THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

AN EXAMPLE OF MISSING THE POINT | 2009-07-25

In "Servitude and Slavery" below, I referred to my own specialty in graduate economics, Public Choice:

"If libertarianism and its theoretical expression, Public Choice, can't even explain why people vote it certainly cannot explain the rest of life.

Under pure Public Choice Theory, as all the experts in that field agree, no votes would occur, no public choices would be made. They admit they can't doesn't explain why people vote, but they don't worry about that."

If you do a straight Public Choice libertarian calculation on whether you should vote, you wouldn't. The cost is going to the polling place and standing in line. And, if we are just talking about the benefit to you PERSONALLY of casting your ballot, what do you get for it? What is the real probability that your particular vote will affect YOU personally?

Zilch.

No pure libertarian would bother to vote. The reason we DO vote goes to the very fundamental error of libertarianism. Voters want to influence how their SOCIETY goes, not just to benefit themselves.

Like Marx and Rand everyone else Public Choice is still in the age when animals did not fight wars. All we have learned about the nature of all social animals has been completely missed.

In other words, Public Choice and libertarianism declare that LOYALTY has nothing to do with humans. The whole Wordist superstructure of libertarianism founders on that one point, just as "anti-racism" founders on the Mantra.

I sent this logic to someone in Public Choice. Remember that I said that the job of respectable conservatism is to miss the point while appearing to address it. The same is true of Public Choice. Our whole training was that of a professional knife thrower, to always MISS just right.

This person is NOT an anti-white. But his TRAINING is to miss the point. He saw what I said. one would vote at all. His reply to me will sound familiar to anyone who has ever actually WORKED with the Mantra.

He said that Public Choicers do still mention the point that if self-interest were the only basis of voting no one would vote at all. But that was ALL he addressed. What I wrote about loyalty might as well have been blank space. I wrote him again to remind him of it and he said I should pay attention to what HE said.

You have to USE the Mantra to understand this reaction. We have here a form of HYPNOTISM. A proposition that will undermine a whole world-view runs into this.

It is vital that you recognize this form of hypnotism. You cannot just "mention the logic of the Mantra." No one will SEE the Mantra even when you first ram it down their throats. All of us who have fought it out know well that you simply CANNOT get onto other topics and that you cannot just "mention the logic."

You must HIT THE TARGET again and again and again. In a week, even someone you have forced to face it will have HYPNOTICALLY forgotten it.

Let us go back to Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis. A friend of his died of a cut on his finger while he was doing a dissection for anatomy on an old corpse. Semmelweis looked at his friend's symptoms and discovered that they were the same as those of "childbed fever" of which so many of the mothers and babies in his hospital died. Doctors in his hospital were doing dissections and then going straight to deliver babies without washing their hands.

It was obvious where the childbed fever was coming from.

Semmelweis explained it and explained it and explained it. The doctors replied that they were discussing childbed fever, just as my friend said they were DISCUSSING why people wouldn't vote at all using Public Choice logic. They got him into discussions of Galen and Hippocrates. They talked about the Simplism of just washing your hands in carbolic acid. The moment he mentioned childbed fever they went off on their own tack.

Semmelweis's deliveries were without the huge mortality rate theirs was. He was denounced as a monomaniac. In other words, they talked about everything but what he told them. They didn't try his simplistic solution.. Hell, they didn't even SEE it.

In the end Semmelweis won, but only after he died in a madhouse.

THAT is what we are facing. It is life and death, and "mentioning the Mantra" while you are going along with someone's discussion won't do the trick.

BOB THE ANCHOR | 2010-06-06

Al Parker asked obliquely what my opinion was on White Rabbit. Well, I wear the tee shirt Horus sent me.

Horus, BBG, Lord Nelson, Truck Roy, BGlass, all would have plenty to argue about but all are making their own places in the intellectual job BUGS is doing.

But the problem with FOLLOWERS as opposed to seminar members is that you have to compliment them or be their Grand Inquisitor. I spent a whole career dealing with constituents -- followers -- and that is a major burden it is a relief to put down.

A person who makes his living the way I did has to come up with an approach to every single issue. But no matter how obsessive compulsive a person may be, can he actually have opinions, or even a point of view, on everything?

If you don't you are damned with that worst of all statements, "So you just don't CARE about" abortion/ starving children/ the environment or what ever else was in the newspaper yesterday.

Not only do I care about very few questions, I no longer HAVE to. I spent a LOT workaholic years getting to be retired, and one of the privileges of that status is that I don't HAVE to act interested in the musings of constituents or congressmen whose entire heads are crammed full of this week's newspapers.

When I made my living this way I had to worry about giving each person his due. I don't give White Rabbit his due. I don't give Trucker Roy his due. I don't' give Lord Nelson the praise he deserves. Hell, I can't even fit in all the people a good PR man or politician or even a good fanatic should note.

Clearly the people who stick with me are not greatly offended. Another thing one is supposed to be is Militantly Modest. But I have retired from the semi sainthood one had to maintain as a Public Figure which required a total abrogation of Self and all that other crap.

