A DEFINITION OF CONSERVATISM

Leftists talk a lot of nonsense about conservatism being opposition to all change, when every conservative I know would like to see a HEAP of things about the world changed. So what IS the basic core of conservatism? Below is how Keith Feiling, an eminent historian of the British Conservative party, defined what he saw as the lasting core of British conservatism over a couple of hundred years:

"It is a scepticism, amounting to disbelief in any purely intellectual process as a means to explain rights and duties or to justify political obligation. They distrust general notions such as "the community" and would argue that the despotism of reason may cloak as much sinister self-interest and self-deception as any other tyranny. Burke made eloquent how he hated 'the very sound' of abstract rights, insisting that men do not act on metaphysical speculations. And even more. His teaching was that the rules of politics are but morality enlarged, and that all moral questions are mixed questions; not to be resolved by pushing some one abstract principle to its extremity which must end in force, open or concealed, but always by reference to relation and circumstance and moral effect......

And it is not hard to see how that caution flows through to distrusting government, distrusting theory-based "reforms" and advocating individual liberty etc. (if my link to Feiling's article gets overloaded, you can also find it here and here)

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ELSEWHERE

Anti-democratic "liberals" (so what else is new?): "Liberals have been beating their collective breast in recent years over the Bush administration's post-9/11 assault on civil liberties. But Michigan Democrats--from Gov. Jennifer Granholm to the State Board of Canvassers--have joined ranks with a radical, 1960s-style Trotskyite group to deny state residents the most basic of all rights: the right to vote. The group, which lives in a Malcolm X-inspired fantasy world and calls itself By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), has been engaged in a long guerilla campaign to prevent the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) from getting on the state ballot. This initiative, backed by Ward Connerly, the California businessman who successfully spearheaded a similar effort in his home state, seeks to end, once and for all, racial preferences in public universities and state government. Polls have repeatedly shown that over 60% of Michigan voters oppose preferences"

Big labor destroys American jobs: "It is truly an amazing thing that the MSM (main stream media) has covered the breakup of big labor so much over the last week without mention of how anti-American labor always has been.... A union seeks to reverse economic progress out of economic ignorance and Democratic exploitation. Instead of getting a higher wage by being worth a higher wage to a free employer, the union seeks to get it through extortion: "give it to me or I'll go on strike, and with my Democratic friends in Washington I'll make it illegal for you to fire me while I'm on strike." This has nothing whatsoever to do with economic progress. It is one part economic ignorance and one part the Democratic exploitation of labor for their money and votes. It is shameful, disgusting, and anti American.... While the Democrats have legalized this domestic extortion, they have not been able, despite their best efforts, to prevent Americans from raising their standard of living by buying cheaper and better goods from overseas. This means that unionized American companies must close down and eliminate the union labor that made the higher priced, lower quality domestic goods. Unions therefore have destroyed major American industries, caused huge unemployment, not raised the general wage level, stolen from the poor, and deposited workers in the unemployment lines without a sense of how to contribute in a free country".

Far-Left lawyers: "the ABA opposes even laws that prohibit adult incest -- a position that would disgust the vast majority of Americans. The ABA also advocates not just abortion on demand but federal and state funding of it -- a position far outside the mainstream. And even in this time of war, the ABA opposes the federal law that requires universities accepting federal funding to allow the armed services to recruit on campus. ...the ABA's "Special Committee on Gun Violence," ...advances the view (according to its Web site) that "the perception that the Second Amendment is somehow an obstacle to Congress and state and local legislative bodies fashioning laws to regulate firearms remains a pervasive myth." This is a stunningly extreme (not to mention misinformed) statement. ...Within the ABA there is some hushed concern about its stagnating membership and creeping irrelevance to the practice of law. But precious few insiders are willing to recognize that the ABA is reaping what it has sown for decades: Its increasingly vocal advocacy of an increasingly extremist agenda appeals only to a minority of the profession."

A great post from an American expatriate in Tokyo. One excerpt: "Night or day, the Ginza district of Tokyo is impressive (actually Ginza is just one urban marvel in greater Tokyo), a cacophony of lights and pristine shop windows containing some of the most creative contemporary commercial art I've seen a longtime -- far better in design and aesthetic impact then some of the crap (to use Morgan Spurlock's word) that the non-commercial art elite tells us to digest (occasionally financed with tax dollars). The architecture and general design scheme around me was something I'd call postmodern sci-fi. The future had finally arrived and capitalism's mark was something that would have made Ayn Rand proud. I couldn't help but contrast the beauty, life, and dynamism around me with the stale and oppressive conformity and drab ugliness of an anti-capitalist ambience ("art" by bureau decree). The free people who walked around me were not obedient clones to an ideology "for a better world," they were manifestations of a better world - bourgeois materialism taken to its limits".

