DERRIDA

Sometimes I feel a bit sorry for Leftists. Their peculiar compulsions often give them a need to deny reality, which is why the "nothing is real" brand of Continental philosophers appeal to them -- with Jacques Derrida being the chief reality denier -- a man who always had a rapturous audience of Leftists on his visits to America. But listen to the painful stuff that Derrida had to say about the 9/11/2001 events in NYC and elsewhere:

"Something" took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the "thing." But this very thing, the place and meaning of this "event," remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it's talking about. We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy-a name, a number-points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.

Amusingly, he got it right in his last sentence above. Leftists are often intelligent people. They must at times find it depressing that they have to claim to find wisdom in such a hopelessly incoherent soul as Derrida. They would find more sense in the average loony bin. (HT Capitalism Magazine)

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

Brookes News Update

Inflation and the US economy -- what's the problem?: As money is not neutral, a price stabilisation policy would aggravate inflation and destabilise the economy by distorting prices and production
The commodities boom and China: the missing ingredient: A great deal has been said about the current commodity boom -- nearly all of it wrong. As usual so-called analysts fell into the trap of confusing symptoms with causes
Murdoch journalists smear President Bush over NSA spying program: What was particularly dishonest about these so-called journalists was their refusal to give space to anyone who could provide a legal argument for the President's surveillance program
The media bats for the Dems to blame the GOP for Abramoff: The Bush-hating Michael Gawenda is another lefty journalist who is falling over himself to slime the Republicans over the Abramoff affair
Illinois GOP: Finding the Promised Land: What incentive is there for voters to unseat a Democratic incumbent and hire a Republican in his place, if the GOP offers candidates who, on the issues, are nothing more than Democrat-light?
Lefty journalist distorts the facts on General Motors' crisis: The leftwing Stephen Ellis is another Murdoch journalist who has trouble confronting reality, in between bashing markets and president Bush
Capitalism is the real friend of the poor -- not socialism: The one question our anti-poverty warriors never really address is the nature and origins of poverty. They always give the impression that poverty is a unique problem caused by an unjust distribution of wealth and income
Keynesians are wrong -- cost cutting does benefit the economy: Cost cutting is an important means of correcting previous erroneous decisions in order to be able to return to a situation where real wealth can be generated again

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

ELSEWHERE

Access to the German version of Wikipedia has been restricted by a German court. This is of course an intolerable attack on free speech which I am sure all libertarians will do their best to defeat. You can see that the forbidden information which caused the site to be taken down -- the information that the real name of a German/Yugoslav hacker known as "Tron" was in fact Boris Floricic -- cannot be found via a search of the German site but the information IS still freely available on the U.S. site. To do my bit towards spreading the forbidden information, I will repeat the core of it here in my rough German: Hacker Tron heisst im Tatsache Boris Floricic. "Tron" is ein Beiname. Weiter hier. And my comment to the German court concerned: "Heil Hitler"!

Interesting that anti-hereditarian psychologist Prof. Elizabeth Spelke now say that at least some types of mathematical ability are genetically hard-wired. Sometimes the data can atom-bomb even a Leftist mind. But she is probably only an affirmative action appointee so unparsimonious thinking on her part should be no surprise.

In the latest "City Journal" we read how Democrats have begun to wield campaign-finance regulations, especially McCain-Feingold, and are pushing for a new Fairness Doctrine to try to muzzle the influential new media world of talk radio, cable-TV news, and the blogosphere. In short order, these outlets have ended the monopoly on U.S. political discourse that the liberal mainstream media, headed by CBS News and the New York Times, so long enjoyed, with seismic political consequences, possibly including George W. Bush's reelection. Apoplectic at its loss of power, the Left, rather than debating these new media, is trying to smother them, in such a flagrant attempt to suppress free speech as would make the Founders weep.

Cheney says domestic surveillance vital : "Vice President Dick Cheney offered a robust defense of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program Thursday, calling it an essential tool in monitoring the activities of al-Qaida and associated terrorist organizations. But he stressed the program was limited in scope and had been conducted in a way that safeguarded civil liberties. In a luncheon speech at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative public policy think tank, Cheney warned that the United States still faced significant threats from a network of terrorists intent on establishing a radical Islamic empire throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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

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.

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