Category: Politics


Unity is NOT the answer

Calls for unity from the left are actually calls for surrender. It is a call for conformity, for rule by consensus – an end to diversity of thought and freedom of speech.

Case in point: a literary agent is fired merely for having an account on alternative social media platforms and for supporting free speech.

If you want to surrender to the new fascism: rule by consensus, at least be honest about what you are doing.

There is a unity worth pursuing. It is to unite with those who share your values. Values of individual rights, of liberty, of free thought and freedom of expression, of respect for property and, above all, respect for life – meaning respect for each person’s right to live their own life the way they chose. These used to be called “liberal” values. That’s why it’s wrong to refer to the left as “liberals”. They are not “progressives” either. The left are actually conservatives, reactionaries who want to return to an era where social elites dictated the rules everyone was to live by. Advocating unity with such an evil is akin to dosing pure water with arsenic – it only takes a little to turn a life saving drink into poison.

Unite on the basis of shared principles. Life affirming and life enhancing principles. This unity requires that we disengage with those tyrants of the left who insist we let politicians, celebrities, corporatists, big tech, and big media do our thinking for us.

If you want to preserve and even increase your personal freedom, disengage the state and its lap dogs. Unite with those who share your values on alternative platforms. Yes, there will be terrible people there as well. But do what people who respect the rights of others should always do – discriminate. That is, you be the judge. You decide whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, correct or incorrect. Exercise your moral agency.

White privilege

Here’s a slightly edited conversation I’m participating in on Facebook on whether there is such a thing as white privilege.

Me: White privilege is a convenient fiction used by those who want to take what others have instead of earning it for themselves.

Anthony: Where’s your hood bud? Don’t you have a cross to burn somewhere? Y’all act like white privilege means we got everything handed to us when all it means is the colour of our skin in most cases doesn’t negatively affect the way we are viewed or treated in the world we live in. And would you mind explaining how anything having to do with white privilege has tried to take anything from anyone?

Me: I’m from a time when there were still a few real white racists – who thought they were entitled to jobs and favours because they were white. Sickening. Beyond stupid. I don’t know of anyone like that now. But there’s a new racist – the non white who thinks things that happened years before he was born entitle him to jobs and favours now because he’s not white.

In the past the hard working black or native kid could be justified in resenting a white kid who got things because he was white. Now some people, mostly white liberals, but also some others who see a way to cash in, want to keep discriminating on the basis of race. It just creates a violent, resentful culture where skin colour matters more than how hard you work and how well you treat others.

Which way is best? A society where you get stuff based on race or based on how what you do benefits other people? I don’t understand how anyone could think that continuing to divide people into races is better than treating everyone as an equal member of the human race – the only race that counts.

Anthony: If you don’t know of anyone like that now that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Ever lived in the Canadian midwest? They are everywhere I bet you know at least one person that is a self proclaimed non-racist that has no problem saying they just don’t want their child to marry a black person.

Affirmative action types of policies and non-discrimination laws were enacted for a reason not just pulled out of thin air to be some supposed cash cow for minorities. Give me one example of anything even remotely like someone “cashing in”

As for your “new racist”, well racist have always came in every colour. I haven’t met one yet the thinks he/she was entitled to a free ride based on the past and I bet you don’t either. I do know minority’s that are more than willing to use programs and systems put in place to help level the playing field. We still live in a society where people get over looked and mistreated based on the colour of their skin.

The problem here is there’s a bunch of you people that think they know something. But answer this: is your family very mixed? Was your school very mixed? Is or was your community very mixed? Have you ever lived in a black community or a predominantly black neighborhood?

Y’all seem to forget to walk a mile someone else’s shoes. And if you cant answer yes to some, if not most of those questions, how could you possibly know a thing about white privilege? Because once again white privilege doesn’t mean being white made your life easy. It just means the colour of your skin most likely has never made your life harder.

Me: I have had to sit down with a struggling, hard working, well-qualified white student and tell him he didn’t get the job because he wasn’t female, black or native – one of the requirements for the government grant that created the job. He was angry and resentful. He called it discrimination. He was right. It was sexist and racist.