What a narrow escape America had from getting another psychopath (after Clinton) as President! There is still more coming out about the defamatory lies John Kerry told about Vietnam. Without the media covering up for him he would never have got past first base. Note this article: "Vietnam veteran Steve Pitkin claims that John Kerry pressured him to lie in 1971 when he claimed U.S. soldiers engaged in atrocities during the Vietnam War. Pitkin had been a key participant in John Kerry's infamous "Winter Soldier" hearings of the same year, which concluded that the U.S. military was allegedly engaging in war crimes against the Vietnamese..... Pitkin discloses that his lack of candor in the 1971 film clip actually reflected his efforts to avoid giving Kerry what he so desperately wanted: war stories about how American troops in Vietnam were daily committing war crimes in a last-ditch attempt to turn the tide in that 10-year conflict. In the end, Pitkin said, he gave in to Kerry's pressure and made up allegations of war crimes."

Realism about nukes: "Yet the notion that the nuclear genie can be willed out of existence through the efforts of right-thinking people is as absurd as it is wrongheaded. Just as guns and knives will be with us forever, so too will the bomb. We need bunker busters because North Korea and Iran are using underground facilities to build weapons that threaten us, and we must be able credibly to threaten in return. We need to have nuclear tests because the reliability of our principal warhead, the W-76, has been seriously called into question, and China must not be enticed to compete with us as a nuclear power. In neither case does the U.S. set a 'bad example.' Rather, it demonstrates the same capacity for moral self-confidence that carried America through World War II and must now carry us through the war on terror. Looking back after 60 years, who cannot be grateful that it was Truman who had the bomb, and not Hitler or Tojo or Stalin? And looking forward, who can seriously doubt the need for might always to remain in the hands of right? That is the enduring lesson of Hiroshima, and it is one we ignore at our peril"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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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Brookes News Update

Is the world suffering from a glut of global savings? Explains why the idea that there is a glut of global savings is nonsense
Liberalism breeds terrorism Being a rational thinker, it is often impossible to understand how Democrats can be so stupid
Why should Israel retreat from Gaza? Will the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza be a victory for Muslim terrorism
Islamic fundamentalism? It just snuck up. Thanks to Muslim terrorists Britain's 'Bobbies' no longer just carry a nightstick as they have for generations but are touting submachine guns through London's theatre district
The ACLU: abortion right, death penalty for serial killers wrong? The Left are hypocritical in their arguments. They want to protect the guilty while saying it's OK to kill those helpless victims who can't defend themselves
Sewer Art Has Become "The Art of Law" California Attorney General Democrat Bill Lockyer used taxpayers' money to fund anti-American 'art'
Environmentalists Demonize CAFTA Objections leveled against the proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) by the environmental establishment organizations are exaggerated

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ELSEWHERE

I have to laugh a bit at the pomposity of Leftist blogger Neiwert. Apparently the Califonia chapter of the Minutemen has gained some Nazi hangers-on and one of them unfurled a Swastika flag at a recent rally. Neiwert is of course condemnatory. If it had been a hammer and sickle banner, however, it would no doubt have been seen as quite chic. Being myself a libertarian, the evil twins of Communism and Nazism are abhorrent to me and in my view anything associated with mass-murder should be abhorrent to all decent people. But that puts Neiwert's type outside the realm of decent people as they are only too quick to at least excuse, if not admire, such mass-murdering creeps as Guevara, Castro, Lenin, Trotsky etc.

Confirmation of my analysis of Leftism from an unlikely source. The following (dated August 11) appeared on a site called "Revolutionary Left": "In my attempts to research the contribution of the Hippocratic school to psychiatry I came across [Dissecting Leftism]. Not sure how it came up in a search, but anyway; I just thought I'd share this piece of sheer idiocy with everyone. I mean, this guy equates "leftism" with Nazism... rrright- and he has a PhD? Look at the list of his other websites- "PC watch," "Greenie Watch" and "Education watch." Why does education need to be "watched?" .... He's right on about me though, I'm a leftie because I want attention"

There is an hilarious story from Germany's major newsmagazine here saying that America is collapsing in the face of economic growth in China: "China's steep climb has left America in a collective state of shock. The era of American dominance is heading towards its end, the century of Asia - with China as its central point - has begun. . For most experts, it is only a question of time until the Chinese economy surpasses the American. .nearly everyday the Americans experience a feeling that was earlier unknown to them: They are being trumped. .Two unequal competitors are facing off in this struggle: There are the Chinese bursting with self-confidence . and there is the USA, economically and militarily number one by a long distance, but weary and increasingly plagued by self-doubts". The fact that America is in fact surging ahead economically because it can give all the shit jobs to impoverished Chinese to do somehow gets ignored. Leftists never can see the obvious.

