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29 February, 2004

HUNTINGTON

Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilisations" has still got the Left on the hop: "In our time, few formulations have sparked more controversy than Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis. In the Harvard political scientist's view, laid out in a 1993 Foreign Affairs essay and expanded into a book three years later, the conflicts of the post-Cold War era will arise not from ideological or economic differences but from cultural divisions. To his admirers, Huntington is a prophet who foresaw the current confrontation with radical Islam... Last weekend, prominent thinkers gathered at a Skidmore College conference ... Participating was a virtual Who's Who of left-liberal academics and public intellectuals ... the panelists were nearly unanimous in their outright rejection of a "clash of civilizations....More than a reconsideration of Huntington, the event doubled as a high-powered bull session on the preoccupations of contemporary liberalism: What are America's obligations to the world? Can there be such a thing as a just war? How is democracy best promoted abroad? How can the secular be reconciled to the sacred? How do universal rights mesh with indigenous traditions?"

Huntington on Mexican immigration to the US and the rise of Spanglish: "Continuation of this large immigration (without improved assimilation) could divide the United States into a country of two languages and two cultures. A few stable, prosperous democracies-such as Canada and Belgium-fit this pattern... The transformation of the United States into a country like these would not necessarily be the end of the world; it would, however, be the end of the America we have known for more than three centuries. Americans should not let that change happen unless they are convinced that this new nation would be a better one. Such a transformation would not only revolutionize the United States, but it would also have serious consequences for Hispanics, who will be in the United States but not of it. Sosa ends his book, The Americano Dream, with encouragement for aspiring Hispanic entrepreneurs. "The Americano dream?" he asks. "It exists, it is realistic, and it is there for all of us to share." Sosa is wrong. There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English. "

Conservative columnist David Brooks argues against Huntington here. Brooks says that Latinos ARE integrating over time. It seems that a retreat from political correctness on this issue is allowing serious immigration debate to occur without a barrage of ad hominem attacks.

I myself think that Huntington is courageously accurate in his stress on the key role in America of Anglo-Protestant culture. Britain today comprises roughly one percent of the earth's population and I doubt that the proportion has varied much in the last few hundred years. Yet the influence of that one percent on practically everything has been immense. To take just one example that is almost never mentioned: Sport. Sport is a major human activity, yet the three sports that the whole world plays were all invented in Britain: Soccer, Golf and Tennis. And boxing is as far as I know still mostly done according to British (Queensbury) rules too. And there is the little matter of cricket. It's not played by all the world but a sport with around a billion followers (mostly in the Indian sub-continent) sure dwarfs most other "local" sports. And the vast British influence on sport is despite the fact that the British themselves are appalling at sports! A sporting win by a British person or team is a rare event.

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ELSEWHERE

Another interesting commonality between the Marxists and the Nazis: They both rejected objective reasoning in favour of the claim that an argument was right or wrong because of who it was that put the argument forward. Marxists rejected logical arguments that did not suit them because they were "bourgeois" and Nazis rejected arguments that did not suit them because they were "Jewish". For centuries the argument that the utterer influences the truth of an argument has been known among logicians as the ad hominem fallacy. The fallacious nature of such arguments is obvious to most people in examples such as the following: "Hitler loved dogs and Hitler was evil so loving dogs must be evil" but Marxists seriously believe such propositions. Another example of Leftist irrationality.

The book Conspicuous Compassion by Patrick West has attracted a lot of attention -- as well it might. It focuses attention on all the bogus compassion that infests our society. Since "compassion" is the false flag under which Leftists customarily sail, the book may make a few people look more critically at Leftist claims.

Have a look at the neo-Soviet system taxpayers are supporting at San Francisco State University.

Some interesting Haitian proverbs: "The constitution is paper, bayonets are steel." "The goat which has many owners will be left to die in the sun"

Economic ignoramus Greg Easterbrook is complaining that goods are too cheap. He thinks that making them dearer will help the poor. England's Sword puts him to rights.

What If accuses the Democrats of "schizophrenia" about prosperity. That's not a clinical diagnosis but it does capture their addled thinking.

I have just posted here some observations from Chris Brand about the publicity-hungry Naomi Wolf and about a split in the British Left over immigration control.

The anti-Semitism of the intellectuals: "It used to be said that anti-Catholicism was the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals. Today, anti-Semitism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals. ... Here the term intellectual is used loosely, to denote not only people who think about ideas -- about thinking -- but also people who think they do. The term anti-Semitism is used precisely, to denote people who dislike Jews. These people include those who say: We do not dislike Jews, we only dislike Zionists -- although to live in Israel is to endorse the Zionist enterprise, and all Jews are implicated, as sympathizers, in the crime that is Israel."

Some of the recent articles now up on the think-israel.org website:
"THE AGENDA OF ISLAM - A WAR BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS" by Professor Moshe Sharon
"THE ROOT CAUSE" by Boris Celser
"ISRAEL'S SECURITY: The Hard-Learned Lessons" by Yaakov Amidror
"WHY WE SUPPORT ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS" by Daniel Kaganovich and Michael Butler
"WHAT WOULD AMERICA DO?" by Beth Goodtree
"VIOLENCE AND LEFT-WING POLITICS: What's Going On At UCLA'S Hillel?" by Sharon Hes
"IS IT ANTISEMITIC TO CRITICIZE ISRAEL? IS ISRAEL AN APARTHEID STATE? Part 1." by Jared Israel
"ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO PRINT? The New York Times and Israel" by Tom Gross
"FORD FUNDS THE PALESTINIAN LEFT" by Lee Kaplan
"FORD HAS A BETTER IDEA: One Nation Under Allah" by Alyssa A. Lappen

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Two more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

FROM BROOKES NEWS

The recession started under Clinton, not Bush No matter what the Democrats and their media stooges claim, the recession began under Clinton and not Bush - and this article proves it.
The Dems' pet scientists lie about Bush Democrats who are scientists have now joined the Party's smear campaign against Bush by falsely accusing him of attacking science.
A Murdoch reporter joins the Democrats against Bush One of Rupert Murdoch's Bush-hating journalists tries to stick it to Bush on behalf of Kerry and Cleland.
Murderous ban on DDT defended by scientists Scientists who defended the ban on DDT that killed millions get hauled over the coals.
How London's red mayor is driving the poor off the city's roads The higher the tax the more the better off will benefit by having more road space for their driving. Think of it this way: the better off pay a tax which is used as a device to coerce the less well off out of their cars.
A Murdoch reporter reveals his loathing for Bush and Israel In order to show how bad some reporters are, one must occasionally return to the scene, so to speak, of some of their previous crimes. This is certainly the case with Roy Eccleston.
Iraq & President Bush: On behalf of the dead A Brazilian author and philosopher takes to task critics of President Bush who refuse to admit the enormous good he did by overthrowing Saddam.

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

A broad-ranging article by the editor of The Lancet (Britain's premier medical journal) argues that scientists these days are far from impartial -- that the conclusions they draw depend very much on what is personally gainful for them: "Opinions are rented out to the highest bidder". My only disagreeement with him is over his apparent view that it could be different. Scientists are people and I have been pointing out for decades that self-interested garbage is common in the academic journals of my own field. The sooner everybody realizes that the better. The only defence against scientific deception and misrepresentation has always been replication -- seeing if other researchers (preferably those with different viewpoints) get the same results. And any conclusions that are the subject of widespread disageement among scientists -- such as the "global warming" theory -- should be disregarded until it is totally clear what the data shows.

Our nice "tolerant" Hollywood "liberals" are out to get Mel Gibson over THAT film. "You won't ever work again in this town, buddy" seems to be the message. But I guess, like Liberace, Gibson is crying all the way to the bank.

Fidel Castro opposes even necessary use of mirrors because they are 'bourgeois'. That sure would upset the Hollywood types who think he is a hero!

Britain's biggest labor union -- its union for government employees -- is sponsoring a "Unite against Fascism" movement which calls for "zero tolerance against the "politics of hate" peddled by the British National Party". The BNP is an anti-immigration party that has recently had some electoral success in working-class areas of Britain and our good Leftist unionists obviously want to shut them up. A feisty comment from a British reader: "It is probably significant that "Unite Against Fascism" makes not the slightest attempt to specify quite what it means by fascism and racism. My experience of would-be-progressive groups is that they routinely use those words as sloppy slandering stereotypes against anyone who challenges their own narrow dogmas. Yet if racism is defined as discrimination by skin colour, and fascism is defined as oppressing and suppressing of alternative viewpoints, then these "antiracists"/"antifascists" are as racist/fascist as anyone. What could be more fascist than a union which expels people merely for opposing some highly controversial political policies? The BNP will continue to grow and grow because their opponents, however well-meaning, will continue to rely on cheap name-calling, authoritarian bullying, self-deluded bias, untruthfulness, censorship and hypocrisy. One does have to wonder whether that's because they haven't actually got anything more substantial to offer"

Shouldn't feminists be outraged by this?. A reader emailed me: "Did you see the new US Government construction standards? All new construction requires 2 women's toilets to one for men. They cite "anatomical differences" - so much for "equality"".

Wow! The Salvation Army is a religious organization. Scandal! "Current and former Salvation Army employees sued the organization ... alleging the government-funded group preached religious and sexual intolerance to its staff. ... The charitable organization required employees to pledge to preach the Gospel, to identify their church affiliation and to authorize their religious leaders to reveal private information to the Salvation Army, according to the lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union's New York chapter."

An overview of the scandal of so-called recovered memory syndrome and its associated witch hunts. "Attention to the chimerical task of divining a patient's early traumas is attention subtracted from sensible help in the here and now. The reason why psychotherapists ought to familiarize themselves with actual knowledge about the workings of memory, and why their professional societies should stop waffling and promulgating misinformation about it, is not that good science guarantees good therapy; it is simply that pseudoscience inevitably leads to harm." Unfortunately the authors have failed to explore the obvious connection between this abuse and the emergence on the left of a desire to transform the welfare state into a therapeutic state ...ever in search of new classes of "victims" to "empower". This new political culture provided fertile ground for this abuse to take root. (See Paul Gottfried, Thomas Szasz and "Spiked" on the therapeutic state )

The reality "Government for the people, by the people? What a load of crap. How about government by the government for the benefit of the government. And it's all paid for by the people. We pay through the nose to be persecuted by people we are supposed to trust.

No presumption of innocence under feminist-influenced law: "[W]hen the government accuses you of fathering a child, no matter how flimsy the evidence, you are one month away from having your life wrecked. Federal law gives a man just 30 days to file a written challenge; if he doesn't, he is presumed guilty. And once that steamroller of justice starts rolling, dozens of statutory lubricants help make it extremely difficult, and prohibitively expensive, to stop -- even, in most cases, if there's conclusive DNA proof that the man is not the child's father."

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Two more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

FOR FREE TRADE

The WSJ really demolishes Senators Kerry and Edwards over their opposition to free trade. The opening salvo: "Trade is a "moral issue," declares Senator John Edwards. The Democratic Presidential candidate is in high dudgeon that "bad trade agreements," by which he means those signed by Bill Clinton, are stealing jobs away from American workers. It should be no surprise by now that his main competitor, Senator John Kerry, has responded by saying, "Me too." Just as Mr. Kerry parroted the rhetoric of Howard Dean on Iraq, the man who voted for NAFTA now claims there is no difference between him and Mr. Edwards on trade."

The real morality involved: "Protectionism is a violation of natural rights because it is a use of governmental coercion to prevent people from peacefully pursuing their own interests in enhancing their lives, exercising their just liberties, and making use of their legitimately-owned property. It is a coerced transfer of income from consumers and foreign businesses to a small, politically active cabal of domestic businesses. It raises the prices consumers must pay for their goods and gives them nothing in return, thereby reducing their standard of living. Even worse, the lack of competition always results in lower quality products as well. By reducing the incomes of our trading partners -- leaving them with less income with which to buy American-made goods -- protectionism harms American exporters as well. Protectionism is legal plunder."

Fruitcake Dobbs: "as long as Lou Dobbs is still kicking at CNN, we'll continue to hear nightly nativist tirades against the loss of manufacturing jobs, the off-shoring of tech jobs, immigration, and general alarmism about the 'outsourcing of America.' The truth, of course, is a bit more complicated than the simplistic picture painted by protectionists."

An extreme example of 'outsourcing' shows that we have nothing to fear from it.

Friedman of the NYT has it right about the desirability of globalization, free trade and "exporting jobs": "I've been in India for only a few days and I am already thinking about reincarnation. In my next life, I want to be a demagogue. Yes, I want to be able to huff and puff about complex issues - like outsourcing of jobs to India - without any reference to reality..... although the U.S. has lost some service jobs to India, total exports from U.S. companies to India have grown from $2.5 billion in 1990 to $4.1 billion in 2002. What goes around comes around, and also benefits Americans".

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"Culturally enlightened French writers show simplistic Americans what justice is all about" They just LOVED 9/11. Ever since my first encounter with French literature in my teens (over 40 years ago) I have always thought French culture was endemically corrupt and devoid of any morality. A superficial cleverness is about all they rise to -- Camille Saint-Saens excepted, of course.

Wow! David's Medienkritik has hit the jackpot. He noted that much was being made of the fact that the suicide rate of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is 13.5 per 100,000. So he looked up the suicide rates in the German and French armies nestling cosily away in their home countries: 17.00 and 19.25!

Comment from a reader on THAT movie: "A lot of the fuss about THE PASSION actually comes from the "liberal" end of the Christian spectrum. Whatever the faults of the movie (and all movies have faults), I suspect even "liberal" Christians would agree that Gibson's movie is closer to the Gospel tradition (however interpreted) than JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, GODSPEL, LIFE OF BRIAN or THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (where he has sex with Barbara Hershey), the last big Hollywood Jesus movie. Gibson is being judged by a much tougher critical standard than that applied to his Jesus movie peers. I can sympathise with critics who focus on the blood and gore portrayed, but this aspect was almost entirely absent from all previous Jesus Christ movies like THE ROBE. Considering the subject matter, this absence has probably been a major flaw of the movies to date. Modern audiences, who demand gritty realism from movies like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN would probably find the classic movie portraits of Christ's death boring and uninteresting. Gibson deserves credit for putting his money where his mouth is, and letting his audience know how confronting the Gospel and the Christian message really is. Like it or not, the Christian message is not saccharine syrup. And you don't have to like it".

Britain copies GWB: "Tens of thousands of Polish, Czech and other eastern Europeans who have been working and living illicitly in Britain, some for many years, are to be given an amnesty in all but name from May 1, the Home Office revealed yesterday. The immigration minister, Beverley Hughes, said that if they ''turn legit' under the new migrant workers' registration scheme, they will not face any retribution. 'They have a right to be here and there is no need for them to carry on working illegally,' she said. The generous attempt to provide tens of thousands of illegal migrants with a route out of Britain's 'hidden economy' comes as new official figures backed up ministers' claims to have drawn the sting out of the asylum crisis."

Illegal aliens are imposing an additional cost amounting to $900 per American child (i.e. child of American-born parents) in the public school system.

Appalling Texas "justice": "Citing misconduct by Texas prosecutors, the Supreme Court Tuesday threw out the sentence of Delma Banks Jr., one of the country's longest-serving death row inmates whose execution was halted last year with minutes to spare. The high court, ruling 7-2, said Bowie County prosecutors allowed two key witnesses to lie to the jury at Banks' 1980 murder trial. They also illegally withheld from defense lawyers the fact that one witness was a paid police informant and the other a two-time felon who cut a deal to testify in exchange for prosecutors dropping an arson charge against him."

"A German drag queen has been given an honorary professorship from the University of Hamburg's faculty for Gender Studies to teach Queer Theory. Oliver Knoebel, better known in Germany as drag queen Olivia Jones, has said he feels honoured to have received the title of professor. ... Queer Theory is primarily concerned with how gender and sexuality bridges social gaps. The subject has developed out of feminist and gay-lesbian research and is mainly taught in the USA."

If he had been studying Queer theory, feminism or environmentalism that would have been fine: "The Supreme Court, in a new rendering on separation of church and state, voted Wednesday to let states withhold scholarships from students studying theology. The court's 7-2 ruling held that the state of Washington was within its rights to deny a taxpayer-funded scholarship to a college student who was studying to be a minister."

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum and all that but John Lennon still seems popular for his peacenik "philosophy". So see here for a dissection of his nonsensical political lyrics -- "Imagine" in particular. Beatle politics are like Hollywood politics: Good for entertainment only.

Michael Darby is back on the net with a big range of posts. Some of his headings:
Caffre the Fairy
Elections in Zimbabwe
Strong, Silent Men Make Good Presidents
Yet another "bank" scam
Don't Worry, Eat Happy
The Mufti of Australia Calls for Jihad
It Takes More Than Spin To Make A Steel Project
Archive of terrorist websites with links

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Two more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

THAT MOVIE

Like many others, I have been puzzled by the fuss over THAT movie. The Pope has approved it, evangelical Christians are lining up to buy tickets to it and all it does is re-tell the basic Christian story -- now nearly 2000 years old. Jeff Jacoby makes the best job of explaining the fuss as far as I can see but I still think the claim that it will stir up antisemitism among Christians is do-gooder nonsense.

I do however like the point in the NYT that the film might make the "modern" (read "social") Christians sit up and think a bit.

Now they're threatening Mel Gibson. Never mind [that] 'The Passion of the Christ' will likely prove a hit, Mel is taking a hit from Hollywood types. One tells the New York Daily News he's all but a marked man. Directors will avoid him. And one goes so far as to say audiences will move on from him. No more 'Lethal Weapon' sequels. No more 'Signs.' Says who? Says some Hollywood honcho irked by the 'Passion' or Mel's passion to make it? I just wonder whether those in Hollywood would be jawboning as much if Mel had taken on a different movie project ... Let's say, 'The Passion of Global Warming' or 'The Passion of Migrant Workers.' No, Hollywood selects what passions are appropriate."

