From the Comments: Open Borders, Immigration and the Sociology of Gradualism

Brandon Christensen Comments, Current Events , , , , , , , , , ,

Dr Delacroix takes issue with my woefully inadequate summary of his work on open borders in the Independent Review. He writes:

Small yet somewhat important correction: In our piece in the Independent Review, Nikiforov and I argue for somewhat more than a guest worker program and our reference is not a to a EU “guest worker program.” (I am not sure whether there is one.) Rather, we argue that little harm would be done and, as we see now, much harm avoided, by simply agreeing that citizens of Canada, the US and Mexico (especially Mexico) can freely move across the common borders of the three countries. including for the long term. What we have seen in the EU for now more than twenty years shows that there is no reason to attach this free movement principle to citizenship.

That you may work, open a business, pay taxes in Mexico does not logically imply that you may vote in Mexican elections. That you may not does not deprive you of any “rights.” As an immigrant into Mexico you knew what you were doing. You moved under your own power. It’s unlikely anyone even invited you. If you crashed the party, you have no moral right to complain that the food is not kosher (or hallal, you decide).

Several years later, I think that the only reason for this insistence on tying residence to citizenship is the Democratic Party’s totalitarian aspirations. Observing the drift in the Obama administration toward non-legality clarified the picture for me, personally. (I am not speaking for my co-author, here. He just spent three years in Russia; I will ask him.)

Historical precedents matter, and a preference for gradualism may make it desirable -in this country- to transition through a somewhat familiar “guest worker program” rather than directly decree open borders for the citizens of the three NAFTA countries.

I am for whatever works but we must keep concepts distinct from each other: A tomato is not really a fruit, not really.

PS I am glad Notes On Liberty publishes my essays (and even my stories) and that it links to my blog. When I grow up, I want a readership like Notes’ readership!

Libertarianism and Psychology

Fred Foldvary Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , , ,

by Fred Foldvary

Recently there have been a stream of negative critiques of libertarianism. All of them are misunderstandings.  It seems that these critics are just dressing up their antagonism with pseudo-scientific textiles.

The latest attack is in Psychology Today. Peter Corning, Ph.D., asks and answers “What’s the Matter with Libertarianism?” under the rubric “The Fair Society.”

He says, “The libertarian model of individual psychology is grounded in the utilitarian, neo-classical economics model of ‘Homo economicus,'” by which he means selfish economic man. Corning provides a couple of quotes by Nozick and Dawkins, but no general evidence that such is the viewpoint of most libertarians.  Is there a survey?  Is there  inductive logic leading to this conclusion? No, there is nothing. And this is supposed to be a scientific finding of a scholarly psychologist.

He cites the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, but is evidently unaware of Smith’s other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which Smith explained the other human motivation, sympathy for others.  Most libertarians that I know personally or from writings believe that it is quite good to be benevolent.

Perhaps Corning is confusing libertarianism with an extreme version of Randian Objectivism. He cites Ayn Rand as writing “Man’s first duty is to himself.”  But libertarian philosophy posits no such “first duty.”  The only libertarian moral duty is to avoid coercive harm to others.

Some libertarians are “anarcho-capitalists” who seem to envision an atomistic society of individuals contracting with protective agencies.  But libertarianism includes the communitarian vision of consensual communities with collective goods.

Corning claims that “libertarians generally have no model of society as an interdependent group with a common purpose and common interests.”  But no libertarian denies that society is interdependent. What is denied, and properly so, is that all the persons in a country have some common purpose and interests.  A multicultural society such as the USA consists of many interests, sometimes in conflict.  The interest of a thief clashes with that of peaceful victims.  If libertarianism is applied to society, the diverse interests can co-exist, the rule being that one may not force one’s interests on others.

Corning then notes that corporate interests sometimes perpetrate malfeasance. Yes, and if they commit fraud, that is theft, and libertarian policy would be to punish this.

