Blog description.

Accentuating the Liberal in Classical Liberal: Advocating Ascendency of the Individual & a Politick & Literature to Fight the Rise & Rise of the Tax Surveillance State. 'Illigitum non carborundum'.

Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.

The premise of this blog is simple: the Soviets thought they had equality, and welfare from cradle to grave, until the illusory free lunch of redistribution took its inevitable course, and cost them everything they had. First to go was their privacy, after that their freedom, then on being ground down to an equality of poverty only, for many of them their lives as they tried to escape a life behind the Iron Curtain. In the state-enforced common good, was found only slavery to the prison of each other's mind; instead of the caring state, they had imposed the surveillance state to keep them in line. So why are we accumulating a national debt to build the slave state again in the West? Where is the contrarian, uncomfortable literature to put the state experiment finally to rest?

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Monday, May 5, 2014

Shining the Light of Individualism into the Dark Prison of Identity Politics … At Harvard, No Less, Via Umair Haque, and at Home. [+ Jeremy Clarkson & 'n' Word.]



(This post is in two thematically conjoined parts: the first deals with Harvard Business Review writer and blogger Umair Haque and is a comment on his statist economic prescription from the point of view of identity politics. Confused? Read it.

Some might want to scroll down to the second heading which includes a further comment on the coercive mess that is identity politics and its anti-individualistic ethic, this time via a discussion on the latest Jeremy Clarkson foot in mouth, as well as a comment on neo-Marxist feminism after another anonymous devotee - handle of Leeb - broke the shallow water of the communal pool to have a crack at yours truly.

For those who think you know my ethic and I'll be supporting Clarkson, you might be surprised.

Apologies for the dreadful formatting of parts: Blogger does my head in sometimes.)



Umair Haque and #WhiteGuyDude/Dick – Identity Politics & Predictabilty | The 'M' Word:

 


According to his Harvard Business Review blog, Umair Haque, with 200k plus twitter followers, is “Director of Havas Media Labs and author of  Betterness: Economics for Humans and The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. He is ranked one of the world's most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50.”


Given the following tweet exchange, the first time Umair has come to my attention, I find his likely influence worrisome, though sadly unsurprising: 






































I realise Umair was provoked, but that said, and given he is supposed to be the professional, what did #whiteguy dick have to do with an economic argument? If you read my posts - down the right hand side bar - on Marxist Feminism, you'll see I've found that little stereotype #WhiteGuyDude, born of identity politics, itself born of a collectivist Marxism, to be an almost perfect predictor of the user's econopolitical world view, and given I've mentioned the 'M' word twice, no guesses as to what that is. Umair’s use of it here tells me much about how his mind is trapped in the ad hominem prison of identity politics, with a simmering hatred that always denotes – you can hear in it his tone even in that single tweet. Just as you hear it in every tweet from the neo-Marxist feminists with the Twitter hashtag #whiteguydude. It means, incontrovertibly, he despises that classical liberal individualism with its laissez faire economics which is the only road we have to the free, prosperous society. It means his thinking is likely blinded by the prejudice and bigotry of the multitude of assumptions all wrapped up in those two appalling hashtags that are based wholly on stereotyping and the denial of an individual's identity which people like this believe must be sacrificed on the bloodied altar of the common good.
 

From an initial skim read of several extracts on his Harvard Business Review blog, I agree with Umair on a single thing: the US crony capitalist economic model is broken, badly. But broken in a way well-trodden: it’s the failure of the central planned, central banked, command economy, and the overthrow, plus final capitulation under Obamamarx, of that one revolution in history that for so long had lasting good and brought the West prosperity, the American one, all its good squandered as the US, following Europe, has slow-goose stepped itself via the voting chamber back to the big  brother global tax surveillance state, its bureaucratic and spying tentacles inveigled through every aspect of society and the world economy, suffocating it, as with life itself.


