A new chapter

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Truth can be absolute

Many years ago I had, with a friend, an intense debate of which I wrote two posts (the nature of truth part #1 and part #2).
I would encourage you to read both, but here is a quick summary:

To some, no lives matter

“I smell a race war brewing”
This was a comment to a Black Pigeon Speaks video commenting on the Dallas events.
I do not want to get into the details of the numbers on black vs white crime and victimization or police brutality, as numbers on those subjects are widely available. Paul Joseph Watson made this video as a commentary on Black Lives Matter just hours before the shooting in Dallas and Stefan Molyneux had his comments  with impeccable sourcing of statistics just after.
Ben Shapiro made a short presentation on the subject last fall and made the same points in a debate around the same time.

The numbers they quote are as indisputable as they are in stark contrast with the Black Lives Matter rhetoric. The numbers are available to anybody. The question is how is it possible then that the media can still get away with the accusations of racism?
I can offer three complimentary theories.

• It’s a conspiracy akin to the European migrant crisis. It is manufactured to create strife, conflict and division. It is manufactured to put people in a mindset that is ready to accept more government, more loss of personal freedom in return for promise of security. Black Lives Matter is NOT a grass root organization. It was created with the help of MoveOn.org, a well known Soros front group. The same organization that is actively helping the European migrant invasion.
• It is dirty politics. It is election year when race baiting and racial conflict pays serious dividends to the Democratic party. Most politicians commenting on it used the opportunity to make matters worse.
• People actually buy into the propaganda. Why? Because it is the ‘nice’ thing to do. Most people do not know the numbers and don’t care. They do believe what they are told by the political class and the media. Blacks believe that white racism is the cause of their problems justifying in turn their own overt racism; while some whites believe that cultural suicide is the nice way to atone for their collective historical sins.

It does not really matter which of the above theories you would want to believe in. The likes of Soros profit from chaos, politicians gain more power but neither would be possible without the narcissism of the people who want to be nice.

There is a race war and it will not get any better because nobody wants to address the real causes. Obama wants to address “racial disparities in the criminal justice system” and the usual solution: gun control. Hillary wants to have federal control over all police forces. (She calls it ‘standards’)
Barak Obama came to power as the nations redeemer, the president who will make Martin Luther King’s dream the nation’s reality. While I do not have numbers to back the claim, I am convinced that racial tension is far worse today than it was when he assumed office.

The fact that there is clearly no evidence of systemic racism on the part of the police toward blacks does not mean that there is no racism in America.

The scope of responsibility

Responsibility exists in two planes: scope and reach. Direct and indirect responsibility.

Barak Obama and the democrats want the race war for political profit. George Soros is financing it because he is likely to expect to profit from it.
THEY ARE responsible for what happened in Dallas.
Black Lives Matter IS RESPONSIBLE for what happened. They used outright lies and distortions of facts to start a fire. Politicians and the media are fanning the flames.
They are also responsible. Anybody who bought into the sleazy narrative is responsible. Anybody who did not bother to check out the facts and provided support to the movement (in whatever form) is responsible.

Angela Merkel (again, with the help of a Soros front group) wants the migrant crisis to exist in Europe. Soros wants to profit from the chaos, Merkel wants to use it as the justification for the creation of an even tighter political union. The political classes and the media are thriving on conflict and they will do anything to prolong it and make it worse.
NONE OF THEM will accept any responsibility for the chaos they were instrumental in creating.

But the chain of responsibility does not end with them. While it is clear that the claims of BLM are false and there is no systemic racism in policing, there is an other, more insidious kind of racism with a broader set of responsibilities.

We live in democracies where representatives are voted into office by the people and the laws and rules they set are implemented by various bureaucracies. Who is responsible when something is screwed up? The incompetent bureaucrats, the sleazy opportunistic politicians or the ill-informed and selfish voters? Or should it be the scumbags putting idiotic ideas into their heads?
We can’t do much about Marx beyond maybe pissing on his grave, but we most definitely can do something about the army of Marxist professors in our universities. The ones who are still worshipping the ideas that led to the untimely death of ninety-four million people.
Anybody calling himself a communist or a Marxist today should be ready to take responsibility for the crimes of communism.

Who is ultimately responsible for ballooning national debts? The Keynesian economists (like Krugman) advocating for them, the politicians who implement them or the people voting them into office to do so?
Ideas have consequences and policy results are measurable. We are not responsible for the reality that is independent of us, but we are all responsible for our actions and the ideas in our heads that led us to them.

