BLACK ANGER

I received recently an email from one of my U.S. readers that helped me understand why most Americans seem to hate even hearing the word "race":

"I had an argument with my neighbor Dwayne this afternoon after my jog. He's a black man, a few years younger than I am. He keeps a nice house and yard and drives a fancy car. We've always gotten along well. Today, however, the discussion turned to Bill Cosby's recent criticism of black parents for not raising their children properly. My neighbor jumped all over Cosby, saying he had no right to tell poor blacks how to live. I didn't challenge any of this, because I wanted to stay on good terms. I mainly let him talk. Then he brought up President Bush, saying he was a racist. I asked for evidence. He had none. When I pressed him as to why he thinks Bush is a racist, he said he just knows. I told him that a few years ago, Bush and his wife drove Alphonso Jackson and his wife (a black couple) to ritzy Highland Park to look at homes. He wanted Jackson as his neighbor. Does that sound like a racist? And who has a black National Security Adviser and Secretary of State? Since Dwayne couldn't cite any evidence for his belief that Bush is a racist, I asked whether all whites are racist. He said no.

At one point I said, half jokingly, that that was the stupidest thing Dwayne had ever said. This changed the tone. He told me to go and not stop by to talk to him any more. He told me to keep my dogs off his grass. It was tense. I pleaded for a moment, then walked away. This man is angry. Until today, I didn't know it. He said at one point that only two presidents cared about blacks: John F. Kennedy ("and they shot him for it") and Bill Clinton. He loves Clinton, as surveys show almost all blacks do. He hates Bush, as surveys show almost all blacks do. Republicans may as well give up on blacks; they're convinced, without evidence, that Republicans are out to get them. They're seething with resentment and anger."

I can see no reason at the moment why that anger will ever abate. Blacks do very poorly compared with whites and it takes a big man to blame himself for the fact that he and his kind are not doing well. "Blame others" is always a much more preferable thing to do than blaming oneself. And when a whole half of national politics is telling you that your failure to reach the heights is because you have been discriminated against, it would be remarkable indeed if you did not believe it. So-called "liberals" breed that anger. They need it and thrive on it. Without the black vote they would sink like a stone.

So is there a solution to the anger? Giving blacks equality that they have not earned (affirmative action) has some superficial attractiveness. The trouble is that that has now been tried on a large scale and the anger still seethes. The gap is probably too big and too basic to be closed by anything short of totalitarian measures. So one hopes that one day the only real alternative will be turned to: A strictly colour-blind and merit-based system that will persuade at least most people that whatever anybody has, has been earned by themselves or their parents. Instead of encouraging race-consciousness (affirmative action) Americans should have put all their efforts into eradicating it. Making sure of equality of opportunity for all would be a far better way of getting the social system to be seen as fair.

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THE UNRAVELLING MYTH OF LEFTIST "PRINCIPLES"

Jeff Jacoby points out that GWB's "idealism" in striving to make the Middle East more democratic is also practical. Trying to bring about an Iraqi government that is both stable and democratic is undoubtedly a difficult challenge but past American policy that satisfied itself with stability only led to the events of 9/11. John Kerry, by contrast, is stuck in the failed past of American isolationism. So who said that it is conservatives who resist change? They only resist half-baked Leftist proposals for change. At the moment it is the Democrats who are refusing to change from a policy that has obviously failed. Leftists have of course always promoted themselves as idealistic and "principled" but the fact that their idealism and principles have vanished in a puff of smoke now that they see electoral advantage in having no principles should surprise no-one. That the people who supported Stalin and the Soviet system throughout the Cold war were "idealistic" was always a joke.

Wavering British Leftist Roger Simon also notes how the behaviour of most of the Left over Iraq contradicts all that they once claimed to stand for: "Who really is "progressive" anyway, those who have been backing democracy in Iraq or those opposing 'unilateral' intervention in totalitarian states?"

And this site records something that BBC journalists were saying before the Iraq invasion but which BBC managers would not let them put into writing: "The far left was becoming the far right. It had gone as close to supporting Ba'athist fascism as it dared". Again something that would surprise only those deluded souls who thought that the Left had principles.

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ELSEWHERE

In connection with my comment yesterday about a post on the blog of Leftist law professor Brian Leiter, it has been drawn to my attention that there is another way one can interpret Leiter's Delphic words. He is probably in fact arguing that because Americans have moved to the Right in recent years (itself a proposition in need of proof) THEREFORE the universities cannot have been preaching Leftism. The unstated but highly amusing premise in that being that all preaching must be influential! That other influences (9/11 anyone?) might more than cancel out any influence from Leftist preaching is just not allowed for in that particular parody of logic! I had not considered that he might be putting forward an argument quite as ridiculous as that but he is a Leftist after all.

More bad news for the "outsourcing" warriors: "U.S. employers hired almost a quarter-million new workers in May, swelling payrolls by nearly 1.2 million for the year so far in a jobs market steadily gaining steam ahead of November's presidential election." Outsourcing is a sign of an efficient and healthy economy.

It's pretty common these days for all kinds of organisations and lobbies to produce scorecards to help voters from their particular audience to judge better the performance of elected officials. Apparently the US Conference of Catholic Bishops' "scorecard" for rating the performance of various congressmen equates issues of liberal political dogma with conformance to catechism and church doctrine. This raises the question as to whether the USCCB's primary allegiance is to Catholicism or liberalism. See here

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

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

Comments? Email me 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.

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MORE LEFTIST LOGIC

I have just come across another bit of "sophisticated" debate on the blog of a Leftist academic. Get this from Brian Leiter: "Yes, it's true that when you raise the intellectual bar high, as serious universities do, you get fewer right-wing kooks, but that simply doesn't mean there is political indoctrination going on at universities. The fact that the U.S. has moved farther to the right during the same time period when the universities have allegedly moved to the left ought to be taken as empirical confirmation of that point." I guess that as a dumb psychologist I may have missed the point of this clever bit of legal reasoning but he seems to be saying that if more people are conservative and the universities are more leftist, the universities can only have got that way by raising their academic standards. But does not that equate higher intellectual standards with greater Leftism? So is he not assuming what he has to prove?

And it is presumably true by definition that "kooks" will be excluded by a higher intellectual standards but why does a higher intellectual standard exclude right-wing kooks only? Are we again asserting that only rightists are kooks? It appears that we are. Otherwise, why put "right-wing" in front of kooks? In Leiter's case, it would appear that abuse and assertion has taken the place of evidence and reasoning. I feel sorry for the law students he is allegedly teaching at the University of Texas. Or maybe my studies in analytical philosophy have just not equipped me for Leiter's version of logic. Maybe I am just a "kook".

