THE ESSENCE OF LEFTISM
Excerpt from Sam Wells
America is in the midst of a giant ideological war between the Left and the Right, and it has been for some time. What is the fundamental nature of that conflict? It is a battle of ideas - very different ideas and strongly opposing ideas. What, then, are the fundamental differences in the main ideas in this war we are in between the "Left" and the "Right" in the United States of America today?
On the most fundamental level and very broadly we say that it is the conflict between collectivism versus individualism -- but that is pretty abstract. What specifically does it mean in terms of differences between overall policy prescriptions and political platforms and actual enacted programs? What is the essence of the agenda of the Left as opposed to that of the Right?
The fundamental essence of political leftism is not merely its snarling antipathy to "big business" or corporations or the idea of a market economy in general, or even its abiding contempt for and resentment against "bourgeois values " (thrift, honesty, work ethic, punctuality, a desire to make a better life for oneself and ones family, etc.). The essence of political leftism is in its opposition to the concept and institution of private ownership of property. To the extent that someone disrespects private property rights - either personally or through the political policies he advocates - to that extent he is a left-winger. Likewise, to the extent that a person consistently upholds and respects the private property rights of others, to that extent he is a "right winger" (in America).
As Ayn Rand reminded us, without property rights, no other rights are possible. Without private property boundaries, both in our persons and in our external possessions and in land, commercial trade or voluntary relationships in general could not function. An advanced culture based on contract and choice -- rather than feudal birth status or socialist top-down commands - could not exist.
Freedom and free markets presuppose and depend on the security of private property rights. Only when property boundaries are clearly defined and property rights are secured from coercive violation, either by criminals or by arbitrary government intervention, can incentives for long-term private planning develop, calculated risks undertaken, opportunities made available, and a sophisticated capitalist economy emerge and flourish....
The Left often postures as being in favor of "tolerance" - but only in such superficial matters as skin color, not in the realm of ideas. The Left's long-time and continuing ideological monopoly in America's universities seethes with anti-conservative and anti-libertarian bigotry and intolerance much uglier and much more unrelenting than the personal prejudice of any stereotyped Southern racist.
Leftists also claim they are for freedom - but it is not the freedom from coercive interference with peaceful adults for which libertarians stand. No. The leftists clamor for freedom from want, freedom from deprivation, freedom from poverty, freedom from being disadvantaged, freedom from discrimination, freedom from having one's feelings hurt, freedom from the real world, and other such bogus "freedoms" which, if they can be achieved at all, come only at the forced expense of productive peaceful adult citizens....
The attack on America, on rational moral values, and on individual freedom comes almost entirely from the Left in this country - from the limousine "liberal" leftists who live in San Francisco and Marin counties to the hard-left socialists who have dominated the Democrat Party since 1972, and the semi-literate America-hating Hollywood leftists who have contempt for even the middle-class audiences they entertain on TV and the silver screen.
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"Left Fascists" are fascists too...
The Fascists of history were ALL Leftists but so deeply ingrained is the opposite myth that stressing the similarity of the modern day Left to the Fascists of history may require a new phrase in order to get much attention. Post below from The American Thinker
J.R. Dunn points out today that leftists cannot be fascists, at least according to leftists. That's nonsense, of course, and it deprives political taxonomy of a perfectly useful term created by the Left itself, i.e., "left fascist". I think the phrase was first applied by Trotskyites for Stalinists, or possibly the other way around. It doesn't matter. The UK Telegraph uses "left fascist" to describe the (racist) British National Party. It also makes a useful retort to bizarros like the New York Times writer who just wrote ,
"Of course there are Christian fascists..."
That sounds a lot weirder to me than Left fascists. I'm not aware, for example, of the last time Christians ran concentration camps, tortured people, and murdered one hundred million of them, as the Left did in the last hundred years. So "Left fascism" fits the bill, all right.
The Left conveniently forgets that real fascists, like the Nazis and Mussolini type, had the same passionate hatred for traditional religion that the Left harbors. Some coincidence!
We should use "left fascist" as an intellectually accurate term, not just another way of shouting "You mother wears combat boots!" "Left fascism" should be a standard part of our vocabulary, because it's so obviously accurate in real life. It was the Left fascists who drove Larry Summers out of the presidency of Harvard University, because he uttered an Incorrect Thought. Thought crimes are typically fascist devices to control human beings.
As George Orwell had it, our first responsibility in a time of lies is to tell the truth. "Left fascist" nails it. We cannot let the Left define the terms, and in this case it's the Left that came up with it! So they can't disown it.
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ELSEWHERE
A good sarcastic comment: "Barbara Boxer's `Freudian Slip' is telling. First, she accused Condaleeza Rice as being a flawed decision maker. Then Ms Boxer insinuated that because she has no children, Condaleeza Rice cannot be as empathetic or sympathetic to those Americans who might lose a loved one. Of course, that would mean Ms Boxer could possibly understand the evil or significance of racism, because she isn't black and thus her positions on race cannot be taken seriously. Ms Boxer can opine on with some credibility on the matter of corruption. Among other things, she funneled $115,000 to Douglas Boxer & Associates, from a PAC for Change, her leadership political action committee. Douglas Boxer calls the Senator, `Mommy.`"
Vietnamizing Iraq: "On Monday I asked, "How many people will the peace movement kill this time?" and pointed out the last time America deserted a a battlefield, millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians died in the wake. It was a victory for tyranny that should bring shame to those senators and congressmen who were responsible. Instead they puff their chests and a few of them want to do the same thing in Iraq."
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason -- Details here and here
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 Pages are here or here or here.
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Sunday, January 14, 2007
EUROPEAN ARROGANCE AGAIN
An excerpt from THEODORE DALRYMPLE
Anyone who watched Saddam Hussein being led to the gallows without any knowledge of who he was would have concluded that a dignified, decent, and upright man was being informally executed by a gang of criminals. After all, it was he, not they, who showed his face to the world; he, not they, who refused to disguise himself.
And the revelation that he was taunted by his gaolers immediately before his execution, and not allowed to sleep the previous night, has rendered his execution less than optimal, from the public-relations point of view. Anything he might have suffered as a result of mistreatment was, of course, trivial by comparison with the suffering he inflicted on thousands, perhaps millions, of others; but a sense of proportion in moral outrage has never been among the Middle East's great cultural virtues.
The same, alas, is now true of Europe, or of the European official class and its tame intelligentsia. Everyone was agreed, of course, that Saddam was a very bad thing, a dictator who used every method of political persuasion from torture to a bullet in the neck and poison gas. But very few missed the opportunity to express an unctuous self-righteousness about the death penalty.
The editorial of Le Monde on the day following, for example, was entitled "No to the Death Penalty," and said that while President Bush may have claimed that the execution was a step on the path to democracy, "our," that is to say the French and superior, concept of democracy was different. The British foreign secretary and Irish foreign minister took the opportunity to express British and Irish opposition to the death penalty; the position of the Italian prime minister was even stronger (or weaker, depending on how you look at it); the Vatican also took the opportunity to express its opposition to the death penalty; and the European commissioner for foreign aid, M. Louis Michel, former foreign minister of that land of irreproachable integrity, Belgium, said, "You don't fight barbarism with acts that I deem as barbaric. The death penalty is not compatible with democracy."
In general, Europeans of the official class spoke as if the death penalty had been abolished in Europe in about 479 b.c., when it was abolished in Britain in 1965 and in France in 1981, not exactly historical epochs ago, even in the baby-boomers' truncated historical perspective. Whatever the practical political consequences of the execution of Saddam, which are inherently uncertain, the fact is that the European leaders are so entirely, parochially, and narrow-mindedly enclosed within their own worldview that they are now unable to conceive of any opinion but their own.
The egregious M. Michel seems to be implying that the two largest and most important democracies in the world, the U.S.A. and India, cannot actually be democracies at all because they have the death penalty. He also seems to be saying that New Zealand, Britain, Australia, Canada, and France were not democracies until 1961, 1965, 1973, 1976, and 1981, an odd reading of history, to say the least. Such is the ignorant arrogance of the great ones of Europe, who must have been confirmed in their decision not to allow any kind of democratic intervention in their deliberations by learning that in fact a clear majority of Europeans believed that Saddam ought to have been executed. If that is what people think, they clearly ought to be abolished.
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ELSEWHERE
Democrat America-hatred: "One thing that has become painfully clear in the new Congress' opening hours is that the mainstream of the Democratic Party is desperate for the Iraq war effort to fail. For those who have monitored liberalism's inner demons the past few years, this is no surprise. Every American setback has been gleefully greeted as a portentous sign of imminent disaster. Actually, every event whether a setback or not has been gleefully greeted as a portentous sign of imminent disaster. So, too, has every non-event."
Is Britain run by a deaf man? "Tony Blair has pledged to investigate the care of discharged soldiers after being challenged by a veteran of the Iraq conflict. During a televised exchange last night the Prime Minister apologised to Justin Smith after hearing that he had been left homeless and paying for medical care after two tours in Iraq. Mr Smith was discharged from the Army after suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In the discussion, broadcast from the Royal Marines Training Centre in Lympstone, Devon, he told Mr Blair: "I have lost my house, my security, my self-belief." He had struggled to find temporary accommodation in Cornwall to be with his wife and had had to pay for some of his medical treatment. Mr Blair initially said that he could not believe that this was typical. But when members of the Royal British Legion insisted that it was, he said he would investigate." [Blair must be the only one who did not know of this problem. "The Times" and other newspapers have been highlighting it for months, if not years]
The minimum wage kills jobs in Samoa only??: "As part of their first 100 hours plan, Democrats are pushing a hike in the minimum wage. It's going to happen, with several Republicans and even President Bush prepared to go along with it. But did you know that American Samoa...a Democrat stronghold...is being exempted from the minimum wage increase?... The average wage for tuna workers in American Samoa is $3.60 an hour. One of the biggest employers there is Starkist Tuna...which is headquartered in San Francisco...Nancy Pelosi land. Anybody care to take a closer look at the campaign contributions of Democrats in the last election? One thing is for sure, the delegate from American Samoa, a Democrat, is loaded down with campaign cash from the tuna industry. So there you have it...a double standard. On the one hand, we're told you can't raise a family on $5.15 an hour and the minimum wage must be raised to $7.25 an hour. But for the right price in campaign contributions, the tuna industry in American Samoa can avoid the minimum wage altogether...they just have to stuff the pockets of the right Democrats. Where is the media on this one?"
More proof that Leftists really believe in nothing -- not even feminism: "Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is being criticized by members of the black leadership network Project 21 for implying that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice lacks a proper perspective on the War on Terror in Iraq because she does not have children. "Barbara Boxer is a feminist who is attacking the feminist dream," said Project 21 member Kevin Martin. "But Condoleezza Rice's achievements are disqualified because she is a black conservative, and her rise was not blessed by the liberal establishment. Former attorney general Janet Reno was also unmarried and childless, but I don't remember insulting questioning like this regarding her handling of Elian Gonzalez or the deadly raid on the Branch Davidian cult."
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason -- Details here and here
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 Pages are here or here or here.
****************************
An excerpt from THEODORE DALRYMPLE
Anyone who watched Saddam Hussein being led to the gallows without any knowledge of who he was would have concluded that a dignified, decent, and upright man was being informally executed by a gang of criminals. After all, it was he, not they, who showed his face to the world; he, not they, who refused to disguise himself.
And the revelation that he was taunted by his gaolers immediately before his execution, and not allowed to sleep the previous night, has rendered his execution less than optimal, from the public-relations point of view. Anything he might have suffered as a result of mistreatment was, of course, trivial by comparison with the suffering he inflicted on thousands, perhaps millions, of others; but a sense of proportion in moral outrage has never been among the Middle East's great cultural virtues.
The same, alas, is now true of Europe, or of the European official class and its tame intelligentsia. Everyone was agreed, of course, that Saddam was a very bad thing, a dictator who used every method of political persuasion from torture to a bullet in the neck and poison gas. But very few missed the opportunity to express an unctuous self-righteousness about the death penalty.
The editorial of Le Monde on the day following, for example, was entitled "No to the Death Penalty," and said that while President Bush may have claimed that the execution was a step on the path to democracy, "our," that is to say the French and superior, concept of democracy was different. The British foreign secretary and Irish foreign minister took the opportunity to express British and Irish opposition to the death penalty; the position of the Italian prime minister was even stronger (or weaker, depending on how you look at it); the Vatican also took the opportunity to express its opposition to the death penalty; and the European commissioner for foreign aid, M. Louis Michel, former foreign minister of that land of irreproachable integrity, Belgium, said, "You don't fight barbarism with acts that I deem as barbaric. The death penalty is not compatible with democracy."
In general, Europeans of the official class spoke as if the death penalty had been abolished in Europe in about 479 b.c., when it was abolished in Britain in 1965 and in France in 1981, not exactly historical epochs ago, even in the baby-boomers' truncated historical perspective. Whatever the practical political consequences of the execution of Saddam, which are inherently uncertain, the fact is that the European leaders are so entirely, parochially, and narrow-mindedly enclosed within their own worldview that they are now unable to conceive of any opinion but their own.
The egregious M. Michel seems to be implying that the two largest and most important democracies in the world, the U.S.A. and India, cannot actually be democracies at all because they have the death penalty. He also seems to be saying that New Zealand, Britain, Australia, Canada, and France were not democracies until 1961, 1965, 1973, 1976, and 1981, an odd reading of history, to say the least. Such is the ignorant arrogance of the great ones of Europe, who must have been confirmed in their decision not to allow any kind of democratic intervention in their deliberations by learning that in fact a clear majority of Europeans believed that Saddam ought to have been executed. If that is what people think, they clearly ought to be abolished.
******************************
ELSEWHERE
Democrat America-hatred: "One thing that has become painfully clear in the new Congress' opening hours is that the mainstream of the Democratic Party is desperate for the Iraq war effort to fail. For those who have monitored liberalism's inner demons the past few years, this is no surprise. Every American setback has been gleefully greeted as a portentous sign of imminent disaster. Actually, every event whether a setback or not has been gleefully greeted as a portentous sign of imminent disaster. So, too, has every non-event."
Is Britain run by a deaf man? "Tony Blair has pledged to investigate the care of discharged soldiers after being challenged by a veteran of the Iraq conflict. During a televised exchange last night the Prime Minister apologised to Justin Smith after hearing that he had been left homeless and paying for medical care after two tours in Iraq. Mr Smith was discharged from the Army after suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In the discussion, broadcast from the Royal Marines Training Centre in Lympstone, Devon, he told Mr Blair: "I have lost my house, my security, my self-belief." He had struggled to find temporary accommodation in Cornwall to be with his wife and had had to pay for some of his medical treatment. Mr Blair initially said that he could not believe that this was typical. But when members of the Royal British Legion insisted that it was, he said he would investigate." [Blair must be the only one who did not know of this problem. "The Times" and other newspapers have been highlighting it for months, if not years]
The minimum wage kills jobs in Samoa only??: "As part of their first 100 hours plan, Democrats are pushing a hike in the minimum wage. It's going to happen, with several Republicans and even President Bush prepared to go along with it. But did you know that American Samoa...a Democrat stronghold...is being exempted from the minimum wage increase?... The average wage for tuna workers in American Samoa is $3.60 an hour. One of the biggest employers there is Starkist Tuna...which is headquartered in San Francisco...Nancy Pelosi land. Anybody care to take a closer look at the campaign contributions of Democrats in the last election? One thing is for sure, the delegate from American Samoa, a Democrat, is loaded down with campaign cash from the tuna industry. So there you have it...a double standard. On the one hand, we're told you can't raise a family on $5.15 an hour and the minimum wage must be raised to $7.25 an hour. But for the right price in campaign contributions, the tuna industry in American Samoa can avoid the minimum wage altogether...they just have to stuff the pockets of the right Democrats. Where is the media on this one?"
More proof that Leftists really believe in nothing -- not even feminism: "Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is being criticized by members of the black leadership network Project 21 for implying that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice lacks a proper perspective on the War on Terror in Iraq because she does not have children. "Barbara Boxer is a feminist who is attacking the feminist dream," said Project 21 member Kevin Martin. "But Condoleezza Rice's achievements are disqualified because she is a black conservative, and her rise was not blessed by the liberal establishment. Former attorney general Janet Reno was also unmarried and childless, but I don't remember insulting questioning like this regarding her handling of Elian Gonzalez or the deadly raid on the Branch Davidian cult."
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason -- Details here and here
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 Pages are here or here or here.
****************************
Saturday, January 13, 2007
THE NON-WATERGATE
Something's a scandal only if the newspapers make it one. On the matter below they have averted their eyes. The NY Sun (excerpt below) is the one paper to have mentioned the matter -- although the blogosphere has known of it for years
That was quite a scoop yesterday by our Josh Gerstein in respect of how the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in its investigations of leaks of our national secrets, has been stonewalled by none other than agencies of America's own government. The disclosures on which Mr. Gerstein reports came in response to litigation Mr. Gerstein filed under the Freedom of Information Act. He obtained FBI documents indicating that our intelligence agencies have been "uncooperative" in investigating leaks. The FBI documents refer to unreturned phone calls, cancelled meetings that weren't rescheduled, and the concern that lawyers from the agency whose information was leaked would "stonewall." And it looks like cases were dropped rather than force government officials and agencies to cooperate with the investigation and produce evidence.....
All this underscores the likelihood that we have had agencies of the American government breaking the law to defeat a military campaign into which the American Congress, by an overwhelming vote, sent our GIs. These implications were sensed immediately by the blogosphere, where Powerlineblog.com lit up on Mr. Gerstein's story at the crack of dawn, and on the airwaves, where Rush Limbaugh devoted part of his broadcast to Mr. Gerstein's story. Said Mr. Limbaugh, "It's become more and more obvious that there is a symbiotic relationship between these agencies - we're talking about State, we're talking about the Pentagon, CIA - there's a symbiotic relationship between these agencies and the drive-by media now, and they're not going to let an election get in their way . They've got their own agendas. . If they have to destroy the policies of a particular administration, they'll do it via leaks, and then when these criminal leaks are investigated, they don't participate."
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IRAN STRIKE COMING?
Excerpt below from a comment by Australian columnist Greg Sheridan
A US military strike against Iran must now be considered formally on the international agenda, following George W. Bush’s sombre, calm, but in substance extraordinarily bold address on Iraq. Bush accused Iran of providing material assistance for attacks on US troops in Iraq. It is hard to imagine a more serious accusation. What’s more, Bush promised to stop such Iranian actions. Whatever you think of Bush, he has a very high level of credibility when it comes to carrying out any threat he makes of military action.
No matter how scornful Bush’s Western critics may be, the powerbrokers in Tehran, and tosome degree in Damascus (forhe also called out Syria), aretoday contemplating the President’s words with sombre apprehension.
In a broader sense, Bush’s speech was aimed at all of America’s enemies and potential enemies in the Middle East and beyond. My presidency may be wounded, he was saying, but it is not dead. Bush will not leave the initiative to the terrorists or to the US’s other enemies. As President, he still wields enormous power and he intends to use it.
This was an unusually calm and direct speech from Bush. It eschewed soaring rhetoric and grand statements. It is likely to be more effective for that. It laid out the consequences of US defeat in Iraq and said that the Bush administration simply refuses to accept defeat. It was a very Ronald Reagan speech in the way it defied every arbiter of conventional wisdom and even public opinion....
The substance of Mr Bush’s speech was encouraging, more for the change in US emphasis than for the sheer increase in troop numbers. It is moving the US much closer to a classic counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq. Such a strategy always gives its top priority to providing security for the civilian population. Amazingly, this is the first time such an objective will be the top priority for the US military in Iraq. The Bush speech represents neither the eclipse nor the triumph of the fabled neo-conservatives. Rather, it represents the liberation of American policy following the departure of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld....
America’s enemies know that democracies tend to be impatient and certainly, after all the misery of Iraq, the American electorate appears impatient. Yet it is highly unlikely that even the Democrat-controlled Congress will actually cut off funding for US troops in Iraq. It may be too late, it may be too little, but Bush has given US strategy at least a fighting chance of success.
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Brookes News Update
Kevin Rudd's economic illiteracy and his attack on Hayek: Firmly convinced of his moral and intellectual superiority Kevin Rudd slime free market economics tells us that Friedrich Hayek hated charity and lacked compassion. And this ignorant bigot wants to be Australia's Prime Minister
The audacity of apostasy: Barack Obama's Muslim links: So far the media have avoided drawing attention to Obama's Muslim past. But sooner the later the media will have to deal with this complication. If they don't - Hillary will
Augusto Pinochet: Chile's reluctant dictator: General Pinochet and his administration were possibly the most reluctant authoritarian regime in all of history. Nevertheless, the left and their corrupt supporters in the media wages a relentless campaign of vilification against the regime. These are the same people who refuse to condemn the sadistic Castro's crimes against women and children
Australian Labor Party's welfare fallacies and interventionism: Although Kevin Rudd now leads the ALP the social democratic myths that Mark Latham promoted still underpin Labor's domestic policies - particularly those relating to welfare and economics
President Bush ain't no friend of Israel's. And Olmert: With the total lack of leadership in Israel, the Islamofascist murderers have reason to celebrate. And, they already are. Fatah is now able to use the kidnapping and killings of IDF soldiers as a precedent to achieve the release of all prisoners
Managing the consequences of Iraq: It is becoming increasingly likely that some form of break-up will be the fate of the nation-state of Iraq. Such a break-up will reflect the relationships among Iraq's Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish groups, and the relationships of these groups to the central government, which in turn should have major consequences for the region.
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason -- Details here and here
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 Pages are here or here or here.
****************************
Something's a scandal only if the newspapers make it one. On the matter below they have averted their eyes. The NY Sun (excerpt below) is the one paper to have mentioned the matter -- although the blogosphere has known of it for years
That was quite a scoop yesterday by our Josh Gerstein in respect of how the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in its investigations of leaks of our national secrets, has been stonewalled by none other than agencies of America's own government. The disclosures on which Mr. Gerstein reports came in response to litigation Mr. Gerstein filed under the Freedom of Information Act. He obtained FBI documents indicating that our intelligence agencies have been "uncooperative" in investigating leaks. The FBI documents refer to unreturned phone calls, cancelled meetings that weren't rescheduled, and the concern that lawyers from the agency whose information was leaked would "stonewall." And it looks like cases were dropped rather than force government officials and agencies to cooperate with the investigation and produce evidence.....
All this underscores the likelihood that we have had agencies of the American government breaking the law to defeat a military campaign into which the American Congress, by an overwhelming vote, sent our GIs. These implications were sensed immediately by the blogosphere, where Powerlineblog.com lit up on Mr. Gerstein's story at the crack of dawn, and on the airwaves, where Rush Limbaugh devoted part of his broadcast to Mr. Gerstein's story. Said Mr. Limbaugh, "It's become more and more obvious that there is a symbiotic relationship between these agencies - we're talking about State, we're talking about the Pentagon, CIA - there's a symbiotic relationship between these agencies and the drive-by media now, and they're not going to let an election get in their way . They've got their own agendas. . If they have to destroy the policies of a particular administration, they'll do it via leaks, and then when these criminal leaks are investigated, they don't participate."
************************
IRAN STRIKE COMING?
Excerpt below from a comment by Australian columnist Greg Sheridan
A US military strike against Iran must now be considered formally on the international agenda, following George W. Bush’s sombre, calm, but in substance extraordinarily bold address on Iraq. Bush accused Iran of providing material assistance for attacks on US troops in Iraq. It is hard to imagine a more serious accusation. What’s more, Bush promised to stop such Iranian actions. Whatever you think of Bush, he has a very high level of credibility when it comes to carrying out any threat he makes of military action.
No matter how scornful Bush’s Western critics may be, the powerbrokers in Tehran, and tosome degree in Damascus (forhe also called out Syria), aretoday contemplating the President’s words with sombre apprehension.
In a broader sense, Bush’s speech was aimed at all of America’s enemies and potential enemies in the Middle East and beyond. My presidency may be wounded, he was saying, but it is not dead. Bush will not leave the initiative to the terrorists or to the US’s other enemies. As President, he still wields enormous power and he intends to use it.
This was an unusually calm and direct speech from Bush. It eschewed soaring rhetoric and grand statements. It is likely to be more effective for that. It laid out the consequences of US defeat in Iraq and said that the Bush administration simply refuses to accept defeat. It was a very Ronald Reagan speech in the way it defied every arbiter of conventional wisdom and even public opinion....
The substance of Mr Bush’s speech was encouraging, more for the change in US emphasis than for the sheer increase in troop numbers. It is moving the US much closer to a classic counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq. Such a strategy always gives its top priority to providing security for the civilian population. Amazingly, this is the first time such an objective will be the top priority for the US military in Iraq. The Bush speech represents neither the eclipse nor the triumph of the fabled neo-conservatives. Rather, it represents the liberation of American policy following the departure of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld....
America’s enemies know that democracies tend to be impatient and certainly, after all the misery of Iraq, the American electorate appears impatient. Yet it is highly unlikely that even the Democrat-controlled Congress will actually cut off funding for US troops in Iraq. It may be too late, it may be too little, but Bush has given US strategy at least a fighting chance of success.
*****************************
Brookes News Update
Kevin Rudd's economic illiteracy and his attack on Hayek: Firmly convinced of his moral and intellectual superiority Kevin Rudd slime free market economics tells us that Friedrich Hayek hated charity and lacked compassion. And this ignorant bigot wants to be Australia's Prime Minister
The audacity of apostasy: Barack Obama's Muslim links: So far the media have avoided drawing attention to Obama's Muslim past. But sooner the later the media will have to deal with this complication. If they don't - Hillary will
Augusto Pinochet: Chile's reluctant dictator: General Pinochet and his administration were possibly the most reluctant authoritarian regime in all of history. Nevertheless, the left and their corrupt supporters in the media wages a relentless campaign of vilification against the regime. These are the same people who refuse to condemn the sadistic Castro's crimes against women and children
Australian Labor Party's welfare fallacies and interventionism: Although Kevin Rudd now leads the ALP the social democratic myths that Mark Latham promoted still underpin Labor's domestic policies - particularly those relating to welfare and economics
President Bush ain't no friend of Israel's. And Olmert: With the total lack of leadership in Israel, the Islamofascist murderers have reason to celebrate. And, they already are. Fatah is now able to use the kidnapping and killings of IDF soldiers as a precedent to achieve the release of all prisoners
Managing the consequences of Iraq: It is becoming increasingly likely that some form of break-up will be the fate of the nation-state of Iraq. Such a break-up will reflect the relationships among Iraq's Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish groups, and the relationships of these groups to the central government, which in turn should have major consequences for the region.
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason -- Details here and here
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 Pages are here or here or here.
****************************
Friday, January 12, 2007
LEFTISTS LIVING IN THE PAST
Excerpt from Richard Miniter
By the way, aren't you tired of the whole "you're-a-fascist" line? The Fascists and the Nazis are only on the right if you yourself are communist-and therefore, they are barely to the right of you on the political spectrum. To the rest of us, Fascists, Nazis and communists are different sub-species of the same murderous monster, a blood-drenched beast that believes in the power of the state and seeks to dismember or murder every individual and every group in society that refuses to bend to its will.
Those of us who believe in free speech and, its economic equivalent, free trade, limited government, tolerance, the equal freedom of the artist and the entrepreneur, the separation of church and state, and so on, are the enemies of fascists and, their ill-clothed counterparts, communists. Indeed, capitalism is the opposite of fascism, which favors government control of the every economic decision. Calling us (liberals and conservatives) "fascists" simply reveals the Left's nostaglia for truly evil enemies (like Nazis) and its current reluctance to engage in a battle of ideas. So Bush is a fascist and so is Heinlein.
I was covering a anti-globalization street demonstration in Prague in 2000 for the Wall Street Journal and noticed that the crowd was chanting loudly in Spanish. I asked a demonstrator why this pan-European crowd was reciting Spanish slogans instead of Czech. "Don't you know it?" he asked. "This is one of the great anti-Fascist chants from the Spanish Civil War." In other words, it was from the 1930s.
Even the young communists think like old men, living in a glorious past that has long since passed. This is why they still want to talk about McCarthy, Nixon, Vietnam, "the 1960s," the minimum wage, the draft, the United Nations.
Their solution for the Iraq war and the Iran A-Bomb? Get France, Britain, Russia and China to agree. In other words, get our World War II allies to join us. Hasn't the world changed in 60 years? The French and British have given away their empires and forfeited a role in global affairs. They have one aircraft carrier each. Russia is failing state that could not rescue the crew on one of their own submarines. China could play only a bit part in the tsunami relief effort and is actively involved with two members of the axis of evil (Iran and North Korea). Surely India, Japan and Turkey are more important to us now?
The Left's one relatively new concern is global warming. Yes, they have been threatening an environmental catastrophe since the late 1950s and climate change since the early 1970s, but it, nonetheless, is among their fresher concerns. Still, it is worth pointing out that worrying about the weather is principally a concern of the aged. The rest of us are too busy hurrying to work.
***********************
ELSEWHERE
The above cartoon refers in part to this story about an actual ban on Santa hats.
Sunnis target shitheads in DETROIT: "As they repaired the broken windows of at least a dozen businesses and mosques along Warren Avenue in Detroit, many Iraqi Shi'ite Muslims wondered Monday if the vandalism was retaliation by local supporters of Saddam Hussein who resented that they celebrated the hanging of the Iraqi dictator. Sometime late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, someone vandalized at least nine businesses and three mosques, all but one Shi'ite, according to Ali Zwen, manager of the Kufa Cultural Forum, a mosque at Warren and Archdale that sustained $4,000 in damage."
New book shows U.S. involvement in the Middle East long preceded 'Israel lobby' : "In 1844, a biblical scholar and professor of Hebrew at New York University published a pamphlet urging the establishment of a Jewish state in the place then known as Palestine. The name of this early Zionist who argued for the recreation of Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel: George Bush. But the astonishing thing about this manifesto is not just that the author was a forebear of two later U.S. presidents of the same name. It was that his advocacy of a theological/political position known as "restorationism" - support for the "restoration" of the Jewish people to their historic homeland - was common in 19th century America."
Moronic "Guardian" writer: "Talking of ignorance, where would we be without Guardian columnists? My old boss, Peter Shore, the late Labour Cabinet minister used to read the Daily Express every morning just to get angry. I prefer The Guardian. Yesterday Zoe Williams informed us that "there is no precedent for a country to be diamond [or petroleum] rich and not spend the rest of its history bogged down in civil and/or external war." I suppose that she has never heard of those two obscure countries, the US and the UK".
Wacky Britain: "`The government's latest wheeze is to raise the legal age for buying cigarettes from 16 to 18. So let me see if I have this straight. You will be able legally to have sex at 16 - or younger, according to senior policemen - but the law won't allow you a postcoital cigarette until two years later. Not even if you are married"
France to cut business taxes? "French president Jacques Chirac has proposed slashing France's corporation tax rate from 33pc to 20pc to relaunch its flagging economy, a move that could leave Britain behind as the high-tax laggard in Europe. ‘We have to take action on corporation tax to save our businesses and help create new ones. The goal should be to reduce it to 20pc in five years,’ he said in his New Year speech, proposing a long-term goal of just 10pc. Mr Chirac also stepped up his attacks on the strong euro policy of the European Central Bank, calling for political intervention to force down the exchange rate. ‘Europe must take its destiny in hand,’ he said. ''It is time that it exercised its economic sovereignty by setting an exchange rate policy and a change in trade policy to take account of globalisation".
Europe wants to tax Britons: "Brussels politicians have drawn up proposals to create a European income tax which would leave Britons shelling out 510 pounds a year to the superstate. The rumbling row over the size of Britain’s rebate from Europe resurfaced as an influential committee of MEPs received recommendations for sweeping reforms to the Union’s current funding system. The Committee On Budgets is facing calls to scale back the current system in favour of a form of direct taxation when Britain’s rebate is re-negotiated in 2008.
Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts on his usual themes of race, IQ and political correctness -- with particular emphasis on the British scene.
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason -- Details here
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 Pages are here or here or here.
****************************
Excerpt from Richard Miniter
By the way, aren't you tired of the whole "you're-a-fascist" line? The Fascists and the Nazis are only on the right if you yourself are communist-and therefore, they are barely to the right of you on the political spectrum. To the rest of us, Fascists, Nazis and communists are different sub-species of the same murderous monster, a blood-drenched beast that believes in the power of the state and seeks to dismember or murder every individual and every group in society that refuses to bend to its will.
Those of us who believe in free speech and, its economic equivalent, free trade, limited government, tolerance, the equal freedom of the artist and the entrepreneur, the separation of church and state, and so on, are the enemies of fascists and, their ill-clothed counterparts, communists. Indeed, capitalism is the opposite of fascism, which favors government control of the every economic decision. Calling us (liberals and conservatives) "fascists" simply reveals the Left's nostaglia for truly evil enemies (like Nazis) and its current reluctance to engage in a battle of ideas. So Bush is a fascist and so is Heinlein.
I was covering a anti-globalization street demonstration in Prague in 2000 for the Wall Street Journal and noticed that the crowd was chanting loudly in Spanish. I asked a demonstrator why this pan-European crowd was reciting Spanish slogans instead of Czech. "Don't you know it?" he asked. "This is one of the great anti-Fascist chants from the Spanish Civil War." In other words, it was from the 1930s.
Even the young communists think like old men, living in a glorious past that has long since passed. This is why they still want to talk about McCarthy, Nixon, Vietnam, "the 1960s," the minimum wage, the draft, the United Nations.
Their solution for the Iraq war and the Iran A-Bomb? Get France, Britain, Russia and China to agree. In other words, get our World War II allies to join us. Hasn't the world changed in 60 years? The French and British have given away their empires and forfeited a role in global affairs. They have one aircraft carrier each. Russia is failing state that could not rescue the crew on one of their own submarines. China could play only a bit part in the tsunami relief effort and is actively involved with two members of the axis of evil (Iran and North Korea). Surely India, Japan and Turkey are more important to us now?
The Left's one relatively new concern is global warming. Yes, they have been threatening an environmental catastrophe since the late 1950s and climate change since the early 1970s, but it, nonetheless, is among their fresher concerns. Still, it is worth pointing out that worrying about the weather is principally a concern of the aged. The rest of us are too busy hurrying to work.
***********************
ELSEWHERE
The above cartoon refers in part to this story about an actual ban on Santa hats.
Sunnis target shitheads in DETROIT: "As they repaired the broken windows of at least a dozen businesses and mosques along Warren Avenue in Detroit, many Iraqi Shi'ite Muslims wondered Monday if the vandalism was retaliation by local supporters of Saddam Hussein who resented that they celebrated the hanging of the Iraqi dictator. Sometime late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, someone vandalized at least nine businesses and three mosques, all but one Shi'ite, according to Ali Zwen, manager of the Kufa Cultural Forum, a mosque at Warren and Archdale that sustained $4,000 in damage."
New book shows U.S. involvement in the Middle East long preceded 'Israel lobby' : "In 1844, a biblical scholar and professor of Hebrew at New York University published a pamphlet urging the establishment of a Jewish state in the place then known as Palestine. The name of this early Zionist who argued for the recreation of Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel: George Bush. But the astonishing thing about this manifesto is not just that the author was a forebear of two later U.S. presidents of the same name. It was that his advocacy of a theological/political position known as "restorationism" - support for the "restoration" of the Jewish people to their historic homeland - was common in 19th century America."
Moronic "Guardian" writer: "Talking of ignorance, where would we be without Guardian columnists? My old boss, Peter Shore, the late Labour Cabinet minister used to read the Daily Express every morning just to get angry. I prefer The Guardian. Yesterday Zoe Williams informed us that "there is no precedent for a country to be diamond [or petroleum] rich and not spend the rest of its history bogged down in civil and/or external war." I suppose that she has never heard of those two obscure countries, the US and the UK".
Wacky Britain: "`The government's latest wheeze is to raise the legal age for buying cigarettes from 16 to 18. So let me see if I have this straight. You will be able legally to have sex at 16 - or younger, according to senior policemen - but the law won't allow you a postcoital cigarette until two years later. Not even if you are married"
France to cut business taxes? "French president Jacques Chirac has proposed slashing France's corporation tax rate from 33pc to 20pc to relaunch its flagging economy, a move that could leave Britain behind as the high-tax laggard in Europe. ‘We have to take action on corporation tax to save our businesses and help create new ones. The goal should be to reduce it to 20pc in five years,’ he said in his New Year speech, proposing a long-term goal of just 10pc. Mr Chirac also stepped up his attacks on the strong euro policy of the European Central Bank, calling for political intervention to force down the exchange rate. ‘Europe must take its destiny in hand,’ he said. ''It is time that it exercised its economic sovereignty by setting an exchange rate policy and a change in trade policy to take account of globalisation".
Europe wants to tax Britons: "Brussels politicians have drawn up proposals to create a European income tax which would leave Britons shelling out 510 pounds a year to the superstate. The rumbling row over the size of Britain’s rebate from Europe resurfaced as an influential committee of MEPs received recommendations for sweeping reforms to the Union’s current funding system. The Committee On Budgets is facing calls to scale back the current system in favour of a form of direct taxation when Britain’s rebate is re-negotiated in 2008.
Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts on his usual themes of race, IQ and political correctness -- with particular emphasis on the British scene.
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason -- Details here
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 Pages are here or here or here.
****************************
Thursday, January 11, 2007
FOOD FADDISM DEMOLISHED FOR ONCE AND FOR ALL
Not that the food faddists will take any notice
Food faddism is important to many people because it gives them both the illusion of control and an ego boost. One of the few things they have absolute control over is what they put into their mouths so they like to think that gives them some larger control over their lives. Food faddism also gives them a feeling of wisdom and righteousness because they attribute some universal truth and validity to their fads. It makes them feel wiser than the poor sods who do not share their "enlightenment". This latter has become particularly pernicious in recent years as the faddists have increasingly been able to force their beliefs on others -- via the demonization of "obesity" -- which they (falsely) claim shortens lifespans.
So it is a timely corrective that one population which has a characteristically "unhealthy" diet has recently been shown also to be one of the longest lived! Details on FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC.
***************************
POLITICAL SUPERSTITIONS
Excerpt from Christopher Chantrill
How do you spell superstition? The professional atheists have been busy spelling it out lately, especially Richard Dawkins with The God Delusion and Sam Harris with The End of Faith. There is almost certainly no God, according to Dawkins.
*******************************
ELSEWHERE
Iranian brain-drain. I wonder why? "According to the IMF more than a 150,000 of the best young minds in Iran are leaving every year."
China now battling Muslims: "China has revealed the depth of its fear of Islamic-linked violence with police disclosing that they had killed 18 terrorists and captured another 17 after a fierce battle at a secret training camp in a remote northwestern region. It was the first time that China had announced the discovery of such a camp in its territory. Officials said that they had uncovered links between the activists and international terrorist groups, hinting at connections to al-Qa'ida. The clash in the Pamir mountains on Friday was one of the deadliest for years in the restive Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region, where 8.5 million Muslims make up most of the population. One policeman was killed and a second wounded.... Liu Jianchao, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said: "There is a large amount of evidence, including evidence from this raid, that shows the movement is associated with international terrorist forces, and that it planned, organised and carried out a series of violent, terrorist activities in China."
Bungling British spooks: "The Director-General of Britain's security service MI5 told senior MPs there was no imminent terrorist threat to London or the rest of the country less than 24 hours before the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings in London, in which 56 people were killed. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller gave the assurance at a private meeting of Labour whips at the House of Commons on the morning of July 6. Last month Dame Eliza announced she was to retire in April. That announcement came weeks before details are expected to be made public of an MI5 operation in which two of the July 7 bombers were kept under surveillance but not arrested."
Australia: Huge rise in job openings after recent labour-market deregulation: "Australian total job vacancies in the three months to November rose 5.9 per cent, seasonally adjusted, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Job vacancies rose 21.4 per cent over the year to November. Seasonally adjusted job vacancies totalled 163,700 in the three months to November compared with an upwardly revised 154,600 in the previous quarter.
More Jimmy Carter deceit: "I became embroiled in a controversy with former President Jimmy Carter over the use of two maps in his recent book, "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid." While some criticized what appeared to be the misappropriation of maps I had commissioned for my book, "The Missing Peace," my concern was always different.... In his book, Mr. Carter juxtaposes two maps labeled the "Palestinian Interpretation of Clinton's Proposal 2000" and "Israeli Interpretation of Clinton's Proposal 2000." The problem is that the "Palestinian interpretation" is actually taken from an Israeli map presented during the Camp David summit meeting in July 2000, while the "Israeli interpretation" is an approximation of what President Clinton subsequently proposed in December of that year. Without knowing this, the reader is left to conclude that the Clinton proposals must have been so ambiguous and unfair that Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was justified in rejecting them. But that is simply untrue."
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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)
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason
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 Pages are here or here or here.
****************************
Not that the food faddists will take any notice
Food faddism is important to many people because it gives them both the illusion of control and an ego boost. One of the few things they have absolute control over is what they put into their mouths so they like to think that gives them some larger control over their lives. Food faddism also gives them a feeling of wisdom and righteousness because they attribute some universal truth and validity to their fads. It makes them feel wiser than the poor sods who do not share their "enlightenment". This latter has become particularly pernicious in recent years as the faddists have increasingly been able to force their beliefs on others -- via the demonization of "obesity" -- which they (falsely) claim shortens lifespans.
So it is a timely corrective that one population which has a characteristically "unhealthy" diet has recently been shown also to be one of the longest lived! Details on FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC.
***************************
POLITICAL SUPERSTITIONS
Excerpt from Christopher Chantrill
How do you spell superstition? The professional atheists have been busy spelling it out lately, especially Richard Dawkins with The God Delusion and Sam Harris with The End of Faith. There is almost certainly no God, according to Dawkins.
The atheists worship a different God. For Dawkins, it seems to be the power of Darwin's theory of natural selection. For Sam Harris it seems to be the value of meditation and a rational ethics. And don't think you can talk them out it.
We can thank the atheists at least for this: They are magnificently applying the principle of "motivated skepticism" to the human God project.
Motivated skepticism? That's the concept from the paper "Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs" by Charles S. Taber and Milton Lodge. (Hat tip to TCS Daily Arnold Kling.)
Taber and Lodge observe that we humans have lots of faith in our own ideas and plans but not in other peoples' ideas.
"Physicists do it...Psychologists do it...Even political scientists do it...Research findings confirming a hypothesis are accepted more or less at face value, but when confronted with contrary evidence, we become "motivated skeptics" ... picking apart possible flaws in the study, recoding variables, and only when all the counterarguing fails do we rethink our beliefs[.]"
To understand the power of faith we have only to look at the 100 hour legislative marathon of the newly empowered House Democrats. They are intent upon passing an increase in the minimum wage. But the science is in on this, and it has been for over a century. The minimum wage puts low-skilled people out of work. Democrats are also intent upon adding new subsidies to college students. But the science is in on subsidies. And the science is also in on drug price controls.
Why do they do it? Faith, that's why. Blind faith in the power of government and their own good intentions.
When a faith has been utterly exploded by science, rational folks like you and me usually call it "superstition."
... *******************************
ELSEWHERE
Iranian brain-drain. I wonder why? "According to the IMF more than a 150,000 of the best young minds in Iran are leaving every year."
China now battling Muslims: "China has revealed the depth of its fear of Islamic-linked violence with police disclosing that they had killed 18 terrorists and captured another 17 after a fierce battle at a secret training camp in a remote northwestern region. It was the first time that China had announced the discovery of such a camp in its territory. Officials said that they had uncovered links between the activists and international terrorist groups, hinting at connections to al-Qa'ida. The clash in the Pamir mountains on Friday was one of the deadliest for years in the restive Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region, where 8.5 million Muslims make up most of the population. One policeman was killed and a second wounded.... Liu Jianchao, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said: "There is a large amount of evidence, including evidence from this raid, that shows the movement is associated with international terrorist forces, and that it planned, organised and carried out a series of violent, terrorist activities in China."
Bungling British spooks: "The Director-General of Britain's security service MI5 told senior MPs there was no imminent terrorist threat to London or the rest of the country less than 24 hours before the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings in London, in which 56 people were killed. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller gave the assurance at a private meeting of Labour whips at the House of Commons on the morning of July 6. Last month Dame Eliza announced she was to retire in April. That announcement came weeks before details are expected to be made public of an MI5 operation in which two of the July 7 bombers were kept under surveillance but not arrested."
Australia: Huge rise in job openings after recent labour-market deregulation: "Australian total job vacancies in the three months to November rose 5.9 per cent, seasonally adjusted, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Job vacancies rose 21.4 per cent over the year to November. Seasonally adjusted job vacancies totalled 163,700 in the three months to November compared with an upwardly revised 154,600 in the previous quarter.
More Jimmy Carter deceit: "I became embroiled in a controversy with former President Jimmy Carter over the use of two maps in his recent book, "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid." While some criticized what appeared to be the misappropriation of maps I had commissioned for my book, "The Missing Peace," my concern was always different.... In his book, Mr. Carter juxtaposes two maps labeled the "Palestinian Interpretation of Clinton's Proposal 2000" and "Israeli Interpretation of Clinton's Proposal 2000." The problem is that the "Palestinian interpretation" is actually taken from an Israeli map presented during the Camp David summit meeting in July 2000, while the "Israeli interpretation" is an approximation of what President Clinton subsequently proposed in December of that year. Without knowing this, the reader is left to conclude that the Clinton proposals must have been so ambiguous and unfair that Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was justified in rejecting them. But that is simply untrue."
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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)
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason
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 Pages are here or here or here.
****************************
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: A FLAWED FIGURE
There is a neocon eulogy of the recently deceased Prof. Seymour Martin Lipset here. Despite the usual adjuration de mortuis nil nisi bonum, I feel that I should say a few words to set the record straight. Lipset was a very popular sociologist and political scientist but that which is popularly believed often turns out to be wrong in the long run and I believe that the positive view of Lipset's contribution is formed by his Leftist origins rather than by the lasting value of his ideas. He started out as a Trotskyite, as did the neocons.
I should perhaps declare a personal interest before going on. Despite the effusions about Lipset's good character, my own encounter with him was unimpressive, to say the least. He agreed to mark my Ph.D. dissertation and then not only failed to do so after many reminders but also failed to return his copy of the dissertation when requested to do so. This created such delays that my Ph.D. was not awarded until 1974, even though the dissertation was handed in in 1970. And why did he behave so badly? I guess it wouldn't be because the dissertation reported research results which undermined ideas that he was identified with, would it? Rather than use new data to develop his views -- as a real scientist would -- he resorted to the old Leftist strategy of denial, just as other Leftists for decades denied the evils of the Soviet State.
The central findings of the large and international program of resarch that I undertook to test a popular Lipset idea -- that working-class people are "authoritaraian" -- were finally published in Sociology and Social Research in 1983. Lipset had used selected public opinion poll data to test his ideas but I used much more closely targeted psychometric methods. I found that there was some tendency for the workers to be conservative on some social issues but NO evidence of them being "authoritarian". See here
Lipset's idea that America was saved from its "bad side" by great men is a typical example of selective Leftist attention to group differences. Leftists will trumpet how blacks have been damaged by slavery or how homosexuals need to be protected from discrimination but acknowledging that another group -- Americans of British and Northern European origin -- have particular strengths and virtues is absolutely taboo.
One only has to look at one of the "great" men that Lipset believed "saved" America -- Frankin Delano Roosevelt, the Fascist sympathizer who turned a normal cyclic depression into the Great Depression by his attacks on business and then delivered whole nations into the hands of the Soviets at Yalta. For some of the less-publicized facts about FDR see here and here and here. The truth of the matter is that America's prosperity and pre-eminence is the product of many millions of decent and hard-working individuals. To be even more precise, the success of America comes from the respect for the individual and for the rule of law which America's immigrants from Britain and Northern Europe brought with them and which they enshrined in America's way of life and institutions. But it is "racist" to say that, of course.
And Lipset's saying that "The United States is the only Protestant sectarian country in the world" is also absurd. "Sectarian" implies severe intolerance and discrimination towards people holding to other belief systems. In fact, America would have to be one of the countries with greatest freedom of religion. It is even safe to be a real conservative in America -- though not in American universities, of course.
I could go on to say more about Lipset's twisted ideas but I have no taste for cleaning out Augean stables.
**************************
AN INTERESTING DEMOGRAPHIC HYPOTHESIS
Gangland slayings in the Palestinian territories this week have pitted the Islamist gunmen of Hamas against the secular forces of Fatah. The killings defy civilised norms: in December even children were targeted for murder. But the killings also defy political common sense. Ariel Sharon's wall cuts terrorists off from Israeli targets and what happens? The violence - previously justified with the cause of a Palestinian homeland - continues as if nothing had changed, merely finding its outlet in a new set of targets. This makes it appear that Palestinian violence has never really been about a "cause" at all. The violence is, in a strange way, about itself.
Gunnar Heinsohn, a social scientist and genocide researcher at the University of Bremen, has an explanation for why this might be so. Since its publication in 2003, his eccentric and eye-opening Sons and World Power* (not available in English) has become something of a cult book. In Mr Heinsohn's view, when 15 to 29-year-olds make up more than 30 per cent of the population, violence tends to happen; when large percentages are under 15, violence is often imminent. The "causes" in the name of which that violence is committed can be immaterial. There are 67 countries in the world with such "youth bulges" now and 60 of them are undergoing some kind of civil war or mass killing.
Between 1988 and 2002, 900m sons were born to mothers in the developing world and a careful demographer could almost predict the trouble spots. In the decade leading up to 1993, on the eve of the Taliban takeover, the population of Afghanistan grew from 14m to 22m. By the end of this generation, Afghanistan will have as many people under 20 as France and Germany combined. Iraq had 5m people in 1950 but has 25m now, in spite of a quarter-century of wars. Since 1967, the population of the West Bank and Gaza has grown from 450,000 to 3.3m, 47 per cent of which is under 15. If Mr Heinsohn is right, then Palestinian violence of recent months and years is not explained by Israeli occupation (which, after all, existed 30 years ago) or poverty (the most violent parts of the Muslim world are not the poorest) or humiliation. It is just violence.
Mr Heinsohn's point is not that the West is "outnumbered". Nor is it that a Malthusian battle for scarce resources is under way. In El Salvador, for instance, the explosion of political killing in the 1970s and 1980s was preceded by a 27 per cent rise in per capita income. The problem, rather, is that in a youth-bulge society there are not enough positions to provide all these young men with prestige and standing. Envy against older, inheriting brothers is unleashed. So is ambition. Military heroism presents itself as a time-honoured way for a second or third son to wrest a position of respectability from an otherwise indifferent society. Societies with a glut of young men become temperamentally different from "singleton societies" such as Europe's, where the prospect of sending an only child to war is almost unthinkable. Europe's pacifism since 1945, in Mr Heinsohn's view, reflects an inability to wage war, not a disinclination.
Mr Heinsohn's theory accounts for the way "idealistic" wars of national liberation can shift imperceptibly into "pointless" civil wars - as in Ireland 90 years ago or in Africa after decolonisation or in Latin America in the 1980s or in Palestine in recent months. In a broader historical perspective, it explains how a half-dozen fast-growing European countries gradually seized control of almost the entire known world after 1485 and why the fast-growing North American colonies revolted in the 1770s, using as a pretext their "rather silly outrage over taxation without parliamentary representation in London".
If you follow this argument to its logical end point, then the religion of Islam, the focus of so much contemporary strategic discussion, is a great red herring. Islamic countries are certainly growing in importance. They will make up a quarter of the world a decade from now. Of the 27 biggest youth-bulge nations, 13 are Muslim. But if there is a clash between civilisations, it is not a civilisational clash. Religion can be a convenient rationalisation for violent people who do not want to think of themselves as conventional criminals, but this problem is not unique to Islam. In the New World 500 years ago, Mr Heinsohn notes, Spanish conquistadores, too, bowed down and prayed before carrying out slaughters.
In an interview with the Neue Zuercher Zeitung last autumn, Mr Heinsohn noted that if Germany had had the same kind of population growth as Gaza (9 children per woman) over recent decades, it would now have 550m people and 80m young men aged 15 to 30. "Do you think these 80m young Germans would be 10 times as pacifist as the 7m we have today?" he asked. "Or is it not much more likely that they would be throwing bombs in Prague and Gdansk and Wroclaw and - just like the Palestinians - saying: 'This is our land, and it was taken from us for historical reasons that we had nothing to do with'?"
Such a demographic perspective on the global unrest gives us grounds for optimism: In a few decades, the era of youth-bulge wars could be over. It is the meantime that poses problems. Should the west just wait for this wave to burn itself out? When the world is at peace, will it have been better to have kept our nose out of other people's business? Will it have been better to say we at least tried to steer the developing world through this crisis in a humane way? Iraq and Palestine are not the only places where these questions ought to be approached with a good deal of intellectual modesty.
Source
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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)
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason
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 Pages are here or here or here.
****************************
There is a neocon eulogy of the recently deceased Prof. Seymour Martin Lipset here. Despite the usual adjuration de mortuis nil nisi bonum, I feel that I should say a few words to set the record straight. Lipset was a very popular sociologist and political scientist but that which is popularly believed often turns out to be wrong in the long run and I believe that the positive view of Lipset's contribution is formed by his Leftist origins rather than by the lasting value of his ideas. He started out as a Trotskyite, as did the neocons.
I should perhaps declare a personal interest before going on. Despite the effusions about Lipset's good character, my own encounter with him was unimpressive, to say the least. He agreed to mark my Ph.D. dissertation and then not only failed to do so after many reminders but also failed to return his copy of the dissertation when requested to do so. This created such delays that my Ph.D. was not awarded until 1974, even though the dissertation was handed in in 1970. And why did he behave so badly? I guess it wouldn't be because the dissertation reported research results which undermined ideas that he was identified with, would it? Rather than use new data to develop his views -- as a real scientist would -- he resorted to the old Leftist strategy of denial, just as other Leftists for decades denied the evils of the Soviet State.
The central findings of the large and international program of resarch that I undertook to test a popular Lipset idea -- that working-class people are "authoritaraian" -- were finally published in Sociology and Social Research in 1983. Lipset had used selected public opinion poll data to test his ideas but I used much more closely targeted psychometric methods. I found that there was some tendency for the workers to be conservative on some social issues but NO evidence of them being "authoritarian". See here
Lipset's idea that America was saved from its "bad side" by great men is a typical example of selective Leftist attention to group differences. Leftists will trumpet how blacks have been damaged by slavery or how homosexuals need to be protected from discrimination but acknowledging that another group -- Americans of British and Northern European origin -- have particular strengths and virtues is absolutely taboo.
One only has to look at one of the "great" men that Lipset believed "saved" America -- Frankin Delano Roosevelt, the Fascist sympathizer who turned a normal cyclic depression into the Great Depression by his attacks on business and then delivered whole nations into the hands of the Soviets at Yalta. For some of the less-publicized facts about FDR see here and here and here. The truth of the matter is that America's prosperity and pre-eminence is the product of many millions of decent and hard-working individuals. To be even more precise, the success of America comes from the respect for the individual and for the rule of law which America's immigrants from Britain and Northern Europe brought with them and which they enshrined in America's way of life and institutions. But it is "racist" to say that, of course.
And Lipset's saying that "The United States is the only Protestant sectarian country in the world" is also absurd. "Sectarian" implies severe intolerance and discrimination towards people holding to other belief systems. In fact, America would have to be one of the countries with greatest freedom of religion. It is even safe to be a real conservative in America -- though not in American universities, of course.
I could go on to say more about Lipset's twisted ideas but I have no taste for cleaning out Augean stables.
**************************
AN INTERESTING DEMOGRAPHIC HYPOTHESIS
Gangland slayings in the Palestinian territories this week have pitted the Islamist gunmen of Hamas against the secular forces of Fatah. The killings defy civilised norms: in December even children were targeted for murder. But the killings also defy political common sense. Ariel Sharon's wall cuts terrorists off from Israeli targets and what happens? The violence - previously justified with the cause of a Palestinian homeland - continues as if nothing had changed, merely finding its outlet in a new set of targets. This makes it appear that Palestinian violence has never really been about a "cause" at all. The violence is, in a strange way, about itself.
