Vox Popoli

Daryl writes to Dave Ramsay, sans brothers:

I was dating someone last year that I was expecting to marry. She was having car problems so I co-signed on a lease with her. Now we’ve broken up and she still has the car. So far, she’s made one payment and I’ve made one. We have a forfeiture agreement on the car where, if she didn’t make a payment by the end of the month, I could come get the car. Her parents have offered to buy her another car and she’s offering to just give me the leased car. She won’t tell me how much her parents are willing to give her for a new car. Our conversations have become pretty confrontational.

I’ve already got a leased truck. Why should I take on these payments as well?

I can’t stress this enough. NEVER co-sign on a loan for anyone. I don’t care if it’s your brother, your mother or your hand-twin, but especially not if it’s someone with whom you’re currently having sex.

If you are determined to help them financially, then just give them the money and forget about it. The reason someone can’t get a loan on their own is because even at a time when lenders are frothing at the mouth to provide loans to anyone with a pulse, they are still considered too high a risk for default. And if they’re not going to pay back a bank, they’re certainly not going to pay you back either. In this situation, if you don’t think the average American woman* won’t find it easier to simply find an excuse to break up with you, therefore providing herself with an iron-clad rationalization for sticking you with the debt, you don’t know much about the way women think.

*i.e. the kind of girl who has no savings and significant credit card debt.

Cedarford reveals some serious holes in his knowledge:

Hitler wasn’t a Leftist. He was a fierce anti-Communist.

The first statement is incorrect. The second is correct. Although many make the mistake of assuming so, the latter does not prove former. Marx, too, was an anti-socialist (he wrote diatribes against the Fabians, an older socialism), and the error in arguing that Hitler’s murderous opposition to a rival POLITICAL party, the KPD, is synonymous with total opposition to all left-wing ideology should be obvious. For the Bolsheviks were demonstrably more fiercely opposed to the Mensheviks, given that they murdered them all, and as someone has already pointed out, Stalin had Trotsky killed as well. And yet all of these men were Communists, quite clearly of the Left. Acts of violence in pursuing and consolidating power should never be confused with ideology.

By Cedarford’s logic, one might as easily argue that the Socialists, (SPD), weren’t leftists because they, too, were anti-KPD, and as I have written before, when the National Socialists made their big gains in the 1932 election, they drew voters primarily from the middle and from the SPD. The right-wing German nationalist party received the same percentage of votes as before because unlike the Socialists, its supporters did not gravitate to the National Socialists.

Unlike those uneducated folks who unwisely make the mistake of sharing their ignorant opinion with everyone, I have actually read Mein Kampf. It is quite clear throughout that while Hitler agrees with Marx’s fundamental notion that the State must reign supreme over the individual, he does not believe in Marx’s concept of class consciousness and he is aware of the problem of getting individuals to work when there is nothing in it for them. It is clear, in fact, that Hitler thinks that Marx is a fool in believing that his form of socialism will ever function.

Hitler proposes a different form of socialism which will harness the power of individual in service to the state. His notion is to inspire the individual, through indoctrination, with the glory of his national consciousness. In other words, National Socialism can be boiled down to the substitution of NATIONAL consciousness for CLASS consciousness, albeit within the same socialist framework. Hence the similarities between Marx’s Communist Manifesto and the National Socialist Munich Manifesto, which Hitler co-authored.

Like Lenin with his New Economic Program, Hitler was forced to moderate his socialist ideology once in power for the obvious reason; socialism doesn’t work. This is why after 70 years of Soviet communism and 50 years of Chinese communism, private property still existed in both left-wing states where, according to Marx, it should not have existed at all.

The idea that the National Socialists’ nationalism makes them definitively right-wing is especially stupid since the Soviet communists had themselves embraced nationalism prior to the Nazi’s coming to power. By 1927, Lenin and Stalin had completely defeated Trotsky’s internationalism in favor of building socialism in one country. As Lenin wrote: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”

JF finds someone to type for him:

I have two words as to your continuing absurdity that
Hitler was a lefty: Pat Buchanan. And BTW: if you are Pro – Pat Buchanan, you are Pro – Hitler. Period.

