Defending constitutionally protected free speech is at the heart of fighting the latest assault on political rights by President Joseph Biden’s Justice Department. Special counsel Jack Smith’s second indictment of former President Donald Trump would gut the First Amendment in an attempt to drive Biden’s main rival for the presidency out of the 2024 race and put him in jail.
Related: MAGA Communism
How Dersh would defend the Orange Man.
Die Fehler sind alle schon da, sie warten nur darauf, gemacht zu werden. (Savielly Tartakower)
The mistakes are already all out there just waiting to be made. (tr. BV)
Substack latest. It opens like this:
Our friend Malcolm Pollack, riffing on some complaints of mine about Michael Anton's talk of natural rights, wrote the following:
Rights are normative in their essence, while Nature simply is. Therefore, I see only two possibilities:
1) “Natural” rights flow from an intrinsic source of normative authority. Since brute and indifferent Nature cannot be such a source, then for such rights to exist in themselves, as opposed to being mere conventions and intuitions, requires the existence of God. They are therefore “natural” rights in virtue of our nature qua creations of a transcendent and normatively authoritative Deity.
2) There is in fact no such authoritative source, and so natural rights are nonsense. (Upon stilts.) It may be in our nature to have the intuitions we do about possessing such rights, but it is a category error to imagine that rights themselves can originate in the material world.
In response, I pointed out that this is far too quick inasmuch as there are Aristotelians who seek to ground norms in nature herself. These thinkers do not accept what to Pollack and the modern mind seems self-evident, namely, that there is a gap between the normative and the factual that disallows any derivation of normative claims from factual ones. One prominent Aristotelian is Philippa Foot. So let's see what she has to say.
Disasters should be named after disasters. The name should be Hillary.
Episode 16 (14 August 2023). RFK Jr. explains Ukraine, bio-labs, and who killed his uncle.
Substack latest.
The philosopher at the hour of death.
A symposium on Gene Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action.
A reason, perhaps the main reason, may be gleaned from the following graphic:
The above stats are clearly in the ball park according to every study I have read. Heather Mac Donald has done outstanding work on this topic. I refer you to her.
One reason why leftists won't enforce existing laws is because (1) doing so would have a "disproportional impact on blacks," and (2) such disproportionality violates the value of 'equity' to which leftists subscribe.
Leftists (mis)use 'equity' to mean equality of outcome or result. 'Equity' is at or near the top of the Left's axiological hierarchy: a high or the highest value to be striven for in our social and political arrangements.
Someone who accepts both (1) and (2) will be loathe to enforce existing laws against homicide and other crimes.
Now (1) is undoubtedly true. The reason is simple: blacks as a group commit more crimes than the other groups mentioned. And so it follows that their incarceration rates are higher. This is so even after we subtract off unjust convictions due to racial bias among jurors, and the malfeasance of corrupt judges, overzealous careerist prosecutors, and bad cops.
(2), however, is undoubtedly false. The reason is that 'equity' is a disvalue, not a value. The word as used by leftists is a neologism that conflates the distinction between equality in legitimate and attainable senses (equality of opportunity, equality before the law, treating like cases in a like manner, and such related ideas as due process which are the glory of the Anglo-American legal system) and, on the other hand, equality of outcome, which is unattainable except by police-state means, and even then not sustainable for long: life's natural hierarchies will inevitably reassert themselves.
It might go like this: the USA under the yoke of 'woke' continues to weaken itself until it collapses under the effect of its own decadence in synergy with external attack and invasion by its geopolitical enemies. It is a good bet that this is in our near future, within ten years. It is not inevitable, but there is no reason to be sanguine about the prospects of push-back. The oligarchic deep state will do everything and anything to crush Donald J. Trump and will of course if necessary attempt an 'Ecuadorean solution.'
If the USA collapses, then the natural hierarchy of aptitude, ability, resoluteness, etc, will have reasserted itself. We will then both collectively and individually face the Islamist-Sino-Russki trilemma: either embrace and affirm the new order, or accept political-cum-religious dhimmitude, or 'be put to the sword,' if not literally then by cancellation of livelihood and incarceration.
There will never be, and their cannot be, equality of outcome or result over the long haul because of the different aptitudes and abilities and interests of different peoples and groups of people.
The example of Maximilian Kolbe
Thomas Mann: Diaries 1918-1939 (Abrams, 1982, tr. R & C Winston), p. 194:
I love this process by which each passing day is captured, not only in its impressions, but also, at least by suggestion, its intellectual direction and content as well, less for the purpose of rereading and remembering than for taking stock, reviewing, maintaining awareness, achieving perspective . . . .
I agree, although for me rereading and remembering have as much value as the taking stock, etc. There is the pleasure of writing but also that of rereading and rethinking what one has written.
As for remembering a passage such as one above, its notation allows me to pull the book off the shelf and return to the pleasurable semantic penumbra which is the quotation's context.
