Political Ponerology – Page 7 – Maverick Philosopher

The Charlottesville Lie

The only sure way to stop a leftist from lying would be by stopping him from talking. The Biden administration is one of the most, or the most, mendacious in our history. Copycat that he is, Biden saw the Clintons and Obama get away with it and resolved to go them one better. A brazen liar and serial plagiarist, truth decay has rotted his soul. Will Nancy Pelosi pray for him? Dennis Prager:

Most people will tell that you that President Trump called Neo-Nazis “fine people” during his famous press conference following the Charlottesville riot. But he never did. So, why do so many believe it? CNN political analyst Steve Cortes explains how the Charlottesville lie happened and why it’s so dangerous. See the video here and then pass it on to family and friends. Then after they’ve seen it, ask them if they still believe “the lie”?

Under six minutes.

Reading Now: Alex Marlow, Breaking Biden

Subtitle: "Exposing the hidden forces and secret money machine behind Joe Biden, his family, and his administration." (Threshold, 2023). Excerpt:

Intellectually, Republicans understand that to have a nation, you need a border. [. . .] But the establishment isn't going to solve a problem if the solution is going to cost them a lot of (any?) money, even if the fate of our nation depends on it.

Unless, of course, we are talking about Ukraine's border with Russia. Then it's essential, heroic even, to have a border and defend it. After all, that border isn't keeping out cheap workers and future voters. (p. 249)

The RINOs and the Democrats are one in that they both want open U. S. borders, albeit for different reasons. The RINOs want cheap labor while the Dems want future votes. Thus talk of a 'uniparty' is apt. The RINOs are in cahoots with the woke globalist plutocrats and have no concern for American workers or American culture. They think they will always be able to find sanctuary somewhere with their wealth and connections, and in the meantime they are content to be lapdogs of the Left and continue to receive invitations to the toniest Beltway soirees. The 'cuckservative' label fits them nicely. Civility and 'character' are so important to Mitt Romney, for example, that he refuses to support Trump because of his 'bad character' while ignoring that of Biden which is far worse. Liz Cheney is another disgusting specimen of this Never-Trumper species.

Marlow sums up his book here.

Kathy Hochul, Leftist Idiot

Head over to Malcolm Pollack's place for some sensible commentary. Meat quote:

Political thinkers from Hobbes to Schmitt have understood that the fundamental principle that legitimizes the power of the State is the reciprocal obligation of obedience and protection. We cede to the State the awesome power of coercion by threat of violence, and in return we expect a guarantee of our public and personal security. This means that when the State abandons its side of that obligation, it is the right, and the duty, of the citizenry to secure their own protection.

That's right. It follows that citizens have the right to keep and bear arms. The rate of exercise of that right stands in inverse relation to the failure of the State to guarantee our public and personal security. The more the government fails to do what it is supposed to do, chiefly, protect life, liberty, and property, the more citizens will arm themselves.

From this you can see just how preternaturally stupid (or deliberately self-enstupidated) libs, lefties, and wokesters are. Presumably, they want fewer guns in civilian hands.* Their policies, however, incentivize gun ownership by Joe and Jane Citizen.

In a piece defending Viktor Orban against the mindless charge of being a 'fascist dictator,' Rod Dreher writes,

Unlike London, Paris, Washington, New York, Brussels, and elsewhere, street crime is very low in the Hungarian capital — and that’s not because the police are everywhere.

Think about it: just this week, the governor of New York [Kathy Hochul] ordered the state’s National Guard troops to patrol New York City’s subways to crack down on violent crime there. This never, ever happens in Budapest. Ever. A British friend traveling this week in New York said the scene outside his lodgings in Manhattan is appalling, with scores of African men — illegal aliens who came through Mexico — loitering on the street and urinating in public. That doesn’t happen in Budapest either, because Hungary is a country that controls its borders.

Read it all.

__________

*And so do I. It can't be good to have all sorts of untrained people packing heat. I defend 2A rights, but I would never try to persuade people to arm themselves. Gun ownership is a grave responsibility. You have to get training, you have to practice, and you have to know the law. Before you even think about buying a gun, you need to develop situational awareness. As the noted trainer Steve Tarani says, "If you have to go to guns, there has been a failure in situational awareness." That is a very slight exaggeration, but not by much. Another trainer, retired Navy SEAL Chris Sajnog here discusses ten ways to improve your SA.

What is the worst enemy of SA? The smartphone. Don't be a dumbass with a smartphone. Don't walk around with your head up your app!

