Monthly Archives: November 2014

Charles Lincoln talks about life in Beverly Hills Reply

by • Uncategorized

Charles Lincoln talks about life in Beverly Hills

 

Guest host Charles Lincoln talks about politics, culture, and life in Beverly Hills, California.

Topics include:

His article Beverly Hills at 100: who sets the style for this style-setting enclave?

Mansionization in Beverly Hills

The concept of nuisance as the origin of environmental law

How banks encourage and profit from overdevelopment

How the transaction tax encourages overdevelopment

The transformation of wealth and class in the United States

The Queen of Versailles

The Iranian Jewish community if Beverly Hills

The multi million dollar security plan for Beverly Hills High

How we create corrupt elites overseas that come back to change our society

Robert Stark interviews Richard Spencer Reply

by • Uncategorized

Robert Stark interviews Richard Spencer

 

Richard Spencer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Spencer is Editor of RADIX JOURNAL, Founder of the Alternative Right, and President of THE NATIONAL POLICY INSTITUTE.

Topics:

Why he quit the Alternative Right to start Radix Journal

The need to reject association with the right wing and phony left right spectrum

Richard’s thoughts on the Republican Party victory

The need to create a new “Centrist” movement that is pro-environment, anti-wall street, and socially moderate

How both Robert and Richard have much in common culturally with SWPL’s and hold many views associated with the left

The myth that Millennials want mass immigration, but rather associate the anti-immigration movement with the right wing of the Republican Party

Why the immigration restriction movement has failed

Facing the Future

The Cat is Out of the Bag Reply

by • American Decline, Anarchism/Anti-State, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Environment, Immigration, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Military, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy, Science and Technology

By Keith Preston

For an opposing perspective, see this article by Joseph Nye. For an article that makes comparable arguments, see this piece in Foreign Policy by Gideon Rachman.

When the future history of the former United States of America is written, the pivotal turning point that likely marked the downfall of the USA will be the events of September 11, 2001.

The United States emerged from World War Two as the most powerful nation-state in the world, rivaled only by the second-rate Soviet Union. American hegemony and dominance spread throughout the world as Western Europe became protectorates of the USA, and the colonies of the former European colonial empires in Asia, Africa, and Latin America became U.S. client states. However the postwar era and the late 20th century were also a time of anti-colonial insurgency, leading the U.S. to get bogged down in the anti-colonial war in Indochina and eventually experience defeat. This had the effect of de-legitimizing U.S. militarism to a great degree. More…

Global Resistance and Rising Anarchism – The New Politics of the 21st Century Reply

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Economics/Class Relations

By Devon Douglas Bowers

Activist Post

A number of occurrences have taken place over the past 13 years since the rise of the new millennium; we have seen and are seeing the rise of popular movements all over the world and a resistance to the forces of imperialism, capitalism, and subjugation, from the most recent Arab Spring to the world’s largest coordinated anti-war protest in history with the global protests against the Iraq War[1], to the rise of the Occupy Movement and the rise of indigenous resistance as can be seen in the Idle No More campaign of Canada’s First Nations population. What we seeing around the world is a global resistance that, in some cases, has anarchist undercurrents. We are witnessing the new politics of the 21st century.

While many movements such as the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring had anarchists and anarchist influences within them, anarchism as a political philosophy is quite misunderstood and some time should be taken to understand it.

Anarchism is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “The theory that all forms of government are oppressive and should be abolished.”[2] While it does advocate the abolition of the state, anarchism also includes “a heightened and radical critique and questioning of power and authority: if a source of authority cannot legitimize its existence, it should not exist,”[3] this has led to anarchism being critiqued by a number of individuals, and an increase in anarchist thought to the point today where there are a large number of anarchist ideas being championed, from anarcho-feminism to queer anarchism to black anarchism.

