Occidentalism

I tried to post this on one of the libertarian Australian sites on facebook, but hit the 450 character limit.

Australian politicians just got a pay rise. There will be much made of it in the media.

To my mind, pay rises and the like for politicians is not the problem. The media likes to focus on politician pay rises because they can then ignore massive spending on mostly worthless government programs, and the resulting oppressive taxation and inflation. Politician pay rises are a mere drop in the ocean. Unfortunately here in Australia, there are very few people that are libertarian in political orientation.

Most Australians are statists, and the first thing most Australians ask is, “what is the government going to do about it?”. We have laws for just about everything, including about what you are allowed to say. Most Australians are fine with this. They are only bothered by such things when it directly and negatively affects them. Australians are blase when it happens to other Australians. We have very little libertarian impulse in this country.

Not only are libertarian issues not dealt with by the ruling duopoly parties, there is no grass roots effort to introduce these issues into political discourse. As an Australian, I can say that the vast majority of Australians are closed minded narrow thinkers. Not only will libertarian issues not be introduced into Australian law and society, but Australians will not even discuss such issues. Ironically, libertarians get labeled as fascist or even racist, even though libertarianism is the exact opposite of that.

What chance do Australian libertarians have of educating the extremely ignorant, prejudiced, and statist Australian electorate? I would argue that except for a few converts (usually people that were open minded and intelligent enough to understand anyway), libertarianism has no chance in Australia as long as nominal “democracy” is the form of government. Democracy in Australia is merely a race in which the people vote away the rights of others, then insist they had the right to do it based on an illusory “will of the people”. Australian democracy is the system of the looters, takers, rights deniers, and second handers (the last one is an Ayn Rand reference – read The Fountainhead). Whoever participates in the so-called democratic system implicitly accepts by their vote that they will accept the result of the vote, even if they do not like the result.

The only option for a libertarian is to drop out of the democratic system. A libertarian is against the system, so no libertarian should implicitly support it by participating in it. When someone says that you don’t have a right to complain because you didn’t vote, you reply it is that kind of thinking that creates the need to dismantle the system. To those that say that such thinking lowers the libertarian vote, I would point out that everyone in this country is required to vote, and there is not even one remotely libertarian politician in the federal government (there may be a case for local government voting as smaller groups of people can effect outcomes, and local governments are fairly responsive to local communities. Even so, it shouldn’t be required). A libertarian in Australia loses nothing by not voting, and gains moral and ideological standing to oppose the system.

A libertarian cannot accept democracy, at least in it’s Australian incarnation, because Australian democracy allows the removal of rights, excessive taxation, violation of civil liberties, regulation of speech and publishing, and so on. Perhaps a libertarian could support a form of democracy in which such things were completely and irreversibly forbidden, no matter what the “will of the people” decides. As long as someone can vote away the rights and plunder other Australians in Australian democracy, then democracy is unacceptable to libertarians.

Libertarians only accept liberty (and liberty is freedom). Democracy is not a proxy for freedom, it is a Trojan horse than has been depriving Australians of liberty for years on end.

This is quite interesting. Here is the synopsis.

A new class of global actors is playing an increasingly important role in globalization: smugglers, warlords, guerrillas, terrorists, gangs, and bandits of all stripes. Since the end of the Cold War, the global illicit economy has consistently grown at twice the rate of the licit global economy. Increasingly, illicit actors will represent not just an economic but a political force. As globalization hollows out traditional nation-states, what will fill the power vacuum in slums and hinterlands will be informal non-state governance structures. These zones will be globally connected, effectively run by local gangs, religious leaders, or quasi-tribal organizations – organizations that will govern without aspiring to statehood.

Anyone interested in the underground of the global economy should watch this.

The Japanese opposition party has one a landslide victory with more than 300 seats in the 480 seat lower house.

The former governing party, the LDP, needed this disastrous loss. Hopefully the loss will return them to principle and the new government will be able to break entrenched special interests.

I should try this technique out to make a youtube video. I wonder how they did it.

Ampontan writes here about the Chinese removing fake atrocity photos from one of their museums in Nanjing.

I wrote about these kinds of fake photos, here, here and here, way back in 2005. The last one is specifically mentioned in the article as being removed.

