With the mainstream media mocking what they describe as President Trump’s delusional claim that former President Obama ordered Trump Tower’s phones to be tapped, I thought it would only be fair to invite readers to look at the other side. In a 12-minute video, Mark Levin, a lawyer who was a chief of staff for Attorney General Edwin Meese during the Reagan administration, has laid out what appears to be overwhelming evidence that backs up Trump’s wiretapping claims. Newt Gingrich offers his take here. Matthew Vadum’s article, Obama’s Wiretaps?, in FrontPage magazine, makes for very disturbing reading. Vadum doesn’t pull any punches:
Now the outlines of a Watergate-like conspiracy are emerging in which a sitting Democrat president apparently used the apparatus of the state to spy on a Republican presidential candidate. Watergate differed in that President Nixon didn’t get involved in the plot against the Democratic National Committee until later as an accomplice after the fact. Here Obama likely masterminded, or oversaw someone like the diabolical Benghazi cover-up artist Ben Rhodes, masterminding the whole thing…
Obama used the IRS to target conservative and Tea Party nonprofits, along with Catholic, Jewish, and pro-Israel organizations. He brazenly lied about it, too. His Justice Department surreptitiously obtained telephone records for more than 100 reporters. He did nothing while Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius repeatedly violated the Hatch Act, an anti-corruption statute.
And if anyone still has doubts, I’d invite them to ask James Rosen and Angela Merkel about former President Obama’s spying. By the way, former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes’ claim that “No President can order a wiretap” is factually incorrect.
Those who think President Trump is concealing his connections with Russia need to check out this article, which pours cold water on that claim.
I’ve also been following mainstream media coverage of another issue that has been in the news lately: Sthe links between crime and immigration in Sweden. Regarding the statistics, I’d invite readers to have a look at these two articles: What Is the Truth about Crime and Immigration in Sweden? and The Truth about Sweden. What does it feel to be a woman in today’s Sweden? Katie Holmes answers that question in two hard-hitting articles in the Daily Mail: Where females fear to tread and The Swedish town where migrant gangs have killed multiculturalism stone dead and laugh at laws they despise and defy.
The mainstream media has ridiculed claims of a link between sexual assault crimes and immigration from Arabic-speaking countries. After reading the four articles linked to in the preceding paragraph, I’m more convinced than ever that the MSM is merely trying to obfuscate the truth – and in so doing, betraying its purpose, which is to report the truth without fear or favor.
So, what do readers think? Who’s crazy: the media or President Trump – or both?
Right. When another person or a corporation does it, it’s….uh….persuasion.
Talk about begging the question.
{To be fair, though–I don’t think that’s actually anybody’s view.}
Not strictly Aristotelian, but broadly scholastic. And it applies here very well.
Principles have their ontological nature. Non-coercion or (more commonly) freedom is of empty nature, devoid of properties. Like space – yes, all objects exist in space, but do all objects follow from space in the sense Patrick would have it? In order for anything to follow, there has to be another substantial or active principle, such as solidarity or equality or prosperity (all common ideological slogans) and when you compare now side by side
FREEDOM and SOLIDARITY
and you think what they actually are, you see it’s only the latter that has some chance of providing some operative guidance (which is what a principle should do) in an actual political situation.
You don’t think that Paul Ryan’s professed view?
Erik,
Just for the record, I’m all in favor of solidarity as a political principle. I was only offering my understanding of libertarianism. That’s not a view I hold, and in fact I think libertarianism is completely mistaken (at best).
No, but I’ll let patrick speak for his brethren granny killer.
.
zombie-eyed granny starver
The LP platform committee members aren’t real people? 😉
My initial political views were aligned with the Democrats, until I learned enough economics to realize that they don’t know what they are talking about. I flirted with the Reagan-style Republicans but couldn’t stomach the religious right’s influence on the party nor the hypocrisy of claiming to be for small government but never actually shrinking it when they were in power. That left me politically homeless. Sometime later a friend gave me a book by P. J. O’Rourke and something he wrote there got me interested in politics again:
. . . remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody’s head.
Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don’t pay taxes, you’ll be fined. If you don’t pay the fine, you’ll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you’ll be shot.
Thus I:
– in my role as citizen and voter
– am going to shoot you
– in your role as taxpayer and ripe suck
– if you don’t pay your fair share of the national tab.
Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, “Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?”
That’s a powerful truth that both incumbent parties and other statists try desperately to hide. It goes further than taxes; eveything the government does is backed by force. Whenever someone says “There ought to be a law.” what they are actually saying is “I am willing to kill someone to require them to do X or prevent them from doing Y.”