In the United States, anarchism has had a rather interesting history with regards to not only Occupy, but also the 19th century labor movement as well. Anti-statism isn’t anything new in the US as there have been a large number of crusaders who “was condemned [the government] as an oppressive tyranny” when slavery wasn’t abolished in the newly founded country. This abhorrence of slavery and hypocrisy caused “Men like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips renounced their allegiance to it, John Brown openly declared war upon it, and thousands of others regarded it as unfit to command their respect and loyalty.”[4] The anti-statism only increased in the 19th century with the inclusion of anarchists in the labor movement.

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Between infoshops and insurrection: U.S. anarchism, movement building, and the racial order Reply

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Race and Ethnicity, Strategy

I’m sure our right-wing readers will be properly offended by this piece.

By Joel Olsen

LibCom.Org

Between infoshops and insurrection: U.S. anarchism, movement building, and the racial order

Joel Olson argues against two major tendencies in American anarchism, counter-institution building and militant street protests, and suggests building a movement against the racial order should be a priority.

This is a slightly revised version of a chapter from the new book Contemporary Anarchist Studies, edited by Randall Amster, Luis Fernandez, etc. (Routledge 2009). Joel Olson teaches political theory at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and has been around anarchist circles in the United States for many years.

Anarchism has always had a hard time dealing with race. In its classical era from the time of Proudhon in the 1840s to Goldman in the 1930s, it sought to inspire the working class to rise up against the church, the state, and capitalism. This focus on “god, government, and gold” was revolutionary, but it didn’t quite know how to confront the racial order in the United States. Most U.S. anarchist organizations and activists opposed racism in principle, but they tended to assume that it was a byproduct of class exploitation. That is, they thought that racism was a tool the bosses used to divide the working class, a tool that would disappear once capitalism was abolished. They appealed for racial unity against the bosses but they never analyzed white supremacy as a relatively autonomous form of power in its own right.

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The Militia Movement Continues to Grow: Record number of anti-government militias in USA Reply

by • Activism, American Decline, Anarchism/Anti-State, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military, Strategy

Dissent is on the rise.

By Donna Leinwand Leger

USA Today

Radical anti-government “patriot” groups and militias, galvanized against gun control, will continue to grow even as the number of groups operating in the USAreached an all-time high in 2012, a report Tuesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center finds.

The center tracked 1,360 radical militias and anti-government groups in 2012, an eightfold increase over 2008, when it recorded 149 such groups. The explosive growth began four years ago, sparked by the election of President Obama and anger about the poor economy, the center says. That growth is likely to continue as the groups recruit more members with a pro-gun message, the center’s senior fellow Mark Potok said.

President Obama’s second term and a gun control movement bolstered by the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School is intensifying anti-government rage and will lead to more growth for the groups, Potok said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit civil rights advocacy group based in Montgomery, Ala., defines the patriot movement as groups of people who believe the federal government is conspiring to confiscate Americans’ guns and curtail liberties to create a socialist government or “new order.” Most are non-violent citizens groups. Some groups also include militias, which arm themselves and conduct military-style training, the center said.

Conservative critics say the center uses its rhetoric to undermine right-wing and conservative groups.

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New Pew Poll Confirms Americans Ready to End War on Drugs Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Police State/Civil Liberties, Therapeutic State

For enemies of the War on Drugs, victory is now on the horizon.

Drug Policy Alliance

Two Out of Three Americans Think People Shouldn’t Be Prosecuted for Possession of Drugs Such as Cocaine and Heroin; 63% Support Moving Away from Mandatory Minimums; 54% Support Marijuana Legalization

DPA’s Ethan Nadelmann: It’s Time to Stop Arresting People for Drug Use or Possession

A new national survey released today by the Pew Research Center reveals that a broad majority of Americans are ready to significantly reduce the role of the criminal justice system in dealing with people who use drugs.

