ELSEWHERE

R.J.Stove (Australian author of "Unsleeping Eye" -- a history of secret police -- and son of leading Sydney University philosopher David Stove) has written about Australian immigration-skeptic Pauline Hanson for a US audience. He argues that modern liberal elites are alienated from the general population, thus creating fertile ground for anti-immigrationists to sprout everywhere: "All over the Western world, elites are suppressing popular resistance to nation-breaking immigration. The story of Pauline Hanson will be repeated again and again"

Nice that I got a link from Instapundit yesterday. It was near the top of the page for most of the day too.

" We have reached the point where those who wish to faithfully apply the Constitution as written and accept its limitations on federal power are considered "outside the mainstream of constitutional law," and that those who agree with the Framers' beliefs about the role of government are summarily disqualified from federal judgeships"

A good parable here to illustrate why government-provided "entitlements" are a very bad idea.

A rather amusing comment in the Globophobia column of The Spectator about Indian call centres and British weather.

Big cost for little value: "Amidst all the woeful tales of college students over-burdened with tuition and college loans, the real college cost story -- that it's taxpayers who are truly suffering -- has been ignored. Here's reality. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, more than half of public universities' revenues -- $79 billion -- were extracted directly from federal, state, and local taxpayers, while only 18.5 percent came from student fees and tuition. ... Of course, tuition, too, is covered largely by taxpayers."

I don't suppose it is going to happen soon but Larry Kudlow has looked at the economic stagnation in "Old Europe" compared with the solid growth in the Anglo-Saxon countries and in the former Soviet-dominated countries and thinks that a new free trade zone incorporating the Anglo-Saxon countries and Eastern Europe would make a lot more sense than the EU. As an Anglophile who would like to see Britain OUT of the bureaucratized monstrosity that is the EU, I heartily agree.

It looks like Leftists are getting a bit embarrassed about the virulence with which some Leftists express their hatred of GWB. If they are not careful we might get the impression that Leftists are HATE-FILLED, mightn't we? We might guess what is behind the "compassionate" mask! Can't have that! So Eric Alterman has written a defence that says that conservatives hated Clinton even more. Hippercitical blows that one apart, though.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again.

In the latest upload of a chapter from my book (See here or Chapter 52 here) I look at one of the favourite concepts of Leftist intellectuals: Alienation. Contrary to assumptions going all the way back to Marx, I show rigorously that working class people are NOT particularly alienated. Unsurprisingly, however, alienated people do tend to be Leftist and anti-authority. So the Leftist attempt to project onto the workers their own feelings of bitterness towards the existing society is a fraud.

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

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.

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