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WHEN BLACK IS BROWN

The Leftist racists are reeling at Berkeley: "This fall, being black at Berkeley is likely to become even more of an anomaly than it already is. As of late spring, 98 black students had registered for fall enrollment out of an expected freshman class of 3,821... "Virtually every part of the campus is extremely concerned about the low numbers of underrepresented minorities and, in particular, the appallingly low numbers of African-Americans," Strait said. The fall enrollment figures came about six months after John Moores, chairman of UC's governing Board of Regents, issued a report saying Berkeley turned away thousands of students who aced the SAT but accepted hundreds - many of whom were black or Hispanic - with low scores". But there are more Asians than whites in the student body, so not all "minorities" are "underrepresented". But Asians don't make a place "diverse" of course -- don't ask me why!

But most amusing of all, note this quote: ""Don't go there thinking, 'I'm going to be looking around for other black kids,'" says Ward Connerly, a part-black UC regent who led the fight to drop race-based admissions". Apparently, if you oppose racism, you can only be "PART-black"! Funny that I have never heard any of the many coffee-coloured Leftists described that way. What a weird world the Left live in! Ideology even affects their colour-vision.

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ELSEWHERE

Leftists just hate the entire field of IQ research. The very idea that some people are smarter than others offends their "all men are equal" religion and the repeated finding that IQ is mostly genetically inherited means that they cannot blame low IQ on "society". So Leftist psychologists are always ducking and weaving in an effort to find some way of devaluing IQ. They normally do that by inventing "other" intellectual abilities that are independent of IQ. I have mentioned the feeble attempt by Sternberg in that direction previously so I guess I should mention another theory that is very popular among Leftists -- the Howard Gardner theory of "multiple intelligences" -- eight of them, would you believe? There is a very clear and simple demolition of the whole Gardner theory here -- which points out that the Gardner theory not only ignores the data but that its criteria for calling something "an intelligence" are so loose that sense of humour, sense of smell, musical ability, athletic ability etc could all be called "intelligences". By adopting similar rules I could say that all cats, dogs and horses are birds -- but that would still not make them so.

Selwyn Duke, from Mens News Daily says the sexualised abuses at Abu Ghraib are serious, but were they 'torture'? And why have the media had a sudden attack of morals? "...if you were weaned on MTV and Loveline, received constant messages that sex is a game, homosexuality a legitimate lifestyle and that what used to be called behaving like a slut is not degrading but the fruits of liberation, how likely would you be to recognize the gravity of the incidents at Abu Graib? Heck, there are some people - and I suspect you can find an inordinate number of them in the media - to whom that kind of behavior is recreation."

An acerbic comment from Peggy Noonan: "Europe is a post-Christian society on a continent devoted to the material except when it is considering astrology, witchcraft and worshiping rocks."

Roger Sandall is an ex-anthropologist and author of The Culture Cult. Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement as "brilliant, sardonic, and impassioned", his attack on romantic primitivism (best known from the writings of Rousseau) ranges from discussions of the horrible decline and fall of anthropology, to the intellectual follies of thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Karl Polanyi, to the baleful triumph of the anthropological meaning of "culture" in the humanities. It is neither polite nor politically correct: but it's a sure antidote to multicultural delusions.

There is a thought-provoking post here that sees concern over animal rights as a capitalist luxury. Without capitalism we would have much more pressing problems than animal rights to deal with.

Dick McDonald has just put up a heap of hard-hitting posts about current American politics. I had missed the news about America's soaring factory output and the way former knockers of it have ignored the turnaround.

Wicked Thoughts now has nine pictures up of the strange things you can encounter if you go shopping overseas.

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

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

Comments? Email me 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.

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SOME RESULTS OF AN AMERICAN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION

Overall, I comment very little on what Leftist bloggers are saying. Cleaning out the Augean stables is not a task for me. But sometimes they get too amusing for me to resist: Open Door is a graduate student of psychology at UTA (with a previous academic background including philosophy), who claims that there is only minimal Leftism in American universities.

In typical Leftist style, our Lefty blogger is good on mere abuse -- he calls me "doltish" and "benighted" -- but he is very short on elementary logic. He takes this statement by Keith Burgess-Jackson: "A recurring theme in liberal thought is that wealth and poverty are undeserved" and comments "This is simply false. The recurrent theme in liberal thought is that some wealth, and some poverty, are undeserved". But that is perfectly consistent with what Keith said! Where is the word "ALL" in Keith's statement? Without any qualifiers, Keith's statement simply spoke of wealth and poverty being GENERALLY undeserved. His attack on Keith is not only an attack on a straw man but in fact reinforces what Keith said! There is a lot more than doors open in the brain of that particular Lefty blogger. How he ever passed his introductory logic course is a mystery. I guess it shows that they teach Leftist "logic" in American universities these days. I note in passing also that our Lefty blogger cannot even cut and paste accurately. He quotes Keith as using the word "recurrent" when he in fact used the word "recurring". What a dodo!

As far back as 1972, I was pointing out that Leftists are very prone to the "projection" (i.e. seeing your own faults in others) that they often accuse conservatives as suffering from. So it is rather fun that this Lefty blogger is an example of it too. I pointed out above that his attack on Keith was an attack on a "straw man" (i.e. a misrepresented or fictional opponent). So guess what he was accusing Keith of? You guessed it -- of attacking a straw man.

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ELSEWHERE

Sheer Leftist insanity -- from Canada: "the McGuinty Liberals, whose recent budget forced Ontario families to fork over hundreds of dollars more annually in new healthcare taxes while simultaneously de-listing services like trips to the eye doctor, chiropractic and physiotherapy services from public health insurance, are set to re-list sex change operations! (That wasn't a typo, I really did mean RE-list, not DE-list.) How will he justify this to an average family?" (Post of May 28th, here). How Leftists hate ordinary people!

There is a great article here by Alan Dershowitz setting out the things that the Left never mention about Israel and pointing out when criticism of Israel is antisemitic and when it is not. (Via Peg Kaplan).

The Real Story of Fallujah: "The meticulous planning process undertaken by the Marines at the tactical level for assaulting Fallujah was not augmented with a similarly meticulous process by the Bush administration at the strategic level for counteracting the easily foreseen media fallout from fighting in civilian areas near Muslim religious sites. The public was never made to feel just how much of a military threat the mosques in Fallujah represented, just how far Marines went to avoid damage to them and to civilians, and just how much those same Marine battalions accomplished after departing Fallujah."

Academic standards seem to be extremely rubbery at American universities (even Harvard has to give 20% of its freshman intake remedial instruction in English!) but it seems that British standards are pretty rubbery too. Note this post from Chris Brand: "A British headmaster running a top girls' boarding school in Tamil Nadu, India, revealed to the Sunday Times that his daughter had been rejected by Edinburgh University when she applied as British, but was subsequently accepted when she applied from an Indian address and without mentioning her British citizenship".

