Monthly Archives: August 2017

A campaign to identify the marchers spread on social media following the bloody right-wing rally in Charlottesville. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)

Updated 3:15 p.m.

A white nationalist who participated in the torch-lit march through the University of Virginias campus this weekendhas lost hisjob at a Berkeley, Calif., hot dog restaurant after Twitter users posted his photo and place of employment. The employee, Cole White, was identified online after he was photographed among a shouting and torch-wielding mobduring the march Friday night in Charlottesville.

After being inundated with inquiries, his former employer, Top Dog, in downtown Berkeley, posted a sign on its door that reads:Effective Saturday 12th August, Cole White no longer works at Top Dog. The actions of those in Charlottesville are not supported by Top Dog. We believe in individual freedom and voluntary association for everyone, multiple news outlets reported. The shop has a political bent of its own, as its well-known in Berkeley forthe libertarian stickers and articles posted on its walls, and website.

Top Dogissued a statement to the Washington Post that read, in part:

Colechose to voluntarily resign his employmentwith Top Dogand we acceptedhisresignation.There have been reports that he was terminated.Those reports are false.There have been reports that top dog knowingly employs racists and promotes racist theology.Thattoois false.Individual freedomand voluntaryexchangearecore to the philosophy of Top Dog.We look forward to cooking the same great food forat leastanother50 years.

Another part of the statement noted: Wedorespect our employees rightto theiropinions. They are free to make their own choicesbutmust accept the responsibilities of those choices.

When asked by The Post if White would have been permitted to keep his job had he not resigned, the shop declined to comment further.

White wasin Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally, which turned deadly on Saturday.James Alex Fields Jr., 20, who was described as a Nazi sympathizer by one of hishigh school teachers,is accused of ramminghis car into a group of counterprotesters, injuring 19 and killingHeather Heyer,32.Two Virginia state troopers H. Jay Cullen, 48, and Berke Bates, 40 were killed while doing surveillance work during Saturdays rally when their helicopter crashed.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) on Aug. 13 said Charlottesville is "stronger" a day after violence erupted in the city. The organizer of a white nationalist rally said clashes occurred because police declined "to do their job." (Whitney Leaming,Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)

[Discomfort food: Using dinners to talk about race, violence and America]

The mostly male crowd that participated in Friday nights tiki-torch-lit rally did not cover their faces, and they were widely photographed. A Twitter account,@YesYoureRacist, began posting photographs of participants and uncovering their identities. White was among the first itnamed.The account would soon identify students enrolled at the University of Nevada and Washington State University, leading both of the schools to issue statements condemning racism.

Top Dog, a Berkeley campus fixture, isnt shy about its libertarian values. The walls are covered with libertarian bumper stickers, yellowed newspaper articles urging the privatization of the postal service, and hand-lettered signs with statements like, Beware the leader and Theres no government like no government,' wrote SF Weeklyin 1996.

A section of the restaurants website is dedicated to Propergander, posting articles about sanctuary cities, nuclear war and diversity.A recent article about an anti-diversity memo circulating at Google read, in part, Jim Crow is long gone, but it seems that Progressives (which gave us Jim Crow in the first place) now are imposing what essentially is a new form of segregation, that being ideological and religious segregation that is more reminiscent of how the former USSR treated dissidents than anything we have seen in private enterprise. The website was down for a time after the weekends incidents but was online as of Monday afternoon.

[In good hands: How immigrants craft your favorite restaurant dishes]

The restaurant wrote to one Twitter user that it had been overwhelmed with inquiries about White:

The restaurants Facebook page has been deluged with complaints about White, and its Yelp page is under active cleanup alert, due to the high number of people posting negative comments about him (Yelps note says it tries to remove comments related more to news events than users experience with the business). One sample review: Great place for Neo-Nazis. For people who arent Neo-Nazis? Not so much. A hot dog is a hot dog, but a hot dog place thatnot only employs Neo-Nazis but posts alt-right screeds on their webpage is a place that makes me want to vomit. But if you hate minorities, you might have a friend in Berkeleys Top Dog.

By the way, the hot dogs arekosher-style.

