Tag: politics

Who is the real problem?

It’s not Putin, observes Pat Buchanan:

From FDR on, U.S. presidents have felt that America could not remain isolated from the rulers of the world’s largest nation.

Ike invited Khrushchev to tour the USA after he had drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. After Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba, JFK was soon calling for a new detente at American University.

Within weeks of Warsaw Pact armies crushing the Prague Spring in August 1968, LBJ was seeking a summit with Premier Alexei Kosygin.

After excoriating Moscow for the downing of KAL 007 in 1983, that old Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan was fishing for a summit meeting.

The point: Every president from FDR through George H. W. Bush, even after collisions with Moscow far more serious than this clash over Ukraine, sought to re-engage the men in the Kremlin.

Whatever we thought of the Soviet dictators who blockaded Berlin, enslaved Eastern Europe, put rockets in Cuba and armed Arabs to attack Israel, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush 1 all sought to engage Russia’s rulers.

Avoidance of a catastrophic war demanded engagement.

How then can we explain the clamor of today’s U.S. foreign policy elite to confront, isolate, and cripple Russia, and make of Putin a moral and political leper with whom honorable statesmen can never deal?

What has Putin done to rival the forced famine in Ukraine that starved to death millions, the slaughter of the Hungarian rebels or the Warsaw Pact’s crushing of Czechoslovakia?

As a general rule, the moment you see an American politician pointing at to someone and claiming he is Hitler, you know he’s probably innocent of whatever he’s being accused of doing. It’s not a perfectly reliable device, but when they’re obviously engaging in hyperbolic rhetoric, the chances are they are doing so because they can’t make a reasonable case based on his actual deeds.

It is somewhat remarkable that even the least competent administration in American history is managing to screw up the Middle East, Russia, and the southern border of the USA all at the same time. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama ordered the bombing of London and an amphibious invasion of Uganda.

It’s obvious that the USA is the real problem here. But what is more difficult to understand is what their motivation might be, beyond a short-term pecuniary interest in pillaging Ukraine.

Mailvox: contra suffrage

Chris Gerrib asks

VD, why shouldn’t every free adult human be able to vote in the country they are a citizen of?

For the same reason unfree children who are not citizens are not permitted to vote: it is expected that their votes will not be in the long-term interests of the country or its citizenry.

Another commenter, Shelles, appears to be of the David Futrelle school of debate, in which her inability to imagine an effective argument is confused with the nonexistence of such arguments. Which I found a little amusing here, since she somehow manages to touch on two effective arguments while missing the aspects that make them effective.

The only way to win the argument that women should not have the vote is to be able to successfully equate them with others that do not have the vote: minors, felons. The condition of being a woman is in no way like either of these.

The other possibility is to argue that the country will be better off if women don’t vote because women have a tendency to for for X, Y and Z, all of which will harm, if not destroy the country. The obvious problem with this argument is that it depends on one’s personal on view of exactly how the country ought to operate. This is countered by offering another personal view of how the country ought to be that is best advanced by women having the vote.

Done.

In essence the argument is: Women should not have the vote because it’s in the interests of a certain group.

It is certainly not the only way, but it is true that one will win the argument that women should not have the vote when one is able to
successfully equate them with others that do not have the vote: minors,
felons, and so forth. However, the fact that “the condition of being a woman is in no way like either of
these” is irrelevant and does not suffice as a counterpoint. The way women are successfully equated with others who do not have the vote is to demonstrate that their votes are equally incompatible with the long-term national interest as the other classes of current non-voters.

This can be done using a variety of metrics, including what Shelles describes as another possibility to the only way. Just to give one example, if the reason children are not permitted to vote is due to their limited time preferences, a comparison could be made between children’s time preferences, women’s time preferences, and men’s time preferences. If women’s time preferences were determined to be more akin to those of children than those of men, that would be a clear justification for denying the vote to them.

But to return to the option to the only way, Shelles says “the obvious problem with this argument is that it depends on one’s personal on view of exactly how the country ought to operate”. But since the argument rests on the country’s freedom, well-being, and future existence, her counter relies upon arguing that the country should be unfree, worse-off, and nonexistent. This is not a successful or convincing counter, even if it truly represents the personal view of the interlocutor rather than a hypothetical position of Shelle’s imagination.

One should always be careful when attempting to summarize an opponent’s position. Words like “in essence” or “basically” tend to be red flags alerting a critic to holes in one’s arguments.  They aren’t necessarily so, but in this case, they are. Because the statement is true: Women should not have the vote because it’s in the interests of a certain group, so long as that “certain group” is defined as “all the citizens of the country, including the women”.