He writes, “our first collective obligation is to ensure that all of our basic needs are met.” Now we see his political agenda.  Corning is a statist collectivist who favors the governmental welfare state. There is no abstract moral collective obligation. All obligations are individual. There can be a group with a mutual contract that then creates a collective obligation, but only from individual delegation.  As to basic needs, libertarian policy enables people to apply their labor and keep all the wages from that, which enables them to provide for their needs.  It is today’s statist restrictions and taxes that deprive workers of the ability to obtain their needs.  The few adults unable to work would get charity. The mass poverty of today is caused by government, not by the non-existent free market.

Evidently Corning believes that a libertarian world would be too selfish to care about the few who fall into misfortune.  But there is no evidence that greater freedom results in greater selfishness in the sense of not caring about others.  So here we have an article that seeks to apply psychology to an ideology, but with no evidence and with flaws in logic.  Psychology here is being applied as a cover for ideological views.  Has this been peer reviewed, or are the peers just as biased and lacking in scientific principle?

No Capitalism Means No Peace: Egypt Edition

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , , , , , ,

I just briefly touched on this in an earlier post, but I thought I’d bring in another perspective to shore up my argument. Fraser Nelson, writing in the UK’s Telegraph, explains some of the important differences between freedom and democracy:

While the West was celebrating Egypt joining the comity of democratic nations, Egyptians themselves were sliding into an economic abyss, with terrifying shortages of fuel, food and security. Sectarian violence has been thrown into the mix, with persecution of the Coptic Christians followed by Sunni v Shia strife. The murder rate trebled. Things were falling apart, which is why the generals were welcomed back.

But the Arab Spring was a demand for freedom, not necessarily democracy – and the distinction between the two is crucial. Take, for example, the case of Mohammed Bouazizi, who started this chain of events by burning himself alive on a Tunisian street market two years ago. As his family attest, he had no interest in politics. The freedom he wanted was the right to buy and sell, and to build his business without having to pay bribes to the police or fear having his goods confiscated at random. If he was a martyr to anything, it was to capitalism […]

The narrative of a 1989-style revolution in hope of regime change seemed so compelling to foreigners that there was little appetite for further explanation. But […] this was a protest for the basic freedom to own and acquire ras el mel, or capital.

Read the rest. I think it is pertinent to note that liberalism (the institutional face of capitalism) was murdered by British imperialism in its infancy (“Egyptian freedom means no more British imperialism, therefore…”).

The people of the Middle East will not get out of the rut they are in until there is a revolution of ideas in their societies. The demand for liberal ideas is certainly there, but Western imperialism provides a convenient scapegoat for authoritarians in the region. Western imperialism is different from Russian, or Persian, or Turkish, imperialism because the Arab public holds the West to a higher standard than other states. It’s time we started doing the same: remove all troops and military equipment owned and operated by the United States from the region.

This will lead to the rapid disappearance of the Islamist monarchies our government protects, and will open up the region to important dialogue. As long as the US military remains in the region, though, the Middle East will not taste freedom. Imperialism is antithetical to freedom, as both the society funding imperial projects and the society being forced to receive imperial projects are coerced in the name of central planning.

See also “Moral Markets and Immoral ‘Capitalism’” and “The Hidden Vice of Capitalism” for more in-depth arguments about the term “capitalism” and what it actually means.

The Immigration “Reform” Bill: RINOs, Labor Unions and a Libertarian Alternative

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links, Politics , , , , , , , ,

Nobody is happy with the current immigration reform package being shoved through Congress at the moment. I don’t know too much about the specifics of the bill, or even about immigration itself (except that immigrants make good drinking buddies), so I’ll just outsource some ideas and arguments I’ve read elsewhere. First up is our very own Jacques Delacroix, an immigrant from France, who writes:

The main objective of the bill is to install in this country an unbeatable Democratic majority for the foreseeable future. The intent is to turn this polity into a one-party system. Everyone assumes, of course, that the electoral benefits of the bill will redound to the Democratic Party. If you don’t believe it, conduct a simple mental experiment: Tell yourself under what circumstances the implementation of the present bill, or of one similar to it, would cause a net increase in the number of Republican voters?

