Archive for We Surround Them
When individuals establish for themselves a government of their own choosing, they generally establish a structure for that government, and explicitly spell out the mission of that government, its purposes, and most importantly, the limitations they impose upon that government. Every bit of detail which outlines the functions of the various branches and bureaucracies of a government is in and of itself a kind of parameter which limits the scope of government to a particular area. Governments which step outside of the boundaries of these missions are generally held to be in violation of the charters and constitutions which give them their authority. In short, a government which violates its mission by stepping beyond the boundaries of its enumerated authorities and roles has abdicated its claim to legitimacy. It is no longer a government of informed consent; it is instead a government which exists in spite of consent and whose continued existence depends on misinformed consent.
In an earlier section, I delineated between the state and the nation by distinguishing the former as the various bureaucracies, organizations, and entities established ostensibly to help the state fulfill its mission while classifying the latter as the people, the land they occupy or hold claim to, and the ideals which those people sincerely believe represent their unique identity as a country. In nearly every state, there is a fundamental bifurcation between the ideals of the people and the actions of the state. Our laws flow from those commonly held ideals which we share with each other, at least insofar as those laws represent what we believe about ourselves and our country. The inevitable result of the state is that those laws are perverted against the very ideals which gave rise to the state and its foundation in various charters and constitutions.
The state accomplishes its abuses in a two-fold manner: it either ignores the laws which its agents find to be archaic and in conflict with some overriding state interest, or it codifies the power to override individual liberty into the very law which flows from a constitution whose very purpose was to prevent abuses of individual liberty by limiting government to a defined role. Ends justify means in either case according to those individual agents, elected or otherwise, who perpetuate the erosion of freedom in order to promote expansions of state authority at the expense of individual liberty and self-determination. These men and women share a commitment to pragmatism above all else, and, as noted in another section, this commitment to an ends justifying means philosophy naturally results in their classification as Leftists. Some will call them utilitarians, but for my own purposes, I refer to them as Leftists. The end result of this pragmatism over principle is that any claim of the state can be justified in hypothetical contexts if not in real world precedents.
For instance, we have never encountered a situation where an individual with knowledge of a deployed dirty bomb was apprehended before the detonation of said bomb, and where intelligence agents had the opportunity through interrogation to prevent the detonation of the bomb in question by using any and all means imaginable. Yet because such a hypothetical is possible, even though it isn’t at all likely, intelligence agencies and defense hawks argue that they need to be legally permitted to torture not only the suspect, but also his children and his spouse in order to compel him to give up what he knows. The torture rises to the point of sexual mutilation of the children, to the point where an infant’s testicles can be crushed in order to compel his father and mother to divulge information, though they are merely suspects and have not even be charged, tried, or convicted of any crime.
This sort of reasoning, based at is it is entirely on hypothetical eventualities or possibilities, can be used to justify any behavior by a state. The logical extension of such logic is thus: we know that a terrorist group resides within a particularly populous area, and that they possess materials which can be used to construct a nuclear bomb. Due to the intelligence we’ve already gleaned, we can be fairly certain that they are already in the process of constructing said bomb. They are actually near deploying the bomb to its target, and their departure from the populous area is impending.
We have the means to strike to preempt their attack, but the strike will involve killing tens of thousands of people in order to eliminate the threat posed by two dozen individuals. However, if the two dozen people in question are successful, their bomb will kill hundreds of thousands. This is the moral and ethical calculus posed by pragmatism, utilitarianism, or Leftism.
The whole of our perspective is comprised of two options, either/or. Both lead to the destruction of human life, but one leads to the destruction of less human life. Then again, given our intelligence agency’s history of lying, assassination, conducting human experiments outside the purview of law, and various other improprieties and illegalities, how do we know that in this particular instance they are telling the truth to us? We know only because they are us. They are an agency of our government. That’s the whole of their credibility, and their shared nationality with us is supposed to expunge or negate their long-documented and oft-lamented record of wrongdoing.
We believe that they exist for our defense, and that their actions, no matter how reprehensible when taken in separately by themselves, are somehow rendered acceptable within a context that remains forever classified or hidden for purposes of national security. This despite the fact that declassified examples have routinely exposed the agencies in question as having no basis from which to assert that their actions were in fact related to national security. Usually, the intelligence community and the security establishment as a whole use national security and the penumbral secrecy thereof to hide evidence of their own incompetence and malfeasance so that they are never held to an account for their failures. By the time declassification occurs, those responsible have long since died, and the public’s outrage has faded. Many individuals who read of the acts in question at the time of their declassification were not even alive at the time the illegalities occurred.
Claims of national security are a key part of the state’s reliance upon myth: one can absolve oneself of accountability for any number of transgression by ensuring they remain hidden in perpetuity, or at least as long as one is alive. In this way the guilty parties ride off into the future to enjoy their lives after entire careers filled with theft, murder, and torture, each example of which was committed supposedly in service of the country and the security of its people. If this is the case, why not have it all out in the open? Surely we can judge for ourselves whether or not a state-sponsored assassination was in fact in our interest.
This is the key distinction between the state and the individual: an individual who commits the sort of acts committed by an intelligence operative is said to be sociopathic and even criminal, while the intelligence or defense operative can continue through the decades of his career racking up impressive statistics even by the standards of our most prolific sadists and serial killers.
For our purposes, let’s reflect a moment on the Holocaust, a tragic genocide in which the lives of six million Jews were systematically extinguished for no other reason than their race. They were judged as complicit in the real or imagined crimes of their forefathers and peers, regardless of their actual involvement in the banking establishment which allegedly brought about Germany’s decline during and after World War I. If the Jews in fact possessed such influence and vast power, as the National Socialists and other backwards bigots alleged, one wonders why such a powerful race was unable to prevent the genocide of six million of its own people. They financed armies, moved nations against their own interests and for the interests of the Jews, and possessed the world’s banking system at their disposal, if one believes the sort of rhetoric propagated by inbred bigots and morons. Yet when a failed artist and World War I veteran set in motion events which would kill six million of their kind, they were unable to prevent the genocide from occurring.
The wealthy Jews of Europe had long existed in ghettoes and slums, from which they were unable to escape. They could not move freely throughout much of Europe. In Italy, the Jews had been crammed into one ghetto in Rome. After Italy’s independence, the Italians did take down the walls which prevented the Jews from walking through the city after sundown, but the vast majority of the Jews lacked the means or the wherewithal to go anywhere else. When the Nazis came for Jews of Italy, they backed their trucks right up to the entrance of the ghetto and began to apprehend them. This took place 300 yards from the Vatican, by the way. These powerful Jews were unable to do anything substantive to resist their persecutors, despite holding sway over the entire world by virtue of their race, if one believes the myth and narrative constructed by the National Socialist state.
Six million people were done in lawfully by a state because of a mythic narrative, with both the myths and the laws constructed by the state who extinguished six million supposedly omnipotent Jews as if it were an afterthought. This was accomplished through the bureaucracies of the German state, through propaganda which flowed from its official ministries and through laws which poured forth from its legislature. The parts of the Holocaust which were not explicitly authorized by the law took place through vaguely constructed laws which gave the government ambiguous powers to subvert the explicit letter of the law in the name of some security interest, some pragmatic concern. Ambiguity in the law is the ally of genocidal maniacs, especially when it empowers a state to override the letter of the law in emergency situations and circumstances.
Now let’s consider another law you may not have heard of, in a place you rarely think of, if you think of it all. In the Bolivian mountains, there is a city named Potosí which lies beneath the Cerro de Potosí, a mountain which sits upon one of the richest silver deposits ever discovered in the history of mankind. Back in the time when Potosí was at its peak, Bolivia was part of the Viceroyalty of Peru under Spanish rule, and the administrator of Potosí, a man named Francisco de Toledo, Count of Oropesa, adapted the Incan system of mita for his own purposes. The Incas had evolved a system of conscription for public service to construct their empire, and owing to their wealth, a family could tend their crops for sixty-five days a year and then spend the rest of the year laboring under the mita system.
Francisco de Toledo’s idea was to use mita for the mining of the silver at Potosí, and the practice eventually evolved into Indian laborers being forced to toil in the mines for months at a time, at a wage which did not equal out to the costs of their subsistence. While the free labor rate was 30 pesos a month, the monthly expenses for food alone came to 28½ pesos. The free laborer also had to pay taxes, and his total expenses for the month were as high as 60 pesos. That’s the free labor rate. If you were conscripted under mita, you were paid around 25 pesos a month at most.
This system and this wage continued for two hundred years, all the way up into the 1800s. The truth was that the mitayo would never get out from under the debts he accumulated under mita, which paid him less than half of what he needed to survive. For him to make up the difference, his wife and children would also have to work in the mines as well. Of course, he would have to feed and shelter them as well.
The fact that forced mine labor was illegal under Spanish law was of no consequence. The fact that Spanish law required mitayos to be paid for their travel to the mine (they were conscripted from all over the Viceroyalty of Peru and had to travel to get to Potosí by foot and through the use of llamas as pack animals) was ignored as well. Eventually the Spanish government repealed the aspects of the law which prohibited forced labor when it became apparent that free labor was more profitable.
This is the state: when the law conflicts with practical purposes of the state and its favored groups, the law is ignored and overlooked. Far from binding the state and men equally, the law holds no efficacy whatsoever to ensure the outcomes for which it was constructed. Then and now, the law is of no concern to the state when the binding power of the law conflicts with the state’s overarching interest, even if that interest is of dubious validity. The Spaniards though they would accomplish cheaper labor costs and better returns through the use of coercive labor practices, but the reality was that on Sunday, the k’apcha workers (workers who worked on Sunday to make up the difference between their wages as free laborers and as mitayos and their actual needs) turned in more silver to the Banco de Rescates than the Spanish did between the years 1773-1777. As noted by John H. Rowe in his article The Incas Under Spanish Colonial Institutions, this fact raises “some interesting reflections on the efficiency of Spanish mining operations (20).”
By some estimates, eight million indigenous people and African slaves died at Potosí due to the harsh labor practices of the Spanish, practices which were arguably inefficient due to the aforementioned k’apcha worker production between 1773-1777. At one point, the Spanish had compelled individual to remain in the mines for periods of four months at a time. Forced labor in the mines was illegal under Spanish law when it began, as was the failure of Spanish officials to compensate mitayos for their travel to Potosí.
This wasn’t capitalism. It wasn’t a free market. The Spanish and didn’t gain their wealth and position, a position which survives to this day in our current world economy, by employing capitalist practices. They gained their wealth by behaving like thugs and ruthlessly crushing any opposition to their practices, even when those practices were illegal by Spanish law. As a state, the Spaniards disregarded their own laws when those laws conflicted with what individual Spaniards or groups among the Spanish elite wanted or saw as conducive to their own interest. The law loses legitimacy when it isn’t enforced equally or fairly, and what is more, a society which has no law has no real structure or consistency and is economically inefficient. People have no motivation to play within the boundaries of the law when the law is merely the instrument with which they are bludgeoned into submitting to policies against their own interest.
All of the colonial powers engaged in this sort of behavior. They had laws which prohibited many of the abuses they engaged in, but it was a state policy to ignore the very laws which limited state abuses if those laws got in the way of what the colonial powers believed to be a profitable course. The natural result of such injustice is strife and revolution, both of which hold bloodshed as a consequence. As further noted by Howe, “…Inca nationalists fought colonial abuses by legal means, petitioned the King for something like equal rights for Indians, and, when peaceful measures proved ineffective, attempted to establish an independent Inca state by armed revolt (158, Ibid emphasis added).
Today, we confiscate the assets of drug dealers and criminals when those assets are accrued through criminal enterprises. Imagine the same logic applied to the various colonial powers who routinely violated the very laws they passed in order to achieve an end. It’s not a comforting thought, but it’s an increasingly likely one in certain instances. The 371 treaties signed by the U.S. government with Indian nations who were recognized as sovereign by the United States at the time of the signings are now coming back to haunt present day landowners, who find that their deed to the land upon which their houses sit is based upon an uncertain and likely illegal provenance. In short, because the United States entered into binding legal agreements Indian nations which established certain territorial and ownership prerogatives, only to disregard those agreements almost immediately after the ink had dried on the documents, modern landowners are finding their ownership of land challenged in court by newly assertive Indian tribes. This is the consequence of a statist disregard for and indifference to the law.
Such statist illegalities hold real consequences for people decades and centuries after the abuse occurs. All that is required is for a court with a rightful sense that contracts cannot be broken with impunity to decide to enforce those contracts decades and centuries after a state broke its legal obligations under the contract with impunity. The bill comes due.
But before it does, human misery reaches catastrophic proportions. We look upon the suffering of the Jews with understandable compassion and we are revolted by the German state’s overreach and abuse. We deny that states can legitimately claim for themselves the power to wipe out entire races of people. But where does the denial begin? Does it apply retroactively to the eight million people who died at Potosí when the Spanish government disregarded its own laws on forced labor and compensation to arrive at a result which its officers and elites perceived as convenient? Can the Spanish state today be sued by the Bolivian government as a representative of those individuals who endured what was arguably a holocaust for the economic convenience and advancement of colonial powers? Probably not. However, when a state violates its own law, the consequences are far reaching.
One could fairly and accurately make the argument that the economic thuggery and lawlessness of the colonial powers is the foundation upon which their current day position and prosperity rest. I am an unabashed capitalist, and I take issue with anyone who suggests that what transpired under colonialism was capitalist. Admittedly, I’m marginal in my views because I also take issue with the idea that there is a true free market anywhere on the planet today. Show me the market without tariffs and barriers to free trade. It doesn’t exist. However, with all of this said, I cannot dispute that economic thuggery and outright lawlessness was the foundation for the prosperity which gives western countries their unique advantage today.
The tariffs and coercive methods which deprived the developing world of a chance then are still in existence today. We allow the developing world to excel at the production of raw goods, but we do not allow them to process those goods. We insist that tea and coffee produced in Africa and South America be processed and finished into a final product in Germany. We erect trade barriers to finished goods from African and South American countries in order to keep them in their place. There are those who argue that these countries aren’t good at manufacturing and processing such products, because they lack the technologies and skills necessary to excel in those areas. We take it as a given that this is the way things are naturally. Without the artificial barriers and economic legacies of colonialism which compel developing countries to specialize in one crop above all others, and deter them from diversifying because those very tariffs prevent them from having an export market and therefore a demand which would enable them to sell their finished products, how can we know that they are just naturally lacking in aptitude?
What’s more, where is the evidence that such arrangements work for us or for them? The idea of a free market, as Bastiat so eloquently pointed out in his work on the subject, is to eliminate scarcity. What does it matter to you or me if we have less in the way of employment if exports make it easier for us to work less and have more? In point of fact, why wouldn’t we want such convenience? Why wouldn’t we want the maximum possible level of that convenience? If you could have the same amount of purchasing power you currently possess working half of the time, would you take the tradeoff?
The acolytes of free trade are not those polished types on CNBC and Fox Business who use empty sloganeering to uphold protectionist policies in banking and decry government interference in fraud riddled financial sectors. In all truth, those types and the interests who own their media outlets are the enemies of free trade. They are the ones at whose behest governments disregard the laws on the books in order to achieve an end, even if it means breaking the law. After their malfeasance is revealed, they exculpate themselves with claims of privilege, or they declare their actions classified and therefore exempt from scrutiny, and they go on their merry little way, breaking the law anew. By the CIA’s own admission, its agents break the law over 100,000 times annually.
These types will tell you that there should be no laws against fraud, as Allan Greenspan allegedly said to then CFTC chairwoman Brooksley Born during their first meeting, for the market should sort out fraud. How can the market punish fraud when bailouts incentivize fraud by providing a publicly funded backstop? You cannot have it both ways. The idea is to have laws, but to protect against their enforcement at all costs. The end result is lawlessness and abuse, and states which careen along, never out of control, but sowing chaos in the lives of middle and working class people the world over with their concerted lawbreaking and malfeasance, and their unequal application of the law as they exempt this person or group while punishing that person or group.
A state above the law is incompatible with individual freedom, and any free people who accept such a state as their own virtually guarantee their enslavement. There is but one appropriate response when the law is of no effect, and that is the overthrow of the lawless state by people who have exhausted legal means and now find themselves forced to choose between slavery and self-determination by a force of their own choosing. Whether it is by the ballot or the bullet, such revolution is never as illegitimate as a state which claims to rest upon the law while simultaneously disregarding that law with wanton impudence. A nation of people whose allegiance is to the ideals for which the state exists to promote, defend, and expand has every right to rebel against a state which departs from those ideals. It is the state which loses its right to continued existence when it departs from the law, and the people hold the rightful power to act. If they fail to do so, everything upon which their lives exist falls. They can have no guarantee of property, for the state may grant them claim to land which it has already granted to another person or group. They can hold no guarantee of individual rights, for their rights are dependent upon the state’s whim at a given time. Order itself ceases to exist in such a nation when a state lays claim to a position above and beyond the law.
Statism and Myth Part VII: The State and the Law
Posted by: | CommentsStatism and Myth as a Tool of Survival and Perpetuation Part VII: The State and the Law
“Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.”
- John Adams, letter to George Wythe
There are reasons why we impose limitations upon the state. We recognize that the natural inclination of statists, or of those individuals who seek power through positions within the statist bureaucracy, is to arrogate greater power unto themselves for the purpose of perpetuating their own authority and expanding that authority. The great flaw within America, indeed within many states, is the assumption by citizens that the state will observe the limitations upon its own power. The state inevitably evolves a wanton disregard for the very laws it is supposed to uphold. What is more, the state’s disregard for the law extends to the drafting of new laws which erode the original limitations placed upon the state’s power at the direct expense and to the exclusion of the original liberties retained by individuals.
Our error was in assuming that government was good, that order flows from government rather than from the notion of the people represented by a government. The people hold certain beliefs and expectations about the sort of order they wish to promote within their society, and they establish institutions and bureaucracies to enforce that order. Order does not flow from these institutions and their bureaucracies; they arise out of the necessity that individuals arranging a society have for a practical means of enforcing the type of order they wish to have for themselves.
The failure to recognize this elemental reality is the direct outgrowth of positivism, which insists upon the state as the origin of rights and order and denies that individuals possess innate rights and dignity apart from the acknowledgement of the state. This positivist outlook stems from the notion of William the Conqueror that all land in England belonged to the King and could be parceled out by the King to his supporters as he saw fit. In this way, the sovereign maintained fealty and established the idea that all real power flowed from his grant alone.
This model was documented in the Domesday Book, which detailed William’s confiscation of all property and his subsequent doling out of that property by grant until the natives were dispossessed of land and therefore any mode of power from which to challenge William’s rule. Economic empowerment, or ownership, is the only form of power that matters in this world. Free and open societies built upon the notion of individual rights and power apart from the state recognize this, and a hallmark of statist tyranny is the erosion of individual ownership, which is a direct assault on individual power. This view of power being linked to ownership is clearly borne out by the fact that rights were linked directly to ownership in William’s world.
It is also borne out by the fact that owning land was the basis of suffrage in the earliest days of our own republic, a reality which continued up until the age of Andrew Jackson and into the 1840s. This evolved over time into a tax requirement, where any man of a certain age who paid taxes of a minimum standard was entitled to vote, but neither the property ownership nor the taxation standard came to an end until 1850 and 1855, respectively. Suffrage was limited rather than universal until 1855 based on these standards, a historical fact which eludes the awareness and comprehension of most individuals today, who have been indoctrinated in the idea that our forefathers fought against England in part under the cry of “No taxation without representation!”
Moreover, the absurdity of the arrangements was captured by the following quote from Benjamin Franklin:
“Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers – but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?”
The echo of these struggles and arguments over suffrage is today heard anew in the cry by some modern figures that individuals who have votes should not based on the fact that they do not pay taxes. Which taxes do they not pay? Income taxes? The fact is that every individual in this country pays taxes in some form or another. Even if an individual was to be personally exempted from sales and excise taxes, he or she would still pay the indirect tax associated with corporate income taxes, which are inevitably externalized by businesses onto workers in the form of lower wages and customers in the form of higher prices. Since workers tend to be customers, this odious tax in particular tends to be a double tax, much like those wealthy advocates of repealing capital gains taxes tend to portray their tax burden given that their dividends were taxed once as a corporate profit and taxed again as capital gain.
The idea that individuals do not pay taxes and therefore should be stripped of their right to vote is therefore absurd. The pernicious reality of our tax code and our entire system of taxation is that it is ubiquitous and pervasive in our society. No one can avoid it in its entirety. They can minimize their obligation, they can even evade their obligation through illegal means, but they cannot avoid taxation entirely.
The implications of this outlook are quite troubling and even enraging when one encounters the methodology of such an outlook in application. In Macomb County, Michigan, the chairman of the Republican Party in that county, a man by the name of James Carabelli used foreclosure lists to challenge the right of individuals to vote in the 2008 elections on the grounds that people whose names appeared on the list were not “true residents of the city or township” in which they were voting (http://michiganmessenger.com/4076/lose-your-house-lose-your-vote).
Michigan state law allows for election challenges at the polls on such grounds, but the reality of a foreclosure list is as follows: if your name is on it, you have not necessarily lost residency, you have merely been served notice that your home has been entered into foreclosure proceedings. To a statist, however, the idea is to strip individuals who might vote a certain of their power to do so utilizing any available means. In this way the law is used to subvert the very freedom and equality of application it is supposed to exist to uphold. What is more, the sorts of loans which typically defaulted in Macomb County were subprime loans, loans which were made overwhelmingly to African-American voters at a rate of over 60%.
Considering that those loans were made by banks whose political interest lies in promoting a certain form of political outcome which favors their outcome above those of the voter, and you can see that subprime loans, which hold the highest rate of default, are potentially part of a concerted overall effort to preserve an order by which certain groups are denied the power of representation and any real chance of financial emancipation with which to reply against those who traditionally oppose their political and financial empowerment on the grounds that such empowerment would be mutually exclusive to banks and the interests they represent. That’s the conspiratorial view, and while it may not be entirely true, it is a convenient outcome, all in all, for the banks and the political interests they have traditionally aligned themselves with, which include pro-business Republicans and Democrats, who will not have to worry about electoral challenges to their continued dominance at the polls.
Incumbency has been remarkably successful over the past 47 years. In that time frame, the rate of reelection in the House of Representatives has never dipped below 85%, and only five times has it dipped below 90%. In every way imaginable, this has been due to an order which has been systematically advanced by incumbents and the interests they represent, those of their campaign contributors. The natural consequences of this order have been the evolution of methodologies to rob individuals of their right to vote through the exploitation of legal technicalities and gray areas, because doing so would prevent any electoral possibility that a plurality of votes might be cast for candidates who would then challenge that order and its benefits for banks and large corporations. This is why we have bailouts and deregulation efforts which lead to market implosion and the need for bailouts.
As you can see, from a strategic vantage point, it is quite within the interests of certain groups and businesses to adopt strategies which constrict suffrage rather than ensuring the access of all people to an equal vote. Conversely, as individuals on the receiving end of such injustice and subterfuge evolve their responses to this lawlessness, we see the net end of such efforts: lawlessness begets lawlessness. In Port Chester, New York, the idea of one man, one vote became a mockery when a judge ordered that individuals be given six votes to cast in an election for trustees to ensure the desired outcome of a Hispanic candidate being elected to office (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/06/15/politics/main6585088.shtml). Then again, given that the alternative is an environment in which caging lists of felons with names similar to law abiding citizens are utilized to challenge the rights of the unconvicted to vote, or foreclosure lists being utilized to challenge the right to vote on the grounds of legal residency, one can see how we might have arrived at such absurdities.
The abuse is not confined to either Republican or Democrats. It is bipartisan, it is ugly, and it is destabilizing our society by constricting the very right which lies at the heart of our republic: the right of the people to select the representatives who will govern on their behalf. What is so troubling about the Port Chester example is that while half the population is Hispanic in a town of 28,000 people, the federal judge in the case decided that Hispanics voting for whites was an unfair and wholly unacceptable explanation for the fact that no Hispanic had ever been elected to the trustee position.
Additionally, the non-profit organization FairVote noted that cumulative voting, as the six vote per person practice was called, would enable “a political minority to gain representation if it organizes and focuses its voting strength on specific candidates.” You don’t say. In a town where half the population is Hispanic, the notion that Hispanics could not mobilize on their own to elect a candidate based solely upon his or her Hispanic race was apparently incomprehensible to FairVote and the federal judge who order six votes per voter.
At the heart of our democratic republic is the notion that individuals should not base their vote or their treatment of their fellow citizens on race. The fact that this clearly occurred in Port Chester was not indicative of any success to FairVote and the judge, it was instead an indication that individuals weren’t polarized enough on the basis of race to make their votes contingent upon a candidate’s racial classification. Enter the order of a federal judge and the consulting prowess of FairVote.
Here are the facts of Port Chester, New York: it’s a town of roughly 28,000 people, where just 25 percent of those eligible to vote do so during elections. 46% of the population is Hispanic, but many of those within the Hispanic population are ineligible to vote due to the following reasons:
They aren’t citizens.
They aren’t old enough to legally vote, a fact that ought to be evident when 10% of the votes cast in a school board district election are from individuals of Hispanic background while 70% of the students within the Port Chester school system are Hispanic.
They don’t bother registering to vote, and the politically active component within their own community has been miserably inadequate at organizing its own for such purposes.
What is more, the at-large voting for the mayoral race, which did not rely upon cumulative voting, produced a Hispanic mayor named Dennis Pilla. Clearly, Hispanics are capable of putting a Hispanic candidate into office in an at large election, except for the fact that Dennis Pilla received votes from whites and blacks as well. He was elected by a democratic majority which contained people of all walks of life and many different racial backgrounds.
In the at large election for Port Chester Board of Education, where individuals could vote for two candidates from the slate of four, Blanca Lopez was elected with just 24% of the total vote in an election where just 172 votes came from Hispanic individuals according to the sign in sheets (http://www.westmorenews.com/docs/20090626/ExhibitB.pdf). The 790 votes received by Ms. Lopez would, if the entire 172 votes cast by Hispanics went to her at least in part (given the ability of each voter to select two candidates), her support was far and away drawn from non-Hispanic voters to the tune of 618 votes. What this means is that she received at least 359% more votes from individuals of non-Hispanic backgrounds, assuming that the entire Hispanic vote was cast for her in the election! In all likelihood, the Hispanic vote was not uniformly cast for one candidate, which would mean that even more of her votes came from non-Hispanics. My God! The bigotry of those who would vote for someone outside of their own race is all the more evident and overwhelming!
To put forth a 46% Hispanic population statistic as though it is proof of racial prejudice in electoral outcomes when that population is made up of a large section of individuals who are either too young to vote or ineligible to vote by virtue of their lack of citizenship is patently misleading. It’s actually blatantly dishonest. It invites the expectation that a demographic of 46% should expect a 46% influence at the polls; when by common sense and basic reality, the demographic in question cannot expect such a proportionate influence due to the ineligibility of non-citizens to vote and the fact that individuals below 18 years of age cannot vote, which basically wipes out the idea of some disproportionate injustice between 10% of the vote being Hispanic in a district where 70% of the students are Hispanic. It’s a false initial premise, and those who make such arguments are well aware of their disingenuous game.
But let’s entertain the notion put forth by advocates of cumulative voting: let’s take those 172 votes by individuals of Hispanic descent and multiply them by six: 1,032 votes! It’s amazing what you can achieve when you have six times the votes, isn’t it? Amazing, indeed, especially when on considers that the trend among white voters would be to divvy up their votes among various candidates, as it was during the Blanca Lopez election, where 1792 people voted and just 172 of those individuals were Hispanic. As you can see, the arithmetic clearly indicates just how disproportionate cumulative voting could for those 172 Hispanics in an at large election where their votes were concentrated behind one candidate. Far from eliminating racial polarization in elections, cumulative voting would cement such voting trends by ingraining within an electorate a sense of the efficacy of such racially concentrated voting strategies. If such strategies were extended beyond elections for office to elections on spending referendums, the implications could be staggering to consider for the pocketbooks of individuals.
But the court went further: “In sum, it is clear to this Court that Hispanic voters and non-Hispanic voters in Port Chester prefer different candidates, and that non-Hispanic voters generally vote as a bloc to defeat Hispanic-preferred candidates.” You don’t say. The court recognized in its bench decision the following realities:
The citizen voting age population of Port Chester was just 13,990 in the Census of 2000, with a demographic division of 65.5% non-Hispanic white, 21.9% Hispanic, and 8.9% black.
The United States’ own expert witness in the case, Dr. Andrew Beveridge, estimated Port Chester’s citizen voting age population as of July 2006 at 14,259, with 27.5% of that number estimated to be Hispanic (United States of America vs. Village of Port Chester 06 Civ. 15173 SCR).
In such a voting demographic, it is entirely plausible that Hispanics would face an uphill battle in an at large election even with full registration and participation, neither of which could be plausibly argued given the documented failure of Hispanics to register and participate in elections. For that matter, the overall population had a participation rate of just 25%!
What is more, the idea that the court could say with certainty that the intent of white voters was to vote against Hispanic candidates solely on the criteria of race alone is not only farcical, it assigns to the court powers of telepathy by which it could communicate with the white voters of Port Chester and read their innermost motivations and deepest, darkest prejudices.
The election of Blanca Lopez proves not only that significant crossover occurred from white voters who voted for a Hispanic, it also establishes a trend among Hispanics to avoid voting, given that the sign-in sheets indicate that only 172 voters were of Hispanic descent. Put simply, though 27.5% of the citizen voting age population in Port Chester is Hispanic, which would give the Hispanic community 3,921 eligible voters, only 172 bothered to show up to vote in an election where one of their own was attempting to gain a seat on the Board of Education. That’s a 4.39% turnout. Perhaps the problem is not racism, but rather apathy among the Hispanic voter population.
However, it’s only the first part of the above paragraph that matters. The crossover among white voters must have been overwhelming, given the fact that the votes of non-Hispanics constituted at least 618 of Blanca Lopez’s 790 votes in her successful candidacy for the Board of Education. You see, the Supreme Court has ruled that white bloc voting cannot be reasonably said to have occurred when 20% or greater crossover in elections has occurred. That is, when 20% or more of the white population has voted for someone outside of their own race, it’s an indicator to the Supreme Court that their motivation in voting was not racism. We could argue about that 20% being indicative of racism or other criteria, but for the purposes of brevity, we won’t examine the absurdity of that standard. We’ll simply say that by the Supreme Court’s own standard to measure bloc voting, bloc voting along racial lines clearly doesn’t occur in Port Chester, which means that Judge Robinson ought to have disposed of cumulative voting and dismissed the notion that racism was to blame for the low proportion of Hispanics attaining election to the Board of Trustees, especially given that in another at large election where no such cumulative measures were undertaken, a Hispanic was elected to the mayor’s office.
In fact, the attorney for Port Chester, Anthony Piscione, petitioned for the abandonment of the cumulative solution on these very grounds. Assistant U.S. Attorney David Kennedy’s response? Due to the fact that fewer than 10% of the overall voters were Hispanic in a school district where 70% of the students are Hispanic, injustice is still present. The intellectual dishonesty is breathtaking. Because the school district is comprised of a 70% demographic ineligible to vote by their race, and over 95% of the eligible Hispanic voters did not bother to show up to vote, Port Chester is a hotbed of inequality requiring federal intervention in their electoral process. What absurdity.
The reality is this: Assistant U.S. Attorney David Kennedy and FairVote don’t particularly care to acknowledge that their claims are not based on fact at all. They don’t care to acknowledge that Hispanics are not elected in Port Chester because only a paltry 4.39% of those eligible to vote bother doing so, or to acknowledge that if the full 3,921 Hispanics eligible to vote in Port Chester turned out to vote, they would have swamped the polls and elected whoever they pleased to the two open seats on the Board of Education. That’s because of the 1792 votes cast in the election, just 1620 were cast by non-Hispanic whites and blacks. If just half of the eligible Hispanic vote had bothered to show up and vote in unison, they would have crushed their white and black neighbors at the polls by a full 340 votes.
The problem among Hispanics in Port Chester isn’t racist oppression. It’s a crushing oppression of their own devising that we know as apathy. They simply don’t give a damn about the political process, but they bitch about it after the fact as though they were disenfranchised when in reality, they didn’t even bother to show up and vote in the first place. By court precedent, the well over 40% crossover which occurred in the school board election and the at-large election of a Hispanic mayor ought to suffice to prove that there was no violation of the Voting Rights Act afoot which explained the lack of Hispanic representation. In fact, by the 20% standard established by the Supreme Court, it absolutely obviates the allegations of racially based bloc voting. The simple reality was then and still is that Hispanics have rights which they do not bother to exercise with any great enthusiasm or consistency in the elections of Port Chester. This tendency unites them with their white and black neighbors, given Port Chester’s stellar electoral turnout of a whopping 25%.
It is overwhelmingly tragic that we have jurists on the bench at the federal level who are apparently incapable of exercising common sense to cut through the nonsense logic offered up by liberals who seek to rescue the electoral system by subverting it altogether as an answer to a problem which arguably doesn’t exist in many of the cases that such advocates bring before our courts.
But it is more than that: it is the idea that a court could accuse individuals of the same color who vote for another individual of the same color of racism if a certain percentage of the overall population of the color in question does not vote for an individual of a different color. In short, the court decides what your motivation is, and if your motivation isn’t pure and good according to a court, then you and your community may face cumulative voting or some other such scheme as a court-ordered remedy to the perceived racism lying at the heart of your motivation in voting for an individual of your own race. There is something pernicious about this idea, something deeply wrong.
A judge who has never met the voters in question, or lived among the community whose members will be subjected to whatever injunctive relief he orders, can arbitrarily order that community and its individuals members to adopt a solution he decrees as adequate, or he can deny them the ability to hold elections altogether in order to coerce them. That’s what happened in Port Chester. The judge stayed elections for the Board of Trustees over a three year period until Port Chester’s government finally arrived at a cumulative voting solution which lined up with his estimation of how things ought to be.
You can either vote in the way that produces an outcome which conforms to a judge’s expectation, or you can lose the right to even hold an election. That’s the reality of Port Chester and the precedent it sets for America. Tyranny advances in incremental steps, slowly and steadily and insidiously moving forward until the day arrives where your vote is measured for its racial significance by a judge who doesn’t even know you or live in your community, where you and your peers are compelled to vote for someone of a different race regardless of their qualifications just to achieve some measure of legitimacy in the eyes of a judge you didn’t get to elect, who knows little if anything about your neighbors beyond census statistics, and the selective excerpting of the very worst examples of behavior within your community. That’s what you and yours are judged for: the selective excerpting and sampling of statistics, which is misleading at best and downright fraudulent at worst.
That’s why the government in its pleadings before a federal district judge has routinely sought to present a proportionate representation argument by utilizing the argument that while 46% of the overall population is Hispanic, no Hispanic has ever achieved electoral success for the Board of Trustees in Port Chester. Of course, the fact that only 21.9% of the overall population are citizens of voting age, and of that proportion, a paltry 5-10% even bother to vote in elections where Hispanic candidates are on the slate of candidates is irrelevant to the government and the judge. Injustice is present! It must be rooted out and deracinated!
The government responds to the idea that a Hispanic achieved election in an at-large election to the Board of Education with the response that while 70% of the student population is Hispanic, just 24% of the overall vote went to the Hispanic winner of the election in question. When 70% of the student population is Hispanic and a Hispanic achieves 24% of the vote to win elective office, nothing is established other than the obvious fact that 70% of the student body is below voting age and therefore one could not reasonably expect a Hispanic candidate to receive anywhere near 70% of the vote, especially when the voting age Hispanic citizens of precinct in question comprise 21.9% of the population in question according to the Census and 27% of the population according the government’s own expert witness. As it stands, the Hispanic receive either 2% more of the vote that one could reasonably expect her to receive if in fact voting age citizens of Hispanic descent voted as a bloc for her, or she received 3% less of the expected vote if you were to go by the government’s estimate of the Hispanic citizen voting age population. Damn those disloyal Chicanos who voted for a white candidate! Don’t they understand the importance of the Board of Education seat for la raza?
But when you factor in that just 172 of her votes could have come from individuals of Hispanic descent if one counts the sign in sheet evidence (and admittedly, given the tendency of white patriarchal imperialists to intermarry with Latinas, there might have been some Latinas on the sign in sheet with Anglo surnames, along with some Anglo blondes whose surnames were Hispanic due to their intermarriage with a Julio or a Miguel) that means that a a full 618 of her votes potentially came from non-Hispanics, or Hispanics and whites so non-racist as to be okay with miscegenation and intermarriage! What, exactly, does the federal government think is afoot in Port Chester? The fact that one or two candidates have circulated literature with borderline racist appeals in past elections is apparently grounds for a massive and costly federal intervention in the elections of a town of under 30,000 people, who were sacked with the cost of a voter education program costing some $300,000 as part of the federal remedy!
This is the pernicious and evil coercion that a state run by ideologues of varying persuasions produces: if the electoral outcome doesn’t conform to their ideological notions of what ought to occur, all of the above-listed factors which might suffice to serve as an explanation contradicting the assumption of racism on the part of voters are disregarded. Every selective excerpt, every selective sampling, and every patently dishonest argument thereof is put forth as clear evidence of racism or injustice to justify centralized remedies from the federal level. If those remedies aren’t accepted with open arms by the municipality or local government in question, well, then, they won’t be allowed to hold elections at all for their Board of Trustees until they get it through their thick heads that they are racist and come up with a solution which will produce the result desired by ideologues who achieve through litigation what they could not achieve through democratic process: racial polarization, demagoguery, and the electoral success thereof.
The argument employed by the government about cumulative voting is this: Port Chester came up with the solution on its own and submitted it to the federal judge, who then approved it! Cumulative voting wasn’t a federal idea; it was the idea of Port Chester’s government and citizens! Yes, after you denied them to right to even hold elections for the Board of Trustees three times, they bent to your will and arrived at the solution you wanted. In the interregnum, they also elected a Hispanic mayor and a Hispanic candidate to their Board of Education. That wasn’t enough for Assistant U.S. District Attorney David Kennedy. No, no, no…he had to see a vote percentage for the Hispanic candidate in line with the school population in an at large election with four candidates where just 1,792 of the eligible voters bothered to show up to the polls, and where the rules of the election gave those voters the option of selecting the two candidates they liked most. The top two vote getters were selected to the Board of Education.
Despite the fact that according to the sign-totals, under 5% of the Hispanics eligible to vote did so, David Kennedy was unimpressed by the fact that even with all 172 votes going to Blanca Lopez, 618 whites and blacks would have had to vote for her in order for her to reach her cumulative total! This racial crossover, while meeting the arbitrary standard of more than 20% established by the Supreme Court in a separate case, did not suffice to pass muster with David Kennedy. No, Blanca Lopez, while receiving a vote percentage equal to or just under the proportionate level of voting age citizens who were Hispanic, did not receive 70% of the vote, which was in line with student population of the school system she sought to oversee. Despite the fact that the student population couldn’t vote due to age restrictions, David Kennedy apparently thinks that they are underrepresented because in a community where 21.9-27% of the eligible voters are Hispanic, the Hispanic candidate received only 24% of the votes cast to win her seat. He therefore petitioned the court to continue tyrannizing Port Chester’s voting process.
It doesn’t matter whether the ethnicity of the vote is proportionate to the candidate’s ethnicity. What matters is getting candidates of color into elected office using any and all means possible. That’s the bare knuckle reality of the injunctive relief of Port Chester and the cumulative voting which was its outgrowth. Let’s say that all of the eligible Hispanics show up to vote, while trends hold at 25% for the white and black communities of Port Chester. In a town of under 30,000 people, 3,921 Hispanics could outvote whites number 2,654 by a tally of 23,526 to 15,924 utilizing cumulative voting if they voted as a bloc. That’s the power of race in voting, and that’s the end result desired by racial fanatics who seek to subvert the principle of one man, one vote to arrive at a notion of brown man six votes, white man six votes in a population where both sides are apathetic but an outside pressure which radicalizes one portion of the population can produce racially based outcomes which were the ostensible factor the courts sought to eliminate in the first place. Far from eliminating racist bloc voting, the individuals who support such machinations hope to cement such disdainful motivations into our electoral process for all time. If just 2,655 Hispanics show up to an election and vote as a bloc against white candidates with cumulative voting, they can outvote the 25% of the white demographic which tends to show up to the polls in Port Chester. What is more, their overall tally would exceed the white vote by six. In at large election where individuals have the ability to divvy up their votes among candidates, it is conceivable that Hispanics who organized to strategically cast their votes could produce an all Hispanic outcome. That’s racial bloc voting, to the exclusion of candidates who are black or white, but if it were to occur, does anyone seriously believe that David Kennedy or FairVote would be spewing invective over the travesty which would have occurred?
And let’s view what the section of the Voting Rights Act in question actually says, because that’s the section the judge in the case held was violated by the at-large Board of Trustee elections in Port Chester:
Sec. 1973 Denial or abridgement of right to vote on account of race or color through voting qualifications or prerequisites; establishment of violation
(a) No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color, or in contravention of the guarantees set forth in section 1973b(f)(2) of this title, as provided in subsection (b) of this section.
A violation of subsection (a) of this section is established if, based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a class of citizens protected by subsection (a) of this section in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice. The extent to which members of a protected class have been elected to office in the State or political subdivision is one circumstance which may be considered: Provided, That nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.
Section 4(f) is also relevant:
(f) Congressional findings of voting discrimination against language minorities; prohibition of English-only elections; other remedial measures
(1) The Congress finds that voting discrimination against citizens of language minorities is pervasive and national in scope. Such minority citizens are from environments in which the dominant language is other than English. In addition they have been denied equal educational opportunities by State and local governments, resulting in severe disabilities and continuing illiteracy in the English language. The Congress further finds that, where State and local officials conduct elections only in English, language minority citizens are excluded from participating in the electoral process. In many areas of the country, this exclusion is aggravated by acts of physical, economic, and political intimidation. The Congress declares that, in order to enforce the guarantees of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, it is necessary to eliminate such discrimination by prohibiting English-only elections, and by prescribing other remedial devices.
(2) No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote because he is a member of a language minority group.
(3) In addition to the meaning given the term under subsection (c) of this section, the term “test or device” shall also mean any practice or requirement by which any State or political subdivision provided any registration or voting notices, forms, instructions, assistance, or other materials or information relating to the electoral process, including ballots, only in the English language, where the Director of the Census determines that more than five per centum of the citizens of voting age residing in such State or political subdivision are members of a single language minority. With respect to subsection (b) of this section, the term “test or device”, as defined in this subsection, shall be employed only in making the determinations under the third sentence of that subsection.
(4) Whenever any State or political subdivision subject to the prohibitions of the second sentence of subsection (a) of this section provides any registration or voting notices, forms, instructions, assistance, or other materials or information relating to the electoral process, including ballots, it shall provide them in the language of the applicable language minority group as well as in the English language: Provided, That where the language of the applicable minority group is oral or unwritten or in the case of Alaskan Natives and American Indians, if the predominate language is historically unwritten, the State or political subdivision is only required to furnish oral instructions, assistance, or other information relating to registration and voting.
Let’s begin our examination by calling your attention to the end of first excerpt in Sec. 1973(b): “That nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.” Nothing in this section establishes the right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population. Yet that is precisely the grounds upon which the plaintiffs in the Port Chester case (the United States Federal Government and a previous loser in the Board of Trustee election named Cesar Ruiz) rested their complaint: no Hispanic was elected to the Board of Trustees despite the large proportion of Hispanics in Port Chester to the overall population. The government sought injunctive relief precisely to achieve a more racially proportionate representation in government, which the very law the government appeals to as the basis for injunctive relief denies is a right of any protected minority language class!
Now, as to the purpose of the sections in question, it was as follows: to prevent elections from being conducted solely in English, so as to exclude individual citizens whose mastery of English didn’t meet their native language proficiency from making an informed vote. That’s all well and good, and let’s review the complaint of the federal government to see if Port Chester sought to conduct English only elections in order to exclude Hispanics from making an informed vote. But first, let’s see the different between Blanca Lopez’s name on a ballot in English and a Blanca Lopez’s name on a ballot in Espanol:
Espanol: English:
Blanca Lopez Blanca Lopez
Wait. They’re the same! Hispanics can make an informed vote for a Hispanic candidate! You see, Spanish and English have very similar script in their alphabets. There are just two differences: ll and ñ. So let’s take a look at how an English only ballot might mislead Hispanic voters if, say, candidate Miguel Nuñez’s name was misspelled.
Espanol: English:
Miguel Nuñez Miguel Nunez
One can easily see how Hispanic individuals might mistake Miguel Nunez for an Anglo candidate and decide against casting their vote for him. After all, they want someone of their own race to represent them, someone who identifies with their issues and their unique experiences and struggles as a minority class within the bosom of oppression which transliterates ñ to n and makes them feel as though even their alphabet isn’t respected.
But I digress: the issue is whether or not Port Chester attempted to conduct English only balloting in its elections to the detriment of Hispanic candidates. Wait, it isn’t. As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, the issue was the “dilution” or “abridgment” of the Hispanic community’s right to vote. The complainants in the case, Cesar Ruiz and the United States of America, acknowledged racial bloc voting on the part of Hispanic voters:
11. Ethnically and racially polarized voting patterns prevail in elections for the Port Chester Board of Trustees as well as in elections for other local offices.
12. Hispanic voters almost always vote cohesively for the candidate they prefer, and the white majority usually votes sufficiently as a bloc to defeat the Hispanic candidate.
- http://brennan.3cdn.net/7b33ee60f30bd8d37c_wrm6b9pyk.pdf
The problem wasn’t racially motivated bloc voting, it was that one race wasn’t winning through racial bloc voting while the other was. That’s the Department of
Justice’s logic: as long as the minority engages in a documented history of voting for minority only candidates, it’s perfectly fine. It’s not racism when you vote for someone of your own color or racial identification exclusively so long as you’re a minority and they’re a minority, but if you’re a majority, it’s an evil to vote for someone of your own color regardless of qualification.
The goal of the Justice Department isn’t to eliminate racism as a motivation in voting; it is to favor one form of racial motivation over another to ensure a particular electoral outcome. In other words, rigging a vote to ensure that someone of color achieves election. If a government agency did this to ensure an outcome for a white candidate, we would be screaming about the injustice of such practices. Before you scoff, consider the words of Judge Stephen C. Robinson in this case: “..but it occurs to me that in 10 years, when I’ll still be here, God willing, that the very people who were upset about this system that is currently in place may wish for it, and those that are fighting for the system to remain intact will be glad that it didn’t. Because I think very soon those numbers are going to cross in a way, the trends show that those numbers will cross in a way that an at-large voting system will actually work to the detriment of the white population. Not part of my ruling. Not part of why I ruled. Just my observation, but I find it fascinating…(Transcript, March 8, 2007, pg. 29 line 8- pg. 30 line 7).”
There’s only one problem: white people aren’t a protected language minority under the Voting Rights Act under any available precedent or interpretation. As soon as the number crossing that Judge Robinson notes occurs, it is almost guaranteed that if cumulative voting is still in effect, there will be court challenges by FairVote and other organizations like FairVote to remove the injunctive remedy of cumulative voting in order to preserve an outright Hispanic majoritarian advantage. That’s reality.
Furthermore, the reality of Port Chester is this: dilution of the Hispanic vote did not occur because of the structure of an at-large election for the Board of Trustees, it occurred because Hispanics traditionally did not register to vote and did not vote even if they were registered. It’s called apathy, and there is no protection in the Voting Rights Act from apathy amongst your own kind for a protected minority language group. Nonetheless, if you can get the Department of Justice to take up your cause, you can force a municipality to choose between its ability to hold elections for open positions and the remedy you see to coercively impose. That’s statism: the law doesn’t matter. It’s twisted and selectively applied to produce outcomes, until the law is no longer an agent of justice or equality, but a perverted instrument whereby inequality can be implemented by the injunctive order of a judge who lays siege to a municipality or state level government until they capitulate to his will and the will of the plaintiffs in a case. Otherwise, they can’t hold elections, elected positions go unfilled, and the administrative duties of a government aren’t discharged. The people aren’t represented at all by a government which is render effectively incapable of filling elected seats due to a judge’s order which stays any election until a city government surrenders. And it will, because eventually, the city government won’t be able to discharge city business.
This isn’t democracy. It isn’t justice. It’s not a republic. It’s rule by fiat and judicial obstruction. Anyone who can litigate can impose an effective paralysis upon a municipal or state government, thereby laying siege which only ends when they get their way apart in spite of the fact that they cannot demonstrate a systemic bias within the electoral process which would justify their challenge to that process. In spite of the fact that ample evidence existed which would have thoroughly refuted and contradicted the baseless claim of the plaintiffs in the Port Chester case that the Hispanic vote was diluted by the government of Port Chester, evidence which clearly explained why a 46% population of Hispanics could not expect 46% representation due to the fact that only 22% of the population was eligible to vote, and of that eligible proportion, there were more than a few individuals who had not even bothered to register to vote; Judge Stephen C. Robinson persisted in seeking to implement injunctive relief in the form of cumulative voting. What is more, his motivation in doing so was clearly aligned with an extralegal outcome: the ensuring that minority class would achieve representation proportionate to their percentage of the population. The Voting Rights Act explicitly states that nothing within its sections shall be construed to establish such a right for minority classes!
Nevertheless, the establishment of just an ideal in action was what the plaintiffs were seeking, and after extorting cumulative action as a solution out of the government of Port Chester by denying the people of Port Chester their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote for their elected representatives to the point where offices lay vacant and city business could not be performed as a practical matter, the court pretended as though all was fine and normal. After all, cumulative voting can’t be all bad: they do it in Europe, and other judges have implemented it elsewhere. What is more, the people of Chilton County, Alabama use cumulative voting to select their school board. If the people of a city, county, or state decide of their own volition apart from any coercion by the state to arrive at cumulative action as their own freely chosen destination, they are free to do so. But if they do so after being denied their constitutionally guaranteed right to choose officeholders for an extended period of time, their consent is coerced rather than free, and it is thus illegitimate.
Statists regard the law in a two-fold manner: if it enables their claim of greater power, and does not obstruct their arrogation of such, the law is perfectly fine. If the law interferes with a desired ideological outcome, it can be disregarded, or even grossly perverted in its application or interpretation to arrive at the desired outcome in question. The law thus becomes an enabler not of uniformity or equality in a society, it becomes the means by which special classes of people are established, and their prerogatives are raised to a level which excludes or reduces the claim of other classes to equal treatment before the law by those vested with the sacred task of enforcing that law. Far from binding us together according to our common interests, the law becomes an enabler of tyranny, a sword to be deployed by partisans and ideologues against their enemies, real and perceived. The law divides the house rather than uniting it, and only a tyrannical military or police apparatus can prevent the house from splitting altogether by coercing those who rightly seek to leave such a coercive arrangement by compelling them with force or threats to stay against their own interest. This is why statism must be fought at all turns from within and without: it prevents men from organizing according to their own interests if those interests conflict with the interests of the state.
As I noted in an earlier section, the acknowledgment of the common interests of men who seek to organize into a society is the only reason for the state to exist. When the state becomes exclusionary to those interests and ends for a portion of its population, and their grievance is legitimately based on the complaint that the state no longer acknowledges them as equal before the law but rather relegates them to an inferior status, those men and women have just cause to seek redress by leaving the state. To suggest that they cannot is to fall back on the notion that their privately held property is a grant of the state, much in the same way that the Domesday Book catalogued William the Conqueror’s appropriation of property and his subsequent doling out of property. Men can and should own property apart from the state, and the state’s role in private property is simple: protection of private property from threat by a commonly funded police and military apparatus, depending upon whether or not the threat is domestic or foreign; and the documentation and enforcement of titles and contracts arising out of property claims for the purposes of order and a clear provenance.
Our forefathers did not fight against one sovereign’s claim of such prerogatives only to exchange his claim for that of another later sovereign who would tyrannize their descendants. They fought, and later generations have also fought, for the notion of the individual as a sovereign and the state as the servant of his sovereign prerogative to pursue his life, his liberty, and his happiness according to his own self-determination. A state which seeks to coerce individuals to act against these ends by various forms of aggression and force, whether physical or by the order of the law, has ceased to retain its claim to legitimacy in our system of governance. It can be rightfully withdrawn from or even abolished by men seeking to assert their prerogatives as sovereigns who rightly recognize that their government no longer represents them as equals on even par with their fellow man, but instead establishes a system whereby some men are more equal than others. We have reached a point of decision in this country, and the apathy which so many in Port Chester have chosen is not a viable option: if we would be free, we must cast off the state and choose whether or not to erect a new state in its place or to go forth in some new and unprecedented manner.
Ethics Complaint against Rep. Bob Etheridge Filed by Judicial Watch
Posted by: | CommentsJudicial Watch has just announced their filing of an ethics complaint against Rep. Bob Etheridge after his alleged assaulting of a college student who simply asked, “Do you fully support the Obama agenda?”.
Judicial Watch‘s complaint, filed on June 18, 2010, states:
It is essential that the House hold Congressman Bob Etheridge to the high standards of behavior expected of a Member of the House. Congressman Etheridge acted out in a violent and threatening manner in response to an unremarkable inquiry by a member of the public. The public confidence in Congress has been diminished as a result.
The complaint goes on to state:
Due to his personal actions, Congressman Etheridge has brought dishonor to the U.S. House of Representatives. Further, Congressman Etheridge could face criminal sanctions for assault under the laws of the District of Columbia, which state in relevant part:
(1) Whoever unlawfully assaults, or threatens another in a menacing manner, shall be fined not more than $1,000 or be imprisoned not more than 180 days, or both.
More specifically, House Rule 23, clause 1, states:
A Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, officer or employee of the House shall conduct himself at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.
While what the Congressman did was a serious violation of House Rules and the laws of the District of Columbia, I have come out and fairly commended the Congressman for televised public apology without the use of excuses. This does not take away my belief that he, as should I, be held accountable for his wrongful actions as a United States Congressman.
The video that was originally reported on Breitbart.tv can be seen in the YouTube video below:
“…and it should be possible to design a world in which behavior likely to be punished seldom or never occurs. We try to design such a world for those who cannot solve the problem of punishment for themselves, such as babies, retardates, or psychotics, and if it could be done for everyone, much time and energy would be saved.”
-Skinner, B.F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity pg. 62.
“Can wicked rulers be allied with you, those who frame injustice by statute? They band together against the life of the righteous and condemn the innocent to death.”
-Psalm 94:20-21, English Standard Version
The great difference between freedom as a positivist understands it and freedom as a naturalist understands is quite substantial. Positivists view freedom as “…a lack of resistance or restraint (56 Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity),” and they try accordingly to erect great and substantial barriers to such a concept in the form of laws to guide behavior and punishments for a failure to conform to such laws. For a positivist, freedom from freedom is the end to which he works. In short, a man must enter into a sort of voluntary bondage, what B.F. Skinner referred to as “automatic goodness,” and what T.H. Huxley did not see as objectionable: “If some great power would agree to make me always think of what is true and do what is right, on condition of being some sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should close instantly with the offer.”
For the naturalist, freedom is defined more as the power to determine for oneself which action or course to undertake, with the understanding that actions and courses have consequences which must be borne as a result of their implementation. Rights and morals do not stem from codes, but codes arise as man attempts to organize into statute or screed what he has come to observe in the course of his undertakings, that which works and that which does not work being the inspiration for his prohibitions and encouragements. It is important to the naturalist that men should find their own way through personal experience, though many naturalists often surrender to the impulse of the positivist by insisting upon codified or written means of behavioral guidance and sanction.
The law is impotent depending on one’s expectation. For the naturalist, the law is quite potent in that it does two things: it identifies a particular behavior as a tort or crime and it prescribes a process to occur in such an eventuality. For the positivist, the law must produce some ideal state, some utopia. Not surprisingly, positivists are often disappointed. In the name of greater freedom from the chaos and disorder that positivists see as freedom, a positivist will establish ever more strident restraints upon human behavior until he at last arrives at totalitarianism; that theory or approach which regulates every moment of a man’s life and tells him what his course will be at every turn, much like T.H. Huxley’s above-quoted example in which he desires to be wound up by some great power like a clock every morning in order that he may be automatically and totally good.
For the positivist, the great debate is over whether or not such robotic goodness is in fact goodness at all, or whether it is some mindless behavior which, due to the removal of free will and self-determination, cannot qualify as moral behavior at all. For the naturalist, the issue is whether or not such a destination is even possible. It isn’t. The most totalitarian societies have had crime. Societies which strive to produce automatons inevitably produce deviants by provoking their sons and daughters to wrath with heavy-handedness. The positivist believes that we are always one innovation or discovery away from a breakthrough which will enable the end of man’s problems in a particular area. He speaks of Theories of Everything, Laws of Everything, and the End of History.
He is a dreamer who dreams of the end of dreams, or at least the elimination of their usefulness to man. He has but one dream: the achievement of everything in one broadstroke. The positivist is that broken man who, in his constant optimism for a better tomorrow, looks sorrowfully upon the day as being somehow worse than the days already passed, no matter how ahistorical his position might be. We have all encountered the acolytes of apocalypse who insist that the world is growing worse by the day, that immorality and disease, wars and rumors of war, the birth-pangs of a groaning Earth, are all multiplying at an alarming rate which threatens the extinction of mankind and the world as we know it. These acolytes are both religious and secular.
The truth of our history is this: it is getting better all the time. We are able to feed more people with less input, but the apocalyptic positivist notes ruefully how better “sanitation and better medicine have made the problems of population more acute,” or how “war has acquired a new horror with the invention of nuclear weapons, and the affluent pursuit of happiness is largely responsible for pollution (Skinner 1).” He is a man who find the thread of discontent in any happy news, a fatalist who believes that man must be controlled or managed according to the way that he and his peers see as optimum for human life, and he and his peers are arrogantly precocious enough to believe that they can know what that optimum standard is in its completeness and its entirety.
Drop the positivist in the Middle Ages, and she will find that wandering through the countryside unescorted as a stranger in a strange land is the first step towards an increased risk of sexual assault. To some degree this is true today, but we have our high risk areas and neighborhoods, and most of us can exercise good sense and take precautions to reduce the risk of harm to ourselves. The positivist male who is dropped into the Middle Ages will find that while better medicine and sanitation do not lead to any threat of overpopulation, the lesser medicine and sanitation of that time do threaten to lead to human extinction in the form of the plague. Either way, the positivist will be happy to note that there are crises to be noted there in much the same way as such crises can be noted here.
The greatest cause of peace in human history has been the development of nuclear weapons. The problem is not the excess of such weapons; it is the fact that all countries do not possess such weapons in abundance. Invasion and foreign aggression would be things of the past if such weapons were proliferated through every nation in the world community. Nuclear weapons are the greatest deterrent to statist aggression ever developed by man. Are they dangerous? Most certainly. Can they destroy our world? Absolutely. Their awesome destructive power for both the state that initiates their use in conflict and the state that responds in kind renders it virtually certain that neither side will use the weapons or initiate lesser forms of direct conflict.
Instead, that portion of the world which does not retain such weapons becomes a great chessboard, as the countries which possess nuclear arsenals carve up spheres of influence in indirect conflict with each other. The side effect of nuclear weapons which has been less than positive has been the denial of nuclear weapons to those states who have traditionally suffered subordinate status in the world, and such states have had to endure their territory and prerogatives being trampled in order that nuclear states might conduct their conflicts in a proxy manner. Nuclear weapons enable and even proliferate a kind of power projection by those states who possess nuclear arsenals over those states that do not possess such arsenals. The positivist is incapable of understanding that the proliferation of nuclear weapons would virtually guarantee diplomacy rather than warfare as the means of settling statist disagreements. In point of fact, universal nuclear armament would likely negate the practical need for standing armies.
In all truth, the positivist likely does realize this, but he refuses to acknowledge it. His existence depends on inequality as the basis of coercion. Those who have nuclear arsenals can dictate to those who do not. This inequality as the foundation of statist coercion is what the positivist covets. It is what he requires as a practical means of constructing the world which he desires. So long as his side has the bomb, he has no real objection to make. But the moment his lessers develop such a capacity, the positivist decries nuclear proliferation as a destabilizing force in the world, and it is no wonder: the proliferation of nuclear weapons means that formerly subordinate states gain the power to reply in the negative to positivists. The positivist can no longer dictate or decree to such states as to how matters will be. They gain their say so about such matters the moment they enter the nuclear club.
Without nuclear weapons in both the Soviet Union and the United States, the world would likely have undergone a third world war with great implications for all people. As it stands, the war that emerged was largely fought through proxy states and theaters, and casualties were greatly minimized as a result. Eventually, the excess of militarized command economics brought down the Soviet Union. Empires are difficult to maintain in perpetuity.
It never once occurs to the positivist that men must learn in the free market of behavior what works and what does not, nor does it occur to the positivist that men can or should die as a result of their wrong choices. The positivist seeks at every turn to interrupt or delay natural consequence. He is the individual who in times of economic crisis does everything to salvage the unsalvageable by pumping vast liquidity into a failed company, never once considering that the expense of intercession may outweigh the benefit of the company’s continued survival. He also fails to consider the negative precedent that such continued survival establishes: you may act in a way that is fatal repeatedly and wantonly, but someone will always interrupt on your behalf to save you from the fate of your own making.
Ironically, the positivist who has this attitude towards a large corporation lacks such an attitude towards his fellow man: if that man is suffering a mortal or terminal illness, the positivist tends to weigh the cost versus the benefit and can very often decree that is it cost negative to offer a treatment. This is of course in times of illness, but in terms of human action, the positivist seeks to rehabilitate the man who wantonly harms others and their property. He wrings his hands in agony as he considers punitive action versus rehabilitative action in penal codes. He seeks to interrupt and check consequence. A criminal can still be saved; a law abiding citizen afflicted with a terminal illness cannot be saved. The efficient allocation of resources and intervention efforts must be directed towards the salvageable: the company or individual who deserves to perish or suffer as the natural consequence of their actions is saved from the full measure of that consequence; while the individual who through no fault of their own develops some chronic medical condition or likely terminal illness has a low possibility of survival and thus can be rightly denied treatment and therefore condemned to certain death. Such is the moral calculus of the positivist and such is his idea of progress and efficiency.
The postivist is full of vim and vigor for such Devil’s calculus; indeed, he is often the individual in any room or conversation who prides himself on the ability to suspend empathy in order to maintain what he perceives as objectivity. The suspension of empathy, and the subsequent dissociation from rational relativity which such a suspension of empathy yields, often gives rise to the nonsensical realities of our world. We spend $28,000 a year on average to incarcerate career criminals and violent sociopaths in climate controlled comfort with access to healthcare and legal representation, but a law abiding individual whose doctor prescribes an expensive treatment will often run into a review board at his insurer that denies the treatment on the grounds that is experimental and unproven, when that same treatment would readily be given to inmates by a state loathe to run afoul of litigious prisoner rights advocates.
This is not freedom at all. Freedom is self determination, free of coercion or aggression, coupled with the responsibility to accept the consequences of exercising freedom. Such an understanding contains within it the natural prohibitions on excess that positivism seeks through statutes and greater regulation: individuals are subject to the implications of their own actions without exception or limitation, and thus are more likely to censor their own behavior accordingly. By removing such limitations and establishing exceptions from the consequences of one’s own actions and excesses, positivists do not prove themselves to be practitioners of some progressive notion of mercy: they are in fact advocates of allowing men to think that failing behavior is working behavior, and as such, the positivist, or as he likes to be known, the progressive, is a blind sadist whose unintentional skill at cruelty is unrivaled.
By further condemning men in no-fault situations such as the development of some chronic disease that is potentially terminal, progressives show themselves to be anything but progressive: they are in fact advocates of regression. The same man who would bristle at the denial of care to an inmate will not hesitate to conceive that medical resources are finite and therefore must be rationed to a regular individual who works hard and enjoins himself to moral or legal behavior. In this way, the good among us are culled while those who wantonly pursue lives of harm to others and their property flourish and survive under the tender mercies of positivist progressives. What a world this is, that we should be reduced to the olden days of casting the infirm, the sick, and the unwanted unfortunates outside the city gates and the protections of the laws within, so that they might perish away from us and be the problem of the savage world outside of our supposedly civilized one. In the meantime, our piteous criminals are held in climate controlled cells, afforded access to comprehensive medical care, legal representation, and three squares a day. Who says crime doesn’t pay more than law abiding indigence?
Those of us who are not misers do not hesitate to recognize that with incarceration comes the assuming of certain responsibilities like food and board, as well as clothing and medical care. We also insist that when an individual enters into a contractual agreement with an insurer, the insurer should not be able to wriggle out of honoring his end of the agreement on technicalities. We insist on something novel that positivist progressives claim as their own but rarely deliver in practice: equality before the law. Our world is the better world when we are allowed to implement it, where the lives of the lawbreaker and the law abider are both equally valuable and equally worthy of preservation. We do not ration the sanctity of life, nor do we impose conditions and exceptions upon said sanctity.
We may not aim for the unattainable world in which crime vanishes and everyone wears white with identification numbers tattooed or subcutaneously implanted on chips, but we do value human life and recognize the basic obligation we have as our brother’s keeper. We aim for what is possible; acknowledge that which is likely even when it is perhaps undesirable, and we plan for such contingencies as the likely and the possible with laws, understanding that the law doesn’t deter or prevent crime, but merely serves to identify crime and outline a process by which crimes can be tried and punished, so that each of us are equal before the law. We don’t aim for Utopia, but we do manage to avoid Dystopias.
In those bastions of progressivism and positivism and leftism, where individuals are so much more enlightened than those of us who cleave to quaint notions like the sanctity of human life as an absolute, things like voluntary euthanasia morph from self-determination over when one’s life ends into a medical professional determining your end without your consent or input. We know that this has happened.
Researchers in Belgium interviewed 248 nurses who admitted to assisting a patient in committing suicide. Of course, 120 of the 248 also admitted to the fact that there was no patient consent. That’s important, because it clearly undermines the notion that euthanasia is at the patient’s discretion under Belgium’s assisted suicide programs. The researchers also noted the likelihood that under-reporting occurred, given their desire to avoid criminal charges for overstepping the boundaries of Belgium’s euthanasia laws, which require patient consent. Of course, the medical profession being what it is, the researchers then exculpated the nurses in question with the following: “It added that many [of the nurses] were probably acting according to their patient’s wishes, ‘even if there was no explicit request (http://bit.ly/bclKZ5).’” How high is the probability that someone who didn’t request to die wanted to die in a country where asking to die is perfectly legal? What objective criterion do we have to ascertain what the wishes of the deceased were to know how probable it was that the nurses in question were acting according to the wishes of the patient rather than, say, a hospital administrator looking to clear beds for budgeting purposes?
There are good reasons why we limit government power and take a dim view of those who exercise powers that they do not legitimately possess: it’s called abuse, and we’d like to avoid abuse. We could die as a result of it. But such powers and the exemption from accountability which typically come as the result of statism are designed specifically to increase government power at the expense of self-determination. In short, these laws are specifically designed not to prevent injurious behavior to the public good, but rather to prevent what the sovereign on his own perceives as injurious to the public good.
These sorts of laws, laws against individual choices which by themselves cannot be shown to constitute any form of aggression against others, are key to the positivist goal of perfectability. Our state would gain in its quest for perfection if only we were to criminalize miscegenation and prevent the degradation of the races, or if we were to foist sterilization on the weaker individuals within our stock, or if we were to criminalize the ingestion of drugs and ban the sale or manufacture of alcohol. These conceptions are in keeping with the positivist conception outlined by T.H. Huxley; namely, that individuals can be wound up like clocks every morning with the knowledge of the various prohibitions placed upon choice by the state, and the individual thus informed will proceed to enjoin himself to whatever right behavior is prescribed by the state. This is utter poppycock.
To begin with, it is not criminal to fall in love with someone outside of your own race. It is a matter of free choice and individual preference that is laudable, for it entails individuals looking beyond appearance and race into the inner character of the individual whom they choose. Such an act is not injurious to the public interest; on the contrary, it is quite compatible to the public interest, for it demystifies race and promotes the humanization of individuals despite their racial and cultural differences. When I was a high school student, I was deeply indoctrinated in my household as to the innate evil and insidious desire of homosexuals to convert heterosexual young men such as myself to their proclivities. This homosexual conspiracy was said to be all pervasive. My own father advocated public stonings and executions of homosexuals.
I departed for college steeped in this reinforced belief. And then I encountered a homosexual, albeit a closeted one. He was a recent Army veteran attending college on the GI Bill. He taught me how to play cards, instructed me in shooting whiskey, and he was the friend I went to for counsel upon breaking up with my first girlfriend. I even roomed with him and another friend that summer in a house. Afterwards, we moved into the same apartment complex with different roommates. It became apparent that he was gay after mutual friends stumbled across the proof of it in the form of his computer diary. My friend never acted in a manner consistent with the supposed homosexual agenda. What is more, upon encountering other homosexuals, few if any of them ever had designs on forcing any issue with me or anyone else.
The point is that getting to know actual homosexuals completely changed my mind about homosexuality and gays. They were merely people. Everything that I had previously seen about them, this notion that homosexuals were cross-dressing, style and interior decor obsessed, feather boa adorned, dilettantes who cavorted around on stilts in and out of pride parades was clearly wrong. Most homosexuals I knew were not promiscuous individuals, and those who were were not any more or less promiscuous than a good many heterosexual men I knew and associated with in college.
These barriers that statism puts up to choice and behavior have little if anything to do with protecting the public from injury and everything to do with promoting stereotypes and prejudices, with inculcating an unfounded mystique on the part of the colored person, the homosexual, or the Semites amongst the perceptions of the larger population. The statist needs an enemy to blame at all times for his own failings and shortcomings, and when the economy tanks, it’s the fault of sodomites and Jews rather than a ruinous monetary policy and the fiscal profligacy of elected representatives. God is judging us for tolerating the Asiatic and homosexual; as opposed to our own accounts taking the natural turn which inevitably occurs when states overspend and over-borrow.
The sovereign decrees such states of being and the choice to associate with individuals in these states of being as criminal not because it is truly injurious to the public good, but because it is helpful to the statist ideal of preserving the state from accountability for its own failings by dissociating blame to those individuals who are colored, gay, or Jewish and the individuals who supposedly undermine the strength of the state by their voluntary association with such people. This reasoning is diseased and utterly false, and it is the codification of bigotry and hatred into statute which is truly injurious to the public good.
It inculcates within individuals a capacity to view gays, coloreds, and Jews as somehow lesser before the law and lesser before humanity, and as such, it promotes the idea that whatever we do to them is not the same as what we do to us. Whites in the early 20th century would never have conceived of lynching a white man for sleeping with a white woman out of wedlock, but they would readily mandate such punishment for an interracial couple, or at least the male or colored portion of that couple. It is dangerous, and it promotes and inculcates within a population a dangerous and insidious tendency towards vigilantism.
In the name of promoting perfectability, we arrive at barbarity and open lawlessness, where men lose their sameneness before the law, and the law loses its power to promote order and a uniform standard of decent and civil behavior. What follows are pogroms, genocides, expulsions, and medical experiments upon individuals without their consent. To say that a man is lesser before the law is to invite his mistreatment by others acting on the notion that what they are doing to the man in question is not inhumane, for he is not fully human. You might as well be experimenting or beating a horse or a dog. It is to strip a human being of his humanity, and to strip his peers of their capacity for empathy or a sense of common humanity which might prevent them from acting in barbaric and abhorrent manner towards the colored, the Jew, or the homosexual.
And what is more, this false notion of perfectability inevitably leads to the inverse, for whatever you acknowledge as the state’s power to act where others are concerned is by implication its power to act towards you as well. When the reciprocity of perfectability comes, it comes in the form of affirmative action, which does not affirm anything other than old failed notions that individuals of color cannot achieve on their own without state interference on their behalf. It comes in the notion of gender and sexual politics whereby our entire culture now portrays the women in advertisements as superior to the men, who sit indolently in their plush easy chairs and insolently reply to their wives’ superior logic. Our interests are as follows: breasts, beer, and sports. We are not the same individuals who constructed the Parthenon or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus at Rhodes, or who established a pantheon of literature and art which has stood the test of time to be classified as timeless. In the positivist and leftist construct which is our dominant worldview, one cannot merely acknowledge the accomplishments of both men and women as indications of their common and equal claim to humanity and greatness; one has to denigrate one in order to raise the other.
Humanity and human achievement are not mutually exclusive on the grounds of race, gender, sexuality, or any other classification. To hell with anyone who claims that they are. It is one thing to argue over whether Shakespeare or Sappho was the greater poet and author; it is abominable to argue that one was greater than the other on the grounds gender or sexuality. Men are conditioned by the pessimism of such logic to believe that our best days lie behind us, that “sanitation and better medicine have made the problems of population more acute,” as Skinner put it, rather than the reality that sanitation and better medicine have enabled more people to realize healthier families and better relationships within those families.
This is not progress; it is false cynicism. It is not unfounded optimism to suggest that our gains in productivity have enabled us to do more with less and to have more with less. It is reality and achievement, and it is cause to celebrate. Perfectability does not entail going backwards towards some optimum standard subjectively selected from the past of human history; it entails going forward to meet the future head on and improving upon the past so that more people can have more of the experiences which are so enriching to human life and human experience. We will never arrive at perfection, for such a destination entails that there is nothing more to achieve or gain. There is always room for improvement, and means to drive the benefits of advancement to people who previously lacked clean water, clean air, basic sanitation, an adequate food supply, and good medical care.
The fact that improvement is not automatic, that difficulties arise on the path to the solving of a problem, is not in and of itself evidence that we should consider destroying or culling human life in order to solve the problem. The measure of a solution is whether or not it can expand human and animal life, and not the cold efficiency with which it extinguishes one as mutually exclusive to the other. To the extent that we have regressed as a society, it has been the advancement of the positivist or the leftist (to me they are one and the same) with his false dichotomies and choices, his either/or, and his notion that the state must have the ability to restrict human action on the most intimate levels imaginable in order to limit some theoretical catastrophe. I have no problem with prophylactics being available to any individual who wants them, but let the individual choose for themselves whether or not to utilize prophylactics. Do not mandate family sizes at the state level.
If there is one thing that is to be extinguished in order to ensure the perfectability or the progress of humanity, it is the leftist and the positivist worldview which decrees such solutions and such mandated limits upon human action and human choice. We are at war, and the war is ideological. There are two ways to wage this war: with the exchange of ideas and open debate, or with the waging of one final physical and coercive conflict between the two extremes. On the one side, we have an ideal which insists upon the primacy of individuals, the sanctity of their lives, the intrinsic and innate dignity and worth they possess merely as result of their conception and birth; on the other side, we have an ideal which states that such dignity and worth is neither innate or intrinsic, but that it is negotiable according to race, gender, sexual orientation, or the subjective standards placed on the measurement of human intellect and achievement by academics who have more oft than not erred in their worldview as their programs of eugenics, alchemy, and various other pseudoscientific approaches would indicate.
These programs and agendas were given the patina of legitimacy by their origin within scientific circles, circles which have as their antecedent the notion that the Earth was flat and rectangular and the geocentric model of our universe. Science can and has been wrong, not merely in its theories, but also in its laws during given time periods within human history. The urgency with which scientists insist on the implementation of some solution ought to be viewed with skepticism given science’s historical tendency to be captured by its patrons and directed not towards factually based views and solutions, but ideologically minded preconceived notions which are bolstered with shoddy academic work and selective sampling of data sets.
Gulags and ghettoes have been built in the name of theoretical perfectability and necessity masquerading as the law of our existence, and today, we have a gulag of public perceptions constructed to denigrate, marginalize, and discredit through ad hominem anyone who challenges the positivist or leftist worldview which is taken as truth in an almost fanatically fervent and reverent way by the intelligentsia and those who view themselves as being in the know. They are the heirs to the W.E.B. Du Bois school of thought which acclaimed Nazi programs to purify the supposed lessers from the supposed betters, with the pretension that a madman who would not acknowledge an achievement by Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics would somehow make an exception for someone of letters like Du Bois. Seriously, how illogical can positivist leftism be?
What perverse logic is this that infects such thought processes, whereby the innocent are condemned to death and their unjust conviction and execution are legitimized through the law itself? I’ll tell you what logic infects such thought processes and the results thereof: leftism, whose perverse moral calculus denies prescribed treatment to a law abiding citizen with a contractual arrangement between himself and an insurer on the grounds that the treatment is experimental. The spirit of the contract is violated by the fine print letter of the thing.
It is one thing to deny treatment to the uninsured, and though that is still barbaric and inhumane, it is nothing compared to the bad faith contractual stipulation which enables one side to occupy an elevated position in a contract that discharges them from the obligation to execute the very purpose under which the disadvantaged party entered into the contract! These are the contracts and statutes which pervade a society given over to positivism, to leftism, and to corporatism, to any of the -isms who spring for the diseased root of such a logic which decrees that ends justify any and every means. And yet, the proponents of such logic are disposed to call their means towards an unattainable end like perfectability progress no matter how many must perish on the way to nowhere.
Contrast that with the naturalist position on the law, as postulated by Cicero: “However one defines Man, the same definition applies to us all.” Let us have this debate, and frame it once and for all for the future of humanity, so that human beings may choose between the positivist and the natural camps as to which approach works for them. Let us articulate it once and for all in these stark terms, and see what people choose as the foundation for their communities and societies going forward.
The positivist cannot sustain the glare of light upon his position. The leftist cannot withstand the scrutiny of objective measure, and neither can the corporatist. It is only by controlling the framing of the debate, by establishing straw men and employing circular logic and ad hominem that the leftist position which is at the root of all of the positivist approaches to life and law can prevail. Only by dividing us into camps of grievances and promising us redress through a reciprocal and vengeful statute which takes our perceived suffering and foists it onto those who are supposedly responsible for the injustice visited upon us and our forefathers can the leftist win the argument. Only by appealing to the lesser impulses and petty, capricious portions of a man’s soul can the leftist win an argument.
The problem has been that few if any on our side have been able to articulate the naturalist position in a way that delineates it from the positivist approach so starkly. So pronounced has our inability to articulate our position apart from leftism that leftists now masquerade around as naturalists in theory while clearly functioning as leftist positivists in action! Part of the issue has been the construction of ideas and philosophies which clearly hold effectiveness. Left Hegelianism works not by virtue of its merit, but through its identification of that which is inferior within mankind: his pettiness, his ability to be reached through demagoguery, and his overall intemperance. Thesis vs. Antithesis enables leftists to play both sides against their desired middle in order to gain the Synthesis which they covet. This is the manufactured consent which I wrote of in an earlier section, and it contains the germ of every pernicious bit of theory ever envisioned by Machiavelli, Hegel, the Left Hegelians, and the Alinskyites. These individuals do not care about being right, nor do they believe that there are standards by which a result can be judged right or wrong. They care only to win for their ideology, and they have no regard for the misery they inflict upon human beings.
They are meritorious in one way only: the identification of those weak and degraded impulses within man such as spite and hatred which can be exploited to gain his assent to surrender his own sameness before the law for the promise of gaining superiority in the law. As Orwell noted in his classic Animal Farm, some animals are indeed more equal than others in such an environment. What these individuals fail to alert their subjects to is this: reciprocity is the inevitable result. There will be extreme backlashes with grave implications for future generations. To the leftist and the positivist, this is of no concern: they are after their perfect world now, and if they can get it now, now is all that they have. They may talk of a better future, but the reality is that they seek the immediate gratification of their ideological impulses and fanatical desires. The promise of a better future is only made to gain the consent of those in the present.
The time is fast approaching when the wheat will have to be separated from the chaff to ensure that the leftist is revealed; his disguise as the conservative, the classical liberal, the Democrat, the Republican, the Libertarian, or the neo-this, that, or the other stripped away until he is at last exposed as an individual who believes only in an ideological end and will resort to any means to achieve it. He has not conviction but the end, some purported perfectability which can be achieved and implemented if only we commit to do whatever it takes, right here and now, without being sidetracked by concerns like the sanctity of human life and the legitimacy of the law, which is rooted in the nation that for the law to have meaning to free men, it must regard them as being the same. To the Leftist, these are incidental concerns to the End, and we must do whatever it takes to stifle any objection rooted in this irrelevant concerns. We must erect gulags and ghettoes, camps with ovens to dispose of the mess, and the road to Utopia is strewn with such edifices and the necessary consequences of Leftism. But at the end lies Heaven, a Heaven that is possible only if men surrender their temporal freedoms to arrive at the blessed Freedom conceived of by the Leftist.
The naturalist cannot promise Heaven, but he can promise you that you will be treated like any other man and given the opportunity to make of yourself whatever you will utilizing your own unique gifts. He can assure you that your life will be valued and preserved with the same fervent enthusiasm reserved for the preservation of the lives of others, that a society built around human rights and founded upon the notion that the state acknowledges to acknowledge and defend human liberty will respond to an attack on the life and liberty of one of its members as though it were an attack upon all of its members. I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. He can promise you progress through human effort and ingenuity, where better sanitation and medicine do not lead to your family being viewed as part of the problem of overpopulation, but as evidence of the achievements of better sanitation and medicine. Life is to be celebrated and not rued. That is the end for which we contend.
“…and it should be possible to design a world in which behavior likely to be punished seldom or never occurs. We try to design such a world for those who cannot solve the problem of punishment for themselves, such as babies, retardates, or psychotics, and if it could be done for everyone, much time and energy would be saved.”
-Skinner, B.F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity pg. 62.
“Can wicked rulers be allied with you, those who frame injustice by statute? They band together against the life of the righteous and condemn the innocent to death.”
-Psalm 94:20-21, English Standard Version
The great difference between freedom as a positivist understands it and freedom as a naturalist understands is quite substantial. Positivists view freedom as “…a lack of resistance or restraint (56 Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity),” and they try accordingly to erect great and substantial barriers to such a concept in the form of laws to guide behavior and punishments for a failure to conform to such laws. For a positivist, freedom from freedom is the end to which he works. In short, a man must enter into a sort of voluntary bondage, what B.F. Skinner referred to as “automatic goodness,” and what T.H. Huxley did see as objectionable: “If some great power would agree to make me always think of what is true and do what is right, on condition of being some sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should close instantly with the offer.”
For the naturalist, freedom is defined more as the power to determine for oneself which action or course to undertake, with the understanding that actions and courses have consequences which must be borne as a result of their implementation. Rights and morals do not stem from codes, but codes arise as man attempts to organize into statute or screed what he has come to observe in the course of his undertakings, that which works and that which does not work being the inspiration for his prohibitions and encouragements. It is important to the naturalist that men should find their own way through personal experience, though many naturalists often surrender to the impulse of the positivist by insisting upon codified or written means of behavioral guidance and sanction.
The law is impotent depending on one’s expectation. For the naturalist, the law is quite potent in that it does two things: it identifies a particular behavior as a tort or crime and it prescribes a process to occur in such an eventuality. For the positivist, the law must produce some ideal state, some utopia. Not surprisingly, positivists are often disappointed. In the name of greater freedom from the chaos and disorder that positivists see as freedom, a positivist will establish ever more strident restraints upon human behavior until he at last arrives at totalitarianism; that theory or approach which regulates every moment of a man’s life and tells him what his course will be at every turn, much like T.H. Huxley’s above-quoted example in which he desires to be wound up by some great power like a clock every morning in order that he may be automatically and totally good.
For the positivist, the great debate is over whether or not such robotic goodness is in fact goodness at all, or whether it is some mindless behavior which, due to the removal of free will and self-determination, cannot qualify as moral behavior at all. For the naturalist, the issue is whether or not such a destination is even possible. It isn’t. The most totalitarian societies have had crime. Societies which strive to produce automatons inevitably produce deviants by provoking their sons and daughters to wrath with heavy-handedness. The positivist believes that we are always one innovation or discovery away from a breakthrough which will enable the end of man’s problems in a particular area. He speaks of Theories of Everything, Laws of Everything, and the End of History.
He is a dreamer who dreams of the end of dreams, or at least the elimination of their usefulness to man. He has but one dream: the achievement of everything in one broadstroke. The positivist is that broken man who, in his constant optimism for a better tomorrow, looks sorrowfully upon the day as being somehow worse than the days already passed, no matter how ahistorical his position might be. We have all encountered the acolytes of apocalypse who insist that the world is growing worse by the day, that immorality and disease, wars and rumors of war, the birth-pangs of a groaning Earth, are all multiplying at an alarming rate which threatens the extinction of mankind and the world as we know it. These acolytes are both religious and secular.
The truth of our history is this: it is getting better all the time. We are able to feed more people with less input, but the apocalyptic positivist notes ruefully how better “sanitation and better medicine have made the problems of population more acute,” or how “war has acquired a new horror with the invention of nuclear weapons, and the affluent pursuit of happiness is largely responsible for pollution (Skinner 1).” He is a man who find the thread of discontent in any happy news, a fatalist who believes that man must be controlled or managed according to the way that he and his peers see as optimum for human life, and he and his peers are arrogantly precocious enough to believe that they can know what that optimum standard is in its completeness and its entirety.
Drop the positivist in the Middle Ages, and she will find that wandering through the countryside unescorted as a stranger in a strange land is the first step towards an increased risk of sexual assault. To some degree this is true today, but we have our high risk areas and neighborhoods, and most of us can exercise good sense and take precautions to reduce the risk of harm to ourselves. The positivist male who is dropped into the Middle Ages will find that while better medicine and sanitation do not lead to any threat of overpopulation, the lesser medicine and sanitation of that time do threaten to lead to human extinction in the form of the plague. Either way, the positivist will be happy to note that there are crises to be noted there in much the same way as such crises can be noted here.
The greatest cause of peace in human history has been the development of nuclear weapons. The problem is not the excess of such weapons; it is the fact that all countries do not possess such weapons in abundance. Invasion and foreign aggression would be things of the past if such weapons were proliferated through every nation in the world community. Nuclear weapons are the greatest deterrent to statist aggression ever developed by man. Are they dangerous? Most certainly. Can they destroy our world? Absolutely. Their awesome destructive power for both the state that initiates their use in conflict and the state that responds in kind renders it virtually certain that neither side will use the weapons or initiate lesser forms of direct conflict.
Instead, that portion of the world which does not retain such weapons becomes a great chessboard, as the countries which possess nuclear arsenals carve up spheres of influence in indirect conflict with each other. The side effect of nuclear weapons which has been less than positive has been the denial of nuclear weapons to those states who have traditionally suffered subordinate status in the world, and such states have had to endure their territory and prerogatives being trampled in order that nuclear states might conduct their conflicts in a proxy manner. Nuclear weapons enable and even proliferate a kind of power projection by those states who possess nuclear arsenals over those states that do not possess such arsenals. The positivist is incapable of understanding that the proliferation of nuclear weapons would virtually guarantee diplomacy rather than warfare as the means of settling statist disagreements. In point of fact, universal nuclear armament would likely negate the practical need for standing armies.
In all truth, the positivist likely does realize this, but he refuses to acknowledge it. His existence depends on inequality as the basis of coercion. Those who have nuclear arsenals can dictate to those who do not. This inequality as the foundation of statist coercion is what the positivist covets. It is what he requires as a practical means of constructing the world which he desires. So long as his side has the bomb, he has no real objection to make. But the moment his lessers develop such a capacity, the positivist decries nuclear proliferation as a destabilizing force in the world, and it is no wonder: the proliferation of nuclear weapons means that formerly subordinate states gain the power to reply in the negative to positivists. The positivist can no longer dictate or decree to such states as to how matters will be. They gain their say so about such matters the moment they enter the nuclear club.
Without nuclear weapons in both the Soviet Union and the United States, the world would likely have undergone a third world war with great implications for all people. As it stands, the war that emerged was largely fought through proxy states and theaters, and casualties were greatly minimized as a result. Eventually, the excess of militarized command economics brought down the Soviet Union. Empires are difficult to maintain in perpetuity.
It never once occurs to the positivist that men must learn in the free market of behavior what works and what does not, nor does it occur to the positivist that men can or should die as a result of their wrong choices. The positivist seeks at every turn to interrupt or delay natural consequence. He is the individual who in times of economic crisis does everything to salvage the unsalvageable by pumping vast liquidity into a failed company, never once considering that the expense of intercession may outweigh the benefit of the company’s continued survival. He also fails to consider the negative precedent that such continued survival establishes: you may act in a way that is fatal repeatedly and wantonly, but someone will always interrupt on your behalf to save you from the fate of your own making.
Ironically, the positivist who has this attitude towards a large corporation lacks such an attitude towards his fellow man: if that man is suffering a mortal or terminal illness, the positivist tends to weigh the cost versus the benefit and can very often decree that is it cost negative to offer a treatment. This is of course in times of illness, but in terms of human action, the positivist seeks to rehabilitate the man who wantonly harms others and their property. He wrings his hands in agony as he considers punitive action versus rehabilitative action in penal codes. He seeks to interrupt and check consequence. A criminal can still be saved; a law abiding citizen afflicted with a terminal illness cannot be saved. The efficient allocation of resources and intervention efforts must be directed towards the salvageable: the company or individual who deserves to perish or suffer as the natural consequence of their actions is saved from the full measure of that consequence; while the individual who through no fault of their own develops some chronic medical condition or likely terminal illness has a low possibility of survival and thus can be rightly denied treatment and therefore condemned to certain death. Such is the moral calculus of the positivist and such is his idea of progress and efficiency.
The postivist is full of vim and vigor for such Devil’s calculus; indeed, he is often the individual in any room or conversation who prides himself on the ability to suspend empathy in order to maintain what he perceives as objectivity. The suspension of empathy, and the subsequent dissociation from rational relativity which such a suspension of empathy yields, often gives rise to the nonsensical realities of our world. We spend $28,000 a year on average to incarcerate career criminals and violent sociopaths in climate controlled comfort with access to healthcare and legal representation, but a law abiding individual whose doctor prescribes an expensive treatment will often run into a review board at his insurer that denies the treatment on the grounds that is experimental and unproven, when that same treatment would readily be given to inmates by a state loathe to run afoul of litigious prisoner rights advocates.
