I’ve been warned. I’ve been reminded. I’ve been catechized about the unwisdom of giving in to fury. It’s not good for me. If it’s good for you, know that I envy you, because there’s a lot to be angry about these days.

     The foofaurauw over the National Football League’s decision to “support the players” in their “protests” against the national anthem and flag of the United States rather than to enforce the league’s rules about proper conduct during the anthem has caused a significant number of previously faithful football fans to tune out. I expect that number to grow still further, especially in light of the mealy-mouthed statements from head coaches, marquee players, and Commissioner Roger Goodell. It will ultimately, if not soon enough for any decent American’s tastes, crash the league financially.

     Yet the disease is spreading:

     Gregg Popovich is the head coach of the San Antonio Spurs basketball team. That team is composed largely of American Negroes, like every other National Basketball Association team and a great many college teams, too. There isn’t one NBA player whose salary is less than the high six figures. There isn’t one who couldn’t augment his income by public appearances and the sale of autographed items, as many do. But supposedly they and theirs are “oppressed” by having to earn their incomes on a basketball court. Now their head coach tells us that we don’t know what it means to be born white.

     As a public service to Popovich, and to anyone else who might be uncertain about what it means to be white – especially, what it means to be a white American – I shall explain.

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     To be born white in the U.S.A. is to inherit a six-digit share of a $20 trillion debt you had no part in borrowing or spending. Your parents, should you be lucky enough to have any, might look upon you as a blessing, but they must also accept the immense burdens and hazards that will accompany your upbringing and maturation: on average, about $1 million for you and each of your siblings until age twenty-one.

     From the instant of your birth, you’re a number in a system designed to tax and control you. Government busybodies will use you as an excuse to intrude into your family’s most intimate operations. Neighborhood busybodies supposedly determined to “keep you safe” will help them. “Educators” with little interest in actual education will propagandize you about a wide variety of “issues.” This will be in support of your share of white guilt: your responsibility for crimes committed by others long dead and not even remotely related to you. Yet those “educators” will deny you answers to many of your questions. You’ll have to look elsewhere for honest information about history and economics. That condition will last all the way through college, should you be inclined toward a “higher” education. Dare to mention in class that before the Civil War there were both white and black slaveholders and white and black slaves, or that the institution of slavery is still rampant among nonwhites in Africa and the Middle East, and you’ll be mobbed or worse.

     Should you reach your maturity determined to be a decent and productive citizen, you’ll be penalized for the color of your skin. White people aren’t entitled to anything, you see; only blacks are entitled. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission isn’t concerned with whether you can get work, only with whether your black competitor can. In any head to head contest with a black employment applicant, your qualifications will weigh less heavily in your favor than the color of his skin will weigh in his. A company determined to hire you rather than him will need to watch its “employment statistics” closely, lest it give the EEOC an excuse to impose “supervision” on it.

     But you’re white, which means no excuses for anything. You’ll find work, and you’ll labor diligently at it. And on paycheck day, the list of deductions from your supposed salary will remind you of just what the State thinks of you: a resource to be mulcted, in large measure for the support of nonwhite idlers and their bastards. Seven out of every ten black babies born today are illegitimate – born out of wedlock. Child support from the father? Not unless the father is an NBA power forward. But to note that fact in public would put you at extreme hazard.

     Still, you’ll soldier on. You’re white; it’s expected of you. As the bumper stickers say, millions on welfare depend on you, so you can’t be allowed to slack off. It would be a crime against society and a betrayal of your “white privilege:” the privilege of being blamed for others’ sins while simultaneously having to pay for them.

     Where will you live? In a city, where the young blacks play the “knockout game” and usually get away with it? In a suburb, where mobs of black teens terrorize schools, parks, and shopping malls? Where the “authorities” will harangue you mercilessly about permits, property taxes, the height of your fence, and your unworthiness to have a handgun? Or in the country, where there’s little work even for a white farmhand, the alternative labor supply – illegal aliens from south of the border – being so copious and so cheap? Decisions, decisions…

     You’ll manage. If there’s anything inherently noble about the white American, it’s that he manages. He keeps trying, no matter how heavy the burdens or how bleak the outlook. But the insults, both overt and covert, will keep coming lifelong. They’re particularly dense in mass entertainments, which appear consciously designed to disparage every last one of the values you hold. Hey, they have to offend someone — giving offense is the style in comedy today, don’t y’know – and you’re the safest candidate. Especially if you’re a white male Christian…or, may God protect you, a Catholic.

     Perhaps you’ll contrive to retire, somehow. That’s becoming quite a feat. At any rate, fewer of us manage it with each passing year. But the insults won’t stop even there. For daring to vote for conservative candidates who at least talk a good game, you’ll be denounced as a racist. To go to a rally for such a candidate, much less to volunteer to work for one, is an act of unusual courage. Well organized groups will target you, expose your most private information, possibly trash your house or attack your loved ones. No, you still can’t have a handgun. Handguns are for criminals only; it’s the law.

     And of course, when you quit this vale of tears, whatever you’ve managed to scrape together for your inheritors will be truncated by the State. (Our motto: “The needs of the State come first.”) However, your share of the white American’s burden will be passed to them with interest.

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     That’s the barest skeleton of your “white privilege.” Think of it as a Christmas tree hung with many “ornaments,” some heavier than others. Every day still more are hung on it…and you. The tree is bowing under the weight. There’s no way to know when it will snap.

     Yes, I’m angry. A lot of whites are. Should this disrespect for us and for the symbols of the country we built – the only things black slaves built were tar paper shacks and the fortunes of a few plantation owners! – spread to baseball or hockey, we might decide to crash the entire overpaid institution of professional sports; the NFL and NBA are already on notice. That might be only the opening stages of a thoroughgoing “readjustment” of national attitudes and institutions.

     Go ahead and call me a racist. Go ahead! We both know you want to! See how much I care?

     Is what follows a realistic summary of a major part of the strategy of our political elite, or merely a conspiratorialist’s fantasy?

     “The women’s rights movement had three goals. First, it got women into the workplace where their labor could be taxed….So, with more women entering the workforce the supply of labor increases and wages are depressed….

     “Now couples need to have two careers to support a typical modern lifestyle. We can’t tax the labor in a home-cooked meal. We can tax the labor in takeout food, or the higher cost of a microwave dinner. The economic potential of both halves of the adult population now largely flows into the government where it can serve noble ends instead of petty private interests….

     “The second reason is to get children out of the potentially antisocial environment of the home and into educational settings where we can be sure they’ll get the right values and learn the right lessons to be happy and productive members of society. Working mothers need to send their children to daycare and after-school care where we can be sure they get exposed to the right lessons, or at least not to bad ideas….

     “They are going to assign homework to their students: enough homework to guarantee that even elementary school students are spending all their spare time doing homework. Their poor parents, eager to see that Junior stays up with the rest of the class, will be spending all their time helping their kids get incrementally more proficient on the tests we have designed. They’ll be too busy doing homework to pick up on any antisocial messages at home….

     “Children will be too busy to learn independence at home, too busy to do chores, to learn how to take care of themselves, to be responsible for their own cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Their parents will have to cater to their little darlings’ every need, and their little darlings will be utterly dependent on their parents. When the kids grow up, they will be used to having someone else take care of them. They will shift that spirit of dependence from their parents to their university professors, and ultimately to their government. The next generation will be psychologically prepared to accept a government that would be intrusive even by today’s relaxed standards – a government that will tell them exactly how to behave and what to think. Not a Big Brother government, but a Mommy-State….

     “Eventually, we may even outlaw homeschooling as antisocial, like our more progressive cousins in Germany already do. Everyone must known their place in society and work together for social good, not private profit….

     “The Earth can’t accommodate many more people at a reasonable standard of living. We’re running out of resources. We have to manage and control our population. That’s the real motive behind the women’s movement. Once a women’s studies program convinces a gal she’s a victim of patriarchal oppression, how likely is it she’s going to overcome her indoctrination to be able to bond long enough with a guy to have a big family? If she does get careless with a guy, she’ll probably just have an abortion….

     “All those Career-Oriented Gals are too busy seeking social approval and status at the office to be out starting families and raising kids. They’re encouraged to have fun, be free spirits., and experiment with any man who catches their fancy….And by the time all those COGs are in their thirties and ready to try to settle down and have kids, they’re past their prime. Their fertility peaks in their twenties. It’s all downhill from there….

     “In another generation, we’ll have implemented our own version of China’s One-Child-Per-Couple policy without the nasty forced abortions and other hard repressive policies which people hate. What’s more, there’ll be fewer couples because so many young people will just be hedonistically screwing each other instead of settling down and making families. Makes me wish I were young again, like you, to take full advantage of it. The net effect is we’ll enter the great contraction and begin shrinking our population to more controllable levels….

     “It’s profoundly ironic. A strong, independent woman is now one who meekly obeys the media’s and society’s clamor to be a career girl and sleep around with whatever stud catches her fancy or with other girls for that matter. A woman with the courage to defy that social pressure and devote herself from a young age to building a home and raising a family is an aberration, a weirdo, a traitor to her sex. There aren’t many women with the balls to stand up against that kind of social pressure. It’s not in their nature.”

     The above excerpt from Hans G. Schantz’s The Hidden Truth struck me so powerfully that I feel a moral obligation to pass it along. Ponder it, please.

     If you’re unfamiliar with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, it’s time to get acquainted with it:

     Linguistic relativity, sometimes called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis or Whorfianism, is a hypothesis in linguistics and cognitive science that holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers’ world view or cognition. The strong version claims that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. The weak version claims that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and decisions.

     The hypothesis evolved from work by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. The hypothesis has influenced disciplines beyond linguistics, including philosophy, neurobiology, anthropology, psychology and sociology. The hypothesis’ origin, definition and applicability have been controversial since first outlined. It has come in and out of favor and remains contested as research continues across these domains.

     An early allusion to this thesis, albeit not by any of the above names, appears in 1984:

     “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

     At this time, one of the Left’s major tactics for attaining its sociopolitical goals is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:

     A professional education consultant and teacher trainer argued at the White Privilege Conference (WPC) in Philadelphia that great teachers must also be liberal activists, and described in detail her goal for destroying the “white supremacist” nature of modern education.

     Heather Hackman operates Hackman Consulting Group and was formerly a professor of multicultural education at Minnesota’s St. Cloud State University, where she taught future teachers. On Friday, Hackman was given a platform at WPC to deliver a workshop with the lengthy title “No Freedom Unless We Call Out the Wizard Behind The Curtain: Critically Addressing the Corrosive Effects of Whiteness in Teacher Education and Professional Development.” The long title masked a simple thesis on Hackman’s part: Modern education is hopelessly tainted by white supremacy and the “white imperial gaze,” and the solution is to train prospective teachers in college to be activists as well as pedagogues.

     In fact, Hackman argued teachers shouldn’t even bother teaching if they aren’t committed to promoting social justice in school.

     Isn’t the connection clear? By associating the behaviors required to learn what is being taught with ugly concepts – “white supremacism,” “the white imperial gaze,” and so forth – Miss Hackman hopes to render actual examination of minorities’ relative lack of scholastic accomplishment impossible. A bit like Orwell’s Newspeak, in which serious discussion of the rights Thomas Jefferson enumerated in the Declaration of Independence is impossible because it’s been labeled crimethink.

