ARE "IS" AND "OUGHT" STATEMENTS DIFFERENT?

Keith Burgess Jackson has a thoroughly admirable account of what ideology does and how he himself escaped from it here. He makes some basic points about argument there that cannot be repeated too often. He shows by example what clear thinking on political matters is like and I found his article a joy to read. So how's that for a recommendation?

To my knowledge, however, there have never been two philosophers who agree on absolutely everything so I do have a quibble about one point he makes. He relies at one point on David Hume's famous contention that there is an unbridgeable gap between "is" and "ought" statements -- so that you cannot justify "ought" statements by "is" statements. Yet that is precisely what people normally do. An "ought" statement always commends some course of action and when people ask WHY that course of action is commended the reply is often in terms of "is" (empirical) statements (e.g. the commendation of X can be explained as: "X leads to generally desired consequences" or "X leads to consequences that you would like" or "I like X" or "X is the prevailing rule in this culture"). So in my view the fact that an "ought" statement can be explained in that way shows that it is an empirical statement to begin with. Statements in general have all sorts of influences on people (for example, if someone said to me: "Your son has just died", it is clearly an empirical statement but it would also have an enormous influence on me if true. It would cause me to take many actions that I would not otherwise take) and an "ought" statement is an empirical statement with what is expected to be one particular sort of influence -- a commendatory influence. So an "ought" statement is often simply a shorthand (compressed) "is" statement that can be promptly expanded if desired.

As I have shown here, however, "ought" statements are used in a variety of ways rather than in one single way. They always commend but they are not always empirical statements. Sometimes they are in fact very incoherent statements (at best pseudo-empirical statements) and I think Hume's difficulty arose out of a determination to find meaning in incoherent uses of "ought" statements (i.e. when "ought" statements are elaborated as being or emanating from timeless and universal rules that are "known" only in some mysterious and untestable way -- typically expressed by saying "X just IS right", with no further explanation given) and I simply regard that quest as a fool's errand. The world is awash with incoherent gibberish and baseless assertions so there is no reason to be either disturbed by it or interested in it when such assertions occur in moral discourse. When I encounter it, my usual response is to point out its incoherence and untestability and then refuse to have any further truck with such things (as I did here). I expand a little further on my view of what "ought" (moral) statements do here

Being primarily a psychologist, I am of course interested in WHY what I have called incoherent uses of moral terminology arise and I find the explanation given by philosophical psychologist John Maze persuasive: That they are a conscious or unconscious attempt at fraud -- an attempt to persuade by saying that immutable and peculiarly moral properties exist and that they have some claim on us because of that. Maze's work is not online but if you have access to a university library, you can find it in: Maze, J. (1973) "The concept of attitude". Inquiry, 16, 168-205. Maze also had a book published in 1983 called The Meaning of Behaviour which I have not read but which almost certainly would contain similar arguments.

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ELSEWHERE

Sowell on the Democrat primary 'debates': It's funny that leftists only protest about light weight intellectual rhetoric when it comes from conservative politicians: "Senator John Edwards, for example, has included among his rhetorical flourishes poor children going to bed hungry at night in America. In reality, obesity is even more common among low-income people than among high-income people.... "

Neil Cavuto has a good reply to the Democrat hatred of "the rich". One excerpt: "You know, not once in my life has a poor person hired me. Rich guys, or at least richer guys, did. Trust me, they weren't all saints, but all the ones I've known were willing to give this Italian-Irish kid from working-class roots a chance . . . whether it be scooping ice cream in a shop or churning out perfume in a factory. Poor people get their breaks from rich people... "

A good article here that points out: "The Democratic presidential hopefuls have been crossing the country this week promising to drive "special interests" and "influence peddlers" out of the White House" and the article then goes on to show that the hopefuls themselves are captive to special interests and influence peddlers -- typical Leftist hypocrisy and non-existent principles.

A good comment from a reader: "Today, the NY Times forbid its reporters from carrying guns in Iraq: Mindless - moral superiority above life itself. Would be a great assignment for Jayson Blair".

Is this how the Iraq invasion has "stirred up" the Muslim world? "Saudi Arabia's top cleric called on Muslims around the world Saturday to forsake terrorism, saying those who claim to be holy warriors were an affront to the faith".