At best, at the very best, the admission of ten million formerly illegal immigrants and of their dependents would have no effect on American electoral politics. There is no scenario whereas it would help the conservative cause.

New immigrants vote Democrat. Immigrants from societies with authoritarian traditions vote Left unless their societies have gone through violent purging convulsions such as happened in “communist” Eastern Europe in the nineties. The idea that the government should leave people alone is a sophisticated one. It does not grow naturally out of the experience of oppression.

Indeed. Is this analysis wrong? If so, feel free to elaborate why you think so in the ‘comments’ section. I highly recommend reading the whole thing. Angelo Codevilla, an immigrant from Italy (and one of Dr Delacroix’s fellow academics), also elaborates on the bill:

Beginning in the 1960s, increasingly dandified native youths shunned agricultural and service jobs. So did the new legal immigrants. This made room for a growing number of laborers from Mexico who came and went freely and seasonally across a basically un-patrolled 2000 mile border. These were not “immigrants,” but rather mostly young men who yearned to get back to their families. They did not come to stay, much less take part in American politics. America came to rely on them to the point that, were a magic wand to eliminate them, whole industries would stop, including California agriculture.

US labor unions however, supported by the Democratic Party, pressed the US government to restrict this illegal flow. While until the 1980s, the US-Mexican border was patrolled by fewer than 1000 agents – nearly all at a handful of crossing points – that number has grown to some 25,000 in our time. As the border began to tighten, making it impossible for the Mexicans to come and go, many brought their families and stayed put in the US between work seasons […]

The controversy over illegal immigration did not touch the core of the immigration problem, namely the Immigration Act of 1965 and our burgeoning welfare system. Nor did it deal with the fact that the illegal flow of Mexicans was really about labor, not immigration, because most Mexican “illegals” had not come with the intention of staying. A well-crafted guest-worker program would give most of them what they want most [emphasis mine – bc].

Hence the “illegal immigration problem” is an artifact of the US political system: The Democratic Party wants the Mexicans as voters, the labor unions want the Mexicans as members rather than as competitors, and the Chamber of Commerce wants them for as low a wage as it can enforce.

Codevilla has much, much more here. Codevilla attributes the US immigration system to the corporate state, but I am unsure if Dr Delacroix feels the same way.

Delacroix’s piece, like Codevilla’s, also brings attention to an alternative guest worker program. Delacroix, in an article for the Independent Review, points out that the guest worker program has worked extremely well in the pre-central bank European Union (I am unsure if this is still the case).

A guest worker program would eliminate the political implications associated with “illegal immigration reform” and, as a result, enhance the economic benefits of seasonal labor flows coming from Mexico. The Cato Institute has recently come out with a policy report detailing how a guest worker program might be implemented. As I’ve stated before, the Cato Institute is one of three think tanks I actually trust (the other two being Brookings and Hoover).

About the time I did grassroots campaigning for a high-end gigolo

muricaderp Politics, Religion

That’s an impertinent way to refer to the Secretary of State. I’d certainly be ashen with embarrassment upon writing such a thing if I were the kind of whinging supplicant who gives a damn about the etiquette of not holding the contemptible in open contempt. If I should be embarrassed by anything, it should be by the fact that a boorish, condescending, socially climbing arriviste with no discernible grasp on American culture beyond Route 128 is my country’s chief diplomat.

Now, is there anything wrong with being a gigolo? That’s a backhanded question to ask, but one that’s still worth asking. It isn’t wrong the way the guys I profiled last night are wrong, so I’ll let other people Godwinize this debate. (And they will. The concern trolls always do.) Getting head-up about some posh bugger having gotten that way by marrying a condiment heiress would normally be a true First World Problem, but John Kerry made his marriage the people’s business by inflicting himself on his nation, as New England’s posh inevitably do. That crowd gravitates to “public service” like flies to a cow pie. Would that they were merely indolent. My position is that the sugar lifestyle in any capacity (momma, daddy or baby) is awfully gauche and in no way admirable. I just feel a certain uneasiness with the idea of paying or being paid for such services in increments longer than a few hours. It comes a bit too close to indenture for my taste. As I see it, sugaring is something that should be done on a woodlot come spring, but needless to say, that takes a different kind of New Englander.