From his single tweet, and superficial read of his site, I can guess all too well where Umair's solutions will lead: a bigger state. And that means a big brother state. Identity politics always does, and so his philosophical solutions will of course be his economic ones. Furthermore, given his lack of understanding about a capitalism he was attacking in his first post, I know there’s nothing he can teach me. The strength of laissez faire capitalism – not our current crony form - is the entrepreneurial spirit behind those apps he despises. Plus Umair doesn’t seem to understand  how an industry making apps doesn't affect others fixing his perceived problems; he seems to think a group of people thinking about this ‘thing’ excludes another group of people thinking, developing, innovating anything else, with the real problem of course being he doesn’t think the multitude of individuals and groups in laissez faire capitalism can work out problems of coordination better than central planners can. This is what his shallow, prejudiced response, speaks to me.


Perhaps this tweet was just a spectacular fail on Umair’s behalf: we all have our moments. But the way he simply slung that hashtag out, I didn’t think so. Identity politics is ingrained misinterpretation, shallow thinking and worse, hatred. A deeper reading of his writing confirms this: take his latest essay, Five Dirty Secrets About the US Economy: unsurprisingly Umair's econopolitick is exactly as I thought it would be, as I surmised above from his use of that revealing #whiteguydick hashag, with every post in this blog the rebuttal of it. What does Umair want, and what is his central ethic? The common good of course:



The US has glaring deficits in all these public goods — education, healthcare, transport, energy, infrastructure — not to mention the other oft- unmentioned, but equally important ones: parks, community centers, social services.

So the US should invest in its common wealth. For a decade, and more. Legions of people should be employed in rebuilding its decrepit infrastructure, schools, colleges, hospitals, parks, trains.


[Snip]


If the US invests in the public goods it so desperately needs, the jobs that it so desperately needs will be created — and they will be jobs that (wait for it) actually create useful stuff. You know what’s useless? Designer diapers, reality TV, listicles, reverse-triple-remortgages, fast food, PowerPoint decks, and the other billion flavors of junk that we slave over only to impress people we secretly hate so we can live lives we don’t really want.




Now read again what I said above about Umair and his distrust of free markets as the best means of coordination and to foster innovation: I had him pinned precisely simply from that single hashtag use. If in New Zealand, Umair would be on the far Left of our Green Party; the extraordinary thing is he's writing for the Harvard Business Review. Chief amidst the dangers being promoted here is his fundamental socialist belief in a society where law making be based on the common good, rather than a principled, free society that seeks only to protect the rights of its smallest minority: an individual. It's advocacy of the state ascendant over the individual; the command (crony) economy, not the spontaneous order arising from the complex web of decisions and results that comes from free adults going about their lives via private enterprise. I'm not covering it yet again, but at the end of this post if you scroll down I've copied a summary from various of my posts on the fallacy of the common good, and how lethal that concept is to a free, prosperous, and civilised society. But to end with the very predictable Umair, how does he propose to pay for these legions of workers building public goods?


Where will the money come from? Dirty secret number three: It doesn’t matter. Print it. Borrow it. Tax it from the super-rich, in whose coffers it’s merely sitting idly. It does not matter one bit. It’s a second order question. If the U.S. doesn’t invest in public goods, it will not prosper; and if it doesn’t prosper, it cannot pay off the debts it already has.


I'm speechless after reading that, including the internal contradictions he makes across just this single short paragraph. Umair's answer is the global tax surveillance state; after all these rich pricks just have their money sitting around idly - who knew - so we'll relieve them of it. I'm always stunned at how socialists so glibly talk about the violence of theft. That money is not sitting idly, albeit this throwaway comment again reveals so much about the writer. And of course Umair is not stopping at just tax, his prescription is, well, as the US government he strangely despises has been doing: printing money and borrowing: despite Umair's PR, there's nothing new under the sun going on here, the only difference being how flippant and careless he is on the topic. His Capitalist Manifesto, appears to me to be just another Keynesian, (inverted commas) 'Communist' one.

That last sentence was deliberate as I already know what Umair's response to this post would be:

 





See, that’s just being glib again; as with the idle money of the rich comment. It’s not because you advocate decent healthcare or jobs, we all want that: it’s that you think the state as master, trumping individual rights, will bring that, and that comes from a certain econopolitick model called socialism, and what modern history has taught people like myself, and thinkers such as Rand, von Mises and Hayek, is that in reality there is no middle way between the free, prosperous society and a socialist one. And with your family’s history, as you explained in your second tweet above, you of all people should understand the dangers of delivering the lives of individuals to the machinations of a state that has the powers it needs for your public works program.