Heterophobia is coming out of the closet in the UK: "But the determination of our new public servants to embrace homosexuality is all too obvious, if at times unfortunately expressed: the document explains that Manchester City Council has a 'bottom-up' approach to gay consultation... "

Interesting that the Hutton report which vindicated what Blair and Bush said about Iraq and shook the BBC to its roots would have been ignored by the major American media except for Fox News publicizing it. Pretty disgraceful.

Not before time: "Yesterday, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee approved Rep. Ric Keller's (R-FL) 'Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act' (H.R. 339). Keller's bill would protect restaurants from the increasing number of greedy lawyers looking to soak them on behalf of portly plaintiffs who don't know when to put down their forks.... these lawsuits unfairly force restaurants to spend millions defending themselves, and those expenses are ultimately passed on to consumers."

The Happy Carpenter is pretty scathing about minimum wage laws.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

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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AMERICANS STUPID?

Although I am an Australian, one thing that really annoys me is the constant refrain among non-Americans to the effect that Americans are stupid. How did a stupid people get to be one of the most prosperous on earth? How did a stupid people get to be the world's only superpower? How did a stupid people avoid ever having their cities bombed flat? How did a stupid people produce military equipment so advanced that no-one else can hope to match it? The Iraqi army put up a tenacious fight against the Iranian army but it just went home when a much smaller American military force arrived. How did a stupid people come to dominate the world with its cultural products? Ever heard of Hollywood or American popular music? And even Italians now make "Western" movies. How did a stupid people get to dominate the world with its products and business systems? Ever heard of Coca Cola, McDonald's or KFC? How did America get to dominate the world with its intellectual products? Ever heard of Microsoft or IBM or Intel or all the American Nobel prize-winners? How did a stupid people get to integrate successfully within their ranks large numbers of people from every country in Europe? South America and North America are both large continents well-endowed with natural resouces so how come there is no South American equivalent of the USA? How come prosperity stops at the U.S.-Mexico border? And how come it is Europe that invented both Communism and Fascism and that it was America that had to rescue them from both?

The truth is that Americans are a very wise and sophisticated people who very often affect a folksy style -- such as the style we see the high-achieving President George W. Bush or in the incredibly high-achieving investor Warren Buffett. But the REALLY stupid people are those who cannot see past the folksy style to the hard-working, dedicated, careful-thinking people beneath it. Only people as stupid as most Europeans could mistake style for substance. Really smart people would try to understand Americans rather than condemn them for having their own ways. They would see the folksiness as a sign of a less elitist and more democratic society rather than as a sign of stupidity.

And it is not only Americans who affect folksiness. Australia's most popular Prime Minister in the last 50 years was "Bob" Hawke -- a conservative in most ways but the leader of Australia's major party of the Left. Although he was so thoroughly bourgeois as to be the son of a Protestant clergyman and brilliant enough win a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford university, he normally spoke during his political career with a broad working-class accent. He certainly wasn't stupid but Australia too is a very egalitarian country where people of all classes are treated with respect.

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ELSEWHERE

Keith Burgess-Jackson has a good link to an insider's story about the kneejerk Leftism in most of the American media.

I haven't had the stomach to find out what "The Vagina Monologues" -- so beloved on the feminist Left -- are all about but Mike Tremoglie has braved it and reports: "It stereotypes males and Christians -- not to mention the fact that it's crude and arguably pro-pedophilia. Most disturbing about the play is the fact that it features the seduction of a female minor by an adult woman, legitimizing predatory sexual behavior". Charming!

Just like Saddam did: "Cuban President Fidel Castro vowed on Friday to die fighting "with a gun in my hand" if the United States invaded Cuba to overthrow his communist government".

Great stuff: "Two anti-war protesters who scaled the Sydney Opera House last year to paint "No War" on its tallest sail have been sentenced to jail and fined more than $150,000. Activists Will Saunders, 42, and David Burgess, 33, attracted international attention when they defaced the icon on March 18 - the day John Howard committed Australia to the war in Iraq."

In the area of taxation, there is probably nothing that drives Democrats crazier than when they hear Republicans praise John F. Kennedy's tax cut and compare their tax cuts to his. Unfortunately, Democrats keep running up against Kennedy's own statements and actions, which show a clear parallel to Republican tax policies since 1980.

National Center for Public Policy research demolishes some Leftist myths about how economic progress is not helping "the poor". One excerpt: "The poverty rate for children of single mothers fell from 50.3 percent in 1995 to 39.8 percent in 2001".

