Barney Fife strikes again. Hat tip to Jim Duncan.
Monthly Archives: June 2011
Is the US government using drones to support Yemeni dictator? Reply
Article by Nick Robertson. Hat tip to Jim Duncan.
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Sanaa, Yemen (CNN) — The Yemeni government has lost control over five provinces, and security in the country is deteriorating, the nation’s acting president told CNN in an exclusive interview Wednesday.
In his first interview with a Western TV network, Vice President Abdu Rabu Mansoor Hadi detailed how U.S. drones are using voice recognition to target al Qaeda leaders and help the government win back control.
Hadi has been Yemen’s acting president since June 3, when President Ali Abdullah Saleh was wounded in an attack on the mosque at the presidential palace.
During Wednesday’s hour-long meeting, Hadi said Saleh’s wounds from what he described as an assassination attempt were so severe that he has no idea when the president will return from medical treatment in Saudi Arabia.
Gottfried on Mencken 3
Paul Gottfried on the figure from American history hated by neocons and liberals alike.
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HL Mencken celebrates the end of Prohibition.Recently I’ve been thinking about someone whose name is attached to an organization I’m currently president of, H.L. Mencken (1880-1956). For years I’ve tried to understand why the Baltimore Sage has been branded, mostly recently in The Weekly Standard (see here and here) and in a voluminous biography by Terry Teachout, as anti-Semitic and anti-Black. The closest I could come to documenting these charges is that Mencken joked in his diary about the bad table manners of an obviously Jewish diner in a club that he frequented. He also said in a moment of levity that “an anti-Semite is someone who dislikes Jews more than is absolutely necessary.” This, as everybody who knew him was aware of, was a quip that Murray Rothbard was fond of repeating.
As for Mencken’s supposed revulsion for Blacks, I can’t find any evidence of it, although he may not have used “African-American,” or whatever is the now fashionable PC term in referring to the minority in question. We know that Mencken criticized segregation in his native city of Baltimore. He also never tired of attacking lower class White Southerners of the kind who wanted to keep Blacks segregated. Indeed if I were going after Mencken for his intolerance, I would have to notice his invectives against Southern Fundamentalists rather than his scattered, insignificant jokes about Jews and Blacks. That said, however, White Southerners don’t count as victims in their own eyes or in anyone else’s. In fact their politicians and journalists seem quite happy to view them as onetime racial victimizers, who were redeemed by civil rights legislation.
In any case, it seems to me that the recent attacks on Mencken have nothing to do with his prejudices. Liberals and neocons hate him for taking stands that don’t have much to do with the accusations made against him. One, Mencken opposed America’s entry into both World Wars, and during the First World War, he was expressly pro-German. (He was after all a German-American.) His predilection for the Central Powers in 1914 elicited a bitter tirade from Fred Siegel in (where else?) The Weekly Standard (January 30, 2006), a screed that charges the “horrid” Mencken with being a lifelong enemy of democracy and decency. Supposedly Mencken’s fondness for Nietzsche (about whom he produced a not very useful or scholarly biography) shows for all to see that he worshipped the “will to power” and saw this incarnated in the Teutonic enemy of Anglo-American democratic civilization. Someone who took such reprehensible positions in foreign affairs, we have to infer from Siegel’s remarks, must also have been against Jews, who represent all that is good and radiant in the West and (lest we forget) Israel.
Two, Mencken expressed anti-egalitarian views that are now unfashionable, and he never missed a chance to cast ridicule on the democratic welfare state. There are more than a few of Mencken’s unseasonable remarks that would cause blood to surge to the head of David Brooks, the New York Times’s “resident conservative,” who has just written about “national greatness” and the role to be assigned to the federal welfare state in making us all “great”: the most famous are “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard” and “every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” And how about this one for the fans of public administration: “I believe all government is evil and that trying to improve it is a waste of time.” And this for the devotees of judicial activism: “A judge is a law student who grades his own examination papers.”
Not all politically incorrect figures have suffered humiliation at the hands of our academics and journalists. For example, the Progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who helped build the foundations of our gargantuan administrative state and advocated a “crusade to make the world safe for democracy,” is given a fairly wide berth, despite the facts that he kicked Blacks out of the civil service and promoted “scientific racism.” And if Wilson, whom Mencken despised, railed against Jews, that too was forgivable. After all, didn’t Wilson agree to a Jewish political entity in the Middle East, while making war on the Germans and Austrians, who were later ruled by Hitler?