Black Lives Matter is a great example again.
Are we responsible for the problems of Black Americans? To what extent am I responsible for slavery?
I came from a different culture. I had no exposure to black subcultures ‘till I turned 28. Nobody who is born in the 20^th century is responsible for what happened in the 19^th. Historic and group retributions create more problems that they solve.
Neither are we (directly) responsible for the violence in black communities. 93% of black murder victims are victims of other black men. If black lives really mattered to the black community, they could start looking inside before looking for someone on the outside to blame.

We are, on the other hand, responsible for great many things. The way Charles Murray described this in Losing Ground:

“If an impartial observer from another country were shown the data on the black lower class from 1950 to 1980 but given no information about contemporaneous changes in society or public policy, that observer would infer that racial discrimination against the black poor increased drastically during the late 1960s and 1970s. No explanation except a surge in outright, virulent discrimination would as easily explain to a “blind” observer why things went so wrong.
Such an explanation is for practical purposes correct. Beginning in the last half of the 1960s, the black poor were subjected to new forms of racism with effects that outweighed the waning of the old forms of racism. Before the 1960s, we had a black underclass that was held down because blacks were systematically treated differently from whites, by whites. Now, we have a black underclass that is held down for the same generic reason because blacks are systematically treated differently from whites, by whites.”

Black are treated differently by socialist policies.

Reverse discrimination is racist.
Hiring and university admittance quotas are racist.
The politics of low expectations is racist.
Drug prohibition is racist.
Minimum wage laws are racist.
Welfare laws designed to create broken families are racist.
Public housing is racist.
Rent control is racist.
Differential and substandard policing is racist.
Public schools are racist.
Licensing laws are racist.
The welfare state is racist.
………and I could go on. If you are a supporter of any of these things, you are a de facto racist. (…..and yes, I would be happy to explain how on any of these claims.) Socialist policies are bad for everybody, but they are especially bad for the poor, the unskilled and the uneducated.

The race war we have to deal with today is a political war that started with Lyndon B. Johnson. Barak Obama and Black Lives Matter are just its latest chapter. It is not about black lives; it is about political power.

LBJ would be pleased. His plans are working the way he expected. His policies created a permanent underclass of dependence, a reliable democratic voting block. The democratic party of the USA has ALWAYS been the party of racism, the party of slavery, the KKK, segregation and discrimination.
Their support for BLM should make any decent person suspicious.
Ann Coulter wrote a book about the political aspects of this leftist racism, Charles Murray wrote about its devastating effects in “Losing Ground”.

Yes, there is racism in America and

If you vote Democrat, you are responsible for it.

…just be good

(The pun implied by the direction of the arrows is not intended)

I got into some extended discussions about my last post. It seems that I did not make myself clear.

F…… nice! Be good!

I actually had a sign on my wall before my civilizing influence made me take it down saying:

F u c k   N i c e ! Be good!

Optimism is the opium of the people

A friend sent me the following snarky question:

What is your “self” judged ratio of writing about negative versus positive things? I mean on the latter, when you were truly celebrating something amazingly wonderful and happy happening in our life.
I am sure that you have lot of blogs of this kind and I just did not see them. Send me some links. I would like to see your bright side too.

Freedom or participation?

Political participation is one of the most difficult questions for libertarians. Liberty is a great idea, but it is not easy to get to it from where we are now. Like (I hope) most libertarians, I do not believe in revolutions because they are always violent and never end up in freedom.

Attawapiskat kulturni dom

Following the latest wave of teenage suicides in a remote reserve close to James Bay, the government  of Canada was quick to announce its solution to the problem: it will build a Youth Centre to help the moral of the suicidal youth on the reserve.

The future of the past

I was walking around in the picturesque town of Lysa nad Labem, my companion reminiscing about the way it was when she went to elementary school there under the communists. The stores that are still the same, the things that are new and the bus-stop that moved. In a small side street, we passed a building with an open window. There were school children inside rehearsing some cheerful musical.

The failure of fuzzy opining

The following item was part of my daily dose of the Economist this Tuesday the 7^th of June:

Class action: China’s university entrance

The 9.4m teenagers taking the two-day exam which starts today have been cramming for years. The tests, known as the gaokao, will (they believe) determine their entire future. Meritocratic exams have been revered in China since imperial times, when any man could sit them to enter the civil service. For centuries they enabled the poor but talented to rise to high office. The gaokao is intended similarly to be a great leveller. But China’s education system is becoming more unfair. The number of university students has increased nearly sevenfold since 1998, but the expanded intake has mostly been from cities, whereas 90% of rural youths leave school at 15 or younger. As a result the country is increasingly divided between those with degrees and those who never even make it to senior high school. Give China’s rulers a failing grade on that test.