ELSEWHERE

The release from prison of Pauline Hanson in my home State of Queensland has been covered by the media worldwide -- even as far away as Scotland -- so I have forborne from making any comment on it up until now on the grounds that everything that could be said about the matter has already been said by others. But in fact there are some things that have been glided over by the mainstream media that people might like to know. She has generally been described only as “Far-Right” or “anti-immigrant” on the grounds that she called for a slowdown in the very high rate of immigration from Asia into Australia. She did indeed do that -- but her greatest emphasis was in fact on Australia’s “Aboriginal industry”. She wanted to abolish the vast bureaucracy and system of handouts that has been set up to cater to Australia’s native blacks. In other words, she wanted to ABOLISH Australia’s official racism. She is in fact Australia’s only ANTI-racist politician in my view -- which is why I voted for her twice. Official racism just makes racist attitudes worse in my view. No wonder they put her in jail on grounds that the Queensland Court of Appeal has just said should never even have gone to trial.

Opinion Journal has a good coverage of GWB's speech about the possibility of democracy in the Arab world. I am almost persuaded. The comparison with a Reagan speech is a telling one.

Jeff Jacoby too weighs in on the present aims and difficulties in Iraq. Cakewalks are for wimps. Great aims must be expected to require effort.

An interesting email from one of my Brazilian readers: "Your post about envy made me remember a scene in the film The Sniper (where a Russian shooter disputes with a German one about who is the best in WW2) -- when the Soviet Commissar admits he envies the love of a woman he will never have, saying that the dream of a society without envy is impossible, and offers himself in sacrifice -- bullet in the forehead. I keep watching the scene over and over, it has a beauty I have not seen before, and it is tragic and redempetion follows. I would like your opinion about it." I rarely watch films so other readers might like to comment.

A geophysicist reports that the Sun is more active now than it has been for a millennium. But any global warming is still our doing -- Right?

Sean Gabb has a rather acid comment on the British Conservative party's recent change of leader: "Looking at the actions of the Parliamentary Conservative Party during the past ten days, it is as though a mental defective had stopped twitching in his wheelchair and turned into something like a Bond villain." But he is glad of the change nonetheless. We Anglophiles live in hope.

I got a laugh out of this "shortened version" of the Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt always be honest and faithful to the provider of thy nookie. And, thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless of course they pray to a different invisible man than you." Attributed to George Carlin. Via Armed Prophet

A thin layer of biodegreadable organic molecules spread over the surface of a water reservoir can cut evaporation so much that it is almost like getting a second reservoir for free. Great stuff? No doubt. But what about the ecology!! "It's natural for water to evaporate", the Greenies will no doubt cry -- and thus stop that huge cost-saver too.

The Wicked one has an unusual list of viruses.

My latest academic upload (see here or here) reviews Hans Eysenck's work on the psychology of politics. I knew him personally. I spent my 1977 sabbatical year in his Department at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. He had a great mind but, sadly, he passed away a few years ago. His work is probably still the best known alternative to the Leftist theory of politics and is based on a view very much like the libertarian account of how politics are structured.

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ENVY

I often point out the evidence for a substantial hereditary component in Left/Right political orientation. Some of the latest evolutionary thinking is consistent with that. Note this comment about the Pleistocene origins of envy, one of the major motors of Leftist thought: "we are prone to envy, to feeling dispossessed or cheated by the mere fact that others own what we do not own. We view the very possession of desirable goods and resources on the part of others as somehow unfair or even immoral, and we will look for evidence allowing us to regard the rich as unworthy of their "luck" and possessions." So Leftism goes back in fact to our evolutionary origins in pre-history. That does not make it any less irrational in our day, though.

All that makes this comment even more relevant: "many capitalist thinkers underestimate the force of envy, and in this regard are far more naive than collectivists. Lenin never tired of stressing that his goal was to make class envy flare into revolutionary hatred.... Ludwig von Mises showed 31 years ago in The Anti-capitalistic Mentality that reason, evidence, and humaneness have about as much impact on public policy as an Oral Roberts sermon would have on Nietzsche. As too few contemporary economists do, Mises realized that for libertarian economists to have a practical as well as scholarly impact, they must understand the non-rational factors that breed hostility to capitalism.... " Mises went on to explain Leftism among academics on the basis of envy too.

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SAFETY FOR FEMALE DRIVERS

I don't know if this story actually happened but the point is that it COULD have happened

Lauren was 19 yrs old and in college. This story takes place over the Christmas/New Year's holiday break. It was the Saturday before New Year's and it was about 1 PM in the afternoon, and Lauren was driving to visit a friend. An UNMARKED police car pulled up behind her and put his lights on. Lauren's parents have 4 children (high school and college age) and have always told them never to pull over for an unmarked car on the side of the road, but rather wait until they get to a gas station, etc. So Lauren had actually listened to her parents' advice, and promptly called No. 112 on her cell phone to tell the police dispatcher that she would not pull over right away. She proceeded to tell the dispatcher that there was an unmarked police car with a flashing red light on his rooftop behind her. The dispatcher checked to see if there was a police car where she was and there wasn't and he told her to keep driving, remain calm and that he had back-up already on the way. Ten minutes later 4 cop cars surrounded her and the unmarked car behind her. One policeman went to her side and the others surrounded the car behind. They pulled the guy from the car and tackled him to the ground ...... the man was a convicted rapist and wanted for other crimes.