This is not freedom at all. Freedom is self determination, free of coercion or aggression, coupled with the responsibility to accept the consequences of exercising freedom. Such an understanding contains within it the natural prohibitions on excess that positivism seeks through statutes and greater regulation: individuals are subject to the implications of their own actions without exception or limitation, and thus are more likely to censor their own behavior accordingly. By removing such limitations and establishing exceptions from the consequences of one’s own actions and excesses, positivists do not prove themselves to be practitioners of some progressive notion of mercy: they are in fact advocates of allowing men to think that failing behavior is working behavior, and as such, the positivist, or as he likes to be known, the progressive, is a blind sadist whose unintentional skill at cruelty is unrivaled.
By further condemning men in no-fault situations such as the development of some chronic disease that is potentially terminal, progressives show themselves to be anything but progressive: they are in fact advocates of regression. The same man who would bristle at the denial of care to an inmate will not hesitate to conceive that medical resources are finite and therefore must be rationed to a regular individual who works hard and enjoins himself to moral or legal behavior. In this way, the good among us are culled while those who wantonly pursue lives of harm to others and their property flourish and survive under the tender mercies of positivist progressives. What a world this is, that we should be reduced to the olden days of casting the infirm, the sick, and the unwanted unfortunates outside the city gates and the protections of the laws within, so that they might perish away from us and be the problem of the savage world outside of our supposedly civilized one. In the meantime, our piteous criminals are held in climate controlled cells, afforded access to comprehensive medical care, legal representation, and three squares a day. Who says crime doesn’t pay more than law abiding indigence?
Those of us who are not misers do not hesitate to recognize that with incarceration comes the assuming of certain responsibilities like food and board, as well as clothing and medical care. We also insist that when an individual enters into a contractual agreement with an insurer, the insurer should not be able to wriggle out of honoring his end of the agreement on technicalities. We insist on something novel that positivist progressives claim as their own but rarely deliver in practice: equality before the law. Our world is the better world when we are allowed to implement it, where the lives of the lawbreaker and the law abider are both equally valuable and equally worthy of preservation. We do not ration the sanctity of life, nor do we impose conditions and exceptions upon said sanctity.
We may not aim for the unattainable world in which crime vanishes and everyone wears white with identification numbers tattooed or subcutaneously implanted on chips, but we do value human life and recognize the basic obligation we have as our brother’s keeper. We aim for what is possible; acknowledge that which is likely even when it is perhaps undesirable, and we plan for such contingencies as the likely and the possible with laws, understanding that the law doesn’t deter or prevent crime, but merely serves to identify crime and outline a process by which crimes can be tried and punished, so that each of us are equal before the law. We don’t aim for Utopia, but we do manage to avoid Dystopias.
In those bastions of progressivism and positivism and leftism, where individuals are so much more enlightened than those of us who cleave to quaint notions like the sanctity of human life as an absolute, things like voluntary euthanasia morph from self-determination over when one’s life ends into a medical professional determining your end without your consent or input. We know that this has happened.
Researchers in Belgium interviewed 248 nurses who admitted to assisting a patient in committing suicide. Of course, 120 of the 248 also admitted to the fact that there was no patient consent. That’s important, because it clearly undermines the notion that euthanasia is at the patient’s discretion under Belgium’s assisted suicide programs. The researchers also noted the likelihood that under-reporting occurred, given their desire to avoid criminal charges for overstepping the boundaries of Belgium’s euthanasia laws, which require patient consent. Of course, the medical profession being what it is, the researchers then exculpated the nurses in question with the following: “It added that many [of the nurses] were probably acting according to their patient’s wishes, ‘even if there was no explicit request (http://bit.ly/bclKZ5).’” How high is the probability that someone who didn’t request to die wanted to die in a country where asking to die is perfectly legal? What objective criterion do we have to ascertain what the wishes of the deceased were to know how probable it was that the nurses in question were acting according to the wishes of the patient rather than, say, a hospital administrator looking to clear beds for budgeting purposes?
There are good reasons why we limit government power and take a dim view of those who exercise powers that they do not legitimately possess: it’s called abuse, and we’d like to avoid abuse. We could die as a result of it. But such powers and the exemption from accountability which typically come as the result of statism are designed specifically to increase government power at the expense of self-determination. In short, these laws are specifically designed not to prevent injurious behavior to the public good, but rather to prevent what the sovereign on his own perceives as injurious to the public good.
These sorts of laws, laws against individual choices which by themselves cannot be shown to constitute any form of aggression against others, are key to the positivist goal of perfectability. Our state would gain in its quest for perfection if only we were to criminalize miscegenation and prevent the degradation of the races, or if we were to foist sterilization on the weaker individuals within our stock, or if we were to criminalize the ingestion of drugs and ban the sale or manufacture of alcohol. These conceptions are in keeping with the positivist conception outlined by T.H. Huxley; namely, that individuals can be wound up like clocks every morning with the knowledge of the various prohibitions placed upon choice by the state, and the individual thus informed will proceed to enjoin himself to whatever right behavior is prescribed by the state. This is utter poppycock.
To begin with, it is not criminal to fall in love with someone outside of your own race. It is a matter of free choice and individual preference that is laudable, for it entails individuals looking beyond appearance and race into the inner character of the individual whom they choose. Such an act is not injurious to the public interest; on the contrary, it is quite compatible to the public interest, for it demystifies race and promotes the humanization of individuals despite their racial and cultural differences. When I was a high school student, I was deeply indoctrinated in my household as to the innate evil and insidious desire of homosexuals to convert heterosexual young men such as myself to their proclivities. This homosexual conspiracy was said to be all pervasive. My own father advocated public stonings and executions of homosexuals.
I departed for college steeped in this reinforced belief. And then I encountered a homosexual, albeit a closeted one. He was a recent Army veteran attending college on the GI Bill. He taught me how to play cards, instructed me in shooting whiskey, and he was the friend I went to for counsel upon breaking up with my first girlfriend. I even roomed with him and another friend that summer in a house. Afterwards, we moved into the same apartment complex with different roommates. It became apparent that he was gay after mutual friends stumbled across the proof of it in the form of his computer diary. My friend never acted in a manner consistent with the supposed homosexual agenda. What is more, upon encountering other homosexuals, few if any of them ever had designs on forcing any issue with me or anyone else.
The point is that getting to know actual homosexuals completely changed my mind about homosexuality and gays. They were merely people. Everything that I had previously seen about them, this notion that homosexuals were cross-dressing, style and interior decor obsessed, feather boa adorned, dilettantes who cavorted around on stilts in and out of pride parades was clearly wrong. Most homosexuals I knew were not promiscuous individuals, and those who were were not any more or less promiscuous than a good many heterosexual men I knew and associated with in college.
These barriers that statism puts up to choice and behavior have little if anything to do with protecting the public from injury and everything to do with promoting stereotypes and prejudices, with inculcating an unfounded mystique on the part of the colored person, the homosexual, or the Semites amongst the perceptions of the larger population. The statist needs an enemy to blame at all times for his own failings and shortcomings, and when the economy tanks, it’s the fault of sodomites and Jews rather than a ruinous monetary policy and the fiscal profligacy of elected representatives. God is judging us for tolerating the Asiatic and homosexual; as opposed to our own accounts taking the natural turn which inevitably occurs when states overspend and over-borrow.
The sovereign decrees such states of being and the choice to associate with individuals in these states of being as criminal not because it is truly injurious to the public good, but because it is helpful to the statist ideal of preserving the state from accountability for its own failings by dissociating blame to those individuals who are colored, gay, or Jewish and the individuals who supposedly undermine the strength of the state by their voluntary association with such people. This reasoning is diseased and utterly false, and it is the codification of bigotry and hatred into statute which is truly injurious to the public good.
It inculcates within individuals a capacity to view gays, coloreds, and Jews as somehow lesser before the law and lesser before humanity, and as such, it promotes the idea that whatever we do to them is not the same as what we do to us. Whites in the early 20th century would never have conceived of lynching a white man for sleeping with a white woman out of wedlock, but they would readily mandate such punishment for an interracial couple, or at least the male or colored portion of that couple. It is dangerous, and it promotes and inculcates within a population a dangerous and insidious tendency towards vigilantism.
In the name of promoting perfectability, we arrive at barbarity and open lawlessness, where men lose their sameneness before the law, and the law loses its power to promote order and a uniform standard of decent and civil behavior. What follows are pogroms, genocides, expulsions, and medical experiments upon individuals without their consent. To say that a man is lesser before the law is to invite his mistreatment by others acting on the notion that what they are doing to the man in question is not inhumane, for he is not fully human. You might as well be experimenting or beating a horse or a dog. It is to strip a human being of his humanity, and to strip his peers of their capacity for empathy or a sense of common humanity which might prevent them from acting in barbaric and abhorrent manner towards the colored, the Jew, or the homosexual.
And what is more, this false notion of perfectability inevitably leads to the inverse, for whatever you acknowledge as the state’s power to act where others are concerned is by implication its power to act towards you as well. When the reciprocity of perfectability comes, it comes in the form of affirmative action, which does not affirm anything other than old failed notions that individuals of color cannot achieve on their own without state interference on their behalf. It comes in the notion of gender and sexual politics whereby our entire culture now portrays the women in advertisements as superior to the men, who sit indolently in their plush easy chairs and insolently reply to their wives’ superior logic. Our interests are as follows: breasts, beer, and sports. We are not the same individuals who constructed the Parthenon or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus at Rhodes, or who established a pantheon of literature and art which has stood the test of time to be classified as timeless. In the positivist and leftist construct which is our dominant worldview, one cannot merely acknowledge the accomplishments of both men and women as indications of their common and equal claim to humanity and greatness; one has to denigrate one in order to raise the other.
Humanity and human achievement are not mutually exclusive on the grounds of race, gender, sexuality, or any other classification. To hell with anyone who claims that they are. It is one thing to argue over whether Shakespeare or Sappho was the greater poet and author; it is abominable to argue that one was greater than the other on the grounds gender or sexuality. Men are conditioned by the pessimism of such logic to believe that our best days lie behind us, that “sanitation and better medicine have made the problems of population more acute,” as Skinner put it, rather than the reality that sanitation and better medicine have enabled more people to realize healthier families and better relationships within those families.
This is not progress; it is false cynicism. It is not unfounded optimism to suggest that our gains in productivity have enabled us to do more with less and to have more with less. It is reality and achievement, and it is cause to celebrate. Perfectability does not entail going backwards towards some optimum standard subjectively selected from the past of human history; it entails going forward to meet the future head on and improving upon the past so that more people can have more of the experiences which are so enriching to human life and human experience. We will never arrive at perfection, for such a destination entails that there is nothing more to achieve or gain. There is always room for improvement, and means to drive the benefits of advancement to people who previously lacked clean water, clean air, basic sanitation, an adequate food supply, and good medical care.
The fact that improvement is not automatic, that difficulties arise on the path to the solving of a problem, is not in and of itself evidence that we should consider destroying or culling human life in order to solve the problem. The measure of a solution is whether or not it can expand human and animal life, and not the cold efficiency with which it extinguishes one as mutually exclusive to the other. To the extent that we have regressed as a society, it has been the advancement of the positivist or the leftist (to me they are one and the same) with his false dichotomies and choices, his either/or, and his notion that the state must have the ability to restrict human action on the most intimate levels imaginable in order to limit some theoretical catastrophe. I have no problem with prophylactics being available to any individual who wants them, but let the individual choose for themselves whether or not to utilize prophylactics. Do not mandate family sizes at the state level.
If there is one thing that is to be extinguished in order to ensure the perfectability or the progress of humanity, it is the leftist and the positivist worldview which decrees such solutions and such mandated limits upon human action and human choice. We are at war, and the war is ideological. There are two ways to wage this war: with the exchange of ideas and open debate, or with the waging of one final physical and coercive conflict between the two extremes. On the one side, we have an ideal which insists upon the primacy of individuals, the sanctity of their lives, the intrinsic and innate dignity and worth they possess merely as result of their conception and birth; on the other side, we have an ideal which states that such dignity and worth is neither innate or intrinsic, but that it is negotiable according to race, gender, sexual orientation, or the subjective standards placed on the measurement of human intellect and achievement by academics who have more oft than not erred in their worldview as their programs of eugenics, alchemy, and various other pseudoscientific approaches would indicate.
These programs and agendas were given the patina of legitimacy by their origin within scientific circles, circles which have as their antecedent the notion that the Earth was flat and rectangular and the geocentric model of our universe. Science can and has been wrong, not merely in its theories, but also in its laws during given time periods within human history. The urgency with which scientists insist on the implementation of some solution ought to be viewed with skepticism given science’s historical tendency to be captured by its patrons and directed not towards factually based views and solutions, but ideologically minded preconceived notions which are bolstered with shoddy academic work and selective sampling of data sets.
Gulags and ghettoes have been built in the name of theoretical perfectability and necessity masquerading as the law of our existence, and today, we have a gulag of public perceptions constructed to denigrate, marginalize, and discredit through ad hominem anyone who challenges the positivist or leftist worldview which is taken as truth in an almost fanatically fervent and reverent way by the intelligentsia and those who view themselves as being in the know. They are the heirs to the W.E.B. Du Bois school of thought which acclaimed Nazi programs to purify the supposed lessers from the supposed betters, with the pretension that a madman who would not acknowledge an achievement by Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics would somehow make an exception for someone of letters like Du Bois. Seriously, how illogical can positivist leftism be?
What perverse logic is this that infects such thought processes, whereby the innocent are condemned to death and their unjust conviction and execution are legitimized through the law itself? I’ll tell you what logic infects such thought processes and the results thereof: leftism, whose perverse moral calculus denies prescribed treatment to a law abiding citizen with a contractual arrangement between himself and an insurer on the grounds that the treatment is experimental. The spirit of the contract is violated by the fine print letter of the thing.
It is one thing to deny treatment to the uninsured, and though that is still barbaric and inhumane, it is nothing compared to the bad faith contractual stipulation which enables one side to occupy an elevated position in a contract that discharges them from the obligation to execute the very purpose under which the disadvantaged party entered into the contract! These are the contracts and statutes which pervade a society given over to positivism, to leftism, and to corporatism, to any of the -isms who spring for the diseased root of such a logic which decrees that ends justify any and every means. And yet, the proponents of such logic are disposed to call their means towards an unattainable end like perfectability progress no matter how many must perish on the way to nowhere.
Contrast that with the naturalist position on the law, as postulated by Cicero: “However one defines Man, the same definition applies to us all.” Let us have this debate, and frame it once and for all for the future of humanity, so that human beings may choose between the positivist and the natural camps as to which approach works for them. Let us articulate it once and for all in these stark terms, and see what people choose as the foundation for their communities and societies going forward.
The positivist cannot sustain the glare of light upon his position. The leftist cannot withstand the scrutiny of objective measure, and neither can the corporatist. It is only by controlling the framing of the debate, by establishing straw men and employing circular logic and ad hominem that the leftist position which is at the root of all of the positivist approaches to life and law can prevail. Only by dividing us into camps of grievances and promising us redress through a reciprocal and vengeful statute which takes our perceived suffering and foists it onto those who are supposedly responsible for the injustice visited upon us and our forefathers can the leftist win the argument. Only by appealing to the lesser impulses and petty, capricious portions of a man’s soul can the leftist win an argument.
