SWEDEN: FASCISM IN SLOW MOTION

I have previously pointed out that modern-day Sweden is rather fun for conservatives to know about but what about the Sweden of the past? I argue below that the old Swedish model -- the "folkhemmet" (people's home) -- gradually became a version of the Fascist "corporate State" with government, business and labor all intertwined to the detriment of the economy

Although it is a commonplace that Hitler got good co-operation from Sweden both before and during the war, the idea that Sweden was itself in any sense Fascist must seem like one of the most absurd suggestions ever made. Has not Sweden been the great icon of the Democratic Left in the postwar period? It has indeed, though these days conservatives have better reasons for mentioning the Swedish experience than Leftists do. Nonetheless, little-recognized though it might be, there are substantial reasons for seeing interwar Sweden as Fascist. Like all Fascisms, however, Swedish Fascism had its own unique national characteristics and its most unusual characteristic was how slowly it developed, with much of its development taking place AFTER WW2 rather than before.

I have set out at considerable length elsewhere the historical details which show that Fascism was nothing more than a particularly authoritarian and nationalist form of Leftism so we only have to ask here whether Sweden in the interwar years was nationalist, authoritarian and Leftist. And the answer to all three questions is undoubtedly: Yes.

And that answer does not depend on the various small explicitly Fascist and pro-Nazi movements that arose in Sweden in the 1930s. It flows from a look at the dominant political party in Sweden from 1932 on: The Social Democratic Party. The program and policy of the Social Democrats centred around transforming Sweden into a folkhemmet (Volksheimat in German). This became the dominant Swedish concept of Sweden in 1932 with the accession to power of the Social Democrats but was well in evidence before that. The concept is usually traced to a book, The State as a Live Form ( Staten som livsform ), written by Rudolf Kjellen in 1910. Like all versions of the word Volk it is not exactly translatable into English as Volk means both "people" and "race" even though there are separate words for people (Leute) and race (Rasse). So folkhemmet is probably best translated as "a home for the Swedish people". And this idea of what Sweden should be was what the Swedish Social Democratic Party preached. The concept is the core of the "Swedish model" and what it brought about was essentially just another version of the characteristic Fascist "corporate" or "collectivist" State. So, like Fascism generally, the Swedish model was seen as a Third Way between Communism and Capitalism.

The Swedish corporate State really got going only in 1938, however, with the Saltsjobaden Agreement between the unions and the employers. This agreement outlawed strikes and created a central wage-fixing system for the whole country.

And the ideology of the Social Democrats did originally include racial elements. The folkhemmet was seen as including only a racially defined folkgemenskap (Volksgemeinschaft, people's community) with members being only people belonging to den Svenska folkstammen (Volkstum, Swedish racial group) with minorities such as the Tornedal Finns being excluded.

And Sweden did have a charismatic leader, in the form of Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson from 1932 to 1946 -- which rather neatly brackets Hitler's years in power (1933 to 1945).

And it was at the initiative of the Social Democrats that Sweden's eugenic laws were set up, with "undesirables" being forcibly sterilized. Does that remind you of anyone?

And Sweden has been essentially a one-party State since 1932, with only a very brief interlude in the 1990s. But what exactly the folkhemmet should consist of evolved and developed only very slowly and gradually. Change in Sweden is glacial even in the hands of Leftists so the fundamentally paternalist folkhemmet took many years to develop a sweeping dominance of Swedish life. Bit by bit taxes were raised, business was regulated and taken over and welfare programs were expanded. It was not in fact until the early 1990s that the whole edifice came crashing down. So the concept of a fatherly government was there from the beginning, the one-party State was there and a quiet conviction of Swedish superiority and unique wisdom was also there.

Like all Fascist ideologies, however, folkhemmet had its own unique national character. Sweden experienced nothing remotely like the huge interwar disruptions that took place in Germany and Italy -- for the excellent reason that Sweden stayed out of WW1. So Swedish nationalism was much calmer and less excitable. Which led to it being neither strident nor expansionist. Swedes felt perfectly comfortable with the burgeoning wealth being produced by their own country and so felt no need for foreign adventures or huge and sudden changes. It should perhaps be noted, however, that there is nothing intrinsic to the Swedish character that is opposed to foreign adventures. That should be obvious both from the Viking age and the perambulations around Europe of Gustavus Adolphus in the 17th century.

One thing that was NOT greatly different, however, was that the power of the Swedish Social Democratic party was founded on its popularity and was achieved by constitutional rather than revolutionary means. Mussolini and Hitler too were very popular and achieved power legally rather than via revolution. Unlike Mussolini and Hitler, however, the Swedish party had no hesitation in renewing its mandate by way of regular and properly conducted elections. And, like the Franco regime in Spain, it kept out of WW2 and thus stayed in power much longer than the Hitler and Mussolini regimes.

So the Swedish folkhemmet State was welfarist, nationalist, paternalist and essentially all-powerful. Because it used its power very sparingly and cautiously, however, and respected civil liberties, it was undoubtedly the mildest of the Fascist States. Fascism varied greatly from country to country (to take a rather striking example, Sir Oswald Mosley initially used to expel from the British Union of Fascists anyone who made antisemitic remarks!) and the distinguishing feature of the Swedish version was undoubtedly that it was the least authoritarian. And after the war the Swedish Social Democrats did as all Leftists did and abandoned overt nationalism -- though a sense of Swedish superiority undoubtedly continued and discreetly made itself apparent from time to time.

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ELSEWHERE

Dick McDonald silences the Left: "Yesterday I got a call from the host whose radio drive-time talk show I have appeared on three times. Kyal informed me that prior to my appearance people from the left would call the show on Social Security matters and scream and call him names. Strangely after my three appearances, the left has left the building. He gets no calls from the left whatsoever. Almost all his calls are positive and his ratings have shot up. All of which proves the point, the left is barren of and unable to discuss issues. We need to confront them. When we do, we win. If you want to tune in, you can listen over the internet at http://www.k-talk.com/ns/Hosts.asp at 4:20 PDT, Thursday August 4, 2005 to my fourth appearance.

Ed Morrissey of "Captain's Quarters" points out how strange is the silence of the mainstream media about the Air America scandal. If it had been a conservative radio network stealing money from the poor it would have been continuous headlines across America for days on end.

Why "Made in China" is good news for the US: "Today, China makes about 8 percent of the world's chips; by 2010, that number may be up to 20 percent. From nowhere to world domination has been the story of China and globalization for the past decade. Textiles, toys, televisions and cellphones -- one global industry after another has succumbed to Chinese competition. Why should chips be any different? Because the chip industry can be an example where globalization works right."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with a big range of reading.

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

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

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

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Brookes News Update

Liberal Party, labour market reform and the unions' minimum wage myth: Union officials are using economic quackery to defend the minimum wage and Liberal Party adviser are letting them get away with it
US deficits and government spending - more fallacies: What Democrats and their media supporters' make a point of downplaying is that deficits occur because spending exceeds revenue
The Murdoch journalist who whitewashed treason: Journalists like Wynhausen have got the gall to slime our society while turning a blind eye to atrocities carried out by the socialist likes of Fidel Castro
G-d save me from the politically correct : The Jews were the canary in the coalmine. Now the terrorists are coming after the 'Sunday People'
America is "Grateful to Almighty God" : Why America truly is a Christian nation
The Liberal Party and social contract nonsense: The striking thing about Australia's Liberal Party is the extent to which many of its supporters, including some in Parliament, are divorced from genuine liberal principles

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ELSEWHERE

More airport madness: "The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has won another victory over the terrorists lurking among American airline passengers. Last Wednesday, it secured a conviction for assault against Phyllis Dintenfass, a 62-year-old schoolteacher who gave as good as she got to a TSA screener. When the screener molested her at a regional airport last September, Mrs. Dintenfass molested her right back, asking, "'How would you like it if I did that to you?'" We ordinary folks might mistake Mrs. Dintenfass for a mild-mannered, neatly coiffed instructor at Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton, Wisconsin. The clairvoyants at the TSA know better. They perceived she's really a terrorist plotting to blow up a plane"

A good article here about the Islamic menace from German publisher Doepfner. Excerpt: "Today we are faced with a particularly grotesque form of appeasement. How is Germany reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in The Netherlands, Britain and elsewhere in Europe? By suggesting - wait for it - that the proper response to such barbarism is to initiate a Muslim holiday in Germany. I wish I were joking, but I am not. A substantial fraction of Germany's Government - and, if polls are to be believed, the German people -- actually believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of fanatical Islamists. One cannot help but recall Britain's Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich, waving that laughable treaty signed by Hitler, and declaring the advent of peace in our time. What atrocity must occur before the European public and its political leadership understands what is really happening in the world?"

Blacks don't want to fight: "The Iraq war is drying up at least part of a pool of recruits the Army has relied upon for decades: black Americans. The Army has long enjoyed a special relationship with black Americans, who have filled its ranks at rates far beyond their share of the population since the draft was abolished in 1973. But in a trend compounding the Army's recruiting woes, those days may be over.... "We saw the most precipitous drop immediately after Sept. 11," Maj. Gen. Michael Rochelle, commander of Army recruiting, said at the Pentagon this year. In fiscal 2001, which ended 19 days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, nearly 23 percent of all new Army recruits were black - as in each of the previous five years. So far in fiscal 2005, which ends Sept. 30, only about 14 percent are.... The Army exceeded its total recruiting goal for June, enlisting 507 more soldiers than its target of 5,650. But that followed four months in which it badly missed its goals, leaving it more than 7,800 short for the fiscal year."

Mad-cow "threat": "For one who would like to see more Democrats in Washington, I spend a disturbing amount of time trying to save the party from itself. Polls show Democrats on the popular side of many big issues: healthcare, Social Security, the environment. But then they go out and lose it on the small stuff. Case in point is their recent tango with the mad-cow 'threat.' Mad-cow disease is a nonissue in the US. As far as we know, not one person has ever died from eating an American cow infected with mad-cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy). And it's not as if Americans haven't been testing beef safety. How many millions of burgers go down every day?"

Some progress in France: "Two months on, Mr de Villepin has, by and large, steered clear of his caricature. He has made employment his priority, dropping in on a job-centre for his first official visit. He is creating a new two-year job contract for companies with fewer than 20 employees, with much-needed easy-dismissal rules, which will come into effect as soon as September. He has promised to tighten controls on welfare benefits. And he has accelerated privatisation, selling a first stake in Gaz de France in July, and announcing a controversial plan to sell three motorway-toll companies this summer."

The insanity of Indian socialism: "When I once went to visit a public sector electricity-generation plant in New Delhi, one of their top officers told me this: I dump the ash (the residue from burning coal) in the river, I do not pay the railways for delivery of the coal, I do not pay the coal company, and I will keep running it this way. Forget about the so-called charitable thoughts of public servants, I could not believe that I was talking to a human being. He was corrupt and irresponsible to the core. Why is someone in such a high position like that? Is it a special racial trait of Indians? Or is it a result of the irresponsible system that socialism, and collectivist cultures create?"

Now 14 million blogs!: "The blogosphere is continuing to grow, with a weblog created every second, according to blog trackers Technorati. In its latest State of the Blogosphere report, it said the number of blogs it was tracking now stood at more than 14.2m blogs, up from 7.8m in March. It suggests, on average, the number of blogs is doubling every five months" [In that context, the current NZ Bear ranking of this blog (no. 527) looks pretty good]

Lots of good articles about Israel from a Christian perspective here

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

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

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

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SOME ECONOMICS

Death tax abolished in Russia: "President Vladimir Putin will in the next few days sign off on a law newly approved by both chambers of parliament that does away with inheritance tax, as well as canceling payment of gift tax by close relatives and spouses. Other transactions will remain subject to real-estate, vehicle, stock, equity and participatory interest gift tax of 13%, the same as Russia's unified income tax rate. The law, due to come into force on January 1, 2006, was drafted by the government with record speed after Putin stated in his April state of the nation address that he thought that it would be a good decision to abolish the inheritance tax".

Death tax boneheads: "Florida Governor Jeb Bush ought to send his counterpart in Connecticut, Republican Jodi Rell, a thank-you note with a box of chocolates and a ribbon tied around it. Last month Ms. Rell marked her first anniversary as Governor by signing into law a tax bill that might as well be called the "Palm Beach Economic Development Act." The law requires that any resident of the Nutmeg State with an estate of more than $2 million pay a death tax of up to 16%--merely for the privilege of dying in Connecticut. The legislators in Hartford hope that the tax will raise $150 million in revenue each year--money that will come in only if the legislators in Hartford are also planning to build a Berlin Wall around the state. Otherwise, expect a stampede of retirees and family businesses out of Connecticut into the many states without a death tax, such as Florida, which has a constitutional prohibition against estate taxes. Thanks to the Connecticut death levy, a successful small business owner with a $10 million estate can save about $1 million by packing up and heading south".

Hear here!: "In a hall of fame for corporate-welfare queens, the sugar industry would occupy a place of special honor. For decades, powerful sugar growers have gotten politicians to enrich them with a protectionist scheme that inflates domestic sugar prices to the detriment of American consumers, American manufacturers, American farmers, and the American economy as a whole. In that congeries of absurdities known as U.S. farm policy, sugar's sweet deal stands out as perhaps the most damaging and least defensible program. Now, more than ever, it needs to be scrapped".