Among the key findings of the report:

  • More than six in ten Americans (63%) say that state governments moving away from mandatory prison terms for drug law violations is a good thing, while just 32% say these policy changes are a bad thing. This is a substantial shift from 2001 when the public was evenly divided (47% good thing vs. 45% bad thing).  The majority of all demographic groups, including Republicans and Americans over 65 years old, support this shift.
  • At the same time, there has been a major shift in attitudes on whether the use of marijuana should be legal. As recently as four years ago, about half (52%) said they thought the use of marijuana should not be legal; 41% said marijuana use should be legal. Today those numbers are roughly reversed – 54% favor marijuana legalization while 42% are opposed.  Just 16% say it should not be legal for either medical or recreational use.
  • Two-thirds (67%) say the government should focus more on providing treatment for people who use drugs like cocaine and heroin. Just 26% think the focus should be more on prosecuting people who use such drugs.

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Americans Losing Confidence in All Branches of U.S. Gov’t Reply

by • American Decline

The System has entered two major wars and lost. The System has bankrupted the economy. The gap between social classes is the highest it’s been in a century. State repression has grown to the point that it’s spilled over into the mainstream. The approval rating of all major institutions, public and private, is at an all-time low. The U.S. is bitterly divided between its major political tribes. 1 in 4 Americans say they would be sympathetic to a secessionist movement in their state or region. Public opinion is even starting to turn against the War on Drugs, long the foundation of the police state.

In other words, everything is moving along right on schedule.

By Justin McCarthy

Gallup

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ confidence in all three branches of the U.S. government has fallen, reaching record lows for the Supreme Court (30%) and Congress (7%), and a six-year low for the presidency (29%). The presidency had the largest drop of the three branches this year, down seven percentage points from its previous rating of 36%.

Americans' Level of Confidence in the Three Branches of Government

These data come from a June 5-8 Gallup poll asking Americans about their confidence in 16 U.S. institutions — within government, business, and society — that they either read about or interact with.

While Gallup recently reported a historically low rating of Congress, Americans have always had less confidence in Congress than in the other two branches of government. The Supreme Court and the presidency have alternated being the most trusted branch of government since 1991, the first year Gallup began asking regularly about all three branches.

But on a relative basis, Americans’ confidence in all three is eroding. Since June 2013, confidence has fallen seven points for the presidency, four points for the Supreme Court, and three points for Congress. Confidence in each of the three branches of government had already fallen from 2012 to 2013.

Americans' Confidence in Branches of Government

Confidence in the presidency is now the lowest it has been under President Barack Obama, as is confidence in Congress and the Supreme Court, given their historical lows. When Obama first took office in 2009, each of the three branches saw a jump in confidence from their dismally low ratings in George W. Bush’s final two years in the White House.

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On 9/11, Osama bin Laden Set a Trap To Lure America Into Perpetual War. Is He Winning? 1

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy

It would certainly appear that way.

By H.A. Goodman

Huffington Post

2014-10-01-ISISTRUCK.jpg

Osama bin Laden is the reason we’re fighting ISIS today and the reason we’ve wage two wars in the Middle East. His vision for chaos in the region was clearly stated even before he murdered 3,000 Americans and long before we entered Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. Our national amnesia fueled by the righteous indignation of watching Americans murdered on ISIS video plays right into the trap bin Laden set on 9/11 and mires us further into the sectarian and religious quagmire in Iraq and Syria. Actually, to be completely accurate, bin Laden’s terror and maniacal visions were only half of the problem. The other half rests with America’s penchant for being lured into never-ending counterinsurgency wars against an enemy who wears tennis shoes, hides in apartment buildings, drives pickup trucks with gun turrets, and makes horrifying videos to frighten the average American household into blindly accepting a forever war. After 4,486 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq and 2,347 U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan, close to 1 million U.S. soldiers wounded in both wars, and a cost that will easily exceed $6 trillion, the last thing American soldiers and their families need is an electorate who willingly accepts perpetual war. Mind you, this blind acceptance is coupled with the fact that according to Forbes, over 900,000 Americans have had their lives altered fighting terror in the Middle East:

All that can be said with any certainty is that as of last December more than 900,000 service men and women had been treated at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics since returning from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the monthly rate of new patients to these facilities as of the end of 2012 was around 10,000.

