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30 June, 2004

SOME HISTORY

Another answer to the Leftist lie that Russia was primitive before the Soviets took over: "Russia under Nicholas II, with all the survivals of feudalism, had opposition political parties, independent trade unions and newspapers, a rather radical parliament and a modern legal system. Its agriculture was on the level of the USA, with industry rapidly approaching the West European level. In the USSR there was total tyranny, no political liberties and practically no human rights. Its economy was not viable; agriculture was destroyed. The terror against the population reached a scope unprecedented in history. No wonder many Russians look back at Tsarist Russia as a paradise lost." Soviet defector, Oleg Gordievsky, letter to The Independent (London), 21st July 1998.

In defense of President Warren Harding: "In another 50 years, Harding will look much better than he does today. His most sensational move was to name Andrew Mellon, the Pittsburgh banker, Treasury Secretary, which is why the Twenties roared. Mellon was the best Treasury Secretary after Alexander Hamilton. Harding's second great move (which preceded his Mellon pick) was to name Calvin Coolidge his running mate. Coolidge is derided because he didn't advocate Big Government, but he was Reagan's hero."

Margaret Sanger and the human weeds: "Against the excuses of her modern defenders, it should be remembered that the founder of Planned Parenthood's main interest in the legalization of abortion was not that women should be freed from the bonds of childbearing, but that unsavory types should be cleansed from the larger population. ... The same woman considered a saint today by the pro-choice crowd warned supporters in 1939 that they did not want 'word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.'"

"The essence of Reagan's policies was always the same: trust the American people. Rather than trying to plan, fine-tune, manage, order, or cajole Americans out of doldrums, he turned the job over to them. He restored an environment in which people could build better lives for themselves -- low inflation so they could count on money they earned being there in the future, and fewer regulations so they could make decisions based on what the economy really needed, rather than on what some bureaucrat in Washington decided it needed."

Richard Cobden , early and largely successful British advocate of free trade, was born just over 200 years ago.

Vox Day has a good article here listing in full the "Fascist Manifesto" of Mussolini. There is plenty of socialism in it, showing that it is the Left, not conservatives, who are the Fascists.

Leftists praise Hitler: "Once in a while I like to take a dark trip down into the deep reaches of the Democratic Underground, a popular message board for ultra-left chatter. Personally, when the topic isn't just another round of Bush bashing, I'm curious to find what the big government proponents and anti-individualists have to say. It's like a frightening reality show guaranteed to give one occasional nightmares. In my browsing today, I came across two separate threads ( here and here) posted by those detailing why they believe Adolf Hitler was better than George Bush. Disliking Bush, even intensily, could be understandable and is not the issue here. Watering down the memory of the Holocaust and 'humanizing' Hitler to the point of making serious comparisons to US presidents is an issue. "We Must Never Forget"? I believe some have. Scary stuff". Since Hitler was a socialist such attitudes are not really very surprising, however.

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ELSEWHERE

Professional Skeptic James Randi debunks Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine by showing some of the techniques Moore uses. I myself think that Moore has devised a lucrative schtick and just plays it up for fun and profit. A lot of what he says is so extreme that he has got to be laughing at the sad souls who lap it up.

Tom Barrett: "Bill Clinton’s book of “memoirs” is being advertised under the name “My Life.” Someone obviously made a mistake when they titled it. Anyone who had actually read the book would have titled it “My Lies.” It is a shameless attempt to distort history and whitewash Clinton’s disgraceful legacy of sexual misconduct, lying under oath, and using the office of the presidency for his own personal gain."

The perils of conservative government: "Australia's economy has been voted the most resilient in the world for the third consecutive year by one of the world's most respected business schools. The International Management Development school in Switzerland also ranked Australia the fourth most competitive economy in the world - up from seventh in 2003. Australia was positioned number one for resilience to economic cycles, and the speed with which a new business could be started. It was second for consistency of government policy and transparency of financial institutions".

"Some of the erosion in Bush's numbers comes from a rather surprising cohort. While Iraq has undoubtedly hurt Bush, he is also facing trouble among his base. Bruce Bartlett recently speculated that Bush has lost the support of fiscal conservatives with his betrayal on a number of issues: tariffs, higher spending on education and agriculture, support for the National Endowment of the Arts, and, of course, the prescription drug bill. A look at the historical numbers from the Washington Post/ABCNews poll suggests this is true."

The death of Right and wrong by Tammy Bruce seems to be a very good book. The author is a former member of the homosexual elite. I say more about it on Leftists as Elitists. She says Leftists suffer from "malignant narcissism" (self-love).

Dick McDonald has some optimistic posts up today -- about immigrants etc.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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 June, 2004

SOME CATHOLIC THOUGHT ON THE EU

Ratzinger Fan Club: "Papal passions were again on display June 20 when he delivered his Sunday Angelus address, his first public comment since the European Union adopted its new constitution. It acknowledges the "cultural, religious and humanist inheritance" of Europe, but omits the specific reference to the continent's Christian heritage that had long been requested by John Paul. It also makes no mention of God. The result embittered the Pope, and it showed. "I want to thank Poland for faithfully defending in European institutions the Christian roots of our continent, from which have grown our culture and the civil progress of our time," he said in his native Polish. Poland was among the handful of European nations -- Italy, Portugal, Malta, and the Czech Republic -- that persevered until the end in requesting a reference to Christianity, but in the end they were blocked by more powerful nations, especially France. (Former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing headed the drafting commission). Thus the papal barb: "One does not cut off the roots from which one is born."

Vatican repercussions: "Finally, I suspect the outcome will to some extent embolden the pro-American faction within the Vatican and the College of Cardinals. Broadly speaking, church leaders have long been divided between those who want Europe to emerge as a third pole in global affairs with a more Catholic vision of society, and those who think the church ought to cast its lot with the Americans because they're the only game in town. This second group would include figures such as Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the pope's vicar for the diocese of Rome, and Bishop Rino Fisichella, rector of the Lateran University. The failure of European leaders to even use the word "Christian," let alone articulate a Christian social vision, in their new constitution makes the pro-American argument that much more convincing. "

On EU "Christopohobia": "To deny that Christianity had anything to do with the evolution of free, law-governed, and prosperous European societies is more than a question of falsifying the past; it is also a matter of creating a future in which moral truth has no role in governance, in the determination of public policy, in understandings of justice, and in the definition of that freedom which democracy is intended to embody. Were these ideas to triumph in Europe, that would be bad for Europe; but it would also be bad for the United States, for that triumph would inevitably reinforce similar tendencies in our own high culture, and ultimately in our law".

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ELSEWHERE

Good point by a letter-writer: "I see in the news that an American soldier is going to be court-martialed for killing a wounded terrorist in Iraq. Well pardon me but isn't that exactly what John Kerry did in Vietnam and he got a Silver Star for it! While in Vietnam, John Kerry finished off a wounded Viet Cong after beaching his boat and putting his crew in great jeopardy. He wrote himself up for a Silver Star and got it. I question why this soldier should be tried for murder while John Kerry, hero of the liberal left, was decorated for doing exactly the same thing. In accordance with International Law, terrorists are subject to immediate summary execution. Perhaps that is the policy that we should adopt. Instead, we are incarcerating these clowns and are criticized for abuse, while they behead American prisoners. And the international press says nothing. We really need to grow up and stop fighting this war like a bunch of liberal social workers. If we do not get things in a proper perspective and start supporting our President and troops we are going to lose this war!"

Jeff Jacoby points out some of the troubling changes that same-sex marriage will inevitably lead to. It seems likely, for instance, that any mention of heterosexual parenting as preferable will soon become incorrect and penalized.

Dick McDonald has put up a moving account of how much it matters to Christians around the world that GWB has stood up to Muslim oppression. Muslims are beginning to think twice about persecuting their Christian minorities. Dick did not give a link to his source but you can find it here.

A Swedish comment on the new EU constitution: "Our democratic, peaceful Europe is a minor miracle, well worth celebrating - as long as we, and not only the eastern Europeans, remember that it was Nato forces, US generosity and Anglo-Saxon values that for decades ensured the European prosperity, democracy and peace which now, supposedly, Giscard d'Estaing's brainchild will guard. (It is an intriguing paradox that we will live under a legal umbrella constructed by a man who would, in any country governed by Anglo-Saxon law, now be in jail.)"

Dennis Prager points out what high value Mexican immigrants are to the USA -- compared to the Muslim immigrants that infest Europe. He rightly notes that the major problem with the Hispanics is the unwillingness of the U.S. political establishment to encourage them to assimilate.

Arlene Peck says that it is hard to understand how much evil there is in Islam but that it has to be faced.

Clayton Cramer on the Boston archdiocese of the Catholic church: "The leadership covered up criminal acts that damaged thousands (at least) of Catholic kids, destroying the morals of many, destroying the faith of others. In some cases, this depraved covering up of evil destroyed lives, by driving young men to suicide, because they did not know how to handle the conflict between what these perverts did, and their claim to be the earthly representatives of Jesus Christ... That anyone could claim to be closer than the laity to Jesus Christ while covering up these sort of crimes just overwhelms me with disgust "

Terry Teachout says that the decline of Musical Comedy is an indicator of America's cultural disintegration.

Saddam is still writing novels!: "for Saddam, writing seems more a consolation for his political failings. He knew that his career as an overlord was on the wane after the 1991 Gulf war, and it is no coincidence that this is when his literary endeavours began"

I have just transferred here Chris Brand's postings for June. I was surprised to hear that Prince Charles had comprehensively criticized Britain's very politically correct school system. Chris has also recently been having fun with a theory that there are three types of European.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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 June, 2004

DUBIOUS INTELLECTUALS

A further note on Straussianism: Strauss focuses on the major thinkers of the ancient world to find precedents for his view that the REAL knowledge must be kept secret from "the masses". In fact, however, it was the mediaeval Catholic church that really put such ideas into practice. The "mysteries" of the Mass were celebrated behind a "rude screen" in mediaeval cathedrals -- so that the people could not see what was going on. And the church's opposition to the Bible in the language of the people (because of the "danger" of it being "misunderstood") is well-known. So if anybody thinks that this real-life Straussian entity was an ideal arrangement, they have all all the Protestant thinkers from Wycliffe and Luther onwards to contend with -- not to mention the many earlier Catholic reformers as diverse as Abelard and St. Bernard of Clairvaux. I should add, however, that there are large divides among Straussians and I would agree with some (e.g. Mansfield) much more than others. See here. Understood as an attack on moral relativism, Straussianism can be valuable.

The Straussians seem generally to be seen as part of neoconservatism -- probably because of a shared elitism. The older neoconservatives are of course ex-Trotskyists so lack the traditional conservative suspicion of the State. They just want to use the State in a more realistic and hence more benign way than their former brethren on the Left. But lovers of the State they are. I personally am very glad that no type of neoconservatism seems to have any mass following. Their influence seems to be solely of a think-tank kind. Note this report of the current thinking of Irving Kristol, probably the leading light among the founders of neoconservatism. He has what I can only call a horrifying vision for America. He wants America to become the world's new dictator, no less. He won't sell that idea anywhere in mainstream America. I think Rockwell voices the libertarian reply to the neoconservatives pretty well here.

One person who does agree with Kristol is, of all things, a Scottish historian: Niall Ferguson. There is a good article on Ferguson here which both sets out his arguments and mentions some of the problems with them. A lot of intellectuals are obviously way out of touch with ordinary people. The idea that you could persuade the average American to take on the burdens of empire for some dreamy reason is absurd. The great majority of Americans just want to be left alone to get on with their own lives in peace and safety.

The statist mind: "The Greeks had a name for this monstrous ego: hubris, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the defining characteristic of the State. They considered it a madness, one that the afflicted never knew was affecting them. They defined a sequence--koros (stability) to hubris (monstrous, conscienceless arrogance) to ate (a madness where evil appears as good) to nemesis (destruction)..... A more modern term for hubris, for Kirk's monstrous ego, is narcissism. Perceiving people as things, ones not fully human, is the essence of narcissism. Peck wrote this about narcissism, "Since [narcissists] deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world."

Orrin Judd has an account of intellectuals which implies an inbuilt bias to the Left in them: "an "intellectual" is someone who deals in pure ideas, that is ideas untested by reality. The term "Intellectual" in turn has come to denote anyone who believes that these untested ideas should be tried out upon society. Once we accept these fairly simple definitions, it becomes pretty obvious why America has an anti-intellectual tradition ... it is the nature of "intellect" to oppose the existing order". I think Orrin is a bit sweeping there but there is something to what he says.

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ELSEWHERE

New Icelandic blogger Great Auk has a pretty inspiring report of what Friedmanite economics have done for Iceland in recent years. They REALLY cut back government in Iceland and what was the result? I don't think I need to tell you.

What a blow! French supermarkets are beginning to stock Australian wines. No doubt the French elites will think as much of that as they do of McDonalds.

A major Australian newspaper has a well-informed review of the latest Michael Moore film, stressing how anti-American and one-sided Moore is.

Good to see that the Iraqi Shiites are getting ready to deal with Falluja as soon as they get the chance. Falluja seems to be the major remnant of the Saddam regime.

Medicare: The rich pay more for it but get more out of it too, surprisingly.

Non-Government Organizations undermining democracy: It's Sunday morning and there's a knock on the door. The kids answer it and soon enough are demanding money to give to the whales, the poor, the starving... Your money is not just being spent to save dolphins, your name is being used to support the political agenda of everything on that donor organisation's list of priorities.... Your views don't count.... "The NGO phenomenon, if taken too far, constitutes a challenge to representative systems and traditional political accountability," Johns and Roskam argue. "The collection of all possible NGOs does not constitute public opinion." Yet they argue that "while the role of NGOs as a voice of the public is developing apace, the ability of the representative system to manage and decipher these voices is under considerable pressure".... the Johns and Roskam analysis of NGO infiltration of government is essentially correct".

Randall Parker has an interesting post on the odd attitude of The Wall St Journal to immigration. The WSJ seems to want open borders and is pretty vicious with immigration restrictionists. It's all pretty amazing to an Australian conservative: Australia's conservative government is notoriously tough on immigration control -- to much applause from the voters. American libertarians seem to lean towards open borders, however, so I suppose the WSJ could be seen as taking a libertarian line. The accusation that the WSJ is backing open borders because cheap Mexican labour is good for its business cronies is unfortunately plausible, however. See also Michelle Malkin on the matter.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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 June, 2004

EDUCATION

Jeff Jacoby: "If teachers unions in Massachusetts spent as much time trying to improve the large number of public schools they control as they do trying to hurt the minuscule number of charter schools they don't control, public education in the Bay State would be the pride of the Western world. Alas, quality of education has never been the highest priority of the unions and the many school-district bureaucrats who do their bidding. Like other monopolists, they are less interested in improving their product than in trying to stomp out competition -- especially when it comes from a tiny but popular upstart. In terms of numbers, charter schools are barely a blip on the Massachusetts radar screen. Of the nearly 1,900 public schools in the state, only 50 are charters. Of the 980,000 children enrolled in public education, only 19,000 -- fewer than 2 percent -- attend charter schools."

Dave Huber has some acerbic comments about the lack of "diversity" at the University of Delaware.

A fruitcake mother: "Kyle Samejima's decision -- to send her three children to the local public school here -- was an unusual one among her neighbors. But she liked the open-education philosophy of Windom magnet school [of Minneapolis, MN], liked that it was just a couple of blocks away, liked the diversity. Now she's helping to spearhead an effort to make Windom even more distinctive, turning it into a dual immersion Spanish school that her youngest child -- a kindergartner already bilingual in Japanese -- will begin next year. 'You can put a label on a school, and if you look at Windom's test scores, they don't look so great,' says Ms. Samejima. 'But test scores don't always tell the whole story.' Many other Minneapolis parents, though, are looking at the test scores. And with an exceptionally high degree of school choice, they're increasingly choosing options outside the district."

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ELSEWHERE

The latest Harvard flap over the fact that its small number of black students are mostly not American blacks is amusing. Blacks who come from REALLY poor environments in Africa and the Caribbean are twice as good at getting into Harvard as American blacks are. So the Leftist explanation that "poverty" keeps blacks out is sheer bunk. Surely, there is only one explanation for the difference: motivation. As black conservative sites like Crispus and Booker Rising often point out, instead of American blacks being challenged and being taught to strive and become independent, what affirmative action -- and "liberal" policies generally -- teach American blacks is passivity: the feeling of victimhood and dependency. The advantage that blacks from Africa and the Caribbean have is that they have NOT been reared in the poisonous politically correct environment of modern-day America.

I have always found Roger Scruton's view of conservatism rather idiosyncratic. To me he is a reactionary, not a conservative. He has a recent summary of his views here. There is much that he says about conservatism which is insightful but he claims to say what conservatism is without once mentioning individual liberty. Is there ANY American -- conservative or not -- who would agree that "the future is the past"? That is Scruton's summary of a core conservative outlook. By that criterion there are no (or very few) conservatives in America, I would think. I prefer an infinitely more influential conservative's view of what conservatism is, Ronald Reagan's: "If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.... The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom"

John Lewis: "Professor Henry Reynolds contends that our white forebears murdered over 20,000 of our black forebears. Keith Windschuttle argues that this figure is grossly exaggerated, prompting a call from academics and others for all men and women of good will to rise against Windschuttle and bring him down. Curiously, those who oppose Windschuttle appear to be more interested in maintaining previously-held beliefs than in determining what really happened, and do not seem to realise that figures of the magnitude claimed by Reynolds arguably contain more insult to our black than our white forebears".

Cuba could teach the U.S. a lot about democracy. You don't believe it? The Minneapolis Star-Tribune says so. Maybe they should rename it the Minneapolis Pravda. The old Soviet propaganda mill is still running smoothly in the USA.

Al Gore thinks that answering back to criticism makes you a Nazi! He said recently: "The Administration works closely with a network of "rapid response" digital Brown Shirts" It's Gore's attitude that sounds like the Nazi one to me. Gore clearly believes in neither freedom of speech nor natural justice. But what Leftist ever really did? Opinion Journal has some more comments on the strangeness of Gore.

Fun! Charles Giacometti, the rage-filled Leftist that I reported a correspondence with on 24th., is apparently a serial abuser. And, like Gore, he wants to prevent people from answering him back. Leftists just can't take dissent. New England Republican gives you the lowdown on him.

Mark Shea has a fun picture of Al Gore which he calls: "Former Veep coughs up hairball"

Evil Conservatives Inc. is a good spoof site, parodying or mocking a lot of Green/Left arguments.

Amy Welborn has a good story about how middle America is not rushing out to buy Clinton's book: "by noon, Lewis had not sold one of his shop's 20 copies, and he intended to cancel the 30 additional copies on order".

