LAWRENCE AUSTER

I rarely comment on arguments put forward by my fellow conservatives, but I am going to make a small exception today to say a few words about the ideas of Lawrence Auster, a traditionalist Jewish writer who thinks that almost nobody these days is conservative enough. He has just put up on Frontpage an excellent article on the antiwar RIGHT that I fully agree with and recommend. He also has an excellent article here that explains why American Jews are so overwhelmingly Left-wing. He says that they are actually AFRAID of American Protestant Christians, who are -- as Auster points out -- in fact the very best friends that Israel and the Jews have. Auster does not say so but I think the Jews concerned can be forgiven their paranoia. It is a pity that they are not more up to date but Christians (including Protestants such as Calvin and Luther) DID persecute them for a very long time.

Some other Auster articles of the many I could mention are ones complaining that the Pope is too Leftist and that most modern conservatives are really Leftists. He also thinks that the "neocons" are a bad lot who have GWB in their hip-pocket and that America's largely open borders are a disaster.

I of course agree with SOME of those other articles. I do think the whole neocon conspiracy thing is just paranoia but, as an Australian conservative I am delighted that our government has just about stopped illegal immigration stone dead and that it locks up any illegal immigrants it catches -- as it would anyone else who defies our laws. And I agree that the Holy Father, like most of his predecessors, is not much of a conservative politically.

My disagreements with Auster arise from the fact that I am one of those villains whom he sees as having destroyed conservatism -- libertarians. He rightly notes that libertarian conservatism is one of the dominant forms of conservatism today (the other being Christian conservatism) and makes the correct point that Christian conservatives are pretty strongly influenced by individualistic, liberty-oriented thinking too. Unlike Auster, however, I do not see this as a particularly modern phenomenon. I have done an extensive historical survey showing that belief in individual liberty has always been central to conservatism. Auster, by contrast, seems to think that traditionalism is the main current. I actually see something more basic in conservatism that underlies both traditionalism AND belief in liberty -- a certain cautious pragmatism and mistrust of the goodwill of others. Because of this basic trait of caution, conservatives want as much freedom to make their own decisions as possible and they also like systems that have been tried and tested. But the liking for tradition is in the end just a tool -- a way of being cautious, not something that is compelling for its own sake.

So the basis of Auster's complaint is that modern conservatives are too liberty-oriented and value-free -- and he sees this as something that they have in common with the Left. A related complaint is that modern conservatives have no anchors -- they just go along with whatever seems to be working. The only thing I disagree with there is the idea that Leftists believe in liberty. They don't. They only believe in power. They advocate various liberties from time to time -- e.g. various sexual liberties -- mainly because it suits them as a way of disrupting existing society and thus hopefully getting themselves into power. But for the rest, I would claim that liberty and the good life are the only lasting values for secular conservatives and that going along with what seems to be working is the historic conservative modus operandi. And long may it continue! We have had more than enough of theorists telling us what to do!

I apologize to Auster for having to a degree caricaturized his views above but I was aiming only to give a quick impression of them. His own prolific writings give plenty of detail, explanation and nuance.

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

ELSEWHERE

This article in "Spiked" sees the form of Islam that is currently plaguing us as being to a significant degree a Western creation -- largely a reaction to the loss of values only too effectively promoted by Western Leftists. It does seem to be Westernized Muslims who are the main problem.

David's Medienkritik reports a good interview from Germany which really chews up the childish attitude of Germans towards the United States.

Joe Sobran says that these are hard times for gay men. Why? "The reason the present age is difficult for gay people is that the word "gay" has been appropriated by homosexual activists. So real gay men have been driven into the closet, afraid to admit they're gay for fear of being misunderstood."

Sharansky's answer to the claim that democracy is impossible in Iraq: "It is important to remember that some of the most serious thinkers once thought that democracy was not compatible with the cultures of Germany, Italy, Japan, Latin America and Russia. The great historian Toynbee questioned whether democracy could ever flourish out of the Anglo-Saxon world or as he put it, in "alien soil.""

I often point out how much in common Nazism and Fascism had with Leninism and other forms of Leftism. Readers may therefore be interested to read another author's account of the history involved. For those with a high-speed connection, the original PDF is here and there are html copies here and here.

V.D. Hanson: "There is much talk of post-election reorganization and rethinking among demoralized liberals, especially in matters of foreign policy. They could start by accepting that ... the problems are fundamental flaws in their own thinking - such as the ends of good intentions justifying the means of expediency and untruth, and forced equality being a higher moral good than individual liberty and freedom. Whether we call such notions "political correctness" or "progressivism," the practice of privileging race, class, and gender over basic ethical considerations has earned the moralists of the Left not merely hypocrisy, but virtual incoherence.... So both here and abroad, the Western public believes that there is a double standard in the moral judgment of our left-leaning media, universities, and politicians - that we are not to supposed to ask how Christians are treated in Muslim societies, only how free Islamists in Western mosques are to damn their hosts.... What is preached in the madrassas on the West Bank, in Pakistan, and throughout the Gulf is no different from the Nazi doctrine of racial hatred. What has changed, of course, is that unlike our grandfathers, we have lost the courage to speak out against it."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

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.

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

"REDNECKS" AND "REPTILES OF THE PRESS"

In response to my post of two days ago about the Leftist use of the term "Redneck" I got a lot of email. Below is one I particularly liked:

"Thank you so much for your post about rednecks, and the "compassionate" left's contempt for them. It's not often that we country folk hear nice things about ourselves. Having grown up in a one-horse town as a poor minister's daughter, I've seen every aspect of "trailer trash" life. Rednecks certainly do have their problems in terms of money, but I've never met a liberal who would give you the shirt right off his back--and I've never met a redneck who wouldn't. What the left doesn't understand, it mocks. The left is comprised mainly of people who've never wanted for anything, so when they look at the poor but proud, they wonder what the heck it is that they're so proud of. What they're proud of, in a nutshell, is something liberals can never have or understand--compassion for each other. Thanks for stickin' up for the little guy."

A couple of readers have mentioned to me that many of the people described as "Rednecks" don't reject the label but instead apply it rather gleefully to themselves -- just as many blacks refer to one another as "niggers". In both cases however, the term is derogatory when used by outsiders. And someone who is really enjoying derogatory labels just sent me a Christmas greeting "from deep in the "red" heart of the "Great Satan"! That did give me a laugh. It rather reminds me of the phrase "reptiles of the Press". Somebody, somewhere once used that expression in an attempt to pour scorn on journalists but journalists now (at least in Australia and Britain) routinely use that expression to refer to themselves (as in "fellow reptiles" etc) -- obviously seeing the expression as great fun. And similarly there is now a lot of Redneck comedy etc. I have been trying for years to find out who coined the term "reptiles of the Press" but nobody seems to know, so if any of my readers can tell me, I would be much obliged.