Dumb CAFTA opponents: "Here's what a leading Democrat opponent said in opposition to CAFTA: "I don't see any benefits for workers, for sugar people," said Democratic Rep. Charlie Melancon, who said his family owed everything to 225 years of sugar production in his home state of Louisiana. "We've given away textiles. We've given away steel. We've given away fruits and vegetables," Melancon said. "Now let's just go ahead and give away everything and be dependent on every other country for our food and our defense." The Democrat Melencon forgot his kindergarten economics. If each American were free to trade with Central America for sugar, instead of being forced to buy high priced American sugar, each American would be richer by the amount saved on sugar. The extra money that had been spent on sugar, could then be spent on other things to raise their standard of living. Yes, American sugar workers would lose their jobs but employment would be stimulated in others industries where the extra money was being spent. This is the nature of economic progress. There is no net lose in jobs. We have had growing free trade, despite Democratic insanity, for 200 years. Unemployment is now at 4.9%, a 30 year low. Homeownership is at an all time peak, average home size is bigger than ever, $3000 TV sets are now common, there are now more cars than drivers"

New Zealand expert highlights inferiority of European social model: In a recent speech, Roger Kerr of the New Zealand Business Roundtable compares the robust performance of Anglo-American economies with the stagnant - and statist - economies of Japan and continental Europe. Kerr cites the work of Olaf Gersemann's Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Realities to dispel myths that American success is associated with social costs: "The big world story of the last two decades of the twentieth century was the demise of communism as an economic system and power bloc, and with it the end of the cold war between East and West. At the same time, another story has been unfolding, not as dramatic as the ending of an entire political and economic system but still of great long-term significance. That story is about the pre-eminent success of the Anglo-American economies (which include not just the United States but also Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the United Kingdom) and the relative failure of the various versions of the so-called social market economy or managed capitalism in Continental Europe and Japan. In the last dozen years or so, economies based on free trade, private ownership, light regulation and moderate taxation have opened up what looks increasingly like a decisive lead over economies characterised by active state partnership with business and trade unions in steering the economy, high levels of taxation and social spending, a greater role for banks than for stock markets in corporate ownership and control, and intrusive regulation of business. ...I fully expect American ideas and practices to continue to exert in the twenty-first century the all-pervasive influence they did in the twentieth century and to set the standards by which all societies are judged, however much they may also be resented and subject to bogus criticism. It seems unlikely that hard-working Chinese, Indians and other Asians will be attracted to the European model"

Japan is privatizing its postal system. If it gets through the Japanese parliament it will set a great precedent. Private enterprise has worked miracles for Japan so one hopes that other countries take note. I think Westerners should be a bit embarrassed that Japan has to show the way.

There is an interesting interview with Ghanaian economist George Ayittey here. He says that both democracy and markets were originally part of the African tradition and that abandoning them in favour of socialist ideas is what keeps Africa poor. I am sure that there is a lot of truth in that.

Wal-Mart enemies are no friends of the poor: "If a capitalist corporation gets to be a big success, it inevitably finds itself in the cross-hairs of leftist political activists who don't much like capitalism, and especially don't like large corporations. In the 1980s, General Motors found itself in this position when Michael Moore made the movie "Roger and Me." More recently McDonald's has been a target, attacked by (among other people) film maker Morgan Spurlock in "Super Size Me." Wal-Mart, now the largest business corporation in the world, could hardly escape the activists' ire. The huge retailer has been charged with underpaying and mistreating its employees, destroying communities, and oppressing workers in the Third World.... When economist Emek Basker of the University of Missouri looked at the employment effects of having a Wal-Mart move into a community, he found it actually increases employment. Nostalgia can be gratifying, but it's not a good basis for preferring fewer jobs rather than more. I suspect what the critics really dislike about Wal-Mart is not economic, it's cultural. Wal-Mart is very "red state." It's headquartered in Arkansas. It's mentioned in country songs. The crowd that likes to say it's on the side of poor Americans ought to appreciate a place whose prices make a modest paycheck go a long way. But they prefer to fight the culture wars, and Wal-Mart is their bugaboo".

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

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

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

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LEFTISTS ARE ACTUALLY DUMBER

An age-old technique for deflecting blame and criticism from oneself is to accuse others of what are in fact your own faults. If done unconsciously, psychologists call it "projection". But whether conscious or not, it tends to confuse the issue and makes people think that there is blame on both sides. So it is a very effective strategy in general. And since Leftists have a very great need to hide the hate and destructivesness that are their real motivations, they have used such a stratgey to the full. So much so that you just have to see what they say about conservatives to know what is true of them. They for instance call conservatives closed-minded, simplistic-thinkers, dogmatic and hate-filled when it is they themselves who in fact are spectacularly charaterized by all those attributes (See e.g. here).

And one of their routine accusations is that conservatives are dumb. They get away with that because it is true that most intellectuals tend Left (see here for why). But intellectuals are only a very small part of the population. What about Leftists in general? Are they more or less intelligent than conservatives? As far as I know, I am the only person who has ever had survey data published in an academic journal that answers that. And I found that, by the standards of what one generally observes in the social science literature, the relationship between core Leftist beliefs and LOW intelligence was quite strong. Leftists in general are dumb. See here.

And the emails I get from Leftists certainly confirm that. Usually their only real content is abuse and they usually cannot even do that without making frequent errors in spelling and grammar. I reproduce below one of the briefer such examples of towering intellect that I have received:

OH ! so now we know , your a Nazi .Then fuck off to Washington and join your buddies ( do they even know you exist), you nasty little hate filled jerk. And when you go do fly Al quieda only their pilot was trained by the yanks too !!

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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 dissect the latest nonsense claims about racism

On Political Correctness Watch I note Methodists putting homosexuality ahead of the Bible

On Greenie Watch I note the controversy about the Maldives -- where sea levels are actually FALLING

On Education Watch I show how the Left use schools to create racial tensions

On Socialized Medicine I note that there is often no dignity for patients in public hospital systems

On Gun Watch I note a would-be rapist who got shot by his victim

On Leftists as Elitists I reproduce a savage critique of the Hollywood elite

On Majority Rights I manouvre some white nationalists into saying that fair skin does not matter!

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ELSEWHERE

Capitalism is healthier: "A new study shows that heart disease in Poland has dropped dramatically, probably due to economic and political transformation. A recently published report by the British Medical Journal aimed to explain a dramatic drop in ischemic heart disease (i.e. heart disease resulting from localized tissue anemia due to obstruction of the inflow of arterial blood) in Poland since 1991. By 2002, deaths from coronary heart disease had dropped by 38 percent for men and 42 percent for women aged 45-64 years old. "The fall in death certification rates for ischemic heart disease seems to have been larger than that previously observed in any country in peacetime," the report says. The results were surprising. The report found that: "Reporting biases are unlikely to have exaggerated the true fall in ischemic heart disease; neither is it likely to be mainly due to changes in smoking, drinking, stress, or medical care. Changes in type of dietary fat and increased supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables seem to be the best candidate." And the study links those changes in diet directly with the political and economic changes Poland experienced during the early 1990s".