Amazing media hypocrisy: "Nothing heroic done by American troops in Iraq is likely to make headlines in the New York Times or be featured on the big three broadcast network news programs. That fact has now been belatedly recognized in a New York Times opinion piece, but with a strange twist. After briefly mentioning a few acts of bravery in Iraq -- including a Marine who smothered an enemy grenade with his own body, saving the lives of his fellow Marines at the cost of his own -- the Times' writer said, "the military, the White House and the culture at large have not publicized their actions with the zeal that was lavished on the heroes of World War I and World War II." Think about that spin: The reason we don't hear about such things is because of the Pentagon, Bush and "the culture at large."

Black racism: Leftist, of course: "Conservative African Americans Tuesday slammed liberal black activist Dick Gregory for referring to a Cybercast News Service reporter as a "white boy" during a nationally televised cable news program Monday night. Gregory later apologized for the remark. The exchange took place during the "Hannity & Colmes" program on the Fox News Channel. Gregory and Cybercast News Service Senior Staff Writer Marc Morano discussed comments Gregory made during an Aug. 6 march in Atlanta commemorating the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act. Reading from Morano's article, co-host Sean Hannity asked Gregory to confirm whether he had made a number of controversial remarks during the event. The activist readily acknowledged that he had referred to Republicans as "white racist thugs" and called the United States "the most dishonest, ungodly, unspiritual nation that ever existed in the history of the planet." But, when Gregory hesitated in his responses, Hannity turned to Morano for confirmation. "You don't have to confirm what I said," Gregory charged. "I've already said it. So I don't need no white boy to come on and say yes, he said it."

Good comment from Medved: "Media stories about the London bombing suspects suggest they became radicalized because of the 'oppression of Muslims around the world.' While it's true that hundreds of millions of Muslims live in miserable circumstances, who's actually responsible for that oppression? Fifty nations boast Muslim majorities and not one of them boasts economic prosperity and a functioning democracy. ... The true oppressor of Muslims is Islam itself, with teachings that destroy any chance of progress, peace or freedom."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again and quite well-done this time. Too often you get desperate attempts to be funny that just make the whole thing hard to follow.

There is also a big new lot of posts up from Chris Brand, with his usual total disregard for political correctness.

And Wicked Thoughts put up quite a range of funny-but-serious posts yesterday.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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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A PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEW OF LEFTISM

This was written back in the 50s but there is still much truth in it. Some excerpts:

Strictly speaking, although he calls himself one, the modern liberal is not a liberal at all, but a collectivist. He is strongly defended by a dogma and when this is attacked he becomes contemptuous, derisive, and replies with verbal formulas and sarcasm. He has an unshakable, unrealistic conviction of his own infallibility and intellectual superiority.... Although modern liberals are actually few in number compared to true liberals or environmental liberals, their influence is felt out of proportion to their number because their anxiety presses them to force acceptance of their needs and since, by nature, they are clever, vociferous, and exceptionally articulate. They are the policymakers behind the scenes in government or the writers of articles of opinion in intellectual magazines and other media of communicatio

Characterologically this liberalism represents a misfired solution to the problem of guilt and anxiety: the anxiety gets bound up in political attitudes and ties, fixed to a specific and characteristic ideology. These "self-evident" truths the modern liberal sees as unshakable and unarguable, since any attempt to challenge them shakes the very core of his defenses and stirs up intolerable anxiety. The modern liberal ... is further from genital primacy [than the true liberal] and less capable of rational functioning. He expounds all the ideas of the true liberal, not any longer for their own sake, but because they give him the feeling of righteousness and purpose. His humanitarianism is largely rationalization. His concern for others is not at all sincere, as in reality he is quite venomous, and his sympathy for the underdog is merely a reaction formation. The modern liberal lives almost entirely in his intellect.

the [modern] liberal uses intellectual contempt, arrogance, and clever verbal castration. His wit is barbed, amusing at the expense of others. He is void of kind or gentle feelings, except superficially in his causes, and that of course stops all argument, since anyone who "feels so deeply" about the injustices of the world must be above reproach. This intellectualism is his chief defense against feeling, especially his guilt and anxiety which color and pervade all his attitudes. His anxiety makes immediate fulfillment of his needs imperative, so he tends to favor revolutionary rather than evolutionary tactics. Since his real problem lies elsewhere, he is never satisfied, but needs to advocate constant change and expediency rather than long-range goals

He can allow himself to be aggressive only in causes and abstractions. Any other aggression fills him with intense anxiety and leads him to pacify, compromise, appease. For this reason he is unable to assume responsible leadership whether it be in government or in raising a child. Privilege he wants as a right and not something that must be earned competitively. The liberal's intellectualism, guilt, and fear of the father leads directly to his egalitarianism. He feels guilt at his own success or advantages and is thus opposed to differences in social structure. Basically he needs to feel that all people are the same. They are brothers and should fraternize freely.