     Sapir-Whorf linguistic tactics are important for another reason as well: if the perversion of language is directed toward rendering particular concepts immoral, it sanctifies the use of violence to suppress those who would dare to speak of them, much less act on them. And as we have seen in recent years, leftists are growing ever more ready to use violence to prevent the discussion of concepts unfriendly to their aims.

     There is, however, a fly in the ointment: Reality is not shaped by the terms we use to describe or discuss it. No matter what anyone says about it, it remains what it is. Only attitudes can be molded linguistically – and only the attitudes of the stupid, ignorant, or easily led.

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     The prevailing attitude on the Left, regardless of whether we speak of the stratgists, the activists, or the unthinking sheep, is one of moral superiority toward the rest of us. Thomas Sowell has called this “an assumption of differential rectitude.” Its circularity should immediately be apparent: “We are morally superior because we are left-liberals; we are left-liberals because we are morally superior.” They have no other argument for their self-flattering stance.

     That stance is impossible to separate from Leftist linguistic practices. It was first necessary to define certain attitudes as inherently virtuous, entirely apart from their conformance or nonconformance with reality. That made it possible to condemn anyone who holds such attitudes. That automatically ennobles those who condemn and work against them.

     In a tangentially related essay, Andrew Klavan makes an interesting observation:

     In a veiled reference to Trump at a recent lunch on Capitol Hill, President Obama declared he was “dismayed” at the “vulgar and divisive rhetoric” being heard on the campaign trail. “In America, there is no law that says we have to be nice to each other, or courteous, or treat each other with respect,” the president said. “But there are norms. There are customs.”

     Are there? When I hear this sort of thing from Obama and his fellow leftists, what I wonder is: Have they not listened to themselves for the past 50 years? Do they really have no idea how vicious, how low, how cruel, and how dishonest their attacks on the Right have been?

     No, they haven’t; and, no, they don’t. The Democrat-monopolized media, which explodes with rage at any minor unmannerliness on the right, falls so silent at the Left’s almost ceaseless acrimony that leftists are never forced to confront what despicable little Trumps they often are. [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     The emphasized evaluation is correct 95% of the time or more. It takes more self-awareness than most left-liberals can muster to reflect on the contradiction between their behavior and their “assumption of differential rectitude.” Moreover, were they compelled to confront the facts – i.e., that their practice is the opposite of what they preach – they would thrust it all away as dangerous, not to be entertained lest it taint the purity of their Cause.

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     I’m moved to recount an episode from 2005, after the Christmas Tsunami devastated many Pacific populations:

     Today, during an afternoon conference that wrapped up my project of the last 18 months, one of my Euro colleagues tossed this little smart-comment out to no one in particular:
     “See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, there’s a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier…
     After which he and many of my Euro colleagues laughed out loud, and then they looked at me. I wasn’t laughing, and neither was my Hindi friend sitting next to me, who has lost family in the disaster.
     I’m afraid I was “unprofessional”, I let it loose -“Hmmm, let’s see, what would be the ideal ship to send to a disaster? Now what kind of ship would we want? Something with its own inexhaustible power supply? Something that can produce 900,000 gallons of fresh water a day from sea water?”
     “Something with its own airfield? So that after producing the fresh water, it could help distribute it? Something with 4 hospitals and lots of open space for emergency supplies? Something with a global communications facility to make the coordination of disaster relief in the region easier? Well ‘Franz’, we peasants in America call that kind of ship an ‘Aircraft Carrier’.”
     “We have 12 of them. How many do you have? Oh that’s right, NONE. Lucky for you and the rest of the world, we are the kind of people who share. Even with people we don’t like.”
     “In fact, if memory serves, once upon a time we peasants spent a ton of money and lives rescuing people who we had once tried to kill and who tried to kill us. Do you know who those people were? That’s right Franz, Europeans.”
     “There is a French Aircraft carrier? Where is it? Oh.. Right where it belongs! In France of course! Oh, why should the French Navy dirty their uniforms helping people on the other side of the globe. How Simplesse… The day an American has to move a European out of the way to help in some part of the world it will be a great day in the world, you sniggering little snob…”
     The room fell silent. My Hindi friend then said quietly to the Euros:
     “Can you let your hatred of George Bush end for just one minute? There are people dying! And what are your countries doing? Amazon.com has helped more than France has. You all have a role to play in the world, why can’t you see that? Thank God for the US Navy, they don’t have to come and help, but they are. They helped you once and you should all thank God they did. They didn’t have to, and no one but them would have done so. I’m ashamed of you all…”
     He left the room, shaking and in tears. The frustration of being on the other side of the globe, unable to do anything to assist and faced with people who could not set aside their asininity long enough to reach out and help was too much for him to bear. I just shook my head and left. The Euros stood speechless. Later in the break room, one of the laughing Euros caught me and extended his hand in an apology. I asked him where he was from, he said “a town outside of Berlin”. He is a young man, in his early 20’s. I asked him if he knew of a man named Gail Halverson. He said no. I said “that’s a shame” and walked away to find my Hindi friend.

     The first-person narrator of the above encounter “reared up on his hind legs” and poured unassailable facts upon those who had demeaned President Bush and the American response to the tsunami. The reaction from the left-leaning Europeans was virtually nonexistent. They couldn’t deal with the reality. They didn’t dare to confront the facts laid out so plainly because the consequences would be fatal to their “assumption of differential rectitude.” So they kept silent, with one honorable exception, and waited for the man who had threatened their worldview to go away.

     When Sapir and Whorf desert him, the typical left-liberal is entirely without weapons or arms. He must stand naked before reality – and reality, as history declaims most eloquently, has not been a friend to the Left.

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     The Klavan essay is significant not merely for its stark delineation of Leftist rhetorical hypocrisy, but for the appropriate sort of response – the sort offered to his European colleagues by the narrator of the episode above:

     …the Left has felt blithely justified in sneering at opposing opinions it deems racist, sexist, or otherwise hateful. But it just doesn’t work. The eyes see what they see; the heart knows what it knows. Bottle up the human experience in silence, and it will ultimately break forth in rage. Thus, the result of these last 50 years of ceaseless left-wing incivility has been not a rainbow-striped paradise of social justice, but the utter collapse of our civic dialogue as the Right now responds with vulgar cruelty of its own. “Those to whom evil is done,” as the poet Auden wrote, “do evil in return.”

     You might say to me, as my mother used to say, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” But I say to you, as I used to say to my mother, “They started it.”

     Klavan’s mother’s statement has a particle of justice…but to give true and vocal coloration to the combined viciousness and sanctimony of the Left is not unjust. It’s merely something we’ve found unpleasant and so have tried to avoid…up to now. Now, however, is when the disciples of Sapir and Whorf – whether they’re consciously or unconsciously so – must get what’s coming to them.

     [I’ve received numerous requests to repost this old chestnut, which first appeared at the Palace Of Reason on June 29, 2003 — FWP]

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     Cause People can be very difficult. Trying. Often hazardous to your health. But they’re getting a progressively larger fraction of the media’s attention, so it’s well to be up on their characteristics and migration patterns.

     If you’re blessedly unacquainted with this subspecies of homo sapiens terrestrialis, and would like to explore, uh, what you’ve been missing, here’s the official Palace Of Reason Cause People Anthropological Summary And Spotter’s Field Guide. Have fun.

     1. Habitat

     Cause People are mostly found along the coasts, in the large population centers. They wear uniform-like clothing, talk in typeset phrases, and evaluate everything according to how it relates to their favored Cause. Certain institutions cater exclusively to Cause People, though the nature of those institutions has changed over time. Once it was coffee shops; today it appears to be specialty bookstores. If you locate one of these watering holes, you can reap a large number of sightings in a very short time.

     2. General Characteristics And Life Cycle

     At the center of the adult Cause Person’s biocycle is, of course, the Cause. The Cause need not be any particular idea or belief. All that matters is that it have first priority in the mind of the Cause Person, to the near-total exclusion of all other considerations.

     Political affiliation provides several Causes. Special interests and fixations on various kinds of perceived threats provide many others. The typical Cause Person selects from a wide assortment of Causes early in his adulthood, attaches himself to it, and afterward nurses from it as the source of all right and justice.

     After forming the attachment, the Cause Person acquires his characteristic mode of expression. Affiliation with a Cause is normally expressed with a limited vocabulary. Therefore, the elements of that vocabulary will appear in the Cause Person’s speech with very high frequency. Take note! Continual repetition of a small group of words or phrases can be a tip-off that you’ve spotted a variety of Cause Person of which you weren’t previously aware. It’s well to carry a pocket notebook for such occasions as these.

     3. Mating Patterns

     Cause People tend to be endogamous. There have been cases of out-breeding, but these are rare. Particularly attractive female Cause People can engender great consternation among males not of their sect, for which reason the temptation to “fraternize” must be stoutly resisted.

     Though endogamous, Cause People do not “breed true.” Possibly because of the difficulty of inculcating their specialized vocabulary in the young, their offspring usually come to regard Mom and Dad as nuts. However, this opinion is normally repressed until Junior has his own car.

     4. Tips For The Field Observer.

     If you decide to “go for the gold” — investigate a gathering of Cause People at close range — you must adopt the appropriate camouflage. As you might expect, this will include your dress, your accessories, and your verbal behavior. Some quick tips:

• Do not approach “world peace” Cause People while carrying a badge or a gun, or wearing a Nuke The Moon T-shirt.
• Do not approach “drug legalization” Cause People in a suit, or while carrying a briefcase or a martini.
• Do not approach “pro abortion” Cause People while wearing a crucifix.
• Do not approach “slavery reparations” Cause People while wearing white skin.
• Do not approach “Bush Is Hitler” or “free Palestine” Cause People at all.

     Your verbal behavior, including body language, must strive to match that of the Cause People around you. This is critical. Cause People in large numbers can be dangerous, to your sanity if nothing else. Upon detecting an outsider in their midst, they converge on him — first retracting their most attractive females to a protected zone — and strive to attach him to their Cause. Their frequency of success varies, but there have been some disturbing reports. Some years ago, an investigator from Nebraska, a typical non-Cause middle American, attended a party among “social justice” Cause People in Southern California’s famous Malibu preserve. He gave himself away rather early in the affair — his blond crew-cut might have done it — and was promptly swarmed under by tract-bearing specimens repeating “peace,” “oppression,” “genocide,” “historical crimes” and “equality” at a rate that swamped the installed monitors. He was recently found in a Hare Krishna compound, making beaded curtains for sale at Los Angeles International Airport.

     5. Excursion And Reattachment.

     The attachment to a Cause, though long-lasting, is not certain to be permanent. A Cause Person can detach from his Cause under the right pressures. The nature of those pressures depends on the Cause Person’s particular situation. Sexual starvation and economic privation are common reasons for detachment.

     However, the yearning for a Cause can reassert itself after an interval of detachment. Therefore, marriage between Cause People and non-Cause people can provide interesting surprises to the latter party. The apostate Cause Person seldom returns to his earlier Cause; that would be too much like admitting to fallibility. But there are many Causes in the world, all of which cry for one’s allegiance. The apostate Cause Person may find himself emotionally naked until he’s reattached himself to one of them. A regular paycheck and frequent sex can help to attenuate the cravings, but these are not guaranteed preventatives. A word to the wise.