There are very solid rational, Constitutional, and historical reasons for denying female suffrage. John Adams summarized them best in his famous written exchange with his wife:

“I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.

“Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.
 
“Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
– Abigail Adams, 31 March 1776

“Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects.

“We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight.”
– John Adams, 14 April 1776

Events have proven John Adams correct. Free men are accustomed to voluntarily limiting the use of their power and not pushing it to the full extent of its capabilities. Women, to say the least, are not. Just as an angry woman does not pull her punches, women in politics do not restrain their instincts to attempt to control the uncontrollable. Abigail Adams is projecting: she wrongly assumes all men would be tyrants if they could because she knows that is true of herself and other women. And women do not hold themselves bound by laws in any case, regardless of whether they have had voice or representation or not. They are bound by fear.

This is why a nation that wishes to remain wealthy and free does not permit female involvement in its governance, and why totalitarians from the Italian Fascists to the Soviet Bolsheviks have historically made a priority of female involvement in the political process.

Women and the civilizational cycle

The materially deleterious effect of women working on a society is illustrated in a paper entitled “Women Prefer Larger Governments: Growth, Structural Transformation and Government Size”

The increase in income per capita is accompanied, in virtually all
countries, by two changes in the structure of the economy, namely an
increase in the share of government spending in GDP and an increase in
female labour force participation. This paper suggests that these two
changes are causally related. We develop a growth model where the
structure of the economy is endogenous so that participation in market
activities and government size are causally related.

Economic growth and
rising incomes are accompanied by a greater incentive for women to
engage in labour market activities as the opportunity cost of staying at
home increases. We hypothesize that government spending decreases the
cost of performing household chores such as, but not limited to, child
rearing and child care so that couples decide to engage further in the
labour market and chose a higher tax rate to finance more government
spending.

Using a wide cross-section of data for developed and
developing countries, we show that higher participation by women in the
labour market are indeed positively associated with larger governments.
Furthermore, we investigate the causal link between the two variables
using as instrumental variables a unique and novel dataset on the
relative price of home appliances across OECD countries and over time.
We find strong evidence of a causal link between participation in the
labour market and government size: a 10 percent rise in participation in
the labour market leads to a 7 to 8 percent rise in government size.
This effect is robust to the country sample, time period, and a set of
controls in the spirit of Rodrik (1998).

This is also an implicit argument against female suffrage. However, the researchers’ hypothesis is incorrect, as government spending observably does not decrease the cost of child rearing and child care; one reason European families have so few children is that the cost of raising children is exorbitant despite the greater amount of spending by European governments. Free day care and year-long maternity leave doesn’t make up for the fact that food and gasoline cost considerably more than in the USA.

Voting is not freedom. The conflation of voting with freedom is one of the key deceptions upon which feminism rests. And like all ideologies based upon deception, the more powerful feminism becomes, the more likely it is that the polity in which it has become influential will collapse on the basis of the weight of its contradictions.

11 Tenets of Progressivism

What is it with lefties and their love for manifestos? Elizabeth Warren outlines what she defines as the core tenets of progressivism:

– “We believe that Wall Street needs stronger rules and tougher enforcement, and we’re willing to fight for it.”
– “We believe in science, and that means that we have a responsibility to protect this Earth.”
– “We believe that the Internet shouldn’t be rigged to benefit big corporations, and that means real net neutrality.”
– “We believe that no one should work full-time and still live in poverty, and that means raising the minimum wage.”
–
“We believe that fast-food workers deserve a livable wage, and that
means that when they take to the picket line, we are proud to fight
alongside them.”
– “We believe that students are entitled to get an education without being crushed by debt.”
–
“We believe that after a lifetime of work, people are entitled to
retire with dignity, and that means protecting Social Security,
Medicare, and pensions.”
– “We believe—I can’t believe I have to say this in 2014—we believe in equal pay for equal work.”
– “We believe that equal means equal, and that’s true in marriage, it’s true in the workplace, it’s true in all of America.”
– “We believe that immigration has made this country strong and vibrant, and that means reform.”
– “And we believe that corporations are not people, that women have a right to their bodies.

