A Timid Plea for Freedom of Speech

JULIUS EVOLA wrote a fascinating introduction to Pali Buddhism. You say Evola was a fascist? Well, Jean-Paul Sartre was a Stalinist; Gottlob Frege was an anti-Semite (according to Michael Dummett); Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt were members of the Nazi Party. Are those affiliations good reasons to not read these great authors? Not to a sane person. Only to an anti-civilizational termite.
 
No book burning, no de-platforming! Stand up for free speech and open inquiry! To hell with the Left and its index librorum prohibitorum.
 
To hell with the Democrat Party.

A Gun is not a Talisman and a ‘Liberal’ can be a Bigot

A gun is not a talisman. Its mere presence won't protect you. To paraphrase Col. Jeff Cooper, owning a gun no more makes you armed than owning a guitar makes you a musician. You will need to get training. In the course of this training and numerous trips to the shooting range and gun stores for ammo, etc., you will find yourself associating whether you like it or not with rednecks, country folk, blue collar types, cops, ex-cops, military, ex-military, church-goers and other subspecies of the people Obama derisively referred to as "clingers" and Hillary as "deplorables."
 
The danger here for 'liberals' is that they will learn that, in the main, these are decent people.  'Liberal' bigotry fueled by hate and ignorance will stand refuted by experience. This may cause such painful cognitive dissonance that they may no longer be able to remain bien-pensant 'liberals.'
 
They have been forewarned.

An Oligarchic Pathocracy

That may well be what we have going in the good old USA at present. You decide.

Oligarchy: a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes. (Merriam-Webster)

Pathocracy: "A system of government . . . wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people." (Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of Totalitarianism,  Red Pill Press, 2022, p.  195.)

What are some characteristics of normal people? Normal people understand and can explain the difference between men and women.  Normal people grasp instantly the unfairness of allowing biological males to compete in female sporting events.   Normal people understand that "Words mean things" (Rush Limbaugh) and must not be hijacked to Left coast destinations. Normal people have moral sense enough to know that it is wrong to lie in the manner of Joe Biden, Alejandro Mayorkas and the rest of the pathocrats in control of the country.  Normal people understand that 'equity' is a sham construct designed to elide the self-evident distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.

From the Pathocracy Blog:

Pathocracy

from Greek pathos, “feeling, pain, suffering”; and kratos, “rule”

A totalitarian form of government in which absolute political power is held by a psychopathic elite, and their effect on the people is such that the entire society is ruled and motivated by purely pathological values.

A pathocracy can take many forms and can insinuate itself covertly into any seemingly just system or ideology. As such it can masquerade under the guise of a democracy or theocracy as well as more openly oppressive regimes.

Characteristics

1. suppression of individualism and creativity.
2. impoverishment of artistic values.
3. impoverishment of moral values; a social structure based on self-interest and one-upmanship, rather than altruism.
4. fanatical ideology; often a corrupted form of a valid viable ‘trojan’ ideology which is perverted into a pathological form, bearing little resemblance to the substance of the original.
5. intolerance and suspicion of anyone who is different, or who disagrees with the state.
6. centralized control.
7. widespread corruption.
8. secret activities within government, but surveillance of the general population. (In contrast, a healthy society would have transparent government processes, and respect for privacy of the individual citizen).
9. paranoid and reactionary government.
10. excessive, arbitrary, unfair and inflexible legislation; the power of decision making is reduced/removed from the citizens’ everyday lives.
11. an attitude of hypocrisy and contempt demonstrated by the actions of the ruling class, towards the ideals they claim to follow, and towards the citizens they claim to represent.
12. controlled media, dominated by propaganda.
13. extreme inequality between the richest and poorest.
14. endemic use of corrupted psychological reasoning such as paramoralisms, conversive thinking and doubletalk.
15. rule by force and/or fear of force.
16. people are considered as a ‘resource’ to be exploited (hence the term “human resources”), rather than as individuals with intrinsic human worth.
17. spiritual life is restricted to inflexible and indoctrinare schemes. Anyone attempting to go beyond these boundaries is considered a heretic or insane, and therefore dangerous.
18. arbitrary divisions in the population (class, ethnicity, creed) are inflamed into conflict with one another.
19. suppression of free speech – public debate, demonstration, protest.
20. violation of basic human rights, for example: restriction or denial of basic life necessities such as food, water, shelter; detainment without charge; torture and abuse; slave labour.

