Month: June 2020

In the last week or so, events have indeed been moving very quickly. For a few days, we were looking at a resurgence of the coronavirus, and “conservatives” expressed concern that Black Lives Matter protestors were violating quarantine to march, even though a few weeks ago they thought that white people marching together with guns and no masks against coronavirus restrictions were just defending their civil rights. (I wonder what changed?)

But the big news right now is a social movement/hashtag to #DefundThePolice. Since I’m more of a bleeding-heart-libertarian, some might ask what my opinion is on the idea to pull money and power away from a part of government most people actually like.

My reaction is, “Great! Can we do the Pentagon next?”

Given that libertarians have been saying for QUITE some time that police have far more paramilitary firepower than most districts need, and that much of the history of our increasingly federalized and militarized law enforcement is an attempt to clamp down on black people in particular, the question is why this idea, which is not really that new, is only now suddenly becoming popular. Maybe because the party that always thinks government is the best solution is finally starting to realize that it isn’t. Meanwhile the right-wingers who claim that government can’t do anything right suddenly change their tune when it comes to beating people up.

Well, on the bright side, in the increasingly likely event that the November elections wipe the Republican Party like the fecal matter it has become, “conservatives” might suddenly remember that libertarianism is about maintaining a healthy skepticism towards government in general, and not just giving intellectual support to the ulterior motives of Koch Industries.

But on another level, “Defund the Police” is just another example of the Left failing to pitch its ideas beyond their own audience because they assume that everyone is on the same page. Like how we had to start saying “climate change” because the Right were able to joke about freak snowstorms in May as an example of “global warming.” Or how they use “white privilege” to describe the normal state of affairs – not getting harassed by police, not being disadvantaged in applying for a loan, going out to vote, et cetera, as though this was a “privilege” that is unearned and needs to be ended instead of a set of rights that ought to be extended to all. Just as white people see “privilege” as normalcy, most of us see the police as functional and constructive (at least until very recently), and using the shorthand phrase without defining what we mean by “police” and what we mean by “defund” is what allows the Party of Trump to sell us-vs.-them rhetoric that would otherwise not be feasible. Some people hear “Defund the Police” and think “Who’s gonna protect me from armed robbery?”

I may seem flippant, but this is a serious moment. Just as Viceroy Trump in trashing the “norms” that the duopoly held to as a substitute for Constitutional government has thrown out the idea that the standards in Washington are fixed and unchangeable, events in Minneapolis are moving towards historic change. There is now a very strong likelihood that at least one major city will in fact end its police force as they had previously known it. This is not a hypothetical. If you’re going to end a major part of local government, what does that mean, and what follows it?

Some of what I’m getting at was well-addressed in a column from Jim Wright, no Ayn Rand fan he:

https://www.stonekettle.com/2020/06/down-with-sogans.html?fbclid=IwAR38OVX__Rm9xzEaaWch_8TDUaB63ClQuNcPZzoyEgaROCGpdY1EavoSw8U

Most of this extremely extended piece is basically Jim posting and referring to the various idiots he has debated this issue with on Twitter, but I direct you to skip towards the later part, where he says: “The current government of America is a pretty good example of what happens when you don’t demand the details up front.”

I have gone over this more than once, and I’m gonna have to do it again: During the Obama Administration, Republicans spent at least six years hopping mad about “socialist” Obamacare, they spent six years voting for repeal after repeal that they knew would get vetoed, and they had six years to come up with a plan that would be better (since even liberals, or especially liberals, knew the ACA has much to be desired). They had a successful candidate for President who asked that the Republican-run Congress give him an Obamacare repeal and replacement that he could sign on Day One. And of course, they didn’t do that. And as I’ve also said, that lack of policy is not simply unhelpful, it is actually harmful to the political movement. Rather than “repeal and replace,” Republicans clearly want to get rid of the current healthcare system without having a serious alternative in mind other than going back to the status quo ante, and if people liked that, we never would have had the Affordable Care Act. And once it became obvious that Republicans planned to kill one of the few parts of government that everybody (including their senior citizen constituents) actually liked, this position became a liability to Republicans in the midterms, and one reason they lost the House in 2018. Similarly, if the other faction of duopoly gets taken over by its scalphunter contingent, and they push an agenda that they have not defined and don’t really know how to pass, they will be in the same fix as the Republicans – either let the institution (in this case, local police) hobble along in a crippled state, which becomes a liability to them as the party in power, or try to outright eliminate one of the few institutions that (however imperfect) most people still want to have. The third alternative, which Republicans never had the imagination to work on, would be to have an actual repeal-and-replace program.

