Ah, it looks like the tolerant lefties in my old stomping grounds in the Pacific Northwest are at it again. There’s an anonymous campaign to target GOP homeowners who display campaign signs in their yards with signs that read “RepublicansAreADisease.”
Peace, love, rainbows, unicorns…and property destruction. Via the Seattle Times (hat tip: reader Jack A.):
A couple in Shoreline have been targeted in a campaign that involves destroying signs supporting Republican candidates, and replacing them with signs for RepublicansAreADisease.com.
The website, which is an anonymous wordpress blog, encourages it’s readers to print out signs reading, “Republicans Are A Disease” and “Republicans America’s Worst Enemy” and place them on their own and public property, and to “tell their neighbors how they feel about the criminals in the GOP.”
The couple that was targeted has replaced its signs, but the “wife is scared to death.”
The RepublicansAreADisease.com founder, who denies any malicious intentions, brags about having a sign in his/her van that reads: “Hang Rove.”
I live in Seattle. I had a sign in the back of my car that read “Republicans America’s Worst Enemy”. Just to let you know I got 20 smiles and thumbs up for every shaking head, and finger! I want to let everyone know exactly how I feel about today’s Republicon Party when I drive around. I now have a “Republicans Are A Disease” sign in my back window. When I get a little too upset, I print up some of these signs, take my ladder, and staple them up high on telephone poles in my neighborhood. If there are any Republicons around, I want my signs in their face. I am mad, and I won’t take their attacks sitting down any more. I am tired of being called names by the likes of Rush Limpbat, and his sickening right wing, ignorant ditto head friends. I love my country, and I am not afraid to let my neighbors know I think the Republican Party is America’s greatest enemy, and must be driven from power. Help me, and your country. Download these signs. Print them, and put them everywhere you can. Carry the message. NOW!!!! When the GOP stops acting like the MAFIA, I will take this website down. Until then, forget it. They are my, and my country’s biggest threat. America’s Worst Enemy!!! Every single Republican should be treated like America’s worst enemy by everyone that truly loves our country too. Just calling yourself a Republican these days means you approve of how they operate. You would have to be one sick, greedy puppy to call yourself a Republican these days. Maybe they could make their own country, and call it Torture Land. They can waterboard each other for fun.
President Obama can reach out to Republicons all he wants, while they are stabbing him in the back every chance they get. I will be poking them in the eye non stop, until they change their ways. I won’t hold my breath…
Keep checking back. I have more signs I will be uploading, and will be getting signs from others to put up as well.
Update: I changed the sign in my car’s back window. Now I have a “Republicans Are A Disease” sign. I also have a “Republicans Are A Disease” sign on the back of my van, along with a “Hang Rove” sign.
Today, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet.”
The Grand Inquisitor Freedom doesn’t grow on trees. It exists by virtue of independence from the powers that might take that freedom away. Since there is no such thing as perfect freedom, and we must all live under one form of authority or another, rights exist to fence out authority from the space allotted to freedom. Rights create an artificial form of freedom through a covenant with the authorities. The more leverage the citizens have over the authorities, the more they can prevent those rights from being trampled upon.
The problem begins when those rights are taken for granted. For example when people begin to assume that the rights they enjoy are inherent to the system, so that they don’t have to worry about them. As long as the system exists, so do their rights.
In the United States, many Americans assume that as long as the flag waves and everyone celebrates the 4th of July, then their rights are safe. But it is entirely possible to have an America in which the flag still waves and people still go to see fireworks on the 4th of July, and in which there are no more rights or freedoms left. The only way this can happen though is when people forget what the flag means and what the 4th of July means, the symbolism of a flag composed of individual states, and a holiday celebrating the Declaration of Independence, which holds that a people may overthrow a government when it violates their rights.
It is dangerous to celebrate symbols, while forgetting what they mean. Because a nation’s fundamental symbols are the keys to its power. They are its scepters and thrones. And when people forget what the symbols mean and begin bowing to the symbols themselves– it becomes possible for a tyrant to take the symbols and have people bow to him, even as he desecrates what those symbols actually stand for.