The British as "useful idiots": "Elements within the British establishment were notoriously sympathetic to Hitler. Today the Islamists enjoy similar support. In the 1930s it was Edward VIII, aristocrats and the Daily Mail; this time it is left-wing activists, The Guardian and sections of the BBC. They may not want a global theocracy, but they are like the West's apologists for the Soviet Union - useful idiots. Islamic radicals, like Hitler, cultivate support by nurturing grievances against others. Islamists, like Hitler, scapegoat Jews for their problems and want to destroy them. Islamists, like Hitler, decree that the punishment for homosexuality is death. Hitler divided the world into Aryans and subhuman non-Aryans, while Islamists divide the world into Muslims and sub-human infidels. Nazis aimed for their Thousand-Year Reich, while Islamists aim for their eternal Caliphate. The Nazi party used terror to achieve power, and from London to Amsterdam, Bali to New York, Egypt to Turkey, Islamists are trying to do the same".

The Democrats do not have philosophies, they have constituencies: "The Democratic "platform" has several odious components. Primarily, the Democrats are totally lacking on ideas on governance. They are unwilling or incapable of stating the simplest political position. Of the many important problems facing the nation, the Republicans are left to carry on alone: Social Security, foreign affairs, War for Democracy, reform of the UN. You name it, and try to find a coherent Democratic position on any of these matters. No such position can be found; no such position exists. In place of considered policies on governance, the Democrats have adopted an unrelieved negative position on all political questions. For example, Social Security is a known problem area, and has been for years; President Clinton was warning about the need to address SS problems a decade ago. Today, Democrats largely deny that any problem exists, and if they are willing to talk about Social Security at all, they want to raise taxes (of course!)"

Chris Brand is blogging up a storm about Australia's "racist" professor -- who had the temerity to say that blacks have a high crime-rate and are therefore undesirable as immigrants.

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

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

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

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SOME RECENT POSTS ON ICJS

The myth of moderate Islam
ABC / Willacy complaint
Beware of Islamics bearing rocket launchers
Beards and scarves aren't Muslim
Letter about PM
Blair takes on 'obscenity' of terrorism
What do Islamist terrorists want?
Democratic Universality and Its Adversaries
Academic Freedom - a continued response
Abbas `condemns' attack on Israelis
When Denial Can Kill
In London, one may seek the Truth under the ground
Discussion of two anti-terrorism Fatwas.
ISRAEL, THE MEDIA AND THE DISENGAGEMENT FROM GAZA
No alternative
Terrorists don't listen to reason
The war within the west
Useful idiots have always apologised for terrorists
A betrayal of trust
Europe's culture clash

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ELSEWHERE

Good one!: "On December 10th 2004 , inner-city minister, Rev Wayne Perryman, - filed a class action Reparation lawsuit (in the United States District Court in Seattle Case No. CV04-2442), alleging "that because of their racist past practices the Democratic Party should be required to pay African Americans Reparations." Perryman said "he based his case on the research that he gathered during the past five years while writing the three editions of his latest book... In his 100-page brief, Perryman concludes that the past racist policies and practices that were initiated against African Americans by the Democratic Party - were no different than the policies and practices that were initiated by the Nazi Party against the Jews. In both situations millions of lives were destroyed (physically, mentally and economically)."

Christian v communist in China: "Richard Spencer reports today from Beijing that there may now be more practising Christians in China than there are members of the Communist Party. The precise figures cannot be known, in a country in which Christians are still persecuted. But the evidence suggests that there may be as many as 80 million or even 100 million members of underground Christian churches in China, unapproved by the state. The Chinese Communist Party, meanwhile, has only 70 million members. If those figures for worshippers are even roughly accurate, then we are looking at a very remarkable development in the history not only of Asia but of all mankind.... Xun Jinzhen, a Christian convert who runs a beauty salon in Beijing, put it eloquently when he said: "We have very few people who believe in communism as a faith. So there's an emptiness in their hearts."

Bush Bashing Fizzles: "This summer, one big story is replaced by another--the London bombings July 7, the speculation that Karl Rove illegally named a covert CIA agent, the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, more London bombings last week. But beneath the hubbub, we can see the playing out of another, less reported story: the collapse of the attempts by liberal Democrats and their sympathizers in the mainstream media--the New York Times, etc., etc.--to delegitimize yet another Republican administration..."

When Castro took over Cuba: "In fact, a high proportion of Batista's army was black and mulatto, especially the officer corps. Castro and Che murdered 600 of them without trial in the first three months of 1959. Even the New York Times admits it. Had these massacres taken place anyplace else, they'd be called lynchings and the United Nations, NAACP, etc., would raise holy hell. Imagine, in any other setting, a lily white regime (like Castro's) lynching several hundred blacks, dumping them in mass graves, then getting a standing ovation by the Congressional Black Caucus, Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangel and Hollywood! Tom, compared to what Cuban-Americans see in the news every day, what Alice found on the other side of the looking glass seems perfectly logical".

Resistance is not futile, it is highly effective: "Recently the Florida State University department of Criminology released a study indicating that people who employed self protection strategies reduced their likelihood of injury when compared to nonresistance. Old research seemed to indicate that resistance to confrontational crime contributed to victim injury. New information reveals the old assumptions were found to be largely attributable to confusion concerning the sequence of self protective actions and injury. In crimes where both occurred, injury followed self protection in only 10 percent of the incidents. Combined with the fact that injuries following resistance are almost always relatively minor, victim resistance appears to be generally a wise course of action."

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE LATEST NONSENSE ABOUT RACE

I am not sure that this summary of a commentary by Arne Ohman, of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden is really worth mentioning but the final sentence in the extract below could mislead:

"By treating men and women like Pavlov's dogs, and giving them electric shocks while they looked at pictures of black and white men, researchers have unravelled our innate and learnt reactions to race. We have evolved to fear people from a different group to our own, in the same way they we fear spiders and snakes, it was found. But close contact can help counter this inherent fear."

Both the things found were rather like proving that grass is green. 1). That people still have some tribal tendencies and tend to be most at ease with people similar to themselves is uncontroversial. 2). The actual second finding about "close contact" was simply that New Yorkers who had dated someone from another race were less fearful of other races. How surprising! Asserting that the dating influenced the attitude rather than the other way around is is absurd.

The original research referred to by Ohman is here. There is a better summary of the work here

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ELSEWHERE

An Australian example of the "professionalism" of mainstream journalism: "Few journalists resort to fantasy, but the issue has aired publicly after The Sunday Telegraph's property writer, Cindy Martin, was accused of journalistic imaginings by the ABC's Media Watch program. The program exposed instances when Martin linked celebrities with properties on the market. Checks with the rich and famous found they had not evinced interest in homes and apartments. The Martin affair has rocked The Sunday Telegraph and starkly exposed the increasingly blurred line between fact and fantasy in some publications".

