposing the Democrat-rigged “democracy” of Colorado, where a “group of wealthy liberals overtook Colorado. They used every scheme possible to impose a backward agenda and they transformed the place [she] love[s] into a testing ground for their liberal ideology.”

Malkin, who once resided in our state, might already know that the dice are loaded against decent people in Washington State too. I-594 is, by Rachel Alexander’s telling, “the only gun-control measure on the ballot this fall anywhere across the country.” It “is being bankrolled by billionaires on the left in favor of gun control, including anti-gun activist and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as former wealthy Microsoft execs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.”

Let us not forget Paul Allen, also a billionaire and also of Microsoft. He and the other bastards—who no doubt have security details guarding their abodes—“have raised more than $6 million” to make it more difficult for ordinary folks to defend life and property.

In 2011, another unfathomably wealthy individual got behind an effort to bilk business men and women of modest means. The Service Employees International Union (state and national locals), the National Education Association, and Washington teachers union locals all united to champion a new income tax, the poster boy for which was William H. Gates Sr., father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Underpinnings of Murderous Rage In The Age of Entitlement

Ethics, Morality, Pop-Culture, Pseudoscience, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Zeitgeist

It’s time for the pop-psychology explanations of how an essentially tender soul, Jaylen Fryberg, was pushed to murder classmates at Washington State’s Marysville-Pilchuck High School. First, the carnage, via CNN:

Two girls are in the intensive care unit at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, and two boys are in ICU at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Providence spokeswoman Erin Al-Wazan said.
Three are “very critically ill” with “very serious” injuries, she said. One is in serious condition. One of the boys, age 14, suffered a jaw injury. The other, age 15, was critically injured in the head.

“When the mental health mavens appear on the scene, the narrative expands some, but generally retains its idiotic thrust. Having been played for all it’s worth, the-culture-of-violence causal factor has given way to the more in-vogue bullying theory.

Skin-deep qualities have always determined the pecking order in schools. Still, Janis Ian’s haunting 1975 song, “Seventeen,” would not have been written today. Angry teenagers nowadays are simply less inclined to ruminate about their angst, and more likely to act on it. Social justice, they are taught, pivots on redistribution. And redistribution is achieved by making some pay for the lesser fortunes of others. When taught to reject the harsh reality of inequality, of not having everything one covets—the anger of entitlement easily bubbles to the fore. Be it popularity or pulchritude, there is a sense that someone ought to pay for the pain of being without.

Furthermore, where once kids might have seen dignity in a brave and stoic face, now, the cultural cognoscenti have declared these to be pathologies, symptoms of repression and denial. Is it any wonder that some kids—the bad ones, at least—feel that the culture of share-your-feelings-with-the-group gives them permission to take the rage of entitlement to its deadly conclusion?”

From “Three-Step Program To Moral Unaccountability” ©2000 By Ilana Mercer

Some of this creature’s tweets: