Share this:

So I’m on the tread mill just before Christmas, pre-sweating for my pumpkin pie, when Tucker Carlson’s hilarious list of 100 things people have deemed “racist” in 2017 comes up. It took me a while to find it — mainly because I wasn’t trying very hard — but it really is funny.

“We live in revolutionary times,” Carlson told his followers on Twitter.

 

Carlson gave each “racist” item its own separate tweet, and while the list is worth reading in its entirety, I just couldn’t do them all. I have novels to write.

Apparently TREES are now racist. A group of trees in Palm Springs, California, was considered racist because the trees separated an upscale golf course from a historically black neighborhood. City officials promised to kill the trees, ridding Palm Springs of a longtime symbol of oppression.

DISNEY movies are now racists, according to Kat George, a writer for VH1’s website, who insisted that in 2017 some of your favorite Disney movies are racist. The Little Mermaid was listed as an offender because Sebastian, Ariel’s crab sidekick, spoke in an exaggerated Jamaican accent. Maybe he was a Jamaican crab.

MILK is now racist. Who knew? Who cared? It’s apparently became a symbol of the alt-right and neo-Nazis this year because racial minorities may be more likely to suffer from lactose intolerance. Even worse, the USDA’s dietary guidelines further such oppression by advertising dairy as an essential part of a healthy diet. As an American Indian who does indeed get gassy if I drink too much milk … get over yourselves. Seriously? If you don’t like milk or can’t drink it … don’t. My brother, as American Indian as I am, loves milk. Does that mean he’s self-loathing?

SCIENCE is apparently now racist. Students in South Africa declared that science is racist because it cannot explain “black magic” — no, really.

“I have a question for all the science people. There is a place in KZN called Umhlab’uyalingana, and they believe that through the magic, the black magic–you call it black magic, they call it witchcraft–you are able to send lightening to strike someone,” one student explained. “Can you explain that scientifically? Because it’s something that happens.”

Military CAMOUFLAGE is also racist. Don’t use face paint while sneaking through the jungle, or you might be accused of racism! The British Army was accused of donning “blackface” after they posted a picture of a soldier wearing dark face paint and holding a rifle.

Some CEREALS are now racist. A diversity officer at Miami University was actually open to the idea of banning Lucky Charms because some undercover students claimed the cereal was racist against Irish Americans. Yikes. Brad, did you know about this? Were you upset when the kids would eat them when they were little? No? How out of touch with your cultural roots can you be? Get angry! Be enraged! Where’s the war-bag?

 

Apparently TIMELINESS is now racist. Expecting students to show up on time to class might be insensitive to “cultural differences,” Clemson University said in a diversity training program.

 

BABIES are also racists. According to a study by the University of Toronto, babies show preferences to adults of their own race. Should we start diversity training in the nursery?

You can follow the full thread on Tucker’s Twitter account HERE. 

Share this:

So, it was New Years Day and we were invited to a friend’s house for food and fun. Mostly we paid Risk. There were several people there who we didn’t know and this one woman asked me if I’d signed some Internet petition demanding that President Trump be removed from office.

Why, no, I haven’t. So, she assumed I’d voted for Trump and things got a little tense there for a moment. Fortunately, our son was sitting with me at the time and he spoke up before hostilities could resume.

“Nope, she voted for Gary Johnson.”

Thanks, Kiernan. The hostile conversation turned abruptly toward my “utopian” principles. Well, actually, it started with “Who is Gary Johnson?” and sort of went from there.

I used to care about politics, but these days, I mostly care about the philosophy behind politics. I came to the conclusion when President Obama and the Democrats took the entire government down the primrose path that voting is the tyranny of a narrow majority against everybody who voted against taking that path. When Obama had a dismal four years as economic leader and foreign policy leader and still won the 2012 election, I realized that our system of elections is apparently rigged. It made no sense to me that state after state had flipped to Republican control at their governor- and legislative levels, but this incompetent was still our president. I had decided at the last moment that I couldn’t support Mitt Romney because until he won the nomination he’d never had more than 40% GOP support and there were some much better-qualified candidates who could have been nominated. So, I voted for whoever was running under the Libertarian ticket at the time. I didn’t expect him to win and there’s no evidence votes for him swayed the Obama-Romney contest at all, but I just couldn’t bring myself to cast a vote between an incompetent and a man who didn’t seem to represent conservatives in the least.

