One Koch Brother comes out against the immigration pause:
Tea Party founder and conservative billionaire Charles Koch has attacked Donald Trump’s controversial travel ban, branding it as ‘authoritarian’. Koch said he will oppose the billionaire president if and when he deviates from a commitment to ‘free and open societies’. Commenting on the travel ban controversy, he said: ‘[The] travel ban is the wrong approach and will likely be counterproductive.’
While a Koch group opposes the Buy American movement President Trump supports:
The pro-jobs tax plan being developed by establishment Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, is now being opposed by the Koch brothers’ advocacy group, Americans For Prosperity.
The opposition of the Koch-funded group shows a widening clash between the GOP’s donors and Donald Trump’s expanding populist “Buy American, Hire American” coalition.
So far, the two groups have clashed over cheap-labor immigration and Trump’s successful candidacy. That clash was garishly demonstrated late December, when Trump publicly booted a friend of David Koch off one of his golf courses, prompting Koch to also leave.
Brothers Charles and David Koch opposed Trump during the Republican primary season and refused to help him against Hillary Clinton, partly because Trump and many of his voters oppose unrestricted trade and mass immigration.
As I have said, libertarianism is a reproductive strategy designed to function alone, in spread out areas with low population densities, where large groups do not form. In r/K Theory, it is akin to the breakdown in r/K that occurs when population densities drop.
Koch is designed to function alone, avoid trouble with others, and only fight as a last resort, if it is absolutely necessary. He lacks the group-forming and reflexively competing urge of the K-strategist. Without that urge, he cannot fathom why we should have borders, or try to out-compete other nations by only buying American. He wants to avoid all conflict, and he is driven to do that by minimizing any constraints we impose on others.
He will formulate all sorts of arguments for why his position is superior. He will talk about the need to treat all religions as equals, he will argue against discrimination, and so on. But he is just trying to punch amygdala buttons that are supportive of his underlying urges, which lack any drive to associate with or form groups or initiate aggressive actions with others in a direct fashion.
He is very much akin to the Grizzly Bear, who wants to avoid others, avoid conflict, and leave everyone else alone. The Grizzly bear can’t grasp why the wolf wants to join a pack or why they attack others they happen upon in their territory for no reason other than the trespass.
Koch would be right, if there were only a few humans around, and we could all avoid each other. But in a densely packed world with other K-strategists actively trying to defeat us, and the insanity of radical Islam lashing out at us, his strategy, no matter how “moral” it “feels” to him, is destined for failure. Amazingly, if he had his way and President Trump imported millions of Muslims, they took over the nation, and suddenly gays were being thrown from rooftops, women were being forcibly circumcised and murdered in honor killings, and all non-Muslims ended up subjugated and taxed for being unbelievers, Koch would proudly say that we should take solace in the fact that we had acted “morally.”
What he wouldn’t grasp is that his morals are just his reproductive strategy, and it was not properly adapted to the K-selected world he was living in.
I understand this, because as a programmed libertarian, I feel his urges. It has only been through intensive observation and contemplation that I came to understand that outside of select areas like the forests of Alaska and the Midwest, the world is too densely packed for libertarianism. r and K will always beat it out, because there are too many people, and they are all driven to either compete or betray. As a result, the only choices we have that will be enacted are r or K. Given the inherent resource scarcity of the world, the only practical option is the K-strategy, and fortunately for libertarians, you can find enough common ground there to provide enough freedom to make the world it creates tolerable.
As the Apocalypse approaches, K will be the only option, because the entire nation is going K.
[…] Koch-servative Brothers Go To War With President Trump […]
He also doesn’t understand that when the wolves are hungry, they will pack up and attack the grizzly, even though it means that they both lose.
i wonder if the cock brothers realize how isolated politically they are now? they are reviled by all/most Trump supporters, and the left. so who remains? the other outcasts from Trump Island; i.e. the #NeverTrumpers. they are a joke now, like the two brothers from Trading Places.
True. It is a bad time to stab the right in the back.
Good stuff! The scientific approach can avoid a lot of grief. I’ve reblogged this along with related material here:
http://ex-army.blogspot.com/2017/01/for-strength-of-pack-is-wolf-and.html
Ahhh, libertarianism, the third strategy of the spectrum [pg 40]. A difficult interpretation, but makes sense with considerable bargain.
Viewing Koch one sees Gorsuch:
“It is not for secular courts to rewrite the religious complaint of a faithful adherent, or to decide whether a religious teaching about complicity imposes ‘too much’ moral disapproval on those only ‘indirectly’ assisting wrongful conduct,” he noted in a concurring opinion.
Hence, welcome the Muslim.
I really like Trump, but the alt-right in me says: Nowhere enough.
r strategist – gamma
k-strategist – alpha
libertarian – sigma.
As a Sigma that helps to explain my lifelong embrace of libertarianism.
Indeed, AC, I think that more and more libertarians like you and me (Vox Day, Molyneux, etc.) are waking up to this reality (some, like Vox, much earlier than others, like me). Thanks for your insights and contribution to this.
In order to have a free country, you need a country.
Very true, but you know that innately because you are programmed as a K. I am actually programmed with less of that urge, though I still have some. I think the hard core Libertarians cannot fathom why it matters who these other people are. They just intend to never see them. Probably easy too, when you are worth billions, so reality never intrudes.
If you want a free country, you need a moral people.
It’s true that Vox Day, Molyneux, and Tom Woods are being pushed more toward K as the situation unfolds. Vox on free-trade/western civ, Woods on the possibility of working with the left, and Molyneux on whether the time to use force has arrived yet. My instincts come from a similar place, although the libertarians I listen to include both open- and closed- border types. Even one prominent open-borders guy I know just added a closed-borders minarchist to his show, so it’s definitely part of the conversation for the non-billionaire types.
The struggle is real. Every instinct I have says to just leave these other people alone and they will leave you alone. Or that if push comes to shove I can fight back to defend myself. It’s difficult to imagine that these might be impossible, and the only option for survival is to band together with a larger group, submit to someone else’s authority, and take action as a group. One thing I do know from listening to libertarians for a long time is they instinctively do NOT form groups. Every story of confrontation is “I was walking home at night alone” or else “I was filming the arrest of someone but I was the only one”. They have no trouble meeting or cooperating while armed, say for a rally or wedding. But the idea of tactics or forming a militia or anything like that is totally out-of-bounds. it doesn’t even occur to them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I44H7PofKNE