Flat, fair and forever: "Every profession has its unofficial list-of-things-you-don't-say, and politics is no exception. A leading entry: Never call for a tax increase. At least, not by name. Instead, do what the Democratic presidential candidates do: Cloak your increase in the reassuring moniker 'tax reform.' ... In other words, the reform they favor is a tax increase. Even if they were candid enough to admit it, though, their policy is misguided. There are two things we should do this year: Make the previous tax cuts permanent, and begin to fix the entire tax code to make it flatter and fairer."

Third World sweatshops: "At the heart of all this is a confusion between the vagaries of fate and the sins of man. All of us wish that workers in Costa Rica and Cambodia, not to mention other poor countries, were able to earn higher pay and live better lives. But wishing will not make it so and causing them to lose their jobs will not help."

Frank Vogelgesang says that the recent deregulatory changes in Germany are small but may be a sign that the dam of regulation is cracking under the weight of unemployment.

"Number Watch" has a send-up of the animal rights group PETA. "Number Watch" has "PERV": People for the Ethical Regard of Vegetables

Some sanity in Taxachusetts: "The state's highest court refused yesterday to block the use of the MCAS exam as a graduation requirement, dealing a blow to high school students who are suing to abolish the controversial test. The Supreme Judicial Court denied a request for an injunction to stop the state from giving the high-stakes exam pending the outcome of a lawsuit, saying an injunction 'would undermine educator accountability and hinder education reform.'"

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

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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A SLIPPERY LEFTIST ARGUMENT

A Leftist analysis of the justice system: "Since the 1970s, in any case, the humanistic veneer has been scraped off, and we have returned to what Foucault, and Nietzsche before him, might consider a much more forthright reckoning of how we really feel about all those ne'er-do-wells: the rapists and the murderers and the bank robbers; and the petty drug dealers and the petty drug users and the poor. And in the United States we now have a penal system undergoing rapid growth, whose primary mission is to separate ne'er-do-wells from the rest of society and, to the extent possible under vestigial humanistic laws, to make this experience unpleasant."

Notice how "the poor" get slipped in alongside rapists and murderers! Rigorous thinkers, those Leftists! And they accuse conservatives of simplistic, black-and-white thinking! But it is only by such sloppy writing and thinking that they can make any case for their views at all, of course. What is wrong with giving rapists and murderers a taste of their own medicine? There should be more of it!

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ELSEWHERE

It's going to be slow as turning an ocean liner around but it looks like the New York Times is TRYING to take an interest in conservative thinking.

Despite frantic Leftist efforts to twist the story, a general realization is slowly dawning that the Kay report shows clearly that GWB did NOT lie or deceive about Iraq's weaponry. Jeff Jacoby sums it up well. Mike Tremoglie has a very clever and amusing article on the subject too.

This article makes the point that the American Left too believes in Demons as an explanation for evil. But their Demons are the Christian Right!

Despite the recent audiotaped messages allegedly from him, Osama B.L. is probably dead: "Prior to Tora Bora, videos of him were the norm. What happened?... The tape was a recording of one of Osama bin Laden's sons, who was deliberately trying to sound like his father. This is, in my mind, the most likely hypothesis."

Seattle schools learn money doesn't buy grades "Seattle school officials are learning a valuable but surprising lesson -- throwing money at schools doesn't always help kids achieve. And spending more money on some students rather than others does little more than cause trouble. Under Seattle's weighted student formula, schools with kids who are poor, not fluent in English or have special needs get more money to help them compete. Only it doesn't seem to work. 'If money is the only thing we need to make better schools ... then we would have seen that by now,' said Lynn Harsh of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, an Olympia-based group that focuses on state budgets and tax policy, welfare reform, health-care reform, education and governance issues. 'Instead we're seeing the opposite results.'"

Socialized medicine at its best: "Compulsory drug testing for Scottish nurses is being considered by the country's largest nursing union amid fears that staff may be under the influence of illegal substances on hospital wards. Screening of nurses for drugs or alcohol at work is being put to the vote by the Royal College of Nursing Scotland, and a pilot project to gauge the scale of substance abuse may follow. Previous attempts to study the level of the problem in Scotland broke down amid concern that checks could make it harder to recruit nursing staff."

