Responding to Criticism

[subscribe2]Art Deco writes:

Neither the 13th (abolition of slavery) nor the 15th Amendment (suffrage for freedmen) have proved problematic. It’s a few phrases in the 14th Amendment which are the problem, and mostly because of the intellectual and moral fraud abroad in the appellate judiciary and legal professoriate.

It’s fashionable to attribute all sorts of trouble to the 17th Amendment, but that complaint is nonsense. The effect of that amendment in the contemporary context is to alter the balance of skill sets in Congress. Absent the amendment, you would get more people adept at building relationships in state legislatures and fewer at running fund-raising and publicity campaigns. Sen. Dede Scozzafava would have her seat for life. Public policy would be little improved.

As for the 16th Amendment, the trouble is that legislature have discretion to determine the dimensions of the tax base, and that discretion is used to confer bon bons on clientele like the oil and real estate industry.

I will wager the schemes in the 25th Amendment will prove unworkable in a true crisis.

The 26th, 24th, and 23d Amendments consisted of some modest adjustments to the suffrage. Not sure why you’re hostile to that. I am not sure why the 19th Amendment (women’s suffrage) counts as a ‘silly fad’. The 20th Amendment was a housekeeping measure. Not sure why that bothers you either.

You want term limits, but the 22d amendment is a ‘silly fad’. You did not give much clear thought to this before you posted, I take it.

First off, my list of amendments and changes was never intended to be a legal brief. You start with a rounding up and quantifying abuses. A good way to do that is to contemplate the possible solutions to those abuses. The fact is, humans are the result of a long evolutionary process. Upon closer inspection, many of our “defects” have more utility than is obvious. His response, however, are a good opportunity to refine a few points.

First off, I think he misses the mischief contained in the 13th and 14th Amendments. The purpose of a constitution is to do three things. One is it puts hard limits on the resulting government. It does this by clearly listing the proper responsibilities of the state. Everything not listed is prohibited. To reinforce this last bit it clearly lists the areas where government is off-limits. The first two items in the Bill of Rights are good examples. Finally it establishes the organization of the new government. The composition of the parliaments and courts, for example.

The 13th Amendment does something different. It places limits on what citizens of the states can do by prohibiting a specific type of legal arrangement. This is never something we want to see from a national government in a country this size. Much of what ails us these days stems from this belief that the national government has a duty to boss around the people. Enshrining the concept as we do in the 13th Amendments is asking for trouble and I think we got it and are living with it.

As for the 14th, it is an example of not being able to see far enough down stream. The abuses stemming from this amendment are legion. More important, this eats away at the supporting structure of the Constitution. The organizing principle is to balance the power of the states against that of the national government. Once you make the national government superior, that relationship collapses. All of the good in this amendment can be accomplished by incorporating the privileges and immunities clause into the body of the constitution or as a separate amendment.

This leads me to the 17th Amendment. America is a big country with a lot of people. Evolution and simple observation tells us that will result in lots of natural diversity. The people of Alabama will have a different language and culture than the people of Oregon. Therefore, the natural governmental unit is the states. The people of Alabama, within the broad framework of the Constitution, should be free to organize their laws as their distinct culture dictates. The only way we can ensure that is to limit the national government, thus giving the people the freedom to organize their state and local government to their tastes.

A lesson learned the hard way is that ambitious men seek a national platform. By making the Senate the stronghold of the states, the ambitious men of Alabama and Oregon will have a national stage from which they can safeguard the interests of their states. That was the point of having the state legislatures pick the senators. The Senate was designed to be the brake on the people, who are represented in the House. The 17th Amendment turned the Senate into the national government’s bulwark against the states.

As to the amendments on suffrage, I think Aristophanes was right. Giving women the franchise was a terrible mistake. Putting that aside, the states should be in charge of figuring out who can vote. I think an allowance can be made for the House of Representatives. A clause to define the franchise for that office is necessary, but not very complicated. Any citizen over 25 should have the vote. Adulthood has been pushed back and it should be reflected in the law. If you want to make an exception for military people, that’s probably a good idea.

