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Mailvox: on national libertarianism

“Maybe it doesn’t interest you but, I would really appreciate if you
could spell out what exactly it is that you oppose in National
Socialism.“

The Socialism.  I oppose 20 of the 25 points of the National Socialist political program, which is considerably more than the average Democrat or Republican does.

“Do you have a theory, or belief, or some posts on national libertarianism?”

I do.  I have long described myself as a Christian Libertarian, but this is a description that only makes much sense to Europeans, where Christian Democrat is still a meaningful political term rather than something rapidly approaching a contradiction-in-terms, if not yet an actual oxymoron. 

In terms of the US political spectrum, I have concluded that it would make more sense to describe myself as a National Libertarian, which some might erroneously conclude is synonymous with paleoconservative or some form of conservatism.

Therefore, I intend to begin a series of posts entitled National Liberty, which will address the subject of why National Libertarianism is not only not a misnomer, but is the only logically coherent form of libertarianism as well as the political ideology best suited for maximizing human freedom in a sustainable manner.

Immigration as ideological weapon

Peter Hitchens admits what was always obvious: the reason the Left has favored mass immigration is because they believed, correctly, that they could use it to politically transform the nation:

The greatest mass migration in our history has taken place…. Our leaders only had to go to Boston, any time in the past five years, and they would have known.

But all our leading politicians were afraid of knowing the truth.

If they knew, they would at least have to pretend to act.

And the truth was, they liked things as they were.

And it was at least partly my own fault.

When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible.

It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain. We saw immigrants – from anywhere – as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.

Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people – usually in the poorest parts of Britain – who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly ‘vibrant communities’.

If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.

Revolutionary students didn’t come from such ‘vibrant’ areas (we came, as far as I could tell, mostly from Surrey and the nicer parts of London).

We might live in ‘vibrant’ places for a few (usually squalid) years, amid unmown lawns and overflowing dustbins.

But we did so as irresponsible, childless transients – not as homeowners, or as parents of school-age children, or as old people hoping for a bit of serenity at the ends of their lives.

When we graduated and began to earn serious money, we generally headed for expensive London enclaves and became extremely choosy about where our children went to school, a choice we happily denied the urban poor, the ones we sneered at as ‘racists’.

What did we know, or care, of the great silent revolution which even then was beginning to transform the lives of the British poor?

To us, it meant patriotism and tradition could always be derided as ‘racist’.

And now the pro-immigrant Left belatedly discovers they have a tiger by the tail that doesn’t give a damn about their careful distinctions between what is useful to them and what is not.  This is par for the course for the Left; the Mensheviks always end up being cast aside by the Bolsheviks. The Richard Dawkins of the world are always happy to foolishly embrace Islam as an attack on Christian culture, if they weren’t too short-sighted to grasp that Islam would prove every bit as implacable a foe as Christianity, they wouldn’t be Leftists in the first place.

Many, if not most, white progressives, libertarians, and conservatives who bought into the Myth of Ellis Island are going to come over to the nationalist side in the next ten years, frightened by the realization that what they celebrated and advocated has come to pass in a very different way than they expected.  But those of us who have always valued nationalist culture and traditions need to always keep in mind that they are, at best, modestly useful allies of demonstrably inferior judgment on such matters.

The Right has a long and sordid history of elevating those who have “seen the light” to be its opinion leaders.  National Review and Pajamas Media is chock full of former progressives, ex-Democrats, and reformed socialists, which is why their positions are so reliably meek, ineffective, and apologetic.  They still want to curry favor with the Leftist institutions they once revered; they simply do not regard the Left with the contempt such organizations and people merit.  Look, for example, at Hitchens’s attack on Enoch Powell in the very article in which he belatedly comes around to accept the essence of Powell’s
position on immigration.

That is why this rush of newly reformed transnationalists cannot ever be trusted or taken very seriously.  They are still the same traitors to their cultures and traditions they have always been, all that has changed is that they are now frightened of what their own actions have wrought and alarmed at the extent to which the transformations they sought are destroying even the aspects of their society they expected to retain.