So ... especially for a woman alone in a car, you should not pull over for an unmarked car. Apparently police have to respect your right to keep going to a "safe" place. You obviously need to make some signals that you acknowledge them (i.e., put on your hazard lights) or call No. 112 like Lauren did.

And the 112 number DOES exist .... as it says here. Best of all, it seems to be the international emegency number .. meaning that you can use it anywhere in the world that has GSM mobile phones.

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ELSEWHERE

Val of Val-e-diction writes in response to my post on multiculturalism and the varieties of racism: "Your good post reminded me of my years working in Trinidad and Tobago. Multicultis believe that only whites can be racists, but I would like them to visit T&T. After their independence from Britain in 1964, the then mostly-black T&T was ruled by the marxist Eric Williams, with the consequent statism that is still rampant today. Over the years years before independence, many Indians were brought in to serve as indentured workers and their descendents later formed an ever growing minority, mostly successful in industry and commerce because they were mostly blocked from government jobs (monopolized by blacks). Today the country is divided approximately 48% blacks and 48% Indians plus several other minorities. The point is that one has to live there to get to know the open and huge racism of blacks towards Indians. And that's not all. Trinidadians dislike and consider Latin Americans somehow inferior -- especially Venezuelans, their closest neighbors on the subcontinent -- because the others just look and talk foreign (maybe also because Trinidadians are islanders and not people from terra firma). In the end it's just a fact that you prefer people whom you think are "like you," whether is by race, ethnicity, pigmentation, appearance, language, ideology, etc.”

I noted recently the Leftist fuss about GWB and Tony Blair praying together. A reader comments: "If sex in private between consenting adults is ok, why isn't prayer?"

A kind reader has translated the French email that I posted recently. Apparently it says that official French secularism is compatible with religious tolerance and that France should therefore not bar Muslim women from wearing their Muslim headgear. I would send them all back to Algeria, headgear and all, myself.

Matthew Cowie has emailed me this link to the Norwegian press (in English). Apparently the Norwegian minister for immigration wants Muslims in Norway to integrate more into Norwegian society. The multicultis worldwide will probably be frothing at the mouth over that! No doubt the good minister will be a "Nazi" in two seconds flat.

My latest academic upload (see here or here) looks at whether or not working class people are more conservative on social issues than others. It is widely asserted that they are. Those who know their old TV series will know of Archie Bunker and Alf Garnet as the stereotypical working-class conservatives. In my data, however, it has always turned out that there is nothing much in the theory. There ARE heaps of workers who are conservative on social issues but there are more or less equally large numbers who are not conservative on social issues. This article did not however examine how the workers stack up on racial issues. One interesting finding, though, was that the workers were more distrustful of expertise as a qualification for being in government. It was people who saw themselves as being more upper-class who agreed with statements like "This country would be best run by men who have had a university education". Given the low quality of most intellectuals, I am pretty glad of the workers' skepticism in that regard.

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

A Jew In Baghdad. A US soldier in Iraq paints a grim picture of what the civilised world is really up against.
North Korea's imbroglio requires patience. Japan's move to strengthen its military is giving Beijing a further justification for modernizing her war machine.
SMH covers up Bush successes in Iraq. The Bush-hating Marian Wilkinson of the Sydney Morning Herald, aka The Saddam Times, is another of those ideologically motivated journalists whose reports on Iraq seem to be written with the sole intention of misleading the public about the true state of affairs in that hapless country.
Australian reporter whitewashes pro-Saddam lefties. Marian Wilkinson of the Sydney Morning Herald is a shameless political bigot and a disgrace to journalism.
Philip Adams' anti-Semitic friends. It seems that the leftwing Philip Adams, a columnist with Murdoch's Australian has decided that Arab Jew-hatred is now is now politically correct. What a charming chap.
How wealthy residents confiscated land in the Mornington Peninsula. Rich adults behaving as though they are caring greenies makes me want to look for a bucket. As anyone with an IQ of 30 could see from a distance, these well-heeled "caring greenies" were attempting an old fashioned land grab.
Behavioural and experimental economics -- what are they all about. Nobel prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith may have unwittingly laid the foundation for a retardation rather than an advancement of the economics discipline.

Details here

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MORE MORONIC "EDUCATION"

A reader writes:

"I have two incidents from my recent graduate education that I thought might interest you.

Several years ago I left an industry job to return to the University to pursue a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. For several reasons including class scheduling conflicts and personal interest I took a minor in STS (Science Technology and Society), basically a liberal arts view of science and technology. I was a bit surprised to find this area of study to be a bit of a fact free zone but there were some tidbits offered as facts.

I was told it was the invention of the steam engine that made it possible for England to ship its convicts to Australia and for England and the other colonial powers to establish empires. I had just read "The Hostile Shore" and knew transportation happen entirely in the age of sail. My elementary school history lessons are enough to know the Spanish, English, Portuguese and Dutch colonial empires were all established at least two hundred years before trans-oceanic steam ships appeared.