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Eating Right

I’m a healthy sort. I don’t go crazy about it, but I try to eat a balanced diet, exercise and so forth. As such, I keep track of my calories. The thing about calories counting is it does not work. Calories counts on food are estimates and no one really knows how accurate they are or even if they are close. McDonalds, for example, claims a Big Mac is 550 calories. I’m sure it is probably pretty close, given the swarm of scumbag lawyers constantly circling major corporations looking for a reason to sue. Still, you have no idea if it is true.

That’s why you should avoid eating junk food. As a treat on occasion, it is fine. Life is for living. The same is true of chains that laughably claim they are better than “junk food.” This story in Vox is a good example.

The ranges on menu items are so vast that, depending on what your order looks like, a burrito could have 350 or 970 calories – nearly a threefold difference. (Never mind that it is nearly impossible to order the lowest-calorie Chipotle burrito, which consists of a flour tortilla with beans.)

This is a problem that lots of fast food chains are confronting now that the health care law requires them to post calorie counts on their menus. At establishments where menu items are highly customizable, places like Chipotle or Dominos, coming up with accurate calorie counts is a vexingly difficult tax.

Chipotle has settled on providing consumers with a calorie range that is, well, quite large. And when consumers see that range, a new study in the Journal of Public Health Nutrition finds, they underestimate the calories in their own burrito by 21 percent.

For starters, Chipotle is just a sit down Taco Bell. Pretty much the same crap. Taco Bell is honest about what their doing, while Chipotle is not. Both sell highly processed food loaded with salt and fat. If you are trying to lose weight or you are on a special diet, STAY OUT OF CHIPOTLE!.

This is better than when eaters don’t have any calorie information at all. In that scenario, researchers found that eaters underestimated the calories in their burrito by a full third.

But there’s a small tweak that can make Chipotle’s calorie labels even more effective: adding examples of how many calories are in the burritos used as the end points of calorie range. This is what that looks like, spelled out (the calorie ranges Chipotle uses appears to have dropped slightly downward since this study was conducted and when I picked up a menu today).

There’s zero evidence that this will make any difference in the real world, other than drive up the price of food and give lawyers a new avenue to suck blood from the economy. It is the fundamental flaw of the totalitarian mind on constant display at places like Vox.

The Obamacare requirement to post calorie labels, however, favors the range approach. In regulations published in 2011, the Food and Drug Administration directed restaurants to publish a range from the lowest calorie version of an item to the highest. But it doesn’t say anything about including examples of what’s included at each end.

“Critics of calorie-count regulations are correct to point out that we cannot justify the costs of such requirements if the mandated information does not improve consumer understanding,” study co-authors Peter Ubel and Peggy Liu write at the Monkey Cage Blog. “The FDA should require restaurants to define the endpoints of calorie ranges. Consumers deserve comprehensible information about their food choices.”

Again, if you care about what you eat, you stay out of fast food joints. If you care about what other people eat, then you harass private business with these insane regulations. The little Eichmans that worship Ezra Klein think this is great, but that’s the nature of the totalitarian.

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When Millionaires Cry

Ever wonder what happens when millionaires get sad? Now you know. Well, this is what happens when really tall millionaires get their feelings hurt.

Los Angeles Clippers players staged a silent protest against owner Donald Sterling before Sunday’s playoff game, while coach Doc Rivers said he isn’t sure what he would have to hear from Sterling to make him want to return next season.

“Don’t know yet,” Rivers said when asked if there were things he needed to hear from Sterling after an audio tape surfaced of Sterling purportedly making racist remarks to his girlfriend V. Stiviano. “I’m just going to leave it at that.”

The Clippers gathered at center court before a 118-97 Game 4 loss in their first-round series against the Golden State Warriors and took off their Clippers warm-up shirts and left them there. They then warmed up wearing inside-out red shooting shirts that did not display the Clippers name or logo. During the game, players wore black arm or wrist bands and black socks.