At university I paid my own way, working 40 hours per week with a working wife and 4 kids and amassing student loans. Some of my classmates had their costs paid for, including a living stipend and were given free tutors – because of their race. That’s not only wrong, it’s stupid. Which do you think would impress a future employer more? Why would any capable person with self respect think s/he needs extra help to do as well as a white person? To do as well as a rich person? Sure! It’s hard to get good marks and work full time and look after a family. But I got into the program because I merited it so much that I got in and succeeded. Not because I was white, but despite the disadvantages I had because I was white.

The advocates for yesterday’s victims have become today’s oppressors. They are perpetuating the cycle of violence and disrespect. Don’t give me any of this white privilege garbage. It’s made up to justify new racism.

Who benefits? Let’s try people who don’t want to accept responsibility for their own lives so they want to blame others and justify their demand of something for nothing. Let’s try politicians and their supporters who see those people as voters they can easily buy with promises to give them something for nothing. Let’s try leaders of groups funded by government – who make careers out of perpetuating racism. Let’s try reporters who know that cars burning on the street get more views than roses and sunshine. Let’s try silly while liberals who really have had it easy and despise themselves (and their parents) for it and once again take the easy road by standing with the “victims” rather than doing the hard work of looking at how much harm those who pretend to represent these victims are actually doing.

Who benefits? Just about everyone except those with enough self-respect to accept responsibility for their own lives and who want to work for a peaceful, productive society where no one wins or loses based on race, gender, ethnicity, or any other irrelevant characteristic.

The case for more government depends on lies

Here’s an example. This is a meme from the “Women’s Justice Center” decrying the fact that an insulin pen in the US costs $700 while in all other countries it is under $100. But I easily found a coupon that gets you an insulin pen in the USA for $126.

But that’s still too high. And the costs in those other countries is under reported because tax payers pay the difference.

More government is not the solution. Less government is the solution.

End drug patents No one should own an idea. Let anyone who wants to sell, sell and the price will go down to what supply and demand says it should be.

End regulation. Government agents, eager to justify their cushy jobs, take too long and come up with too many obstacles that make it too hard for companies to bring drugs to market at low prices. Without government interference there would still be people who would test and report on drug safety for a fee. The free market would ensure they were as low cost and efficient as possible.

End border controls on drugs. Let people buy from wherever they can get the drugs they need for the lowest cost.

Government is never the answer. People need to grow up, take responsibility for themselves and stop looking for government to solve their problems because governments are in the business of making problems so they can pretend to fix them.

Americans should not emulate Canadian health care system

If Americans want to suffer and die like Canadians while they wait for treatment then sure, they should go for universal public health care. I don’t know why though. Now American hospitals offer public apologies for 15 minute wait times while Canadian ERs routinely require people to wait 4-6 hours or longer. The wait time for medically necessary procedures is even worse and getting even worse.

The problem with the US isn’t too little government but too much – mostly in the form of ridiculously huge damage awards and the effect they have on costs and insurance premiums.

1) Respect the right of patients to contract out of potential negligence claims (sign a waiver of liability) in return for lower prices.

2) Allow anyone, including nurse practitioners to offer whatever services, treatments, etc. they want.

3) Support private watch dogs like Consumer Reports for health care or the various doctor rating websites to track the competency of health care providers.

All of this is simply respecting the rights of consenting adults to voluntarily do business with each other without some politician, judge, or bureaucrat interfering. This would guarantee that the market would provide exactly what we really need at a price that represented its true value.

Canadians kill in the nicest way possible

Guilty: Harper’s Conservatives, Trudeau’s Liberals and all those who support and sustain them with votes and money.

Crime: Aiding and abetting Saudi Arabia in the murder of those who fail to obey the Saudi monarch and who said monarch’s agents can get their murderous hands on. This includes anyone in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Background:
Is Saudi Arabia deploying Canadian-made weapons in Yemen?

Saudi Arabia beheads 37 citizens and pins one of the headless bodies to a pole

Fact: During the Arab Spring the Saudi puppet dictator of Yemen was tossed out by the people. The Saudi army, using, inter alia, Canadian arms, has been killing Yemenis ever since.

Fact: The Saudis have been lopping the hands and heads off anyone who they get to confess, under torture, of having extreme ideas – ideas opposed to the inhuman application of Islamic law by the Saudi regime.

Penalty: All rational (i.e. moral) persons ought to deny all support to the Saudi state and to any state that aids and abets it’s murderous activities, including Canada.

