The Art of Suppression: new book

David Davis

I chanced just now upon this and it’s too good not to flag. The indefatigable Ian B, who comments often here, would I know appreciate the thesis behind this book and has also his own theories about how and why this modern death-cult of prohibition/suppression of individuals’ desires and physical/psychological needs came about.

Pickle a Leftie?

Anger Management…..Or Preserve Wildlife- Pickle A Politically Correct Twit

Guy Leven-Torres

27th September 2011

No doubt none of you will have heard the term ‘Deconstructionism’? It is a pseudo post-Marxist idea that literally strips back society by altering its structure by the use of alternative words, or speech and applying new ones, leading in time to a new society altogether, or even destroying it replaced by a Socialist one. It acts like all Socialist viruses by infiltrating the host body and changing the DNA with replicants of itself. A serious piece of structural social ‘DNA’ replacement took place over the weekend, with hardly a murmur of protest, from the feckless bovine herd that now passes for the British public.

Sean Gabb on Multiculturalism

by Sean Gabb
http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2CNEZXYD5LL4A/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

This review is from: Multiculturalism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (Paperback)

Multiculturalism is part of the legitimising ideology of our present ruling class. It serves many functions, which you will find laid out in some detail in my own book Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get it Back. One of the functions, however, goes like this:

Richard Blake debates with a reviewer of Συνωμοσίες στη Ρώμη

Here is a link to an interesting debate between Richard Blake and one of his Greek reviewers:

http://akamas.wordpress.com/2011/07/23/richard-blake-%cf%83%cf%85%ce%bd%cf%89%ce%bc%ce%bf%cf%83%ce%af%ce%b5%cf%82-%cf%83%cf%84%ce%b7-%cf%81%cf%8e%ce%bc%ce%b7-%ce%b5%ce%ba%ce%b4%cf%8c%cf%83%ce%b5%ce%b9%cf%82-%cf%83%ce%b5%ce%bb%ce%af%ce%bd/#comment-2467

Emancipate Yourselves from Mental Slavery

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=8375

A reader of one of my previous columns (“Another Stupid Remark from Mitt — But Who’s Counting,” C4SS Sept. 10, 2011 ) published in a local newspaper complained that the Center for a Stateless Society is “a far-left organization that promotes worker radicalism and anarchy.” But characterizing a position as “far-left” or “promoting worker radicalism and anarchy” isn’t the same as answering it on grounds of logic and evidence.

Review of Deep Citizenship

by Sean Gabb
http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3LN47QMZENE41/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

1.0 out of 5 stars Softening us up for the NuLab tyranny,25 Sep 2011

This review is from: Deep Citizenship (Hardcover)

Every so often, I gather up a mass of the review copies I have been sent of new books and take them to the nearest charity shop. The book that I am briefly reviewing here has lain unopened on a shelf for about five years. Looking through it, I realise I should have made an effort with it, as it is deserving of some notice. I cannot be bothered to give it a full scale review. But here are my brief thoughts on it.

The death of the Euro

David Davis

I can’t find it in my heart to crow about this forthcoming event. Whether it occurs in an orderly way in early November, or later and bringing much worse trouble, it is sad. Sad because neo-Nazis were still allowed to get their hands on the levers of political power and patronage in Europe, and their eager supporters and brown-nosers here too, while our backs were turned. Why nobody handed Monnet, Schumann and Spinelli to Stalin’s resettlement-gooks in 1845, escapes me.

At least the fallout that reaches Britain (and this is a British blog, the main writers are English, and some of us libertarians think nationalism is an important and useful force) will be limited only to several hundreds of billions…

…hundreds of billions of Euros? of Dollars? of Sterling? Kilograms of gold? What difference does it make? It’s rounding errors by that time. When you hear phrases like a “2.6-trillion-Euro bailout fund to ringfence Greece, Ireland and Portugal” so as “not to have to bail out Spain and Italy which are too big to bail out”, you wonder what sort of drunken auction is going on where we can’t see it, and what the buggers are smoking.

And when you hear that “the Footsie has jumped 10 points upon the announcement of the bailout fund, and regained the psychologically important 5,000 level”, you wonder how shallow, uncurious and uncritical your Banks’ analysts actually are, and may always have been.

Look, we did all say that when people said, in all seriousness, things like “THE EURO IS THE ROOF OF THE HOUSE OF EUROPE: THE TASK NOW IS TO BUILD THE FOUNDATIONS” … then either nobody has thought this Reich through as to how to do it without creating international Terror-Police (I think some guys had thought of that but pretended to keep schtumm), or – worse – HAD thought it through, and knew what the outcome would be…but thought the terror-police would be in place, in time.