Many injustices are committed on the altar of social consciousness.... I do not mean to imply that a sense of social justice is pathological. One has to look at the source. In the [modern] liberal the express motives are not the real motives. There is a great difference between a stock altruism based on hidden guilt and a genuine feeling for the golden rule, reality based. This stock altruism is not open to argument, because the [modern] liberal does not argue rationally, rather he uses sarcasm to imply that any intelligent and reasonable person would think as he does. He supports his premise by rhetoric rather than logic. He mentions reason often in his arguments-and even enthrones it as a panacea but seldom is he open to it.

The modern liberal is contemptuous of capitalism. The expressed reason is that capitalism is cruel and heartless: the real reason is that capitalism is cruel to him, because it is a system in which individuals must compete on their own, which he cannot tolerate.[Thus the modern liberal advocates that the government interfere in the constructive work of others]. The expressed motive is to help those unable to succeed; the real motive is to eliminate success, so that he will not have to feel anxious and inferior.

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ELSEWHERE

Lord love us! What has the world come to? In The Guardian, of all places, we find an article reporting that there is such a thing as general mental ability (popularly known as IQ) and that it is highly hereditary! I guess that after around 100 years of scientific evidence to that effect, the truth is getting just too hard to ignore. Excerpt: "Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry are trying to unravel how much genes, rather than environmental factors, affect a child's academic prowess. By analysing the test results of 6,000 twins, they were able to see clear genetic factors emerging for both numerical skills and reading ability. They compared test results for seven-year-old identical twins, who share the same DNA, with the results from non-identical twins, who only share 50 per cent of their DNA, to assess how much was down to genes. Yulia Kovas, who led the investigation, said: 'Our work shows that there is a substantial genetic overlap between maths and reading, but also between maths and general intelligence. 'It seems that there is a group of "general" genes that govern our achievements at school."

Further to my comments yesterday about Bruce Kovner, a regular reader who was once himself a NYC financial trader writes: "I knew him when I worked at CS in the early 90's. He was/ is everything he is described and even more. He was also fair in his dealings with banks when other hedge fund operators were complete shitheads. We sat down once for a conversation about markets. That conversation taught me a few things about trading which I haven't forgotten".

Blair gets a deserved boot up the backside: "Two of Britain's closest allies in the war on terrorism made scathing criticisms of the Government yesterday for being soft and indecisive in dealing with Muslim extremists at home. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, both countries that co-operate closely with Britain against al-Qaeda, said that Tony Blair's Government had consistently failed to tackle Islamic militancy. In a farewell interview with The Times, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the outgoing Saudi Ambassador to London, said that he had been "going around in circles" during his 2«-year posting in a failed attempt to make Britain understand the danger posed by Saudi dissidents in London linked to al-Qaeda".

U.N. corruption: "A federal prosecutor investigating corruption in the $64 billion oil-for-food program issued the case's first criminal charges against a U.N. official, accusing a former Russian procurement officer of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from companies doing business with the United Nations. Alexander Yakovlev, 52, pleaded guilty to three counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, said David N. Kelley, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. The charges could carry a penalty of up to 60 years in prison. The case against Yakovlev grew out of the United Nations' own investigation of its marred oil-for-food program, and it came on a day when a U.N.-appointed panel accused Benon V. Sevan, the program's former director, of receiving nearly $150,000 in kickbacks from a company run by relatives of former U.N. secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali"

There is an amazing post up on Strange Justice that shows what a huge problem are wrongful convictions in the USA and why so few get reversed.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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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EGO AND POLITICS

I often make the point that Leftists have big but weak egos. They think they are wonderful but need constant approval from others to reassure themselves of that. So they advocate anything that sounds good at the time regardless of any adverse long-term consequences that it might have.

The converse of that, of course, is that conservatives have no need of all that hoopla. They just quietly get on with lives that they are broadly satisfied with. Ronald Reagan, of course is an excellent example of conservative humility. As Nancy Reagan said: "I think they broke the mold when they made Ronnie. He had absolutely no ego, and he was very comfortable in his own skin; therefore, he didn't feel he ever had to prove anything to anyone." And as Cal Thomas said: "He was hated for precisely the same reasons he was loved. He had convictions and made those without them look weak. ... He knew who he was before he came to office; he did not need the office to complete him." And Eamonn Butler noted Reagan's lack of egotism too:

"The pompous conceit of the media Establishment is parried by Reagan's own epitaph on his administration, which reveals his own complete lack of both pomposity and conceit, tempering his pride in having changed minds and changed events: "Men and women across America for eight years did the work that brought America back. My friends, we did it. We weren't just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger, we made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all.""

