ELSEWHERE

Good gal: "Janice Rogers Brown, the African-American daughter of Alabama sharecroppers who was confirmed Wednesday to the federal appeals court here, often invokes slavery in describing what she sees as the perils of liberalism. "In the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery," she has warned in speeches. Society and the courts have turned away from the founders' emphasis on personal responsibility, she has argued, toward a culture of government regulation and dependency that threatens fundamental freedoms. "We no longer find slavery abhorrent," she told the conservative Federalist Society a few years ago. "We embrace it.""

I have just heard that Kevin Lamb was fired from his day job as Managing Director for the conservative Human Events magazine purely because of phone-calls from the Leftist Southern Poverty Law Centre accusing him of insufficient political correctness. He edits in his own time the online magazine Occidental Quarterly -- one of the few magazines game to mention the word "race" without going into paroxysms of condemnation about "racism". Apparently American 'conservatives' and 'liberals' are BOTH now spineless against 'anti-racist' fanatics. Details here. I don't agree with everything in the OQ but it is no nuttier than the New York Times (faint praise, I know).

The American dream lives: "A strong global economy gave 600,000 people an entree last year into a highly envied group: the world's millionaires. The annual World Wealth Report, released Thursday by Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. and the Capgemini Group consulting firm, found that there were 8.3 million people worldwide with $1 million or more in financial assets at the end of 2004, up from 7.7 million a year earlier... Not surprisingly, the expansion of the millionaire class was especially strong in North America because of the solid economic growth last year in both the United States and Canada. "Significantly, North America surpassed Europe both in total high net worth individuals population and wealth for the first time since 2001... According to the latest figures, the number of high net worth individuals included 2.7 million in North America"

The Latino vote: "While Cuban Americans have historically voted Republican by wide margins, primarily because of the GOP's strong anti-communist credentials, Americans of Mexican, Central American and South American descent have been equally ardent supporters of the Democratic Party and its candidates. But that Democratic advantage is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Over the last three presidential election cycles, Latino American support for Democrats has steadily declined, from the 72% that voted for Bill Clinton in 1996 to the 53% that John Kerry received last year. Although these percentages are based on exit polling and the precise numbers are still being debated, the overall trend is beyond dispute, and a party that loses nearly a quarter of a core constituency in less than a decade is a party with cause for distress".

Another reason to control your own retirement savings: "By any standard, the pension default by United and other U.S. companies is simply outrageous. Pension funds are supposed to be set aside by companies in separate accounts so they will be there when employees retire. Instead, dishonest company officials have been commingling pension funds with other company revenues, and using them to fund current expenses, pay executive perks, and to fund corporate expansion. The PBGC reports that during the past six years, many large companies have put nothing into their pension accounts. ... The massive corporate default on pensions is fraud any way you look at it, and the corporate officials responsible should have their personal assets attached to pay off their obligations to employees, and then be put behind bars, like any other thief. Instead, courts have quietly OKed United's default on their pension guarantees."

Prager on the corruption of Amnesty: "Sometime in the 1970s, I sent a donation to Amnesty International. As soon as I heard that a group had been formed to combat torture, I knew I had to support it. Unfortunately, like almost all international and most domestic groups, the Left took over Amnesty International, and it devolved into another predictably anti-American, morally destructive organization. That devolution was most apparent years ago when Amnesty International listed the United States as a major violator of human rights because it executed murderers. The organization's inability to morally distinguish between executing murderers and executing innocent people means that Amnesty International is worse than ineffectual; the good it has done notwithstanding, it is becoming harmful to the cause of human rights".

Windschuttle has a delightful fisking of Robert Fisk. Fisk really is an amazing liar.

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

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 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.

Leftist ideologues 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 and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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ELSEWHERE

Journalists have high standards?? Is this guy joking?: ""By responding to bloggers, we are giving them credibility that they don't deserve," says Bob Furnad, a former executive vice president at CNN who now teaches at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. "I wouldn't respond to them until they are held to the same standard that we are."" (HT Security Watchtower).

Did you know that New Zealand is sending special forces to help out in Afghanistan? Not all Kiwis are happy about it, of course -- particularly those who supported the SOVIET intervention in Afghanistan!

Pathetic Canadians: "The CBC's television news coverage of the United States is consistently marked by emotional criticism, rather than a rational consideration of US policy based on Canadian national interests, according to The Canadian "Garrison Mentality" and Anti-Americanism at the CBC, released today by The Fraser Institute."

Brown achievers: "For any American contestants, the most uncommon words at last week's national spelling bee were not appoggiatura and onychophagy, but the names of the top four finishers: Anurag Kashyap, Aliya Deri, Samir Patel and Rajiv Tarigopula. All were of Indian ancestry. In recent years, descendants of Indian immigrants - less than 1 percent of the population - have dominated this contest, snatching first place in five of the past seven years, and making up more than 30 of the 273 contestants this year."

The dying church of England: "More than half of the Church's 16,000 parish churches have fewer than 50 members. Average weekly attendance in 2003 was 1,187,000 compared with a figure in 1968 of 1.6 million. [The British population is 60 million]

Reliapundit wants mandatory logic classes in schools to combat Leftism! It could help to balance things up a bit.

A Democrat Watergate is OK: "It was a political scandal of unprecedented proportions: the deliberate, systematic, and illegal misuse of the FBI and the CIA by the White House in a presidential campaign. The massive black-bag operations, bordering on the unconstitutional and therefore calling for impeachment, were personally approved by the president. They included planting a CIA spy in his opponent's campaign committee, wiretaps on his opponent's top political aides, illegal FBI checks, and the bugging of his opponent's campaign airplane. The president? Lyndon B. Johnson. The target? Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the 1964 Republican presidential candidate".

I am very sorry to hear that blogger Bunker Mulligan has passed away. It was always good to receive the occasional email from him. My condolences to his family.

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

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 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.

Leftist ideologues 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 and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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LEFTIST EGO EXPLAINS THEIR HATRED OF CHRISTIANS

Tim at Random Observations has been mulling over the short essay on Leftism that I put up a couple of days ago and he has come up with one thought that I particularly like. He has an explanation for the huge upsurge of hatred against Christians among Leftists in recent times. Like most people, I had seen the phenomenon as a response to the tendency of evangelical Christians to vote GOP but there seems to be a passion in the hatred directed towards Bible-believing Christians which borders on insanity at times. It seems much more than dislike of someone you disagree with.

Tim explains the fervid hatred by saying that many people (particularly Leftists) need to feel superior to someone else in order to boost their own ego but Leftists are not supposed to feel superior to almost anybody these days (homosexuals, blacks, poor people etc) so Christians and conservatives (and those two overlap a lot) are about all that is left as permissible scapegoats. So all their hatred is poured out through the narrow openings that their beliefs allow. So Christians are one of the few permissible targets. Though that old standby -- the Jews -- also seems to be making a comeback.