We are living in “interesting times”. I’m not sure I’m pleased about this at all.

Mr Blake Does It Again!

Συνωμοσίες στη Ρώμη
Κύριος Συγγραφέας: Blake, Richard
Εκδότης: Σελήνη
Ημερομηνία Έκδοσης: 12/2010
Σελίδες: 405
ISBN: 9789608455801 

Σύντομη περιγραφή Περισσότερες πληροφορίες

Το πρώτο μέρος μιας τριλογίας ιστορικών μυθιστορημάτων που διαδραματίζεται στην Βυζαντινή Ευρώπη του 7ου μ.Χ αιώνα, με πρωταγωνιστή το φιλόδοξο νεαρό Έλρικ. Εξορισμένος στην Ρώμη, άθελα του θα βρεθεί αναμεμειγμένος στη σύγκρουση μεταξύ Εκκλησίας, αριστοκρατίας και του αυτοκράτορα της Κωνσταντινούπολης.

The guilty men

by Richard North

There are very few occasions when I disagree with Dellers, but his eulogy of Peter Oborne and Frances Weaver and their “Guilty Men” pamphlet is one such occasion. We then have this ghastly pair in The Spectator grandly declaring:

Very rarely in political history has any faction or movement enjoyed such a complete and crushing victory as the Conservative Eurosceptics. The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age — they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse.

This is typical “above the line” crap, but it is more than that … it is practically a blood libel. The victory, such as it is, goes to Jimmy Goldsmith and his Referendum Party, and the thousands of candidates and workers who boxed first Hague and then Blair into a corner, getting a commitment to a referendum before the UK could join the euro.

As always, while the Tories sat around their hands in their pockets, the mavericks made the running. The Tories simply went along for the ride. And if you want “guilty men” look to the likes of The Scotsman on 5 October 2004. Then, James Kirkup and Fraser Nelson were writing about Michael Howard and his “best efforts to bury the Tories’ divisive obsession with all things European”.

John Redwood, they said, appeared determined to make opposition to the European Union the party’s first priority. “Above all, we’re going to win by telling people the truth about Brussels and the EU – no to the European constitution, no to giving up the pound”, he was saying.

Cut then to David Cameron, who was at the time about to oversee the writing of the Tory manifesto. He delivered a direct rebuke to the former Welsh secretary. “We don’t win by picking one single issue, whether it’s Europe or anything else, and talking about it incessantly”, said The Boy, described then as “a rising star, tipped by some as a future Tory leader”.

Said Cameron back then in 2004, “If you don’t sound balanced, you won’t seem balanced.” Thus did he say that the Tories had to focus on “schools, hospitals, crime – the things people talk about in the pubs and clubs. We mustn’t go off into wild forays into different areas”.

From there we saw the Tory dictum, “don’t mention Europe”. All the good little Tories, Redwood included, rolled over and obeyed. The EU disappeared from the agenda. They are the guilty men, the men who said nothing while others fought the battle. At least the europhiles had the courage of their convictions. The Tory eurosceptics had neither courage nor convictions.

Now it has become fashionable to be “eurosceptic” and they are all creeping out of the woodwork, with the court jester Oborne singing their praises. So no, this is not a Tory eurosceptic victory – but like Tories everywhere, they’d steal the clothes off your back if it gave them a headline. They are stealing a “victory” won by others.

The autumn’s new libertarian conference

John Say

There’s a new libertarian conference this autumn, hosted by the Liberty League. On Saturday 22 October, at the National Liberal Club in London, the Liberty League has put together a day of speakers and a dinner. For £65, you get the whole thing.

To book visit this webpage.

I hear that it is shortly going to run out of places.

Man bailed over Bramhall ‘intruder’ stab death

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-14968236
by Mark Roussell

I imagine the police would claim that the death of a man is prima facie evidence of a crime having been committed, i.e. they would perceive it as a reasonable cause to assume that murder had occurred. However, whether or not this is a genuinely reasonable or logical assumption surely depends on the circumstances as they appeared to the police at the time. It’s entirely possible the police are aware of critical circumstances that have not been reported that would make an assumption of murder appropriate. Or then again they may just be over-interpreting the law, going that extra politically correct mile, and arresting obviously innocent people who have clearly used “reasonable”, but
lethal, self defence. I wonder which it is.