But Jeff Jacoby sums up Ronald Reagan's humility best. A small excerpt:

"But one trait has gone largely unmentioned: His remarkable humility.... But if no man was his better, neither was he the better of any man. That instinctive sense of the equality of all Americans never left him -- not even when he was the one with fame and power. I don't think I have ever heard a story about Reagan in which he came across as arrogant or supercilious. In a number of reminiscences this week, former staffers have described what it was like to work for the president. Several have recalled how, even when they were at the bottom of the pecking order, he never made them feel small or unworthy of notice. To the contrary: He noticed them, talked to them, made them feel special. Reagan climbed as high as anyone in our age can climb. But it wasn't ego or a craving for honor and status that drove him, and he never lost his empathy for ordinary Americans -- or his connection with them"

But, as great an example as Reagan was, one swallow does not make a summer so I thought readers might be interested in another example of an American conservative with vast influence but who nonetheless needs and seeks no praise or fame -- so much so that most people have never heard of him. I quote a few excerpts from an article about him by a Leftist journalist who, in a typically uncomprehending Leftist way, can only see the self-effacing manner of the man as "nutty"!

"If no one knows anything about Bruce Kovner, it is because he likes it that way. Yet the unassuming manner is camouflage for one of the most powerful people in the country, culturally, financially, and politically. Kovner, 60 years old and divorced, manages the largest hedge fund in the world and every year ratchets higher on the Forbes list of the richest Americans.... He's a neoconservative godfather. He is among the backers of the Manhattan Institute and the fledgling right-wing daily the New York Sun.... Most important, Kovner is chairman of the American Enterprise Institute. The right-wing think tank has supplied the government with the most powerful ideas in foreign policy in a generation... This is perhaps Bruce Kovner's signal (and shared) achievement: to underwrite what had been extreme ideas and bring them into mainstream discourse.... Now and then, Kovner's spending is directly political; last year, he spent a lot to re-elect President Bush. But his main interest has been quietly strategic: the idea factory. "Bruce is an intellectual. He understands the world of ideas," says Norman Podhoretz, the legendary editor of Commentary.... But again there is his outward manner: self-erasing. His press has been mostly limited to financial journals.... A socialite who encounters him at the opera is surprised by his schlumpy dress and regular-guy mien: "You'd never know he's a jillionaire." "One of his distinguishing characteristics is humility," says Thomas Carroll, president of the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability. "If you meet him on the street, you would never know who he was. There's no fanfare, no pomposity, no effort to get people's attention." .... Kovner, over two decades, has underwritten the infrastructure the neocons have used to achieve their current prominence. On the fifth floor of the AEI building, the Project for the New American Century helped lay the ground for the Iraq war .... He plays visionary and psychiatrist to the AEI board. "He's brilliant," says Perle. "He's intellectually rigorous, balanced, and thoughtful.".... I gained the impression that everyone I had talked to gave me: that of a thoughtful, unpretentious, and highly reserved person, a man with a musical voice and a self-effacing manner"

And one of the comments about Kovner that the journalist records is insightful. It is a comment from another whizz in financial trading:

"Kovner's objectivity made him great. "If you can find somebody who is really open to seeing anything, then you have found the raw ingredient of a good trader-and I saw that in Bruce right away." Weymar told me that one of the most important qualities of a trader is ego strength, the self-confidence that allows a person to acknowledge his mistakes and not fall in love with his ideas. "The biggest risk in trading is hubris."

So we see again that a really strong ego leads to humility. It is weak egos who need to boast and cannot admit that they are less than wonderful.

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ELSEWHERE

A reader has pointed out to me an amusing response to the Guardian article I mentioned yesterday. The article said basically that the poor were in desperate need of having more money shovelled at them. More money would reduce their stress and make them happy. But another constant Leftist theme that goes back at least as far as Marx is that money does NOT make you happy (See e.g. here). So which is it? Why bother redistributing such useless stuff? One never expects logic or consistency from the Left, of course.

What a relief! The shuttle got home safely. More from good luck than good management, though. NASA has a lot to answer for.

AFL-CIO splitup ominous: "Despite wide coverage of bickering among Big Labor's top brass, the mainstream media overlooked the real story: The acrimony among several union chiefs amounted to little more than political posturing, blame-shifting, and a wrestling match over control of more than $10 billion in compulsory union dues. These developments only mean that America will face even more union militancy and even more coercive organizing. All the fireworks aside, the power to force more than twelve million workers to pay union dues or be fired - the crown jewel of all Big Labor special privileges - was unaffected by the shake-up. At its core, the controversy was simply a debate over tactics toward achieving the same end: corralling even more workers into union affiliation.... These militant tactics involve attacking companies until they agree to herd their employees into forced unionism without even so much as a workers' vote."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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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TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I list what I think were the best posts on my various blogs in the preceding week.

On Blogger News I look at how to improve majority rights.

On Dissecting Leftism I note that up until the 1990s Sweden was Fascism in slow motion

On Greenie Watch I note that the antarctic is the key to sea-level rise but that the antarctic is COOLING overall

On Political Correctness Watch I report the failure of a religious vilification trial in Australia

On Education Watch I note that homeschooling in Germany is FORBIDDEN! You must obey! Not much has changed since Hitler's day.