The only thing that protects our rights

Scenario: a would-be tyrant issues executive orders calling for “patriotic” state agents to take “extraordinary measures” to defend the country from [insert your favourite bogeyman here]. As a result, the supreme court suddenly has some vacancies which are filled by similarly “patriotic” judges. Constitutional protections are subject to their rulings and case law quickly develops to permit “reasonable limits” on these protected rights. A careful strategy of jurisdiction and judge shopping quickly expands the limits contained in these binding supreme court decisions. By the end of the tyrant’s first term, your constitution is no better protector of your rights than was the constitution of the Soviet Union or any other dictatorship.

In Canada our constitutionally “protected” rights are already entirely subject to the whim of the Prime Minister. If his party holds a majority of seats in Parliament, which is possible to achieve with as little as about 30% of the vote, which translates into about 20% support from all eligible voters, he can use the “notwithstanding clause” (section 33) to enact whatever he wants, notwithstanding the fact that it violates these rights. Further, section 1 makes all rights subject to “reasonable limits” opening the door our supreme court often walks through to justify limits on basic individual rights to expand the power of the state and the special rights of politically powerful interests.

The idea that the right to bear arms is any protection against the state’s erosion of individual liberty flies in the face of two facts. One, the history of the state’s success in incrementally eroding these rights to the point where it can confiscate almost 50% of our property in taxes and tell us what we can do and not do with the other 50% and people still sing the praises of living in a “free country”. Second, the matchless firepower of the state vs the unorganized and mostly submissive population would (and does) make short work of any rebellion. The US, where this right is most strongly entrenched, falls far down the list of the freest countries in the world giving more support to the argument that this right is not an effective deterrent to the state.

The only effective protection for individual rights is the same as it’s always been, and it is weaker now than at any time in history, although it will not remain that way for long. That is, a frontier, an alternative, an escape. We’ve almost always been able to vote with our feet and simply leave an oppressive state. Europeans did when they migrated to the new world. Oppressed groups in America were able to flee to the west. Offshore tax havens allowed people to protect their property by taking advantage of states jealous of their sovereignty.

Increasingly, technological progress is enabling us to transfer more and more of our lives, economic and social, to the virtual world where the physical coercion upon which political power depends is difficult to exercise. Cyberspace is the new frontier. The state’s fear of a mass migration to cyberspace is the only real protection for our rights. Ultimately it will be our only refuge as history shows that state power only ever increases. But when the level of online economic interaction outside state control inevitably reaches a critical point, the state will collapse. Hopefully when the state system falls it will be like how the iron curtain fell and not in a manner that takes our technological civilization down with it. I am hopeful.

That law which cometh of evil

Here’s a couple of articles I don’t want to lose track of. Both by Connor Boyack. The first was written in 2013 entitled, “The Lord’s Leaders are Fallible — And That’s Okay”. The comment I left on that article was as follows:

Thank you for this article. It strikes me as thoroughly enlightened and reasonable. Like you I sustain the leadership of the Church even while acknowledging that they are all human and prone to error, though far less often than I. That they sometimes err gives me hope that I too may err and yet still, for the most part, obtain truth and find favour in God’s sight.

The more recent one is entitled, “Why Does My Church Oppose Medical Marijuana?“. I agree with the author in that I believe the position taken by the Church leadership is wrong. I could couch that in many and varied ways but it would all amount to a cowardly way to state this unpleasant truth. Unpleasant but only unpleasant and I refer myself back to Boyack’s earlier article for the reason why “that’s ok”.

I am not as enamored with the beneficial properties of marijuana as Boyack seems to be but I am not nearly as well read on the issue. My position is that basic individual rights are being eroded by the state and this is contrary to the will of God as clearly recorded in scripture. It is not in man that we should place our trust and certainly not in that evil institution, the state. The state was not ordained of God. Government was, but only such government as protects individual rights. No modern state is governed according to that principle, if indeed there ever was one. Perhaps Israel in the time of the judges or the Nephite theocracies. Today our duty is to live the law of God and forsake evil.