     6. Gratuitous Bad Pun

     Since no Curmudgeonly emission would be complete without at least one bad pun, regard the following exhortation, seen on a lapel button in Manhattan by a Palace associate.

PROTECT YOURSELF:
Accidents
Cause
People

     This slogan was printed over the silhouette of a condom. Don’t say your Curmudgeon didn’t warn you.

     An early Robert A. Heinlein novella with the above title described an American theocracy that was eventually brought down in a violent revolution. I have no idea whether the young Heinlein was subject to influences that might have predisposed him to believe that such a future was probable. However, the Afterword to his collection Revolt in 2100, in which that novella appeared, suggests that he did think it plausible at least.

     No, that future didn’t arrive. Instead, the United States has turned in the opposite direction: secular and hedonistic. But Heinlein wasn’t the only writer to explore the idea of an American theocracy. Michael Flynn, whose work has often been compared with Heinlein’s, sketched such a future in his The Nanotech Chronicles. If he was guided by presentiments like Heinlein’s, he gave no indication of it.

     As usual, I’m sort of skirting my point here, so I’ll put it right out in the open:

Many trends are merely mental artifacts.

     One can “assemble” such a “trend” by choosing what to look at and what to ignore, which your detractors will call “cherry-picking” the news. However, the counterpoised effect is just as important:

Many who deny a trend simply refuse to see it.

     And inasmuch as some trends are pretty BLEEP!ing scary, the urge to take refuge in I-don’t-see-it denial can be very strong.

     The previous 250 words are prefatory. I see a trend in motion. It’s beginning to look to me like an avalanche. And I don’t like what it portends. But I’ll allow that I could be wrong; it’s the absolute requirement of intellectual honesty. In fact, I want to be wrong. So in reading what follows, please, Gentle Reader, do your best to:

• Refrain from an emotional response;
• Focus on the available data;
• If you don’t see it, tell me so and why.

     We begin.

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Two Doors

     The day had worn him down. His prior case, the fifty-seventh since he’d reached his desk that morning, had just been dragged weeping from the office, but he could not rest. He was behind his quota. The ships were already behind their sailing schedules. He had to plow onward.
     He pressed the button on his phone console that signaled to the pen outside that he was ready for his next case. The green indicator light over his office door went dark and the yellow one lit. Barely a minute had passed when the door opened and two husky guards brought him number fifty-eight. As they closed the door behind them, the yellow light above it was extinguished and the red one lit.
     This one was female. She looked aged beyond her natural count of years, though the stress of the upheavals could do that to anyone.
     The guards sat her none too gently in the restraint chair, secured her shackles to the chair’s hard points, and laid her paperwork on his desk before stepping back to line his office doorway. He reviewed the short description of her status and noted the contents of the check box. He’d seen it checked fifty-three times that day. This made fifty-four.
     She’ll have two options. No others.
     He steeled himself and faced her squarely. She seemed unable to meet his gaze.
     “Have you been informed about what happens here…” He glanced at her form again. Her given name was one of the trendy sort that he found too challenging to pronounce. “…Miss Jones?”
     She shook her head, but remained mute.
     “I’m your routing officer. You and I have the responsibility for determining the next stage of your life. I’m constrained by the law, but you will have a choice, though your choices are rather limited. The person who limited them was you.”
     He picked up the form and waved it at her. “Do you know what this paper says about you?”
     She sniffed and shook her head.
     “Were you given a chance to read it?”
     “Can’t read,” she said.
     “Then I’ll read it to you. ‘Miss Jones is 34 years old and a single mother of two sons. Son Tyrell was killed at age 18 during a police raid of a crack den. Son James was serving a life sentence for a gang-related murder when the Sterilization Orders came down. He was 16 at the time of his execution. Miss Jones has never been self-supporting. She tests positive for cocaine, syphilis, and hepatitis B.’”
     He looked directly into her eyes. “Do you deny any of that?”
     She would not answer.
     “Miss Jones, if I go by what’s on this paper, your future will not be a happy one. And I have to go by it unless you can convince me that what it says is not true.”
     “Can’t,” she said at last. “It’s right. Never got married. Got by on the welfare. My boys was bad asses. Baddest in the hood.” Her eyes rose to meet his at long last. They flashed in challenge. “Ain’t gonna cry over it. Any of it.”
     She thinks she’s hard. Maybe she is. She should hope so.
     “Miss Jones, if all this is true, then under the Separation Edicts, there are only two places you can go when you leave this room.” He rose and pointed toward his eastward window. Her gaze followed his gesture and lit on the giant ship that stood waiting in the harbor.
     “That,” he said, “is an exile ship. It’s one of your choices. If you choose it, it will take you to another continent, a place where you’ll be set free to live out your life as best you can. There are no whites there, no courts or prisons, and no welfare, either. And very little that you’d recognize from your life here in America.”
     She looked out at the giant vessel, plainly uncomprehending. Before the upheaval it had been a cargo carrier. On every trip it had ferried two hundred thousand tons of cargo in steel containers, each one filled with some item the residents of other lands valued, across the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean. Its holds had been refitted as row upon row of barred cells. Its next journey would convey ten thousand exiles to their new homeland. They would next see sunlight, if they saw it at all, when they debarked on the west coast of Africa, in the land that had once been called Liberia.
     Most of those exiles had been personally guilty of nothing. They’d merely abetted a race war. Some had promoted hatred of whites. Others, by their promiscuity and negligent parenting, had produced generation upon generation of parasites and violent predators. Still others had done nothing but subsist on the handouts of a too-generous society, indolently declining to add to its riches.
     Twenty-three of them had declined to board the ship.
     Far too many of them.
     “Are you willing to board that ship, Miss Jones?”
     She glowered at him sullenly. “Ain’t gettin’ on no ship.”
     “I see. Well, you do have another choice, but I can’t recommend it.” He nodded toward the door to the right of his desk. “It goes through that door.” He started to describe what took place on the other side of the door, stopped himself.
     It might be better if she didn’t know.
     “Would you like me to tell you about that second choice, Miss Jones?”
     She sneered and looked away. “Ain’t gettin’ on no ship.”
     “I need an answer, Miss Jones. Will you board, yes or no?”
     She shook her head.
     I suppose that’s good enough.
     He nodded to the guards. They released her shackles from the restraint chair and stepped back.
     “Then whenever you’re ready, just step through that door and close it behind you. You’ll be given instructions about what to do next.”
     She gave him one more contemptuous sneer and shuffled to the second door. The three men watched in silence as she stepped through it. As she closed it behind her, the green phase indicator above it went dark and the yellow one lit. A moment later the yellow gave way to red. The red light glowed for perhaps a minute before going out.
     Twenty-four.
     “Sir?” one of the guards said. “Why didn’t you tell her?”
     He grimaced. “I thought it might be kinder this way.”
     The guard frowned. “Maybe.” He glanced out at the exile ship. “It sure as hell ain’t gonna be kind for them.” They stepped out the door through which they had entered.
     He lowered his face into his hands.
     I volunteered. I understood the necessity. I still do. But it’s harder than anything I’ve ever done.
     Colonel John MacKenzie had led troops into battle. His battalion had been the first into Monrovia, and had led its pacification. He’d killed men who’d been trying their best to kill him. He’d weathered it all and had come home to a wife who loved him unreservedly despite it all…who refused to let him doubt himself.
     The men I killed were armed. They went to war knowing the risks. Miss Jones wasn’t armed with anything worse than her attitude.
     He felt his tears rising again and sternly shoved them down.
     Those are for the men I led who died in honorable combat. Not for the Miss Joneses of the world. They brought this upon themselves even if they were too dull to know it.
     He pressed the button that would bring him number fifty-nine.

#
     MacKenzie reached his billet barely able to draw a breath. Estelle awaited him at the front door, as always. His condition was plain to her. She wrapped her arms around him and pressed him to her before he could step over the lintel.
     “I love you,” he muttered against her shoulder. Despite his efforts, a single deep sob escaped him.
     She stroked his hair and said nothing.
     Presently he said. “Mark Thorsten killed himself.”
     “I know,” she said. “I spent most of the day with Pam.” A pause. “She wasn’t surprised. She said…she said she saw it coming. John, will she be all right?”
     He looked at her in puzzlement. “Was she all right when you left her?”
     She frowned. “You know what I mean.”
     He grimaced. “I don’t know, Eppie. I hope so. If I hear anything to the contrary, I’ll…I don’t know. This is a first.”
     She nodded. “For all of us. How many today?”
     “A hundred twenty-six.”
     “How many…” Her voice caught briefly. “…for the other door?”
     “Forty-seven.” He shuddered. “I stopped telling them, Eppie. After the first twenty-three I just…stopped. I figured it would be kinder that way.”
     Her expression was as understanding and accepting as always. She nodded.
     “Would you like to, to get out for the evening?” he said. “We could go to—”
     She shook her head. “I’d rather stay home with you. Just in case Pam…you know.”
     “Yes,” he said. “I know.”
     He took her hand, marveling afresh at the contrast between the lightness of her palm and the smooth jet of the opposite side. He brought that palm to his lips and kissed it tenderly.
     What a marvel. She knows what’s happening, and accepts it. She knows what I’ve been assigned to do, and accepts it. She doesn’t know why I and the others were chosen for this duty, yet she accepts it. She does know that except for having married me, she would be in that pen, awaiting her own disposition…and accepts it.
     “You’re my lifeline,” he said. “My tether to sanity in an insane time. Without you, I might do what Mark did.”
     She smiled sadly. “I know. It’s why you were chosen.”
     He peered at her. “Huh?”
     “Hadn’t you thought about it?” she said. “The Army has plenty of colonels. Some of them would enjoy doing what you do.” She stroked the sides of his face. “I’m the guarantee that you won’t…because you can’t.”
     “You do know,” he said wonderingly.
     “I always did, John. General Lapierre told me. Let’s have some dinner.”
     She took his hand and led him to their kitchen.

---

     Think it won’t happen, Gentle Reader? Think it can’t happen?

     I must disagree. It’s drawing nearer all the time. The indicators have never shone more garishly:

• Trayvon Martin.
• “Bryce Williams.”
• Ferguson, Missouri.
• Baltimore, Maryland.
• The “knockout game.”
• The New Black Panthers.
• Black illegitimacy at 69%.
• ”Flash mobs” of black teens.
• Black racialists openly inciting violence against whites.
• The many outbreaks of black-on-white violence chronicled by Colin Flaherty.
• And the rising tide of sentiment among normally peaceable whites that we have had enough.

     If it happens, it will be horrible beyond measure. I don’t want it to happen. I fear it greatly. More people will die than have died in all of America’s wars together. But neither my fears nor anyone else’s will prevent it. Only a massive outbreak of good sense among American Negroes, most especially the willingness and determination to discipline their own and accept the verdicts of the judicial system when that discipline fails, can stave off the racial cleansing of the United States: the Separation Edicts and Sterilization Orders of the little story above.

     “Bryce Williams” described himself as a “powder keg.” His focus was wrong; it’s America that’s the powder keg. His murders seem to me to bring the match very close to the fuse. We can’t have much time or many chances left to avert the explosion.

     If I’m wrong, tell me I’m wrong…but tell me why. Convince me.

     And pray.