Sam Francis on Anarcho-Tyranny

From a 1994 Chronicles article:

This condition, which in some of my columns I have called “anarcho-tyranny,” is essentially a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites: the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety. And, it is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent.

[. . .]

In fact, we criminalize the innocent all the time in the United States today—through asset seizure laws that confiscate your property even before you’re convicted of possessing illegal drugs; through mandatory brainwashing programs designed to reconstruct your mind with “sensitivity training,” “human relations,” and rehabilitation if you display politically incorrect ideas on certain occasions; through prosecuting people like Bernhard Goetz who use guns to defend themselves; and through gun control laws in general. Under anarcho-tyranny, gun control laws do not usually target criminals who use guns to commit their crimes. The usual suspects are noncriminals who own, carry, or use guns against criminals—like the Korean store owners in Los Angeles or like Mr. Goetz, who spent several months in jail after picking off the three hoodlums who were making ready to liberate him from life and limb.

Sound familiar? That was 30 years ago. Things are worse now. And you are still a Democrat?

How many of you remember Bernie Goetz?

Stop Concealing Soviet Crimes

Why no equal time for Soviet crime? An explanation.

If January 6th was an Insurrection . . .

. . . how long until mere disagreement with the ruling class and their regime is deemed insurrection?

Authoritarianism from the Left

Michael Anton

I solicit comments on the following excerpts (bolding added):

The greatest factor in hastening the end of American-style democracy over the past 125 years (at least) has been increasing government centralization and administrative rule. To answer the question posed by Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein’s edited volume, Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America: it already did happen here! The project all along has been, and still is, to end politics. That is, to foreclose as illegitimate public debate and disagreement on issues allegedly settled by science and administered via expertise. As our personal freedom to abuse our bodies, sate our appetites, and neglect our duties ever expands, our actual freedom to govern ourselves and determine our collective future radically contracts. The people writing these ostensible democratic laments are all in the intellectual lineage of those who brought us to this point. Their aim is to complete the project. Trump’s aim—however inchoate or implicit—is to reverse it. Who’s the real anti-democrat?

Earlier in the piece we read:

In any event, it’s rich to read the Left fret about the end of “democracy” when they have spent so much conscious effort undermining its necessary preconditions. They have done so, I think, for two reasons. First, they long ago came to equate liberty with license. Philosophically, once nature was discarded as the standard by which to guide and judge human life, the satisfaction of appetites became the only conceivable end. Hence in matters of personal morality, the contemporary Left is a curious combination of libertine and censor. Any physical—especially sexual or pharmaceutical—act that does not draw blood or pick a pocket is permitted. There are no mores that are simply necessary to society or to personal well-being. If you’re not directly harming someone else, then no one has any business even passing judgment on what you do. But you deserve to be crushed for thinking or saying the wrong thing—especially for passing judgment! Witness the recent massive freak-out over Penn Law professor Amy Wax’s praise of the once-commonplace concept of “bourgeois norms.” How dare she!

My take on Amy Wax:

Amy Wax on Free Speech

I am afraid Professor Wax does not appreciate what she is up against. She writes,

It is well documented that American universities today, more than ever before, are dominated by academics on the left end of the political spectrum. How should these academics handle opinions that depart, even quite sharply, from their “politically correct” views? The proper response would be to engage in reasoned debate — to attempt to explain, using logic, evidence, facts, and substantive arguments, why those opinions are wrong. This kind of civil discourse is obviously important at law schools like mine, because law schools are dedicated to teaching students how to think about and argue all sides of a question. But academic institutions in general should also be places where people are free to think and reason about important questions that affect our society and our way of life — something not possible in today’s atmosphere of enforced orthodoxy.

Of course I agree with this brave little sermon. But it is naive to think that it will have any effect on the leftist termites that have infested the universities. They don't give a rat's ass about the values Wax so ably champions. Wax doesn't seem to realize that civil discourse is impossible with people with whom one is at war.

Liberals Need to Preach What They Practice

Liberals who have amounted to something in life through advanced study, hard work, deferral of gratification, self-control, accepting responsibility for their actions and the rest of the old-fashioned virtues are often strangely hesitant to preach these conservative virtues to those most in need of them. These liberals live Right and garner the benefits, but think Left.

They do not make excuses for themselves, but they do for others. And what has worked for them they do not think will work for others. Their attitude is curiously condescending. If we conservatives used 'racist' as loosely and irresponsibly as they do, we might even tag their attitude 'racist.'

It is the 'racism' of reduced expectations.