That’s ridiculous. Go read the Munich Manifesto, which Hitler co-wrote, then tell me if that sounds more like a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican. Hitler had more in common with Howard Dean than Pat Buchanan.

If you think any modern American commentator has anything to do with Hitler, pro or con, you shouldn’t be allowed out of the house without diapers. Try reading a book for once.

George wonders how things stacked up:

We saw your impressive stats on materiel in your lovefest with Michelle…Tell us please, what was the state of the American Military in 1940 compared to Germany?

German forces consisted of 3,737,000 in the Heer (army), 400,000 in the Lufwaffe, 50,000 in the Kriegsmarine and 35,000 in the Waffen SS. This represented 19.2 percent of all German males between the ages of 15 and 65 in 1939.

The US Army consisted of 174,000 enlisted men in July 1939. However, within four years, US forces had 6.6 million in the Army plus another 2 million in the Air Force. This compared well with the 6.5 million in the 1943 Heer and 1.7 million in the 1943 Luftwaffe. Also, the US Navy was quite large in 1939, far superior to the Kriegsmarine, although not being a Navy buff I don’t have the numbers to hand.

The chief German advantage in 1939 was the training of its officers. Even before its PzIIIs were online, its officers were highly trained in aggressive tactics that were still catching American troops off-guard in 1944. In addition to the strategic problem – or perhaps insanity would be a better word – of a two-front war against two larger and more powerful nations, the Germans suffered from air inferiority as well as a failure to realize that quality is not an adequate substitute for overwhelming quantity.

And on the Eastern front, Russian armor was superior to German armor for most of the war. Indeed, early German anti-tank guns were not capable of penetrating T-85 armor and although the Tiger and King Tiger are far more famous, Russian heavy tanks and tank destroyers actually possessed larger bore main armaments.

Other than the element of surprise, Germany’s chief advantage in the initial going was that Stalin had purged the Red Army of most of its officer staff. But two years of battle provided the Soviets with hard-earned experience while many good German officers died, leveling the leadership aspect and allowing the Soviet advantages of shorter supply lines, better armor and superior numbers to take effect.

Pat Buchanan writes on WND:

True, U.S. and British troops liberated France, Holland and Belgium from Nazi occupation. But before Britain declared war on Germany, France, Holland and Belgium did not need to be liberated. They were free. They were only invaded and occupied after Britain and France declared war on Germany – on behalf of Poland.

When one considers the losses suffered by Britain and France – hundreds of thousands dead, destitution, bankruptcy, the end of the empires – was World War II worth it, considering that Poland and all the other nations east of the Elbe were lost anyway?

If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a “smashing” success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in.

If it was to keep Hitler out of Western Europe, why declare war on him and draw him into Western Europe? If it was to keep Hitler out of Central and Eastern Europe, then, inevitably, Stalin would inherit Central and Eastern Europe.

Was that worth fighting a world war – with 50 million dead?

One of the things I most admire about Pat Buchanan is his ability to look beyond the superficial and ask pertinent questions about things that no one else thinks to question. There’s no doubt that he was correct about NAFTA – like many others I originally assumed it was just a free trade agreement back in the early 1990’s – and he was the first media figure to point out Europe’s demographic suicide.

It will be interesting to see if anyone manages to respond substantively to him or if we’ll just see more of the mindless “it was worth it because I can’t imagine otherwise” tripe that often passes for debate these days.

UPDATE – You can always count on this zero to try to interject his race into the discussion. “Abraham Foxman, president of the Anti-Defamation League, called Buchanan’s comments ‘immoral’ and ‘bordering on Holocaust denial’.” It’s a tossup as to who is more egregiously annoying, Abe Foxman or Arianna Huffington.