Boyack states, “Church scripture holds that anything ‘more or less’ than the Constitution ‘cometh of evil.'” Not quite. In Doctrine and Covenants 98, to which Boyack is referring, the Lord is speaking of the ‘law of the land’ (v.4). He does also qualify it by saying He is talking about the law ‘which is constitutional’ (v.5) but he expands on that. It is not whether it is constitutional per se that matters but whether it ‘supports that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges’ that makes it ‘justifiable before me’ (v.5). Further, such law as this ‘belongs to all mankind’ (v.5), a phrase which I believe puts to rest the Americocentric fixation on their constitution as a uniquely inspired document. It may very well have been inspired, but only insofar as it ‘supports that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges’ and not a hair’s breath more. Neither is it any more inspired than any other document expressing as strong or stronger support for individual rights.

It is any law which does ‘more or less’ than support our rights and freedoms that ‘cometh of evil’. Regarding such the Lord commands that we ‘forsake all evil’ (v.11) and thus forsake all law that fails to uphold our rights and freedoms regardless of what infernal state claims sovereignty over us.

To forsake is to disengage insofar as is consistent with preserving such freedom as we can. It is NOT to engage in civil disobedience, let alone violence of any kind because violence is the realm of the state. Civil disobedience is a useless means of begging for scraps from the table of your acknowledged master’s table. Voting is even more useless but I can see it if only meant to show your utmost respect for someone who agrees with your principles though still harbours a naive belief that the state will ever allow itself to be dismantled from within. The virtue of person like that morally obligates you to vote for him. DC 98:10 sets the bar high for such an individual requiring that he be: 1) honest, 2) wise, and 3) good. One would be inclined to laugh through one’s tears contemplating how the only two candidates that America’s much-vaunted constitutional electoral process permitted any actual chance of winning their last Presidential election stacked up against those criteria. Rather they both more closely epitomized the dishonest, unwise and evil. It was a sin for anyone professing belief that DC 98 is the word of God to have voted for either of them. On the other hand, the virtue of a man like Ron Paul, running in the previous campaign, though hopelessly destined to fail, made voting for him nearly a moral requirement. Otherwise peaceful disengagement ought to be the norm for the faithful, freedom-loving individual.

Peaceful disengagement is entirely inconsistent with lobbying the state to employ force against someone based on which plants they consume.

Hitler did it – – – so what?

It has become fashionable to make fun of anyone who uses Hitler references in debate. The suggestion seems to be that such historical references were somehow made illegitimate merely due to the rarely paralleled depths of depravity to which Hitler’s “ethics” sank.

The fact that Hitler did something, anything, should make that thing suspect. He, and other tyrants, past and present, have forced kids to march in support of their causes. The state education system is now forcing kids to march in support of gun control. Any reasonable person would find that similarity worrying – certainly worrying enough to consider the implications within their historical context.

There’s a pattern here with this fashionable anti-anti-Hitler non-argument. Intelligence has been described in terms of pattern recognition. Higher intelligence not only recognizes a pattern but can extrapolate from that pattern to predict future behaviour – more cause for concern.

Entire books have been written on the things Hitler did, comparing them with things that states are doing now. Are these cautionary historical analysis somehow illegitimate because Hitler was such an archetypal tyrant? If he had been just a little evil then it would be ok to study his past in order to avoid making similar mistakes but because he was so evil we are to be castigated for drawing comparisons? Isn’t the study of history intended to be a means of avoiding past mistakes and repeating past success? By what principle would one then exclude history’s most egregious villains from among the mistakes to be avoided – unless of course one secretly admired much of what they did?

Talk about being stupid, simple, and intellectually lazy! I can’t think of a worse example of intellectual sloth than to NOT consider things done by evil people in the past and where those things lead. If you see a fire in a building we’re in, tell me, I want to know. If you see people acting like Hitler, tell me, I want to know that even more.

People Control

“Gun control” is a euphemism for people control. But guns are supposedly bad. They hurt people and so controlling guns is good right? But there’s still enough of us who believe that people are good that make “people control” a politically risky slogan, even if it is exactly what gun control advocates really mean when they spout their nonsense about gun control.

If you reasonably determine that a person poses a threat to the life, liberty, or property of you or another person, you are justified in initiating the reasonable use of force to eliminate the threat. In a free society, that is the only justification for denying someone the possession of a gun. If you believe most people are good and would not use a gun to threaten the life, liberty or property of another, then you are not justified in denying most people the possession of a gun. Which individuals constitute reasonable threats is a legitimate question. The mentally or morally would be obvious: the young, the old, the insane, the mentally ill. Possession of a gun by any who have acted violently in the past could be reasonably held to be threatening. Should a psychological test be administered to all who posses, or would possess guns? That might be too far as, in the absence of evidence, there is no basis for a reasonable apprehension of a threat and therefore no basis to require such a test. All others have the right to possess a gun.