Interestingly, two of the people who emailed me have the same surname as mine, which figures, as "Ray" is an old Celtic name found throughout the British Isles in various spellings and "rednecks" and "crackers" do seems to be mainly of Celtic (Scotch-Irish) origin. Here is part of one of the emails concerned:

"As you say, cracker and redneck just mean that you're a working-class white person in the south. We do have a sense of humor about ourselves, but OTOH we're the last group left that you can openly mock and criticize in the crudest of terms. The good news is, however, that Redneck Culture -- NASCAR, bluegrass and country music, pro wresting, Jeff Foxworthy and the like, are huge. We're taking over, no matter what they say about us"

The term "Redneck" seems to have had usages in Britain long before it was used in America and I am always amused by the fact that, among Afrikaners, the term "Rooineck" (meaning "redneck") refers to the English! And (for good reasons in their case) the Afrikaners don't mean it kindly, either. Given my fair skin, I guess I too would be a redneck if I spent much time in the sun.

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

ELSEWHERE

There is some well-deserved sarcasm here about Federal Air Marshal Service Director Thomas Quinn, the subnormal who insists that America's air marshalls dress in a way that makes them easily detectable by terrorists. Where does GWB find these wackos?

Evil feminist mentality at work: "A city fire captain who had been accused - and then cleared - of raping his daughter will go back to work next month, city officials said. Michael Tecklenburg had been on administrative leave since he was arrested Sept. 14 and charged on suspicion of raping his 15-year-old daughter, who had run away from home. But the girl testified that she had been pressured by investigators into making the allegations. Last week, a San Joaquin County Superior Court judge dismissed the charges, citing insufficient evidence".

I have never freaked out at the idea of national ID cards the way some conservatives do so I was pleased to see some realistic comments on the matter by Dick McDonald. Opposition from both Left and Right killed off the idea of a national ID card for Australians some time ago now.

There is a rather amusing article here reporting that the Europeans are finally getting ants in their pants about all the Muslim immigrants in their midst. The wisdom of "Cowboy" GWB's war on militant Islam might soon start to get through to them. How embarrassing that will be!

Iran: "Few countries have a more paradoxical relationship than the US and Iran. While the Iranian regime continues to be belligerently anti-American, the Iranian people are overtly pro-American"

Accuracy in Media has a list of the top 20 under-reported stories of the year. A few of them: How liberals tried to use federal agencies to delay or censor Sinclair Broadcasting's airing of Stolen Honor, showing how John Kerry's anti-war testimony led to the torture of our Vietnam POWs.; How and why MIT's Dr. Richard Lindzen, perhaps the country's leading climatologist, doesn't accept the man-made global warming theory; How Senator John Edwards used "junk science" in some of the cerebral palsy lawsuits that made him rich; John Kerry's failure to release all of his military and medical records.

Fred Reed uses satire to highlight the underlying logic of homosexual marriage. He ends up deciding he will marry his desk.

Albanian Muslims making assholes out of themselves: "The [Greek] government asked its citizens not to retaliate against immigrants Thursday, a day after two Albanian gunmen hijacked a bus. The 18-hour standoff near Athens ended peacefully early Thursday after police successfully negotiated the release of 23 hostages. The gunmen, Gaz Resuli and Leonard Murati, 24-year-old Albanian immigrants who surrendered shortly after midnight, had demanded $1.33 million in ransom and safe passage out of the country." [Bill Clinton bombed Christian Serbia for the sake of ethnic Albanians].

A reader has sent in his own theory of Leftism which I have just put up here. It has some interesting points in it.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

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.

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

THE ARMY AND THE JAPANESE

I am still feeling pretty disgusted about the treatment of young Japanese women in Paris that I mentioned yesterday. Because I offer cheap accomodation and prefer Asians as tenants, I have met more than a few of the young treasures of Japan over the years and there is no way they deserve to be driven into hospital by foul treatment. Partly because I am a former Army man myself, I have met and talked to many "old Diggers" (Australian Army veterans) from WWII over the years and I share their disgust about what "the Nips" did to prisoners and others in that war. To this day, many of them would not consider buying a Japanese car. But because of their experiences, if nothing else, those men are true gentlemen and I can guarantee you that not one of them would be rude to a young woman just because she was Japanese. But ethics have always been something of an afterthought to the French from what I can see.

While I am thinking of the Army, I also want to record my disgust at the way Leftists commonly disparage the armed forces. To me the profession of arms is the noblest profession there is. Who else volunteers to lay down his life for his fellow-citizens?

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

HISTORY CORNER

There is a rather silly article here which compares GWB to Teddy Roosevelt on the grounds that both Presidents have sent U.S. armed forces to intervene in foreign countries. Although TR was a Republican President, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats were clearly Leftist or Rightist in TR's days and TR was a notable supporter of the "Progressive" (Leftist) wing of the GOP. He even left the GOP at one stage and set up his own "Progressive" party. And his actions abroad were thoroughly imperialistic -- under a very thin cloak of righteousness. They were certainly not driven by defence needs. GWB, by contrast, is simply responding as best he can to the war on America declared by the Islamic extremists. And the difference between a defensive war and a war of expansion is surely of considerable importance. As is shown here American wars abroad are normally the work of the American Left. It is only the needs of defence that have got GWB into such wars. (Thanks to PID for the links).

There is a site here which points to the remnants of America's Christian heritage still engraved on major American public buildings despite all that the ACLU has so far done to stop that. There is however another site here which points out that the various depictions of the Ten Commandments are mostly blank so could in fact represent other things -- such as the Bill of Rights. On occasions where Moses is shown holding the tablets of stone, however, that is a pretty feeble criticism.

There is an article here giving background to the recent 150th anniversary of Australia's "Eureka Stockade" uprising. The Left always seem to think it vindicates them in some mysterious way. How a revolt against a tax by self-employed people does that, however, has always been a mystery to me. There should be more tax revolts in my opinion. If people started rebelling against most of their taxes being spent to feed millions of bureaucrats and paper-shufflers, we might get some real sanity in public life.

Von Mises in 1940 knew that Fascists and Communists were all socialists: "Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini constantly proclaim that they are chosen by destiny to bring salvation to this world. They claim they are the leaders of the creative youth who fight against their outlived elders. They bring from the East the new culture which is to replace the dying Western civilization. They want to give the coup de grace to liberalism and capitalism; they want to overcome immoral egoism by altruism; they plan to replace the anarchic democracy by order and organization, the society of "classes" by the total state, the market economy by socialism."

An interesting email from a reader: "I thought you would find this interesting as we share the belief that presenting the Nazis as 'conservative' is one of the biggest leftist lies of the 20th century. I am reading Iris Chang's book 'The Rape of Nanking' and in one chapter she talks about John Rabe, a high-ranking Nazi official living in Nanking who selflessly saved and protected many people. While trying to reconcile how a devoted Nazi official could be so kind and helpful, known as the 'living Buddha of Nanking', his granddaughter explained that Rabe saw the Nazi Party primarily as a socialist organization and did not support the persecution of Jews and other ethnic groups in Germany. It also says that Rabe repeatedly summed up his Nazi philosophy in socialist terms: "We are soldiers of work, we are a government of workers, we are friends to the worker, we will never leave the worker's side in times of crisis." (p109-100)

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

ELSEWHERE

Love it! "A former Claremont McKenna College psychology professor convicted of falsely reporting her car was vandalized and spray-painted with racist and anti-Semitic slurs was sentenced Wednesday to a year in state prison."