Burgess gets another Leftist scalp: "News just in: The Daily Ablution can claim its second scalp for Burgess's work the on Sassygate scandal. The Guardian's executive editor for news, Albert Scardino, has just resigned according to Burgess. Burgess reports that his source at The Guardian said Scardino's position had become "untenable" due to the split between Aslam's supporters and those who wanted him gone. Editor Alan Rushbridger has conceded that this affair and its internal repercussions constitute "a significant crisis for the paper".

As in Marxism, it is the privileged who are the vanguards of jihad: "When you read reports that the Muslim terrorists who bombed the London Underground may have gotten together for a pre-attack whitewater rafting trip in Wales, you realize that this is a very particular enemy -- and one that is recognizable to students of history. This is the revolt of the privileged, Islamic version. They have risen so far, so fast in the dizzying culture of the West that they have become enraged, disoriented and vulnerable to manipulation. Their spiritual leader is a Saudi billionaire's son who grew up with big ideas and too much money".

Muslim against Muslim: "The latest reliable report confirms that on average 33 Iraqis die every day, executed by Iraqis and foreign jihadis and suicide bombers, not by US or British soldiers. In fact, fewer than ever US or British soldiers are dying since the invasion more than two years ago. Instead, we now watch on television hundreds of innocent Iraqis lying without limbs, bleeding in the streets dead or wounded for life. If this is jihad someone got his religious education completely upside down. Palestine is on fire, too, with Palestinian armed groups fighting one another - Hamas against Fatah and all against the Palestinian Authority. All have rendered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas impotent and have diminished the world's respect and sympathy for Palestinian sufferings."

The Leftist chickens come home to roost on us all: "Being a rational thinker, it is often impossible to understand how Democrats can be so stupid. What exactly do the Democrats think is going to happen when they Balkanize America and invent categories for people so that no one is an American any longer but rather an "African-American" or an "Hispanic-American" or a woman or a homosexual whose allegiance shouldn't be to America but rather to the "cultural heritage" or the unique behavior that "defines" him or her? What do the Democrats think is going to happen when English is not the language of everyone but everyone is to speak his own language (even made up slang like "ebonics") so that communities become isolated and antagonistic and incapable of communicating with one another to solve differences and problems?... What's going to happen is exactly what has happened in London where native-born children blow the skulls off their "fellow countrymen." After all, thanks to the liberals there, what did these murderers have in common with the people they destroyed?"

European impotence fuels anti-Americanism: "Bush-hating has also given Europeans a marvelous distraction from their own failures; their failure in the Balkans, their failure to come up with a constitution for the European Union, their failure to build an independent military force, their failure to put together a single, coherent European foreign policy. In so many ways, Europeans who once ran the world now feel impotent to affect international events or even get their own house in order. They float like a lovely but rudderless old yacht in the surging wake of an American aircraft carrier. So, Europeans do the one thing that makes them feel superior: revile Bush, the lunatic cowboy, and all those gun-toting, overweight, money-obsessed, religion-crazed Americans who chose him as their president.

All Gods are not the same: "The atheist, when confronted with two distinct religious illusions does not jump to the conclusion that they are both aimed at invoking the same supreme being. Instead of looking up toward the transcendent object of the illusion, he is able to look at the quality of the illusion itself, and to the practical and concrete consequences of this illusion on the lives of those who subscribe to it. Religious illusions, when approached from this direction, clearly reveal themselves as distinctive as different forms of social organization -- as distinctive as feudalism and capitalism, communism and meritocracy. Indeed, the atheist will quickly see that few things can differ more profoundly than the diverse ways in which human beings have imagined the nature of the Divine".

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brookes News Update

US interest rates, growth and China : It's the Fed's monetary policy that has been driving the trade deficit and interest rates and not Chinese exports. If there is ever a run on the dollar, blame Greenspan - not Beijing
US Immigration: The Wall Street Journal gets it wrong - again: Stephen Moore, a member of 'The Wall Street Journal's' editorial board, boldly and proudly supports the pro-immigrant side - and gets it badly wrong
How useful is macro-economic data?: Macro-economic indicators are fictitious devices used by governments to justify intervention with businesses. They tell us very little about wealth formation and thus individuals' well-being
The day after terrorists bombed London G8 gave Palestinian terrorists $9 billion: What a 'wonderful' gift! I wonder how many more Jews will have to die more from bombs purchased using the money from Israel's "friends"?
Separation of church and state: myth and reality: Liberals have been indoctrinating American children with lies about the First Amendment. Separation of church and state does not appear anywhere in the Constitution

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

ELSEWHERE

I am rather bemused at the way an official "line" about the 7/7 London bombings seems to have taken hold. Everybody now seems to chant that they were suicide bombers whereas there are much better reasons for thinking that they were duped: They knew what they were doing but thought they would get away before the bombs went off -- as the earlier bombers in Spain did. An early version of the "duped" theory is here and I have also re-posted the story here. Recent findings that the car they left behind still had lots of unused bombs in it tend to reinforce they idea that the bombers thought they were coming back and going on to plant more bombs. Whether they thought they were coming back or not does not reduce the evil of the deed as far as I can see. British blogger Snowball thinks there is some sort of official coverup going on.

God, Leftists are thick at times! The BBC has just reported with great amazement that identical twins got identical marks in their university examinations. You'd think they had never heard of genetics! But I guess that 100 years of evidence about the huge role of genetics in what we are and do must be treated as if it did not exist.

There is an amusing explanation here of what the Dems believe in. Excerpt: "They are for a New Holocaust in Israel, a Final Solution de novo, since they are for the Palestinians, whose cultural cause, obsession, raison d'etre, is the annihilation of Israel, and they are not for Israel doing anything in self-defense. They are for a government monopoly of education, even though they are opposed to all other monopolies, except, of course, the fantasy of a Democratic monopoly on political power. They are for the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs to any and all other countries, because they have been against all efforts to build ugly new factories in America for decades - Not In My Backyard!"

Shut down official feminism: "If Republicans are looking for a way to return to their principles of limited government and reduced federal spending, a good place to start would be rejection of the coming reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del. It's a mystery why Republicans continue to put a billion dollars a year of taxpayers' money into the hands of radical feminists who use it to preach their anti-marriage and anti-male ideology, promote divorce, corrupt the family court system, and engage in liberal political advocacy. Accountability is supposed to be the watchword of the Bush administration, but there's been no accountability or oversight for the act's spending of many billions of dollars. There is no evidence that the Violence Against Women Act has benefited anyone except the radical feminists on its payroll".