Incidentally, these apps Umair is so scathing of, are themselves more important than he realises, and they didn't come about without an invention history that includes 'public good' firms which aren't minor, including Apple and Microsoft. Via apps I have been able to increase my productivity, and my quality of life, because apps have truly allowed me to live in a seascape in the middle of nowhere, and yet only be an electronic click away from my client base: apps have allowed me to live here:


Even better, all these apps which make my life so joyous were paid for out of profits made possible from apps that previously increased my productivity,  and my choices; they were not paid for by theft from someone else's hard work via the tax state. And no need to stop here. I only know of Umair and his writings because of an app called Twitter on my laptop; I wrote this blog post on Office Squared, an app on my iPad; and will publish it to blogger on another app. Perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to disparage the meek little app, brought to us by the millions, billions of free humans working voluntarily in that wondrous social meeting place called the market, all going about their lives pursuing their happiness.

But not for the socialists, of course. No the Umairs' of the world are so arrogant as to say all these billions of people are wrong, and that the state knows best. Again, Umair, get your head out of managementspeak and read history on what happens in societies where the state knew best.


Anyway, so Umair is a ‘leading management thinker’ in the West. Yeah, I’m sure he is, because there’s the problem; it’s why we are so far down an individual’s road to serfdom, prisoners to each other’s minds, our lives sacrificed, rights and privacy lost, to the cult of the tax surveillance state worshipping at the second hander alter of redistribution and the dependency it has wrought on once free peoples. You don’t own your income. You are watched. You are owned by the state. And identity politics is a stiffer warden of your imprisonment, than any single human tyrant could be, with the jailers just as imprisoned as the jailed, they just don't seem to understand it. Umair's essay is common garden little red book economics with touchy feely opining - not philosophising - thrown in. Not sophisticated as I would have thought from an 'influential' thinker, and from that essay, anyway, a bunch of homilies born of the emoting of policy with little thinking about it.




Leeb & the Neo-Marxist Feminists Again | Jeremy Clarkson and ‘Nigger’ | The 'N' Word.


And remarkably, almost a month to the day after the above thread, there’s a homegrown addendum to this post: again the #WhiteGuyDude hashtag ignorantly and randomly thrown at me by a previously unknown (to me) Tweeter called Leeb. Before her, though, Jeremy Clarkson. I was on a thread where his use of the word nigger on a Top Gear outtake was being debated; although debated is hardly the word for it, because Left-liberal identity politickers' on that thread were seriously contending no one even be allowed to write the word down. Indeed as I write now, I've just seen this scroll by on my Tweetdeck:



On another Twitter thread I saw a Left-Liberal male being castigated by other identity politickers for using the phrase 'beautiful writer' of a female writer, because beautiful to them is a genderised term: their contention being a male can't use that word as it always referred, when written by a male, to a woman's looks, not the style and quality, in this case, of her writing. (Jesus Christ almighty). Anyway, the stupid male on that thread buckled and deleted his tweet. So only blacks can use nigger; only women can use the word beautiful when speaking of a woman's attributes outside of physical beauty. I'm wondering if someone better codify all this for us? You can't imagine the anger I feel over that, and to any writer or artist reading this post, I ask how do you feel about being proscribed words on the basis of political correctness like this? More of that dangerous thread in another post, but seriously, forget aesthetics, how are we to have needed discussions on serious matters that are denoted and signified by a word, if we're not allowed to write the word down: we just have to whisper it's the 'n' word. Soon we'll be investing words with mystical powers, which only shaman will be able to speak. Again, again, again, again, this is childishness. While reserving myself the right to use the word in a novel, I would never employ it in the ordinary course of life because it is offensive, but it behoves us to be adult when analysing the society we've both made and had imposed on us. Case in point, Musa Okwanga.

If you want to intelligently write on the harm done by Clarkson, you do it like Musa Okwanga does. Note in his piece on Clarkson, Musa spells the whole ‘n’ word, and he does so deliberately because of the effect it has:



Jeremy Clarkson said the word Nigger – let’s look at that word for a moment, uncensored, in all its ugliness.