Good if it were true: "President Bush's re-election strategists plan to portray the November election as the first since the Reagan era to offer voters a stark choice between liberalism and conservatism. ... 'Conservatives have for a generation yearned for an election in which there would be a very clear choice on the issues and a strong focus on grass roots,' said Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman. 'This election will represent a clear choice, an ideological choice on the issues. And this campaign is totally committed to grass roots.'"

Non-education: "To me, it seems as if the single biggest problem in this country today, after government, is education. No longer are our children required to learn to think, but only to memorize, with the material to be memorized strictly controlled by teachers, school boards, and religious groups. Our children are no longer taught history. Instead they are subjected to socialist propaganda, designed to undermine any attempt to see the failures of socialism in general and to downplay the importance of individualism."

Taiwan: The campaign to keep Taiwan out of international forums is not just a diplomatic issue to do with the legitimacy or otherwise of governments in Taipei and Beijing. It impacts down to earth issues like SARS control too: "If a killer-flu arises, it will be most likely in South China, where animals and humans, especially pigs and poultry, live in close proximity. With the thousands of people travelling daily between Taiwan and China - and between Taiwan and the rest of the world - there is no telling how devastating such an outbreak could be, with the missing Taiwan link. Taiwan needs the concerted efforts of the international community to allow its entry to the WHO - now."

China, Japan and anti-missile defence: Beijing does not want to get caught up in the kind of technological race that finally broke the Soviet empire. Her last hope is a Kerry victory.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again -- in very folksy style this time.

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

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

Comments? Email me 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.

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HISTORIANS STRAIGHT AND CROOKED

V.D. Hanson has an article here putting the recent terrorist attacks on Westerners in Saudi Arabia into perspective. He says a tough response is needed.

Daniel Pipes has a brief survey of Saudi Arabian history which manages to make some sense of the support GWB gives to the Saudi Arabian regime -- saying it is the lesser of two evils.

This article reports a poll of some American academic historians which produced the supremely unsurprising finding that they did not like GWB. One of my readers comments: "You will not be surprised by the overall results of the poll, but even I was startled at the level of sheer acrimonious bombast hurled at this president by historians trained to evenhandedly examine evidence (including the author, Prof. McElvaine). There is, for example, the repeated invocation of special treatment for Halliburton -- i.e. no competitive bidding -- even though the Clinton administration repeatedly awarded contracts to Halliburton in an analogous fashion; similarly, there is complaining about the administration's plan to cut down certain trees in national forests, even though there is ample evidence that old and rotting wood leads to forest fires." I myself was struck by this dotty charge against GWB in the article: He has supposedly "Overseen an economy in which the stock market suffered its worst decline in the first two years of any administration since Hoover's". That may be true. The economy does not change quickly. What went on in the early part of the Bush administration reflects what CLINTON did! And the Australian stockmarket hit an all time high a month or two ago so I imagine the Dow Jones did the same: The ASX tends to track Wall St. So GWB has in fact presided over a big economic recovery. What totally dishonest historians!

More crooked historians: "President Bush's nomination of Allen Weinstein - author of the definitive biography of Alger Hiss, "Perjury" - for the post of national archivist has triggered a furor. "The American people need a better custodian of their history," the Nation magazine editorialized. The Society of American Archivists and the Organization of American Historians are questioning Weinstein's credentials.... Far from being an unsuitable candidate, Weinstein is vastly more qualified for the job than the current archivist ... Weinstein brings a long record of first-rate scholarship ..... Weinstein has become a target for ... those who continue to insist that Hiss was never a spy for the Soviet Union".

"And in the most disgraceful essay of this new century, Susan Sontag, writing in The New York Times Magazine, associated the prisoner-abuse affair with the massacres in Rwanda and the Holocaust. Really? Does Ms. Sontag truly believe that Abu Ghraib equals Auschwitz? Does she know a single American soldier? How simple the world must look from behind her desk"

Muravchik, an honest historian: "On 9/11, however, the terrorists managed to kill us by thousands at a swoop, and what Bush understood was that our policy of passivity, like the West's efforts to appease Hitler in the 1930s, had only invited more audacious attacks. He saw that we had no choice but to go to war against the terrorists and their backers. If we did not destroy them, the terrorists would set their sanguinary sights higher until they succeeded in killing us by the tens or hundreds of thousands."

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ELSEWHERE

Jeff Jacoby summarizes the case for school vouchers. Excerpt: "Education policy in the United States treats Americans as too incompetent to provide for their children's schooling. Unlike food or clothing or health care -- where the market generates lots of options and parents are free to choose among them -- education is mostly supplied on the Soviet model: Schooling is "free," but the schools are owned and operated by the state.... Putting power in the hands of parents is the real key to equality -- and the key to excellence, too".

Hal Colebatch comments on the recent big surge in the polls of Australia's conservative government and sees every reason for a big win in the next election -- contrary to what most of the pundits have been saying.

Great news: Students at the University of Wisconsin -- birthplace in the 60s of the very radical SDS -- cheered every mention of GWB despite all the Leftist propaganda that had been poured out at them during their education.

"An article by Jeffrey Gedmin, Director of the Aspen Institute office in Berlin, in "Welt am Sonntag" (the Sunday edition the German daily "Welt") made my whole day. It was a breath of fresh air in contrast to the stale anti-American fare coming from the German media: "The two closely related ideologies, EU-nationalism and anti-Americanism like to keep themselves above mere facts. ... But perhaps you could ask yourself why, after the discovery of the American abuses in Abu Ghraib, a half a million Iraqis didn't march in protest on the streets of Baghdad."

Another stupid judge: "Millionaire Joe Gutnick slammed as "pathetic" yesterday the jail term that could see Jack Roche - the Muslim convert who plotted to assassinate the Jewish businessman - walk free in three years"

Hernando de Soto says: "The choice is simple. To build modern nations, we have to learn how the poor work and then structure law that fits their needs. In the end, Peruvians, Chinese, and Americans want essentially the same things: life, liberty, and property. And to get it, you have to build on a market economy based on the rule of law. Our real enemies are not Marx and others, but are essentially the people who do not believe in the potential of human beings liberated by the rule of law."

Good to see the "Anglosphere" idea getting a bit of press, even if pretty negative. This article in "The Australian" -- Australia's national daily -- gives one account of it. I myself think that the Anglosphere will always be important in an informal way only.

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

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

Comments? Email me 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.

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RECENT "TOWNHALL" WISDOM

More Democrat antisemitism: "Words can be hurtful. They reveal feelings long held dormant. No where was this more apparent than in a May 7, 2004 column for the State newspaper of Columbia, South Carolina by the 82 year old Senator Ernest Hollings. In this piece Hollings accused President Bush of invading Iraq "to secure Israel" and "to take the Jewish vote from the Democrats." It should also be noted that a secure Iraq may remove one of Israel's many Middle East enemies, but it does not assure her security as any daily reading of newspapers can attest. What Hollings' view reflects is a reflexively anti-Jewish belief so common among anti-Semites. Paranoia is evident along with attributions about Jewish power and behind the scenes influence."