Sean Gabb has an interesting article on why he thinks that drink driving (DUI) should not be a crime. He says however that causing harm while drink driving should be severely punished.

Joe Cambria has replied to Prof. Quiggin's accusations about him. See here.

Amazing: Some Iranians are trying to convert to Judaism both as an expression of distaste for the Islam of the Ayatollahs and as a way of getting out of a decaying Iran.

Peggy Noonan has an amusing column up in which she tells the Democrats that they could win back a lot of supporters if they came out and supported Christmas and displays of faith in public life. She's right and I am sure they know she is right but the haters who are their main supporters won't allow it, of course. What a bind for them!

GWB just gave the perfect reply to the outsourcing worriers: "Bush told reporters the trade deficit was "easy to resolve. People can buy more United States products if they're worried about the trade deficit."" Exactly. If the Democrats are so worried about us buying things from abroad, let THEM pay more to buy their products instead of trying to force that on all of us. The whole speech was pretty amusing. He also said "The policy of my government is a strong-dollar policy" Seeing that the "weak" dollar is good for American business and bad for European business, one wonders how he kept a straight face while saying that.

Amusing: European gloom about their stagnant economy and problematical future means that individual Europeans save rather than spend -- thus depressing their economy even further.

Conservative scholarship is under attack at Princeton's Department of Near Eastern Studies -- which mainly studies Islam.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

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.

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

"REDNECKS" FOLLOW-UP

A good comment from a reader about my post yesterday on "Rednecks": "Something I have observed for a while that I don't think I have seen in any of your writings is the Right's ability to laugh at themselves -- while the left seems to have no tolerance what-so-ever for anyone making fun of them. The Redneck comedy is a good example - but even better is a classic TV show called All In The Family. The series was created by a super Liberal, Norman Lear, and although his intention was to mock conservative views, it became a big hit among conservatives, and I guess among liberals too. The fact is, it's just damn funny... but somehow I don't think it would have ever made had it been mocking liberal views.

Another reader thinks I should have mentioned "cracker" as another bigoted term often used by Leftists. He summarizes: "Cracker is a pejorative term used by Northerners (Yankees, aka blue states) to describe people of the South (red states). It is ante-bellum in origin. The civil war between the North and South was more a conflict of cultures than anything else and was a conflict that was already centuries old at the Revolution (see the Mel Gibson movies Braveheart or The Patriot), it being the conflict between the Anglo-Saxon English and the Celtic peoples or Scotland, Ireland, Wales, etc. The Yankees being predominantly of English stock considered themselves to be industrious, well bred, civilized people. They considered the people of the South to be a temperamental, emotional lot who would rather spend their days screwing their women and running through the woods with their hound dogs than working. This idea of Southerners remains to this day."

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

FROM BROOKES NEWS

More on immigration, wages and other myths, part II Does immigration drive up profits while driving down wages?
The Age slimes the free market - again Tim Colebatch and Kenneth Davidson must be among the worst of Australia's economic commentariat - and that's saying something
Unions, wages and labor surveys Outworkers are not the victims of callous market forces and greedy capitalists. They are the victims of callous ideologically motivated economic illiterates
Professor John Quiggin slimes Windschuttle John Quiggin's specialty appears to be moral posturing, character assassination and personal abuse
Holland and Islamic terrorism: Disaster in waiting How ludicrous that the legislators of Holland are so afraid of the violent Arabs, who are taking over their community, that they can't sleep safely in their homes for fear that one of them might come in and behead them

Details here

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

ELSEWHERE

There is an excellent article here on the multiple links between the far Left and the Islamists. Such links make no logical sense at all given the way Islamic attitudes to women and to sexual licence run directly against long-cherished Leftist causes but, as usual, Leftist attitudes can only be understood psychologically rather than logically and the alliance makes great sense psychologically. Both Leftists and Islamists want to tear down existing society and put themselves in the drivers' seat instead. So at a basic level the two groups have identical aims. It is only power that Leftists really want. All the rest of what they say is just posturing -- and there could be no clearer evidence of that than the way they have abandoned the various "rights" they have always stood for by co-operating with the world's most notable opponents of such rights.

This is pretty disgusting. Young Japanese women living in Paris get so shocked by constant French rudeness towards them that some of them end up hospitalized with depression. I am sure my own manners are a bit rough at times but I always try to treat the invariably polite people of Asia with the courtesy that such politeness deserves. But like all elitists, the French think everyone else is scum, particularly Americans of course.

Lots of young educated Arabs LIKE George Bush! "The same ideas came up again and again: he is a strong leader, an honest man, and, most of all, a believer. Like the winning margin of American voters this year, these Middle Easterners related to Bush's sense of religious conviction and his confident steering of a nation and culture they admired... In addition, some of the most articulate students expressed intense misgivings about central Democratic electoral platforms, including gun control, limitation of the death penalty and especially abortion and gay rights. Just the word "homosexual" made many of them cringe and click their tongues in that uniquely Arab way of showing disapproval. A final piece of the puzzle fell into place when I learned that more than half of the students in my advanced class, among them a third-year medical student and daughter of a Western-based diplomat, rejected the theory of evolution. "I just can't believe that we came from monkeys," she said".

Mobsters have a point "Italian mobsters jailed on the island of Sardinia, apparently outraged by terrorism, beat up an Algerian terror suspect and threatened to kill him unless he got himself transferred to a new prison. The same threat was made against at least one other Algerian inmate. "You guys set off bombs and do massacres. If you don't change prisons, you're dead," the criminals were reported to have told Saadi Nassim"

A good post on the British welfare State. One excerpt: "State education began in 1870 with the Forster Act, which allowed the creation of government schools. Its purpose was not to wipe out the existing private and charitable schools. The whole idea was to catch those few people who were missing out. It was reckoned in 1861 that 95 percent of children were getting between five and seven years of education. State education was started to save that missing 5 percent or less. Now, 134 years later, with the state dominating education, a government survey reveals that 20 percent of the adult population is functionally illiterate. State education, instead of saving the bottom 5 percent, has quadrupled the number of those left out"

Watching the signs: "Not since 1952 has a presidential election lacked a sitting president or vice president as a contestant, and Ike was about as close as one could get to non-official incumbent. Before that, it was the 1928 race, and there, too, Herbert Hoover was, like Ike, a figure of towering popularity. In other words, there has never not been a front-runner in at least one party in the modern scrambles for the presidency. Here is a bit of evidence that the race for 2008 also has a leader, one along the lines of Eisenhower and the Great Engineer.... Giuliani swept more than three-quarters of the votes"

The Carnival of the Vanities is up again with enough good reading to keep you busy for a long time.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

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.

