The Left has finally understood who’s to blame for the collapse of Detroit, and it’s quite obvious when you think about it — white racists did it with their super-powerful evil thoughts:

As payback for the worldwide revolution symbolized by hot jazz, Smokey Robinson dancin’ to keep from cryin’ and Eminem trading verses with Rihanna, New Orleans and Detroit had to be punished. Specifically, they had to be isolated, impoverished and almost literally destroyed, so they could be held up as examples of what happens when black people are allowed to govern themselves.

Hang on, you can stop composing that all-caps comment – I don’t actually believe that what happened to Detroit and New Orleans resulted from anyone’s conscious plan. Real history is much more complicated than that. I do, however, think [sic] that narrative has some validity on a psychological level …

(Apparently the psychic racist death rays were first tried out on New Orleans, where they were “goosed along a bit by rising carbon emissions and rising temperatures,” creating a massive atmospheric disturbance.)

Goodbye sanity, your day is done. Hail madness and gathering night …

This sort of thing could begin to irritate people:

The six victims who gave evidence were aged between 11 and 15 when the abuse took place. They were plied with drugs and alcohol, repeatedly raped, sold and trafficked as prostitutes, all at a time during which when they were supposedly in the safekeeping of local authorities.

The trial — details of which were so disturbing that jury members were excused from ever having to sit on a jury again — exposed years of failings by Thames Valley police and Oxford social services. The court heard that the girls were abused between 2004 and 2012 and that police were told about the crimes as early as 2006, that they were contacted at least six times by victims, but failed to act.

The mother of Girl “A” said the police and social services had failed to protect the girls and made her and other family members feel as if they were overreacting. She said: “I can recall countless incidents when I have been upset and frustrated by various professional bodies.”

The mother of Girl “C” told the British newspaper The Guardian that she had begged social services staff to rescue her daughter from the rape gang. She said that her daughter’s abusers had threatened to cut the girl’s face off and promised to slit the throats of her family members. She said that they had been forced to leave their home after the men had threatened to decapitate family members.

Despite irrefutable evidence that the girls were being sexually abused, no one — according to a report published by the House of Commons on June 5 — acted to draw all the facts together, apparently due to fears by police and social workers that they would be accused of racism against Muslims.

When it comes to the libertarian suicide race, Bryan Caplan leaves Don Boudreaux in the dust. Caplan takes the Non-Aggression Principle and runs with it, all the way into a maximum-velocity self-directed death cult. (Self-directed, solely in the ideological sense, of course.) Given the considerable merits of this book, in particular, it’s a sad thing to see.

American libertarianism has always been vulnerable to neo-puritan spiritual extravagance. Caplan systematically pushes this tendency to its limit, divorcing its arguments from any realistic estimation of consequences, and transforming it into a form of deontological moral fanaticism, in which self-defense, retaliation, and boundaries are strictly prohibited. He envisages a world of games in which only unilateral altruism is permissible to the libertarian player. It would be fun to go a few rounds of prisoner’s dilemma with him.

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Confession No.1: I generally like Don Boudreaux’s writing a lot.

Confession No.2: I think this is simply insane. By that I mean: I simply don’t get it, at all.

Boudreaux begins by explaining the concerns of a “few friends whose opinions I hold in the highest regard” that “immigrants will use their growing political power to vote for government policies that are more interventionist and less respectful of individual freedoms.” Hard to imagine, I know. Especially if one ignores insignificant examples such as — ummm — the state of fricking California.

It then gets weirder. We learn that “concern over the likely voting patterns of immigrants is nothing new.  Past fears seem, from the perspective of 2013, to have been unjustified.” I’m about to poison my nervous-system with my own sarcasm at this point, so instead I’ll simply ask, as politely as possible: What would count as evidence of America moving in a direction that was “more interventionist and less respectful of individual freedoms”? Would it look anything at all like what we’ve seen — in highly-accelerated mode — since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act?

Then comes the overt celebration of libertarian suicidalism:

But let’s assume for the moment that today’s immigrants – those immigrants recently arrived and those who would arrive under a more liberalized immigration regime – are indeed as likely as my concerned friends fear to vote overwhelmingly to move American economic policy in a much more dirigiste direction.  Such a move would, I emphatically and unconditionally agree, be very bad. Very. Bad. Indeed.

I still support open immigration. I cannot bring myself to abandon support of my foundational principles just because following those principles might prove fatal.

The thing is, they did prove fatal. That’s why the neoreaction exists.

Genomics isn’t just about you.

Noureddine Krichene at ATol:

There are contrasts and similarities between the extinguished communism of Mao and the rising one of Bernanke-Obama. Both reject Hayek’s theory and the private sector, and believe in a provident state; wealth has to be redistributed equally. Both believe that capital has no remuneration and the interest rate has to be zero.

Nonetheless, there are contrasts between Mao’s Red Book and Bernanke-Obama collectivism. The former called for confiscation of private poverty and forced labor to work with hands and small tools; unemployment was not allowed and workers earned deservedly a share in the product. The Bernanke-Obama model is based on Keynesian economics and calls for creating as much demand as possible through fiscal deficits and money printing.

If Leviathan needs a mascot, here‘s the guy.

A couple of remarks on the recent unpleasantness which have every chance of becoming thoroughly mainstream. First, a reminder from Mickey Kaus:

… there’s a good argument that “welfare benefits + ethnic antagonism” is the universal recipe for an underclass with an angry, oppositional culture. The social logic is simple: Ethnic differences make it easy for those outside of, for example, French Arab neighborhoods to discriminate against those inside, and easy for those inside to resent the mainstream culture around them. Meanwhile, relatively generous welfare benefits enable those in the ethnic ghetto to stay there, stay unemployed, and seethe. Without government subsidies, they would have to overcome the prejudice against them and integrate into the mainstream working culture. Work, in this sense, is anti-terrorist medicine. (And if you work all day, there’s less time to dream up ways and reasons to kill infidels.)

Secondly, from Richard Fernandez:

The Washington Post sets out five charts to explain Sweden’s “youth riots.” “The violent youth riots that spread across Stockholm’s suburbs this week seem at odds with the public perception of Sweden as one of the world’s most liberal and tolerant countries.” We are told the “youth riots” are due to the relative underprivilege of the “foreign born.” But does the Post mean Chinese immigrants then? No they don’t. The Washington Post knows what it means and we are supposed to know what it means, but we are not supposed to admit that we know what it means.

ADDED: Foseti ties things together, beginning with this exquisitely ominous sentence: “In Sweden, only dark explanations can explain the burning cars.”

ADDED: Considerably less likely to become ‘thoroughly mainstream’ any time soon.

Heartiste (via Jim):

Stick a fork in the West, she’s done.

Joseph Chamie has a bridge to global harmony to sell you:

… with US immigration increased to 10 million per year, the enhanced America with a population of 1.6 billion by century’s close would mean a more secure and flourishing world. As the world’s most populous nation by 2100, America would strengthen its capacity to continue promoting democracy, freedom and development, thereby ensuring peace, stability and prosperity for every region of the world.

What could possibly go wrong?

ADDED: How (oh how) could this happen? Sailer’s genius on full-burn: “It’s funny how the refugee system works. It’s almost as if foreigners who are really good at getting their neighbors to hate them seem to wind up as refugees in America more than foreigners who are good at getting along with their neighbors.”