Gunnar Heinsohn, a social scientist and genocide researcher at the University of Bremen, has an explanation for why this might be so. Since its publication in 2003, his eccentric and eye-opening Sons and World Power* (not available in English) has become something of a cult book. In Mr Heinsohn's view, when 15 to 29-year-olds make up more than 30 per cent of the population, violence tends to happen; when large percentages are under 15, violence is often imminent. The "causes" in the name of which that violence is committed can be immaterial. There are 67 countries in the world with such "youth bulges" now and 60 of them are undergoing some kind of civil war or mass killing.
Between 1988 and 2002, 900m sons were born to mothers in the developing world and a careful demographer could almost predict the trouble spots. In the decade leading up to 1993, on the eve of the Taliban takeover, the population of Afghanistan grew from 14m to 22m. By the end of this generation, Afghanistan will have as many people under 20 as France and Germany combined. Iraq had 5m people in 1950 but has 25m now, in spite of a quarter-century of wars. Since 1967, the population of the West Bank and Gaza has grown from 450,000 to 3.3m, 47 per cent of which is under 15. If Mr Heinsohn is right, then Palestinian violence of recent months and years is not explained by Israeli occupation (which, after all, existed 30 years ago) or poverty (the most violent parts of the Muslim world are not the poorest) or humiliation. It is just violence.
Mr Heinsohn's point is not that the West is "outnumbered". Nor is it that a Malthusian battle for scarce resources is under way. In El Salvador, for instance, the explosion of political killing in the 1970s and 1980s was preceded by a 27 per cent rise in per capita income. The problem, rather, is that in a youth-bulge society there are not enough positions to provide all these young men with prestige and standing. Envy against older, inheriting brothers is unleashed. So is ambition. Military heroism presents itself as a time-honoured way for a second or third son to wrest a position of respectability from an otherwise indifferent society. Societies with a glut of young men become temperamentally different from "singleton societies" such as Europe's, where the prospect of sending an only child to war is almost unthinkable. Europe's pacifism since 1945, in Mr Heinsohn's view, reflects an inability to wage war, not a disinclination.
Mr Heinsohn's theory accounts for the way "idealistic" wars of national liberation can shift imperceptibly into "pointless" civil wars - as in Ireland 90 years ago or in Africa after decolonisation or in Latin America in the 1980s or in Palestine in recent months. In a broader historical perspective, it explains how a half-dozen fast-growing European countries gradually seized control of almost the entire known world after 1485 and why the fast-growing North American colonies revolted in the 1770s, using as a pretext their "rather silly outrage over taxation without parliamentary representation in London".
If you follow this argument to its logical end point, then the religion of Islam, the focus of so much contemporary strategic discussion, is a great red herring. Islamic countries are certainly growing in importance. They will make up a quarter of the world a decade from now. Of the 27 biggest youth-bulge nations, 13 are Muslim. But if there is a clash between civilisations, it is not a civilisational clash. Religion can be a convenient rationalisation for violent people who do not want to think of themselves as conventional criminals, but this problem is not unique to Islam. In the New World 500 years ago, Mr Heinsohn notes, Spanish conquistadores, too, bowed down and prayed before carrying out slaughters.
In an interview with the Neue Zuercher Zeitung last autumn, Mr Heinsohn noted that if Germany had had the same kind of population growth as Gaza (9 children per woman) over recent decades, it would now have 550m people and 80m young men aged 15 to 30. "Do you think these 80m young Germans would be 10 times as pacifist as the 7m we have today?" he asked. "Or is it not much more likely that they would be throwing bombs in Prague and Gdansk and Wroclaw and - just like the Palestinians - saying: 'This is our land, and it was taken from us for historical reasons that we had nothing to do with'?"
Such a demographic perspective on the global unrest gives us grounds for optimism: In a few decades, the era of youth-bulge wars could be over. It is the meantime that poses problems. Should the west just wait for this wave to burn itself out? When the world is at peace, will it have been better to have kept our nose out of other people's business? Will it have been better to say we at least tried to steer the developing world through this crisis in a humane way? Iraq and Palestine are not the only places where these questions ought to be approached with a good deal of intellectual modesty.
Source
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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)
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason
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 Pages are here or here or here.
****************************
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Leftist Delusions of "reality"
Not long ago, as I was listening to a BBC reporter describing the latest terrorist outrage in Baghdad-scores killed . deteriorating security situation . Iraqi government helpless . military untrained and disorganized . terrorists operating at will, etc.-it occurred to me that, even if all that the reporter had said were perfectly true it was also exactly what the terrorists would have said if they could have written his script for him. Did this matter? Was it just a coincidence that the "reality" of the Iraq war, endlessly repeated and identified as such by the news media, so closely resembled the terrorist "narrative," as our brainy students of textual deconstruction would put it? Or-the question seemed just worth asking-was reality itself being shaped by the terrorist narrative because of, first, the media's predisposition to believe it and, second, the lack of any persuasive rival narrative from those who continued to claim, in more or less vague terms, that "progress" was being made against the insurgency?
I don't know the answer to this question, but one indication of the importance of asking it came as the media themselves, perhaps emboldened by the success of their preferred party in the recent election, embarked on one of their periodic "reality" jags, proudly boasting of their own intimate relations with that elusive commodity and taking the occasion to pour scorn and contempt upon what they take to be the Bush administration's unfamiliarity with same. For even if we are willing to accept that the media's picture of the Iraq war is largely accurate, we cannot regard as credible the contention that not only the President of the United States but also the entire administration over which he presides and the generals advising it are merely delusional. Nor can I share the easy assumption of the substantial Bush-hating faction in and out of the media that our President is so stupid as to be utterly blind to things obvious and transparent to the likes of Frank Rich of The New York Times or Keith Olbermann of MSNBC's "Countdown."
Here is what the latter said, as transcribed by the Media Research Center, about some remarks President Bush made on his November trip to Vietnam: "It is a shame and it is embarrassing to us all when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality again . . But most importantly, important beyond measure, his avoidance of reality is going to wind up killing more Americans. And that is indefensible and fatal." Well, killing usually is fatal, though it is not always indefensible. But Mr. Olbermann's obvious passion has distorted more than his English. What had excited his wrath was the President's response to a question about the "lessons" of the Vietnam War in which he said that these, applied to the current war, included the fact that "the task in Iraq is going to take a while" and that "we'll succeed unless we quit." It is not so obvious to me as it apparently is to Keith Olbermann that these supposed lessons are misconstrued, but let's say that they are. How does that tell us anything about the President's grasp of "reality"? Does he really think that President Bush-or any American president in wartime-could have said anything else?
It may be, that is, that Iraq is like Vietnam, at least in being not only a losing struggle but an unwinnable one, but even if the commander-in-chief thought so, he would be mad to say so instead of quietly trying to find a way to extricate American forces-which is in fact what he seems to be doing. If Mr. Olbermann thinks otherwise, then he is the delusional one. The same affliction seems to trouble Frank Rich, who professes to believe that his president "isn't merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality. It's not that he can't handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn't know what the truth is." The blithe insouciance with which Mr. Rich issues such a serious charge is itself evidence of its ridiculously hyperbolical nature. Generally speaking, the rhetorical resort to the popularized language of psychotherapy should be treated as prima facie evidence of a lack of intellectual seriousness, and that applies in spades to any allegation of psychosis against one's political enemies.
If Mr. Rich actually thought that the President was a victim of mental illness, he would have used more sober language and consulted one or two more qualified diagnosticians than himself, rather than simply tossing off the accusation as part of his weekly anti-Bush rant.
Much more here
************************
ELSEWHERE
Why poverty? "Beginning with Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet, everyone wants to do something to end poverty in the world. That's supposedly why the World Bank and myriad other expensive international institutions, plus the foreign-aid programs of developed nations, were created. But they've been at this effort for more than 50 years, and judging by the state of the underdeveloped world, there is little evidence of success. Even some of their own experts admit this. Why the poor results? A consideration of the reason for this colossal failure is necessary if we want to help the poor create prosperity. There is no reason why poverty should exist in the world today amid all the modern wonders in technology, agriculture, medicine, and more. Poverty persists because governments in poor countries do stupid things, many of them advised by their well-intentioned charitable donors. Lets point out a few of these obvious but persistent tragic mistakes..... The reasons for the donors' failure is that they allow ideology to prevail over common sense. They invest time, effort, and money trying to alleviate the effects of poverty rather than the obvious causes and thus perpetuate it. If we want to help the poor, let us use our heads more than our hearts.
Crazy "rights" still dangerous: "Over the last couple of years I have explored FDR's Second Bill of Rights because recently some heavy hitters in politics and legal theory (e.g., Cass Sunstein) have made a point of championing these ultimately phony rights. With the Democrats back in power in Washington, it is not unreasonable to suppose that securing and expanding FDR's list of rights-as distinct from those laid out by the American founders in the Declaration of Independence-will once again dominate the federal government's agenda.... FDR's list included some lulus, I must say, but among them what's worth discussion in our day are the so-called economic rights. Take, for example, "The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment." Notice immediately that to secure any such alleged right what would be required is for those who supposedly have them to gain the willing or unwilling services of other people. ... The sorts of rights FDR and his followers promote are instruments of more or less Draconian tyranny. Because they are peddled as well intentioned efforts to do us good, resistance to them is difficult to articulate without seeming to be mean. But resistance to them is nonetheless imperative-it is a large measure of the vigilance that's the price of liberty.
Another large Christian country: "President Putin celebrated Orthodox Christmas in a monastery outside the Russian capital as senior figures in his Government attended a service in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in the city, led by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. National television broadcast footage of Mr Putin crossing himself and lighting a candle at the New Jerusalem monastery, which was turned into a museum after the 1917 Revolution and regained its status only in the 1990s. Despite a career as a KGB officer in the officially atheist Soviet Union, Mr Putin is a publicly devout Orthodox Christian and has cultivated links with the Church's leader, Patriarch Alexy II. In his Christmas message to the country, Mr Putin said: "This holiday brings joy and good expectations in the homes of millions of people, unites everyone on the basis of traditional moral values and strengthens moral principles and accord in society." The Church has enjoyed a significant resurgence since 1991 and says that two thirds of the 144-million strong population are observant."
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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)
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason
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 Pages are here or here or here.
****************************
Not long ago, as I was listening to a BBC reporter describing the latest terrorist outrage in Baghdad-scores killed . deteriorating security situation . Iraqi government helpless . military untrained and disorganized . terrorists operating at will, etc.-it occurred to me that, even if all that the reporter had said were perfectly true it was also exactly what the terrorists would have said if they could have written his script for him. Did this matter? Was it just a coincidence that the "reality" of the Iraq war, endlessly repeated and identified as such by the news media, so closely resembled the terrorist "narrative," as our brainy students of textual deconstruction would put it? Or-the question seemed just worth asking-was reality itself being shaped by the terrorist narrative because of, first, the media's predisposition to believe it and, second, the lack of any persuasive rival narrative from those who continued to claim, in more or less vague terms, that "progress" was being made against the insurgency?