In my monograph on Leftism I go to some length in my discussion of ego need as basic to Leftist psychology. In summary, what I say is that Leftists are people who have a huge need to think highly of themselves. But such a belief is hard to maintain and is hence vulnerable to disconfirmation in various ways. A big ego is a weak ego. Someone who sees himself as just an average guy (or a Christian who sees himself as just a sinner) will find confirmation of that belief all about him most days of his life. But someone who thinks he is out of the box will be constantly scrabbling for support of that belief. So Leftists are always looking for the praise, for the attention and for the power that they need and that they think they deserve. And they will do anything to get it. They will do anything to bolster their big but fragile egos. Their ego need is far more important to them than any scruple. They will say anything at all that they think will get them esteem, influence or power.

But they have an awkward limit to what they can do or say. Being "superior" can only be relative. Superior to whom? So the Leftist always needs to feel superior to someone or some group in particular. There has to be some group that they don't need to pander to and which they are free to put down and hate. And, at the moment, that is where Christians come in. So the fervour of hatred towards Christians that the Leftists currently pour out reflects both how narrow their opportunities for preening themselves now are and how badly in need of propping up their egos are after their many defeats from the fall of the Soviet Union on.

Anyone who doubts that Leftists do see themselves as superior beings should trawl through the achives of my LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS blog for a while. That will set any doubts completely at rest.

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ELSEWHERE

Journalists think they're God: "There is an unspoken but real impulse in today's media to see themselves as "independent" of America, even above America, not so much because they are superior to America but because America is so egregiously flawed. It is their role to shed light on America's failings. They're not keen at being seen as Americans. They choke at the idea of wearing flag pins. ABC boss David Westin tried so hard to be above America that he wanted to stay neutral on the question of whether our Pentagon is a legitimate target for terrorists..... So disdainful have they become that they are silent when fellow journalists claim -- without a shred of evidence -- that American soldiers are engaging in targeting and assassinating journalists hostile to America's foreign policy aims. When CNN Vice President Eason Jordan "exploded" earlier this year at a conference at Davos, Switzerland and, in objection to liberal Congressman Barney Frank calling the death of journalists "collateral damage" in Iraq, there were no glaring mainstream-media spotlights on Jordan's remarks. When Jordan resigned, there was a tiny blip on the Feb. 12 Saturday "Today" show on NBC, a tiny blip on the Saturday night "CBS Evening News," and no mention on ABC until it was mentioned in passing on a March 8 "Nightline"

A rare victory for decency: "A French court last week found three writers for Le Monde, as well as the newspaper's publisher, guilty of "racist defamation" against Israel and the Jewish people. In a groundbreaking decision, the Versailles court of appeal ruled that a comment piece published in Le Monde in 2002, "Israel-Palestine: The Cancer," had whipped up anti-Semitic opinion.... "Israel-Palestine: The Cancer" was a nasty piece of work, replete with lies, slanders and myths about "the chosen people," "the Jenin massacre," describing the Jews as "a contemptuous people taking satisfaction in humiliating others," "imposing their unmerciful rule," and so on. Yet it was no worse than thousands of other news reports, editorials, commentaries, letters, cartoons and headlines published throughout Europe in recent years, in the guise of legitimate and reasoned discussion of Israeli policies.... Grotesque and utterly false comparisons such as these should have no place in reporting or commenting on the Middle East. Yet although the French court ruling -- the first of its kind in Europe -- is a major landmark, no one in France seems to care. The country's most distinguished newspaper, the paper of record, has been found guilty of anti-Semitism. One would have thought that such a verdict would prompt wide-ranging coverage and lead to extensive soul-searching and public debate. Instead, there has been almost complete silence, and virtually no coverage in the French press".

Democrats? "One-quarter of all Americans met the criteria for having a mental illness within the past year, and fully a quarter of those had a "serious" disorder that significantly disrupted their ability to function day to day, according to the largest and most detailed survey of the nation's mental health, published yesterday."

Black GOPers: "African-Americans who are Republicans take it on the chin a whole lot," said Smothers, a 35-year-old educational psychologist. "Some feel safer voting Republican and keeping it to themselves." So to let people know black Republicanism is no oxymoron, Smothers and Wolaridge have helped form Black Republicans in the County of Kern. BRICK, a 1-year-old chapter of a statewide organization, wants to promote the GOP agenda, find qualified blacks to run for local office and through education, reverse some of the ills plaguing the black community. The group reminds people a Republican president freed the slaves, Republican congressmen voted for civil rights legislation and a Republican -- from Bakersfield, no less -- was chief justice when the U.S. Supreme Court desegregated public schools in its 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education decision. And it tries to dispel the notion the Democratic Party is the party of poor people. Actually, BRICK members argue, Democrats have created an "underclass" of people too reliant on government."

Strange Justice has a disturbing post on the strange state of Florida justice at the moment.

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

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 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.

Leftist ideologues 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 and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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TUESDAY ROUNDUP

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

On Dissecting Leftism I note the amazing lies of Australia's Left-leaning academic historians

On Political Correctness Watch I note that radical feminists treat men like the "niggers" of the old South

On Greenie Watch I note that in California the Greenies are trying to save flies!

On Education Watch I ask: are Spanish-only schools coming in California?

On Gun Watch I note that Californian legislators are trying to put serial nos. on bullets!

On Leftists as Elitists I have a report on the antisemitic British elite

On Socialized Medicine I report a bureaucratic health care system that has totally bogged down

On Blogger News I look at political centrism and its implications

On Majority Rights I summarize research into psychological authoritarianism

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

US economy, trade deficit, money supply and growth : No matter what the current crop of Pollyanna's think, the US economy's insatiable demand for imports has nothing to do with a 'demographic gap between the US and other developed countries'
The Australian economy, manufacturing and the exchange rate: There is considerable dispute about whether the Australian economy is running into capacity constraints. So what is really happening?
Australian economy: wages and the fallacy of union bargaining: Tragically for Australia's unemployed, our rightwing economists appear to be doing nothing to educate the public in basic economics or even economic history
Rebuilding the Twin Towers: The Twin Towers had been under attack by terrorists for years because they were such a perfect symbol of a free economy
What is the Best Way to Prevent Abortions?: One sobering statistic reveals that every time a teenage girl has extramarital sex, she has a 47 percent chance of catching the virus that causes cervical cancer
In my opinion what is CNN, O'Reilly and Newsweek?: Newsweek deliberately contributed to the escalation of Muslim hatred towards the US

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ELSEWHERE

Amnesty backs off "Despite highly publicized charges of U.S. mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, the head of the Amnesty International USA said on Sunday the group doesn't "know for sure" that the military is running a "gulag."" [The damage is done now, however. Their "humanitarian" cover is blown. Everybody now knows that they are loony Leftists]

German media as mad as in Hitler's day: "Germany's PBS station ARD alleges the Bush family's involvement in the 9/11 WTC attacks. I watched the Sunday night prime time movie in stunned disbelief. The subtext of the plot was the explicitly stated allegation that 9-11 was instigated by the Bush family for oil and power. TV audience for the movie was 7.27 million."

For those who missed the spearing of Krugman by Okrent in the NYT, there is a good reprise here. Sounds like Okrent is one of the diminishing band of decent Democrats.