Why the Left Won’t Budge on Anything

This from a long-time reader with my comments in blue:
 
Really enjoy your site . . . .
 
From north of the border, I'm watching the abortion chaos and the Machiavellian machinations of court document leakers. 
 
Since having a child, I have come to the admittedly not the most logically airtight position on the matter: if a "fetus" exhibits "human" behaviours, it is in fact a baby and not a "clump of cells." After witnessing ultrasounds, and reading about thumb sucking, laughing, and other quintessentially human and very recognizable behaviours — say, around 17-18 weeks — that's the line I draw. It's a timeframe which, while not exact, is a demarcation point after which I'd find any termination so-called, ugly, ghoulish, and morally indefensible.  
 
I ran this by a few people I know on the left, thinking I could perhaps find common ground. And no, I didn't. They won't concede any territory. And my position is the European one for the most part. And that means your left has not only caught up to that continent, but in some ways has eclipsed it in its lunacy. 
 
As far as I can tell, they won't budge on anything. And therefore, by extension, there will be no principles the left and right can agree on (hell, that's basically the situation now). Plus, by controlling all facets of the education system, that won't change. 
 
Right you are: the Left won't budge on anything. This is because they see politics as a form of warfare.  Too many conservatives, however, still see politics as gentlemanly debate under an umbrella of shared assumptions, values, and principles.  This puts conservatives at a disadvantage as I explain in an eponymous Substack article. In my contribution to Dissident Philosophers, I put it like this:
 
For the culturally Marxist Left, politics is not a process of bargaining and accommodation based on mutually accepted norms between parties with common interests and a desire to coexist peacefully. Failing to appreciate that leftists embrace what could be called the converse Clausewitz principle—namely, that politics is war conducted by other means—puts classical liberals and conservatives at a disadvantage. They cannot bring themselves to believe that their political opponents are enemies who will do anything to win and are impervious to charges of “double standards” and “hypocrisy.” These conservatives allow their virtues to hobble them in their fight with enemies who reject conservative values but use them Alinsky-style against conservatives (as Saul Alinsky says, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
 
Conservatives are at a second disadvantage in that they are political part-timers who understand that the political is a limited sphere, whereas leftists are full-time agitators beholden to the totalitarian conceit that the political exhausts the real. The left is totalitarian in that “to realize its agenda the left must invade and dominate the sphere of private life.” (Horowitz, David, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, Dallas: Spence Publishing, 1999, 88.) And this they do increasingly. (William F. Vallicella, "From Democrat to Dissident," in  Dissident Philosophers : Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy, edited by T. Allan Hillman, and Tully Borland, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2021, pp. 261-277
 
Augusto del Noce speaks of a new totalitarianism:
 
Unlike Stalinism or Hitlerism, its main characteristic is not that of being a political movement that aims at world domination. It is marked, instead, by a quest to bring about the disintegration (dissoluzione) of one part of the world (in the case at hand, Europe). Nevertheless, the word totalitarianism is still appropriate because the essential features remain the same: the individual is extinguished and the idea of politics is subsumed within the idea of war, even in peace time. This means that all forms of criticism must be 'prevented' — whenever they are addressed at 'real power' — because, instead of advancing real arguments, supposedly they reflect or conceal the conservatism or reactionary spirit of a 'repressed psychology' . . . . ("Toward a New Totalitarianism" in The Crisis of Modernity, tr. Carlo Lancellotti, McGill-Queen's UP, 2014, p. 87
 
Del Noce goes on to speak of a "denial of the universality of reason." This is why the new totalitarians do not respond rationally to arguments, but resort to shadow banning, deplatforming, shout-downs, and other forms of cancellation.  To these people it is all power at bottom, and all reasoning is a sham rationalizing of  underlying racial and class interests.

Real or Fake, Leftists Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste

The Left not only exploits real problems for its political gain, it also manufactures problems for the same purpose. COVID-19 is real and so is Putin's war against Ukraine. But both are being used by the left to advance its agenda. We may reasonably differ about the extent to which these unfortunate developments have been and are being exploited by leftists, but no objective and fair-minded observer of the passing scene could deny the fact of the exploitation.

When the Left runs out of real crises, it creates more out of thin air.  Our distinguished president recently informed us of the terrible threat posed by 'ghost guns.'  Here is a definition from the reflexively left-leaning  Brady site:

Ghost guns are unserialized and untraceable firearms that can be bought online and assembled at home. 