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Antifa and Neocons Unite! 2

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism
Try Not to Vomit remember when ANTIFA was statist and Anti-israel? Pepperridge Farm remembers
I have long suspected that “left-wing” totalitarian humanism would eventually bend into “right-wing”  neoconservatism.
After all, the neoconservatives were originally liberals or leftists (often very far leftists) who moved rightward and became “pro-American.” They did so on, first, social democratic and Trotskyist anti-Soviet  grounds, and then, after the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars, on “pro-Israel” grounds.
The two primary figures associated with the formation of neoconservatism were Irving Kristol, a former Trotskyist, and Norman Podhoretz, an early New Leftist in the 1950s and early 1960s. Then there’s the odyssey of Christopher Hitchens, a former Trotskyist turned neocon who called for bombing Afghanistan “out of the stone age.”
Also, notice the favorable views that leading neocons have expressed concerning Madame Hillary.
The more powerful the cultural Left becomes in the U.S. the more we will see the hard left calling for the use of U.S. military power to wipe out allegedly “reactionary” states and cultures around the world.

Poll: Nearly one in four in America would favor secession 3

by • Activism, American Decline, Anarchism/Anti-State, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Secession, Strategy

Grey Tribe becomes a de facto political majority + Support for secession becomes a de facto majority=We Win!!

This is the most up to date data on secessionist sympathy I can find, and it looks like secessionist sympathy is up by a few percentage point. My guess is that secessionist sympathy is highest in the Southwest due to the prevalent of “reconquista” sentiments among Hispanics. Here’s hoping the folk in D.C. keeping screwing up and fueling secessionist sympathies.

Things are now moving along a lot faster than I would have ever thought.

Los Angeles Times

One in four americans in favor of state secession

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The State: Its Rise and Decline Reply

by • Activism, American Decline, Anarchism/Anti-State, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare, Immigration, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Military, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy, Science and Technology, Secession, Sexuality and the State, Strategy, Therapeutic State

Read this classic lecture from 2000 by Professor Van Creveld, and then read my “Philosophical Anarchism and the Death of Empire” from 2003. Van Creveld’s lecture describes the emerging world order, and my essay outlines a new paradigm for the “worldwide Grey Tribe” as it might be called.

By Martin Van Creveld

October 16, 2000

This is an excerpt from the keynote lecture given at the Mises Institute conference on the themes in Professor van Creveld’s talk.

The background of the state as we know it today is formed by civil war, although at that time, of course, it was not yet called civil. The endless wars between the various principalities, some of them Christian and others Moslem, that took place in the Iberian Peninsula during the fifteenth century; the English Wars of the Roses; the French guerres de religion; and the Thirty Years War which devastated much of Germany and Central Europe–all these resulted in so much death and destruction that, to end them, people were even prepared to have their appetites controlled. As figures such as Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes argued, the only way to bring about peace and quiet was absolute government invested in a single person. And peace and quiet, more than anything else, was what people wanted and what history seemed to demand.

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The Rise of the Grey Tribe 19

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Secession, Strategy

Right now, the most important thing that anarchists, libertarians, anti-state radicals, decentralists, anti-authoritarians, paleos, communitarians, and allied others can be doing is growing the Grey Tribe as a third force in U.S. politics beyond the Red Tribe/Blue Tribe dichotomy.

Read the blog post below and then read Scott Alexander’s analysis of present day mainstream politics. Then read my article “Liberty and Populism” from nearly nine years ago, and you will see that the emerging Grey Tribe is more or less what I predicted a libertarian-oriented third force in U.S. politics would be.

Growing the Grey Tribe is one of the primary steps that needs to be taken towards the application of the ARV-ATS paradigm and strategy (along with continuing to increase popular support for the idea of secession).

Also, notice how this writer describes how the Red Tribe is increasingly being marginalized from the mainstream of U.S. politics, and is instead developing its own regional strongholds, while an emerging Blue Tribe/Grey Tribe conflict is taking place. That fits perfectly with my past predictions as well, i.e. that the Red Tribe would become increasingly irrelevant over time, and that the Blue Tribe would become the de facto norm, with the Grey Tribe emerging as the de facto “real Left” opposition to the totalitarian humanism of the Blue Tribe with the left-libertarian/anarcho-leftoids being caught in the middle.