I was told here in America the very promising steam engine power automobile was defeated by an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease. In an effort to contain this disease, public watering trough were destroyed removing the water source needed by the owners of steam powered automobiles, most of which did not have condensers and therefore required several liters of water per mile to operate.

No word on why steam engines in steam ships which by definition do not lack for water for cooling fell into disfavor at about the same time."

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ELSEWHERE

Bernhardt Varenius of Anti-Socialist Tendencies has asked me to comment on the theories of George Lakoff, the Leftist linguistics professor who seems to think he knows all about the psychology of politics. Lakoff has written a book (reviewed here) which purports to explain the Left/Right polarity of politics as Mother-oriented politics versus Father-oriented politics -- a book called: Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think. So I have put up a "deconstruction" of Lakoff's "text" here. If a few other bloggers link to the file, Lakoff will be confronted by a deconstruction of his grotesquely oversimplified theories every time he Googles his own name! Fun!

Check here for the latest example of Leftists saying anything at all to justify their hatreds -- even if it is exactly opposite to what they have always said before. The anti-Globos are now saying that they oppose the World Trade Organization because it will reduce national sovereignty! But national soverignty has always been a conservative cause! For decades Leftists were the great internationalists. And the WTO is just a bunch of quarrelling politicians from all over the world anyway -- any "power" it has is minute. What a total nonsense anti-globalism is!

A Pastor with balls: "The Big Lake pastor who shot and killed two men he caught burglarizing his chapel before dawn on an April morning should never have gone into the church in the first place, said three of the jurors who deliberated on the case. But those same jurors also said that the Rev. Phillip Mielke had a legal right to check on the chapel -- and deserved to be acquitted on criminal charges.

Silflay Hraka has a nicely sarcastic post about the connection between global warming and the activity of the Sun.

Thrift equals liberty? Even libertarians can get pretty muddled at times but this writer deserves some sort of prize. He says "the market economy has to end at some point" !!! and that government spending must go on eating up an ever bigger slice of the national income!!! I think he needs a cold shower and a good rest.

Arlene Peck thinks that the barbarism Americans are experiencing in Iraq at the moment may help more Americans understand what Israel is stuck with.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again.

The Wicked one explains why it is great to be a guy.

My latest academic upload (see here or here) is of interest to psychometricians only -- dealing with response skewness.

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WHY MULTICULTURALISM?

Sean Gabb has a long but very good article on the fact that Britain now has a Leftist ruling class and that its official ideology -- multiculturalism -- is a recipe for disaster. “Multiculturalism” once stood for tolerance of unimportant differences. Now it seems to stand for denigrating and tearing down all the standards and values that have made Western civilization the tremendously successful phenomenon that it is. Excerpt: “In the neo-Marxist terminology, the ruling class and its ideological state apparatus are imposing a new hegemonic ideology of multiculturalism. The great apparent problem with this new ideology is its impossibility. It is a false ideology.... There cannot be one society made up of widely different communities each of which loves and respects all the others. There cannot be a society in which the ethnic composition of every group - from university vice chancellors to hairdressers, from lunatic asylum inmates to fashion models - exactly parallels that of the census returns. Instead, there will be a retreat into ethnic nationalism among all groups”. In other words, a race war looms and a police State will be needed to suppress it.

What I think we need to add to Sean’s account is WHY the Left have been so successful in promoting their perverse value-free gospel of multiculturalism. How have they got at least grudging acceptance of it from so much of the community? The Left have been successful precisely because very few people know much history and what little they do know tends therefore to be heavily oversimplified. And the oversimplified lesson that our intellectual class has drummed into everybody as a result of the vast trauma of World War II is: racism is evil. Never mind that racism was a normal and open feature of ALL human societies up until World War II. Never mind that this means that all our ancestors were evil. So dominant is this view among ALL people (not only Leftists) today that I feel I am pissing into the wind even to question it. But it IS a false assumption and question it we must if we are not to do ourselves and our society great harm. There is no doubt that Hitler’s racism was terminally evil but to conclude from that that ALL racism is evil is oversimplified “black-and-white” thinking on a grand scale.

Let us look at an obvious counter-example: The British Empire. There is no doubt that there were some terrible events in the time of the British Empire. The massacre at Amritsar and the Boer war still make me grieve. But far from the actions of General Dyer at Amritsar being officially encouraged, they were not even officially condoned. He was cashiered over it (i.e. dismissed from the Army). And, terrible though the Boer war was (for both sides), wars of territorial aggrandisement are as old as time and from China’s takeover of Tibet to General Galtieri’s assault on the Falkland Islands, still go on today. You don’t need any racist factor for such wars to occur and the Dutch Protestants who were the target of the Boer war were in any case as racially and culturally similar to the British as you were ever likely to get.

So setting those sad events aside, the plain fact is that the British Empire was as racist a phenomenon as any you are likely to get and yet it did NOT engage in genocide or anything like it -- rather the reverse if anything. It was to a significant extent benevolent towards what were seen as “the lesser races” -- Kipling’s famous “White man’s burden”. Virtually no Englishman at the height of the Empire had any doubt that the English were a superior race who were destined to rule. In racist ideology they were virtually indistinguishable from the Nazis. And that is one reason why Hitler admired the British greatly and made repeated efforts to stop the war with them that he did not declare -- even on his personal direct orders stopping his Panzern in their tracks so that the defeated British Army could go free at Dunkirk.