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

"REDNECKS" AND "TRAILER TRASH"

In the great outpouring of Leftist hatred towards conservatives (some of it recorded on Leftists as Elitists) that followed the recent Presidential election, one of the most frequent terms of disparagement of conservative voters was "Rednecks", and, to a lesser extent, "White trash" or "Trailer trash". All three terms are extremely derogatory in American life and I am frankly amazed that Leftists use them at all. These self-proclaimed heroes of tolerance reveal themselves thereby to be in fact most viciously prejudiced and ignorant.

When we strip away the abusive component, after all, what really are rednecks? They are simply country people, probably farm workers, with necks red from working in the sun. They like simple recreations such as shooting and they are far more likely to be practically inclined than intellectually inclined and they don't have much time for others who don't pull their weight but how is that in any way deserving of condemnation? I grew up in a small Australian country town and I have since then seen quite a bit of country people both in Australia and the USA and I have no hesitation in saying that to my mind country people are the salt of the earth. If you want humble, kind, generous, trusting people you can't go past them. They make lots of city people look very degraded indeed. And I know that I am far from alone in that assessment of country people. So in my view abusing them as "rednecks" is grossly offensive, prejudiced and ignorant and those who use such terms just show what ignoramuses they themselves are.

And the allied term "Trailer Trash" is, if anything, more offensive. People who live in trailers (we call them "caravans" in Australia) generally do so because they are poor but how does that make them contemptible? I have seen a fair bit of Australian caravan parks over the years so I know what the people who live there are really like. I am not relying on popular stereotypes. And I have no hesitation in saying that the great majority of people who live there are thoroughly decent people who do very well on their limited resources. They may drink a bit but they are not alone in that. And there are certainly some rowdy and ignorant types there but such types are far from typical and there is plenty of worse morality to be found in many upmarket bars and nightclubs. So the only thing that really sets trailer-dwellers apart is their poverty, and Leftists are always pretending "compassion" for the poor. I doubt that they do in fact feel any compassion for anyone but themselves. It is certainly their contempt that is more evident. And such contempt is grossly offensive to many good people who are getting by as best they can and generally doing pretty well.

It is the prejudiced Leftist haters who deserve contempt.

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

ELSEWHERE

A current campaign by PETA is to get clothing stores to boycott clothing made with Australian wool. The "sex sells" crowd at Abercrombie & Fitch seem suddenly to have discovered morality -- or at least the PETA version of it -- and have fallen into line. This article has a good idea: Boycott Abercrombie & Fitch. I'm guessing that there are a lot more Americans who approve of Australia than approve of PETA. If it all happened it could really spike the guns of PETA for a long time.

There is an excellent article here on the Buttiglione affair -- where a devout Cathoic was denied a position in the adminstration of the EU because of his beliefs -- even though he made clear that his beliefs would have no influence on how he did his job. If he had been a Muslim, of course, they would have given him the job by acclamation. The article defines "secularist" as a religious skeptic who is intolerant of religion. I like that definition. It does make it clear that we were dealing with bigotry in the Buttiglione affair. I am myself an atheist but I am always pleased to deal with Christians. I think that having God in charge of quality control is a distinct advantage to me.

The famously Bush-hating Jonathan Chait has an article in which he defends the overwhelming Leftist bias in academe. He rejects the notion that underrepresentation implies bias, though he realizes that Leftists like himself normally make the opposite argument where blacks are concerned. That does rather highlight the difficulties that the dishonesty of Leftists gets them into. Chait in fact is forced to admit that conservatives are right and that lack of proportionality does not imply bias! A major backdown for a Leftist, it seems to me. He also has a point in saying that academe is not a natural career choice for a conservative, though I disagree with his reasons. Academe is a stuffy bureaucracy and conservatives prefer the more free-wheeling and wide-open business world. I was in academe for many years and I am in no doubt that most of my colleagues would not last 5 minutes in business. My own combination of actual success in both academe and business is certainly extremely rare. There are however many conservatives with academic ambitions and Chait ignores what almost every one of those people could tell him -- that you virtually cease to exist in academe once your conservative views are known. Like most conservatives who do make it into academe, I got an academic job before my political views were known but once they were known, the roadblocks put up to my further progress in academe were almost amusing in their compulsiveness and violation of academic principles. Chait is just not acknowledging the facts, which is what I expect from Leftists. I have more on the Leftist nature of academe here and Prof. Bainbridge also gives Chait a serve.

Soviet Britain: You can have as much free speech as you like in Britain as long as it is within prescribed bounds. Joe Stalin would agree. "Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, has been released on bail after his arrest in connection with an investigation into inciting racial hatred. It follows a television documentary exposing the extent of alleged racism in the organisation. Earlier it was revealed that the party's founding chairman John Tyndall had been held on Sunday."

There have been a few articles lately about how the Left is breeding itself out of existence. here is a summary.

At last! A bureaucracy dies: "State government rarely shrinks, but last week California's 3-year-old public power authority disappeared. Created by Democratic lawmakers in the tumultuous days of blackouts and price spikes, the agency sputtered to a halt after Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed its funding. ..."

Tom Barrett: "I have long believed that the United Nations is the most dangerous organization on our planet. The corruption that has been revealed there over the last few years has only reinforced my opinion. Now it is becoming apparent that the rampant corruption at the UN starts at the very top. More than any thing, the UN is a savagely anti-United States propaganda outlet. It is made up primarily of nations that hate or are jealous of the US..... "

There is an interesting contrast here between the way two poor countries -- India and Indonesia -- deal with Muslim violence. The terrorists mostly get a free pass in Indonesia but India prosecutes energetically. The British origins of India's legal system no doubt have a lot to do with it.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

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.

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

TUESDAY ROUNDUP

From the emails I receive, many people get quite a lot out of my blogs. Since I have seven regular blogs at the moment, however, it seems obvious to me that very few of my readers would read them all. So I thought it might be useful if I were to highlight what I thought were the most interesting posts on each of them once a week. That way everyone who reads this blog will get some idea what is on all of them. So here goes:

On Dissecting Leftism, I discuss America's most offensive four-letter word.

On Leftists as Elitists, I discuss the Hollywood elite.

On Political Correctness Watch, I note that winners are now frowned on in Canadian school sports.

On Greenie Watch I note that global warming is now said to be racist(!).

On Socialized Medicine, I note that drug price-controls are bad for your health.

On Education Watch, I note that educational attainments went up in Florida schools when social promotion was ended.

Gun Watch has some pithy sayings about the usefulness of guns.