On Socialized Medicine I report a case of public hospital waiting times forcing a British boy to go all the way to India for surgery

On Gun Watch a psychiatrist examines the anti-gun mentality

On Leftists as Elitists I note the colossal and unjustified arrogance of the Art world

On Majority Rights I look at ideology and IQ and note that Leftists are in fact DUMBER.

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ELSEWHERE

There is a review in The Guardian of a book (The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier by Richard G Wilkinson) which claims to show that poor people suffer more stress and therefore die younger on average. So shovelling more money at the poor will save their lives! I expect that this will be a staple Leftist argument for a while now. But to say that the problem is money is just a typical Leftist kneejerk reflex. As a former boarding house proprietor in a poor area, I can emphatically confirm that the poor do indeed suffer more stress. But it is not for want of income. Australian welfare benefits are generous. When I was a student many years ago I lived on them myself with no adverse effects. No. The reason that the poor are stressed is because of one-another! The people they associate with tend to be stupid, dishonest and violent. And that leads to no end of stress, believe me! But it is too much to ask that a Leftist make any serious inquiry about WHY people are poor in countries that do so much to help them. To Leftists, it's "the system". In the Middle Ages it would have been "demons". Both explanations are equally empty.

There is a good critique of the incoherence of Marxist and socialist theory here. It's rather amazing that intelligent Leftists still think that way but the hate-filled conclusion they come to matters far more to them than how they got there.

Paul Johnson on antisemitism: "What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense. In the whole of history, it is hard to point to a single occasion when a wave of anti-Semitism was provoked by a real Jewish threat (as opposed to an imaginary one). In Japan, anti-Semitism was and remains common even though there has never been a Jewish community there of any size.... Like many physical diseases, anti-Semitism is highly infectious, and can become endemic in certain localities and societies. Though a disease of the mind, it is by no means confined to weak, feeble, or commonplace intellects; as history sadly records, its carriers have included men and women of otherwise powerful and subtle thoughts. Like all mental diseases, it is damaging to reason, and sometimes fatal".

A good quote from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Historically, Democrats had "rewarded the articulation of moral purpose more than the achievement of practical good."

Democracy demands ousting the incumbent class: "These days, there are fewer and fewer competitive congressional elections. That is a very worrisome trend, because political competition matters a great deal. More candidates for office and the increased turnover of representatives produce better choices for voters. Political competition also heightens voter interest, stimulates the adoption of distinctive policies by candidates and parties, and produces higher voter turnout. This is not the outcome our constitutional framers intended. The House of Representatives was designed to be the legislative body most responsive to public opinion. But the decline in competitiveness makes the House less representative. This is not the outcome our constitutional framers intended."

Don't get into a lather over sweatshops: "San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing the city council to adopt an ordinance that forbids the use of municipal funds to purchase uniforms and other clothing made in 'sweatshops.' Across the country, colleges often adopt similar standards for clothing displaying their school logos. North American unions, such as Unite Here, the apparel and housekeeping workers' union, often lobby to impose working standards for developing countries similar to San Francisco's proposed ordinance. Though these efforts are intended to help poor workers in the third world, they actually hurt them."

Huge savings by cutting out the government middle-man: "Extracting taxes and administering their redistribution is also very expensive and inefficient. Imagine the army of bureaucrats servicing that perpetual round-robin. His first modest proposal is that as much as possible of the money churned out via tax and then back via transfers and services to the self-same individuals should be left in their pockets. About $85 billion is churned in this way every year. If left with taxpayers, it would represent vast tax cuts. If all churning could be stripped out of the system, it would allow personal income tax to be reduced to a flat rate of 10 per cent, with a tax-free threshold of $20,000. That would enable a great many people to self-fund their health and welfare needs, to save, to buy income insurance during their working lives and buy annuities or otherwise provide for retirement".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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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HOW TO IMPROVE MAJORITY RIGHTS

We live in an era where it is a reliable source of acclaim to campaign for minority rights. I think however that there is a case for arguing that majority rights have become neglected in the process. I have a whole separate blog -- Political Correctness Watch -- where I document the favouritism that is extended to minorities of all sorts. It is of course a matter of mere logic that to extend favouritism to one group is to discriminate against other groups.

In my moderate, tolerant Anglo-Saxon way, I am not greatly disturbed by some degree of favouritism towards disadvantaged groups -- though I think that any help should be aimed at the individual with problems rather than at any group that he or she might belong to. The situation today, however, has got very much out of hand. Discrimination against some groups who are conceived of as the majority has become almost as brutal in its effects as the discrimination that was once aimed at blacks and Jews. Far from being defeated, racism of one sort has been replaced by racism of another sort.