The absurdity of this jumps from the page. This is the same league that jumped on the Zimmerman case in Florida without knowing any of the facts, other than a black guy was the alleged victim. On race alone they had all the players wear hoodies and make a big deal of it at games. Their reaction was purely based on race, thinking it was a black kid getting shot by a white guy. Even when the white turned out to be a NAM, they persisted in calling him white.

The players have a right to be offended. They have a right to speak their mind on the issue. This sort of childish melodrama is another matter. If they had refused to play then I’d have some respect for them. Giving up loads of money for a principle is admirable, even if you think the principle is not a big deal. Turning their jerseys inside out is what teenagers do when they are mad at the gym teacher.

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The Next Constitution

John Derbyshire’s latest Taki column is on amendments he would like to make to the Constitution. It’s a take off on the book written by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. Stevens would like to repeal the Second Amendment. John would like to add a bunch of things to address the abuses that bug him the most. I don’t think his list is intended to be taken seriously. It’s just a handy list of grievances to fill in a column. There’s no harm in it. The whole point of a site like Taki is to generate some conversation amongst those interested in topics banned by The Cult.

The “next constitution” is a topic I think about a lot. Not because I am plotting a revolution or expect one. We do seem to be heading for an end of cycle moment, but how that plays out is a mystery to me. Maybe we are headed to World War III. Who knows? Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.

I don’t know, but what comes next will be a response to what went wrong. That’s always the way it goes. The Constitution was a reflection of the Founders reading of recent history,  a few centuries or so, in Europe. Much of their concern was the abuses they knew first hand and that’s what they tried to address. Whoever is left after the great upheaval will do the same.

With that in mind, here’s my list:

1) Clean Up Past Mistakes: The first change is to eliminate the amendments 13 through 27, except 25, which seems sensible. The Civil War Amendments have resulted in so much abuse they are not repairable. The 16th Amendment is another area of abuse. The 17th has been a disaster, knocking the pins from under the balance of powers. The rest are just reflections of silly fads, for the most part. The basic Constitution is an excellent starting point for a Federal Republic, which has proven to be the form of government resulting in the most liberty and prosperity for the average citizen.

2) You Vote Where You Were Born: One of the great abuses in recent times has been people moving from one state that is dysfunctional to a well run state. Instead of learning from their new neighbors, the emigrants start voting for the same degenerates that destroyed their home state. This amendment is aimed at fixing that problem. If someone from Massachusetts moves to New Hampshire, they still vote in their home state. The children of that person, assuming they were born in the new state, will vote in the new state. This also solves the problem of foreigners moving here and then voting for authoritarians. I would also be amenable to a twenty year waiting period as well.

3) No Federal Debt: The systematic borrowing by the Federal government has led to a mountain of abuses. If taxes had to be raised to pay for government, we would have a lot less government. The laqst half century has seen the massive growth of the government at all levels fueled by debt. Government debt has also fueled the explosion of the financial sector and all of its abuses. Borrowing would only be permitted in times of war – declared wars against real countries. No more wars against concepts. The ban on debt would also extend to things like pensions. Any promise to pay beyond the term of the current Congress would be invalid.

4) All Income Taxed At 12%: The last century has seen Congress auctioning off tax breaks for campaign cash to the point where the tax code is unintelligible. Government needs to be financed and the only source of revenue will be a fixed levy on all income to individuals. No business taxes. No tariffs. Nothing but the 12% tax, which will apply to all income regardless of source. The tax is collected by the source, not the recipient. That way cheating is minimized. The benefit is it limits the size of the state to the size of the economy. More important, it removes a source of corruption that is at the heart of all forms of socialism.

5) Term Limits: All citizens will be limited to ten years of Federal checks. One of the great abuses today is this army of people living off the tax payer. The government needs employees, but it should not be a career. Putting a ten year cap clears out the vast army of loafers, but it also clears out the political class. They have to get jobs in the dreaded private sector. Most likely it shifts them to their state capitals, which is OK. I’d exempt the military and post office. In all likelihood th workaround would be a shift from a civilian workforce to contractors, but that’s OK. The point is to remove the government as an employer of first resort.