Obama’s rise to power could not have taken place except through a forgetfulness that has been with us for some time now. And Obama has been quite talent at manipulating symbols, posing in front of half a dozen flags, a Superman statue, glowing halos, historic sites and documents. That these symbols have no meaning to him except as tokens of power, that his very presence next to them or adjacent to them, should be anathema because of the profound gap between the ideals they represent, and the agenda he represents, is obvious to those who remember that symbols also have meanings.
But Obama’s success is due to those who do not remember. To whom the flag represents America, but who do not understand that it is not a random selection of shapes meant to look pretty against a blue sky. To whom the Constitution is a document that protects their freedoms, without understand how it does that and what part their active participation must play for it to work. And so Obama exploits symbols, while the media warns about the dangers of anyone literate enough to understand their meanings. In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is a dangerous extremist. Because he can see what those in power can’t.
When the NAACP allowed itself to be used by the Democratic party to try and smear a grass roots movement for smaller government as racist, the resulting controversy shone a light on more than just racism by individuals associated with the NAACP, but with the organization’s inability to delink class warfare from racism. If there is one thing that both the white media elites at Jornolist and the NAACP leadership agreed on, it’s that fighting for smaller government is racist.
The peculiar notion that reforming government by reducing its size is racist originates from the marriage of racial equality with class warfare to create the 40 Acres and a Mule politics covering everything from wealth redistribution to affirmative action to social welfare programs– all under the aegis of the federal government. And yet this same brand of 40 Acres and a Mule politics underlies the particular tragedy of the black community, whose leaders traded in aspiration and equality for government handouts, forcing them to make the argument over and over again that there can be no social justice without total government control.
When the Democratic party was forced to make the transition from a party of Northern businessmen and Southern plantation owners, after two Republican Presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, put a severe dent in their Southern plantations and the Northern business offices that had formerly given the party a death grip on the country’s economy– it did so by redefining the “Company Store” to mean the Federal government. The Republican notion of individual rights and free labor met the new Democratic notion of ward boss handouts at the Federal level in a battle for the soul of the Black community, and the Democrats won. Not immediately, not conclusively and not absolutely– but they won, and the NAACP’s leadership demonstrates why.
The black leadership has gained distinct advantages for itself as a separate class, while disadvantaging the black community as a whole. Civil rights leaders who made their money on lawsuit shakedowns and diversity training seminars, corporate executives and business owners who got where they were through affirmative action programs that encouraged companies to hire one black executive for appearance not merit, and rewarded minority business owners for the color of their skin, rather than for results– helped create a black leadership that owed its position and power to government intervention, rather than ability. And in the process that same leadership marginalized more qualified people within the black community, while teaching the lesson that aspiration and ability did not matter, only connections and politics did.
Affirmative action politics closed far more doors than it opened, but those who got through the open door knew exactly what they owed it to. Creating racial quotas as a way to select leaders was an effective tool for perpetuating the same system over and over again, marginalizing black candidates and business owners as a whole, while rewarding a select few who would then be in a position to praise and maintain things the status quo.
The racism charge leveled against the Tea Party is the doing of a leadership that sees itself as completely dependent on the Federal government, so much so that it finds any talk of reducing it to be dangerous and threatening. And as the Democratic party has identified itself closely with the domestic expansion of government and wealth redistribution politics, it has been able to manipulate the black community, to appropriate its decision making powers and use it as a political tool, while virtually eliminating its actual political clout. The sad state of affairs in which the official black leadership damns anyone who doesn’t toe the Democratic party line as Uncle Toms and “not real black people” reveals just who really calls the shots in this arrangement. And it is not the black leadership, which gets trotted out when the Democratic party needs them, and gets told to go home when it doesn’t. Which is no different than the treatment accorded to women’s or Jewish groups.