Students rebel against Leftist propaganda: "Best-selling author Erica Jong was booed and told to "Shut up!" and "Go Home!" during her 40-minute speech yesterday at the College of Staten Island's commencement exercises. As Ms. Jong, best known for her 1973 novel "Fear of Flying," talked about everything from truth in advertising to truth in politics and the shallowness of public relations -- but said precious little about graduation -- some of the thousands in attendance on the great lawn at the college's Willowbrook campus stood up and began to object loudly. A little less than halfway through her speech, some graduates began tossing around an inflatable beach volleyball. Some even got up from their chairs, just yards from her podium, to go chat with friends and family who were seated behind them.... Ms. Jong's remarks were met with some vehement disapproval. "She gave a political speech when she was supposed to be doing a pep talk," said the father of a CSI graduate who declined to give his name. "Some graduates wanted to throw stuff at her. Whoever heard of a commencement speaker talking about body bags?" Dorothy, a 48-year-old mother of a CSI graduate, categorized Ms. Jong's speech as "all-around bashing. "It was disgusting, despicable," said the Fort Wadsworth woman, who would not give her surname. "She called politicians liars, called us all liars. She trashed America.

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

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 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.

Leftist ideologues 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 and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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

A short essay on Leftism

I don't have any urgent comments on current events to put up today so I thought I might stand back a bit and reflect:

By "Leftist" I mean here someone more extreme than a mere VOTER for a democratic socialist party such as The Australian Labor Party or the U.S. Democratic party -- though Leftists in my sense may well be members and officers of such parties. I mean by "Leftist" someone who is committed to a high degree of control over society and coercion of people in it with the ostensible aim of "levelling" incomes and other privileges among people in the society concerned. In the 20th Century, such people normally had at least some Marxist sympathies.

What I think the facts show is that Leftists are basically angry, hate-filled people who hunger for power over others and enjoy hurting others but who hide their malign and hurtful motivations under a cloak of humanitarian intentions. Their anger at the ordinary people about them leads them to want to control, hurt and change those about them -- by violence and mass-murder if necessary. Their proclaimed humanitarian intentions and concern for "the worker" are, therefore, just deception and camouflage -- perhaps unconscious deception and camouflage in some cases.

There was a poster around the universities a few years back that is rather informative about the Left-wing viewpoint. It said: "I love humanity. It's just people that I can't stand". My own way of putting much the same point would be to say that Leftists (in my sense) say that they "care" for people but will cheerfully murder half of them -- whereas conservatives do not claim to love humanity but they do not want to murder half of them either.

I had a Communist girlfriend some years back -- a schoolteacher by trade, funnily enough. She had talents other than her politics. I noticed at the time how much anger she had in her towards all sorts of people and thought how well that fitted in with her support for Communism. She was basically a gentle nurturing person but anger leads to hatred and hatred leads to murder. It is hard for me to understand how any decent person can ever have supported anything as brutal as Communism but the fact that large numbers of intelligent people often did tends to show where anger and hatred can lead otherwise decent people.

The characteristic Left-wing slogan is: "Smash X" -- where X can be almost anything -- from the current government, to racism, to big business, to some particular law etc etc. They are very big on smashing things -- with revolution being only the most extreme example of that. If some person or group is not doing what the Leftist wants or thinks that they ought to do, the Leftist immediately wants to coerce them (with violence or otherwise) or murder them. Nice people! They want power over other people at any price. Beware anyone who stands in their way!

All the great mass-murders of the 20th Century (under the control of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Tse Tung) were committed in the name of socialism and "the people". Compared to these crimes, lesser slaughters such as that by the Serbs in Kosovo (who were in any case led by their old Communist boss, Slobodan Milosevic) pale into insignificance. It is hard to think that anything could be worse than Serb troops throwing a 2 year old toddler down a well in front of his mother but "socialists" can do it.

My account of Leftist motivations would seem to explain a lot. It does make sense of a lot of seemingly senseless behaviour -- which is a good test of any scientific theory. For instance, only a fool or a scoundrel would advocate such counterproductive nostrums as State ownership of industry or rent control and I do not accuse those on the Left of being fools. They are too smart for their own good, if anything. They think no-one can teach them anything. Advocating State ownership of industry or rent control is nonsense if you really want to improve the long-term lot of the worker but is, of course, perfectly rational if your real main aim is to concentrate as much power and control as possible in your own hands (or in the hands of your clique).

In my view the reason why psychologists tend to be Leftist is also that psychology (like teaching) seems to offer the prospect of personal power over the minds of others -- the ultimate form of coercion. Leftists want that and are attracted to studying psychology for that reason. Fortunately their own innate dishonesty makes them very bad at it.

As I see it, most real Leftists (advocates of a high degree of State coercion and control -- who in turn are generally intellectuals of some kind) start out with some degree of intellectual orientation but little capacity for intellectual originality. They are, in other words, theologians rather than philosophers. They can debate and rehash an existing body of thought ad nauseam but are barren of new ideas. Anybody who knows the vast lengths to which they go to in debating "what Marx really meant" will see the appositeness of the "theologian" appellation. The excitement over the discovery of Marx's "Grundrisse" was also like the discovery of a new holy book. Nonetheless their intellectual orientation does alert them to the many ways in which the world around us is not ideal and makes them want to propose ways of improving things. Because they are not very good (i.e. unoriginal) intellectuals, however, they can come up with only the crudest of proposals (i.e. make people behave better).

When life eventually forces them to confront the evidence that their crude methods tend to be inhumane and counterproductive they face being shown up as the inferior intellectuals they are. They face being shown up as wrong and foolish, meaning that their self esteem is threatened. So they either abandon the Left-wing romance with coercion and change their views to more conservative ones or if they are really infatuated with coercion they stay Leftist by using any and every device available to aid that.

And the most insidious device that they can use is intellectual dishonesty. They simply refuse to believe anything adverse to them and will themselves lie to manipulate others ("for their own good"). Thus I remember Leftists of the bad old days in the '50s and 60's who greeted accounts of Stalin's purges and massacres of his own people as "inventions of the capitalist press". How do you persuade such people? You can say that we have a free press rather than a capitalist one but since mass media do tend to be big businesses this can be made to sound implausible too. The truth is that you cannot persuade such people and waste your time by trying. "There are none so blind as those who will not see". All the evidence on almost any question will seldom be available at any one time and place so all or almost all judgments of fact have to be made on a probabilistic basis. So all the intellectually dishonest person has to do is to keep demanding higher and higher probabilities before he will believe. You soon reach the point where that level is unobtainable so he looks like he has had a polemical victory of sorts. He has. Dishonesty has its rewards. It is still despicable and misleading, however. So a Leftist is also someone who uses dishonesty in support of coercion.

It may be argued that on my account of things Leftists should also tend to be policemen etc. Policemen have a lot of interpersonal power. In fact, of course, policemen, the military etc tend to be very Rightist. There are several obvious answers to this. Perhaps the most obvious is that these jobs are not very intellectual and the Leftist does start out as a (second-rate) intellectual. Another answer is that the ratio of gain to risk is high. Policemen and soldiers risk getting shot and only ever gain temporary power over a few individuals. For a power-mad Leftist that is just not a very attractive offer. It is a bad deal. When the Leftist takes up arms he tends to do so as a guerilla (so he can shoot from safety) and for very big stakes (major social change --a "revolution" -- that will make him a big-shot if it succeeds). He does not want power over just one or two individuals. He really wants power over everybody -- for himself or his clique. A really nice guy(!). Teaching or psychology, of course, offer power without much cost or threat.