The language would be key, as the weasels that seek to live off the state are good at twisting the meaning of words. Inevitably, they would find new ways to abuse the system. No set of arrangements will outlast the endurance of the parasite class. Like the poor, they will always be with us. But, the Founders created a system that served us pretty well for 100 years. Lincoln drove a stake through it and subsequent generations finished it off, but it staggered on for another 75 years after Lincoln.

The Founders addressed what they knew. The French Revolution had yet to reveal the frightening new danger facing civilization. They can be excused for thinking the excesses of the French Revolution were temporary. The republic they created was designed to arrest the abuses of the past. They simply had no way of anticipating the tidal wave of sewage that was about to wash over Western Civilization. This virulent suicide cult we call Liberalism in America was unimaginable in the 18th century. The constitutions of the 21st century will have to deal with it.

National Bigot Association

In post-reality America, this will be the dominant story of 2014. Even the coming election will not get the same level of coverage. In fairness to the press, it probably should be the dominant story. After all, this will be the first time a billionaire member of The Cult will be stripped bare in public and sent off to the cultural equivalent of Siberia. All of our rich and tall black people are upset with him. Magic Johnson, a very rich and tall black person, is angry. LeeBong James, currently the most famous tall black guy in America, wants Sterling banished. The comically illiterate Stephen A. Smith wants the tall wealthy black employees of Sterling to boycott their next game.

If you are not publicly and passionately outraged by the evil Donald Sterling, you are a monster!

All joking aside, it says something about the state of the nation when the ramblings of a cuckolded old weirdo, apparently in some sort of spat with his paramour, make national news. As I’m fond of saying, race is all about piety with The Cult. It is how they get to tell one another how much they hate America and how much they really hate hate white people from the South. Hotbeds of racial piety like New England practically glow in the dark they are so white, while allegedly backward places like Georgia have large and growing black populations. In the Cult, they talk like MLK and live like the KKK.

There’s another piece to this. How in the world did TMZ get a recorded phone call? Obviously, Sterling did not send this to TMZ. California is an all-party consent state. In order to record a telephone conversation all parties must agree. Without consent, the recording is illegally retained and TMZ is aiding and abetting a criminal act. In a sane and rational society, the authorities will have arrested the reporter and his editor at this point. They have confessed to taking possession of an illegally obtained recording.

It seems to me that one of the reforms that will come downstream is tougher laws regarding communications and privacy. Sterling may be an old bigot, but he has a right to privacy. He made these statements with an expectation that they would remain between him and this cunt he apparently pays for sex. In a nation of laws, she and the TMZ people would be cooling their heels in the can right now. They would also be liable for all damages resulting from the public revelations. In my opinion, everyone at TMZ should be drug from their homes, torn to pieces and then fed to the dogs. There’s no place in civil society for these people. But, that’s just my opinion.

The other very strange thing is why in the world would someone with such disdain for blacks buy a basketball team? Basketball has been the game of black people for fifty years now. When Sterling bought the team, he had to know he was going to spend a lot of time around black people. His team president was black for many years. I get the sense that Sterling is a very weird man. Being a billionaire lets him get away with being weird to a point and we may reached that point.

Another entertaining aspect of this is how The Cult immediately moved to show he must be a “Republican” and a “Conservative.” Inside The Cult, there are many words for the undifferentiated other on the other side of the wall. There’s some drift over time. In my youth, “fascist” was the ubiquitous term for the bad guys. Today, “republican” just means people The Cult does not like. Since The Cult does not like racists, all of them must be “right-win Republican conservative of the most extreme right-wing kind.” As I’m fond of saying, they talk like MLK but live like the KKK. The great strongholds of The Cult are whiter than a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert in Reykjavik.

The coming weeks promise to be very entertaining.