But Hitler was a socialist and the British, by contrast, were the great redoubt of conservatism and what a difference that made to what actions racist beliefs led to! Where Hitler massacred Jews wholesale, who did the British Conservative party adopt as their highly successful leader at the height of the Empire -- a JEW (Benjamin Disraeli). Disraeli DID have to make a pretence of conversion to Anglicanism that fooled no-one but that was it! That was the sole “racist” requirement of him and even that was only needed because he wanted to become Prime Minister. Had he chosen to remain a private citizen he could have done as he pleased. What a contrast to Auschwitz and Belsen!

And those naughty British racists were even so dastardly as to have two Indian members of Parliament representing them in the British House of Commons at the height of the empire (Dadadhai Naoroji 1892-1895 and M.M. Bhownagree 1895-1906)! It was not only Jews who could attain popular acceptance if they had the ability.

I know I must sound like a one-eyed Rightist nutter to be saying so but the plain fact of history is that it is only LEFTIST racism that is destructive. Conservative racism is essentially harmless. Racist attitudes can lead to all sorts of different actions but in the hands of the chronically destructive Leftists they of course lead to destructive actions. In the hands of comfortable, compromising conservatives they at worst put people on their mettle. Just remember: a racist Leftist murdered 6 million Jews but racist Conservatives made a Jew their Prime Minister. Such an extreme contrast should tell anyone how stupid it is to generalize about racism.

But because virtually no-one today connects together the simple facts of history that I have just outlined, we have this consensus that ALL racism is evil -- and multiculturalism follows more or less logically from that.

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ELSEWHERE

Noting Leftist hysteria over a story that GWB and Tony Blair have prayed together, the WSJ very reasonably asks: “why does it seem that the irreligious left is more horrified by a pair of Christians who lead democracies praying together in private than by radical Islamic mullahs openly praying for the deaths of Jews and Americans?”

Further to my post yesterday about a Greenie nut who got eaten by the bears he used to “commune” with, a reader sent in this link to a cartoon

I occasionally get emails from what I take to be French conservatives but I have never studied French so it would take a bit of work for me to decipher them fully. I am hoping that by posting this one here someone will summarize it in English for me

China Hand has an update on what happened to Hong Kong’s famous walled city, on Chairman Mao’s calligraphy and on unethical business in Hong Kong.

The Wicked one has a cartoon explanation of how Leftists work.

My latest academic upload (see here or here) shows that their typically Leftist belief in coercion even leads psychologists into the mire when they do public opinion polling.

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MORE ON SUVs

My past posts on SUVs have always produced a big response from readers and my post yesterday was no exception. It reminds me of a study that the letters editor of the Sydney Morning Herald (one of Australia's major newspapers) did many years ago. He went through all his files to see what single topic had attracted the most letters to the editor. Was it something to do with war, the economy, morality etc.? No. The question that drew most letters was whether one should mount the toilet paper on the toilet-paper holder so that the paper ran down the front of the roll or the back of the roll!! I still laugh every time I tell that story. The obvious lesson is that people care most about things in their own lives. Not too surprising, really.

Anyway, here is one comment that I received on SUVs:

"I like the points you make. I'm not in love with SUVs, mainly because through observation I've come to the belief that not only does driving an SUV make them feel safe, it makes them feel invincible. I used to commute to the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, some fifty miles from where I live. I made the drive in all but blizzard conditions. One treacherously snowy morning, I was driving down the Interstate. I was traveling at 45 - 50 miles per hour and thought I might be pushing it a bit. Suddenly an SUV loomed behind me and passed at what I'd guess was normal highway speed. This SUV had a "personality plate" on it. If you don't know what that is, it is this: for an extra fee you can specify exactly the letters and numbers on you license plate, as long as it is unique. This particular personality plate read: LITG8R, i.e., litigator, lawyer, solicitor. So, this legal eagle, who might even be on his way to try a negligence case, was on the verge of being grossly negligent.

The SUVs may make their owners feel safe, but in making my commute for almost ten years, the most frequent vehicles I saw off the road during/after a snow storms were SUVs, pickup trucks, and semis (or articulated lorries). Almost without exception, the SUVs would be either lying on their side or be upside down".

And another email:

"Read your blog post tonight about SUVs. Agree with you, but I think you misunderstood the article you linked to. I read it and he did not say you can't put one baby seat in a compact. He said you can't put four kids under 12 in a sedan. Maybe you can in Australia, but you can't here in the US because you aren't allowed to use the front seat. And when all your kids 85 pounds or less have to have a baby seat/booster chair (which is the law here) even three kids often can't fit because most sedans can't fit three baby seats and boosters across one row. The writer also was talking about SUVs and minivans together. Parents could live without SUVs if minivans exist or vice-versa but those of us with several little kids or more than three kids would have a hard time without one or the other. Maybe if they brought back station wagons with a third row of seats but they are hard to find these days, and if you have to put your kids in the third row, where do the groceries go?"