The attacks hurled at the government reforms advocated by Tea Party groups rely on invoking sixties racist boogeymen about States’ Rights, but the Tea Parties are not fighting to resegregate schools or lunch counters, as many times as liberal political bloggers may try and market that particular smear. Instead the Tea Party is an attempt to salvage the financial viability of the Middle Class that has traditionally been America’s only reliable bastion of political and social equality. And their targets are not Eisenhower’s forced desegregation and challenges to States’ Rights, a Republican President, but the out of control government expansion that began with FDR’s New Deal, which enforced racial segregation and plunged the country deeper into the depression.
Wealth Redistribution will never solve the black community’s problems, only worsen them. Which may be why most of the greatest African-American inventions took place before it, not after. All that spending has not helped the black community, in part because while the spending may use social welfare as a justification, it is mostly directed at building up the size of government itself. The gargantuan bureaucratic structures that form as a result only perpetuate poverty for everyone, while feeding money to a small group of insiders who are politically connected enough to benefit from it. The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disasters in which black homeowners were saddled with debt, that was then resold worldwide by bankers and brokers, is a typical example of what happens and where the money really goes.
Throughout the War on Terror, liberals have been lecturing us on the virtue of holding on to the “Moral High Ground”, which is their way of saying that we should forgo trying to defeat terrorists military, and instead show them up with our superior civil liberties. Yes Abdul, you may have a suitcase nuke, but if we catch you, we’ll still pay for your legal defense. Torture our soldiers if you will, Mohammed, but see if you aren’t impressed when we TIVO your favorite team’s soccer matches for you in that horrible 19 million dollar hellhole of misery and degradation at Guantanamo Bay.
Of course Mohammed is never going to be very impressed by his free legal team, Halal cooking, volleyball courts and pro bono prosthetic legs, because Islamists don’t derive their moral high ground from doing nice things for their enemies. They derive their moral high ground from getting up on a high place and tossing rocks or grenades down at their enemies. A Good Muslim is willing to kill for Islam. The Koran says so explicitly. On the other hand liberals insist that only a Bad American is willing to kill for America. A Good American will believe that Islam is a religion of peace, even while he’s having his head chopped off by Johnny Mujaheed. He will eschew any tacky American flags, in favor of Chomsky and Zinn essays that will enable him to understand what a rotten country he lives in, and why the terrorists chopping his head off might have a point. All this really means is that practicing the Moral High Ground is a good way to get beheaded and reading the works of mentally ill Communists is not a good survival strategy.
We can’t win the War on Terror so long as we hold to liberal definitions of the Moral High Ground. We can’t even begin to really fight it. What’s worse, is that not only does this warped understanding of morality result in more American deaths, it results in more deaths of both fighters and civilians on the enemy side. Because where the soldier understand that the most moral way to win a war is, quickly. The bleeding heart liberal thinks that the most moral way to win a war is, never. To a liberal if we must fight a war, we should do it with our hands tied behind our backs, and after a decade of senseless bloodshed, we’ll finally come to realize that war is a bad thing.
Putting liberals in charge of determining what soldiers can do in a war is like putting die hard big government advocates in charge of privatizing the government. Not only will they see that the whole thing fails, they’ll make sure that it fails as painfully and horribly as possible in order to serve as a lesson to any future government that might flirt with any similar notion. They did it with the War on Terror, intimidating military interrogators with threats of legal action and exposure, while helping the terrorists realize that all they need to do is claim torture in order to be set free. They did it brilliantly in Iraq, subverting the reconstruction in the aftermath of a successful war, from within, until the entire thing collapsed into squabbling factions. They did it on Iran, feeding false claims that there was no nuclear program long enough for Bush to leave office.
Their goal is to break Western civilization. Break it of its exceptionalism. Break it of any notion that it has any worthwhile accomplishments to its name. Break it of any idea that it has a right to exist. That is their real Moral High Ground. National and international suicide in favor of nobler and better Third World creeds that won’t be as greedy or as industrially developed, and will build societies based on sharing and caring, and of course the obligatory head chopping. Nothing else matters.
