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31 December, 2004

AN EMAIL FROM NORTHERN SCOTLAND:

Blogger Dave Terron is a distinguished British soldier and I felt honoured to receive the following email from him about the Scottish/English rivalry that I noted in my Christmas-day post. And, given the Scottish passion for celebrating the new year, it feels very right to start off with a link to Scotland on New Year's Eve.

"Na diobair caraid's a charraid (Forsake not a friend in the fray).

The population of Scotland overall has some 20% English or of English extraction. Nearly one in five are English and they are the biggest 'minority' in Scotland. There are MSPs such as Mark (Muppet) Ballard of the Green (Muppets) Party who are English and most of the main government posts in the executive and Holyrood are held by English people. In fact were you to come to the Highlands you would find that the population of people in Moray is 17,6% English which does NOT include the two big RAF airbases. Why? Because many of the English come here on posting and love the quality of life so much that they stay once they finish with the RAF or other government jobs. They are fully integrated and intermarried with some very interesting results in terms of local accent I can tell you! A mix of Yorkshire Aberdeen Lancashire Cockney and Scouse I think....

The problem with the so called 'coldness' towards the English is (a) more to do with the dependency culture here in Scotland or rather in the Central Belt where 1 in 5 are on sickness benefits or welfare of some sort despite there being thousands of jobs remaining to be filled. The increase in immigration is aimed at filling those posts that the Scots will not fill...and (b) the stupidity of Scottish politicians who persist in telling the Scottish people that when things go wrong it is not the Scots parliament's fault it is Westminster. Indeed whenever there is a hint of a problem the Holyrood mob send the problem to Westminster and then claim that their hands are tied....see here for details or on my blog.

Scotland's 'native' population is falling because most of the bright young things are seeing that the Central Belt idle fat voters are being cuddled and given money to get fatter so long as they waddle down to the voting station when required to vote for a continuance in the Labour welfare state and their beer money. In the Highlands we see no investment, fewer jobs and everything is aimed at the Central Belt fat idle etc.

Were you to come to Inverness you would get a much warmer welcome than in downtown Falkirk if you were English. Australians? We canna understand 'em and we don't have a decent Rugby team either. But our cricket team did take part in the World Cup a few years back!


I served 23 years with a Scottish Highland regiment and not once did any of the Jocks slag me off for being English. Not once. But when I served with a Lowland regiment for a year (I was drafted in to sort them out as their discipline had collapsed) boy, did I get the mutterings behind the old back. It was more of a blame the English because we will not admit we are at fault for having such an inferiority complex type thing. I was glad to get home to my Highlanders!

I think anti-English chat is rare and only gets prominence because some people want to distract from the bigger picture; Scotland is becoming less Scottish as the cultural things such as the music, dress and the regiments are slowly whittled away. Its an EU plot damm their eyes!"

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SWEDEN AND THE TSUNAMI

There were a lot of Swedish tourists in the fleshpots of Thailand when the Tsunami hit so the following is an interesting email received yesterday from one of my correspondents in Sweden:

"The Swedish government has made a total a*** of itself. Within a day of the size of the problem becoming known, the travel agents here organised something like 6 extra aircraft to begin shuttling stranded tourists and the less badly hurt home to Sweden/Scandinavia. The government, in contrast, took until today to begin organising an airlift of the significant number of seriously wounded citizens who can't be transported on the regular aircraft. They also did not/have not yet asked for help from such countries as Australia (we did get the obligatory shot of an Australian airforce Hercules transport in Indonesia). So, private companies acting with no profit motive have quickly responded to a major catastrophe on the other side of the world while the government of the people sits on its hands and does nothing. Hmmm, how do these burks get voted in again? I suspect the deeper problem is that the government *can't* quickly respond to such incidents despite their claims. Sweden is busy laying off its armed forces, where I guess quickly activated medical teams and aircraft are traditionally located, so they have been caught with their pants down. As for why they didn't ask for help from Australia or the US? That is a curly one, a cynic would suggest pride in not asking the dreaded Anglo-aggressors for help. There really is no other reason I can imagine. Granted, Australia may be stretched already and the US -- well, we get no information about that -- although I know at least one naval group is in the area to help. The point I think was that the Swedes didn't even ask"

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ELSEWHERE

PID summarizes about all you can reasonably say about the tsunami. Beyond Wallacia seems to be keeping up with the Australian and Indonesian news about the aftermath.

European hatred of Microsoft: "Yesterday?s antitrust ruling against Microsoft by a European Union court sends a troubling message about the future of competition and innovation in Europe and around the world. The penalties imposed on the company threaten to chill investment in new technologies and impose billion of dollars of costs on European consumers and independent software developers. In addition to a fine of $665 million, Microsoft will be forced to separate its Windows Media Player from its operating system and disclose parts of its internal software code for server applications to other companies. While these changes in the company's software and intellectual property protections will impose huge costs on the IT industry and its customers, the alleged benefits of the ruling is far from clear."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with holiday reading for all.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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30 December, 2008

A LEFTIST GAME-PLAN FOR 2008

It is pleasing to see a post on Daily Kos that shows a considerable grip on reality. Some of his attempts to deal with the reality concerned are a bit amusing, though. The point of the post is to tell Democrats how to change their message so that they win in 2008. The whole post is actually worth fisking but I will content myself with a few notes:

He says: "The Left is the true home of moral values, once you understand that morality is more than sex." Really? How can it be the home of ANY morality when they keep telling us that there is no such thing as right and wrong?

He says: "The Republicans have become the party of Christianity, globalization, and capitalism -- three victorious historical forces. If we can't reclaim those forces for the Left, we lose. The question is how". That's the question, all right!

He says: "For those liberals who don't read the Bible -- that's part of the problem, by the way -- I'll explain". That is a very LARGE problem if you want Christians onside.

He says: "Christianity belongs to us". When they are constantly doing all in their power to suppress public expressions of Christianity?

He says: "When he's not talking about sex, the Pope is actually a flaming liberal". There's a lot of truth in that but Catholics only obey the Holy Father when it suits them these days.

He says: "Globalization belongs to us". When they are constantly demonstrating against it and condemning it as "outsourcing"?

He says: "Capitalism belongs to us. This is a long-term project that probably won't be ready for 2008, but we need to keep working on it.... Could there be a left-wing capitalism that harnesses the efficiency of market forces to the values of liberal society? William Greider says yes. He doesn't have it all worked out yet ..." I'll have to agree that that one won't be ready for 2008 -- or ever!

He says: "The Right may have mastered the art of winning elections, but it lacks a fundamental understanding and appreciation of democracy. A healthy democracy is not a herd of sheep that legitimizes its shepherd by taking a vote. In the long term, democracy requires an active, informed, responsible citizenry that participates in shaping and running its public institutions." Is that why the Left BUY most of their vote off ill-informed minorities by handing out the welfare dollars?

I could go on but I think that is enough laughs for today. The poor sod DOES have a pretty good idea of how the Democrats need to change but they seem to be paddling furiously in the opposite direction to that at the moment. His big problem is that you cannot win elections anywhere in the Anglosphere (except Canada) unless you at least pretend to be conservative and appear to mean it. You have to proclaim things like, "The era of big government is over". And Leftism only goes down well in Canada because it is not American.

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AMERICA CREDULOUS?

A good comment from a reader about some of the amazingly stupid things outsiders say about America -- nearly as stupid as the things that American Leftists like Michael Moore say about America:

"I followed your link to The Times column by Gerard Baker, enticed by the quote you selected. Wow, I thought, a column by a European who actually "gets" America and our optimism, self-confidence, idealism and lack of cynicism. But while it is true that he does actually see that aspect of America, it seems though that he really views it from the perspective of our sophisticated, condescending, European betters as little more than a quaint, simplistic characteristic that he finds cute maybe once a year, as this quote from the end of the column reveals:

"At other times, I can't quite take all this American idealism and sentimentality. It is just a bit too much at odds with a complex world. As the country's critics never tire of observing, it can lead to a little too much certainty and self-belief and a deficit of doubt and acknowledgement of error."

It seems quite clear to me that far from being "too much at odds with a complex world," that our idealism, optimism and self-confidence along with the political, legal and financial institutions inspired by them have proven over the past 2 centuries to be far more successful in dealing with a "complex world" than any other in the history of civilization. We have been steadily expanding the perimeter of freedom here at home while weathering the many perfect storms of totalitarian ideologies enthusiastically generated by the quite prolific European political imagination.

It is astonishing that a man like Baker, who apparently lives in the US, could say that we suffer from a "deficit of doubt and acknowledgement of error." This seriously calls into question his powers of observation. Since 9/11 we have had an incredibly rich and dynamic debate about everything from just about every political perspective in newspapers, magazines, journals, think tanks, blogs, films, in the streets, in Congress and in our homes. It seems that yet again the Left is projecting its own flawed characteristics onto the United States. I think that if there is a "deficit of doubt and acknowledgement of error" anywhere it can be found in Brussels, Berlin and Paris where the massive failure that is the European welfare state goes merrily along producing stagnant growth and 9% unemployment. It just boggles the mind."

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HISPANIC IMMIGRATION AND IQ

American conservatives and libertarians are greatly divided about the mostly illegal Hispanic influx into the USA. I contribute regularly to a blog that is concerned with minority/majority issues and I have just put up a post there on the issue of Hispanic IQ. For those who are interested see here. For convenience, I have also combined my latest post with my previous posts on immigration to make a single article. See here or here.

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ELSEWHERE

The American Left still love Castro: "Leave it up to a liberal university to pony up big bucks - some of it taxpayers' - to give to a cruel dictator. So it is that the University of California at Davis is gleefully helping Castro's dollar-strapped Cuban economy by paying more than $100,000 to his government for allowing 10 Cal-Davis students to study in Cuba".

Michael Darby has up the latest report from his source in Zimbabwe. Pretty grim!

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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29 December, 2004

MY CHRISTMAS REVISITED

Two interesting emails from two different readers provoked by my Christmas-day postings:

"I enjoyed the account of your Christmas Day and wanted to contribute to the Scots/English debate, I am half-and-half with a with a Jewish great-grandfather. My grandparents came to London from Glasgow a hundred years ago and they were keen, lifelong Conservatives, in fact my Grandmother worked at the Party headquarters. My grandparents belonged to some society for Scots in London where my grandfather played the piano for Scottish songs and dances, there was a party at Halloween for the grandchildren and New Year's Eve was celebrated in the usual way. However, apart from my grandmother sighing over us grandchildren as "Sassenachs" because we ate our porridge with sugar and my granfather telling me about the Auld Alliance with France and pointing out the French origin of some Scots words "a silver tassie" for a silver cup for example, I don't remember any expressions of Scottish nationalism.

The bad thing about Scotland was the lack of economic opportunity and it was for work that my grandfather came to live in London.

I would say that my family felt they had certain advantages over the English because we are by nature more intelligent, more industrious and have better values! Having married a half Franch-Canadian and lived in Quebec before the "Silent Revolution"I would say my family's sense of being separate from the English was quite different from the French Canadian "distinct society" identity.

Incidentally, I often pretend to be a "kiwi" here in eastern Canada, as my "cut-glass" English accent is resented and Canadians don't have a good enough ear to hear the dufference. An actor friend tutored me in "Canadian English" but although I made some changes in my pronunciation and vocabulary I was always found out!"

The misspelling of "dufference" above will be understood by anybody who has ever heard New Zealanders speak. They are the only significant European nation to have lost a whole vowel in recent times. Regarding Scotland, readers might also find some relevance in the latest series of jokes up on Wicked Thoughts. Anyway, the second email:

"As a UK resident I found the Queen's Christmas speech quite depressing. I have never been a fan of her Xmas speeches and this was the first I had heard for several years. It sounded as though it might have been written by Cherie Blair or a BBC journalist. Bland, full of phoney re-assurance and pointless.

Of course the ethnic communities shown would seem respectable rather as red carpets are rolled out for members of the royal family. In recent elections the British National Party received up to a third of the vote in parts of the Black Country and elsewhere. Perhaps these voters see a less sanitised version of developments.

I believe most British people welcome the more cosmopolitan changes in the population in recent decades but not the mass take over of our major cities by Muslim immigrants, which seems demographically inevitable on present trends".

I can certainly understand the final point above

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ELSEWHERE

Lawrence Auster says that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim. He is wrong. One of the major religious leaders (and a former Prime Minister) of the world's largest Muslim country is actually pro-Israel. And I'll bet Lawrence does not even know whom I am talking about. That there is no such thing as a moderate ARAB Muslim I might tend to agree with, however. No doubt there are some decent Arabs but they seem to be vastly outnumbered by others whom I can only call disgusting.

There is a good article here pointing out the biased and deceptive reporting of the famous "100,000 war deaths" poll conducted in Iraq and reported in the British medical journal Lancet. Given the blatant bias in the reporting, the whole study has to be suspect.

There is an article here about the situation in the Netherlands which shows that the Dutch have finally realized that their experiment in multicultural tolerance of Muslims has failed. It will be interesting to see what their next move is. They are already getting tougher on the Muslims in small ways. One would hope that the failure of the super-tolerant Dutch will show others that not everything can be mindlessly tolerated.

An article here says that Islam now fills the role in French ghetto suburbs that Communism once did. The author sees that as a hopeful sign for the future, which it may perhaps be, but given the big role that the Communist party had in France up until recently, it is a pretty bleak comment on the present. It does confirm, however, that France has always been a revolting country.

There is an article here from an historian which argues that Bush and Blair may one day be seen as akin to Roosevelt and Churchill

The absurd George McGovern seems to have learnt nothing over the years since he was a failed Democrat Presidential candidate. He now wants America to surrender, not just withdraw from, Iraq. How deep his hatred of America must be! And he's what they call a "progressive" these days! At least the American "Progressives" of 100 years ago were patriotic. The American Left these days really is deeply decayed.

There are some interesting defences of a variety of libertarian ideas here

There is a prayer request here that many of my readers might like to heed.

Jeff Jacoby shows via historical quotes that GWB's military interventions in the Muslim world are very similar to past interventions by esteemed Democrat Presidents like JFK, Truman and FDR. The modern-day American Left has clearly lost its way. Democrats once had principles. Now they are pure psychopathic nihilists who believe only in power for themselves.

Antisemitism denied: One of my readers has sent in a fisking of a Leftist claim (by Tony Judt in The Nation) that antisemitism is not a serious problem in France. See here.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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28 December, 2004

DIVERSITY, GOOD AND BAD

It is amazing how Leftists have perverted the word "diversity". The people who can call a vicious dictatorship "The People's Democratic Republic of .... " have done a similar hit-job on "diversity". American universities pride themselves on their diversity but are in fact one of the least diverse places on the planet (See here). In American university-speak, "diverse" translates fairly directly as meaning "black" and nothing more. Elsewhere, "diversity" has become an excuse for suppressing all traces of majority culture. Anything not characteristic of majority culture is "diverse" to Leftists and is to be praised no matter what. And any element of majority culture is conversely not "diverse" and must therefore be condemned.

In fact, diversity should be a good conservative value. I myself think that real diversity is strength and so does the Queen of England (See her Christmas message). Fascists, by contrast, think unity is strength. The very word "Fascism" is an allusion to the tied-up bundle of rods (the fasces) that the lictors of ancient Rome bore as a visible symbol of the united strength of the Roman people. And Rome was a Fascist State -- with the godlike leader (at least from Caesar onwards), the socialism ("panem et circenses") and the fiercely nationalist belief in Rome's destiny to rule. So it is no wonder that Mussolini named his Fascist movement after the ancient symbol of all that. And Hitler was the same. The most famous Nazi slogan is "Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fuehrer" -- which translates as: "ONE State, ONE people, ONE leader". And we all know how much diversity of thought and enterprise there was in the old Soviet Union.

Conservatives, by contrast, don't believe anything is that simple. They see the world as complex and hence diverse. They accept and deal with diversity whereas Leftists, despite their current pretensions, have since the French revolution always tried to suppress it when they have the power to do so. But for Leftists to preach one thing and then do the opposite when they gain power is a very old story. And part of actually accepting and dealing with diversity (instead of just preaching it to others) is to discriminate among types of diversity. Only a Leftist could propose such an absurd rule as saying that all diversity is good. Murderers are pretty diverse from the rest of society, for instance. Is it a good thing to have lots of them? Sane people would say not but Leftists in our society defend criminals. They say criminals are just "misunderstood". Conservatives, by contrast, want to lock the criminals up and thus reduce that element of diversity in their society.

A similar question arises with ethnic diversity. I myself, for instance, think that most forms of ethnic diversity are a good thing. I have a good friend who was born in India, I love Indian food and I am pleased that my country (Australia) now has in its population many of the instinctively civilized people of China. But I don't think that having Muslims in Western populations is a good thing at all. There are of course many decent Muslims (I have one living in my own house) but they are such a troublesome population in general that I would like to see the least assimilated element of them shipped back whence they came.

And let's look at the blogosphere. Two of the bloggers I think most highly of are Razib and "Godless" of Gene Expression. But Razib is a brown-skinned man of Bangladeshi origin and, if my memory serves me rightly, "Godless" is a Jew. Is not that diversity a strength? Are we not benefited by having those two people to exchange ideas with? If Americans had not welcomed the families of both men into their midst, Razib might just be swatting flies in a Bengali village and "Godless" might be marooned in an East-European shtetl. So I am all for real diversity and utterly against the parody of diversity preached by Leftists.

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TUESDAY ROUNDUP

In recognition of the fact that I post too much for many readers to keep up with, I once again list what I think are the best posts on my various blogs over the last week.

Dissecting Leftism shows that Hitler's German nationalism was foreshadowed by very similar nationalism from Friedrich Engels, one of the founders of Communism.

Political Correctness Watch notes that British schoolteachers are being told by their government to promote homosexual lifestyles

Greenie Watch notes that biotech advances are being held up by huge regulatory costs

Gun Watch has a story of an 84 year-old successfully defending himself

Leftists as Elitists has the story of a Leftist who denies that he is an elitist because ordinary Americans really are low types!

Education Watch has a story of charter schools helping native Americans.

Socialized Medicine says the FDA does more harm than good.

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ELSEWHERE

Powerline has an excellent demolition of a whole parade of Leftist distortions in the NYT. That Leftists repeatedly have to rely on misrepresentation in order to support their arguments shows how weak their arguments are.

I have just reposted here two excellent conservative letters that appeared in the usually Leftist "Pasadena Star Weekly". Letters tend not to stay up for long so good ones need reposting.

In case you have not come across it yet, the Anonymous Lawyer blog is excellent dry humour. And here is the non-anonymous blog of the lawyer concerned. It is pretty good too.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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27 December, 2004

CHRISTMAS DAY FOLLOW-UP

My comments about my Christmas day generated a few comments of interest. There was some skepticism about my comment that the Scots "loathe" the English. I guess that was too strong a term. How about "profound suspicion" of the English instead? I first went to Scotland accompanied by a Scottish wife so I saw one side of Scotland that way. I also personally did a randomized doorknock survey in Glasgow for publication in the academic journals -- and several journals did in fact publish the results. So I got another view of Scotland that way: A community-wide view. So I saw Scottish people both intensively and extensively, as it were. So I do have some grounds for saying what I do. But one experience I repeatedly had is one that many Australians report: Scots cannot tell the difference between an educated Australian accent (or to some extent any Australian accent) and a Southeastern English accent. So Scots normally assume that an Australian visitor is English -- I was told on several occasions that I "sounded like the TV". And so they usually give the visitor the frozenly polite treatment that they reserve for the English. It is that treatment which causes the English to come to the remarkably false conclusion that the emotional Scots are "dour". When the Scots learn that you are Australian rather than English, however, they are greatly relieved, the frozen mask drops immediately and you are given a thoroughly Scots sentimental welcome. It is a joy to experience and sad that the English never do experience it.

