Category: Current Affairs

The Manifesto of the Modern Protester

I found the following in the archives of my first weblog.  The hyperlink has long been dead.  The author is Nicholas Antongiavanni.  Curiously timely in light of the antics of the 'Occupy Wall Street' crowd.  This may  be only  an excerpt.  I cannot find the original document.

1. No ill is so trivial that it can be borne, even for a day; no grievance is so slight that its redress can wait, even for an hour.

2. Until the world is made perfect and justice reigns supreme, getting on with life or transacting any public business is immoral and selfish.

3. Therefore all means (up to and including violence) are justified–nay, obligatory–in stopping the movement of ordinary life until such time as all grievances are redressed.

4. One's moral worth is determined far more by one's social and political opinions than by one's actions or behavior toward others.

5. With one exception: The most noble, moral, and courageous thing one can ever do is participate in (or, better yet, organize) a protest.

6. Therefore, whatever a protest is ostensibly about, it is fundamentally about itself.

7. There are no such things as chance or fortune or bad luck or inherent, irreducible flaws or problems. If something–anything, anywhere–is wrong, unfair, unequal, tragic, inconvenient, annoying, vexatious, or merely perceived to be such, it is not only someone's fault, that someone is profiting unjustly at the expense of someone else. Which is to say, Lenin's "Who/Whom" question–"who" is sticking it to "whom"?–is fundamentally true regarding all human interaction.

7a. All peoples and individuals may therefore be categorized as either oppressors or oppressed.

7b. The oppressed as a whole are a coalition of various oppressed groups. Whatever their apparent differences, they share the same fundamental interests by dint of their all being oppressed.

7c. Whatever the oppressors say about standards of justice or morality is a priori wrong, since it must be presumed to be sophistry concocted for their selfish benefit. The most clever–and most pernicious–of these sophistries is the notion of natural right, i.e., that there is a permanent standard of justice not determined by human choice or opinion. But in truth every professed standard of natural right is a tool of those oppressors who devise and promote it. The only reliable information about justice comes from the oppressed, because they alone are public spirited and pure of heart. Also, because the oppressed alone suffer whereas the oppressed only cause suffering, the oppressed alone can judge what suffering is and how it affects the human soul. Since there is no permanent standard of justice, the response or reaction of the individual soul to any action or actions is the only dispositive factor in determining the justice or injustice of any action. Therefore, justice and injustice are whatever the oppressed say they are.

A Bit of Freedom Comes to Castro’s Island

Fidel Castro came to power in 1959.  In his socialist worker's paradise home ownership was legally forbidden until just now.  Suppose you were 30 in '59, at the age when many are in a position to buy a house for the first time.  Well, now you are 82 with a year to live.  You can buy a house to die in. 

Ain't socialism grand?  That's why leftists want it here, there, and everywhere. 

Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  This being Friday afternoon, I reckon I'll fix me a Cuba Libre and hoist my glass to liberty.

Mark Steyn on the Wall Street ‘Occupiers’

Excerpt:

So they are in favor of open borders, presumably so that exotic Third World peasants can perform the labor to which they are noticeably averse. Of the 13 items on that “proposed list of demands,” Demand Four calls for “free college education,” and Demand Eleven returns to the theme, demanding debt forgiveness for all existing student loans. I yield to no one in my general antipathy to the racket that is American college education, but it’s difficult to see why this is the fault of the mustache-twirling robber barons who head up Global MegaCorp, Inc. One sympathizes, of course. It can’t be easy finding yourself saddled with a six-figure debt and nothing to show for it but some watery bromides from the “Transgender and Colonialism” class. Americans collectively have north of a trillion dollars in personal college debt. Say what you like about Enron and, er, Solyndra and all those other evil corporations, but they didn’t relieve you of a quarter-mil in exchange for a master’s in Maya Angelou. So why not try occupying the dean’s office at Shakedown U?

Can One Consistently be Pro-Life and Pro-Death Penalty?

This topic just won't go away.  Recent example:

[Texas Governor Rick] Perry’s identification as a strong supporter of “a culture of life” and what he called the “ultimate justice” of capital punishment, however, raises some potentially thorny questions about the meaning of being “pro-life.” In campaign season, the question is whether American voters, especially voters who identify as “pro-life,” are going to raise concerns about why Perry’s position doesn’t represent what some Catholic theologians call “a consistent ethic of life,” opposition to both legalized abortion and capital punishment.

The above-mentioned Catholic theologians are most likely just confused.  There is no defensible sense in which it is 'inconsistent' to be both pro-life and pro-death penalty.  I prove this here.

Tea Party ‘Racism’ Again

This from an NPR interview of Julian Bond:

SIEGEL: Some people read into the Tea Party's almost neuralgic reaction to government spending, a sense that white people figure black people benefit disproportionately from federal programs. Do you suspect a racial subtext to that whole argument?

BOND: Absolutely. And I'm not saying that all of the Tea Party members are racist. Not at all. I don't think anybody says that. But I think there's an element of racial animus there and the feeling that some white people have that these black people are now getting something that I'm not getting and I should be getting it, too.

Yet another reason to defund NPR.  Neuralgic reaction to government spending? How obtuse can an obtuse liberal be?  Companion posts:

The Bigger the Government, the More to Fight Over: The NPR Case

National Public Radio Needs Your Support!