Walter Williams argues that disruptive black students should be expelled from school on a large scale: "Educational triage would acknowledge that there are black youngsters who cannot benefit academically no matter how many educational resources are spent on them. They have little or no family support. Their very presence in school, through disruptive and criminal behavior, makes education impossible for others. Spending resources on these youngsters is the educational equivalent of medical practitioners spending resources on disaster victims who'll die even if treated. These youngsters should be removed and not allowed to take resources from and make education impossible for those who do have a chance for academic achievement."

Compassion? "One of President Bush's most recent "compassionate" initiatives has indirectly led to more horrific deaths along the Arizona-Mexico border. Bush's proposal for a quasi-amnesty for illegal aliens has been interpreted by poor Mexicans as a welcome mat, increasing the rate of attempted border crossings and the tragic deaths that go with them. Sixty-one people have died along the Arizona border since last October, a threefold increase from the rate of the previous year. The bodies are a testament to America's broken immigration system. If we really want to encourage more Mexicans to come here, we should have the decency to help ensure their safe passage. If we don't -- as most politicians, including Bush, would maintain -- then all talk of any sort of amnesty should be dropped, and our seriousness about enforcing immigration laws should be broadcast so clearly that it is understood even in the far reaches of Mexico."

Leftists who have nothing to say -- Endlessly recycled abuse is all they can think of: "He isn't very bright. He's a religious fanatic who sees the world in black and white. He engaged in an "elaborate campaign of disinformation" designed to "mislead his own people" about the war. He's not really running the government; he's a puppet manipulated by a subordinate. And his name is -- Tony Blair. So says author Geoffrey Wheatcroft in June's "The Atlantic Monthly" in a profile of the prime minister of Great Britain. It demonstrates how the left demeans its opposition so uniformly that Wheatcroft managed to hurl the exact same insults at Blair that U.S. lefties have hurled at President Bush for years."

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ELSEWHERE

Keith Burgess-Jackson has asked what I think of the idea of national character. National character is still a rather suspect topic to most psychologists. The Left, in its usual simplistic way, seems to think that if you allow talk of national differences then you will also have to allow talk of racial differences and that of course is RACISM! On the other hand, there would hardly be an international traveller alive who has not thought that he/she could discern differences between the people of different countries: The Germans are in general seen as particularly efficient, the French are in general seen as particularly arrogant etc. The fact of the matter, of course is that there is absolutely no reason why nations or races should all be the same. People are not all the same so why should groups of them be the same? It is only bone-headed ideology that says otherwise. Two books that do look at psychological differences between nations are: MADARIAGA, S. DE. (1970) Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards: An essay in comparative psychology 2nd ed. London: Pitman; and LYNN, R. (1971) Personality and National Character. Oxford, England: Pergamon. And I probably should resist the temptation to point out the excellent scientific evidence for large and important national differences in average IQ but I have never resisted it before so what the heck! See here.

Pope backs crooked Cardinal: "Pope John Paul II yesterday appointed Cardinal Bernard F. Law to a ceremonial job overseeing one of the four major basilicas of Rome, granting the former archbishop of Boston a prestigious appointment just two days after the Archdiocese of Boston announced that it was closing 65 parishes." The very man who condoned paedophilia by shuffling paedophile priests around rather than do anything to stop them! The Pope has made it clear he approves! What disgusting old farts they both are! No wonder Catholics are deserting the ship. Their church is a blot on the name of Christ.

And Queensland has its own paedophila disgrace too, summed up here. It involves the lesbian-looking Leanne Clair, a political appointee as Queensland's Director of Public Prosecutions -- an appointment made to ensure "balance" between the sexes in Queensland's top government jobs. A prominent sporting coach was committed for trial on child sexual abuse charges by a magistrate but Ms Clair has repeatedly refused (on the flimsiest of grounds) to prosecute the case. She thinks she is judge and jury. She was also one of a troika of Leftist females in high office who sent prominent conservative politician Pauline Hanson to jail on a legal technicality -- a conviction that was totally thrown out by the Court of Appeal only weeks later. These feminazis really think they are God.


But is this the flip before the flop? "Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry called for increasing the U.S. military by 40,000 troops, probably for a decade, in order 'to match its new missions' in the war on terror and homeland security. ... Kerry would pay for the added troops by making cuts elsewhere in the Pentagon budget. He gave no specifics."

More petty bureaucracy from the EU: "Italian officials want new rules on how big a pizza should be and how hot it's cooked, before being allowed to use the name. Department of Agriculture officials say they want to clamp down on so-called 'pizza pirates.' In order to be labelled a pizza, it must be three millimetres thick in the middle,. have a one to two centimetre thick crust and have been cooked at 450 degrees centigrade.The diameter should not exceed 35 centimetres. The ministry says the rule is part of a one million pound PR exercise and say they have signed up inspectors to check kitchens."

I have just put up here an article that shows the jargon used in the schools these days. No wonder teachers can't teach and students don't learn much of the time. Leftist "postmodernist" language is being used to confuse kids now too.

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

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

Comments? Email me 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.

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LAKOFF REVISITED

I have had a couple of shots on this blog in times past at George Lakoff -- the Leftist linguistics professor who thinks that conservatives all want to be punitive fathers. There is of course a Mt. Everest of nutty Leftist psychological theories around so why have I given Lakoff special attention? Because what he writes does, when you read it, sound very moderate, balanced and reasonable. It sounds good and it persuades many. But it is still nonsense for all that. In the past I have simply pointed out where and why it is nonsensical and contradicted by the evidence but I don't think that is enough to shoot down his theory. Theories tend to be killed off by better theories rather than by evidence. So I have just added a new introduction to my article on Lakoff that reads as follows:

"George Lakoff is a Leftist linguistics professor whose linguistic theories seem now to have fallen out of favour but who seems to think he knows all about the psychology of politics. Lakoff has written a book (reviewed here) which purports to explain the Left/Right polarity of politics as Mother-oriented politics versus Father-oriented politics -- a book called: Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think.

His program is an ambitious one. He rightly points out that there are many "contradictions" (I would call them compromises) in any real-life political program (he describes them eloquently here) and says he has a grand theory that explains how all such apparent contradictions arise -- a theory that shows the real consistency underlying the apparent inconsistency. That is undoubtedly a noteworthy and attractive claim.

I too think I can explain the inconsistencies Lakoff mentions but I think I can explain it, not in a book, but in one paragraph. Does that not trump Lakoff? I think it does. So here is the paragraph:

What I would say that is that the contradictions arise because neither side of politics is in fact much INTERESTED in being consistent. Conservatives don't like theories and just go by what seems to have worked well for people in the world to date -- in all the untidy complexity that the real world has. And Leftists are only interested in what sounds good at the time and are perfectly capable of advocating completely contradictory things from occasion to occasion as long as they sound good on each occasion [John Kerry, anyone?]. The example par excellence of Leftist contradiction is their common claim that right and wrong or good and bad is at least totally arbitrary if not meaningless altogether -- which claim can be followed almost immediately with a self-righteoous sermon on the rightness and goodness of (say) "tolerance". Leftists want to make us "better" while at the same time denying that there is any such thing as "better"!!