Charlottesville residents respond to the violence that erupted in their city Aug. 12. (Elyse Samuels,Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)

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Charlottesville white nationalist demonstrator loses job at libertarian hot dog shop - Washington Post

Last week in TAC, Zoltan Istvan wrote about The Growing World of Libertarian Transhumanism linking the transhumanist movement with all of its featureslike cyborgs, human robots and designer babiesto the ideas of liberty. To say Mr. Istvan is mistaken in his assessment is an understatement. Transhumanism should be rejected by libertarians as an abomination of human evolution.

We begin with Mr. Istvans definition of transhumanism:

transhumanism is the international movement of using science and technology to radically change the human being and experience. Its primary goal is to deliver and embrace a utopian techno-optimistic worlda world that consists of biohackers, cyborgists, roboticists, life extension advocates, cryonicists, Singularitarians, and other science-devoted people.

The ultimate task, however, is nothing less than overcoming biological human death and to solve all humanitys problems. Throughout much of Mr. Istvans work on this issue, he seems to think these ideas are perfectly compatible with libertarianismself-evident evenso he doesnt care to elaborate for his befuddled readers.

While most advocates of liberty could be considered, as Matt Ridley coined it, rational optimistsmeaning that generally we are optimistic, but not dogmatic, about progressit is easy to get into a state in which everything that is produced by the market is good per se and every new technology is hailed as the next step on the path of progress. In this sense, these libertarians become what Rod Dreher has called Technological Men. For them, choice matters more than what is chosen. [The Technological Man] is not concerned with what he should desire; rather, he is preoccupied with how he can acquire or accomplish what he desires.

Transhumanists including Mr. Istvan are a case in point. In his TAC article he not only endorses such things as the defeat of death, but even robotic hearts, virtual reality sex, and telepathy via mind-reading headsets. Need more of his grand ideas? How about brain implants ectogenesis, artificial intelligence, exoskeleton suits, designer babies, gene editing tech? At no point he wonders if we should even strive for these technologies.

When he does acknowledge potential problems he has quick (and crazy) solutions at hand: For example, what would happen if people never die, while new ones are coming into the world in abundance? His solution to the fear of overpopulation: eugenics. It is here where we see how libertarian Mr. Istvan truly is. When his political philosophythe supposedly libertarian onecomes into conflict with his idea of transhumanism, he suddenly drops the former and argues in favor of state-controlled breeding (or, as he says, controlled breeding by non-profit organizations such as the WHO, which is, by the way, state financed). I cautiously endorse the idea of licensing parents, a process that would be little different than getting a drivers licence. Parents who pass a series of basic tests qualify and get the green light to get pregnant and raise children.

The most frustrating thing is how similar he sounds to communists and socialists in his arguments. In most articles you read by transhumanists, you can see the dream of human perfection. Mr. Istvan says so himself: Transhumanists want more guarantees than just death, consumerism, and offspring. Much More. They want to be better, smarter, strongerperhaps even perfect and immortal if science can make them that way.

Surely it is the goal of transhumanists that, in their world, the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. You can just edit the genes of the embryo in the way that they are as intelligent as Aristotle, as poetic as Goethe, and as musically talented as Mozart. There are two problems, though: First, the world would become extremely boring, consisting only of perfect human beings who are masters at everything (which perhaps would make human cooperation superfluous). Second, that quote was famously uttered by the socialist Leon Trotsky.

As Ludwig von Mises wrote sarcastically, the socialist paradise will be the kingdom of perfection, populated by completely happy supermen. This has always been the mantra of socialists, starting with utopian thinkers like Charles Fourier, but also being embraced by the scientific ones like Marx, who derived his notion of history in which communism is the final stage of humanity from Hegel. Hegel himself believed in the man-godnot in the way that God became man through Jesus, but that man could become God one day. Intentionally or not, transhumanists sound dangerously similar to that. What they would actually create would be the New Soviet Man through bio-engineering and total environmental control as the highest social goal. In other words, you get inhuman ideological tyranny taken to a whole new level.

It should be noted that sometimes transhumanists recognize this themselvesbut if they do, their solutions only make things worse (much worse). Take Adam Zaretsky as example, who says that these new human beings shouldnt be perfect: Its important to make versions of transgenic human anatomy that are not based on idealism. But his solution is frightening: The idea is that you take a gene, say for pig noses, or ostrich anuses, or aardvark tongue, and you paste that into a human sperm, a human egg, a human zygote. A baby starts to form. And: We could let it flow into our anatomy, and these peoplewho yes, are humansshould be appreciated for who and what they are, after they are forced to be born in a really radically strange way. Its no surprise that Rod Dreher calls Mr. Zaretsky a sick monster, because he truly seems to be one when it comes to his transhumanist vision. He wants to create handicapped human beings on purpose.