I don't know the answer to this question, but one indication of the importance of asking it came as the media themselves, perhaps emboldened by the success of their preferred party in the recent election, embarked on one of their periodic "reality" jags, proudly boasting of their own intimate relations with that elusive commodity and taking the occasion to pour scorn and contempt upon what they take to be the Bush administration's unfamiliarity with same. For even if we are willing to accept that the media's picture of the Iraq war is largely accurate, we cannot regard as credible the contention that not only the President of the United States but also the entire administration over which he presides and the generals advising it are merely delusional. Nor can I share the easy assumption of the substantial Bush-hating faction in and out of the media that our President is so stupid as to be utterly blind to things obvious and transparent to the likes of Frank Rich of The New York Times or Keith Olbermann of MSNBC's "Countdown."
Here is what the latter said, as transcribed by the Media Research Center, about some remarks President Bush made on his November trip to Vietnam: "It is a shame and it is embarrassing to us all when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality again . . But most importantly, important beyond measure, his avoidance of reality is going to wind up killing more Americans. And that is indefensible and fatal." Well, killing usually is fatal, though it is not always indefensible. But Mr. Olbermann's obvious passion has distorted more than his English. What had excited his wrath was the President's response to a question about the "lessons" of the Vietnam War in which he said that these, applied to the current war, included the fact that "the task in Iraq is going to take a while" and that "we'll succeed unless we quit." It is not so obvious to me as it apparently is to Keith Olbermann that these supposed lessons are misconstrued, but let's say that they are. How does that tell us anything about the President's grasp of "reality"? Does he really think that President Bush-or any American president in wartime-could have said anything else?
It may be, that is, that Iraq is like Vietnam, at least in being not only a losing struggle but an unwinnable one, but even if the commander-in-chief thought so, he would be mad to say so instead of quietly trying to find a way to extricate American forces-which is in fact what he seems to be doing. If Mr. Olbermann thinks otherwise, then he is the delusional one. The same affliction seems to trouble Frank Rich, who professes to believe that his president "isn't merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality. It's not that he can't handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn't know what the truth is." The blithe insouciance with which Mr. Rich issues such a serious charge is itself evidence of its ridiculously hyperbolical nature. Generally speaking, the rhetorical resort to the popularized language of psychotherapy should be treated as prima facie evidence of a lack of intellectual seriousness, and that applies in spades to any allegation of psychosis against one's political enemies.
If Mr. Rich actually thought that the President was a victim of mental illness, he would have used more sober language and consulted one or two more qualified diagnosticians than himself, rather than simply tossing off the accusation as part of his weekly anti-Bush rant.
Much more here
************************
ELSEWHERE
Why poverty? "Beginning with Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet, everyone wants to do something to end poverty in the world. That's supposedly why the World Bank and myriad other expensive international institutions, plus the foreign-aid programs of developed nations, were created. But they've been at this effort for more than 50 years, and judging by the state of the underdeveloped world, there is little evidence of success. Even some of their own experts admit this. Why the poor results? A consideration of the reason for this colossal failure is necessary if we want to help the poor create prosperity. There is no reason why poverty should exist in the world today amid all the modern wonders in technology, agriculture, medicine, and more. Poverty persists because governments in poor countries do stupid things, many of them advised by their well-intentioned charitable donors. Lets point out a few of these obvious but persistent tragic mistakes..... The reasons for the donors' failure is that they allow ideology to prevail over common sense. They invest time, effort, and money trying to alleviate the effects of poverty rather than the obvious causes and thus perpetuate it. If we want to help the poor, let us use our heads more than our hearts.
Crazy "rights" still dangerous: "Over the last couple of years I have explored FDR's Second Bill of Rights because recently some heavy hitters in politics and legal theory (e.g., Cass Sunstein) have made a point of championing these ultimately phony rights. With the Democrats back in power in Washington, it is not unreasonable to suppose that securing and expanding FDR's list of rights-as distinct from those laid out by the American founders in the Declaration of Independence-will once again dominate the federal government's agenda.... FDR's list included some lulus, I must say, but among them what's worth discussion in our day are the so-called economic rights. Take, for example, "The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment." Notice immediately that to secure any such alleged right what would be required is for those who supposedly have them to gain the willing or unwilling services of other people. ... The sorts of rights FDR and his followers promote are instruments of more or less Draconian tyranny. Because they are peddled as well intentioned efforts to do us good, resistance to them is difficult to articulate without seeming to be mean. But resistance to them is nonetheless imperative-it is a large measure of the vigilance that's the price of liberty.
Another large Christian country: "President Putin celebrated Orthodox Christmas in a monastery outside the Russian capital as senior figures in his Government attended a service in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in the city, led by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. National television broadcast footage of Mr Putin crossing himself and lighting a candle at the New Jerusalem monastery, which was turned into a museum after the 1917 Revolution and regained its status only in the 1990s. Despite a career as a KGB officer in the officially atheist Soviet Union, Mr Putin is a publicly devout Orthodox Christian and has cultivated links with the Church's leader, Patriarch Alexy II. In his Christmas message to the country, Mr Putin said: "This holiday brings joy and good expectations in the homes of millions of people, unites everyone on the basis of traditional moral values and strengthens moral principles and accord in society." The Church has enjoyed a significant resurgence since 1991 and says that two thirds of the 144-million strong population are observant."
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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)
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason
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 Pages are here or here or here.
****************************
Monday, January 08, 2007
Multiculturalism doesn't make vibrant communities but defensive ones
(Excerpt from an article by Steve Sailer )
It was one of the more irony-laden incidents in the history of celebrity social scientists. While in Sweden to receive a $50,000 academic prize as political science professor of the year, Harvard's Robert D. Putnam, a former Carter administration official who made his reputation writing about the decline of social trust in America in his bestseller Bowling Alone, confessed to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that his latest research discovery-that ethnic diversity decreases trust and co-operation in communities-was so explosive that for the last half decade he hadn't dared announce it "until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it `would have been irresponsible to publish without that.'" In a column headlined "Harvard study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity," Lloyd summarized the results of the largest study ever of "civic engagement," a survey of 26,200 people in 40 American communities:
Lloyd noted, "Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, `the most diverse human habitation in human history.'" As if to prove his own point that diversity creates minefields of mistrust, Putnam later protested to the Harvard Crimson that the Financial Times essay left him feeling betrayed, calling it "by two degrees of magnitude, the worst experience I have ever had with the media." To Putnam's horror, hundreds of "racists and anti-immigrant activists" sent him e-mails congratulating him for finally coming clean about his findings.
Lloyd stoutly stood by his reporting, and Putnam couldn't cite any mistakes of fact, just a failure to accentuate the positive. It was "almost criminal," Putnam grumbled, that Lloyd had not sufficiently emphasized the spin that he had spent five years concocting. Yet considering the quality of Putnam's talking points that Lloyd did pass on, perhaps the journalist was being merciful in not giving the professor more rope with which to hang himself. For example, Putnam's line-"What we shouldn't do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us"-sounds like a weak parody of Bertolt Brecht's parody of Communist propaganda after the failed 1953 uprising against the East German puppet regime: "Would it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?"
Before Putnam hid his study away, his research had appeared on March 1, 2001 in a Los Angeles Times article entitled "Love Thy Neighbor? Not in L.A." Reporter Peter Y. Hong recounted, "Those who live in more homogeneous places, such as New Hampshire, Montana or Lewiston, Maine, do more with friends and are more involved in community affairs or politics than residents of more cosmopolitan areas, the study said."
Update:
The original reports of Putnam's findings are here and here.
**********************
Brookes News Update
The US economy, consumer spending and the GDP fallacy: It has become the received wisdom that increased consumption more than offset the spending decline that the Clinton recession brought about. This is dangerous nonsense and that can only end in another recession
Imports and trade deficits: the good and the bad: The protectionist injunction against "free trade at any cost" is ridiculous. Free trade never takes place "at any cost". Trade only occurs up to that point where the cost of trading exceeds the benefits
Augusto Pinochet: the untold story: Even now the media cannot tell the truth about Allende's efforts to turn Chile into a Stalinist Gulag. As for leftists, history also teaches us that when they get even a small taste of their own medicine, their moaning and whining and sniveling becomes a worldwide cause celebre
US elections reveal a growing discontent: Congress appears to be that problem. They are out of control making promises they can't keep, spending the growth in revenues from a good economy as fast as they can on pork for their financial supporters
Opening the doors of Islam: The neurosis of Islamofascism can only be eradicated from within Islam by Moslems themselves. Ijtihad is how they are going to do it, how they are going to open the doors of Islam after being closed for a thousand years and bring it into the 21st century
Will the US dollar collapse?: The US dollar is having a hard time of it. But why is this so? Why has the dollar been falling? The basic argument is that the trade deficit is unsustainable and is driving down the dollar. But this does not tell us what is driving the deficits
*****************************
ELSEWHERE
Israel 'has plans for Iran nuke strike': "Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons, Britain's Sunday Times newspaper said. Citing what it said were several Israeli military sources, the paper said two Israeli air force squadrons had been training to blow up an enrichment plant in Natanz using low-yield nuclear "bunker busters". Two other sites, a heavy water plant at Arak and a uranium conversion plant at Isfahan, would be targeted with conventional bombs, the Sunday Times said. [STACLU has a lot of discussion about how much credence can be attached to this story]
The right minimum wage: "Democrats consider the minimum-wage increase a signature issue. But the minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities' prices. Washington, which has its hands full delivering the mail and defending the shores, should let the market do well what Washington does poorly"
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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)
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason
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 Pages are here or here or here.
****************************
(Excerpt from an article by Steve Sailer )
"In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us".
-Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam
It was one of the more irony-laden incidents in the history of celebrity social scientists. While in Sweden to receive a $50,000 academic prize as political science professor of the year, Harvard's Robert D. Putnam, a former Carter administration official who made his reputation writing about the decline of social trust in America in his bestseller Bowling Alone, confessed to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that his latest research discovery-that ethnic diversity decreases trust and co-operation in communities-was so explosive that for the last half decade he hadn't dared announce it "until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it `would have been irresponsible to publish without that.'" In a column headlined "Harvard study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity," Lloyd summarized the results of the largest study ever of "civic engagement," a survey of 26,200 people in 40 American communities:
When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. `They don't trust the local mayor, they don't trust the local paper, they don't trust other people and they don't trust institutions,' said Prof Putnam. `The only thing there's more of is protest marches and TV watching.'
Lloyd noted, "Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, `the most diverse human habitation in human history.'" As if to prove his own point that diversity creates minefields of mistrust, Putnam later protested to the Harvard Crimson that the Financial Times essay left him feeling betrayed, calling it "by two degrees of magnitude, the worst experience I have ever had with the media." To Putnam's horror, hundreds of "racists and anti-immigrant activists" sent him e-mails congratulating him for finally coming clean about his findings.
Lloyd stoutly stood by his reporting, and Putnam couldn't cite any mistakes of fact, just a failure to accentuate the positive. It was "almost criminal," Putnam grumbled, that Lloyd had not sufficiently emphasized the spin that he had spent five years concocting. Yet considering the quality of Putnam's talking points that Lloyd did pass on, perhaps the journalist was being merciful in not giving the professor more rope with which to hang himself. For example, Putnam's line-"What we shouldn't do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us"-sounds like a weak parody of Bertolt Brecht's parody of Communist propaganda after the failed 1953 uprising against the East German puppet regime: "Would it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?"
Before Putnam hid his study away, his research had appeared on March 1, 2001 in a Los Angeles Times article entitled "Love Thy Neighbor? Not in L.A." Reporter Peter Y. Hong recounted, "Those who live in more homogeneous places, such as New Hampshire, Montana or Lewiston, Maine, do more with friends and are more involved in community affairs or politics than residents of more cosmopolitan areas, the study said."