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

ELSEWHERE

There is a relatively new Leftist group-blog called "Left2Right" that aims to "talk to" conservatives in a civil and persuasive manner: A rather amazing idea in the context of the torrents of abuse and contempt that is usually all that the Left can produce by way of dialogue with conservatives. A recent post by Elizabeth Anderson aims to deflect the common charge that Leftists are not patriotic. Given the way America-haters like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky are lionized and given every honour by America's Left, that is a big ask from the outset and the way the charming Ms Anderson goes about her task is very revealing. She is indeed persuasive that she personally loves her country but some of the other things she says about herself and her views suggest that she is in fact fairly conservative: She says: "Give me the pursuit of excellence over "self-esteem" any day" and "Central Park ... Fully restored and enhanced to great glory, it is a far cry from its dismal state in the 1970s, when it was a decrepit haven for drug dealers. Now families don't hesitate to take their children there to play. There is no more vivid sign of the spectacular revival of New York City than this (except perhaps for the clean, grafitti-free subways). The new reign of civility --and yes, I do give former Mayor Giuliani credit for this--" and "Chinatown shows how free trade in goods and free movement of people are inextricable from the free exchange of ideas and willingness to learn from and welcome them, no matter their origin" and "Mayor Giuliani brought spectacular benefits to the city by insisting not just on a crackdown on crime, but on restoring order and civility to the streets, without which people cannot raise families in the city". I could go on but it seems to me that the lady is far to the Right of most Leftists and would in fact be unremarked as a moderate Republican. Given his big spending on the war and such things, GWB could certainly use her eagerness to pay taxes! So what the good woman seems to have proved by her own example is precisely the opposite of what she aimed at. She has shown that you have to be substantially conservative in America today to be patriotic!

The dreaded Windschuttle summarizes his latest book on the now defunct White Australia Policy here. Once again he has thrown sand into the bearings of the hate-machine that is Leftist history.

I have just been reading A Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and it is one of the most amazing collections of myth-busting facts you will ever see. It shows how the facts dynamite practically everything that you are told in orthodox histories. Things that I have been saying about American history for years are suddenly all there in book form. Do yourself a favour and have a look at this summary at least. It could almost be a textbook for conservatives. But DON'T give it to any kid studying history at an American university. They would end up being thrown out of the class for subversion. The book is probably the best 20 buck's worth I know of.

Clinton's crook: "Billionaire Marc Rich has emerged as a central figure in the U.N. oil-for-food scandal and is under investigation for brokering deals in which scores of international politicians and businessmen cashed in on sweetheart oil deals with Saddam Hussein, The Post has learned. Rich, the fugitive Swiss-based commodities trader who received a controversial pardon from President Bill Clinton in January 2001, is a primary target of criminal probes under way in the U.S. attorney's office in New York and by Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau"

Jehovah's Witnesses are learning Arabic to aid their outreach to Muslims. Isn't it amazing? It takes fundamentalist Protestants to do something that nobody else is doing. Where are the multi-cultis on this? It looks like a faith-based initiative is miles ahead of them.

V.D. Hanson is having a bit of a laugh about the dilemma Europe finds itself in now that its multicultural tolerance has simply put a large and very hostile Muslim minority inside its borders.

The Left seem to hate novelist Michael Crichton lately, in part because he has cast Greenies as the villains in his latest novel. PID however argues that Crichton should really be beloved by the Left.

Good comment from a reader: "I always laugh at Leftists when they say that Bush is a "Nazi" and is "Hitler" when fascist states like Hitler and Mussolini's and Stalin's Soviet Russia and Soviet Russia itself had a hostitility toward ANY religion, especially Christianity. Leftists should stop, think and look themselves in the mirror to see how much in common they have with Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. Leftists are making a fascist assault against Christianity during this holiday season and even though I am not that religious, I am seeing them committing these acts against Christianity".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

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.

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

STEREOTYPING

Around 15 years ago, I went to the library at the University of Queensland and looked up their PsycLIT CD-ROM. The CD was published by the American Psychological Association and indexes what has been published in all the world's academic psychology journals. I entered the search terms "racism" and "ethnocentrism" and looked at the authorship of the stream of articles that came out. There was one author who had published far more than any other -- accounting for about a fifth of the articles concerned. So, by normal academic conventions, that author would clearly be the world's leading authority on the psychology of racism. I am that author. See here

No doubt the situation has changed considerably since then. I neither know nor care nor does anybody else. My research generally arrived at conclusions uncongenial to Leftists so has always been thoroughly ignored by my fellow academics and I have therefore long since stopped doing any of it. I mention the matter only to establish that I do know the subject exceptionally well and am not talking through my hat in what I am about to say. And what I am about to say I have set out in more academic terms, complete with references, elsewhere. I should also note that what I am about to say is in part a sequel to what I said yesterday on the subject of racism so if anyone reading this has not read what I wrote yesterday, please do so before reading any further here.

In psychology, a "stereotype" is the word used to refer to a belief that someone has about a particular group of people. A common stereotype would be the belief that blacks are lazy. Stereotypes are therefore in general greatly condemned. The grounds for condemning them are twofold: 1). It is argued that no group has distinct characteristics; and 2). That even if a majority of a group has some characteristic, not all members of the group will have so it is pernicious to judge the individual by the group to which he belongs.

The first claim is simply silly. Of course groups have common characteristics. Most people of African ancestry have dark skin, for instance. Even if there are some or even many exceptions to the rule, the rule still exists. To say that no rule may have any exceptions would exclude most rules we use in life. The second claim is of course correct. To say that a person has a characteristic that he does not is plainly foolish and unjust and any public policy (such as the Jim Crow laws or "affirmative action") that assumes characteristics in an individual because of some group to which he belongs is also therefore foolish and unjust. The United Nations charter says that each person should be treated according to his/her individual merits and that is probably the most uncontroversial pronouncement the UN has ever made. Whether people act on it, however, is another matter.

So there are intellectually compelling reasons why public policy should not take group membership into account. Enquiries can always be made about the characteristics of the individual who might be affected by a policy instead of assuming the characteristics of the individual from some group to which he/she might belong. If a policy is designed to help poor people, for instance, enquiries should be made about the income and assets of each individual concerned before they are helped rather than assuming that because he/she is a member of a generally poor group (such as blacks) he/she should automatically be helped.

Private life, however, is another matter. In private life we very often HAVE to deal with people on the basis of very imperfect knowledge about them. A landlord deciding on whether or not to let his property to someone, for instance, will often know very little about the prospective tenant. He will of course ask for references etc but as crooks often have the best references, that will not get him far. So he will necessarily use very imperfect rules in deciding what to do. If, for instance, he has had repeated bad experiences with (say) Korean tenants, he may well decide not to accept a particular prospective tenant who is Korean. He will undoubtedly make some mistakes in doing so but he will probably make fewer mistakes that way than if he had used no rules at all. But clearly, what he has done is "stereotyped" Koreans as bad tenants. So what is quite improper in public policy may be perfectly proper in a limited-information, day-to-day environment. Circumstances alter cases and to say that stereotyping is ALWAYS undesirable is in fact to stereotype stereotyping.

So the rational conclusion from realities such as those mentioned out above is that consideration of group membership should be outlawed in public policy but allowed in private life. Needless to say, Leftists advocate the exact reverse of that.