Some readers also doubted that the Scots see the English as oppressors. The Scots certainly shouldn't and perhaps in their objective moments they don't, but one must not forget that Celtic memories are long and I can assure you that the execution of Mary Queen of Scots by Elizabeth I is still a lively memory in Scotland. So perhaps "oppressors" is a bit strong too but again I think "profound suspicion" does a pretty good job of characterizing the Scots attitude to the English. The Scots certainly see Australians in a much more positive light than that.

One reader also commented that the pervasive Leftism of Scotland is a fairly recent phenomenon. That could well be true, though I have some reason to doubt it, but in any case I did explicitly say that I thought the Leftism concerned was "not genetic" -- which means that it could change with circumstances.

There was also some dissatisfaction that I did not criticize the multicultural emphasis of the Queen's Christmas message. I did not do so because I think the Queen was being perfectly realistic in her approach. The English egg has now been thoroughly scrambled and the dark-skinned population is not going to go away. So what the Queen was very strongly saying was that each group should honour both its own traditions and the traditions of others. And that way the different groups could live together without friction. What the multiculti Leftists want, on the other hand, is for the tolerance to be all one way. At the very least they want Anglo-Saxons to be tolerant while Muslims can be as intolerant as they like and it would be better still for Anglo-Saxons to lose their own traditions, customs and identity altogether. The Queen, by contrast, was saying that EVERYONE should be tolerant and that EVERYONE should honour their own traditions. And I agree in seeing that as the only viable solution for community harmony in modern Britain. No doubt there are more than a few people in Britain who would like to kick all the darkies out but that is not going to happen.

I suppose one could argue that the Queen could have stressed assimilation more but, on the other hand, the ethnic community members she showed did seem, as far as one could tell, to be highly assimilated. Assimilation does not imply uniformity -- just a familiarity with and respect for the ways of the majority community.

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ORIGINS OF NAZISM

Something that needs to be noted more often: "While most of the media and political class refer to communism and socialism as leftist ideologies and Nazism and fascism as ideologies of the far right, these ideologies are merely different forms of statism. Socialists believe in government ownership of all economic entities and land. Fascists realized that government did not have to own enterprises in order to have total power over them. Thus, fascists tend to be extremely authoritarian and comprehensive regulators. Both ideologies are based on the subjugation of individual liberty and free markets by the agents of the state."

A typical Hitler rant: "True, it is a fixed idea with the French that the Rhine is their property, but to this arrogant demand the only reply worthy of the German nation is Arndt's: "Give back Alsace and Lorraine". For I am of the opinion, perhaps in contrast to many whose standpoint I share in other respects, that the reconquest of the German-speaking left bank of the Rhine is a matter of national honour, and that the Germanisation of a disloyal Holland and of Belgium is a political necessity for us. Shall we let the German nationality be completely suppressed in these countries, while the Slavs are rising ever more powerfully in the East?" But it was not Hitler who said it. It was written in 1841 by Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx's co-author.

The original German of the above quote is: "...Allerdings ist es eine fixe Idee bei den Franzosen, dass der Rhein ihr Eigentum sei, aber die einzige des deutschen Volkes wuerdige Antwort auf diese anmassende Forderung ist das Arndtsche 'Heraus mit dem Elsass und Lothringen!' Denn ich bin - vielleicht im Gegensatz zu vielen, deren Standpunkt ich sonst teile - allerdings der Ansicht, dass die Wiedereroberung der deutschsprechenden linken Rheinseite eine nationale Ehrensache, die Germanisierung des abtruennig gewordenen Hollands und Belgiens eine politische Notwendigkeit fuer uns ist. Sollen wir in jenen Laendern die deutsche Nationalitaet vollends unterdruecken lassen, waehrend im Osten sich das Slawentum immer maechtiger erhebt?" Nazism was Marxist!

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ELSEWHERE

From this it seems clear that the Associated Press (AP) news organization has now admitted that they are in bed with the Iraqi terrorists. It would seem to make them traitors not only to America and Iraqis but to humanity as a whole. Or is murdering innocent people for an AP camera OK now? Leftists always tell us that, as far as they are concerned, there is no such thing as right and wrong. Let's believe them!

Chris Brand has done some good posts in December so I have transferred them here for easy reading. I was particularly interested to see his report that smoking reduces your IQ. I myself reported a negative correlation between smoking and IQ many years ago.

Fun! "This is a bittersweet holiday for a Chicago activist and his son. Father Michael Pfleger is against the war in Iraq. His adopted son recently joined the Army. Their story is similar to mayor Daley's, whose son, Patrick, enlisted earlier this year. "Shock. We were standing out in front of the church one day. He said, 'I need to tell you something.' He said, 'I enlisted.' And I said, 'You what?'" said Father Michael Pfleger, St. Sabina Church. Father Pfleger is an anti-war activist who calls the invasion of Iraq immoral-- but he's also the loving father of a 30-year-old adopted son, Lamar. Lamar lost a good job with an airline company after 9-11 and decided this year to join the Army. He went through basic training in the fall and reports for active duty in less than month. "I just opened my eyes and realized that this was something I want to do. I see the other troops and what they re doing and I want to be part of that," said Pvt. Lamar Pfleger U.S. Army."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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26 December, 2004

MY CHRISTMAS DAY

Unlike most bloggers, I rarely say anything about my personal life. But I think Christmas is a good occasion to make an exception to that. As I always do, I attended a large family gathering on Christmas morning -- with "family" being very loosely defined. It is however essentially the same gathering I have been attending for many years. And, like most Australian Christmas gatherings, it is totally secular -- with no religious allusions at all. All the people there are however very good-hearted unbelievers. They even laugh at my jokes, so what more can I ask?

A small sadness for me was that, out of the 17 people present, there were only two children and one teenager. What used to be a very child-centered gathering still is a child-centred gathering but most of the "children" have now grown up and are young adults. No doubt the young adults concerned will one day have children of their own but the longer they leave parenthood, the fewer children they will eventually have, of course. So my family occasion did in a very small way encapsulate a problem that the whole of Western civilization is having -- too few children to replace itself.

I was delighted to see that one of the presents received by the small boy present was a pictorial "Encyclopedia of modern military aircraft" -- something that almost any boy would enjoy but which is of course totally politically incorrect. But the boy's father is a former Royal Air Force man so no doubt he too would be incorrect to the unhappy minds of the Left.

We had a "secret Santa" session before the "real" presents were given out and it was a really fun thing to do, with lots of laughs. I ended up with a "crumb sweeper" -- a small ceramic pig made in China that had a tiny electic motor in that turned it into a mini-vacuum-cleaner. I promised to take it with me next time I go to a Chinese restaurant -- to suck up straying grains of rice!

One of my stepdaughters spent a year in the U.K. recently, most of it in Scotland, and I asked her over breakfast what she thought of the Scots. "Loved them. Lovely people", she said. "But they were glad I was Australian". I too have great affection for the Scots. I even married one once. But Australians probably see the Scots in their best light. The Scots still loathe the English and they see Australians as fellow-sufferers from English oppression! Rather mad, really. But there is a definite streak of craziness in the Scots -- not the least of which is their intensely socialist outlook. But Scots outside Scotland seem to be heavily conservative -- as we know from America's Scots-Irish population (See also here). So it doesn't seem to be genetic. I once did some survey research on the Scottish difference which is reported here.

The weather was normal Australian Christmas weather -- hot and humid. So the various Bing Crosby Christmas songs that were being played in the background ("Jingle Bells" etc.) were referring to a different world. It did however show that culture trumps climate. I did of course eat too much but I think I will draw a discreet curtain over that.

In the evening, I watched the Queen's Christmas message on TV, as I usually do. Every Christmas day the Queen broadcasts a short message to Britain and the other Commonwealth countries and it is always a positive message stressing important basics. She started out this time by stressing that Christmas is a Christian holiday so according to the politically correct brigade she was being most offensive to millions of people. In the British sphere of influence, however, what the Queen does and says is proper by definition so she does not have to worry about petty would-be dictators. Her message also stressed the importance of Britain's different ethnic communities living peacefully together and there were lots of shots of her and her family talking to British subjects of Indian origin. I have always liked Indians and got on well with them so I was delighted to see her extending such acceptance to them.

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ELSEWHERE

Well, it now seems to be definite. Several readers have traced the expression "reptiles of the press" to the same source for me. The consensus is that the expression was taken from the "Dear Bill" letters of the 1980s in Britain's satirical "Private Eye" magazine. There are accounts of the letters concerned here and here.

Lawsuit abuse from Rhode Island to the Hawaiian Islands: "With the cost of torts rising from just over 1% of GDP in 1973 to double that today, one might expect to see a similar increase in causes for such suits, such as doctors making more mistakes or businesses making more dangerous. But this is not the case. Instead, trial lawyers pushing questionable suits and winning exorbitant awards from juries are the driving force behind this cost increase. In one famous example of class action gone awry, a settlement against the Bank of Boston awarded $8.64 to each class member, but then charged each of those members $90 in trial lawyer fees. Similarly, in a case against Blockbuster, the attorneys took home over $9 million in fees. The harmed plaintiffs each got a $1-off coupon for future video rentals. And the list goes on."

That wonderful U.N. again: "Home-made pornographic videos shot by a United Nations logistics expert in the Democratic Republic of Congo have sparked a sex scandal that threatens to become the UN's Abu Ghraib. The expert was a Frenchman who worked at Goma airport as part of the UN's $700 million-a-year effort to rebuild the war-shattered country. When police raided his home they discovered that he had turned his bedroom into a studio for videotaping and photographing sex sessions with young girls.

When Massachusetts politician Elbridge Gerry had the boundaries of his electoral district redrawn, the resulting map of it was a strange shape that looked like a salamander. Hence the name "Gerrymander" now commonly used for such arrangements. A California congresswoman, however, makes Elbridge Gerry look like an amateur. Have a look at this map of her district. Electoral redistricting is never a pretty sight but this one shows no respect for democracy at all.

Your friends, the bureaucrats: "A battle is brewing between Costco and Washington state's government over the price of wine and beer, and the fight is expected to be as long as the legs of a fine wine. The retail giant, based in the Evergreen State, is suing, saying that government involvement in regulation of beer and wine means higher prices, mandatory mark-ups and middlemen. That, says company officials, prevents the retailer from selling beer and wine in bulk at lower prices, which is what the company prides itself on. 'Obviously we want to be able to bring products to market at a lower price, irrespective of what that product is,' said Jim Sinegal, president and CEO of Costco."

Astute blogger makes the good point that American culture is adopted worldwide because it is a people's culture -- not something prescribed by an elite. So ordinary people everywhere like it.

Who said this? "It is high treason to pay taxes. Refusal to pay taxes is the primary duty of the citizen!". It was none other than Karl Marx!.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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25 December, 2004

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

To all those who come by here on this great day

And may all those who recognize Jesus as Lord always walk in his wisdom

Being a born pedagogue, I can't resist this occasion to offer a tiny bit of seasonal information: I realized only recently that many people do not understand why "Xmas" is sometimes used as a short form of "Christmas". Rather alarmingly, some people even seem to think that it is yet another attempt to take Christ out of Christmas. It is anything but. It in fact harks back to the earliest Christian times. The original New Testament documents were of course all written in the Greek language of the day and the name "Christos" (Christ) in Greek begins with the letter "Chi". And the Greek letter Chi looks just like a big Latin "X". So X is in fact the earliest symbol of the holy name and it was widely used as such by the early Christians of the Roman empire. So "Xmas" can in fact be seen as an acknowledgment of the early Christians.

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CHRISTIAN BELIEFS STILL PERSECUTED: IN THE AUSTRALIAN STATE OF VICTORIA

Several of my readers have asked me about this news item:

"Two Christian pastors in Australia have been found guilty of religious vilification of Muslims.... One of the pastors, Daniel Scot, is Pakistani. He fled his native land seventeen years ago.... Last Friday, Judge Michael Higgins of The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal found him guilty of vilifying Islam in a seminar hosted by his group, Catch the Fire Ministries. The judge noted that during the seminar, Scot stated that "the Quran promotes violence, killing and looting." In light of Qur'anic passages such as 9:5, 2:191, 9:29, 47:4, 5:33 and many others, this cannot seriously be a matter of dispute".

The laws concerned are peculiar to the State of Victoria -- which has a number of crazy Leftist laws -- and there is no substantial move to adopt them elsewhere in Australia. And the ruling is from an administrative tribunal -- something of a kangaroo court, i.e. without all the features of a normal court. I am no student of Victorian law but I understand that such decisions have to be referred to a normal court for enforcement -- at which time this ruling could be, and should be, overturned. Judge Higgins certainly does appear to have been what Australians would call a "galah". The galah is an Australian native parrot noted for low brainpower.

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A good comment from The Times: "This time of year captures, perhaps better than any other, the defining characteristic of Americans in the modern world — their lack of cynicism and scepticism, their enduring hope and faith in themselves, their country and even the world around them".

How French! "Police suspect a French prosecutor of paying a prostitute with a stolen credit card just hours after addressing a conference on ethics, a Justice Ministry source says."

Jim Bennett has just put up a long but excellent article that looks at the likely futures of the EU and the USA: A good Christmas read for the times in between eating and drinking. Bennett does not think much of the prospects for the EU. I liked this quote: "[German author Gersemann addresses] the "yes, but..." arguments made by Europeans and their admirers when addressing the visible GDP gaps between America and Continental Europe. These run "Yes, America has a substantially lower unemployment rate ... but that's because so many Americans are in prison", or "America makes more jobs, but they are low-wage, service-sector 'McJobs.'" (Gersemann characterizes the latter argument as "We can't actually make any jobs, but if we did, they would be good ones.") Gersemann systematically and persuasively rebuts such arguments". Details about the Anglosphere institute (founded principally by Bennett) are here. I have just joined, myself.

Iranians are turning in droves to Christ: "This phenomenon didn't take place through the efforts of foreign missionaries, Afshar said, because after the country's Islamic revolution of the late 1970's, all foreign missionaries were expelled from Iran. Much of the evangelism of Muslims in Iran, Afshar said, has been done through shortwave radio and satellite television programs by Iranians who came to know Christ while outside their own country. "With the revolution there also came a mass exodus of almost 6 million Iranians out of Iran to various countries around the world," Afshar said. "It was there that for the first time many of these exiles were exposed to the gospel, and eventually a great number of them became followers of Jesus-50,000 by some estimates. It is because of these exiled believers and other faithful ones who never left Iran that (this) phenomenon is unfolding."

There is a good short summary here of some of the important facts that American High School history textbooks routinely leave out.

Like a lot of Australians with military connections, I have always been a great fan of the Salvation Army so I am delighted to hear that Wal-Mart has taken over where Target left off. And I am betting that it won't do Wal-Mart's bottom-line a bit of harm. (Link via Carol Platt Liebau).

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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24 December, 2004

AN INTERESTING EMAIL FROM GERMANY

In response to my post yesterday about the Marxist origins of genocide, I received the following email from one of my correspondents:

It's good to see that somebody in the Anglospehre begins to expose the true spirit of Marx and Engels. There is a great german book, written by Prof. Konrad Loew, "Das Rotbuch der kommunistischen Ideologie - Marx und Engels, die V,ter des Terrors" ("The Redbook of communist Ideology - Marx and Engels, the Fathers of Terror"), consisting nearly entirely of quotes by Marx and Engels. Their hate and contempt was infinite, and wasn't limited to capitalists or other nations. You'll find insults against Democrats, Christians, Jews, Blacks and many other People, a megalomanic poem written by the young Marx, the conspiracy of Marx and Engels to extort money from Marx' mother, about the need for a bloody revolution and (after that) a merciless dictatorship, and so on.

Loew not only took quotes out of the "Marx Engels Werke" (Marx & Engels Works), but also found (maybe even more) interesting stuff in the private letters of Marx and Engels. It's a sad picture. Apparently, those two figures where hate-filled sociopaths. Marx, for example, extorted his father and tried to blackmail his mother after the death of his father.

I have compiled a 100 Kb file out of the book, consisting of the most "hardcore" quotes (in German, with annual details and references to the "Marx Engels Werke"), which I use in online-discussions with communists and socialists. Let me know if you have any use for this file, and I'll send it to you.

I am myself a bit busy for it but if anybody feels like translating Dirk's 100kb file from German, I would be happy to post the result on the net.

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ELSEWHERE

Another good email from Germany: "I saw your link to the "German Idiocy" article and had to laugh. The story fits in quite well with my experiences as an American living in Germany and working in the German academic enviornment. I attended a presentation on Bayesian statistics several weeks ago, where the presenter needed an example of updated probabilities. He began discussing the probability that the U.S. would invade Iran now that the U.S. had invaded Iraq. This led to some in the audience mentioning other countries where the U.S. had been engaged militarily. I quickly shouted out, "Germany!" This shut them up, and the presentation continued without further America bashing."

Lawrence Auster is a pretty old-fashioned conservative himself so his critique of the "paleocons" (who as far as I can see are in fact largely anarcho-capitalists rather than any sort of conservative) got a bit of a reaction. Such internecine feuds are normally of little interest to me but this particular feud involves criticism of "psychologizing". The claim is that one should look only at the argument someone is advancing rather than their motivation for making the argument. That is of course the classic critique of "ad hominem" arguments but in cases when an argument makes no sense at the logical level, I think you have to look at the psychological motivation. It is of course my contention that Leftism can ONLY be understood as a psychological rather than a rational phenomenon. Leftist arguments are so inconsistent from occasion to occasion that one has to look at what is behind such a strange phenomenon. So I am on Auster's side in this one. There is of course an argument against speculative or "pop" psychologizing but my 200+ published academic journal articles on political psychology insulate me fairly well from that charge. I do not however rely on any claims of authority to substantiate what I say about Leftist psychology. I do what all scientists do (or should do): Present evidence for what I say. And again, I think Auster does a fair job of substantiating his points in that way.

Good news: Refusing to be brushed off by Democratic opposition in the Senate, President Bush plans to nominate for a second time 20 people who did not receive up or down votes on their nominations for federal judgeships."

Read this bit of Leftist propaganda: "Freedom has become the political buzzword of the 21st century. George Bush's agenda is to bring democracy and freedom to the rest of the peoples of the world, while his own are slaves to work, crippled by personal debt, and trapped in loneliness or loveless relationships-the shackles of the rich. Now that the surviving Afghanis and Iraqis are enjoying the benefits of Western freedoms, what will this mean for their health?" So where is the quote from? From the British Medical Journal, no less. Another example of the politicization of science. Code Blue goes to town on the story. I blogged on how far Left the BMJ is 18 months ago so the current story is no surprise to me.

Government should fund science?: "Folks like Friedman take it for granted that only the government will undertake large-scale scientific ventures. But where does the government get the money? All government can do is take wealth from those who produced it and give it to those who didn't. The stock answer is that private investors won't finance 'basic research' because it's not profitable in the short run. What this really means is that politicians and bureaucrats can be counted on to see the benefits of basic research more objectively than entrepreneurs. I'd like to see Friedman say that with a straight face."

Bush presses for "guest worker" program: "President Bush yesterday renewed his call for a guest-worker program for immigrants seeking employment in the United States. He said the Border Patrol shouldn't be chasing 'good-hearted people who are coming here to work.' Bush has wanted such a program since taking office four years ago.But the idea was sidetracked by the Sept. 11 attacks and then left on the sideline because the White House did not want to tackle such a heated issue during an election year."

Steven Landsburg is a very clever economist. He has here an amusing but serious defence of Ebenezer Scrooge. I am myself a bit of a scrooge in Landsburg's terms -- in that I live simply from choice rather than necessity -- so I quite like Landsburg's argument. I do greatly enjoy Christmas, however. I have got Christmas carols on the stereo as I write this in fact. One of my favourites is playing: "God rest ye merry gentlemen". I think Christmas carols are wonderful and I pity the poor twisted Leftist souls who cannot participate in the great and joyous emotions they convey. They must be very shaky in their own convictions if any mention of Christianity bothers them. Gloria in excelsis Deo!