Moreover, it hardly seems that the “Great Emancipator” qualifies as the racial egalitarian that he is now depicted as. That honor devolved on our 16th president because he freed slaves in seceded states, as a military measure. And then many decades later Lincoln became identified with a civil rights movement that represented positions that were not at all his. But Mencken was not as useful as Lincoln or Wilson. He did not write or do much that would please our present rulers. Except for his rants against Christianity, this satirist did not leave behind the sorts of slogans that would suggest that he was politically progressive. In fact, if Mencken had gotten what he wanted, most of our political class would lose their public financing and be forced to become gainfully employed.
A Reply to Matthew Lyons, Part Two: The Subjectivity of Authoritarianism and Special Pleading as Ideology 32
This is the second in a series of essays in response to Matthew Lyons’ critique “Rising Above the Herd: Keith Preston’s Authoritarian Anti-Statism.” And here is the transcript of a recent lecture by Lyons where yours truly gets a couple of mentions. Part One may be viewed here.
by Keith Preston
“If the individual cannot get along with the community, and the community cannot tolerate the individual, what real good will state intervention produce—wouldn’t separation be, in any world, the rational, noncoercive, nonviolent solution? Yes, it might be possible to contrive a state process that would force a Jewish Community to accept the Nazi Individual, or a White Community the despised Black, or a Fundamentalist Community the threatening Atheist. But it needs only for the principle of free travel to be observed—to the advantage of both the leavers and the stayers—and the Nazi, the Black, the Atheist can all find congenial communities of their own. The virtue of a multi-communitied world would be precisely that there would be within its multitude of varieties a home for everyone.”
-Kirkpatrick Sale
“Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany is a horror; Adolf Hitler at a town meeting would be an asshole.”
–Karl Hess
“When a previously disadvantaged group rises to power, it exploits its new position just as did the group or groups it has displaced.”
-Mark A. Schneider, American sociologist
“The ultimate aim of multiculturalism is the creation of a totalitarian state ordered as a type of caste system where individual privilege is assigned on the basis of group identity and group privilege is assigned on the basis of the position of the group in the pantheon of the oppressed.”
-Keith Preston
The core aspects of Lyons’ objections to my own outlook are fairly well summarized in the following passages from his critique, and these comments from Lyons are also fairly representative of the most common arguments against my views offered by Leftists:
Preston only acknowledges oppression along lines of race, gender, sexuality, or other factors to the extent that these are directly promoted by the state, particularly through formal, legal discrimination against specific groups of people. Arguing that “the state is a unique force for destruction,” Preston ignores or trivializes the dense network of oppressive institutions and relationships that exist outside of, and sometimes in opposition to, the state. It is these societally based systems of oppression, not state intervention, that perpetuate dramatic wealth disparities between whites and people of color, widespread domestic violence that overwhelmingly target women, and suicide rates much higher among LGBT teens than heterosexual teens, among many other examples.
Preston portrays secession as a voluntary process, in which many varied groups of people decide to go their own separate ways and coexist peaceably side by side. But what does “voluntary” mean in a context where wives are expected to submit to the authority of their husbands, workers to obey their bosses, or homosexuality is regarded as a perversion and a crime? And how long would peaceable coexistence last in the face of absolutist ideologies that are inherently expansionist? The leaders of a Christian Right statelet would believe that homosexuality and feminism are wrong not only within the statelet’s borders, but everywhere, and they would feel a religious duty to enforce this belief as widely as possible.
The bottom line is that the primary objection to anarcho-pluralism, pan-secessionism, national-anarchism, anarcho-libertarianism and overlapping perspectives raised by leftists such as Lyons is their fear that some individuals, institutions, organizations, or communities is such a meta-political framework will practice values disapproved of by leftists or engage in discrimination against groups favored by leftists. The selective and arbitrary nature of such criticism is easy enough to identify. Imagine if a right-wing critic of anarcho-pluralism were to make comments such as the following:
Preston only acknowledges oppression resulting from liberalism and the Left to the extent that these are directly promoted by the state, particularly through formal, legal discrimination against specific groups of people. Arguing that “the state is a unique force for destruction,” Preston ignores or trivializes the dense network of oppressive institutions and relationships that exist outside of, and sometimes in opposition to, the state. It is these societally based systems of oppression, not state intervention, that perpetuate dramatic disparities in the rate of violent crimes perpetrated against whites by blacks and Hispanics, widespread dissemination of pornography that contributes to sex crimes and social decay, and the promotion of drug use, sexual promiscuity and homosexuality leading to teen pregnancy, illegitimacy, drug abuse, broken families, child neglect, venereal diseases, crime, welfare dependency and other social pathologies .