This is not a David Horowitz-style political conversion tale. Indeed, I campaigned for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid, and I did so in an inhospitable jurisdiction: Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, whose electorate was voting for Republicans two to one back then. To this day, I see no shame in that game.

There should be shame in it, but I beheld the man’s competition, and I blanched. A lukewarm Nantucket Catholic ketchup gigolo with a penchant for windsurfing and a schmucky trial lawyer with a powerful head of political hair made for an objectively awful slate, one that called into question the sanity of the party nominating them. It would have been brilliant to vote against that rotten duo, had their opponents not been a dry drunk hereditary boy king and his regent Dr. Strangelove.

In the latter case, we were dealing with a party that wasn’t just insane, but also depraved. The Democratic Party was being strangled by myopic, tone-deaf BoBo status whores, the same facepalmably witless cohort that has lately been smearing Edward Snowden for being a high school dropout. As pathetic as that was, the Republican Party was being strangled by a rogue’s gallery of dangerous authoritarians: theocrats, sex scolds, capital punishment fetishists, prison brutality fetishists, boot-in-the-ass jingoists, martial law enthusiasts, ad nauseam. Nor was there any need to be bashful about doing a mix-and-match at the crazy buffet: the more kinds of religious-nationalistic atavism, the better.

As choices of poison went, it was an easy one. This wasn’t so much a choice between the gas chamber and the electric chair as it was between either following the neighborhood serial murderer into his basement or spending the evening being high-hatted by the local gentry at an estate party. George W. Bush strikes me as someone who spent his childhood performing vivisections on cats. It’s a subjective gut feeling: nothing provable, and probably not the case, but I can’t shake it, either. Many Americans, especially ones who vote in the Republican primaries, looked at him and saw a pious Christian. What, you ask, was Jesus of Nazareth’s relationship to the death penalty? Never mind that. W is a Bible-believing man of God who doesn’t make fun of Christians for attending snake-handling churches.

Oh, you say he did make fun of pious Christians behind their backs? It can’t be. David Kuo must have been a red diaper baby liberal atheist to say such a thing.

What the Democrats have is a communication problem. As a rule, the electorate isn’t so much alienated by their policies as by their personas. The opposite is generally true of public attitudes towards the GOP. I suspect that if equally effective communicators from the Left and the Right squared off, the Right would get creamed.

Libertarians have a communication problem, too, albeit of a different sort, mostly of a tin foil hat variety. This is how Pennsylvania ended up with Ken Krawchuk burning a five dollar bill on stage to demonstrate the worthlessness of fiat money, Mike Fisher sanctimoniously accusing him of criminally defacing US currency, and Ed Rendell, a slimeball, as governor.

Again, though, the communication problems bedeviling Democrats go beyond rhetoric. They have style problems, too. As befits every posh New Englander, more than a few of them have problems involving watersports. Maybe the other kind of watersports, too, but definitely the kind openly practiced around Nantucket. Just the other day, John Kerry was caught out on his yacht while shit hit the fan in Egypt. A major but tenuous Arab constitutional republic was disintegrating, and that fool was out fooling around on a rich person’s boat. It must be that when you’re an international gigolo, it’s always time for a cool change.

Notice that Republicans don’t get caught pulling that kind of shit. George W. Bush clearing brush on his ranch is a trustfunder’s form of recreation, but at the most superficial level, the level that counts in American politics, it doesn’t look bad at all. It’s the kind of thing that any red-blooded American man might do, especially if he has a late-model pickup and eleventy thousand acres of personal backyard. Republicans know that this sort of thing really resonates with inattentive goobers, and they do it skillfully. Dick Cheney may shoot people in the face when he goes hunting, but he doesn’t look like a pandering doofus from the city the way John Kerry does in a hunting coat.

