News You Need to Know – Page 27

Witch Hunts

I’m back. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any time between Monday evening and last night to put together material for this blog. However, I did find one story that I felt was worth mentioning.

Much like the Bloods and the Crips, the neo-fascists and anti-fascists have an ongoing gang rivalry. While I couldn’t care less about two violent gangs wiping each other out, these rivalries always end up catching innocent bystanders in the middle. Earlier this week a man was stabbed by a supposed anti-fascists because of his “Nazi” haircut:

A “confused anti-fascist” swung a knife towards the face of a man with a haircut similar to the one popular with white nationalists.

Joshua Witt, 26, was getting out of his car at Steak ’n Shake in Sheridan, Colorado when a man ran over to him yelling, “Are you one of them neo-Nazis?”

The man aimed for his head over his car door, but Witt blocked the blow with his hand, which needed three stitches.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of the fascists are exploiting this attack to gain sympathy from the general public. Many of the anti-fascists, likewise, are claiming that this attack was a false flag performed by a fascist to make the anti-fascists look back. Was this attack perpetrated by an anti-fascist who decided a haircut is enough justification to stab somebody, was it a false flag, or are the facts being reported incorrectly and the real answer doesn’t involve either warring faction? It’s hard to tell.

Gang rivalries have a nasty habit of going from a disagreement over an actual transgression to mindless “us” versus “them” fighting rather quickly. Once a fight stops being about actual wrongs suffered and begin being about group identity, the tactics tend to change to the means justifying the ends. After that point it becomes difficult to tell who did what. When the means justify the ends, false flags becomes acceptable as well so you have a hard time knowing what side actually perpetrated an atrocity. Zealotry becomes common and that brings with it individuals identifying with either side trying to prove their piety by performing a seemingly random act of violence. These seemingly random acts of violence are often indistinguishable from acts of violence performed by unaffiliated individuals.

Update: 2017-08-29: Now that an investigation has been performed it appears that Mr. Witt stabbed himself and then claimed an anti-fascist did it. However, I believe the point I made in this post, that ongoing gang rivalries tend to catch innocent people in the crossfire, still holds true.

Nietzsche Opposed Nationalism and Racism

I’m going to be pretty busy for the next couple of days so content here will probably be a bit light. However, I will still find time to point out how fucking stupid national socialists and their international brethren are.

Today’s post deals with reading comprehension. The Nazis periodically cited the works of Nietzsche when arguing their philosophy. Their offspring; neo-Nazis, the alt-right, and other flavors of national socialists; have followed in their footsteps. However, unless you read Nietzsche particularly badly and are entirely ignorant of the personal views he expressed throughout his lifetime, there are no grounds on which to cite Nietzsche when making an argument in favor of nationalism:

But if you read Nietzsche like a college freshman cramming for a midterm, you’re bound to misinterpret him — or at least to project your own prejudices into his work. When that happens, we get “bad Nietzsche,” as the Week’s Scott Galupo recently put it.

And it would appear that “bad Nietzsche” is back, and he looks a lot like he did in the early 20th century when his ideas were unjustly appropriated by the (original) Nazis. So now’s a good time to reengage with Nietzsche’s ideas and explain what the alt-right gets right and wrong about their favorite philosopher.

[…]

“Nietzsche’s argument was that you had to move forward, not fall back onto ethnocentrism,” Hugo Drochon, author of Nietzsche’s Great Politics, told me. “So in many ways Spencer is stuck in the ‘Shadows of God’ — claiming Christianity is over but trying to find something that will replace it so that we can go on living as if it still existed, rather than trying something new.”

[…]

Nietzsche was interested in ideas, in freedom of thought. To the extent that he knocked down the taboos of his day, it was to free up the creative powers of the individual. He feared the death of God would result in an era of mass politics in which people sought new “isms” that would give them a group identity.

“The time is coming when the struggle for dominion over the earth will be carried on in the name of fundamental philosophical doctrines,” he wrote. By doctrines, he meant political ideologies like communism or socialism. But he was equally contemptuous of nationalism, which he considered petty and provincial.

Only a lack of reading comprehension could lead somebody to believe that Nietzsche supported the idea of national socialism. Come to think of it, only a lack of reading comprehension could lead somebody to believe that national socialism is a good idea so I think I’ve found a significant underlying problem.

If the leaders of the new national socialist movement can’t read a handful of books and actually comprehend what they say, why should anybody think that the ideas they espouse are any less stupid than they are?

The State Doesn’t Provide Protection

The Supreme Court has ruled that law enforcers have no obligation to protect you even though you have an obligation to pay them. Being paid for services that haven’t been rendered leads to some unfortunate situations. For example, law enforcers refused to provide protection to a Jewish synagogue during the Charlottesville fiasco so they had to hire professionals:

The Jewish community in Charlottesville hired armed security to protect its synagogue for the first time after local police declined to provide a guard for the site despite hundreds of white supremacists congregating on the town over the weekend for a rally that resulted in the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer.

