Darien Sumner – Bumbling Bees

Purity spirals

26 March 2023 by Darien Sumner

Walter Block has posted a piece of correspondence he recently received on the topic of saving the world, libertarianism, and making fools of ourselves. It’s a topic we’ve addressed before — a few times, actually — but it continues to have legs. The question, in brief, is: would you steal a penny from someone to save the world?

Obviously, the heart of the question is this: how seriously do you take the non-aggression principle? Are you so committed to it that you would never engage in even the smallest violation of it under any circumstances, or do you accept that there are some situations in which the NAP isn’t the only consideration? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it remains popular among internet libertarians to claim the former.

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Last Week in Weird

8 March 2021 by Darien Sumner

I do not like them, Sam-I-Am

Ah, drag queen story time, that wonderful, family-friendly American institution. Where else can you take your children to have them taught wholesome things than to a dude who’s had himself surgically altered to look as much like the Devil as possible, and who wears a shimmering dress, fishnet stockings, studded leather gloves, and plastic Yu-Gi-Oh hair? Speaking as a father with a young son: that’s a role model, that is!

After all, if we don’t let the cross-dressers indoctrinate our precious youth, they might end up reading horrible far-right hate fear Qanon stuff like that racist Dr. Seuss.

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Last Week in Weird

1 March 2021 by Darien Sumner

Game is you, komrade!

Childhood is a magical thing. With no preconceived notions bounding a child’s imagination, he is able to come up with all manner of games to play and stories to spin. Children are indeed highly adept at applying all manner of bizarre logic to nearly anything; if you’ve ever witnessed a child playing with blocks, or balls, or even rocks, you’ve noticed the way those seemingly mundane objects acquire characters and personalities.

So naturally it’s important to fill the children up with the right notions so they play the right games!

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Last Week in Weird

22 February 2021 by Darien Sumner

It’ll be a cold day in a hot place

I’m sure you’ve heard about the weather. Throughout most of the continental United States, the last week has been unusually cold and snowy (which is because of global warming and don’t you forget it, you horrible science denier). Texas certainly had the worst of it, though; not only were temperatures in the single- or low-double-digits for most of the week, but the infrastructure was unable to withstand the sudden cold — due to years of crony deals, about a quarter of Texas’s electricity is generated by wind and solar, none of which was designed to operate in the cold and buried under snow, and millions of Texans were left without power for days on end, leading to no end of misery and a fair few deaths.

So naturally, deranged rodeo clown Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says the problem was that Texas didn’t green energy hard enough:

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Last Week in Weird

15 February 2021 by Darien Sumner

Auntie Tom’s Syrup

If there’s anything that can bring people together — people of all races, colours, and creeds, without regard to national boundaries, places of origin, or bizarre hallucinations about having an intimate relationship with Tetris — it’s pancakes. And what pancake feast would be complete without a heaping helping of high fructose corn syrup, artificially flavoured to taste vaguely like what focus groups in southern California assume is maple? Why, truly, it would be a sad day in America without our precious national heritage of remotely food-like bottled rubbish.

Because you’re a newly-hatched innocent little bright-eyed butterfly, I’m sure you’re startled to hear that pancake syrup is racist too.

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Last Week in Weird

8 February 2021 by Darien Sumner

Tomorrow’s just another day, and I don’t believe in Time

For months now, anybody who has had the temerity to point out the obvious, observable fact that the 2020 presidential election was a fraud has been drummed out of polite society, canceled by social media platforms, and “de-platformed” by service providers. Your humble narrator has been an un-person for years, having been in the vanguard of pointing out that the 2016 presidential election was a scam and a hoax also, so none of this comes as a surprise to me.

What, on the other hand, does come as a surprise to me is the fact that the election defrauders are already openly admitting that they rigged the election, in such stodgy, establishment rags as Time magazine, no less:

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Last Week in Weird

1 February 2021 by Darien Sumner

Won’t somebody think of the evil dolls?

Ah, the government. Ever helpful and deeply concerned about the plight of the common man, yes? So concerned, and so helpful, that it even runs the “Amber Alert” system to spread the word about missing children, and help their families — God willing — recover them. Surely, not even as deeply hateful a white supremacist as your humble narrator could possibly have anything to say against that!

Why, the government’s Amber Alert system is in fact so useful that it remains our last line of defense not only against child sex traffickers, but also against 80’s slasher villains.

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Last Week in Weird

26 January 2021 by Darien Sumner

Welcome to the afterlife, Jean-Luc. You’re dead.

Boy howdy did I get in trouble four years ago for talking about what a sham that election was. I’m assuming all you gooves who gave me no end of flawlessly civil and respectful disagreement over that one are once again busily convincing yourselves that this year’s electionball tournament also featured what they call NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER, but it may be worth pointing out that your humble narrator is not a “Trump guy” this time around any more than he was last time.

So complaining that the new guy wasn’t actually elected — which is obviously the case — has roughly the same moral weight as Misty posting a sign on the Cerulean Gym saying that Giovanni is not the rightful boss of Team Rocket. It’s important because it’s true — except the bit about Team Rocket, which I made up — but it’s not like the figure of the boss is the important element. The organization is evil either way, yeah?

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The Myth of Tremendous Government

11 August 2018 by Darien Sumner

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that you really like these Objection! columns, but you wish they were 9216 words long and came with a bibliography. Well guess whose prayers have just been answered? If you happen to be Mark Christensen, then not yours, but pretty much everybody else is golden, since I’ve written a long, detailed rebuttal of his piece calling for conservative-scented big government. An exerpt:

Christensen assumes a set of criteria for determining whether or not a government is "good", which I will grant for the purposes of this rebuttal. He then asks whether big or small government is most likely to be "good". Granted, his very next sentence—"[o]f course, the question is ridiculous"—almost throws the entire thing away; not only is that question not ridiculous, it is the entire core of the argument! If big government does not do a better job of being "good", then what on earth would be its purpose? Surely a smaller, less expensive government capable of achieving the same or a greater level of "goodness" would be preferable; why would one not choose the less expensive means of identically achieving one’s ends?

Having thus thrown away most of his cards, Christensen is left in the unenviable position of having to argue that, while big government may not be more "good" in general, it is obviously more "good" in certain specific circumstances…

Yeah. It’s a pretty thorough shredding of the argument for big government. I go all the way back to the French Revolution to deliver ye olde smack. You can read the full piece on The Zeroth Position; just be aware that, as befits the nature of the publication, it’s less flippant and jokey than you’ve come to expect. No less devastating, though.

And now: Libertommunists!

25 May 2018 by Darien Sumner

I trust you’ve heard about the new "GDPR" edict recently pronounced by the savages in Brussels. In case you haven’t, here’s the skinny: it stands for "General Data Protection Regulation," which means that it’s exactly as communist as the acronym "GDPR" makes you think it is. The long and short is that the European Union — read: a bunch of feckless bureaucrats in Brussels — now asserts that it has the authority to control exactly what data literally every entity in the world collects and what is done with it. Because, you know, safety and that.

Apparently, the level of monstrous totalitarianism on display here just isn’t sufficiently obvious to disabuse fashionable libertarians of the notion that arrogating huge amounts of power to a tiny cabal of criminals will be just aces for freedom and liberty.

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