The point I wish to make is this was appropriate not because Musa is 'a man of colour', a black man as the tweeter above would say, but because he is a writer/commentator discussing the causes and effects of casual racism, and in this case he does so beautifully. And I would’ve said he does so beautifully, had he been a female, and it would’ve meant the same thing. Indeed note carefully how Musa describes himself on the ‘About’ tab in his blog; there is no self or society imposed 'thou shalt not' delimiting here:



Musa Okwonga is a poet, author, sportswriter, broadcaster, musician, communications adviser and commentator on current affairs, including culture, politics, sport, race and sexuality.


And further note in his post, no #WhiteGuyDude hashtag; this piece is so powerful because he deals with Clarkson first and foremost on the level of a complex individual who is both ‘brilliant’ and flawed:
 

I am not some paid-up member of an anti-Clarkson fan club. I am busy and Jeremy Clarkson’s racism wastes my time, because every now and then he makes a bigoted comment and I am asked to respond to it.  I don’t sit in wait for him to slip up.  He is a brilliant broadcaster whose show would still be a success if he never said another racist thing again.  And I would honestly rather that he didn’t.



This is writing, discussing, debating, as adults. Not wishing to welch out of taking a position myself, I accept the bulk of what Musa says in his piece, indeed he significantly changed my mind on some aspects of this story – read the last paragraph of his post - but will that stop me watching Top Gear? No, it’s a brilliant show. And there is so much I love about Clarkson and his otherwise irreverence to authority. Unlike a huge swath of the Left I see only evil in excluding the unclean and in silencing what you don't agree with. Plus even in this incident - not some of his others - there is doubt cast from the paper trail and later video he put out; indeed, aware of how his 'traditional' rhyme could go wrong, he was trying to ensure that word was not verbalised. Of course to his enemies, Clarkson will never be given the benefit of the doubt, and I see some implying his 'thought crime' is on a par with the crimes of appalling abuser Max Clifford and the two should be sharing a cell. No need to comment on what a sane person would say to that. Probably some, including Leeb below, would call me racist for that, but that’s because they’ve taken on a stereotyped, one dimensional view of life that misses so much, and thus distorts human affairs and does real harm (and harm mainly to what I suspect she sees as ‘her cause’).


So, to Leeb herself, whose random tweet - I'd never heard of her before - came splicing into the Clarkson thread as slickly as ignorance. I have to give some of the previous thread first to provide its context (or lack of it):




















And here it goes …








So after I linked to a piece totally relevant to the discussion at hand, I get that unrelated nonsense tweet, as if ‘white dude’, and Leeb would say, white mans privilege, destroys my argument somehow; just as Umair employed #WhiteGuyDude. No attempt to argue on the facts, or even the topic, just an infantile put down, in this case for Leeb to inform, I assume, the sistas, because this is always a pack hunting thing, these women don’t deal at the level of recognition of our individuality, only men as a stereotype – it’s bigoted; it’s prejudiced. Both Umair and Leeb are mired hopelessly in Marxist feminist, Marxism proper, and post structural racism tropes: a lethal mix. And note from this second thread what these two hash tags are really about, reinforcing my first tweet above, while reiterating RedBaiter's point, they're about the modus operandi of identity politics: #WhiteGuyDude is saying that as a white male I am to have no voice in these topics; I am to be silenced. What arrogance. Worse: the oppression these two groups have felt - no argument from me on that - they now wish to oppress white dudes with - there's no road to the free, voluntary society from that, only the road to the serfdom of all of us. I’ve got another post coming soon on identity politics, I just need time to edit it, but first my response to Leeb, and to repeat in ending this post, my earlier post which will be the precursor to my future one:














Through this stage, Leeb was was retweeting my posts to the Sistas – it’s the Twitter expression of sarcasm – so my final post:








If you want to read that earlier post, about the distorted view of human relationships that comprises rape culture, it is reprinted below, I'll be following it up more fully soon. After that I've included at the end of this post a summary of two blogs noting the fallacy - one with vicious consequences - of the common good that Umair pushes.