Israel, which has its own hard-at-work left, has something similar called “Purity of Arms” which is Hebrew for the “Courageous Restraint” medal that General McChrystal was thinking of handing out to US soldiers in Afghanistan for not killing terrorists. Purity of Arms is one of the best strategic advantages Israel has ever handed to the terrorists, because it gives the terrorists a free pass to carry out attacks behind civilians, while threatening soldiers with severe penalties if they fire without being 100 percent certain that they’re about to be murdered if they don’t. The ongoing captivity of Gilad Shalit and the entire Second Lebanon War would probably never have happened, if the IDF weren’t constantly trapped in the Purity of Arms madness, as soldiers in a war zone are forced to second-guess their own survival, because Jewish self-defense is bad for public relations.
How many people died in both Israel and Lebanon because IDF soldiers are trained not to shoot, rather than to shoot, thereby allowing themselves to be ambushed by terrorists and turned into hostages and the causes of a war? How many more people will die when Noam Shalit finally gets his way and thousands of terrorists with blood on their hands are traded in for Gilad Shalit’s freedom? And how many more will die when the cycle repeats itself. The numbers become more horrifying as you trace them back to their source.
Why does Israel have a terrorist problem, and not Jordan, which has the same Arab population that Israel does? It’s not simply because Israel is mostly Jewish and Jordan is mostly Muslim, though that is a contributing factor. A primary focus of Islamists is to take over countries with majority Muslim populations in order to build the Caliphate. The reason is because in 1970 when the terrorists began hijacking planes and declared that a part of Jordan belonged to them, King Hussein sent in the army. He didn’t kill a mere 52 Palestinian Arab terrorists, as Israel did in Jenin. Or a mere 107 in Deir Yassin. Not even the 800 or so killed in fighting between Arabs in Sabra and Shatilla. No, according to Arafat, King Hussein’s troops killed an estimated 25,000 Palestinian Arabs.
This wasn’t some sort of unique event by Middle Eastern standards. When the Islamists tried to stage an uprising in Hama, Syrian troops killed somewhere between 20,000 to 40,000 people. When Arafat sided with Saddam during the Gulf War, Kuwait expelled 400,000 Palestinian Arabs. Why did they do it? Because by 1990, Kuwait had some 564,000 native Arabs, and some 450,000 Palestinian Arabs. So the Kuwaitis began bombing Palestinian Arab neighborhoods, top officials boasted about “cleansing” Palestinian Arabs from Kuwait, and tanks and troops were sent into Palestinian Arab neighborhoods, setting up checkpoints, killing, imprisoning and torturing thousands. There were plenty of atrocities that got brief mentions in the media, before the Palestinian Arabs were gone from Kuwait, and everyone moved on.
One of the great errors of big government liberalism is its belief that inhuman systems are superior to human beings. This form of mechanical thinking is a commonplace error in a scientific age in which we have become used to using mechanical systems to solve problems. But people are not machines, and trying to turn people into gears in the great machine of government leads to tragic results.
The embrace of big government in the United States was driven by the belief in scientific government as a perfectible system. This creepy worship of elitist technocracy lingers around the more idealistic liberal administrations, from FDR to JFK to Obama. Always followed by a list of PhD’s and degree holders in the cabinet revealing a failure to understand that higher education does not make one immune from human flaws. The idea of a perfected government is at odds with democracy, which treats political chaos and voter misjudgments as valid tradeoffs for a leash on government. It worships the idea of government, rather than the reality of government. An egotistical exercise for policy wonks certain that the right people can set everything to right, regardless of what the people as a whole might think about it.
ObamaCare showed us the ugly spectacle of elitist government and its supporters, dismissing and ignoring the democratic objections of the public as the clamor of an ignorant and dangerous rabble. That is how tyrants throughout history have viewed public protest. It is not however the response of a democratic government to the will of the majority. It is how those who view their policy endgame as a superior ideal to the will of the people, think and act. And that is shorthand for tyranny.
