Peter Schiff argues that the US government could never have had any complicity in 9-11, because, get this, it’s dumb, not evil. And only an “evil” government would kill thousands of its own people.

Well, we don’t believe anyone is all “evil,” although many of us do evil things, but, um, Peter….what d’you suppose the government is doing when it sends Americans to fight in wars?
Killing Americans, right?

Update (November 5, 2011)

For the record, I don’t believe the government “done it”, at least, not in the usual sense. I think a number of intelligence agencies and government groups (from the ISI to the CIA to Saudi intelligence to the Mossad) have had suspicious ties to 9-11.

I suspect the globalists had a hand in it, or, at least, had some advance knowledge of it, on which they never acted, because they knew they could leverage the fall-out to their advantage.

That’s as far as I’ll go now, from what I’ve read, but, if someone told me 9-11 was plotted out in detail, I wouldn’t call it at all improbable. I’d certainly not dismiss it out of hand. There are just too many bizarre coincidences and “accidentally on purposes” for me to do that. The government may well be incompetent, as Schiff says.  And I doubt it is diabolical, or, at least, no more than I can be… or you… But there are certainly agents and agencies in this government (and in many foreign governments) that are highly competent ….

Meanwhile, our government never did a good job of explaining any of what happened, relying instead on demonizing 9-11 critics as “troofers”, “nutters”, and “anti-American”.  Which is pretty suspicious just there.

To top it off,  there’s quite a bit of sophisticated disinformation about 9-11 on the web, courtesy of various intelligence agencies (Pentagon intelligence, CIA, Mossad, ISI, MI6, RAW ), some claiming there are no terrorists at all and others finding them everywhere they look, and yet others inserting misleading items into otherwise credible explanations.

In short, caveat lector. 9-11 research is a Barnum and Bailey world…..

Arundhati Roy, in an interview about Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement in India explains what’s wrong with the movement:

“Sagarika Ghose: But isn’t that its strength? It’s an inclusive agenda. Anti-corruption movement brings people in.

Arundhati Roy: It’s a meaningless thing when you have highly corrupt corporations funding an anti-corruption movement, what does this mean?

(Lila: Please note the similarity to the anti-corruption aspect of OccupyWallStreet. OWS appears to have multiple ties to George Soros. In any case, it is certainly supported by a whole slew of outfits in the media, the unions, and NGOs, whose agenda we don’t know yet).

And trying to set up an oligarchy which actually neatens the messy business of democracy and representative democracy however bad it is. Certainly it’s a comment on the fact that our country suffering from a failure of representative democracy, people don’t believe that their politicians really represent them anymore, there isn’t a single democratic institution that is accessible to ordinary people. So what you have is a solution which isn’t going to address the problem.

Sagarika Ghose: So a corporate funded movement which seeks to lessen the power of the democratic state and seeks to reduce the power of the democratic state?

Arundhati Roy: I would say that this bill would increase the possibilities of the penetration of international capital which has led to a huge crisis in the first place in this country.

Sagarika Ghose: Just on a different note, what do you think of the fast-unto-death? Many have criticised it as a ‘Brahamastra’ which shouldn’t be easily deployed in political agitations, Gandhi used it only as a last resort. What is your view of the hunger strike or the fast-unto-death?

Arundhati Roy: Look the whole world is full of people who are killing themselves, who are threatening to kill themselves in different ways. From a suicide bomber to the people who are immolating themselves on Telangana and all that. Frankly, I’m not one of those people who’s going to stand and give a lecture about the constitutionality of resistance because I’m not that person. For me it’s about what are you doing it for. That’s my real question – what are you doing it for? Who are you doing it for? And why are you doing it? Other than that I think I personally believe that there are things going on in this world that you really need to stand up and resist in whatever way you can. But I’m not interested in a fast-unto-death for the Jan Lokpal Bill frankly.

Sagarika Ghose: So what is your solution then. How would you fight corruption?

Arundhati Roy: Sagarika, I’m telling you that corruption is not my big issue right now. I’m not a reformist person who will tell you how to cleanse the Indian state. I’m going on and on in all the 10 years that I’ve written about nuclear powers, about nuclear bombs, about big dams, about this particular model of development, about displacement, about land acquisition, about mining, about privatisation, these are the things I want to talk about. I’m not the doctor to tell the Indian state how to improve itself.”