Preston portrays secession as a voluntary process, in which many varied groups of people decide to go their own separate ways and coexist peaceably side by side. But what does “voluntary” mean in a context where leftist localities have the option of banning private firearms and private property, where urban white families have to live among and send their children to schools with violent black youth, or where Christianity is regarded as a backward superstition and a dangerous threat to freedom and progress? And how long would peaceable coexistence last in the face of absolutist ideologies that are inherently expansionist? The leaders of a Marxist statelet would believe that Christianity and private property are wrong not only within the statelet’s borders, but everywhere, and they would feel an ideological duty to enforce this belief as widely as possible.
Such criticisms would correctly be dismissed as special pleading on behalf of right-wing ideological values, political interest groups and favorite causes. One of the principal ideas behind anarcho-pluralism is the recognition that irreconcilable differences between different political factions and population groups will always exist, and the need to establish societal institutions that are capable of accommodating such differences in a way that avoids both bloodshed and the subjugation of some groups by others. With regards to the “authoritarianism” question, it is necessary to point out that abstract notions like “freedom,” “liberty,” and so forth are understood in radically different ways by different kinds of people. Lyons gives no evidence that his own ideological preferences are somehow decreed by the cosmos, by some divine creator, or by natural law. The bottom line is that the political and social preferences of leftists like Lyons reflect the subjective value judgments of individuals and groups in the same manner as any other kind of assertion of ideological principles. Leftism is ultimately just another tribe like Christianity, Islam, fascism, libertarianism, Satanism, or veganism.
The selectivity of Lyons’ criticisms is further illustrated by his choice of which groups to attack from the list of potential constituents for anarcho-pluralism that I have identified. He focuses on three of these: the League of the South, Christian Exodus, and believers in Christian Identity. He chooses not offer any criticism of “Marxist-Leninists,” “Islamic rightists,” “people of color nationalist movements,” “militant environmentalists,” and so forth. It is only those tendencies that claim to speak for the interests of white Christians that he seems particularly concerned about. This raises the question of whether it is really “authoritarianism” that Lyons is worried about or whether it is merely white Christians as a general population group whom he regards as the problem with political “authoritarianism” not really being all that important if it is controlled by leftists and their allies or constituents.
Census shows whites lose US majority among babies 4
The Census data is now available.
The two most obvious political implications of this are that the anti-immigration movement is a failure and that the future of ethnic conflict in North American will be a scenario where everyone is a “minority.” This second point is one where both the Left and the far Right lack foresight. Both camps continue to view everything from the “people of color vs whitey” paradigm. Ethnic conflict in the future will be sharpest between those groups who are in the closest competition for scarce resources.
Common Sense from Veteran Secessionist Carol Moore Reply
Let’s talk about widespread consciousness, not “concentrated forces.”
Once everyone realizes the US is in worse shape than Greece, secession
will look better and better. Of course some of the leaders may be state
bureaucrats who want to ensure their own big fat pensions by cutting off
the feds ability to tax their subjects!
Keeping representative majority rule governance in seceded entities is
not sufficient a solution, since it always leads to minority rule, with
politically motivated promises of social welfare programs inevitably
based on unsustainable grounds. Direct democracy where only say 80% of
80% of eligible voters (or better 95% of 95%) can pass a law or tax is
best way to ensure freedom and sustainability. And of course sunset or
minority repeal provisions so bad laws passed by majorities in haste can
be revoked in a timely manner also important. And of course strong
individual bills of rights.
A libertarian philosophy also helps. See http://secession.net
-Carol Moore
How a new type of social movement is transforming Detroit 4
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What has developed through both conscious organizing drives and the actions of many individual residents is a significant urban agricultural movement in Detroit. All over the city there are now thousands of family gardens, more than two hundred community gardens, and dozens of school gardens. All over the city there are garden cluster centers that build relationships between gardeners living in the same area by organizing garden workdays and community meetings where participants share information on resources and how to preserve and market their produce.