The Japanese empire of old is dead and buried, as Ampontan says. I think that is an important fact to consider when witnessing the rage that Japan seems to evoke in some circles.

Ron Paul is a long shot candidate that is having his chances improve all the time. It is not hard to see that a lot of the media pundits would like to see him out of the race because of the opinions he has been expressing, like his opposition to the Iraq War and opposition to corporate welfare. Usually Ron Paul is ignored by the main stream media, and that forces his supporters to come up with gimmicks to force the media to pay attention, like breaking the US record for political donations in a single day – that was on December 16th.

That being true, Ron Paul seems to have no trouble attracting all kinds of negative media attention. Much was made by the media about Ron Paul supporters being “spammers” when he was winning all kinds of online polls, a smear that has lost its power with the proof of his fund raising from small, individual donors. Likewise there was an attempt to link Ron Paul to the 9/11 truth movement, with claims that he “met” with 9/11 truthers, when in fact they simply turned up to a place where he was campaigning and asked him a question. There was even a hilariously clumsy hit piece on FOX news about it.

Much jesting was also made about the support of a Nevada brothel owners support of Ron Paul, and there was hand wringing over a $500 donation by a neo-nazi website owner.

The MSM is stirring up a storm in a tea cup because Ron Paul did not return the donation given by the neo-nazi website owner. I haven’t heard of any groups demanding that the brothel owners donation be returned, although I suppose there are groups out there demanding that too. What is important to understand is that Ron Paul is a libertarian, but not a social libertarian. That means he supports freedom to do things even if he doesn’t approve of how that freedom is used.

The donation by the brothel owner from Nevada and neo-nazi website owner makes a good comparison. Ron Paul does not approve of brothels but does not think the federal government should have anything to do with it. Therefore the brothel owner supports him. The neo-nazi website owner is against the Iraq War and against giving amnesty to illegal immigrants. Therefore he is supporting Ron Paul, who is the only Republican candidate to hold both of those positions. Even the neo-nazi website owner concedes that Ron Paul is not supporting their positions.

Black said he supports Paul’s stance on ending the war in Iraq, securing America’s borders and his opposition to amnesty for illegal immigrants.

“We know that he’s not a white nationalist. He says he isn’t and we believe him, but on the issues, there’s only one choice,” Black said Wednesday.

The neo-nazi website owner supports Ron Paul not because Ron Paul is a crypto-racist, but out of mainstream interests that are of concern to a lot of people. There is only so far one can take guilt by association but I suppose one could also claim that anyone that wants an end to both the Iraq War and illegal immigration are neo-nazis because it happens to be the same position of a neo-nazi website owner.

So why not just return the donation, you ask? Well, as Ron Paul says, the money has probably already been spent and any money sent back would be out of another persons donation. Isn’t it strange that people are turning around and demanding that Ron Paul should make a donation to a neo-nazi website owner? Nonetheless, Ron Paul is one of the leading proponents of civil rights in congress and if anything could turn ‘bad money’ into ‘good money’, it is a donation to the Ron Paul campaign. Ron Paul answers questions in detail about that particular donation on Neil Cavuto’s show..

Returning the money will not end this ‘problem’ for Ron Paul, it will only cause a snowball effect, as the media manages to dig up more people that have fringe ideas, at which point Ron Paul’s campaign will be more about vetting the irrelevant ideas of people that happen to support his campaign than running for the Presidency. It is Ron Paul’s ideas that will be implemented if he is to become President, not the ideas of the MSM caricature of his supporters.

All of this is consistent with his belief system. He endorses freedom but does not endorse what people do with it. He will take your money, even money from brothel owners, neo-nazi website owners, and also the far more numerous regular people, but they won’t get anything back for it from him except what he has explicitly promised to do if he is elected president. Ron Paul would even take money from the neo-con war criminal Military Torture Complex if they were foolish enough to send him money. Now that would be real dirty money! Money that every single Republican candidate can count on – except Ron Paul.