To argue that government gets its authority not from representative democracy, but from the purity of their policymaking is to create an ideological tyranny. It is the deathblow of democracy. And yet that is exactly what the raison d’etre of the Obama Administration has been. Government as god, dispensing the blessings of its policymaking to the unworthy hoi polloi, the great unwashed who don’t know enough to go green, buy health insurance and read the Huffington Post. And when those who govern feel themselves to be superior to those they govern, they divest power from the people, and invest it in systems under their own control. And so big government grows even bigger.
Where the Founders viewed Constitutional government as a kind of anti-system, an inoculation against government that was meant to keep in its place, liberalism has come to view government as the ultimate tool that can do anything. Government as a Swiss Army Knife of course leads to even bigger government. Where the Bill of Rights tried to restrain the role of government by creating legal DMZ’s where its authority could not extend, subsequent Supreme Courts and legislatures have in some cases eroded and in other cases eradicated those DMZ’s in the name of the public good. The public good of course not being defined by the public, but by the branches of government itself.
The dangerous fascination with systems is a hallmark of inhuman government. That is because those who love systems the most, distrust human beings. Representative Democracy works on the understanding that people are flawed, and that those flaws are nevertheless who we are. Tyranny on the other hand insists that the right person can rule the mob for their own good. Modern liberalism with its progressive ideas of government, insists that the right system can bring equality and teach everyone to be better people under the all-encompassing arm of the nanny state.
To think that way, you first have to define human beings as the problem. Where the Constitution defined government as the problem, the modern day rulers view the limitations of the Constitution as an irritating remnant of paranoid landholders, with as much relevance as the Magna Carta. It may be paid lip service to, so long as it isn’t taken too seriously. Because they know that the real problem are the people. Which is how it is from the perspective of rulers. The system to them is a tool for controlling the real problem, the people.
The system of course isn’t human. Or rather it’s as human as its strongest elements and as inhuman as its weakest elements. A strong controlling figure in a system humanizes it for good or ill. That is why a system is only as good or bad as the people who hold authority within it. That reduces the system once more to the human frailties of those who hold power in the system. Corrupt officials will corrupt a system. Because the system is them writ large. But the bigger a system gets, the less human it becomes. That is because its size diminishes the ability of individuals to influence its full scope. Instead the system begins to run on scripts. Scripts define how those serving within the system will react to events. Which leads to the painful inflexibility and rigidity of bureaucracies, as men and women who have been trained to respond like machines, try to cope with a crisis.
I don’t usually promote specific events, but the Freedom Action Conference that will convene at Valley Forge, PA, August 12-14, at the Dolce Hotel, is one you should consider attending if, like Howard Beale in the movie, “Network”, you’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore.
It will feature three days of speakers who will train attendees and provide hands-on knowledge about how to end federal and UN attacks on individual freedoms, states rights, local loss of control, Second Amendment rights, and other issues that affect you and everyone else right where you live.
In 1777, George Washington’s tired and starving troops, having experienced initial defeat at the hands of the most powerful army of its times, retreated to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania to regroup, to train, and to take up the struggle to establish independence. By 1781, they were victorious at Yorktown, Virginia.
Today, Americans are under siege again, but this time from a federal government seeking to overturn the protections of the Constitution and to establish control over every aspect of our lives via legislation that affects our health, our property, our access to energy, and via international treaties that over-ride the Constitution.
The American Policy Center, a grassroots, activist organization led by Tom DeWeese, along with 22 co-sponsoring organizations, will convene a three-day conference where American liberty began its struggle, where patriots suffered and regrouped to establish the world’s beacon of liberty at Valley Force, Pennsylvania. You will be able to join other concerned Americans.
A website, freedomactionconference.com will facilitate registration. “In the same fashion as the spontaneous creation of the Tea Party movement,” says Tom DeWeese,the founder of the American Policy Center, “we are expecting a large turnout of people who want to learn about the threats to their freedoms and to learn what they can do at the grassroots level to fight them.”