The BBC’s Plan For America

Every society has its mythologies. The oldest in America is the foundation myth. That is, the country was founded by people looking for religious freedom. It is certainly true that many of the original settlers were religious fanatics, but the Constitution was written by rich guys who financed the Revolutionary War. It’s why the Constitution is mostly about protecting private property and commerce. The men running America in the 18th century were property holders and a merchants. For them, religious liberty was as much about taking religion off the table as any idealistic notions of liberty. But, we still teach kids in school about the Pilgrims, even making some of them black and Latino to be inclusive.

Another enduring myth in America is the people have a say in the running of the country. There’s little evidence to back this up, but it makes for a nice myth. It keeps the peace.  The proof of this is the last thirty or so years. If you go back to 1980, the Republicans have been the majority party for 16 years and the Democrats for 18 years. If the polls are correct, the GOP will tie the score here with the next election. At the end of Obama’s term, both parties will have split the White House evenly.

Over that period, taxes as a share of GDP have changed very little, a percentage or two one way or the other. What has changed is who pays how much. Middle class tax rates have remained fairly static, while lower income taxes have disappeared and rates at the top declined. The rich have been made subject to new taxes and have seen many of their shelters disappear so the net result is the tax burden on Americans has changed little. The spending has gone up every year, regardless of who is in charge.

The point being that regardless of the party in charge, the polices remain the same. The counter is that the people like this stasis, but that easily shot down. The people have never favored ObamaCare, yet it passed and will never be overturned. It is also why, despite widespread opposition across all demographics, amnesty will be passed this summer.

A bipartisan overhaul of immigration, considered dead in the water just a few weeks ago, is not only alive, according to the House Republican leading efforts to broker a deal — it’s gaining steam.

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., told CQ Roll Call that pro-rewrite calls earlier this week from two Illinois Republicans, Reps. Adam Kinzinger and Aaron Schock, recent comments from Speaker John A. Boehner, combined with a rash of immigration rallies and protests across the nation in recent days, are indications that momentum has shifted back to those hoping to implement an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws this year.

Diaz-Balart, a major player in ongoing efforts to produce a bill that could balance Republican demands for border security with Democratic calls for legal status for the undocumented, said a solution is closer than ever.

“I think we finally have the policy right,” he said in a phone interview. “I think we have figured out a way to secure, to have border and interior security, holding the administration accountable for the enforcement … forcing the administration to enforce the law whether they want to or not. And I think we figured out a way to deal with the folks that are here in a way that is fair — fair, by the way, to those in the legal system … who are doing everything legally, and also deals with the folks that are here in a way that is fair and reasonable. And adheres, strictly adheres, to the rule of law.

“So I think we finally have the policy right. And what we’re finding is more and more people out there as they’re seeing it, different aspects of the policy, are starting to say, ‘Hey, that is something that makes sense.’”

Diaz-Balart said he thinks they’re close to a deal that can pass both chambers.

“It is as close as we have ever been. It is still a big, big, heavy lift,” he said. “I think we’re going to get there.”

The Florida lawmaker’s optimism comes as the immigration overhaul, declared dead by pundits and politicians alike earlier this year, is back in the headlines. Boehner, speaking at a Rotary Club luncheon in Ohio, doubled down on his support for an overhaul and openly mocked those in the Republican Conference who have dismissed immigration proposals as “amnesty.”

The reason, of course, is two fold. One is the Cult likes new citizens from authoritarian hell holes like those in South America. These little brown people don’t mind working in the field and living in tin shacks. More important, they never question the big man in the big house on the hill. Those rowdy white people from Northern Europe make bad subjects so the Democrats, the political wing of the CML, favor open borders.

The GOP, on the other hand, just likes being bribed. Boehner is stuffing his pockets with money from the Billionaire Boys Club to push amnesty. This post from Steve Sailer makes clear who is against whom.  When all the rich people are for something, there’s no stopping it. They have no qualms about handing traitors like John Boehner their pieces of silver. To them, it is pocket change. For Boehner, it is an easy way to get rich. The mountain of evidence that it will destroy his political party will never overcome crass greed.