Even now, the transnationalist right is still trying to finesse an irrelevant difference between illegal immigration (bad) and legal immigration (good).  This is a fool’s game. The fact is that ALL immigration beyond a small and readily absorbed amount is invariably destructive and will always transform the invaded nation into something different than it was before.  Whether the transformation is desirable or not is a separate and debatable matter, the point is that the transformation is definitely going to take place.

Still too big to jail

The banks are still above the law:

Money laundering by large international banks has reached epidemic proportions, and U.S. authorities are supposedly looking into Citigroup Inc. (C) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Governor Jerome Powell, on behalf of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, recently testified to Congress on the issue, and he sounded serious. But international criminals and terrorists needn’t worry. This is window dressing: Complicit bankers have nothing to fear from the U.S. justice system.

To be on the safe side, though, miscreants should be sure to use a really large global bank for all their money-laundering needs.

There may be fines, but the largest financial companies are unlikely to face criminal actions or meaningful sanctions. The Department of Justice has decided that these banks are too big to prosecute to the full extent of the law, though why this also gets employees and executives off the hook remains a mystery. And the Federal Reserve refuses to rescind bank licenses, undermining the credibility, legitimacy and stability of the financial system.

Considering that the banks can get away with laundering drug money and committing large scale mortgage and deed fraud with impunity, what makes you think they won’t get away with taking as much of their depositors’petty creditors’ money as they decide they need?

Women’s rights are anti-freedom

The truth tends to reveal itself over time. Over the last ten years, I’ve observed that the intrinsically anti-freedom authoritarianism of feminism is increasingly out in the open. At this point, only those who aren’t paying attention can still pretend to buy into the idea that feminism and women’s rights are even remotely compatible with Western civilization or resemble anything that the Western intellectual tradition would consider legitimate rights.

Consider the words of one Barbara, who isn’t shy about speaking for all women when she quite seriously argues “we should be able to make you not offend us”:

I think that I can speak for all women when I say that this very
important because we cannot offend science fiction fans of other
religions. The right to free speech is irrelevant to women’s rights and
freedom of religion. People need to understand that being offended is a
really big deal and that we should be able to make you not offend us.
And science fiction cannot be sexist or minority-phobic either. This is
what it is. Period.

That is the true heart of feminism.  As I wrote when I pointed out that feminists are sub-civilized: “This is what the feminist’s vaunted concept of equality means.  This is
what it has always meant: the legal protection of a woman from all and
any consequences of her actions.  This includes a woman’s ability to
break any contract at will, to steal from anyone as she pleases, and
murder even the most innocent without having to even hear a whisper of
protest to make her uncomfortable.”

Barbara helpfully adds an element that I neglected to include, which is that women “should be able to make you not offend” them. Being intellectually incoherent and unjustifiable in the eyes of every rational observer, feminism is necessarily an ideology of force. This is why it has to be resisted every bit as strenuously as other such ideologies, including communism and National Socialism.

And a science fiction that cannot be sexist or minority-phobic is not science fiction at all, but a dogmatically limited sub-genre in which all literary value is necessarily subservient to ideological whimsy.

Feminist SF/F convention battles lookism

I suppose it was really only a matter of time before the appeal of the strong horse began to take its toll among the feminist swaddle.  And to be honest, given what I saw of Madison the last time I was there, burqahs probably aren’t the worst idea considering the amount of corpulent, graffitied flesh on display:

WisCon Makes Burqas Mandatory for All Attendees

Today the SF3 ruling committee for the Madison,
Wisconsin-based feminist SF convention WisCon announced that starting
this year, all attendees would be required to wear burqas.

“We were trying to think of what we could do to make Wiscon more
inclusive,” said con chair Belle Gunness. “Suddenly, we realized that
devout Muslims could easily be offended by the amount of sinful and
wanton flesh on display at Wiscon. Therefore, starting with this year’s
Wiscon, we’ve made burqas mandatory for all attendees. Allah Akbar!”