In response to my post yesterday about Straussianism , a reader notes similarities between Straussians and Fabian socialists:

Wicked Thoughts has a serious post up for once -- with a good document about "Islamophobia"

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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

Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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 June, 2004

STRAUSS AND THE STRAUSSIANS

Urged on by one of my correspondents, I spent a while last night reading about conservative philosopher Leo Strauss and his followers. I read accounts by various sorts of Straussians and anti-Straussians as a way of deciding if it seemed worthwhile to sit down and read the great man himself. He is said to be a difficult and ambiguous study so preliminary enquiry seemed needed. Two of the many accounts I read are here and here. Strauss disciples do seem to be rather prominent in the Bush administration and that does of course get the Left frothing at the mouth and trotting out their usual conspiracy theories. And for once there is a small germ of truth in what they say. Strauss was what would usually be called a "Gnostic" -- a purveyor of "hidden" knowledge or knowledge known only to initiates. Gnostics were very influential and widely followed in the ancient world both before and after the time of Christ. The best known Gnostic sects of the modern world are probably the Rosicrucians, the Scientologists and whatever is left of the old Freemasons.

I myself think that all Gnosticism is rubbish so will not be reading Strauss. The idea of any real and widely useful knowledge remaining secret for thousands of years is ludicrous. But I can see the appeal of Straussianism. Like all Gnostic sects it is both elitist and fraternal -- which is a pretty powerful combination. It both tells you that you are superior and that you have a band of similarly wise brothers on your side. No wonder it has attracted followers! I find its elitism particularly obnoxious. Elites as such are no problem for me. They exist. They become obnoxious when they see themselves as a natural ruling class who are licensed to lie, conceal, collude and deceive in order to bend "the masses" to their will -- "for their own good", of course. Yuk! Straussianism has too much in common with the Left for me. I will stick with libertarian conservatism. Many conservatives are pretty appalled at the big-government agenda of GWB and I have argued that GWB is in fact in some ways to the Left of Clinton. Maybe he really has been influenced by his Straussian advisors.

What primarily motivated Strauss was his concern that the "nihilism" or moral relativism preached by Leftist ideologues (and now accepted by many educated people) would eventually make civilization impossible. There are however many alternatives in philosophy to moral relativism and I think my version of ethical naturalism is only one of many accounts of morality which take into account the arguments for moral relativism but still show or purport to show that values and standards are important, non-arbitrary and persuasive.

The practical upshot of Straussian thought does seem to be reasonably conservative in that Strauss opposed both Communism and Nazism and supported Christianity and traditional values but his reasons for those conclusions seem to be peculiarily his own.

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ELSEWHERE

I think this is right: Clinton was good for America because he did so little. And he did so little because he spent most of his time defending his own repeated amoral behaviour. And I see that Monica Lewinsky has entered the fray again -- with some understandably hurt comments about his recent "60 minutes" interview. I think there is little doubt that Clinton is a psychopath -- even his much-noted charm is characteristic of psychopaths. The stupid lie about how Hillary got her name is typically psychopathic.

A crime against the poor: "John Kerry says he wants to raise the minimum wage to $7 an hour from $5.15". He wants to force the lowest rung of the workforce out of work, in other words.

Jeff Jacoby on U.N. antisemitism: "The lengths to which the UN will to go to avoid any condemnation of Jew-hatred would be comical if they weren't so contemptible. When it adopted an international convention against racial discrimination, it refused to include a reference to antisemitism. "The Soviet Union, its satellites, and its Arab allies," noted Bayefsky, "insisted that antisemitism was a question not of race but of religion." Yet when the UN later adopted a resolution on religious intolerance, the lead sponsor insisted that antisemitism should be omitted because that was a matter not of religion but of race."

Affirmative Action a noble goal? "Advocates of U-M's policies speak in collective terms about race disadvantage and gender inequities. What they don't deal with is individuals. AA admission (and other) policies do not look at the individual merits of your son or daughter at the grade average they've struggled to maintain, the volunteer organizations they've joined, the dreaming human beings they are. Instead, AA advocates see skin color and genitalia. There is nothing noble about that vision."

Attempts by UK Tories in the House of Lords to extend Blair's 'civil partnerships' act to cover non-homosexual households (eg spinsters, family carers etc) have been attacked as 'homophobic'(!)

There is an amusing attack on "Islamophobia" here -- followed by an extremely frank reply from one of my readers. One excerpt: "In other places in the Koran and in Mohammed's life and in constant Islamic practice, is revealed a "value" of persecuting, intimidating and indeed killing people for their expressing disagreement with the half-baked failed system of ideas that is Islam. In total contrast to this, Christ said "Father forgive them for what they do""

Pretend-Catholics: "Only 1 in 5 senators who claim to be Catholic actually support a bill that would enshrine marriage as the union of one man and one woman"

Ecumenical Insanity has an amusing report about a new "translation" of the Bible. The Church of England thinks you can just change what the Bible says willy-nilly. They pretend that the Bible tells you to have a "regular partner" rather than a husband or wife. The apostates have clearly taken over that church.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again, including some quiz questions about the old South.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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

Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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 June, 2004

PURITANISM, SOCIAL CLASS ETC.

Someone commented to me recently that I do not put enough personal stuff on this blog. I mostly just reproduce thoughts from others that I find interesting. So I will remedy that to a very small degree today -- by commenting on two recent posts by Keith Burgess-Jackson. Keith noted that I use only a dialup connection and commented that it must be my Puritan heritage, considering that I could easily afford any connection I want. There is considerable truth in that. My Presbyterian upbringing did indeed teach me frugality, or, as the Scots say: "A careful way wi' money". The sites that I visit are rarely graphics-intensive so dialup is not, however, the frustration it might seem. My frugality is still moderate by Scottish standards, though. When I was in Scotland, I occasionally made jokes about "using things up", "getting your money's worth" etc but nobody ever saw that I was joking. They all thought I was being perfectly sensible!

In another post Keith spoke with some asperity about "dolts" who don't think much about the world around them and know little of politics. Another philosopher -- Socrates -- once said something similar: "The unexamined life is not worth living". Keith got a blast from one of his readers for speaking so ill of ordinary folk -- a blast that Keith posted up without comment -- by way of a mea culpa, I assume. I can actually see Keith's point of view as well as that of his reader. I am aware of a large gulf between academic types such as myself and the man in the street and I normally have little to do with those with whom I cannot share at least some intellectual or aesthetic interests. I do not however think ill of ordinary people in any way. I admire them for getting by and leading generally decent lives without the intellectual resources that I have. They quite simply need almost all their attention for their day-to-day lives and so cannot afford the luxury of constant reflection that I can. And I am strongly inclined to believe that, in general, a simpler, more basic life leads to greater wisdom and balance than the far flights of fancy one often encounters among intellectuals. I have certainly found that so in my personal life. I find that intelligent working-class girls are far easier to get on with as wives and girlfriends than bourgeois women are. The bourgeois ladies are always getting bothered about little things that don't really matter whereas the working-class women just look at the basics and are delighted to get those right. There is no doubt which group is happier.

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THE RELIGION OF PEACE

A good summary here of the Saudi responsibility for Islamic terrorism and some slight sign that they may be repenting it: "Hopefully, Al-Muqrin's killing is proof that the Saudi regime is at last taking the threat from al-Qaeda seriously. And that the royal House of Saud will stop feeding the monster of Islamic terrorism it has so foolishly created".

America welcomes terrorists: "Do you know how the alleged "shopping-mall" bomber entered our country? He didn't cross the border illegally. He didn't sneak in on a ship. He came through the front door at America's invitation. Nuradin M. Abdi, who was indicted last week for plotting with al Qaeda to blow up an Ohio shopping mall, flew here from Somalia and received bogus "refugee" status... thousands of refugees and asylum seekers who have made flimsy claims of persecution are let loose."

Poverty and South Asian immigrants to the US: Interesting that although the overall rate of poverty among South Asians was high, the rate for Indians was similar to the rate for native-born white Americans. Muslims from Pakistan and Bangladesh would be the other major South Asian category so they are obviously a disaster as immigrants. That wonderful religion of peace sure is great for all concerned!

This Muslim author at least has the common sense to point out that prejudice against Muslims is not always unreasonable. "the suspicion of Muslims is not always reasonable, it is absolutely understandable. After all, several vile massacres have been committed in our name, however much we reject them. It may not be fair, but a degree of guilt by association is human nature. We must come to terms with this and reclaim our collective reputation from those who would sully it." 50 years after WWII, there is still plenty of everyday prejudice expressed in Australia about Germans and Japanese, indeed it is common to hear anti-Japanese and anti-German statements even from well-educated people. It seems inevitable that until Muslim leaders openly reject their vile brethren and do so without qualifications, or other elastic escape clauses, the dislike of Muslims will continue.

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ELSEWHERE

Dick McDonald has a good post on the lies and deceptions in the Clinton book.

Now this really is obscene: The German media are drawing parallels between the Abu Ghraib abuses and the Nazi concentration camps.

Homosexuals CAN change: "Given the will, and skilled therapy, there can be an end to the nightmare of same-sex attraction.... Doom for the tall tale that being gay is like being black, an immutable inborn identity. Doom therefore, in the debate on gay marriage, to false analogies with apartheid and Aborigines, since blacks cannot stop being blacks, but gays can stop being gay.... As to the exact causes of homosexuality, the medical jury is still out. But the baseless claim, promoted by Justice Michael Kirby and others, that gays are just born that way, is given no support by the American Psychiatric Association. Their Fact Sheet on Sexual Orientation (2000) sums it up: "There are no replicated scientific studies supporting any specific biological etiology for homosexuality"... late last year a remarkable research paper was published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour by one of America's senior psychiatrists, Dr Robert Spitzer.... "Although initially sceptical, in the course of the study, the author became convinced of the possibility of change in some gay men and lesbians". Spitzer says: "Mental health professionals should stop moving in the direction of banning therapy that has as its goal a change in sexual orientation"."

Fred Reed on Israel "what exactly do we expect the Israelis to do? I mean, I know they're terrible and all, but they're there. Maybe a better question is what would you do if you were where they are. It's easy to solve problems you don't have from Cleveland.... Thing is, Israel does exist. Should and ought to have don't matter. It's like saying Aunt Penelope shouldn't have married a drunk and had seven feeble-minded kids. But she did. You gotta deal with it.... Build that fool wall. I guess that's what I would do. It's a bad idea and probably won't work, which distinguishes it slightly from bad ideas that certainly won't work".

Boneheaded Leftist "rights" "The government, wanting to empower the tenants on public housing estates, provided tenant workers as their advocates. The tenant workers proclaimed that there was a right to housing and that tenants could not be evicted for non-payment of rent. Rent collections fell catastrophically and the Housing Commission was unable to sustain, let alone expand, its operations. In schools students were proclaimed to have a right to education and it became much more difficult to suspend or expel disruptive students who threatened the quality of education being offered to the rest. In these cases rights spectacularly trumped utility".

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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

Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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 June, 2004

THOSE WICKED GUNS

Simple logic too much for Leftists: "The framers of the constitution understood the necessity of American citizens to keep and bear arms. Unfortunately, our society has been infected by so many of those on the left, that many of us now believe that we should give up that right ... Thus leaving ourselves, our homes, and even our loved-ones at the mercy of the criminals. You see, gun laws only affect the law-abiding. We constantly hear about the importance of background checks being implemented by gun store owners. Criminals do not now, nor have they ever purchased their weapons in legitimate gun shops. It is cost prohibitive (Why would they pay several hundreds of dollars for a gun, when they can buy one on the street for a fraction of the price?), and it leaves a paper trail. However, those on the left choose to ignore this fact. Background checks and waiting periods do nothing, except put barriers between American citizens and their ability to defend themselves."

The "crazies" excuse for gun control: "In the words of an old billboard I once saw, 10 out of 10 criminals prefer their victims disarmed. Disarming crazy people does not make them less crazy or less criminal. It just leaves law-abiding people defenseless. Evil abhors a vacuum. When you disarm innocent people, bad things happen."

What gun controllers don't want you to know: "I used to support gun control, meaning civilian disarmament. There was no reason, the rationale went, for a private citizen to own a gun. The only ones who wanted guns had small genitalia, were paranoid crazies, and criminals. All this was assumed, without any empirical or statistical research to base it upon. Due to the influence of one of my clients who is a person of great honor, I began to research the issue of gun control on my own. Having been a college boy who loved library research, I knew how to ferret out fact from fiction. It was interesting to find that the claims of the NRA, John Lott, et al., were easy to verify from neutral or even slightly pro-gun control sources. More ominously, I found that the gun control groups consistently lied or twisted minor factoids taken out of context in their articles. This begged the question: if they are lying to advance their agenda, can we really trust the utopian outcome they promote as true?"

An ex-cop on preventing rape: "While the prevalence of rape is greatly exaggerated by radical feminists, it happens. What can a woman do to avoid it? ... A fair number of women of my acquaintance in Virginia have quietly come to the same conclusion: The most workable approach is to get a concealed-carry permit and a small revolver. The idea is shocking to the highly liberal. It is, however, remarkably effective. Being shot a half-dozen times usually causes the assailant to reconsider his priorities. Except through a miracle, a woman isn't going to fight off a determined attacker, but a woman can pull a trigger as well as a man can.... When I took the carry course, some of the instructors were women."

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THE INTELLECTUAL POVERTY OF LEFTISM

I mentioned recently the low quality of the emails that I and other conservative bloggers receive from Leftists. There is normally no attempt at rational argument -- just rage and abuse. I thought I might publish the most recent correspondence I have had with a Leftist to show readers what I mean. Reproduced below are emails from one Mr Charles Giacometti of cosmo39@hotmail.com. They are mercifully brief and my replies are even briefer. I have not kept the initial email but it expressed incredulity at the heading on my blog which points out the origin of the word "Nazi" and said that surely I did not mean that Nazism was Leftist. Read on:

CG: Wow, sorry. I continued reading your blog. You are seriously fucking crazy. Please don't write me back.
JR: Your ignoring the facts is seriously fucking crazy
CG: I forwarded your Web site to some friends. They thought it was hilarious too.
JR: Thank you. It might stir doubt about their certainties one day
CG: No, it merely confirmed that you are crazy... Don't bother to write back. You are on my ignore list now. I don't have time for people with mental illness. Seek some professional help. Quickly.
JR: I will publish this correspondence

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ELSEWHERE

Mr Giacometti is not the only one to engage in low-quality debate. I see that Stuart Buck is having the same problems with Leftist law professor Brian Leiter that I had. Leiter makes sweeping and imprecise generalizations that turn out to be arrant nonsense however you interpret them. I think Stuart is wasting time on the ladder-man, though ("Leiter" is German for ladder). Leiter writes to make Leftists feel good, not to engage in the careful argument that one would expect of a lawyer. He is to law what the Jug Man (Krugman -- "Krug" is German for Jug) is to economics: He tries, however irrationally, to find bits that comfort Leftists.

Laws against Hate crime "are not aimed at hate, but at particular kinds of hate found disagreeable by particular political groups, chiefly on the left. (Note that the groups granted special privilege invariably vote Democratic.) That is, we all understand that a woman who kills a man because she hates men will not be guilty of a hate crime, as neither will a black or Hispanic who kills a white from hostility to whites, or a homosexual who, furious at heterosexuals for their lack of respect, kills a heterosexual."

Tom Barrett has some good Father's Day reflections -- e.g. "You dads who are at home, pay attention to your kids. Talk to them, get involved in their lives. Tell them that you love them every day – several times a day. If you’re too busy for this, you are too busy. If you have to take a different job with less hours, move into a smaller house, drive an older car, do it! As a minister I have been with many men as they died. I never heard one say, “I wish I had spent more time at the office.” I have heard many say, “I wish I had spent more time with my kids.”"

What feminist complainers forget: ""Being male is now the single largest demographic risk factor for early mortality in developed countries," said Daniel Kruger, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. "The magnitude of the sex difference is most starkly summarized by the numbers of deaths before age 50," Kruger said. "For every 10 premature female deaths, 16 men died prematurely.""

Hezbollah connections in Australia: Leftist politicians, of course. Hardly mentioned in the press for some obscure reason.

I have just put up a brief posting on Leftists as Elitists

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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

Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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.

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



23 June, 2004

FROM BROOKES NEWS

Vladimir Putin backs Bush on Saddam's terrorist links but media continues to lie The mainstream media's accusation that President Bush lied about terrorist links between al Qaeda and Saddam were blown out of the water by President Vladimir Putin
Beijing's militarists push for more spending The Pentagon's 2004 report on Chinese military power confirmed that China's military was impressed with the American military's performance
Anonymous Bush-hating 'CIA analyst' maligns President Bush Bush-hating ' Guardian', a British newspaper, has claimed that a "senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of President Bush
The media lied about President Bush and the 9/11 Commission findings The 9/11 Commission has found no "credible evidence" linking Saddam to the 9/11 atrocity. Why this statement does not add up
Government plans massive house price rise Australians had better look out, our politicians are planning to attack one of our most precious institutions - the family home
The ABC collective's little commissar Last May David Marr used Media Watch to provide a bully pulpit for the socialist Ramona Koval, a staff-elected director of the ABC

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

Hilarious! This is John Kerry's "religious outreach director": "Mara Vanderslice was raised without any faith and didn't become an evangelical Christian until she attended Earlham College, a Quaker school known for its adherence to pacifism. When in college, Mara was active in the Earlham Socialist Alliance, a group that supports the convicted cop killer Mumia Abu- Jamal and openly embraces Marxism-Leninism. After graduating, Mara spoke at rallies held by ACT-UP, the anti-Catholic group that disrupted Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1989 by spitting the Eucharist on the floor. In 2000, she practiced civil disobedience when she took to the streets of Seattle in a protest against the World Trade Organization.. etc." She sounds more like a slice of Satan to me.

Weep for John Kerry's "poor": "In 1999 a quarter of US households were poor (with less than $25,000 pa)... In this context of US poor households, 45.9 percent own their own home, 72.8 percent have a car, and 77 percent have air conditioning. Their average living space is 1,200 sq ft per household. The European average including both rich and poor is 1,000 sq ft".

Psychologists are mostly Leftists and we know what miserable sods Leftists are so their finding fault with happiness should come as no surprise: "As the British psychologist Richard P. Bentall has observed, ''There is consistent evidence that happy people overestimate their control over environmental events ... Bentall has proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder". See also here and here. Some think Bentall meant it as a joke and maybe he did but it also seems to be seen as insightful.

Dennis Prager lists the moral monstrosities who hate America and says it is a badge of honour to be hated by such people.

I don't get this at all: "President Bush plans on Wednesday to designate Vietnam as a new focus for his $15 billion plan to combat AIDS globally, expanding the initiative from Africa to Asia for the first time, congressional sources said. By designating Vietnam a "focus country," eligible to share in the $15 billion, the United States can sharply increase funding to nongovernmental organizations that provide AIDS services there. "It will make Vietnam eligible for a huge increase in funding," one congressional aide said."