Fred Reed on the Internet as the last refuge of elitism:

“Odd: In one sense the internet is highly democratizing, giving any teenager in Tennessee resources greater than those of the Library of Congress. It does this equally for a Cambodian teenager in Battambang. A bright youngster can learn almost anything with a cheap computer and broadband: mathematics, literature, languages.

The net also allows a terribly needed aristocracy, by which I mean not a govermental arrangement but the community of those of discrimination. They will shortly amount to a secret society, perhaps with a distinctive hand-shake for mutual recognition. It could become dangerous to speak correct English. It would indicate Elitism. We live in a society in which elitism is thought far more criminal than mere pederasty or cannibalism.

“Elitism” of course means only the principle that the better is preferable to the worse, but society today, except in matters of football, believes the worse to be preferable to the better. (One does not readily imagine a quarterback being urged to lower his passing percentage so as not to wound the self-esteem of his colleagues.)

It is literally true that the better is suspect. If you correct a high-school teacher’s grammar, she will accuse you of stultifying creativity, of racism, of insensitiviy. If you reply that had you wanted your children brought up as baboons, you would have bought baboons in the first place, she will be offended.

Home-schooling, it seems to me, becomes a towering social responsibility. I have actually seen a teacher saying that parents should not let children learn to read before they reach school. You see, it would put them out of synch with the mammalian larvae that children are now made to be. Bright children not only face enstupiation and hideous boredom in schools taught by complacent imbeciles. No. They are also encouraged to believe that stupidity is a moral imperative.

Once they begin reading a few years ahead of their grade, which commonly is at once, school becomes an obstacle to advancement. This is especially true for the very bright. To putt a kid with an IQ of 150 in the same room with a barely literate affirmative-action hire clocking 85 is child abuse.

Essential, even crucial, to the preservation of civilization in the deepening gloom is a grim, intransigent determination not to apologize. You cannot cleanse the schools of teachers who barely speak English. The country is too far gone. But you needn’t be cowed into regarding cretins as other than cretins. In front of your kids especially, don’t be cowed. If your child in the second grade is readfing at the level of the sixth grade, she (I have daughters, which clouds my mind) she is superior. It is not that “she tests well,” with the subtle implication that testing well is some sort of trick, having nothing to do with intelligence, which doesn’t exist. She is smart, literate,

superior (oh, forbidden word).

She will have figured out the “smart” part anyway. You need only to let her know that smart is a good thing.

In an age of blinkered specializaton perhaps we should revive the idea of the Renaissance man. Today the phrase is quaint and almost condescending (though how do you condescend up?), arousing the mild admiration one has for a dancing dog. A time was when the cultivated could play an instrument, paint, knew something of mathematics and much of languages, traveled, could locate France, attended the opera and knew what they were attending. They wrote clearly and elegantly, this being a mark of civilization. I think of Benvenuto Cellini, born 1500, superb sculptor, professional musician, linguist, elegant writer, and good with a sword.

If there is any refuge, it is the internet. Let us make the most of it.”

“A man must be ready to obey another man’s will so long as his own will is not yet fully developed.”

Gurdjieff.

David Boaz (Cato Institute) reviews Avatar:

“Despite its magnificent 3-D special effects, it features a tired plot and merely serviceable dialogue.

But conservatives have focused on the ideas that the film embodies. In National Review, Frederica Mathewes-Green mocked its dreamy vision of “the apparently eternal conflict between gentle people with flowers in their hair and technology-crazed meanies.”

Ross Douthat in the New York Times called it an “apologia for pantheism.” John Podhoretz in the Weekly Standard complained that it asks “the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency.” Lots of conservatives complain that a movie about American soldiers invading another planet and killing people is an allegory about the Iraq war. And many agree with Bolivia’s socialist president that “Avatar” is anti-capitalist.

They all have a point. The film is a perfect souffle of left-wing attitudes.

But conservative critics are missing the conflict at the heart of the movie. It’s quite possible that Cameron missed it too.

The earthlings have come to Pandora to obtain unobtainium. In theory, it’s not a military mission, it’s just the RDA Corp. with a military bigger than most countries. The Na’vi call them the Sky People.

To get the unobtainium, RDA is willing to relocate the natives, who live on top of the richest deposit. But alas, that land is sacred to the Na’vi, who worship the goddess Eywa, so they’re not moving. When the visitors realize that, they move in with tanks, bulldozers and giant military robots, laying waste to a sacred tree and any Na’vi who don’t move fast enough.

Conservatives see this as anti-American, anti-military and anti-corporate or anti-capitalist. But they’re just reacting to the leftist ethos of the film.