So, in 2016, there were no good choices after the nomination. There were some good choices in the primaries, but that all went away after Super Tuesday. I definitely would have voted for Rand Paul or, had Malcolm O’Malley won the Democratic nomination, I might have voted Democrat against Donald Trump. So, I planned by the weekend after Super Tuesday that I was voting for the Libertarian candidate. I actually think Gary Johnson would have made a good president, though his vice-presidential mate was such a progressive Republican he should have been a Democrat.

This is where I have evolved to over the last few years in the political realm. It was the answer I gave to my host’s sister when she asked me how I could not have taken sides in the election of 2016 and the year following.

I don’t believe that some humans — let’s call them “rulers” — should get moral sanction to use violence against other people – we’ll call them (“the ruled”) — to get what they (“rulers”) want.

If that doesn’t sound controversial to you, you probably agree with me (you’re reading my blog afterall). But it is possible that, like my friend’s sister, you aren’t paying close enough attention to how politics works.

Although I don’t believe the world is non-violent by nature, I think we should strive to not exert violence on our fellow human beings. Which casts all governments into doubt, because force is the essence of all governments from top to bottom. How did Louis XIV funding the palace of Versailles? Force) When George III raise an army to crush a revolt, he used force to make that happen. Vladimir Lenin redistributed confiscated land by force. Your local police officer enforces any number of laws through the use of threatened force, which amounts to the same thing. In every instance where government operates, you’re talking about people who rely on violence or the threat of violence to achieve compliance for their plans. They ultimately do not ask or require your consent. Their authority ultimately rests on the implied threat that they will beat you up if you don’t do what they say.

Somehow we came to believe that this was a normal state of affairs. It’s not okay to rob people in the park even if it is to pay for mowing the park grass, but it is okay to elect people who rob your bank account for taxes to pay for mowing the park’s grass. I’ve recognized the hypocrisy of that and I reject it. Just because we exert force upon each other through politics rather than guns to the head doesn’t mean we are acting non-violently toward each other. The threat of force makes it violent.

My views are pretty radical because a consistent commitment to non-violence means I don’t think “governments” as we know them should exist. Governments are easily the most organized and pervasive violence-users on the planet. 

Ideals like mine often get confused with utopianism. We’ve all been there. We’ve all heard the refrains – “The world has always been like that,” “Human beings are violent by nature,” and “Human beings always create violent systems/governments, though!” It all boils down to “But that’s utopian!”

With due respect, you’re missing the point entirely.

I believe violence exists and is one of the world’s biggest problems. I even warn you in advance that I believe in the right to self-defense. Since the Fall, humans have been a violent species. Human history is bloody, and we only get better at devising new ways to use violence to kill and manipulate each other. I’m not against violence because I believe that the humans are inherently good or peaceful. We’re not. Treating each other without aggression is not, from my viewpoint, going to make us better at root. We are what we are and we are prone to push each other around. But why shouldn’t we condemn aggression even if we can’t get rid of it?

Why shouldn’t I oppose aggression regardless of our tendency to use it? If humans are indeed corrupt by nature, why wouldn’t I want to limit our access to violence and tools of aggression like government?

Yes, government is a tool of aggression and violence. Consider how a majority of the population was opposed to the ACA prior to its passage, but the ruling class forced us to accept it and now some of us have gotten used to it, regardless of whether others have a different opinion. That was aggression in action – some people (rulers) forcing others (the ruled) do do what the rulers wanted.

Now consider this last year of Trump. What are people rioting in streets for? They fear that the Trump administration will force them to participate in things they don’t want to participate in. And, if they’re right, then government is an instrument of aggression and they are right to resist it.

Think about the problem of police brutality. It existed in the Bush 2 administration, seems to have gotten worse in the Obama administration and has not gone anywhere in the Trump administration. Is the problem who is in charge of the police or is it that the police exist at all? Well, we’ve tried to put different people in charge without a lot of change, so maybe the problem is that the police have the power to conduct violence against everyone else and it is their existence that is the problem.