The media still love old Communists: "But the tributes to this un-American symbol of Hollywood subversion just don't stop... Let me tell you about the real John Randolph. He was a member of the Communist Party USA during its heyday. This was during the time that Josef Stalin was murdering millions in the name of communism in the Soviet Union. And the Communist Party USA took its orders and received its funding from Moscow".

Further to my post about modern drugs being worth the cost, one of my medical correspondents commented: "Most young people just don't remember - almost no one went to public swimming pools in the early 50s because of the polio epidemic; Procedures to burn facial nerves to eliminate pain are no longer needed; drugs are effective; Procedures to block or cut nerves to the chest wall for shingles are no longer done; drugs are effective; Modern drugs to treat blood pressure and psychiatric disease have very few side effects; in contrast, side effects of older drugs often led to discontinuation of drugs; Years ago, patients with severe ulcers had their stomachs removed - bleeding ulcers could be fatal - now, we hardly ever see stomach surgery for ulcers; drugs are effective; Of course, many cancers are "cured" by modern drugs". And fancy those evil drug companies CHARGING for all that! Drugs should be devised for free by workers' collectives, of course. Odd that none are, though.

France vs. USA: "the core of all French-American differences can be traced to the contrast between Bonaparte and Washington, the former seeking to become "emperor," the other willing to "give up his power." He's aware that French leaders, more than American ones, typically exhibit imperial temperament... "

Gnu Hunter has an interesting extract from "Alliance Voices" (PDF) -- the Socialist Alliance Discussion Bulletin Vol. 4 no. 6, April, 2004 -- the bulletin of an Australian far Left activist organization. It shows graphically how the far Left carefully organize most demonstrations and "protests" in Australia. Demonstrations are what they do.

Another amusing extract from the same document: "This pre-conference discussion takes place in revolutionary times. Revolutionary times because the United States wages nuclear war in Iraq and Afghanistan. We witness not the doomsday stuff of a mushroom cloud, not the Cold War, mutually assured destruction (MAD) bogey but the extermination -- genocide -- of selected humans, untermenschen -- the Nazi term for those they considered sub humans -- through the use of depleted uranium (DU) warheads." How you can wage nuclear war using uranium from which the radioactivity has been REMOVED, they do not explain. I guess "depleted" is a hard word for them.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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

Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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.

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



22 June, 2004

ARE LEFTISTS ALL THE SAME?

I do from time to time get emails from Leftists -- mostly consisting of screams of rage and abuse. I am sure that most conservative bloggers will know what I mean. Amid the abuse and insults, however, there is the odd glimmer of intelligent comment and the chief such comment seems to be that Leftists are not all the same. American "liberals" in particular sometimes claim not to be Leftists at all! ("If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then ..."). It is certainly my view that the motivations for Leftism vary widely and I have a large article on the net which goes through those various possible motivations. And the article emphasizes that the motivations and thinking of those who vote for Left-leaning political parties at election time can be very different from the motivations and thinking of Leftist intellectuals. And it is overwhelmingly the thinking of Leftist intellectuals and preachers of Leftism that interests me. They are the ones who get their hands on the levers of power if they win an election. Even among leftist intellectuals, however, there seems to be a variety of motivations -- from the naively idealistic at one extreme to the elitist haters who want all power, success and fame for themselves at the other extreme.

To understand Leftism, however, it seems essential to me that one NOT accept the Leftist's own account of what his/her motivation is. In the case of the naive idealist, the account may be fair and accurate but in the case of the ruthless lovers of power (Stalin and the Communists anyone?) it would clearly be foolish to do so. Lies and dishonesty are a necessary subterfuge for the power-seeking haters so we have to judge them by deeds, not words. The problem, is, of course, that one can not usually know what sort of Leftist one is dealing with. To judge from what one can see of history and current events, hiding the most dismal motivations behind a mask of "compassion" seems to be only too commonly Leftist. So claims of humane motivations must in my view always be treated skeptically. And I do just that, of course. I assume that the Leftist I am dealing with is one of the dismally motivated kind. Sometimes I will be wrong of course. Some Leftists do move rightwards as they get older (Ronald Reagan for example) and it is my view that all of the idealistically motivated Leftists will eventually make that journey given sufficient information about the world.

So I don't think that Leftists are all the same but they have done so much evil and destruction in the world that I think we have to assume the worst of them until proved otherwise. We CERTAINLY cannot believe their own account of their thinking. And coming to realize that is an important thing for conservatives to do -- which is why I spell it out repeatedly. If you assume that the Leftist is motivated primarily by a desire to make himself look good rather than by a desire to do anybody else any good, all the shallow thinking that they come out with will become a lot more understandable. I have an extended discussion here of what Leftism is and what Leftists have in common with one-another.

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SECULARISM AND CONSERVATISM

The "church of secularism": "In the controversies surrounding the Pledge of Allegiance and the L.A. County seal, what we're seeing is an unacknowledged interreligious civil war. Centuries ago in Europe and the Middle East, intolerant faiths sought to suppress one another, erasing symbols of their rivals wherever possible. Churches were converted to mosques, their crosses removed. Synagogues were converted into churches, their Jewish symbols effaced. Today the church of secularism agitates against its rival, the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the interest of honest debate, at the very least it would be of benefit to recognize secularism for what it is: an aggressive religion competing for converts, a faith lacking the candor to speak openly of its aims."

I think the above article makes a lot of sense in that it accurately identifies the non-religious (secular) world as what Christians feel most threatened by. And in the USA the allegedly non-religious world is in fact often quite religious -- worshipping the addled creeds of Leftism. I myself am however REALLY secular in that I am a complete atheist and worship neither Jesus Christ nor Karl Marx (and many of my former academic colleagues in sociology clearly DID assign almost godlike status to old Karl). So I think it needs to be added that while some secularists (the more insecure ones in my view) do actively menace Christianity, not all secularists do and some -- such as myself -- think highly of Christianity. And secular people can CERTAINLY be conservative. For more on that see here

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ELSEWHERE

I have had Booker Rising on my blogroll for a little while now but I think it deserves special mention. It is a site by and for conservative American blacks. From its authors: "We began Booker Rising to counteract negativity, victimology, and defeatism, which is too often thrust upon black Americans by the media, schools, and so-called leaders. We're concerned about eroded values, hopes, and dreams, even though overall we're living better than ever. Booker Rising wants to help stop the sacrilegious assault of our grandparents' (and ancestors') legacy, as if little to no progress has been made and the civil rights movement was almost for naught. Inspired by Booker T. Washington's work, our website promotes self-help, education, enterprise, democracy, and society as the seeds for Black America's future. We won the civil rights movement. It's now time for Stage II: further propelling black American success in this increasingly globalized era, via our "seeds.""

Jeff Jacoby has a roundup of the good news from Iraq

Medicines are worth the price we pay: "Like other products resulting from research and creativity, medicines are really made of knowledge -- a kind of intellectual property capable of preventing and curing diseases as well as relieving the pain of a headache or hip transplant. This knowledge does not come cheap. Discovering, developing, testing, and gaining regulatory approval for new medicines is expensive, time-consuming, and risky."

Drug Prohibition: "None of these officials was able to cite any study that demonstrated the beneficial effects of drug prohibition when weighed against its costs. The leaders of the war on drugs are apparently unable to defend on rational cost-benefit grounds their 70-year-old policy, which costs nearly $10 billion per year (out of pocket), imprisons 75,000 Americans, and fills our cities with violent crime.... the period of greatest availability in the United States was the 19th century. For most of the century, opium, morphine, and cocaine were legally and cheaply available without a prescription at drugstores and grocery stores and through the mail. And yet, far from being marked by drug-crazed criminals and drug-paralyzed workers, that period was a time of unprecedented economic growth and productivity".

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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

Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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.

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



21 June, 2004

RATING THE PRESIDENTS

Buchanan on U.S. Presidents. Whatever else you think about Buchanan, he does know his history:

"Certainly, Washington is our greatest president, the father of our country and the captain who set our course. But Lincoln is great only if one believes that preventing South Carolina, Georgia and the Gulf states from peacefully seceding justified the suspension of the Constitution, a dictatorship, 600,000 dead and a resort to a total war that ravaged the South for generations. As for FDR, he was the greatest politician of the 20th century. But why call a president great whose government was honeycombed with spies and traitors, and whose war diplomacy lead to the loss of 10 Christian countries of Eastern Europe to a Muscovite despot whose terrorist regime was the greatest enemy of human freedom in modern history?

Now consider one of the men whom all the raters judge a "failure" and among our worst presidents, Warren G. Harding. Harding served five months less than JFK, before dying in office in 1923. Yet his diplomatic and economic triumphs were of the first order. He negotiated the greatest disarmament treaty of the century, the Washington Naval Agreement, which gave the United States superiority in battleships and left us and Great Britain with capital-ship strength more than three times as great as Japan's. Even Tokyo conceded a U.S. diplomatic victory. With Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, Harding cut Wilson's wartime income tax rates, which had gone as high as 63 percent, to 25 percent, ended the stagflation of the Wilson presidency and set off the greatest boom of the century, the Roaring Twenties. When Harding took his oath, unemployment was at 12 percent. When he died, 29 months later, it was at 3 percent. This is a failure?

Harding, Coolidge, Eisenhower and Reagan were men who kept us out of war and presided over times of peace, security and often of soaring prosperity. Yet, the 20th century presidents who took us into war and who lost the fruits of war - Wilson, FDR, Truman - are "great" or "near great." These ratings tell us less about presidents than they do about historians, scholars and journalists.

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ELSEWHERE

This anti-Moore site makes it pretty clear that Michael Moore is just an entertainer who is proud of his success in the marketplace: "Michael Moore is a ... millionaire who boasts of wealth as proving his value -- "I'm a millionaire, I'm a multi-millionaire. I'm filthy rich. You know why I'm a multi-millionaire? 'Cause multi-millions like what I do. That's pretty good, isn't it?" So it's the horde of Leftists (particularly in Germany) who treat his glop as revelation who are the suckers. I wonder how many realize that he is a member of the NRA and sends his kids to a private school? He must be laughing all the way to the bank.

Amusing: "House Democratic leadership is pitching a law that would prohibit Pennsylvania doctors from refusing to treat a patient based on the patient's job, political opinions or litigation history." Why? Because some doctors have started to refuse to treat lawyers. Even if the law passes, it will just drive the phenomenon underground: Doctors could send lawyers for heaps of invasive and unnecessary diagnostic tests, for instance -- or refer them to specialists unnecessarily etc. I imagine the law would run into constitutional problems too. Didn't America outlaw slavery somewhere there way back? I myself have in the past refused to take on lawyers as tenants. The less you have to do with them the better, in my view.

Some good comments from a "liberal" supporter of the Iraq war: "Abu Ghraib, in all its horror, shows how much has changed in post-Saddam Iraq. Scrutiny and accountability are possible now. But judging from the tone of much of the comment, you'd think that Abu Ghraib makes the coalition morally indistinguishable from the mass-murdering regime it deposed. Critics of the war also display a creeping sympathy for the coalition's foes. We often hear that Iraqi insurgents are "nationalists", which sounds comfortingly like the French Resistance. But the main rebel factions are the opposite of freedom fighters: former Baathists and religious extremists, who mostly slaughter fellow Iraqis, beat or murder alcohol vendors, and threaten women displaying a strand of hair".

Surprising. Australia's most Leftist newspaper gives Australia's Left a blast for its kneejerk "ban everything" approach to obesity: "A ban on TV advertisements selling junk food to children is no substitute for policy".

Interesting point from Fred Barnes: "The Clinton presidency was, in effect, an extension of the Reagan presidency, though Clinton would be loath to admit this. Completing the Reagan agenda was not his intention".

Michael Duffy on Leftist hypocrisy in Australia: "Before 1996, it was all right to detain boat people because it was a Labor government that was doing it. After 1996, when John Howard started doing it, it became a crime against humanity. Pauline Hanson argued for a reduction in immigration numbers and advocated economic policies that would have destroyed our standard of living. She was widely derided as a racist and an economic illiterate. Peter Garrett supports similar things and, hey, he's welcomed into the Labor Party with open arms. Imagine if the Liberal Party took on someone with Garrett's views on immigration. The sneers and denunciations would still be running on the front pages."

I have just noticed something interesting in this academic survey of Canadian university professors by Nakhaie & Brym. Professors rated themselves on a scale of 1 to 7 in terms of Right to Left -- meaning that a score of 3.5 would mean neither Right nor Left. Table 5 shows that the only subgroups that averaged below 3.5 (i.e. were slightly Rightist) were professors of accounting, finance and mechanical engineeering. Professors in all other disciplines tended Left. The most far-Left group was, of course, the sociologists -- the most meaningless of all the disciplines. I taught in a university school of sociology for 12 years so I have some cause to know the emptiness of most sociology. Leftism sure is pervasive in academe. I explain why here.

A former cop on why drugs are here to stay: "What would a serious attack on drugs require in the US? Most conspicuously, an assault on the black ghetto, where drugs are most obviously sold. This is politically impossible. It would also mean jailing large numbers of influential whites in the suburbs, who use lots of drugs, but not too obviously. It would also mean jailing their children, who use copiously in the high schools. These things also are politically impossible."

I have just put up two good new postings on Leftists as Elitists

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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

Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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.

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



20 June, 2004

V.D. HANSON: BIN LADEN IS THE SANE ONE

"Like Hitler, bin Ladenism has an agenda: the end of the liberal West. Its supposedly crackpot vision is actually a petrol-rich Middle East free of Jews, Christians, and Westerners, free to rekindle spiritual purity under Sharia. Bin Laden's al Reich is a vast pan-Arabic, Taliban-like caliphate run out of Mecca by new prophets like him, metering out oil to a greedy West in order to purchase the weapons of its destruction; there is, after all, an Israel to be nuked, a Europe to be out-peopled and cowered, and an America to be bombed and terrorized into isolation. This time we are to lose not through blood and iron, but through terror and intimidation: televised beheadings, mass murders, occasional bombings, the disruption of commerce, travel, and the oil supply....

It was hard for the Islamic fascists to find ideological support in the West, given their agenda of gender apartheid, homophobia, religious persecution, racial hatred, fundamentalism, polygamy, and primordial barbarism. But they sensed that there has always been a current of self-loathing among the comfortable Western elite, a perennial search for victims of racism, economic oppression, colonialism, and Christianity. Bin Laden's followers weren't white; they were sometimes poor; they inhabited of former British and French colonies; and they weren't exactly followers of the no-nonsense Pope or Jerry Falwell. If anyone doubts the nexus between right-wing Middle Eastern fascism and left-wing academic faddishness, go to booths in the Free Speech area at Berkeley or see what European elites have said and done for Hamas. Middle Eastern fascist killers enshrined as victims alongside our own oppressed? That has been gospel in our universities for the last three decades....

While all Westerners prefer the bounty of capitalism, the delights of personal freedom, and the security of modern technological progress, saying so and not apologizing for it - let alone defending it - is, well, asking a little too much from the hyper sophisticated and cynical. Such retrograde clarity could cost you, after all, a university deanship, a correspondent billet in Paris or London, a good book review, or an invitation to a Georgetown or Malibu A-list party....

No, bin Laden is quite sane - but lately I have grown more worried that we are not." More here.

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LEFTIST NON-THINKING

"The gymnastics of mind and imagination required to be a liberal should be enough to keep even the most corpulent among them trim... Perhaps the most amazing of liberal axiomatic thought is the notion that it is safer to surrender and do nothing when confronted by a roaring lion. To be liberal, one must believe that the lion, hungry and violent, will do nothing to such an attractive meal as a cowering, simpering and obviously defenseless man-steak.... This is the attitude, however, of the liberal mind when it comes to terrorism. It is at once required, and an article of faith, for the liberal to believe that the woes of the civilized world befall it because of its insufferable bad manners and excess. Consequently, when confronted by a culture bent on the demise of the civilized world, liberals are bound to find no fault in the attacker, and only failing and turpitude in the civilized world... in the liberal mind, the pagan can do no wrong. Why is it necessary for modern, sophisticated, and intelligent society to wait for the barbarian to be literally at the door to recognize that this is not a war of persecution, as Radical Islam proclaims, but a war of expansion waged by radical Islam itself against modern civilization?

How to stop people working: "It all goes back to liberal first principles. Nobody, to the liberal, has a valid claim on anything, even his or her talents. Those who produce or acquire wealth do so not because of effort, initiative, creativity, or sacrifice. They're just lucky. They were born healthy and into loving families. Others are unlucky. They were born unhealthy or into indifferent families. Since none of us is entitled to what we have at birth, none of us is entitled to anything we produce thereafter. We might call this, to borrow a term from the criminal law, the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine. Wealth, to the liberal, belongs to all of us in common, not to any of us in particular. There are possessions, but not property."

Dalrymple: Why Leftists condone terrorism: "The idea that if someone is prepared to do something truly horrible, he must have a worthy cause remains attractive to liberal intellectuals, who perhaps envy those who take up arms against the sea of troubles that is human existence".

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ELSEWHERE

"Gun control has not worked in Canada. Since the new gun registration program started in 1998, the U.S. homicide rate has fallen, but the Canadian rate has increased. The net cost of Canada's gun registry has surged beyond $1-billion -- more than 500 times the amount originally estimated. Despite this, the Canadian government recently admitted it could not identify a single violent crime that had been solved through registration. Public confidence in the government's ability to fight crime has also eroded, with one recent survey showing only 17% of voters support the registration program."

Welfare state unfair: "Two academics - Dr Alan Tapper of Perth's Edith Cowan University and Dr David Thomson of New Zealand's Massey University - have confirmed that, across much of the Western world, the 60-year-old welfare state is in crisis. The welfare state has come to be not so much a straight-out redistribution from the haves to the have-nots, as was originally intended. Rather it has been, in Tapper's words, "one generation imposing costs on its successor".... Dr David Thomson's study, Selfish Generations? How Welfare States Grow Old (Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 1996), has produced evidence from Britain, Europe and the USA, that the welfare state is increasingly unable to satisfy the conflicting demands for "intergenerational justice". Australia's young generation is burdened, not only by heavy taxation and reduced welfare entitlements, but also soaring property prices and poor job prospects... The plight of Generation X caused the ANZ's chief economist Saul Eslake recently to exclaim that he could not understand why the young were not rising up".

Peg Kaplan is appalled at the half-hearted reaction of the Leftist media to the recent beheading in Saudi Arabia. The Abu Ghraib harassment can be shown endlessly but not the terminal brutality of Muslims.

Reagan and the "homeless" "In 1987, Reagan signed into law the Stewart B. McKinney act, a collection of programs that provided health care, shelter and transitional housing for homeless people, and saved many lives"

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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 June, 2004

ARNOLD KLING ON THE DANGEROUS NEW TACTICS OF THE LEFT

The Left's tactical weapons: "The last 25 years have seen an intellectual victory by the Right over the Left on the topic of central planning. ... Thus, conservatives might be lulled into thinking that we have beaten back the argument for big government. However, the Left has not gone away. It has mutated, and as Sebastian Mallaby suggests, those of us who advocate small government may very well be losing...