What Mel Gibson's foes forget: "These days, the most consistently pro-Israel group of Americans, oddly enough, are evangelical Christians. A sane and rational person might assume that fact would be appreciated and applauded by us. By and large, however, that isn't the case. Many of my fellow Jews don't like or trust devout Christians. When I ask them why, they suddenly become history professors. To listen to them, you'd think the Inquisition had ended earlier this year. Frankly, when I hear them dredging up ancient animosities, I'm surprised they haven't taken a page out of the Al Sharpton playbook and demanded reparations from Spain!"

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Keith Burgess-Jackson and many other conservatives have been appalled at Andrew Sullivan's extreme, irrational and hysterical reaction to GWB's opposition to homosexual marriage. From the way Sullivan speaks, you would think GWB was out to murder homosexuals. Sullivan is of course himself a homosexual so I was not myself surprised by his reaction. Homosexuals themselves now normally claim that they are genetically different and it is certainly my observation that over-emotionality is very prevalent among them -- wicked of me though it no doubt is to say so. And it is not the first time Sullivan has been noticeably irrational. His expression of contempt for British culture (he is himself British-born) is hard to see as anything other than an emotional outburst (See here and here).

Marriage: "It's really nothing more than a private contract between two individuals, consecrated by their notion of God. At least that is how it started. It was a completely non-governmental arrangement -- until the Socialists weaseled into the deal with promises of 'official certification' by the State. The recognition of this fine institution of human companionship by an artificial entity (government) proved to be the camel's nose under the tent, with the hump of regulation over the private affairs of individuals soon to follow."

An appalling tale in "Spiked" of an influential medical researcher determined to condemn the Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine as a cause of autism -- without any scientific foundation and for his own personal gain. How many kids have become seriously ill for no good reason because of this greedy crook's lies and distortions? I know what I would like to do to him. This anus of a so-called doctor is particularly despicable to me because, as a libertarian, I cannot support compulsory vaccinations. Yet I hate to see kids suffer and and be permanently damaged needlessly. So the alternative is to persuade the parents that vaccination is a good thing to do -- and putting needless scares into parents about vaccination seems to me in the circumstances to verge on the criminal. As the "Spiked" article says: "One speculative paper, now utterly discredited, has had the effect of reducing the uptake of MMR far below that required to maintain community resistance to measles, mumps and rubella." For the record, my own son has had every vaccination going.

Conservatives have been saying this for a long time: "Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, stepping into the politically charged debate over Social Security, said Wednesday the country can't afford the benefits currently promised to the baby boom generation. He urged Congress to trim those benefits"

Probably more just than the official response: "An air traffic controller who ordered a passenger plane into the path of another aircraft over Germany - a crash that killed dozens of Russian children - was stabbed to death Wednesday"

Naderism's dark underbelly "Yes, the same man who rails against corporate welfare - because it coercively takes money from taxpayers and funnels it to corporations - has set up a rather ingenious, if underhanded and manipulative, way of coercively taking money from college kids - and funneling it to Ralph Nader".

Amusing: The Socialist International has just had a meeting in China and the Australian Labor party sent along a representative. His comment to his hosts was rather acid: "China's opening up policy is quite successful. If one looks at China's TV programs and reads the youngsters' state of mind, one has this to say that if China's march toward the world is compared to a film, then the film is one just started."

Martha Stewart's surreal ordeal: "This statement highlights what this trial is about -- not insider trading, but the right to declare one's innocence, even when the government later agrees with the declaration. Surely if others attempted a similar defense in the face of a Kafka-esque judicial machine, the bullying Justice Department would be seen for what it is, forcing it to assume a lower profile and move somewhere behind the front line of the government's funding trough."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its condensation of the blogosphere.

A humorous test to discover if you're a conservative, liberal, libertarian, or a communist here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Two more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

HOMOSEXUALITY RAMPANT

From one of my correspondents: "Homosexual men already have equal marriage rights -- the right to marry a woman".

P.P. McGuinness on homosexual marriage: "Why should homosexuals when they have had all obstacles removed to making any arrangement of their affairs between themselves that they want to, insist on going through a form of marriage, and on calling it marriage? Clearly, they assign a greater significance to marriage than considering it just a civil contract, as do most heterosexuals. In principle, it seems they want the community to give them the kind of social approval which goes with marriage. The difficulty with this is that the social approval that goes with marriage has traditionally been related to a whole complex of beliefs about the desirability of stable and loving heterosexual union, usually intended to result in children produced by the natural methods."

Public schools are promoting homosexuality to kids: "Teachers and kids can't talk about Jesus Christ, Moses or Biblical ethics - at least not in a positive, plausible sense - in the classroom. But they can talk about Timmy and Tommy the Testicle Twins? About Daddy's male roommate? About anal sex and oral sex between teenagers of the same sex? Parents - the innocence you work your butt off trying to provide for your kids at home is being eroded, undermined or at least under-valued within the New Public School.

Keith Burgess-Jackson has lots of scholarly stuff on the homosexual marriage issue.

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Nader: One of my medical correspondents writes: "Around 1970, there was a hysterical reaction to "microshock" in hospitals. New electrical equipment made people cautious about leakage currents around central venous catheters, pacemakers, etc.. Under the right circumstances, very small shocks could cause cardiac arrest. The claim that "5000 people die from microshocks" caused a hysteria like never before - this was the typical liberal "zero risk" knee jerk - to prevent "microshock" billions of dollars were spent making every ICU bed like an operating room - isolation transformers, special isolated floors - added about $50, 000 to each bed. Of course, architects and electrical contractors were overjoyed. And Nader was one of the crusaders to "save lives from microshock." One of the staff at our hospital was a recognized expert in electrical safety. He searched for the source of such information and discovered - There was no source - the numbers were "made up" somewhere along the way and people rode with it. Some common sense eventually prevailed. The logical conclusion was that these "microshocks" were unusual, and deaths rare. So a more conventional approach - to use a good grounding system and be careful - was effective. Again, this "zero risk" mentality was typical of Greens - like Nader - who are not concerned at all with costs." So good old Ralph helped make medical care more expensive for everyone. Well done! No wonder the people-hating Greenies like him!

Dick McDonald of the California Republicans has sent me a detailed email about the peacenik votes of John Kerry in the Senate which I have just posted here. It shows that if Kerry's votes in the Senate had carried the day, the U.S. armed forces would now have hardly any of the weapons that now make them so effective. See also Joshua Muravchik for a broader coverage of Kerry's pacifist record.

There is a most detailed site here refuting the "Bush was a draft-dodger" lie. It appears that, like myself, Bush DID actually volunteer for service in Vietnam but was not accepted.

I think that the homosexual marriage issue is a Godsend to GWB. How many normal Americans are going to want their own marriages cheapened by calling anything a marriage? I think Bush could win because of his stand on just that issue.

On the "dumbness" of George W Bush -- Another view from Australia: "But most simply, media claims of stupidity have more to do with a sneering kind of elitism and faux intellectualism typical of many commentators rather than being based in fact. One remembers the famous "60 Minutes" interview with Pauline Hanson when she admitted to not knowing what "xenophobic" means. While this was taken up with much glee by the commentariat at the time as proof of Hanson's unsuitability for politics, for many supporters this was in fact seen as proof of her common touch - a much more valuable trait in the political process. No doubt in a presidential election year, some media commentators.. will take great delight in labelling President Bush and other candidates "dumb". And yet the lack of intellectual rigour involved in such analysis suggests that some media commentators, looking for an easy angle to their coverage are perhaps not so bright themselves.

I like it: "Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation's largest teachers union a 'terrorist organization' Monday, taking on the 2.7-million-member National Education Association early in the presidential election year. Paige's comments, made to the nation's governors at a private White House meeting, were denounced by union president Reg Weaver as well as prominent Democrats."

Review of Peter Brimelow's The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education: "The point here is not to debate the dubious merits of Mr. Bush's plan to improve accountability in the nation's failing schools. As Brimelow proves, the perverse incentives in this socialized system don't allow for much latitude. The thing to observe, however, is how masterful the educrats are at mounting a noisy, well-masked offensive at the slightest threat to their Soviet-style status quo."

"A northern Islamic state in Nigeria that is at the heart of a spreading African polio outbreak declared Sunday it would not relent on its boycott of a mass vaccination program which it called a U.S. plot to spread AIDS and infertility among Muslims". With great difficulty, I will refrain from comment.

A very interesting letter here from a reformed peacenik who now supports the U.S. presence in Iraq. Apparently 9/11 provided the needed dose of reality. Via Bunker Mulligan.

Amusing: Conservative bloggers were recently asked to nominate the dinner guest from Hell. Michael Moore was the "winner" by a long chalk. I voted for Noam Chomsky.

David's Medienkritik has a lot of posts on Michael Moore at the moment. Apparently they can't get enough of him in Germany. He is viewed as "educational" there. Apparently he has sold more books in Germany than in the USA.

The Wicked one has some wise words about speeding and parking tickets.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Two more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

ECONOMIC ISSUES

Virgina Postrel says official figures make unemployment look a lot worse than it is because the U.S. government's bean-counters miss out on whole categories of small business that have grown rapidly over the last few years.

Learn from Colorado: "Colorado is often cited as the state with the most stringent tax and expenditure limit (TEL) in the country. State elected officials nationwide can learn from how Colorado got its TEL and how it is attempting to cope with recent challenges. One of the most important changes in Colorado tax policy was the adoption in 1987 of a flat income tax set at 5 percent, replacing the graduated income tax."

Take, for instance, the case of Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers. Mankiw has been castigated of late for his pronouncement about the loss of service sector jobs, saying that 'outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade.' Political opposites as different as John Kerry and Dennis Hastert roundly condemned Mankiw, accusing him of economic heresy. But while the lawmakers are right about the importance of jobs, their criticism of Mankiw is off-target. The economist may need some coaching in the art of phrasing his comments, but he is right that job shifting naturally occurs in a global economy."

A good article here about how globalization and outsourcing are changing large numbers of lives in India for the better.

"Argentina's flouting the rule of law explains the poverty of nations. Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' explained how a non-governmental 'invisible hand' in free markets fuels national prosperity. In contrast, as the Argentine example corroborates, national penury is explained by the 'black hands' of government leaders who torch the rule of law and private property rights for political benefit. A succession of Argentine presidents since 1999 have ruined the nation's fortunes by making the laws and contractual promises akin to a restricted railroad ticket, good for this day and train only."

Official U.S. government data on who pays most tax here. Excerpt: "The top one percent of tax filers paid 36.18 percent of federal personal income taxes in 1999, the latest year for which data are available... The 4.00 percent share paid by the bottom half of taxpayers was virtually unchanged during this period, as was the 96.00 percent share borne by the top half". In other words almost all tax in America is paid by "the rich". "The poor" pay nothing.

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I had a good laugh over Keith Burgess-Jackson's post about voting for Nader. I said yesterday that lots of idiots will vote for Nader but Keith says he will vote for Nader. So clearly some non-idiots will also vote for Nader. I think there is a rather overlooked possibility that some conservatives might vote for Nader as a way of registering their disgust at the big-spending ways of GWB. But I still think Nader is an idiot. Why? Because he is more of a danger to his friends than his enemies. Keith explains in detail why he votes for Nader here. I think Keith should think more about his reasons for rejecting the view that Nader is ego-driven, however. At least as far back as St Bernard of Clairvaux in the Middle Ages and Simeon the Stylite in Byzantium, material poverty and strong principles have been perfectly compatible with the pursuit and attainment of great fame and influence -- and fame and influence are the the egotist's chief desires. One of my readers commented about Nader's "Meet the Press" appearance: "He was just too funny. Nothing he said made any sense at all - and he offered NO SPECIFICS: Just blind rage against Reps and Dems and corporations and government. No amount of government oversight of corporations was ever enough for Nader."

Perhaps I shouldn't be amazed but I have discovered that "The Wall Street Journal's" chief editorial writer and I both think that old cars are a good thing. The car I drive at the moment was recently valued at $1,500! (Yes, $1,500, not $15,000). It works perfectly as far as I am concerned. Sheesh! Am I becoming a Ralph Nader?

Between a rock and a hard place: According to a study by the National Taxpayers Union, all the Democrat candidates for president propose spending tens, and in some cases, hundreds of billions of dollars more than Mr. Bush. The sad fact is at the moment the voters are left with a choice between bad and truly awful."

"It is a sad irony that the world's freest Muslims -- those who live in liberty in the West -- are so unwilling to publicly condemn the world's worst Muslims -- the militant Islamist fascists who believe in violent jihad, intolerant theocracy, subjugated women, and hatred of Jews and Americans...."

The Iraqi "resistance" seem more like Mafia crooks than traditional resistance movements: "Who's behind the suicide bombings, roadside attacks and prison breakouts in postwar Iraq? Whoever you want it to be, by the look of things. No Iraqi or Islamic group has claimed responsibility for the sporadic attacks, but there is no shortage of Western commentators, coalition officials and anti-war activists claiming responsibility on behalf of various groups and interests"

Sounds reasonable: "Britain will throw open its doors to workers from the former communist countries joining the European Union on May 1, but those that refuse to get a job will be denied benefits and thrown out, the government has pledged."

The Spectator has some good articles in their issue of 21st -- on what the British Tories need to do to regain power, on the "epidemic" of obesity and on Turkey's acceptance into the EU -- but they do not make it possible for anyone to link directly to their articles these days. You first have to register with them and even then you cannot get to the articles except via their table of contents. Registration is however very tricky and defeated me. I suggest you don't bother with it. I finally got to their articles by logging in as info@rationalreview.com with the password: rationalreview.

Melanie Phillips in The Guardian: "Anti-Semitism is on the increase and its roots are not in the Right but in the Sharon-hating Left"

There are a lot of short and to-the-point posts over at Texas Conservative

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Two more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin

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

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23 February, 2004

GREENIE CORNER

Robert Bidinotto, of ecoNOT.com, recently posted a commentary on the ongoing campaign by a well-heeled green group, Oceana, to intimidate the Google search engine company. Oceana is attempting to use harassment and other tactics to pressure Google to carry attack ads against the Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. After Oceana was notified about Bidinotto's commentary, one of the group's staff wrote a reply. In it, he attempted to rationalize Oceana's flagrant thuggery -- which includes publishing on its Web site the private contact information of Google and Royal Caribbean officers, and encouraging its members to subject those individuals to further harassment and intimidation. Bidinotto has now published a new response to Oceana. And "since turnabout is fair play," the letter includes the e-mail addresses of Oceana's relevant officers and staff members.

Patrick Moore, Greenpeace founder, now green apostate, versus his former co-religionists: "Compromise and co-operation among environmentalists, government, industry and academia are essential for sustainability. Not all my former colleagues saw things that way, however. Many environmentalists rejected consensus politics and sustainable development in favour of continued confrontation, ever-increasing extremism, and left-wing politics. At the beginning of the modern environmental movement, Ayn Rand published Return of the Primitive, which contained an essay by Peter Schwartz The Anti-Industrial Revolution. In it, he warned that the new movement's agenda was anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-human.... They have alienated themselves from scientists, intellectuals and internationalists. It seems inevitable that the media and the public will, in time, see the insanity of their position".

Green religion: "David Brower is, by wide agreement, the most influential environmentalist of the past 50 years. In the 1950s and 1960s he pioneered many of the tactics later used by environmentalists to stop the construction of dams, roads, shopping centers, and all manner of projects all over the United States. He was the executive director of the Sierra Club for seventeen years, and later founded another environmental organization, Friends of the Earth. Brower was also a leading figure in a book by one of the most observant chroniclers of our time, John McPhee. In Encounters with the Archdruid, McPhee wrote in 1971 that "Brower, who talks to groups all over the country about conservation, refers to what he says as The Sermon." McPhee found that, "to put it mildly, there is something evangelical about Brower".

"Sustainable development" in the Third world: "WORLDwrite believes that there is a danger of these policies sustaining poverty, rather than alleviating it."

"The [UK] government is to go ahead with genetically modified crops despite what it acknowledges is considerable public resistance, cabinet committee papers passed to the Guardian reveal. The minutes of the discussion -- which was held eight days ago and involved senior cabinet ministers including the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and the environment secretary, Margaret Beckett -- disclose the government's final decision to give the green light to the first crop of GM maize in Britain."

The Greenies have nobbled our water heaters!. Hot water systems are all now routinely set at a temperature too low to kill bugs. But you can turn yours up and you will then live in a house that is a lot healthier to be in.

Dodging Greenie oppression: "A few years ago, my wife and I began seeing refrigerators and air conditioners lining the ditches on roads outside of Tulsa. It was strange; in the middle of the night people would come along and push old air conditioners off trucks into the ditches and fields. ... But what made us wonder was the sheer number of them and the ones that kept being added once we became aware of the problem. Why were so many people littering the outskirts of our lovely town?"

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Whoopee! The idiot Nader is running for Prez. And lots of idiots will vote for him. GWB should give him a medal!

Lots of good historical quotes in this article. For example: "I will be voting to give the president of the United States the authority to use force -- if necessary -- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security." -- John Kerry, Oct. 9, 2002

I have posted a few items pointing out that the outsourcing of service jobs to India is beneficial to the people at large in both countries. One of the big complaints is the outsourcing of computer programming jobs to India. As a programmer myself, I have always thought that the possibilities there have been much exaggerated. Typically, writing a program involves a constant interaction between the programmer and the person who wants it written and you basically have to be in the same room together for that to work well -- not continents apart. One of my readers who is a much more experienced programmer than I am agrees.