If this were what libertarians think should happen, it would be sad (thankfully its mostly not). As Jeff Deist notes, it is important to remember that liberty is natural and organic and comports with human action. It doesnt require a new man. Transhumanists may say that the introduction of their idea is inevitable (in Istvans words, Whether people like it or not, transhumanism has arrived) but that is not true. And in this sense, it is time for libertarians to argue against the notion of extreme transhumanism. Yes, the market has brought it about and yes, the state shouldnt prohibit it (though giving your baby a pig nose could certainly be a violation of rights), but still, one shouldnt be relativist or even nihilist about such frightening developments. It would be a shame if the libertarian maxim of Everyone should be able to do whatever one wants to (as long as no one is hurt by it) becomes Everyone should do whatever one can do just because it is possible.

Finally, it comes as no surprise that transhumanists are largely, if not all, atheists (or as Mr. Istvan says: Im an atheist, therefore Im a transhumanist. This just proves what the classical liberal historian Lord Acton talked about when he said, Progress, the religion of those who have none. In the end, transhumanism is the final step to get God out of the way. It would be the continuation of what Richard Weaver wrote about in Ideas Have Consequences: Instead of seeing nature, the world and life overall as a means to get to know God, humans in the last centuries have become accustomed to seeing the world as something that is only there for humans to take and use for their own pleasures. Transhumanism would be the final step of this process: the conquest of death.

You dont have to be religious to find this abhorrent. As we have seen, it would be the end to all religion, to human cooperation overall, in all likelihood to liberty itself, and even the good-bye to humanity. It would be the starting point of the ultimate dystopia.

Kai Weiss is an International Relations student and works for the Austrian Economics Center and Hayek Institute, two libertarianthink tanks based in Vienna, Austria.

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Transhumanism Is Not Libertarian, It's an Abomination | The ... - The American Conservative

August 16 - To the Editor:

The recent events in Charlottesville have left me disgusted and ashamed. Our country is better than what was on display last week.

What was even more frightening to me was the echoed silence coming from many members of the Republican Party. For too long they have turned the other cheek to their racist and bigoted members within their party base, fearing to lose their vote come election season.

For too long their silence has enabled the factually incorrect and morally repugnant wing of their party to grow in numbers and in power, to spread their hate-filled ideology, to the point of placing a white-nationalist enabler in the White House with known white-nationalist advisors.

To those in the Republican Party who are as appalled and sickened as I am seeing the racist views and openly practiced neo-Nazism on their airwaves, I beg of you to make a stand. Denounce the evil within your party and root out those within your party who treat others as second class citizens.

Or simply abandon the sinking ship of the GOP, because there is another political party which believes in fiscal conservatism and human rights. There is another party out there that believes that all people are created equal and inhibit certain inalienable rights. There is another party out there that believes all human rights apply to all humans, regardless of demographic. There is a party that believes this so strongly, they put it in their platform for all to see.

Join the Libertarian Party, and leave the racists and bigots to their festering party of white-nationalism enablers, and join a party of principle. Join the party that pledges never to use force to achieve political or social goals. Join a party that accepts everyone of faith, everyone of color, and every one of every gender not because it is popular, but because it is the right and moral thing to do.

I am Brian Shields, and I am running for State Representative in Dovers first ward, and I am doing so as a proud Libertarian because Dover needs a new voice in Concord. A voice that will not stand for bigotry, misogyny, and hatred, and will not turn the other cheek. This, I can promise you. You need someone who will protect your rights, all your rights. You need someone who will not have their vote bullied by party power leadership to further an agenda that doesnt benefit Dover. I am the independent voice Dover needs in Concord.

The Libertarian Party is the independent voice New Hampshire needs in the State House. If you are politically homeless, check us out. We welcome everyone with open arms.

Brian Shields

Libertarian Candidate for State Representative, Strafford 13

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Libertarian Party is the independent voice for NH - Foster's Daily Democrat