  1. And yet, they’re not willing to end Wall Street’s monopoly. One observes that by this definition, President Goldman Sachs is no progressive.
  2. That’s nice and all, but science does not mean we have a responsibility to protect this Earth anymore than it means that we have a reponsibility to make the hajj.
  3. Can’t argue with that. It seems I’m a progressive!
  4. Actually, I’m fine with this. Raising the minimum wage is a de facto anti-immigration measure. Two for four!
  5. Isn’t this covered in (4)?
  6. So she’ll be permitting defaults on college loan debt and getting the government out of the college loan business? I’m all for that, but I’m guessing that’s not quite what she had in mind.
  7. Good luck with that. Do the math.
  8. Great. So am I. Get rid of maternity leave and “sick” days and require equal work and equal hours for equal pay. Deal?
  9. So, progressives are against pro-female family courts? I am skeptical.
  10. Progressives are pro-vibrancy. That’s hardly news. And here we see the intrinsic incoherence of progressivism. You can’t have more immigrants and a higher minimum wage. See: Adam Smith.
  11. Good luck with that. Corporations are juridical people, as per the Supreme Court. And women obviously don’t have any right to their bodies or they could sell title in them or shoot up heroin while naked in public having sex for money.

A more straightforward version: Progressives favor corporate regulation, environmentalism, free Internet, minimum wages, unions, public education, subsidizing old people, women in the workforce, gays, immigration, and abortion.

UPDATE: As is his wont, John C. Wright not only translates the ProgSprache into plain American, but sums it up in a beautifully brutal manner.

To sum up, translating all this from bafflegab and craptalk to English, it means three things (1) the Left are parochial, and only regard the issues of the current news cycle as being principles (2) the Left hates civilization and all its institutions (3) the Left hates the Catholic Church, and will destroy itself attempting to destroy her.

Regarding this last point, allow me to say on behalf of the one, true, catholic and apostolic Church that better men than you, leftwing nutbag, far better men, such as the potent and remorseless Imperators of Rome tried that.

We are here. They are gone. Soon — as we count time — you will be gone.

When beauty isn’t enough

When 17-year-old Axelle Despiegelaere went to support her native Belgium at
the World Cup she wasn’t expecting it to lead to a job offer. But a
long-distance photo of her went viral on Twitter, where she was labelled the “most
beautiful” fan in Brazil, and L’Oreal came knocking with a modelling
contract. The competition is not even over and the company has already shot a video
where Axelle is doused in its products, uploaded it to YouTube and received
over two million hits. Such is the speed at which marketing now works. But the flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long: Axelle’s fledgling modelling career is already finished, after images of her posing
next to dead animals on the African savannah with a rifle and a smile as big
as she wore at the football. 


Apparently it’s not enough to be young and beautiful. To be employed as a professional model, a girl must also possess politically correct opinions concerning big-game hunting. We’ve seen this in the publishing world. We’ve seen this in technology. Now we’re seeing it in modeling, of all places.

Remember this the next time you’re congratulating yourself on your open-mindedness, and patting yourself on the back for the way you hired that [insert repulsive left-wing opinion or identity here] individual despite the fact that you completely disagree with him. Because not only will you not be the beneficiary of the same treatment if your positions are reversed, you are helping to ensure that your side is going to lose.

Wars do not require two sides. You can lose a war even more easily by refusing to fight in the first place. One hopes that some rifle manufacturer or hunting magazine will be smart enough to see the opportunity in hiring a very pretty young spokesmodel who knows how to put lead on target.

A 2010
report from Microsoft said that social media checks were already as
important in the job selection process as a CV or interview. Some 70 per
cent of HR managers at the top 100 companies in the UK, US, Germany and
France said that they had rejected candidates because of their online
behaviour.  

Most people, when reading this, think that this means pictures of guys doing keg stands or girls posting naked selfies. Such things are included, of course, but so are one’s political identifications, such as expressing support for a political candidate during the electoral season. Don’t think that they aren’t.

On libertarianism

Increasingly of late, people have been attempting to claim I am not a libertarian on the basis of my failure to adhere to one or another common libertarian shibboleths. Consider my purported heresies:

  1. I oppose open borders.
  2. I oppose free trade.
  3. I oppose female suffrage.
  4. I oppose “equal rights”.
  5. I oppose desegregation.
  6. I oppose the incoherently named “gay marriage”.
  7. I have observed, and stated, that sexual anarchy is incompatible with traditional Western civilization.
  8. I have observed, and stated, that female education is both dyscivic and dysgenic.
  9. I support the right of free association.