Verbally and visually, Republicans know how to stay on message. Authoritarians make great communicators.

Mealy-mouthed moral relativism won’t carry the day. I’m amazed that it even carried Pennsylvania in 2004. Left-liberal, conservative, or libertarian, regardless of the angle of attack, the only way to take on authoritarians is with some principles. There is evil in this world. It exists. Newsday may be too sheepish to print the pictures, but it’s true: SATIN LIVES.

Our closing hymns today, both written by the truest son of the Guyland, will be a celebration of how not to make a political disaster of one’s boating habit and a survey of the activities of the major American political parties. Go in peace, gigolos.

Life Unplugged

Brandon Christensen Books, Current Events , ,

Hey all,

I’ve been enjoying LA. I finished up 1493 about a week ago and can’t recommend it enough.

Chapters 8 and 9 – on the impact that Africans and Asians had on the New World – are especially fascinating . Mann essentially destroys every myth about race that has ever been devised, but does so in a way that is not condescending (Politically Correct) and not reactionary.

I’ve since been slowly working through Mastering Space, but it’s a real daisy and I think the only people who take it seriously are Marxist-oriented geographers and anthropologists.

I picked up a couple more books with graduation money (Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms, Edwin Wilmsen’s Land Filled with Flies and Bernard Lewis’s Islam and the West), but most of my time will be spent going through Volume 2 of Armen Alchian’s collected works (the volume on property rights and economic behavior), finishing up Said’s Orientalism (again) and studying for the GRE.

The coup in Egypt was predictable. Imperial Britain essentially strangled liberalism in Egypt just after its birth. What we have in Egypt is a large society with no political alternatives: either you can pick the Islamists (and Islamism has nothing to do with Islam, of course) or you can pick the national socialists (i.e. the fascists). Without a regime based on private property rights, individualism and free trade, Egypt will never know tolerance, prosperity or liberty. Democracy by itself can do nothing for Egyptians.

Around the web: Casual Friday

muricaderp Economics, Law, Links

1. How to reduce absenteeism by monitoring the help instead of maybe abusing it less.

2. The Great Australian Sickie: “People taking a sickie are more reluctant to fake it to a kindly nurse on the other end of the phone line.”

If you’re thinking that of course you wouldn’t fake it with an Australian nurse, remember:

3. Men can be nurses, too.  See also Exhibit 3B.

4. Another reason not to give your son the middle name of Lynn. Some of this stuff just can’t be made up: “On March 2, 2005, the Park City council terminated Rader’s employment for failure to report to work or to call in.”

Because RULES. But it’s fitting. Rader has always believed in them, at once too much and too little.

5. Don’t believe me? Ask my buddy Kasper. D. Lynn Rader is much more of a model prisoner than some of my people are. The Roths left some real scuzzies behind.

Around the Web: Rumpy Pumpy

muricaderp Liberty, Links, Politics

Just one link tonight, since I have to be onsite at a vineyard in less than five hours for work tomorrow.

Here it is, in all its sharp English glory. What does Mark Steyn find so compelling about an almost unheard-0f British politician named Nigel Farage? Here’s a taste:

The wobbly boozer turned out to be the steady hand at the tiller UKIP needed. He was elected (via proportional representation) to the European Parliament, which for the aspiring Brit politician is Siberia with an expense account. Then, in 2010, Farage became a global Internet sensation by raining on the EU’s most ridiculous parade — the inaugural appearance by the first supposed “President of Europe,” not a popularly elected or even parliamentarily accountable figure but just another backroom deal by the commissars of Eutopia. The new “President” was revealed to be, after the usual Franco-German stitch-up, a fellow from Belgium called Herman van Rompuy. “Who are you?” demanded Farage from his seat in the European Parliament during President van Rompuy’s address thereto. “No one in Europe has ever heard of you.” Which was quite true. One day, Mr. van Rompuy was an obscure Belgian, the next he was an obscure Belgian with a business card reading “President of Europe.” But, as is his wont, Nigel warmed to his theme and told President van Rompuy that he had “the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.” A few days later, having conferred in their inner sanctum, the Eurocrats ordered Farage to make a public apology. So he did — to low-grade bank clerks for having been so ill-mannered as to compare them to President van Rompuy. He was then fined 2,980 euros (about $4,000) for his impertinence, since when he has referred to the European president as Rumpy-Pumpy, a British synonym for a bloody good shag.

I have to say, I like the guy. Nigel Farage is why we need Englishmen in Congress. But please no Belgians.

I’d round out this piece with some topical porn links or other suitable rudeness (autoerotic asphyxiation figures in Steyn’s piece), but I have  to be up before dawn. I’m the Help these days.

On the plus side of the ledger, the site where I’m working tomorrow is beautiful, and the grapes don’t talk back.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Zionism’s Colonial Roots

Brandon Christensen History, Politics , , , , , ,

Today, Benjamin Netanyahu is seen widely as a leader of the Right (although in comparison with Avigdor Lieberman and others who have held office in Israel lately, Netanyahu could look moderate), and Israeli politics have long been categorized in terms of Left and Right, with the Revisionists cast as right-wing no-goodniks. That was so from the 1930s: with the rise of fascism, it became quite common to characterize Jabotinsky as a fascist, a word widely used by his Zionist foes. Rabbi Stephen Wise, a prominent liberal Jewish American of his day, called Revisionism “a species of fascism,” while David Ben-Gurion—the leader of the Labor Zionists in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in British Palestine) and then a founding father and first prime minister of Israel—referred to his foe privately as “Vladimir Hitler,” which didn’t leave much to the imagination. And to be sure, while Jabo called himself a free-market liberal with anarchist leanings, the oratory of Revisionism—“in blood and fire will Judea rise again”—and the visual rhetoric—the Betarim in their brown shirts marching and saluting—had alarming contemporary resonances.

Read the rest, it’s very good throughout.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , , , ,
  1. The Reality of Feel-Good Government. James Bovard on “federal service” programs
  2. Will Wilkinson says “I smoke pot and I like it” (there’s more to the piece than just a confession)
  3. Map of police officers per 100,000 people in Europe
  4. Filming North Korea’s Film Industry
  5. Stephen Walt weighs in on the Snowden affair: What, me worry?
  6. Sex in the Arab World. An interview with Shereen El Feki

Internal Revenue Service Even Handed After All

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , ,

Liberal commentators in all media and even on this blog have been eager to announce that the IRS was an equal opportunity offender between Left and Conservative groups and that, therefore, there is not much of a (new) scandal attached to the IRS.

Peggy Noonan resets the clock in her column of Wall Street Journal of 6/29/13. (All boldings below come from me.)

According to a House Ways and Means Committee source , only seven (7) cases of the 298 cases flagged by the IRS for extra scrutiny appear to represent progressive causes. Not one of the seven was subjected to harassment and abuse. Of the seven, only two were sent follow-up questionnaires after their application for tax-exempt status was received […] And all seven saw their applications approved […]

The “source” was not identified by name. Want to bet it does not exist?

[…] Russel George, the Treasury Inspector General whose audit broke open the scandal answered Rep. Sander Levin’s charge that the audit had ignored the targeting of progressives (by the IRS, bolding and comment mine) […]

The evidence showed conservative groups were singled out by the IRS, not liberal groups. While some progressive groups may have ended up on a BOLO list, the IRS did not target them. We did not find evidence that the criteria you (Rep. Levin), labeled “Progressive” were used by the IRS to select potential political cases during the 2010 to 2013 time frame we audited. One hundred per cent of the groups with “Tea Party,” “Patriot,” or “9/12″ in their names were given extra scrutiny.