Excerpted from Grace Lee Boggs, Scott Kurashige, in Yes magazine:
“The Detroit Summer began in 1992 and has since been an ongoing and developing program for more than fifteen years. Since 2005 it has been organized by a multiracial collective of twentysomething young people, many of whom have been a part of our past summer programs. With this younger generation now at the helm of leadership of the Detroit Summer Collective, the organization continues to tap the creative energies of urban youth.
Some skeptics question whether a program such as Detroit Summer can make much of a difference, given the magnitude of the city’s problems. They doubt that a program, which at its greatest capacity involved sixty youth, could have an appreciable effect in stemming the crises of school dropouts, violence, and incarceration that are stealing lives by the thousands. They ask how tending to a handful of gardens, painting one or two murals a year, and fixing up a house or vacant lot here and there can address the blight that has taken over much of the urban landscape. And they lament that small dialogues—between youth and elders, between neighbors, between people of different backgrounds, and between activists from various cultural and political traditions—cannot match the force of large demonstrations involving tens of thousands.
What they don’t understand is that our goal in creating Detroit Summer was to create a new kind of organization. We never intended for it to be a traditional left-wing organization agitating masses of youth to protest and demonstrate. Nor did we intend that it become a large nonprofit corporation of the sort that raises millions of dollars from government, corporations, and foundations to provide employment and services to large populations. Both of these forms of organizing can be readily found in Detroit and all major cities in the United States, but the system continues to function because neither carries the potential to transform society.
By contrast, our hope was that Detroit Summer would bring about a new vision and model of community activism—one that was particularly responsive to the new challenges posed by the conditions of life and struggle in the postindustrial city. We did not feel this could be accomplished if control of our activities was ceded to the dictates of government or the private sector, even though this meant that we would be working on a small scale. However, by working on this scale, we could pay much closer and greater attention to the relationships we were building among ourselves and with communities in Detroit and beyond.
The result has been that we have been able to develop the type of critical connections—of both ideas and people—that are the essential ingredients of building a movement. The best metaphor Detroit Summer has come up with to characterize itself is “planting seeds of Hope.”
What has developed through both conscious organizing drives and the actions of many individual residents is a significant urban agricultural movement in Detroit. All over the city there are now thousands of family gardens, more than two hundred community gardens, and dozens of school gardens. All over the city there are garden cluster centers that build relationships between gardeners living in the same area by organizing garden workdays and community meetings where participants share information on resources and how to preserve and market their produce.
When I think of this incredible movement that is already in motion, I feel our connection to women in a village in India who sparked the Chipko movement by hugging the trees to keep them from being cut down by private contractors. I also feel our kinship with the Zapatistas in Chiapas, who announced to the world on January 1, 1994, that their development was going to be grounded in their own culture and not stunted by NAFTA’s free market. And I think about how Detroiters can draw inspiration from these global struggles and how—just as we were in the ages of the CIO unions and the Motown sound—our city can also serve as a beacon of Hope.
Living at the margins of the postindustrial capitalist order, we in Detroit are faced with a stark choice of how to devote ourselves to struggle. Should we strain to squeeze the last drops of life out of a failing, deteriorating, and unjust system? Or should we instead devote our creative and collective energies toward envisioning and building a radically different form of living?
That is what revolutions are about. They are about creating a new society in the places and spaces left vacant by the disintegration of the old.”
Smoking, Class and the Legitimisation of Power 1
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The “War against Tobacco” is one of the central facts of modern life. In this book, Sean Gabb analyses the nature and progress of the “war”. The stated reasons for the war have varied according to time and place. According to Dr Gabb, however, all reasons have one thing in common—they rest on a base of lies and half truths. But this is not simply a book about the history of tobacco and the scientific debate on its dangers. It also examines why, given the status of the evidence against it, there is a war against tobacco. Dr Gabb shows that this war is part of a much larger project of lifestyle regulation by the ruling class, and that its function is to provide a set of plausible excuses for the extraction of resources from the people and for the exercise of power over them. This book provides a kind of “unified field” theory to bring within a single explanatory structure some of the most important attacks on free choice and government limitation that we face today.
2011 Conference of the Property and Freedom Society Reply
Watch videos of this event filmed by Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance.