And there are ideas for that. The Movement for Black Lives site says that “communities most harmed by destructive policing (should) have the power to hire and fire officers, determine disciplinary action, control budgets and policies, and subpoena relevant agency information.” It also mentions (under ‘End The War On Black People’) “an end to zero-tolerance school policies and arrests of students, the removal of police from schools, and the reallocation of funds from police and punitive school discipline practices to restorative services” as well as “An end to money bail, mandatory fines, fees, court surcharges and ‘defendant funded’ court proceedings”, “the end to the use of technologies that criminalize and target our communities (including IMSI catchers, drones, body cameras, and predictive policing software) ” and “An immediate end to the privatization of police, prisons, jails, probation, parole, food, phone and all other criminal justice related services.”

Yeah, but… we get into details. In particular, body cameras and software are ostensibly intended as a means of making police more accountable to the public, and, as with having police in schools, would require rethinking some of the security procedures that were already instituted by public demand, and admitting that maybe they aren’t working.

Moreover, as with rethinking an “education” system whose funding is largely dependent on local property values, we need to recognize how much of this bullshit law enforcement system is based on a need to fund government, or make it self-funding as in the case of privatizing services. It is certainly not news that institutions seek to perpetuate themselves, and as with ticket quotas and adding fines and fees for things that previously didn’t used to require such, we create more, not less, incentive for government to be intrusive and oppressive. You could certainly add more income and property taxes into the system so that the funding isn’t so regressive, but that simply shifts the issue and raises the question of how many of these government “services” we actually need.

It’s almost as if, in seeking to remove only one support pillar of a system that seems especially problematic, we find out how many other parts of the system need to be questioned!

In summary, leftists: Be careful what you wish for, smash the state, and thank you for boosting libertarianism!

When I said these protests could spread to Washington in November, I underestimated them.

The George Floyd protests already had the city of Minneapolis on edge, but violence really started on May 28 when the 3^rd Police Precinct was burned, along with several businesses. The local government’s inability to stop the violence led to the Governor authorizing the National Guard. Over the weekend the protests became national, and then global. In response to the growing outrage, Viceroy Donald Trump threatened Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey if he couldn’t get control, and said, among other things, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts!”

(Trump also said, ‘less talk, more rock’, ‘the more cushion, the less pushin’, and ‘It puts the lotion on Its skin, or else It gets the hose again.’)

For some reason all this bluster failed to impress. It got to the point where protesters in Washington DC rattled the White House barricades and almost reached the perimeter, prompting staff to turn off the visible lights on the property and haul Trump off to the facility’s bunker (hashtag: #bunkerbitch). This made King Dick Who Be The Most Macho and Tremendous of Dicks look even less impressive. So after yelling out a virtual conference of governors on June 1 for not being “tough” enough, he announced himself as the “law and order” president and then, 25 minutes before the mayor’s curfew was to start, got the police forces to disperse a peaceful crowd so he could walk out to the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, which had just been vandalized by rioters. This also served to demonstrate Trump’s potency by proving he can still walk about a tenth of a mile without a golf cart. At least one Episcopal priest serving at the church was among those tear-gassed. And at the site, Trump held aloft a Bible as though he had never seen a Bible – or a book – before, and posed for the cameras with an expression that was almost cartoony in its sourness, a frown whose gravity created its own singularity. It was the face of a mean little boy who had finally gotten to stick a live M-80 up a cat’s ass to see it run off screeching into the night, only to realize that he was still unhappy.

It would be one thing if Trump had just blustered about The Insurrection Act and casually violated local laws and American legal traditions. Or as we call it in America, “Monday.” But even as the forces of authority, officially led by Trump, focused on the looters and people who assaulted civilians and police, there have been numerous incidents recounted by journalists of police forces actively initiating violence. Indeed, while protests in places like Las Vegas were fairly civilized and even friendly between population and police, SOME motherfuckers decided they had to cause grief. And then there were several social-media documented cases where police not only initiated violence, in their haste to beat on marchers, they moved away from neighborhoods and businesses that the Right has been so upset about getting looted, and which of course DID get looted because the police had higher priorities.

It’s almost as if the government was more about protecting its own privileges than protecting the public!

Not only that, you have at least one Republican Senator openly agitating for American elite military units to shoot civilians, and wouldn’cha know, the 82^nd Airborne has just been deployed near the capital!

Make no mistake: What we are watching is authoritarianism’s dry run for November. Assuming of course that the Trump Organization and its enablers will wait that long.