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Iceberg Slim

One of the things you learn as you travel around this world of ours is that people are not all the same. Way back in the olden thymes, our school teachers had just picked up Cultural Marxism and were preaching to us about how people everywhere were the same. I recall learning the word “ethnocentrism” in the fourth grade. We were about to learn about Japan and India and the teacher spent an hour telling us about how not to laugh at the weird things we were about to learn. That’s close to half a century now for our ruling fanatics to scream epithets against reality. Yet, reality is still here.

Race and culture are just stubborn things and will not yield to wishful thinking. Although I identify as African-American, my ancestors having left the dark continent 50,000 years ago, I am white. I’m very white. Other white people assume I am white and of the white culture. Black people make the same assumption. It is not that everyone is racist. It is that they have eyes and notice things like skin color. People also notice that, the occasional Oreo and Wigger notwithstanding, that skin color tracks closely with race and culture in America.

A good example of this is the film Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp. Until last night, I had never heard of the movie or knew much about the man. I am a fan of true crime so I am familiar with notorious criminals of all races. People find it odd that I can recall the names of obscure ghetto gangsters, but every man has his hobbies. Not only was I not very familiar with Mr. Slim, I had no idea he played such a big role in the culture of black America. Here’s the trailer:

Documentaries about people long after they are gone are usually full of lies.The director is not going to have a bunch of people on-screen saying they never heard of the subject of the documentary. Instead they find people willing to say they share the director’s passion for the subject. Still, according to Wiki, Slim’s books sold millions of copies in the 1970’s, exclusively to black readers. Yet, few white people have ever heard of him or hold “pimping” in the same regard as black Americans.

That last bit is an important takeaway. The Cult can rattle on about racism all they like, but people have eyes and they see things. Black people are covetous of their culture, black culture. They don’t want it thrown into the diversity blender. They want their heroes and antiheroes. Iceberg Slim is not an “American”  hero; he is a black hero.

It is why being authentically black looms so large over successful black entertainers. Snoop Dogg and Chris Rock live like the Clevers for goodness sakes. I’m more gangster than those two phonies, but they have to “keep it real” and pretend to be ghetto whenever the cameras are rolling.

That said, your culture is not getting very far if you insist on celebrating social pathologies as if they were cultural achievements. Much of American culture these days is exactly that, a celebration of the base and the crude. One television show after another is holding up the riff-raff and carny freaks as role models. Snoop Dogg got very rich pimping the nation’s youth out like whores. There are consequences to such things. For most of human history entertainers were treated as scum, pushed to the fringe of society. Today they are in charge, telling us about the greatness of a ghetto pimp.

 

 

 

Happy Lesbians

Today I stopped for a sandwich at the local bagel shop. It is a treat I have maybe one or twice a month. Usually there’s a pretty little blond at the counter, but she was hustling tables this morning. A new girl was handling takeout. I’m assuming she is a lesbian due to the lip ring, boys jeans, plain hair and sports bra. For whatever reason, lesbians like to try and hide their boobs. I’m sure there is more nuance to lesbian dress codes, but as a non-lesbian, I only notice the basics. The other thing that seems standard with lesbians is the sour look. They always look sad.

Are there happy lesbians? I’m reminded of this classic from Steve Sailer. Re-reading it, I get the sense unhappiness is woven throughout the lesbian lifestyle. It is, after all, a narrow subculture that has never enjoyed the popularity with elite culture  that we see with male homosexuality. Lesbians in popular culture are mostly depicted as hotties performing for men. The typical lesbian, butch and surly, is ignored by popular culture. I would imagine that makes the sub-culture of lesbianism more difficult. The overall exclusivity of the group probably explains some of the surliness as well as the strict dress code. When roughly 1-in-100 are a potential sex-partner, life can be quite lonely.

