Freedom or Equality

The two terms usually go together.  One wonders if people give them much thought.  It seems mostly, like the litany of the Pledge of Allegiance, to go over most people’s heads, and is received as “good and nice things.”  But Freedom and Equality are opposites.  Freedom means the freedom to discriminate, the freedom to be unpopular, the freedom to hurt feelings, the freedom to associate (and not associate) with whom one wants.  And we’ve seen now the mask come off from advocates of gay marriage, whose totalitarian desire is not merely tolerance but rather to bludgeon, shame, and destroy all elements of the society that dare to hurt their feelings and a concomitant desire to obtain social approval and social acceptance and ostracism of their opponents.  We saw this earlier in the “outings” of those who supported California’s referendum against gay marriage, and we see it now with regard to Indiana’s Religious Freedom Law (an analog to the 20 plus year old Federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act).The left’s totalitarianism is nothing new, but it is startling in its current brazenness.

There seems an effort by the gay marriage movement to align itself with the earlier struggle for black civil rights which, by contrast, had a strong claim of justice on its side, particularly with regard to the effects of institutionalized discrimination in the form of Jim Crow laws and various forms of anti-black terrorism by supporters of white supremacy.  Those days are long over. And even then the movement went too far, in my view, by forcing associations among those where at least one party wanted to remain apart. Freedom does not mean the mirror image of those rules, however, which is what I would argue both affirmative action and forced association laws in favor of other civil rights, like gay rights, are.  The opposite of enforced discrimination is not enforced discrimination in favor of minorities, but rather the freedom of groups and individuals to associate or not with whomever they please.  The commitment to that principle is sadly lacking, whether in defenders of Indiana’s law, or otherwise.  And thus we have seen the equality principle supersede the freedom principle, that latter of which is the true genius of America’s legal regime. And, like attempts to enforce equality in Revolutionary France or Bolshevik Russia, we see the evidence of a totalitarian tendency that is an ominous sign of what is to come.

The only equality that matters is equality before the law, including an equality of freedom, but equality as a social goal undermines freedom and is totalitarian in nature.  It is half the organizing principle of the Civil Rights crusade of yesteryear, which included both the undoing of forced disassociation and the imposition of equal access.  That struggle too had totalitarian overtones, not least in the involvement of the federal government in social reengineering through school bussing, among other failures.  I am somewhat ambivalent, however, as the movement was limited, and it had a certain rough justice appeal due to decades of enforced anti-black discrimination.  As the groups and behaviors to which it is applied has expanded, the valuable and sustainable principle of freedom has been undermined. We now have affirmative action for newcomers, federal agents forcing religious institutions to violate their conscience, and a nationwide conspiracy against anyone that would dare to hurt the feelings of homosexuals.  Equality this may be–indeed, it is the logical outgrowth of this commitment–but it is anti-freedom in the extreme.

Cruz, Eh

I like that there is a large slate of conservative candidates, more or less, in this year’s Republican running.  Jeb would be a disaster for reasons too numerous to count.  Christy, Graham, Jindal, and Huckabee all fail for similar reasons:  not committed to anything, too liberal, or unable to rally the base. This was fundamnetally McCain’s problem, as it was Dole’s in 1996. Carson, Paul, Walker, and Cruz all at least get my attention.

No candidate is that great on immigration, reducing the issue of 1mm plus legal immigrants to one solely of the question of amnesty.  The problem is much bigger than that, and there is no significant distinction of the quality or impact of legal and illegal immigrants on our economy.

Ideally, the next president will be the most conservative person that can also win.  Cruz is almost certainly not this person.  He is polarizing to an extreme degree and does not even particularly get along with other Republicans, and not solely for reasons of ideology. So that leaves me, and most people of a conservative bent, thinking Scott Walker is the guy.  He is a winner.  He has tangible successes.  The media will almost certainly overplay their hand regarding his lack of a college degree.  He is not overly scary and seems able to forge a coalition.  I haven’t looked at him super-closely to date, and I recognize politics is only one part of the hydra-headed monster of liberal media, liberal schools, liberal courts, liberal literature, and liberal everything that is corrosive to America’s stability and flourishing.  But it’s something, and there’s no good reason to accelerate the decline.

All of the candidates–except Rand Paul, I suppose–concern me in their failure to learn very much from the last decade of inconclusive war with al Qaeda and Iraq.  Some are urging a more aggressive push back into Iraq (based on the myth of the surge), taking on Russia on behalf of Ukrainian coup-makers, and an even a more public and less critical alignment with Israel, who is unable to provide much help to us in the Middle East due to its pariah status.  This is all folly, but I fear this is also the spirit of the Republican Party these days, whipped into uncritical war-mongering by a combination of distaste for the lunatic pacifism of Obama and the far left, as well the replacement of conservative thinking with jingoist, militarist nationalism among right-wing media organs.  I know there is no small group of conservative-minded people who would like to limit severely our activities overseas, but they probably are a smallish faction of the current Republican Party, so I’m sure whoever wins, I’ll have much to be disappointed in.