The left uses the Corruption weapon to attack the legitimacy of business enterprises, conservatives, and Republicans... Faced with the Corruption charge, the Right faces a dilemma. Nobody wants to defend mistakes or adverse results. However, if the Right caves in to every demand, then the corporate profits that do not disappear under a mountain of regulation will be extracted via shakedowns (called "settlements"). If business and war had to be conducted perfectly to be conducted at all, then we would have not have any private enterprise in our economy and we would not have won a single war in our history.... In order to reduce the abuse of the Corruption weapon, we need to make a habit of always pointing out cases where it is used to attack rather than to strengthen our society. Our goal should be to help sensitize the public to the difference between constructive criticism on the one hand and efforts to undermine our economy and our foreign policy on the other... We also need to emphasize to the public the large costs of Nader-esque crusades. Hasty legislation, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, tends to penalize decent, well-run corporations a great deal, for very little benefit in constraining the future behavior of unscrupulous individuals.

The other banner under which the Left marches is Compassion. If you favor more market-oriented approaches to health care, education, or Social Security, you will be accused of a lack of compassion -- of throwing grandma out of her wheelchair.... Instead of trying to placate the Left on Compassion, I believe that we ought to emphasize the ways in which government compassion is an oxymoron. In particular: The taxes to fund government compassion create new groups of needy people. For example, many of the young families without health insurance pay thousands of dollars a year in Social Security taxes.... Government compassion does not target the needy, but instead leads to state control of everyone's education, health care, and retirement security. In Thomas Sowell's phrase, "The left uses the poor as human shields".. For reducing the population of the needy, economic growth works better than government aid. As Robert Lucas (Nobel, 1995) put it recently, "of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor. The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production."

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ELSEWHERE

A touching memoir by Father John, a former Anglican who grew so disgusted with the secularism of his church that he left it and joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. "Our decision to leave was difficult, and not made easily. But, by the mercy of God, we had found the Orthodox Church, and faith, and way of life; and what had started as a way of fleeing from the coming apostasy of ECUSA became an increasingly powerful desire to embrace the faith of the Church that has existed since the day of Pentecost, her continuity unbroken, her faith unchanged. We started out as refugees; and found ourselves coming home. There are not words, nor time enough, to adequately say "thank you" to God for His mercy and favor in bringing us home. If any Anglicans happen to stray across this page, let me say again to you that the faith you desire is safe, and secure, and found today where it has always resided: in the Orthodox Church."

BRAVO for Michelle Malkin!: I thought that what the WSJ says about immigration -- it champions open borders -- was pretty strange but Michelle really gives it to them.

Job-stealers almost all American: "Quite often we see headlines about U.S. jobs being "lost" overseas or even "stolen" abroad. Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a report that said that just a small fraction of U.S. jobs lost were lost to overseas workers. "Of the 239,361 private sector nonfarm workers who were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days in the first quarter of 2004, the separations of 4,633 workers were associated with the movement of work outside of the country""

But what about the farm vote! "Eliminating global trade tariffs and other protective barriers would lift at least 500 million people out of poverty over 15 years, according to a new study released on Thursday.... In the study, titled "Trade Policy and Global Poverty," Cline also argues that lifting trade barriers would enable rich industrial nations to convey about twice as much gain to developing countries as they currently provide through foreign aid -- at a benefit rather than cost to their own consumers"

I guess it is worth something that "Britain fought a successful rearguard battle to preserve national vetoes on key policy areas such as taxation, social security, foreign and defense policy and criminal law" in the EU constitution negotiations.

Norm Weatherby points out that we COULD stop terrorist kidnappings and beheadings in their tracks if we really wanted to.

Bureaucracy at work: The Minnesota Commerce Department, believing that discount gasoline is worse for consumers than ridiculously inflated gasoline prices, hit Arkansas-based Murphy Oil with a $70,000 fine, and Kwik Trip Inc. with a $5,000 fine, for not making sufficient profit on their gasoline, i.e., for charging too little for their gasoline.

Reagan the racist: "So, how did blacks fare under Ronald Reagan? From the end of 1982 to 1989, black unemployment dropped 9 percentage points (from 20.4 percent to 11.4 percent), while white unemployment dropped by only 4 percentage points. Black household income went up 84 percent from 1980 to 1990, versus a white household income increase of 68 percent. The number of black-owned businesses increased from 308,000 in 1982 to 424,000 in 1987, a 38 percent rise versus a 14 percent increase in the total number of firms in the United States"

Gipper? A reader explains: "George Gipp was a famous and very successful football player. Reagan played him in "Knute Rockne, All American". Rockne was the coach at Notre Dame college, played in this case by Pat O'Brein, a pro Irishman. When Gipp, known as the Gipper, was dying from pneumonia and a strep infection he is supposed to have said as encouragement to Notre Dame against Army - "win one for the Gipper." This is a high note in the movie, of course.

Another communist absurdity: Mongolians lost their surnames under Communism and are only now getting them back

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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

Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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 June 2004

REALISM IN SOCIOLOGY!

Highly respected sociologist Peter Berger notes a big upsurge of Protestantism in Latin America and says it will lead to a big increase in democracy and capitalist prosperity there: "our research has estimated that there may be between forty and fifty million Protestants south of the United States border. And something like eighty percent of them are first-generation Protestants, so we are dealing with a massive phenomenon- most of them, by the way, again somewhere around eighty percent, are Pentecostal, so it's a very particular kind of Protestantism that is exploding.

I would say there are a number of consequences one can already see. If you talk about social institutions, we have here an incredible replication of some of the values and habits that Max Weber was describing in terms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and North America, the Protestant ethic.... Economically, again one can say the same thing, it's creating a group of people with very strong entrepreneurial interest.... They tend to favor democracy, because it's very much a people's movement. ... . The Protestant ethic-hard work, saving, discipline, basically not enjoying life very much and saving for the next generation- these kinds of values and behavior patterns are very conducive to success. ...

Socialism is no longer just an idea, it's a form of economic and political organization that has been tried in many countries, not just in the Soviet Union. It has unfailingly produced economic disaster, and in most cases, pretty odious political tyrannies. So the idea that socialism is the way to personal liberation is, empirically speaking, a horrendous mistake"

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ELSEWHERE

Amusing: "A new book by a prominent Washington psychoanalyst says President George W. Bush is a "paranoid meglomaniac" as well as a sadist and "untreated alcoholic.... Dr. Frank has been a psychiatrist for 35 years and is director of psychiatry at George Washington University. A Democrat, he once headed the Washington Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility". So a Leftist shrink thinks GWB is nuts. I am sure the feeling is mutual. Leftist psychiatrists said much the same thing about Ronnie. Yet all the psychiatrists in the world put together would be lucky to have one millionth of the popularity of Ronald Reagan. If psychiatrists can mistake one of history's greatest human beings for a nut, it shows who the real nuts are. Being despised by Leftist psychiatrists puts GWB in very good company indeed.

"Self-impressed protesters who wanted to 'shut down' the BIO 2004 conference in San Francisco last week could take a lesson in morality and courage from Emeryville's Chiron Corp. The protesters engaged in their cheap stunts knowing there would be no real consequences for their actions -- not in San Francisco. Chiron employees, on the other hand, endured personal abuse and vicious harassment for months because they believe their work to develop new medicines and therapies is too important to abandon. The harassment began in 2003, when animal-rights activists began targeting Chiron because it had contracted with the animal-research firm, Huntingdon Life Sciences. The campaign -- which included yelling obscenities in front of workers' homes, following workers' children and jamming employees' home phone lines -- is the handiwork of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, an animal-rights group dedicated to shutting down Huntingdon for using animals in research."

Interesting that France still has influential Fascists who seem to have been lifted straight out of the 1930s. Variously called "villieristes" and "sovereignists", they are socialists who are also strong nationalists -- just like Hitler and Mussolini. They have at least one representative in the EU parliament -- best known for proposing that France give nuclear weapons to the Arabs to "even things up" between them and the Jews. Hitler would have loved it. See here for more.

Churchill once advocated using gas on rebellious Iraqi tribesmen, but what gas was he talking about? Another Leftie lie exposed.

Tribal morality: "Why do nice people do evil acts? In the old South, White folks who were polite to their families and neighborhoods would gang up to hang innocent Blacks. Germans who listened to classical music and were kind to their children would turn around and send Jewish children to death camps. Why? It is because human beings compartmentalize their thinking. We mentally divide the world into categories with different standards. There is a human propensity to put our own tribe into the human category, to be treated with politeness and respect, and to put an enemy or a perceived inferior group or those who do disapproved acts into a separate category, 'them.'"

"human beings discriminate every day. You do it, and I do it. And it doesn't mean we're close-minded. It means we care about the situations we put ourselves into. We choose our friends carefully, for example. For whatever reason -- be it the way they're dressed, the way they smell, the way they walk, or whatever -- we choose not to befriend a large majority of the people we meet. That's discrimination. Maybe they should sue?"

Oliver Kamm had a recent post that made me laugh. This is the whole of it: "On my way home last night I noticed that my local cinema is showing a film entitled "The Prince and Me". I have no idea what it's about, but me am incredulous and appalled." He is obviously more of a stickler for Latin grammar than I am. For those who take an interest in British politics, Kamm seems to be the scourge of Britain's most wishy-washy political party -- the Lib-Dems. We have a similar political party in Australia -- the Australian Democrats -- so I sympathize.

The new N-word among the Democrats: "Just the mention of defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, attorney general John Ashcroft or vice-president Dick Cheney will set diatribes in motion. But if you really want to see them in a rage wait until the Bushwhacking stops and someone admits that they voted for Ralph Nader, the anti-corporate crusader, in the 2000 presidential elections. The N-word should not be spoken in polite liberal company. Once his name has been uttered all camaraderie and bonhomie evaporate as readily as if the miscreant had confessed to relieving himself in the host's sink. There is a ready-made vocabulary Democrats use to describe how they feel about George Bush. When it comes to Nader, and by association those who voted for him, words fail them."

Shaun Bourke has posted the following comment on Catallaxy: "Over many years I have found that,in relation to homosexuality,women can be found in basically two camps. Those that are happily married and those that are not or are divorced. It is in the latter group that you will find the most profound approval of homosexuality" He would like to know if anybody else has noticed that.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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

Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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 June, 2004

SOME INCONVENIENT HISTORY

Was it conservatives or progressives who were responsible for the Tuskegee experiment? "The Tuskegee syphilis study ranks almost with slavery and lynching as a symbol of America's racist past. There is probably not one black American adult who does not know-or thinks he knows-about an experiment from the 1930s in which government health authorities deliberately withheld treatment from 400 black syphilitics just to see what would happen to them.... Anthropologist Richard Shweder of the University of Chicago has just published a detailed analysis of the Tuskegee study in which he shows that virtually every popular assumption about it is false. (Tuskegee re-examined, January 8, 2004) The study was undertaken by "progressives" who wanted to fight a disease that afflicted many blacks, it had the full support of black medical authorities to the end, and- most important- it probably caused no harm to the 140 men (not 400) who took part.

Windschuttle has posted a recent summary of the history wars. He gives many examples of blatant and deliberate lies by Leftist Australian historians who try their hardest to foster white guilt. Just two excerpts: "Lyndall Ryan cites the Hobart Town Courier as a source for several stories about atrocities against Aborigines in 1826. However, that newspaper did not begin publication until October 1827 and the other two newspapers of the day made no mention of these alleged killings" and "Lloyd Robson claims the settler James Hobbs in 1815 witnessed Aborigines killing 300 sheep at Oyster Bay and the next day the 48th Regiment killed 22 Aborigines in retribution. However, it would have been difficult for Hobbs to have witnessed this in 1815 because at the time he was living in India. Moreover, the first sheep did not arrive at Oyster Bay until 1821" What total crooks Leftist historians are!

Any Leftist will tell you that the Nazis were really bad guys compared to those lovable well-intentioned Soviets. The truth however appears to be very different. Read this account of how the Nazis surrendered to the wives of imprisoned Jews in Berlin itself. A public demonstration against Nazi policy actually caused the top Nazi leadership to release Jews who had been destined for the concentration camps! Sad though it is, Nazism was actually popular in Germany -- as any number of pre-war writers (such as Roberts and Heiden) attest -- and the Nazis were keen not to jeopardize that. Any idea that Stalin cared for public opinion in Russia is merely laughable. Unlike Stalin, Hitler came to power by democratic means (details here) rather than revolution and so started out as a rather extreme democratic Leftist rather than a Marxist. Once he escaped democratic restraints, however, he, like Stalin, showed what all Leftists are really made of.

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ELSEWHERE

Money can buy happiness: "Two studies released yesterday shed new light on the importance of economic circumstances, and undermine earlier findings that poor people are just as happy as the rich. Money doesn't buy Happiness - or Does It? by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, at Melbourne University, shows that when wealth - not just income - is measured, the rich are indeed happier than the poor. Earlier research that focused only on income found very little difference in the reported happiness of high-income and low-income people. Mark Wooden, the study's co-author, said: "This has led some people to say money is not that important, relative to other things." However, when people's assets were taken into account - the value of their houses, cars, art works, even stamp collection - a different picture emerged."

Good stuff! "I have long written about how adherence to the Modern Liberal philosophy requires a childish mentality. The grown up mind, forged in the real world, quickly dismisses the infantile "tooth fairy" mentality of the left where riches are bestowed to one, without labor or merit, in their sleep. Those who mature soon grow out of the Democrats' disdain for personal responsibility, seeing it as more befitting an angry teenager looking for someone to blame than grown men and women seeking to make a better life and a better world.... Anyone who has raised a teenager recognizes the ridiculous hyperbole that has become the standard fare in stump speeches and personal appearances by today's Democratic Party "leaders... Today's Democrats, like small children, see only their own immediate gratification and the chance to advance their short-term personal wants." (Via Dick McDonald)

I have just done an extensive revision of my big monograph on the motivations of Leftists. I have greatly expanded my coverage of the claim that Leftist intellectuals suffer from a milder form of a psychiatric condition known as psychopathy. The best bit is here.

Appeals court reinstates petition drive against affirmative action: "Giving a boost to the beleaguered campaign to end the use of race in government hiring and university admissions decisions, the state Court of Appeals has reinstated a petition drive aimed at placing the issue before Michigan voters. A unanimous three-judge appeals panel, in a seven-page opinion dated June 11 and obtained Saturday by the Free Press, overturned a March ruling in Ingham County Circuit Court that the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative was improperly worded and likely to confuse voters."

A column here by David Brooks points out that America's highly educated elite is divided between the professions and the business managers, with the former usually Democrat and the latter usually Republican. He omits to say that both are graduates of roughly the same universities. So how come the first lot have stayed true to what they learnt at university and the business-people have not? Easy. It's a lot harder life in business -- dog eat dog -- so illusions don't last long. It's yet another example of how experience teaches conservatism.

Even the NYT has never managed to muster much enthusiasm for John Kerry. But they do have some good advice for him here: "For months, Senator John Kerry has been among the loudest in the chorus criticizing President Bush for not persuading our allies to shoulder more of the Iraq burden. But now it is time for Mr. Kerry to start admonishing the allies.... One way to persuade voters that he is presidential is for Mr. Kerry to put the country's interests ahead of his own, narrowly construed. Turning his considerable critical attention, however briefly, onto the failings of others (besides President Bush's) would be a great place to start."

After last week's debacle (which I did not think worth linking to) Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its usual convenient range of good posts all in one place.

Wicked Thoughts has a post suggesting that Ronald Reagan was a gambler.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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 June, 2004

AFRICA

Amazing! "Amid chronic fuel, food and currency shortages and a contracting economy, Zimbabwe has secretly placed a 200m order for fighter jets and military vehicles from China". While millions of Zimbabweans are going hungry at the same time, of course. Obviously a Leftist government! And how will they pay for it? Maybe with all the farms they have just "nationalized" somehow?

There is a graphic description here of the disaster that is socialism in Ethiopia today. It was a totally foreseeable disaster and is a perfect example of the fact that Leftists are not even interested in thinking ahead -- something also seen in the Muslim-appeasers of today's "antiwar" American Left. Only the instant gratification of appearing praiseworthy in the present matters to them. A small excerpt: "Abraham Tekelgne's family couldn't have been happier when a socialist government swept to power, seized the country's private farmland and allotted it to rural peasants... Today the family often gets by on one meal of toasted corn a day. Too poor to buy fertilizer and with few trees left to cut, they're not sure how they will make it another year... The stakes are highest in Ethiopia, where the number of people dependent on international food aid is growing by 2 million a year"

William Shawcross on the current Darfur holocaust: "Since early last year, this vicious campaign has claimed an estimated 30,000 civilian lives; international aid agencies say that over 1.2m people have been displaced within Sudan and at least 120,000 have fled to neighbouring Chad, making Khartoum's conduct a grave threat to regional as well as internal stability. USAID estimates that another 350,000 could die due to the desperate situation in Darfur. In short, the government of Sudan is conducting a scorched-earth, near-genocidal war against its own citizens. Again... But the time for the international community to stand by and hope is long past. The government-supported atrocities in Darfur are too horrific and widespread to ignore. The roaring silence from the Arab League and the Muslim world over Darfur is inexcusable. Both the Arab aggressors and the black African victims are Muslims. So one might have expected to hear something from those quarters, at least a call from the former for Arab brethren to show restraint, if not condemnation from the latter of the massacre of Muslims. The European Union has not fared much better, offering weak words at best"

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USING RACE TO DESTROY EDUCATION

Dave Huber has another post up about the desperate twists and turns of the education authorities in Delaware. They do and say ANYTHING rather than admit that blacks do less well at school because blacks are different. To admit to any differences would take away one of their favourite propaganda tools -- the claim that all men are equal. The tragic thing is that blacks COULD do well at school if given the high-discipline environment that the Left are determined to deny them. But if you understand that hatred of other people's success is the real Leftist motive, what they do makes perfect sense. When they forcibly "integrate" blacks into low-discipline classes of white students, they destroy the education of BOTH blacks AND whites. Bravo! Well done!

In a rational system, both high and low discipline schools would be readily available and students would end up in one or the other according to which helped them most. And if it were mostly blacks who ended up in the high discipline schools, so what? Leftists once advocated that official policy should be colour-blind. Now they advocate the opposite. Which shows again what sort of principles and guiding philosophy they have: None. As long as they can use a policy to create havoc, they will.

There is a full exposition here of how Leftists use government to create and perpetuate racial discrimination, disharmony and disadvantage.