I also wonder if the biology is more the issue than social pressure. Homosexuals have much higher drug and alcohol abuse. They have very high suicide rates. Violence between homosexuals is also much higher than between heteros. Lesbians, according to crime figures, are twice as likely to be a victim of domestic violence as hetero women. That’s a staggering number. When you look at divorce rates, it’s rather clear that homosexuals should not bother with marriage. Their rates of divorce are astronomical. Lesbians are the least likely to remain “married.” All of this points to a population of uncommonly miserable people.

Answering The Dorm Stormers

I saw this linked over at National Review. The commentary at NRO is pretty much what you expect from people on the Right these days. There are are no greater defenders of Israel and American Jewry than American Conservatives. Even Israelis are not as enthusiastic for the Tribe as these people.

The strangeness of it is America Jews are mostly hostile to the Right in America. I think that speaks well of Conservative Inc. and those who look to them for guidance. It means their position is a philosophical one, not political. The Left loves only those who help the Cult. If Jews start voting the wrong way, Liberal Democrats begin sporting little mustaches (the women) and khaki shorts.

Reading the story, I’m a little unsure if their position is sensible.

“Dorm Storming” is a tactic used by anti-Israel activists at many campuses to slide mock eviction notices under student bedroom doors in the middle of the night, allegedly to let students know how Palestinians feel when served with eviction notices prior to demolition of their homes. The content of the flyers, including the frequency, number, and practice of such pre-demolition eviction notices is disputed, but that’s somewhat besides the point.

Students for Justice in Palestine frequently is the perpetrator of these dorm stormings, as happened at Northeastern University recently, resulting in SJP’s suspension.

The point of sliding political flyers under dorm doors, rather than handing them out on the street as students enter and exit, is to intimidate students in their most vulnerable place, their bedroom, and at their most vulnerable time, while they sleep. That is why many if not most universities ban the practice.

I’m not sure if it is intended to intimidate. Maybe it is. Maybe sometimes it is. Maybe it is also intended to draw attention to their cause. There’s a tradition in America of this sort of outlandish behavior for the purpose of drawing attention. It’s easy to take a casual view of this as a consequence, even though it is clear these Palestinians hate Jews and hate America.

Universities have a legitimate interest in protecting student privacy in their homes (dorms) and bedrooms (dorm rooms).

This is a strong argument. There’s a time and place for everything in an orderly society. Harassing people who have zero to do with any of this is exactly what the school should discourage. On the other hand, This is not a legal issue. This is a culture issue. Why in the world are we inviting this here?

Assuming the constitutional right to free speech applied to private college campuses as in public spaces, the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld ordinances protecting homeowners against unapproved intrusions.  Rowan v. U.S. Post Office Dept., 397 U.S. 728, 738 (1970)(“We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another…. That we are often ‘captives’ outside the sanctuary of the home and subject to objectionable speech and other sound does not mean we must be captives everywhere.”)

This is where it is time to change gears. There are no Muslim run countries where this sort of deliberation is possible. There are no Arab countries where this is possible. The concepts of free speech, peaceful protest and privacy are strictly Western concepts. More precisely, they are northern European concepts. If not for that collection of eccentrics on a barren island in the North Sea, liberal democracy would have remained a mystery to mankind. If the people called “Palestinians” got their way, we would all be dead, including the Jews.

The “dorm storming” is really much broader than just this college campus. By letting these savages into our lands, they are treating our country the same way they treat this college. These people have no interest in being Americans. They have no interest in the culture that allows for liberal democracy. The only reason they are here is to cause trouble for the West. The response  to macro-scale “dorm storming” should be mass deportation and a ban on all immigration from Muslim countries.

If this seems like an over reaction, consider this article from The Weekly Standard. Specifically, this passage in the body of the article:

Wilders has lived under heavy police protection for more than a decade. Credible threats have been made against him on many occasions, and plots broken up to take his life with bombs and guns. The spokesman for a group called Sharia4Holland called for giving “this dog of the Romans” the same treatment van Gogh got. More recently, hundreds of jihadists have left the Netherlands to fight in Syria, including one—“Khalid from Almere”—who can be seen on right-wing websites posing with heads he has separated from infidel bodies. (Wilders’s party is the top vote-getter in Almere.) All this immigration-related violence has changed the country from top to bottom. It was announced the week of Obama’s visit that van der Graaf will be released in May after serving 12 years of an 18-year term. The usual reaction among the Dutch has been incredulity that they once lived in a country that sentenced people so leniently.