Unbelievable stupidity: "They're called living wages. But they are the wages of death -- economic death. Santa Fe is the latest villain here, abetted by local union activists. The city government recently passed a minimum wage of $8.50 per hour, scheduled to take effect in 2004. Another hike kicks in by 2008, boosting the minimum to $10.50. The big jump in labor costs means that many businesses in Santa Fe will close down, or move to another town. And it means that employees in Santa Fe who were worth hiring at $5 or $6 an hour, but not worth hiring at $8.50, will be out of a job."

The "worker's paradise" of North Korea "Well known in Japan from TV and tabloid coverage, Kim Jong Il's "Entourage of Delight" is just that-a group of entertainers devoted to providing Kim Jong Il with delight and gaiety. The women of this entourage were frequently summoned to the "Number 8 Banquet Hall" in Pyongyang to perform elegant dances... During a banquet one night a group of five dancers in the entertainment entourage were performing a disco dance. Suddenly Kim Jong Il ordered, "Take off your clothes!" The girls took off their clothes, but then Kim told them to take it all off. They seemed surprised and could not hide their bewilderment, but they could not object to their Dear Leader's orders. In awkward embarrassment they stripped down and continued their performance in the nude. After a while he turned to his cabinet staff members and instructed them, "You guys dance with them too." And soon enough I, too, was ordered to dance. However, he cautioned us, "You'll dance, but you won't touch. If you touch, you're thieves.""

Dave Huber is a U.S. Middle School teacher and has a big post saying that behaviour problems in his classes are as enormous as those I recently noted in British schools.

The most succinct comment yet on John Kerry's alleged affair with an intern. Anyone smell a coverup?

The Wicked one says blondes are smarter, not dumber.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Another example of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries!

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

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22 February, 2004

REPARATIONS

Is this the most sanctimonious site on the internet? "We, an organization of white Americans, express our deep remorse for the ongoing wrongs committed by our people against Black men, women and children in the U.S. and throughout the Diaspora who are descendants of enslaved Africans. We see the United States of America as immoral from its very foundation .... We support and advocate reparations proposals put forward by Black leaders, recognizing that white Americans have no part in deciding what is required to repair and restore the descendants of enslaved Africans individually and collectively, and that these decisions belong to Black people alone" How warm and wonderful they must feel!

Thomas Sowell says claims for restitution for slavery or colonization undermine human brotherhood. Look at the example of the Germans and Czechs: "Relations between today's Germany and today's Czech Republic - both consisting mostly of people who were not even born when any of these events happened - are strained because of unresolved problems growing out of attempts to right the wrongs of the 17th century."

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I think this article proves that mathematicians should not try to inject politics into their work. Popular mathematician Keith Devlin has decided in his wisdom to call some types of mathematical proof Right-wing and other types Left-wing. And no prizes for guessing which type of proof is derided. He says: "What is a proof? The question has two answers. The right wing ("right-or-wrong", "rule-of-law") definition is that a proof is a logically correct argument that establishes the truth of a given statement. The left wing answer (fuzzy, democratic, and human centered) is that a proof is an argument that convinces a typical mathematician of the truth of a given statement." I would have thought that any knowledge of political history would have shown him that both his sets of labels in fact describe conservatives. Conservatives do believe in the rule of law and that there is a difference between right and wrong but they are also fuzzy, democratic and human-centred. It is Leftists who have strict and simplistic formulas and moulds that they most want to fit us all into by force of law or by just plain force. How "fuzzy" and "human-centred" is that? Whereas from Edmund Burke on it is always conservatives who have stood up for democracy and humanity against Leftist revolutions and tyranny. At a time when the indisputably Leftist French revolution was -- in its "human centred" way -- guillotining people wholesale it was Burke who said that nothing in politics is simple and insisted on the wisdom of fuzzy, evolutionary democracy versus the bloodthirsty oversimplifiers and tyrants of the French revolution. And Stalin sure was a "human centred" guy too, wasn't he? And what a democrat he was! And it was really "fuzzy" the way he threw people into his Gulag at the drop of a hat wasn't it? And you've got to admire the guy for the way he rejected that boring old rule of law and made his own whim the only authority in Russia!

Seablogger is most naughtily cynical about the recurrent Greenie claim that Australia's coral reefs are dying and that ratifying the nonsensical Kyoto "global warming" treaty would fix it.

Australia's beloved "Middle-Easteners" again: "Up to seven shots were fired into a car yesterday morning during a dramatic road-rage incident in Sydney's southern suburbs. Several shots were fired, with three bullets lodging in the driver's side of the Honda. Police described the shooter as a male of Middle Eastern appearance". Great that Australia's strict gun-control laws keep guns out of their hands!

An outbreak of common-sense: "A study released last week by market research firm Heartbeat Trends concludes modern women no longer have a problem making it to the top of the corporate ladder if they want, but most opt to put more time and energy into their family instead". How the radical feminists must be fuming!

Martha McCarthyism: "Stewart is being tried not for her crimes (though crimes there may have been) but for who she is - rich, famous, and abusive to the help."

Is Europe becoming irrelevant? "Europe has lost its leverage in all the places that matter. The EU's star is faint in America, Russia and the Middle East" And Germany's major news-magazine thinks Germany has become a laughing stock too -- and asks: "Are we a nation of failures, not fit for the future, governed by bungling amateurs?" Need I say more? As a lover of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart etc., I am an instinctive Germanophile but from Hitler to Schroeder, socialism has been a recurrent disaster for Germany.

An American military strategist points out that GWB's pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein was not only good conservative caution but something that has good precedent in American military history: "Times have changed. The events of September 11, 2001 were a mere appetizer for the potential buffet of almost unimaginable violence that could befall the United States from enemies not bound by conventional restraints... In response, the President of the United States has proclaimed the Bush Doctrine.... The Bush Doctrine defines the enemy threat as a horrible combination of radicalism and technology that is not vulnerable to Cold War concepts of deterrence and containment. That is, terrorist groups and rogue states, who are unrestrained by the prospect of mutually assured destruction, create a new threat that demands an unprecedented response. To wait until they attack, as we might have historically preferred, is a far greater risk then can be justified. As President Bush warned at West Point, "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long"."

Daniel Pearl's widow says the "Wall Street Journal" has done nothing to see that his muderers are punished. They haven't even hired lawyers in Pakistan. What does it take? Are their reporters expendable?

According to this British school teacher, British schools are so preoccupied with getting students to behave -- now that most disciplinary measures have been outlawed -- that learning anything at all comes a distant second.

I have just put up some more lively postings from Chris Brand -- including the good news that Britain seems to be about to recognize different abilities in different students in its schools.

There is a VERY funny act of revenge on a Nigerian scamster here. Note that, unlike a blog, it is NOT in last-date-first format. Via Agitprop

Blogarama is a useful site. They must be: They have got this blog listed at the top of their Right-wing politics section.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Another example of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries!

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

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21 February, 2004

MORE ON ANTI-CONSERVATIVE BIAS IN ACADEME

Easily Distracted doesn't know how to spell "supersede" but nonetheless seems to think he knows all about anti-conservative bias at Swarthmore and universities and colleges generally. I don't suppose we should be surprised that it is mostly pretty ivory-tower stuff, however -- about how he perceives his colleagues and how things should be rather than how they are. Facts (such as what conservative students constantly report) are very thin on the ground. For instance, he says in point 10 of his post of 16th that being a registered Democrat doesn't tell you everything about a Professor's views or actions -- which is obviously true -- but he then seems to move on to the conclusion that it tells you almost nothing about a Professor's views and actions -- which is highly questionable to say the least. And add in the fact that almost all of the Professor's colleagues will be Democrats too and the whole claim about the irrelevance of party affiliation becomes absurd. Pervasive Leftism is not reflected in what is taught? Only Pollyanna would believe it.

He is right about some things, though: "In most of the humanities there's a default assumption that everyone around the table more or less broadly can be classed as a liberal, and a certain stunned incredulity when someone departs from that assumption". That in fact is how I got my first and only full time university teaching job. It was in a Sociology Department and it never occurred to anyone to make any enquiries of anyone about my politics. They just assumed I was a fellow Leftist and appointed me with immediate tenure. When I resigned 12 years later and sought teaching jobs at other universities, however, my politics had become widely known (my 1974 book ensured that) and I not once even got interviewed -- even though I had by then what would normally be considered the enormously attractive record of over 200 articles published in the academic journals. Fortunately, I didn't need the money by then but I would have liked to have done some more teaching.

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One of the most pervasive Leftist doctrines is what they call moral relativism -- which they use to attack any and all standards for behaviour. "There is no such thing as right and wrong", they say. The doctrine is a corrupt form of what philosophers would call "ethical naturalism" and I too am an ethical naturalist. I have therefore put up a very brief essay setting out my version of ethical naturalism and showing that ethical naturalism does NOT lead to the abandonment of standards that Leftists pretend it does.

Speaking of ethics, who do these professional "ethicists" think they are? What authority do they have for the rules that they apply? The only authority they seem to work on that I can see is whether or not something fits in with Leftist prejudices. A case in point: A noteworthy recent example of what most would see as unethical behavior comes from a professional ethicist at the University of Melbourne's Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics -- dealing with the half-baked plagiarism smear launched against frontier historian Keith Windschuttle. Without having actually read Windschuttle's book, merely a precis prepared by a hostile Leftist critic, this ethics teacher gave his "thumbs up" to the smear. At least he apologised a few days later. However the apology, unlike the original attack, was buried on newspaper back pages.

John Ralston Saul has pompously and at great length declared globalization to be "dead". A pity about the constant expansion of world trade! This is the sort of statement he makes: "Then came the explosions of September 11, 2001. In the following days, the world economy began plummeting into a depression. Corporate leaders hunkered down to their businesses, forgot about world leadership and, with a classic desire to reduce risk, slashed their investment programs, thus accelerating society's economic plunge". What total ignoring of the facts! A day or two after 9/11 my highly diversified share portfolio had lost one eighth of it value only and in six months it was back to where it had previously been. And it is now much higher than it has ever been. Some depression!

That Leftist hunger for publicity again: "The American feminist Naomi Wolf has accused a noted Yale University professor of sexually harassing her while she was an undergraduate, and alleged a long history of such events at Yale. Camille Paglia accused Wolf of staging a witch-hunt similar to those that swept New England in the 17th century and, in distinctly unfeminist fashion, of exploiting her looks to advance her career. Paglia said it was "indecent" of Wolf to wait for 20 years "to bring all of this down on an elderly man who has health problems, to drag him into a 'he said/she said' scenario so late in the game"."

Another feminist myth bites the dust: "Yet there's no evidence that most older men recoil from women of their own age. On the contrary, older men who remarry generally pick a woman from their own age-group — a trend that appears to be strengthening."

The charade of American education: "The advent of high-stakes testing is revealing more than just information on what American high school students know and are capable of doing; it is also revealing a significant shortfall between that assessment of actual skills and what schools have been telling students about their achievement and ability. For some students, the failure to pass a high school exit exam is the first warning signal they may be sorely unprepared for the demands of college."

Democrat Zell Miller's tribute to GWB has been reprinted all over the place so if you have not read it by now maybe you should. It is a portrait of a genuine, humble and decent man.

Amazing! Some lies about pre-invasion WMD intelligence originally put out in the Australian media have been taken up by the German press. David's Medienkritik nails the lies concerned. If it's anti-Bush, the German media will even go all the way to Australia for their distortions.

Krauthammer is very good on the amazingly hypocritical Democrat complaints about the Republicans engaging in "negative" advertising -- when the Democrats themselves have been nothing but negative in their comments about GWB.

My fellow psychometrician Kimberly Swygert has a powerful post on the follies of affirmative action in college admissions.

Wayne Lusvardi has put together two most revealing lists about how Democrats and Republicans are approaching the upcoming Presidential campaign -- emotionalism and abuse versus rational discourse.

The Wicked one has just put up some more jokes.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Another example of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries!

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

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20 February, 2004

FROM BROOKES NEWS

More myths about Clinton's boom & bust economy The '90s boom owed absolutely nothing to Clinton's policies and neither did the recession. In short, he had nothing to do with either. The responsibility for these events lies entirely with the Federal Reserve.
Hollywood sickoes want hatchet murderer freed What kind of sickness has infected those Hollywood celebrities who defend mass murderers and sadists? A number of them have now demanded the release of Kevin Cooper, a homicidal thug who used a hatchet to massacre a family as they slept.
Why the Bush victory still worries China's militarists I have but one question for my American readers. Would you really vote for a group of politicians for whom China's generals are rooting? If so, perhaps Euripides was right after all: 'Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.'
America has changed the world for the better Dr. Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari, former dean of the Faculty of Islamic Law at the University of Qatar has publicly endorsed President Bush's actions in Iraq.
Dr. Caldicott's Soviet connection CBC has financed a documentary about Helen Caldicott. What it does not contain is a report on her pro-Soviet activities and support for Leonid Brezhnev, the thug who ordered the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.
Taiwan 'free'; China 'not free': Freedom House technical study Taiwan is a free country - according to a technical analysis published recently by Freedom House - but not China.
Bush's deficit: fact and fiction The increasing ratio of spending and taxation to GDP has given many politicians the impression that the US economy can accommodate significant and permanent increases in government spending without impairing economic growth. This is a dangerous delusion.

Details here

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"Feminist" defends rapist -- and it wasn't even in a Muslim country: "Last July, a 20-year-old thug named Stewart Pearson soaked a rag in toilet bowl cleanser and Ajax and used it to smother 17-year-old Tina Phan while she was sleeping in her Terra Linda, Calif., home... Pearson raped and brutalized her. According to Phan, Pearson told her he had committed the same crime before and planned to do it again. Enter Rep. Woolsey. As first reported by the Marin Independent Journal, the outspoken feminist and anti-violence-preaching Democrat attempted to intervene in the case. She used her official stationery to send a letter to the local presiding judge in support of the convicted rapist"

Americans in France are now regularly abused: "While the number of Americans who visited France dropped in 2003, a great part of those who live in, or pass through France complain of a genuine harassment. "We've had it," they say." Americans should stop going there altogether. The howls from the huge French tourist industry would be really amusing.

Cambridge's religion researcher Phillip Jenkins notes that traditional Christianity is growing fast in Africa and South America while it is waning in Europe and much of North America. It is no longer a mainly European religion and the wishy-washy "modern" Christians are sidelining themselves. On another issue: Jenkins makes the interesting claim that the incidence of pedophilia seems to be no higher in Catholic priests than in other occupational groups -- and note that Jenkins is not himself a Catholic. He seems to miss the point that it is the habitual CONDONING of pedophilia by the Church hierarchy that is the towering offence. It is the bishops and Cardinals who allowed it to go on who should be in jail.

A brain-dead theologian:: "A. Roy Eckardt, emeritus professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, suggested that Christians ought to abandon the resurrection of Jesus, since it "remains a primordial and unceasing source of the Christian world's anti-Judaism."" He may be a theologian but he is no Christian. For 2000 years, the resurrection of Christ has been the central tenet of Christianity.

Outsourcing (ie U.S. firms locating some part of their production process out of the U.S.) is an emerging election theme in the U.S. Yet "Insourcing" (i.e. foreign firms outposting some of their jobs into the US) also is big -- roughly as big as the outsourcing. If you were stupid enough to stop the one you might lose the other -- and so gain nothing but disruption and impoverishment for all your meddling. But Leftists would like that, of course. Destruction is their only talent. Reason certainly isn't.

Computer programming jobs going to India: "Now I do not doubt that there are many computer programmers in the West who will, in the short run and maybe if they can find nothing else to do in the longer run as well, suffer severely. But it is also true that the availability to the West of much cheaper Indian programming power will create massive new economic opportunities in the West, and everywhere else."

Some links on Australia's mini-race riot recently here and here and here -- including a very conservative response from the leader of Australia's major Leftist party. Clearly, police behaviour in the matter was just the reverse of the usual old Leftist accusations made about them.

A bit of optimism from the NYT: "One major criticism of the Iraq war is that by invading Iraq, the U.S. actually created more enemies in the Arab-Muslim world. I don't happen to believe that, but maybe it's true. What the critics miss, though, is that the U.S. ouster of Saddam Hussein has also triggered the first real "conversation" about political reform in the Arab world in a long, long time. It's still mostly in private, but more is now erupting in public."

The Mufti of Australia has denied calling for a jihad in Lebanon this week and said that "he didn't support suicide bombing . . . in no circumstances".

Even the solidly democrat "Washington Post" seems to have become fed up with John Kerry's rubbery "policies" -- if you can call them that: "John Kerry has become the favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination without a detailed or clarifying debate on many issues.... Now, with the nomination seemingly within his reach, the Massachusetts senator must begin to more fully explain where he stands on the major challenges facing the country. That task is particularly important for Mr. Kerry because of his fuzziness on issues ranging from Iraq to gay marriage"

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Another example of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries!

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

WE WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY!

I have lost track of where I got this quote about happiness from and Google doesn't know it so maybe it is behind a subscription wall somewhere. I have commented on this subject previously myself here and here:

"In a recent New York Times op-ed touting his book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, psychology professor Barry Schwartz criticized political reforms aimed at expanding choice. He argued that "for many people, increased choice can lead to a decrease in satisfaction. Too many options can result in paralysis, not liberation."... There is much to be said against this thesis. First, if choice makes us unhappy, why do so many of us stop patronizing mom-and-pop stores and rush to Wal-Mart the moment we get the chance?... Choice in the marketplace grows out of individual freedom. I want shoes. Many people are free to sell me shoes. That presents me with choices, requiring me to pay attention and to discriminate. What's the alternative? Government control aimed at limiting choice. Where's the evidence that that makes people happy?... Schwartz is a professor. If someone were to suggest that too many books, journals, and magazines crowd the shelves, that all this choice makes people unhappy, and that government could serve us better by restricting the number of choices, Schwartz and his ilk would scream like banshees".