I have combined the above comments into an article here or here

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

ELSEWHERE

This article gives five good reasons why the USA should immediately pull out of that corrupt monstrosity known as the United Nations.

I have been reading Ben Stein's columns for many years. For those who don't know him here is a typical one. If ever a man had sound values, Ben Stein does.

An update here on the still laughable state of America's airline security system.

Andrew Bolt exposes Australia's top film critic as the grossly biased Leftist that he is.

Thank goodness someone can stop blaming whites for black failure: "Bill Cosby visited a San Francisco school Thursday to rail against what he considers the culture of victimization in low-income African American communities, telling parents they must invest in their children's education before they wind up teenage moms, jail inmates, drug dealers -- or dead"

Amazing Leftist arrogance: "A standard "action alert" has provided a rare glimpse inside the mind of the Shadow Party. In a December 9th e-mail signed by "Eli Pariser, Justin Ruben, and the whole MoveOn PAC team," the Soros front group stated: "In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back." To clarify, the hysterical Left believes not only that America's oldest political party is for sale, but that George Soros has already made the down payment."

American illiteracy keeps spreading: Despite much checking, a memorial to the campaign in Burma at the recently completed Illinois World War II Memorial at Oak Ridge Cemetery spells the place-name as "Berma".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

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.

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

AMERICA'S MOST OFFENSIVE FOUR-LETTER WORD

There is no doubt that the most offensive four-letter word in America today is "race". I gather that my occasional mentioning of it greatly limits the readership of this blog. It is my contention, however, that it is mainly the Left that keep it that way -- by going ballistic every time that the word is mentioned. Absurd though it is, the convention that the Left have forced onto American society by their torrents of abuse is that anyone who mentions the word "race" is a "racist". And "racist" is in fact the most potent term of abuse that there is in most of the world today.

And the reason why is no mystery. Hitler's appalling application of the racial hygeine theories that were common among the Leftists of his day have made all good people super-anxious not to have anything to do with such horrors. But because a particularly nasty socialist once used the idea of race to inflict horrors does not mean that there is anything wrong with the concept of race. Atomic bombs are horrible too but the horribleness of the idea of atomic bombs does not make the reality of such bombs go away. Putting it another way, one does not have to want to persecute other races in order to recognize that they exist.

I have always been quite unhesitating in saying that races do exist and that there are differences between them -- and it is my view that anyone who says otherwise is deliberately blind. There is even good evidence from the geneticists saying so but I do not expect that sort of evidence to be influential with people who cannot even believe what their senses tell them every day.

I am sure that the kneejerk brigade have stopped reading this by now so I presume that I am now talking to those who are capable of acknowledging that there are races and that race can make a difference. The important question now, then, is what USE does the concept have? And my answer to that is: "Not a lot". As a conservative I believe in the primacy of the individual so I believe that each person should as far as possible be treated on his/her individual merits, regardless of whether he/she is black, white or brindle.

Unfortunately, however, as in Hitler's day, the Left do not do that. They do not treat people as individuals and they do discriminate against people on the basis not only of their race but even on the basis of their skin colour. I refer of course to "affirmative action". They practice racial discrimination without using the word "race" -- generally preferring the term "minorities" instead, which is about as big a distortion as claiming that homosexuals are "gay". Sad homosexuals are apparently not allowed and the minority that suffers most official discrimination against them in America today is undoubtedly white middle class males. Such confusion of speech makes intelligent discussion difficult so I am going to call leftists what they are: Racists. And I am going to call the categories that they use "races" too. If I try to use the deliberately confused terms that Leftists use in this matter, I run the risk of falling into the sort of confused thinking that they display -- the sort of confused thinking that denies that race exists and then proceeds to base vast policies on it.

The racial category that American Leftists most focus on is of course blacks of African ultimate origin. And by constant repetition over the last 50 years or so they seem to have persuaded lots of white Americans that they should feel guilty about the problems that such blacks tend to have. White feelings of guilt about blacks appear to have been fairly uncommon before World War II. And the principal point I am aiming at for the moment is that whites should NOT feel guilty. I am not responsible for what my ancestors did nor is anybody else. We can only deal with the situation as we have it today and the plain fact is that American blacks are the luckiest of their race in the world today. If people of African ancestry in America have problems, their problems are as nothing compared to the problems of Africans in Africa. Although it was not done with benevolent intentions, the transportation of African slaves into America was in fact the best thing that anybody has ever done for Africans. The descendants of the slaves are infinitely richer and better off in a whole host of ways than are the descendants of those Africans who were not enslaved. And at least one prominent black American has acknowledged that.

So my point is that if we must use the Leftist practice of basing policy on race, the logic would be that American blacks owe whites something, and not vice versa. The guilt about blacks that many American whites appear to feel is, in other words, a giant Leftist con job. That they have managed to make people feel guilty about something that they also claim does not exist is an abiding wonder, however. If Leftists really did treat people as individuals regardless of their race, neither the guilt nor the affirmative action policies based on it would be possible.

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

ELSEWHERE

A very popular story around the blogs at the moment is this one about the conversion of an atheist professor to belief in some sort of supreme being. I guess his conversion is seen as comforting to Christians. But it isn't really. Prof. Flew is of the view that the being concerned is far beyond our ken and that view in fact corresponds to what is probably the most common religious belief in Australia -- that there is a God but the churches don't know anything about him. I myself think that the whole idea of God is meaningless. Maybe there is something eternal but if so it might as well be the universe itself. Postulating a God adds nothing to the explanation. Spontaneous order can spring from very simple influences -- as anyone who has observed the formation of crystals will know. Prof. Flew is just getting old.

Sanity coming to the Unhinged Kingdom? "Tony Blair announced yesterday that the Government will consider changing the law to protect householders from prosecution if they tackle burglars. Mr Blair clashed with the Tory leader, Michael Howard, in the Commons over an issue creating alarm across Britain: the fear of being attacked in one's own home. Mr Blair said it was important to send a 'very, very clear signal to people' that the Government was on the side of the victim, not the offender."

Dutch fleeing their own multiculturalism: "Escaping the stress of clogged roads, street violence and loss of faith in Holland's once celebrated way of life, the Dutch middle classes are leaving the country in droves for the first time in living memory. The new wave of educated migrants are quietly voting with their feet against a multicultural experiment long touted as a model for the world, but increasingly a warning of how good intentions can go wrong. Australia, Canada and New Zealand are the pin-up countries for those craving the great outdoors and old-fashioned civility."

On 8th December I published an email from Joe Cambria that was critical of blogger Prof. John Quiggin. On 10th I received an email from Prof. Quiggin which described Cambria's email as inaccurate and misleading and asking me to delete it from my blog. As I was not prepared to acquiesce in what seemed to me an attempt at censorship, a chain of short emails ensued in which Quiggin appears to threaten legal action against me. I have posted the correspondence here and would be interested in comments from readers.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

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.

