ELSEWHERE

I have said this all along too: “One year ago, this column first reported that Allied Forces would be unlikely to discover Saddam's WMD stores in Iraq -- that the UN Security Council's foot-dragging had provided Saddam with plenty of time to export his biological and nuclear WMD..... In December, a senior-level intelligence source confirmed again that much of Iraq's WMD had, in fact, been moved to and through Syria. This week, there was, for the first time, official public confirmation of our report.”

Anti-Globos are one of the most brainless political movements today so that they should be turning to antisemitism is no surprise: "But another element of the new anti-Semitism is often overlooked: The time frame for this resurgence of judeophobia corresponds with the intensification of international links that took place in the 1990s. "People are losing their compass," observes Dan Dinar, a historian at Hebrew University. "A worldwide stock market, a new form of money, no borders. Concepts like country, nationality, everything is in doubt. They are looking for the ones who are guilty for this new situation and they find the Jews." The backlash against globalization unites all elements of the political spectrum through a common cause, and in doing so it sometimes fosters a common enemy -- what French Jewish leader Roger Cukierman calls an anti-Semitic "brown-green-red alliance" among ultra-nationalists, the populist green movement, and communism's fellow travelers."

I hate to be cynical about what should generally be a good thing but I think that the recent peace-treaty between Britain’s Anglicans and Methodists shows that their common Leftist politics have become more important to them than religious matters.

The young warriors at Protest Warrior seem to be doing a good job of derailing Leftist self-congratulation. I used to do something similar myself when I was a lad.

This article documents in great detail how ABC news anchor Peter Jennings has been far-Left for many years.

Val-e-diction thinks that the parole system should be abolished. He thinks we would save a lot of lives that way.

Slattery has a rather appalling picture showing the lengths that some people will go to to get attention to themselves. I’ll bet the guy is a Leftist.

There is a very sarcastic site here about “human shields”.

Chris Brand has some interesting comments about Britain’s new Conservative party leader.

“The Economic Society of Australia is so concerned about the erosion of standards in the popular business and economics courses in universities that it is considering the idea of students sitting an external exam before they receive their degrees”. It’s partly because Australian MBA and B.Ec. courses attract big enrollments from Asia. So it’s the old story of short-sighted university administrators being so keen to hang on to their large number of fee-paying Asian students that they don’t want to fail any of them. But many speak poor English so don’t understand their courses very well. So standards are lowered to vanishing point. Of all the subjects I studied as an undergraduate many years ago, the ones I found most enlightening were the courses in economics and philosophy but teaching in both subjects seem to have become very degraded since then. I gather that philosophy these days is in most places just a tour of Leftist theology.

Economist Stephen Karlson sounds rather defensive about the way I gently chided him over his simplistic approach to moral philosophy. Since he is clearly out of his depth, I guess I should explain that there is wide agreement that “circumstances alter cases”. The central question of moral philosophy and the question I briefly addressed in my main post of October 26th is where we get the rules to decide HOW circumstances alter cases (among other things).

I have just uploaded a chapter from my book Conservatism as heresy with the rather forbidding title of: "Is self-theory the hypostatization of a syncategorematic word?". See here (Chapter 40) or here. It is much more readable than it sounds, though. All that I am doing in the chapter is using the precise concepts of analytical philosophy to clear up the vast muddle surrounding use of the word “self” among psychologists, sociologists and psychiatrists.

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