There is a more reasonable article on what makes us happy here.

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Leftists have always hated free speech. The facts are deadly to them: "If reaction to Daniel Pipes' lecture on Tuesday (2/10) was any indication, fascism is alive and well at UC Berkeley. Pipes was invited by the Israel Action Committee and Berkeley Hillel to speak at the college campus known for its leftist politics. But ironically, the home of ''free speech'' and ''tolerance'' has shown itself to be distinctly intolerant to those who express political views other than their own. And Daniel Pipes happens to fit that description.... All of these combined make Daniel Pipes public enemy number one according to UC Berkeley leftists and especially radical Muslim students. Indeed, the Muslim Student Association (MSA) was out in full force on Tuesday, acting like the thugs and bullies they routinely accuse Pipes of supporting. There were about 50-70 of them, amidst a crowd of 700, and after failing to prevent Pipes from speaking, they did their best to try and disrupt the lecture and intimidate the audience.... The fact is, radical Muslim students and their leftist counterparts are the most domineering, destructive, and dangerous forces in higher education today. If we're to win the War on Terrorism, we may have to start with our own college campuses." {Pipes's own account of the matter is here}

Redoubtable economist Arnold Kling has another explanation of why so many academics are Leftist: "If your temperament favors freedom without responsibility, then there are certain occupations that are a good fit. Academic life is one of them.. The trick to having freedom without responsibility is to get paid without having to worry about where the money comes from. Most professors do not worry about fundraising or attracting tuition-paying students... Thus, we should not be surprised that their ideological bent is toward modern liberalism, which translates this personal preference into a political platform".

Red Cross criticizes Israel. How unusual! Antisemitism is nothing new to them. But the Red Cross is a European organization and antisemitism is of course very European -- even today

An unbelievable verdict. Australia has insane judges too.

The light begins to dawn: Dutch plans to expel up to 26,000 failed asylum seekers have sparked protests across Europe and led to threats of hunger strikes by those denied refugee status. The moves came as Britain finalised emergency measures to tighten welfare eligibility for immigrant workers before May 1, when the European Union admits 10 new countries.

Front Page has some extracts from speeches by made the Mufti of Australia (Sheikh Al-Hilali) in Lebanon which reveal him as being very anti-Israel. No surprises there. In Australia, however, he is viewed as a strong force for peace between Muslims and other Australians -- as this speech shows. We are probably lucky to have him. There is more on the matter here. My guess is that he is like any politician -- he says different things to different audiences. What he says to Australian Muslims is probably as good as we can hope for, however.

This article is presented as a commentary on just one American university. But most of it seems to be true of America's Left-dominated education system as a whole. Note that even Harvard needs to give around 20% of its "Freshers" remedial instruction in English. .

Peter Hitchens, a historian of crime amongst other things, sees Britain's new "FBI" as ending up more like a KGB: "Britain doesn't need an FBI abseiling all over the place, smashing down doors, clad in armour, waving Glock automatics and yelling 'Freeze!' It needs large, veteran coppers plodding the streets, radiating reassurance to the good and scaring the bad... since MPs were overtaken by collective madness after September 11, these PC police forces can now arrest and detain people in ways we used to think only happened abroad. Mr Blair, who does not care a damn for English liberty, keenly seeks to get convictions on 'lower standards of proof' while Mr Blunkett works away to get rid of jury trial".

Britain's "Saddam-gate": "Money illicitly siphoned from the UN oil-for-food programme by Saddam Hussein was used to finance anti-sanctions campaigns run by British politicians, according to documents that have surfaced in Baghdad. Undercover cash from oil deals went to three businessmen who in turn supported pressure groups involving the ex-Labour MP George Galloway, Labour MP Tam Dalyell, and the former Irish premier Albert Reynolds"

Carnival of the Vanities is up again -- though in a rather compressed form.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Another example of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries!

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

ISRAEL'S RIGHT TO BE JEWISH

A good imaginary conversation with a Leftist over at Crusader War College:

Leftist: "Israel should accept the One State solution demanded by the Palestinians!"

Me: "Israel doesn't want the Palestinians as citizens".

Leftist: "That's terrible, cruel, and unjust of Israel! Where could they go?"

Me: "The territories used to belong to Egypt and Jordan. They could become Egyptian and Jordanian citizens again, like they used to before the 6 Day War".

Leftist: "But Egypt and Jordan doesn't want them!"

Me: "So when Egypt and Jordan says they don't want the Palestinians as citizens, you accept THAT with nary a murmur, complaint, or suggestion that THEY are terrible, cruel, and unjust. BUT, when Israel says the same thing, you scream, holler, and jump up and down in "righteous" indignation, despite the fact that, since these people either used to be Egyptian or Jordanian Citizens, or born to former Egyptian or Jordanian citizens, makes the obligation fall upon Egypt and Jordan more than Israel! Or does Egypt and Jordan, in your eyes, have rights that YOU DENY ISRAEL?"

Leftist changes subject

Arlene Peck has a good column about Walid Shoebat, the former Palestinian terrorist who became a Zionist when he found out what lies he had been fed as a child. Another report about him is here

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Edward Feser gives part 2 of his explanation of why so many academics are Leftist. He says that FEAR of Christianity and morality is a major motivator for such people. Problem: I share the philosophical views that Feser says are Leftist (atheism and moral naturalism) but am nonetheless generally conservative. So how come? Because I respect Christianity rather than fear it. So why don't I fear it? Because I am completely CONFIDENT in my atheism and moral naturalism -- which is probably a rarity. It should be stressed that Feser is talking about academics rather than the general public. In Australia, for instance, there is little overall association between religion and politics but among Australian academics in the social sciences and humanities, both Leftism and religious skepticism are overwhelmingly the norm.

There is another take on what makes Leftist intellectuals tick in Paul Hollander's book "Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society". To quote one Amazon reviewer: "Political Pilgrims is the amazing story of how Western intellectuals embraced Marxist tyrants at the very moment their colleagues were rotting in prison cells, and the common people everyone claimed to be concerned for, were starving. The book relates how cultural and religious leaders from the West, including familiar names, visited the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other communist countries, and told the most appalling lies"

And even at the local government level the Soviet mentality never dies. This was the Leftist mayor of Brisbane (my home city of about 1 million people) yesterday: "Population targets were needed to guide where people lived in southeast Queensland, Brisbane Lord Mayor Tim Quinn said yesterday. Cr Quinn said population targets should be developed across the region as part of a comprehensive regional plan, aimed at housing new arrivals in the right areas".

And some of the most barefaced Leftist liars are the teachers' unions. See here: Australian teachers' unions are publishing advertisements crying that government schools do not get as much money from the Federal government as private schools do -- completely ignoring the fact that most taxpayer funding for Australian government schools comes via the State governments not via the Federal government. The private schools, by contrast, get almost all their taxpayer funding via the Federal government. When you count in the State government money that the unions deliberately ignore, the situation is exactly the reverse of what the unions would have you believe. Can you imagine what a great education the lying low characters responsible for these advertisements are giving to the kids entrusted to their care? "How to deceive in ten easy lessons" would be an obvious curriculum item. No wonder a third of Australians send their kids to private schools.

Eleanor French Spreitzer has a good post about why America's Leftist elites send their kids to private schools while hypocritically telling everyone else about what a good thing public schools are.

Michael Ross has some background on the recent race riot in a predominantly black area of Sydney (Australia). One quote: "I know an Aborigine ... And he used to brag about how he would do pretty well whatever he wanted at school knowing the teacher could not do anything because he was an Aborigine". See also here

I have just put up on PC Watch a news release about BBC censorship that does not seem to have made it into the mainstream media. Blacks are apparently allowed to accuse whites of racism but whites are not allowed to question that.

"When [we] decided to send John 'Sue the Bastards' Banzhaf a box of chocolates for Valentine's Day, we ran into an obvious problem: How to avoid being sued by Banzhaf for contributing to his obesity? Here's a guy whose signature law school course is nicknamed 'suing for credit' and whose license plate reads 'SUE-BAST.' His crusade to cash in on our nation's love handles has reached such outlandish proportions that he has threatened to sue milk companies, pork farmers, school boards, fast food restaurants and perhaps even mom with her apple pie. Luckily, a solution presented itself. Before sending Banzhaf the chocolates, we asked him to sign a 'Valentine's Day Chocolates Liability and Indemnification Agreement.'" More here

The Wicked one has a whole lot of new funnies up -- mostly about getting old.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Another example of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries!

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

FREE TRADE HAS ENEMIES EVERYWHERE -- ALL SHORT-SIGHTED

GWB not excepted: He protected U.S. steel makers and thereby shafted U.S. steel users; He protected U.S. sugar producers and thereby sent U.S. candy manufacturing jobs off to Canada and Mexico

But it mainly seems to be Leftists who are trying to make a big deal out of the fact that lots of jobs are done overseas these days. In Australia, it is the Australian Labor Party and in the USA it is the Democrat Presidential hopefuls. The Italian Fascist dictator Mussolini did the same 80 years ago too. He tried to make Italy self-sufficient ("autarky") -- which greatly increased Italian poverty. John Kerry, however, is the last one who should be bringing up the subject: "The Kerry family business, H.J. Heinz Co. of Pittsburgh, operates 22 factories in the United States and 57 in foreign countries. I don't think that Kerry should shut down The Heinz 57, but he might drop the rhetoric and talk about trade responsibly. He should support, not trade's contraction, but its expansion, like George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and every president since Herbert Hoover."

There is, however, a difference between 'good politics' and 'good economics'. One of Bush's economic advisors, Gregory Mankiw (Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers) has got a lot of flak for noting the basic economic truth that 'outsourcing' (moving manufacturing and service jobs offshore) is ultimately good for Americans' job prospects. Why? Because the lower costs mean there is a bigger surplus to reinvest (and you need investment to create jobs) and the lower costs also mean that the American companies who move their operations to where it is cheapest are more likely to withstand international competition. This good economics seems regrettably to be bad politics -- as the argument has always been too complicated for many voters to understand. That the whiners are all trying to force everyone to pay more for all the goods and services that they buy might help some people to realize what is at issue, however. The basic reality is that jobs come and go all the time and trying to change that is like trying to hold back the tide.

Very often, of course, industry moves elsewhere because of excessive red tape and bureaucratic controls, something 'liberals' usually add to -- but you won't hear them mentioning that!

Free trade has done wonders for electic guitars. Most of them are now made in Korea and are both better and cheaper.

And many classes of jobs are a dodo everywhere: "A strange idea has taken hold that if jobs are lost in one place, then some other place must have gained them. Somebody somewhere must have gained the millions of farm jobs we have lost, for example. Lou Dobbs of CNN appears as obsessed with this bizarre notion as he once was with space.com. Even stranger, those afflicted with Dobbsian trade phobia assume the places that gained jobs must be other countries, not other counties. Yet manufacturing jobs could not possibly have moved to another country, since every industrial country lost manufacturing jobs since 1995 -- particularly China, Japan and South Korea. And the United States has a huge surplus in business services with every region in the world -- that is, the United States sells much more 'outsourcing' to other countries than it buys from them."

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David's Medienkritik has a series of photos that prove that John Kerry is getting younger. We have all heard about the botox but the varying hair-colour is amusing too.

George Will has 28 excellent questions for the rubbery John Kerry. Just two of them: "You say the rich do not pay enough taxes. In 1979 the top 1 percent of earners paid 19.75 percent of income taxes. Today they pay 36.3 percent. How much is enough? You say the federal government is not spending enough on education. President Bush has increased education spending 48 percent. How much is enough?

A coverup uncovered: "The University of Newcastle's two top executives are to be replaced in the wake of a plagiarism scandal that has plagued the institution for more than a year." In my time teaching at a major Australian University, I was appalled at the lack of standards.

Jean-Francois Revel's recent book "Anti-Americanism" has a number of reviews on amazon.com. The last reviewer on the list makes a number of good points: "Revel concludes that the lunatic ravings of hatred for America and the opinionated ill will in much of the European media will only lead to Americans rejecting the idea of consultation. He believes that the USA's mistakes should always be subject to vigilant criticism but that the gross bias currently reigning will only weaken its exponents and encourage American unilateralism. The most important lesson from this book is that anti-Americanism is a disease, not a position. The prognosis is not good - Revel believes that countering this attitude with facts and reason will not work: " ... the disinformation in question is not the result of pardonable, correctable mistakes, but rather of profound psychological need.""

Looks like the Roman Catholic Church is still covering up for pedophile priests. The entire church hierarchy should be taken to court and be charged with the offence of being accessory to a crime. Honesty and decency seem to be beyond them. They've got the consciences of a maggot. You begin to understand the extreme Protestants who have always said it is the Devil's church, not Christ's church.

Australia's version of affirmative action has just given us race riots. When will the do-gooders ever learn? Strict and impartial policing is needed, not handouts for doing nothing.

Against UN influence in schools: In the 1960s, Dr. Robert Muller, U.N. deputy secretary-general, prepared a "World Core Curriculum." Its first goal: "Assisting the child in becoming an integrated individual who can deal with personal experience while seeing himself as a part of 'the greater whole.' In other words, promote growth of the group idea, so that group good, group understanding, group interrelations and group goodwill replace all limited, self-centered objectives, leading to group consciousness." Not much room for the individual there.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Another example of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries!

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

GREENIE CORNER

The very idea of climate engineering is a horror to the Greenies. "Don't change anything" is their fearful mantra. The fact that humanity has done NOTHING BUT change the natural environment ever since civilization was invented passes them by. Yet the beloved Greenie "Kyoto" treaty on global warming is just that -- an attempt to change our climate by turning back the clock. Since even its advocates admit that the Kyoto treaty would have virtually zero effect on climate, the real aim of the treaty is probably to turn back the clock rather than do anything about our climate but if the Greenies really are concerned about our climate, they would not be asking IF we should do climate engineering but rather HOW we should do it. And surely any global-warming believer would be looking at alternative ways of engineering our climate. Don't hold your breath, of course. This article looks at why alternative solutions are not being considered:

"Among environmentalists, adaptation is less popular than cutting back. But even less popular is the idea that we should find ways to intervene positively in order to create a better climate... There have been a number of proposals put forward for climate engineering. The simplest idea is to inject dust into the upper atmosphere using artillery shells or aircraft. The dust would then scatter some of the sun's rays back into space, cooling off the Earth. Another proposal is to add iron to the oceans, which would suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by encouraging algae to grow.... Why have we cooled on the idea of climate engineering? One explanation is that we have become more aware of the difficulties involved. .. But history suggests a more complex reason. The reaction against climate engineering began in the 1970s, at the same time that environmentalism became a widespread outlook. The new environmentalism was not a simple response to scientific facts. Rather it was informed by a particular moral position, which prioritised the natural environment and problematised human intervention... It is an aversion to intervening with nature that explains climate engineering's bad reputation today, more than any practical difficulties. Leading climate scientist Stephen Schneider is strongly suspicious of what he calls 'geoengineering'. Although he cites scientific uncertainty as the reason, it is clear that he sees human consumption as a habit to be stemmed rather than aided.... For the moment, our capacity to intervene on a planetary scale remains relatively puny. Our ability to detect a human effect on climate is testimony to the sensitivity of our instruments and the sophistication of our theories more than the scale of our mastery of nature. Global warming may yet cause us problems, but compared to geological forces such as volcanic eruptions or asteroid impacts, humanity barely registers... However, there is increasingly some truth to the idea that humanity can have an effect on a planetary scale... Our knowledge of climate is not yet sufficiently advanced to undertake real planetary geoengineering. We have neither a precise enough understanding of global warming nor the confidence to understand the effects of intentional interventions. But as research on climate change advances, this is changing. It is entirely sensible to start the experiments with technologies - and the political discussions - needed for global engineering now".

There is more on iron-seeding of the oceans as a means of soaking up any "excess" carbon dioxide here. The iron-seeding experiments so far HAVE worked but only temporarily -- the problem is to deliver the iron in a form that does not sink to the bottom so quickly. Since nature manages it, however, we should be able to do so eventually as well. Note how the National Geographic takes the same facts and turns them into blatant and emotional Greenie propaganda. Their argument -- if you can call it that -- seems to be that because nature does it one way, there is no other way to do it. Pathetic.

Farmers trump Greenies: "An effort to save two rare fish more than a decade ago could come back to haunt environmentalists after a recent court decision awarded millions of dollars in compensation to farmers who lost water in the process. ... The case stemmed from the government's efforts to protect endangered winter-run chinook salmon and threatened delta smelt between 1992 and 1994 by withholding billions of gallons from farmers in California's Kern and Tulare counties. Court of Federal Claims Senior Judge John Wiese ruled that the government's halting of water constituted a 'taking' or intrusion on the farmers' private property rights. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from taking private property without fair payment."

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Chris Lawrence summarizes the discussion so far about the "conservatives are stupid" claim. Most bloggers have rejected the claim on the basis of survey evidence that Republican voters are better educated and have more political knowledge. None of them seem to have picked up my post referring to published evidence of a link between Leftist attitudes and low IQ. I suppose academic journal articles can be a bit daunting.

NewsWeekly has a good summary of why the post-Iraq war controversy is based on fallacies.

Iraq War: "The right mistake to make" says The Atlantic: "A policeman shoots a robber who has killed in the past and who brandishes what seems to be a gun. The gun turns out to be a cellphone. The policeman expects a thorough investigation (and ought to cooperate). In the end, if he is exonerated, it is not because he made no mistake but because his mistake was justified. Reasonable people, facing uncertainty, would have thought they saw a gun.... The war was based on lies. Not Bush's or the CIA's; Saddam Hussein's."