The lady has a point. The article I linked to did lump together minivans and SUVs. The two are of course different and it is only SUVs that people seem to get heated about. There are heaps of minibuses and small wagons with a third row of seats here in Australia so that is the normal big-family option here rather than a SUV (or 4WDS as we call them). And I am also betting that less than 5% of SUVs ever have more than two baby seats in them.

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ELSEWHERE

There is another sad cry from the People's Republic of Berkeley here. Leftist "linguist" George Lakoff explains recent Republican triumphs at the polls as a result of the way conservative think-tanks have "dominated" public discussion of political issues. I am sure that some conservative think-tankers might be momentarily inclined to preen their feathers at such a generous compliment but what a laugh the whole claim is nonetheless. The Left have almost total control of America's universities and colleges! Compared to that vast network of influence, the conservative think-tanks are the merest fleabite! That the Left are declining at the polls simply because they talk so much nonsense is the one thing that the desperate Prof. Lakoff will do anything to avoid admitting. Thanks to Bernhardt Varenius of Anti-Socialist Tendencies for the link.

When the American Chinook was shot down, nearby Iraqi villagers danced around celebrating. I would have mown the bastards down to teach all Iraqis that hostility to the West and harbouring terrorists is not wise. Arabs think kindness and decency in such circumstances is weakness. It's wasted on them. It just makes them behave worse. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, GWB said that he held responsible all those who sheltered and supported the terrorists. He needs to get serious about that doctrine.

It's sad to hear of anyone being killed by a bear or anything else but A Greenie fruitcake pays the price for his unrealism and his refusal to listen to others. The system did its best to protect him but no system can protect you from your own stupidity.

Sanity won: The Senate rejected an attempt to limit greenhouse-gas emissions yesterday in the first vote Congress has ever taken on major climate-change legislation.

Vaccine not guilty: "There is now unequivocal evidence that MMR is not a risk factor for autism - this statement is not spin or medical conspiracy, but reflects an unprecedented volume of medical study on a worldwide basis.' So says Dr Simon Murch, who, along with Dr Andrew Wakefield, was one of the authors of a 1998 study which claimed a connection between bowel problems and autism. See also here

One of my readers has recommended the book The Children's Story by James Clavell as a good lesson in how destructive Leftist schoolteachers can be to the minds of children.

I have just uploaded two short academic articles that will not be of much general interest. The first (here or here) is one of my three tentative forays into the murky world of feminist research and the second (here or here) is yet another demonstration that a questionnaire widely used by psychologists (the Shostrom "Personal Orientation Inventory") is essentially a heap of garbage. It is about as useful as your horoscope.

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SUVs AND FREE CHOICE

This foolish writer tries to defend SUVs as being necessary. He makes the claim that a lot of families have to buy SUVs in order to fit baby capsules on board. What rubbish! There are any number of non-SUVs with baby capsules in them. I fitted one into my compact car just fine.

I regard the vandalizing of SUVs as symptomatic of typical Leftist totalitarian thinking but you don't have to lie to defend free choice. People drive SUVs because it makes them feel big and powerful and safe. So what! People drink and smoke to make themselves feel good too. If you roll over in your SUV or get cancer from smoking, it's your choice. It's a free country -- or at least it was. Next time some self-righteous middle-class busybody tells you that you should not have an SUV tell him that he should not have wine or coffee with his dinner either. Neither SUVs nor drugs with your dinner are necessary but both are pleasing. Each to his own.

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LEFTISM AS A FORM OF NARCISSISM

Steven Hamori expands his thoughts about Socialism and narcissism:

"Clinically, Narcissistic Personality Disorder is related to the Schizoid Personality Disorder. A narcissist is a schizoid with rage, unresolved childhood issues relating to abuse (which they perpetuate themselves), and envy (sound familiar?). This causes them to construct a false self (and reality) and need to use others to reassure them that this false self is real (insert megalomaniac leftist of choice here_ and their supporters / henchmen who are also addicted to power).

If schizoids were creating the art of modernism, their narcissistic cousins (who, by definition, need to control other people) are creating its social ideas / systems (socialism, fascism, economic planning). Here is a great site with info on Narcissistic personality disorder."

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ELSEWHERE

Hear here! "Does Ronald Reagan deserve this? Does Nancy, who has nursed her dying husband through a horribly difficult decade as he struggles in the final hours of his life, deserve what is being done to her?"

Comparing the American and the Canadian health care systems shows that the solution does not lie in more state intervention but, on the contrary, in more business-like medicine." The waiting times in socialized medicine can be shocking. For one modern diagnostic test mentioned, the wait in Canada was 150 days compared to 3 days in the USA. Pity if you had a fast-growing cancer!

There is a good article here on the mutual admiration society that existed between Messrs. A. Hitler, F.D. Roosevelt and B. Mussolini in the 1930s. It points out that the American "New Deal", Italian Fascism and German Nazism were all basically the same thing economically and to some extent in other ways too.

That would be right: "A crackdown along the U.S.-Mexico border designed to prevent terrorists from entering the United States hasn't stopped even one known militant from slipping into America since Sept. 11, an Associated Press investigation has found"

Forgive me while I laugh: "Expensively-priced organic food sold in supermarkets has been found to contain pesticide residues equal to the maximum limit legally allowed in traditional food products".