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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23 December, 2004

THE IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE

"In January 1849, months before he migrated to London, Karl Marx published an article by Friedrich Engels in Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung announcing that in Central Europe only Germans, Hungarians and Poles counted as bearers of progress. The rest must go. "The chief mission of all other races and peoples, large and small, is to perish in the revolutionary holocaust."

Genocide arose out of Marx's master-theory of history -- feudalism giving place inevitably to capitalism, capitalism to socialism. The lesser races of Europe -- Basques, Serbs, Bretons and others -- being sunk in feudalism, were counter-revolutionary; having failed to develop a bourgeoisie, they would be two steps behind in the historical process. Engels dismissed them as left-overs and ethnic trash (Voelkerabfall), and called for their extinction.

So genocide was born as a doctrine in the German Rhineland in January 1849, in a Europe still reeling from the revolutions of 1848. It was to become the beacon light of socialism, proudly held and proudly proclaimed."

The above is a quote from the latest article by George Watson -- a literary historian specializing in the early history of socialism (I have an earlier article of his posted here and there is a review of his major book here). The quote is taken from an article in the December 2004 issue of Quadrant, Australia's premier intellectual conservative magazine. The article will not be online for a month or so yet but I have temporarily posted here and here a PDF of the first page.

I have of course for some time been pointing out that eugenics was a great Leftist cause right up until Hitler thoroughly discredited the idea with his atrocities. Documenting the Leftist infatuation with eugenics in the first half of the 20th century is all too easy. But the fact that the idea largely originated with Marx and Engels themselves has been hidden from public awareness with almost total success. There are many avid scholars of Marx's every word but some things are just too embarrassing to mention. I earnestly hope that the Marxian origin of Hitler's doctrines will become increasingly well-known. I hope that other bloggers will join me in publicizing it.

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ELSEWHERE

Although I am an atheist, I have never wavered from my view that the New Testament is the best guide to living and I still enjoy reading it. Here is what the apostle Paul says about vegetarians: "For one believeth that he may eat all things: another, who is weak, eateth herbs. Let not him that eatheth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eatheth not judge him that eateth." (Romans 14: 2.3). What perfect advice! That is real tolerance: Very different from the one-way tolerance of the Left.

German idiocy: "Scene: An elevator in a hotel in a small town in Germany, about a week ago. Dramatis personae: Your humble columnist, your humble columnist's mother, a German gentleman in his 60s. My mother and I exchanged a few words in our native Russian, whereupon the German gentleman inquired amicably, 'Russisch?' I explained that we did, in fact, come from Russia originally, but had lived in the United States for nearly 25 years and were now American. The man's demeanor changed visibly. After a glum silence, he remarked sourly as we were leaving the elevator, 'America is always starting wars everywhere in the world. It's not good for people.' I was so shocked that the most obvious comeback did not occur to me until a couple of minutes later, when he was out of sight: 'You mean, like World War II?'"

Marijuana risky: "Using marijuana in adolescence and early adulthood can cause psychotic symptoms later in life, a new study suggests. The risk of developing these symptoms is "moderate", say researchers, though is higher in people with a pre-disposition to psychosis.... A team led by Jim van Os of the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands followed 2437 people aged between 14 and 24. After four years, 21% of cannabis users had experienced psychotic symptoms compared with 15% of non-users. And the more a participant used cannabis, the more likely they were to develop symptoms". [For the record, I believe that marijuana use should not be legally prohibited but I also believe that people should be fully informed about any hazards involved. There is a longer extract from the article, with comments here]

War can be necessary: "I argue that our main problems are not too much force, but too little. A peaceful world is not a world with no ready forces but one with adequate, responsible, and superior force that is used when necessary. The failure to have or use such forces causes terror and war to grow exponentially. Unused force, when needed at a particular time and place, ceases to be force..... Nor is this an argument for force "for force's sake." It is an argument for force for justice's sake. I am not for "eternal peace," which is a this-worldly myth, but for real peace of actual men in an actual and fallen world. Peace is not a goal, but a consequence of doing what is right and preventing what is wrong and, yes, knowing the difference between the two. Justice and force require one another in the actual world".

An interesting explanation of why Leftists say America is evil: "Those who reject morality in their own lives often project their conscience out onto the periphery of their experience. They take righteous stands on political issues and embrace idealistic ideologies, as a compensation for the moral failures and guilt in their personal lives. They reject personal morality but believe in social morality. Holding the right political beliefs enables them to feel self-righteousness, without the trouble of actually being righteous..... Christians know that self-righteousness of every kind is a spiritual delusion that shuts out the need for Christ's forgiveness". [(If this article is offline, find it here])

"Social justice" defined: "The Left uses the phrase 'social justice' simultaneously to claim moral high ground and to avoid addressing the weaknesses of their catchphrase arguments. By declaring that all of their positions advance 'social justice,' anyone who opposes them must necessarily be a cruel bigoted Neanderthal. After all, what reasonable person could be against 'justice?' As a general rule, the less logic there is behind an argument, the more often the words 'social justice' are uttered in defending it."

I have just put up here an email from an American lady who is very passionate about her country.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again to ensure that you have plenty to read if you are bored at Christmas.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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22 December, 2004

SOME MORE ECONOMICS

Ignorant tribal thinking: "Mention any topic touching on international trade and you are sure to provoke multiple discussions, ranging from child labor to parity in workplace safety, and including catchy terms like "dumping," "outsourcing," and "brain drain." It seems as if many of our best and brightest scholars are devoting their precious talents to enumerating all of the horrible ills that will beset humanity if we do not act immediately to combat each and every development in the global economy. Yet what do these various proposals to regulate trade all have in common? They are all attempts to prevent people from cooperating with each other. The critics of recent developments in international trade relations, though they have couched their arguments in sophisticated economic rhetoric, are ultimately relying on the tribe mentality: It's us versus them, and anything that they are for must be bad for us. Fortunately for those who cherish harmony and peace, the tribe mentality is factually incorrect. Trade is a positive-sum game"

How about fairness toward employers and landlords? "The Louisville Council is debating whether to reinstate its 'fairness' ordinance, which prohibits employers and landlords from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. The proponents of this ordinance claim that it expresses the community's tolerance and fairness toward all its citizens, but, in fact, it really expresses bigotry and intolerance against employers and landlords."

Economies as ecosystems: "Are economies ecosystems? The parallels are striking. The energy driving ecosystems ultimately comes from the sun, while the energy driving economies ultimately comes from another boundless of energy source -- human imagination and innovation. Inspired individuals -- energetic, enthusiastic, and perhaps just a bit sun-struck -- plant their seeds of innovation, creating new products and starting new companies. Those seeds are fragile at first. Many fail, crushed by competition, starved by high costs or strangled by burdensome regulations."

Even Leftists can learn eventually: "The Boston City Council voted down a rent control proposal yesterday, sparking a dramatic protest by tenants and housing activists... The 8-to-5 defeat of the ''community stabilization act," a milder version of one proposed by Mayor Thomas M. Menino and killed by the council two years ago, probably means the end of efforts to cap rents and provide other tenant protections in the city -- at least for the foreseeable future".

How to discourage job-creation in one easy lesson: "Today, in Germany and France, divorcing your spouse is easier, and in most cases cheaper, than dismissing an employee under due observance of the provisions of the contract of employment. The administrative hurdles can be a long nightmare. Court approval may be required and failing it, the employees in question must be reinstated. The labor union representing a majority of the employees must agree to the "social plan" by which the employer company undertakes to assist the employees who lose their jobs."

The myth of wartime prosperity: "It is clear enough that war stimulates certain sectors of the economy. But it is logically and economically unjustified to equate that stimulus with prosperity for the American people as a whole. Ludwig von Mises summed up the correct position when he observed, 'War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.' Fr,d,ric Bastiat exposed the 'broken window' fallacy in the mid-nineteenth century. A shop window broken by a man's 'incorrigible son' is said to benefit the economy, since the company that fixes the window enjoys a 'stimulus,' which in turn is passed along to those with whom the window company does business."

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ELSEWHERE

Further to my recent post on blogs Right and Left, David Boxenhorn thinks that Leftist blogs have a bigger readership because Leftists are more conformist. He is however assuming that only the top Leftist blogs have big readerships (compared with conservative blogs). My impression is that lots of Leftist blogs have big readerships. One of my correspondents had yet another take on the matter. He wrote: "I'd be willing to bet the main reason lefty blogs get so many hits is because folks on the right usually have some kind of freakin' job which precludes them from haunting the web all day..."

The Independent Institute has up a very skeptical article on America's missile defence system. Sadly, I must say that I think that the system is a flop so far and much more research needs to be done before anything is deployed.

Democrats repel Catholics: "the Party's platforms and candidates have ever more stridently advocated policies that undermine the traditional family structure, such as unrestricted abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, and homosexual "marriage." The Democrats' extreme platforms recognize no right of conscientious dissent: in other words, these policies have become the very basis on which the Party rests, and their candidates willy-nilly must accept them. The Catholic Church, which has labored for decades to preserve and promote the dignity of the person and the family, is threatened by these policies. Indeed, the founding principle of our country-that all men are created equal in their natural rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness-is equally contradicted by the Democratic Party's dedication to policies that weaken families, kill unborn human beings, and manipulate human nature in the name of science. Until the Democratic Party reforms itself, most Catholics-educated by their bishops to recognize these policies as sinful-will no longer vote for Democratic presidential nominees".

Hilarious! The tax-loving People's Republic of Berkeley has just knocked back tax increases: "After years of voting for various tax measures that have made Berkeley's property taxes the highest in the state, voters are now saying: enough already. On Nov. 2, four tax measures designed to fund basic services such as fire and police, youth programs, medical services and libraries -- yes, libraries -- failed to get the two-thirds vote they needed to pass"

David Brooks has a very sarcastic article about the "unfortunate" stream of events that have led to various encouraging developments in the Middle East.

There is a good short account of the history of ancient Rome here that shows how Rome destroyed itself through socialism.

There is a humorous posting here called: ""Overcoming Leftism: A 12-Step Program"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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21 December, 2004

TUESDAY ROUNDUP

In recognition of the fact that I post too much for many readers to keep up with, I once again list what I think are the best posts on my various blogs over the last week.

Dissecting Leftism says that a belief in individual liberty is more basic to conservatism than is traditionalism.

Political Correctness Watch lists some of the recent attacks on Christmas.

Greenie Watch lists some of the low points of the big global warming confab in Buenos Aires.

Gun Watch notes a case of free speech about guns being suppressed at a university.

Socialized Medicine lists big problems with Canada's "free" health care

Education Watch notes that the Dutch too are now fleeing from "black" inner-city schools.

Leftists as Elitists says that contempt for the ordinary person underlies the desire to keep retirement funding in government hands.

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HISPANIC IMMIGRATION

I rarely say much about immigration control. It is now a settled issue in Australia with illegal immigration having been brought to a virtual standstill. So I have no concerns about the Australian situation. The American situation is however a different matter. The great divisions in America are mainly among conservatives and I can see merit on both sides of the argument. I do however contribute regularly to a blog that is concerned with minority/majority issues so I have posted there a few thoughts on what I see as the basic issues involved. For those who are interested see here and here.

Update

Drat! The site on which my thoughts on immigration are recorded seems to be down at the moment. I have therefore reposted the material here

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ELSEWHERE

A WSJ article here says that GWB has won a new and like-minded ally in India. Policies that piss off the Europeans are well-received in India.

There is an article here about how intensely Christian the American revolutionaries were. That their constituton has been interpreted to ban public displays of anything Christian is clearly a vast perversion of their intent and thus reflects badly on most of the modern courts that have claimed to interpret it.

An amusing WSJ article here points out that the "Blue Stater" grumbles about paying more tax than the "Red Staters" do is a direct result of the "soak the rich" policies that the Blue Staters up until now have always claimed to believe in. They have brought their higher taxes on themselves!

Mike Tremoglie exposes the distortions in media reports of what Rumsfeld said in Iraq about armour for U.S. military vehicles.

Chomsky's myth of the leftist silent majority: "What we are really dealing with here is a classic trope which has been a sacred catechism of the Chomskyite Left since the landslide defeat of George McGovern in 1972: the myth of the silent Leftist majority; the idea that, somehow, the majority of the American electorate is, in fact, composed of radical Leftists who, if given the chance, would vote the capitalist system out of existence; the only reason they do not, the theory goes, is the sinister manipulations of the media/political class, who brainwash them into ignoring their true beliefs and interests and conspires through the electoral/media system to keep the Left a marginal electoral force."

Discrimination myths: "The ideology that informs the thinking of present-day "civil rights" agitation is cluttered with misconceptions. It is not true, for example, that discrimination must lead to poverty. As Thomas Sowell observes, the Chinese have never enjoyed an equal playing field in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, or Vietnam, yet the Chinese minority in these countries - a mere five percent of the population - owns most of these nations' total investments in a variety of key industries. In Malaysia, the Chinese minority suffers official discrimination at the hands of the Malaysian constitution, and yet their incomes are still twice the national average"

The Leftist track-record: "With the fall of the Soviet Union and communist governments in Eastern Europe, too many have the impression that Marxism, the religion of communism, is dead. Hardly. It is alive and well in many countries still, such as North Korea, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, a gaggle of African countries, and in the minds of many South American political leaders. However, of most importance to the future of democracy, communism still pollutes the thinking of a vast multitude of Western academics and intellectuals. Of all religions, secular and otherwise, that of Marxism has been by far the bloodiest - bloodier than the Catholic Inquisition, the various Catholic crusades, and the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants. In practice, Marxism has meant bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and murderous forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and fraudulent show trials, outright mass murder and genocide. In total, Marxist regimes murdered nearly 110 million people from 1917 to 1987. For perspective on this incredible toll, note that all domestic and foreign wars during the 20th century killed around 35 million."

Here is a pictorial explanation of why the Muslims hate us.

Paragraph Farmer has an amusing story about a pathetic actress (Natalie Portman) who cannot even be politically correct when she tries.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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20 December, 2004

BLOGS RIGHT AND LEFT

Fun! Thanks to Arthur Chrenkoff, I have just learned that some loony Leftist has put up a site called "Dissecting Rightism". It is a deliberate spoof of this site. As Arthur said to me: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The author has even gone to the trouble of copying my template -- which must have been a little bit of work. The "View Source" command gets you only so far and I don't think Pyra now circulate the original template on which mine was based. Anyhow, his work has just got him a link from me, though I doubt that any of my readers will log on more than once. The author of the site calls himself "Noel Chrotsky", which seems to be a reference to two very nasty Leftist hate-merchants -- Noam Chomsky and Leon Trotsky. I suspect that the author must be Australian. My site is a prominent one by Australian standards but is very small beer in any international comparison. I think an American Leftist would have spoofed (say) Powerline or LGF -- though I see that LGF does already have a Watch site.

This little episode has caused me to reflect a little on why Leftist blogs seem to have far more hits and far more commenters than conservative blogs do. Kos, for instance, gets around 400,000 hits per day compared to Instapundit's 200,000. I think the main reason is an obvious one: Leftist beliefs need a lot more propping up than do conservative ones. A conservative finds his views -- such as the belief that you have to be careful whom you will trust -- confirmed all around him every day, whereas a Leftist finds that his views -- such as the belief that no-one (except "Rednecks") is really evil -- constantly contradicted by events. So the Leftist needs all the help he can get to generate a distorted and selective view of reality that will keep him going. So he is far more active in seeking out supportive sites than conservatives generally are. And Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore have made a bundle out of catering to that need for confirmation of Leftist beliefs too, of course. The fragility of Leftist beliefs is also attested to by how abusive they become when questioned and the Stalinist way they do their best to keep all conservative thinking out of their university enclaves. Reality has to be kept at a distance by hook or by crook.

Generating a counter-factual view of reality takes some talent, however, so that also explains why right-leaning blogs seem to outnumber Leftist blogs by about 2 to 1. You have to be ingenious to defend Leftism whereas a conservative just has to point out the facts.

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ELSEWHERE

Lawrence Auster made the following brief comment on my post yesterday about his writings: "I thank Mr. Ray for his sympathetic and thoughtful overview of my writings. However, regarding his main criticism of me, I don't think I ever said that the belief in individual liberty was not part of the American conservative tradition. The difference is between those who understand liberty as being within a moral and constitutional order, and those who see liberty, or rather freedom, as essentially free of any constraints". Mark Richardson is another writer who often makes that sort of point. I find such a view incomprehensible. I know of NO conservative who denies that "rights connote duties" and I know of NO conservative who denies that we are in at least some ways constrained in what we do by "human nature". So the claim that there are conservatives who believe in some sort of absolute liberty is a total straw man.

Leftists still like the status quo: "No issue quite highlighted the left's reactionary impulse than when, during the campaign, Bush proposed redeploying American troops from their Cold War outposts around the world. Liberals immediately reacted negatively, making the argument, basically, that the troops should stay where they are, because they've been there for 40 years, and everyone is comfortable with it. It is in foreign policy that the new liberal orientation has been most stark. Liberals once believed in global change based on the advance of human rights. This was an admirable idea (if sometimes poorly implemented). Now it's been abandoned because Bush has picked it up, and liberals believe in little else in foreign policy except that whatever we attempt will fail".

For Australian readers, there is a great article here about cricket in Israel. Once again, it is the Indian influence. You can't separate Indians from their cricket. Because of India, cricket has a FAR bigger following than baseball. Cricket is the world's premier bat-and-ball sport, in fact. Some of the Indian allusions in the article may be a bit obscure so perhaps I should note that Maharashtra is the Indian State where the great commercial centre of Bombay (now Mumbai) is located. And Thane is a sort of outer suburb of Bombay. They make a very good beer there called "London" beer, in fact. And Maharastrans don't normally speak Hindi. They speak Marathi. But because of immigration there are now also lots of native Hindi and Gujurati speakers (among others) in Bombay.

New report highlights continued growth of privatization: "A new report from the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation shows 2004 has been a banner year for privatization at the state level. A slowing economy and fewer new revenues opened the doors to more privatization as governors and legislatures across the country either expanded current initiatives or created new ones. The Council of State Governments (CSG) conducted a national survey of state government officials to identify recent privatization trends. That survey showed a continued increase in and reliance on privatization."

The greatest gift for all: "All Americans have a huge stake in Christianity. Whether or not we are individually believers in Christ, we are beneficiaries of the moral doctrine that has curbed power and protected the weak. Power is the horse ridden by evil. In the 20th century the horse was ridden hard. One hundred million people were exterminated by National Socialists in Germany and by Soviet and Chinese communists simply because they were members of a race or class that had been demonized by intellectuals and political authority. Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing traditions is not limited by moral and religious scruples. V.I. Lenin made this clear when he defined the meaning of his dictatorship as 'unlimited power, resting directly on force, not limited by anything.'"

A good email from a reader: "The point you make about targets that the left choose for their outrage being arbitrary and inconsistent strikes a chord. A great example of this was the Anti Iraq War marches of 2003. Watching the news broadcasts of it, one of the most prominent banners was from CND. This struck me as odd indeed. At the time, the thrust of debate on the war was not that Saddam did not have WMD, but whether he was a threat to us. No one seemed to bat an eyelid that an organisation set up with the aim of riding the world of WMDs, was protesting against a war to force a country to disarm itself of WMDs! But of course CND was only about disarming the West of its WMDs. If CND were really about disarming the world of nuclear weapons, I would not expect them to exactly cheer leaders like George Bush, but they could at least have shown some ambivalence about the war -- instead of being part of the founding 'Stop the War' committee."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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19 December, 2004

LAWRENCE AUSTER

I rarely comment on arguments put forward by my fellow conservatives, but I am going to make a small exception today to say a few words about the ideas of Lawrence Auster, a traditionalist Jewish writer who thinks that almost nobody these days is conservative enough. He has just put up on Frontpage an excellent article on the antiwar RIGHT that I fully agree with and recommend. He also has an excellent article here that explains why American Jews are so overwhelmingly Left-wing. He says that they are actually AFRAID of American Protestant Christians, who are -- as Auster points out -- in fact the very best friends that Israel and the Jews have. Auster does not say so but I think the Jews concerned can be forgiven their paranoia. It is a pity that they are not more up to date but Christians (including Protestants such as Calvin and Luther) DID persecute them for a very long time.