Soon, very soon, the Internal Revenue Service will withdraw its apology for misdeeds it gave about two weeks ago precisely for persecuting, treating unfairly conservative-sounding groups. Right?

I wish the liberal deniers on this matter were cunning and twisted rather than something else. It’s easier to deal with conscious dishonesty than with the alternative. Many 1932 Germans were also not twisted, not consciously dishonest; they just would not see the evidence of their eyes.

Yo, bro, suck it up and pray!

muricaderp Law, Liberty, Links, Religion

It’s time for the libertarian discourse to get rude again. Stephanie Drury called attention yesterday to a donnybrook over a Family Research Council prayer campaign graphic, a graphic one indeed, that has been construed to depict a man performing oral sex on one of his fellows.

Did that coalition of family men after God’s heart in fact publish such an obscene image? You be the judge. I suspect, however, that this is an instance in which Potter Stewart would have known it when he saw it. Ignore, if you wish, the civic mind rot in the preceding link about the Family Research Council having been “officially designated a ‘hate group.'” It’s unfortunate that such a bigoted organization’s opponents aren’t suggesting that its members get in line for the coming Sunday’s “services” instead of insinuating that their free speech be chilled merely because it offends a lot of people, especially since it’s so easy to demonstrate that the FRC’s modus operandi is to misuse concern about the health of American families for the purpose of censorious asshattery pending the nationwide implementation of Comstock-style theocratic government. Thankfully, it’s also an organization that tries too hard to be hip and ends up with slogans like this:

call 2 fall 

On our knees for America.

June 30, 2013

I’m in. 

Or, as General Petraeus said to Colonel Broadwell, “Yeah, baby, I’m all in.”

The whole thing has to be seen to be believed. I’ll note without further commentary that “I’m in” is written in white lettering on a smeared blotch of red.

For a counterpoint in defense of family values, prayer, and all that, let’s now turn to Drury’s “Facebook comment of the day”:

“Thanks for pointing this out. I did not know about the call to prayer which I certainly will join. The group that wrote this article would think a Christian sleeping is daydreaming of homosexual activity. They are mean, biased and christian-haters. That is rather obvious to anyone with the slightest bit of objectivity or integrity. Only a perverted mind would see a man praying and construe it as this article does.”

Project much? This “call 2 fall” is, of course, in response to Wednesday’s  Supreme Court rulings invalidating the Defense of Marriage Act and California Proposition 8 on equal protection grounds. A summary layman’s explanation of why these laws were properly held to be unconstitutional is that they denied numerous civil benefits to committed cohabiting partners on account of their sexual orientation, many of these benefits having nothing whatsoever to do with childrearing.

In other words, this is a national call to prayer for the sole purpose of reversing court decisions expanding equal protection under the law. It’s bigotry and bad civics. At the risk of causing further hurt to already tenderized religious right fee-fees, I should add that bigotry and bad civics are the stock in trade for much of the religious right. At rock bottom, much of the religious right’s agenda is the soft subversion of the United States Constitution.

To return to the subject of sexual purity, no prominent, Bible-teaching evangelical pastor has ever regularly consorted with a male meth whore and partaken of the crank pipe. That kind of thing is obviously the province of liberals: secularists, pluralists who are against religious tests for public office, low-class people who are too busy having unsanctioned sexytime to make it to church on Sunday morning, those of us who get a bit rattled or disgusted when the in-your-face nutters take over our congregations, those of us who find that morning services conflict with some combination of sleep and Face the Nation, those of us whose attitudes towards whores are at least as favorable as St. Augustine’s. We, not sexually repressed evangelicals in Colorado Springs, are obviously the ones with impure inclinations. We’re the ones who kick girls off football teams because they’re fixing to cause lust among teh boyz. It must have been a freak like Ron Wyden who publicly told an unsubstantiated story about bathroom privileges being restricted for high school girls in Southeast Oklahoma in response to an epidemic of lesbian sex, because it couldn’t have been a pious, conservative man of God like Tom Coburn.