But what's the alternative? "Giving the current president a pass on his super-sized government meddling programs just because he professes to be from 'the heartland' or a 'good Christian' or for 'the American way' is no different than excusing Clinton from the fact that he treats women like garbage simply because he claims to like feminists. We should judge the tree by its fruit, and the fruit of the Bush administration has been more of the same government-run-amok that flowered under the Clinton administration."

A good review here of a very interesting new book on elites by Laura Ingraham. Excerpt: "Ingraham explains that when elites use the phrase "freedom of expression," what they really mean is that they may criticize whomever they want with impunity, but if the average American exercises the same "freedom" to criticize an elite person or organization, it becomes "censorship"." It reminds me of another very good critique of Leftist elitism.

The Wicked one has an excellent story about American misunderstanding of the British. You may have to have lived in England to get the full force of it, though.

I have just completed the first draft of a new essay on the vexed question of how closely intertwined are conservatism and Christianity. To many American Christians, the question is a no-brainer. Of course Christianity is the basis of conservatism. Such a view makes sense given the current American political scene but in basically irreligious countries like Australia and England, the scene looks very different, with few conservatives being particularly religious and most outspoken church leaders clearly favouring the Left. I argue that Christianity and conservatism are indeed thoroughly separable. See here or here

As a follow-up to my recent post on the dubious economics of higher education, I have just uploaded a chapter called "Are we overeducated" from my book Conservatism as heresy. See here (Chapter 31) or here. In it I look at the usual non-economic arguments in favour of a liberal education and show how specious they are. I conclude that taxpayer funding of college courses in the "Humanities" cannot be justified.

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GREENIE WATCH

Oh dear! "An important new paper in the journal Energy & Environment upsets a key scientific claim about climate change". In summary, when the errors in the original scientific paper that supported global warming theory are corrected, THERE IS NO GLOBAL WARMING!

Greenie destruction in California: "If we had done all the thinning we wanted to over the years, we could have kept this fire from exploding, and we could have saved the towns it burned through." - Kate Klein, Forest Ranger

The same old arctic warming scare is being recycled by the Greenies. But looking at the data they quote actually shows the tiny amount of warming involved to be best explained by solar variability, not human activity. But despite the fact that solar variability has been known since Galileo, Greenies regularly ignore it.

Drama beats facts: "The National Assessment is fatally flawed. It employs computer models that are proven to project climate less capably than a table of random numbers. Though the models also carry disclaimers admitting their futility at producing regional and even national results, the Assessment nonetheless purports that they detail dire calamities broken down with specificity even to the state level."

In recent years politicians have gotten good mileage with a Green Scare campaign. Vice President Al Gore wrote Earth in the Balance, a book filled with green scares, most of dubious merit, far overblown, or simply false, but all requiring central control of property and the economy. Environmental horror stories are so widely accepted that political opponents are chary of sneering about them. It's worth reviewing the facts about some famous Green Scare stories, most of which are still repeated as gospel.

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I have said this all along too: “One year ago, this column first reported that Allied Forces would be unlikely to discover Saddam's WMD stores in Iraq -- that the UN Security Council's foot-dragging had provided Saddam with plenty of time to export his biological and nuclear WMD..... In December, a senior-level intelligence source confirmed again that much of Iraq's WMD had, in fact, been moved to and through Syria. This week, there was, for the first time, official public confirmation of our report.”

Anti-Globos are one of the most brainless political movements today so that they should be turning to antisemitism is no surprise: "But another element of the new anti-Semitism is often overlooked: The time frame for this resurgence of judeophobia corresponds with the intensification of international links that took place in the 1990s. "People are losing their compass," observes Dan Dinar, a historian at Hebrew University. "A worldwide stock market, a new form of money, no borders. Concepts like country, nationality, everything is in doubt. They are looking for the ones who are guilty for this new situation and they find the Jews." The backlash against globalization unites all elements of the political spectrum through a common cause, and in doing so it sometimes fosters a common enemy -- what French Jewish leader Roger Cukierman calls an anti-Semitic "brown-green-red alliance" among ultra-nationalists, the populist green movement, and communism's fellow travelers."

I hate to be cynical about what should generally be a good thing but I think that the recent peace-treaty between Britain’s Anglicans and Methodists shows that their common Leftist politics have become more important to them than religious matters.

The young warriors at Protest Warrior seem to be doing a good job of derailing Leftist self-congratulation. I used to do something similar myself when I was a lad.

This article documents in great detail how ABC news anchor Peter Jennings has been far-Left for many years.

Val-e-diction thinks that the parole system should be abolished. He thinks we would save a lot of lives that way.

Slattery has a rather appalling picture showing the lengths that some people will go to to get attention to themselves. I’ll bet the guy is a Leftist.

There is a very sarcastic site here about “human shields”.

Chris Brand has some interesting comments about Britain’s new Conservative party leader.

“The Economic Society of Australia is so concerned about the erosion of standards in the popular business and economics courses in universities that it is considering the idea of students sitting an external exam before they receive their degrees”. It’s partly because Australian MBA and B.Ec. courses attract big enrollments from Asia. So it’s the old story of short-sighted university administrators being so keen to hang on to their large number of fee-paying Asian students that they don’t want to fail any of them. But many speak poor English so don’t understand their courses very well. So standards are lowered to vanishing point. Of all the subjects I studied as an undergraduate many years ago, the ones I found most enlightening were the courses in economics and philosophy but teaching in both subjects seem to have become very degraded since then. I gather that philosophy these days is in most places just a tour of Leftist theology.