Should be a lot more prosecutions of "alternative" egotists: "A naturopath convicted of the manslaughter an 18-day-old baby who had a critical illness -- which he claimed herb drops had cured - - was today sentenced to five years jail. ... Mitchell was born with critical aortic stenosis, a heart defect which could be treated only by surgery. He died just days before surgery was to be carried out, after his parents -- on advice from Fenn that herbal drops had cured the baby -- cancelled the operation."

Those pesky genetics again: "People with hostile or aggressive personality traits may have genetic tendencies that make them "born to smoke," researchers at the University of California, Irvine, reported Thursday. Brain-imaging studies suggest that the same genetic variations that give people hostile personality traits may also make them more likely to become addicted to nicotine, said Dr. Steven Potkin, a professor of psychiatry and a brain-imaging specialist who led the study".

Unusual good sense from Harvard: "New York's government should also go beyond the tax waivers and credits it now provides and actually reduce the taxes on small businesses. This would ensure that costs of operating in New York do not prevent companies from expanding - and it would also increase the rate of tax collection because fewer businesses would dodge taxes. Finally, the Bloomberg administration should reduce the bureaucracy and red tape that often make running a legitimate enterprise in New York City a logistical nightmare."

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Another example of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries!

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

U.S. "LIBERALS" ARE JUST LEFTISTS SAILING UNDER A FALSE FLAG

Joe Willingham emailed me as follows about my contention (post of 11th.) that all U.S. "liberals" today are in fact Leftists:

"American liberalism is in such a degenerated state today that it is easy to lose sight of some of the complexities of its history. FDR and Harry Truman, for all their faults, were great men who led the nation through World II and the beginning of the Cold War. Their liberalism was about security and a better life for the working man, and it had little in common with the demented "multiculturalist" victimology that passes for liberalism today. Don't forget that in 1948 American liberalism split into pro-Soviet and pro-western camps, and that to their credit the majority of liberals adhered to the latter. With the debacle in Vietnam liberalism fell apart, leaving only the pitiful caricature we see today".

I largely agree with that. I think there was once a core of conservative values that almost all Americans shared. But that is all gone now, of course, and optimists like Porphyrogenitus are just living in the past.

Oddly enough, it is the other way around in Australia. Australia was once much more polarized than it now is. The two major parties in Australia today seem to share a broadly conservative consensus in most of the policies they put forward. Australia's two major parties have just agreed on measures to cut the taxpayer-funded perks of politicians. I may have missed something but I think that in the USA today, a similar proposal would be only a dream.

Mike Tremoglie has a very good sarcastic explanation of why HE is a "liberal".

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The courageous Edward Feser looks at why academics are overwhelmingly Left-leaning. He lists a number of explanations which do undoubtedly play a part but he omits what I think is the major factor: From my observations, Leftist academics are basically second-rate thinkers. Originality is the Holy Grail of academe but most academics in fact have nothing new to say at all -- so they say silly things just in order to appear different. They use perversity to create a false impression of profundity. It was precisely because I DID have something different to say that I got so many articles published in the academic journals. Even though my articles generally undermined Leftist views, their having that all-important originality got them published. And how my fellow academics hated me for it! In most years I got more articles published than the rest of my university department put together. That I could do easily what they found so hard to do was real heartburn for them.

Fun! The philosophy professor who said conservatives are stupid has now backed down!

Inequality -- the statistics: "The main reasons some families earn more than others are not as shocking as politicians would have you believe. Consider these horribly shocking Census Bureau facts about inequality: -- Families with two people have incomes at least three times larger than families in which nobody works. .... Mature, experienced employees earn at least three times as they did when they were young apprentices and trainees. Average family income was $16,014 among families in which the household head was younger than 24, but $45,978 when the household head was 45 to 54.... College grads earn at least three times as much as middle-school dropouts. For family heads with a bachelor's degree, median income was $78,518; for those with less than a ninth-grade education, median income was $25,077. If all this rampant inequality strikes you as grossly unfair, you should indeed consider electing politicians promising to do something about it. But they can't really do much unless they promise to take money from two-earner families and give it to no-earner families, to take money from those who go to college and give it to those who didn't bother attending a free high school... "

The National Center for Public Policy Research answers the ignorant Leftist nonsense about how bad it is for jobs to move overseas. It seems commonsense at first to think job loss is bad -- and Leftists of course play on that -- but it only takes a few minutes of thinking to see that getting rid of old jobs and replacing them with better ones is actually how we got to be so much better off now than we once were. You can't have economic progress and stand still at the same time. But what Leftist wants economic progress? Economic destruction is more their specialty.

George Will gives examples to show what any economist knows: Protecting jobs in one industry just leads to job losses in other industries. GWB's determination to "protect" America from half-price Australian sugar, for instance, just drives American candy-manufacturing jobs to Mexico and Canada. Clever!

"As for George Bush's military service, he served honorably and we submit that flying F-102s is dangerous business regardless of what hard-deck you're over. McAuliffe, Cleland and his opportunistic Leftist cadre should take note that every time they denigrate the service of Guardsmen and Reservists, they spit in the faces of hundreds of thousands of citizen-soldiers -- and their families -- who make enormous sacrifices whether serving on the front lines in Iraq or the home front."

Amusing. The NYT says that French cultural hero Albert Camus (not Irving Kristol et al.) was the first "neocon". Even though once a member of the French Communist Party, "Camus found himself ever more repulsed by Communism, which he called "the modern madness." He saw Communism as a desperate attempt to create meaning and certainty. He wrote, "Those who pretend to know everything and settle everything finish by killing everything."". This led to him being dumped by the Left.

In case you missed it, here is the direct link to the confession of Leftist bias on America's ABC TV news network. There is also a summary here which notes that the same has been shown to be true of CBS.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Another example of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries!

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

WHY HITLER WAS AN ANTISEMITE

The most commonly heard "explanation" for Hitler's antisemitism is that he was "insane" or "evil". These are are however little more than the usual abuse that the Left uses in lieu or argument and explanation. Since antisemitism pervaded the whole of Northern Europe in Hitler's day (and still seems to, in fact), such explanations tend to implicate the most influential section of the human race as insane and evil. You can believe that if you like. Fortunately, it is quite easy to do better than such childish "explanations". Hitler himself explains it all at some length in the early part of Mein Kampf. It is of course true that Mein Kampf is unreliable as objective history but there can be little doubt that it is good psychological history -- i.e. it might not be a good guide to what really happened but it is a good guide to Hitler's perception of what happened.

And you might be surprised to learn that Hitler for quite a long time had a good cosmopolitan's contempt for antisemitism. He saw it as ignorant and stupid in his early years and it was quite a wrench for him when he realized "I had become an antisemite". So what changed his mind?

To answer that you first have to know the secret of why the Germans followed him so devotedly right to the bitter end. There were of course a number of factors involved in that but to any open-minded reader of Mein Kampf one answer stands out like dog's balls (forgive the Army language): The whole of Mein Kampf is in effect a love-song to the German people (Volk). Hitler loved his people and -- surprise, surprise -- they loved him back (or many did anyway). But how could Hitler love all of a people who were so bitterly divided among themselves -- who hated one another probably about as much as U.S. Democrats and Republicans do today? There was only one possible answer to that: Somebody had to be manipulating and deceiving them into fighting with one another. But who could that be? To Hitler the answer was obvious -- and it was NOT the Jews. It was the Marxists. The Austro-Hungarian Empire in which Hitler lived was in its death throes in Hitler's youth and that gave an opening for lots of radical agitation. And the military defeat of Austria in World War I only increased the radicalism. So throughout Hitler's time in Vienna the Marxists had a big following. And what were the Marxists preaching? Class warfare! They were preaching that one section of Hitler's beloved people should make war on another section of it. That was of course a horror to Hitler and he struggled to understand such folly and error. How could Germans preach such hatred of one another?

The answer came when he noticed that the prominent Marxist preachers and leaders of Marxist organizations in the Vienna of his day were just about all Jews. To this day, of course, Jews tend to the Left politically so there is no reason to doubt that there was considerable substance in what Hitler saw at that time. So that was the "out" Hitler needed to explain why Germans were so at odds with one-another -- they were being manipulated by people who were NOT really Germans. So it was his idealized and romantic love of his own German people (Volk) that caused him to see the Jews as evil and destructive manipulators who were the underminers of German strength and unity. And so he adopted the antisemitism that -- through jealousy -- was already common around him. He however saw antisemitism as a rational deduction from what he had seen and he pursued it with the zeal of a convert and the huge political passion that was characteristic of him. Tragically, he does seem to have genuinely believed that the destruction of the Jews was essential for the salvation of the German people. And he devoted his huge political talents to that end. To him, everything else became secondary to that.

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There is a good cartoon here that ties in with my post yesterday about some Leftism being the outcome of low-grade psychosis.

Democrat blogger, Blogfonte has some amusing comments about the philosophy professor (See my post of 12th) who thinks that conservatives are too stupid to be philosophers. {Via Naive Humanist}. Spoons has some reasonable thoughts on it too

Good to see that the French attack on Muslim demands extends to a lot more than the rather trivial ban on headscarves.

Mustn't joke about the French: "Canada's government on Friday condemned a show by U.S. late-night television host Conan O'Brien that insulted people in French-speaking Quebec and seemed to suggest everyone in the province was homosexual."

Anti-Americanism in Iran is running out of steam, thanks to the US Army: "Iranian pilgrims returning from Iraq are spreading admiring stories of their encounters with American troops. Thousands of Iranians have visited the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala since the war ended. Many have expressed surprise at the respectful and helpful behavior of the U.S. soldiers they met along the way."

I have just put up Chris Brand's latest postings here. He notes some signs of realism on race, IQ, education and immigration in Britain.

Michael Darby has just put up a lot of new posts. Some of his headings:
Recalling 1991 - the Year of Liberty
Yet another "bank" scam
Monetary Policy in Zimbabwe.
Cathy Buckle: Deepening Disaster in Zimbabwe
Professors for Alger Hiss
The Global Warming Censors
Wise Words from Professor Flint
Archive of terrorist websites with links
Blind Alley of Nihilism
My Minute with President Bush
WMDs: 'Kay' Sera, Sera
WMDs - Helpful Quotations

I have just put up here a book review of Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History by the straight-thinking Lee Harris.

Readers will have noticed that I have just changed my font to one that is bigger and easier to read (I in fact just copied Keith Burgess-Jackson's stylesheet holus bolus). I think the new setup looks quite elegant in high resolution but in medium resolution (which I imagine a lot of readers still default to), all characters seem to come out as bold. There is no distinction between bolded and ordinary text -- which is a bit pesky. I would appreciate emails from anyone who feels strongly that I should either stay with the new or revert to the old.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Another example of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries!

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

GREENIE CORNER

How biotech will save billions from starvation: "Today, most people around the world have access to a greater variety of nutritious and affordable foods than ever before, thanks mainly to developments in agricultural science and technology. The average human lifespan -- arguably the most important indicator of quality of life -- has increased steadily in the past century in almost every country."

Now it's parking lots: "So why are a tiny but growing number of atmospheric scientists taking a hard look at parking lots? Because, they say, land-use changes have at least as much, and perhaps even greater, impact on climate change than CO2. It's a radical idea that has heated up the scientific community and is prompting a wider look at the forces behind climate change. The effect on public policy could be enormous."

From The Federalist: "The Kyoto Protocol, that international environmental treaty to limit "greenhouse emissions," will cost Canada an estimated $1 billion this year alone, and $4,700 per taxpayer per year for the next five years, according to The Heartland Institute's Dr. Kenneth Green -- and that's to meet only the first 8% of Canada's emission-reduction requirements. "Of course, that's probably a low estimate, since some studies suggest even higher compliance costs for industry; other forms of taxation increase the cost of raising money; and it's likely to cost more for each succeeding set of reductions," says Green. "While the first 8% might cost $1 billion, the next 8% is likely to cost more, and so on with each succeeding step toward the target." The Kyoto Protocol was originally signed by then-President Clinton but was subsequently rejected by the Senate, 95-0, in an eye-popping display of bipartisanship. Now we know why." See here for the original report.

"The Food and Drug Administration has issued a new warning to pregnant women about mercury in seafood. You can 'protect your baby' from developmental harm by following three rules, the agency claimed. But there's no evidence the rules will protect anyone, and they're likely only to foster undue concern about an important part of our food supply."

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A couple of days ago I noted that the weird mental gymnastics of Leftists are best explained as the outcome of a dishonest character rather than any mental defect. A reader has however emailed me to tell of an interesting case he knows where someone developed a paranoid mental disorder -- which is a type of psychosis and would normally stem from a chemical imbalance in the brain, with too much dopamine being present. Before the disorder developed, the person concerned was conservative. As his paranoia developed, however, his politics drifted to the left. He now thinks that all members of his family should pool their wealth and then re-distribute it equally. Of course, he would contribute nothing and benefit greatly. He is now very opposed to Bush even though he formerly voted for Reagan. So is an excess of dopamine in the brain generally associated with leftist political leanings? It's a testable hypothesis. I must say that some of the emails I get from Leftists do have all the hallmarks of psychotic thought disorder. It is hard to make head or tail of some of them. And loss of reality contact would seem to be characteristic of both schizophrenics and Leftist ideologues so it does seem a lively possibility to me that SOME Leftists are suffering from a low-grade psychotic disorder.

My post yesterday about the "missing" homosexuals in Britain's most recent census moved one reader to email me with the observation that there OUGHT to be very few of them: Since they channel their sexual impulses into non-reproductive behaviour, they should in fact all eventually die out. That assumes, of course, that homosexuality is passed on genetically -- which is what homosexuals themselves now seem generally to claim. Probably some homosexuality, however, is learned behaviour rather than being inevitable. In the past, fear of condemnation made many homosexuals pretend to be normal, and to prove that they married and had children, which probably accounts for there being still some of them around. Modern-day tolerance of homosexuals however has mostly removed their need to reproduce so the "born" homosexuals should die out quickly now. I have also just put up on PC Watch some good comments by Peter Hitchens that were inspired by the discovery of how few homosexual couples there in fact are in Britain.

The widely-read Chronicle of Higher Education has at last given coverage to the problem of Leftist bias in academe and what David Horowitz is doing to overcome it. There is also a site here run by students themselves which gives even more information on how huge the problem is. There is an article from last year here by David Horowitz that makes clear that there is actually what amounts to a blacklist against hiring conservative professors at almost all U.S. universities. The Chronicle has an attempted reply by a Leftist to Horowitz which admits that the Left "have won the curricular battle" (meaning that what is taught at U.S. universities is Leftist) but goes on to such absurdities as claiming that political correctness is used by Leftists as "irony". He must be the only one in the world who thinks it is a joke!

John Kerry's anti-American activities during the Vietnam war era are outlined here

And John Kerry shows the usual Leftist hypocrisy and lack of any principles. As Jeff Jacoby writes: "In the 2004 presidential field, there is a candidate for nearly every point of view. His name is John Kerry. Equivocating politicians are sometimes accused of trying to be "all things to all people," but few have taken the practice of expedience and shifty opportunism to Kerry's level. Massachusetts residents have known this about their junior senator for a long time. Now the rest of the country is going to find out..... "

Scientifically-assisted production of a real living human clone seems to be a way off yet but when one comes I will welcome it. Why the random cloning of nature (twins) is OK but scientifically assisted cloning is not has always escaped me. But as the father of an IVF child I have a bias there perhaps. That conception too was scientifically assisted and I am profoundly grateful for it. But I think that good people will always differ over the use of cloning to produce "spare parts" -- which is what the latest announcement is about. People who favour abortion, however could have no rational objection to it so the only debate SHOULD be among conservatives. No doubt, however, Leftists -- with their usual rubbery principles -- will try to get mileage out of it.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Another example of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries!

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

RACIAL SHENANIGANS

More deceitful "education" being practiced on High School students: A group of students were shown how to examine one particular genetic marker that was already known to be widespread among different races. When they found that people of all different races in their class had the marker, that was presented as "proof" that there is no such thing as racial differences. Pity about all the OTHER millions of genetic markers that were NOT examined! The old nonsense about all races sharing more than 99% of their genes was also trotted out as proving that there is no such thing as race biologically. Somehow they forgot to mention that we share nearly as high a percentage of genes with chimpanzees. So by that reasoning humans and chimps are really the same too. Let's reserve more college places for chimps! Down with chimpism! The truth of course is that percentage of shared genes is a total red herring. Differences in just ONE critical gene out of millions of genes can make a huge difference to one's life -- as many people with genetic illnesses have sadly found. The students were also apparently told that "scientists know that traditional notions of race no longer hold up". I guess they must have just overlooked what these geneticists found! There are a lot of comments on the matter on the Joanne Jacobs site for anybody who thinks there is anything more worth saying about such nonsense.

Interested participant is very sarcastic in reporting a story of fighting between two groups of blacks: "The cause of the whole circumstance is inexplicable. Since the tension is between two African-American student populations, it can't be racially motivated. And, since it's generally recognized that only white people are capable of intolerance, this can't be a case of intolerance. It also can't be a case of lack of diversity since everyone involved is African-American which would indicate total diversity." Joking aside, there is in fact an interesting aspect to the story. The fighting is between Afro-Americans of slave descent and people of Somali origin -- i.e. people who are racially West African versus people who are racially East African. Aside from their common blackness, the two groups do differ quite visibly. East Africans tend to be tall and thin with thin lips whereas West Africans tend to be heavily built with highly everted lips. So the fact that they don't get on well with one-another is, I am afraid, all too human. Not that races exist, of course.

"Reparations" hypocrisy: "The rally was significant for no other reason other than it provided an indication of the real motives and objectives of the reparations movement - cash. No matter what else is said reparations are not about black civil rights or social justice. Reparations are about green dollars."