[This piece first appeared at Eternity Road on August 6, 2005. Today being the 101st — yes, the 101st — anniversary of the day I deem “most awful” in post-Industrial Revolution history, and a number of geopolitical trends having bent in the direction of large-scale replays thereof, I felt it appropriate to repost it. — FWP]

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On August 6, the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, it’s your Curmudgeon’s habit to reflect on the terrible decisions that led to that event, and to ponder whether any of them might have been made differently if their makers had had foreknowledge of the things that we of this time have experienced. He’s done so before, and will probably do so again.

But not today.

Quite a number of commentators have characterized August 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay killed Hiroshima and 130,000 of its mostly civilian residents, as the most awful day in the history of the world: the day humanity exhibited both its ability and its willingness to annihilate itself in toto. It was an awful day, to be sure, but not for that reason. As of that day, we did not have the power to destroy ourselves that completely. Nor do we have it yet today, the dire mutterings of darker souls notwithstanding.

It was an awful day because, in the opinion of President Truman and his key advisors, the atomic bombing of a Japanese city was the least bad of the available tactical choices. Every other means by which they might force the Japanese to surrender had a higher total casualty figure attached. One, the amphibious invasion of the Japanese Home Islands by American troops, had been estimated to produce a million American deaths, to say nothing of how many Japanese would have died in the fighting.

There’s no way to revisit that crucial moment in history and supply those decision makers with the foreknowledge of the next sixty years. Even if one could, there’s no way to know whether it would have made a difference: in the decision they reached, or in the relative quality of the six decades since then. All one can say with certainty is that it was an awful day indeed, one we would certainly have averted if a less awful alternative had presented itself.

But what, then, was the most awful day? If Hiroshima doesn’t take the trophy, what human atrocity could?

Opinions will vary, of course. Some will go by casualty figures; others by broader and more inclusive metrics. Some will argue that calamities other than wars ought to be included in our considerations; others will reply that Nature is indifferent to human concerns, and that only Man’s inhumanities to Man should qualify for condemnation.

Your Curmudgeon’s angle on the matter is, as you might expect, an unusual one.

The Biblical story of Genesis, which your Curmudgeon considers allegorical rather than a literal narration of Creation and the Fall of Man, speaks plainly yet powerfully of the deed of Cain: the archetypal murder propelled by that deadliest of sins, envy. Note that, by the Biblical account, the Fall was an accomplished fact. Man had already been exiled from Eden. Many an analyst would say that Cain’s deed was therefore inevitable; once separated from Divine guidance, someone had to be the first to spill human blood. The use of Cain, the allegorical first child of a woman’s loins, as the protagonist in the story merely emphasizes the immediacy of the peril in which Man had placed himself by the Fall.

That approach to the event has considerable substance. Once Man had been removed from the realm of the eternal and unchanging, all possible changes, both for good and for evil, impinged upon him. Murder was only the most dramatic.

Shall we look forward in time, then? He who considers the number of deaths to be the most important measure would look to the genocides of the century past, or to the deaths of millions in our mass wars. These were genuinely horrible, doubt it not. But to your Curmudgeon, comparing the heights of mounds of flesh tends to miss the point.

The history of Man’s political and moral development records many fits and starts. Some of these are shrouded behind thick veils of time, such that we of 2005 cannot be certain how many persons, or which nations, were affected by them. But we can be reasonably certain about the Enlightenment and the moral revolution it ignited, for it remains with us today. Indeed, as our contest with the savageries of Islam should illustrate, Enlightenment concepts of rights and justice remain the most powerful and critical moral propositions known to our race.

The wars of pre-Enlightenment Europe were as savage as anything of any other time, our own included. Armed men regularly targeted and slew the unarmed when it suited them to do so. What differed was the technology available. To deal death, one had to employ personal skill and exert muscle power, which limited the amount of carnage a single man or a single army could wreak. But there can be little doubt that, had the weapons of now been available to the warriors of then, they would have used them without scruple. The moral level of the time was too low to expect otherwise.

With Enlightenment moral philosophy and the associated political concepts came a great change in warfare: the conviction that the destruction of war ought to be limited solely to those who elected to participate. As those concepts permeated the nations of the West, many of the ancient practices of war — enslavement, rapine, looting, the slaughter of non-combatants, the use of non-conbatants as cover or “human shields” — were put under the cloak of the forbidden, to be scorned by decent warriors and punished by them as they were discovered.

The West saw two centuries of steady improvement in the moral constraints on warfare. Battles came to be ever more regular, ever better confined to a designated, delimited field of conflict. Many battles were actually scheduled; meeting places and times were agreed upon beforehand between the contending forces. Statesmen and thinkers looked forward to a time when death itself might be banished from the battlefield, as an obsolete practice irrelevant to true contests of strength and virtue between the governments of civilized lands.

Until one terrible day in August.

A government with evil intentions had sent two million men marching on a mission of conquest. Its liege lord and top military planners were angry at the stubbornness of a minor power, neutral by treaty, that refused those armies free passage through its lands. The conquest-minded state decided on a strategy of intimidation. An aircraft long kept in reserve was sent aloft on a mission of terror, the first since Hume, Smith, and Locke put their stamp on the moral renaissance of the world.

The aircraft was a Zeppelin, designated the “L-Z” by the commanders of the armies of the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Its weapons were gravity bombs, thirteen in number. Its target was the Belgian city of Liege, where the Kaiser’s troops had met unexpected resistance to their Schlieffen Plan thrust against France. Its harvest was nine civilian lives: the first civilians deliberately killed by authorized military action in the Twentieth Century.

The date was August 6, 1914.

That, to your Curmudgeon’s way of thinking, was the most awful day. The day a major Western power, nominally committed to individual rights, the rule of law, and the norms of civilized warfare, threw all of that aside in hope of imposing its will on the government of another land. The day the line between combatants and civilians was erased.

That line has not yet been redrawn. Perhaps it never will be.

No material advantage can compensate for the sacrifice of a principle. An inflexible, inviolable principle is a safeguard against villainy, a shield behind which ordinary man untouched by the irrationalities and passions of others can conduct peaceable lives in whatever degree of comfort they can contrive. But once a principle has been violated, it protects no one. Often the first violator is ultimately saddest of all over its loss.

We stand ninety-one years down the river of time from that most awful day. America, braced by its unmatched military power and technology, has regained its grasp on the principles of civilized warfare, but the forces we face have no interest in the notion. It would be a high irony if, having clambered so painfully from the pit of Hell Mankind excavated with the mass slaughters of the century past, we should once again unlearn all virtue under the tutelage of our Islamic foes. It would be an irony to defeat all others if the lesson should eventuate in their complete effacement from the Earth.

     It’s more than the title of an overhyped Spike Lee movie. It’s a way of life…or it should be.

     Many people talk a good game. They proclaim, propound, and promise. They make extravagant statements about what they would do – or will do – if this or that should occur. They pose as Twenty-First Century versions of Patrick Henry…as long as they know they won’t be called on it.

     Sportsmen call that “the locker-room game.” It has no effect on the eventual score.

     Today, the draft of the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Second Continental Congress, which had voted unanimously for independence from Great Britain two days earlier. (To the anonymous commenter who quarreled with me about that: brush up on your history. It’s a matter of public record.) As I wrote yesterday, the fifty-six delegates whose names appear on the document probably spent a good deal of the time since pondering the consequences of their decision. For many, the consequences would be terrible indeed.

     They did the right thing: the thing their consciences urged upon them. They did it knowing that that price could be their lives.

     Contemporary Americans are much slower to risk such a price.

---

     There’s a significant amount of game theory involved in my former trade, which has compelled me to become acquainted with a few highly useful concepts. The two of interest today are minimax and mainchance.

     If your gaming strategy is to minimize what you could possibly lose, you’ve adopted the minimax approach. You will select your moves such that no matter what your opponent(s) might do, your maximum loss has been minimized. Games in which the players adopt the minimax strategy tend to be boring and highly predictable, especially if there’s no random element in the mix. Payoffs will be low, and over time every player’s aggregate winnings and losses will tend toward zero. In other words, clear victories or losses are rare, unless the game’s rules are inherently biased toward or against some of the players.

     If your gaming strategy is to play for the highest possible return and not worry about potential losses, you’ve adopted the mainchance approach. Needless to say, as most real-world games tend to associate great potential gains with equally great potential losses, this requires courage. Games in which the players choose the mainchance strategy can be wild – and wildly exciting. Oftentimes a player “goes broke” from his choices, and must leave the game. Mainchance delivers winners and losers as minimax does not.

     A revolutionist must be a mainchance player from the very first. The penalty for being an unsuccessful revolutionist is almost always death plus the attainder of one’s family, often out to second and third cousins. Exceptions are rare.

     It says something about the human psyche that as regards the deliberate triggering of dramatic social upheaval, we find minimaxers among the well off and well-to-do, and mainchancers far more often among those who have little or nothing to lose.

---

     You might be wondering what this is headed toward. You have good reason; I’ve been more circuitous even than my usual.

     Perhaps you’re familiar with the case of Aaron and Melissa Klein, the Oregon couple who declined, out of Christian conviction, to make a wedding cake for a lesbian wedding. Just recently, the state of Oregon piled injury upon injury:

     Oregon Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian finalized a preliminary ruling today ordering Aaron and Melissa Klein, the bakers who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, to pay $135,000 in emotional damages to the couple they denied service.

     “This case is not about a wedding cake or a marriage,” Avakian wrote. “It is about a business’s refusal to serve someone because of their sexual orientation. Under Oregon law, that is illegal.”

     In the ruling, Avakian placed an effective gag order on the Kleins, ordering them to “cease and desist” from speaking publicly about not wanting to bake cakes for same-sex weddings based on their Christian beliefs.

     “This effectively strips us of all our First Amendment rights,” the Kleins, owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa, which has since closed, wrote on their Facebook page. “According to the state of Oregon we neither have freedom of religion or freedom of speech.”

     Were you aware that a state official has the power to silence dissent? I wasn’t. Indeed, I don’t think he does – freedom of speech is a Constitutionally protected right – but the question I find most interesting is whether the Kleins will defy him.

     They’ve been fined a huge amount of money – probably more than their bakery took in over a whole year. The bakery has been closed. They’ve been subjected to enormous torrents of vilification by the activist homosexual community. I don’t know whether they have any means of subsistence. They have very little, if anything, left to lose…but they have a great deal to gain by challenging this upstart official directly, charging him with abuse of power under color of law and compelling him to answer those charges in a federal district court.

     One of the blessings of our time is that the Internet enables those of us who believe in their cause to support them, with verbal encouragement and funding.

     Consider also the recent case of harassment of Reason magazine:

     The United States Department of Justice is using federal grand jury subpoenas to identify anonymous commenters engaged in typical internet bluster and hyperbole in connection with the Silk Road prosecution. DOJ is targeting Reason.com, a leading libertarian website whose clever writing is eclipsed only by the blowhard stupidity of its commenting peanut gallery.

     Why is the government using its vast power to identify these obnoxious asshats, and not the other tens of thousands who plague the internet?

     Because these twerps mouthed off about a judge.

     Last week, a source provided me with a federal grand jury subpoena. The subpoena1, issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, is directed to Reason.com in Washington, D.C.. The subpoena commands Reason to provide the grand jury “any and all identifying information”2 Reason has about participants in what the subpoena calls a “chat.”