What in the world possessed the Dutch to let these Muslim lunatics settle in their lands? What possible justification could there have been for such a brazen act of stupidity? Was anyone ever walking around Amsterdam saying, “This great city would be perfect if we added some dirty savages from the other side of the world. If we can find some that really hate us, that would be great!”

Of course not. The people never wanted any of this. It is their ruling elite who decided to invite a million Muslims to make war on the native population. Immigration is a means to break the back of the middle-class who operate as a natural check on the ruling class. If the Dutch had any sense, they would rise up and first hang every elected official, then turn on the collaborators, otherwise known as government employees. Once they took back control of their government, the next task should be the deportation of every Muslim and the leveling of every mosque.

A Systematic Assault on Order

[subscribe2]Inflection points in a culture are not always obvious when you are living through them. In the 1970’s the political culture changed in America, but not everyone was seeing it. Nixon, who relied on the same political tactics used by both parties through most of the 20th century found himself standing on shifting ground. Johnson and Kennedy, after all, played dirty tricks and used the power of their office to help their election chances. Kennedy beat Nixon because the Illinois Democratic machine rigged the election. Johnson got started by gaming local elections in Texas. Then all of a sudden the rules no longer applied to Nixon and he was hounded from office. The press was not going to merely be an observer of the battles. They were now part of the fight. Ever since it has been axiomatic that the press is liberal and has different rules for covering Republicans and Democrats.

In the 1990’s, the political culture changed again. The Republicans had caught up to the Democrats and were winning a lot of elections. The response from Democrats was public relations. The lesson they learned from Reagan was that a good presentation can change minds, even if the argument was flawed. Since they were convinced Reagan was a loon, the only explanation for his success was the presentation. The Clinton years gave us “spin”, which is just a nice word for baldfaced lying. An army of “spinners” were sent onto TV to tell one whopper after another, often violating the rules of decorum that had prevailed in public affairs broadcasting for decades. Just as important, the liberal press had to be aggressively partisan. It was no longer enough to be biased. Who, whom was all that mattered.

I think we will look back and see the Bush years as when it became OK to assault the basic institutions of democracy. In the Bush years, the need for vote reform became a hot topic on the Right. The reason is ballot stuffing operations kept turning up all over. The left was furiously trying to sign up illegal aliens to vote and the Right was furiously trying to pass laws to stop them. By the Obama years, nationwide voter fraud schemes like ACORN were in league with major Democratic financial operations like the SEIU. This story is just another example of how much abuse has crept back into the system as The Cult tries to get around the limits of public tolerance for their madness.

That’s just one type of abuse. You also have organizations busing around bums and Latinos to vote at multiple locations. In 2012, I saw a bus pull up at my polling place. It was full of Mexicans, not a one speaking English. A gal in a purple shirt gave them instructions in Spanish and they marched into the polling place. My bet is there were a lot of people voting from the grave. The Cult cross-checked the death certificates with the voter rolls and suddenly they have thousands of new votes wherever they need them. This is nothing new, of course. Liberal Democrats have been stuffing the ballot box since the 19th century. Today they have better data and better tools to do it. Still, the outright contempt for the idea of self-governance is what’s appalling.

When you look at the serial abuses from the Obama administration that the press shrugs at now, it is fair to say the ground has shifted once again. Instead of ritualized combat between citizens, who agree on the big issues, American politics is looking more like a gang fight. There are no rules, just what you can get away with. Whatever respect the ruling class had for the institutions of the republic is now gone. Anything goes. In an increasingly feudal society, the old feudal customs are making a comeback. It won’t be long before they are poisoning one another and burning down each other strongholds.