In my view any defensive action on one’s own property must automatically be assumed to be “reasonable”, even if it results in the death of an intruder. There is no other rational, effective, realistic or ethical interpretation.

The fact that the arrested man has been released on bail seems to suggest that he is not considered by the police to be a risk to others, which in turns seem to me to suggest that he probably should not have been arrested at all. Arresting the probably traumatised victim of a crime is simply not the behaviour we should expect from our police.

As an aside, I’d like to say to anyone who supports the idea of ‘tough policing’ from the likes of Bill Bratton or similar that these supercops seem most unliikely from what I’ve heard to avoid problems such as these, where homeowners are arrested for defending themselves and their property. Indeed, I suspect they would be all the more eager to arrest the homeowners in situations like this as potential criminals! So called tough, no compromises, policing tends to imply even less discrection, even less common sense, even less reasonableness than is exhibited at present. Sure, they might be less politically corrct but they will
replace this with an even greater disinterest in genuine reasonableness(*). They are probably the last people that libertarians should support.

(*) I am willing to believe otherwise if any of these supercops are willing to go on the public record to make it clear that they will always presume in favour of the homeowner in cases like this.

Graphic Designer Wanted

by Kevin Carson

My friend Gary Chartier of LaSierra University has a manuscript anthology of free market anti-capitalist writing in development. Unfortunately the designer working on it at Autonomedia decided to drop out because the book was “an affront to anarchism” and he couldn’t support it. I’ve included everyone in the writing & editing industry who looks like they deal with this kind of stuff. Can anyone recommend someone who’s skilled at cover design, formatting text, etc., who would be a good fit for this?

You can reach Gary at gary.chartier@gmail.com

Spitting in public: a re-appraisal

Michael Winning

The boss down south upbraids and spanks me for not checking my spellcheck thing, so I’ll try. That means, to do better in furture, However today I had occasion to go to Slaidburn to deliver a pedigree boar on loan to a mate. In the main street I passed a youth and his friend, one of whom spat, for no observable reason, with a focussed deliberation which made me think he was doing a sort of ritual act. They were walking along past the “Hark-to-Bounty”, he turned his head right, spat towards the wall, turned it left to “centre” and went on. There were one or two other souls in the rod including women. That made me think too, I’ve never seen a woman spitting in public, have you?

All life I’ve also noticed guys doing it in the gents at the urinal things, which is also public in a way.

The thought comes up that you wonder what this process is for. If it’s something about physiology, why is it not documented and why don’t British primary schools have anything in their lesson plans about it? They cover safe sex for 11-year-olds and how to put a condom on your partner, drugs (OK), drink (not), Henry the Eighth’s wives and the Egyptians and William the Conqueror and the holocaust and other disgusting things like that so why not this and what to do about how to watch where you put your feet? The irony is I have to carry a plastic bag to get up my dog’s shit off the pavement, even when taking a porker to a mate, so what should guys do about their buccal excretions, which are also bodily derived?

I also own a little bronze notice plaque from the London and North Western Railway from about 1880. It says: “Do not spit in the carriages. It is not only offensive to other passengers but is stated by the Medical Profession to be a source of serious disease”.

The advice I want from other libertarians is what they think ought to be done about something you could say is victimless but offensive to sensitive men like me and ours. And is arguably a physical act, not at all like syaing “all immigrants ought to be shot now in public, flogged afterwards and then sent home”, assuming that was really meant. Which is merely a thought expressed. We all agree, that everyone should be free to express thoughts or I thought we did anyway.

The boss says that down his way he sees shcoolboys cycling to school who do the same thing, often not even holding the handlebars which incenses him even more. He thinks it’s the “football culture” because he says that people tell him that footballers spit on the pitch (Ugh! And you might be tackeld and fall in it! Ugh! YUK!)

Is there some sort of cultural degradation going on?

Totalitarian Humanism and Mass Immigration

by Keith Preston
http://attackthesystem.com/?p=10203

This is the full text of my speech at the National Policy Institute Conference on September 10, 2011 in Washington, D.C.

The True “Spread the Wealth Philosophy”

By David D’Amato
http://c4ss.org/?p=8301

In a feature on issues in the 2012 campaign for CBS News, Brian Montopoli asks, “Who’s to blame for the wealth divide?” Citing the fact that, according to a Harvard/Duke study last year, “the top 20 percent controlled about 84 percent of the wealth,” Montopoli contends that political “decisions tend to follow the desires of the affluent.”

