UPDATED: Blade Runner Still Walking On Water

Celebrity, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, Pseudoscience, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Race, South-Africa, Sport

A high-profile murder involving a class of people whose role in South Africa’s endemic crime is statistically insignificant occurred last week. The two wealthy white South Africans involved, however, will become a perfect foil for the hypocritical tele-twits of the West. The latter have said nothing about the carnage of crime in that country—and they’ll continue to say nothing meaningful at all.

Crime in South Africa should have been making news headlines across the world throughout South Africa’s overnight transition from minority to majority rule. It hasn’t. Blade runner Oscar Pistorius’ run-in with the law has occasioned the first such mention that I can recall by anchor-personality Megyn Kelly of Fox News, and her colleagues in the industry. (The killing fields of South Africa are dissected in “Crime, The Beloved Country,” a chapter in my book).

A statistical outlier, an anomaly—the murder of a (white) South African celebrity (Reeva Steenkamp) by another (Olympian Oscar Pistorius), allegedly—has newsmen in the West mentioning a subject they’ve so far submerged.

Steenkamp was a South African model. Pistorius is also a celebrity whose fame comes from being a tenacious (and talented) track-and-field annoyance. An annoyance, because most hardcore track-and-field fans want able and disabled Olympians segregated. (Yes, this is an intentional play on “loaded” words. Call the PC police!) The separation why? So as to allow fans (me) to enjoy the sport without the accoutrements of technology and the incontinent gushing that accompanies Pistorius whenever he makes a run for it.

In any event, how PC and TV perfect is this crime? (This or any other crime should never be called “a tragic circumstance,” as such vague language implies that bad deeds are invariably caused—never committed. And that they are caused by factors outside the perpetrators. (See “Rah-Rah For Rioters.”)

I wager that next, Anderson Cooper or Piers Morgan will call on the actress Charlize Theron to comment about the relevance of her pet campaign to stop violence against women in our former homeland, and its relevance to this case.

There is no relevance. Violence in the “Rambo Nation” is unidirectional: black on black and black on white. Violence against women—at least the kind that causes more than hurt feelings—follows the same pattern.

Meanwhile, the blade runner is still walking on water. Oscar Pistorius is receiving “overwhelming support” from his fans. Or so his agent informs the fans and the press.

UPDATE: FROM the Facebook thread. It’s just as I said. The Guardian is turning a statistical anomaly in this group (well-to-do whites) into a generic statement about violence against women in South Africa.

Desmond Tutu NOT An Example Of Black Privilege

Affirmative Action, Israel, Neoconservatism, Race, Racism, South-Africa

I am not sure why the authors of Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream, reviewed by philosopher-pundit Jack Kerwick on FrontPage Magazine, picked on Desmond Tutu as an example of black privilege in South Africa.

It must be an authorial tic peculiar to neoconservatives, and applied to anyone with an anti-Israel position, for which Archbishop Tutu is famous. It is also typical of the neoconservative’s reflexive ahistoric approach, where a proposition or an idea (black privilege) is applied without nuance, to any and all annoying blacks (Tutu is that alright).

Horowitz and Perazzo even show that black skin privilege transcends continents. Alluding to South Africa’s Bishop Demond Tutu, they write: “What white spiritual leader could support the torture-murders of South African blacks, compare Israel to Nazi Germany, and still be regarded as a moral icon? A black cleric like Bishop Desmond Tutu can.” (Indeed, as occasional Front Page Magazine contributor and former South African resident Ilana Mercer amply demonstrates in her, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, the new South Africa is black skin privilege on steroids.)

(From “Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream” by Jack Kerwick.)

I don’t think Desmond Tutu is an example of black privilege. He supports it, but doesn’t exemplify it.

If anything, the elderly Archbishop, whose inauguration I attended and with whom my father and I took afternoon tea many decades back, embodies the old-style, old school African man. Tutu grew up in wretched poverty, received—and gladly accepted—a decent education courtesy of the Church, and worked his ministry so hard as to reap the rewards. (In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” I discuss the wonders the white-run churches had done in South Africa, as do I mention what was for me a memorable meeting with the Archbishop. From that occasion I took away that he was fond of my father and respectful of dad’s Jewish faith and scholarship. How good an equalizer were some schools in the old South Africa? You be the judge. Tutu and I, and tens of thousands of other Africans, belong to the same alma mater: UNISA.)

Sure, Tutu is a left-liberal. But to me, as I said in “King Tut(u) Not So Terrific,” his impiety stems from never having piped up about the ethnic cleansing of rural whites, Afrikaners mostly, from the land in ways that beggar belief. Saint Mandela has also remained mum about these Shaka-Zulu worthy murders.

And so have our neoconservatives!

Witness the authors of Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream, who, it would appear, protest Tutu’s alleged support for the “torture-murders of South African blacks” (by which I am told they meant white South Africans), but say nothing, seemingly (just like Tutu), about the targeted slaughter of whites in South Africa, and then only when it’s politically safe to do so. (Watch Barely a Blog for commentary about Oscar Pistorius.)

Jack Kerwick, of course, is correct (and most kind) to subtly remind neoconservatives that it is “the new South Africa [that] is black skin privilege on steroids” (and that a rightist has already plumbed the depths of this topic).