So Lakoff's program is foredoomed from the start. What he deals with is intrinsically INconsistent. There is no large-scale consistency there for a theory to describe. But a brief look at what he claims does nonetheless seem in order. His claim is an attractive one so deserves examination of its fit to reality...."

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ELSEWHERE

A reader draws attention to this bit of Leftist double standards: "They broke the rules and broke the law. Despite the controversy, some Tigard High School students will still get to participate in graduation. But fellow students are saying, 'Not so fast!' A letter sent to parents a few weeks ago seems to be very black and white, stating that any senior who is involved with drugs or alcohol in the last few weeks of school will not be allowed to take part in commencement ceremonies. But it didn't work. Six seniors were caught intoxicated at prom, but stop the band; they will be allowed to partake in graduation." My reader comments: "Though Tigard, Oregon, is not Seattle, (it's about 200 miles away) it is certainly a soulmate. I laughed out loud thinking about all of silliness regarding zero tolerence in our schools regarding anything that even closely resembles a weapon of any kind. Whether it's a toy gun, a sharp object or dinner utensils, anything brought on campus and discovered by the thought police (teachers) results in automatic suspension. I remember a story about a little boy who was suspended because he used his hand and forefinger like a gun. These students are just lucky nobody had a nail clipper on them. That would have been real trouble".

A reader responded to my post yesterday about Leftists being really interested only in power as follows: "I've got to agree with you on that. I've recently been trying to re-read Atlas Shrugged (not that I am really a libertarian ) because when I tried to read it twenty-five years ago I could not get past the radio speech. It amazes me how much the plot resembles what happened in Chile and what is now happening in Venezuela. Just in case you've never read the book, it describes a leftist government citing compassion in order to create the economic chaos preparatory to a takeover. Does this not resemble Allende's Chile, where the goverment policies drove inflation to over 200% and government policies on business which were ostensibly meant to help actually created more problems, and ended with the confiscation of private businesses and lands? Does this not now resemble Chavez's Venezuela? While Ayn Rand portrays the industrialists as implausibly noble, her portayal of the well-meaning idiots led by the unscrupulous does not seem at all far from the mark. The stories from France about the 15,000 dead in last summer's heat-wave, and the recently built Paris airport terminal falling down, also seem to agree with her plot-line of an increasing sacrifice of competence in leadership for political correctness."

Leftists excuse Stalin and hate Hitler, YET: "From 1929 to 1939, in peace time, Stalin and the Bolsheviks killed about 20 million Soviet citizens, for no predictable reason. Hitler and the National Socialists ruined the businesses and careers of hundreds of thousands of German citizens, but the number of people killed by them before the outbreak of the war was only a few hundred, most of them fellow Nazis and all of them for a predictable reason. Even immediately after the onset of the war, when it became known that the Nazis had begun to engage in mercy killings of the incurably insane (euthanasia), the Catholic bishops, led by Bernhard von Galen, openly protested, and German public opinion compelled the Nazis to halt the program. Bishop (later: Cardinal) von Galen survived the Nazi regime. Under Stalin and the Bolsheviks, any such opposition was impossible and Bishop von Galen would have been quickly disposed of." So what does that tell us? Easy: Stalin was even farther Left than Hitler so he was more murderous. Leftists love humanity -- it's just people they can't stand. It may be worth noting that Israeli historian Aryeh Unger long ago showed that Stalin was much more totalitarian than Hitler.

Bureaucratic idiocy: Butchers can no longer give the dog a bone: "Butchers across the UK are to be banned from giving left-over bones to customers' dogs. Under new EU rules bones are classed as a waste by-product and butchers must pay for them to be incinerated, says The Sun. Britain's 10,000 butchers are being sent letters by local councils warning them they face fines if they pass left-over bones to pet-owners in the traditional way."

Wicked Thoughts has been visiting a Greek Orthodox blog and even found some jokes there!

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

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

Comments? Email me 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.

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ONLY POWER MATTERS TO THE LEFT

I know I shouldn't be, but I was slightly surprised that my considerable efforts to point out that party politics in modern democracies are essentially centrist were totally lost on the Leftist bloggers (calling themselves "One Good Move") who have been criticizing Keith Burgess Jackson for some fairly ordinary statements he made about the sources of ideology. Who, for goodness sake, disputes that aging makes you more conservative? Practically every conservative intellectual there is (including Keith and including the dreaded Neocons) started out on the Left! I am a considerable rarity in being a lifelong conservative intellectual.

But the fact that a centrist such as GWB is hated with a passion by so-called American "liberals" (really Leftists. Liberty is a very low priority for them) is itself instructive. If you look at the legislation and policies that Clinton and GWB have supported and implemented, it would be a hard task to say which was the more Leftist. With his support for all sorts of expansion of government, I would definitely say that GWB is the more Leftist but the fact that the matter can be reasonably debated shows just how centrist both men are. So why do the Left loathe GWB? I know of nothing directed towards John Kerry by conservatives that remotely approaches the rage and hate that is routinely directed towards GWB by the Left. Contempt for Kerry's dishonesty is common among conservatives but that is about all. So why do American Leftists take their party politics so seriously? Why were the "One Good Move" bloggers so completely incapable of taking on board the simple fact that a vote for the GOP is NOT automatically a vote for conservatism?

A vote for the GOP is SOMETIMES a vote for conservatism but American politics are essentially interest-group politics. Each party has its client groups (mostly minorities in the case of the donkeys and particularly New Testament Christians in the case of the GOP) and it is speaking for them that brings in the great majority of votes -- which is why lots of GOP supporters who deplore GWB's expansion of government will still vote for him in the next election and which is why American blacks who are conservative on lots of social issues almost always vote for the donkeys. It is only small minority of centrist (swinging) voters who decide which candidate will win or lose and that is a major part of the reason why both candidates themselves have to be centrist.

So it all boils down to power. Does your team occupy the top positions or not? Are people you can identify with in charge? And for Leftists, politics is NOTHING BUT power. They have no principles and openly ridicule (particularly via postmodernism) the idea that anything could be right or wrong. Policies that were once popular but which have become unpopular (such as eugenics) are abandoned so completely by Leftists that only historians know that such policies once had large-scale Leftist support. And with the way antisemitism is surging on the Left, the time will come when people will have forgotten that Leftists were for a time anti-racist. So for Leftists it is only party that matters and conservatives such as myself and Keith who take ideas, principles and ideology seriously are simply incomprehensible.