That all said, a Hillary victory is simply too much to bear.  It would signal the end of politics as a useful field for conservative resistance and the need for an entirely different strategy, and it would do much to hurt the lives of ordinary Americans, the esteem of its institutions, and the possibility of any future renewal.  And it would probably lead to a foreign policy that is both bellicose and anti-American, so that issue is a wash at best.  So we have to do something, not least of which is find someone who is reasonably pointed in the right direction that can win.

Playing Referee

It used to be pretty obvious that when your enemies were fighting one another, you stood back and watched.  It’s called “divide and conquer,” and it’s been well known by smart leaders since the age of Sun Tzu. But our leaders, wedded to the superbrilliant idea of American “leadership” and “benevolent global hegemony” think now is the time to get knee deep back in Iraq, even when it’s clear a Sunni-Shia war is taking place that distracts both sides from their other perennial obsession with the “Great Satan.”  This regional war is obvious in Yemen, Syria, and now Iraq.  ISIS is just a pretty brutal proponent of Sunni power.  It is worrisome and should be destroyed if it gets too powerful–like Napoleon facing the united European powers after the 100 days–but so far its chief focus is anti-Shia violence.

Instead of following this low-cost path, instead we’re told Iraq was a grand idea and a success that the evil Obama squandered, even though it was a low grade civil war before, during, and after the vaunted “surge.”  Obama’s motives in withdrawing may have been an instinctual anti-Americanism and a desire to “empower the Third World,” hence his snubs of old allies and courting of the Third World street in the form of the chaotic and ultimately pro-Islamist Arab Spring movement.  Nonetheless, Iraq turned out to be a colossal failure from a perspective of US security interests, not least because it undid the equipoise of Sunni and Shia between Iraq and Iran, but also because it cost a lot of lives and money and made our troops the main attraction of Jihad tourists during the 2000s, in the same manner as Bosnia and Chechnya were the attraction in the 90s and Afghanistan in the 80s. Just because Obama’s motives are insane does not mean doing the opposite is not also insane or unwise.

The worst thing America could do in Yemen, Iraq, or elsewhere is get involved, particularly in the modern US manner which is to remain aloof from both sides and be on the side of a chimera: nonsectarian democracy.  It makes us a target, costs us a lot of money, alienates people who are otherwise fighting each other, instead of allowing them to grind each other down and distract themselves from us.

This is not a question of “human rights” or “pacifism,” just good strategic sense.  We don’t help ourselves, nor do we improve our security, by being at war everywhere all the time, nor by assuming other countries with wealth and nationalist sentiment will not arm themselves and control their own neighborhoods, which they care about infinitely more than we do.  Sometimes, the best thing to do is husband one’s resources, particularly when our enemies (or potential enemies) are using up theirs.

Spontaneous Combustion

The media is now treating terrorism like black on white crime, refusing to speculate when it appears likely, refusing to delve into the suspect’s mind, and treating each suspect as an individual and not part of a pattern.  This is quite unlike the “southern gun culture” or “police brutality” speculations that the media uses to delve into the causes of school shootings or police shootings.  In other words, our nefarious media with its infinite bad faith will notice patterns sometimes and deliberately not notice them and refuse to look for them in others, even when the weight of evidence is literally minuscule in the case of the former and enormous in the case of the latter.

It’s increasingly obvious that the gap between “what we can talk about and notice” and “what is reality” is getting wider all the time.  The media, the schools, the political establishment are in overdrive to maintain their power, and that power depends upon certain myths of America’s need for reform and the the backwardness and moral disqualification of its traditional people, i.e., white people.

Now when I heard about this Germanwings crash, I thought of four possibilities in descending order:  group terrorism, spontaneous Jihad by a pilot, spontaneous suicide by a despondent pilot (likely also the cause of the Malaysian flight disappearance), or a mechanical problem. I wasn’t wedded to any of them, as they all struck me as possible and none wildly more likely than the other.  It looks like it’s the second or the third reason, at this point.

You heard almost nothing about this in previous days; terrorism was ignored all together, even though active Islamic terrorist cells are operating to do exactly this all around the globe.  Mohammad Atta lived in Germany, after all.   It’s not like suggesting a space alien took the yoke, but we can’t do it.  The honor of this community must be protected at all costs, even the cost of our brains and our sanity and the truth.

