ELSEWHERE

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!

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