The Misanthropyst has a report about a U.S. public school deliberately deleting advanced classes for more able students in favour of "equality". In other words, the very bright and the very dumb all now get put into the same class -- to the obvious detriment of both. The bright students will be so bored that they will just misbehave to entertain themselves and the dumb ones will not get the special attention they need. And no doubt the people who have instituted the new system consider themselves "humane"! That they really hate their students and wish them ill is obviously what is really going on. Deeds speak louder than words. Leftists hate ordinary people in general. They consider themselves to be an elite and that they alone should have rights and privileges. It's what they did in Russia and they constantly show that the same thing is the ideal of Leftists everywhere and everywhen.

An excellent article from a Leftist about why a sincere Left WOULD have supported the Iraq invasion.

Arlene Peck thinks that Israel's recent release of hundreds of Palestinian terrorists is totally insane. I agree. It just encourages the terrorists to kidnap Israelis and will soon make impossible the holding of any terrorists as prisoners.

Like Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, Brazil's President Lula Da Silva does seem to have come from the Left to end up very pro-capitalist: "In an all-out bid to attract foreign investment, Brazil's energetic president and members of his Cabinet met with more than 200 executives Thursday to promote their country as a prime site for building factories and opening businesses"

Gene Berman has a great essay on what drives the Left and why the Left will always be with us.

The latest Carnival of the Vanities is now up with its usual big range of stories.

I have just put up some more of Chris Brand's recent postings here. He has a big coverage of the current British debate about eugenic infanticide.

The Wicked one says there is more economic freedom in Ireland than in the United States.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

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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FROM BROOKES NEWS

The US economy losing its manufacturing base? Although most economists and economic commentators have rationalised the shift from manufacturing into services as a natural process brought about by increased living standards, it should be noted that this view is merely an opinion presented as economic analysis.
The balance of payments myth Dr Shostak exposes some of the myths behind much comment of our so-called balance-of-payments problems, and argues that government foreign debt is the only type of debt that should concern us.
Technology, investment, risk and state interference Now that Carmen Lawrence, Australia's foremost economic thinker, has been appointed the Australian Labor Party's national president, it's time to revisit the intellectual pretensions of this would-be central economic planner.
The Left and the corruption of language and thought Once language is corrupted, the whole process of thought is corrupted too. George Orwell made this point painfully clear in his 1984. It is our responsibility to never allow the left to get away with the kind of language that corrupts and distorts our thinking.
Hanson's medianomics Pauline Hanson's One Nation's got its economics from its left-wing media critics, the very same ones who mocked her as an economic illiterate.

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

An interesting comment from a reader on my post yesterday about a brilliant black who is not allowed to teach High School: "Yes - there are Racists in Atlanta - racists who just don't want their Black students to have good role models - most likely the under achievers at the school - not the students, but the teachers and administrators who just can't stand someone that looks like them being a hell of a lot smarter". I think that may have hit the nail on the head.

The "gender" divide in education: Maybe a comeback of same sex schools is needed -- or maybe less feminist teachers -- or maybe males have been more rebellious against the Leftist and Greenie propaganda that so often passes for education these days: "The women's movement has taught us many things, one of the more surprising being that boys are not performing in school as well as they might... In the late 1970s more girls than boys began to enroll in college, and the disparity has since increased. Today women make up approximately 56 percent of all undergraduates, outnumbering men by about 1.7 million. In addition, about 300,000 more women than men enter graduate school each year." Given the meaninglessness of a lot of the credentials concerned, it may just mean that men have found better things to do -- like go into business.

David's Medienkritik is having fun with the official British Inquiry into bias at the BBC by Lord Hutton. He says that not only the BBC but the German media too have got a black eye out of the report findings.

Documents from Saddam Hussein's oil ministry reveal he used oil to bribe top French officials into opposing the imminent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Starbucks in Paris: "The great attraction of Starbucks is: It's different! This monster of American homogeneity breaks the mold of the homogenized French cafe. Starbucks is, dare I say it, cool here". Another teeth-grinder for the French elite. Must Americans win ALL the time?

"The great paradox of the civil rights revolution is that instead of enforcing and expanding equality before the law, the revolution created differential rights based on race, gender and, any day now, sexual orientation. The great liberal revolution, centuries in the making, that brought forth equality in law has been overthrown. In its place we see rising a new feudal legal order of status-based rights." -- Paul Craig Roberts (Via The Federalist)

A new wave of young traditionalist clergy are emerging within the Catholic Church. And the older, more Leftist priests are a grumpy and unhappy lot. More unhappy Leftists. How unusual!