The Limits of Intolerance

by Guy Leven Torres
16^th September 2011

Our civilisation is slowly but surely collapsing or rather metamorphosing into something else. Let me repeat again my earlier classifications of types of society-

Power to the people

by Richard North
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/09/power-to-people.html

The Mail on Sunday is all over the shop with this story. On the one hand, it is telling us that “a powerful cross-party coalition of MPs plans to put unprecedented pressure on the Government to pull back from Europe – as support grows at Westminster for Britain to leave the EU altogether”.

Non Transit Turpia Mundi

by Sean Gabb

I’ve just turned on the wireless, to hear that the euro may be collapsing. I haven’t noticed much shift in the exchange rate with sterling – then again, the pound is probably collapsing as well. No benefit for Mr Blake, then, on his next trip overseas to launch a novel translation.

The Legal Rackets Behind the Drug War

by David D’Amato
http://c4ss.org/?p=8336

Last month, the National Drug Intelligence Center at the U.S. Department of Justice released its “National Drug Threat Assessment” for this year. No doubt hoping no one will notice or care, the report itself observes that “[t]he abuse of several major illicit drugs, including heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine, appears to be increasing, especially among the young.”

Nevertheless, the report, like the statistical insanity emanating from the telescreens in Orwell’s 1984, emphatically insists on the overall success of the so-called “War on Drugs.”

It’s easy, maybe even intuitive, to conflate opposing drug use and supporting the War on Drugs. The two positions, at first blush, seem to go hand in hand, forming a logical pair framed by common sense, and condemning something that seemingly no reasonable person would celebrate. After all, there’s no disputing the harmful effects of so many of the drugs that are today illegal, or the deleterious social consequences of the drug trade itself.

The inception and intensification of the War on Drugs have coincided with a full-fledged militarization of municipal police forces, arming them with high tech weaponry and equipment, and witnessing unprecedented levels of police impunity. Documenting the meteoric rise of “no-knock” or “quick-knock” raids, criminal justice scholar Peter B. Kraska argues that SWAT teams and “the military special operations model” are largely no longer employed in “forced reaction situations.”

“[P]olice departments,” his work shows, “are choosing to use an extremely and highly dangerous tactic, not for terrorists or hostage takers but for small-time drug possessors and dealers.” These escalations, transforming America into an Orwellian police state, represent contracts for the implements of repression and murder totaling in the millions.

And the ranks of the imprisoned in America, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, reflect the determination that characterizes the Drug War. So when the United States’ Gestapo isn’t killing citizens outright, they’re making quite sure that America preserves the oft-cited record of housing one quarter of the globe’s prisoners (even while it has only about one twentieth of its total population).

For the companies that, for example, operate the prisons and transport the prisoners, the Drug War is a cash cow that they never want to stop milking — a godsend in the form of communities devastated by the victimless crimes of prohibition. These huge companies, titans in the world of Washington lobbying like Corrections Corporation of America, do everything in their power — spend as much as they can — to protect their bottom lines from the mere possibility that the federal government might amend the Drug War in any significant way.

The Drug War’s complete and categorical lack of success, then, can be overlooked or ignored because they make sense (or, more accurately, dollars and cents) for America’s corporate-political elite; its failures have very successfully been recast, in Minitrue’s specious Newspeak, as a series of decisive steps toward the chimera of drug-free society.

It’s easy to see, though, that a drug-free United States would ruin the game for the ruling class, for whom public policy is actually, quite serviley formulated. Incidentally, it would also ruin the artificially high prices that the immense drug cartels are today able to charge, the result of a supply constricted by the very fact that drugs are a “black market” commodity, conspicuously outside of legitimate commerce.

Still further, the Drug War provides a convenient, useful justification for furtive military interventions into the domestic affairs of other countries. And if anything motivates the interests mobilized at the capital, it’s imperialism, and anything that makes it easier to account for as a practical matter.

We’ve likely all heard the phrase “there are only so many seats at the table.” Well, for the powerful people at the table, at the nexus where the state’s coercive power meets corporate deep pockets, the class instrument of the War on Drugs is indispensable. Literally billions of dollars are at stake, a fact that we shouldn’t ignore next time we hear the moralistic, anti-drug language that characterizes the overt assault on private life and civil liberties that passes for good public policy.

What’s the big deal about global warming anyway? Why is it bad to have longer growing seasons on more land?

Michael Winning

I just send this. David Friedman needs more exposure on this thing. God knows we could do with a bit more global warimg up here where I live.