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ELSEWHERE

Another pack of lies in the "New York Times": This time about Australia. Australia is in the process of abolishing its major Aboriginal (black) organization (ATSIC) and the NYT explains that, predictably, as racism on the part Australia's conservastive Federal government. Why Australia's major party of the Left (the ALP) also supports abolition was not explained. The single word that explains it all was not even mentioned in the NYT: "corruption". ATSIC stank to high heaven of it -- to the point where it could not be ignored any longer. Government funding that went to ATSIC was routinely diverted into the private pockets of those running it and nothing seemed able to stop that. Abolition was the only option. What an utter rag the NYT has become. It's the Soviet propaganda machine of the 21st century.

More glories of socialized medicine: "A shocking 50 per cent of overseas trained doctors admit they need training in life support and clinical judgment. More than 1761 foreign-trained doctors were working in NSW last year and many of them have never passed the Australian Medical Council Exam to prove they meet Australian standards. The frightening admission has prompted the nation's GP training body to set up a special training program for them. There has been a massive 74 per cent increase in overseas trained doctors working in the state since 2000 as governments try to make up for a shortage of locally trained graduates".

But beat this: 23-year-old Joe Quinone of Colorado Springs, Colorado, has been walking around for 2 1/2 months without the right side of his skull. It was removed during emergency surgery and cannot be put back on until the two state agencies arguing over which should pay for the procedure work it out. In the meantime he's been walking around wearing a helmet, unable to drive and unable to work.

Boo hoo! for the Dimocrats: "U.S. companies are gearing up to create jobs at rates not seen since the height of the 1990s boom, a survey released on Tuesday showed"

Muslim terrorism was fairly easily halted in a less politically correct age. See here for how General Pershing did it in the Philippines. He took their 72 virgins away!

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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

Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never outgrown the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

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 June, 2004

BLACK ANGER AGAIN

I put up here on 5th an anecdote about the irrational hatred of the GOP by blacks. There is a similar story on Crispus. I gather that the author of it is black. Excerpt:

"On Saturday I had a very heated debate with a close friend and her husband. My friend claimed that the 1980s were "the worst decade for black folks ever!" She then went into a tirade about Reagan and linked it to the current Bush, saying they were the worst presidents ever for black folks....

I brought up Thomas Jefferson's "I hate slavery but I still own and rape my slaves" stance as a key example of hypocrisy which trumps modern presidents. I brought up how liberal social programs have harmed black communities, and that we must return to our old-school personal responsibility ethic. My friend then proceeded to shout me down (can liberals ever have a civil discussion, I asked her?), called me "classist" and then abruptly ended the conversation saying that we should never discuss politics again. It got so heated that she pulled rank when I calmly disputed her points, saying "This is my house and I won't tolerate such crazy comments in it (she did apologize yesterday).

I put stuff in context and surely being free and middle-class (which is most black Americans) beats being enslaved and poor. I thought conservatives were over the top when they said that liberal thought is totalitarian when it comes to other viewpoints, but more and more I'm seeing it. Mind you, I have mixed opinions about Ronald Reagan (which I'll outline later) but liberals just can't allow common sense to overcome their hatred".

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

The American economy recovers - as predicted August last year I predicted that America's employment rate would start picking up within six months or so. I also stated thatthe productivity surge indicated recovery. The results are in: President Bush is on a winner
Patriotism and the Abu Ghraib paintings Colwell deliberately painted American troops as a bunch of sadistic Nazis. His paintings were not an anti-war statement but a cowardly attack on the US and its military
Why oil taxes are no solution to oil imports The Iraq war, troubles in Saudi Arabia and rising oil prices has led some folks to conclude that the road to energy independence can be found through state-sponsored higher energy price
The UN sex for food scandal and Abu Ghraib UN 'peacekeeping forces' in the Congo have been raping and impregnating girls as young as thirteen years old in exchange for food
Rudyard Kipling's stirring reply to the left's loathing of the US military Rudyard Kipling's answer to the leftists who hate and despise the military
Hunger in Israel: Never Thought I'd See the Day Israel's growing poverty is, in part, also due to the constant attempts by Western countries to place boycotts on Israeli products
A Marxist economist screws up on wages and living standards Frank Stilwell, a socialist professor of economics at the University of Sydney, is another graphic example of the left's total inability to learn from history, particularly economic history

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

Reuters can't do arithmetic: With reference to the poor showing of Tony Blair's Labour Party in the EU elections, Reuters says: "Voters punished the prime minister for waging war in Iraq". They also report that Labour got 23% of the vote, Conservatives got 27% and the Independence Party got 16%. But ALL THREE of those parties are in favour of the Iraq war. So 66% of Britons voted for pro-war parties! Very different from the lies peddled by Reuters! But it is what we have come to expect of Reuters, of course.

I am still steaming a little about the Leftist claim (summarized recently by Oliver Kamm) that Reagan's antinuclear stance made him a Leftist. At least in part, that denial springs from the conceit that only the Left are "antiwar" or "antinuclear". So if Reagan was antinuclear he must have been a Leftist. That is a total misrepresentation of conservatism and really is the most offensive arrogance. No person in his right mind, Left or Right, wants war, particularly a nuclear war. The only difference between Leftists and Rightists over the issue was the means adopted to avoid war. Conservatives had the guts to believe that there was some alternative to surrendering to tyranny and undertook the arduous task of deterring war through strength -- which in the end brought about the marvellous achievement for all humanity of both destroying the threat of nuclear war and destroying the world's most threatening tyranny as well. The only idea that Leftists had in the matter was surrender -- or "unilateral disarmament", as they called it. They probably rather fancied themselves as Soviet Commissars in a Communist State anyway. I have put up a fuller account of the defects in the Leftist claim here

A former deputy Prime Minister of Sweden says that European anti-Americanism and ant-Zionism are just the modern versions of old-fashioned Jew hatred. See here

Pammy Anderson backs PETA: "Pam went on the attack today with nothing in her corner but words -- and the letterhead of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. 'When you take a multimillion-dollar endorsement from a company,' she wrote Earnhardt (in a letter released to the media), 'you must also take some responsibility for the company's practices.' We could make the same point -- and a few others -- about Pammy's relationship with PETA. Anderson's Hollywood handlers might want to advise her that hooking up with a group that funds violent extremists, consistently opposes life-saving medical research, and cavalierly traumatizes millions of children might not be as good a career move as she thinks."

No free speech in Britain! "A 71 year old man has been banned from driving for warning other motorists of a speed trap up the road -- even though he wasn't in his car at the time! He was also ordered to pay 364 pounds in costs. Stuart Harding stood on the A325 near Farnborough [UK] with a sign saying 'Speed Trap -- 300 yards ahead.' He had stood there on previous occasions warning motorists to slow down because of a car boot sale up the road which generated a lot of pedestrian traffic. Police however took exception when Harding warned of their speed trap."

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never outgrown the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

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 June, 2004

INTELLECTUALS AT WORK

Andrew Bolt points to the deplorable record of siding with tyranny that intellectuals have. It wouldn't have anything to do with intellectuals themselves wanting to be tyrants, would it? Excerpt: "We are reminded of the three wars America and its friends have fought in the past 60 years against totalitarianism -- the fascism of the Nazis, the communism of the Soviet Union, and the Islamic fascism sponsored by regimes such as Iran's. And, each time, which class of people in the West tended to side with these enemies of humanity, in thought, deed or omission? Who? The intellectuals of the Left -- the folk who contrast the messy world of free people with the disciplined perfection of steel dreams and paper plans, and find freedom ugly. Before World War II, many sophisticates in Britain and France urged against confronting Hitler. It would just goad him, they said. And didn't he have reasonable claims?"

Black leader slams do-gooder elitism: "Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has accused social justice advocate Father Frank Brennan of expecting Aborigines to eschew materialism, even though his own relatives are "successful and high-earning lawyers and professionals". Calling Father Brennan "part of an old Catholic, Labor social-justice ... tradition", Mr Pearson said the Jesuit lawyer was part of a lobby that believed Aborigines should not engage in capitalist society "unless they have found solutions to all of the dilemmas and problems of materialism, individualism and secularism"."

Another disgusting Leftist bishop: "Three months after Ian George was installed as Anglican Archbishop of Adelaide in June 1991, an Adelaide Hills priest was arrested on serious charges of gross indecency towards two boys. The Archbishop personally took charge of the case and spoke several times to the mother of the boys. On one occasion, she claims Dr George told her the priest was "just trying to be one of the boys" BUT, we also read of the bishop: "He was a leading advocate of women joining the priesthood and reconciliation with the Aboriginal community. He was vocal on the plight of asylum seekers. He spoke with intelligence, offering thoughtful and constructive comment on the implications of war with Iraq". In other words, like Leftists generally, he was only interested in "the big picture". Individuals were merely a nuisance.

Arrogant judges: "Since the spate of gang rape trials exposed the fact the courts are treating rape victims like cannon fodder, there has been an outbreak of Brahmanism from within the legal profession - a self-appointed higher caste, with a sense that any robust criticism of the courts or, God forbid, the judiciary, from outside is, by definition, ill-informed and inappropriate.... Again and again in recent months, judges have shown a willingness to throw out trials or grant appeals on grounds that appear suffocatingly narrow or excessively technical. Underpinning all these decisions is a tacit belief that jurors, non-lawyers, are malleable and impressionable...."

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ELSEWHERE

A good reply to Leftist critics of Reagan: "Almost ALL of Reagan's policies were approved by a Democrat-dominated Congress!" A good example of Reagan humour: To some question about contradictions in the administration, he replied, "Yes, sometimes our right hand doesn't know what our far right hand is doing."

Dick McDonald has just put up a substantial excerpt from an article in the WSJ by Milton Friedman. Friedman shows that, while Reagan did not manage to cut the overall size of government, he did bring its growth to a screaming halt. Friedman was of course a friend and fan of the Gipper and concludes: "But few people in human history have contributed more to the achievement of human freedom than Ronald Wilson Reagan"

See here for the latest on the official results of the EU voting. It looks like a major upset in Britain, with the new anti-EU party likely to get more votes than one of the major parties. And the German socialists look like getting a bloody nose too. Background here.

Russia sides with GWB: ""I am deeply convinced that President Bush's political adversaries have no moral right to attack him over Iraq because they did exactly the same," Putin said Thursday at the G8 conference in Georgia. "It suffices to recall Yugoslavia". Now why was THAT not all over the news?

Hardly anybody believes big TV now: "Democrats are more than twice as likely (34 percent) to believe CBS News as Republicans (15 percent).

A recent poll of college students found that only 42 percent backed Kerry, with 30 percent for Bush. After all that brainwashing! And many of them will be voting for Bush anyway, though not willing to admit it. "Where have we failed?", the Leftist professoriate must be asking.

An interesting article in World Tribune: "The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council on new findings that could help trace the whereabouts of Saddam's missile and WMD program". There is now clear evidence that sophisticated missiles were sent out of Iraq before US forces took control so it is also clear that failure to find WMDs in Iraq means nothing.

You've got to laugh. At the recent D-day celebrations "Schroeder thanked "France and its allies" and "Russia" for --in the words of CNN's Christiane Amanpour--"liberating" Germany from the Nazis. No mention of America". The Europeans grow more pathetic by the day.

But it's for the good of "the people" of course: "A North Korean official attending an inter-Korean economic meeting in Pyongyang confirmed that mobile phones were banned from May 25"

Good to see that one of the parents of students killed in the Columbine massacre did not turn into an anti-gun nut: Read his comments here. He blames the anti-Christian elite for the tragedy instead. I myself think that nobody can conclude anything from what two mental-cases did.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never outgrown the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

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 June, 2004

PRAGMATISM

In my recent comment on the Leftist claim that Reagan was a peacenik, I pointed out that his negotiations with Gorbachev over nuclear disarmament were in no way Leftist-inspired but rather an example of good conservative pragmatism -- something Gorbachev himself perceived. It is interesting that Kesler's survey of American conservatism in the 20th century also identifies American conservatives generally as being overwhelmingly and repeatedly pragmatic and little concerned with or unified by broad theoretical systems -- though Kesler, as a believer in natural-law morality, deplores that. Excerpts:

"it is possible to have conservatives without having a unified conservative movement. Indeed, this was the situation in America before the mid-1950s. If it is not quite the plight of conservatives today, it may soon be again... Meyer's fusionism thus missed many of the hard questions about morality and politics.... The overwhelming practical imperative was to resist liberalism at home and defeat Communism abroad, and it would have been wrong to try to insist on other principles or conditions for such a necessary alliance... More and more, conservatism lacks a common message or focus, and the education it offers citizens and politicians is splintered into myriad discussions of specific policies."

The word "pragmatic" however, is a rather broad term and it could be held to imply a total lack of principles. I think that Reagan himself is the best demonstration that that is not so. His was the most principled pragmatism one could imagine. Everything he did was calculated to get the best possible deal for the individual. His goals and principles could not have been clearer or more firmly-founded. And who would deny that getting both the USA and the USSR to scrap all nuclear weapons would have been a tremendous victory for the individual? As a true conservative, Reagan had guiding values but he was very flexible about the means of attaining them. Conservatives go by what works but they go by what works in the service of the individual.

Another point I explore elsewhere is that the association between love of individual liberty and pragmatism is no accident. The two attitudes are in fact related.

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ELSEWHERE

Margaret Thatcher's eulogy to the Gipper was brief but very much to the point. See here. Excerpt: "Others prophesied the decline of the West; he inspired America and its allies with renewed faith in their mission of freedom. Others saw only limits to growth; he transformed a stagnant economy into an engine of opportunity. Others hoped at best for an uneasy cohabitation with the Soviet Union; he won the Cold War not only without firing a shot, but also by inviting enemies out of their fortress and turning them into friends".

Like Iain Murray, I was pleased that the funeral was an Anglosphere affair -- with two of the four eulogists not being American. And nobody even thought to question it that I know of.

I have just learned that Reagan once said this: "I learned the value of prayer. My mother told me that everything in life happened for a purpose. She said all things were part of God's plan, even the most disheartening setbacks, and in the end, everything worked out for the best". In the circumstances I am rather glad I said what I did about belief in predestination two days ago. (Link via Petrified Truth).

There is a reply here from several black Americans to the scurrilous claim on ABC News to the effect that Reagan was bad for blacks. Reagan was good for Americans of ALL races.

But Leftist fruitcake Jimmy Breslin's comment on Reagan's funeral can only make one laugh. Breslin said: ""His whole weeklong funeral is cheap, utterly distasteful American publicity." Breslin sure knows how to make himself look a fool.

Larry Elder has an amusing recap of the dumb things the Left had to say about Reagan whilst he was President. And they called Reagan dumb! That Reagan had read Bastiat, von Mises, Hayek and Hazlitt when they were still little-known shows that he was a considerable intellectual, in fact -- just not a Leftist one. And the worth of that intellectual background showed in the success of his economic policies. Had Reagan been reading Miliband, Gramsci, Althusser or any of the other Marxist theologians so favoured by Leftist intellectuals, his policies would have been the usual dismal socialist failure.

There is a fabulous gallery of Reagan photographs here. Ignore the anti-Reagan rant someone has also posted on the site.

Michael Totten says that the Peoples Republic of Berkeley has now become the Islamic Republic of Berkeley. No change of principles was needed, of course. Leftists have the same principles that Stalin had: None.

Nader hypocrisy again: "So let's get this straight: While the workers Nader claims to fight for were braving the New York cold to shame Cisco and other jobs-shipping multinationals, Nader was by the fire polishing up a speech calling such firms 'unpatriotic' -- all the while holding up to half a million dollars in Cisco stock."

About time: "Employers are sick and tired of graduates who cannot function in the workplace, and university funding should be linked to ensuring students complete a graduate skills test, Education Minister Brendan Nelson has warned. In an interview with The Australian, Dr Nelson has flagged plans to force universities to publish the results of the tests, revealing how many of their graduates are ready to go to work.

A forthright summary from Peter Hitchens in his very pessimistic commentary on the EU and its "third way" politics: "it is quite possible for capitalism and socialism to coexist, provided you abolish liberty"

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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

Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never outgrown the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

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 June, 2004

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE GIPPER

It has been a sad week for me. I loved everything I ever saw or heard of Ronald Reagan and the thought that he is now gone forever is deeply upsetting to me. It must be the sentimental Celtic component in my ancestry but the tears have never been far away in the last few days. When he was in the White House I felt that he was MY President too -- even though I am a 5th generation Australian and live half a world and nearly a whole time zone away from America. So I offer below some brief thoughts about him and what he was -- to coincide roughly with his being laid to rest in his final place in his beloved America

Reagan had the strong, independent psychological makeup that Leftists lack: "I think they broke the mold when they made Ronnie. He had absolutely no ego, and he was very comfortable in his own skin; therefore, he didn't feel he ever had to prove anything to anyone." --Nancy Reagan. And: "He was hated for precisely the same reasons he was loved. He had convictions and made those without them look weak. ... He knew who he was before he came to office; he did not need the office to complete him." --Cal Thomas

And Eamonn Butler (post of 7th) noted Reagan's lack of egotism too: "The pompous conceit of the media Establishment is parried by Reagan's own epitaph on his administration, which reveals his own complete lack of both pomposity and conceit, tempering his pride in having changed minds and changed events: "Men and women across America for eight years did the work that brought America back. My friends, we did it. We weren't just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger, we made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all.""

But Jeff Jacoby sums up Ronald Reagan's humility best. A small excerpt: "But one trait has gone largely unmentioned: His remarkable humility.... But if no man was his better, neither was he the better of any man. That instinctive sense of the equality of all Americans never left him -- not even when he was the one with fame and power. I don't think I have ever heard a story about Reagan in which he came across as arrogant or supercilious. In a number of reminiscences this week, former staffers have described what it was like to work for the president. Several have recalled how, even when they were at the bottom of the pecking order, he never made them feel small or unworthy of notice. To the contrary: He noticed them, talked to them, made them feel special. Reagan climbed as high as anyone in our age can climb. But it wasn't ego or a craving for honor and status that drove him, and he never lost his empathy for ordinary Americans -- or his connection with them"

A Leftist who grew up speaks (excerpts) : "When I was a young professor at the University of California in the late sixties I despised Governor Reagan, the more fool I... Later I read the Austrian free market economists, and realized two things: one, that they had essentially won the argument with the socialists, both on the theoretical level and on the level of practical results; and two, that Reagan had realized this twenty or thirty years earlier, and it was I, the socialist, who had been the pseudo-intellectual, and not he.... Those who never grow up in our society always blame our own responsible officials when something goes wrong. Reagan taught us to place the blame where it belonged, on the enemy, and to make peace with them as our enemies -- without firing a shot, as Margaret Thatcher put it.... The Europeans and intellectuals thought Reagan was brain dead; but he was Old Possum: he was only playing brain dead... Reaganomics were likewise just a matter of being adult. The child lives in a world of gift.. ..But the eternal children in our society refused, and still refuse, to accept that they will die. Their anguish at the cost of the Iraq war is the great symptom of that refusal, of the inability to grow up. There should be no costs, they feel; when we were children there were no costs, in a socialist society there would be no costs...."