Some other Auster articles of the many I could mention are ones complaining that the Pope is too Leftist and that most modern conservatives are really Leftists. He also thinks that the "neocons" are a bad lot who have GWB in their hip-pocket and that America's largely open borders are a disaster.

I of course agree with SOME of those other articles. I do think the whole neocon conspiracy thing is just paranoia but, as an Australian conservative I am delighted that our government has just about stopped illegal immigration stone dead and that it locks up any illegal immigrants it catches -- as it would anyone else who defies our laws. And I agree that the Holy Father, like most of his predecessors, is not much of a conservative politically.

My disagreements with Auster arise from the fact that I am one of those villains whom he sees as having destroyed conservatism -- libertarians. He rightly notes that libertarian conservatism is one of the dominant forms of conservatism today (the other being Christian conservatism) and makes the correct point that Christian conservatives are pretty strongly influenced by individualistic, liberty-oriented thinking too. Unlike Auster, however, I do not see this as a particularly modern phenomenon. I have done an extensive historical survey showing that belief in individual liberty has always been central to conservatism. Auster, by contrast, seems to think that traditionalism is the main current. I actually see something more basic in conservatism that underlies both traditionalism AND belief in liberty -- a certain cautious pragmatism and mistrust of the goodwill of others. Because of this basic trait of caution, conservatives want as much freedom to make their own decisions as possible and they also like systems that have been tried and tested. But the liking for tradition is in the end just a tool -- a way of being cautious, not something that is compelling for its own sake.

So the basis of Auster's complaint is that modern conservatives are too liberty-oriented and value-free -- and he sees this as something that they have in common with the Left. A related complaint is that modern conservatives have no anchors -- they just go along with whatever seems to be working. The only thing I disagree with there is the idea that Leftists believe in liberty. They don't. They only believe in power. They advocate various liberties from time to time -- e.g. various sexual liberties -- mainly because it suits them as a way of disrupting existing society and thus hopefully getting themselves into power. But for the rest, I would claim that liberty and the good life are the only lasting values for secular conservatives and that going along with what seems to be working is the historic conservative modus operandi. And long may it continue! We have had more than enough of theorists telling us what to do!

I apologize to Auster for having to a degree caricaturized his views above but I was aiming only to give a quick impression of them. His own prolific writings give plenty of detail, explanation and nuance.

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ELSEWHERE

This article in "Spiked" sees the form of Islam that is currently plaguing us as being to a significant degree a Western creation -- largely a reaction to the loss of values only too effectively promoted by Western Leftists. It does seem to be Westernized Muslims who are the main problem.

David's Medienkritik reports a good interview from Germany which really chews up the childish attitude of Germans towards the United States.

Joe Sobran says that these are hard times for gay men. Why? "The reason the present age is difficult for gay people is that the word "gay" has been appropriated by homosexual activists. So real gay men have been driven into the closet, afraid to admit they're gay for fear of being misunderstood."

Sharansky's answer to the claim that democracy is impossible in Iraq: "It is important to remember that some of the most serious thinkers once thought that democracy was not compatible with the cultures of Germany, Italy, Japan, Latin America and Russia. The great historian Toynbee questioned whether democracy could ever flourish out of the Anglo-Saxon world or as he put it, in "alien soil.""

I often point out how much in common Nazism and Fascism had with Leninism and other forms of Leftism. Readers may therefore be interested to read another author's account of the history involved. For those with a high-speed connection, the original PDF is here and there are html copies here and here.

V.D. Hanson: "There is much talk of post-election reorganization and rethinking among demoralized liberals, especially in matters of foreign policy. They could start by accepting that ... the problems are fundamental flaws in their own thinking - such as the ends of good intentions justifying the means of expediency and untruth, and forced equality being a higher moral good than individual liberty and freedom. Whether we call such notions "political correctness" or "progressivism," the practice of privileging race, class, and gender over basic ethical considerations has earned the moralists of the Left not merely hypocrisy, but virtual incoherence.... So both here and abroad, the Western public believes that there is a double standard in the moral judgment of our left-leaning media, universities, and politicians - that we are not to supposed to ask how Christians are treated in Muslim societies, only how free Islamists in Western mosques are to damn their hosts.... What is preached in the madrassas on the West Bank, in Pakistan, and throughout the Gulf is no different from the Nazi doctrine of racial hatred. What has changed, of course, is that unlike our grandfathers, we have lost the courage to speak out against it."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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18 December, 2004

"REDNECKS" AND "REPTILES OF THE PRESS"

In response to my post of two days ago about the Leftist use of the term "Redneck" I got a lot of email. Below is one I particularly liked:

"Thank you so much for your post about rednecks, and the "compassionate" left's contempt for them. It's not often that we country folk hear nice things about ourselves. Having grown up in a one-horse town as a poor minister's daughter, I've seen every aspect of "trailer trash" life. Rednecks certainly do have their problems in terms of money, but I've never met a liberal who would give you the shirt right off his back--and I've never met a redneck who wouldn't. What the left doesn't understand, it mocks. The left is comprised mainly of people who've never wanted for anything, so when they look at the poor but proud, they wonder what the heck it is that they're so proud of. What they're proud of, in a nutshell, is something liberals can never have or understand--compassion for each other. Thanks for stickin' up for the little guy."

A couple of readers have mentioned to me that many of the people described as "Rednecks" don't reject the label but instead apply it rather gleefully to themselves -- just as many blacks refer to one another as "niggers". In both cases however, the term is derogatory when used by outsiders. And someone who is really enjoying derogatory labels just sent me a Christmas greeting "from deep in the "red" heart of the "Great Satan"! That did give me a laugh. It rather reminds me of the phrase "reptiles of the Press". Somebody, somewhere once used that expression in an attempt to pour scorn on journalists but journalists now (at least in Australia and Britain) routinely use that expression to refer to themselves (as in "fellow reptiles" etc) -- obviously seeing the expression as great fun. And similarly there is now a lot of Redneck comedy etc. I have been trying for years to find out who coined the term "reptiles of the Press" but nobody seems to know, so if any of my readers can tell me, I would be much obliged.

Interestingly, two of the people who emailed me have the same surname as mine, which figures, as "Ray" is an old Celtic name found throughout the British Isles in various spellings and "rednecks" and "crackers" do seems to be mainly of Celtic (Scotch-Irish) origin. Here is part of one of the emails concerned:

"As you say, cracker and redneck just mean that you're a working-class white person in the south. We do have a sense of humor about ourselves, but OTOH we're the last group left that you can openly mock and criticize in the crudest of terms. The good news is, however, that Redneck Culture -- NASCAR, bluegrass and country music, pro wresting, Jeff Foxworthy and the like, are huge. We're taking over, no matter what they say about us"

The term "Redneck" seems to have had usages in Britain long before it was used in America and I am always amused by the fact that, among Afrikaners, the term "Rooineck" (meaning "redneck") refers to the English! And (for good reasons in their case) the Afrikaners don't mean it kindly, either. Given my fair skin, I guess I too would be a redneck if I spent much time in the sun.

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ELSEWHERE

There is some well-deserved sarcasm here about Federal Air Marshal Service Director Thomas Quinn, the subnormal who insists that America's air marshalls dress in a way that makes them easily detectable by terrorists. Where does GWB find these wackos?

Evil feminist mentality at work: "A city fire captain who had been accused - and then cleared - of raping his daughter will go back to work next month, city officials said. Michael Tecklenburg had been on administrative leave since he was arrested Sept. 14 and charged on suspicion of raping his 15-year-old daughter, who had run away from home. But the girl testified that she had been pressured by investigators into making the allegations. Last week, a San Joaquin County Superior Court judge dismissed the charges, citing insufficient evidence".

I have never freaked out at the idea of national ID cards the way some conservatives do so I was pleased to see some realistic comments on the matter by Dick McDonald. Opposition from both Left and Right killed off the idea of a national ID card for Australians some time ago now.

There is a rather amusing article here reporting that the Europeans are finally getting ants in their pants about all the Muslim immigrants in their midst. The wisdom of "Cowboy" GWB's war on militant Islam might soon start to get through to them. How embarrassing that will be!

Iran: "Few countries have a more paradoxical relationship than the US and Iran. While the Iranian regime continues to be belligerently anti-American, the Iranian people are overtly pro-American"

Accuracy in Media has a list of the top 20 under-reported stories of the year. A few of them: How liberals tried to use federal agencies to delay or censor Sinclair Broadcasting's airing of Stolen Honor, showing how John Kerry's anti-war testimony led to the torture of our Vietnam POWs.; How and why MIT's Dr. Richard Lindzen, perhaps the country's leading climatologist, doesn't accept the man-made global warming theory; How Senator John Edwards used "junk science" in some of the cerebral palsy lawsuits that made him rich; John Kerry's failure to release all of his military and medical records.

Fred Reed uses satire to highlight the underlying logic of homosexual marriage. He ends up deciding he will marry his desk.

Albanian Muslims making assholes out of themselves: "The [Greek] government asked its citizens not to retaliate against immigrants Thursday, a day after two Albanian gunmen hijacked a bus. The 18-hour standoff near Athens ended peacefully early Thursday after police successfully negotiated the release of 23 hostages. The gunmen, Gaz Resuli and Leonard Murati, 24-year-old Albanian immigrants who surrendered shortly after midnight, had demanded $1.33 million in ransom and safe passage out of the country." [Bill Clinton bombed Christian Serbia for the sake of ethnic Albanians].

A reader has sent in his own theory of Leftism which I have just put up here. It has some interesting points in it.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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17 December, 2004

THE ARMY AND THE JAPANESE

I am still feeling pretty disgusted about the treatment of young Japanese women in Paris that I mentioned yesterday. Because I offer cheap accomodation and prefer Asians as tenants, I have met more than a few of the young treasures of Japan over the years and there is no way they deserve to be driven into hospital by foul treatment. Partly because I am a former Army man myself, I have met and talked to many "old Diggers" (Australian Army veterans) from WWII over the years and I share their disgust about what "the Nips" did to prisoners and others in that war. To this day, many of them would not consider buying a Japanese car. But because of their experiences, if nothing else, those men are true gentlemen and I can guarantee you that not one of them would be rude to a young woman just because she was Japanese. But ethics have always been something of an afterthought to the French from what I can see.

While I am thinking of the Army, I also want to record my disgust at the way Leftists commonly disparage the armed forces. To me the profession of arms is the noblest profession there is. Who else volunteers to lay down his life for his fellow-citizens?

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HISTORY CORNER

There is a rather silly article here which compares GWB to Teddy Roosevelt on the grounds that both Presidents have sent U.S. armed forces to intervene in foreign countries. Although TR was a Republican President, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats were clearly Leftist or Rightist in TR's days and TR was a notable supporter of the "Progressive" (Leftist) wing of the GOP. He even left the GOP at one stage and set up his own "Progressive" party. And his actions abroad were thoroughly imperialistic -- under a very thin cloak of righteousness. They were certainly not driven by defence needs. GWB, by contrast, is simply responding as best he can to the war on America declared by the Islamic extremists. And the difference between a defensive war and a war of expansion is surely of considerable importance. As is shown here American wars abroad are normally the work of the American Left. It is only the needs of defence that have got GWB into such wars. (Thanks to PID for the links).

There is a site here which points to the remnants of America's Christian heritage still engraved on major American public buildings despite all that the ACLU has so far done to stop that. There is however another site here which points out that the various depictions of the Ten Commandments are mostly blank so could in fact represent other things -- such as the Bill of Rights. On occasions where Moses is shown holding the tablets of stone, however, that is a pretty feeble criticism.

There is an article here giving background to the recent 150th anniversary of Australia's "Eureka Stockade" uprising. The Left always seem to think it vindicates them in some mysterious way. How a revolt against a tax by self-employed people does that, however, has always been a mystery to me. There should be more tax revolts in my opinion. If people started rebelling against most of their taxes being spent to feed millions of bureaucrats and paper-shufflers, we might get some real sanity in public life.

Von Mises in 1940 knew that Fascists and Communists were all socialists: "Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini constantly proclaim that they are chosen by destiny to bring salvation to this world. They claim they are the leaders of the creative youth who fight against their outlived elders. They bring from the East the new culture which is to replace the dying Western civilization. They want to give the coup de grace to liberalism and capitalism; they want to overcome immoral egoism by altruism; they plan to replace the anarchic democracy by order and organization, the society of "classes" by the total state, the market economy by socialism."

An interesting email from a reader: "I thought you would find this interesting as we share the belief that presenting the Nazis as 'conservative' is one of the biggest leftist lies of the 20th century. I am reading Iris Chang's book 'The Rape of Nanking' and in one chapter she talks about John Rabe, a high-ranking Nazi official living in Nanking who selflessly saved and protected many people. While trying to reconcile how a devoted Nazi official could be so kind and helpful, known as the 'living Buddha of Nanking', his granddaughter explained that Rabe saw the Nazi Party primarily as a socialist organization and did not support the persecution of Jews and other ethnic groups in Germany. It also says that Rabe repeatedly summed up his Nazi philosophy in socialist terms: "We are soldiers of work, we are a government of workers, we are friends to the worker, we will never leave the worker's side in times of crisis." (p109-100)

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ELSEWHERE

Love it! "A former Claremont McKenna College psychology professor convicted of falsely reporting her car was vandalized and spray-painted with racist and anti-Semitic slurs was sentenced Wednesday to a year in state prison."

Sean Gabb has an interesting article on why he thinks that drink driving (DUI) should not be a crime. He says however that causing harm while drink driving should be severely punished.

Joe Cambria has replied to Prof. Quiggin's accusations about him. See here.

Amazing: Some Iranians are trying to convert to Judaism both as an expression of distaste for the Islam of the Ayatollahs and as a way of getting out of a decaying Iran.

Peggy Noonan has an amusing column up in which she tells the Democrats that they could win back a lot of supporters if they came out and supported Christmas and displays of faith in public life. She's right and I am sure they know she is right but the haters who are their main supporters won't allow it, of course. What a bind for them!

GWB just gave the perfect reply to the outsourcing worriers: "Bush told reporters the trade deficit was "easy to resolve. People can buy more United States products if they're worried about the trade deficit."" Exactly. If the Democrats are so worried about us buying things from abroad, let THEM pay more to buy their products instead of trying to force that on all of us. The whole speech was pretty amusing. He also said "The policy of my government is a strong-dollar policy" Seeing that the "weak" dollar is good for American business and bad for European business, one wonders how he kept a straight face while saying that.

Amusing: European gloom about their stagnant economy and problematical future means that individual Europeans save rather than spend -- thus depressing their economy even further.

Conservative scholarship is under attack at Princeton's Department of Near Eastern Studies -- which mainly studies Islam.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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16 December 2004

"REDNECKS" FOLLOW-UP

A good comment from a reader about my post yesterday on "Rednecks": "Something I have observed for a while that I don't think I have seen in any of your writings is the Right's ability to laugh at themselves -- while the left seems to have no tolerance what-so-ever for anyone making fun of them. The Redneck comedy is a good example - but even better is a classic TV show called All In The Family. The series was created by a super Liberal, Norman Lear, and although his intention was to mock conservative views, it became a big hit among conservatives, and I guess among liberals too. The fact is, it's just damn funny... but somehow I don't think it would have ever made had it been mocking liberal views.

Another reader thinks I should have mentioned "cracker" as another bigoted term often used by Leftists. He summarizes: "Cracker is a pejorative term used by Northerners (Yankees, aka blue states) to describe people of the South (red states). It is ante-bellum in origin. The civil war between the North and South was more a conflict of cultures than anything else and was a conflict that was already centuries old at the Revolution (see the Mel Gibson movies Braveheart or The Patriot), it being the conflict between the Anglo-Saxon English and the Celtic peoples or Scotland, Ireland, Wales, etc. The Yankees being predominantly of English stock considered themselves to be industrious, well bred, civilized people. They considered the people of the South to be a temperamental, emotional lot who would rather spend their days screwing their women and running through the woods with their hound dogs than working. This idea of Southerners remains to this day."

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

More on immigration, wages and other myths, part II Does immigration drive up profits while driving down wages?
The Age slimes the free market - again Tim Colebatch and Kenneth Davidson must be among the worst of Australia's economic commentariat - and that's saying something
Unions, wages and labor surveys Outworkers are not the victims of callous market forces and greedy capitalists. They are the victims of callous ideologically motivated economic illiterates
Professor John Quiggin slimes Windschuttle John Quiggin's specialty appears to be moral posturing, character assassination and personal abuse
Holland and Islamic terrorism: Disaster in waiting How ludicrous that the legislators of Holland are so afraid of the violent Arabs, who are taking over their community, that they can't sleep safely in their homes for fear that one of them might come in and behead them

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

There is an excellent article here on the multiple links between the far Left and the Islamists. Such links make no logical sense at all given the way Islamic attitudes to women and to sexual licence run directly against long-cherished Leftist causes but, as usual, Leftist attitudes can only be understood psychologically rather than logically and the alliance makes great sense psychologically. Both Leftists and Islamists want to tear down existing society and put themselves in the drivers' seat instead. So at a basic level the two groups have identical aims. It is only power that Leftists really want. All the rest of what they say is just posturing -- and there could be no clearer evidence of that than the way they have abandoned the various "rights" they have always stood for by co-operating with the world's most notable opponents of such rights.

This is pretty disgusting. Young Japanese women living in Paris get so shocked by constant French rudeness towards them that some of them end up hospitalized with depression. I am sure my own manners are a bit rough at times but I always try to treat the invariably polite people of Asia with the courtesy that such politeness deserves. But like all elitists, the French think everyone else is scum, particularly Americans of course.

Lots of young educated Arabs LIKE George Bush! "The same ideas came up again and again: he is a strong leader, an honest man, and, most of all, a believer. Like the winning margin of American voters this year, these Middle Easterners related to Bush's sense of religious conviction and his confident steering of a nation and culture they admired... In addition, some of the most articulate students expressed intense misgivings about central Democratic electoral platforms, including gun control, limitation of the death penalty and especially abortion and gay rights. Just the word "homosexual" made many of them cringe and click their tongues in that uniquely Arab way of showing disapproval. A final piece of the puzzle fell into place when I learned that more than half of the students in my advanced class, among them a third-year medical student and daughter of a Western-based diplomat, rejected the theory of evolution. "I just can't believe that we came from monkeys," she said".

Mobsters have a point "Italian mobsters jailed on the island of Sardinia, apparently outraged by terrorism, beat up an Algerian terror suspect and threatened to kill him unless he got himself transferred to a new prison. The same threat was made against at least one other Algerian inmate. "You guys set off bombs and do massacres. If you don't change prisons, you're dead," the criminals were reported to have told Saadi Nassim"

A good post on the British welfare State. One excerpt: "State education began in 1870 with the Forster Act, which allowed the creation of government schools. Its purpose was not to wipe out the existing private and charitable schools. The whole idea was to catch those few people who were missing out. It was reckoned in 1861 that 95 percent of children were getting between five and seven years of education. State education was started to save that missing 5 percent or less. Now, 134 years later, with the state dominating education, a government survey reveals that 20 percent of the adult population is functionally illiterate. State education, instead of saving the bottom 5 percent, has quadrupled the number of those left out"

Watching the signs: "Not since 1952 has a presidential election lacked a sitting president or vice president as a contestant, and Ike was about as close as one could get to non-official incumbent. Before that, it was the 1928 race, and there, too, Herbert Hoover was, like Ike, a figure of towering popularity. In other words, there has never not been a front-runner in at least one party in the modern scrambles for the presidency. Here is a bit of evidence that the race for 2008 also has a leader, one along the lines of Eisenhower and the Great Engineer.... Giuliani swept more than three-quarters of the votes"

The Carnival of the Vanities is up again with enough good reading to keep you busy for a long time.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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15 December, 2004

"REDNECKS" AND "TRAILER TRASH"

In the great outpouring of Leftist hatred towards conservatives (some of it recorded on Leftists as Elitists) that followed the recent Presidential election, one of the most frequent terms of disparagement of conservative voters was "Rednecks", and, to a lesser extent, "White trash" or "Trailer trash". All three terms are extremely derogatory in American life and I am frankly amazed that Leftists use them at all. These self-proclaimed heroes of tolerance reveal themselves thereby to be in fact most viciously prejudiced and ignorant.