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

SOME ECONOMICS

Germany will not face the fact that German laws have priced Germans out of work: "The number of people out of work in Europe's largest economy has risen for the tenth straight month as growth remains stubbornly slow. German unemployment rose 7,000 in November to 4.464 million people, or 10.8% of the workforce.... With unemployment stuck above 4 million for years, the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has put job creation at the top of the agenda. A controversial package of measures to shake up incentives to get back to work, paid for by cutting some cherished benefits, has sparked anger among some German workers.... Among the new initiatives are the so-called "one-euro jobs" which top up unemployment benefit.... "The deterioration of the labour market does not come as a surprise," said Isabelle Kronawitter at Hypovereinsbank. "Job creation measures probably prevented a stronger increase in the seasonally adjusted numbers."" [German workers now get so many government-dictated benefits that it is prohibitive to employ them. For comparison, deregulation of the labour market in Australia has just led to record LOW unemployment]. (Link via Reliapundit)

End corporate income tax: "On Nov. 18, in a speech given at the Finance Ministry in Vienna, Austria, the very highly regarded European economist and first woman president of the Mont Pelerin Society, Professor Victoria Curzon Price, called for eliminating the corporate income tax. There, in the center of socialist Europe, was not only the call to get rid of this destructive tax, but almost everyone in an audience of economists, various government finance officials and public policy experts appeared to agree with her. The idea and practice of the corporate income tax has been dying slowly for the last two decades. The corporate income tax is a highly destructive tax that greatly distorts proper economic decision-making, taxes the same income more than once, is endlessly complex, and provides a declining share of tax revenue in most countries." [Double-taxing of company profits was abolished long ago in Australia -- by a LEFTIST government! And I have just received a big refund cheque to prove it!]

Tough row to hoe: "When Nebraska Gov. Mike Johanns, whom President Bush has just nominated as the next agriculture secretary, takes office, his first order of business should to push for an end to America's drastically distorted farm subsidy programs. Eliminating U.S. farm subsidies would dramatically reduce government spending, end a program that mostly benefits corporate interests and the wealthy, strengthen U.S. agriculture, give us much needed leverage in international trade negotiations, and allow the United States to extricate itself from embarrassingly undermining its own foreign aid program."

The Chinese are coming!: "Until recently, the Chinese have taken the boatloads of dollars we sent them and recycled them into Treasury bonds. Now Chinese companies are investing some of those greenbacks into something more productive: companies and businesses. Here in the United States, we're schooled to think of foreign direct investment -- a vital component of global capital flows -- as going from the First World into the Third. Now the river is running in the opposite direction. These American businesses, some of them bankrupt or on the verge of abandonment, are getting dynamic new parent companies. It's just another step in the continued seamless integration of the world's economy. Man, globalism is cool!"

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

ELSEWHERE

The very Leftist EU: "Christians are bad. Comrades are good. That is the lesson of the recently concluded parallel process by which the European Union Commission and the European Parliament accepted Laszlo Kovacs of Hungary as a European commissioner while vociferously rejecting Italy's European affairs minister, Rocco Buttiglione, for his views on marriage and homosexuality. The media describe Laszlo Kovacs as a "socialist." In fact, he is a career communist with decades of totalitarian experience. Mr. Kovacs worked closely with the leadership of Janos Kadar's sinister regime, installed literally over the dead bodies of the Hungarian democracy activists killed by Soviet tanks after the 1956 popular uprising against the Communist Party's monopoly of power. Years before glasnost, Mr. Kovacs was one of the dictator's henchmen"

Nobel discredited again: "Just a day before she is scheduled to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, the Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai tried Thursday to defuse a controversy over reports that she said "evil-minded scientists" in the developed world intentionally created AIDS to decimate the African population."

Milton Friedman has a great article pointing out that it is time to start rolling back government.

Jeff Jacoby says that the medical marijuana case before SCOTUS is really about stopping unlimited Federal power.

Nazis and other Leftists get together again: "Arafat`s attention-grabbing series of airplane hijackings set the standard for the new generation of terrorists who took his invention and improved upon it on September 11, 2001. In death, he continues to inspire, and is already sorely missed by "progressives" and neo-Nazis who share one thing in common - enthusiastic support for the slaughter of unarmed Jewish men, women, and children - and who sound eerily alike in their online remarks praising the PLO chief and cursing the Jews."

The People's Republic of Berkeley: "John Kerry won 90 percent of the votes cast for president in Berkeley, while George Bush won the support of only 6.6 percent of Berkeley's voters.... Among cities with a majority of white residents, there is no question that Berkeley ranks number one in the nation in support for Kerry".

Californian legislators are rushing through a law to OK homosexual marriage. Wayne Lusvardi thinks Arnie will veto it and comments: "Something like 70% of California voters nixed same sex marriages a few years ago; this legislation is meant to depict Gov. Schwarzenegger as prejudiced".

Arlene Peck has some pungent comments about the spineless Dutch response to Islamic terrorism. Many of them want to emigrate from their own country rather than crack down on the evildoers.

Darlene Taylor is a relatively new blogger from my home town of Brisbane. I don't really follow what she is on about but she seems to be a disillusioned member of the Australian Labor Party.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

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.

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

AIRPORT MAYHEM

Bureaucratic nonsense at airports: "I recently flew back to the United States, my birthplace and home for most of my life. I didn't like it. It was wonderful seeing good friends, some of whom I hadn't seen for almost 20 years. But travelling in the US is now so unpleasant that I prefer to give the US a miss. There are too many places in the world I haven't seen to worry about being hassled by little people with big authority who now dominate American airports. ... The first inkling of what a hassle it would was the announcement on the air plane regarding what forms one had to fill out just to get bureaucratic permission to leave the airport. Previously announcements regarding this took a few seconds. This time it dragged out."

Transportation shakeup urgently needed: "One of the highest priorities for whoever succeeds Tom Ridge at Homeland Security should be to take political correctness and a fear of litigation out of national security decisions. From immigration enforcement to intelligence gathering, government officials continue to compromise safety in order to avoid accusations of "racial profiling" -- and in order to avoid publicly acknowledging what the 9/11 Commission finally said: that the enemy is "Islamist terrorism." This blind antidiscrimination reflex is all the more worrying since radical Islam continues to seek adherents and plan attacks in the U.S. The government antidiscrimination hammer has hit the airline industry most severely. Department of Transportation lawyers have extracted millions in settlements from four major carriers for alleged discrimination after 9/11, and they have undermined one of the most crucial elements of air safety: a pilot's responsibility for his flight. Since the charges against the airlines were specious but successful, every pilot must worry that his good-faith effort to protect his passengers will trigger federal retaliation".

More TSA arrogance: "The Transportation Security Administration, that federal bureaucracy that keeps the peripatetic public safe from attack by fingernail file-flailing fanatics, threw itself a half-million dollar awards ceremony at the Grand Hyatt in DC. Expenses included $81,000 for plaques, $500 for cheese displays and $200,000 for travel and lodging. Senior executives awarded themselves bonuses averaging $16,000 apiece while one employee was presented a 'lifetime achievement award' (the TSA is two years old).