Self-Segregation Trumps Imposed Multiculturalism

Ilana Mercer, Liberty, Multiculturalism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Correctness, The West

“Originality is rare in punditry these days,” writes Joseph F. Cotto, who is “a scholar and columnist from central Florida.” “Every time a new narrative-of-the-day arrives, we take refuge in groupthink rather than thinking for ourselves. Not Mercer … [who] is one of America’s leading paleolibertarian voices, [with] “a prominent column on WorldNetDaily.”

Mr. Cotto recently interviewed this writer for the Washington Times’ community pages. You can read the interview, “Self-Segregation Trumps Imposed Multiculturalism,” at WND. Here are excerpts:

JOSEPH F. COTTO: This seems like one of the most polarized eras in American politics. Why do you think that our country’s political atmosphere has become so divisive?

ILANA MERCER: I think you are correct in your assessment regarding the unparalleled polarization of American society. Have you noticed how commentators on both sides of received political wisdom attempt to diminish the fact you articulate by referring to America’s fractious history? Nevertheless, this is a complex issue that is hard to answer briefly. I’ll try. In the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” economist Milton Friedman underscores this important point: “The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”
Underway today in the USA is a monumental clash between individualism and collectivism; between the forces of reason and reality, against force and coercion. The “philosophical” differences between the Republikeynesians, on the one hand, and the Democrats, on the other, are insignificant. The first believe individual rights should be carefully calibrated by central planners; the latter believe these natural rights can be overridden.
There is also a cultural dimension to these irreparable divisions. We are today, thanks to social engineering, a deracinated and divided society. We are no longer what John Jay termed “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and custom.” There can be no unity without community. The glue of togetherness is gone, replaced by a flimsy, fluid, and thoroughly fake unity peddled by politicians. “Ideas” they call it. On the one day, it’s a crusade for democracy; on the next, it’s a war against racism.

COTTO: Multiculturalism is spreading rapidly across the Western world. This has led not only to cultural barriers, but tremendous religious and ethnic conflicts. What are your views on the subject?

MERCER: Multiculturalism as practiced in the West amounts to top-down, centrally enforced and managed integration. Show me a historical precedent where forced integration has worked. As it works across the Anglo-American and European spheres, one group (the founding, historical majority) is forced by self-anointed and elected elites—no contradiction there—on pain of public and professional ostracism, to submerge its history, heroes, customs, culture, language, and pander to militant minorities, who’ve been acculturated by the same elites in identity-politics warfare. …
… An interesting new book, reviewed by one Barnaby Rogerson, makes the point that the Levant of the 18th century was peaceful and prosperous (and surprisingly libertine), because it was made up of “a grid of self-governing communities.” Integration between disparate communities was not enforced. And surprise, surprise: communities freely chose to live in complete segregation. This freedom fostered “remarkable tolerance” among diverse communities across the cities of the Levant of that time. “Deals before Ideals, City before State, Trade before Politics,” as the reviewer puts it. This freedom of association was the source of strength. These autonomous ethnic communities were free of the top-down, punitive, forced integration that has become the hallmark of the 19th-century nation-state that usurped their authority. …

This interview, “Self-Segregation Trumps Imposed Multiculturalism,” continues at WND.

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A Not-So Soft Fascism

Crime, Fascism, Government, The State

Dominating this week’s news headlines were two events: The hunt for Christopher Jordan Dorner and Barack Obama’s fourth State of the Union (SOTU) extravaganza. Both events involved forceful displays by what Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises called the Total State.

(Only the first event is the topic of this blog post. BHO’s SOTUs have been chronicled in “Man With The Reverse-Midas Touch” (2010), “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State” (2012), and in many blog posts. The president’s 2013 SOTU doesn’t rate a mention.)

Von Mises coined the term in his treatment of “totalitarian collectivist systems” exemplified by Nazism and fascism. The arc of totalitarianism, however, led Mises and others to the post-modern totalitarian state, which is characterized by a “soft fascism,” as Perry de Havilland of the British Samizdata blog calls the modern Managerial State.

But there was nothing soft about the way Local, state and federal assassins went in for the kill in the countrywide manhunt for Christopher Dorner. Dorner, who is presumed dead, was a former LAPD officer with a grudge against the Los Angeles Police Department.

According to the Wikipedia timeline, the Navy veteran blew his stack and went on the lam after a killing spree in Southern California. He is alleged to have shot three police officers, one fatally, in Riverside, and committed a double homicide on Sunday, in Irvine, murdering the daughter of a former Los Angeles Police Department captain (Randal Quan), also the lawyer who represented Dorner during his dispute with the LAPD. Ms. Quan’s fiance was also murdered.

I am not here saying that Christopher Dorner did not need killing. I’m asking you to jump a level of abstraction and look at the meta picture. The one killer syndicate (the state’s agents) converged on another lone assassin (Dorner), as the first group concentrated almost all the resources provided (at the point of a gun) by a third party (taxpayers), to eliminate the lone assassin with whom a personal score had to be settled.

The police force went in for the kill, Waco style. Dorner’s cabin did not combust, or “catch fire,” as media put it, but was incinerated with smoke devices and demolished wall by wall.

In the course of this demonstration of might, innocent bystanders were shot at, their vehicles rammed, and businesses entered and shuttered.

Does this sound like law enforcement, or like the actions of a private army run for the benefit of sectional interests?