There is some support for the account I have given in the academic literature. For example, a paper by Winter & Wiecking [Winter, D.G. & Wiecking, F.A. (1971) The new Puritans: Achievement and power motives of New Left intellectuals. Behavioral Science, 16, 523-530] tells a bit about Leftist power motives and the many books and articles by Rothman and Lichter [e.g. Rothman, S. & Lichter, R.S. (1982) Roots of radicalism: Jews, Christians and the New Left Oxford: Univ. Press] tell about Leftists being in love with themselves -- "narcissism" if you are being polite about it, "arrogance" if not. A paper by Himmelfarb gets it pretty right too [Himmelfarb, G. (1989) Victorian values/Jewish values. Commentary, 87(2), 23-31.]

As I said at the beginning, one must distinguish between real Leftists (a small but poisonous clique) and those who vote for them. Real Leftists (Communists, Trotskyists and their usually "intellectual" ilk) have virtually no voter support in moderately well-informed societies (i.e. in the developed world) but they do at times manage to dominate mass political organizations of democratic society (e.g. the British Labour party up until the late 90s). People who vote for such parties can often be (as S.M. Lipset points out in his 1960 book Political man) actually quite conservative. They tend to be working class people who simply vote for those who appear to offer them the best deal. In other words, Leftist lies and pretences of good intentions do sometimes gain votes from those least able to be critical. Even then, the Leftists cannot be too overt. The obvious extremism of the British Labour Party in the '70s and '80s was the main reason for the Conservatives' long term in office. Mrs Thatcher's biggest asset was the British Labour Party. People seldom liked her and her Conservative government much but liked the alternative even less. British Labour was in fact still so hopelessly in cloud-cuckoo land in the early 90s that they could not even beat the wimpish John Major in the midst of a recession!

I remember saying to supporters of the British Labour Party in the 90s, "But your lot are so hopeless that they couldn't even beat John Major". That remark was obviously far from original to me but it always went home. It tended to strike them dumb in fact. With the pain of having to bear remarks like that, no wonder they gave up most of their old policies soon after.

Under Tony Blair they in general became just another bumbling conservative party -- except for a bit of feel-good rhetoric and tokenistic reform (such as further reform of the already emasculated House of Lords and the banning of hunting to hounds). They even started to espouse "family values" -- the old catchcry of the religious Right. The penalty of their pre-Blair Leftist extremism was impotence. They gained power only by abandoning most of their old committments to Leftist causes. That the party of unilateral disarmament became the party of Iraq intervention was truly a seismic shift. Only their love of bureaucracy and big spending survived.

About a third of the people (e.g. in Allende's Chile) can sometimes be persuaded to support the Leftists. Some of those can be sincere. In the long run, however, they will learn. At what a price! Generally after many deaths: Tibet! China's Tienanmen Square and Great Leap Backward under Mao! The Hungary of Imre Nagy and Janos Kadar! The Czechoslovakia of Dubcek! The Cambodia of Pol Pot! The incredible human, economic and environmental disaster of Soviet Russia! What a lovely list of achievements for the so-smart Leftist intellectuals (really arrogant ignoramuses) to contemplate! Not that they care, of course.

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

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 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.

Leftist ideologues 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 and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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A NAZI GRAPHIC

I rarely put up graphics on this blog both because I like the page to load fast and because I don't have much bandwidth. But the graphic below is too interesting to miss. Although Leftists furiously dispute it, readers of this blog will be aware that there is any amount of evidence to show that Hitler was exactly what he said he was -- a national socialist. For those who want to check it, I have presented a small selection of the evidence of his socialism here.

Aside from the nationalism, it is amazing how much Mein Kampf sounds like modern Leftism in fact. Even Hitler's antisemitism would pass unremarked among modern Leftists. And Hitler's nationalism was in fact one way in which he was smarter than modern Leftists. Have a look at the 1939 Nazi propaganda placard below (a Wochenspruch for the Gau Weser/Ems). The placard promotes one of Hitler's sayings. The saying is, "Es gibt keinen Sozialismus, der nicht aufgeht im eigenen Volk" -- which I translate as "There is no socialism except what arises within its own people". Hitler spoke a very colloquial German so translating that one was not easy but I think that is about as close to it as you can get.



(If the image does not come up, click here)

As some modern context for that saying, note that there have now been various psychological studies (e.g. here) showing that people are more willing to share with others whom they see as like themselves. That leads to the view that socialism will find its strongest support among an ethnically homogeneous population -- which the Scandinavian countries notably were until recently. And ethnic diversity therefore will undermine support for socialism (as in the U.S.A.). And from my studies of them, I have noted that the Scots are a very brotherly lot. There is even a line in a famous Harry Lauder song that says: "Where brother Scots foregather ...". And of course the Scots are enormously socialistic. When Margaret Thatcher came to power on a huge swing towards the Conservatives in England, Scotland actually swung away from the conservatives.

So the "diversity at all costs" orientation and open borders policies of the modern Left are actually very inimical to the socialistic aims of the Left. The modern day Left do not see that their promoting of infinite diversity will undermine support for socialism. Hitler did.

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

When did the US economy begin to crack? Like the 1929s boom the Clinton boom was replete with lessons for the US economy. Unfortunately the lessons have been completely ignored by the Fed and the economic commentariat An economic illiterate at Crikey smears the H. R. Nicholls Society on labour market reform Crikey might be noted for many things but certainly not its economic commentary. It recently published an attack on H. R. Nicholls Society by an economic illiterate Does China determine US interest rates? China's exchange rate policy has very little effect if at all on changes in the demand for US dollars and the level of US interest rates The media covers for the murderous Fidel Castro and does his dirty work The sickening hypocrisy of The Age is unbelievable. Now it is parroting the sadistic Castro's demands Outing the "Liberal Democrats" at NPR I had the idea of researching what the other side is doing, so I decided to search Google.com for the words "Liberal Democrat." I found some very interesting things

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HOLLYWOOD PAST AND PRESENT

Far Leftist Hollywood in the past: "Until now, Hollywood's political history has been dominated by a steady stream of films and memoirs decrying the "nightmare" of the Red Scare. But in Red Star Over Hollywood, Ronald and Allis Radosh show that the real drama of that era lay in the story of the movie stars, directors and especially screenwriters who joined the Communist Party or traveled in its orbit, and made the Party the focus of their political and social lives. The authors also show the Party's attempts at influencing filmmaking; their greatest achievement being the film Mission To Moscow, which justified Stalin's great purge trials.... The Radoshes' most controversial discovery is that during the investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Hollywood Reds themselves were beset by doubts and disagreements about their disloyalty to America, and their own treatment by the Communist Party."

Far Leftist Hollywood today: "Long hospitable to the countercultural meme about the evils of capitalism, Hollywood, which ironically is one of the most successful examples of big business in America, has ratcheted up its war against the dreaded profit motive.... Hollywood has a long tradition of producing movies that bash the capitalist system and while it has every right to use film as a medium to criticize the excesses of capitalism, is it truth these artists seek to portray? More likely, it is a complete lack of knowledge and understanding of the virtues of the free-market.... How expansive is this assault on corporate culture? By the age of 18, the average TV viewer has seen businessmen and businesswomen attempt more than 10,000 murders and countless lesser offenses ranging from extortion and bribery to kidnapping and dumping of toxic waste, according to a survey by the Media Institute".