Further to my comment yesterday that ideals are not ideology and that Reagan showed true conservative pragmatism rather than an ideologist's dogmatism, I note that Gorbachev saw that too. He commented in the New York Times: "Reagan was a man of the right. But, while adhering to his convictions, with which one could agree or disagree, he was not dogmatic; he was looking for negotiations and cooperation"

A good Reagan saying: "I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress." The 1982 speech in which Reagan foresaw the Soviet system ending on the "ash heap of history" is here. And how can I, as a libertarian conservative, go past this Reagan quote: "If you analyze it, I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism."

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REAGAN'S CRITICS

With reference to the politicians and media types who despised Reagan once but who now are speaking well of him, Armavirumque is pretty acerbic. It says that they were either "fools then or dishonest now".

The current mainstream Leftist line about Reagan seems to be that his triumphs were all due either to accident or just his irresistable personal charm. Ann Coulter rebuts that by pointing out how wide, deep and resolute his conservatism was -- both in word and deed -- and noting how much the Left hated him when he was in office.

Another lame put-down that is coming from the Left at the moment (e.g. Yglesias) says that Reagan in fact showed the impossibility of the conservative agenda by failing to cut the overall size of government. What that failure in fact shows, of course is that Reagan couldn't do everything by himself. He had to get what he could from Congress. He got an amazing amount in some ways and very little in others. No matter which party is nominally in control of Congress, it is an essentially corrupt body that thrives on the art of the deal -- and the loser in every deal is the taxpayer. It is only Congress that can cut back the size of government and there is no sign that it will. And, like Reagan, GWB has bigger (foreign) fish to fry rather than wasting time on trying to make Congress do something that is against its fundamental nature. U.S. Congressmen are very good at keeping their jobs and they largely do it by robbing Peter (the taxpayer) to pay Paul (their supporter groups) and that is not going to change any time soon.

I mentioned a couple of Leftist Reagan-hate sites recently. Wallace of "Big Gold Dog" has drawn my attention to the autobiographical details of the people behind one of the sites. Beth Henry - a "contributing editor" to Axis of Logic describes her beliefs thus: "Democracy is a word politicians use as camouflage for any number of nasty power grabs, murderous campaigns abroad, and capitalist swinery and larceny. Patriotism is a ridiculous concept, designed to separate people of different nations and races, and cause them to objectify one another so that they will be more willing to kill and be killed for the ruling class". Sounds like straight Karl Marx to me. Leftists will never learn.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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

Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never outgrown the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

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 June, 2004

WAS OUR RON A PEACENIK?

British blogger Oliver Kamm is a moderate Leftist who supports the Iraq war -- much like his Prime Minister. In his postings of 7th he has an interesting survey of the claim that Ronald Reagan turned into a peacenik in the latter part of his Presidency. The claim is not as ridiculous as it seems. Reagan definitely did have the very idealistic aim of de-nuclearizing the world. And he went close to achieving it. He and Gorbachev at Reykjavik actually agreed to scrap all nuclear weapons on both sides. It was only Reagan's refusal to scrap his missile defence program that scuppered the agreement. And it may also be noted that Reagan was no warmonger. The overseas military operations he initiated were tiny compared to what his three successors as President have done and tiny compared to the great but fumbled intervention in Vietnam. Reagan's concentration was on building up American strength at home rather than on intervening abroad.

Like various others in that small subsection of the Left which takes a genuine interest in reality, Kamm takes all this as evidence that Reagan was as much a Leftist as a Rightist. That shows very little understanding of conservatism, however, and of American conservatism in particular. Reagan's "America first" strategy is in fact a good example of the isolationism that ruled among American conservatives right up until Sept. 11, 2001. American conservatives have always wanted to let the rest of the world to go to hell in its own way and it was DEMOCRAT presidents that got America into both world wars, Korea and Vietnam. America has to be under serious threat for American conservatives to take any notice of the rest of the world at all. It was only Saddam's serious threat to oil supplies that got George Bush Senior into the first Gulf war and he pulled out as soon as that threat was removed. It was only when 9/11 showed beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt that America was under serious and lasting threat from implacable Islamic hatred that George Bush II began his interventions in the Islamic world.

And Reagan's refusal at Reyjavik to abandon missile defence is a perfect example of conservatism. Whatever else it may be, conservatism from Burke onwards has been cautious and Reagan's desire to have a defence in case nuclear disarmament did not completely succeed was clearly caution -- and caution that he rigorously insisted on above all else. There was nothing in that of the unilateral disarmament nonsense that the peaceniks of the Left were always preaching at that time. As always, of course, Reagan himself summed it up best in his well-known maxim: "Trust but verify". There was idealism there indeed: Very high ideals. But it was never allowed to overcome good conservative caution.

In the end, however Kamm does arrive at an essential insight: "My own interpretation of this idiosyncratic record is that, having established his anti-Communist credentials, Reagan's 'soft diplomacy' approach worked well at exactly the time it was needed. It was puzzling, but effective, and probably no one else could have done it". In other words, Reagan was no rigid ideologue. Ideals are not ideology. Ideology and grand theories are for Leftists. Conservatives are pragmatic and flexible. Conservatives have ideals but in pursuing those ideals they go by what works. And our Ron showed that flexibility and pragmatism to brilliant effect.

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"IT WAS MEANT TO BE"

Keith Burgess-Jackson had a post recently which questioned why people say "It was meant to be" or "It happened for a reason". Such expressions appear to be versions of the original Calvinist doctrine of predestination, which was a founding doctrine of the Presbyterian Church and which is also given guarded approval in the 39 "Articles of Religion" of the Church of England (See article 17). The puzzle, then, is not that Christians believe it but that others do. "It was meant to be" was certainly a common expression in my generally irreligious but nominally Protestant family as I was growing up and, on occasions when it was particularly heartfelt, it would be expanded to: "It was all laid down long before we were ever thought of". And I know many other people of Protestant background but only the vaguest of personal religious convictions who make similar utterances with some regularity. Why? Does it really indicate religious belief? I don't think that it always does. When I ask people "who laid it down?" or "who meant it to be?", I not infrequently get a denial that it was the doing of God. What I think happens among unbelievers is that they perceive a non-random patterning of events in their lives and instinctively feel that there are unknown forces or influences at work (generally beneficial ones) which have brought that patterning about. It reflects a sense that something was inevitable for some reason or at least part of a larger whole. I myself have never had the slightest twitch of predestinarian thinking or feeling but many good and wise people certainly see such patterning in their lives all the time.

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ELSEWHERE

Now how did THEY get there? "UN experts have found 20 engines used in Iraqi Al Samoud 2 missiles in a Jordanian scrap yard, along with other equipment that could be used to produce weapons of mass destruction".

This story of social worker Fascism should alarm every parent. They are now saying that it is child abuse if you do not give unruly children psychiatric drugs! They are getting more intrusive and dictatorial by the day.

China Hand has a post up about the state of motor racing in China today. He thinks that they still have a lot to learn. China Hand was something of a sportscar racer himself in his youth. He and I and a certain journalistic person shared a house in Sydney at the time. I was the only one of the three who was not a car-buff. I have a very utilitarian view of cars. When (around 1970) I bought myself a new Mazda 1300 -- a small, cheap Japanese car -- my purchase was greeted with some derision and my explanations of the virtues of the vehicle were scorned. The favourite magazine of the other two at the time was Australia's leading car magazine -- called "Wheels". When the next edition of "Wheels" came out however, it named its "Car of the Year". Which was? The Mazda 1300! So what did the others do to cope with this calamitous event? They hid the magazine so that I wouldn't find out! It was only years later that they owned up. Fun!

There is a rather delightful advertisement here that is not allowed to be put up near British mosques. One of my female readers comments: "If it will offend enough of them perhaps it should be displayed prominently near all mosques. It may even encourage them to decide it is better to go back home. Or perhaps it could be used at Abu Ghraib for further torture - only 4 not 72 and probably not vestal!"

I liked this comment about the BBC from a French blogger: (post of May 12th) "Can somebody please inform Sebastian Usher from the Ba'athist Broadcast Corporation that Islamist means by definition radical follower of Islam and that consequently, writing with insistence "radical Islamist" is nothing but a tiresome exercise in redundancy?.. it's as superfluous as associating 'collectivist' with 'Communists'... or 'corrupt' with 'French politician'."

Good news for Australia's conservative government: "Australia's unemployment rate fell to a 23-year low in May, despite a surprising fall in the number of people in work during the month."

This new Anti-Chomsky site is good at exposing the sly deceptions of our Noam -- a man who uses his undoubtedly great cleverness to obscure the truth rather than reveal it: The ultimate intellectual prostitute. And, as with prostitution generally, it pays him well.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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

Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never outgrown the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

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 June, 2004

THE LASTING REAGAN LEGACY

A good article here on how Reagan jolted the entire American political spectrum rightwards. Just a few excerpts:

"American politics today is evenly split into two camps, the Republican Reaganites and the Democratic Reaganites. Start with economics.... it is the Democratic Reaganites (like Robert Rubin) who today warn against fiscal policies that threaten to raise interest rates again. Reagan railed against the federal deficit-his screeds are echoed almost word for word by the Democratic Reaganites these days. ... Reagan preached Supply Side Economics that combined basic themes of republicanism and efficiency. In terms of political ethics it reflected Grover Cleveland's dictum that unnecessary taxation is unjust taxation-it is a corruption and an evil. In the name of efficiency, supply siders argued that cutting taxes would permanently boost the economy by releasing entrepreneurial spirits. The Republican Reaganites of course hold faithfully to the creed. Most Democrats, like John Kerry, have accepted it. (Kerry says he will only raise taxes on the undeserving super-rich, thus neutralizing the idea that unnecessary taxes are a corruption.) ... Reagan's redefinition of welfare as corrupt and inefficient allowed the triumph of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in 1995, when they abolished the most egregious features that perpetuated a cycle of poverty and dependence. ....Reagan's judicial triumphs helped eventually to reverse the crime wave. After getting blown apart by the way Michael Dukakis mishandled the explosive crime issue in 1988, Democrats sought safety under the Reaganite umbrella. Today they nominate tough prosecutors like Kerry and take credit for adding 100,000 new police officers, building hundreds of thousands of new prison cells, and keeping them filled so that our streets are no longer so fearsome.....

The Democratic Reaganites hail Reagan's achievement in ending the Cold War. In 1991 Jimmy Carter proclaimed, "Under President Ronald Reagan, the nation stayed strong and resolute and made possible the end of the Cold War." Just yesterday Kerry said Reagan had "shaped one of the greatest victories of freedom." ..... Reagan found just the right formula-Star Wars, combined with a massive increase in high tech warfare and a new offensive mission for American military might. Star Wars was funded and is going forward right now--all the major Democratic candidates this year supported it (including Howard Dean)"

Bruce Bartlett's comment:

"Ronald Reagan's economic achievements were among the most important of his presidency. When he took office in January 1981, the U.S. economy was suffering from many ills, including slow growth, high inflation, rising unemployment and unprecedented interest rates. Economists commonly believed that it would take decades to fix all these problems, if they could be fixed at all, and that the political cost of doing so was impossibly large for a democracy. Yet, well before the end of Reagan's presidency in 1988, he had succeeded in reversing all of the problems he inherited, putting the U.S. economy on the path of sound, noninflationary growth that continues to this day.....

As impressive as Reagan's tangible accomplishments in office were, his less tangible accomplishments were also significant. Together with Margaret Thatcher, he restored the idea that private individuals and businesses were the true sources of prosperity, not government. They gave legitimacy to free markets, open trade and sound money, in contrast to socialism, planning and price controls, which had dominated economic policy throughout the world for more than half a century. The renaissance of growth and freedom in Eastern Europe and the Third World owes much to Reagan's and Thatcher's discrediting of the socialist idea and their tireless defense of economic freedom."

I am glad to see that Conservative Truth agrees with me: "Ronald Wilson Reagan was America's greatest president. I am sure many people will disagree with me on this. Democrats will say that Kennedy was the greatest. Historians will argue for Washington or Lincoln. But in my humble opinion no president ever accomplished as much in as many areas for America as did Ronald Reagan".

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ELSEWHERE

Dick McDonald was a tax accountant during Ronald Reagan's Hollywood years so what he has to say about Reagan's personal motives for tax-cutting is more than a little interesting. It is the opposite of what is generally said and I have never heard it anywhere else. I think Instapundit should be on to this one. Dick also points out that Reagan had a economics degree. He was no simple cowboy. Again something rarely mentioned.

Yet more glories of socialized medicine: "Almost one-third of patients treated in emergency departments across Australia wait eight hours or more for a hospital bed to become available - a figure that has astonished doctors' advocates".

"Genocidal left-wing dictator Robert Mugabe, who has already turned Zimbabwe from a breadbasket into a basket case, announced today that he was taking all remaining farmland he hasn't already stolen. "There shall be no such thing as private land," decreed John Nkomo, minister of "land reform," who apparently never heard about similar catastrophic "reforms" imposed by the Soviet Union, Cambodia, Cuba and other communist dictatorships" A reader comments: "I wonder how much outcry will we see in the press regarding this horror story? And will the Greens and Democrats speak out? Where is the voice of St. Nelson Mandela and other African leaders who dare to equate Bush and Howard as Nazis??? Or the French and Germans who so resisted the liberation of the Iraqi people from Saddam?"

What a laugh: "Britain is pressing for the UN Security Council to take action to resolve the humanitarian crisis in Sudan's Darfur region, despite resistance from other council members"

The French make sense to me for once: "Bulky four-by-fours could be banned from clogging up the chic streets of Paris after a top official... described them as a polluting "caricature of a car" unsuited to city life. An anti-sports utility vehicle (SUV) resolution passed by the city council could lead to a ban on the popular vehicles in about 18 months.. "We have no interest in having SUVs in the city. They're dangerous to others and take up too much space." "

There is a very good post here about what the troops are doing on our behalf in Iraq. It may take a little time for all the excellent pictures to load but it is worth the wait.

New PID post on multiculturalism and the left : "There is some politically incorrect economic analysis of immigration here. There is evidence that the lower socio-economic groups are the losers when it comes to immigration. Is it any wonder the left wing parties in Australia in the late 19th century and early 20th century generally opposed immigration, most notably in their support of the "White Australia" policy?"

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never outgrown the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

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 June, 2004

CONSERVATISM

There have been two articles in the WSJ recently that look at how Ronald Reagan influenced our conception of conservatism. This one argues that Reagan's conservatism was something new, different and complex while this one argues that Reagan simply returned America to its roots. Both articles are worthy efforts in their way but the first one in particular mistakes what he had to do as a matter of practical politics for what his basic aims and values were. But why take anybody's word for what Reagan stood for when we have it all summed up by the man himself in his farewell speech as President? He makes it clear there that there is just ONE thing he stood for above all: Individual liberty. As he said:

"And in all of that time I won a nickname, "The Great Communicator." But I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: It was the content. I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn't spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation - from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in principles that have guided us for two centuries.... Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which "We the people" tell the government what it is allowed to do. "We the people" are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I've tried to do these past eight years.... I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.... We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom - freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs protection". I'll go with Reagan's definition of conservatism any time.

This blog is of course only one of many that is scathing in its criticisms of all forms of Leftism and so-called "liberalism". Unsurprisingly, however, Leftists do shoot back and one of their favourite tactics is to misrepresent conservatism in various ways. I have therefore put up here a brief survey of the historical and psychological evidence on what conservatism is -- thus giving, I hope, useful ammunition to combat Leftist lies and misrepresentations. And I can assure everyone that what Reagan stood for has been a consistent theme in Anglo-Saxon politics for over a thousand years. In the hope of drawing the article to the attention of as many as possible of my fellow bloggers, I have posted it on blogspot together with a big blogroll. I think most bloggers do track down mentions of themselves on other blogs so they should come across the article whilst doing that. Note that the permalinks for the article are gathered together at the end in the form of a clickable index.

And this is the sort of unreason conservatives are up against: "Ronald Reagan's biggest crimes were the bloody military actions to suppress social and political change in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Afghanistan"

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ISRAEL

I have just posted up here some of the "Middle Eastern Studies" that you will NOT hear about in most universities that claim to teach such a subject.

Readers of this blog will be well-aware that I am very pro-Israel, that I quote many Jewish writers, that I am derisive of antisemitism and that I do not link to antisemitic sites. People might assume from that that I am another one of the many Jewish bloggers. I am not. My background is Presbyterian and my ancestry is wholly from the British Isles. I am as WASPish as you can get and make no apologies for it. And I am not pro-Israel because I am pro-Jewish. I am pro-Jewish because I am pro-Israel. I think Israel is a wonder and a great triumph of the human spirit.

Arafat has been a war criminal for a long time: An excerpt from an article here: "When Yasser Arafat's Black September terrorist stormed the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum in March of 1973 and took US Ambassador Cleo Noel, Charge d'Affaires George Curtis Moore, and others hostage, Sirhan's release was one of their main demands. On March 2, 1973, after Nixon rejected that demand, Arafat was overheard and recorded by Israeli intelligence and the U.S. National Security Agency giving the code words for the execution of Noel, Moore, and Belgian diplomat Guy Eid, who were shot to death"

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ELSEWHERE

I am pleased to see that it will be an Anglosphere line-up at the Gipper's State funeral: "Former President George H.W. Bush, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney are scheduled to join President Bush in eulogizing Ronald Reagan at his state funeral service Friday"

This site notes that although the Tienanmen square massacre was a defeat for those who wanted immediate democracy in China, it sowed the seeds for great change nonetheless. Note this rather amazing comment: "China is rapidly changing on many fronts. China has increasingly allowed economic liberalization and privatization to proceed, effectively addressing some of the protesters original complaints. And today, even the Chinese edition of the free-market economist F. A. Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom, has become a best-seller."

"Reflecting on the way in which the law has been changed in America, the well-known Harvard Law Professor, Mary Ann Glendon, referred recently to "the flagrant disregard shown by judges and local officials for the rights of citizens to have a say in setting the conditions under which we live, work and raise our children. Many Americans - however they feel about same-sex marriage - are rightly alarmed that local officials are defying state law, and that four judges in one state took it upon themselves to make the kind of decision that our Constitution says belongs to us, the people, and to our elected representatives ... "Whether one is for, against or undecided about same-sex marriage, a decision this important ought to be made in the ordinary democratic way - through full public deliberation in the light of day, not by four people behind closed doors.""

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

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 June, 2004

My "farewell" picture for Ronald Reagan is not accessible at the moment. Too many people must have logged on and exceeded the download limit. I have now posted it here as well.


RONALD REAGAN

By the time of his death, there seems to have developed an overwhelmingly positive view of Ronald Reagan among that part of the American people who take an interest in politics. Even many former foes and critics grew to praise him. Only the hard Left resisted a recognition of his greatness as a President. So guess who is in the the camp of that small, narrow, extreme and embittered minority? The New York Times, of course. See here. Their progression from the newspaper of record to a narrow-minded and far-Left propaganda rag is now complete. And who more than Ronald Reagan deserved that traditional courtesy: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum? It was not a courtesy extended by the New York Times. One of my readers made the following comparison: "When conservative "pundits" were commenting on D-day, there was just no such thing coming from their direction - they praised Roosevelt for winning the war, but remained silent about Roosevelt's inept management of economics in the 1930s."