If I dare say so, I have reasons for being all in for the return of the Victorian gynecological day spa, as well as an increase in the number of its manly counterparts. In fact, I haven’t come close to providing a comprehensive survey of these reasons. I just know that Senator Coburn is itching to get in on that action, no matter what he says. Methinks the doctor doth protest too much. Switzerland, with its sixteen-year-old age of consent and distance from the power centers of the Northeast Corridor, will be an appropriate jurisdiction for him and Chris Hansen to ply their new trade.

Ladies, don’t get any dirty ideas, but in an ideal world I’d be available for outcall massages in the Salem area. In the real world, I’m doing stoop labor with Yamhill County felons. There’s no sexual angle to that pathetic situation, so I don’t expect any intercession from the Family Research Council.

Blow me.

Edward Snowden is a Commie

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty , , , , , , , ,

So says Max Boot at Commentary, a neoconservative publication that specializes in lies and slander to further the imperialist cause (there is, if you think about it, no other way to further a cause such as theirs). No, really, read it yourself.

Boot tries to pretend that the NSA was only spying on citizens of foreign states, rather than on Americans, but this is laughable on its face, especially given the recent IRS scandal (where an august body of bureaucrats charged with collecting taxes suddenly finds itself targeting conservative political groups during a close presidential election season).

I’ve read elsewhere that Snowden was inspired by Ron Paul. If this is true, then Ron Paul is even more of a bad ass than I thought. The only people on my campus who do not like Ron Paul are hardline Democrats and hardline Republicans. But just think: very few young people identify with a specific political party. The reasons for this vary, but for the most part young people are much more independent thinkers and have yet to enter the workforce. Once they enter the workforce, of course, they will begin to vote for a party line, but kids in college who already identify with a political party tend to constitute tomorrow’s fascists: they are condescending, gullible and believe that the political system is the best way to change society for the better.

American imperialism is dead. Once the Obama administration begins arming al-Qaeda, and the media begins to really throw Obama under the bus, the idea that US government can magically make the world a better place by bombing, arming and invading other countries will find its rightful place in the dunce’s corner of American politics once again. In the mean time, we need more heroes like Snowden to expose the horrific abuses of liberty that Washington has been pursuing under the guise of wars on terror, drugs and poverty over the last half century.

The Decline of the State?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , ,

From the Atlantic:

Health care for the world’s poorest and human rights for the oppressed as private-sector businesses? Where there’s money to be made, a commercial alternative will emerge. But core state enterprises are subject to increasing non-commercial competition, as well. Many in southern Lebanon willingly receive social services and other incidents of modern government from the terrorist group Hezbollah rather than from the official government. Al-Qaeda presents many Islamic radicals with an even more extreme — and arguably more effective — non-territorial alternative to the nation-state for purposes of waging war.

The whole thing is interesting throughout, though I don’t agree with the author that virtual states are somehow replacing traditional states. I don’t think we’ll see the disappearance of the state anytime soon either. What will happen, I think, is that governments will become more minarchist in nature as markets simply overwhelm the crummy services that governments essentially force on people using their own extracted money.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I apologize for the dearth of posts lately. I have been reading a lot of books the old-fashioned way, chasing girls down so that I can  smell their hair and generally just enjoying life post-graduation.

  1. Will Wilkinson blogs about the drug war’s inherent racism at Democracy in America.
  2. Rebecca Liao writes about Democracy in China for Dissent.
  3. Randy Barnett on the future of federalism after the “gay marriage” SCOTUS decision.
  4. Uganda versus South Korea. An interesting take on development by Andrew Mwenda.
  5. The Economist has a great piece on the violence in Turkey.
  6. Fascinating ‘comments’ thread on Hayek and Pinochet. I am going to dedicate a long piece to this thread shortly. American Leftists are just classical liberals who have come to think of themselves as superior to their neighbors. Leftists in Europe and Latin America are murderous.