When we strip away the abusive component, after all, what really are rednecks? They are simply country people, probably farm workers, with necks red from working in the sun. They like simple recreations such as shooting and they are far more likely to be practically inclined than intellectually inclined and they don't have much time for others who don't pull their weight but how is that in any way deserving of condemnation? I grew up in a small Australian country town and I have since then seen quite a bit of country people both in Australia and the USA and I have no hesitation in saying that to my mind country people are the salt of the earth. If you want humble, kind, generous, trusting people you can't go past them. They make lots of city people look very degraded indeed. And I know that I am far from alone in that assessment of country people. So in my view abusing them as "rednecks" is grossly offensive, prejudiced and ignorant and those who use such terms just show what ignoramuses they themselves are.

And the allied term "Trailer Trash" is, if anything, more offensive. People who live in trailers (we call them "caravans" in Australia) generally do so because they are poor but how does that make them contemptible? I have seen a fair bit of Australian caravan parks over the years so I know what the people who live there are really like. I am not relying on popular stereotypes. And I have no hesitation in saying that the great majority of people who live there are thoroughly decent people who do very well on their limited resources. They may drink a bit but they are not alone in that. And there are certainly some rowdy and ignorant types there but such types are far from typical and there is plenty of worse morality to be found in many upmarket bars and nightclubs. So the only thing that really sets trailer-dwellers apart is their poverty, and Leftists are always pretending "compassion" for the poor. I doubt that they do in fact feel any compassion for anyone but themselves. It is certainly their contempt that is more evident. And such contempt is grossly offensive to many good people who are getting by as best they can and generally doing pretty well.

It is the prejudiced Leftist haters who deserve contempt.

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ELSEWHERE

A current campaign by PETA is to get clothing stores to boycott clothing made with Australian wool. The "sex sells" crowd at Abercrombie & Fitch seem suddenly to have discovered morality -- or at least the PETA version of it -- and have fallen into line. This article has a good idea: Boycott Abercrombie & Fitch. I'm guessing that there are a lot more Americans who approve of Australia than approve of PETA. If it all happened it could really spike the guns of PETA for a long time.

There is an excellent article here on the Buttiglione affair -- where a devout Cathoic was denied a position in the adminstration of the EU because of his beliefs -- even though he made clear that his beliefs would have no influence on how he did his job. If he had been a Muslim, of course, they would have given him the job by acclamation. The article defines "secularist" as a religious skeptic who is intolerant of religion. I like that definition. It does make it clear that we were dealing with bigotry in the Buttiglione affair. I am myself an atheist but I am always pleased to deal with Christians. I think that having God in charge of quality control is a distinct advantage to me.

The famously Bush-hating Jonathan Chait has an article in which he defends the overwhelming Leftist bias in academe. He rejects the notion that underrepresentation implies bias, though he realizes that Leftists like himself normally make the opposite argument where blacks are concerned. That does rather highlight the difficulties that the dishonesty of Leftists gets them into. Chait in fact is forced to admit that conservatives are right and that lack of proportionality does not imply bias! A major backdown for a Leftist, it seems to me. He also has a point in saying that academe is not a natural career choice for a conservative, though I disagree with his reasons. Academe is a stuffy bureaucracy and conservatives prefer the more free-wheeling and wide-open business world. I was in academe for many years and I am in no doubt that most of my colleagues would not last 5 minutes in business. My own combination of actual success in both academe and business is certainly extremely rare. There are however many conservatives with academic ambitions and Chait ignores what almost every one of those people could tell him -- that you virtually cease to exist in academe once your conservative views are known. Like most conservatives who do make it into academe, I got an academic job before my political views were known but once they were known, the roadblocks put up to my further progress in academe were almost amusing in their compulsiveness and violation of academic principles. Chait is just not acknowledging the facts, which is what I expect from Leftists. I have more on the Leftist nature of academe here and Prof. Bainbridge also gives Chait a serve.

Soviet Britain: You can have as much free speech as you like in Britain as long as it is within prescribed bounds. Joe Stalin would agree. "Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, has been released on bail after his arrest in connection with an investigation into inciting racial hatred. It follows a television documentary exposing the extent of alleged racism in the organisation. Earlier it was revealed that the party's founding chairman John Tyndall had been held on Sunday."

There have been a few articles lately about how the Left is breeding itself out of existence. here is a summary.

At last! A bureaucracy dies: "State government rarely shrinks, but last week California's 3-year-old public power authority disappeared. Created by Democratic lawmakers in the tumultuous days of blackouts and price spikes, the agency sputtered to a halt after Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed its funding. ..."

Tom Barrett: "I have long believed that the United Nations is the most dangerous organization on our planet. The corruption that has been revealed there over the last few years has only reinforced my opinion. Now it is becoming apparent that the rampant corruption at the UN starts at the very top. More than any thing, the UN is a savagely anti-United States propaganda outlet. It is made up primarily of nations that hate or are jealous of the US..... "

There is an interesting contrast here between the way two poor countries -- India and Indonesia -- deal with Muslim violence. The terrorists mostly get a free pass in Indonesia but India prosecutes energetically. The British origins of India's legal system no doubt have a lot to do with it.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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14 December, 2004

TUESDAY ROUNDUP

From the emails I receive, many people get quite a lot out of my blogs. Since I have seven regular blogs at the moment, however, it seems obvious to me that very few of my readers would read them all. So I thought it might be useful if I were to highlight what I thought were the most interesting posts on each of them once a week. That way everyone who reads this blog will get some idea what is on all of them. So here goes:

On Dissecting Leftism, I discuss America's most offensive four-letter word.

On Leftists as Elitists, I discuss the Hollywood elite.

On Political Correctness Watch, I note that winners are now frowned on in Canadian school sports.

On Greenie Watch I note that global warming is now said to be racist(!).

On Socialized Medicine, I note that drug price-controls are bad for your health.

On Education Watch, I note that educational attainments went up in Florida schools when social promotion was ended.

Gun Watch has some pithy sayings about the usefulness of guns.

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ELSEWHERE

There is a relatively new Leftist group-blog called "Left2Right" that aims to "talk to" conservatives in a civil and persuasive manner: A rather amazing idea in the context of the torrents of abuse and contempt that is usually all that the Left can produce by way of dialogue with conservatives. A recent post by Elizabeth Anderson aims to deflect the common charge that Leftists are not patriotic. Given the way America-haters like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky are lionized and given every honour by America's Left, that is a big ask from the outset and the way the charming Ms Anderson goes about her task is very revealing. She is indeed persuasive that she personally loves her country but some of the other things she says about herself and her views suggest that she is in fact fairly conservative: She says: "Give me the pursuit of excellence over "self-esteem" any day" and "Central Park ... Fully restored and enhanced to great glory, it is a far cry from its dismal state in the 1970s, when it was a decrepit haven for drug dealers. Now families don't hesitate to take their children there to play. There is no more vivid sign of the spectacular revival of New York City than this (except perhaps for the clean, grafitti-free subways). The new reign of civility --and yes, I do give former Mayor Giuliani credit for this--" and "Chinatown shows how free trade in goods and free movement of people are inextricable from the free exchange of ideas and willingness to learn from and welcome them, no matter their origin" and "Mayor Giuliani brought spectacular benefits to the city by insisting not just on a crackdown on crime, but on restoring order and civility to the streets, without which people cannot raise families in the city". I could go on but it seems to me that the lady is far to the Right of most Leftists and would in fact be unremarked as a moderate Republican. Given his big spending on the war and such things, GWB could certainly use her eagerness to pay taxes! So what the good woman seems to have proved by her own example is precisely the opposite of what she aimed at. She has shown that you have to be substantially conservative in America today to be patriotic!

The dreaded Windschuttle summarizes his latest book on the now defunct White Australia Policy here. Once again he has thrown sand into the bearings of the hate-machine that is Leftist history.

I have just been reading A Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and it is one of the most amazing collections of myth-busting facts you will ever see. It shows how the facts dynamite practically everything that you are told in orthodox histories. Things that I have been saying about American history for years are suddenly all there in book form. Do yourself a favour and have a look at this summary at least. It could almost be a textbook for conservatives. But DON'T give it to any kid studying history at an American university. They would end up being thrown out of the class for subversion. The book is probably the best 20 buck's worth I know of.

Clinton's crook: "Billionaire Marc Rich has emerged as a central figure in the U.N. oil-for-food scandal and is under investigation for brokering deals in which scores of international politicians and businessmen cashed in on sweetheart oil deals with Saddam Hussein, The Post has learned. Rich, the fugitive Swiss-based commodities trader who received a controversial pardon from President Bill Clinton in January 2001, is a primary target of criminal probes under way in the U.S. attorney's office in New York and by Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau"

Jehovah's Witnesses are learning Arabic to aid their outreach to Muslims. Isn't it amazing? It takes fundamentalist Protestants to do something that nobody else is doing. Where are the multi-cultis on this? It looks like a faith-based initiative is miles ahead of them.

V.D. Hanson is having a bit of a laugh about the dilemma Europe finds itself in now that its multicultural tolerance has simply put a large and very hostile Muslim minority inside its borders.

The Left seem to hate novelist Michael Crichton lately, in part because he has cast Greenies as the villains in his latest novel. PID however argues that Crichton should really be beloved by the Left.

Good comment from a reader: "I always laugh at Leftists when they say that Bush is a "Nazi" and is "Hitler" when fascist states like Hitler and Mussolini's and Stalin's Soviet Russia and Soviet Russia itself had a hostitility toward ANY religion, especially Christianity. Leftists should stop, think and look themselves in the mirror to see how much in common they have with Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. Leftists are making a fascist assault against Christianity during this holiday season and even though I am not that religious, I am seeing them committing these acts against Christianity".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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13 December, 2004

STEREOTYPING

Around 15 years ago, I went to the library at the University of Queensland and looked up their PsycLIT CD-ROM. The CD was published by the American Psychological Association and indexes what has been published in all the world's academic psychology journals. I entered the search terms "racism" and "ethnocentrism" and looked at the authorship of the stream of articles that came out. There was one author who had published far more than any other -- accounting for about a fifth of the articles concerned. So, by normal academic conventions, that author would clearly be the world's leading authority on the psychology of racism. I am that author. See here

No doubt the situation has changed considerably since then. I neither know nor care nor does anybody else. My research generally arrived at conclusions uncongenial to Leftists so has always been thoroughly ignored by my fellow academics and I have therefore long since stopped doing any of it. I mention the matter only to establish that I do know the subject exceptionally well and am not talking through my hat in what I am about to say. And what I am about to say I have set out in more academic terms, complete with references, elsewhere. I should also note that what I am about to say is in part a sequel to what I said yesterday on the subject of racism so if anyone reading this has not read what I wrote yesterday, please do so before reading any further here.

In psychology, a "stereotype" is the word used to refer to a belief that someone has about a particular group of people. A common stereotype would be the belief that blacks are lazy. Stereotypes are therefore in general greatly condemned. The grounds for condemning them are twofold: 1). It is argued that no group has distinct characteristics; and 2). That even if a majority of a group has some characteristic, not all members of the group will have so it is pernicious to judge the individual by the group to which he belongs.

The first claim is simply silly. Of course groups have common characteristics. Most people of African ancestry have dark skin, for instance. Even if there are some or even many exceptions to the rule, the rule still exists. To say that no rule may have any exceptions would exclude most rules we use in life. The second claim is of course correct. To say that a person has a characteristic that he does not is plainly foolish and unjust and any public policy (such as the Jim Crow laws or "affirmative action") that assumes characteristics in an individual because of some group to which he belongs is also therefore foolish and unjust. The United Nations charter says that each person should be treated according to his/her individual merits and that is probably the most uncontroversial pronouncement the UN has ever made. Whether people act on it, however, is another matter.

So there are intellectually compelling reasons why public policy should not take group membership into account. Enquiries can always be made about the characteristics of the individual who might be affected by a policy instead of assuming the characteristics of the individual from some group to which he/she might belong. If a policy is designed to help poor people, for instance, enquiries should be made about the income and assets of each individual concerned before they are helped rather than assuming that because he/she is a member of a generally poor group (such as blacks) he/she should automatically be helped.

Private life, however, is another matter. In private life we very often HAVE to deal with people on the basis of very imperfect knowledge about them. A landlord deciding on whether or not to let his property to someone, for instance, will often know very little about the prospective tenant. He will of course ask for references etc but as crooks often have the best references, that will not get him far. So he will necessarily use very imperfect rules in deciding what to do. If, for instance, he has had repeated bad experiences with (say) Korean tenants, he may well decide not to accept a particular prospective tenant who is Korean. He will undoubtedly make some mistakes in doing so but he will probably make fewer mistakes that way than if he had used no rules at all. But clearly, what he has done is "stereotyped" Koreans as bad tenants. So what is quite improper in public policy may be perfectly proper in a limited-information, day-to-day environment. Circumstances alter cases and to say that stereotyping is ALWAYS undesirable is in fact to stereotype stereotyping.

So the rational conclusion from realities such as those mentioned out above is that consideration of group membership should be outlawed in public policy but allowed in private life. Needless to say, Leftists advocate the exact reverse of that.

I have combined the above comments into an article here or here

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ELSEWHERE

This article gives five good reasons why the USA should immediately pull out of that corrupt monstrosity known as the United Nations.

I have been reading Ben Stein's columns for many years. For those who don't know him here is a typical one. If ever a man had sound values, Ben Stein does.

An update here on the still laughable state of America's airline security system.

Andrew Bolt exposes Australia's top film critic as the grossly biased Leftist that he is.

Thank goodness someone can stop blaming whites for black failure: "Bill Cosby visited a San Francisco school Thursday to rail against what he considers the culture of victimization in low-income African American communities, telling parents they must invest in their children's education before they wind up teenage moms, jail inmates, drug dealers -- or dead"

Amazing Leftist arrogance: "A standard "action alert" has provided a rare glimpse inside the mind of the Shadow Party. In a December 9th e-mail signed by "Eli Pariser, Justin Ruben, and the whole MoveOn PAC team," the Soros front group stated: "In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back." To clarify, the hysterical Left believes not only that America's oldest political party is for sale, but that George Soros has already made the down payment."

American illiteracy keeps spreading: Despite much checking, a memorial to the campaign in Burma at the recently completed Illinois World War II Memorial at Oak Ridge Cemetery spells the place-name as "Berma".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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12 December, 2004

AMERICA'S MOST OFFENSIVE FOUR-LETTER WORD

There is no doubt that the most offensive four-letter word in America today is "race". I gather that my occasional mentioning of it greatly limits the readership of this blog. It is my contention, however, that it is mainly the Left that keep it that way -- by going ballistic every time that the word is mentioned. Absurd though it is, the convention that the Left have forced onto American society by their torrents of abuse is that anyone who mentions the word "race" is a "racist". And "racist" is in fact the most potent term of abuse that there is in most of the world today.

And the reason why is no mystery. Hitler's appalling application of the racial hygeine theories that were common among the Leftists of his day have made all good people super-anxious not to have anything to do with such horrors. But because a particularly nasty socialist once used the idea of race to inflict horrors does not mean that there is anything wrong with the concept of race. Atomic bombs are horrible too but the horribleness of the idea of atomic bombs does not make the reality of such bombs go away. Putting it another way, one does not have to want to persecute other races in order to recognize that they exist.

I have always been quite unhesitating in saying that races do exist and that there are differences between them -- and it is my view that anyone who says otherwise is deliberately blind. There is even good evidence from the geneticists saying so but I do not expect that sort of evidence to be influential with people who cannot even believe what their senses tell them every day.

I am sure that the kneejerk brigade have stopped reading this by now so I presume that I am now talking to those who are capable of acknowledging that there are races and that race can make a difference. The important question now, then, is what USE does the concept have? And my answer to that is: "Not a lot". As a conservative I believe in the primacy of the individual so I believe that each person should as far as possible be treated on his/her individual merits, regardless of whether he/she is black, white or brindle.

Unfortunately, however, as in Hitler's day, the Left do not do that. They do not treat people as individuals and they do discriminate against people on the basis not only of their race but even on the basis of their skin colour. I refer of course to "affirmative action". They practice racial discrimination without using the word "race" -- generally preferring the term "minorities" instead, which is about as big a distortion as claiming that homosexuals are "gay". Sad homosexuals are apparently not allowed and the minority that suffers most official discrimination against them in America today is undoubtedly white middle class males. Such confusion of speech makes intelligent discussion difficult so I am going to call leftists what they are: Racists. And I am going to call the categories that they use "races" too. If I try to use the deliberately confused terms that Leftists use in this matter, I run the risk of falling into the sort of confused thinking that they display -- the sort of confused thinking that denies that race exists and then proceeds to base vast policies on it.

The racial category that American Leftists most focus on is of course blacks of African ultimate origin. And by constant repetition over the last 50 years or so they seem to have persuaded lots of white Americans that they should feel guilty about the problems that such blacks tend to have. White feelings of guilt about blacks appear to have been fairly uncommon before World War II. And the principal point I am aiming at for the moment is that whites should NOT feel guilty. I am not responsible for what my ancestors did nor is anybody else. We can only deal with the situation as we have it today and the plain fact is that American blacks are the luckiest of their race in the world today. If people of African ancestry in America have problems, their problems are as nothing compared to the problems of Africans in Africa. Although it was not done with benevolent intentions, the transportation of African slaves into America was in fact the best thing that anybody has ever done for Africans. The descendants of the slaves are infinitely richer and better off in a whole host of ways than are the descendants of those Africans who were not enslaved. And at least one prominent black American has acknowledged that.

So my point is that if we must use the Leftist practice of basing policy on race, the logic would be that American blacks owe whites something, and not vice versa. The guilt about blacks that many American whites appear to feel is, in other words, a giant Leftist con job. That they have managed to make people feel guilty about something that they also claim does not exist is an abiding wonder, however. If Leftists really did treat people as individuals regardless of their race, neither the guilt nor the affirmative action policies based on it would be possible.

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ELSEWHERE

A very popular story around the blogs at the moment is this one about the conversion of an atheist professor to belief in some sort of supreme being. I guess his conversion is seen as comforting to Christians. But it isn't really. Prof. Flew is of the view that the being concerned is far beyond our ken and that view in fact corresponds to what is probably the most common religious belief in Australia -- that there is a God but the churches don't know anything about him. I myself think that the whole idea of God is meaningless. Maybe there is something eternal but if so it might as well be the universe itself. Postulating a God adds nothing to the explanation. Spontaneous order can spring from very simple influences -- as anyone who has observed the formation of crystals will know. Prof. Flew is just getting old.

Sanity coming to the Unhinged Kingdom? "Tony Blair announced yesterday that the Government will consider changing the law to protect householders from prosecution if they tackle burglars. Mr Blair clashed with the Tory leader, Michael Howard, in the Commons over an issue creating alarm across Britain: the fear of being attacked in one's own home. Mr Blair said it was important to send a 'very, very clear signal to people' that the Government was on the side of the victim, not the offender."