However, first, as a final note, to the repressed groups Umair and Leeb feel themselves part of, here's the crazy thing: I believe absolutely in your rights, as individuals, to do, believe, advocate whatever you like, so long as you do no harm, initiate no force or fraud, and let me go about my life as I wish. I am not the enemy you want to create from me with your hateful hashtags, so let me tell you as a 'friendly': grow up. I reckon that's my most oft used phrase currently. And then get your common good coercion unto slavery out of my life; you have no right to be there because my right to be left alone trumps all in a free society, albeit I realise a free society is the last thing either of you want. Not really, because this common good, these public goods to be built by the legions, have to be paid for by a coercive global big brother tax surveillance state that renders the privacy abuses of PRISM, NSA, Stasi, et al, insignificant. And that's even if command economies worked: they don't, in Venezuela right now the planners can't even coordinate a supply of toilet paper, and if you follow the news, you'll note the predictable killing has started, as has occurred through the history of collectivism and every tyrant whom has set out using the iron fist of state to enforce on the citizens the common good as 'they' see it.

And finally to the Marxist Feminists, the 'hey look, #WhiteDude', is tactically like telling a joke: told the first one thousand times, yeah, it's a bit funny, but from the one thousand and oneth time, it falls rather flat. This blog is where I construct, and then reconstruct my-'self', so far be it from me to tell you what to do, given that's your point, but I reckon a bit of creative reinvention wouldn't do you any harm either. Surprise me ... or not; yeah, there's me demanding again.



Extract - Identity Politics & Rape Culture - Warning:

Coincidentally, I'm currently working on a piece about rape culture feminism; an -ism based on identity rather than individualism. My thinking has changed on this, from an initial unthinking feeling of a rape culture as correct, as given to me by the media, to a questioning of the underlying assumptions of a rape culture premise based on distorted, and distorting, views of human relations. Readers of this blog will know from my posts over the latter part of 2013, this topic has become increasingly important to me, as it should be to all of us who dream of the free, civilised society. For this is the further inveigling of neo-Marxist brutishness into the lives of individuals: radio announcers Willie Jackson and John Tamihere were silenced by a rape culture seeking not dialectic, but vengeance. I will show it is quite possible these two men were fired from their show for merely doing their jobs - running a talkback show: talking to callers; questioning callers; bringing items of public interest up for debate. But rape culture feminism, in a move pregnant with symbolism, found them guilty in the questioning, so went for the boycott in a campaign instigated and run by white male Marxist Giovanni Tiso. Indeed the instance of a white male strutting in with his righteous indignation to rescue the little women is so full of irony it's hilarious, at least, if it were not so serious. And what Tiso did was serious, because he shut down not only Willie and JT's radio show, but diverted all the properly directed energy there had been in the debate surrounding the horrible Roast Busters, and the violence of rape in our society, to two radio jocks who were paid to be controversial, and there the energy from a useful discussion was dissipated entirely. I've not even heard of the Roast Busters since. What a waste that deflection was. Nothing is ever gained by silencing. Nothing. That point is quite possibly the only point on which I agree with Chomsky:




I will also show, thereby, in this piece I'm still writing, quoting almost wholly two feminists who believe in reason and individualism, how neo-Marxist rape culture feminism has become a feminism seeking only the oppression of an insidious Left-centric conformity which wants forever to stomp on the face of an individual human being, and to do that sadly via the ruthless mechanism of the state - the latter especially regarding the enforced gender quotas, in public and private office, which form part of this agenda, and are possibly only one election away in New Zealand. And as Willie and JT found out, when dissent is made an example of against conformity, the tactic is always initially to sully the reputations of those deemed to be drunk on their privilege, a tactic from which even the Law Review Girls were not immune. Just as for the sin of a single tweet into her timeline, on Twitter - social media - and on a matter not even regarding gender politics, the anonymous Thorny proceeded to write an entire blog on how drunk on privilege I must be, with the clear inference I'm a misogynist. And that ludicrous, slanderous post is still up. I'm calling bullshit to this. Further case in point, a sadly typical tweet by such an identity mired feminism on Twitter:







‘Men attention seeking’ is the catch cry shrilled by this feminism at those who would reason against it, seemingly ignorant this was the very tactic of Edwardian men against the suffragettes - diminishing their reality by calling them attention seekers. These neo-Marxist feminists have become what they despise. Albeit in the face of such a tweet as this, all I can say - meeting matronising with patronising - is stop drawing attention to white men, then, dear. You've scored an own goal, just like Tiso did. More importantly, as I have to mansplain it to you, stop feeling about men so childishly as mere identity – the stereotypical generic male invented by a rape culture feminism – because we men, unsurprisingly like you women, if you care to think about it, are all complex individuals, damn near all of us, not rapists. And understand how rape culture feminism, even this tweet, thus forces society into a confrontational paradigm between the genders. What is gained by that? My piece will show there's a constructive alternative that can set us all, women and men, each race, each religion, free to pursue our happiness - classical liberal individualism; because the opposite of sexism is individualism, just as the opposite of racism is individualism. An individualism, poignantly as regards this debate, that shows gender, race and belief stereotypes for what they are: stereotypes.






Compare that identity-bound tweet above telling generic white men to butt out, thus bringing stereotyped white men front and centre into the very frame the tweeter wants them removed from, to this tweet, informed by an adult individualism of a woman who is thinking, and who is simply, gloriously, herself:







Extract II - The Fallacy of the Common Good:

I quote just two of my previous blogs on the tyranny of common good: from TheTyrant’s Call:

the common good has been the battle cry of almost every tyrant throughout history. The common good has been so important, apparently, that hundreds of millions of individuals over the twentieth century had to be exterminated or killed by the state for it. Rights cannot attach to a collective, when you try to, you open the gates to tyranny and atrocity. That same common good is currently being used in Christchurch to usurp private property rights on a breath-taking scale. Just as the common good is used as the excuse to steal the property and effort of productive individuals while making those individuals victims to a department of state with literally the powers of the true Orwellian police state. To be meaningful, and cause no harm through the force of state, rights can and must only attach to individuals. A society must only base itself on protecting the smallest minority: the rights and property of an individual (and especially from the abuse of state).


And – politicians note – from this blog’s most read post, still with hundreds of weekly reads, and growing, despite having been written in 2012, 1984 Comes to 2012, talking of how children in the UK were in a school education unit being taught to dob in suspected tax evaders in their neighbourhood (including mum and dad presumably):

Look at the ‘good citizens’ these children are taught to be in our schools, with all these ‘obligations’ to each other. And so strong is the programming, that I am confident more than ninety percent of those reading this would feel, deep down, that they have to agree with the teachers’ ethic here, with what this tax course in the schools is founded on: that self-sacrifice for the common good, is a noble thing, and the needs of others are what social democracies must hold at their centre. This is what New Zealand Socialist commentator, Chris - The Fist - Trotter forces on us.


But it’s a magic trick, an illusion, that’s been done in our minds by Gramsci, a linguistic sleight of hand, all the more evil because it initially appeals to our 'better natures'. All we need do to understand it, see the reality of it, is change the focus, the narrative point of view, and see what it really says, which is that for you to live your life, it is acceptable that the lives of others, total strangers, be sacrificed to you, their pursuit of happiness destroyed for you, and that the state will initiate force to back you up in this, and mince up the livelihoods, and freedom, of those who will not bow down to you. And part of being a good citizen, now, is for you to dob these people in, so they can be dealt to.


Free men know that the civilised society is not based on such an extinguishment of life, but founded on a bed-rock of the non-initiation of force, particularly the state against the people, and on each individual being responsible for themselves, and self-reliant. That a civilised society works on the natural love and affection between families and loved ones, on compassion and charity freely given for strangers, and on voluntarism.



 

6 comments:

  1. What a long long long post.

    This in particular is just nuts:

    . If in New Zealand, Umair would be on the far Left of our Green Party

    No. He wouldn't. He just wouldn't. For a clue, he advocates:

    rebuilding its decrepit infrastructure, schools, colleges, hospitals, parks, trains.

    and that infrastructure, in his case, includes things like roads and road bridges.
    The Greens would never fall for that. So - roads, "roads of national significance". schools & hospitals like Christchurch. Parks like the Wellington War Memorial and trains like Electric fucken Britomart.

    No, he wouldn't be on the "far left of the Greens". He'd be in the National Cabinet

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True. He's definitely Greens on the anything goes financing though.

      Delete