What The World Owes Palestinians and The Left: "In the last few weeks, innocent men, women and children have been blown up, paralyzed, brain damaged and otherwise had their lives ruined by Muslim suicide bombers in Britain, Egypt and Iraq. Who can we thank for this man-made plague? Palestinians and the Left. We need to thank Palestinians for their major contribution to humanity -- religiously sanctioned mass murder of innocents through suicide. Prior to the Palestinians, this did not exist.... If blowing up Jewish children is OK, so is blowing up Egyptian, Moroccan, Iraqi, British, Spanish and Russian children. And that is where the Left comes in. They have provided the secular and universal justification for Palestinian Islamic terror against Jews. According to the world's Left, it's OK for Palestinians to put bombs in an Israeli student cafeteria.. But, alas, the anti-Israel Left (an almost redundant description), too, did not understand the genie it had helped unleash onto the world. Why is it all right for Muslims to blow up Israeli children, but not Russian children? Israeli buses, but not British buses? Jews in Israel, but not Muslims in Iraq?.. Like London's mayor, the Left around the world blames Israel for the Palestinian suicide bombers, and blames America for those in Iraq. Without the Left around the world, the Palestinian God-based mass murder through suicide would have been an isolated phenomenon, universally condemned as the evil it is.

Failures of intelligence: "Three weeks before the London bombings of July 7, Britain's Joint Terrorist Analysis Center advised policymakers that 'at present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack the UK.' ... Less than a month later, 52 people were murdered and 700 wounded when three subway trains and a bus were blown up in the worst act of terrorism the United Kingdom has experienced since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988. Obviously this was a serious intelligence failure. ... But the botched terror assessment raises a question for us, too: Which kind of intelligence failure is better -- the kind that badly understates a threat, such as the one in London, or the kind that overstates a threat, such as the insistent warnings before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons of mass destruction?"

NASA is so hopeless that it needs to be abolished: "NASA grounded future shuttle flights Wednesday because a big chunk of insulating foam flew off Discovery's fuel tank during liftoff -- as it did in Columbia's doomed mission -- but this time apparently missed the spacecraft. 'Until we're ready, we won't go fly again. I don't know when that might be,' shuttle program manager Bill Parsons told reporters in a briefing Wednesday evening. He and other managers do not believe the flying debris that snapped off the external fuel tank harmed Discovery, threatening a safe return of its seven astronauts."

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIMITS ON MULTICULTURALISM COMING

Excerpts from an article by Australian conservative columnist Janet Albrechtsen

The 1960s, the decade that became a state of mind, is finally over. With each new terrorist horror in London, as we learn more and more about British homeboy terrorists, it seems safe to declare that age of innocence is dead. It was an age where wide-eyed all-you-need-is-love romanticism inevitably spawned moral and cultural relativism. But when boys, born in British hospitals, develop allegiances that demand death to their countrymen, you know that the utopian vision of multiculturalism, urged on us with the best of intentions, has not gone as planned.

Three years ago, to suggest that multiculturalism was slowly killing us, or at least killing some of us, brought down a heavy rain of criticism. Back in September 2002, to mark the approaching first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US, I wrote on this page that the West's multiculturalism created conditions that encouraged the West's fanatical enemies. We were so busy being inclusive, denigrating our own culture, that we were not noticing what was happening. I suggested that Multicultural Man and his lazy cultural relativist thinking needed to be dismantled. A few others were saying the same thing. But not many.....

How times have changed. When four young British Muslims set off from Luton, detonating four bomb blasts in London, most people were shaken out of their reverie. Eventually, it seems, reality bites. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes cruelly. Now, more than a few people are saying that tolerance is not as safe as it seems. That too much of the stuff can be a problem because it suggests to those who detest our values and our societies that we will not make judgments about what is right and what is wrong....

Now, even long-time supporters of multiculturalism, such as The Age's Pamela Bone, wonder aloud whether it is time for us to lay down some ground rules for those from different cultures who wish to live side by side with our culture. "Couscous yes, child marriage no?" she asked....

Advocating multiculturalism for people from cultures with similar values was never going to be problematic. But when cultures differ sharply, multicultural policies that promote all cultures as equal lead us in all sorts of wrong directions. A young Aboriginal woman points to tribal law to excuse her for killing her philandering husband. An educated man, the father of a group of Pakistani gang rapists, claims they did not understand our culture.

Finally, more of us are saying "Hang on, some values are non-negotiable." Perhaps we can draw a shade on the '60s view that all cultures are equal.

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ELSEWHERE

There is an article in Harpers that is getting a lot of links. It claims to show that Americans call themselves Christians but don't behave in Christian ways. They imply the rather ludicrous claim that Harpers has a better understanding of what Christianity is than America's Christian pastors do. In some cases that would not be hard of course. Almost anybody would have a better idea of what Christianity implies than Bishop John Shelby Spong does, for instance. I could go on to pick apart all the erroneous ideas about Christianity that Harpers promulgates but they are mostly just old Leftist standbys that I have already demolished on my Scripture Blog so I think I will leave it to Christian bloggers to put up a more systematic reply.

Phew! That was close. CAFTA just squeaked past the House. There is now "free trade" between the USA and Central America. It is in fact still far from free but it is freer than it was, which will be good for all the countries concerned.

Arlene Peck has some very interesting figures on the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. (See bottom of post).

I have just put up a book review from a centre-Left source on Leftists as Elitists which savages the Stalinist Hollywood elite and defends Joe McCarthy! The concluding paragraph: "So what has all this to do with the fate of the American left or American liberalism? Any movement that does not own up to its past hobbles its future. These flanks are still enchanted with the suicidal heroism of the self-deluded Hollywood communists. This twisted syndrome did not stop with apologetics and excuses for Stalinism. It continues with the tortured explanations and barely disguised extenuations for the Muslim terror war against democratic and civil society. The Radoshes have written a wise, honest, and perceptive book."

Newsweek: Truth is the First Civilian Casualty in Iraq: "But civilian killings by U.S. troops are not nearly as common as the critics of the war in Iraq would like us to believe. It has become an article of faith among them that American troops have been slaughtering Iraqi civilians indiscriminately, and that one of the consequences of the war has been an unconscionable loss of life among the civilian population. It just isn't true. The most recent entry in this campaign is a report released on July 19 by Iraq Body Count. This Web-based group (www.iraqbodycount.org) compiles news accounts of casualties in Iraq and tabulates them... The text of the report is decorated with pull quotes from news accounts of checkpoint killings and aerial bombardments. Even if U.S. troops didn't kill all these people, they're telling us, these civilians would not have died were it not for the U.S. presence. Is it the policeman's fault when the hostage taker kills his hostage? In fact, a fair reading of the report's own data could support a completely contrary conclusion. Were it not for the insurgents, there would scarcely be much of a civilian death toll in Iraq now. A few isolated cases, yes, but nothing like the 8,000 civilians the Iraqi government says have died so far in 2005 from insurgent attacks.