Unlike law enforcers, private security providers are motivated to provide protection because if they don’t then they don’t get paid.

This situation is a counterargument to the people who claim that the State is necessary to provide protection. These statists usually argue that in a society without a government poor people would be preyed upon because they wouldn’t be able to hire protective services. However, that situation doesn’t differ from the situation we currently live under. Even though there is a government people still have to hire private security if they want security because the State has exempted its own security providers from having to actually provide it.

The Fight of the Century

This could be the greatest fight of the century:

“The Mother of All Rallies” is coming to Washington, D.C. on September 16th. The Pro-Trump group bills itself as “The Woodstock of American Rallies” on its official website, with the aim of sending “a message to congress the media and the world” that “we stand united to defend American culture & values.” Over 7,000 people follow the rally’s Facebook page. It should be quite the gathering.

There’s only one problem: there will already be another kind of gathering in town.

Also scheduled to storm the National Mall that day is the Juggalo March, a collective of I.C.P. fans seeking equal treatment, which we first reported on here last summer.

Trumpsters versus Juggalos? Where do I buy tickets to this event? Is VIP seating available? I’m willing to pay for it!

False Idols

Early yesterday morning, and by early I mean under the cover of darkness, workers whisked away a handful of idols to a government that vanished some time ago:

Statues dedicated to Confederate heroes were swiftly removed across Baltimore in the small hours of Wednesday morning, just days after violence broke out over the removal of a similar monument in neighboring Virginia.

Beginning soon after midnight on Wednesday, a crew, which included a large crane and a contingent of police officers, began making rounds of the city’s parks and public squares, tearing the monuments from their pedestals and carting them out of town.

Thou shalt have no other state before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image of false states.

Personally, I have no issue with remove idols of statism from public view. My problem is how selectively it’s being done. Idols to the Confederate States of America are being removed by idols to the United States of America have so far remained untouched. I know a lot of people who have been demanding the removal of Confederate statutes have argued on the grounds of racism and slavery. Since the United States of America maintained the practice of slavery after the Revolutionary War as well committed mass genocide of American Indians, it would seem appropriate to move its idols as well. Unfortunately, I find myself doubting that the same zeal will be put into removing idols of George Washington as Robert E. Lee because most people living in the United States seem to believe that it’s the One True State.

Almost the Right Idea

On Monday a group of individuals in Minneapolis held a solidarity march with the people in Charlottesville who protested the national socialists. This wasn’t surprising in the least. There is a pretty solid Antifa movement here in the Twin Cities as well as a large contingent of international socialists (although the two groups often overlap there are also people who are members of one but not the other). What was rather surprising though was that some of the marchers actually remove the Hennepin County flag at the Hennepin County Government Center and replaced it with an Antifa flag. Afterwards, the Hennepin County flag was burned along with an effigy of a Nazi.

I think that the protesters almost had the right idea. Had they simply remove the flag and called it a day I’d have given them serious kudos. After all, I’m in favor of removing the State’s symbolism. But replacing the State’s symbolism with more tribal symbolism is, in my opinion, pointless. So I guess I’ll give the protesters half credit for that one.

Voluntary Association Strikes Again

A white supremacist website, the Daily Stormer, ran into a hiccup yesterday. The website’s domain registrar, GoDaddy, informed the site administrators that it no longer wished to associate with them and that they had 24 hours to move to another registrar. So the administrators moved the domain name to Google and was then informed by Google that it had no desire to associate with them:

For years, the website Daily Stormer has promoted hatred against Jews, black people, LGBT people, and other minorities, making it one of the Internet’s most infamous destinations. But on Sunday, editor Andrew Anglin outdid himself by publishing a vulgar, slut-shaming article about Heather Heyer, a woman who was killed when someone rammed a car into a crowd of anti-racism protestors in Charlottesville.

The article prompted a response from the site’s domain registrar, GoDaddy. “We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service,” GoDaddy wrote in a tweet late Sunday night.

On Monday, the Daily Stormer switched its registration to Google’s domain service. Within hours, Google announced a cancellation of its own. “We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service,” the company wrote in an statement emailed to Ars.

As the article points out, the website isn’t likely to go offline because of this. Both Wikileaks and The Pirate Bay have a long history of having to jump from registrar to registrar to stay online. However, it is nice that GoDaddy and Google have the ability to decide that they no longer wish to associate with the Daily Stormer. But voluntary association is one of those things that people seem to love only when it benefits them or their causes. As soon as voluntary association clashes with people or their causes they quickly move to demand that the association be mandated by government.