'The Tit ofthe State': Krauthammer versus NPR's Totenberg

Britain and the Barbarians

Commentary by Theodore Dalrymple.  You may have noticed that liberals have a exasperatingly lenient and casual attitude toward criminal behavior:

A single example will suffice, but one among many. A woman got into an argument with someone in a supermarket. She called her boyfriend, a violent habitual criminal, "to come and sort him out." The boyfriend was already on bail on another charge and wore an electronic tag because of another conviction. [. . .]  The boyfriend arrived in the supermarket and struck a man a heavy blow to the head. He fell to the ground and died of his head injury. When told that he had got the "wrong" man, the assailant said he would have attacked the "right" one had he not been restrained. He was sentenced to serve not more than 30 months in prison. Since punishments must be in proportion to the seriousness of the crime, a sentence like this exerts tremendous downward pressure on sentences for lesser, but still serious, crimes. 

So several things need to be done, among them the reform and even dismantlement of the educational and social-security systems, the liberalization of the labor laws, and the much firmer repression of crime.

The sentence I bolded is very important. This is why a ban on the death penalty is very foolish besides being morally obtuse.  But there is no common sense on the Left, so much so that contemporary liberalism is arguably more of a mental aberration than a cogent  position on social and political questions.

Attacking the Messenger

Standard and Poor's downgrading of the credit worthiness of the U. S. government from AAA to AA+ should come as no surprise to anyone.  We all knew that current levels of debt are unsustainable.  So what do Obama and Geithner and their shills in the liberal media do?  They blame the messenger for the ill tidings he delivers.

They do the same with the Tea Partiers.  The central concern of the Tea Partiers is fiscal responsibility:  "There is one common thread that is uniting the one million plus people who protested on April 15th, 2009 at over 850 Tea Parties across this great country. That common thread is that we all want fiscal responsibility with our tax dollars."

So what does the Left do?  Instead of facing reality, it launches scurrilous attacks on the messengers.  They are racists, terrorists, hostage-takers, astro-turfers. 

But what is to be done?  This from the WSJ:

Despite S&P's opinion, there is no chance that America will default on its debts. The real importance of the downgrade will depend on the political reaction it inspires.

If the response is denial and blaming the credit raters, then the U.S. will continue on its current road to more downgrades and eventually to Greece. What has already become a half-decade of lost growth will turn into a lost decade or more.

If the response is to escape the debt trap by the stealth route of inflation—a path now advocated by many of the same economists who promoted the failed spending stimulus of 2009—then the U.S. could spur a dollar crisis and jeopardize its reserve currency status.

The better answer—the only road back to fiscal sanity and AAA status—is to reverse the economic policies of the late Bush and Obama years. The financial crisis followed by the Keynesian and statist revival of the last four years have brought the U.S. to this downgrade and will lead to inevitable decline. The only solution is to return to the classical, pro-growth economic ideas that have revived America at other moments of crisis.

Bill Clinton, the Race Card, and Voter ID

Race Card - Bill Clinton Say it ain't so, Bill.  This from the The Wall Street Journal:

The last time Bill Clinton tried to play the race card, it blew up his wife's primary campaign in South Carolina. Well, the Voice is back, this time portraying the nationwide movement to pass voter ID laws as the return of Jim Crow.

"There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today," the former President warned a student group last month.

I find this simply astonishing.  How can any reasonable person find the Voter ID question worthy of debate? 

Anyone with common sense must be able to appreciate that voting must be conducted in an orderly manner, and that only citizens who have registered to vote and have satisfied the minimal requirements of age, etc. are to be allowed into the voting booth. Given the propensity to fraud, it is therefore necessary to verify the identities of those who present themselves at the polling place. To do this, voters must be required to present a government-issued photo ID card, a driver's license being only one example of such. It is a reasonable requirement and any reasonable person should be able to see it as such.

Why are liberals so stupid?  The darker surmise, of course, is that they are not stupid but cunning and unprincipled: they want voter fraud.  They want to win at all costs, fraud or no fraud.

And please notice how leftists like Clinton will not hesitate to commit a tort on the English language  if it serves their purpose.  Clinton implies that an identity check would limit the franchise of blacks.  Preposterous. There is also the slam against blacks.  Those of my acquaintance don't live under bridges and they do manage to do things like cash checks.

Clinton famously stumbled over the meaning of 'is.'  Apparently he is equally challenged by the meaning of  'franchise.'

A Big Victory for the Tea Party

Call it Schadenfreude, but it was certainly a pleasure to wake up this morning to the gnashing of leftist teeth over last night's Tea Party triumph.  The howling of the lefties is as music to my ears.  In his latest outburst, Paul Krugman speaks of "extortion."  Others speak of 'hostage-taking,' 'terrorism,' 'Taliban tactics,' 'arson.'  One commentator likened the Tea Partiers to Hezbollah.

This absurdly extremist rhetoric lets us know that for the Left this is a war.  But then how can we treat it as a civil debate?  They are lying about us blatantly and brazenly.  (Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist said on C-Span the other night that Republicans want to destroy Social Security.)  So we must tell the truth about them and gird our loins for the next round.  Meanwhile a bit of celebration is in order.