     The “chat” in question is a comment thread on Nick Gillespie’s May 31, 2015 article about Ross “Dread Pirate Roberts” Ulbricht’s plea for leniency to the judge who would sentence him in the Silk Road prosecution. That plea, we know now, failed, as Ulbricht received a life sentence, with no possibility of parole.

     Several commenters on the post found the sentence unjust, and vented their feelings in a rough manner. The grand jury subpoena specifies their comments and demands that Reason.com produce any identifying information on them.

     That’s bad enough…but it’s not the end of the story:

     Last Friday the folks at Reason confirmed what I suggested on Thursday — that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, after hitting Reason with a federal grand jury subpoena to unmask anonymous hyperbolic commenters, secured a gag order that prevented them from writing about it.

     Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch describe how it all went down. Read it.

     So, the truth is out — and it’s more outrageous than you thought, even more outrageous than it appears at first glance.

     What, you might ask, could be more outrageous than the United States Department of Justice issuing a questionable subpoena targeting speech protected by the First Amendment, and then abusing the courts to prohibit journalists from writing about it?

     The answer lies in the everyday arrogance of unchecked power.

     An organ of journalism was forbidden by a federal gag order to write about an egregious abuse of power. Ponder that.

     If it can forbid an American organ of journalism to report on the most important sort of story – the abuse of State power – “our” government is no better than that of North Korea. Surely the editors at Reason know that. Yet they remained silent about the abuse targeted at them. Why?

     I don’t read minds; ordinary English text is enough of a challenge. But if I had to place a bet, I’d wager that Reason’s editors feared that the feds would contrive to ruin them and their magazine completely, even if they were eventually to win in court. In short, they have more to lose than they cared to venture.

     John Peter Zenger, call your office! Urgent! Urgent!

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     The critical paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, whose approval we celebrate today – see previous tirade – sets forth the rationale for the American Revolution:

     We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

     Those two hundred words are among the most famous ever written, and deservedly so. But the real punch comes at the very end of that famous document:

     And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

     No other phrasing of “and we really mean it” has ever come near to that one.

---

     As you’re aware, I always go by my full and correct name, whether in the flesh or on the Internet. I consider it a matter of propriety – I don’t want anyone else to have to answer for my statements – but I also consider it a matter of integrity. I intend to stand behind my words. Should I be proved wrong, I’ll admit it. Should I change my mind about some issue, I’ll explain why I did so. I want the record to be clear and complete.

     Most Internet commenters won’t do that. Why not? What do they fear? Hate mail? Awakening to a severed horse’s head?

     When I’ve been harassed over the Net, it’s almost always been by some clown who goes by an anonymizing moniker. That’s his right, I suppose, but it makes it fairly easy for me to dismiss him as just one more low punk without any courage at all, much less enough to stand by his convictions in an open contest of intellect. I suppose they’re not bright enough to realize what worms they’ve revealed themselves to be, but that would be part of the syndrome, wouldn’t it?

     There’s neither honor nor integrity in rejecting one’s own identity. There’s no profit in it for anyone…and there could be consequences for innocent others, as the federal harassment of Reason has shown.

     I once described my readers’ favorite character thus:

     His quality was plain and open. He did not hide, and he did not strut.

     That character endeared himself to my readers in exactly that way: He always said what he meant, without unnecessary artifice, and he always did what he thought was right, regardless of the possible cost. He was a genuine hero in a world overrun by pretenders and antiheroes, and hundreds of readers continue to email me, pleading for more stories about him.

     Have another genuine hero:

     “Oh please, Chris. You’re totally self-sacrificing, oblivious to personal danger, and resistant to temptation, though God knows I’ve tried. I knew what you were going to do for those kids the moment I saw the expression on your face. You right wrongs. You fight for the little guy. Why do you think that Chatterjee chick calls you the Hammer of God?”

     We can’t all be heroes – no, sorry, David, not even just for one day – but we can all speak plainly and stand behind our words. We can all defy those who would intimidate us into anonymity or silence. Are some of the fears that impel us to conceal ourselves legitimate? Possibly, even probably. But they fall far short of “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

     If you would like to honor the Founders in a true commemoration of their courage and their achievement, you can do that much. Swear this day that you will always go by your right name, and never deny your own words. Swear it to yourself if to no one else. You’ll know whether you’ve fallen short of that standard…and you’ll punish yourself for it.

     Lend strength to those who have come under the State’s hammer by lending not merely your words but your name to their cause: the cause of freedom.

     Happy Declaration of Independence day.

     Time was, I wrote more than I do today about the abstract ideals that undergird freedom. These days, my attention is more focused on current events and what they portend. I’m not sure why that should be, except that it’s clear that, as Jubal Harshaw said in Stranger In A Strange Land, wallowing in the troubles of others can make you seriously neurotic.

     Back in the old Palace Of Reason days, and during the Eternity Road era that succeeded it, the subject of rights – what they are, why they exist at all, and what they imply for government in a society that respects them – was frequently on my mind. Of all the brief, powerful things ever said on the subject, my favorite is this one, from a Nineteenth-Century French politician and historian:

     Either rights exist, or they do not exist. If they exist, they involve absolute consequences…Furthermore, if a right exists, it exists at every moment. It is absolute today, yesterday, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, in summer as in winter, not when it pleases you to declare it in force. [Louis Thiers]

     When Thomas Jefferson wrote the birth certificate of the United States:

     We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

     …he had that concept of rights – the peaceable individual’s possession of absolute moral trumps that prohibit infringement for any reason – firmly in mind.

     Clearly, the Jefferson / Thiers concept of rights differs from that of a permission or a license, which is granted only when the State pleases to do so and may be qualified or withdrawn at any time. Which brings us to this morning’s question:

Are Americans accorded any rights whatsoever?

     Not de facto, mind you, but de jure. In other words: does an individual possess any absolute protections against State coercion? Protections that cannot legally be abridged, infringed, or set aside on the grounds of a “compelling government interest?”

     Think it over.

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     “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Jefferson’s original phrase was “Life, Liberty, and Property,” but after some wrangling with the rest of the convention he agreed to substitute “the Pursuit of Happiness,” probably because the assertion of an absolute right to one’s property would thwart the later assertion of a power to tax.

     Yet Jefferson was sincere about property rights. One of the accomplishments of his first term as president was the cessation of direct federal taxes:

     At home, fellow citizens, you best know whether we have done well or ill. The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. These covering our land with officers, and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which, once entered, is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of produce and property. [ Second Inaugural Address ]

     Every tax, regardless of its nature or its rationale, is an infringement upon property rights. This is true even of an indirect tax, for it infringes upon the right of buyer and seller to trade their rightful property. Jefferson’s dedication to property rights led him to eliminate direct federal taxation – taxes that fall upon individuals and institutions – out of the federal exchequer, leaving indirect taxes – taxes on imports, exports, and particular kinds of commerce, which can therefore be avoided – as Washington’s sole sources of revenue.

     What persons or institutions escape direct taxation – federal, state, or local – today? In these post-Kelo years, what item of real or tangible property is safe from arbitrary confiscation? Is it safe even to have cash or other valuables on your person?

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     Jefferson’s conception of liberty embraced the freedom of choice and movement he deemed every peaceable individual to possess. An American’s self-ownership, in Jefferson’s view, was absolute; he could therefore do whatever he pleased, subject only to the constraint that he not interfere in others’ equal right to do likewise, and the State could do nothing to hinder him. Nor could the State force him to labor for its sake, which would constitute the most direct imaginable “tax” on his unalienable rights to himself and his freedom of choice.

     The writ of habeas corpus, mentioned specifically in the Constitution, is an expression of Jeffersonian liberty. An individual’s freedom of movement could only be constrained by the State if it could make a “valid reply” to a petition for habeas corpus. In the early years of the Republic, few replies were deemed valid: chiefly imprisonment subsequent to a criminal conviction by a jury of one’s peers.

     When Abraham Lincoln decided to institute conscription for the purpose of fighting the Civil War, he found it legally necessary to suspend the applicability of habeas corpus. Though there is provision for this in the Constitution:

     The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it. [Article I, Section 9]

     …it is a specifically Congressional prerogative to do so. Lincoln bypassed Congress and issued an order on presidential authority that habeas corpus petitions were to be ignored by his military commanders.

     Today, habeas corpus can be answered by a slew of “valid replies.” Most of them would have horrified Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers. Given that a man can be stopped for “questioning” without pretext or charge, and can be detained arbitrarily for 72 hours, entirely on police say-so, in every state in the Union, is there freedom of movement in America today?

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     Ah, the “right to life.” You’d think that one, at least, would still be respected. After all, the State can’t just kill you as you’re walking along, can it? Surely it can’t come into your home and kill you, just because it decides to do so?

• Ruby Ridge
• Waco I
• Waco II
• No-Knock SWAT raids
• Other Executions by Cops

     Oops. Sorry. My mistake.

     So much for your “right to life.”

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“Rights are an archist concept. Rights have no meaning except when confronted with superior power. They are what is left to the people after the government has taken all its wants. Your country’s Bill of Rights defines your most cherished freedoms how? By limiting the legal power of government to encroach upon them.” [Eric L. Harry, via fictional anarchist theorist Valentin Kartsev in Harry’s novel Protect and Defend.]

     It would appear that “superior power” acknowledges no rights. The rationale is almost always “compelling government interest:” that is, the State’s interest in…what? How can the State, a fictional creature made up of individuals such as you and I, hired to do the relatively simple jobs (NB: “simple,” not necessarily “easy”) of keeping the peace in the streets, operating a court system, and defending the territory of the United States, have “interests?” It’s a BLEEP!ing hireling, and hirelings have no interests; they have responsibilities and delegated, enumerated powers, nothing more.

     The State’s “interests” are nonexistent. However, the individuals at the levers of power don’t see it that way. They want power, and as much of it as they can grab. Your “rights?” Sorry, buddy, they were just an Eighteenth Century philosopher’s idle fancy. Just a few words on a scrap of parchment. At any rate, we shan’t concern ourselves with them today. There’s oppressing work to be done!

     “Your government’s” work.

---

     I’ll close this tirade with a snippet from a work of fiction. It comes closer to capturing my cynicism and fear than anything else that currently comes to mind. The book it’s from is about an unusual family. All three of its members possess psi powers…and all three of them have the State’s crosshairs on their backs:

     “Once upon a time there was an experiment in which twelve people participated,” Quincey said. “About six years ago. Do you remember that?”

     “I remember it,” Andy said grimly.

     “There aren’t many of those twelve people left. There were four, the last I heard. And two of them married each other.”

     “Yes,” Andy said, but inside he felt growing horror. Only four left? What was Quincey talking about?

     “I understand one of them can bend keys and shut doors without even touching them.” Quincey’s voice, thin, coming across two thousand miles of telephone cable, coming through switching stations, through open-relay points, through junction boxes in Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, Iowa. A million places to tap into Quincey’s voice.

     “Yes?” he said, straining to keep his voice level. And he thought of Vicky, who could sometimes turn on the radio or turn off the TV without going anywhere near it-and Vicky was apparently not even aware she was doing those things.

