Alex Knepper
I am: Alex Knepper. 20 years old. Republican. Classically liberal. Atheist. Gay. Contrarian. I support: Laissez-faire capitalism. A robust foreign policy. Social tolerance. Individualism. Reason. I oppose: Statism. Collectivism. Government schools. Psychiatry. Religion -- especially Islam. I admire: Aristotle. Epictetus. John Taylor Gatto. Rudy Giuliani. Barry Goldwater. Rudy Giuliani. Friedrich Hayek. Christopher Hitchens. H.L. Mencken. Ludwig von Mises. Camille Paglia. Isabel Paterson. Ayn Rand. Robert Spencer. Thomas Szasz.
“Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitute, and misery.” – Milton Friedman
We certainly do take a lot for granted. Consider that on this planet of about 6.7 billion people, Americans comprise about 4.4% of the world population. If an American — and one who is healthy enough to function well, intelligent enough to be on a site like this, and even somewhat financially secure — you’ve won life’s lottery. You had a far greater chance of being born in — and usually confined to — China, or Sub-Saharan Africa. But out of sheer luck, you weren’t. For the vast majority of us living in the United States, we were fortunate enough to simply be born into history’s grandest civilization: one that we had not yet earned nor contributed to.
So why do we never feel so lucky? Amidst apocalyptic conservative rhetoric about impending tyranny, leftist outrage about relations between the sexes, races, or classes, and our own personal fixations on our relatively minor problems — why is it so difficult to take a step back, take the historical and international perspective, and realize how incredibly fortunate we are?
Glenn Greenwald makes me as mad as this phoenix
Sometimes I doubt my ambition to become a famous cultural commentator, and then I look at twits like Glenn Greenwald and am reassured.
Greenwald is angry that John McCain is angry — angry that the Iranian regime spends more money on finding ways to blow up innocent civilians than on enriching the quality of life of the citizenry. Greenwald — the other ranting, ideological Glenn — reminds us breathlessly that the United States is also killing innocent civilians in its occupation of Afghanistan. One can see him grinning behind his computer screen, thinking he’s one-upped the conventional wisdom. In his frantic quest to bash the United States, he may have missed the fact that Hezbollah is actually trying to blow up civilians. read more…
Ah…finally!
Barack Obama, tired of being called an elitist professor-type, decided to perform in Reagan drag today, declaring on the Today Show that, far from responding ineptly to the oil spill, he’s actually ready to “kick some ass.”
Like most drag queens, Obama was fairly unconvincing as a man: only middle school boys and feminists think that men try to prove their competence by announcing to the world that they’re ready to find some “ass to kick.”
The Left was enraged when George W. Bush told Islamists to “bring it on,” crying breathlessly that he’d defiled the office with his juvenile cowboy chatter. Now that Obama is seeking “ass to kick” within corporations not even located out of the country he governs, they don’t seem to care — left-wingers are only driven into a sputtering rage over cowboy talk when it’s directed at their friends the Muslims. read more…
When it comes to Israel and its genocidal enemies, Andrew Sullivan is a master of moral equivalency. The man has it down to an art form, sort of like the way that children enjoy playing with their food. “Look, mommy, my Alpha-Bits say ‘I hate Israel’!” “Yes, we know, Andrew. We forgive you now for supporting the Iraq War.” He’s one of those guys who says “I have nothing against Jews, but…”
As a refresher: in the recent past, he launched into a mind-numbing exegesis over a slightly-misplaced religious metaphor from one of Netanyahu’s advisers to imply that Israel’s “paranoia” is equivalent to Ali Khamenei’s possibly-genocidal ambitions. Basically, Sullivan has decided a priori that all nations have essentially the same character, and so we should treat religious references by the Netanyahu in the same manner that we would treat reference that come from Khamenei’s regime. read more…
The critics are right: the flotilla attack today was indeed heinous and unforgivable. It is a moral outrage, and must be condemned by all civilized people. Indeed, it was an act of planned terrorism. We must stand as one and condemn it.
Alas, this is unlikely to happen. When one party is represented by ‘oppressed third world people of color,’ we’re not likely to get anywhere. And when it’s a premeditated assault by Islamists on Jews, turn the lights out.