Both male and female members will be required to don the traditional
black, face-covering, head-to-toe Islamic garb for all convention
events. Gunness indicated that the convention would have substantial
quantities of Burqas for rental to congoers, from Small to 5XL sizes. As
an added benefit, she said that the new regulations would help
eliminate “rampant lookism.”

Gunness said that guests would be required to wear the garb as well, “in the spirit of egalitarianism.”

Wiscon also announced that next year’s guest lineup would consist of
J. K. Rowling, Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, Joss Whedon and
Suzanne Collins. “At least as far as you know.”

You do have to wonder about a convention of lunatics so psychologically disturbed that Elizabeth Moon, of all people, is too rabidly right-wing for them.

UPDATE: The utter cravenness of Locus’s apology is considerably funnier than the originally posted article.

“We would like to offer our apology for the offensive April Fool’s
post that was published on the site today. The April Fool’s pieces were
not seen by the Locus HQ staff before being posted — it was an ugly
moment this morning when we saw the post already online, and we
immediately took steps to remove it. Of course, being after the fact, it
was too late, and the offense had already happened. We did not find the post funny at all, and it does not reflect in any
way the opinions of the magazine staff. We apologize for it appearing
under our auspices.”

It’s not funny.  It’s not funny at all!  Also, and I quote, “John Scalzi is a rapist.” 

A graphic argument

This is why the USA should have let the banks fail in 2008.  This is why it is an expensive mistake to allow the very people who created to problem to provide the solution to it.  And if you think this looks bad, imagine how the Cypriot employment rate is going to look next month.  The chief problem with bailouts isn’t the moral hazard involved, although that is not insignificant, it is that they prevent the necessary reset of the economic system. From Zerohedge:

Nocturne: a novel

Sometimes, you just know something is going to turn out a certain way, but even when it does, the fact that it turns out that way doesn’t prevent it from being every bit as deliciously and delightfully funny as you imagined.  As some of you are aware, an anklebiting troll by the name of Will aka Dan aka Dimwit Dan aka Luscinia Hâfez aka Yama the Spacefish has made a habit of denigrating my fiction at every opportunity for years, marks every positive review of my books on Amazon as “unhelpful”, and now claims “give me one minute and I can write a sentence better than anything in The War In Heaven.” 

Fortunately, we can put this hypothesis to the test thanks to the astonishing act of literatury greatness he has committed and graciously made available to the public.  And so, with not inconsiderable pleasure, I am deeply honored to present to you a selection of text from the next great American novel, Nocturne, by Will aka Dan aka Yama etc.