The roving hands of airport insecurity: "Under normal circumstances, if a strange man tried to stick his hands down my pants, one of us would end up lying on the ground bleeding. But we have entered into a world of the surreal -- a world where millions of otherwise intelligent Americans are willing to stand in line and wait their turn to be groped by a complete stranger. I'm not exactly sure how it happened. But, I certainly seem to have done something to get myself on the airlines 'bad boy' list. Every time I set foot in an airport these days, I get dragged off for one of their 'random' special searches -- three times in a row during a recent trip."

Breast exams at the airport "Beginning in mid-September, the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) put into place a policy that provides for the physical frisking of selected airline passengers prior to boarding. The purpose of the new policy is to detect nonmetallic explosives of the sort that apparently were used by two Chechen women in terrorist attacks that destroyed two planes and killed ninety airline passengers in Russia earlier this year. ... Women passengers have been especially unhappy about the new policy and have made numerous complaints. In addition, there is reason to believe that the numbers of complaints understate the true scope of the problem, because -- as with sexual assaults generally -- women's distress at being fondled by airline security personnel may be underreported."

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

ELSEWHERE

A good comment from Wayne Lusvardi: "Here is a story which shows how off base the mainstream media is. It reports that homeless Iraq war vets are showing up in homeless shelters. Anyone who has dealt with the homeless is aware that many of them claim they are Viet Nam vets or vets of some war in order to get sympathy and benefits. The media doesn't even question this."

I have never so far put up a link on this blog to an audio file because text files tend to be much quicker to absorb but there is a time for everything (as Solomon said) so here is a link to an interview with Keith Windschuttle that I found very informative. I have known for over 40 years that the White Australia policy (designed to exclude Chinese immigrants) had its principal base of support in the Australian Left (Australian Labor Party) but it is only from this interview that I learned that the principal opposition to the introduction of the policy was the Free Trade party! Score one for conservatives and libertarians, I think. Belief in individual liberty has many ramifications. It was also the Democrats in the USA who were mainly responsible for Jim Crow laws of course.

Opinion Journal has an excellent takedown of Berkeley's wacky Professor George Lakoff.

Two Swedish economists recently published a study that asks how European countries would fare if suddenly admitted into the American union. The results? If the UK, France, or Italy became U.S. states, they would rank as the fifth poorest of the fifty, ahead only of Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia, and Mississippi. The richest EU country— Ireland— would be the 13th poorest. Sweden would be the 6th poorest. In fact, the study found that 40% of all Swedish households would classify as low-income in the U.S. [Leftist wriggle out of such facts by saying that money isn't everything and that is no doubt true but most people seem to want more money anyhow]

A good email from a reader: "My experience with people who apply the "liberal" label to themselves is that they are almost exclusively hyper-sensitive and intolerant. This morning a group of us was discussing the upcoming Christmas Party. One of the group then reminded everyone that a certain someone, who originates in Brooklyn, New York, takes great offense at the term "Christmas Party" and insists that it is a "Holiday Party." Being reminded of that, I intend to use the term "Christmas Party" as much as possible in her presence. The woman in question is hardly the only self-proclaimed "liberal", with whom I am acquainted, to behave in such an intolerant fashion. I wonder if these people realize that their intolerance belies the label they love so much".

Be thankful for this man: "This is the story of a military veteran whistleblower. He spoke out against someone he thought was dangerous for the nation, talked to local newspapers, and appeared on talk shows. In return, he was vilified by reporters, threatened by a political operative, fired by his company, and now he's broke.... Gardner explains he was sitting at home in Clover, S.C., when he first saw Kerry on television. It was before the primary races. For 35 years, Gardner says, he hadn't talked about his tour of duty in Vietnam. But when he saw Kerry talking about running, he says he got up, called the newspaper in town, called radio stations and "talked to anyone I could about why this man should never be president." .... And, even though Gardner is broke and jobless for speaking out, the husband and father of three says he'd do it all over again. He says it wasn't for politics. It was for America."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

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.

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

"SENSITIVE" LEFTISTS: A MINOR DISAGREEMENT WITH DENNIS PRAGER

I am a great fan of Dennis Prager. Prague has suffered a great loss in losing him and his family. But I have two minor quarrels with him about this article -- headed: "Blue America, the land of the easily offended".

My first quarrel with him is about his use of the term "Blue America" as a synonym for American Left-wingers. The "blue" (Kerry-voting) counties in the last Presidential election were almost entirely the big cities, with their heavy concentration of minorities and welfare clients. And their vote was "bought" with the usual Democrat promises of more handouts etc. Subtract the "bought" vote and the Democrats would almost certainly have been as heavily outnumbered in the "blue" counties as they were in the "red" ones. And given that minorities often have very conservative views on social issues, there is every reason to subtract them. There is therefore no reason to believe that Leftist true-believers are dominant ANYWHERE in America. So there IS a "blue" (Democrat-voting) America but that does NOT mean that there is a Left-leaning America. The two terms are far from synonymous. The idea that there is a Left-leaning America is actually a Leftist security blanket -- so let us snatch it away from them when we can! They need to grow up.

My second quarrel is with Prager's description of the Left as "easily offended". I suspect that the description is in fact rather tongue-in-cheek but there is a point to it nonetheless. What I would like to suggest is that most of the offence that the Left takes on behalf of other people is totally phony. They say they are afraid that Christmas might offend Jews not because they care about Jews (which they certainly don't, given their hatred of Israel) but because it will upset Christians. The Left are true descendants of Cromwell's Puritans and their attitude to bear-baiting. But that Leftists get mightily miffed at insults to themselves there can be no doubt whatever. Their seething rage at the rejection of their candidate in the last Presidential election is proof enough of that.

Finally, I just loved this last paragraph of Prager's article: "Liberal American Indian spokesmen and other liberals regularly tell us how offensive Indian names of sports teams are. The latest polls show that most Indians have no problem with such names, but liberals are still offended on their behalf. To make the point of how offensive the name "Indians" is for the Cleveland baseball team, one liberal caller once asked me, "How would you feel if a team were named 'Jews'?" I told him that it would be a great day in Jewish history -- for 3,000 years, Jews have been looking for fans."

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

FROM BROOKES NEWS

Holland to implement neo-Nazi euthanasia program for babies The Dutch government is set to implement the Groningen Protocol, a policy similar to the Nazi program of killing defectives
Immigration, wages and other myths, part I There are a great many myths both in the US and Australia regarding the economic and social consequences of immigration
Post Arafat: Now what? The Palestinians don't want peace. What they want is the extermination of Israel and every Jew that lives there
Media, politicians and the religious right The outcome of the American and Australian elections provoked our lefty journalists into making sanctimonious noises about the rise (or is it resurrection?) of the religious right
leftist history confronts economic theory - and loses An example of how leftist thinking distorts students views about capitalism and the industrial revolution

Details here

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