The Conference will feature an extensive lineup of speakers on a wide range of topics that include the Constitution, states rights, Second Amendment rights, illegal immigration, the environmental movement, Sustainable Development, the United Nations, property rights, health and education issues, and grassroots activism.
My, how time flies when you’re having fun. Ever since the steam-rolling of the health care bill by the Congressional DeMarxists, the rapid growth of the American Conservative movement caught everyone, but especially the DeMarxists, by surprise…to those critics who sagely counseled that the Tea Party phenomenon was but a momentary glitch on the political landscape. They have been proven wrong by several orders of magnitude. The debris of Conservative Republican victories across the DeMarxist landscape is a not so mute testimony to the growing strength and influence of the burgeoning Conservative movement.
Poizner and Whitman
The California primary is on June 8. California, to put it succinctly, is a complete disaster. Arnold and that bunch of clueless commies in Sacramento have destroyed the economy of the State. I don’t see how we can avoid bankruptcy. This is such a left-leaning state, at least in the urban centers of Los Angeles and that greatest of all outdoor lunatic asylums, the San Francisco Bay Area.
Let’s face it, it’s going to be difficult for Conservatives to have a huge impact in California, though there are some Conservatives running across the state with surprising strength. The race for the Republican primary shapes up to look like a mud wrestling contest. I’ll state up front I’m not a fan of Meg Whitman, I think we’d be buying a major RINO with her. She has been spending an astonishing $500,000 a day of her own money. Looks like Meg is going to beat Steve Poizner handily. Just remember, she is no conservative!
Campbell, Fiorina, DeVore.
It’s too bad that the only candidate that has the best chance against Babes Boxer for her US Senate seat is Tom Campbell, who probably won’t win against Carly Fiorina… another mega-rich dilettante who Babes would much rather face than Campbell or Chuck DeVore, who has been running a distant third in the race.
Not the greatest lineup we’ve ever put out there, but it’s still a call to action.
Start calling all your friends and fellow patriots, to remind them that their vote is the voice of freedom.
How much more juvenile do we need to get before people actually UNDERSTAND what this law is about? Our Federal officials are making derogatory statements against the law that they have not even read. Do they know the same law exists in the Federal government? Do they understand the federal law does not specifically prohibit using race or ethnic background as a means of identifying potential illegal aliens? The Arizona law PROHIBITS the use of race or ethnic background. Law enforcement must stop someone for some other reason FIRST, and then based on that encounter will determine if there is reasonable suspicion to question a potential immigration problem.
We are asked for identification everywhere we go, so why is the question of producing your immigration card, which by federal law you are required to carry with you at all times, a perceived violation of civil rights when every other form of identification is not? Only the illegal aliens need to be concerned. Everyone else, no matter the color of their skin, is welcome!
I have to say that I was a little surprised to see such a robust discussion happening over yesterday’s article. I had originally intended to not write an article this evening, to simply let the Arizona debate rage on. However, with over 300 comments already, it would begin to get tough to navigate through. So I figured instead of simply replying to individual posts, I would instead write a sort of follow on article that addresses some of the things that were said yesterday, and allows for the conversations to continue with a somewhat fresh start (at least in the number of comments to read through). It was interesting to see how entrenched some folks are in their positions, some so much so that they were unable to see past it to other sides of the debate. That is unfortunate, as it is essential that we all begin to see different perspectives if we are going to somehow find a way to get through all the madness coming out of government these days.
One of the first things I noticed was that, despite my pointing out that this is a completely false statement, some are still sticking to the mantra that this Arizona law requires racial profiling in order to be enforced. This is simply not true. When reading the bill, and especially when factoring in the follow up bill that was passed, it becomes clear that the government was working to eliminate this from being so. But before we get into this, I noticed a discussion about whether it is OK to profile. So I want to touch on this.