This Substack piece by N. S. Lyons is very long but very good. I invite my top commenters — I won't name names lest I inadvertently omit someone — to weigh in on it or parts of it. The drift of the piece is announced early on:
. . .when it comes to the most fundamental political questions, China and the United States are not diverging but converging to become more alike.
In fact, I can already predict and describe the winner set to prevail in this epochal competition between these two fiercely opposed national systems. In this soon-to-be triumphant system…
Despite a rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism and “democracy,” the elite class deeply distrusts and fears the people over whom it rules. These elites have concentrated themselves into a separate oligarchic political body focused on prioritizing and preserving their rule and their own overlapping set of shared interests. Wracked by anxiety, they strive constantly to maximize their control over the masses, rationalizing a need to forcefully maintain stability in the face of dangerous threats, foreign and domestic. Everything is treated as an emergency. “Safety” and “security” have become be the watchwords of the state, and of society generally.
Who can deny that given the events of the last few days?
Deeper in, the following passage caught my attention due to my interest in Carl Schmitt:
Across the West, the managerial elite therefore immediately went into a frenzy over the danger allegedly presented by “populism” and launched their own revolt, declaring a Schmittian state of exception in which all the standard rules and norms of democratic politics could be suspended in order to respond to this existential “crisis.” In fact, some began to question whether democracy itself might have to be suspended in order to save it.
“It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses,” New York Time Magazine journalist James Traub thundered with an iconic 2016 piece in Foreign Policy magazine. This quickly became a view openly and proudly embraced among the managerial elite, who no longer hesitated to express their frustration with democracy and its voters. (“Did I say ‘ignorant’? Yes, I did. It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them,” Traub declared.) “Too Much Democracy is Killing Democracy,” is how a 2019 article published by neocon rag The Bulwark put it, arguing for Western nations to take their “bitter technocratic medicine” and establish “a political, social, and cultural compact that makes participation by many unnecessary.”
My posts on Carl Schmitt are collected here. Most relevant is perhaps A Good Summary of the Political Thinking of Carl Schmitt. (Written 17 February 2019)
Leftists have something like the Midas touch. Everything King Midas touched turned to gold; most of what leftists touch turns to crap. NYC and San Fran are prime examples. No surprise that these crapholes are bleeding population 'big time.'
The Asians, bien-pensant 'liberals' apparently, blamc 'society' and not the racism of the black teens.
More than a soupçon of absurdity is added to the story by the fact that "Cops are calling it a hate crime – something the Youngs say shouldn't be the case."
I rather doubt that the Youngs understand why it should not be a 'hate crime,' but Nat Hentoff does.
An oldie but a goodie less than six minutes long by the late, great civil libertarian. We of the Coalition of the Sane and Reasonable need to punch back hard against the willfully self-enstupidated wokesters who promote 'hate crime' blather. As Hentoff points out, 'hate crime' is thought crime.
Here is a recent example of what we are up against:
“Under the proposed statute, ‘intimidate and harass’ can mean whatever the victim, or the authorities, want them to mean. The focus is on how the victim feels rather than on a clearly defined criminal act. This is a ridiculously vague and subjective standard,” he said.
“The absence of intent makes no difference under this law. You are still guilty of the crime because the victim felt uncomfortable.
“The bill will lead to the prosecution of conservatives, pastors, and parents attending a school board meeting for simply expressing their opposition to the liberal agenda,” Kallman said.
The proposed statute is obviously insane and anti-civilizational as any reasonable person will immediately discern. Like it or not we are now in the Age of Feeling.
Let it be noted en passant that 'liberal agenda' is not quite the right phrase; 'hard' Left' and 'woke' are more fitting adjectives. To say it again: don't confuse a classical with a contemporary liberal. The latter slouches toward the Gomorrah of wokery. A pox be upon all who so slouch.
The Asian family story here.
We all know it's a joke, a joke worthy of that all-time jokester and comedian, Lavrenti Beria.
Beria would have appreciated AG Garland's "sudden" naming of a Special Counsel to look into Hunter Biden, this after years of saying no SC was needed. He also would have appreciated that the Special Counsel (SC) named is none other than US Attorney David Weiss (another miserable Trump appointment), who "investigated" Hunter for the past three three years: remember the laptop? On top of it, Beria would have appreciated how Garland has violated the law by picking Weiss; the law requires that the SC come from outside of the government, certainly not be a DOJ Attorney and the one, on top of it all, who has protected the Biden Crime Family (BCF) for these past three years. Let us not forget that Weiss masterminded that other joke: the "plea deal" for Hunter which would have allowed that crackhead to skate on serious tax fraud and gun charges that would have put any of us in the slammer for years.
Well, of course, it turned out some honest judge threw out the plea deal as it contained promises of, in essence, permanent immunity for Hunter from any other prosecutions.
Read it all. Garland & Co. see themselves and their 'president' as above the law while piously intoning, "No man is above the law, not even the president of the United States."