Pax Vobiscum

Everyone knows America has two cultures. Ever since the bitterly contested 2000 Bush v. Gore election we’ve referred to “Red States” and “Blue States”. The states in question of course aren’t monolithically “Red” or “Blue” but the color describes the dominant culture of the population of those states. Red and Blue are more clearly thought of as tribes. Scott Alexander describes the American Red & Blue tribes in one tiny bit of his terrific #longread about outgroups:

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Rosetta stoning: Social media’s secular Puritans are putting Western civilization on trial Reply

by • Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism

This is an absolute must read.

“That this Twitterstorm happened in Anglo-Saxon countries is not a coincidence, and can be traced directly back to the Protestant – and often Puritan – foundations of these societies.

A tight-knit 17th century New England Puritan commune, with its “worldly saints” – those who proved to themselves that they were predestined by God for salvation by strictly abiding the Scriptures – and the others, excluded, contains many of the same impulses at work today. With religious authority concentrated not in Rome, but in the hands of the “godly” local elders, and the division of a community into the spiritual haves and have-nots, this gave a platform for Pharisaic, and hypocritical spiritual leaders – whose belief in their own superiority was often as egregious a sin as those they condemned – to decide the fates of others with a pointed finger. With outward evidence of God’s favor being the main yardstick of godliness, outcome was valued over motive, conformity over individuality, reputation over substance.

It is unsurprising that the Salem Witch Trials are still the image used when someone is hounded for failing to comply with social norms.

By Igor Ogorodnev

Russia Today

Matt Taylor (Image from twitter.com/mggttaylor)

Matt Taylor (Image from twitter.com/mggttaylor)

It was easy enough to defend Rosetta scientist Matt Taylor from the venomous enforcers of social mores, but even when they lose, the guardians and their enablers are poisoning the public sphere, making people jittery, and damaging Western societies.

The Twitter outcry over Taylor’s Hawaiian shirt was simultaneously the reductio ad absurdum and the generic template for a modern-day media scandal.

For those few innocent enough to have followed only the scientific progress of Rosetta, the first space probe to ever land on a comet last week, here is a quick recap.

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Sharyl Attkisson vs. Obama’s Police State Reply

by • Police State/Civil Liberties

The return of “The Plumbers.” As others have pointed out recently, the Obama Democrats are Nixon Republicans under another name (plus some cultural leftism thrown in to pacify potential critics from the Left).

The former Trotskyite turned Cold War liberal turned Israel Firster neoconservatives took over the intellectual leadership of the Republican Party in the 1970, 80s, and 90 (in collusion with Sun Belt plutocrats, neoliberal economists, military-industrial complex war profiteers, and moral majoritarians), So where did the former Nixon-Rockefeller liberal Republicans go? They went to the Democrats (in collusion with the totalitarian humanists). Hence, today’s Democratic Party is a hybrid of Nixon Republicans from the right and warmed over New Leftists from the left (symbolized in many ways by the present day friendly relationship between Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger, who would have been on opposite sides of the fence forty years ago).

By Justin Raimondo

Antiwar.Com

If the revelations of Edward Snowden didn’t convince you that we’re living in a police state, then Sharyl Attkisson’s book, Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington, is the clincher. Indeed, it is more convincing insofar as the reporting that came out of Snowden’s disclosures never definitively demonstrated how such powerful technology in the hands of unrestrained government has led to the targeting of political opponents by government officials. In Attkisson’s book, the ultimate Orwellian nightmare comes true….

It’s 3:14 in the morning when Sharyl Attkisson – star CBS reporter – is wakened by a noise: her computer has come to life, unbidden – again. It’s been happening a lot lately: and it’s not just her desktop Apple. The other night her Toshiba laptop clicked on all by itself. And her phones are so afflicted with clickings and other mysterious noises as to be unusable.