Chald the Elder suggests a TV show even I would watch:

Start off with a bunch of contestants and let the public vote each week to narrow down the field and eventually pick the crew. Show them going through training. Show the launch and their continued adventures as they hurtle through space. You think people on the Real World get up in each other’s faces? Imagine being stuck in a spaceship with seven or eight strangers for the REST of your life. We’re talking ratings gold here baby.

I don’t know about the technical considerations for building a ship that could undertake such a journey. But then again I ain’t a rocket science, I’m an ideas man. Anyway those pointy headed geeks at NASA should be able to work out all of those sort of details. That’s what we’re paying them for, right?

Genius. Pure genius. Of course, it would come at a tremendous cost to humanity when their descendants returned one hundred thousand years from now and Honoured Matres unleash their awesome sexual powers to conquer and enslave us, but in the meantime, it would make for one awesome television show.

I feel, I said, I feel a novella coming on….

DA wonders about the future:

I’m just a young lad of 28 years getting ready to venture out into society as a surgeon and my question to you is that have I come along too late? I read your blog and column religiously and am not particularly bullish when it comes to America, but how do we get back to what it once was? Is nothing short of a 2nd American Revolution the answer? Are we a nation of millions heading towards another Eurpoean Union as you suggest, or is there anyway we can become the greatest rap album of all-time? Do Americans even have the balls of brass to do something or should I just head to Switzerland and get it over with?

The best, perhaps only hope for America as an entity is probably the Free State Project. If I were on my own, I’d move to New Hampshire as a first step. Taxes are low, there’s people dedicated to trying to rescue America from itself there and it’s a nice place to live. My brother lived there for two years and he quite liked it. After establishing an American home base of sorts where you can contribute to the remote possibility of in-system change, I’d next investigate various expatriate possibilities. These largely depend upon your attachment to the trinkets of modern civilization. Switzerland and Ireland are both more economically free than the USA, but it’s very difficult to get residency in Switzerland and it may soon become part of the EU in all but name. Ireland, of course, is already owned by the EU and has been enjoying explosive growth since the 1980s, so it is much more expensive than it was. New Zealand is another option of this sort.

If you can tolerate a certain degree of lawlessness and lesser infrastructure, Mexico, Portugal (especially Madeira) and southern Italy are reasonable possibilities, along with Belize. The governments here are superficially more overbearing than in the United States, but the reality is that they don’t pay very much attention. Unlike American and German bureaucrats, who delight in throwing their weight around and controlling the behavior of the populace, a Latinate bureaucrat doesn’t care what you do, he just wants to be left alone to smoke his cigarettes and read his newspapers.

In the case of either variety, you’ll pay significantly less taxes over the course of your lifetime, although it may be difficult to find work that pays as well as it does in the United States. Language can also be a difficulty, depending on your adaptability. Some of the new EU members, such as Estonia and Hungary, are also moving towards more freedom, but the EU may prove too much weight for them. However, it’s worth noting that the Hungarian women are arguably the most beautiful in the world.

The best place to begin your research is Escape Artist, which has many articles written by expat Americans in many countries.

As far as a second (third) American revolution, I see very few signs that the populace as a whole is not content with its fate. It is fat, lazy and generally happy, and has good reason to remain so because the government has been wise enough to treat it like milk cows instead of like beef on the hoof as socialist governments usually do. Indeed, this gentle neosocialism is arguably one of the most enjoyable forms of government that history has ever seen, the problem is first that it is not freedom, second that there are growing economic signs that it cannot last long.

I generally enjoy Townhall, I do, but today I’m just staring at the screen and shaking my head. Ben Shapiro is taking the controversial position that it’s okay to get angry about young girls being murdered, while Me So is blowing kisses to the cops. John Stossel, meanwhile, dedicated his 750 words to discussing how sugar does not inspire hyperactivity while Debra Saunders demonstrates that she doesn’t know the first thing about British electoral politics.