Dutch fleeing their own multiculturalism: "Escaping the stress of clogged roads, street violence and loss of faith in Holland's once celebrated way of life, the Dutch middle classes are leaving the country in droves for the first time in living memory. The new wave of educated migrants are quietly voting with their feet against a multicultural experiment long touted as a model for the world, but increasingly a warning of how good intentions can go wrong. Australia, Canada and New Zealand are the pin-up countries for those craving the great outdoors and old-fashioned civility."

On 8th December I published an email from Joe Cambria that was critical of blogger Prof. John Quiggin. On 10th I received an email from Prof. Quiggin which described Cambria's email as inaccurate and misleading and asking me to delete it from my blog. As I was not prepared to acquiesce in what seemed to me an attempt at censorship, a chain of short emails ensued in which Quiggin appears to threaten legal action against me. I have posted the correspondence here and would be interested in comments from readers.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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11 December, 2004

SOME ECONOMICS

Germany will not face the fact that German laws have priced Germans out of work: "The number of people out of work in Europe's largest economy has risen for the tenth straight month as growth remains stubbornly slow. German unemployment rose 7,000 in November to 4.464 million people, or 10.8% of the workforce.... With unemployment stuck above 4 million for years, the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has put job creation at the top of the agenda. A controversial package of measures to shake up incentives to get back to work, paid for by cutting some cherished benefits, has sparked anger among some German workers.... Among the new initiatives are the so-called "one-euro jobs" which top up unemployment benefit.... "The deterioration of the labour market does not come as a surprise," said Isabelle Kronawitter at Hypovereinsbank. "Job creation measures probably prevented a stronger increase in the seasonally adjusted numbers."" [German workers now get so many government-dictated benefits that it is prohibitive to employ them. For comparison, deregulation of the labour market in Australia has just led to record LOW unemployment]. (Link via Reliapundit)

End corporate income tax: "On Nov. 18, in a speech given at the Finance Ministry in Vienna, Austria, the very highly regarded European economist and first woman president of the Mont Pelerin Society, Professor Victoria Curzon Price, called for eliminating the corporate income tax. There, in the center of socialist Europe, was not only the call to get rid of this destructive tax, but almost everyone in an audience of economists, various government finance officials and public policy experts appeared to agree with her. The idea and practice of the corporate income tax has been dying slowly for the last two decades. The corporate income tax is a highly destructive tax that greatly distorts proper economic decision-making, taxes the same income more than once, is endlessly complex, and provides a declining share of tax revenue in most countries." [Double-taxing of company profits was abolished long ago in Australia -- by a LEFTIST government! And I have just received a big refund cheque to prove it!]

Tough row to hoe: "When Nebraska Gov. Mike Johanns, whom President Bush has just nominated as the next agriculture secretary, takes office, his first order of business should to push for an end to America's drastically distorted farm subsidy programs. Eliminating U.S. farm subsidies would dramatically reduce government spending, end a program that mostly benefits corporate interests and the wealthy, strengthen U.S. agriculture, give us much needed leverage in international trade negotiations, and allow the United States to extricate itself from embarrassingly undermining its own foreign aid program."

The Chinese are coming!: "Until recently, the Chinese have taken the boatloads of dollars we sent them and recycled them into Treasury bonds. Now Chinese companies are investing some of those greenbacks into something more productive: companies and businesses. Here in the United States, we're schooled to think of foreign direct investment -- a vital component of global capital flows -- as going from the First World into the Third. Now the river is running in the opposite direction. These American businesses, some of them bankrupt or on the verge of abandonment, are getting dynamic new parent companies. It's just another step in the continued seamless integration of the world's economy. Man, globalism is cool!"

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ELSEWHERE

The very Leftist EU: "Christians are bad. Comrades are good. That is the lesson of the recently concluded parallel process by which the European Union Commission and the European Parliament accepted Laszlo Kovacs of Hungary as a European commissioner while vociferously rejecting Italy's European affairs minister, Rocco Buttiglione, for his views on marriage and homosexuality. The media describe Laszlo Kovacs as a "socialist." In fact, he is a career communist with decades of totalitarian experience. Mr. Kovacs worked closely with the leadership of Janos Kadar's sinister regime, installed literally over the dead bodies of the Hungarian democracy activists killed by Soviet tanks after the 1956 popular uprising against the Communist Party's monopoly of power. Years before glasnost, Mr. Kovacs was one of the dictator's henchmen"

Nobel discredited again: "Just a day before she is scheduled to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, the Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai tried Thursday to defuse a controversy over reports that she said "evil-minded scientists" in the developed world intentionally created AIDS to decimate the African population."

Milton Friedman has a great article pointing out that it is time to start rolling back government.

Jeff Jacoby says that the medical marijuana case before SCOTUS is really about stopping unlimited Federal power.

Nazis and other Leftists get together again: "Arafat`s attention-grabbing series of airplane hijackings set the standard for the new generation of terrorists who took his invention and improved upon it on September 11, 2001. In death, he continues to inspire, and is already sorely missed by "progressives" and neo-Nazis who share one thing in common - enthusiastic support for the slaughter of unarmed Jewish men, women, and children - and who sound eerily alike in their online remarks praising the PLO chief and cursing the Jews."

The People's Republic of Berkeley: "John Kerry won 90 percent of the votes cast for president in Berkeley, while George Bush won the support of only 6.6 percent of Berkeley's voters.... Among cities with a majority of white residents, there is no question that Berkeley ranks number one in the nation in support for Kerry".

Californian legislators are rushing through a law to OK homosexual marriage. Wayne Lusvardi thinks Arnie will veto it and comments: "Something like 70% of California voters nixed same sex marriages a few years ago; this legislation is meant to depict Gov. Schwarzenegger as prejudiced".

Arlene Peck has some pungent comments about the spineless Dutch response to Islamic terrorism. Many of them want to emigrate from their own country rather than crack down on the evildoers.

Darlene Taylor is a relatively new blogger from my home town of Brisbane. I don't really follow what she is on about but she seems to be a disillusioned member of the Australian Labor Party.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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10 December, 2004

AIRPORT MAYHEM

Bureaucratic nonsense at airports: "I recently flew back to the United States, my birthplace and home for most of my life. I didn't like it. It was wonderful seeing good friends, some of whom I hadn't seen for almost 20 years. But travelling in the US is now so unpleasant that I prefer to give the US a miss. There are too many places in the world I haven't seen to worry about being hassled by little people with big authority who now dominate American airports. ... The first inkling of what a hassle it would was the announcement on the air plane regarding what forms one had to fill out just to get bureaucratic permission to leave the airport. Previously announcements regarding this took a few seconds. This time it dragged out."

Transportation shakeup urgently needed: "One of the highest priorities for whoever succeeds Tom Ridge at Homeland Security should be to take political correctness and a fear of litigation out of national security decisions. From immigration enforcement to intelligence gathering, government officials continue to compromise safety in order to avoid accusations of "racial profiling" -- and in order to avoid publicly acknowledging what the 9/11 Commission finally said: that the enemy is "Islamist terrorism." This blind antidiscrimination reflex is all the more worrying since radical Islam continues to seek adherents and plan attacks in the U.S. The government antidiscrimination hammer has hit the airline industry most severely. Department of Transportation lawyers have extracted millions in settlements from four major carriers for alleged discrimination after 9/11, and they have undermined one of the most crucial elements of air safety: a pilot's responsibility for his flight. Since the charges against the airlines were specious but successful, every pilot must worry that his good-faith effort to protect his passengers will trigger federal retaliation".

More TSA arrogance: "The Transportation Security Administration, that federal bureaucracy that keeps the peripatetic public safe from attack by fingernail file-flailing fanatics, threw itself a half-million dollar awards ceremony at the Grand Hyatt in DC. Expenses included $81,000 for plaques, $500 for cheese displays and $200,000 for travel and lodging. Senior executives awarded themselves bonuses averaging $16,000 apiece while one employee was presented a 'lifetime achievement award' (the TSA is two years old).

The roving hands of airport insecurity: "Under normal circumstances, if a strange man tried to stick his hands down my pants, one of us would end up lying on the ground bleeding. But we have entered into a world of the surreal -- a world where millions of otherwise intelligent Americans are willing to stand in line and wait their turn to be groped by a complete stranger. I'm not exactly sure how it happened. But, I certainly seem to have done something to get myself on the airlines 'bad boy' list. Every time I set foot in an airport these days, I get dragged off for one of their 'random' special searches -- three times in a row during a recent trip."

Breast exams at the airport "Beginning in mid-September, the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) put into place a policy that provides for the physical frisking of selected airline passengers prior to boarding. The purpose of the new policy is to detect nonmetallic explosives of the sort that apparently were used by two Chechen women in terrorist attacks that destroyed two planes and killed ninety airline passengers in Russia earlier this year. ... Women passengers have been especially unhappy about the new policy and have made numerous complaints. In addition, there is reason to believe that the numbers of complaints understate the true scope of the problem, because -- as with sexual assaults generally -- women's distress at being fondled by airline security personnel may be underreported."

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ELSEWHERE

A good comment from Wayne Lusvardi: "Here is a story which shows how off base the mainstream media is. It reports that homeless Iraq war vets are showing up in homeless shelters. Anyone who has dealt with the homeless is aware that many of them claim they are Viet Nam vets or vets of some war in order to get sympathy and benefits. The media doesn't even question this."

I have never so far put up a link on this blog to an audio file because text files tend to be much quicker to absorb but there is a time for everything (as Solomon said) so here is a link to an interview with Keith Windschuttle that I found very informative. I have known for over 40 years that the White Australia policy (designed to exclude Chinese immigrants) had its principal base of support in the Australian Left (Australian Labor Party) but it is only from this interview that I learned that the principal opposition to the introduction of the policy was the Free Trade party! Score one for conservatives and libertarians, I think. Belief in individual liberty has many ramifications. It was also the Democrats in the USA who were mainly responsible for Jim Crow laws of course.

Opinion Journal has an excellent takedown of Berkeley's wacky Professor George Lakoff.

Two Swedish economists recently published a study that asks how European countries would fare if suddenly admitted into the American union. The results? If the UK, France, or Italy became U.S. states, they would rank as the fifth poorest of the fifty, ahead only of Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia, and Mississippi. The richest EU country— Ireland— would be the 13th poorest. Sweden would be the 6th poorest. In fact, the study found that 40% of all Swedish households would classify as low-income in the U.S. [Leftist wriggle out of such facts by saying that money isn't everything and that is no doubt true but most people seem to want more money anyhow]

A good email from a reader: "My experience with people who apply the "liberal" label to themselves is that they are almost exclusively hyper-sensitive and intolerant. This morning a group of us was discussing the upcoming Christmas Party. One of the group then reminded everyone that a certain someone, who originates in Brooklyn, New York, takes great offense at the term "Christmas Party" and insists that it is a "Holiday Party." Being reminded of that, I intend to use the term "Christmas Party" as much as possible in her presence. The woman in question is hardly the only self-proclaimed "liberal", with whom I am acquainted, to behave in such an intolerant fashion. I wonder if these people realize that their intolerance belies the label they love so much".

Be thankful for this man: "This is the story of a military veteran whistleblower. He spoke out against someone he thought was dangerous for the nation, talked to local newspapers, and appeared on talk shows. In return, he was vilified by reporters, threatened by a political operative, fired by his company, and now he's broke.... Gardner explains he was sitting at home in Clover, S.C., when he first saw Kerry on television. It was before the primary races. For 35 years, Gardner says, he hadn't talked about his tour of duty in Vietnam. But when he saw Kerry talking about running, he says he got up, called the newspaper in town, called radio stations and "talked to anyone I could about why this man should never be president." .... And, even though Gardner is broke and jobless for speaking out, the husband and father of three says he'd do it all over again. He says it wasn't for politics. It was for America."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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9 December, 2004

"SENSITIVE" LEFTISTS: A MINOR DISAGREEMENT WITH DENNIS PRAGER

I am a great fan of Dennis Prager. Prague has suffered a great loss in losing him and his family. But I have two minor quarrels with him about this article -- headed: "Blue America, the land of the easily offended".

My first quarrel with him is about his use of the term "Blue America" as a synonym for American Left-wingers. The "blue" (Kerry-voting) counties in the last Presidential election were almost entirely the big cities, with their heavy concentration of minorities and welfare clients. And their vote was "bought" with the usual Democrat promises of more handouts etc. Subtract the "bought" vote and the Democrats would almost certainly have been as heavily outnumbered in the "blue" counties as they were in the "red" ones. And given that minorities often have very conservative views on social issues, there is every reason to subtract them. There is therefore no reason to believe that Leftist true-believers are dominant ANYWHERE in America. So there IS a "blue" (Democrat-voting) America but that does NOT mean that there is a Left-leaning America. The two terms are far from synonymous. The idea that there is a Left-leaning America is actually a Leftist security blanket -- so let us snatch it away from them when we can! They need to grow up.

My second quarrel is with Prager's description of the Left as "easily offended". I suspect that the description is in fact rather tongue-in-cheek but there is a point to it nonetheless. What I would like to suggest is that most of the offence that the Left takes on behalf of other people is totally phony. They say they are afraid that Christmas might offend Jews not because they care about Jews (which they certainly don't, given their hatred of Israel) but because it will upset Christians. The Left are true descendants of Cromwell's Puritans and their attitude to bear-baiting. But that Leftists get mightily miffed at insults to themselves there can be no doubt whatever. Their seething rage at the rejection of their candidate in the last Presidential election is proof enough of that.

Finally, I just loved this last paragraph of Prager's article: "Liberal American Indian spokesmen and other liberals regularly tell us how offensive Indian names of sports teams are. The latest polls show that most Indians have no problem with such names, but liberals are still offended on their behalf. To make the point of how offensive the name "Indians" is for the Cleveland baseball team, one liberal caller once asked me, "How would you feel if a team were named 'Jews'?" I told him that it would be a great day in Jewish history -- for 3,000 years, Jews have been looking for fans."

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

Holland to implement neo-Nazi euthanasia program for babies The Dutch government is set to implement the Groningen Protocol, a policy similar to the Nazi program of killing defectives
Immigration, wages and other myths, part I There are a great many myths both in the US and Australia regarding the economic and social consequences of immigration
Post Arafat: Now what? The Palestinians don't want peace. What they want is the extermination of Israel and every Jew that lives there
Media, politicians and the religious right The outcome of the American and Australian elections provoked our lefty journalists into making sanctimonious noises about the rise (or is it resurrection?) of the religious right
leftist history confronts economic theory - and loses An example of how leftist thinking distorts students views about capitalism and the industrial revolution

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

More illiteracy in The Times: "an international criteria". The singular is of course "criterion". British education exposed for what it is again.

Texafornian is pretty miffed that the Left are comparing the "red" States to the old slave States of Confederacy days. A good quote: "“History reveals that every piece of racist legislation that was ever passed and every racist terrorist attack that was ever inflicted on African Americans, was initiated by the members of the Democratic Party. From the formation of the Democratic Party in 1792 to the Civil Rights movement of 1960's, Congressional records show the Democrat Party passed no specific laws to help Blacks, every law that they introduced into Congress was designed to hurt blacks. The chronicles of history shows that during the past 160 years the Democratic Party legislated Jim Crow laws, Black Codes and a multitude of other laws at the state and federal level to deny African Americans their rights as citizens. History reveals that the Republican Party was formed in 1854 to abolish slavery and challenge other racist legislative acts initiated by the Democratic Party".

Evil social workers again: "Like any new father, Marco Zepeda was nervous changing his newborn's diaper for the first time. His hands shook. He fumbled with the sticky seals and sealed one side more snugly than the other. But he never imagined that would propel child protection officials to consider taking custody of his baby. ... Zepeda and his wife are blind, and they believe that's why they were targeted by employees of Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City and San Mateo County social workers. Officials from the hospital didn't return calls, and county officials declined to comment on the specifics of the couple's situation but said the process the couple went through was common. That's not so, say activists for the blind. 'This day and age, we only see cases like this in remote parts of the country,' said Chris Gray, president of the American Council of the Blind." (See also here)

V.D. Hanson refreshes our memories of what the Left said about the impossibility of confronting the Islamic evildoers immediately after 9/11 and shows that much progress has in fact been made since then despite all the prophecies of doom.

Lawless California: 120,000 inmates freed early: "Nearly 120,000 convicted offenders have been released from jail over the past 2 years without serving their full sentences, Los Angeles County sheriff's officials said. ... When sheriff's officials began releasing inmates early to save money in June 2002, they screened prisoners to decide how much time they should serve. Since last year, they have released all but the most serious offenders after they served less than 10 percent of their sentences, officials said."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again and seems particularly good this week

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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8 December, 2004

MORE ON DALRYMPLE

My recent skeptical comments (see post of 6th below) about the claims of "Theodore Dalrymple" elicited the following email from Father Mike Walsh of the Maryknolls.

I must express some disagreement with your post on Theodore Dalrymple's latest. Specifically: I doubt intelligence has much to do with it. All the intelligence in the world won't inoculate you against bad ideas. I have known a great many simple virtuous people, and many quite intelligent people who have messed up their lives. As to why more in Britain have not done so, or, to put it another way, why Britain (or any modern place) isn't much worse, may be described, metaphorically, in terms of physics and economics. That is, people are being carried along by sheer momentum, but a momentum that is decaying. They are spending moral and intellectual capital without replacing it. I believe the respect for authority you observed among your renters of years ago, for example, was residual. The main difference that intelligence makes is that intelligent people are better able to cover their mistakes. Your own rise --owing no doubt in large measure to talent and intelligence-- must surely have depended also on habits and virtues in which you were raised, and which are now in decreasing supply in the society at large. Whether or not the trends can be reversed is another matter, about which, I must agree, it's hard to be optimistic.

First, a minor quibble: The respect I got from my tenants was only three years ago, not in the distant past.

The argument that secular society remains relatively civilized only because it has a residue of Christian culture is a popular one but does not withstand a moment's inspection. The most civil, law-abiding and orderly society on earth is undoubtedly Japan, where there are very few Christians and where the main religion (Shinto) is about as primitive as you can get -- a combination of nature worship and ancestor worship. So Christian culture or even any sophisticated religion is not necessary for civility. And the opposite case is persuasive too. Many Africans in both Africa and elsewhere are intensely Christian and in many places African culture is overwhelmingly Christian but .... need I say more?

So once again I have to point to genetic inheritance as being far more important than culture. The twin studies bear that out too. Such studies enable apportionment of the causes of any characteristic into what is genetically caused and what is traceable to family environment. In almost all cases so far studied, the influence of family environment on what the mature person becomes is minimal.

I have some extended comments on the influence of Christianity on society here.

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AN INTERESTING EMAIL

"I thought you may be interested to know that since yesterday I have had a raging fight with John Quiggin. Quiggin had the audacity to call Windschuttle a racist because of a book he is about to publish (or has published) on the White Australia policy. Quiggin hasn't read the book but is prepared to malign Windschuttle as a racist. I find this horrid. Although I haven't read Windschuttle's works I have noticed that leftoids accuse him of horrible things but I have not read anything anywhere directly refuting his work on Tasmanian aboriginals. In other words leftoids call him names etc. and think that is enough rather than attacking his work in a scholarly way. I took to Quiggin repeatedly, asking him how could he attack Windschuttle without reading his book. He then accused me of being a racist as well. I let him have it. I called him a Nazi and a second rate mind. He has now threatened me with legal action. I have never feared a thug like Quiggin so I encouraged him to go right ahead as I would be happy to see him in court. The man throws names and accusations around like they were balls. Honestly, I don't understand how someone like that could teach kids. This is a serious accusation to make against someone. I dare Quiggin to sue me and let the courts see how many people this animal has maligned in the past. I know of three already".

.

It seems that Quiggin can dish out the insults but can't take it in return: Very Leftist. Being an academic, Quiggin is careful with words and he denies that he called Windschuttle a racist. What he actually called Windschuttle was: "a consistent apologist for racism, happy to use racist arguments in support of his cause". But isn't an apologist for racism who uses racist arguments a racist? In common usage it certainly is. Given Windschuttle's many years of committment to Leftist causes, I am sure he has some antiracist past so I think Quiggin is on very shaky ground should Windschuttle sue him. It's typical of the Left, however, that they can only abuse Windschuttle, not refute his facts and arguments.