Attkisson, a 20-year veteran of the CBS newsroom, has been investigating some pretty hot stories: “Fast and Furious,” the code name for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) program that let US guns “walk” over the border and into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, and the Benghazi incident, among others. She knew the administration considered her an adversary (as these emails prove), an obnoxious pit bull out to trip them up, but she never imagined they would go so far as to spy on her. It’s the fall of 2012, and Snowden’s secrets are still under wraps. A friend with a connection to “a three-letter agency” expresses admiration for her coverage of Benghazi-gate and then clues her in:

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Kevin Carson vs. Hans Hermann Hoppe 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right

The ironic thing for me about the Hoppe vs Carson debate is that while I am a big fan of the work of both men, I doubt I would ever get invited to a gathering of either the Property and Freedom Society or the Center for a Stateless Society. I am neither an Austrian economist nor a cultural conservative, so my guess is that I’m out as far as Hoppe is concerned. I am not a cultural leftist or a so-called “social justice warrior” so I am out as far as Carson is concerned (as he has made abundantly clear, lol).

That I said, I find Hoppe’s attacks on both democratist and PC pieties, and Carson’s attacks on vulgar libertarianism and reactionary conservatism, to be amazingly refreshing.

And as a non-universalist, I don’t feel the need to care about the issues that divide these two thinkers.

Homophobic anarcho-monarchism for Hoppeland, and genderqueer mutualism for Carsonland.

By Kevin Carson

Center for a Stateless Society

You may be familiar with Murray Rothbard’s article “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature.” Hans-Hermann Hoppe, beloved eminence grise at LewRockwell.com, takes things a step further and makes belief in human inequality the defining characteristic of right-libertarianism (“A Realistic Libertarianism,” Sept. 30). This isn’t just a hill he’s willing to die on, but a hill on which he’s willing to make his own one-man reenactment of Pickett’s Charge.

The Left… is convinced of the fundamental equality of man, that all men are “created equal.” It does not deny the patently obvious, of course: that there are environmental and physiological differences, i.e., that some people live in the mountains and others on the seaside, or that some men are tall and others short, some white and others black, some male and others female, etc.. But the Left does deny the existence of mental differences or, insofar as these are too apparent to be entirely denied, it tries to explain them away as “accidental.”…

In fact the Left (or at least most members of it) does not deny that there are differences in individual ability and intellect. But never mind that. Hoppe isn’t satisfied to stop there:

…[The right libertarian] realistically notices that libertarianism, as an intellectual system, was first developed and furthest elaborated in the Western world, by white males, in white male dominated societies. That it is in white, heterosexual male dominated societies, where adherence to libertarian principles is the greatest and the deviations from them the least severe (as indicated by comparatively less evil and extortionist State policies). That it is white heterosexual men, who have demonstrated the greatest ingenuity, industry, and economic prowess. And that it is societies dominated by white heterosexual males, and in particular by the most successful among them, which have produced and accumulated the greatest amount of capital goods and achieved the highest average living standards.

Some people might see an internal contradiction between Hoppe’s repeated use of the term “dominated” to describe the role of certain privileged segments of society, and the idea that “libertarian” ideas were formulated by societies based on domination.

But obviously Hoppe does not, since he makes little effort to hide his salivation at the prospect that his avowedly principled belief in self-ownership, non-aggression and rules of initial acquisition will have the effect — just coincidentally, of course — of perpetuating the domination of these same white heterosexual males. So the primary beneficiaries of the ideas of liberty that straight white men invented will be those same straight white men.

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Free speech is so last century: Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’ Reply

by • Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism

Anarchists and libertarians should be the foremost critics of this kind of thing. Unfortunately, many of them are among its primary perpetrators. Says one of these moronic students: “‘The idea that in a free society absolutely everything should be open to debate has a detrimental effect on marginalised groups.’”

This is essentially a restatement of Lenin’s dictum that “freedom is a bourgeois prejudice.”

By Brendan O’Neill

The Spectator

Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.