The Leftist hatred of Reagan has its amusing side though. I noted these two headings on one Leftist site: "Killer, Coward, Conman - Good Riddance, Ronnie Reagan" followed shortly thereafter by: "The Real Plague on Society is Bigotry". Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Intolerant preachers of tolerance are nothing new on the Left, however.

Of the many tributes to Ronald Reagan, one I liked particularly was from someone who knew him well from the early days -- Jack Wheeler: "There was a depth of character to his charisma that seemed bottomless. There was a solidity of integrity and humanity behind the dazzling charm that was matchless. You loved Ronald Reagan for his ideals and his complete fearlessness in advocating them - and you loved Ronald Reagan for the man, the human being, he was. Ronald Reagan was the single greatest American - American, not just American president - of the 20th century"

I have posted here a picture which is I believe an evocative farewell to the great man.

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ELSEWHERE

Reality creates another conservative: "The afternoon of the day I was attacked, I drove into the nearest town and bought a gun. In the report I had already filed with the police, I described the stranger who broke into the house while I was taking a shower. 'Go away,' I screamed. He told me to shut up. After a kicking, howling struggle, which took us from the bedroom to the living room, he ran off. He was gone, but I felt panicky and powerless. I had seen into the heart of reality and been permanently changed. What kind of fool would be nonviolent in a violent world? I laughed at my old liberalism, my empty prating about the evils of violence and the value of human life. The man who attacked me didn't have those scruples, and I had lost mine in a heartbeat. If I hadn't fought back violently, I believe I would have been raped, and I might have been killed."

A good D-Day meditation: "But, in a world where the only alternative is the moral posturing of arthritic international organisations such as the EU or the UN, the transatlantic partnership is the only force that can still offer freedom to distant lands. Then, as now, the Atlantic alliance in arms is an awesome thing".

No Pasaran notes that there was not one American flag on display in Paris during GWB's recent visit there in connection with the D-Day celebrations. French gratitude. Chirac said all the right things in his D-Day speech, of course, but sometimes deeds speak louder than words.

I think Mark Steyn is right about Saudi Arabia: "What exactly is 'realist' about continuing to back the Frankensaud monster? The present policy is all but certain to wind up delivering the peninsula and its oil into the hands of Osama's buddies... Given the inevitability of disaster if we stick to a failed containment strategy, how could things be any worse if we went in for some creative disruption? At the very minimum, Washington needs to have solid, detailed contingency plans for securing the oil fields, and making sure the Hashemites are on stand-by to return to Mecca and Medina. Saudi Arabia can't be saved, and the more we postpone reaching that conclusion and acting on it, the messier it's going to be. Whoever you're backing in November, the quiet life isn't on the ballot".

Martin Luther where are you? "Croatian monks have been ordered to sell off their BMWs and Mercedes and drive something cheaper to show solidarity with other parishioners. The new rule by the order of Franciscan monks in Croatia comes into effect from this weekend. It bans monks from owning any luxury brand of cars like the Audi, BMW or Mercedes and demands they drive cars that are cheaper and not likely to alienate them from parishioners."

Good news about the new government of India: "Kalam promised the government would maintain 7 percent to 8 percent economic growth, encourage foreign investment and increase employment... The government has promised to sell off state enterprises that lose money, but not profit-making ones". I think that means they will sell ALL of them off!

What passes for humour on the Left: "The truth, hard as it is to accept, is that Bush is an Iranian agent."

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

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 June, 2004

THOSE NASTY GENETICS AGAIN

I linked to Chris Brand's report of this study in Child Development on 18th. last month. The media have now got hold of it. As it says here: "Love and genes can overcome even the most abject poverty, according to a study into the effects of environmental factors on child development. The study of 1,116 mothers and their five-year-old same-sex twins in poor households in England and Wales found that poverty did not have to be a life sentence and the right combination of parental care and genetics could triumph over adversity. "Children in our study experienced more than just poverty as measured by family income level, Julia Kim-Cohen of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College in London wrote in the May issue of the journal Child Development. "Living in the poorest neighbourhoods, their homes were rated as being overcrowded, damp or in disrepair," she added... It showed that genetic makeup does play a role in the ability of children to rise above their poverty and not suffer behavioural or cognitive setbacks, but it was not the whole answer". Leftists of course mostly seem to believe that poverty is SOLELY caused by environmental factors. That genes play a major role in whether you stay in poverty or rise out of it is abhorrent to them. It means that there are some big things that social engineering cannot change. It does also tend to show how right a certain wise man from the past was -- Matthew 26:11.

"Tiny genetic changes add up to huge differences when human DNA is compared to that of chimpanzees, researchers said on Wednesday in a report that explains how people and apes can be so close, yet so far apart. Genetically, chimpanzees are 98.5 percent identical to humans. But the differences between the species are clearly profound and geneticists have been laboring to find out how such subtle variations in DNA can be so important. "Clearly, the genomic differences between humans and chimps are much more complicated than conventional wisdom has portrayed," Asao Fujiyama of the RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center in Yokohama, Japan, and colleagues in Japan, Taiwan and China wrote in their report, published in this week's issue of the journal Nature". Leftists claim that the almost complete genetic similarity between blacks and whites means that there cannot be any inherited race differences. By the same logic there are no inborn differences between humans and chimps. In fact, a difference in JUST ONE gene can make a huge difference to how somebody turns out.

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ELSEWHERE

There have of course been a huge number of well-deserved tributes to Ronald Reagan since his death. But for me the most poignant memory of him is when I saw him on TV giving this speech at the time of the first space-shuttle disaster. It still moves me to tears just to read it. And to have seen that good and dignified man himself giving it..... He was a genuinely kind and caring man. He really was what Leftists only pretend to be.

And here is the text of his farewell address to the nation after his eight years as president, delivered in the Oval Office on January 11, 1989. I have also put up here a memoir of Reagan from one of my readers -- with particular comments on the Leftist claim that he was an intellectual lightweight.

As readers of this blog will be aware, I do get a bit sarcastic at times so you may not be surprised that this piece of sarcasm made me laugh out loud: Oliver Kamm quotes a politician from Britain's wishy-washy Left (the Lib-Dems) as follows: "Peace in the Middle East is next on the agenda. [Hughes] pledges to visit the mayors of Jerusalem and Ramallah to see if he can sort things out. As a Christian who supports Israel and a lifelong campaigner for a Palestinian state, he says, he can be a good mediator. "The position of Jerusalem is central to a resolution," he says. "I don't believe there aren't ways of moving that forward."" Kamm then comments: "Yes, that's it! The reason the Arab-Israeli conflict persists is obviously that there aren't enough foreign politicians meddling in it. How visionary, yet at the same time eminently pragmatic. I'm impressed".

More Roman Catholic decline: "The priesthood in the 21st century will be perceived as a "predominantly gay profession," says Rev. Donald Cozzens, an American priest who wrote a book on the topic" If they habitually betray their oath of celibacy, is there any faith or trustworthiness in them? (Via Norm Weatherby, who has lots more on the subject)

Norm Weatherby summarizes the huge and ubiquitous corruption of the United Nations.

Based on his own admissions to U.S. interrogators, Jose Padilla seems to deserve the "enemy combatant" handle. The American citizen's path to al-Qaeda membership is detailed in a gripping investigative summary prepared by Justice Department officials.

Headline from the NY Sun of June 4th.: "Obesity Could Be More Widespread Than Thought". Sub-editors do have fun.

Same-sex marriage in Australia: "George Orwell once remarked, "There are some ideas so preposterous that only an intellectual could believe them". The move to redefine the nature of marriage may be a case in point. When the Prime Minister recently suggested that our marriage laws should be strengthened, the reaction was as swift as it was hostile. A number of commentators labelled this proposal "radical". What a curious thing to say. There is nothing radical about reaffirming what most cultures throughout human history have always affirmed"

I wonder too: "Police are relying on donations for basic equipment including computers, televisions and furniture. The Queensland Police Union says budget cuts over recent years have forced officers to go cap in hand to the public to buy "necessities". In one case, a Lions club had to buy maps for the officer in charge of search-and-rescue operations in a huge area of northwestern Queensland... Police at Petrie, just north of Brisbane, were able to create a comfortable room for child victims and witnesses only after community groups lent a hand last year. The local Lions club donated $1000 worth of equipment, including a television and sofas. President Len Woodward said "one of the lasses from the police station" approached the club seeking help. "The longer you work in organisations like I am, the more you wonder where all of your taxes go," he said"

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

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 June, 2004

I am in mourning: Ronald Reagan, my only hero, has passed away. I loved that man. He was such a great gentleman. For my money he is the greatest President the USA has ever had. He won his war without a shot being fired. I will never forget him.



ANOTHER CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVE

C.S. Lewis is mainly considered an able Christian apologist, which he was, but he was also an incisive conservative political critic and an opponent of the planned state which, like Hayek, he saw as ending in tyranny. Unlike Hayek, Lewis was no free market economist and approached social issues from a very different perspective. That he reached the same conclusions about planned states as Hayek from a different route only reinforces the argument.

Some quotes: "The modern state exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good--anyway, to do something to us or to make us do something... We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.... I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has 'the freeborn mind.' But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by the Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of the Government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology".

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JOHN KERRY

A New York reader has sent me a brief but penetrating analysis of the elitist and socialist thinking behind John Kerry's recent pamphlet A Call to service. Read it here.

More on John Kerry's dishonest attempts to exploit his fleeting presence in Vietnam here: "Larry L. Rose said: "If John Kerry allows this commercial to run, it will show the kind of person John Kerry is. That he allows his campaign team to lift Hispanic faces from a Caller-Times book, to violate copyright, and to violate the individual rights of those Hispanic veterans, is appalling."

"John Kerry's campaign strategists and top Democratic officials say their party is more unified than ever for the 2004 presidential election. Don't believe it, of course. Apparent desertions by Democrats backing independent candidate Ralph Nader are mounting, along with bitter grumblings from black and Hispanic leaders who say Mr. Kerry has taken them for granted. His troubles with an often-contentious political base do not end there."

John Kerry opposes medical research: "If Kerry's plan were implemented and America tried to piggyback on Canada's price controls, it would create an unprecedented health care disaster not just in Canada, but in the U.S. as well. American companies spend an average of $800 million to develop a new drug. They must be able to recoup that investment, which is why the price of a drug is so much higher than the simple cost of manufacturing a pill."

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ELSEWHERE

Leftist elitism again: Dick McDonald reproduces an excerpt from a WSJ article in which the head of Fox News replies to an attack on Fox: "John S. Carroll, the editor of the Los Angeles Times, recently gave a speech at the University of Oregon, in which he attacked Bill O'Reilly, Fox News Channel and me, the chairman of Fox News. However, Mr. Carroll obviously did not feel particularly restricted by facts, truth or sources.... In fact, the Fox News Channel today has 53% of the audience share of cable news. CNN and MSNBC divide up the rest. According to Mr. Carroll, that proves most Americans are therefore stupid and gullible. It's that elite, arrogant, condescending, self-serving, self-righteous, biased and wrong-headed view of Americans that causes viewers and readers to distrust media people like John Carroll."

Australian blogger Evil Pundit has reproduced an email he received from an American reader which powerfully evokes the sheer foaming rage that many American Leftists feel towards GWB. The successes of someone so different from them are just unbearable to these jealousy-consumed haters. And THEY are the ones who claim to admire "diversity"! There is also a quote here from American novelist John Updike about the New York literary scene in the Reagan era. He says it "seethed with barely suppressed anger and was audibly impatient with any utterance other than a straightforward condemnation of the Reagan administration". So the present cross-eyed rage is really nothing to do with GWB in particular. It is just their normal psychological state when they are not getting their own way.

There is an excellent short essay on The Belmont club about why Leftists are such murderous miseries. It echoes much that I have been saying and anybody who likes this blog should read it. One quote: "The naive scholar who searches for a consistent Leftist program will not find it. What there is consists only in the negation of the present"

I kind of like this unfortunate guy: It is a wonder that there are so few such protests against bureaucracy: "Heemeyer on Friday plowed the armor-plated bulldozer into the town and within two hours had knocked down or damaged nine buildings before the machine ground to a halt in the wreckage of a warehouse. City officials said he was angry over a zoning dispute and fines for city code violations at his business in the town about 50 miles west of Denver".

Agitprop is a good Canadian blog -- from the big frogpond of Montreal. I loved his post about the modern Canadian version of the ant & grasshopper tale.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

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 June, 2004

BLACK ANGER

I received recently an email from one of my U.S. readers that helped me understand why most Americans seem to hate even hearing the word "race":

"I had an argument with my neighbor Dwayne this afternoon after my jog. He's a black man, a few years younger than I am. He keeps a nice house and yard and drives a fancy car. We've always gotten along well. Today, however, the discussion turned to Bill Cosby's recent criticism of black parents for not raising their children properly. My neighbor jumped all over Cosby, saying he had no right to tell poor blacks how to live. I didn't challenge any of this, because I wanted to stay on good terms. I mainly let him talk. Then he brought up President Bush, saying he was a racist. I asked for evidence. He had none. When I pressed him as to why he thinks Bush is a racist, he said he just knows. I told him that a few years ago, Bush and his wife drove Alphonso Jackson and his wife (a black couple) to ritzy Highland Park to look at homes. He wanted Jackson as his neighbor. Does that sound like a racist? And who has a black National Security Adviser and Secretary of State? Since Dwayne couldn't cite any evidence for his belief that Bush is a racist, I asked whether all whites are racist. He said no.

At one point I said, half jokingly, that that was the stupidest thing Dwayne had ever said. This changed the tone. He told me to go and not stop by to talk to him any more. He told me to keep my dogs off his grass. It was tense. I pleaded for a moment, then walked away. This man is angry. Until today, I didn't know it. He said at one point that only two presidents cared about blacks: John F. Kennedy ("and they shot him for it") and Bill Clinton. He loves Clinton, as surveys show almost all blacks do. He hates Bush, as surveys show almost all blacks do. Republicans may as well give up on blacks; they're convinced, without evidence, that Republicans are out to get them. They're seething with resentment and anger."

I can see no reason at the moment why that anger will ever abate. Blacks do very poorly compared with whites and it takes a big man to blame himself for the fact that he and his kind are not doing well. "Blame others" is always a much more preferable thing to do than blaming oneself. And when a whole half of national politics is telling you that your failure to reach the heights is because you have been discriminated against, it would be remarkable indeed if you did not believe it. So-called "liberals" breed that anger. They need it and thrive on it. Without the black vote they would sink like a stone.

So is there a solution to the anger? Giving blacks equality that they have not earned (affirmative action) has some superficial attractiveness. The trouble is that that has now been tried on a large scale and the anger still seethes. The gap is probably too big and too basic to be closed by anything short of totalitarian measures. So one hopes that one day the only real alternative will be turned to: A strictly colour-blind and merit-based system that will persuade at least most people that whatever anybody has, has been earned by themselves or their parents. Instead of encouraging race-consciousness (affirmative action) Americans should have put all their efforts into eradicating it. Making sure of equality of opportunity for all would be a far better way of getting the social system to be seen as fair.

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THE UNRAVELLING MYTH OF LEFTIST "PRINCIPLES"

Jeff Jacoby points out that GWB's "idealism" in striving to make the Middle East more democratic is also practical. Trying to bring about an Iraqi government that is both stable and democratic is undoubtedly a difficult challenge but past American policy that satisfied itself with stability only led to the events of 9/11. John Kerry, by contrast, is stuck in the failed past of American isolationism. So who said that it is conservatives who resist change? They only resist half-baked Leftist proposals for change. At the moment it is the Democrats who are refusing to change from a policy that has obviously failed. Leftists have of course always promoted themselves as idealistic and "principled" but the fact that their idealism and principles have vanished in a puff of smoke now that they see electoral advantage in having no principles should surprise no-one. That the people who supported Stalin and the Soviet system throughout the Cold war were "idealistic" was always a joke.

Wavering British Leftist Roger Simon also notes how the behaviour of most of the Left over Iraq contradicts all that they once claimed to stand for: "Who really is "progressive" anyway, those who have been backing democracy in Iraq or those opposing 'unilateral' intervention in totalitarian states?"

And this site records something that BBC journalists were saying before the Iraq invasion but which BBC managers would not let them put into writing: "The far left was becoming the far right. It had gone as close to supporting Ba'athist fascism as it dared". Again something that would surprise only those deluded souls who thought that the Left had principles.

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ELSEWHERE

In connection with my comment yesterday about a post on the blog of Leftist law professor Brian Leiter, it has been drawn to my attention that there is another way one can interpret Leiter's Delphic words. He is probably in fact arguing that because Americans have moved to the Right in recent years (itself a proposition in need of proof) THEREFORE the universities cannot have been preaching Leftism. The unstated but highly amusing premise in that being that all preaching must be influential! That other influences (9/11 anyone?) might more than cancel out any influence from Leftist preaching is just not allowed for in that particular parody of logic! I had not considered that he might be putting forward an argument quite as ridiculous as that but he is a Leftist after all.

More bad news for the "outsourcing" warriors: "U.S. employers hired almost a quarter-million new workers in May, swelling payrolls by nearly 1.2 million for the year so far in a jobs market steadily gaining steam ahead of November's presidential election." Outsourcing is a sign of an efficient and healthy economy.

It's pretty common these days for all kinds of organisations and lobbies to produce scorecards to help voters from their particular audience to judge better the performance of elected officials. Apparently the US Conference of Catholic Bishops' "scorecard" for rating the performance of various congressmen equates issues of liberal political dogma with conformance to catechism and church doctrine. This raises the question as to whether the USCCB's primary allegiance is to Catholicism or liberalism. See here

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

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 June, 2004

MORE LEFTIST LOGIC

I have just come across another bit of "sophisticated" debate on the blog of a Leftist academic. Get this from Brian Leiter: "Yes, it's true that when you raise the intellectual bar high, as serious universities do, you get fewer right-wing kooks, but that simply doesn't mean there is political indoctrination going on at universities. The fact that the U.S. has moved farther to the right during the same time period when the universities have allegedly moved to the left ought to be taken as empirical confirmation of that point." I guess that as a dumb psychologist I may have missed the point of this clever bit of legal reasoning but he seems to be saying that if more people are conservative and the universities are more leftist, the universities can only have got that way by raising their academic standards. But does not that equate higher intellectual standards with greater Leftism? So is he not assuming what he has to prove?