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ELSEWHERE

I mentioned yesterday the new findings tracing the genetic basis for high Jewish IQ. There have been many summaries of the work in the media so I thought some people may wish to go past the summaries and look at the original report. It is here (PDF). Interesting that it is only the Ashkenazim (Western Jews) that show the high IQ and also interesting that persecution of Jews seems not to have been important. The article is also a useful short introduction to the academic IQ literature for those unfamiliar with it.

Logical Meme has got a roundup of several recent findings about genetic differences between races. Reality is SO incorrect!

Good comment on the Gitmo "Gulag" from the Locker Room: "With all of the attention generated by Amnesty International's recent report on Guantanamo, an important question needs to be asked. Did Amnesty International also visit Castro's prisons? In his book, Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant, Humberto Fontova states, "Given Cuba's population, Castro incarcerates at a higher rate than Stalin," which leads one to believe that there are a lot of prisons on that island that needed a visit while Amnesty was in the area. According to Fontova, Castro's prisons are true Gulags! Through his interviews with the survivors of Castro's Gulags, Fontova's presents a clear picture of the horrific conditions and treatment of prisoners in Cuba's prisons. From Castro's practice of draining and selling the blood of prisoners to the severe torture endured by prisoners, these are the true Gulags on the island of Cuba, not Guantanamo. Fontova also notes that Castro's prisons are 80% black because like many true Communists, Castro is a racist. When Fontova speaks in Raleigh on June 14, I'm sure he can tell us what Cuban prisons Amnesty International should have observed"

Malkin on the facts about Gitmo: "The mainstream media and international human rights organizations have relentlessly portrayed the Guantanamo Bay detention facility as a depraved torture chamber operated by sadistic American military officials defiling Islam at every turn. It's the "gulag of our time," wails Amnesty International.... Erik Saar, who served as an army sergeant at Gitmo for six months and co-authored a negative, tell-all book about his experience titled Inside the Wire, inadvertently provides us more firsthand details showing just how restrained, and sensitive to Islam -- to a fault, I believe -- the officials at the detention facility have been. Each detainee's cell has a sink installed low to the ground, "to make it easier for the detainees to wash their feet" before Muslim prayer, Saar reports. Detainees get "two hot halal, or religiously correct, meals" a day in addition to an MRE (meal ready to eat). Loudspeakers broadcast the Muslims' call to prayer five times a day. Every detainee gets a prayer mat, cap and Koran. Every cell has a stenciled arrow pointing toward Mecca."

Buchanan on "Throat": "And so the great mystery, "Who was Deep Throat?" reaches its anticlimax. He turns out to be a toady who oversaw black bag jobs for J. Edgar, violated his oath and, out of malice and spite, leaked the fruits of an honest FBI investigation to the nest of Nixon-haters over on 15th Street, then lied about it for 30 years. Why did Felt lie? Because Felt knew he had disgraced himself and dishonored everything an FBI agent should stand for. He didn't want his old comrades to know what a snake he had been.... Not one miscreancy committed by Nixon's men did not have its antecedent in the White Houses of JFK or LBJ. But they got away with it, including the distribution to the press of dirt on Dr. King, picked up by secret FBI photo and wiretap. What Segretti dirty trick remotely approaches that one, which the liberal press covered up?"

Institutionalized Leftism: "The BBC's world is one in which America is always wrong, George W. Bush is a knuckle-dragging simpleton, people of faith are frightening ignoramuses, and capitalism is a rot on the fabric of social justice. Through this prism, the United Nations is the world's supreme moral authority, multiculturalism is always a force for good, war is never warranted, and U.S. Republicans sprinkle Third World children over their Cheerios for breakfast."

A good article here on anti-Christian attitudes in the Canadian media. The article concludes: "In the meantime, how exactly the Globe would have the Conservative Party meet this ominous "Christian" peril, it did not say. Will candidates for nomination be formally questioned under oath: "Are you now, or have you ever been, a Christian?" Canada is not there yet, of course. But we're progressing."

A great Milton Friedman saying: "A private firm that makes a serious blunder may go out of business. A government agency is likely to get a bigger budget."

I am sorry to see that Australian blogger A.E. Brain is having a lot of health problems. Let's hope the medicos get to the bottom of the problems and give him an easier life.

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

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 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.

Leftist ideologues 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 and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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EUROPE

What incomprehensibly arrogant European logic! Only governments can kill the EU constitution, the voters don't matter: "Britain is leading moves to shelve the European constitution until EU leaders agree a way forward after the emphatic "no" vote in France and the Netherlands. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, is expected to tell MPs on Monday that legislation paving the way for a British referendum will be suspended until there is "clarity" from EU leaders. Officials in Brussels fear that suspending the ratification process is tantamount to killing it, and European leaders have demanded that the process continue despite the defeats."

David Brooks on learning from the EU: "Forgive me for making a blunt and obvious point, but events in Western Europe are slowly discrediting large swaths of American liberalism. Most of the policy ideas advocated by American liberals have already been enacted in Europe: generous welfare measures, ample labor protections, highly progressive tax rates, single-payer health care systems, zoning restrictions to limit big retailers, and cradle-to-grave middle-class subsidies supporting everything from child care to pension security. And yet far from thriving, continental Europe has endured a lost decade of relative decline. Western Europeans seem to be suffering a crisis of confidence. Election results, whether in North Rhine-Westphalia or across France and the Netherlands, reveal electorates who have lost faith in their leaders, who are anxious about declining quality of life, who feel extraordinarily vulnerable to foreign competition - from the Chinese, the Americans, the Turks, even the Polish plumbers."

Amusing comment from Thomas Friedman: "It is interesting because French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Good luck."

I am still laughing about this desperate post from Rockwell: "There is a more recent indebtedness to France that most Americans lack the decency to acknowledge: the refusal of Chirac's regime to join forces with George W. Bush's unprovoked aggression against Iraq, the first step in a neocon-inspired effort to get the world to prostrate itself at the feet of American emperors. By refusing to join with such lap dogs as Tony Blair -- eager to roll over in exchange for any morsel of recognition from the grand imperator -- the French became a symbol to other nations of the importance of pursuing a course of principled integrity in dealing with others."

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ELSEWHERE

Surprise, Surprise: ""U.N. satellite imagery experts have determined that material that could be used to make biological or chemical weapons and banned long-range missiles has been removed from 109 sites in Iraq, U.N. weapons inspectors said in a report obtained Thursday. U.N. inspectors have been blocked from returning to Iraq since the U.S.-led war in 2003 so they have been using satellite photos to see what happened to the sites that were subject to U.N. monitoring because their equipment had both civilian and military uses."

There is an amusing review here of a book on "God's politics" by Jim Wallis, the Leftist "Evangelical" whose congregation consists of about 40 people.

Publius Pundit has more on the absurdly biased Amnesty International and its allies in the media.