It is not enough to practice what you preach; you must also preach what you practice.

Law professors Amy Wax and and Larry Alexander have recently come under vicious fire for pointing out the obvious: many of our social problems are rooted in a collapse of middle-class cultural norms. But it is a good bet that the leftist scum who attacked them live by, and owe their success to, those very same 'racist' norms. It is an equally good bet that they impose them on their children.

Now let me see if I understand this. The bourgeois values and norms are 'racist' because blacks are incapable of studying, working hard, deferring gratification, controlling their exuberance, respecting legitimate authority and the like?

But surely blacks are capable of these things. So who are the 'racists' here? The conservatives who want to help blacks by teaching them values that are not specifically white, but universal in their usefulness, or the leftists who think blacks incapable of assimilating such values?

Or is it something like the opposite of 'cultural appropriation'? Is it that whites violate and destroy black 'culture' by imposing on blacks white values that blacks cannot appropriate and turn to use? But of course the values are not 'white' but universally efficacious.

Just as self-control helps keep me alive, self-control would have kept Trayvon Martin alive if had had any. And the same goes for Michael Brown of Ferguson.

Higher Education or Higher Enstupidation?

In case you haven't yet had your fill of academic insanity, take a gander at Heather MacDonald's Higher Ed's Latest Taboo is 'Bourgeois Norms.'

Apparently, such norms are white-supremacist, misogynistic, and homophobic. And what norms might these be? Why, "hard work, self-discipline, marriage and respect for authority."

Apparently you are a 'racist' if you advise blacks to "Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Eschew substance abuse and crime."

As stupid as this is, it perhaps gives us a clue as to the 'liberal' criterion of racism: Something is racist if it is something blacks can't do. So deferring gratification, working hard, saving and investing, refraining from looting, showing respect for legitimate authority are all racist because blacks as a group have a hard time doing these things.

To promote and recommend these life-enhancing values and norms is to 'dis' their 'culture.' After all, all cultures are equally good, equally conducive to human flourishing, right?

Are these the implications here? I'm just asking. I am trying to understand. I am trying to get into the liberal head. So far it seems like diving into a bucket of shit. Or am I being unfair? Am I missing something?

The Greatest Risk We are Taking

Pat Buchanan warned us six years ago.

Substack latest.

Suicide by Illegal Immigration

Such suicide is what the leaders of the present-day Democrat Party promote. They are out to destroy the United States of America. It is perfectly plain that diversity is not our strength despite their asinine and oft-repeated asseverations to the contrary. Diversity sans unity = decline, downfall, disaster. 'Asinine' is exactly the right word, deriving as it does from the Latin asinus meaning donkey, the jackass being the symbol of the Democrat Party, a party once respectable, now despicable. The CPUSA couldn't win under the hammer and sickle, but are now winning in their successor incarnation under the sign of the jackass upon which is mounted the demented puppet Joey B.

As for the useful idiots who follow the leaders, they are an ovine and bovine bunch who need to be reminded that it is not 1960 anymore.

The graphic below is crude and I would prefer not to have to post such things, but the time for unrestricted civility is over. Civility is for the civil, not for political enemies who pose an existential threat, a threat not merely to our lives, but also to our way of life.

Annus Horribilis in Excelsis

That is what 2024 is shaping up to be. Ben Shapiro:

All of which means that 2024 is going to be the most insane and ugly presidential election in American history. And that’s saying a lot, since 1968 and 2020 are both years that existed. Under what circumstances, precisely, would Democrats accept the result of a Trump election? Under what circumstances, precisely, would Republicans accept the result of a Biden election?

The weaponization of the legal system creates an all-consuming fire, burning everything in its path. There is simply no 2024 result likely to result in anything but complete—and perhaps violent—chaos at this point.

One quibble, though. Shapiro ignores an important difference between Democrats and Republicans. The Dems, not inaptly describable as successor commies, are under party discipline: you can expect them all to toe the party line. There is no counterpart of the RINO among them. The Republicans, by contrast, are lousy with RINOs and cuckservative lapdogs of the Left.

To put it in terms of political 'circularity': the Dems circle the wagons while the Repubs favor the circular firing squad. And the Libertarians (Losertarians)? They expend themselves in the circle jerk.

Since Dementocrat scum will do anything to stop Trump, I predict that they will succeed, even if they have to 'raise' John Gotti to do so. And the Republicans, 'conservatives' who manage to conserve nothing, will acquiesce in the result and go back to writing learned articles about the Constitution and the rule of law.

Please disagree with me on this. I don't want to believe it.