Against new wave protectionism: "The case for free trade is as strong as ever. Worries about the "flight" of service-sector jobs out of the United States are largely overblown"

Hmmm... "A federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit brought by descendants of slaves against corporations they say profited from slavery, saying the plaintiffs had established no clear link to the companies they targeted. The court still left the door open for further litigation. "

John Moore was a military reservist in his younger days and is hopping mad at the way the Left deride GWB for having been a military reservist too. As a former military reservist myself, I am glad to see John put the record straight about what military reservists do and what GWB's record actually means.

Lying in Ponds is an interesting site devoted to the idea that anyone who finds no fault with his own political party but heaps of faults with the opposing party is being dishonest. I am inclined to agree. I do post approving comments about the Australian Labor Party leadership (see yesterday, for instance) and, like many conservatives, was appalled by GWB's steel tariff, for instance. I can't remember finding anything to praise in the current U.S. Democrats, however. Anger and hate seem to be their only message. I have always thought of Clinton, however, as a moderate who did quite a lot of good -- particularly with the budget. But don't start me on Waco! I still am moved to tears by the fate of all those young Christian women and their children. I cannot imagine how their families must feel.

I have just put up some more of Chris Brand's recent postings here -- on postmodernism, IQ, Muslims, the Fascist Left and much more besides.

The Wicked one has a post on privacy and ID cards that will not please everyone.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

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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GREENIE CORNER

Enviro-imperialism: "International environmentalists finally are being held accountable for the havoc they are wreaking around the world. On Jan. 20, the Congress of Racial Equality -- a 62-year-old, New York-based civil rights group -- and the Women's National Republican Club convened a Manhattan teach-in to begin educating the public on what they call 'eco-imperialism.' Countless Third Worlders still plunge into darkness every dusk. After they fall asleep, they dream about such things as lights, running water and the defeat of diseases Westerners cannot even remember. Then these Third Worlders awaken ... to none of the above. American and European environmentalists help maintain this grim status quo, even as they claim to pursue the best interests of black, yellow and brown people the world over. Meanwhile, these First World citizens enjoy refrigerators, indoor plumbing, Internet access and CAT scans. This toxic hypocrisy is the core of eco-imperialism".

Wind farms in the gun again: The low frequency sound from them makes people sick who live anywhere near them. Ban them! They were once of course the Greenie solution to just about everything.

The "Wizard of Id" on Global Warming -- great cartoon.

The far Left is deep Green. The facts don't matter to them there either: "No doubt trying to distract attention from the recent Bush-Hitler ad controversy and its sponsorship of an event where B-list celebrities used the F-word to describe Republicans, the liberal organization MoveOn.org hosted an event on global warming recently in a freezing New York City. The speaker was a man whom few associate with cursing, former Vice President Al Gore. Yet, ironically for an organization called MoveOn, Gore's speech was very much stuck in the past."

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ELSEWHERE

An absolutely amazing article here. A brilliant young black was refused a High School teaching job because he was too high an achiever. It was felt that he would set an "unrealistic" example for his students. Can you get a clearer message than that? Blacks are supposed to be dumb and not rise above their "station" in life and teachers of blacks are not expected to be very bright. The affirmative action era and the Jim Crow era have a lot in common!

An Australian Leftist leader who is more conservative than most conservatives? "A federal Labor government could ask courts to order parents to undergo parenting classes if they failed to adequately discipline their children, Opposition Leader Mark Latham said today. In his Australia Day address to a citizenship ceremony in his electoral base of Campbelltown, Mr Latham said a federal Labor government would support the introduction of 'parental responsibility' contracts and orders. Under the scheme, parents of troubled teenagers would be encouraged to sign voluntary contracts, obliging them to take stronger action and responsibility for their childrens' behaviour. The process would allow the local courts, when all else failed, to impose a 'parental responsibility order' on parents of children at risk." Latham is conservative in being business and free-market oriented too -- though some elements in his party are discontented over that one.

A nasty one for the Leftists: Poverty does NOT cause terrorism: "Krueger and Maleckova compared terrorist incidents in the Middle East with changes in the gross domestic product of the region and found that the number of such incidents per year increased as economic conditions improved. On the eve of the Intifada that began in 2000, the unemployment rate among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was falling, and the Palestinians thought that economic conditions were improving. The same economic conditions existed at the time of the 1988 intifada. Terror did not spread as the economy got worse but as it got better."