And this pathetic old fool is a "moderate" Muslim: "Mahathir Mohamad, modern Malaysia's founding father and moderate Islam's self-styled champion, denounced the Bush administration yesterday as a "rogue regime" bent on terrorising innocent civilians. He also said he was disappointed that Tony Blair, whom he called a "proven liar", had won re-election after joining the US invasion of Iraq. ... Asked whether he regretted his statement that "Jews rule the world by proxy", which caused an international furore in 2003, Mr Mahathir said he took nothing back."

Why Jews are brainier: "The idea that some ethnic groups may, on average, be more intelligent than others is one of those hypotheses that dare not speak its name. But Gregory Cochran, a noted scientific iconoclast, is prepared to say it anyway. He is that rare bird, a scientist who works independently of any institution.... Together with Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending, of the University of Utah, he is publishing, in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Biosocial Science, a paper which not only suggests that one group of humanity is more intelligent than the others, but explains the process that has brought this about. The group in question are Ashkenazi Jews. The process is natural selection."

Fathers rights victory: "A determined father in Massachusetts has delivered an early Father's Day gift to non-custodial parents, the overwhelming majority of whom are dads. Dr. Henry M. Fassler has successfully contested a 1998 Massachusetts law that requires a non-custodial parent to have court certification as a non-batterer on a yearly basis before he (or she) is allowed access to their children's school records. The school system currently views all non-custodial parents as guilty of battery until proven innocent. But all that is going to change."

Sad story: "The forced removal of the Bushmen was the culmination of what the Botswana government said was years of effort to bring development to southern Africa's most traditional people. The Bushmen have resisted at every turn, defying hunting restrictions, refusing to abandon their villages and battling the government in a court challenge they hope will reverse policies that, they say, have pushed them to the edge of extinction."

Private sector is key to African development: "The United Nations and the Commission for Africa, a British government group headed by the Prime Minister Tony Blair, have recently called for massive increases in foreign aid to Africa. But past aid to African governments achieved little. Economic growth in Africa, as in the rest of the world, depends on a vibrant private sector. African entrepreneurs, however, face daunting constraints. They are prevented from creating wealth by predatory political elites who control the state. African political elites divert private sector savings to finance their own consumption and to strengthen the repressive apparatus of the state. Unfortunately, Western aid continues to flow to the source of Africa's problems -- the African governments."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its usual big range of select reading.

On LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS today I have a dissection of a really crazy bit of Leftism that calls GWB "The Spoiled Man-Child"!

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

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 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.

Leftist ideologues 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 and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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"LIBERALS" HAVEN'T CHANGED

Why are Americans who advocate broadly the reverse of what 19th century English liberals advocated still called liberals? The answer given to that is usually in terms of a steady Leftward drift and that explanation has its merits in isolation. But consider another much less well-known but even more striking phenomenon: What American "progressives" believed in the early 20th century. I have already documented what that was at some length elsewhere so I will just summarize here: The Left of American politics from the beginning of the 20th century up to FDR and the "New Deal" were essentially Fascist. They believed in eugenics, in nationalism, in national uniformity, in war as a purifying force, in the inferiority of Jews and blacks etc. Nowadays the American Left rejects all that with apparent horror (though the antisemitism does seem to have roared back with a vengeance recently). So how did THAT huge change in doctrine come about? I think there is a single explanation for both changes. And that explanation is a psychological one. Psychological explanations for conservatism (e.g. Norton & Aughey, 1981; Gilmour, 1978; Feiling, 1953; Kirk, 1993, Scruton, 2002, Standish, 1990) are routine (though Leftist accounts of conservative psychology are amazingly counter-factual) but I think Leftism also has to be explained psychologically.

As I have set out at great length elsewhere, the primary motive for most Leftist activists and intellectuals (though not for most Leftist followers) is to get acclaim for themselves. That is a perfectly normal human motivation but one that is pursued by Leftists more or less to the exclusion of all else. But how do you get acclaim? The surest way by far is to adopt as one's own whatever it is that the population already acclaims and become a great champion of that. If people generally think it is unquestionable that blacks and Jews are inferior and need to be kept down then a Leftist will become a vigorous advocate of keeping blacks and Jews down. And Leftists did just that in the early 20th century. Up until World War II Harvard had an excellent relationship with the Hitler regime, for instance and Hitler in turn took American eugenic policies as a model for his own. But if certain world horrors take place (WWII) which cause people to change their views and see tolerance is a virtue above all else then Leftists will immediately become great preachers of tolerance. And that too has now happened.

And something similar happened in the 19th century. England was at that time enormously influential and powerful so whatever was characteristically English came in for great scrutiny, not the least in England itself. What was it that made England great? And as I have set out at great length elsewhere, the English themselves had for centuries seen their liberties as a great national treasure. English liberty was a byword and its virtue was unquestionable. So again Leftists did the sort of thing that they always do. They became great champions of liberty. They supported laissez faire in business and writers such as J.S. Mill pushed ideas of liberty to just about their logical extreme. Conservatives, of course stuck with the ideas of extensive but not unlimited liberty that had been normal up until that time. That the "liberals" of that time really were just Leftists can perhaps most clearly be seen in the case of Mill himself. As I have set out briefly here and here the actual policies Mill advocated in parliament were often quite socialist and interventionist. If he could get acclaim for himself by advocating various government interventions in people's lives, all his pro-liberty principles suddenly vanished, just as eugenics suddenly vanished from the Leftist vocabulary after Hitler.

So conservatives just plod along with their boring quest for balance and realism (including, as always, liberty up to a point and tolerance up to a point) while Leftists push what are usually good ideas to extremes. Leftists once masqueraded as extremely pro-liberty. They now masquerade as extremely pro-tolerance. But they believe in neither. Their behaviour always gives them away as believing in nothing but their own entitlement to power. Leftists who get virtually unlimited power (Stalin, Mao etc) soon show how much liberty and tolerance they believe in.

References:
Feiling, K. (1953) Principles of conservatism. Political Quarterly, 24, 129-133.
Gilmour, I.H.J.L. (1978) Inside right. London: Quartet.
Kirk, R. (1993) Ten conservative principles. Russell Kirk Center.
Norton, P. & Aughey, A. (1981) Conservatives and conservatism. London: Temple Smith
Scruton, R. (2002) A question of temperament. Opinion Journal, Dec. 10th.
Standish, J.F. (1990) Whither conservatism? Contemporary Review 256, 299-301.

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ELSEWHERE

Ben Stein has the best comment yet on "Deep Throat" and Richard Nixon. Ben was a Nixon speechwriter so he knows it all.

Austin Bay has a good comment on the recent destruction by Amnesty International of its own credibility. I was a member myself once but withdrew after some one-sided criticisms of Israel from them.

Feser on "legislating morality:" It's not just a Christian thing "For as we've seen, liberals and libertarians themselves appeal to certain moral principles in defending their favored policies. So how can they consistently criticize conservatives for doing the same? Isn't the liberal trying to 'legislate morality' when he advocates redistributing wealth in the name of fairness? Isn't he thereby 'imposing his moral views' on the wealthy? Aren't libertarians also 'imposing their moral views' on liberals by trying to stop such redistribution? If libertarians who think that redistributive taxation amounts to theft could enact a law forbidding it, wouldn't this too amount to 'legislating morality?'"