The problem has been that few if any on our side have been able to articulate the naturalist position in a way that delineates it from the positivist approach so starkly. So pronounced has our inability to articulate our position apart from leftism that leftists now masquerade around as naturalists in theory while clearly functioning as leftist positivists in action! Part of the issue has been the construction of ideas and philosophies which clearly hold effectiveness. Left Hegelianism works not by virtue of its merit, but through its identification of that which is inferior within mankind: his pettiness, his ability to be reached through demagoguery, and his overall intemperance. Thesis vs. Antithesis enables leftists to play both sides against their desired middle in order to gain the Synthesis which they covet. This is the manufactured consent which I wrote of in an earlier section, and it contains the germ of every pernicious bit of theory ever envisioned by Machiavelli, Hegel, the Left Hegelians, and the Alinskyites. These individuals do not care about being right, nor do they believe that there are standards by which a result can be judged right or wrong. They care only to win for their ideology, and they have no regard for the misery they inflict upon human beings.
They are meritorious in one way only: the identification of those weak and degraded impulses within man such as spite and hatred which can be exploited to gain his assent to surrender his own sameness before the law for the promise of gaining superiority in the law. As Orwell noted in his classic Animal Farm, some animals are indeed more equal than others in such an environment. What these individuals fail to alert their subjects to is this: reciprocity is the inevitable result. There will be extreme backlashes with grave implications for future generations. To the leftist and the positivist, this is of no concern: they are after their perfect world now, and if they can get it now, now is all that they have. They may talk of a better future, but the reality is that they seek the immediate gratification of their ideological impulses and fanatical desires. The promise of a better future is only made to gain the consent of those in the present.
The time is fast approaching when the wheat will have to be separated from the chaff to ensure that the leftist is revealed; his disguise as the conservative, the classical liberal, the Democrat, the Republican, the Libertarian, or the neo-this, that, or the other stripped away until he is at last exposed as an individual who believes only in an ideological end and will resort to any means to achieve it. He has not conviction but the end, some purported perfectability which can be achieved and implemented if only we commit to do whatever it takes, right here and now, without being sidetracked by concerns like the sanctity of human life and the legitimacy of the law, which is rooted in the nation that for the law to have meaning to free men, it must regard them as being the same. To the Leftist, these are incidental concerns to the End, and we must do whatever it takes to stifle any objection rooted in this irrelevant concerns. We must erect gulags and ghettoes, camps with ovens to dispose of the mess, and the road to Utopia is strewn with such edifices and the necessary consequences of Leftism. But at the end lies Heaven, a Heaven that is possible only if men surrender their temporal freedoms to arrive at the blessed Freedom conceived of by the Leftist.
The naturalist cannot promise Heaven, but he can promise you that you will be treated like any other man and given the opportunity to make of yourself whatever you will utilizing your own unique gifts. He can assure you that your life will be valued and preserved with the same fervent enthusiasm reserved for the preservation of the lives of others, that a society built around human rights and founded upon the notion that the state acknowledges to acknowledge and defend human liberty will respond to an attack on the life and liberty of one of its members as though it were an attack upon all of its members. I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. He can promise you progress through human effort and ingenuity, where better sanitation and medicine do not lead to your family being viewed as part of the problem of overpopulation, but as evidence of the achievements of better sanitation and medicine. Life is to be celebrated and not rued. That is the end for which we contend.
Perhaps nothing is so annoying to a statist than an individual who places himself in a position of superiority, as opposed to the ancillary function which most statists believe is the proper role of citizens. In the world of statists, citizens are to complement the state by conforming to its every demand, no matter how unreasonable or intrusive. Buckle your seat belt, go outside to smoke, and don’t drink a drop before you get behind the wheel of a car, ever. Be kind, rewind; don’t be a litterbug; say no to drugs; recycle and reuse. Though the state builds roads and bridges with your tax dollars, don’t you dare run the toll booth. And whatever you do, no matter how unpleasant or unprofessional the police are during a routine stop or a traffic violation, do not reciprocate their attitude with one of your own.
That last part is one that we can all identify with. I’ve always been a pro-law enforcement sort of man. My wife’s father is a policeman, and he and his eldest son are both constables, as is the step-uncle of my niece. A cousin of mine is a city police officer in my hometown. I have never been arrested or detained by the police. I take great pains in my adult life to abide by the law, even when I’m late for work or an engagement.
I’ve had tickets for various offenses throughout college and afterward. I once ran three stop signs in succession at about a quarter to 7 a.m. on a summer morning in a sleepy residential area. I’ve had tickets for speeding, improper backing, and the like. I even once had a ticket for DOWSOR.
Now, for those of you who don’t understand what DOWSOR is, I’m going to explain it to you as it was explained to me when a friend of mine drove me to the local precinct to ask. But first, a little background: I, like most individuals out of college, frequented the cheapest drink and dinner specials around town. One of my favorite haunts was a local watering hole with constantly changing management and names. When I first arrived in town, the establishment was known as Sidelines, and by the time I departed, it was Double Play. Its iterations of nomenclature aside, it had a wonderful set of dinner specials including 10 cent wing night and a $5.99 ribeye night.
I went to $5.99 ribeye night one particular evening, and along with my ribeye, I quaffed two beers. I hadn’t been feeling myself at the time, or I would have had more beer, because in those days, I drank quite heavily. The disappointment on the bartender’s face was evident, but the bouncers looked relieved at my restraint. I shot a half dozen games of pool, and between my ineptitude and that of my playing partners at billiards, the games took close to three hours. They had been drinking far more than I had, and I played far better drunk than I ever did while sober. It was a recipe for longevity.
My Pyrrhic victory at long last attained, and my wrists and arms sore from the exertions of the night, I departed into the crisp night air to my car. I took the back road to get home, and one of Montevallo’s finest was coming round the curb when I was turning. He immediately did what we in Montevallo affectionately referred to as a “blue turn,” and pulled up behind me at the stop sign. His lights were not flashing. For several miles we rode on, and when I turned onto the street leading to my apartment, the officer flashed his lights and I dutifully obliged by pulling over onto the curb.
What followed was a basic exercise in futility: the officer asked me an honest question and I gave him an honest answer, which one should never do when speaking to a police officer. He asked if I had been drinking. I informed him that three hours ago, I had imbibed two beers. He requested that I step out of the car.
As he examined my license and registration, I stood in front of my car awaiting further instruction. Across the way, my friends were sitting on the balcony of their apartment, recognizing in their own alcohol induced stupor that I was indeed pulled over on the side of the road with a policeman. The officer then asked me to stand on one leg, touch my index finger to my nose and stretch my arm out straight to my side while reciting my ABCs backwards. To his disappointment, I was able to comply with little if any difficulty.
It was at this time that the officer informed me that he would be writing me a ticket, and when I inquired as to the violation, he snapped at me that he hadn’t been drinking before he had been driving. I informed him that such a revelation was a relief to me, and then asked yet again what my citation was for. He was not in good humor. He tore the ticket off and handed it to me, and after a cursory perusal, I noted that my violation was DOWSOR. I asked him what DOWSOR was. He snapped that I had been the one drinking that night, and I needed to hurry home ASAP. I informed him of my familiarity with ASAP and inquired yet again as to what DOWSOR stood for.
During my Disco Duck ABC routine, my compadres on the balcony had begun hollering obscenities at me in order to encourage me to dance better. By now, they had reached a fever pitch in their drunken and slurred cheers. The officer glanced at them, and then stared at me. He thumbed towards them and informed me that one of my friends could likely assist me with the meaning of DOWSOR.
He then told me to get off of the road. I pulled into my friend’s apartment complex, and requested a ride to the precinct from the girl who owned the apartment. She was miraculously sober. I relayed my confusion over DOWSOR, and none of my friends could clarify for me what DOWSOR meant, although one got as far as slurring out “Dick…Over West Side…” At that point, I knew I need a professional’s assistance. Off we went to the precinct, where I endured the laughter and ridicule of my friends in the car. When we arrived, I stormed in to find myself staring at the lieutenant, who looked like one of those high school Explorers who do ride-alongs and what not with local law enforcement. When I asked to speak to a real police officer in an even tone of voice, he took offense. His voice cracked as he notified me that he was a lieutenant police officer. He then cleared his throat and hooked his thumbs in his utility belt.
I asked him if I appeared intoxicated, and he stared for a moment and replied in the negative. I then presented the DOWSOR citation to him. He immediately looked up and informed me that I had been cited for Driving On the Wrong Side Of the Road. I told him that his department ought to make it a policy to include definite articles in their acronyms so that stupid people like myself would not need to ride all the way up to the precinct for deciphering, and he asked me to leave. My agitation was palpable. Nevertheless I left, and upon counsel from the local judge that an officer is an expert witness (who apparently never lies in such matters), I paid the ticket.
It was the first time I’d ever been pulled over for anything where I had been 100% innocent of wrongdoing. The other times I’d been pulled over, I’d acknowledged my guilt without reservation. It’s rather obvious when you run three consecutive stop signs. No use lying about it. It was also the first time I’d been cognizant that such things could happen to white guys with clean cut hair and a respectable appearance. I got screwed, and law enforcement lost a bit of its lustrous reputation that night.
Back in those days, a camcorder was bulky and hard to conceal, and quite expensive as well. Apparently the officer’s dash mounted camera was out of commission when he pulled me over, so I had no way of using the footage to dispute his expert testimony. And that’s the point, really, from the perspective of statists and their counterparts within the various enforcement and bureaucratic apparatuses which proliferate like so many weeds over time.
They can surveil us, they can put up multiple cameras at every intersection, and on the off chance that their cameras catch us in an incriminating act, the footage proves beyond all doubt our guilt. Only inadvertently does our surveillance state and the society which is its outgrowth exculpate ordinary citizens, as in the case of the Duke lacrosse team, who were exonerated in large part because footage from an ATM camera proved that the alleged participants were not at the location in question during the timeframe alleged by their accuser. One has to wonder what the outcome of a subpoena for intersection footage would if a defendant did in fact petition the court for potentially exculpatory footage from the state. Would the state’s interest outweigh an individual’s interest in trying to establish his innocence, or at least his whereabouts in a manner which contradicted the state’s timeline in a criminal complaint or indictment? Give the wide latitude that judges seem to give states nowadays, we can say with some certainty that the state could very well win and shut down any such subpoena on the grounds that it would be too great an expense, or that it might establish a precedent whereby states and communities would be required to archive such footage in perpetuity.
But when we surveil the state and its officials, especially those enforcement officers who routinely act in an unprofessional manner with impunity, we could very well find ourselves on the receiving end of a felony wiretap charge. In no fewer than 12 states, it is now illegal to videotape police officers (Watching the Watchers, Popular Mechanics, http://bit.ly/9LPinc). You can face felony charges, much like Christopher Drew, who was arrested for a misdemeanor charge of not having a peddler’s license and peddling in a prohibited area on the streets of Chicago. Both original charges were dropped, but now Drew faces a Class I felony charge of illegal recording and a potential sentence of 4 to 15 years in jail (Are Cameras the New Guns? McElroy, Wendy http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.3315).
You see, Drew intentionally peddled for three months to provoke arrest under the city’s ordinance prohibiting such peddling, so that he could challenge the city’s ordinance in court. The police avoided enforcement because they were aware that a federal challenge to the ordinance would be mounted, but eventually, Drew was arrested and his recording of the arrest was proof which would have established documentary evidence of his standing to challenge the law. In order to obstruct Drew’s ability to challenge the ordinance, the police dropped the misdemeanor charges and brought forth felony charges, the net effect of which would be to chill any ordinary citizen’s challenge of local and state overreach in court. The financial toll Drew is likely to undergo as an individual street artist whose original crime was attempting to sell art at a dollar a piece on the sidewalk will conceivably hamper his ability to function and dampen his enthusiasm for challenge the state. That’s the idea, really: to dampen enthusiasm on the part of those who might actually dissent.
The police cannot demonstrate that their officers were harmed in any way by Drew’s recording of the arrest. This is important, because under tort law, harm is the basis of any complaint. Under criminal law, the government defines crime as “any act which the sovereign (that is, the state) has deemed contrary to the public good; a wrong which the government has determined is injurious to the public and, hence, prosecutable in a criminal proceeding (Barron’s Law Dictionary, Giftis, Steven H.).” In a free and open society, as a republic like our own allegedly is, the people have some input into what is injurious to the public good. It is doubtful that your average individual would define videotaping the police as injurious to their own interest. In point of fact, given Rodney King and many other cases, many of us might define recording the police as aligning with the public interest and not as injurious to it.
The simple reality is that crime is no longer what is injurious to the public good; rather, it is instead what is injurious to the state’s good and the state’s interest. Crime is whatever exposes the state to culpability for its overreach and documents such overreach in an indisputable fashion. This is what lies at the basis of any statute such as the Class I felony charge of illegal recording. It is not a concern with individual privacy, for the police perform arrests and traffic stops routinely without the expectation of such privacy. Hell, they have dashboard mounted cameras on their interceptors which record their stops and encounters with the public. But that’s the footage the state can edit, control, and even accidentally delete. It’s consistent with their root cause of controlling the narrative and establishing the myth as they see fit.
And that’s important to states. That’s actually of paramount importance, because the state routinely does things which are morally, ethically, and even legally abhorrent. Take the following examples of recorded police behavior:
-”In October 2007, an elite unit of the Chicago Police Department was disbanded after video emerged of its members shaking down barroom customers (http://bit.ly/9LPinc).”
-”A policeman in Puerto Rico is under FBI investigation because video–uploaded to YouTube–apparently shows him executing an unarmed man (ibid).”
-”[A] Baltimore woman recently won a $180,000 false arrest and imprisonment lawsuit based on police videotape evidence that confirmed a different but similarly dressed woman was the one buying drugs (ibid).”
We’ve all seen the Rodney King beating, and the recent leak by Wikileaks which shows the military blowing two Reuters reporters to smithereens because soldiers mistook their camera lenses for RPG launchers. You see, citizen surveillance, and leaked footage by whistleblowers, shows the state as it is rather than as it wishes to be seen. The state despises this because its agents cannot control the narrative and foist a myth in place of the truth when the people have information which clearly and plainly shows that the state’s version of events is a total lie.
This is why in 12 states, you can now be arrested and face jail time for documenting on your own what the states document routinely through the use of dashboard mounted cameras, or even what the military documents through helicopter and aircraft mounted cameras. Because if you have the footage, and it isn’t edited to favor the state, the state’s narrative comes into dispute. It’s control, and isn’t that why we established states in the first place? So that they could control us up to the point of leading us to believe in a totally false version of events? Of course it is.
Despite what states seek routinely to establish as crime, I think that we can all agree that the public good aligns with the police being constantly recorded by as many individuals and groups as possible. In fact, though I oppose the expansion of bureaucracy as a general rule, I propose a taxpayer funded stand alone bureaucracy whose level of funding is dependent on a direct vote of the taxpayer as opposed to appropriations committees, and I support this institution’s mission, which would be to follow and videotape elected officials and enforcement agents wherever they go in the course of their daily duties. Once the officials in question clock out and go home, they’re entitled to some expectation of privacy, but when they’re on our dime, I support a policy of total surveillance. If that’s a bit absolutist, so be it. I pride myself on being totally inflexible when advocating the increased authority and power of citizens over their governments, and I firmly believe that transparency is the path to greater citizen authority and power. How much more transparent could we get than having every minute of every working day on videotape where our government and its bureaucracies are concerned?