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A stupid philosopher: This bit of wisdom is from a Duke University philosophy professor -- commenting on why he does not hire conservatives to teach philosophy: "We try to hire the best, smartest people available," Brandon said of his philosophy hires. "If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill's analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia". So he takes an attack by Mill on his political opponents that Mill made in Victorian-era Britain and treats it as good information about the USA today. And even if that were a reasonable thing to do, note the non sequitur: Even if stupid people are generally conservative (and there is no EVIDENCE offered of that; I have met a lot of stupid Left-voters in my time), it does not follow that conservatives generally are stupid. Note the usual Leftist elitism too. Brandon is clearly implying that society generally is stupid. Nice type! Just to REALLY ruin Brandon's party, however, let the FACT be noted that the correlation in the general population between anti-authority attitudes (which Leftists pride themselves on) and low IQ is quite substantial. Survey research shows that it is in fact Leftist attitudes that are associated with stupidity!.

Federal Communications Commission a useless "New Deal" monstrosity: Some of the most significant "accomplishments" of the FCC include protecting AT&T from competition for decades by granting the company monopoly privileges, similarly protecting television broadcasters for years by restraining cable television, and delaying the entrance of cellular phones into the marketplace for more than a decade. Such bureaucratically inflicted stagnation on the communications industry has cost the economy tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars. Bringing the cumbersome FCC into the mix is unnecessary in the Timberlake-Jackson controversy. If the pop stars defied a contract with CBS in their salaciousness, the market will handle it in the best possible way and CBS can always seek legal damages. It is not in the network's interest to offend viewers or to pull so much attention away from the game itself, which happened to be quite exciting this year. Contractual promises and fear of losing work will have more influence on celebrities than will government harassment of the networks on which they appear

The strange case of the missing homosexuals: The recent UK census indicated that the homosexual population is tiny -- only one 750th of the 10% that is sometimes quoted. The homosexual activist response to the low count is that it indicates most homosexuals are still afraid to come out of the closet. Ticking a box on a confidential census form is coming out of the closet? Definitely one for Sherlock Holmes.

Fleeing socialism: "Germany's brightest and best qualified young professionals are leaving the country in droves and securing lucrative positions abroad. ...Every seventh person with a doctorate in science leaves Germany for the United States, The Scientist magazine has reported. Three of the four German Nobel Prize winners work in the United States".

Porphyrogenitus has an analysis of Leftist psychology that is similar to mine but he thinks there is still some life in the old story that some U.S. "liberals" are not Leftists. I am sorry to say that I think he has been had on that one. Are there ANY "liberals" who don't believe in using government coercion to increase "equality"? If they do believe in it they are just slowed-down Communists and if they don't believe in it they are conservatives as far as I can see.

Keith Burgess-Jackson has put up a good letter from the NYT about the "Bush lied" chant.

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

True love is forever? Diamonds are forever? The Wicked one says that only herpes is forever.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Another example of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries!

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

SOME BASICS OF LEFTIST PSYCHOLOGY

I get a lot of email in connection with this blog and my other writings. Most of it is from fellow conservatives and most of it is highly supportive -- which I appreciate very much. One theme that I often notice in the emails I get is how crazy and incomprehensible my readers find Leftists to be so I thought I might make a brief comment on that here. For instance, an email I received recently said in part:

"I noticed certain "errors of thought" occuring with those to the left of me -- logical errors, or a disinterest in fact, and quick switches to emotionally-based arguments. I wondered if there was actually some kind of thinking impairment going on, if there was some kind of brain defect or differing cognitive structure.

I replied

You are right that Leftists SEEM to think differently but they don't really. They are just dishonest about what they think. Arriving at a self-serving conclusion is all that they care about and they will slip and slide all over the place to do that. Their defect is of character, not of the mind. They know perfectly well what they are doing but their own ego matters more to them than the truth.

In other words, puffing themselves up as wise and benevolent is their overriding aim -- not confronting and dealing realistically with harsh facts -- and they will duck and weave and say anything convenient that occurs to them to achieve their aim. So most of the time it is pointless even to argue with them. They are just not interested in the facts -- only in their own warm inner glow of righteousness and wisdom. They will allow nothing to threaten that. It is generally only middle of the road people who have been hoodwinked by the Left who are worth your breath.

I do also get some email from Leftists and a recurrent theme in that is to say that I overgeneralize. They that say that not all Leftists are as nasty as Stalin, Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot, Mao, Kim Jong Il and all the other lovely "socialists" who have gained unrestricted power. Some American "liberals" even say (through gritted teeth?) that they hate such "totalitarians" or "authoritarians". I have dealt with that argument at some length elsewhere so I will just mention the basics here. Perhaps the easiest answer is that if "liberals" hate Communists, how come they were apologizing for the Soviets and praising them and trying to protect them almost up to the day that the Soviet Union imploded? Even to this day, to have been a Communist in the past is treated most indulgently in "liberal" intellectual circles -- as no more than excessive idealism or as having been "a liberal in a hurry". And what American "liberal" has ever said a bad word about Castro? I got an email from a Leftist just a few days ago saying what a good and wise man Castro is -- despite his police State, his political prisons, his political executions and his suppression of free speech and any opposition. So it is "liberals" themselves who make it clear that the only real difference between Communists and themselves is how much power they have. U.S. "liberalism" is just an attempt to achieve the old Communist goal of enforced "equality" in a gradual, step-by-step way. They are just "slowed down" Communists and like the Communists, their real motive for seeking equality is not "compassion" but hatred of other people's success.

Aside from that, the public opinion survey data I have gathered over the years also make clear that there is only one Left/Right dimension -- with people differing on it only in matters of degree. See here

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I normally agree with Jeff Jacoby but I have a lot of problems with his latest posting. He is undoubtedly right that what is going on in North Korea at the moment rivals what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany but where I have the problem is with his conclusion that the USA should "do something" about it. Why does it always have to be the USA? Is there no humanity left anywhere else in the world? America is having big problems at the moment with ensuring its own security against the Islamic madmen without taking on any more of the world's probems. Who made it the world's policeman? And it never gets thanked for anything it does anyway. I personally think that what America should be doing about North Korea at the moment is hectoring Europe to live up to its supposedly "humanitarian" ideals and offering them support if they do decide to do something. Europe killed millions of Jews (and don't forget that most of Europe helped the Nazis out with that) so let them make up for that by saving millions of Koreans. Russia alone could push North Korea over in a day if it wanted to -- and they are North Korea's neighbours -- unlike the USA.

Amusing: A Leftist blogger (of all people) has recently criticized me for being an atheist! Of the more than 200 conservative bloggers who have linked to me (many of whom I know to be Christians) not one has to my knowledge ever criticized me in that way. It's another example of the hypocritical way the Left will seize on and advocate anything no matter what they themselves personally believe (if anything). His ground for criticizing my atheism is that "you cannot prove a negative". Presumably he argues that people who refuse to believe in unicorns are being foolishly dogmatic too! As I have said before, all the Christians I know have given great thought to their beliefs and think that there is overwhelming evidence for them. They have clearly considered the evidence carefully -- even if I personally think they have come to the wrong conclusion. Unlike Leftists, I do not have to agree with their conclusion to respect it. I think it is the anti-religion people like Richard Dawkins who are the true dogmatists. To me it seems obvious that religions can be good or bad -- depending on what is believed.

Legalize incest! "So, in redefining marriage to mean something brand new, why didn't the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court say prohibiting brothers and sisters from marrying would 'have the effect of maintaining and fostering a stigma of exclusion?' Or parent and child? If you are going to change an ages-old meaning of an institution, why not also mandate that a legislature allow polygamy?"

An interesting article here about people going overseas for cheaper surgery. A lot of people come to Australia for surgery too -- particularly from Japan. A common example: a boob job in one of Australia's resort areas costs about $3,500 in U.S. dollars.

I love it! "Dr. Atkins, the founder of the Atkins diet was apparently obese when he died (aged 72)".

The Wicked one has a post about the Swiss getting tough on crime.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Another example of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries!

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

FROM BROOKES NEWS

Bush's deficit: fact and fiction The increasing ratio of spending and taxation to GDP has given many politicians the impression that the US economy can accommodate significant and permanent increases in government spending without impairing economic growth. This is a dangerous delusion.
Richard Dreyfus and Hollywood's hateful left There are two Americas: there is one that believes in the constitution and the inherent goodness of America; then there is the other 'America' that would trash our constitution and our traditions in the belief that our America is a racist, sexist, unjust and exploitative society.
Why Beijing will not attack Taiwan Beijing's continued sabre rattling should be seen for what it is - sabre rattling. Beijing has no intention of launching an attack on Taiwan, at least not for some considerable time. The name of one almost forgotten island tells it all - Iwo Jima.
President Bush is a victim of America's political civil war The length, intensity and moral turpitude of the Democrats' hate Bush campaign is probably unprecedented in American history, and reveals the Democrats' hateful intolerance of conservatives.
Murdoch's resident Bush-hater sticks it to Steyn and sucks up to Kerry the Quisling Stephen Romei from Rupert Murdoch's Australian is at it again, sucking up to Sen. Quisling Kerry, sliming Bush and targeting Mark Steyn.
The Age maligns Bush's NMD proposal Why are reporters bitterly opposed to President Bush's national missile defence proposals and where do they get their phony facts?

Details here

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Men are people too: "In the age of feminism, she argues, we have paid a lot of attention to women's complaints about men and criticized men for not meeting women's needs -- but we've forgotten that men too have needs and women too have faults. Somehow, we've even developed the notion that a woman who seeks to meet her husband's needs is subservient (but a husband who fails to meet his wife's needs is a pig)."

When will we get affirmative action for men? "Here is a consequence of egalitarianism. According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, men's life expectancy is on the average about 7 years less than women's. There is thus an inequality between men and women....Egalitarians, thus must see it as a requirement of justice to equalize the life expectancy of men and women. This can be done, for instance, by men having more and better health care than women; by employing fewer men and more women in stressful or hazardous jobs; and by men having shorter work days and longer vacations than women..."

Oh boy! It doesn't take long for my prophecies to come true. Just two days ago I predicted that Yale's Skull and Bones society would appeal to conspiracy theorists and what do I read now? -- "The Order of the Skull and Bones is far from the fratty, fun-and- games milieu that uninformed people think it is. The fact is, Skull and Bones may be the world's most bizarre, and exclusive, secret society. Therefore, if both the President of the United States and the top Democratic contender for the job are devoted members of this Order, and they are, the American public ought to know more..... "

The most popular cry at Democratic rallies was against 'special interests'. Thomas Sowell asks about the Dems' own special interests: "When Senator Kerry gives examples of special interests, do not look to see the teachers unions included. When Senator Kerry votes against school vouchers, sacrificing the future of millions of children for the greater glory of the National Education Association, that is not called serving special interests because the NEA supports Democrats. Still less will the trial lawyers be called special interests. Presidential candidate Senator John Edwards made his fortune as a trial lawyer, winning huge damage awards from doctors and hospitals, thereby contributing to the rising costs of medical care, which he now so much laments".

Leftist financier George Soros first says Bush is another Hitler -- then denies it when he realizes how stupid it makes him look. So he's he's a fruitcake and a liar as well as a parasite. No wonder he's a Leftist!

Sounds like a Fox News convert: "If you believe in limited government; if you argue that lower taxes spur economic growth; if you want our borders protected; and if you are a white man ... then, according to the media elite, you are the source of all that is wrong with America... We don't like to switch on TV and hear everything that we value somehow put down and vilified. We don't like you trying to make us feel stupid because we believe in God, freedom, family and the flag. That's why we're taking our remote control and turning you off."

Vin Ferrari has a post noting how much bloggers rely on traditional news media for their information. He is pretty right but not totally. I myself have on occasions put up news that has come to me in emails from my correspondents and Instapundit seems to do it often. It is early days yet but I do think blogs are evolving into being a SOURCE of news as well as giving commentary on it. And blogs of course can draw worldwide attention to stories that might otherwise lapse into obscurity.

PID points out that the comic-book hero Tin-Tin was exposing the evils of the old Soviet system at the same time as the New York Times was covering up the same evils. It rather reminds me of the way Homer Simpson gives political incorrectness a wide audience that it would not otherwise have. I think the lesson is that only a wide diversity of information sources will stymie the Left's incessant attempts to control the information that reaches us. Viva blogs!

In the Germany of Hitler's day it was quite common for young political thugs to change allegiances from the Communists to the Nazis. A bad attitude to other people cloaked in a rhetoric of loving the worker was the obvious common denominator. According to David's Medienkritik, it happens in modern-day Germany too.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Another example of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries!

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

ANOTHER NOTE ABOUT MY PAST POLITICAL ADVENTURES

I have never feared to investigate anything political or religious or to speak the unvarnished truth about what I find as the result of my investigations -- and that means I get a lot of abuse and false accusations -- most of which merely amuse me. I took an interest in politics from an early age and read some of the works of Karl Marx in my junior High School years. I was therefore at that time known as "Commo John". Since then I have joined or associated with almost any political group I could find in the hope of getting to understand them better and find out what I could from them. That neo-Nazis were among the groups concerned has of course at times given Leftists an excuse to call me a Nazi. At the same time as I was attending neo-Nazi gatherings (in the 60s) I was however also attending meetings of my local far-Left student activist group (called SDA after the American SDS) and was also attending meetings of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society. So anyone who claims to infer my sympathies from my associations is pissing into the wind. In fact, my only real passion is for rationality and I just don't find much of that on the Left. To make clear the broadness of my background, I have just added a few of my former interests at the top of the green column over to the left of my blogspot page. I have no formal political affiliations at all these days.

The Australia-Soviet Friendship Society was particularly amusing. Most of the members were what Australians call "wharfies" ("longshoremen" in the USA, "dockers" in the UK) -- as wharfies were almost all Communist sympathizers at that time -- but there were a few extreme Leftists from the university there too. But their way of running meetings was pure wharfie. There were no majority votes about anything. One of the organizers would put up a proposal but instead of votes being called for the question was: "Any objections?". I cannot remember there ever being any!

Because I made no secret of the variety of my associations, I was always suspected of being a police spy wherever I went -- which indeed I was -- but I always just laughed off such accusations (e.g. by saying "testing, testing" into my lapel) so it is rather amazing how much I was given the benefit of the doubt. It's amazing how "brass" carries the day. I guess the members of extremist groups WANT to believe that their arguments are overwhelming so are willing to tell all to almost any listening ear. The police were certainly interested to hear much of what I could tell them of both the neo-Nazis and the student Left.

Because I went straight from being a fundamentalist Christian to complete atheism in my late teens, one type of belief I have never taken the slightest interest in is the "The Occult". I would just not be able to keep a straight face long enough. But I gather that as part of the general Nazi fascination with Germany's pagan past, Hitler did take some interest in it so maybe my studies of Nazi history are incomplete without taking some account of such beliefs. This book gives an occultist's interpretation of Hitler's actions and says that he won the war that he was REALLY fighting. I think there is a grain of truth in that. Hitler went from being a superb strategist in the early part of his rule to being his own worst enemy later on. Why? I think part of the answer to that is that he DID have a higher priority than defeating the Allies. But I don't think we need to suggest any occult motives. Hitler himself could not have made it plainer. Wiping out the Jews from anywhere under his control was his no. 1 aim and he DID win that war -- tragically.

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Well how about that! Australia and the USA have signed a free-trade agreement. It leaves out the one thing that would have benefited Americans most -- much cheaper Australian sugar -- but "protecting" the local farmers seems to be an almost universal human folly and America's folly in that regard is about average. India has set up a local free trade zone too but Muslim Bangladesh has of course shafted itself by staying out of it.

I think this is pretty silly but since I myself wear the kilt on Scottish occasions, perhaps I should shut up about it: "In what future generations may look back on as the birth of the Male Unbifurcated Garment movement, about 100 men in skirts marched in Manhattan to proclaim their right to wear women's clothing. "We're not transvestites, homosexuals or cross-dressers," David Johnson, a retired teacher, said. "We don't want you to call us Jean or Sally. We're men. Men who want the right to wear a skirt."

US budget: If you took all our government spend divided it evenly among all families of four in America, each family would be more than $50,000 richer. This is double the level of spending in 1960 and fourteen times the amount government spent in 1900, even after adjusting for inflation. The question American taxpayers need to ask is this: Does my family really get anywhere near $50,000 worth of services every year from city hall, state government, and Uncle Sam, Inc.? ...and...In 1935 there were 4,000 pages of federal regulations in the Federal Register. Now there are 68,000 pages. That's a 17-fold increase in sixty-five years. Since 1970 the number of federal regulators nearly doubled from 69,000 to 130,000. We work almost half our lives now complying with government rules, edicts, levies, paperwork requirements, taxes, and fees.

Arlene Peck disagrees with Ariel Sharon's policy of relocating Jews to Jewish areas and Arabs to Arab areas within Israel. For once I think she is wrong. Separating the two communities seems to be an elementary security measure to me.

Maybe I shouldn't laugh but this is a good one: Making a police speed camera issue fines to itself!. What class! Via Sam Ward. If it's true it's a good example of Australian irreverence for authority.

I have just put up Chris Brand's latest postings here. He is very amused at the attempt by Gabon's President Bongo to seduce Miss Peru and has some nice pictures of her.

The Wicked one defends stockmarket insider trading.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Another example of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries!