Update:
The original reports of Putnam's findings are here and here.
**********************
Brookes News Update
The US economy, consumer spending and the GDP fallacy: It has become the received wisdom that increased consumption more than offset the spending decline that the Clinton recession brought about. This is dangerous nonsense and that can only end in another recession
Imports and trade deficits: the good and the bad: The protectionist injunction against "free trade at any cost" is ridiculous. Free trade never takes place "at any cost". Trade only occurs up to that point where the cost of trading exceeds the benefits
Augusto Pinochet: the untold story: Even now the media cannot tell the truth about Allende's efforts to turn Chile into a Stalinist Gulag. As for leftists, history also teaches us that when they get even a small taste of their own medicine, their moaning and whining and sniveling becomes a worldwide cause celebre
US elections reveal a growing discontent: Congress appears to be that problem. They are out of control making promises they can't keep, spending the growth in revenues from a good economy as fast as they can on pork for their financial supporters
Opening the doors of Islam: The neurosis of Islamofascism can only be eradicated from within Islam by Moslems themselves. Ijtihad is how they are going to do it, how they are going to open the doors of Islam after being closed for a thousand years and bring it into the 21st century
Will the US dollar collapse?: The US dollar is having a hard time of it. But why is this so? Why has the dollar been falling? The basic argument is that the trade deficit is unsustainable and is driving down the dollar. But this does not tell us what is driving the deficits
*****************************
ELSEWHERE
Israel 'has plans for Iran nuke strike': "Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons, Britain's Sunday Times newspaper said. Citing what it said were several Israeli military sources, the paper said two Israeli air force squadrons had been training to blow up an enrichment plant in Natanz using low-yield nuclear "bunker busters". Two other sites, a heavy water plant at Arak and a uranium conversion plant at Isfahan, would be targeted with conventional bombs, the Sunday Times said. [STACLU has a lot of discussion about how much credence can be attached to this story]
The right minimum wage: "Democrats consider the minimum-wage increase a signature issue. But the minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities' prices. Washington, which has its hands full delivering the mail and defending the shores, should let the market do well what Washington does poorly"
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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)
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason
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 Pages are here or here or here.
****************************
Sunday, January 07, 2007
US Attacked: National Guard Routed
How utterly disgusting. If this was a diversion, as one scenario suggests, we can only hope that something even more dangerous wasn't smuggled in. And if you need a better example of an alleged super power so hobbled by political correctness and weak political leadership that it can hardly protect itself, let alone wage a war - you may be waiting a long time for better than this.
I imagine the National Guard was operating under ROE's [rules] that prevented them from firing back. But, yes, armed men from Mexico entered the US, attacked a National Guard position and the National Guard turned tail and ran, probably their only alternative under President Bush's wonderful border enforcement policy.
Americans should be as outraged as they are sad, because if this precipitates any change, it'll likely be seen as a rationale for taking the Guard off the border, not giving them the ability to fight back. Face it, this administration probably fears gunning down some illegal more than it does allowing them to enter the country at will.
From Riehl World
**************************
The betrayed children of the welfare society
These neglected children are kids like Michael Oher, who turned up recently in The New York Times in Michael Lewis's "Ballad of Big Mike." Of kids like Michael you can too often write:
"that Michael's father had been shot and killed and tossed off a bridge, that his mother was addicted to crack cocaine and that his life experience was so narrow that he might as well have spent his first 16 years inside a closet... Big Mike, as he was called, was essentially homeless and so had made an art of sleeping on whatever floor the ghetto would provide for him. "
Yes, read the whole thing. It's a compelling story, and for you sophisticated ironists there is even irony in it. African American Michael Oher is doing fine now as a stand out left offensive tackle at Ole Miss thanks to a bunch of rich white conservative football fans of a school in the Old South.
But why should we continue spending five percent of GDP every year on government schooling and $200 billion a year on welfare when a nice kid like Michael Oher completely falls through the safety net? What combination of personal and institutional heedlessness does it take to produce a 16-year-old like Michael Oher, utterly unschooled and utterly unsocialized? How many more are there like him? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?
It would be interesting to apply the "Enron Test" to the case of Michael Oher and the other victims of the welfare state. Suppose that Michael Oher had been neglected not by his mother, the local government child services bureaucracy, and the local school bureaucracy but by the late Ken Lay and the evil Enron corporation. What would our Democratic friends say then? For the heedless bureaucrats of the welfare state it's not the money. It's power that frees them from accountability.
More here
**************************
ELSEWHERE
Charitable nation: "Americans are better people than Europeans. Hold on, it gets better. Religious Americans are better than non-religious Americans. And religious Americans tend to be politically conservative. This admittedly tendentious rendering of reality is how some on the right are interpreting Who Really Cares? by Arthur Brooks, a professor of public administration at Syracuse University. Brooks doesn't really deal with what makes one person 'better' or 'worse' than any other. But it's fair to say that how much a person gives -- of either his money or time -- is usually considered an important indicator of character. It turns out that by this yardstick alone, my little talk-radio-ready summary is basically correct."
Iran admits its nuke program may be used for weapons: "Iranian top nuclear envoy Ali Larijani said in a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao Friday that Iran is committed to peaceful use of nuclear technology. "We oppose obtaining nuclear weapons and we will peacefully use nuclear technology under the framework of the Nonproliferation Treaty," he said. "But," he warned, "if we are threatened, the situation may change."
People running from over-regulated Leftist New York: "Advocates for more pro-growth policies in New York will get new ammunition today with the release of a report from the U.S. Census Bureau showing that the Empire State was one of only a handful of states that lost population this year, with thousands of people moving away to other parts of America and not being replaced by new residents. The state lost more than 9,500 people between July 2005 and July 2006, putting its total statewide population at 19.3 million, according to the federal statistics. Only states like Michigan, which has been hard-hit by the decline in the domestic auto industry, and hurricane-ravaged Louisiana, which lost 4.9% of its population due to the storm, saw a more dramatic decline, the bureau estimated".
Leftist dishonesty about American wage rates: "Some economists and journalists-I'll call them "the real-wage pessimists"-have claimed that average real wages have fallen during substantial time periods over the last 30 or so years.... Start with the person's hourly wage rate. Many of the real-wage pessimists don't carefully estimate that but, instead, settle for looking at average weekly wages. But comparing average weekly wages over time will give a much more pessimistic view than is justified. Why? Part-time jobs as a percentage of total jobs have increased over time.... there is another reason that average weekly earnings understate the growth in hourly wages: the average work week, even for full-time workers, has fallen steadily... The third factor typically left out by the real-wage pessimists is the growing fraction of compensation paid in the form of benefits. Reynolds points out that between 1973 and 2005, total compensation per hour (including health insurance, retirement, and other benefits as part of compensation), rose by almost 40 percent.
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
**************************
"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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)
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason
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 Pages are here or here or here.
****************************
How utterly disgusting. If this was a diversion, as one scenario suggests, we can only hope that something even more dangerous wasn't smuggled in. And if you need a better example of an alleged super power so hobbled by political correctness and weak political leadership that it can hardly protect itself, let alone wage a war - you may be waiting a long time for better than this.
I imagine the National Guard was operating under ROE's [rules] that prevented them from firing back. But, yes, armed men from Mexico entered the US, attacked a National Guard position and the National Guard turned tail and ran, probably their only alternative under President Bush's wonderful border enforcement policy.
Americans should be as outraged as they are sad, because if this precipitates any change, it'll likely be seen as a rationale for taking the Guard off the border, not giving them the ability to fight back. Face it, this administration probably fears gunning down some illegal more than it does allowing them to enter the country at will.
From Riehl World
**************************
The betrayed children of the welfare society
These neglected children are kids like Michael Oher, who turned up recently in The New York Times in Michael Lewis's "Ballad of Big Mike." Of kids like Michael you can too often write:
"that Michael's father had been shot and killed and tossed off a bridge, that his mother was addicted to crack cocaine and that his life experience was so narrow that he might as well have spent his first 16 years inside a closet... Big Mike, as he was called, was essentially homeless and so had made an art of sleeping on whatever floor the ghetto would provide for him. "
Yes, read the whole thing. It's a compelling story, and for you sophisticated ironists there is even irony in it. African American Michael Oher is doing fine now as a stand out left offensive tackle at Ole Miss thanks to a bunch of rich white conservative football fans of a school in the Old South.
But why should we continue spending five percent of GDP every year on government schooling and $200 billion a year on welfare when a nice kid like Michael Oher completely falls through the safety net? What combination of personal and institutional heedlessness does it take to produce a 16-year-old like Michael Oher, utterly unschooled and utterly unsocialized? How many more are there like him? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?
It would be interesting to apply the "Enron Test" to the case of Michael Oher and the other victims of the welfare state. Suppose that Michael Oher had been neglected not by his mother, the local government child services bureaucracy, and the local school bureaucracy but by the late Ken Lay and the evil Enron corporation. What would our Democratic friends say then? For the heedless bureaucrats of the welfare state it's not the money. It's power that frees them from accountability.
More here
**************************
ELSEWHERE
Charitable nation: "Americans are better people than Europeans. Hold on, it gets better. Religious Americans are better than non-religious Americans. And religious Americans tend to be politically conservative. This admittedly tendentious rendering of reality is how some on the right are interpreting Who Really Cares? by Arthur Brooks, a professor of public administration at Syracuse University. Brooks doesn't really deal with what makes one person 'better' or 'worse' than any other. But it's fair to say that how much a person gives -- of either his money or time -- is usually considered an important indicator of character. It turns out that by this yardstick alone, my little talk-radio-ready summary is basically correct."
Iran admits its nuke program may be used for weapons: "Iranian top nuclear envoy Ali Larijani said in a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao Friday that Iran is committed to peaceful use of nuclear technology. "We oppose obtaining nuclear weapons and we will peacefully use nuclear technology under the framework of the Nonproliferation Treaty," he said. "But," he warned, "if we are threatened, the situation may change."
People running from over-regulated Leftist New York: "Advocates for more pro-growth policies in New York will get new ammunition today with the release of a report from the U.S. Census Bureau showing that the Empire State was one of only a handful of states that lost population this year, with thousands of people moving away to other parts of America and not being replaced by new residents. The state lost more than 9,500 people between July 2005 and July 2006, putting its total statewide population at 19.3 million, according to the federal statistics. Only states like Michigan, which has been hard-hit by the decline in the domestic auto industry, and hurricane-ravaged Louisiana, which lost 4.9% of its population due to the storm, saw a more dramatic decline, the bureau estimated".
Leftist dishonesty about American wage rates: "Some economists and journalists-I'll call them "the real-wage pessimists"-have claimed that average real wages have fallen during substantial time periods over the last 30 or so years.... Start with the person's hourly wage rate. Many of the real-wage pessimists don't carefully estimate that but, instead, settle for looking at average weekly wages. But comparing average weekly wages over time will give a much more pessimistic view than is justified. Why? Part-time jobs as a percentage of total jobs have increased over time.... there is another reason that average weekly earnings understate the growth in hourly wages: the average work week, even for full-time workers, has fallen steadily... The third factor typically left out by the real-wage pessimists is the growing fraction of compensation paid in the form of benefits. Reynolds points out that between 1973 and 2005, total compensation per hour (including health insurance, retirement, and other benefits as part of compensation), rose by almost 40 percent.
For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.
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)
R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason
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