When the First Amendment Applies

Since there is some confusion about what free speech actually means, I gave an example of what doesn’t constitute a violate of free speech. Today I will give an example of what does count as a violation of free speech:

Can the government ban the text of the First Amendment itself on municipal transit ads because free speech is too “political” for public display?

If this sounds like some ridiculous brain teaser, it should. But unfortunately it’s not. It’s a core claim in a lawsuit we filed today challenging the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s (WMATA) restrictions on controversial advertising.

The ACLU, ACLU of D.C., and ACLU of Virginia are teaming up to represent a diverse group of plaintiffs whose ads were all branded as too hot for transit: the ACLU itself; Carafem, a health care network that specializes in getting women access to birth control and medication abortion; People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA); and Milo Worldwide LLC — the corporate entity of provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

WMATA is a government agency, which means its decisions to allow or prohibit certain forms of speech constitute government censorship and therefore fall under the First Amendment.

This case brings up something I’ve often wondered about. Public transport in the Twin Cities is operated by Metro Transit, which is part of the Metropolitan Council government organization. Metro Transit’s buses and trains are plastered with advertisements. If Metro Transit rejects a proposed advertisement, does that qualify as a violation of the First Amendment. I believe it does but I’ve been curious what the courts would say (not because I think the decisions of courts are meaningful but because I have a morbid curiosity).

A Disturbance in the Bordertarian Force

Bordertarians, a term I like for referring to “libertarians” who advocate for closed borders, were on the receiving end of some rather hilarious karma. Members of the band Backwordz, a band that raps about libertarian concepts, was recently ejected from Canada:

One of the people sympathetic to this idea, Eric July of the libertarian-themed band Backwordz, was on his way to a gig in Canada with the rest of his bandmates when they were stopped and held at the border going into Canada.

They were denied entry into the country. They were turned around. They have to cancel their date in Toronto.

One of the members of the band had a DUI on his record and, according to Canadian law, enough time had not passed to allow him entry into the country with that mark on his record.

The border was closed to them.

Justifiably, Eric July was not at all happy about what had happened. That seems like a ridiculous rule to have in place. But more importantly, an uninvited third party, the government of Canada, stepped in between Eric July and the venue that was supposed to host Backwordz. Without any actual authority to do so, they prevented the concert from occurring even though none of the private property owners involved had any issue over the arrangement.

For some reason this has upset some bordertarians. It turns out that they didn’t quite understand what closed borders entail.

In the fantasy utopia of bordertarians, governments pass laws that prevent people they don’t like from entering the country but allow people they do like to enter the country. But that’s not how things work here in the real world. When governments can decide who can and cannot cross their imaginary lines the people aren’t given a say. If, for example, the government decides that people with a DUI charge are prohibited from entering the country even if a majority of the people living in that country find such a rule stupid, people with DUI charges don’t get to enter the country.

As a radical individualist, I oppose any interference with voluntary association, which means I necessarily oppose closed borders. In my world, unlike the world of bordertarians, Backwordz would have been able to play its show because the venue wanted them to play there. The venue’s desire to associate with the band is all that should be needed for Backwordz to play there.

You reap what you sow. If you’re a bordertarian, you should be jumping for joy at this news since a government did exactly what you advocated.

Only a Fool Would Let His Enemy Teach His Children

One of my friends posted this article on Facebook. The article is from a year ago but what it discusses is still valid today. Even though Venezuela is collapsing under the weight of socialism, socialism remains appealing to many people. The fact that a majority of people still support socialism even though it has been one of the greatest killers of the 20th and 21st centuries is probably the greatest argument against democracy but I digress.

How can people still love socialism even though it has caused so much death and misery? I think I can explain this fact using two quotes. Lenin one said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Malcom X said, “Only a fool would let his enemy teach his children.” The ideas of socialism usually take root in the minds of children in government ~~schools~~ indoctrination centers.

All states are socialist to some degree. Some countries, like the United States, have become extremely socialist in nature. Since government indoctrination centers are concerned with ensuring children in their confines develop a love of Big Brother, it’s not surprising that children subjected to a government “education” develop a love of socialism. It’s literally programmed into them at a young age.

People have a tendency to make things fit their bias. This is especially true with biases that were programmed in at a young ago such as political ideology and religion. Even if you present objective truth to somebody that one of their programmed beliefs is incorrect they will more often than not find a way to dismiss that truth so they can continue believing what they believe. The reason socialism remains appealing to so many even though mountains of evidence show that it’s a horrible idea is because parents have let socialists educate their children.

Lenin wasn’t even shy about the fact that he wanted to ability to educate children and why. Malcom X pointed out that it’s foolish to let your enemy educate your children. Yet people who should know better continue to subject to children to government indoctrination centers and are surprised when their children turn out to be mindless statists. That’s how you know Lenin was a strategic genius. He didn’t hide what he was doing and his enemies still fell into his trap.