Who do these hysterics think they are persuading? "On April 29 and 30, liberal activists gathered in New York City for a weekend conference on "Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right." ... The conference was sponsored by People for the American Way, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and the National Council of Churches (NCC), along with the left-wing periodicals The Nation and The Village Voice... The tone of the speakers was often quite shrill. "Jim Jones [the 1970s cult leader who led followers in a mass suicide] has gone mainstream!" cried journalist Katherine Yurica. "Today we are living in a nation governed by an unholy cult!" Yurica maintained that the Republican Party had gained power through "Hitlerian tactics." She insisted that evangelical leaders from Billy Graham to Jerry Falwell "had to have read Hitler's Mein Kampf." She explained, "I say this confidently because anyone who has learned to quack like a duck has studied ducks!""

This article in Harpers about "America's most powerful megachurch" seems to have got a lot of attention. It is very informative but the author never misses a chance to sneer.

Jimmy Carter: "It was Carter's pacifism that allowed the fall of the shah in Iran, giving fundamentalist Islam a nation-state to control. Subsequently, it was Carter's pacifism that encouraged the Soviets to invade Afghanistan, creating a rallying point for mujahadeen and, as Hayward notes, reviving the idea of jihad. Taken in concert, these two events are the catalysts that have forced the war on terrorism to its present stage. Carter's pacifism, be it de facto or de jure, shaped the modern Middle East and helped Islamic fascism survive its infancy. This is a much more dire legacy than the simple corruption of Democratic ideology."

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

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 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.

Leftist ideologues 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 and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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THE AMAZING LIES OF AUSTRALIA'S LEFT-LEANING ACADEMIC HISTORIANS

Keith Windschuttle has a long and detailed article on Australia's history derived from the original documents. Below I grab just a few excerpts

Unless they have taken a course in history in recent decades, most Australians would be surprised to learn they inhabit one of the world's most shamefully racist countries. The historical consensus today is that the White Australia Policy -- a series of restrictions on non-white immigrants dating from the gold rushes of the 1850s, culminating in the Commonwealth's Immigration Restriction Bill of 1901 -- made this country the moral equivalent of South Africa under apartheid. Some historians even label Australia at Federation one of the 'herrenvolk democracies'. 'Herrenvolk' is the German term for 'master race', so those historians who use it are making a direct comparison between Australian attitudes and the racial nationalism of Nazi Germany.

Apart from two incidents on the goldfields in 1857 and 1861, there was no serious mob violence in Australia perpetrated by whites against non-whites. In both of the goldfields cases, colonial governments defended the Chinese victims, compensated them for their losses and took action against the white perpetrators.

The greatest enthusiasts for White Australia, and the genuine racists of the time, were the members of the late nineteenth century republican Left, especially its writers, artists and other intellectuals. Their strongest opponents were traditional liberals, the purported reactionaries of their era who supported free enterprise against the growing power of the state.

Social Darwinism, rather than being a widely-accepted theory as claimed by historians, was something few Australians at the time had even heard of. Its adherents were a small group of intellectuals at the extremes of opinion. In the 1880s, they were the followers of the theories of political economy of Herbert Spencer. In the 1910s and 1920s, the theory was most strongly advocated by members of the Victorian Socialist Party.

I found one of the biggest single inventions in all Australian historiography. It was made by Henry Reynolds in his book The Other Side of the Frontier. He claimed that, before Federation in 1901, a total of 10,000 Aborigines had been killed by white settlers in Queensland. The source he provided as evidence of this was an article of his own called 'The Unrecorded Battlefields of Queensland', which he wrote in 1978. But if you look up the article you find something very strange. It is not about Aboriginal deaths at all. It is a tally of the number of whites killed by Aborigines. Nowhere does it mention an Aboriginal death toll of 10,000. Reynolds invented this figure and then gave a false citation to disguise what he had done.

Lyndall Ryan says the so-called 'Black War' of Tasmania began in the winter of 1824 with the Big River tribe launching patriotic attacks on the invaders. However, the assaults on whites that winter were made by a small gang of detribalized blacks led by a man named Musquito, who was not defending his tribal lands. He was an Aborigine originally from Sydney who had worked in Hobart for ten years before becoming a bushranger. He had no Tasmanian tribal lands to defend

Lyndall Ryan cites the Hobart Town Courier as a source for several stories about atrocities against Aborigines in 1826. However, that newspaper did not begin publication until October 1827 and the other two newspapers of the day made no mention of these alleged killings.

Lloyd Robson claims the settler James Hobbs in 1815 witnessed Aborigines killing 300 sheep at Oyster Bay and the next day the 48th Regiment killed 22 Aborigines in retribution. It would have been difficult for Hobbs to have witnessed this in 1815 because at the time he was living in India. Moreover, the first sheep did not arrive at Oyster Bay until 1821

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ELSEWHERE

LOL: Some Leftist site must have linked to me recently as I have had an upsurge of hate mail. All abuse, of course. Not a shred of rational argument. Here is my favourite so far (from perryloganclone@yahoo.com of http://www.perrylogan.org) -- Leftist elitism at its arrogant and self-defeating best: "A conservative trying to understand a liberal is like a dog trying to understand its master. Your website betrays the usual right-wing thought disorder of believing you can read minds. Every other phrase is "they don't care" or "they hate" or other confident assurances about what the left feels & thinks. Your site is a collection of bigoted slams against the left--all based on your remarkable ability to read our minds. I promise you, you cannot read the minds of people more intelligent than yourself, no matter how much you may hate them. Unless you can tell me what number I'm thinking, I'll have to conclude you're just another loony."

GWB's Iraq policy is normal for America: "In fact, as John Lewis Gaddis points out in his elegant essay on American foreign policy, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, the national-security policy of President Bush is in fact the traditional American response to external threats. If, in John Quincy Adams’s famous phrase, America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, America nonetheless has never hesitated to send bayonets against monsters that might someday pose a threat".

There is a rather amazing article here about French pandering to Muslim bigotry. The article is in German but what it says is that in French schools, Muslim pupils and their parents have demanded and got separate toilets and dining tables because they do not want to mix with the "unclean" other children. Muslim pupils also refuse to go into churches (on sightseeing tours with other pupils), and have even refused to have lessons about the mediaeval age when the big cathedrals where built. They refuse to dance, sing or make music in school. They reject the theory of evolution in favor of creationism, and (get this) refuse to draw anything that looks even remotely like a Christian cross in the math class. And of course, there is rabid antisemitism. As the report states, Jewish children who can only avoid harassment when they hide their Jewish identity. The article is based on an official French government report under the aegis of Jean-Pierre Obin, General Inspector of the Education Ministry. Unlike other official reports, however, the French have not put this one up on their Education Ministry website. More here (in German). There is an English comment on the report here.