     “Oh yes, he’s for real,” Quincey was saying. “He’s—what would you say?-a documented case. It hurts his head if he does those things too often, but he can do them. They keep him in a little room with a door he can’t open and a lock he can’t bend. They do tests on him. He bends keys. He shuts doors. And I understand he’s nearly crazy.”

     “Oh … my … God,” Andy said faintly.

     “He’s part of the peace effort, so it’s all right if he goes crazy,” Quincey went on. “He’s going crazy so two hundred and twenty million Americans can stay safe and free. Do you understand?”

     “Yes,” Andy had whispered.

     “What about the two people who got married? Nothing. So far as they know. They live quietly, in some quiet middle-American state like Ohio. There’s maybe a yearly check on them. Just to see if they’re doing anything like bending keys or closing doors without touching them or doing funny little mentalist routines at the local Backyard Carnival for Muscular Dystrophy. Good thing those people can’t do anything like that, isn’t it, Andy?”

     Andy closed his eyes and smelled burned cloth. Sometimes Charlie would pull open the fridge door, look in, and then crawl off again. And if Vicky was ironing, she would glance at the fridge door and it would swing shut again—all without her being aware that she was doing anything strange. That was sometimes. At other times it didn’t seem to work, and she would leave her ironing and close the refrigerator door herself (or turn off the radio, or turn on the TV). Vicky couldn’t bend keys or read thoughts or fly or start fires or predict the future. She could sometimes shut a door from across the room and that was about the extent of it. Sometimes, after she had done several of these things, Andy had noticed that she would complain of a headache or an upset stomach, and whether that was a physical reaction or some sort of muttered warning from her subconscious, Andy didn’t know. Her ability to do these things got maybe a little stronger around the time of her period. Such small things, and so infrequently, that Andy had come to think of them as normal. As for himself…well he could push people. There was no real name for it; perhaps autohypnosis came closest. And he couldn’t do it often, because it gave him headaches. Most days he could forget completely that he wasn’t utterly normal and never really had been since that day in Room 70 of Jason Geameigh.

     He closed his eyes and on the dark field inside his eyelids he saw that comma-shaped bloodstain and the nonwords COR OSUM.

     “Yes, it’s a good thing,” Quincey went on, as if Andy had agreed. “Or they might put them in two little rooms where they could work full-time to keep two hundred and twenty million Americans safe and free.”

“A good thing,” Andy agreed.

     “Those twelve people,” Quincey said, “maybe they gave those twelve people a drug they didn’t fully understand. It might have been that someone—a certain Mad Doctor—might have deliberately misled them. Or maybe he thought he was misleading them and they were deliberately leading him on. It doesn’t matter.”

     “No.”

     “So this drug was given to them and maybe it changed their chromosomes a little bit. Or a lot. Or who knows. And maybe two of them got married and decided to have a baby and maybe the baby got something more than her eyes and his mouth. Wouldn’t they be interested in that child?”

     “I bet they would,” Andy said, now so frightened he was having trouble talking at all. He had already decided that he would not tell Vicky about calling Quincey.

     “It’s like you got lemon, and that’s nice, and you got meringue, and that’s nice, too, but when you put them together, you’ve got…a whole new taste treat. I bet they’d want to see just what that child could do. They might just want to take it and put it in a little room and see if it could help make the world safe for democracy. And I think that’s all I want to say, old buddy, except…keep your head down.”

     [Stephen King, Firestarter]

     Know of any convenient planetoids, Gentle Reader?

I’ve long held the belief that any man who’s willing to assert the absolute truth of even one statement must eventually accept that every well-formed statement – i.e., a statement that either posits a fact or a causal mechanism — is either absolutely true or absolutely false, men’s contrary opinions notwithstanding. The concept behind that assertion is, of course, that there is such a thing as absolute truth – objective reality itself – which makes my notion quasi-tautological. For all that, note how few persons are willing to contradict the anti-objectivity propagandists of our time. That latter sort is permitted to gambol about screaming that “There are no absolutes!” virtually without contradiction – not even a murmur of “Including that one?”

Note how this applies to argument. This significant episode related by Mike Adams:

When I asked another feminist to debate me on abortion she said that she didn’t discuss such personal topics publicly. But then I read her biography. After talking about losing her virginity (including details about how she cleaned the blood off the couch afterwards) she dedicated countless pages to the issue of abortion and how a “lack of choice” adversely affects young women. After reading on, I realized why she didn’t tell me the truth. She revealed that she was a postmodernist who didn’t like to use the word “truth.”

The next time I got into an argument with a feminist – over whether a female student who lied about a rape to get out of a test should be expelled – I understood the postmodern feminist position better. Feminists just can’t help but lie because there really is no such thing as the truth.

Since so many feminists cannot tell the truth – because it doesn’t even really exist – I simply cannot take them seriously.

Columnist Maggie Gallagher once wrote that if there is no such thing as objective, absolute truth, then all our statements to one another are merely instruments of manipulation, attempts to use one another, or to avoid being used. Apply that insight to Mike Adams’s encounter related above, and ponder the implications.

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A couple of recent political polls have presented the reader with an intriguing question: “Among the following issues in current political discourse, which would be your ‘hill to die on?’” To select any of the subsequent choices – or an issue not listed – would imply that the reader holds that position as “a matter of principle,” not to be compromised at any price. But given how few persons grasp the meaning of principle, we might prefer a clearer statement: “My position on this issue is absolutely right; therefore, I cannot be persuaded to retreat from it.”

In that connection, have a favorite quote from Herbert Spencer:

I asked one of the members of Parliament whether a majority of the House could legitimize murder. He said no. I asked him whether it could sanctify robbery. He thought not. But I could not make him see that if murder and robbery are intrinsically wrong, and not to be made right by the decisions of statesmen, then similarly all actions must be either right or wrong, apart from the authority of the law; and that if the right and wrong of the law are not in harmony with this intrinsic right and wrong, the law itself is criminal.

…and a snippet from 1984:

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

If Spencer and Orwell were correct, then our adversaries’ entire campaign consists of the assertion that two plus two can be made not to make four by political decree. Ponder the implications of that.

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There is an underlying objective reality. All the froth and gas about the irremediable uncertainty of human knowledge is merely an attempt to confuse the issue: to substitute human limitations for that metaphysical postulate. While we can never achieve absolute precision in our knowledge of reality, we can approach it asymptotically. The Principle of Correspondence, the very heart of theoretical physics, expresses that postulate as well as it can be expressed.

Consider also the Aristotelian approach to definition: the assignment of objects to categories on the basis of their shared properties. No other approach to definition makes abstraction, and therefore reasoning, possible – and it rests immovably upon the assumption that an object’s properties are objectively real rather than mere matters of opinion.

It is possible that objective reality has a dynamic aspect – i.e., that some or all of the laws of nature change over time, albeit very slowly. Indeed, modern cosmology is founded on that conjecture. However, whatever reality is at a given instant is what it is. Quoth Star in Robert A. Heinlein’s Glory Road:

“May it please milord hero, the world is not what we wish it to be. It is what it is. No, I have over-assumed. Perhaps it is indeed what we wish it to be. Either way, it is what it is. Le voila! Behold it, self-demonstrating. Das Ding an Sich. Bite it. It is. Ai-je raison? Do I speak truly?”

Either that truism is true beyond the possibility of refutation, or there’s no point in saying anything at all.

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One point of these “Off The Mishnory Road” pieces is to deflect current conversation from politics, a realm in which “everybody’s got a right to an opinion,” to the bedrock upon which all argument must be based, political argument most emphatically included. Given that, this essay should be considered the prerequisite to all the others. It’s rather a pity that that didn’t occur to me up front, but here we are.

In effect, I want us to be equipped to make the following statement to a political opponent:

“Regardless of how passionately attached we are to our respective positions, we can’t evade this: one of us is right and the other is wrong. We have to have some criteria to determine which is which, if our politics is to be beneficial rather than harmful. What criteria should we use? In other words, what evidence would persuade you to reconsider your position, and what evidence would persuade me to reconsider mine?”

Evidence – facts – data from objective reality – is the only means by which any position can be verified or falsified. He who is not prepared to accept the possibility that data might exist that contradict his position has elevated it to an article of faith…and you know it’s useless to argue matters of faith.

More anon.

I’ve subjected my Gentle Readers to three “Politically Insoluble” essays. The themes in those essays have kept me going back to the core concept behind them all:

“They say here ‘all roads lead to Mishnory.’ To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.” [Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness]

If we’re going to get “off the Mishnory road” – i.e., if we’re to stop looking to political processes for the restoration of freedom – we must do so deliberately, fully conscious of what we intend.

I gave a few examples of what I have in mind in the last of those three essays. They addressed problems that are normally left in the political sphere as if that sphere did not exist. Were the approaches perfect? Assuredly not. But the driving force – turning away from political processes in the vain hope of solutions from those processes – is the important thing.

One of the keys to an improved future is the conservation of what remains good and worthy today. Once again: don’t think ‘politics’ as you read this. Think rather of what you, the Twenty-First Century’s Robinson Crusoe, would carry away from the slowly submerging wreck of contemporary American civilization before the chance is lost.

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For today, I’d like to focus on the critical distinction between the psychologies of Right and Left. It’s one that the media have attempted to efface:

1. Leftists regard all of life as fodder for political processes and State intervention. No subjects, no activities, and no attitudes are regarded as intrinsically private.
2. Rightists believe in a private sphere in which politics and the State have no place. (Some Rightists disbelieve in any sphere for State action, but that’s a separate subject.)

In this connection, ponder well this essay on the Sturm und Drang besetting the video gaming community. Take particular note of the following highly revealing snippet:

[W]hile watching a video about GamerGate, I clicked on a link to an archive of one of the original articles, “A Guide To Ending Gamers” by Devin Wilson at Gamasutra….

I was scrolling down through the article’s list of strategies for eliminating gamers, trying to keep an open mind, and actually thinking there were one or two somewhat valid points. Then I got to item #11:

We stop upholding “fun” as the universal, ultimate criterion for a game’s relevance. It’s a meaningless ideal at best and a poisonous priority at worst. Fun is a neurological trick. Plenty of categorically unhealthy things are “fun”. Let’s try for something more. Many of the alternatives will have similarly fuzzy definitions, but let’s aspire to qualities like “edifying”, “healing”, “pro-social”, or even “enlightening”. I encourage you to decide upon your own alternatives to “fun” in games (while avoiding terms like “cool” and “awesome” and any other word that simply caters to existing, unexamined biases).

That paragraph represents everything that is wrong with social justice thinking in less than 100 words.

Indeed it does…but be sure to isolate the central concept rather than merely turning away in disgust:

The Left abhors fun because it’s inherently apolitical.

It’s worth a moment or two of your time to reflect on why that is so.

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Fun – that which we strive to attain through the “play impulse” – is one of the keys to a successful life. C. S. Lewis noted its importance in The Screwtape Letters:

I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. What that real cause is we do not know. Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like it occurs in Heaven—a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell.

Fun is closely related to Joy—a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct. It is very little use to us. It can sometimes be used, of course, to divert humans from something else which the Enemy would like them to be feeling or doing: but in itself it has wholly undesirable tendencies; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.

We play – i.e., we engage in activities that have no deliberate gain in view – specifically because it’s fun. It comes naturally to us to do so, especially when in the company of those we love. One of the great quantitative differences between America and other nations is the fraction of our resources we have available for play. It could justly be said that Americans are the world’s foremost players – no pejorative intended.