Some people give Dave a hard time for praising me so often. Dave remembers that I criticized him for getting off OUR subject and I said that I would be happy if he would just keep mentioning my name. It's a good trick for forcing yourself back from wandering away intellectually,

But also now that I am no longer a professional politico I can admit that it is not just my constituents' egos that need a little boosting. I can't imagine that anyone is so naïve he doesn't realize that while overdoing it turns people off, everybody needs some ego boost.

I do not want to create a Whitakerism. But in BUGS, I like the way people keep using my name where it fits. This is BOB'S Seminar. We have a VERY wide-ranging set of ages and education and all the rest, so the only point of unity is the Old Man.

And my ambition as I keep repeating, is to have Bob's Seminar go on long after Ole Bob dies or is put in the funny farm. That will be when your understanding of exactly where I fit in the pattern will be absolutely critical. You are well aware of how groups split when the central character is no longer there.

This is the home of the Mantra. This is the central point of Mantra Thinking. Bob is connected to THAT.

I am not a subtle person and my statements are deliberately about as obscure as a hand grenade. My basic points are few but you can apply them to anything. Nobody has less trouble than BUGS readers in telling when a commenter has wandered off the point and is trying to his own personal world view on things, rather than BUGS logic.

What you can use is my approach, not my opinion. Long after I am dead one should not read my BUGS writings for my opinions, but for my way of thinking.

That, and ONLY that, is the reason Ole Bob's name is important here.

A HAPPY MCCAIN DELIVERS ANOTHER POUND OF FLESH TO HIS LIBERAL FANS | 2000-04-29

During the primary campaign, I quoted John McCain as saying that "the Confederate flag is a symbol of slavery and oppression." McCain fans sent me e-mails saying that that was quoted out of context. I saw him say it, and it was not quoted out of context. Someone else said it was the result of editing. I have done a lot of tape editing in my time, and this was no edit.

But someone else did say something about that comment which was true. He said McCain had disavowed that statement on his website. He denied it throughout the primary campaign.

Now McCain has come to South Carolina to say, yes, that is exactly what he did say and that is exactly what he did mean.

McCain is so happy. The press is proud of him again.

During the campaign I pointed out that every one of what the press calls McCain's "bold, independent statements" was devoted to catering to liberals. Not once did he defy THEM, and they loved him for it. As the most respectable of respectable conservatives, McCain was crazy about all that liberal praise. It hurt him to have to bow out on attacking the flag during the primary campaign. It disappointed his leftist fans.

For McCain, all is now well. Granted, he admitted to an outright lie. But he gave the media a way to save its old "He's so honest" mantra. He did this by admitting he was afraid he would lose the primary if he came out against the flag back then. So that makes him honest, you see.

This is supposed to charm us and everybody can say what an honest, fearless man he is.

This is how respectable conservatives operate. Last week, I explained how William Buckley wrote a column in which he started off sounding conservative. It said that Pinochet was being kidnapped from Britain and sent to Spain for trial by leftists because he was a rightist who had driven the Communists out of power in Chile. Buckley stated that that no former leftist official would ever be tried for any crime. So he sounded conservative.

But at the end of his column, Buckley insisted that the leftists should have had their way and gotten Pinochet. Like McCain, he sounds conservative or honest at first, but he reserves the bottom line for anything liberals really want. And what liberals really want is that leftist extremists be treated as misguided idealists and rightists as criminals.

By the same token, McCain saves the bottom line for the liberals.

The bottom line is that he said what I heard in the first place. The bottom line is that he lied about it. But betraying the right is what makes him so bold, independent -- and above all HONEST-- in the eyes of the liberal media.

"BOTH SIDES" EQUAL ONE SIDE | 2004-11-29

I mentioned before that if democracy means voting, there have never been more truly democratic countries on earth than those ruled by Communist regimes. They held THOUSANDS of regular elections. In every single one of those elections the voter turnout was over 99!

In fact, if voter turnout makes a democracy, North Korea is the most democratic country that ever existed. North Korea is the only country that EVER had a ONE HUNDRED PERCENT turnout in a national election.

Did the Communists hold REAL elections?

Absolutely. An election gives the voter two sides, BOTH sides, to choose from. The voter was given a ballot with a list of candidates put forward by the Communist Party. You could: 1) not mark the ballot and drop it into the ballot box; or 2) mark out any names you didn't like.

If a candidate didn't get fifty percent of the vote, the Party had to come up with a new nominee.

That never happened. But you had TWO choices. You could choose between "both sides."

And, it was a secret ballot. You could take the list behind a curtain and mark off any names you didn't approve of.

Going behind this curtain presented a minor problem. You were in a room where Communist Party members were sitting. If you wanted to approve the entire Communist Party ticket you simply took the ballot of dropped it into the ballot box. Almost everybody did not go behind the curtain and loyally dropped the list straight into the box.

If you took the ballot behind the curtain to mark some names off, several Party members saw you do it.

Oddly enough, not only did over 99% of voters turn out, but over 99% of them voted a straight Communist ticket.

But "both sides" were represented.

In America we have free speech because "both sides" are represented. Both leftism and respectable conservatism are supposed to be given equal time. But what if you aren't a leftist, a respectable conservative, or somewhere in between?

If you are not one of the "both" sides, then you go behind that curtain.

And people see you do it.