The empty-headedness of cultural relativism: "Too often, cultural relativists cannot get beyond drawing this one conclusion, which they use as ammunition against traditionalists: "The traditions you think of as having an absolute claim on the human race are merely those that happened to have come down to us, and which we have blindly accepted." While this objection does follow logically from the cultural relativists' premise, so too - and just as logically - does this conclusion: If we cannot use our traditional ethos to attack another's, it is equally illegitimate for him to use his to attack ours. If our cultural relativists must forgive those who sacrifice their infants to Moloch, they must also forgive members of their own society who wish to abide by their own traditions. The cultural relativist's position, practiced consistently, collapses into reactionary obscurantism: All cultures, including his own, are incommensurable, so it is impossible to judge any of them by higher standards than those offered by the cultures themselves. The appeal to enlightened reason rings hollow, for if enlightened reason can guide us to condemn characteristics of our own culture by offering us a higher standard by which to judge them, the same standard may also be used to judge other cultures as well. The cultural relativist must make up his mind: Either there is a higher standard or there isn't. If there isn't, it is impossible to judge among competing traditions, as the cultural relativist argues; if there is, it is possible to judge tradition A to be superior to tradition B, provided A meets the higher standard and B does not."

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

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 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.

Leftist ideologues 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 and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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WEALTH AND POVERTY

Comment from a Jesuit in Zimbabwe: "Even if there was more fairness in the trade between the southern and northern hemisphere, debts were largely cancelled and aid was flowing in, as long as bad governance and corruption are tolerated poverty will prevail. What is the point of cancelling debts if that merely frees funds to buy fighter planes in China? What good do better terms of trade make if we destroy our economic base for ideological reasons which makes staying in power priority number one to which all other interests are sacrificed? What good is "more and better aid" if it falls into the long fingers of bureaucratic embezzlers who refuse to be accountable as a matter of "national sovereignty"?.... Too many want a slice of the cake without asking where the cake is coming from. If production is not the focus of all our efforts, the existing wealth produced by others will disappear quickly as it is being shared with "cronies". As long as holding on to power is priority number one, overriding all other interests, the economy will continue to be raided for goodies with which to buy the support of this or that particular group of influential people. Those without influence - the sick, the poor, widows and orphans, the homeless and aliens - will continue to go without medication and treatment, starve and die.... "

Greed: "To leftists, greed is when someone else makes more money than they do. The problem with that word is that it's impossible to objectively define. Is a cab driver that chooses to work 60 hours a week instead of 40 greedy? According to whom? Suppose he wants the extra income to send his children to college? Suppose he wants to blow it in Las Vegas? A market economy doesn't ask these questions. They're irrelevant to public policy. Regardless of his motivations, a farmer who produces twice as much as his neighbor has added that much more to the nation's product. He should be suitably rewarded. The tax collector will relieve him of quite enough of the fruits of his labor. What he does with the rest is his business... Leftists have little regard for the creation of wealth. They take that for granted. Their fun comes in redistributing income and wealth. It may be difficult to define greed, but it's easy to define covetousness. That's the greed of leftists for governmental power to confiscate the property of others".

Start frugally to end up rich: "About to graduate from college? If you've been reading much, you could be forgiven for thinking you should cower under your Star Wars comforter at Mom and Dad's house after collecting your diploma. The media buzz: Becoming a financially independent adult is as tough for today's grads as Hercules' labors (which you can now safely forget) were for him.....; But here's a secret you won't hear in the rush to blame young people's woes on everyone except themselves: Society hasn't lost its ladder to financial stability. Young people have just lost interest in starting out poor. Too many 22-year-olds expect to start their adult lives at their parents' level of material satisfaction, without the 30 years of labor it took them to get there. Our world of easy credit and mysteriously glamorous TV apartments says you can have it all now. But live like you're entitled to your parents' finances, and you'll be back living with them soon enough. Live within your means, though, and you'll achieve financial independence before the naysayers say it's possible".

Thoughts on poverty: "One reads much about the poor in America, their piteous lives, their blighted hopes, and the unrelieved downtreading of them by various social ogres such as oppressive corporations who sell them greasy hamburgers. (Why does my wretched spell-checker object to 'downtreading'? You can't be downtrodden unless someone downtreads you. How obvious is that?) This I submit is goober-brained nonsense. America has precious little poverty, if by poverty you mean lack of something to eat, clothing adequate to keep you warm and cover your private parts, and a dry and comfortable place to sleep. In the 'inner cities' or, as we used to call them, slums, there is horrendous cultural emptiness, yes, and the products of the suburban high schools are catching up fast. But poverty? The kind you see in the backs streets of Port au Prince? It barely exists in the United States."

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ELSEWHERE

Why can't Anglo-Saxons run passenger trains? The British invented them after all. No American should need me to tell them about Amtrak and residents of Australia's largest city (Sydney) are almost beyond frustration with their dangerous and unpunctual trains too. Now we hear that in Britain, a lot of trains ran faster in the age of steam!. One could blame government. The American and Australian passenger railways are government run. The railways of the 19th century were of course private and the present British railways have only recently been privatized and run under a burden of regulations. But when one looks at the fast and punctual Japanese railways one wonders.

China is doing more to help low-income Americans than all the bureaucrats put together: "China on Monday threatened to take the United States to a dispute proceeding at the World Trade Organization if the Bush administration persists in restricting imports of Chinese-made textiles. China also rescinded tariffs on its own textile exports, asserting that it will do nothing to limit its shipments as it offered to do last week so long as the United States and Europe impose their own restrictions."

Airbus problems: "Delivery of Qantas's new flagship double-decker super-jumbo will be delayed by at least six months because of problems at European manufacturer Airbus, triggering penalty payments and damaging the national carrier's plans to secure its pre-eminence on the lucrative Pacific route. The shock news comes less than two months after the Europeans trumpeted the successful maiden flight of the plane and two weeks before they go to battle with rival Boeing at the Paris airshow. Airbus representatives delivered the bad news to Qantas chief executive Geoff Dixon during the International Air Transport Associations annual general meeting in Tokyo this week. The Australian understands delays apply to all aircraft in the A380 program"

Barriers to publishing conservative books come down: "There was "a tremendous amount of marketplace and institutional resistance" to publishing conservative books, said Adam Bellow, an editor at Doubleday. The New York publishing world was a liberal preserve. How things have changed. Over the last 18 months, three superpower publishers have launched conservative imprints: Random House (Crown Forum), Penguin (Sentinel) and, most recently, Simon & Schuster (Threshold, headed by former Bush aide Mary Matalin). Nor is that all. ReganBooks and the Christian publisher Thomas Nelson are putting out mass market right-of-center books, while mid-list conservative titles pour forth from Peter Collier's 5-year-old Encounter Books and several smaller imprints. There's never been a better time to be a conservative author. What's behind the shift? Crown Forum chief Steve Ross thinks Sept. 11 made the industry less reflexively liberal. There's doubtless some truth to that. But what really turned the big New York publishers was the steady stream of bestsellers that Washington-based Regnery was producing.... Right-of-center authors can now reach millions of potential readers without being reviewed by such traditional gatekeepers as the New York Times Book Review or the New York Review of Books, which rarely deigned to review conservative books". (This story originally appeared in the L.A. Times but now appears to be offline. There is a similar article here).

Strange Justice has just put up another amazing story about Canadian justice -- or the lack thereof.

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

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

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 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.

Leftist ideologues 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 and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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