I realized that not only do I not want that done to me, I am unwilling to do it to others.
Recognizing this made me realize that being apolitical wasn’t an option. The federal and state governments in the U.S. are past any pretense of legitimacy and have been for decades at least. So I found a party that is more aligned with the value of non-coercion to support and I do what I can to educate people on the real nature of government. Most are too committed to the status quo to listen, but every once in awhile I manage to pass on the flame.
To directly answer your question about government funding, there is a lot of argument in the LP between the minarchists and the anarchists on that topic. The income tax is clearly coercive, anti-privacy, and subject to abuse. It needs to go. Reducing the role of the federal government to protecting citizens against force and fraud, combined with a significant reduction in the size of the military, will reduce the amount of funding required dramatically. Taxation is inherently coercive, so at that point it’s a search for least bad options. My personal preference is for the federal government to be funded by the states. Each state gives what its legislature decides is appropriate. That allows for experimentation on the best way to raise revenue. If people don’t like what their state is doing, they can vote with their feet while still remaining in the country.
Whether you agree with me or not, I hope the next time you think “There ought to be a law.” you’ll also consider whether or not you’d kill your mother for doing whatever it is you want restricted or required.
There are minarchists and anarcho-capitalists within the Libertarian party. They have some profound disagreements on the best way to achieve a non-coercive system, but they share the goal. A common metaphor for the problem of overreaching government power in the U.S. is that we’re standing neck deep in the ocean off Rhode Island and we want to head towards California. Some people want to stop in Barstow and others want to go all the way to the Pacific. There’s a lot of traveling to do before we have to make that decision.
The Randians don’t have that much influence in the LP anymore. The cult of personality she built up around herself is off-putting to people who aren’t authoritarians.
That makes no sense. The fundamental principle of libertarianism is that no one should initiate force or fraud against another person. Other than that, everyone is free to do as they choose. Individual liberty is the goal, non-coercion is how to achieve it.
That’s not my understanding. Other people can certainly coerce you. The state is certainly a significant threat to liberty because everything it does is based on coercion, but it’s not the only threat. That’s one reason libertarians support the right to self-defense.
As an evilutionist, my political thought revolve around how do we get from here to there.
In utopias, everyone is nice, everyone eats, there are no wars.
The problem I see is not listing our wishes, but moving toward what we want.
My reading of history is consistent with the Better Angels reading. Over time, things get better. There is a ratchet that preserves improved social institutions. The ratchet is really independent of individual wishes. My personal motto is, this too shall pass.
I spend a fair amount of time and effort resisting the urge to comment on these threads, because I think they are non-productive and mostly consist of one tribe shouting at another tribe.
To apply a Wagner analogy, My political inclination is to ask not what is ideal, but to ask what doors are available, and what is behind them. It would be nice to have a top view and know where every choice leads, but I think reality denies us that view of the future.
Implementing ideologies seems like tearing down the house and building from scratch. Sometimes it seems like the house is made of people, and the tearing down involves killing.
I would prefer that architects having new visions build and live in their dream houses, on their own lots. If it looks good, it can be replicated.
It certainly is a logical possibility
Not sure about that. (It’s epistemically possible, anyhow.)
That’s a logical possibility.
Glen Davidson
Hah. Always. It’s a freaking likelihood, in fact!
Most libertarians I know realize that we got to this point step by statist step and that the damage needs to be undone carefully. Cato has some good suggestions to start.
Hey, no one I know is happy that John McAfee is a member. An idea is not responsible for those who hold it.
I am one of those unfortunates who can find fault with anything, but have little to offer in terms of positive suggestions.
The only thing I’ve done that was both complicated and successful was raise kids. I have years of education in psychology and special ed, but everything I know was summed up by a professor who said, be the kind of person you want your kids to be. He was talking about what makes a good teacher, but I wound up never teaching.
I think there’s a religion that espouses something like that, but precepts tend to get lost in translation.
I think the prevailing theory on this thread is that a good parent is sure to have lots guns and other weaponry in the house.
Ah, Cato–just need to get the Pioneer Institute up here too. And maybe some Rand books. They’re, you know, ESSENTIAL.
(maybe not Nozick though. He’s the smartest of the bunch, but he recanted.)
There are other important things.
Like, you know, ammo.
Glen Davidson
Haven’t read every word of the thread. Can you point to where this is asserted?
That’s a significant accomplishment. I’m still in the process. None have died, all love to read, and those out of school are on their own two feet. I’m cautiously optimistic.