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

GREENIE CORNER

This writer is understandably confused about the disagreement among scientists about whether there is any global warming going on. But the fanaticism of its advocates persuades him that it is no more than an ego-serving cult: "Last week's London snowstorm was the last straw. With no particular scientific evidence in hand, I have come to the conclusion that global warming is a looney cult... The scientific controversy is beyond me, but I can recognize the fixed stare, the strained voice-throb and the rigid jaw of a madman at a hundred paces. The Greens hector us about the impending end of the world. I put it to them: perhaps it is not the end of the world, but just the end of you. Analysis of global temperature is a subtle issue about which reasonable men might in good faith reach different conclusions. The evangelical zealotry that motivates the global-warmers has a different source than the facts.... The sense of the transcendent they derive from contemplating nature is of desperate importance. "It is not that I will pass from the earth without leaving so much as a grease spot to mark my stay," thinks the Green. "It is the earth herself who is in danger. The rain forests will vanish! The whales will become extinct! The German forest is dying! The ice caps are melting!"

Denis Dutton on skepticism and science and environmentalism: "In the post-Enlightenment West, religions have diminished power, but they are being supplanted by nontheological belief systems that follow patterns of religion. It is clear from Hecht's history that religions have a knack for drawing vast, cosmic conclusions from scattered and marginal evidence, such as the dreams of seers or reports from ancient, uncorroborated texts.... Today, environmentalism is my pick as the best candidate for a belief system needing dollops of the kind of doubt formerly applied to religion. Like most traditional religions, environmentalism can do a power of good. But watch out for the dodgy data and the hysterical insistence that, unless we repent and change our ways, we and our children are doomed"

A moving tribute to the late John Daly on Number watch: "Daly was the epitome of a new phenomenon of the post-scientific age, a lone scholar with all the traditions of meticulous attention to detail and truth that the word implies, with limited means upholding the principles of the scientific method in the face of adversaries with vast resources. He usually won, but the establishment media ensured that the world never got to hear of it... He made mistakes, inevitable for the lone scholar, but they were vastly outweighed by his triumphs. He spotted the fiddled graphics, the unforgivably careless publication of contradictory numbers and the sheer failures of logic that go to prop up the eco-theological morass that is the modern substitute for real science. Most of his admirers around the world never met him, but nevertheless held him in great esteem, simply on the basis of his writings. Forget all the pornographers, mass mailers and virus producers; one Daly is sufficient justification for the existence of the World Wide Web.

Wow! Is this going to be the big new Greenie campaign now that Russia seems to have killed off the Kyoto treaty? Apparently glass windows kill birds because birds don't recognize them and run into them. The solution? Change all the world's window glass to a type that birds can see! Can you imagine what a huge upheaval that would be? Don't laugh. Give the Greenies time and it will come to a window near you! I have myself seen lots of birds run into window glass but they only ever look embarrassed by it. {Thanks to Matthew Cowie for the link}

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There is an absolutely ludicrous furore going on in Britain at the moment about racism in their mental hospitals. A violent schizophrenic Rastafarian died in one of them while being held down to restrain him and it is all said to be the fault of "racism" -- and black people generally are said to be mistreated in such hospitals. But most of the staff in such hospitals are themselves black! So who are the racists? Don't tell me that the British are finally recognizing that blacks can be racists too! No such luck I am afraid. It is obviously the overworked white staff doing a near impossible job under the politically correct rules they are subjected to who are being scapegoated.

French culture in crisis? "Concern over France's diminishing importance in world cuisine has prompted the government to create a gourmet university, which it yesterday promised will be nothing less than the "Harvard for the art of French cooking"... London is now a more interesting dining spot than Paris. The core problems involve an overregulated French labor market and excessively high French taxes." Interested that they used Harvard as a metaphor for excellence. A "Sorbonne" for French cooking would not impress? How humiliating!

It appears that John Kerry is about as opposite to a man of the people as you could get. A super-privileged freeloader would be more like it: Another Leftist elitist pretending to be what he is not.

It is rather surprising that the conspiracy theorists have not made more of a song and a dance about Yale University's "Skull and Bones" secret society. Like his father and grandfather before him, GWB is a "bonesman" and he has appointed a lot of fellow "bonesmen" to senior posts in his administration. The fact that John Kerry is also a "bonesman" is probably a bit of a fly in the ointment but any conspiracy theorist worth his salt should be able to leap past inconvenient facts like that with one bound.

A few people had trouble getting on to a site that I mentioned yesterday as containing my reply to some old Leftist accusations about my being a Nazi. The site does seem to be a bit buggy so I have reposted the reply here and here as well.

This article by Israel's deputy Prime Minister on Israel's security fence and the U.N. has a good quote from Abba Eban [Israeli foreign minister, 1966-1974] saying that "if Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the Earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions."

The Wicked one has some funnies up for old and young.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

OCCIDENTALISM: THE JEALOUS IDEA THAT FEEDS ISLAMIC ANTI-WESTERNISM

Excerpts on "Occidentalism": "However, the kind of violence currently directed at targets associated with the West, from the World Trade Center to a discothèque in Bali, is not just about the United States. Nor can it be reduced to global economics. Even those who have good reason to blame their poverty on harsh forms of U.S.-backed capitalism do not normally blow themselves up in public places to kill the maximum number of unarmed civilians. We do not hear of suicide bombers from the slums of Rio or Bangkok.

Something else is going on, which my co-author, Avishai Margalit, and I call Occidentalism (the title of our new book): a war against a particular idea of the West, which is neither new nor unique to Islamist extremism. The current jihadis see the West as something less than human, to be destroyed, as though it were a cancer. This idea has historical roots that long precede any form of "U.S. imperialism." Similar hostility, though not always as lethal, has been directed in the past against Britain and France as much as against America. What, then, is the Occidentalist idea of the West? ....

Clearly, the idea of the West as a malign force is not some Eastern or Middle Eastern idea, but has deep roots in European soil. Defining it in historical terms is not a simple matter. Occidentalism was part of the counter-Enlightenment, to be sure, but also of the reaction against industrialization. Some Marxists have been attracted to it, but so, of course, have their enemies on the far right. Occidentalism is a revolt against rationalism (the cold, mechanical West, the machine civilization) and secularism, but also against individualism. European colonialism provoked Occidentalism, and so does global capitalism today. But one can speak of Occidentalism only when the revolt against the West becomes a form of pure destruction, when the West is depicted as less than human, when rebellion means murder.

Wherever it occurs, Occidentalism is fed by a sense of humiliation, of defeat... But nothing matches the sense of failure and humiliation that afflicts the Arab world, a once glorious civilization left behind in every respect by the post-Enlightenment West... Humiliation can easily turn into a cult of the pure and the authentic. Among the most resented attributes of the hated Occident are its claims to universalism... It is when purity or authenticity, of faith or race, leads to purges of the supposedly inauthentic, of the allegedly impure, that mass murder begins. The fact that anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, and a general hostility to the West often overlap is surely no coincidence... But Zionism came from the West. And so Israel, in the eyes of its enemies, is the colonial outpost of "Westoxification." Its material success only added to the Arab sense of historic humiliation... The idea, however, that Jews are a people without a soul, mimics with no creative powers, is much older than the founding of the State of Israel. It was one of the most common anti-Semitic slurs employed by Richard Wagner... "

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Eleanor Spreitzer has emailed me an interesting question about what happens if homosexual "marriage" becomes generally legalized: "Are women who give up their children for adoption given the opportunity to chose that their children be adopted only by heterosexual couples or do they have no say in the fact that a homosexual couples may adopt their children? Women who bear children rather than abort them are doing the right noble thing. I certainly think they have a right to demand that their children only go to a heterosexual couple if that is what they want".

When Leftists fall out: Berkeley University recently got most unreasonably shafted over a technicality by the Federal Dept. of Education. Why? The first thing it shows is how nasty bureaucracies can be but jealousy of Berkeley's widespread acclaim in Leftist circles was certainly the cause of the bloodymindedness. Like the rest of America's educational system, the Education Department is sure to be Left-dominated and Leftists hate one-another at least as much as they hate conservatives -- look at Stalin versus Trotsky or the Soviets versus Mao etc. Leftist hate and envy know no bounds. A pity a lot of innocent students got caught in the middle. But who cares about them?

From the Vatican: "The Holy See wants to make peace with the Orthodox patriarch in Russia, and with the Bush administration in the United States. It’s the new course set by its new foreign minister, Giovanni Lajolo"

Safire on Soviet techno smuggling in the Cold War and how the CIA exploited it: "In our complex disinformation scheme, deliberately flawed designs for stealth technology and space defense sent Russian scientists down paths that wasted time and money. The technology topping the Soviets' wish list was for computer control systems to automate the operation of the new trans-Siberian gas pipeline. When we turned down their overt purchase order, the K.G.B. sent a covert agent into a Canadian company to steal the software; tipped off by Farewell, we added what geeks call a "Trojan Horse" to the pirated product. "The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire," writes Reed, "to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."

John Keegan on pointless WMD enquries: "Little or nothing about the past, even about such a well-known episode as the V-weapons, has influenced those who have so violently denounced the Government over the so-called September dossier. Its critics have taken the view throughout that intelligence can and ought to be perfect, and that the editing of the dossier's contents amounted to systematic falsification. Not only does that attitude reveal the critics' complete ignorance of how intelligence is collected and assessed, it also suggests that they have not bothered to read the dossier, included complete in the Hutton report"

The headscarf debate in France: Is the scarf really all that Islamic anyway? And will traditional Catholic nuns still be allowed to wear wimples?

The recent attack on me my a couple of Leftist bloggers relied on a nitpicking old far-Left document that claimed I was a Nazi. I have not previously taken the document seriously enough to reply to it but I have now done so. I have reproduced the document together with my reply to it here -- for whatever interest it might have.

The Wicked one has lots of amusing sports-commentator wisdom.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

There is a history of conspiracy theories here that endeavours to show that they are equally prevalent on the Right and the Left of politics. Hogwash! All the current conspiracy theories ("Bush was forewarned about 9/11" and all the rest) come from the Left.

Contrary to what the article claims, Ann Coulter's defence of Joe McCarthy against widespread condemnation is not a conspiracy theory. McCarthy IS still widely and systematically condemned despite being eventually proven justified in the general thrust of his enquiries. And JFK defended McCarthy too. And the idea of a new world order is no fairytale. President Bush senior openly proclaimed such an aim after the first Gulf war. And we have certainly got a new world order now -- though not the one envisaged.

The prime example usually given of a "Rightist" conspiracy theory is Hitler's theory about the Jews. But Hitler was a socialist! He himself from the very beginning proclaimed his socialism and love of the worker and put his claims into practice too. See here.

The fact of the matter is that conspiracy theories (in the 60's, "the CIA" was responsible for everything) are part and parcel of the simplistic thinking that is characteristic of the Left. That is not to say that there are NO conservatives who sometimes entertain conspiracy theories but such theories are nonetheless far and away the characteristic mental hidey-hole of the Leftist who cannot afford to face reality lest his entire conceptual house of cards come tumbling down.

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Thomas Lifson on GWB's academic qualifications: "President George W. Bush is the very first President to hold a Masters Degree in Business Administration. Even better (or worse, depending on your perspective), his MBA is from Harvard Business School". Lifson goes on to show that the degree at the time was a very demanding one that could only have been obtained by a lot of ability and hard work. Lifson also points out that what was taught in the degree GWB obviously still applies.

What about the far greater number of Muslim immigrants? "Tighter controls on immigrants from Eastern European countries about to join the European Union were promised by Tony Blair yesterday".

All religions are not equal either: "We do know that in some cultures certain practices and well entrenched customs develop that stress objectives that are incompatible with economic prosperity. So, for example, wherever people spend most of their time striving to appease mystical deities, worshipping their dead ancestors, seeking pure spiritual salvation or paying respect to their elders, they will not pursue the kind of intense productivity that is likely to get them out of poverty. Indeed, in some cultures many people scoff at such an objective, deeming it to be a distraction from more important matters. Yet they also complain about the poverty!"

High expectations are certainly a highroad to discontentment: "Quite a few people would probably rail against Laura Schlessinger, the radio pop psychologist known for her diatribes against abortion, working mothers, and gay rights, even if she said that you should be kind to animals and brush your teeth regularly. When 'Dr. Laura' writes a book which pins most of the blame for modern marital problems on selfish, overly demanding women, that's bound to ruffle feathers. Schlessinger's new book, 'The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands,' is viewed by friend and foe alike as a 'back to the good old days' treatise: for some, a rediscovery of the deep truths we've forgotten in the rush to women's liberation; for others, an attempt to roll back decades of women's progress."

The PETA principle: Lab rats over sick kids: "PETA President Ingrid Newkirk's comment: 'Even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we'd be against it.' The lunatics at PETA continue to use their tax-exempt millions thwarting contributions to health charities like the March of Dimes, the American Red Cross, and the American Heart Association."

A terrible injustice by know-all "professionals": "Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP) is the psychiatric diagnosis by which a parent -- almost always a mother -- is believed to intentionally harm or kill a child in order to garner attention". The whole idea now seems to be totally discredited and many cases have been overturned in the courts but many innocent parents have had their children taken off them and seem unlikely to get them back.

Theodore Dalrymple has a good article on how a Muslim who has had it all can still be excused of the most utter viciousness because he has experienced "prejudice". I suppose short men who commit rape and murder will soon be excused because women are "prejudiced" against them. And I guess the prejudice against conservatives in our universities means that mudering members of academic selection panels who fail to hire good conservative candidates is OK too. I look forward to seeing it.

Marty is a conservative Australian university student who seems to love provoking the Left. He has reproduced here some of the hate mail he has received in response. It is truly awesome how the Leftists rise to the bait. None of the "compassion" or "tolerance" or "understanding" that they so often advocate is evident -- just furious hate. No wonder Stalin, Hitler and all the rest of the "socialist" dictators murdered so many when they got the chance. There are clearly plenty of would-be Hitlers and Stalins among Australian Leftists to this day.

Tim Blair has another good example of the hatred and racism that lurks just below the surface of a "tolerant" Leftie. Sam Ward has more comments on this charming chap.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its usual one-stop shop of blogospherical wisdom.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

CURRENT GREENIE NONSENSE

Some establishment scientists who back the baseless Greenie ban on DDT seem to be getting a bit rattled by repeated revelations that the ban has caused millions of deaths from malaria in the Third World. They of course disclaim responsibility for the deaths. They get a pointed reply here from Ted Lapkin -- who is one of those who have pointed out recently the holocaust caused by the ban. Lapkin's original article on the subject is not online but there is a mention of it here

Latest from former Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore: "Environmentalists were often able to produce arguments that sounded reasonable, while doing good deeds like saving whales and making the air and water cleaner...But now the chickens have come home to roost. The environmentalists' campaign against biotechnology in general, and genetic engineering in particular, has clearly exposed their intellectual and moral bankruptcy. By adopting a zero tolerance policy toward a technology with so many potential benefits for humankind and the environment, they have lived up to Schwartz's predictions. They have alienated themselves from scientists, intellectuals, and internationalists. It seems inevitable that the media and the public will, in time, see the insanity of their position.."

From "Inside the Beltway" of February 3, 2004: U.S. military training in the war against terrorism has been curtailed and even canceled so as not to "harass" marine mammals. "Vague" language of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, amended last year in the National Defense Authorization Act, has had a "damaging effect" on military training, according to the president of the Navy League, causing "exercises at night and in shallow waters to be canceled or conducted under unrealistic conditions ... to ensure that marine mammals were not 'harassed.' " .... Meanwhile, the deployment of a vital submarine-detection system - Surveillance Towed-Array Sensor System, Low Frequency Active - was delayed, the league president tells Congress, because special-interest groups claimed its sound emissions posed a risk to marine life. The system is considered a centerpiece of the Navy's quest to guard against quiet diesel-electric boats deployed by North Korea and Iran. The Navy already funded a $10 million independent research program, conducted in part by Cornell University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which found the system could be employed with "minimal risk" to marine mammals. Nonetheless, special-interest groups sought intervention of the courts, and last October, a U.S. District Court in Northern California issued a permanent injunction restricting military operations of the sensor system. The Justice Department has filed a notice of appeal.

The elitist Greenie people-haters: "An old Chinese curse goes, 'may you live in interesting times.' Well, these happen to be interesting times for the Sierra Club. A small chunk of its membership is worried about what it calls 'impact of mass immigration on the environment and quality of life for future generations' of Americans. These dissidents want the Club to promote public policy that will restrict America's future population growth." Immigration control is perfectly reasonable but the Greenies just want to stop immigration altogether as part of their usual anti-people attitude. Conservatives, on the other hand, think SOME immigrants are OK. Immigration is after all an historic American and Australian tradition. But Greenies dislike all immigrants equally. Both Greenie and Leftist ideology is too simplistic to differentiate between different types of people -- though Leftists and Greenies certainly do plenty of differentiation in their personal lives. How many Greenies and Leftists marry blacks, for instance? Equality is for other people, obviously.

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With the U.S. Presidential race heating up, and Kerry bringing up Bush's military service record, John Moore's blog has become a major debating place on the subject. See Vietnam Veterans Against Kerry

A remarkable WSJ article about how GWB applies his intelligence in getting to know and understand people rather than in concentrating on intellectual abstractions. That certainly fits well with the characteristic conservative respect for the individual and is the ideal qualification for a job where delegation of tasks to others is important. And in what job could delegation be more important than President of the United States?

Hmmm... It sounds like Australia's new "Leftist" leader is pretty conservative on social issues to do with families too. If he wins the next election, it looks like Australia will have a Prime Minister just about as conservative as our present conservative Prime Minister. Australian politics are very centrist and the centre seems to be moving further right all the time. See also here

Leftists have enormous problems accepting reality but one Israeli Leftist seems to have had it forced upon him. From Opinion Journal: "Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center reports on the recent "World Social Forum" in Bombay, India: "An Israeli backpacker added: "I am a good Israeli. I accept the Palestinian right to violent resistance." He was crushed by the response of Faisal from Tullkarm: "I know better Israelis; they are dead."" Proof again that Islamic fanaticism cannot be negotiated with. Islam originated as a religion of the sword and the sword (or its modern equivalents) is all that gets through to its more fanatical adherents to this day.