And the target of most racism today is in fact itself a rather small minority -- straight white middle-class males. There are special favours for women, special help for the poor and all sorts of favoured treatment for sexual and racial minorities. The target for all hate, blame and discrimination are straight white middle-class males. This is enormously unjust in almost any morality and would be regarded as thoroughly obnoxious were any other group so targeted.

But again in my tolerant, balanced way I don't see that group -- one to which I belong -- as suffering greatly from most of the measures aimed against it so am inclined to write most of the discrimination off as just another one of the many follies of the world.

There is however one way in which the pervasive racism of the modern world DOES badly effect my minority group and it is also something that this time really does affect the majority -- the fact that group favouritism greatly impedes law enforcement and has led to considerable danger and suffering for many innocent and decent people. Some of the especially privileged groups -- blacks and illegal immigrants in particular -- have a very high propensity to crime and are yet allowed to rampage more or less unchecked in many instances. So I think every effort should be made towards eliminating this form of discrimination. Whether a gang is black, Latino, Asian or white should not matter a hoot. It should be cracked down on with all the force that the law can muster. And regardless of what the population of a particular neighbourhood might be, if there is a lot of crime there then there should also be a heavy police presence there. If the "zero tolerance" policies of Giuliani and Bratton drastically reduced crime in NYC, tough policing procedures can work anywhere.

There are of course many other ways in which the racism of the current era is offensive and I sympathize with the offence that many people feel in that connection but if we REALLY want to make a difference it is no good just sitting down and praying for utopia: We have to concentrate on the one most urgent problem -- crime. And only when we have got effective and non-discriminatory law-enforcement does it make sense to start pursuing less urgent goals. And it is my personal belief that once we have got effective and non-discriminatory law-enforcement, other forms of discrimination will be much weakened and other problems will be much reduced.

So how do we go about removing the handcuffs from our police and other law-enforcement officials? It will not be easy. The publicity that the Minutemen give to the silly games that go on at the U.S./Mexico border is an excellent start but ultimately the solution has to be political. And I can see no way in which what I have advocated is at odds with the claimed ideology of either of the major political parties. So people who share my concern should join whichever of the major political parties they feel most comfortable with and become single-issue campaigners within that party. There really is no other way.

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ELSEWHERE

I must confess to being enormously relieved at the rescue of the Russian submariners. They were facing an awful death from suffocation. I am so glad that sanity prevailed and Western help was immediately requested -- and, of course, given. The Brits must be cock-a-hoop.

What the envious Wal-Mart haters ignore: "Wal-Mart hasn't just sliced up the economic pie in a way that favors one group over another. Rather, it has made the total pie bigger. Consider, for example, the conclusions of the McKinsey Global Institute's study of United States labor productivity growth from 1995 to 2000. Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate in economics and an adviser on the study, noted that the most important factor in the growth of productivity was Wal-Mart. And because the study measured productivity per man hour rather than per payroll dollar, low hourly wages cannot explain the increase. Second, most of the value created by the company is actually pocketed by its customers in the form of lower prices. According to one recent academic study, when Wal-Mart enters a market, prices decrease by 8 percent in rural areas and 5 percent in urban areas. With two-thirds of Wal-Mart stores in rural areas, this means that Wal-Mart saves its consumers something like $16 billion a year. And because Wal-Mart's presence forces the store's competitors to charge lower prices as well, this $16 billion figure understates the company's real impact by at least half".

Islamic perverts: "Last Sunday, an American journalist, Steven Vincent, had an opinion piece published in The New York Times, written from Basra, in southern Iraq. He warned that the British Army was allowing the power vacuum in Basra to be filled by Shiite religious groups engaging in a campaign of religious assassinations and constraining the freedoms of women: "At the city's university, self-appointed monitors patrol the campuses, ensuring that women's attire and make-up are properly Islamic." Retribution was swift. Vincent was still in Basra and he was abducted within 48 hours. His body was found on Wednesday. To call him a casualty of a war or the victim of terrorists would be a mistake. He was murdered by perverts. "Pervert" does not remotely confer the same aura and power of "terrorist". This murder was committed in the name of religion but, at its deepest level, was another manifestation of envy, impotence and sexual repression.

Brian Micklethwait seems to be getting more and more eccentric as time goes by. I always suspected that there was a crusty old Tory underneath his libertarianism.

There is a petition on Strange Justice that desperately needs more signatures. Please read it. It is the first online petition I have ever signed.

I have just put up on a Leftists as Elitists an article that rather blows the pretensions of the Art world out of the water.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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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THE MISERABLE LEFTIST MINDSET

From an interview with media veteran Bernard Goldberg about his book "The 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America"

One of those essays in those first fifty-four pages quotes a piece that James Piereson wrote for The Weekly Standard.com on the occasion of President Reagan's death last year. Called "Punitive Liberalism", it's a great touchstone connecting the patriotic liberals of the FDR through LBJ era with those who came afterwards in the wake of George McGovern's failed 1972 presidential campaign.