Americans are so fun-oriented that we devote whole industries to it, most emphatically including the video gaming industry. We even seek to make our work lives fun, to the extent that might be possible. My favorite source of business advice, Robert C. Townsend, put it this way:

If you don’t do it excellently, don’t do it at all. Because if it’s not excellent it won’t be profitable or fun, and if you’re not in business for fun or profit, what the hell are you doing here?

(Granted that not much can be done for coal mining or grave digging. But note how such jobs are the ones most swiftly put to automated techniques.)

The entire point of video gaming is fun, delivered through virtualized adventures in which a gamer can face all sorts of challenges and trials without actually risking life, limb, or loot. The gamer can imagine himself to be an intrepid explorer, a mighty warrior, a brilliant detective, a pioneering spaceman, or whatever. For a few hours he can experience challenges and take risks that his mundane life doesn’t offer. Afterward, he can pop out the DVD, turn off the console, and return to that mundane existence nicely refreshed.

But while we’re having fun, we’re not focused on some Cause. We’re not straining under some heavy load of moral obligation. We’re not engaged in some humorless, self-righteous attempt to remake others according to our priorities and preferences. To whatever extent we ever indulge such considerations, the play impulse shoves all of them to the back of the stove.

Fun and the Left are mortal enemies.

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The following tangent should give any thinking American pause for thought:

“There is no room for play in Islam. Islam is deadly serious…about everything.” [Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini]

Islam, like Leftist politics, attempts to absorb all of life into a single, all-encompassing set of prescriptions and proscriptions. Both mindsets demand that nothing be allowed to exist independent of their dictates. Their hostility toward fun is probably the best indictment one could lay against either. Note also that though many, perhaps most Leftists denigrate and deride Christianity, the very same folks never have a word to say against Islam. Cowardice? Perhaps. But the sub rosa recognition among Leftists that Islam is “the enemy of my enemy” should not be overlooked.

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Play – the quest for fun — is a bastion of freedom. It’s inherently invulnerable to the attacks of the “social justice warriors.” They know it, which is why they’re so anxious to anathematize it.

The “social justice warriors” would simply love to take over the gaming industries and put them to use in their preferred directions. However, it’s impossible by the very nature of gaming. As they awaken to this immutable aspect of gaming, they will shift to an all-out assault on gaming. If they cannot conquer it, they must destroy it.

Developments such as “GamerGate” point in that direction. They also point to the best countermeasure available to us: laughter.

Laugh at the “social justice warriors.” Exclude them from your gatherings. Ostracize them so completely that they have no one to rant and rave to but one another. Conserve and propagate the fun in gaming. Make it profitable to produce highly involving, fun-filled games utterly devoid of any political, economic, or sociological message. Then play them, independently or in groups, and hold them out to the unaware as among the under-appreciated fruits of freedom and capitalism. Just because they hate fun doesn’t mean we have to put down our toys.

I’ll leave it to others to draw the parallel between gaming and the independent-writers movement.

Before we launch into today’s tirade, please read Dystopic’s latest opus at The Declination. The snippet that inspired me is at the very beginning:

There is a certain irony in the fact that Progressives, with their White privilege narrative, are too deeply rooted in European history to notice that other cultures are fundamentally unlike them. So when China tells them that human rights are a thing, and they are working on the problem, the Left blindly believes them. They do not understand the nature of Asian culture and persist in seeing it from a Western perspective.

The alpha male of the world order, the US, is neither willing nor capable of defending the steering system. It has ceased being the indispensable nation. The streak of idealism has disappeared, forcing the US to fall back on raw power despite the talk about soft power. Moral authority has slipped away, no longer available to support and substantiate US policies and interventions. [From this piece — FWP]

Terminology is important here. The author carefully made use of the term “alpha male,” a code word on the Left that signals a universal derision. Your official Two-minutes Hate is now required. For them, this is a seminal moment. In their minds, the great Evil, the sinister demon, the focus of all their efforts, is finally beginning to topple from its golden throne. They have exposed the war mongering beast.

“Alpha male” a pejorative? Yes, indeed it is…on the Left. Did you think the anti-masculinity stance of the gender-war feminists was irrelevant to the greater whole? Quite the opposite: it’s at the heart of the Leftist philosophy, insofar as they have one.

Masculinity in this context has nothing to do with sex. It’s entirely about the virtues traditionally associated with the well-bred, well-reared Western man.In the classical era, masculinity was deemed inseparable from the Stoic Virtues:

Borrowing from the Cynics, the foundation of Stoic ethics is that good lies in the state of the soul itself; in wisdom and self-control. Stoic ethics stressed the rule: “Follow where reason leads.” One must therefore strive to be free of the passions, bearing in mind that the ancient meaning of ‘passion’ was “anguish” or “suffering”,[20] that is, “passively” reacting to external events—somewhat different from the modern use of the word. A distinction was made between pathos (plural pathe) which is normally translated as passion, propathos or instinctive reaction (e.g., turning pale and trembling when confronted by physical danger) and eupathos, which is the mark of the Stoic sage (sophos). The eupatheia are feelings that result from correct judgment in the same way as passions result from incorrect judgment.

The idea was to be free of suffering through apatheia or peace of mind (literally, ‘without passion’),[21] where peace of mind was understood in the ancient sense—being objective or having “clear judgment” and the maintenance of equanimity in the face of life’s highs and lows.

For the Stoics, ‘reason’ meant not only using logic, but also understanding the processes of nature—the logos, or universal reason, inherent in all things. Living according to reason and virtue, they held, is to live in harmony with the divine order of the universe, in recognition of the common reason and essential value of all people. The four cardinal virtues of the Stoic philosophy are wisdom (Sophia), courage (Andreia), justice (Dikaiosyne), and temperance (Sophrosyne), a classification derived from the teachings of Plato.

Following Socrates, the Stoics held that unhappiness and evil are the results of human ignorance of the reason in nature. If someone is unkind, it is because they are unaware of their own universal reason, which leads to the conclusion of kindness. The solution to evil and unhappiness then, is the practice of Stoic philosophy—to examine one’s own judgments and behavior and determine where they diverge from the universal reason of nature.

If you’ve ever wondered about the origin of the “cardinal” virtues, there it is. Wisdom (alternately, prudence), courage (alternately, fortitude), justice, and temperance are just as essential to the well-bred, well-reared man today as they were to the classical Greeks.

In this connection, ponder this compact expression of Aristotle’s approach to happiness:

1. Happiness – that which we seek as an end in itself and for no other reason – is the consequence of a life well lived.
2. To live well requires the cultivation and consistent practice of the Stoic virtues.
3. We acquire the virtues by practicing them – i.e., by acting virtuously in advance of internalizing them.
4. Therefore, happiness – what we all seek – depends upon the practice of the Stoic virtues.

Gentle Reader, it could not be made any simpler.

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If you accept the above, it would follow that masculinity as the Stoics understood it is essential to happiness. (That the Stoics were less concerned with the feminine virtues need not trouble us here.) If a society’s men are adequately masculine – i.e., if they cultivate and practice the Stoic virtues – that society will have a good chance of being a happy one. Inversely, if a society’s men are notably unmasculine, that society will be mired in misery. It’s probably at the edge of destruction.

A happy society need not consist entirely of unvaryingly happy men. Every man will know setbacks, disappointments, and suffering at various times in his life. But a happy enveloping society will incorporate the attitudes, institutions, and mechanisms by which he can survive, persevere, and ultimately prevail over his troubles, with or without assistance. Note also that the assistance of others in one’s times of troubles is far more likely in a society that celebrates the Stoic virtues.

I argued in the previous essay that Leftists are hostile to the concepts of fun and play. That follows from their “The personal is the political” attitude toward all of human affairs. Fun and play are inherently personal experiences. They cannot be collectivized; they can only be sought by individuals, each to his own. Thus, the Left resents those quintessential manifestations of happiness: if you’re having fun, you’re insufficiently engaged in a Left-approved Cause.

I begin to sense that everything that conduces to happiness will countervail Leftist thought and goals. Nor am I surprised by that.

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To sum up: the Stoic conception of masculinity is a better approach to the concept than the simplistic contemporary idea of the masculine as purely aggressive. The famous maxim from John Bernard Books in The Shootist:

I won’t be wronged. I won’t be insulted. I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.

…captures Stoic masculinity better than any equally concise formulation, both in what it asserts and what it omits. There’s a reason for the enduring popularity of Western adventures such as that one; their heroes inspire us to think of what we could be.

To recover what we have lost, traditional Western masculinity, depending upon the Stoic virtues and their implications, must be conserved and perpetuated. To conserve it, we must defend it; to perpetuate it, we must celebrate it and the examples of it, and pass it on to our successor generations. The passivity and acceptance of subjugation characteristic of most Eastern cultures, which the Left would have us emulate, cannot stand against it.

More anon.

Brace yourself, Gentle Reader. It’s a day for fundamentals and fundamental questions:

Who owns the economy — if you have any idea what that is?
Who owns the ground beneath your feet?
Who owns your car, or your phone?
Who owns the law?
Who owns you?

Have you been asked those questions anywhere else lately? Have you asked them of yourself? Or are you baffled as to why longtime opinion-spouter and widely celebrated pompous ass Fran Porretto has called them “fundamental?”

In two of the four cases above, the typical respondent will be quick to answer. In the other two, he’s likely to want to ponder the matter, perhaps even doubting whether the question itself “makes sense.” But many will go zero for four, at least under an empirical treatment of the matter.

Beneath those four questions lies one that’s more basic still:

What does it mean to own something…or someone?

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If you’re under thirty years old, there are certain names familiar to us older farts that you probably never heard in school. One of those, perhaps the most important of them, is John Locke.

Locke, a seventeenth century physician who also put his prodigious intelligence to moral and political philosophy, was the first of the Enlightenment thinkers to give serious consideration to the concept of property, specifically property in material things. His Two Treatises of Government, coupled to Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, are the cornerstones of the ideals expressed in the greatest two hundred words of prose ever penned:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

It is with infinite sadness that I note that any under-thirties in the audience might never have been presented with that in school, either.

Locke concerned himself with how a material thing becomes property, and arrived at a thesis based on the investment of human labor in the thing to be owned. The essence of his thesis can be captured in a simple diagram:

Unowned items reside conceptually in the common, from which they can be made property by any moral agent by homesteading: the investment in the item of enough labor to “enclose it from the common.” (Locke used the example of gathering berries from a wild bush as his illustration of this operation.) Inversely, an owned item can revert to unowned if its owner neglects it sufficiently that it can no longer be distinguished from the common. (For this operation, I like the example of leaving your Chevy on the side of the Cross Bronx Expressway with the keys in the ignition.) Owned items can pass from owner to owner through trade, a voluntary process in which the current owner surrenders his title to a new one for some consideration.

Locke deemed the attachments conferred by these processes to belong to the category of natural rights: morally ironclad associations that arise from the nature of Man and the laws of the universe in which we live. By giving property a moral character, Locke invalidated Smith’s acquisition of (or interference with) Jones’s property by force or fraud: the diametrical opposite of voluntary exchange. Force and fraud are the inverse of rights; no right can be premised upon them without destroying the very concept of rights.