Here is another list of quotes proving that the President lied about Iraq having WMDs -- Only the President concerned is of course William Jefferson Clinton. One quote: "If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program." - President Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998

I have just put up some more of Chris Brand's recent postings here -- on talking parrots, mad Muslims, the BBC and Zimbabwe.

The Wicked one says that foeign investment is good -- whether you are giving it or receiving it.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

A GREAT LOSS

An Email just received from a reader:

"Greenhouse sceptic John Daly yesterday passed away after a heart attack. During college he was my electronics teacher and generally a great man. I looked up to him as the only teacher (indeed the only person at that time) to challenge the 'politically correct' interpretation of global warming. I hope as time progresses someone else will rise to the legacy of John Daly and show the world that something as complex as our climate can not be reduced to simplified leftist slogans. As far as I have read, no one -- and I mean no one -- has ever come close to arguing successfully against the work of John Daly. There must be good reasons for that."

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THE NAZIS WERE THE FIRST MAJOR "GREEN" PARTY

A good email from a reader:

"Great job infiltrating the Nazis. You are definitely not a cloistered ivory tower academic.

If you remove the nationalism and racism from the party platform of the National Socialist German Workers Party of Hitler it becomes virtually identical to the modern Greens. Here is a partial list of the common positions:

National socialist health care
Strict government oversight of corporations
Extreme labor rights versus employers
High taxes
Big government
Strict gun control
Deification of nature
Aversion to Judeo-Christian theology

If a complete analysis was done I believe you would find many more common policies with very few differences. I believe you could devise a sociological experiment that laid out the Nazi party platform minus the racism and nationalism and asked people what party had that platform. Most would say the Greens. They would be shocked to find out it was the Nazi platform. I have done this a few times informally with educated leftist friends. It always leaves them confounded and upset with me that I could dare compare the two."

There is already considerable documentation of the Nazi/Green similarities here. See also here. Some historians try to dodge the similarities by saying that the Greenies of today are NOT like the Nazis of history in that the modern Greenies do not have an overt racial agenda (though the Greenies DO think that the poorer countries of the world should stay poor). That misses the point, however. Of course history never repeats itself exactly. Racism and eugenics were very popular among Leftists in Hitler's day. Hitler was being a perfectly orthodox socialist in having those beliefs. Since then, however, the Left have switched sides and now make just as big a play of being anti-racist as they once did of their "racial hygeine" (eugenic) beliefs. And the Greenies follow suit. But they are all still Leftists with the same desire to tell everybody else what to do. And Hitler showed where those desires lead if the people concerned actually get power.

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An amazing fuss about a partially-exposed breast. Since it seems to be a matter of such great interest I thought I might mention the probable psychological cause of the event: The breast concerned is obviously an augmented one and it is quite common for women (though not all women) who have had implants to be very keen to display their new assets. Connect the dots.

Lots of people now seem to be waking up to how Leftist psychology works: If you want to know how Leftists tick, just listen to what they say about how conservatives operate and treat it as a confession about the Leftists themselves. From Opinion Journal: "The critics of America and the coalition seem to be engaging in what psychologists call "projection"--attributing their own deficiencies to others. A case in point is Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter who claimed the government of Tony Blair had "sexed up" information on Saddam Hussein's weapons. Now that the charge has been investigated, it turns out--and we said it way back in July--that it was Gilligan's report that was up-sexed. The BBC itself reports that Gilligan tendered his resignation Friday, following two Beeb executives out the door."

Bad principle, good politics but peanuts anyway: "Despite a ballooning deficit and objections from members of his own party, President Bush announced that he would increase funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. It was Laura Bush who confirmed on Thursday the $18 million boost in the federal contribution to art programs around the country.

"The Soviet Union was, of course, the first country to adopt all-round socialized medical care -- the dream of most of America's modern politicians."

The Wicked one is a bit cynical about GWB's recently announced spending cuts.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

LEFTIST STEREOTYPING DEMOLISHED AGAIN

The most successful "big lie" of the 20th century is undoubtedly the Leftist myth that Nazism is just a more extreme form of conservatism. Leftists really hate it when you point out that it was the Conservative Winston Churchill who was Hitler's most unrelenting foe and that Hitler and Stalin were allies until Hitler tried to grab Russia. That conservatives did and do oppose Nazism as much as they oppose any other form of socialism or totalitarianism just cannot be fitted into the Leftist worldview. From the Marxist psychologist Adorno onwards (writing in 1950), the Leftist line has always been to ignore the socialist nature of Nazism and to assert fervently that Nazis and conservatives are allies, not enemies.

As an outspoken conservative myself, I too have obviously been the target of such dishonest accusations. Any outspoken conservative (including of course President Bush) will get called a "Nazi" by Leftists sooner or later and I have certainly been called that many times. I am inclined to think that such accusations are in fact a badge of honour: they show that you are an effective opponent of the Left. And a couple of Australian Leftist bloggers have repeated that old accusation about me recently and been rather competently demolished in reply by Sam Ward. And I have also myself replied to similar criticisms years ago.

In fact, however, I have been more of an enemy of Nazism than most people. Leftists just sit in their armchairs and condemn Nazism in order to make themselves feel good without actually doing anything practical about it. I, on the other hand have actively tried to combat and undermine Nazism. Part of that effort has been in the academic journals for over 30 years -- my sociological observations of Australian neo-Nazis -- in which I went out and got to know lots of actual real-life neo-Nazis in order to describe and analyse what they are really like and what motivates them (see here and here). The first step in combatting something is to understand it and I put a lot of time and effort into understanding what makes modern-day Nazis tick in the hope that it might help me understand Nazi Germany better. The usual Leftist explanations of Nazism are rendered worthless by their perverse determination to identify it with conservatism. And all my work on the subject was published in Jewish academic journals, as it happens. So the occasional Leftist claim that my work was sympathetic to Nazism is the height of absurdity.

Until recently, however, I have kept my mouth shut about another very active way I have combatted Nazism -- my role as a police agent reporting on them. My sociological studies of Australian neo-Nazis yielded not only information of psychological and sociological interest but information of interest to the police too. And I gladly supplied that information to the police -- in order to assist the police in preventing any Nazi thuggery. Since over 30 years have now passed since that time, however, I think any need for secrecy is at an end and I have recently gone VERY public about my police role by telling all to Brisbane's Sunday newspaper. The reporter who interviewed me seemed to know a lot about the matters concerned and I was able to give him enough detailed information about my police and Nazi contacts to enable him to authenticate what I said.

So, far from being a Nazi, I have done far more to combat REAL Nazism than any Leftist I know. But that just makes me a good conservative -- contrary to what the Leftists would have you believe. And, in case anybody thinks that studies of Nazism/Fascism are irrelevant to the modern-day world, they should have a closer look at how things are going in Russia.

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Good to see that the social-worker busybodies are at last being held accountable somewhere. These generally Left-leaning know-alls have done enormous harm to innocent people with their false claims of child abuse and some at last are being taken to court over their malicious accusations and prosecutions.

French corruption again: "President Jacques Chirac passionately defended today his former prime minister and long-time political partner, Alain Jupp‚, convicted last Friday in a corruption scandal dating from the days when the two men served together in the City Hall of Paris"

Steve Forbes says new property rights reforms in Egypt may help lead the middle-East out of its current mess

Two good points in an email from a reader: 1). "What was called "Communism" in Russia turned out to be an example of the very thing it claimed to hate: Monopoly Capitalism. Indeed, under the Soviet Command economy everyone and everything was owned by Joseph Stalin. Stalin ruthlessly persecuted his rivals.... 2). To those Leftists who say that there never has been a True Communist society, one could counter that there has never been a True Laissez Faire Capitalist Society either. Laissez Faire means a system of "hands off", where the Government does not regulate Big Business"

The history of education in the UK and USA shows that national levels of literacy at least as high as those of today were achieved through private schools BEFORE "free" and compulsory State education was introduced. And the degree of cultural sophistication in the population at large seems to have been higher then too. The E G West Centre has lots more on the topic. Clearly it is a myth that education without the state would be for the rich only.

George Will says that big government may have to be accepted as inevitable and that the key to the Left/Right divide is really HOW government power is used -- to free up the individual or to promote artificial equality at the expense of the individual. I think he has a good point there. NOTHING seems to stop the growth of government. Too many people are always ASKING for government intervention -- with conservative farmers and businessmen not the least of them.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

GREENIE CORNER

The latest twist in the wind-power farce: "An Iowa farmer is at the center of a legal battle that could have far-reaching effects for the future of wind-generated power in the United States. The dispute is over whether people who put up wind turbines have the right to connect them to the power grid and sell excess electricity back to utilities". Next thing my local supermarket will be taking me to court to get an order saying that they have a right to sell me their groceries.

No moderation and realism from the Greenies: "The realistic assessment says that global warming is happening, it is probably insignificant and we will be able to adapt to it. If the only counter to that argument is extreme or worst case scenarios, then they should be exposed for the tiny risks they are... Recent weeks have provided a couple of excellent examples of how the environmental alarmist movement works. Emphasis on "extreme scenarios" is still at the forefront of its tactics."

What a dilemma for the Greenies! A flower that detects landmines. What could be greener than that? But wait! It has been produced by a BIOTECH company. Horrors! "A Danish biotech company has developed a genetically modified flower that could help detect landmines and it hopes to have a prototype ready for use within a few years."

"Is the climate really warming? Weather satellites measuring atmospheric temperatures day in and day out from pole to pole report only a minute rise that extrapolates to about half a degree Centigrade by 2100. Is this rise caused by human activities, like the burning of coal, oil, and gas? That's difficult to tell -- climate varies naturally both up and down, so it could be partly non-human."

Global warming alarmists are the ones filled with hot air: "What we know is that the earth's average temperature has warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the last century. The National Academy of Sciences reports on their website: 'This warming has been particularly strong during the last 20 years, and has been accompanied by retreating glaciers, thinning arctic ice, rising sea levels, lengthening of growing seasons for some, and earlier arrival of migratory birds.' ... If you stopped reading there -- as most of the knee-jerk, junk scientists do -- you'd be terribly misled."

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Fun! I got a bit of a write-up yesterday as part of a story in one of the local tentacles of the Murdoch empire (owners of Fox News). See here. It would be good sport if one of our Australian Leftist bloggers tried to find something detrimental to me in it. Rather to my surprise, the newspaper reporter did quite a fair job of reporting what I said. He sounded like one of the old school and clearly had a personal recollection of some of the events described so that may explain it.

In response to my post of two days ago about Americans being anything but stupid, Wallace, from Texas emailed me: "Thanks......and well said. Although most of us let these kinds of things roll off of our backs, it's good to hear a cheery word. What does upset many of us is the total lack of acknowledgement of the good things the US does overseas. I think as a people we have to be among the tops in generosity in aid both in money and personal effort". My reply was to the effect that Americans are undoubtedly the most generous nation the world has ever seen, so no wonder they are hated: They make the rest of the world look so bad by comparison.

Report from a Louisiana reader about Louisiana Public Broadcasting: "Tonight, they showed a 'nature show' - some island where the foxes were dying - more attention to the foxes than people. But then - switched to dolphins - and this "chick" said - I kid you not - "MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS THE DOLPHINS". Years ago, a friend from Gainsville Fla had a story this "chick" would just love - This guy said that "People just don't understand alligators" - so he swam among them - with the obvious result."

An educational policy of a Leftist State government in Australia: "A flying squad of talent-spotters will work through West Australian high schools identifying and helping students who have the potential to get to university, under a landmark plan announced yesterday."

Some interesting research here on the complex relationship between religion and wealth. It looks like being religious will tend to make you richer -- as long as you are not too fanatical about it.

The collapse of "Theory" in literary studies is amusing. These guys actually think they matter. I have never thought that literary studies of any kind mattered myself. I have never needed someone else to tell me how to enjoy a novel or a poem. I know slabs of Chaucer by heart in the original Middle English not because I ever did a course on him but because I like it. And I think there is no other lyric poet who even approaches Robert Burns but study of him seems very rare in English literature courses as far as I am aware. I guess he is "too popular". What an indictment -- not of Burns but of the puffed-up elitist ignoramuses who see popularity as a negative.

There is an excellent set of comments on this German blog (written in English) about why there is such huge anti-Americanism in Germany. There are lots of good points there but I myself think the main reason for most anti-Americanism everywhere is envy. Envy is after all a major driver of (Leftist) politics generally.

A good article here to make people more relaxed about the rise of China as a economic force. The bottom line is that even while they make cheap things which compete with some of our industries, they also buy things that we make or produce, and as they get richer the will buy a great deal more. Various other common fallacies about China are also debunked.

The Wicked one has a post about anti-gun nuts -- noting that facts don't seem to disturb them.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here 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 February, 2004

ARE "IS" AND "OUGHT" STATEMENTS DIFFERENT?

Keith Burgess Jackson has a thoroughly admirable account of what ideology does and how he himself escaped from it here. He makes some basic points about argument there that cannot be repeated too often. He shows by example what clear thinking on political matters is like and I found his article a joy to read. So how's that for a recommendation?

To my knowledge, however, there have never been two philosophers who agree on absolutely everything so I do have a quibble about one point he makes. He relies at one point on David Hume's famous contention that there is an unbridgeable gap between "is" and "ought" statements -- so that you cannot justify "ought" statements by "is" statements. Yet that is precisely what people normally do. An "ought" statement always commends some course of action and when people ask WHY that course of action is commended the reply is often in terms of "is" (empirical) statements (e.g. the commendation of X can be explained as: "X leads to generally desired consequences" or "X leads to consequences that you would like" or "I like X" or "X is the prevailing rule in this culture"). So in my view the fact that an "ought" statement can be explained in that way shows that it is an empirical statement to begin with. Statements in general have all sorts of influences on people (for example, if someone said to me: "Your son has just died", it is clearly an empirical statement but it would also have an enormous influence on me if true. It would cause me to take many actions that I would not otherwise take) and an "ought" statement is an empirical statement with what is expected to be one particular sort of influence -- a commendatory influence. So an "ought" statement is often simply a shorthand (compressed) "is" statement that can be promptly expanded if desired.

As I have shown here, however, "ought" statements are used in a variety of ways rather than in one single way. They always commend but they are not always empirical statements. Sometimes they are in fact very incoherent statements (at best pseudo-empirical statements) and I think Hume's difficulty arose out of a determination to find meaning in incoherent uses of "ought" statements (i.e. when "ought" statements are elaborated as being or emanating from timeless and universal rules that are "known" only in some mysterious and untestable way -- typically expressed by saying "X just IS right", with no further explanation given) and I simply regard that quest as a fool's errand. The world is awash with incoherent gibberish and baseless assertions so there is no reason to be either disturbed by it or interested in it when such assertions occur in moral discourse. When I encounter it, my usual response is to point out its incoherence and untestability and then refuse to have any further truck with such things (as I did here). I expand a little further on my view of what "ought" (moral) statements do here

Being primarily a psychologist, I am of course interested in WHY what I have called incoherent uses of moral terminology arise and I find the explanation given by philosophical psychologist John Maze persuasive: That they are a conscious or unconscious attempt at fraud -- an attempt to persuade by saying that immutable and peculiarly moral properties exist and that they have some claim on us because of that. Maze's work is not online but if you have access to a university library, you can find it in: Maze, J. (1973) "The concept of attitude". Inquiry, 16, 168-205. Maze also had a book published in 1983 called The Meaning of Behaviour which I have not read but which almost certainly would contain similar arguments.

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Sowell on the Democrat primary 'debates': It's funny that leftists only protest about light weight intellectual rhetoric when it comes from conservative politicians: "Senator John Edwards, for example, has included among his rhetorical flourishes poor children going to bed hungry at night in America. In reality, obesity is even more common among low-income people than among high-income people.... "

Neil Cavuto has a good reply to the Democrat hatred of "the rich". One excerpt: "You know, not once in my life has a poor person hired me. Rich guys, or at least richer guys, did. Trust me, they weren't all saints, but all the ones I've known were willing to give this Italian-Irish kid from working-class roots a chance . . . whether it be scooping ice cream in a shop or churning out perfume in a factory. Poor people get their breaks from rich people... "

A good article here that points out: "The Democratic presidential hopefuls have been crossing the country this week promising to drive "special interests" and "influence peddlers" out of the White House" and the article then goes on to show that the hopefuls themselves are captive to special interests and influence peddlers -- typical Leftist hypocrisy and non-existent principles.

A good comment from a reader: "Today, the NY Times forbid its reporters from carrying guns in Iraq: Mindless - moral superiority above life itself. Would be a great assignment for Jayson Blair".

Is this how the Iraq invasion has "stirred up" the Muslim world? "Saudi Arabia's top cleric called on Muslims around the world Saturday to forsake terrorism, saying those who claim to be holy warriors were an affront to the faith".

Heterophobia is coming out of the closet in the UK: "But the determination of our new public servants to embrace homosexuality is all too obvious, if at times unfortunately expressed: the document explains that Manchester City Council has a 'bottom-up' approach to gay consultation... "

Interesting that the Hutton report which vindicated what Blair and Bush said about Iraq and shook the BBC to its roots would have been ignored by the major American media except for Fox News publicizing it. Pretty disgraceful.

Not before time: "Yesterday, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee approved Rep. Ric Keller's (R-FL) 'Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act' (H.R. 339). Keller's bill would protect restaurants from the increasing number of greedy lawyers looking to soak them on behalf of portly plaintiffs who don't know when to put down their forks.... these lawsuits unfairly force restaurants to spend millions defending themselves, and those expenses are ultimately passed on to consumers."

The Happy Carpenter is pretty scathing about minimum wage laws.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Comments? Email me here 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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