Economist Stephen Karlson sounds rather defensive about the way I gently chided him over his simplistic approach to moral philosophy. Since he is clearly out of his depth, I guess I should explain that there is wide agreement that “circumstances alter cases”. The central question of moral philosophy and the question I briefly addressed in my main post of October 26th is where we get the rules to decide HOW circumstances alter cases (among other things).

I have just uploaded a chapter from my book Conservatism as heresy with the rather forbidding title of: "Is self-theory the hypostatization of a syncategorematic word?". See here (Chapter 40) or here. It is much more readable than it sounds, though. All that I am doing in the chapter is using the precise concepts of analytical philosophy to clear up the vast muddle surrounding use of the word “self” among psychologists, sociologists and psychiatrists.

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Spam advice: Like most people, I have had a huge upsurge in spam lately and the measures I have had to take to deal with that may occasionally have resulted in my missing legitimate emails. So if I appear to have ignored an email from anyone, please resend the message to BOTH my email addresses above with nothing in the subject line. Thanks.

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RUSSELL KIRK ON CONSERVATISM

Like many American conservatives, the famous Russell Kirk saw conservatism as founded on a belief in God. We irreligious conservatives in Australia, the UK and elsewhere do not exist, presumably. But two of his other themes -- the superiority of the individual over the State and the need for caution about big theory-driven changes to the tried and tested -- would be agreed to by almost all conservatives, I think. As Chuck Colson says here: "Kirk sought to derive policies from the moral and religious wisdom of Western civilization -- as opposed to the utopian schemes of coffee-house dreamers. Kirk's social vision, like that of our founders, depends on a critical mass of virtuous citizens who govern themselves. Instead of a policeman on every corner, a society must imbue each citizen with law-abiding inner disciplines. But government, you see, can't do that. What can are other institutions: families, churches, synagogues, schools, and community organizations _ what Kirk, quoting Edmund Burke, liked to call the "little platoons" of society".

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Mike Tremoglie "deconstructs" the philosophy of the mega-Leftist Herbert Marcuse -- who seriously asserted that only whites can be racist. Most Leftists still seem to believe it.

"For any free society to be successful, there must exist not only individual liberty, but also individual responsibility. Sadly, both qualities are dissipating in America today and the standards of personal choice and responsibility that once were applied in the common law have been eroded to alarming levels under our current tort system. Too often, human parasites, ambulance chasers, and even criminals are seeking to benefit from their own negligence or bad luck. Ironically, they are increasingly petitioning the very judicial system that is supposed to protect our rights and freedoms and administer justice -- and winning."

But there's always money to pay the bureaucrats: "Stone-faced parents gathered at the Ottoson Middle School library in Arlington [MA] one recent morning looking determined and exhausted. 'We have all spent so much time in the last six months working to find money to restore what's been cut,' said Jeff Carver, who has two daughters at Ottoson in grades 6 and 9. Parents in Arlington who raised $275,000 after a Proposition 2 1/2 override attempt failed are now wondering where to draw the line. How much should public school budgets rely on private fund-raising?"

When U.S. Army security is as lax as this, it shows how dumb the terrorists are that they have not done more damage.

I never knew Leftists had a sense of humour about anything remotely political but there is a very funny letter in The Guardian -- allegedly from the British tax office to an irate British taxpayer.

The forgotten payroll tax: "It's a huge tax that most Americans don't understand. And most of those who support leviathan government want to keep it that way. They're betting on the apathy and ignorance of the average American when this tax is discussed." Penalizing employers for employing people is NOT a great way to lower unemployment. And anybody who thinks a tax is not a penalty needs a new brain.

The Press a watchdog? The pundits are coming to the wrong conclusions. While the issue is being framed as one of freedom of the press and the press as a 'watchdog' of government, it seems that few people understand that the mainstream media in this country clearly is not a 'watchdog' of the state in any true sense."

The European Union is considering a vast new regulatory program that promises to stall innovation worldwide and eventually shut many U.S. products out of EU markets. Fortunately, trade experts in the Bush administration have been battling against the policy since the beginning. After months of debate, support for the policy is finally eroding in Europe as well."

Public Choice: Politics Without Romance Public choice theory demonstrates why looking to government to fix things can often lead to more harm than good, as one of its leading architects and Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan explains

Government Hinders Environmental Progress, Free Market Advances It:. Attacks on the Lexmark "prebate" etc.

China Hand has some new postings -- including a story about buying a new car in China.

The Wicked one has a joke about romance among the elderly. I can only say that I hope that I am that good if I get to that age.

Chris Brand thinks that the Thernstroms -- much applauded conservative campaigners for less permissive black education -- have missed the elephant in the bedroom.