I don’t think doing away with government will somehow create a society without violence. Human beings will always be able to turn to violence to get what they want. I don’t see a way around it. But that doesn’t mean that reducing government violence would make the situation worse. There’s an awful lot of Americans behind bars for “victimless” crimes that would not be behind bars if police didn’t have a mandate to use violence against them. Those people come out of prison unable to get jobs, which increases their propensity to use violence to get what they need to live. It’s easy to say “if they just didn’t break the law”, but was the law even necessary for a peaceful society and what might happen if we stopped using government to force people to live as we want them to live? You see, my opposition to violence isn’t contingent on a fairy-tale wish fulfillment of a society free of violence. I’m focused on harm-reduction.

There are plenty of things we choose to consistently oppose on ethical grounds: murder, rape, theft, child abuse, etc. These crimes will never go away completely. We don’t make an ethical exception for these acts because they’re inevitable. We condemn them roundly regardless of our inability to completely eliminate them.

So my question is this: why shouldn’t condemn violence even if we can’t get rid of it? So, why shouldn’t we condemn violent governments even if we can’t get rid of them?

 

The accusation of utopianism misunderstands both utopianism and nonviolence.

The actual utopians we’ve seen in history were social planners. They had a vision for a world they would build, usually from the top down. The communists and the Nazis were by-the-book utopians, as have been the social organizers and religious leaders of hundreds of social experiments and colonies. The really earnest utopians loved to use violence (or the threat of violence) to get the magical new world order they wanted. They weren’t nice guys. They made life hell for everyone around them.

 

The non-aggression principle is a counter-cultural ideal, resting entirely on the premise of “non aggression.” It doesn’t rule out self-defense against the violence of others. It’s not a vision for what a society should be. It’s not a plan for how millions of people should make their billions of daily decisions. It’s only a prohibition on one way – the destructive way – to relate to other people. It’s a humble way of living with other humans, and it’s effectively a prohibition on utopianism because it’s grounded in realistic optimism

The history of the world is full of darkness and violence, but there have also been flashes of peace and creativity. I don’t think human nature really changes, but it does vary a lot. The countries with the most authoritarian governments are rarely the most peaceful and creative. Think the USSR or China when it was a full-fledged communist regime. And, truthfully, we’ll probably always have some forms of authoritarian system because some people feel comfortable with governments, gangs, warlords and the like. But just because violence and the systems that organize it won’t go away doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight for the ideal.

 

 

When I ask people to join me in condemning politics, I’m asking them to do the same thing. The great joke about libertarianism is that we are plotting to take over the world and leave you alone. I have no desire to plan a society or create a new human being from scratch. I don’t see utopia ahead. I see a long, slow chain of day-to-day ethical decisions where individuals choose not to agress on one another. Even today, individual people choose in every moment of their political lives whether they will use violence, participate in violence,  or cheer on the “popular” violence done by someone in a government promising them safety or wealth or peace or …. well, name that political campaign.

As for me, I won’t sanction it. Maybe you’ll decide that you won’t either. if enough of us start doing things differently, we might just make the world better. Whether we succeed or not (in our lifetimes or a dozen generations from now), we still have to make a choice for ourselves. I choose non-aggression, and I guess that makes me a radical, but I reject the notion that I am utopian because utopians tend to be aggressive in their attempts to establish the new world order they envision.  

I’m writing an apocalyptic series. When I first started, I didn’t really think the US would be headed toward a civil war before my son’s beard completely grew in, but the last year has me rethinking that feeling … at times.

I want to believe that the fears of civil war are mostly overblown, but …. I want such scenarios to stay inside my books, but ….

The Good News?

I see some hard leftists and some hard rightists will to kill each other, but I don’t see even my heavily-armed neighbors shooting at one another or even at the people in neighbors within my city. Politics makes people irrational, but average people don’t shoot each other over political disagreements.

The Bad News?

Some observers disagree with me. They don’t live in Alaska, where politics is an indoor participation sport, and they think there’s a rational argument for why civil war can happen.

 

Jonathan Logan makes a thoughtful, informed argument for the plausibility of civil war:

• For young people to be susceptible to war (the young fight while the old stay home and direct), they must not be too settled, invested, or satisfied with the status quo and they can’t be living stable lives. They require some motive, be it “making a name for themselves” or “fighting evil” or whatever.
• Few young people in the West are willing to fight a foreign enemy for their country. (Polls find approximately 12% in Germany and 20% in the US). But when you ask if they would participate in riots against an unjust political order, the numbers shoot up. In Germany, it’s 66%; in the US, it’s about 60%.
• For a civil war (which is really just a big riot against what is perceived to be an unjust political order) to break out, enough people must perceive the current situation as unbearable and be willing to use violence.
• The police must be unable or unwilling to keep the two sides apart.