Military recruitment going fine: "Buried in all the mainstream media coverage this week over new terrorist bombings in London, space shuttles that didn't launch, the trashing of Karl Rove and the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice was a little-noted item about re-enlistments in the U.S. armed forces exceeding expectations. USA Today offered some prominence to the story, but it was widely ignored by most of the Fourth Estate. Perhaps that's because it's a 'good news story.'"

I am pleased to say that a few readers commented on my "woolly hat" post. One reader sent me a pic of a guy in Costa Rica (in the tropics) wearing a beanie in the middle of summer so the only thing I am reasonably sure of after that is that they are all a bit missing somewhere. And there is a picture of a well-known Australian Leftist blogger here which does not change my mind. I have even got him on my blogroll, I am rather mortified to say. I think I will delete all Lefty links soon.

Chris Brand is in fine form with another lot of posts up about British and Australian news.

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF WOOLLY HATS

Just to take our minds off more serious concerns for once, I thought I might point out something I have noticed that other people might or might not be able to confirm from their own experience. I have noticed that people whom Australians would call "drongoes" (foolish and stupid people) are very prone to wearing woollen hats -- beanies etc. Australians very rarely wear hats of any sort even when they should (given our high incidence of skin cancer) so people wearing warm head-coverings do tend to stand out. And from listening to such people and observing them for many years I am much struck by the low-grade intelligence that seems to prevail among such wearers. No doubt that would not apply in really cold countries such as Russia where furry hats significantly enhance survival but Australia is a generally warm country where few people feel the need for top-deck insulation. So when I see a beanie-clad head in the streets, I immediately identify the person concerned as one best kept away from: as someone with a probably significant tendency to crime and violence. Having been for some years a boarding-house proprietor in a down-market suburb, I am well aware of the fact that crime and violence is a common way for drongoes to cope with life.

So why the association between social pathology and a desire to keep the head warm? I think it is no mystery at all. The brain uses up about 20% of the body's energy. It is a huge consumer of calories in relation to its mass. So the head is normally the last part of the body that feels cold. Having the brain inside the head working is like having a radiator inside it. And as far as I am aware, active brains use up more calories than less active ones. So the people with the relatively inert brains put out less heat from the head and thus feel the cold in their heads more than others do. So an unusual need for warm head-coverings suggests an unusually inactive brain. That's my theory anyway.

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ELSEWHERE

An amazing spasm of sanity from the Democratic Leadership Council: "Here's a novel idea: The war on terror should be, above all, a liberal's war. Think about it: The jihadist campaign is not some generic explosion of terrorism, but rather a calculated attack on all that liberals hold dear: tolerance, diversity, women's rights, the fundamental freedoms and protections of democracy, even trade unionism. In short, liberal values. That's why the liberal left makes a profound mistake if it concedes this war to George W. Bush and the right"

White House may sidestep Democrats on Bolton: "Frustrated by Senate Democrats, the White House hinted Monday that President Bush may act soon to sidestep Congress and install embattled nominee John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations on a temporary basis. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush has used his power for temporary appointments when 'he has to get people in place that have waited far too long to get about doing their business.' He said that 'sometimes there's come a point' when Bush has decided he needs to act."

Archaeologists are now beginning to see evidence of human social inequalities stretching back to the Stone Age. I am only amazed that they ever thought cavemen were equalitarian. There are dominance hierarchies in ALL social animals, including all the primates, so why should man be different? Only a raving Leftist would suggest otherwise.

Genes cause autism too: "While debate still rages over the 'cause' of autism, mounting evidence suggests that genetic factors play a major role in the disease. Two recent studies led by James Sutcliffe, Ph.D., and Randy Blakely, Ph.D., investigators with the Vanderbilt Center for Molecular Neuroscience and the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development, suggest that multiple rare mutations within a single gene may increase risk for autism.... "Autism has such a high genetic risk, but these new findings suggest that there may be many variants of individual genes at work," Blakely said. With such genetic testing, said Sutcliffe, "you might be able to predict which kids would respond positively to particular SSRI medications." "We now have concrete evidence in our families that the SERT gene is a risk factor in autism," Blakely said."

Racist judge: "A judge's comments in recent months that she would refuse to seat an all-white jury have raised eyebrows at Cook County Criminal Court and questions about whether the judge acted inappropriately. "Folks, you all know I have a rule; I don't seat all white jurors," Circuit Judge Evelyn Clay said as a jury was being picked to hear a murder trial last month, according to court transcripts.... Clay, who is African-American, made the remarks in chambers before three separate trials, according to transcripts reviewed by the Tribune.... Ronald Allen, a law professor at Northwestern University, called the judge's comments extraordinary. "I've never heard of a judge making such a statement, and I think it was ill-advised to do so publicly," he said. "It injects an unfortunate racial element into the matter, and quite frankly it raises very serious questions about whether [the judge] is discriminating against whites."... In a 1986 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Batson vs. Kentucky that it was a violation of the constitution to keep blacks off juries solely because of their race. The court found that the public's confidence in the fairness of the system would be damaged.

Leftist Kristof says Christians shame the Left: " But these days liberals should be embarrassed that it's the Christian Right that is taking the lead in spotlighting repression in North Korea. Perhaps no country in human history has ever been as successful at totalitarianism as North Korea. Koreans sent back from China have been herded like beasts, with wires forced through their palms or under their collarbones. People who steal food have been burned at the stake, with their relatives recruited to light the match. Then there was the woman who was a true believer and suggested that the Dear Leader should stop womanizing: after she was ordered executed, her own husband volunteered to pull the trigger. "The biggest scandal in progressive politics," Tony Blair told The New Yorker this year, "is that you do not have people with placards out in the street on North Korea. I mean, that is a disgusting regime. The people are kept in a form of slavery, 23 million of them, and no one protests!" Actually, some people do protest. Conservative Christians have aggressively taken up the cause of North Korean human rights in the last few years, and the movement is gathering steam. A U.S.-government-financed conference on North Korean human rights convened in Washington last week, and President Bush is expected shortly to appoint Jay Lefkowitz to the new position of special envoy for North Korean human rights.

