ELSEWHERE

Hmmm.. I think I need to come to the aid of one of my fellow Australian conservative bloggers. A Leftist blogger by the name of "Darp" (?) attacked Mike Jericho over his enjoyment of guns and such things -- a rather common theme among conservative bloggers (the esteemed Kim Du Toit does rather spring to mind as another example). And Mike was hornswoggled enough to replace some of his martial graphics with a picture of some nice mountain scenery. Leftist attacks on gun usage are of course ho-hum stuff on the political scene (even I get hate-mail for my occasional pro-gun postings) but they also figure in psychology -- with the claim being that people who like guns are "death merchants" etc and are also of course thoroughly deranged. I review and attack one such claim in the psychological literature here. What our trembling Leftists overlook of course is that man evolved as a hunting animal and a liking for hunting and weapons (lacking aggressive teeth and claws, mankind unfortunately needs weapons for hunting) is therefore throroughly NORMAL. Mike is the normal one and he needed to make no apologies for it. And we won't mention the Molotov cocktails, clenched fists etc that feature so often in Far-Leftist iconography. They are pretty death-oriented but have no redeeming connection to hunting. And all the megadeaths of the 20th century were the work of socialists so if "death-merchants" are deranged, it is pretty clear who the deranged ones are.

Buchanan: "While Kerry delivered the speech of his life at Boston, the man is simply not credible. When the basic math is done, the gap between his promises and what he can plausibly deliver is so transparently huge he ought to be hauled before the Federal Trade Commission for consumer fraud."

Conservative black columnist Larry Elder has some great stories from the Democrat convention -- noting their total reliance on abuse rather than rational argument.

V.D. Hanson has a good reply to the loony Lefties who think that the USA has "provoked" the Islamic fruitcakes: "The [9/11] commission has helped to resurrect the fable that we are hated for what we do or don't to Muslims rather than who we are. But the collective brain power of the commissioners could not adduce a simple explanation as to why French and Germans are busy rooting out plots to blow up their own citizens - despite billions of EU money sent to terrorist organizations like Hamas, support for Arafat, and cheap slurs leveled at America in Iraq. Why do Muslim radicals hate Europe when Europeans have no military power, no real presence abroad, give billions away to the Middle East, despise Israel, will sell anything to anyone anywhere at anytime, and have let millions of Arabs onto their shores? Are daily threats to Europeans earned because of what Europe does - or is the cause who they are?"

Race doesn't exist, of course: "A heart drug being tested in black patients is on course to become the first medicine approved for use in a specific ethnic group, challenging those scientists who believe that race is a bad basis for prescriptions. The drug, made by Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company NitroMed, was abandoned after a trial in the 1980s produced unimpressive results. But, because the data hinted at differences between white and black patients' responses, in 2001 NitroMed decided to carry out a further clinical trial using only African Americans. This week NitroMed announced that the trial, in over 1,000 black heart-failure patients, has been stopped early because it appears so effective when used on top of normal therapy. "I'm so thrilled about it," says study leader Anne Taylor of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. If the drug, called BiDil, receives regulatory approval, the company says it will aim to launch it in early 2005.

Ben Stein's latest book seems pretty good. He documents how hate-filled the contemporary American Left are. God help us if the American Left were ever to get the power that the Left had in Soviet Russia! He explains such Leftism as psychologically juvenile -- an explanation some others give too (see here and here) but, although that is true enough as a description, I think we can go a bit deeper than that and see the juvenility as just one symptom of a broader psychopathic syndrome. See here and here.

The latest collection of nutty conspiracy theories from the Left is a book called The New Pearl Harbor. Guess why the twin towers of the WTC fell down on 9/11? Because George Bush blew them up, of course! There is a hilarious send-up of both that book and the whole of the current Left here. Excerpt: "Some attribute the Left's inability to argue coherently to laziness. Others blame the NEA. Whatever the cause, Lefties don't bother to read anymore because reading is hard. It's a lot easier and more fun to fire up a blunt and listen to Rage Against the Machine and Bono for all your political insights. Plus there's all these "facts" that get in the way of a strongly held emotional reaction to things like poverty, crime, terrorism and why conservatives think they have a right to keep at least half their income."

Snowball is pretty irate at how the left-leaning British traffic planners always treat the individual car driver as some kind of enemy to be thwarted and forced onto nice socialist buses -- when there is much that they could and should be doing to make the road network more efficent instead.

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

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Leftists acclaim "diversity" yet say "All men are equal". Figure that one out.

Perhaps the original example of Leftist "projection": Marx condemned conventional religion as the "opium of the masses". Why? Because he had an opiate to peddle.

Why can those who claim to understand the dangers of meddling with a complex ecosystem like the natural environment, not understand that government interference with a complex system like the economy is perilous too?

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and people who will say anything to win applause

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