Unless you advocate the initiation of violence as an appropriate means to an end. That seems like a very strange way to combat violence.

But if you believe people are bad then you can start with the assumption that they will do harm to others with a gun and denying them possession is justified. That is the fundamental belief of the left. People are evil and must be controlled. People are evil. Other people. Not the leftists who are enlightened enough to realize this and impose their goodness, by force, on the rest of society. They are good. They can be trusted with power. Absolute power.

Instances where those wielding absolute power, including gun control, engaged in mass killing.

Dzungar genocide, 1750s
Indian Removal, 1830s
California Genocide, 1848–1873
Circassian genocide, 1860s
Selk’nam genocide, 1890s–1900s
Herero and Namaqua genocide, 1904–1907
Greek genocide, 1914–1923
Assyrian genocide, 1914–1925
Armenian Genocide, 1915–1923
Libyan Genocide, 1923–1932
Soviet famine of 1932–33
Holodomor, 1931–1933
Kazakhstan, 1930–1933
Kalmyks, 1943
Chechens and Ingush, 1944
Crimean Tatars, 1944
Nazi Final Solution Porajmos, 1941-1945
Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles, 1941-1945
Nazi crimes against Soviet POWs, 1941-1945
Serbian genocide, 1941-1945
1971 Bangladesh genocide, 1971
Burundian genocides, 1972 & 1993
East Timorese genocide, 1974–1999
Cambodian genocide, 1975–1979
Guatemalan genocide, 1981–1983
Kurdish genocide, 1986–1989
Isaaq genocide, 1988–1989
Rwandan genocide, 1994
Bosnian genocide, 1992–1995
Srebrenica massacre, 1995
Darfur genocide, 2003–
Yazidi genocide, 2014-2017
Shia genocide, 2014-2017
Christian genocide, 2014-2017
Central African genocide. 1970-

These deaths number in the hundreds of millions. The number of deaths due to so-called “mass shootings” pale by comparison.

If the objective is to save people from being shot dead, the place to start is to deny possession of guns to the state.

Freedom is Inevitable

I wrote this in response to this article: I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again. Neither should you.

It’s not that Trump is a fascist. It’s that they are all fascists, or at least corporatists (but that’s essentially the same thing). The ideal behind the original version of the US constitution, that the ultimate political values are respect for each INDIVIDUAL person’s right to his/her own life, liberty, and property, have been replaced with the ideals of the corporatist state – that we are all mere elements of a single body (corpus) which that body (the corporate state) can utilize or dispose of as it sees fit to further its interests. The individual per se is not valued and his/her rights are not respected expect when it serves the state’s higher purpose to do so – which is becoming increasingly less frequent.

In this slide toward corporatism it is not Trump that is the problem, nor trigger happy cops, or terrorists – it is YOU if and when you support ANY erosion of the individual’s right to life, liberty, or property. That means any time you undertake or advocate the initiation of violence, or the threat thereof, against another, you violate his/her individual rights. Essentially you declare war on an innocent person and make yourself the enemy of all who respect individual rights and oppose violence.

I say “declare war” but war has already been declared. It was declared millennia ago when the first advocate of force declared his opposition to the concept of the free moral agency of the individual. What we are witnessing now is the last, desperate assault of the side that started that war. They fight a losing battle against two forces: 1) the individual empowerment that inevitably results from technological progress and 2) the relative efficiency of free (unregulated) markets. As more and more of us can, more and more of us will disengage the state, incentivized not by accepting a libertarian philosophy but simply by the greater economic returns in doing so. For the vast majority money (material security) matters more than philosophical truth. When they see that the statism actually threatens, rather than preserves, that security, they will reject it.

The war is on but it is very asymmetrical. The statist’s weapons are force, violence, aggression, guns, bombs, detention, borders, barriers, taxes, etc. The individualist’s weapons are simply to disengage from the corrupt statist body, to live as freely and peacefully as s/he can, and wait for the rest to do the same. When enough of us disengage, the state will collapse because there will be too few under its control for it to conscript, control, and confiscate what it needs to sustain itself.

Freedom, liberty, is inevitable.

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