And it will come as no surprise that Quiggin shows very little grip on what he is talking about. Take this sentence: "I'll also be happy to publish comments from anyone seeking to use quibbles about the definition of "racism" to claim that a policy that openly defined itself in terms of skin colour was, in some sense, not racist." The policy concerned was in fact mainly designed to keep out the Chinese, whose skin colour falls within the range of Caucasian skin colour, so Quiggin's claim that it "openly defined itself in terms of skin colour" is sheer nonsense. All Quiggin seems to know is the popular name ("White Australia") for the policy.

And the slightest knowledge of Australian history would also have told Quiggin that it is perfectly easy to defend the policy on non-racist grounds. A major bastion of support for the policy was in fact the union movement and unionists supported it because it helped keep out cheap labour. Quiggin is a Professor of Economics. He should stick to what he knows.

Update:

Some comments by Prof. Quiggin on this post are to be found here

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ELSEWHERE

Reliapundit says that the Left's refusal to say a word of criticism about any of America's enemies is due to their postmodernist amorality. It's not. Postmodernism is just a tool for Leftists. The thing they want for themselves above all is power and they hate American power most of all both because it is the greatest power and because they do not control it. And because of the separation of powers in the U.S. constitution and because of the love of liberty of the American people (meaning that even Democrats have to campaign on conservative platforms -- remember the amusing spectacle of John Kerry pretending he was a gun-lover?), they never will control it. So they LOVE anything that harms America.

An Australian education beats an American one (not hard, though): "Australian school students are among the best in the world at reading, maths and science... An international survey of 15-year-olds in 41 countries showed Australia was fourth in reading... In science, Australia ranked sixth" whereas: "The U.S. students were behind most other countries in overall math literacy and in every specific area tested in 2003, from geometry and algebra to statistics and computation". And: "student wealth or poverty "was not so strong a determinant of mathematical literacy" in Australia than it was in countries such as the US, Germany and Belgium"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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7 December, 2004

THE AMERICAN ROOTS OF FASCISM

The American "Progressives" were the first Fascists of the 20th century

"Fascism" is a term that was originally coined by the Italian dictator Mussolini to describe his adaptation of Marxism to the conditions of Italy after World War I. Lenin in Russia made somewhat different adaptations of Marxism to the conditions in Russia during the same period and his adaptations came to be called Marxism/Leninism. Mussolini stayed closer to Marx in that he felt that Italy had to go through a capitalist stage before it could reach socialism whereas Lenin attempted to push Russia straight from feudalism into socialism. Mussolini's principal modification of Marxism was his rejection of the notion of class war, something that put him decisively at odds with Lenin's "Reds".

If the term "Fascism" means anything of itself it means "Groupism" -- as the fasci of Italy at the time were simply groups of political activists. The fasces of ancient Roman times were of course the bundles of rods carried by the lictors to symbolize the great strength of the organized Roman people. The idea again was that people were stronger in groups than as individuals.

Mussolini's ideas and system were very influential and he had many imitators -- not the least of which was Adolf Hitler -- and some even survived World War II -- such as Peron and Chiang Kai Shek. I have set out at length elsewhere what Mussolini's Italian Fascism was all about so I will simply summarize here by saying that Fascism was a nationalist form of extreme socialism whereas Trotskyism was/is a internationalist form of extreme socialism and Leninism was somewhere in between.

So was Mussolini a totally original thinker? Not at all. Students of ancient history see Sparta as the first Fascist State and students of Marx identify Fascism with Bonapartism -- the type of regime devised by Napoleon Bonaparte and revived by his nephew Napoleon III. But Mussolini was quite intellectual and his thinking was in fact much more up-to-date than that would suggest. He was certainly influenced by Marx and the ancient world but he had a whole range of ideas that extended beyond that. And where did he turn for up-to-date ideas? To America, of course! And the American ideas that influenced him were in fact hard to miss. They were the ideas of the American "Progressives". And who was the best known Progressive in the world at that time? None other than the President of the United States -- Woodrow Wilson -- the man who was most responsible for the postwar order in Europe. So Mussolini had to do little more than read his newspapers to hear at least some things about the ideas of the American Progressives.

And what those ideas were is pretty amazing. "Progressive" was the label favoured by the American Left of the day -- as it still is -- and yet they believed in such things as war being a purifying force, the subjugation of democracy to elite leadership, book-burning, stiff-arm salutes, loyalty oaths, flag ceremonies, the inferiority of blacks and Jews and, of course eugenics. And who said this: "Conformity will be the only virtue and any man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty." It could easily have been Mussolini or Hitler but it was in fact Woodrow Wilson.

So 20th century Fascism was in fact an American invention, or more precisely an invention of the American Left. Like many American ideas to this day, however, it proved immensely popular in Europe and it was only in Europe that it was put fully into practice. As it does today, American conservatism kept the American Left in some check in the first half of the 20th century so it was only in Europe that their ideas could come into full bloom. For documentation of the many surprising statements I have just made, see an expanded version of this post here (extra copies here and here) and for deep background on the Progressives see this essay on Croly, one of the leading lights of Progressivism. Note the agony caused to Croly by the need to keep within democracy.

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There is a good summary here of Australian attitudes to their alliance with America. Formal alliances in the form of treaties and other bits of paper have a history of worthlessness. It is alliances that spring from the heart that matter.

Groan! Is nothing sacred? I have just found a spelling mistake in the Times of London. In this story, they say "complementary" when they mean "complimentary". Both are proper words so a spellchecker could not have caught the mistake. It certainly confirms the decline of British education.

There is an interesting post here that suggests a "third way" between the present futile "war on drugs" and complete drug legalization: He suggests that a big research effort be put into finding and selling non-addictive and non-harmful alternatives to the current "pleasure drugs". Maybe it is indeed time to look at that again -- despite the fact that heroin originated in exactly that way: It was originally devised and promoted as a non-addictive alternative to morphine!

Dick McDonald has an extremely good point about the way the new Democrat leader in the Senate has denigrated Justice Thomas. If any Republican had said the same there would be banner headlines calling for his resignation on every newspaper in the country.

Capitalism strikes a blow against media bias: "Clear Channel Communications Inc., the nation's largest radio station operator, has selected Fox News Radio to provide national news for most of its news and talk stations in deal expected to nearly double Fox's radio presence. No terms of the five-year cash deal were disclosed Monday. But Fox, a unit of News Corp., says if all options in the agreement are exercised, its radio service could have more than 500 affiliates by the middle of next year".

Anti-Bush demonstrators observed: "What we see ... is an almost pure fanaticism -- that radical spirit of alienation that ultimately motivates the Jihadis, too. This nihilism is the splinter in the heart of our modernity; it rejects everything; it proposes, finally, nothing in its place. It is the devil himself speaking out of his void.... To understand it, we must look into the very faces contorted with rage, and the mouths uttering the vilest obscenities. The evil is not coming from outside them: it is instead welling from the void within. And yet the tragedy of these people -- whose fanaticism puts them beyond the pale of give-and-take in party politics, and whose views, should they spread, would take the whole democratic order down with them -- is that they know even less about themselves than they know about the world they condemn. They are angry, but finally they don't know why. They don't believe in evil, as a category; yet it haunts them externally on every side: "Bush" being only the straw man of the moment.... They see evil everywhere. They rail, and they rail."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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6 December 2004

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: SOME SKEPTICAL THOUGHTS

I am sure that there can be few readers of this blog who have not enjoyed at least some of the columns by British prison doctor Anthony Daniels (a.k.a. "Theodore Dalrymple"). I myself read right through every one I encounter. His latest column, however, reveals that he is retiring from his job and suggests that he is looking for a different perspective on life. What he has mainly documented so far is the disastrous state of the British underclass. From his experiences as a prison doctor, he pictures an entire social milieu that is basically feral, devoid of hope and devoid of most of the best things in life. Read his latest column and you will know what I mean.

He attributes the sad state of the people among whom he has been working to two things: The welfare State that deprives people of any sense of individual responsibility and the politically correct Leftist doctrines that have told people that anything goes and that any misfortunes that they suffer are the fault of others. His proposed remedy, therefore, appears to be a winding back of the welfare state and a restoration of traditional, conservative values. With the first remedy I wholeheartedly agree but with the second I think he is pissing into the wind. There is no way that anybody can revive social values that have been replaced by values that come more easily to people. Only the influence of religion can go some way towards doing that for certain individual people and there will always be many who are deaf to the appeals of religion -- particularly in traditionally irreligious Britain.

What I think Dalrymple overlooks is that the vast majority of people in Britain continue to live decent and productive lives despite the politically correct amorality and denial of standards that is constantly being preached at them by their government and by their elites generally. How come, then, that not everybody is equally affected by the collapse of the moral and social standards that make a civilization possible? To answer that, I am afraid I am going to have to mention the elephant in the bedroom: Intelligence. The self-destructive behaviour that Dalrymple documents is in most cases quite simply foolish and if not obviously foolish shows at least a severe lack of forethought -- which is itself a sign of low intelligence. The women whom Dalrymple describes exemplify what I mean. He describes women who apparently get their legs up at the drop of a hat -- with no forethought about what that might lead to. And as a result they have multiple children to multiple partners and receive abuse rather than support from the fathers concerned. But how many intelligent women behave like that? Not many or at least not often. To this day most women are very selective about their sexual partners or at least make sure that casual sexual encounters have no lasting consequences. And does any bourgeois woman decide to bear the children of a man without great confidence in his longterm committment to her? Very few. So it seems to me that Dalrymple is blaming on culture what is really the outcome of lack of intelligence.

So until some new Einstein discovers a way of boosting intelligence in those who lack it, it seems to me that most of what Dalrymple describes will continue no matter what happens in the society at large.

I might add that I myself am of thoroughly working class origins and that I have also had plenty of experience with the stratum of society that Dalrymple describes. I was for a couple of years proprietor of a large boarding house in a very unprestigious suburb (Ipswich) where a substantial part of my customers came to me straight out of prison or via referrals from welfare agencies. And I certainly saw the drunken fights, the thievery and the abuse of women that Dalrymple describes. Perhaps because of my own working class origins, however, I knew how to deal with my customers and got on perfectly well with almost everyone -- even receiving civility from them when I was kicking them out for getting behind with their rent. Even though I physically bundled people out the door on a number of occasions, nobody ever laid a finger on me. So there is in fact a quite powerful culture at work even among the lowest of the low -- if you know how to work it and use its shibboleths.

And I must say that my own rise from a poor background to a state of affluence was virtually effortless. Intelligence is a key that unlocks almost every door and without it almost all doors might as well remain shut -- as the fate of most lottery winners attests.

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The death of the Left: "The hysterical reaction of the Western Left to the reelection of President George W. Bush is not just a primal scream from politicians and intellectuals deprived of political power. The violent language, numerous acts of violence, and demonization of Bush and his electorate - the same as that directed against Tony Blair in Britain, Jose Maria Aznar in Spain, and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy - portend a more fundamental event: the death rattle of the traditional Left, both as a dominant political force and as an intellectual vision. For the most part, the Left only wins elections nowadays when their candidates run on their opponents' platform (Clinton and Blair) or when panic overwhelms the political process (Zapatero and Schroeder).... There is no more dramatic proof of the death of the Left than the passage of its central vision - global democratic revolution - into the hands of those who call themselves conservatives"

More tolerance the way forward for Democrats: "If Democrats want to get back in the "values" game and change the perception of their party as being full of secularists intent on removing any reference to G-d from culture and even the history of America, they can start in the government schools. That's where reverent or favorable mentions of G-d are often prohibited, but using His name as a curse word is protected by the same First Amendment that supposedly prohibits the favorable mention of His name. Democrats have an ideal case that they could make their own in the San Francisco suburb of Cupertino, where a fifth-grade public school teacher has filed a discrimination lawsuit against his school. The teacher, Steven Williams, says he has been prohibited by the school principal, Patricia Vidmar, from teaching the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents of the United States because they often refer to G-d . Democrats could make political hay for their party and do a good deed for public school students by opposing the extension of political correctness to history books and historical documents. Attempts to expunge references to G-d , past or present, are not limited to one California school. In Maryland, there is a dispute concerning what may and may not be properly taught in that state's public schools. The Washington Times carried a Capital News Service (CNS) story Nov. 23 that reported that when teachers instruct about the 17th-century origins of Thanksgiving, they can only say the Pilgrims thanked the Indians and cannot say they also thanked G-d for their safe journey and for the bounty set before them."

Supernatural selection "Look, I'm not saying we should turn the average biology class into a lesson on theology. It doesn't need to become a class about religion. There's plenty enough to learn about religion that it deserves a class all its own. The neat thing about intelligent design is it merely suggests something often thought to be the opposite of what's taught in the science classroom; then it attempts to back it up through scientific fact. I think that's pretty cool. If we're going to teach about the origins of life in public school -- indeed, if we're going to have such a thing as public school to begin with -- we ought to be teaching every kind of theory. All of 'em. Simple and intricate alike. And if we have to name names, let's name names. The truth will sort itself out."

Ed Mick is back online with a theory about why the Left have made such a big fuss over the "values" voting in the recent Presidential election.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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5 December, 2004

GOVERNMENT SERVICES WORK BETTER IN AUSTRALIA

An interesting email from a very pro-American Australian who knows both Australia and the USA well

As a rule I have found all Government-run services in Australia to be far, far superior to anything you would find in the USA. Aussies simply know how to run Government services better than in the US. I think I know why. The reason is that all levels of governments in the USA treat government employment as a minority outreach program and, as you would know, this produces horrendous results. Going to get a driver's license or getting a green card is as experience you will never forget. In other words dealing with any Government entity is awful. Truly it is an experience no Aussie could fathom. That's the reason why Americans as a whole would not want to go anywhere near a Government-run health system -- because they fear they would be dead on arrival. To be frank, the problem is that they have many minorities running these places who should not be there. You can blame the Dems for this mess.

So the Dems have shot themselves in the foot. By putting legions of underqualified minorities behind government desks they have helped give Americans a horror of government -- which is exactly what the Dems want NOT to do! Fortunately, Australia's biggest ethnic minority is Asians -- who mostly scorn government jobs as giving too few opportunities -- so Australia's government jobs are mostly filled by Anglo-Celtic people who have to qualify on merit.

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A reader had a rather interesting comment on my post yesterday about morality. I noted that when ordinary people debate whether an action is ethically right or not, the critierion "If everyone did that .... " is very popular. My reader commented that Leftists would not be able to accept that criterion because it would make homosexuality wrong. But as Leftists themselves often tell us, they think there is no such thing as right and wrong anyway (except when convenient) so there is really no problem for them. I might mention that there is an big post on Gene Expression that also looks at morality as a product of evolutionary biology. It is very slow-loading, however, so it must be stored offline. Scroll down to Nov. 8th.

An unusual Muslim: "Prof. Khaleel Mohammed is not a beloved figure among Muslim students in the United States. His visits to campuses to lecture are almost always accompanied by demonstrations of protesters condemning his opinions and his views. He has also felt hostile looks at the mosque where he used to worship in the city where he lives, San Diego, and therefore he rarely goes there. And indeed Mohammed's views are very unusual in the Arab world. His main thesis is that the Holy Land (according to most commentators, this refers to the area of Israel-Palestine) was given to the Jews. He takes this from the Koran itself, the divine book that is sanctified by Muslims, and is prepared to do battle with anyone who disagrees with him."

Poor old Maureen Dowd. Feminism has failed: "Tonight on NBC, one tall and handsome white male anchor with bespoke clothes will replace another tall and handsome white male anchor with bespoke clothes.... The networks don't even give lip service to looking for women and blacks for anchor jobs - they just put pretty-boy clones in the pipeline.... Even if I felt like raising a ruckus about Boys Nation, who would care? Feminism lasted for a nanosecond, but the backlash has lasted 30 years.... I checked around for feminist outrage, but couldn't find any... But my pal admits that she watched Mr. Brokaw partly because he was "eye candy," and declares women at fault in this matter: "Women like to read books about men and go to movies about men. But men don't like to read books about women or go to movies about women. The only way this is going to change is if women refuse to watch men. And the problem is, women like watching men." (Link via Dick McDonald).

The Coulter is having fun: "In light of their reaction to the nomination of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, I gather liberals have gotten over their enthusiasm for multiculturalist milestones. It's interesting that they dropped their celebrations of the "first woman!" "first black!" "first Asian!" designations at the precise moment that we are about to get our first black female secretary of state. When Madeline Albright was appointed the FIRST WOMAN secretary of state, the media was euphoric... But Bush nominates a brilliant geopolitical thinker who happens to be black and female and all of a sudden she's Butterfly McQueen, who don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no Middle Eastern democracies.... "

Pentagon, analysts hit anti-U.S. bias at Red Cross: "The International Committee of the Red Cross is breaking with tradition by publicly criticizing the United States for the way it handles terror suspects, say Pentagon officials and outside experts. On at least two occasions in recent months, the ICRC overtly criticized the Bush administration for detaining suspected Taliban and al Qaeda fighters without giving them access to judicial proceedings. The administration has deemed them 'enemy combatants' and not members of a formal military organization that would give them the rights of prisoners of war." [The Red Cross are antisemitic too. Never give them a cent]

Comment of a Leftist who DID move to Canada: "Part of what's irksome about Canadian anti-Americanism and the obsession with the United States is that it seems so corrosive to Canada. Any country that defines itself through a negative ("Canada: We're not the United States") is doomed to an endless and repetitive cycle of hand-wringing and angst. For example, Canadians often point to their system of universal health care as the best example of what it means to be Canadian (because the United States doesn't provide it), but this means that any effort to adjust or reform that system (which is not perfect) precipitates a national identity crisis: To wit, instituting co-payments or private MRI clinics will make Canada too much like the United States. The rush to make comparisons sometimes prevents meaningful examination of the very real problems that Canada faces..... Many Canadians have American relatives or travel frequently to the United States, but a large number are pretty naive about their neighbors to the south. A university student confidently told me that there had been "no dissent" in the United States during the run-up to the Iraq war.... In "officially multicultural Canada," hostility toward Americans is the last socially acceptable expression of bigotry and xenophobia. It would be impossible to say the things about any other nationality that Canadians routinely say -- both publicly and privately -- about Americans".

There is an interesting essay from a year ago here which argues that American culture has lost much of its masculinity and that that is endangering the effectiveness of America's armed forces.

Wayne Lusvardi is defending Dennis Prager from an attack posted on the Lew Rockwell site. When libertarians fall out ....

Michael Darby is online again with articles about Ukraine, the partial ban on Christmas in Sydney and the anniversary of Australia's Eureka revolt.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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4 December, 2004

MOST MORALITY IS INSTINCTIVE

Although moral philosophy is a field in which I have made some very minor academic contributions, I have never taken it very seriously. So although my own account of the nature of morality is in my view at once factually correct, useful and not dependant on religious assumptions, I have been content merely to outline it rather than defend it in every detail. And I believe that to be a very conservative thing to do. And in making that claim I am also saying that there is a substantial opposition between what philosophers generally do and what conservatives generally do. And I should make clear that in talking about philosophers, I am talking about real students of the world and of discourse about the world -- not the psychiatric cases and comedians (Derrida etc.) who pass as philosophers in Europe.

There are two things behind what I have just expressed: 1). My belief that morality is largely inborn and, 2). A thoroughly conservative distrust of theory carried to extremes. That really constitutes the whole of what I want to say on the matter but let me spell it out a bit more anyway.