I’ve said before that unless the Democrats have a complete blowout victory on Republicans in November – or maybe even especially if they DO – Trump is gonna come up with some weasely, bullshit excuse that the election was “rigged” or “fake” or “unfair” and all the Republicans in Congress are gonna goosestep in line to approve his ascension, half of them because they truly want a dictator and half of them because they just don’t want the responsibility of doing their jobs. And I get the impression that a lot of Democrats would go along with it, because their public posture over a generation is learned helplessness, and a lot of them just don’t want the responsibility of doing their jobs.

This becomes that much more likely because of coronavirus, and just as the powers that be discovered the wisdom of curfews only after poor black people went out in public, the states and Federal government will use the barriers that were already in the way of voting and smooth elections to justify not doing anything about those barriers, which would make votes that much less likely to be counted, which the Banana Republican Party would see as a feature and not a bug. Why do you think they’re so desperate to stop certain state initiatives to vote by mail?

What can the average civilian do if the shooting starts? Not a whole lot, frankly. Which is why we need to contain this to the political realm while we still can.

Now, just as Joe Biden doesn’t have control of a military, he has also been restricted by the coronavirus. But now that Our President has given us leave to break quarantine by going back to golf, Joe seems to be going out more. So he might be in position to make a political gesture that will raise the stakes for Trump without any sacrifice on his part.

All Biden has to do is to announce the obvious, that Trump’s actions have gone beyond the pale and violate his oath of office, the recent period being only the most noxious example, and as a result he must resign. Biden should then ask Mike Pence to take over according to Constitutional procedure, and say that this is the only way to save the Trump Administration, and the Republican Party.

Because it is.

It’s not like anyone in the lickspittle Banana Republican Party will take up the offer. I’ve gone over all the reasons why they’ve aligned with Trump; he has probably done more to adapt to them than the other way around. He is the figurehead and personality cult that they need to foist ideas that would otherwise be even less popular than they are. Not only that, the minute Trump is no longer President, he is subject to investigation, indictment and prosecution in state and Federal courts, and let’s face it, he’s too pretty for jail.

What this maneuver would do would be to undermine the legitimacy that the Trumpublicans would need for a serious takeover. Because as blatant as the thugs are being, all they need, just as in 2016, is a perception of legitimacy or a perception of the enemy’s illegitimacy, in order to sway the undecided. That’s why the thugs are staging riots and agitation. They know that fearful people who don’t pay much attention will cry out for Law and Order ™ and they’ll be more than happy to oblige.

Declaring that Trump has made himself illegitimate would shift the focus back to him. It would be merely stating the obvious. And at this point, somebody HAS to state the obvious. Somebody has to say this “Emperor” is no longer clothed in legitimacy. And the beautiful thing is that for Biden to do such would be to shift the burden onto the Banana Republicans at little or no cost to himself. After all: he’s the designated major-party opponent to the incumbent. He’s EXPECTED to oppose him. Saying “Don’t listen to Sleepy Joe, cause he’s a meanie, and he hates me, and he’s a meanie hater” isn’t going to count with people who aren’t already in the choir. The rest of the country will have to ask: Is he wrong? Does the president need to resign?

Saying that Trump needs to make way for Pence, again, is the correct Constitutional process. For one thing, it attacks the Trumpnik dogma that non-Trumpniks are just mad that they lost the 2016 election and want to overturn it. To me, at least, Trump won the Electoral College fair and square and if Clinton couldn’t figure out the victory conditions, that’s her fault. Trump is illegitimate not because he beat Queen Hillary the Inevitable, but because of everything he’s done since being inaugurated. And what all that means is that by retaining a Republican from the winning ticket, the election is not in question. The person who has abused his office is in question. The Trumpniks should not get away with saying otherwise.

Here’s the other element of this: this puts the focus on the Banana Republican Party as a whole. It has been said, and exhaustively demonstrated, that Republicans always choose Party over Country. But it really goes beyond that. Ultimately they choose Trump over Party. After US v. Nixon, certain Republican Senators like Barry Goldwater went up to the White House to tell President Nixon that he would not have Republican support in an impeachment trial. That was why he resigned. Most would say that the Senators chose country over party, which is true, but pragmatically, they chose party over Nixon. They did get shellacked in 1974 and 1976, but they came back in 1980 under Reagan. And that’s partly because at least they retained enough legitimacy to create a transition, and of course it was Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, who was able to pardon him. If Nixon had rode it out, it would have been that much worse for the Party, and there wouldn’t have been that many people in place to rehabilitate him.

