Blog Roundup

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. "Give Me Your Tired ... Never Mind," by Brian Phillips (The Texas Institute for Property Rights):

[Kristi] Noem's announcement came shortly after an Afghan immigrant was arrested for allegedly shooting two members of the National Guard. Because of the actions of one Afghan, all Afghans are to be treated as criminals. Imagine the outrage if Noem announced that, since some white men born in Ohio have engaged in criminal activities, all white male Ohioans will be treated like criminals.

390 words/1 minute

2. "Trump's Gestapo Is Now Murdering Protestors," by Harry Binswanger (Value for Value):

ICE men are not police officers. Disobeying them is not anarchistic because their function and raison d'etre are to grab people and deport them.

Yes, given the laws against immigration, their actions could be called "law enforcement" in the abstract, but as we have seen, ICE acts arbitrarily, violently, thuggishly. They do not restrict their actions to criminalized immigrants. Or, more precisely, they, not the law, decide what the scope of their actions are.

The nature of an action follows from the nature of the entity that acts. The nature of ICE as an entity is: arbitrary force. They are thugs. I would never refer to them as "law enforcement."

(My use of "Gestapo" is figurative. Literally, ICE is the transition to that kind of evil agency.)

1150 words/4 minutes

3. "Let's Repeal 'State Capitalism'," by Jaana Woiceshyn (How to Be Profitable and Moral):

[R]epealing statism doesn't have to start with a wholesale revolution. We can often have more influence than we think, by opposing freedom-curtailing government policies as they are being proposed and demanding better protection of individual rights, particularly property rights. This can be done by reaching out to our political representatives and using social media to raise awareness of the mixed economy's propensity toward statism -- and its negative impact on our freedom and flourishing.

615 words/2 minutes

4. "Value Jars, an Emotional Resilience Tool," by Jean Moroney (Thinking Directions):

The practical effect of this process is that "deep rational values" will occur to you spontaneously when they are relevant. That happens because you have programmed your memory banks so that these values are more easily triggered.

...

The work involved is not memorizing a list of words. It is integrating them with your knowledge and values. That -- the conceptual connections with your existing values -- is what makes introspecting your emotions and re-orienting to values faster and easier. And doing that quickly is having emotional resilience.

1,375 words/5 minutes

-- CAV