A young woman with close-cropped hair, dark at the roots and bleached
almost white at their tips, held with a band and a gold disk pendant
amongst silver chains, dressed in black clothes under a white wool
cardigan and midnight blue coat came out of the building. “Spies?” she
said, momentarily puzzled and starry-eyed, pushing the door shut. Snow
fell in flurries, the flakes were melting on our hair. “No matter,” she
said, unsheathing a blade. She sighed, and ran after me, stopping and
slashing. I blocked it with my pipe. “You don’t have your patron
Cleisourarch to help you. He’s dead by Red hands, impaled with a stake
and paraded naked and flayed open through the streets of Mediolanum and
dumped in the river. You face me alone. Me, the greatest swordswoman in
all of Carantania.”
“Marciana, can you support me?” Adrenaline warmed my body.
“I don’t know. I’ll try.”
“Good.”
“Stop! I know them,“ another woman cried.
“Anysia?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Uh, I’m terribly sorry,” the woman who attacked us said, her voice
languid and melodic. The gold disk on her neck was inset with a large
red stone with a carving of an eye at the center of a star and six
cabochons of varying tones of green at the points, actually
light-emitting diodes. A bead of amber with a fly, like Ava’s, hung from
the side of the headband, wrapped in fine gold chains. A sardonyx
brooch with a cameo was pinned to her coat. “I heard you walking around
up there, and I couldn’t really see you. Thought you were Selinian, or
worse, Pannonian agents. I’m Cantianilla, by the way. Cantianilla
Vasilescu, if you were wondering. Veridiana told me to wear it with
pride because it’s part of who we are, for better and worse. I’m not
sure but for what it’s worth, there’s a lot of people with that kind of
family name, Vasilescu and Gavrilescu and Stefanescu and a bunch of
other people with -escu at the end. Mine reminds me of basilisks. Do you
know what a basilisk is? There’s a folktale about a feathered lizard
that can turn a man to stone with its gaze. But maybe I’m mixing them up
with dinosaurs. Those were real, but they didn’t have a petrifying
glare or anything. I see you know Anysia. So, what are your names,
wayfarers?”
“I’m Marciana. And only Marciana.”
“I’m Nicasius
Patrescu. Ava calls me Nica. It’s nice, but a little feminine.
Marciana’s been my friend ever since we were small children. Are any of
the others here?” I asked.
“Yes, I heard you say that. It was a bit
comforting, since Pannonians think we’re idolators and don’t have names
like yours and keep their women in the home as a mandate, but who knows?
Nobody really knows who the Synod is. Rumors abound that the Synod
members wander the streets of Vindobona as vagrants, that the
Magisterium funding the Pannonian Revolutionary Front as a lure for
potential traitors to the Church and Nation. Should I believe it? It
seems more like an old story than reality, but you know what they say
about stories and half-truths. I understand that there are Saugumas, I
mean, agents of the Synod in the Pannonian Revolutionary Front, and thus
they decentralized it, and everyone can name only the members of their
cell. You must forgive me for not trusting you. Eight others are all
with us,” Cantianilla said. “Veridiana’s heartbroken. She’s with Ava
now. They’re in the basement.”
“What happened?” Marciana asked.
“Theopemptus happened,” Anysia said.
“Curse the house Daubresse until the sun goes bloated and rotten and
the stars are shaken from the heavens. Mansuetus died in an attack on
the Cleiousarch’s soldiers a day after you left. They had some kind of
warmech with them, and I don’t know where they got it, maybe a blue-gray
alliance of sorts. A mortar tore him apart. I witnessed it, oh, oh,”
Cantianilla said. She seemed less brash once she knew we were friendly.
“I’m sorry,” Marciana said. “I know all too well the pain of loss.”
“There’s nothing you could do. I mean, we won in the conflict against
the Blues, but victory has a price and many of us wondered if it was
worth it. There’s a stela on the demesne with fifty names on it. If you
could ever go back, you’d notice the number of Pannonian names on it.
They fought valiantly, and their sacrifice for a free Carantania was not
in vain.”

Great stuff.  FREEDOM!  I particularly enjoyed this line: “Me, the greatest swordswoman in
all of Carantania.” That’s QUALITY literature.  Look out, Doestoevsky!  Now, what do you think the odds are that Cantianillawafer
Vasilfawltytowerescu’s starry eyes are purple?  Five-to-one?  Ten-to-one?

They’re going to need a bigger bank

Glenn Reynolds observes that the Federal Reserve is worried about the growing lack of confidence in the banking system. But they don’t seem to have identified the primary threat, which is the one they have created themselves through their own actions.

IN RESPONSE TO ELIZABETH’S POST ON CYBERWAR THIS MORNING, I should note that when I was down speaking at the Atlanta Fed, they told me that cyberwar is one of their biggest worries — not so much something that would bring the banking system down as something that would render it untrustworthy, which in some sense is worse, or at least harder to fix.

The problem is that the Fed’s fractional reserve banking system is, quite literally, a confidence game.  And cyberwar isn’t the real issue, the real issue is that events such as MF Global, the refusal to arrest and convict John Corzine, the deposit heist in Cyprus, and the fact that people are finally beginning to realize that the money they have deposited in the banks is not legally theirs have already undermined the necessary confidence to a considerable degree.