Jonathan Logan’s theory goes like this:

• There’s a growing inability of “cultural progressives” and “cultural conservatives” to engage in reasonable dialogue. Civility long ago hit the fan and was shredded by the blades.
• For a long time the “cultural progressives” had success after success. That led to the internal perception that they were not just right but also absolutely right if only those stupid hicks (deplorables) would get out of their way. This was really the general lay of the American political landscape from the late-1960s through to the 2016 election with a couple of moderate setbacks when Reagan restructured taxes in 1986 and when Congress did the Contract with America in 1994.
• Meanwhile, with limited and sporadic access to the reins of governmental power, “cultural conservatives” grew dissatisfied. They were pushed by progressives on a whole variety of issues to the point where they had a hard time tolerating some of the cultural changes that were forced on them.
• Before Brexit and Trump, progressives were absolutely convinced that they were right, that they would win, and that the future would be bright. This wasn’t just an assumption. They were convinced of this as surely as they were convinced the sun will rise tomorrow morning. The election of 2016 came as a crushing surprise to them. They didn’t just lose an election. The results of that election destroyed their world perception. OMG, progressive liberals are NOT the center of the universe. The sky IS FALLING!
• The result is widespread post-traumatic stress disorder. The progressives didn’t just lose; they were traumatized. They now experience anything or anyone that doesn’t go 100% according to their ideology as being violent, hurtful, and triggering. Their coping mechanism is to push harder, become more radical, accept less compromise. They feel that everyone else is actually trying to kill them.
• At the same time the cultural conservatives experienced something new: victory. They’d just spent a decade in one losing battle after another. First, Bush 2 had reneged on his promises to them and then Obama had told them to sit down, shut up and let their betters lead because they were never getting into power again. Although they won the election of 2016, they are intently aware that there’s a huge mess to clean up. When they see progressives pushing back, they remember all the times conservative values were shelved, denigrated and ignored. They remember what it was like to be backed into a corner. Many of them haven’t actually left the corner yet.
• So, we have two groups backed into corners with a huge no-man’s land between them. Both groups are deeply polarized and have virtually no shared values on which to find common ground.
• A defining characteristic of my children’s generation (Millennials) is that they know they can expect nothing from the status quo. Add to that they lack tools for conflict resolution. Their generation is split between progressives and conservatives. Yeah, really, there are many conservative Millennials. Currently they are not the largest generation in existence and they lack influence because they are young. They, therefore, have no way to implement anything that matters to them.
• So, the Millennials on the progressive side feel they must radicalize because it is imperative to destroy the “evil” other side. Antifa, BLM, RevCom, those groups at the center of the protests and riots, are desperate, hurting, hating, and they feel righteous in their anger.
• Meanwhile, conservatives are starting to feel fear. Conservatives reject radicalism and the disorder that comes with it. They look at the progressive side and they see agitation, violence and hateful rhetoric. Their natural reaction is to defend themselves.
• We’re already seeing the more radical of Millennial conservatives and progressives pull out clubs. That’s what happened in Charlottesville and Oakland. That’s a growing trend that doesn’t show signs of stopping. In fact, the progressives have planned a whole series of color-revolution-type protest/riots for November.
• At the same time, the police are choosing to stand down in these conflicts. More often than not, they agree with the progressive sentiments, but occasionally a conservative administration will not step in the middle of a clash until someone has died.
• And their refusal to decisively take sides is what allows the ingredients of civil war to ignite. –

I kind of agree with Logan that people are currently so polarized that the ingredients are there for civil war, but I’m going to keep hoping that people will listen to their better angels and just stay home. That’s unlikely with the media stirring the pot in the pursuit of ratings. If a civil war does happen, Judy Woodruff and Sean Hannity will be culpable for causing it.

Notice, I’m not blaming this on President Trump. Why not? Because I don’t think the president is that important. I also don’t think he is seeking to tear the country apart. He is seeking to fulfill his campaign promises and, regardless of whether he does fulfillment well, he’s answerable to the people who put him in office. Let him have his turn. He’ll be out of office in three years if he doesn’t do a good job or seven years if he does and then you’ll get another shot at tyrannizing the country … or not. Maybe by that time, you polarized advocates for coercing “the other guy” will have figured out that politics is poison and that we’d all be better off if we paid less attention to it.