Top ten reasons to privatize public broadcasting : "Republicans in Congress are debating whether to make small cuts in the funding for public broadcasting. They're not thinking big enough. Here are the top ten reasons to cut off the taxpayer dollars flowing to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System: 10.) We live in a 500-channel world. Back in 1967, when the Public Broadcasting Act was passed, most Americans only had three television channels -- ABC, NBC and CBS. But today we have six over-the-air networks and hundreds of cable channels offering everything from news to soap operas to classic movies to history and opera. 9.) Sesame Street isn't so special any more. ..."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with a huge range of reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

KIN PREFERENCE, FRANK SALTER AND EMMANUEL TODD

Frank Salter is a very popular guy in white nationalist circles. He has written a book (On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration) that has been widely acclaimed in those circles as giving a rational argument in favour of preferring your own race and stopping immigration. As it happens, I know Frank personally but that is not what I want to talk about here. I want to outline his ideas very briefly and then point to an alternative view. Frank rightly notes that we tend to prefer being with and helping people who are genetically similar to ourselves and that members of our own racial group are more similar to us genetically than are members of other racial groups. From my reading of the scientific literature in psychology and genetics, both those statements are clearly true and racial preference therefore probably is indeed an extension of kin preference.

Frank however extends his reasoning to say that we SHOULD prefer people who are genetically closer to us -- but I am agnostic about that. I cannot say SHOULD NOT because that would be telling most of the human population not to behave in the way that they do and I cannot say SHOULD because I see it as a basic civil liberty that people should be allowed to make their own choices about whom they should or should not associate with and prefer. I don't remotely understand bondage freaks but if their interactions with one-another help them get their rocks off, good luck to them. Similarly I think that most white women who take black lovers will regret it (ask Nicole Brown Simpson about that -- Whoops! You can't) but if it turns them on that is their business. We all take our risks in one way or another and if our bedrooms are not private where is privacy to be found?

So I will confine myself to the DO rather than the SHOULD. I want to look more closely at exactly how kin preference works. And the first thing to note is of course that kin is only one of the critieria we use in deciding whom we wish to be with and help. There are many instances where opposites attract and there are many sorts of similarity that we like other than genetic similarity. I think that is too obvious for me to bother with examples -- though I cannot help noting that most Westerners who spend time in India do come away saying that they "loved India" -- despite India's deprivations and dissimilarities.

And I owe what I think is the key fact in this matter to a French Leftist intellectual -- Emmanuel Todd. Now I know that that statement will immediately have brought on acid reflux in some readers here so let me assure you that I am in general as contemptuous of what passes for philosophy in France as I am admiring of Wittgenstein (Yes: I know that Wittgenstein was so far Left that he emigrated to Russia but it is also true that he lasted only three weeks in Russia. Nobody is wise about everything! It is not his politics but his cautious and anti-theoretical arguments about the nature of knowledge that I like -- arguments that fall squarely within the tradition of Anglo-Saxon conservatism as far as I can see).

But if even a stopped clock is right twice a day, a French intellectual can occasionally be right too. And Todd is half English anyway. And in his 1985 book The explanation of ideology Todd's approach is thoroughly empirical -- combining history and anthropology. And what he points out is that the English family has always been weird by world standards. Nobody values kin as little as the English do and they have been that way for as far back as we can follow it. I myself noted that in my Australian survey research. In one of my doorknock surveys, one of the questions I asked was: "How often do you visit relatives?" If the household was a Mediterranean one (usually Greek or Italian) the normal and immediate answer was "every weekend". In Anglo-Australian households however most people had to think hard about that and a common answer was "Never". Anglo-Saxons tend to choose their company with little or no regard to relatedness whereas family is all to most of the rest of the world.

But as it happens, those weird Anglo-Saxons seem to have got it right. It is their culture that dominates the world and it is they (together with their close relatives in North-Western Europe) who have largely created the modern world. So I think that all Anglo-Saxon ways come with some presumption in their favour. And it could be the reduced kin preference among Anglo-Saxons that is the key to their success. On Salter's reasoning, their minimal kin orientation would be part and parcel of their greater devotion to individualism, their greater racial tolerance, their greater devotion to abstract justice and their lesser tendency to corruption. That sounds like a pretty good brew to me!

And since practically every personality trait the geneticists look at turns out to have a large genetic component, it seems likely that degree of kin preference is genetically encoded too. So others may not be able to emulate the Anglo-Saxons just by trying. Though they may have advantages in other ways, of course. So it is surely some irony that the people to whom Frank primarily addresses his arguments (his fellow Anglo-Saxons) are the ones least likely to be moved by them. But it does explain why Frank needed to write his book: The desirability of people to whom one is related is instinctively obvious to most of the world. Only the Anglo-Saxons need a book to tell them that!

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ELSEWHERE

In a convincing demonstration of the Leftist disconnect from reality, that Prince of exaggeration and made-up "facts" -- John Pilger -- still seems to be respected on the Left. He has the current cover-story on the New Statesman -- alleging of course that the fault for the London bombing lies at Tony Blair's door. It is just standard Leftist "blame the West" stuff, of course, but I suppose someone has to debunk it occasionally and Spartac.us is one of those who have waded in to clean up the mess. I think Pilger's stock in trade is that he really seems to believe the crap. Leftists in general are such phonies that they badly need someone like that.

Under the heading "Evil must be fought" Rabbi Steinsaltz has an excellent brief response to the terror attack in London on July 7. Excerpt: "What happened in London recently should bring about a fundamental change in our way of seeing the world. There really is evil in the world. It has its own ideology and own organizations, and it exists not only somewhere far away, but here".

There are some amusing comments on Powerline about the rumoured takeover of Danone -- a French yoghurt-maker -- by Pepsi. Apparently the French government has been going ballistic over it. I liked this comment: "You know a country is in the throes of a deep identity crisis when its elites unanimously decide that dairy products are of the highest strategic importance, calling for nationalist wagons to circle around a firm selling such high-technology products as chocolate cookies, mineral water and fruit yogurt..."

Concerned Women for America has some good mockery of all the various Leftist objections to GWB's SCOTUS pick.

CATS: There are some absolutely amazing thoughts about domestic cats here. All cat-lovers should read it. It certainly opened my eyes and I am more a dog person. I was once a registered dog breeder, in fact -- of English Bull-terriers.

Bluto has fired back at The Guardian for treating his satire about headchopping as serious.

Chris Brand has a new lot of posts up on British and Australian issues.

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

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

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

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TUESDAY ROUNDUP

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

On Dissecting Leftism I question whether Australia's immigration policy is selective enough

On Political Correctness Watch I note that homosexuality seems to trump Islam in political correctness

On Greenie Watch I note that the evidence is now in that Michael Mann committed scientific fraud in his famous "hockeystick" claims about global warming

On Education Watch I note that some Leftist teachers are so reluctant to administer any discipline that they are now calling the police to deal with 5-year-olds

On Socialized Medicine I note that lives are being put at risk as British public hospitals ignore medical alerts

On Gun Watch I note that a gun club is being sued for committing lead pollution!

On Leftists as Elitists I note that a left-leaning Australian High Court judge admitted that he was consumed by anger when he considered some cases

On Majority Rights I note opposition to black immigration in Australia

On Blogger News I note that Sweden has useful lessons for conservatives. (Post also below)

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