Perhaps support of brothel owners or neo-nazi website owners might be a scary thing if they were supporters of candidates that are already proven whores of special interests like Big Pharma and the Military Industrial Complex. People might then suspect a relationship between the candidate and the objectionable donors. The candidates that are rejecting certain donors are just trying to prove that they are honest politicians in the sense once a special interest buys them, they stay bought. Ron Paul on the other hand cannot be bought and has proven that time and time again during his ten terms in congress. Lobbyists do not even bother to darken his congressional door.

In the debates Ron Paul talked about important issues that are being ignored by the other Republican candidates, like the plunging dollar, the Iraq War, and special interests, which makes the other mercenary candidates nervous. As the only candidate not on the payroll, Ron Paul is in a unique position to criticise the source of their endless millions for campaigning, something the other candidates cannot do because they often have the same donors, which is a great insurance policy for the special interests that have hijacked the nations policy against the interests of the people.

The Republicans are going to lose the election because every single one of them running, except for Ron Paul, resembles President Bush running for a third term. Only Ron Paul, the true change candidate, has a chance to save the Republican party from a humiliating but easily foreseen defeat. No amount of guilt by association smears by the Bushite wing of the Republican party and their dead-ender supporters will change that fact.

From the Winds of Jihad blog.

Muslim nations, the European Union and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Friday expressed outrage at an anti-Islam film posted on the Internet by a ‘far-right’ Dutch lawmaker.

UN chief Ban Ki-Moon called Geert Wilders’ film “offensively anti-Islamic” while Iran and Bangladesh warned the film could cause grave consequences and Pakistan protested to the Dutch ambassador.

Snip -

“I condemn in the strongest terms the airing of Geert Wilders’ offensively anti-Islamic film,” the UN chief said in a statement. “There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence. The right of free speech is not at stake here.”

Why is it so hard for Secretary General Ban say that the only reason the right of free speech exists is because people might say or write things that others disagree with or consider offensive. Secretary General Ban only wants “free speech” for things that people already agree on – what kind of free speech is that?

By the way, if Geert Wilders is killed by Jihadi, will Secretary General Ban be taking some responsibility for encouraging violence with his denunciation?

Given what we know about the vote fraud that is going on, this report by the Onion, which is supposed to be satire, is spot on.

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

You can try to cover stuff up, but the fact is that the net is a permanent record of events.

Around three days ago I wrote about Trans-pacific Radio accusing Ampontan of having a sock. Since that time they have completely deleted that post and all the comments in it. Fortunately, the net is a permanent record. There is the google cache of their perverse cover-up. Archive.org also collects things frequently.

This is their Modus Operandi. Write something outrageous that eventually leads to their embarrassment, then delete it later on when no one is looking. And yes, they have done it before.

Now my link to their page just leads to their “affiliates” page.

Why would they cover-up something if they were not ashamed or embarrassed of something? I find it pretty interesting that they seem to have a pretty good relationship with Debito too. A case of 類は友を呼ぶ　(birds of a feather flock together)? Definitely!

UPDATE: OK, it looks like they have set up a redirect so if you access their site from a link here, it goes to their affiliates page. They are posting about it now on their site. It is quite funny. But lets see the posts.

Comment by JS

February 7, 2008 @ 7:02 pm

Now that guy is trying to claim that this post was deleted!

http://www.occidentalism.org/?p=828

A comment by JS. Then Ken, a moderator, replies -

Comment by Ken Worsley

February 7, 2008 @ 10:24 pm

Even more hilarious! It\’s amazing how far some people will go to keep an in-joke going!

That should settle any credibility issues forever.

OK, kind of funny Ken, but now you are going to be exposed. First up, the redirect to the affiliate page from my site. Here it is, all youtubed.

And next up, who is that guy JS, and how is it he is able to include a link to my post at 7pm Japan time, more than 3 hours ago, when I only wrote the post around an hour ago? To make it clearer, here is a graphic for you, JS (or is that Ken? Yep!)

Either JS has future predicting powers in which he can accurately predict posts more than 2 hours before I write them, comment on it and include a link to boot, or Ken Worsley is messing with time stamps and is actually JS, talking to himself.

Yes, this does “settle any credibility issues forever”.

This is about as bad as it gets – obvious vote fraud. “Democracy” in which the results are rigged.

I guess there are several ways to rationalize it but what cannot be rationalized is the intransigence of the authorities once there was a complaint.