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ELSEWHERE

I must say that it does rather surprise me how many bloggers depend on blogging software. I use blogger.com for this blog because of the permanent free blogspot hosting and to save a little bit of time but all my mirror sites are hand-coded. Basic html is very easy. I have never so much as opened a book on html or looked at a FAQ on it. I just see how other people have done things and copy that. So the only blogging software I use for my mirrors is a text editor plus what is in my noggin. I am rather moved to comment on the matter at the moment because of the loud grumbles coming from the MT people over recent price rises there. And some people pay for separate blogrolling software too! It all seems a bit sad to me when learning a tiny bit of html would enable people to do their blogging for free. I decided last night that I should put up some permalinks to the various parts of my online book about Leftism so I now know how to hand-code permalinks too -- dead easy! And hand-coded html loads twice as fast as the mass of junk produced by html editing programs. Here is a useful sample of my new permalinks (or here if that site is overloaded).

"A major poll of 1,388 American Roman Catholic voters shows Catholic presidential candidate John Kerry getting only 20% support among America's 51 million Catholics on issues where he opposes the Church's position -- with his support on some issues dropping as low as 6%."

Melanie Phillips on a "blame America" and "blame Israel" letter to The Guardian by Canon Paul Oestreicher of the Church of England: "This letter illustrates how the toxic combination of vicious prejudice and astonishing ignorance combine to produce an astounding inversion of moral values. These occupations [of Iraq and Palestinian areas] are not illegal. There is no brutal repression of civilian populations, but a defence against terror and mass murder in an attempt to restore order and respect for human life. As for his convoluted last thought, he appeared to be equating the deaths of Nazis during the occupation of France with the deaths of Israelis, Americans and British now, and proposing that Islamist mass murderers are the moral equivalent of the French Resistance."

Your government will protect you: "Australia admitted that its top spy agency ignored repeated attempts by convicted terrorist Jack Roche to warn it of the activities of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terror network two years before the Bali bombing".

Duplicitous translation: A Swedish speaker of Arabic compares mosque sermons to their press coverage: "America rapes Islam," the Imam roars in Arabic from the platform. The interpreter translates as: "We condemn USA's torture of Iraqi prisoners."

Don't laugh: The latest list of FBI Al Qaeda suspects includes a man raised on a goat ranch in Riverside County, Calif. He converted to Islam as a teenager after moving to Garden Grove, Calif. (presumably he was homesick!)

Slattery has picked out a nice selection of quotes from America's Leftist "celebrities". It certainly shows out of their own mouths what a nasty lot the "celebrities" are.

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

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

Comments? Email me 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.

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

Democrats violate "separation of church and state" dogma by telling bishops to whom they can give communion and to whom they should not In a brazen act of outrageous chutzpah forty-eight democratic Catholic congressman publicly Dictated theology to the Catholic Church by telling her to whom she should give communion.
Journalist bashes President Bush on polls and Iraq Greg Hywood, the Sydney Morning Herald's editor, slags President Bush over funding, polls and the Iraq war ? and gets it wrong.
This tells us all we need to know about the media A picture about Nick Berg that exposes the media's double standards and moral bankruptcy
The media, Abu Ghraib and the forgotten massacres Abu Ghraib has given our leftist journalists a club with which to beat President Bush and the war to overthrow Saddam. This is the same rotten crew who never seriously protested Saddam's vile tortures and mass murders.
Free markets and Gradgrind executives In his novel Hard Times Charles Dickens' caricature of a free marketeer was the calculating and apparently cold-hearted utilitarian Gradgrind.
Journalist accuses America of war crimes in Iraq The Bush-hating Brian Toohey accuses the US of murdering women and children in Fallujah who were then buried in a mass grave in the town's football stadium. This journalist also defends terrorist as resistance fighters.

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

Sometimes the intellectual dishonesty (or should I say, the intellectual desperation) of the Left is so gross that it still has the capacity to amaze even me. After my big post yesterday pointing out that ideology and political party preference are only weakly correlated (25% overlap at a maximum) and that ideology therefore has to be studied separately fom party loyalty, the person to whom the post was replying emailed Keith Burgess-Jackson as follows: "I read John Ray's post. It was quite interesting. Nevertheless he presented no data that supports your assertions. Since you don't like exit poll data and John Ray's post attacks voting record as an unreliable way to identify ideology, I found some more stats for you. They are very much like the exit poll data, but are based on a survey. The stats still do not go in your favor". And what are the stats about? Political party preference! My entire post was devoted to pointing out the irrelevance of such statistics to the study of ideology yet he still claims to have read my post. What a fraud he is! And his claim that I "presented no data" is a colossal lie. I linked here to an academic journal article based on massive survey research that showed older people to have more conservative attitudes and I linked here to another academic journal article -- again based on massive survey research -- showing that people of higher socio-economic status tend to have more Leftist attitudes! Stalin's chronic lying has plenty of counterparts among modern-day Leftists.

America's so-called "liberal" intellectuals defended the Soviet system right throughout the cold war. And that still continues!. Popular young Leftist blogger, Matthew Yglesias, has just got himself into deserved hot water with his appalling claim that lots of Russians "got themselves killed" by Stalin: As if it were the doing of the victims rather than the doing of Stalin. See comments here and here. At the very least, it shows characteristic Leftist indifference to mass-murder. His further claim about the backwardness of pre-revolutionary Russia is sheer propaganda too. As one of the commenters on "Catallarchy" said: "Russia was not "a totally undeveloped country" in 1917. It was an industrial nation spanned by railroads with an emerging capitalist class, labor unrest, factory strikes and all the other attributes of a developed nation of the time.... Still, it had freed its slaves (serfs) before the US did and even gave them land though they had to pay for it in future installments." Russia was in fact the world's 4th largest industrial economy at the time and was steadily becoming more democratic -- and if the Tsar had not bothered his head with the Serbs, Russia would be a modern advanced nation today. There is even a photographic record of what Russia was like in the early 1900s -- in clear and brilliant colour too.

Brent Bozell notes some hate speech from Democrat leader Pelosi (about GWB, of course) and regrets that the media mostly ignored it. he says: "The public deserves to hear the words, and see the face, of the hate-filled Left."

I must say that I feel slightly overwhelmed by the fact that the National Library of Australia has just archived my entire website here: All 400+ files of it as far as I can see, including my blog archives. THAT'S backup for you. I suppose that being no. 42197 out of 20 million Australians is some sort of honour.

Great news for all internet users: "A US man who sent 850 million junk emails through accounts he opened with stolen identities has been sentenced to up to seven years in prison."

Rather surprising: The Australian presence in Hollywood goes back a long way. I didn't know that.