Because the standard psychological measures of moral attitudes (e.g. Kohlberg's) are profoundly contaminated by the Leftist assumptions of their authors, I have not even tried to look up inheritance data about morality in the behaviour genetics literature. So suffice it to say that most important human characteristics seem to show very substantial genetic inheritance (See e.g. here and here and here). If morality were an exception that would be most surprising. And from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, it would be even more surprising. Man is both a social animal and an animal that falls very readily into conflict with his fellow humans. So ways of regulating behaviour to enable co-operation and forestall conflict must necessarily be of foremost importance. And that is largely what moral and ethical rules are all about. To forestall conflict there HAVE to be rules against murder, stealing, coveting your neighbour's wife etc. And that is why there are considerable similarities between the laws of Moses (ten commandments etc) and the much earlier Babylonian code of Hammurabi. The details of moral and legal rules are of course responsive to time, place and circumstances, but there are some basics that will almost always be there. And given the importance of those basic rules for social co-operation, it should be no surprise that such rules became internalized (instinctive) very early on in human evolution. So many if not most of our social instincts are in fact moral or ethical instincts. Ethics are the rules we need for co-operative existence.

Obviously, however, the rules are not so well entrenched as to produce automatic responses. We have broad tendencies towards ethical behaviour but that is all. This is probably due to their relatively recent evolutionary origin. Most of what we are originates far back in our evolutionary past whereas the social rules that we use became needed only with the evolution of the primates.

Additionally, we are the animal that relies least on instinct. So all our instincts can be both modified and defended by our reasoning processes. Just because a thing is instinctive to us it does not mean that the behaviour concerned is emitted in any automatic way. We think about why we do what our instincts tell us and generally conclude that our instincts are thoroughly commendable! And we do generally explain our rules of behaviour in a thoroughly empirical and functional way -- generally starting with: "If everyone did that .... ". And moral philosophers are of course people who specialize in such talk. But the talk is largely epiphenomenal (an afterthought). It is predominantly their set of inherited dispositions that make people behave ethically, not any abstract rationalizations.

And that realization does explain why philosophers so often back themselves into absurd corners. You might guess what is coming next at that point: Peter Singer. Peter Singer is undoubtedly a very able and influential philosopher and in good philosophical style he starts out with a few simple and hard-to-dispute general rules from which he logically deduces all sorts of conclusions that are greeted with horror by normal people -- his view that babies and young children may be killed more or less at will, for example. As a theoretical deduction, his views are defensible but seen in the light of the biological basis of morality, they are counterproductive. A society that killed off its young more or less at will would not last long.

So we come back in the end to the good Burkean principle that theories are to be distrusted and and continually tested against whether or not they lead to generally desired outcomes. Philosophers judge an argument on its consistency, elegance and comprehensivesness. Conservatives judge it on its practical outcomes. And Leftists judge it on whether they can use it to make themselves look good.

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This excellent article by Anne Applebaum under the heading "The left now sees evil behind pro-democracy campaigns" has already been linked to by Instapundit and many others but I think it makes such an important point about the utter moral decay of the modern Left that I want to draw attention to it as well.

Speaking of Instapundit, I was pleased by his reference to me yesterday as: "Remind me never to get this guy mad at me", so I have followed blogospheric tradition and put the description towards the top of my index column to the Left.

Windschuttle blows the whistle again: "Controversial historian Keith Windschuttle has opened a new front in Australia's history wars by challenging the view that the White Australia Policy, which severely restricted non-European migration to Australia for more than half a century, was a deep stain on the country's conscience. Instead, he has defended it as a "rational and, in a number of ways, progressive, product of its times".... Besides taking colleagues to task, the book launches a new assault on multiculturalism"

There is an article here that is headed, "Bush backs extreme view on sex". Wow! Polygamy? Sodomy? Incest? Discipline? No: Abstinence! What an odd world where what was once almost universal can now be called "extreme"! But anything will do as fodder for Leftist propaganda and misrepresentation, I guess.

There is a very moving letter from a Ukrainian girl at the end of this article.

There is a new website here called "Help Christmas". Its aim is to help people to tell Target and other national retail stores to bring back Salvation Army bell ringers to their properties. Target (America's second largest retailer) has just this year changed its company policy to exclude Salvation Army bell ringers from its stores. This could cause the Salvation Army to lose as much as $9M in anticipated donations.

Methodism not dead yet: "A very divided jury of United Methodist church clergy has voted to defrock an open lesbian minister whom they'd earlier convicted of violating church law."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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3 December, 2004

LEFTIST LOGIC

An email from a reader

Regarding "that good old Leftist inconsistency and opportunism" that you mentioned in your post on Darwin [November 29th.], another great example is their inconsistent stance on the "Race doesn't exist" issue. I learned this the hard way in my personal life, and it wasn't pretty.

I'm sure you're aware of the leftist claim that racial categories are nothing but social constructs with no basis in fact. Well, over a year ago I posted an essay at work that argued that race *does* exist ("Race Is a Myth?"). The next day I came to work and found that the essay had been literally torn off the wall. The minute my butt hit the seat, my boss, who is ultra-leftist, walked over to my cube and said in a quavering voice, "You want to step into my office for a minute?" He then proceeded to tell me that he'd taken down my essay because it was *racist* and violated company policy prohibiting "racial harassment"! I pointed out that merely arguing that race exists is not racist.

He countered: "Yes, but it's the first step to arguing racial superiority. First you claim that people are different and put them in separate categories. From there it's just a short step to saying this category is better or smarter than this other one, and so on..." He also claimed that the source of the essay, a Web site called *American Renaissance*, was registered as a "hate" Web site and edited by an admitted white supremacist.

I said, "But without race, how can you have 'diversity' and multiculturalism and all the other goals cherished by the left that actually *require* the existence of racial differences?" To my astonishment, he said, "Well, it's obviously situational." Situational! He continued: "For example, in the case of the California proposition that would ban recording racial information on government job applications, which we would want to oppose, clearly we would not want to say that race doesn't exist. But in other cases..." In other words, he was trying to take his *logical inconsistency* and turn it into a virtue. Basically he was saying, "When it suits our ends, we argue that race doesn't exist. Otherwise, we admit that race exists." Usually leftists are more crafty about blowing hot and cold, but in this case my boss apparently was feeling no shame. Needless to say, that was the last time I ever posted an essay at my workplace.

Another example of leftist opportunism: States' rights. If the state government is doing something they don't like, such as banning sodomy in Texas, they want the federal government to step in and declare it unconstitutional. No surprise there -- leftists love centralized control in the federal government. But if the Feds want to interfere with a state program the leftists *like* -- such as a recent environmental program in California -- look out! Suddenly the leftists are crying out in favor of "states' rights," talking like some hotblooded Southern Confederate warrior from 1861.

BTW, their overall entire ethical philosophy is built this kind of opportunistic inconsistency. They believe that morality is "relative," that there are no objective standards by which to criticize other cultures, that ethical views are matters of personal preference that cannot be decided by reasoned debate. And yet they are quick to tell you that capitalism is "evil" -- and anyone who disagrees is stupid, irrational, and backward!

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There is a strange article by "Spengler" that chronicles the history of American Protestantism. He makes the interesting point that the descendants of the original Puritans very rapidly lapsed into secularism -- giving of course the very secular (irreligious) "Blue staters" of the North-East today. He points out that most American evangelical Protestants got that way through conversion rather than through family or community tradition. The only common cause he can find for such evangelical upwellings is the power of the Biblical story itself. With that I agree. I think that New testament Christianity is an immensely powerful and persuasive system of thought that has always burst through whatever shackles are placed upon it. It is a system of thought that has produced people who willingly suffer and die for their faith in every age. But instead of seeing American Christianity as a tribute to Biblical thought, the author arrives at the totally absurd conclusion that American Christianity is "religionless Christianity". How he leaps to that strange conclusion totally escapes me, I am afraid. I don't even know what he means by such strange language.

The real story of Nazi's Harvard visit: "At a conference on the Holocaust at Boston University last Sunday, Stephen H. Norwood, a historian at the University of Oklahoma, claimed that Harvard University was 'complicit in enhancing the prestige of the Nazi regime' and cited the 'welcome' given to the Nazi publicist Ernst Hanfstaengl when he attended his 25th reunion in 1934. But a close examination of the Hanfstaengl affair reveals that the university and its president, James Bryant Conant, rejected Hanfstaengl's advances; it was Harvard students and alumni who embraced him. The real story is more shocking than Norwood's flawed reconstruction in revealing the common anti-Semitism of the time. ... On the charge of coddling Nazis, Harvard University has nothing to apologize for. The blindness of many of its students and alumni to the Nazi threat unfortunately reflected general American attitudes."

Father's rights making some progress: "Bolstered by their recent ballot-initiative victory, Holstein and others are filing a bill next week in the State House calling on judges to begin with the presumption of shared custody. ''I walked into court believing we were a society that had worked hard toward gender equality," Holstein said, recalling his divorce proceedings. ''Then I began to see all these attitudes running counter to that.""

Charles Kupchan was member of the National Security Council under the Clinton administration. He says: "one side's terrorist is another side's freedom fighter, and it's difficult in reality to distinguish one type of event from another, because one has sympathy for the causes" [Sympathy for people who behead welfare workers? Sympathy for people who blow up children attending a Bar Mitzvah? Is there no end to Leftist moral corruption?]

Interesting that Fox TV accepted a pro-homosexual advertisement but CBS and NBC would not. So who is "homophobic" now?

Nathan Tabor has written an article advocating that English should be declared the sole official language of the USA.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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2 December, 2004

FROM BROOKES NEWS

The yuan and the US economy There are strident calls for the US to do something about the yuan. The situation is more complex than they realise
Productivity, wages and labor markets Labor reform per se cannot bring about a continuous increase in productivity: only a continuously expanding capital structure can achieve that
Anti-American Ba'th activities in Paris Proof that the French [Vichy] Government is giving support to the thugs who are waging a terror campaign in Iraq. There seems to be no bottom to the depravity of the French Government
Wages and labor markets According to Keith Hancock free labor markets produced "sweated labour, long working hours, unsafe and unhealthy factories . . ."
Like banging my head against the wall Israel is not in an intifada - the entire world is in a war. A war with a savage subculture that is out to kill everyone who is not part of it - a war against Islamic-Nazi crazies
George W. Bush and His "Stupid" Kool-Aid Drinkin' Buddies Why will the left lie, cheat and smear to give a conservative the boot? And what is it that socialist elitists hate so much about the structure of America?

Details here

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The Leftist idea of themselves as an elite can get pretty amusing. Take this sentence from the top Leftist blog: "The conservative bigotted position is untennable. It has no basis in fact or reason. Arguments against gay marriage are predicated entirely, 100 percent, on emotion. And the vehicle for those emotional appeals are the word "marriage". A mere semantic." If the writer of that is a truly elite person, how come he has the English language skills of a dribbling idiot? "Bigoted" has one t. "Untenable" has one n. And the singular subject "vehicle" should be followed by the singular verb "is". And what he means by calling marriage "A mere semantic". I have no idea at all. And Leftists lap up such illiteracy at the rate of hundreds of thousands of hits every day! His wisdom must be profound. Too profound for me, certainly. If I were as prone to spelling and grammar mistakes as Kos is, I would at least use a spellchecker and grammar checker. But to do that I guess you have to be humble enough to admit your limitations. And humble is just what Leftists are not.

Oh dear! A Leftist has woken up to what bad advice George Lakoff gives: "Overall, I have a deep fear that if liberals are taking this stuff too seriously we could be about to drive ourselves off a cliff."

The United Methodist Church is promoting a far-Left "anti-corporate" petition that wants just about everything put under socialist control. That is of course about what we have come to expect of the declining older Protestant churches. Their new faith is more in Leftism than in the Gospel of Christ. It is therefore also no surprise that three scriptural passages that they quote in alleged support for their views say pretty much the opposite of what the church advocates: "Ecclesiastes 3:22 "So I saw that there is nothing better than that all should enjoy their work for that is their lot," Luke 10:7 and 1 st Timothy 5:18 "the laborer deserves to be paid", Matthew 20:8 "Call the laborers and give them their pay." As far as I can see, those scriptures envisage that you work for your living -- not get it in a socialist handout!

Still some backbone among some Methodists? "Nineteen months ago, the Rev. Irene Elizabeth Stroud gave a sermon that began and ended with Jesus saying, 'Peace be with you.' In the middle, she told her congregants that she was living in a 'covenant relationship' with another woman. Stroud's disclosure was no surprise to her flock at the First United Methodist Church of Germantown, a 210-year-old Philadelphia parish that welcomes gay men and lesbians. ... But Stroud's sermon was a challenge to the national church's rule against self-avowed gay men and women in the ministry, and it set in motion an investigation and charges that will culminate Wednesday in a church trial before a jury of fellow ministers."

Cafe Hayek pulls apart the nonsensical statement that “half the country can't afford health care.” It might be of some interest to look at the cost of health insurance though. I have a very high level of insurance that covers me for the best private hospital treatment there is here in Australia. And Australian private medicine is so good that we even have Japanese coming in for transplant surgery right here in my home town of Brisbane. My health insurance premiums are $212 per month. Lots of smokers would spend $300 per month on their habit. So how's that for affordability? Since lots of poor people smoke, I think it has to be seen as totally affordable.

The poor are very few: "As it is, less than three percent of the American work force earns the minimum wage or less, and more than half of them are under 25".

Soviet Canada: Trotsky's triumph: "In Canada, the people sheepishly accept all this crap, and we never even had a Stalin to terrorise us into submission. But then you don't have to train sheep to be sheep. People here like the 'nanny state,' as it saves them from having to think for themselves. A highly educated friend of mine (in response to my contention that a truly free market in insurance would result in lower rates than government mandated and controlled insurance) had this to say, 'But I don't want to have to investigate and compare companies; it's way easier for me just to pay the government.'"

Amtrak: On time for yesterday: "On-time performance has long been Amtrak's principal strength ... not the trains, but the financial crises. Little seems more predictable than Amtrak's periodic budget crises and calls for more money from those na‹ve enough to believe that nostalgia should be publicly financed, like defense or welfare. The latest chapter is a new U.S. Department of Transportation Inspector General report indicating Amtrak is experiencing unsustainably large losses and is deferring needed investment."

TSA -- bullies at the airport : "If you traveled by air last week for the Thanksgiving holiday, you undoubtedly witnessed Transportation Security Administration agents conducting aggressive searches of some passengers. A new TSA policy begun in September calls for invasive and humiliating searches of random passengers; in some instances crude pat-downs have taken place in full public view. Some female travelers quite understandably have burst into tears upon being groped, and one can only imagine the lawsuits if TSA were a private company. But TSA is not private, TSA is a federal agency -- and therefore totally unaccountable to the American people."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its usual big range of select reading.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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1 December, 2004

FAMILY SIZE AND CONSERVATISM

Steve Sailer has an article up at the moment which is getting a lot of attention. He shows an extraordinarily high correlation between birth-rate and voting for GWB. States with high birth-rates were almost all "red" and states with low birthrates were almost all "blue".

I am afraid that I have to issue a warning about what statisticians call "ecological" correlations, however -- and that's nothing to do with Greenies, surprisingly. Ecological correlations are correlations based on grouped data and grouping people only on the basis of the state they live in is very coarse grouping indeed. Such correlations are not comparable to correlations between individuals, allow no direct inferences about correlations among individuals and are commonly higher than correlations betweeen individuals. I say a bit more about them in the course of one of my academic articles here. So the correlations are a little less startling than Steve seems to think.

With all that statistician's caution out of the way, however, my best guess is that the results reflect failure to have children at all rather than family size per se. I think average birthrate is low in the blue states not necessarily because families are smaller there but because families with children are fewer. Lots of intellectual ladies never have children at all. I should know. I married two such women. My son comes from a third marriage to an intelligent but non-intellectual woman. And the low birthrate among highly educated people has long been a subject of much comment and heartburn anyway.

Why highly educated people tend Left is a subject I cover at some length here.

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A quite hilarious but very popular post among Leftists at the moment is this one. Now that I have had time to stop laughing, I will tell you what it says. It says that George Bush is like an abusive husband towards all those poor 56 million who voted against him! I kid you not. I don't think even Einstein could work out how George Bush stands in anything like a husband relationship to the gang of special interest groups who tried to oust him but apparently the analogy makes lots of sense to lots of Leftists. I could go on but what's the point....

David Boxenhorn thinks he has discovered a conservative streak in Paul Krugman. I think he is wrong. Krugman is a plainly off his head when it comes to politics, but as far as economics goes, he is mainstream -- which SOUNDS conservative only because it is mainly conservatives who take much notice of economic rationality. Leftists tend to believe in all sorts of economically irrational things such as price controls, punitive taxation, protectionism etc. David also thinks Krugman's criticism of complex explanations is conservative. I think the reverse is the truth. Leftists are simplistic thinkers. Can you get any more simplistic than the core Leftist doctrine of "All men are equal"? So Krugman's rejection of complexity is perfectly Leftist. Where David might have a point is that Krugman does appear to criticize innovation for innovation's sake and says that older explanations are the best. I think that this is specifically a criticism of the economic modellers, however. And I don't think you have to be a conservative to be aware that mathematical models are mostly just a pretentious form of guessing.

Well, there seems to be one Democrat columnist who thinks that George Lakoff (See my post of November 24th) is the goods. She thinks that the donks should abandon moves towards the middle ground and just assert their own values. I hope they take her advice. It would be interesting to see how low the donk vote could go.

First class economic growth continues: "The US economy - helped out by more brisk consumer and business spending - grew at an annual rate of 3.9 per cent in the third quarter, a performance that was stronger than previously thought."

Reliapundit says that Leftists attack conservative blacks so furiously because Leftists explain everything by what group a person belongs to. So people who don't fit the group that they are in upset the Left's entire explanatory scheme.

Bob Hayes makes the undeniable point that all political parties are supported by particular interest groups. He says however that the Democrats have far more interest groups to please than the GOP does. So you have to accept an awful lot of strange stuff to support the donks. He says the GOP is much less demanding and more tolerant -- making support for the GOP a lot easier. I think there is a lot in what he says. Conservatives certainly seem a lot more laid back and less fanatical than the Left are.

"Lawyers Against the War": "This group claims to be "a Canada-based committee of jurists and others with members in thirteen countries" and is demanding that the government of Canada refuse George Bush admission to this country on the basis of his being accused of crimes against humanity. There is no mention of who actually filed the charges against Bush or where. hey write, "The evidence of President Bush's past and ongoing criminality is overwhelming. A recent editorial in the Washington Post commented on some of the now well known facts..." According to these two brilliant jurists, if the Washington Post or any of the other liberal media write that someone is guilty of war crimes, then it must be true. As such ban Bush from Canada. End of Story. Oh and let's lock up anyone who supports him, as well.... Prof. Mandel's letter is indicative to what lengths left wingnuts will go in efforts to get their way. They will threaten the Prime Minister with the possibility of jail. They will threaten the press with the possibility of jail. They will do anything necessary by whatever means to achieve their goals.

Drug companies are a favourite Leftist whipping-boy. The Leftist alternative to drug companies is truly moronic, though. They argue that we would be all better off if pharmaceutical research and development were taken over by the government, or if we at least put in national price controls to keep prices down. I wonder if they know how many new drugs countries with price controls like Canada put on the market each year. The answer is none. Price controls or nationalization of the industry would be equivalent to morphing the current energetic, innovative, productive private-sector drug industry (think FedEx) into the Rx equivalent of the U.S. Post Office."

Did the homosexual "marriage" issue help Bush? "In states that voted on the gay-marriage ban, Bush increased his vote share from 53.33% in the 2000 election to 54.17% in the election just past. That's an increase of 0.84%. In states where gay-marriage bans were not on the ballot, Bush increased his vote share from 48.82% to 50.78%. That's an increase of 1.96%. Bush's vote share rose more than twice as much in states where voters didn't have a chance to ban gay marriages. The evidence suggested that the gay marriage measures actually hurt Bush -- and hurt him substantially. And this makes a lot of sense, if you think about it."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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