They fail to see what’s really happening. People have traveled to Pandora to take something that belongs to the Na’vi: their land and the minerals under it. That’s a stark violation of property rights, the foundation of the free market and indeed of civilization.

Sure, the Na’vi — who, like all of the people in lefty dreams, are psychically linked to one another and to all living creatures — probably view the land as their collective property. At least for human beings, private property rights are a much better way to secure property and prosperity. Nevertheless, it’s pretty clear that the land belongs to the Na’vi, not the Sky People.

Conservatives rallied to the defense of Susette Kelo when the Pfizer Corp. and the city of New London, Conn., tried to take her land. She was unreasonable too, like the Na’vi: She wasn’t holding out for a better price; she just didn’t want to sell her house. As Jake tells his bosses, “They’re not going to give up their home.”

Comment:

I was checking out EPJ, where Bob Wenzel notes a list of libertarians which writes out Rothbard and Mises from the tradition and traces it from Adam Smith to David Boaz.

I have seen that coming for a long time. But while checking out the post, I came across this review by David Boaz of the Cato institute. It’s a review of the movie, Avatar, which is a kind of mish-mash of anti-globalization themes.  Boaz reads the movie as going to the heart of capitalism and property rights.

I’ll come back to Mises and Rothbard and the whole spat between Mises.org and the Beltarians (Beltway Libertarians, per Wenzel) in a bit, meanwhile, I thought this was a thoughtful piece and I’m posting it.  I wonder how Rothbard, always an interesting thinker, would have responded…..

Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, was arrested for photographing the arrest of another man who had been photographing the Wisconsin Assembly.

“”We ought to have a right to take a picture,” Matt Rothschild told the conservation warden escorting him Tuesday night for ticketing.

Wearing a sign taped to his shirt that spelled out the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and provisions in the state Constitution ensuring the right to free speech and assembly, Rothschild went to the Capitol prepared to be arrested. Like many of the others who filled nearly every seat in the Assembly gallery, Rothschild said he was fed up with the arrests in recent weeks of citizens who defied the Assembly ban on displaying signs, and shooting photos and video.

“I have just had enough personally and I can’t take it anymore,” Rothschild said Tuesday afternoon.”

Comment:

Matt Rothschild adds his name to other left-liberal activists who have been arrested at the OccupationWallStreet protests, including Cornel West (October 21st) and Naomi Wolf (October 17th), both big on the lecture circuit. Before that Canadian activist and writer, Naomi Klein, was arrested protesting a pipeline project, on Sept. 2. Both the ladies looked very nice in their photos, and I just wondered, a bit mischievously, whether Citizen Jane, when she has her mugshot flashed in the dailies, ever looks so good.

“Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn’t.  You cannot shirk this and be a man.  To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let man label you as they may.  If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country – hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

– Mark Twain, “Two Fragments from a Suppressed Book Called ‘Glances at History’ or ‘Outlines of History’ “

Update (Nov. 6)

The Daily Bell, in a comment on this post (in the comments section), suggests that there cannot be more than one motivation for those who pursue global government.  This is a serious mistake. “Causation,” in so far as one can trace it, and it’s always fraught with interpretative and methodological pitfalls, is usually multiple, not singular, because no one entity is involved in the action and not all share the same motivation.

ORIGINAL POST

Here are a few crucial mistakes I see repeated in the language of many libertarians.

These are mistakes that I think are consequential, not simply matters of opinion or differences in emphasis.

They not only do not advance an anti-globalist agenda, they actively help the globalists.

1. Capitalism is a jungle, not a zoo.

Lila: Capitalism is neither a jungle nor a zoo. It is more like an English garden or a game park or an estate, privately managed.

Consequence of error: Statists respond that libertarians believe in the law of the jungle (might makes right) and do not belong to the tradition of Adam Smith. They are simply cultists following some aberrant understanding of liberty and their libertarianism will only lead to fascism.

2. Zionism X Anti-Semitism

Lila:

Zionism/Judeo-Supremacism X Anti-Zionism

Philo-semitism X Anti-Semitism

Consequence of error: Anyone who uses the word Zionism is demonized as being against Jews individually. Critics of Zionism or Israel are thus depicted as racists and silenced. Since the only people condemning the

siphoning off of America’s wealth, military, and technology to the ultimate benefit of Zionists and Israel (not just through the relatively minor amount of aid, but through all sorts of subsidies and other programs) and since the only one railing against Israel’s dominance over policy-making and journalism here are anti-Zionists,  this effectively makes their criticism illegitimate and removes the only obstacle to the Zionists’ efforts.