The five points below, presented very briefly, are the essential facts of this incident. When dealing with people who have decided a priori that Israel is the bad guy and is therefore guilty in any conflict in which it is a party, no progress can be made. But most people have no strong opinion about the Israeli-Arab conflict. Reaching them is a moral imperative. This little guide for the perplexed should help people connect the dots and realize that — as usual — Israel has done nothing wrong and is being treated like, as Alan Dershowitz has aptly put it, the ‘Jew among nations,’ even when dealing with genocidal terrorists. read more…
David Forsmarck and Jenn Q. Public have both objected to my dismissal of the term “survivor” when dealing with victims of rape. My original statement, which I stand by, reads thus:
“Survivor” is a term we typically employ to those who have endured the horrors of genocide, war, or famine, and managed to come out alive. Sexual assault is not a lethal act, nor is it a life-defining event, akin to suffering in Auschwitz. Feminists would like it to be a traumatic event: like Hamas, the more of their alleged constituents that sufferer [sic], the more that they can manipulate people’s emotions — but it’s a terrible debasement of the term survivor to apply it to those who are simply victims.
Jenn takes an approach of empowerment, arguing that one should never refer to oneself as a victim:
Being a survivor means refusing to remain tethered to a traumatic experience. It has nothing to do with the feminist racket, and everything to do with individual strength and resilience. read more…
From the department of throwing crap at the wall until something sticks: Progressives have now become enamored with the idea of tax cuts. A new campaign of dubious origin has emerged called, “The Other 95%.” Its credo: “95% of Americans received a tax cut from Obama. But most of us don’t know it! It’s a fact: Every one of us making under $250K got a tax cut in ’09 & ’10.”
I suppose it’s a good thing that, even though they’re still lying, liberals are now at least lying with the idea in mind that tax cuts are good for the American people. On the other hand, they’re still lying.
After weeks of prudent silence, American University’s president, Neil Kerwin, has finally spoken up about the date-rape controversy sparked by my recent column. Now, the last time anyone was interested in what was coming out of American University, it was because Kerwin’s predecessor was caught embezzling school funds — so perhaps, not used to all of the attention, the opportunity was too tantalizing for him to stay quiet. Trying — and failing — to assume a position of balance, Kerwin writes thus in his campus-wide spring semester memorandum:
The aftermath of my column
For the past two days, I have been embroiled in an enormous campus controversy concerning a column I wrote criticizing the concept of “date rape” and decrying the victim-based ideology of the sexual left. Printed in the university’s paper, the American University Eagle, the column went up on its website on Sunday night.
Readers of NewsReal Blog can probably anticipate what’s coming next. Papers were vandalized, people have been intimidated — par-for-the-course. I knew what I was getting into. Although from a pro-feminist perspective, Amanda Hess of the Washington City Paper has the run-down of who said what.
Sometime yesterday, Jezebel.com, a leading feminist blog, decided to chip in its two cents. What did the site’s commenters say when they found a picture of me — that wasn’t actually of me?
Is the CBO really so infallible?
Almost alone in the public’s appraisal of the government, the Congressional Budget Office emerged from the health care debate as a symbol of nonpartisan truth-telling. Who, asked the media, would doubt the Non-Partisan, Objective CBO? If the CBO claims that the Democrats’ plan will reduce the deficit, who are we citizens to doubt?
Well, contrary to expectations from the infallible CBO, which stated there we had six more years until this problem would arise, we now know according to an article from yesterday’s New York Times that Social Security revenue will not equal payout beginning this year:
Farewell, Mitt.
As they cast the 216th vote last night, Nancy Pelosi and her minions also smashed Mitt Romney’s presidential ambitions. There is literally no substantial difference between Obamacare and Romneycare. The fundamentals are exactly the same: an individual mandate is placed upon all citizens to purchase health insurance, with subsidies handed out to those in the lower-income strata. And more: insurance companies cannot deny coverage based upon pre-existing conditions, and new bureaucracy is enacted to comply with the new laws.
Massachusetts has seen the future, and the verdict from the citizenry is in: it doesn’t work. Consider the following:
Is this an AP article or a White House press release?:
WASHINGTON – Triumph in their grasp, President Barack Obama and House Democrats demonstrated command of the votes needed to pass landmark health care legislation Sunday night, a climactic chapter in a century-long quest for near universal coverage.
The House argued its way through a thicket of Republican objections toward a late-evening vote on the bill to extend coverage to 32 million Americans who lack it, ban insurers from denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions and cut deficits by an estimated $138 billion over a decade.
“Today is the day that is going to rank with the day we passed the civil rights bill in 1964,” said Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, a member of Congress since 1955. “Today we’re doing something that ranks with what we did with Social Security or Medicare. This is a day of which we can all be proud if we vote for that legislation.”
What commentary could I possibly provide here? This sycophantic worshiping speaks for itself. read more…