When the Banana Republicans acquitted Trump in impeachment, making it as obvious as possible that they weren’t going to hear the evidence, Susan Collins of Maine said that Trump had learned his lesson. He sure did. The lesson he learned is that he can do anything he wants and his Party won’t do anything to stop him. That means that every thing he has done and will do since that time is on them. We all know that the Banana Republicans are not going to back a plea for their sweet, innocent little boy to resign, but in opposing such a plea, their own legitimacy is called into question. They have to be asked if they support a call to have federal troops shoot civilians just because The Most Americanest President Evar said so. If he’s bluffing, that threat becomes a campaign issue for them. If he’s not – they can’t assume that everyone in the military, or even every Second Amendment fan, is on board, and those people will hold them accountable if Trump’s pussy-power-grab goes Tango Uniform.

The Party of Trump serves him because they see it as in their interest to do so. He is more of an asset than a liability. They choose not Party over Country but Trump over Party because they don’t see a Party outside of Trump. They have to be made to understand the stakes. Trump is one man who will not live forever. They COULD survive Trump, just as the Democrats survived being the Party of the Confederacy- but if they choose to tie their fates to his, they will not.

And this is the nasty part: The more Republicans are made to confront the reality of their choice, the more they will have to reconsider their loyalty. And if Biden makes such a challenge publicly, that means Trump will have to reconsider the loyalty of his troops. I keep saying: a man who has no external sense of reality besides consensus and the media is more vulnerable to gaslighting than the liberals. But at the same time, they know how much The Leader hates even the perception of disloyalty, and the more on edge they will be. The more America is forced to confront the obvious, the more the Party of Trump will have to do so, and the less the Party and Trump will be able to trust each other. After all … he can sacrifice any number of them to the mob. They only need to sacrifice one man.

So with one maneuver, Biden’s campaign can challenge Trump’s telegraphed coup, challenge the legitimacy of his government and plant a seed of discord between Trump and his institutional followers.

Of course, I have no belief that Biden or his people would do something like this, because they are at pains not to be evil and Machiavellian, and even if they wanted to, they wouldn’t know how. But then again while the Trumpniks are evil, most of them wouldn’t know Machiavelli from a macchiato.

That’s my idea, anyway. But we ought to discuss tactics, because I get the feeling that things are going to be moving very quickly.

“If you’re not with me… you’re my enemy.”

“Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

I see a whole bunch of people reacting to Viceroy Trump’s attempt to label “Antifa” a terrorist organization, despite the fact that it technically doesn’t exist. And I see a whole lot of these people posting on their Facebook walls saying “I am anti-fascist.”

So let me get something straight.

I am NOT anti-fascist.

I am anti-collectivist.

I am pro-liberty, pro-individualism and pro-thinking for yourself.

And that means, IN ADDITION TO being anti-fascist, I am also anti-communist. Among other things, this means I am against people who rationalize the crimes of Castro’s Cuba by saying the Castros “gave people free education and healthcare”, which is on par with the old Right saying “at least Mussolini made the trains run on time.”

Not all anti-fascists are the same. STALIN was anti-fascist. I am also anti-Stalinist. And because I am anti-collectivist, I am ALSO anti-racist and anti-fascist. Specifically, I am against anybody who acts like National Socialism or the Confederacy were good for anybody, including their ostensible support base.

That means I am against any “conservatives”, “libertarians” or “freedom lovers” who talk a good game about protecting the Second Amendment to make sure citizens can defend against a tyrannical government but when they see REAL people getting shot by THIS government, they go, “Yay! Finally, Law and Order!”

It means I am against any white boys, leftist or white nationalist, who turn peaceful protests into excuses for violence, because more than fascism or communism they hate “normie” government and just want an excuse to hurt people.

It means I am against the Republican Party, a pagan cult of the state that used to be the Party of Lincoln, which worships a gold-plated calf because they know the rest of the country is against them, and the only way they can maintain their power is through force and fraud.

It means I am against cultists who worship an “anti-communist” who praised President Xi on January 24 for containing the coronavirus in China, and who previously came out of a closed-door meeting with Vladimir Putin slumped over and walking funny.

And it means that I am against any attempt to brand “Antifa” as some kind of Enemy of the State, because if the leftists are correct and the Trump Organization’s declaring war on anti-fascism means that they have implicitly identified with fascism, that is quite likely what they are counting on, because apparently all you need to do is change people’s programming is to change the labels they use, to define censorship as “free speech,” violence as “peacekeeping”, the Electoral College as “democracy” and Trump as “your president.” And because the Right is that much more reductionist and simple-minded than the Left.

Basically, I am against any bullshit attempt to use labels to foist a package deal of ideas that are anti-liberty, anti-individual, and anti-thinking for yourself.