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Property and Freedom Society
Sixth Annual Meeting
Bodrum, Turkey, 26-30 May 2011
Karia Princess Hotel
Video shot by Sean Gabb,
Director of the Libertarian Alliance
Friday, May 27
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Welcome and Introductions
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Politics, Money and Banking. Everything You Need to Know in 30 Minutes
Mateusz Machaj, How and How Not to Criticize the Central Bank
Philipp Bagus, The FED and the ECB: Banksterism Compared
Doug French, Going Broke: The Ethics of Default
Thomas DiLorenzo, The Fallacies of “Happiness Research”
Nikolay Gertchev, Psychology Ain’t Economics. New Fads in Economics
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Mateusz Machaj, Philipp Bagus, Thomas DiLorenzo, Nikolay Gertchev, Discussion, Q & A
Saturday, May 28
Stephan Kinsella,Correcting Some Common Libertarian Misconceptions
John Derbyshire, Understanding China and the Chinese
John O’Sullivan, Understanding Europe and its Bureaucrats
Norman Stone, Understanding Turkey and the Turks
Mustafa Akyol, Drawing Borders in the Middle East: Ottoman Provinces v Western State Creations
Roman Skaskiw,“Fighting for Freedom” in the Middle East. A Combat Soldier’s Report
Derbyshire, Stone, Akyol, Skaskiw, Discussion, Q & A
Sunday, May 29
Sean Gabb,The Case Against the American War of Independence
Paul Gottfried, How the Left Conquered the Right
Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple), The Mirage of “Equal Opportunity”
Nicola Iannello, Of Producers and Parasites
Yuri Maltsev, Of Customs and Condoms. Moving from One Empire to Another
Gabb, Gottfried, Daniels, Iannello, Kinsella, Maltsev, Discussion, Q & A
Hans-Hermann Hoppe,Concluding Remarks and Announcements
Syria and the “Popular Will” Reply
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Against the backdrop of anti-government protests and his regime’s brutal response, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad addressed the country on June 20. Downplaying both the demonstrations and the dissatisfaction that they represent, Assad called on “the people and the state [to] come together.”
With the death toll climbing, Assad’s assurances about “getting the military back to their barracks” hardly ring believable, but there was a faint truth to his words. Although the insight is no doubt lost on Assad himself, by appealing for the unification of the people and the state he implicitly acknowledges that the two are quite distinct.
Summarily taking to the streets following Assad’s speech, unconvinced protesters met his talk of “reform” with chants of “liar.” For market anarchists, their chants were loaded with subtext regarding the relationship between society and state. Nietzsche perhaps said it best: “The state is called the coldest of all cold monsters. And coldly it lieth; and this lie creepeth out of its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’”
Far from personifying some collective will, the state is merely the unwieldy implement of a power elite, plotters who conspire not behind a curtain, but right out in the open. The political class, the parasitic few who contrive the system of state capitalism, feel no need whatsoever to hide; they cheat and extort the public from behind protestations of the “popular will.”
We will find, though, that historically the “popular will” has been no more than an assiduously attuned cover for the will of rulers, rhetorical chicanery to hold the ruled in line. Other meanings, any formulae that advance the phrase as something beyond just the sum of individual wills, proves elusive or altogether illusional.
To market anarchists, abstract notions like the “free market,” “the popular will,” and “democracy” are, by definition, not things that can be orchestrated according to design or imposed by some governing body. To have any real significance, such expressions must be properly understood as verbal proxies for complex webs of voluntary interactions.
Popular concerns about what is now considered “the free market,” warranted as they are, are in fact worries about an economic reality in which the state has intervened for powerful business interests at every level of analysis. Distinguished by its Himalayan peaks of concentrated wealth separated by vast expanses of poverty, today’s system is a product of the state rather than of a pure free market.
Consider, by analogy, the tendencies of liquid or gas molecules, their natural drift from areas of higher density into areas of lower density. As related in a popular science text, “Unequal pressures will always equalize themselves if given a chance.” The functioning of a genuine free market — one composed of the unobstructed trades of self-ruling people — would achieve the same kind of balance.
It is the concentration of power in society, with the state falsely holding itself out as “the people,” that gathers wealth into the hands of a small coterie. The social phenomenon of the state, then, is thoroughly tied to the economic conditions we observe today. As is very apparent in countries like Syria, for the yawning breach between the “haves” and the “have-nots” to exist, the introduction of coercion is necessary.
The public outcry in Syria demonstrates that there’s distinction between political and economic problems — or between political and economic freedoms. Market anarchism is the idea that all relationships, whether of a social or commercial kind, ought to be grounded in consent and mutual respect. This is the simple idea that can unchain a true social will from the state’s ruling classes.