This definition makes no sense. The (proper) parts of a firearm are not firearms. If I buy a kit of unassembled parts, I have not bought a firearm, and if I by a firearm, I have not bought the unassembled parts of one. But I am famously charitable and so I offer the following coherent reformulation:

Ghost guns are unserialized and untraceable firearms the parts of which can be bought online and assembled at home. 

Is there a problem here? If there is, it pales in comparison with the problem of our unenforced and wide open southern border across which all sorts of things and people are flooding to the detriment of the Republic. Among the contraband: guns.

You would have to be quite blind not to see that the Biden bunch is deploying one diversionary tactic after another.

The Manipulative Rhetoric of Garrett Epps

Keith Burgess-Jackson on a law professor gone amok:

Two years ago this past month, law professor Garrett Epps published a short essay entitled “Common-Good Constitutionalism Is an Idea as Dangerous as They Come” in a high-brow literary magazine, The Atlantic. That he published his essay in this organ rather than, say, a law review suggests that he was trying to reach non-specialists. The result, I am afraid to say, is a disaster. The essay is too simplistic to be of any use to his fellow law professors, but too arcane and abstract for many or most of the magazine’s readers.

No Takers Without Makers

You can't take wealth and 'redistribute' it unless someone makes it. But human nature is such that people need incentives to make things. People will work hard for themselves, their families, their friends, and their communities but not for something as nebulous as the 'common good' when, as inevitably is the case under socialism, the 'common good' is primarily the good of the central planners who then generously allow some 'trickle down' to the centrally planned.  There can be no government-sponsored social programs without a robust economy, and no such economy without capitalism.  That is the point of the graphic below.
 
But leftists, in the grip of utopian fantasies, do not understand human nature; worse, they deny that man has a nature, holding that humanity is itself a social product.  
 
 
Socialism-capitalism
 
 

Still At It

This weblog turns 18 today.  I won't repeat what I said on this date when she turned sweet sixteen though it still holds.

I thank you for reading.

And remember: triple your money back if not completely satisfied.

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What is the Most Pernicious of the Left’s Errors?

Contemporary leftists (cultural Marxists) deny that there is a reality antecedent to our classifications and conceptualizations. (V. I. Lenin was of course an exception along with other classical Marxists.) Everything becomes a socio-political construct. How convenient for identity-political totalitarians! The bird of reality can be carved up in any way that suits the will to power of some interest group — because there is no bird to carve. Avis rara in excelsis!
 
Next stop: the Twilight Zone.
 
Rachel Dolezal is black. Elizabeth Warren is a Cherokee. Warren, a.k.a. 'Fauxcahontas,' despite her contribution of a recipe for lobster bisque to Pow Wow Chow, that must-have cookbook for the bien- pensant, is the Rachel Dolezal of American politics. Continuing in the alimentary mode, Warren cooked her own goose anent her presidential pretensions, and is now 'toast.'
 
But why can't a cooked goose 're-imagine' herself as toast?

To Provoke a Pre-Emptive Crap Storm?

Is that why it was leaked?

………………………

A correspondent replies:

Yes, Bill, I believe so. Someone in Sotomayor's or Kagan's office. 

It was a call to action. They weren't going to let their side be blindsided.

The leaker will either be protected or, if caught, then lionized. For them, the end of Roe is the end of the world.  Roberts will do for Roe what he did for Obamacare. The homes of Alito et al. will be picketed, their occupants threatened to revise their opinion. The enemy's been planning for this as they have for the next election.

Sadly, our political opponents are indeed enemies. If you are one of us, broadly conservative and/or classically liberal, and you do not understand this, then you are a useful idiot. One of the reasons the destructive Left is so hard to defeat, despite the obvious lunacy of so many of their assertions and policies, is because of this very large group of useful idiots.  It includes roughly half of the Republicans in government, and a large segment of rank-and-file Democrats who live in the past, or for some other reason are oblivious to the threat the 'woke' folk pose to them, their progeny, their beliefs, their security, and their way of life. If you are not on the hard Left and you voted for Biden, then you are a  useful idiot. I have noticed, however, that people do not like being called idiots; adding the qualifier 'useful' does little to mitigate their umbrage.  For they  understand that they are being called useless to the cause of the Sane and the Reasonable.