All of economics, from Adam Smith onward, is premised on the Lockean conceptions of property and natural rights. And there are those two hundred words I quoted above, as well.

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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:

Men must be free
Because nothing else can be.

“Free” in the above context has two quite distinct meanings: one when applied to men’s property, and one when applied to men themselves. In the former case, “free” means “without cost.” But even an isolated Robinson Crusoe type, alone on his island, cannot properly regard any of the bounties of the island as “free” in that sense, for he must go to the effort of gathering them at the very least. In the latter case, “free” means “not subject to external coercion or constraint:” the political meaning of freedom. Both senses of the word are bound to the understanding of property and property rights, which brings us back to the questions at the beginning of this tirade:

Who owns the economy — if you have any idea what that is?
Who owns the ground beneath your feet?
Who owns your car, or your phone?
Who owns the law?
Who owns you?

If we apply the Lockean standard to these questions, we get fairly simple answers easily defended from first principles. However, in at least three of those five cases, governments habitually act as if they disagree — and they back up their positions with guns.

Not one square inch of land surface in these United States is immune from property taxes: literally, a rent you must pay to occupy the plot upon which you live. Fail to pay that rent and you’ll be involuntarily ejected from your home, quite possibly at gunpoint. So who owns the ground on which you stand?

Under the contractarian basis on which the Constitution and all the lesser state and county charters are premised, the law, whatever it may be, is the joint property of the American people; though we formulate it through representatives, its implementation and its protections are uniform, as the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to emphasize. More, any citizen has as much law enforcement power as any other, badges and municipal salaries notwithstanding. So why is it that police are deemed to exercise command authority over private persons, such that for the latter to “disobey” the former constitutes a cause for arrest?

One comes to self-ownership by a process of “self-homesteading:” the acquisition of learning and capability that results in a self-supporting adult. More, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States supposedly put a permanent end to slavery and involuntary servitude: i.e., the ownership of persons by other persons or institutions. So why do we have a conscription law, which requires all young men to register with the Selective Service system when they turn eighteen?

Think it over.

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The essential difference between a free society and other sorts is that in a free society, the individual possesses rights against the State. Those rights are Lockean property rights: to oneself, to one’s freedom of action, and to one’s honestly acquired property. Given that force, the defining characteristic of the State, is the exact opposite of rights, there can never be a right of any description that’s premised upon forcible coercion or constraint (i.e., intimidation through the threat of forcible punishment).

How does that comport with all the incredibly sloppy “rights talk” afloat in our national discourse:

• “Right” to marry.
• “Right” to health care.
• “Right” to an education.
• “Right” to free contraception.
• “Right” to be supported by the State.

…and so on?

Isn’t it time we started whacking “rights-mongers” across the chops with a wet mackerel for their demonstrable abuse of the most important conception in all of human thought?

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This morning’s rant was triggered by this piece from the invaluable David De Gerolamo:

Another clash between protesters and police lit up Ferguson, Mo., on Wednesday night, with police shooting tear gas into crowds and briefly arresting two journalists.

Reporters Ryan J. Reilly of The Huffington Post and Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post were briefly arrested while covering the protests after police entered a McDonald’s where the two were working. Reilly tweeted his arrest as several reports emerged that police on the scene were telling TV crews to leave.…

“Oh, God,” Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson said when told of the arrests by the Los Angeles Times. “I told them to release them,” Jackson said of the two reporters. His department was in command.

The enveloping context of the arrests was Ferguson police using SWAT tactics to empty a peaceable restaurant, in which the aforementioned reporters were eating and working. By what right did the police assert an owner’s rights over someone else’s property? By what right did they command the immediate obedience of private citizens engaged in wholly legitimate, wholly peaceful activities? Given the context, had the reporters resisted arrest, they might well have been shot down on the instant. By what right would the Ferguson police have deprived those men of their most fundamental properties: their lives?

That sort of conduct by armed agents of the State is characteristic of war zones: places where no rights are recognized, where the preponderance of force is the one and only standard of ownership, where “you’re either one of us or the enemy.” Is Ferguson, Missouri at war? If so, who are the combatants? What uniforms do they wear, if any?

Have the governments of these United States — some 88,000 in number — gone to war against the nation’s citizens? Was it declared at some point, published in two-point type in some obscure periodical like the pro forma announcement of a zoning board meeting to which the public would be unwelcome, such that we were intended to miss it?

Answer those questions for yourself. If you find the answers disagreeable, you might want to ponder which side you’re on.

Who owns you?

From The Analects of Confucius:

Zi-lu said, “The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you, in order with you to administer the government. What will you consider the first thing to be done?”

The Master replied, “What is necessary to rectify names.”

“So! indeed!” said Zi-lu. “You are wide of the mark! Why must there be such rectification?”

The Master said, “How uncultivated you are, Yu! A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve.

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.

If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.

When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish.

When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded.

When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot.

Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately.

What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.”

Consider also what this more recent commentator had to say:

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end….Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

We know ourselves — our species, that is — very well. As humans have been around for a long time now, such that human nature has become thoroughly familiar to us, seldom do we learn anything genuinely new about it. Nevertheless from time to time some atavistic genius, a Confucius or an Orwell, must remind us about some part of it that’s apparently slipped our minds.

We think in symbols — words. He who wishes to enlist your mental resources in the effort to confuse you will endeavor to cloud your understanding of the words by which you represent important concepts. By implication, it is vitally important to all serious discourse that we hold fast to the accurate, publicly agreed upon meanings of words.

Some words can be subtle in application. There’s a good example in the paragraph above. Look for it. If you think you’ve found it, call it out in the comments. For a change, I’ll participate there myself.

In the political realm, we frequently employ labels as shorthand for enveloping political postures. Various persons then associate those labels with bundles of policy positions, and perhaps also with particular organizations that purport to represent them. That’s where trouble sets in.

To be truly useful, a word must have an exact meaning. It cannot have more than one without becoming dangerous to one’s thought processes. What recent political discourse has done to the critical labels has made them extremely dangerous to our thinking, and to the future of our already endangered Republic.

First consider liberal, a word whose original, exact meaning has been severed from it for practical purposes. Have a gander:

Liberal \Lib”er*al\, n. One who favors greater freedom in political or religious matters. [Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, 1913 edition]

Anyone who hasn’t spent the last fifty years in a coma will immediately see how far the word liberal has been carried from that meaning. And it has indeed been carried away; it didn’t migrate to its contemporary usage all by itself. The kidnapping of liberal was quite deliberate.

Similarly, we have conservative, whose original meaning has also been lost:

Conservative \Con*serv”a*tive\, n. One who desires to maintain existing institutions and customs. [Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, 1913 edition]

Contemporary American conservatives could hardly be accused of that with any justice. Most of then are as hostile to the existing state of things as Bakunin or Kropotkin. Yet they stubbornly clutch the label conservative to their breasts rather than use a more accurate one, perhaps out of a misplaced…conservatism.

The damage consequent to these distortions has been incalculable. It’s been inflicted upon us with malice aforethought. The profit has accrued entirely to the Left.

Confusion can only benefit him who seeks to prevent accurate perception and thought. The Left must confuse its targets for a simple reason: the Leftist agenda, to the extent that it’s persistent in character, is wholly at odds with human nature and the laws of reality. In practice it conduces to misery and destruction. No hyper-charismatic leader and no amount of tinkering can “make it work,” the representations of Leftist mouthpieces notwithstanding. Moreover, this could never be concealed from a person of ordinary rational capacity…if he were equipped with accurate symbols for the key components of the socio-economic-political tableau and were permitted to employ them in thought unobstructed by cant about “inequality,” “exploitation,” “racism,” “patriarchy,” “institutionalized bigotry,” and the like.

(I could go into one of my customary rants about the importance of distinguishing between the Left’s well-meaning fools and the power-lusters who make up its leadership, but that’s not germane to the larger point.)

Concerning another word of increasingly frequent misapplication, consider the usages in this essay:

Now, doubtlessly many of you will have been quicker on the uptake on this point, but here is how the average layperson (who even knows what libertarianism is) hears about libertarianism: fiscally conservative, socially liberal. Don’t tell me I’m the only one who’s heard that. Following the new Reason study on millennials, which found a profile somewhat matching that definition, there are tons of people concluding millennials are libertarians.

A quick pause for an interjection: Anyone who’s followed me this far, and who’s acquainted with libertarian thought to any extent, will be aware that “socially liberal” does not mean favorable to greater freedom! The author of the essay devotes a series of unsparing paragraphs to nailing “liberal” to the cross it now deserves. But here’s his conclusion:

What am I, therefore? I am fiscally conservative and socially… well, socially libertarian. I believe in reserving to the states and to the people those rights and duties not clearly associated with mediating interactions between states and representing the United States as a whole to the world. I believe that, wherever possible, the individuals closest to an issue or, at worst, the state in which groups of individuals closest to an issue reside, should be allowed to decide on social issues. As a lodestar in that discussion I believe the best solutions will be the ones that involve the least paperwork, the least government interference, and the least litigation, but I also believe that groups and citizens alike are happiest, and find the best solutions fastest, when they are allowed to do things which I consider stupid.

Stop right there. If we proceed from the exhortations of prominent contemporary conservatives, what does “fiscally conservative” mean to you, Gentle Reader? Does it mean restricting federal spending to those few areas that have been Constitutionally approved? Does it mean that the Treasury should honor only gold and silver as the valid monies of the land? Does it mean limiting taxation to funding only “the common defense and the general welfare of the United States?” Or does it mean rather “keeping a lid” on currency inflation, plus some modest reductions in federal spending, so the national debt might grow a little more slowly?

Constitutionalist libertarians — i.e., those closest to conservatives in their practical propositions — demand absolute adherence to the terms of the Constitution. They don’t settle for niggling slivers of budgetary reductions, or for “more moderate” currency growth. If Article I, Section 8 doesn’t authorize it, the constitutionalist libertarian will have no truck with it…but the overwhelming majority of contemporary conservatives, anxious to avoid looking “uncompassionate” or “overturning too many rice bowls,” will swallow just about everything Washington has done to us, with only the tiniest adjustments around the edges. For a contrast, consider this statement from an ardent, though fictional, constitutionalist:

“Walter Coleman has promulgated several executive orders, through which he’s conscripted an entire profession and seized control of two major American industries,” Sumner said. “The power to do such a thing is not granted to any branch of the federal government. Yet the president backed up his will with federal troops, who remain at the aerospace and electronics plants to this day. He claimed that Harry Truman’s seizure of the steel mills during the Korean War was adequate precedent, but an unconstitutional seizure of power can’t be justified by saying that it’s been done before.”

Perhaps the perversions of the word libertarian have not yet become important enough to register on most radars. I expect that they will…because over the past three decades conservatives have become ever more libertarian in their attitudes and approaches, and are resolved not to shed their accustomed label for fear of losing popular attention to a competing school of thought. (Also, the Left has heaped enormous quantities of slander upon libertarian for comparable reasons.)

What is necessary is to rectify names: to speak and write with exactitude, such that one’s statements will be armored against misuse. Unless this begins at once, the corruption of our language will progress — and it’s a “progressive” project, beyond all question — making clear, undistored, entirely defensible political statements will become ever more difficult, and ever more Americans will sink into passivity and despair.