Happy New Year!

(Since some of you suffer from irony deficiency, I mean that ironically. I will be happy to explain the pun too, if that is necessary.)

Jewish Disproportionality!

Not even the Hamas sexual atrocities recounted on the basis of a NYT report by Alex Berenson justify Jewish disproportionality:

On Thursday, The New York Times recounted in awful detail the sexual atrocities the men of Gaza committed during Hamas’s October 7 raid into Israel.

I know Jeffrey Gettleman, who had the piece’s lead byline. He is a serious reporter who served with distinction for many years in Africa. He doesn’t exaggerate.

Which is good, because the Times’s descriptions of these crimes nearly beggar belief. They go beyond rape, or gang rape, or even the execution of prisoners. As described by witnesses who survived, and confirmed by video and forensic evidence, Hamas’s attackers turned murder and torture into can-you-top-this sport:

The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

—

Every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

Moral equivalence, anyone?

Political Opponents or Political Enemies?

If you are among the sane, reasonable, and morally decent, then you ought to consider leftists, and this includes today's Democrats, as political enemies. Here is one reason among many:

Earlier this year, RCP [RealClear Politics] learned that it was one of many news sites that appeared on an advertising blacklist put out by a group called Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British NGO that advises advertisers and search engine companies. GDI labeled RealClear Politics as a high-risk news site for disinformation. All because we include voices they don’t like. That we pair such voices with those they agree with doesn’t seem to matter to them.

Alles klar?

The Psychology of the Pollyanna and the Political Ponerology of Leftism

We all know pollyannas. They are more often women than men and the charm of these lovable ladies is in no small measure due to their openness to the positive in people and things and their seeming incapacity to discern the negative and evil. A most extreme example has come to my attention, one

. . . Natali Yohanan, “a 38-year-old mother of two, who never locked the doors of her house in Nir Oz, a kibbutz near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. There wasn’t even a key.” And then: “On Oct. 7, a Gazan woman walked through Yohanan’s unlocked front door and made herself at home for hours, eating, singing, and watching Netflix. Sometimes, the woman served drinks to armed terrorists who stopped by for a break from the massacre they were conducting outside.” Ms. Yohanan speaks of the impact of 10/7 on her in the 10-minute video below.

Watch the video and then ask yourself the question that I ask myself: how could an adult Israeli be so naïve, so trusting, so lacking in insight into human nature? The woman is not stupid; how then explain this blind spot? At one point Yohanan, a teacher, says that all children are good. Plainly false! Has this teacher never been on a schoolyard? Children can be vicious in a way that no animal can be vicious. That is why they need to be socialized and, yes, indoctrinated, but in correct and ameliorative doctrines. (That 'indoctrination' is a dirty word is another piece of stupidity that you are well-advised in dropping.)

Yohanan is an Israeli. Surely she knows something about how her state came to be and why it came to be. Her kibbutz is right next to the Gaza Strip. Did she know nothing of Hamas and their genocidal intentions? They make plain their antisemitism and their anti-Zionism in their charter. Does she know nothing about Islam? (See this excellent article by Raymond Ibrahim.)

As I say elsewhere, homo homini lupus does not capture the depth of human depravity, and is an insult to the wolves to boot. Man is not a wolf to man; man is a demon to man.

I am touching upon one of the roots, perhaps the deepest, of the delusional Left, namely the insane notion that everyone, deep down inside, is basically good. Not only is this conceit a characteristically leftist bit of delusionality, it also serves to distinguish conservative from leftist. No conservative accepts that crazy conceit.

And let's not forget that those who accept the crazy conceit that people are basically good refute their own false theory by being the most murderous of all. In the 20th century alone communist governments have murdered some 85-100 million people according to The Black Book of Communism.

Radical Islam’s Threat to the Left

Substack latest.

Why don't leftists — who obviously do not share the characteristic values and beliefs of Islamists — grant what is spectacularly obvious to everyone else, namely, that radical Islam poses a grave threat to what we in the West cherish as civilization, which includes commitments to free speech, open inquiry, separation of church and state, freedom of religion, freedom to reject religion, universal suffrage, the emancipation of women, opposition to cruel and unusual penal practices, and so on? In particular, why don't leftists recognize the grave threat radical Islam poses to them? Why do leftists either deny the threat or downplay its gravity? Given their atheism and pronounced libertine ‘wobble,’ they would be among the first to lose their heads under Islamic law (Sharia).

Here is a quickly-composed list of twelve related reasons based on my own thinking and reading and on discussions with friends.