My latest academic upload (here or here) is a short review of Ivar Berg's book, "Education and jobs: The great training robbery". Berg showed years ago that most higher education was not justified on economic grounds (either for the community or for the individual) and all the Leftist Professors around the place at the moment seem hell-bent on showing that it is not useful on any other grounds either so perhaps one day most people will give up wasting their time and money on it. On the other hand, maybe it is just too good a holiday to give up! How else can you go on a subsidized holiday for years? But academic work in the hard sciences is still worth doing, of course, if you have the high ability, high motivation and lack of materialism required. But as for B.A.s and M.B.A.s -- forgive me while I guffaw! The main use of my "social science" Ph.D. has been to show what a gang of klutzes most of my fellow "social science" Ph.D.s are (e.g. here and here and here and here and here). But at least that is useful, I guess -- given the way people so often get hornswoggled by so-called "experts" these days.

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“MISINFORMATION” ABOUT IRAQ

There is a real sob-story from a Leftist in The Washington Post saying how the American people are misinformed about the Iraq war. He quotes public opinion poll data showing that viewers of Fox news believe “false” things about the Iraq war. As ChuDogg points out, however, the supposedly “false” beliefs are true! Fox viewers have got it right!

I actually had a look at the poll results themselves and THAT makes clear what was really upsetting our Leftist sobber: Roughly two thirds of Americans have continued to think that America did the right thing by invading Iraq! I suspect technical irregularities in some of the interpretations of the other poll data (cell sizes in some of the crosstabs being very small, statistical significance is unlikely) but the whole thing is a bit too silly for me to bother investigating that.

Even if our sobber were 100% right in his interpretation of the poll data, however, he still overlooks that what most people believe is OFTEN an imperfect guide to the facts. Even if people get the general impression right, they will often oversimplify the details. Not everybody is a specialist. And you will also often get what psychologists call a “halo effect” -- i.e. if one thing is believed, other things that are congenial to the belief concerned will be assumed to be correct as well.

And what viewers of the other networks believe about such things as the “global warming” myth would be interesting too! What you hear from the mainstream media about that is almost pure propaganda.

Discriminations has more details and commentary about the story.

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FROM “CITY JOURNAL”

The new issue of City Journal is out, and it includes a cover story called "Why We're Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore" -- it's about the blogosphere and the revolution in conservative media. Also of interest: Victor Davis Hanson v. Francis Fukuyama on the direction of history; Heather MacDonald on policing in L.A. -- and what challenges Chief Willam Bratton faces; and Sol Stern on the tragedy of school reform in NYC. Plus lots of “Theodore Dalrymple”.

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Conservative economic policies have now undisputably trumped communism and it looks like the conservatives have had the last laugh over the feminists too. This NYT reporter has found that lots of able women would rather just be mothers after all -- despite getting top university educations etc. And the percentage of stay-at-home mothers is INCREASING! And as even this Canadian feminist grudgingly admitted: "Certainly it's true that more women are leaving the work force to tend to their families. U.S. Census figures released in 2001 revealed a growing number of women at the peak of their careers were dropping out to stay home for the first time in 25 years”.

A good “Townhall” comment: “The Bush administration's prophecy that its tax cuts would produce an economic recovery is coming true... In a front-page story about the fastest pace of economic growth in four years, there was this rare (for The Times) admission: "Most of that growth stemmed from a sharp rise in consumer spending, driven largely by a continuing boom in mortgage refinancing and checks that were mailed out as part of the recent tax cut." .... Low interest rates and tax cuts are the twin strategies of the Bush administration for restoring the economy following the post-9/11 recession. They appear to be working”. More detail on the recent U.S. economic surge here.

A feminist attacks a good Samaritan: "The price tag for decades of gender warfare is usually expressed in general terms -- for example, through data-filled studies that reflect how 'boys' are slighted in education. The ordeal of Michael Wright -- a student at Oklahoma University at Normal -- captures the human factor. And it leads me to a question: What does the devil look like?" I sincerely hope that the disgusting creature concerned is a lesbian. I would pity any man who got involved with her.

I pointed out recently that because Leftists are great moral relativists it can be fun to use moral relativism against the Leftists themselves when they start using moralistic language. Steven Hamori has gone one better. I have just posted here his argument against socialism in French existentialist and poststructuralist terms. I must confess that it loses me at times. He seems to be saying some pretty nasty things about Leftists, though. Any commentary on Leftism that uses the word “narcissistic” is going to be pretty right.

Brazilian blogger Luis Afonso sends news of continuing Leftist inroads being made into Latin American politics. Among other things, it looks like Brazil is about to become Cuba’s new “rich uncle”! There is a good backgrounder on the Leftist gains in Latin America here.

Chris Brand takes apart a “philosopher” who claims that race does not exist.

The Wicked one has an amusing post on the difference between teachers and educators.

I have just uploaded a short chapter (Chapter 5) from my book, Conservatism as heresy. See here or here. It harks back to something that is quite recent but seems now to be almost forgotten: For 20 years or more France was second only to the USA as an object of hate for the Green/Left. Why? Because France continued holding nuclear tests long after the USA and Britain had halted testing. China continued to hold tests too but that was OK to the Left of course as the Chinese bomb was a “people’s bomb”!! Anyway, my chapter points out that in the awful context of the cold war the French policy was not unreasonable and that the criticisms of it coming from the Left WERE unreasonable.

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

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