I personally believe that racial profiling has become a bastion of political discourse, while those that condemn it refuse to accept the reality of life. The reality is that not only is profiling OK, in my opinion, it is essential for survival in today’s world. Profiling is what we do each and every day, hundreds of times a day. We learn from our experiences and attempt to predict future behavior based on the patterns that we see. We do it with everything. We see a car coming down the street and it slows down, the driver makes eye contact, and we cross the street, because past experience tells us that is the pattern. We see a new employee arrive to the workplace looking disheveled, and we profile them as disorganized and possibly undependable. We see a guy with his pants hanging below his boxers, and we assume that he will be disrespectful or uneducated. Are all these assumptions right? No, but they fit into a pattern of experience. That car might hit you, that employee may be excellent, and the teenager may be a Rhodes scholar.
Patterns are how we move through life without taking an extreme amount of time to identify and analyze every situation as if it has never happened before. Then we get into profiling based on “race”. Allow me to first say that I think “racial profiling” is somewhat of a myth. I think that the person who profiles does so based on circumstance and appearance, not race. A black man with his pants down and a hood up in July is completely different than a black man in a pair of slacks and a button down shirt. It isn’t the color of his skin that creates the profile, it is the way he carries himself, the way he dresses, and the way he acts. And whether we like it or not, the profile is usually accurate. If it wasn’t, it would not be a means of identifying people. That isn’t to say that racial profiling cannot happen, I just believe it is far less frequent than we are led to believe. It isn’t usually the color of skin that causes one to profile, it is usually the way one acts, the way they carry themselves, and the way that they behave. Someone of a different skin color behaving in the same way would receive the same treatment. Perhaps that is my being naive, but that is what I see.
So I have zero issue with law enforcement officers profiling as they work. It is their job to identify possible problems and head them off at the pass. Saying that they must wait until the crime is committed is ridiculous. How on earth do you expect them to protect the public if they cannot act until the crime is done? Does this mean that they are going to question some people that have done nothing wrong? You bet, but as Mathius is prone to say when it comes to spreading my money around, I would much rather err on the side of too safe than not safe enough.
It is patently false to claim that this Arizona law will require or cause more racial profiling. Because the bottom line is this: There are two types of law enforcement officers. The first is one who does his job correctly. He doesn’t harass those who aren’t acting funny or doing something wrong. This is the vast majority of officers. The second, and far more rare, is the officer that is a bigot and who assumes that all people of one race are criminals that must be stopped. This law is not going to suddenly make officers that fall into the first category begin to act like those that fall into the second! What makes you think that the law in Arizona is going to suddenly turn good cops into bigoted bullies? Put yourself in their shoes. Would this law make you all the sudden become a racial profiler if you weren’t one before the bill passed? What kind of thought process makes you think that everyone else would do so? Do you think that police officers are mindless robots that you can suddenly reprogram? Or do you think that they are all closet bigots just waiting for a law that allows them to legally harass a certain group of people? The claim that this bill will cause this is fear mongering at its best. Given what the two laws put into place, and the fact that police officers are caring moral people just like everyone else, it is ludicrous to claim that this law will somehow cause police officers to act in ways that are different from how they acted previously.
Another topic of discussion yesterday seemed to be on the idea that people should be able to come and go as they please. The “open border” concept, if you will. Allow me to be clear on where I stand on this one. I vehemently oppose the open border idea. I am all for immigration reform that makes it easier to get a work VISA or whatever is needed to enter the country legally. However, the very beginning step to immigration reform lies in first securing the border. We are a sovereign nation. As such, we have every right to close our border and admit only those we wish to admit. Given today’s hostile environment, it is a very necessary step to take. There are many who believe that the best thing they can do is come to America and cause trouble. Terrorists, criminals, etc. We cannot simply allow them instant and free access to our country. 150 years ago, no problem. Today, simply not possible.
The government wants to know how much your kids weigh. It wants to know how much salt there is in your ketchup and whether you’re having a second soda with that burger. It wants to control what you eat and drink. For your own good of course.