(The point isn’t that Labour won, Debra, it’s that it lost over 60 percent of its majority and Labour’s old guard has never been particularly enthusiastic about Tony Blair. In a parliamentary system, a demonstration of weakness like this is almost always an occasion for the party leader’s rivals to make their bid for the top spot.)

I mean, it’s not like there’s anything going on across the country, with the markets poised on the brink of a serious downturn, the housing markets looking very toppy and steady interest rate raises of the sort that usually precede a recession. And then there’s the national government pushing for a political union with Mexico while installing an internal police state.

Ah well, to each his own.

Shrubbery asks a question:

How is voting not thinking? How is a restriction on voting rights different from hate crime legislation? Correct me if I’m wrong but are you not opposed to hate crime legislation?

First, let me state that confusing one thing with another unrelated thing is very common on the Internet and is a warning sign of imprecise thought. Usually it is obfuscated slightly through the use of weasel words such as “really”, “basically” or “virtually”, for example the quadrennial notion that voting for X is “really” a vote for Y when simple addition demonstrates that it is nothing of the kind.

Now to the question. It is eminently clear that voting is not thinking. One is a private mental act with no ramifications for anyone else, the other is a public act with potentially fatal ramifications for everyone else. The hate crime analogy is a particularly weak one, as a hate crime is an secondary crime added onto an ACT that is already a crime based solely on what the prosecution believes the criminal was thinking. It is pure thought crime; the crime is based solely on the perceived thoughts.

Voting restrictions such as I have defended are not based on anyone’s thoughts, they are based on the statistical probability of an individual’s actions. The individual’s thoughts are completely irrelevant, as he, (or as we’ve mostly been discussing, she), may want to vote for the socialist because a) the socialist candidate is cute, b) the socialist candidate promises a chicken in every pot, c) the socialist candidate promises a new Medicare entitlement for the children, d) the socialist candidate is a woman. It doesn’t matter, far from being any sort of thought policing measure, the thoughts are absolutely irrelevant.

Pretend we’re not talking about voting for a moment. Substitute purchasing for voting and the smallpox virus for socialism. The right to buy and sell private property is far more fundamental than the so-called “right” to vote; it can actually be found in the Constitution. And yet who would argue that anyone should be allowed to purchase the smallpox virus, much less those who have reliably demonstrated for eight decades that, if given the chance, they will purchase smallpox and distribute it to everyone at the first opportunity?

I wish that the states were still a laboratory of democracy, as I think it would be extremely informative for everyone to see what would happen in two neighboring states, one where only women were franchised and one where only men were franchised. What most people don’t realize is that historically speaking, there is an example of the latter in pre-1971 Switzerland, and as one might expect, Switzerland was significantly less centralized than any Western democracy and is still less centralized today although since 1971 it has joined the UN, modified its national constitution to grant the federal government the right to pass gun control laws, legalized abortion, is considering getting rid of the national militia that has defended it for centuries and has an elected government lobbying the people to pass a referendum approving the goverment’s decision to permanently open its borders and labor markets to the entire European Union.

This will, in all probability, kill the country’s economy, its banking system and its high standard of living. But hey, at least they’ll have the consolation of knowing their frauleins were voting.

From the back of a new paperback:

Wendy Chrenko, former high school misfit, is now an overworked graduate student, researching her dissertation on “Remnants of Matriarchy in the Ancient Sumerian Inanna Cycle.” Still smarting from the painful wounds of a long relationship that ended abruptly, Wendy is bound and determined to prove that men and women once lived together in perfect equality, even if it means volunteering for a bizarre and dangerous scientific experiment.

And here I thought that we’d reached the bottom of the barrel with romance novels in space and hot lovin’ wereseals ravishing women by the seashore. I was so wrong.

The punchline is that this book is the proud product of the publisher I was told I’d never be able to publish with due to my “vile” view of women authors and hard science fiction. Lawsy, whatever shall I do?