I was attacked by a swarm of Stepford students this week. On Tuesday, I was supposed to take part in a debate about abortion at Christ Church, Oxford. I was invited by the Oxford Students for Life to put the pro-choice argument against the journalist Timothy Stanley, who is pro-life. But apparently it is forbidden for men to talk about abortion. A mob of furious feministic Oxford students, all robotically uttering the same stuff about feeling offended, set up a Facebook page littered with expletives and demands for the debate to be called off. They said it was outrageous that two human beings ‘who do not have uteruses’ should get to hold forth on abortion — identity politics at its most basely biological — and claimed the debate would threaten the ‘mental safety’ of Oxford students. Three hundred promised to turn up to the debate with ‘instruments’ — heaven knows what — that would allow them to disrupt proceedings.

Incredibly, Christ Church capitulated, the college’s censors living up to the modern meaning of their name by announcing that they would refuse to host the debate on the basis that it now raised ‘security and welfare issues’. So at one of the highest seats of learning on Earth, the democratic principle of free and open debate, of allowing differing opinions to slog it out in full view of discerning citizens, has been violated, and students have been rebranded as fragile creatures, overgrown children who need to be guarded against any idea that might prick their souls or challenge their prejudices. One of the censorious students actually boasted about her role in shutting down the debate, wearing her intolerance like a badge of honour in an Independent article in which she argued that, ‘The idea that in a free society absolutely everything should be open to debate has a detrimental effect on marginalised groups.’

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The Military-Industrial Candidate Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy

By Kelley Vlahos

The American Conservative

jdwfoto / Shutterstock.com

Frontpage / Shutterstock.com

Analysts were right to say that the Republican takeover of Congress bodes well for the war machine: already we see the levers of power slowly shifting in reverse, eager to get back to salad days of post-9/11 wartime spending.

But waiting in the wings, Hillary Clinton just may prove to be what the defense establishment has been waiting for, and more. Superior to all in money, name recognition, and influence, she is poised to compete aggressively for the Democratic nomination for president. She might just win the Oval Office. And by most measures she would be the most formidable hawk this country has seen in a generation.

“It is clear that she is behind the use of force in anything that has gone on in this cabinet. She is a Democratic hawk and that is her track record. That’s the flag she’s planted,” said Gordon Adams, a national security budget expert who was an associate director in President Bill Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget.

Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who has spent her post-service days protesting the war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, is more blunt. “Interventionism is a business and it has a constituency and she is tapping into it,” she tells TAC. “She is for the military industrial complex, and she is for the neoconservatives.”

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The Return of Mormon Polygamy? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Religion and Philosophy, Sexuality and the State

The money quote comes at the end of this article. This is also my prediction:

“In the next 30 or 40 years I have left to live, I expect to see liberal forms of religion die out, and conservative forms become more conservative — this, while the great mass of the American people drift steadily into secularism. Pope Benedict XVI predicted this for Europe, and I think we are only a generation behind our Old World forefathers. What’s going to be interesting is to see in what ways that intensifying conservatism among religious believers expresses itself. I think we may all be in for some surprises”

By Rod Dreher

The American Conservative

LDS Prophet Joseph Smith (R) shows Brigham Young the way (Photo credit: Action Sports Photography/Shutterstock)

LDS Prophet Joseph Smith (R) shows Brigham Young the way (Photo credit: Action Sports Photography/Shutterstock)

Ross Douthat has a thought-provoking reflection on the future of religion, both globally and in America. He says that it’s dangerous to assume that the future will look like the present, only moreso. Which Catholics in 1940 would have foreseen something as epochal as the Second Vatican Council, coming just 20 years later? Who could have anticipated that China is on track to having the largest Christian population in the world, and that Africa would be sending missionaries to the West? But here we are. Douthat calls attention to Will Saletan’s Slate piece saying that the Mormon Church has a clear theological method to change doctrine, has done so (on polygamy and other issues), and will do it on homosexuality eventually. Saletan points out that the Mormons have a history of changing doctrine to make it easier for them to get along in American society.

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