And it is presumably true by definition that "kooks" will be excluded by a higher intellectual standards but why does a higher intellectual standard exclude right-wing kooks only? Are we again asserting that only rightists are kooks? It appears that we are. Otherwise, why put "right-wing" in front of kooks? In Leiter's case, it would appear that abuse and assertion has taken the place of evidence and reasoning. I feel sorry for the law students he is allegedly teaching at the University of Texas. Or maybe my studies in analytical philosophy have just not equipped me for Leiter's version of logic. Maybe I am just a "kook".

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WHEN BLACK IS BROWN

The Leftist racists are reeling at Berkeley: "This fall, being black at Berkeley is likely to become even more of an anomaly than it already is. As of late spring, 98 black students had registered for fall enrollment out of an expected freshman class of 3,821... "Virtually every part of the campus is extremely concerned about the low numbers of underrepresented minorities and, in particular, the appallingly low numbers of African-Americans," Strait said. The fall enrollment figures came about six months after John Moores, chairman of UC's governing Board of Regents, issued a report saying Berkeley turned away thousands of students who aced the SAT but accepted hundreds - many of whom were black or Hispanic - with low scores". But there are more Asians than whites in the student body, so not all "minorities" are "underrepresented". But Asians don't make a place "diverse" of course -- don't ask me why!

But most amusing of all, note this quote: ""Don't go there thinking, 'I'm going to be looking around for other black kids,'" says Ward Connerly, a part-black UC regent who led the fight to drop race-based admissions". Apparently, if you oppose racism, you can only be "PART-black"! Funny that I have never heard any of the many coffee-coloured Leftists described that way. What a weird world the Left live in! Ideology even affects their colour-vision.

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ELSEWHERE

Leftists just hate the entire field of IQ research. The very idea that some people are smarter than others offends their "all men are equal" religion and the repeated finding that IQ is mostly genetically inherited means that they cannot blame low IQ on "society". So Leftist psychologists are always ducking and weaving in an effort to find some way of devaluing IQ. They normally do that by inventing "other" intellectual abilities that are independent of IQ. I have mentioned the feeble attempt by Sternberg in that direction previously so I guess I should mention another theory that is very popular among Leftists -- the Howard Gardner theory of "multiple intelligences" -- eight of them, would you believe? There is a very clear and simple demolition of the whole Gardner theory here -- which points out that the Gardner theory not only ignores the data but that its criteria for calling something "an intelligence" are so loose that sense of humour, sense of smell, musical ability, athletic ability etc could all be called "intelligences". By adopting similar rules I could say that all cats, dogs and horses are birds -- but that would still not make them so.

Selwyn Duke, from Mens News Daily says the sexualised abuses at Abu Ghraib are serious, but were they 'torture'? And why have the media had a sudden attack of morals? "...if you were weaned on MTV and Loveline, received constant messages that sex is a game, homosexuality a legitimate lifestyle and that what used to be called behaving like a slut is not degrading but the fruits of liberation, how likely would you be to recognize the gravity of the incidents at Abu Graib? Heck, there are some people - and I suspect you can find an inordinate number of them in the media - to whom that kind of behavior is recreation."

An acerbic comment from Peggy Noonan: "Europe is a post-Christian society on a continent devoted to the material except when it is considering astrology, witchcraft and worshiping rocks."

Roger Sandall is an ex-anthropologist and author of The Culture Cult. Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement as "brilliant, sardonic, and impassioned", his attack on romantic primitivism (best known from the writings of Rousseau) ranges from discussions of the horrible decline and fall of anthropology, to the intellectual follies of thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Karl Polanyi, to the baleful triumph of the anthropological meaning of "culture" in the humanities. It is neither polite nor politically correct: but it's a sure antidote to multicultural delusions.

There is a thought-provoking post here that sees concern over animal rights as a capitalist luxury. Without capitalism we would have much more pressing problems than animal rights to deal with.

Dick McDonald has just put up a heap of hard-hitting posts about current American politics. I had missed the news about America's soaring factory output and the way former knockers of it have ignored the turnaround.

Wicked Thoughts now has nine pictures up of the strange things you can encounter if you go shopping overseas.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

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 June, 2004

SOME RESULTS OF AN AMERICAN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION

Overall, I comment very little on what Leftist bloggers are saying. Cleaning out the Augean stables is not a task for me. But sometimes they get too amusing for me to resist: Open Door is a graduate student of psychology at UTA (with a previous academic background including philosophy), who claims that there is only minimal Leftism in American universities.

In typical Leftist style, our Lefty blogger is good on mere abuse -- he calls me "doltish" and "benighted" -- but he is very short on elementary logic. He takes this statement by Keith Burgess-Jackson: "A recurring theme in liberal thought is that wealth and poverty are undeserved" and comments "This is simply false. The recurrent theme in liberal thought is that some wealth, and some poverty, are undeserved". But that is perfectly consistent with what Keith said! Where is the word "ALL" in Keith's statement? Without any qualifiers, Keith's statement simply spoke of wealth and poverty being GENERALLY undeserved. His attack on Keith is not only an attack on a straw man but in fact reinforces what Keith said! There is a lot more than doors open in the brain of that particular Lefty blogger. How he ever passed his introductory logic course is a mystery. I guess it shows that they teach Leftist "logic" in American universities these days. I note in passing also that our Lefty blogger cannot even cut and paste accurately. He quotes Keith as using the word "recurrent" when he in fact used the word "recurring". What a dodo!

As far back as 1972, I was pointing out that Leftists are very prone to the "projection" (i.e. seeing your own faults in others) that they often accuse conservatives as suffering from. So it is rather fun that this Lefty blogger is an example of it too. I pointed out above that his attack on Keith was an attack on a "straw man" (i.e. a misrepresented or fictional opponent). So guess what he was accusing Keith of? You guessed it -- of attacking a straw man.

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ELSEWHERE

Sheer Leftist insanity -- from Canada: "the McGuinty Liberals, whose recent budget forced Ontario families to fork over hundreds of dollars more annually in new healthcare taxes while simultaneously de-listing services like trips to the eye doctor, chiropractic and physiotherapy services from public health insurance, are set to re-list sex change operations! (That wasn't a typo, I really did mean RE-list, not DE-list.) How will he justify this to an average family?" (Post of May 28th, here). How Leftists hate ordinary people!

There is a great article here by Alan Dershowitz setting out the things that the Left never mention about Israel and pointing out when criticism of Israel is antisemitic and when it is not. (Via Peg Kaplan).

The Real Story of Fallujah: "The meticulous planning process undertaken by the Marines at the tactical level for assaulting Fallujah was not augmented with a similarly meticulous process by the Bush administration at the strategic level for counteracting the easily foreseen media fallout from fighting in civilian areas near Muslim religious sites. The public was never made to feel just how much of a military threat the mosques in Fallujah represented, just how far Marines went to avoid damage to them and to civilians, and just how much those same Marine battalions accomplished after departing Fallujah."

Academic standards seem to be extremely rubbery at American universities (even Harvard has to give 20% of its freshman intake remedial instruction in English!) but it seems that British standards are pretty rubbery too. Note this post from Chris Brand: "A British headmaster running a top girls' boarding school in Tamil Nadu, India, revealed to the Sunday Times that his daughter had been rejected by Edinburgh University when she applied as British, but was subsequently accepted when she applied from an Indian address and without mentioning her British citizenship".

Good if it were true: "President Bush's re-election strategists plan to portray the November election as the first since the Reagan era to offer voters a stark choice between liberalism and conservatism. ... 'Conservatives have for a generation yearned for an election in which there would be a very clear choice on the issues and a strong focus on grass roots,' said Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman. 'This election will represent a clear choice, an ideological choice on the issues. And this campaign is totally committed to grass roots.'"

Non-education: "To me, it seems as if the single biggest problem in this country today, after government, is education. No longer are our children required to learn to think, but only to memorize, with the material to be memorized strictly controlled by teachers, school boards, and religious groups. Our children are no longer taught history. Instead they are subjected to socialist propaganda, designed to undermine any attempt to see the failures of socialism in general and to downplay the importance of individualism."

Taiwan: The campaign to keep Taiwan out of international forums is not just a diplomatic issue to do with the legitimacy or otherwise of governments in Taipei and Beijing. It impacts down to earth issues like SARS control too: "If a killer-flu arises, it will be most likely in South China, where animals and humans, especially pigs and poultry, live in close proximity. With the thousands of people travelling daily between Taiwan and China - and between Taiwan and the rest of the world - there is no telling how devastating such an outbreak could be, with the missing Taiwan link. Taiwan needs the concerted efforts of the international community to allow its entry to the WHO - now."

China, Japan and anti-missile defence: Beijing does not want to get caught up in the kind of technological race that finally broke the Soviet empire. Her last hope is a Kerry victory.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again -- in very folksy style this time.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

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 June, 2004

HISTORIANS STRAIGHT AND CROOKED

V.D. Hanson has an article here putting the recent terrorist attacks on Westerners in Saudi Arabia into perspective. He says a tough response is needed.

Daniel Pipes has a brief survey of Saudi Arabian history which manages to make some sense of the support GWB gives to the Saudi Arabian regime -- saying it is the lesser of two evils.

This article reports a poll of some American academic historians which produced the supremely unsurprising finding that they did not like GWB. One of my readers comments: "You will not be surprised by the overall results of the poll, but even I was startled at the level of sheer acrimonious bombast hurled at this president by historians trained to evenhandedly examine evidence (including the author, Prof. McElvaine). There is, for example, the repeated invocation of special treatment for Halliburton -- i.e. no competitive bidding -- even though the Clinton administration repeatedly awarded contracts to Halliburton in an analogous fashion; similarly, there is complaining about the administration's plan to cut down certain trees in national forests, even though there is ample evidence that old and rotting wood leads to forest fires." I myself was struck by this dotty charge against GWB in the article: He has supposedly "Overseen an economy in which the stock market suffered its worst decline in the first two years of any administration since Hoover's". That may be true. The economy does not change quickly. What went on in the early part of the Bush administration reflects what CLINTON did! And the Australian stockmarket hit an all time high a month or two ago so I imagine the Dow Jones did the same: The ASX tends to track Wall St. So GWB has in fact presided over a big economic recovery. What totally dishonest historians!

More crooked historians: "President Bush's nomination of Allen Weinstein - author of the definitive biography of Alger Hiss, "Perjury" - for the post of national archivist has triggered a furor. "The American people need a better custodian of their history," the Nation magazine editorialized. The Society of American Archivists and the Organization of American Historians are questioning Weinstein's credentials.... Far from being an unsuitable candidate, Weinstein is vastly more qualified for the job than the current archivist ... Weinstein brings a long record of first-rate scholarship ..... Weinstein has become a target for ... those who continue to insist that Hiss was never a spy for the Soviet Union".

"And in the most disgraceful essay of this new century, Susan Sontag, writing in The New York Times Magazine, associated the prisoner-abuse affair with the massacres in Rwanda and the Holocaust. Really? Does Ms. Sontag truly believe that Abu Ghraib equals Auschwitz? Does she know a single American soldier? How simple the world must look from behind her desk"

Muravchik, an honest historian: "On 9/11, however, the terrorists managed to kill us by thousands at a swoop, and what Bush understood was that our policy of passivity, like the West's efforts to appease Hitler in the 1930s, had only invited more audacious attacks. He saw that we had no choice but to go to war against the terrorists and their backers. If we did not destroy them, the terrorists would set their sanguinary sights higher until they succeeded in killing us by the tens or hundreds of thousands."

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ELSEWHERE

Jeff Jacoby summarizes the case for school vouchers. Excerpt: "Education policy in the United States treats Americans as too incompetent to provide for their children's schooling. Unlike food or clothing or health care -- where the market generates lots of options and parents are free to choose among them -- education is mostly supplied on the Soviet model: Schooling is "free," but the schools are owned and operated by the state.... Putting power in the hands of parents is the real key to equality -- and the key to excellence, too".

Hal Colebatch comments on the recent big surge in the polls of Australia's conservative government and sees every reason for a big win in the next election -- contrary to what most of the pundits have been saying.

Great news: Students at the University of Wisconsin -- birthplace in the 60s of the very radical SDS -- cheered every mention of GWB despite all the Leftist propaganda that had been poured out at them during their education.

"An article by Jeffrey Gedmin, Director of the Aspen Institute office in Berlin, in "Welt am Sonntag" (the Sunday edition the German daily "Welt") made my whole day. It was a breath of fresh air in contrast to the stale anti-American fare coming from the German media: "The two closely related ideologies, EU-nationalism and anti-Americanism like to keep themselves above mere facts. ... But perhaps you could ask yourself why, after the discovery of the American abuses in Abu Ghraib, a half a million Iraqis didn't march in protest on the streets of Baghdad."

Another stupid judge: "Millionaire Joe Gutnick slammed as "pathetic" yesterday the jail term that could see Jack Roche - the Muslim convert who plotted to assassinate the Jewish businessman - walk free in three years"

Hernando de Soto says: "The choice is simple. To build modern nations, we have to learn how the poor work and then structure law that fits their needs. In the end, Peruvians, Chinese, and Americans want essentially the same things: life, liberty, and property. And to get it, you have to build on a market economy based on the rule of law. Our real enemies are not Marx and others, but are essentially the people who do not believe in the potential of human beings liberated by the rule of law."

Good to see the "Anglosphere" idea getting a bit of press, even if pretty negative. This article in "The Australian" -- Australia's national daily -- gives one account of it. I myself think that the Anglosphere will always be important in an informal way only.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

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 June, 2004

RECENT "TOWNHALL" WISDOM

More Democrat antisemitism: "Words can be hurtful. They reveal feelings long held dormant. No where was this more apparent than in a May 7, 2004 column for the State newspaper of Columbia, South Carolina by the 82 year old Senator Ernest Hollings. In this piece Hollings accused President Bush of invading Iraq "to secure Israel" and "to take the Jewish vote from the Democrats." It should also be noted that a secure Iraq may remove one of Israel's many Middle East enemies, but it does not assure her security as any daily reading of newspapers can attest. What Hollings' view reflects is a reflexively anti-Jewish belief so common among anti-Semites. Paranoia is evident along with attributions about Jewish power and behind the scenes influence."

Walter Williams argues that disruptive black students should be expelled from school on a large scale: "Educational triage would acknowledge that there are black youngsters who cannot benefit academically no matter how many educational resources are spent on them. They have little or no family support. Their very presence in school, through disruptive and criminal behavior, makes education impossible for others. Spending resources on these youngsters is the educational equivalent of medical practitioners spending resources on disaster victims who'll die even if treated. These youngsters should be removed and not allowed to take resources from and make education impossible for those who do have a chance for academic achievement."

Compassion? "One of President Bush's most recent "compassionate" initiatives has indirectly led to more horrific deaths along the Arizona-Mexico border. Bush's proposal for a quasi-amnesty for illegal aliens has been interpreted by poor Mexicans as a welcome mat, increasing the rate of attempted border crossings and the tragic deaths that go with them. Sixty-one people have died along the Arizona border since last October, a threefold increase from the rate of the previous year. The bodies are a testament to America's broken immigration system. If we really want to encourage more Mexicans to come here, we should have the decency to help ensure their safe passage. If we don't -- as most politicians, including Bush, would maintain -- then all talk of any sort of amnesty should be dropped, and our seriousness about enforcing immigration laws should be broadcast so clearly that it is understood even in the far reaches of Mexico."

Leftists who have nothing to say -- Endlessly recycled abuse is all they can think of: "He isn't very bright. He's a religious fanatic who sees the world in black and white. He engaged in an "elaborate campaign of disinformation" designed to "mislead his own people" about the war. He's not really running the government; he's a puppet manipulated by a subordinate. And his name is -- Tony Blair. So says author Geoffrey Wheatcroft in June's "The Atlantic Monthly" in a profile of the prime minister of Great Britain. It demonstrates how the left demeans its opposition so uniformly that Wheatcroft managed to hurl the exact same insults at Blair that U.S. lefties have hurled at President Bush for years."

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ELSEWHERE

Keith Burgess-Jackson has asked what I think of the idea of national character. National character is still a rather suspect topic to most psychologists. The Left, in its usual simplistic way, seems to think that if you allow talk of national differences then you will also have to allow talk of racial differences and that of course is RACISM! On the other hand, there would hardly be an international traveller alive who has not thought that he/she could discern differences between the people of different countries: The Germans are in general seen as particularly efficient, the French are in general seen as particularly arrogant etc. The fact of the matter, of course is that there is absolutely no reason why nations or races should all be the same. People are not all the same so why should groups of them be the same? It is only bone-headed ideology that says otherwise. Two books that do look at psychological differences between nations are: MADARIAGA, S. DE. (1970) Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards: An essay in comparative psychology 2nd ed. London: Pitman; and LYNN, R. (1971) Personality and National Character. Oxford, England: Pergamon. And I probably should resist the temptation to point out the excellent scientific evidence for large and important national differences in average IQ but I have never resisted it before so what the heck! See here.

Pope backs crooked Cardinal: "Pope John Paul II yesterday appointed Cardinal Bernard F. Law to a ceremonial job overseeing one of the four major basilicas of Rome, granting the former archbishop of Boston a prestigious appointment just two days after the Archdiocese of Boston announced that it was closing 65 parishes." The very man who condoned paedophilia by shuffling paedophile priests around rather than do anything to stop them! The Pope has made it clear he approves! What disgusting old farts they both are! No wonder Catholics are deserting the ship. Their church is a blot on the name of Christ.

And Queensland has its own paedophila disgrace too, summed up here. It involves the lesbian-looking Leanne Clair, a political appointee as Queensland's Director of Public Prosecutions -- an appointment made to ensure "balance" between the sexes in Queensland's top government jobs. A prominent sporting coach was committed for trial on child sexual abuse charges by a magistrate but Ms Clair has repeatedly refused (on the flimsiest of grounds) to prosecute the case. She thinks she is judge and jury. She was also one of a troika of Leftist females in high office who sent prominent conservative politician Pauline Hanson to jail on a legal technicality -- a conviction that was totally thrown out by the Court of Appeal only weeks later. These feminazis really think they are God.

But is this the flip before the flop? "Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry called for increasing the U.S. military by 40,000 troops, probably for a decade, in order 'to match its new missions' in the war on terror and homeland security. ... Kerry would pay for the added troops by making cuts elsewhere in the Pentagon budget. He gave no specifics."

More petty bureaucracy from the EU: "Italian officials want new rules on how big a pizza should be and how hot it's cooked, before being allowed to use the name. Department of Agriculture officials say they want to clamp down on so-called 'pizza pirates.' In order to be labelled a pizza, it must be three millimetres thick in the middle,. have a one to two centimetre thick crust and have been cooked at 450 degrees centigrade.The diameter should not exceed 35 centimetres. The ministry says the rule is part of a one million pound PR exercise and say they have signed up inspectors to check kitchens."

I have just put up here an article that shows the jargon used in the schools these days. No wonder teachers can't teach and students don't learn much of the time. Leftist "postmodernist" language is being used to confuse kids now too.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

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