3. Capitalism is responsible for what we have.

Lila: No. Some part of what we have is also the result of mercantilism and plunder. However, mercantilism and plunder are responsible for having bankrupted us as well. Frankly, we don’t “have” much of anything. We owe much more than we have.

Consequence of error: The status quo (crony/criminal capitalism) is the way it ought to be. Any change is anti-Capitalist. Anyone opposing the warfare state is actually anti-Capitalist

4. Everybody is greedy.

Lila: Everyone is not greedy. Everyone pursues what they want. Which is entirely different. One man may want things consonant with the highest reason and love. He therefore “wants” what is in the best interests of all parties to his actions, in as much as anyone can understand them. Another wants only in the sense of compulsion, since he is a slave to appetite, obsession and lusts. The former want is “angelic”, or in accord with “right reason”. The latter cannot be called a want, but is more in the nature of a mechanical response to external stimulus. It is “demonic”.

Consequence of error: By conflating all types of “wanting”, the defenders of capitalism appear as idiots to the common man, who correctly sees that ordinary people in the middle-way of life are not usually sociopathic, whereas a high proportion of people at the top of this society are indeed sociopaths and/or criminals.

5. “Do what you will and pay the piper” is the only ethics worthy of libertarians.

Lila: There is no such ethics in all traditional religion or in rational ethics, as far as I know. While some moral genius might indeed discover new “truths” about morality, there are few of those, and one would need to look at everything else they wrote and did to find out if their truths were indeed profound and new, or only old error. Moral truths are not like new technology in computers. They don’t wear out or age that fast.  Innovation and eye-appeal are not the criteria, and in fact are usually signs of something amiss.

The Gita says the “drink that is at first bitter is at last sweet.”  In sports, the truism is “no pain, no gain.”

False notions about morality and ethics make libertarianism look like the justification of amoral or unethical behavior.  They also legitimize the statists’ demands for more federal regulation or laws.

Libertarians claim that private institutions can produce the institutions and culture to reign in  bad behavior faster than laws.  If so, they should be the first to denounce criminal actions by corporations, rather than glorify any individual or business that is successful.

M.K.Gandhi:

No Cowardice

“I want both the Hindus and Mussalmans to cultivate the cool courage to die without killing. But if one has not that courage, I want him to cultivate the art of killing and being killed rather than, in a cowardly manner, flee from danger. For the latter, in spite of his flight, does commit mental himsa. He flees because he has not the courage to be killed in the act of killing. (YI, 20-10-1921, p335)

“My method of nonviolence can never lead to loss of strength, but it alone will make it possible, if the nation wills it, to offer disciplined and concerted violence in time of danger. (YI, 29-5-1924, p176)

“My creed of nonviolence is an extremely active force. It has no room for cowardice or even weakness. There is hope for a violent man to be some day non-violent, but there is none for a coward. I have, therefore, said more than once….that, if we do not know how to defend ourselves, our women and our places of worship by the force of suffering, i.e., nonviolence, we must, if we are men, be at least able to defend all these by fighting. (YI, 16-6-1927, p196)”

Business Insider has run an article claiming that Peter Schiff, and by extension, all libertarians who believe in freedom of association, are actually covert (and not so covert) racists. The claim is they want to avoid hiring minorities, and are using “libertarianism” as a cover for that.

Well, freedom of association is not a cover for anything.  It is a cardinal principle of liberty.  Peter Schiff can and should be able to hire whom he wants in his private business.

But while Peter might not be a racist, he is almost certainly a good German..that is to say, a good Zionist. Which, these days, is also a good American. And latterly even a good Indian.

Like most good Americans, most good Israelis, and even quite a few good Indians, he sees the Anglo-Israeli “lebensraum” as legitimate, justified, and extending to other people’s property.  Indeed, everywhere. Full spectrum lebensraum.

What is the sound of a property right, if it is bull-dozed away in the night?

Can you hear it? Can you defend it?

If you don’t, doesn’t that make you a good Zionist? And isn’t a good Zionist no different from a good German?

What were the Germans doing except “getting what they had been denied before” ? Room to live. Even if the room was already occupied. Even if it meant driving the occupants into the streets. Or killing them. Or robbing them.

What are the property rights of Palestinians? How many Muslim lives does it take to keep Christendom guilt-free of its own Judenhass?

And should the rest of us, whose consciences aren’t burdened by any such guilt, make sure that no future age will judge us guilty likewise