Arlene Peck has some more dreadful news from Israel: "there are actually children in Israel who are going hungry! Actually, to tell the truth, I was amazed that the situation has gotten so serious in Israel that there are now programs like Hazon Yeshaya soup Kitchens ... It seems the savage and senseless Intifada over the past few years has caused the number of Israeli children who live below the poverty line to be approximately 30% and climbing. That translates to over 690,000 Jewish children living in Israel who are going to bed hungry. Ironic how, one of the fears that we in America have is that school children are becoming obese because of lack of exercise and over indulgence in `junk food.'?"

Who moved my truth is really getting the knife into the female chauvinist sows.

David's Medienkritik has a fun picture from Germany of how one kid prayed for "peace" (meaning U.S. defeat) in Iraq.

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

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

Comments? Email me 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.

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CONFUSING THE LEADERS AND THE LED

Keith Burgess-Jackson forwarded me a copy of the following email that he received: "Your recent article, "Expiating Liberal Guilt" seems to make two empirical claims. 1. There is a correlation between growing older and a predisposition to conservative politics. 2. There is a correlation between being brought up in a wealthy or at least middle class family and being liberal. I would have thought a scholar who describes himself as "anal" would have at least done a Google search to see if any statistics back up these claims. I found some exit poll data from the 2000 election that suggests you are dead wrong on both claims. I hope you will post a true mea culpa on your blog regarding this. If you do not, I question whether you are a philosopher who is interested in the truth. Here is the link".

The writer makes the common mistake of confusing the leaders and the led. There is a huge amount of research in the psychological literature showing that the two can be quite different. Keith was talking about those who preach "liberalism" rather than those who vote for the Democrat candidate in Presidential elections. The two are far from the same. Far more people vote Democrat than are committed to "liberalism". Only 20% of U.S. voters self-identify as "liberal". So why do so many others vote for Democrat candidates?

In part it is because ALL successful Presidential candidates (Democrat or Republican) are in fact centrists. They have to stay pretty close to the political centre (regardless of what their real, personal views might be) in order to maximize their appeal. No candidate can hope to win unless he appeals to a lot of centrist or "floating" voters and both candidates will try to offer something to everyone. The candidate can only be Right-leaning or Left-leaning rather than truly Rightist or Leftist. And there could be no clearer demonstration of that than John "flip-flop" Kerry. He carries the attempt to be everything to everybody to a ludicrous degree. And GWB too wooed "liberal" voters by stealing Leftist rhetoric and campaigning as a "compassionate" conservative. Another sign of how centrist successful Presidential candidates have to be is that there is a quite respectable case for arguing that Clinton was more conservative than GWB is. Work for the dole took off under Clinton and Clinton balanced the budget whereas GWB oversaw a major welfare expansion (prescription drug benefit) and ran the budget into deficit. So in those respects the two men did exactly the opposite of what the ideologies normally attributed to them would lead one to expect. Both have been conservative on some things and "liberal" on others.

So while it would be extremely odd indeed if conservative-leaning candidates were not preponderantly backed by conservative people, the differentiation is rarely strong (the strongest correlation I have found in my surveys was a correlation of .5 -- implying only a 25% overlap between ideology and vote). So GWB would have got votes from all sorts of people for all sorts of different reasons: For instance, as well as getting votes from Christians and committed conservatives, GWB would have got votes from centrists who liked his balance of "compassion" (i.e. being pro-handout) and caution about social change and from some genuinely compassionate "liberals" not because they liked his views in general but because they thought he would be most likely to bring about economic betterment for all (through economic growth etc.). A vote for GWB was, then, only only on some occasions an indicator of real voter conservatism.

Secondly, S.M. Lipset pointed out decades ago that vote is determined more by perceived economic self-interest (what in Australia we call the "hip-pocket nerve") than by ideological affinity -- so that you can have socially conservative working-class people (particularly blacks in the U.S. case) voting for Leftist candidates solely because they believe Leftist promises that the Left will give them personally a better deal. They might want to castrate homosexuals but they want bigger welfare cheques even more. See here.

So the fact that wealthier people were slightly more likely to vote for GWB is in fact good proof of Keith's contention. Wealthier people in general obviously saw GWB's policies as better for them but how come so many wealthy people voted against GWB? Obviously there was a big ideological pull among wealthy people that was influencing them to vote against economic self-interest. It shows that once you are well-off yourself, you are more likely to put money worries aside and concentrate on other goals -- such as telling the "peasants" what to do.

It has often been noted too (see again here) that it is education rather than occupation which is the major social class influence on ideology. Exposure to the educational system is a Leftist influence. And the Gore/Bush election results do show that. Gore's strength was among both those with the lowest level of education (for economic reasons) and those with the highest level of education (for ideological reasons). Just why education is a Leftist influence is set out at some length again here.

Economic self-interest matters a lot to older people too. The Democrats are big advocates of welfare and older people are big consumers of wefare so it was no surprise at all that GWB's share of the elderly vote was well-down. It was of course to help reverse his anti-welfare image among the elderly that GWB sponsored the prescription drug benefit initiative. Aging as such, however, is very strongly associated with conservative thinking. There is a list of some of the beliefs here that strongly differentiate the old and the young. You will see that what old people tend to believe is in fact rather amazingly Right-wing. Older people were likely to believe, for instance, that "Patriotism and loyalty to one's country are more important than one's intellectual convictions and should have precedence over them" and "Treason and murder should be punishable by death". They rejected views such as "Our treatment of criminals is too harsh: We should try to cure them, not punish them" and "People should be allowed to hold demonstrations in the streets without police interference".

So vote is the outcome of many influences and for most people ideology is not the crucial influence (remember that 25% maximum mentioned above). Ideology is important to party leaders and activists, however, so is still an important thing to study and analyse -- which Keith and I both have the habit of doing. I in fact have had over 200 papers reporting on aspects of it published in the academic journals.

As something of a footnote to the above, it may be worth noting that even self-identification as a "liberal" (etc.) may be misleading and unreliable. Not only vote but even self-identification may correlate poorly with ideology. Some recent Pew Research survey data (summarized again here) shows that the views held by so-called "moderates", for instance, can in fact be very Leftist. And there are no doubt many conservatives who regard themselves as moderate too. In other words, what people see as conservative, liberal etc varies widely. If GWB and Clinton are in fact both mostly centrists but are widely described as being of the Right or the Left, it should be no surprise that such confusions arise. It is only by asking questions about particular issues (as I did above in looking at the beliefs of the elderly) that one can have some hope of placing people realistically on an ideological spectrum. And it may be worth noting that when one does that, most people fall around the middle (in statisticians' terms, political ideology approximates a normal distribution) -- which is why successful politicians head in that direction too.

And some people reading this (particularly libertarians) will no doubt want to argue that the very idea of a Left/Right ideological spectrum is simplistic and wrong. To answer that, however, I will have to refer readers elsewhere.