Goldberg says, logically, that most liberals have never heard of Piereson's phrase. But its symptoms resonate with them nonetheless, "because they see themselves as more sensitive, and more concerned about their fellow man. They say, 'well, this is a country that polluted our air and water', which it did. 'This is a country which had racist policies towards blacks', which it did. 'This is a country that treated women as second-class citizens', which it did."

Goldberg is quick to add, "All these things were wrong", repeating the phrase slowly for added emphasis. "But most of us say, 'let's fix it. Let's make sure we don't do that anymore, and move on.'" In contrast, he says, the modern left dwells on these past transgressions. "It doesn't occur to them somehow that people are literally killing themselves to get to this country. That poor people all over the world want to come to America, because this is a land of great opportunity.

Despite that, Goldberg notes that many, but not all of America's cultural elites are uncomfortable with America's power (and possibly with the idea of power itself). "I think it stems from the fact that we do have a history where we did things wrong in this country. But for them it's always yesterday-they can't look forward. They enjoy that. They enjoy the fact that America isn't the perfect place. And it isn't."

"But you know what?", Goldberg asks rhetorically, "It's a lot more perfect than most other places."

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ELSEWHERE

Poor old Michael Totten! He seems to be a pretty reasonable guy in general but, like most products of a modern-day American education, he knows bupkis about history. His recent claim that Fascists are not Leftists is ludicrously ill-informed, as you can see here and here but his key problem is one that he shares with most people alive today -- a total unawareness about how different politics were before World War 2. Most people assume that the Left then were just like the Left of today. They were and they weren't. The big difference is that the prewar Left were as nationalist and racist as they are today anti-patriotic and anti-racist. More precisely, a prewar Leftist could be either a nationalist or an internationalist but it was the nationalist stream that predominated. Hitler was in fact part of the prewar Leftist mainstream. See here for a detailed description of what that mainstream was like. Even Marx and Engels were frantic racists. Marx mainly hated the Jews and Engels thought Germans were the greatest. Put them together and you get: Adolf! Marx died in 1883. Hitler was born in 1889. So Marx's ideas were very current in Hitler's day. The old patriotic prewar Left did carry over into postwar politics for a short while -- which is why Presidents Truman and JFK did and said the sort of thing that GWB is doing and saying today.

Forgive me while I laugh, but some historians have just discovered not one, but TWO new "Hitler Diaries". The only historian who immediately spotted the fakery in the last bogus "Hitler Diaries" was the much decried David Irving so I will wait to hear what he says before I take any further interest in the matter.

South Africa following the Zimbabwean road to disaster: "South Africa's 50,000 white farmers are threatened with forced land expropriation after a government land summit called for a 'fast-track' programme of redistribution. The weekend summit was convened by the government to review the slow pace of land reform in South Africa. Significantly, it rejected the market-based willing buyer/willing seller policy as the basis on which redistribution must proceed.The South African government has set a target of voluntarily transferring 30 per cent of productive farmland from whites to previously disadvantaged blacks by 2014. But President Thabo Mbeki's government is worried the target will not be met, at the very slow rate at which white farmers are offering land for sale. It also claims farmers are asking for unjustifiably high prices."

The Dallas Morning News gets it right: "Today, this editorial board resolves to sacrifice another word -- 'insurgent' -- on the altar of precise language. No longer will we refer to suicide bombers or anyone else in Iraq who targets and kills children and other innocent civilians as 'insurgents.' The notion that these murderers in any way are nobly rising up against a sitting government in a principled fight for freedom has become, on its face, absurd. They drove that point home with chilling clarity Wednesday in a poor Shiite neighborhood. As children crowded around U.S. soldiers handing out candy and toys in a gesture of good will, a bomb-laden SUV rolled up and exploded. These children were not collateral damage. They were targets. The SUV driver was no insurgent. He was a terrorist. People who set off bombs on London trains are not insurgents. We would never think of calling them anything other than what they are -- terrorists. Words have meanings. Whether too timid, sensitive or 'open-minded,' we've resisted drawing a direct line between homicidal bombers everywhere else in the world and the ones who blow up Iraqi civilians or behead aid workers. No more. To call them 'insurgents' insults every legitimate insurgency in modern history. They are terrorists."

The brainless Leftist chant about poverty: ""Though evidence shows that the terrorists are interested in acquiring nuclear weapons to use against our cities, a learned writer for the New York Review of Books insists that the real weapons of mass destruction are world poverty and environmental abuse. Of course, world poverty is rarely mentioned by terrorists, and those known to be involved have almost all been well fed and are well to do."

There is rather a good article here about Australian slang. I use it a lot in everyday speech because I find it far more vivid and expressive than standard English but on this blog I have to stick to what will be most widely understood. Though I know that I do occasionally let bits of academic jargon slip out.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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

The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). 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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