But there comes a point where this “open mindedness” renders one stupid, like Stalin’s lassitude on the opening days of Operation Barbarossa when he convinced himself “his ally” Hitler could not possibly be invading.  To admit that would be also to admit an enormous mistake.  So, for some time at least, people cling to costly, dangerous, and false assumptions about the world, because their own power, their own psyches, and the confirmation of their own manifest stupidity are all at stake.  This often ends–not always–either in an epiphany or self-destruction.  It remains to be seen which way the West and its elites will go.

This is not an elephant, you ignorant racist!

Eric Holder and Obama Have Incited a Riot

Setting aside the innumeracy of the “damning report” on Ferguson’s policing, consider instead the failure to give law enforcement any benefit of doubt, the rush to judgment, the inflammatory language regarding profiling, the deliberate refusal to consider the real cause of profiling (massively disproportionate rates of crime by race, age, and sex), and the national media’s and national political establishment’s myopic focus on what turned out to be a completely justifiable shooting in a small town of a hulking thug who had earlier committed a strong arm robbery.

Steve Sailer asks:

How much blood do Eric Holder and George Soros, who pays for many of the protests, have on their hands?

There is Zemir Begic, the two murdered cops in Brooklyn, and now these two Missouri cops, who appear to be survivors. The toll is starting to mount.

We’ve seen these “hit and run” tactics before, and if anyone expects soul searching or an apology from the partisans of revolution and disorder, they’re going to wait a long time.  Their preferred method is simply to move on to the cause du jour.  Even Al Sharpton, of the infamous Tawana Brawley hoax, now gets invited to the White House and appears frequently as a media commentator. There is simply no justice in this massive, unjustifiable, and malicious hate campaign.  But at least we’ve seen, yet again, that nothing has changed since the 1960s, when this disorder was unleashed and the excuse-making began in earnest.

The only saving grace is that these events remind us that the Grand Unifier is actually a parochial, tribalist hack, whose policies have radicalized even more of the middle class into a suspicious, right-wing, law-and-order party that knows it will get no quarter, no magnanimity, and no decency from the Holders and Obamas of the world.

ATF Getting Aggressive Again

Obama tried to get gun control up and running as a wedge issue after the Newton school shooting, but he failed miserably.  It’s clear he has tried to do what he can do to harass gun owners and make their lives more difficult through back channel methods, including new regulations.  His ATF is trying to ban a popular AR-15 bullet–the M855/SS109–which is widely used and also something of a premium brand.  (I personally prefer M193.)  Nonetheless, the move is worrisome, as the potential classification of this round as “armor piercing” could lead to banning nearly all rifle ammunition on the same basis because, public hysteria aside, it is well known that nearly all rifle bullets will penetrate ordinary soft armor vests.  Since he is a second termer and clearly tone deaf, I would not put this past him.

Sean Davis at the Federalist has authored the most rigorous criticism of the ATF’s moves to date.  

Netanyahu Obama Tiff

I bow to no one in my disregard and contempt for Obama, but I am more than a little concerned with the GOP’s use of a foreign leader to do so.  In foreign policy, for good or ill, the President is the symbolic head of the country and its national leader.  Disrespect to him by foreign leaders is, often enough, disrespect for the country as a whole.

The Congress, while it contains an important role in foreign policy–the approval of funds and, in the case of the Senate, ratification of treaties–it should not have its own, separate foreign policy.  It was unseemly, for example, when liberal Senators like John Kerry traipsed around Nicaragua back in the 1980s, seeking to avoid “another Vietnam” by making sure the communists won. It is unseemly that a foreign leader–any foreign leader–would meet with other members of the American tripartite government without presidential approval.  It is a breach of decorum, a deliberate provocation, and the very kind of “foreign entanglement” our first President warned us of so eloquently in his Farewell Address.

There is no doubt most Americans support Israel, do not want Iran to have nukes, and are wary of Obama’s misguided foreign policy. But the affection for the former should be kept within certain bounds.  We are a separate country.  Our interests are distinct and they sometimes diverge.  Israel and its leader never forgets this, dealing as it does with our rivals such as China to sell its own sophisticated arms, but American congressman sometimes do.  Here, in their enthusiasm to court evangelical voters, Jewish donors, and Obama haters everywhere, they are undermining the formerly well settled principal that the nation speaks with one voice in matters of war and peace and that voice, for good or for ill, is of the President.

This is an unserious act by thoughtless, short-sighted people. Obama won’t be president some day, but a dangerous precedent of foreign leaders using one party that holds them in high regard against the president has been set.