These positions are obviously anti-libertine, but are they truly anti-libertarian? I don’t see that the case can be made if one considers the actual definition of libertarianism rather than various dogmatic policies that have somehow come to pass for the philosophy itself. From Wikipedia:

Libertarianism (Latin: liber, free) is a classification of political philosophies that uphold liberty as their principal objective. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and freedom of choice, emphasizing political freedom, voluntary association and the primacy of individual judgment. While libertarians share a skepticism of authority, they diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing political and economic systems. Various schools of libertarian thought offer a range of views regarding the legitimate functions of state and private power, often calling to restrict or even to wholly dissolve pervasive social institutions. Rather than embodying a singular, rigid systematic theory or ideology, libertarianism has been applied as an umbrella term to a wide range of sometimes discordant political ideas through modern history.

All of my supposedly anti-libertarian positions are based on the idea of maximizing liberty in a society based on Western civilization. So, far from being anti-libertarian, I would argue that my National Libertarianism is more in keeping with the true concept of libertarianism than all the various dogmas that are libertarian in theory, but in practice have material consequences that are observably anti-human liberty.

The end may not justify the means, but the end is the only correct means of judging any social policy. Intentions and hypotheses and flights of fancy are all equally irrelevant. In the end, one can only look at the policy and decide: does this advance or detract from human liberty in this particular polity.

The new battle cry

Repatriation. Some of you may recall that I have predicted this for some time now:

Lynes’s growing group of protestors in Murrieta has been organizing and plans to continue their protests until something is done. Their message is support Border Patrol, stop illegal immigration, enforce existing U.S. laws at the border, and repatriate those here in the U.S. illegally to their home countries.

They’re focused on illegals now. But, just as we’ve seen in the larger immigration debate, the shift from illegal immigrants to all immigrants will take place soon. It’s already happened in most European countries. Because it’s not about the legality of the entry, it’s about who is where.

This is a literal invasion of the country. And given the growing indications that the Executive Branch helped it take place, it is without question an impeachable offense.

It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up

The IRS-Lerner scandal looks like it has the potential to be a lot bigger than Watergate ever was:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed.

The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” Sonasoft in 2009 tweeted, “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”

Sonasoft was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.

But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right.

It would certainly be unexpected if it turned out to be IRS shenanigans that took down the Obama administration. At this point, even the cowardly House Republicans and the RINOs in the Senate have to be seriously discussing a special prosecutor and a possible impeachment. Especially in light of the amnesty-related debacle on the southern border.

Republican sellout bites the dust

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s political career was just ended over his traitorous love of immigration:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defeated Tuesday by a little-known economics professor in Virginia’s Republican primary, a stunning upset and major victory for the tea party. Cantor is the second-most powerful member of the U.S. House and was seen by some as a possible successor to the House speaker. His loss to Dave Brat, a political novice with little money marks a huge victory for the tea party movement, which supported Cantor just a few years ago.

Perhaps the idiot Republicans will rethink their decision to serve as Obama’s vanguard on the invasion amnesty. Opposing immigration, opposing amnesty, and opposing the ongoing foreign invasion is the winning issue in American politics, just as it is in European politics. As more immigrants migrate, the more blacks and whites of every ideological stripe will turn against immigration and the politicians who support it.

It’s not about legal or illegal, it’s about the numbers.

Desperately avoiding default

One thing you have to understand about every federal debt-related action: it’s not for the benefit of the borrowers, but for the benefit of the banks. We saw this in 2009 with “mortgage reform” and it will be the same with “student loan reform”:

President Barack Obama is prepping new executive steps to help Americans struggling to pay off their student debt, and throwing his support behind Senate Democratic legislation with a similar goal but potentially a much more profound impact.

Obama on Monday will announce he’s expanding his “Pay As You Earn” program that lets borrowers pay no more than 10 percent of their monthly income in loan payments, the White House said. Currently, the program is only available to those who started borrowing after October 2007 and kept borrowing after October 2011. Obama plans to start allowing those who borrowed earlier to participate, potentially extending the benefit to millions more borrowers.

 The problem Obama is addressing is that although it is impossible for graduates (and non-graduates) to formally default on their student loans, they will effectively default on them when they simply don’t have the money to make their payments.

This is simply reducing the payments in order to keep them on the hook longer and thereby prevent the loans from being correctly recognized as bad loans that have to be written off. As Karl Denninger correctly ascertains, the ultimate goal is to keep the
young borrowers on the hook, but force taxpayers to pay off their
loans. It about the banks not the borrowers. It’s ALWAYS about the banks.