 

 

How do you discuss something you’re not allowed to name? The media and academia declared the Alt-Left a myth, a product of American dialectical thinking that requires a balance to the Alt-Right, but not really something to worry about. Pay no attention to the club-wielding, masked thugs in Charlottesville, Berkley and Boston. Keep your eyes trained on the “fascists” because the Alt-Left doesn’t really exist and to use the term “Alt-Left” is a pejorative” used only by the right-leaning media and the center Left to attack a legitimate people’s movement. “Smart” people know it’s all nonsense.

For those self-identified liberals who may have been seduced by this belief system with its propaganda — I know I made you mad just now. I hope you will continue reading because this is a conversation we need to have.

I would define Alt-Left as a leftist, illiberal authoritarian ideology rooted in postmodernism and neo-Marxism that supports censorship, condones violence in response to speech, is obsessed with identity politics (much like the Alt-Right), and functions like a secular religion that gives its believers a sense of moral self-worth.

Share this:

Share this:

I’m starting to really wonder what’s going on.

Jason Kessler, the organizer of the August 12th alt-Right march in Charlottsville, VA, used to be an Occupy Wall Street organizer. He claims he’s changed his mind, but it’s well-known by those who study fringe groups, that the neo-Nazi groups have been thoroughly infiltrated by Department of Justice agents. Does that mean the march was planned by undercover agents for a reason that hasn’t been stated? You could wonder … which I do.

On the other side, who organized the masked, club-wielding Antifa counter-protesters? It’s not a spontaneous movement. Among the organizers is the Revolutionary Communist Party.  Check out their website because it’s important to know what these folks believe and what they want.

RevCom is planning a series of marches starting in November (the 100th year anniversary of the Russian Revolution, btw) with the goal of forcing the removal of the Trump administration … and not just President Trump, but Vice President Pence and the Cabinet. That is, of course, unconstitutional, but yes, THIS is a constitutional crisis because it would set aside the established electoral process that we as a country have followed for 250 years.

In reading through RevCom’s website, I was struck by their goals. They want people to go out and throw bricks, beat people up and set things on fire because they want to replace the democratic republic of the United States with a communist junta. Among their ideas is to segregate the Southeast part of the country as a black-only state. Any remaining white people in that zone would have no rights. Which is one reason they want to tear down the statues and monuments now, because communism always seeks to control history.

So other weird things that I am just wondering about.

Rumor has it that the guy who drove the car was a schizophrenic and a big-time Hillary Clinton supporter. I used to work with schizophrenics. With the right words, you can manipulate them to do things that they wouldn’t do ordinarily. Who was pulling his strings? We’ll never know, but it sounds eerily like this other incident.

Today, there was a free speech rally in Boston. I couldn’t find out much about the organizers because their Facebook pages were overrun by angry vitriol from those not interested in a conversation about free speech. Today, if the news is to be believed, the bandstand was surrounded by opposition forces, so that the speakers couldn’t speak. How is that free speech? Will we ever know what the organizers hoped to accomplish? Probably not because of groups like Black Lives Matter, Antifa and Communist Revolution won’t let anyone they disagree with speak where they can be heard.

So, where are we headed? It sure looks like a color revolution. That’s where an uprising forces the removal of the (often) lawfully elected government to be replaced by someone (or a group of someones) who aren’t chosen by the people. Do we want the violent, club-wielding organizers of these groups to be in charge?

At best, if the entire Presidential administration is removed from power, it logically forces us to martial law — you know, like in Egypt. Because this country’s ordinary folks are armed, martial law is likely to ignite a civil war. And it probably should. Why shouldn’t we fight against a government that has been imposed on us?

I’m not calling for armed war. I’m saying that’s where it’s headed because the government RevCom is calling for would be wholly illegitimate and we the people reserve the right to impose our own sovereignty. Or should. I can’t imagine that people like me, who believe in free speech, would be allowed to exist very long under their hegemony.

I’m not afraid of this scenario. I think it’ll be a great time to be in the backwater of Alaska. But ask yourselves … would you be okay if a Communist revolution forcibly replaced the American government with a military junta bent on segregating us into warring factions within certain regional zones? You don’t have to believe me … follow the link and decide for yourself if you want Bob Avakian in charge of your country?