So much of the current Nanny Statism has been focused on the “threat” of obesity. A movement that will only get worse with its prime movers having consolidated control over national health care with ObamaCare. Now that government can claim that everyone’s individual health is no longer just an issue for them, but a public cost, they have a mandate to exercise complete control over what everyone eats.
But what’s really behind liberalism’s Obesity Obsession?
First of all, a War on Obesity justifies all sorts of micromanagement of the agricultural and food production sectors. Blaming America’s food production sector for a public health problem allows them to play the same game with every company from Kraft to Heinz to General Mills to PepsiCo that they previously have with tobacco companies. To understand why the left would want to do this, you only need to look at the USSR in the past or Venezuela in the present, both of which imposed price controls over food products and tight control over farming. Controlling food production and distribution is essential to controlling the population. This brings us right back to Hydraulic Despotism or the Water Empire. If you can seize control over a major resource that the population needs to survive, you also control the population.
Rising government regulation squashes family farms and small farming, something that agribusiness is happy to aid and abet, until it’s their turn. The left’s strategy in the West is to destroy small businesses in order to put all of capitalism’s eggs into a few corporate multinational baskets. And those multinationals are easy enough to paint as the villains and take down when the time comes. Or to just take them over with enough bailouts and grants so that they’re too government dependent to resist incorporation into a corporate socialist state.
Secondly, a staple of the left’s exercise of power is to “shame” the public for their abuse of resources. This is common in every Communist countries that run on the illusion of collective economies and constantly berate some group for taking more than “their fair share”.
The Obesity Obsession has that same agenda, to suggest that a group of people are consuming more than their fair share and depriving others of food. Since the left hasn’t managed to reduce American food production to a state of permanent food shortages yet, by “others” they mean other countries. Thinking globally and acting locally to them, means that everyone locally should eat less, so that starving children in Africa will have more. This obviously doesn’t work as anyone with a grain of sense would know, but to the left it’s a moral formula, a bit of pious economic flotsam which insists that Western greed for resources is the reason children are starving in Africa today. (Why children were starving in Africa for the entire history of the continent is a topic best not raised in their presence.)
Freedom doesn’t grow on trees. It exists by virtue of independence from the powers that might take that freedom away. Since there is no such thing as perfect freedom, and we must all live under one form of authority or another, rights exist to fence out authority from the space allotted to freedom. Rights create an artificial form of freedom through a covenant with the authorities. The more leverage the citizens have over the authorities, the more they can prevent those rights from being trampled upon.
Wealth Redistribution will never solve the black community’s problems, only worsen them. Which may be why most of the greatest African-American inventions took place before it, not after. All that spending has not helped the black community, in part because while the spending may use social welfare as a justification, it is mostly directed at building up the size of government itself. The gargantuan bureaucratic structures that form as a result only perpetuate poverty for everyone, while feeding money to a small group of insiders who are politically connected enough to benefit from it. The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disasters in which black homeowners were saddled with debt, that was then resold worldwide by bankers and brokers, is a typical example of what happens and where the money really goes.
I don’t usually promote specific events, but the Freedom Action Conference that will convene at Valley Forge, PA, August 12-14, at the Dolce Hotel, is one you should consider attending if, like Howard Beale in the movie, “Network”, you’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore.
I have to say that I was a little surprised to see such a robust discussion happening over yesterday’s article. I had originally intended to not write an article this evening, to simply let the Arizona debate rage on. However, with over 300 comments already, it would begin to get tough to navigate through. So I figured instead of simply replying to individual posts, I would instead write a sort of follow on article that addresses some of the things that were said yesterday, and allows for the conversations to continue with a somewhat fresh start (at least in the number of comments to read through). It was interesting to see how entrenched some folks are in their positions, some so much so that they were unable to see past it to other sides of the debate. That is unfortunate, as it is essential that we all begin to see different perspectives if we are going to somehow find a way to get through all the madness coming out of government these days.