Quite simply, the money isn’t there, it has never been there, but now everyone knows it, not just the sort of freaks and geeks who read dry, dusty tomes like The Theory of Money and Credit for pleasure and make a habit of perusing the latest H.1 report.

The fractional reserve system worked beautifully as long as depositors believed that while one bank or another might fail, their money would remain safely within the system and be accessible to them. But the advent of the “too big to fail” banks necessarily destroyed that confidence because the four largest banks in the system, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, and Wells Fargo now account for 43 percent of all of the deposits in the system.  If they were permitted to fail – and all four appear to be insolvent due to the worthless assets they are still keeping at ludicrously inflated values on their balance sheets – their creditors and shareholders would be severely affected. And that won’t be permitted by Congress because their creditors and shareholders happen to be the wealthiest and most Congressionally influential people in the nation.

We learned from TARP that the taxpayers would be levied before the creditors and shareholders would be permitted to suffer losses. The Cyprus actions have now made it clear that depositors will be robbed if necessary too. And that is why it is impossible for Americans to have confidence any longer in their banking system.  The Fed will almost surely respond to this lack of confidence in the customary manner: by instituting domestic capital controls and cracking down even more severely on the use of currency that is nominally legal tender. But these actions will only serve to confirm people’s doubts and hasten the inevitable system failure.

I wrote back in 2008 that Congress had to let the banks fail if they wanted to save the system.  They unwisely didn’t.  They did manage to buy a little time instead, but that time is now running out.  Sooner or later, financial gravity always prevails.

Statewrecked

The next stage in the financial crisis must be coming sooner, rather than later, for the NYT to publish an open warning like this one by David Stockman:

As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones (“clean” energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests. The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating “demand,” even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.

The culprits are bipartisan, though you’d never guess that from the blather that passes for political discourse these days. The state-wreck originated in 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt opted for fiat money (currency not fundamentally backed by gold), economic nationalism and capitalist cartels in agriculture and industry….

The United States is broke — fiscally, morally, intellectually — and the
Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the
Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is
crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops,
there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice
to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is. 

This would appear to be some sort of warning shot across the bow of Wall Street.  And when he talks about getting out of the markets and hiding out in cash, don’t forget that leaving your money in the bank is absolutely NOT getting into cash.

Cheerful Chavez Day!

While it is obviously intended as some sort of stupid snub to Christians, Google is only managing to look petty and underline the importance of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ by pointedly refusing to acknowledge the worldwide holiday:

On Easter Sunday, Google is honoring the birthday of the late labor organizer Cesar Chavez by placing a Chavez portrait within the middle “o” of the Google logo that appears on the homepage of the popular search engine. While Google frequently decorates its logo to celebrate various holidays and special events, it is unclear why the company chose specifically to honor Chavez’s birthday, instead of Easter Sunday.

No doubt some Christians, and even some sympathetic non-Christians will be outraged about this.  I’m not, because regardless of what the godless lords of Google may intend, I know that on thousands of Google-hosted sites, the Resurrection is being proclaimed and celebrated today.

Remember, sooner or later, EVERY knee will bow.  Sooner or later, EVERYONE will acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord. Obviously, this will be later in the case of Google. So what?  I’d much rather see a company in Google’s position illustrate the significance of Easter by this sort of intentional and painfully glaring omission instead of providing some sort of token nod in the form of bunny rabbits and painted eggs.

And really, what can you expect of a company that has to remind itself on a regular basis to not be evil?  If you worked next to a man and had to listen to him repeatedly telling himself, “don’t be evil, don’t be evil”, what would you conclude about his tendencies?

But in light of Google’s effort, if not their success, to control their natural instincts, I should like to wish everyone, not merely those readers who happen to belong to the United Farm Workers union, a Cheerful Chavez Day. (raises fist) Sí, se puede! Stay strong, my brothers!

UPDATE: The amusing thing is that, as Steve Sailer demonstrates, the sanctimonious seculars at Google couldn’t even find a picture of the very important man whose birthday they are celebrating today.