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ELSEWHERE

The politics of unreason: "How do supposedly intelligent people view the Middle East? Recently: The Australian Broadcasting Company's former news director called for Israel's destruction. A majority of "quality" British newspapers falsely claimed Israel deliberately massacred large numbers of children in Gaza after two were killed by accident. A Canadian Broadcasting Company correspondent maliciously concocted a report to convince his viewers that Israel was responsible for the torture of Iraqis by US soldiers. That's in the moderate, Western, English-speaking democracies. Rather than easing the Middle East's madness, the West has caught the disease itself."

Homosexuals: An amusing comment from Interested Participant: "Preparations are well under way for this summer's Democratic Party National Convention in Boston and it appears that the Democrats are aggressively courting the homosexual population. According to this report, Democratic parties in 15 states and Puerto Rico are requiring that a specific number of their delegates be homosexual, bisexual or transgender.Quota numbers and specific states are not identified, but one has to wonder why 35 states are excluded in this affirmative action requirement for assignment of delegates. Certain populations of homosexuals will be geographically discriminated against by not being included in the quota scheme. Within the Democratic Party, it appears that homosexuals in some states are more equal than homosexuals in other states".

Professor Bunyip has divined the central motivations of Phillip Adams, Australia's best known Left-wing columnist: "[Adams] set out to provide further proof of his gifts by delivering a little lecture on the joys of Shakespeare. Well, that was the stated reason, but knowing Adams as we all do, the real inspiration was the usual one: "Look at me, my ignorant readers! Aren't I the smartie though, but?" Just a typical Lefty, in other words.

The movie reviewer in the Sydney Daily Telegraph of 27-May-2004 (Pg. T02), after saying that Michael Moore's Cannes winning documentary is even worse than his previous two efforts, called him the "Goebbels of the 21st century" (Not online).

One of my readers has put my "Hitler was a socialist" article online at Free Republic. It was interesting to read the comments. Several commenters seemed to think that everybody already knew that Hitler was a socialist. If only that were true. I have had many comments from conservatives saying that it came as news to them and Leftists all ridicule the idea, of course.

In my reading of other blogs, I occasionally come across references to the life of the academic. Here is an account -- only slightly tongue in cheek -- of what you need to do to get a Ph.D. and here is a very serious account of what you need to do in order to get a tenured university teaching job. My own experience was nothing like either of those accounts, however. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation in six weeks and spent the rest of my Ph.D. period researching and writing for the academic journals. So when I applied for my first job, I already had several publications and was therefore not only given the job but was also given immediate tenure.

Wicked Thoughts has just put up a very topical joke.

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

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

The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

Comments? Email me 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.

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MORE ON GUN CONTROL

A reader who takes more of an interest in guns than I do has emailed me as follows:

"The Australian compulsory gun "buyback": See the red line in slide 17 of this Australian Institute of Criminology report (PDF). (Background to the report here). Note that the "gun buyback" happened in 1997 but the national homicide rate showed not a twitch in response.

A more international flavoured report is here (PDF) which describes Australia's gun-buyback scheme and associated bans as a "failed experiment". The article concludes: "In all cases, disarming the public has been ineffective, expensive and often counterproductive". Also of note is this summary of the Australian statistics -- showing that "The number of (firearm) offences has increased even when 642,000 guns were destroyed".

It is not necessary to agree with Lott's contrarian "more guns equals less crime" hypothesis to support the long established right to own firearms -- as this summary of British history shows. This Austrian paper (PDF), for example, accepts as a starting position the idea that reduced gun availability would reduce crime, but then argues that the cost of enforcement and the extent of evasion undermines the practicality of the whole scheme. The real value of Lott is that his work dramatically shows that the much more widely believed "less guns equals less crime" hypothesis is based on not much more than wishful thinking. Sometimes science requires stirrers to shift the dead weight of unthinking complacency. The relationship between guns and crime is probably complex, changeable, highly dependent on other factors, highly variable between societies and even generations within the same society, and not easily subject to any simplistic "one size fits all" rules.

Unfortunately legislators and antigun zealots think we belong to a deterministic world where humans behave as predictably as Skinner-box pigeons. As humans are not pigeons, their ham-fisted legislation almost always fails, usually producing unintended consequences that the hapless social engineers never imagined. In general the great cost of establishing and enforcing these systems is money that would be better spent on more direct crime prevention and law enforcement measures. Something many police forces have actually pointed out: "The New Zealand government discontinued firearms registration in 1984 after the New Zealand police recommended it's termination. The Canadian Police Association was at the brink ofwithdrawing it's support of the firearms registration because of it's serious shortcomings. At the height of the Austrian gun debate some two years ago leading police officials stated that a then called-for prohibition of handguns would not only be senseless and a waste of time and money, but that itwould be outright dangerous because of it's impact on the black arms market." (Source again here [PDF])

This Canadian site calls gun control advocates. Hoplophobics. It's great to see the old leftist debating device of psychologising every competitive opinion (eg xenophobia, homophobia etc) used against them!"

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ELSEWHERE

An email from a born-in-Seattle reader: "More silliness in Seattle is on display as Seattle refuses to punish lawbreakers and votes to dump a law that impounded cars from people who had their licenses suspended. The newspaper headline is a classic, "City Council votes to dump unpopular impound law." I'm sure the law was unpopular with it's criminal targets. The argument used to oppose the law is a real head turner, "opponents said the law amounts to economic injustice because it treats violators who pay tickets better than those who do not, regardless of the public danger posed by both groups of drivers." The Seattle Council takes another step in the direction of creating another dysfunctional city".

Peggy Noonan: "Fast Eddy Doctorow told a story at the commencement all right, and it is a story about the boorishness of the aging liberal. An old '60s radical who feels he is entitled to impose his views on this audience on this day because he's so gifted, so smart, so insightful, so very above the normal rules, agreements and traditions. And for this he will get to call himself besieged and heroic -- a hero about whom stories are told! -- when in fact all he did was guarantee positive personal press in the elite media"

Amazing. The fat filmic slob is in favour of school choice: "Every parent wants to do what's best for their child. Whatever I can afford, I'm going to get my kid the best education I can get" More on Moore on the Adam Smith blog.

"Neocon" nonsense: "Although there are notable exceptions, many European commentators and much of the public are resorting to conspiratorial theories to explain the direction of U.S. foreign policy and somehow overlook the fact that American public opinion runs in favor of the president's handling of foreign affairs. Perhaps more important, however, they overlook the deep historical roots of the current direction of American foreign policy. It is not driven by a "neocon cabal." Rather, it is that certain individuals associated with the neoconservative label have been particularly articulate in expressing a set of policies that flow from two ideas that resonate deeply in American public opinion. The first is a belief that the United States has a responsibility to spread its vision of individual liberty. The second is that the primary and perhaps exclusive task of the federal government is to protect its citizens from external threats".

Carnival of the Vanities is up again -- blessedly free of strained attempts at humour this time.

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

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

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