Margaret Thatcher talks about religion and individual liberty. One excerpt: "Freedom is a moral quality. It comes from the Old Testament and the New. It's definitely a part of Judaism and Christianity. The talents that we have are God-given talents, therefore we have a right to use them. But, of course, you can only exercise that right under the rule of law of the state. But in the last analysis, each of us is accountable for the way in which we live our lives."

An oldie but goldie: There is a very feisty but anonymous collection of conservative attitudes here that make a lot more sense than most of the mealy-mouthed stuff we read in the media.

National Center for Public Policy Research has a good article here on pay equity for women. It points out that there already IS pay equity once everything is taken into account. See also their blog for further comment.

European Latino immigrants: A good email from a regular U.S. reader: "We are starting to see many more immigrants in the U.S. from the South of S. America. Most of them are white, which confounded a reporter in our local paper who went to interview one of these new immigrant families. She could not get over the fact that they were not little brown people! I informed her that there are millions of Europeans in S. America, and that Argentina, where this family that she interviewed came from, is 97% white. This reporter is typical of those on the Left who are always looking to talk to the downtrodden minorities, but she got a shocking lesson in population demographics, and the fact that things are not always as they seem after her visit with a poor, but well educated family of German descent!"

Not all immigrants are equal -- despite what the Leftists would like to think: Apparently the Indians expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin who went to the UK are now one of the highest per capita income groups in the UK. They were entrepreneurial, with strong middle class ambitions and had received a traditional British-style education.

Rubbery Leftist "principles" again: "It goes without saying that the mantra of The New York Times Editorial Pages is 'All the Leftist Propaganda That's Fit to Print.' But sometimes the newspaper's transparent knee-jerk liberalism shocks even us. Take, for example, the Gray Lady's political hypocrisy when it comes to appointment of federal judges...." The Times previously said: "Clinton rightly moved to address _ the refusal by Congress to consider judicial nominees with reasonable dispatch." -- But Bush cannot do the same thing, apparently.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

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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IQ SUDDENLY ORTHODOX AGAIN

Wow! I don't know whether to be pleased or disappointed but it seems that mainstream psychology is catching up with what psychometricians such as myself have been saying for years: That IQ is highly general, highly central, highly hereditary and of overwhelming importance in determining people's life-chances. Even a few years ago any claim to that effect would be very marginal within psychology and would expose anyone making it to all sorts of nasty accusations.

But you can now read it all not in some obscure academic journal or some Rightist source but in the latest issue of the American Psychological Association's most widely-circulated journal -- the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Article after article there sets out the importance of IQ. And for social psychologists to be taking an interest in such evidence is really amazing. Psychometricians have known all that stuff for years. It is the social psychologists who have been most resistant to such ideas. I fear that I have suddenly become mainstream! I guess that even an organization as Leftist as the American Psychological Association has to come to terms with the evidence eventually. I would never have predicted it, though.

The madness of the 60s must be waning at long last. Before the 60s the central importance of IQ was uncontroversial introductory textbook stuff in psychology but the radical takeover of the universities from the 1960s onward and its inevitable accompanying baggage about "all men are equal" caused the whole idea of IQ to be marginalized for many years.

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GREENIE CORNER

The idea that many scientists might be influenced by such crass considerations as money is still hard for a lot of people to get used to -- though Leftists have always said it of any scientist who gets funding from business sources. But when juicy government funding is coming their way many scientists must want to believe the claims that produced the funding. The global warming myth is the most obvious case in point but I think I have just found another instance of it. The scaremongering over mobile phones is well-known but countless investigations of it have shown no harm in them (e.g. here). But a study has just been published which shows really gross ill-effects from mobile phones. How come? Why is that study so different? Are the results fake? Who knows? But want to bet that the authors of the study get big funding to investigate it further?

U.S. Spends Most on Pollution Abatement: "As a percentage of output, American manufacturers spend considerably more on pollution abatement than do their competitors in Germany, Japan, France, the U.K., Canada, Mexico, China, South Korea, and Taiwan,". See also here

"The environment values deserve as much -- but no more -- protection than other values. Nature cannot protect itself. Trees cannot have standing as legal actors, but behind every tree can stand an owner who, by protecting his property, protects it for all. The classical liberal approach is not to seek more efficient ways to advance some politically determined goal, but rather to create an institutional framework to facilitate exchanges and trade offs between individuals, empowering them to make their own choices."

How uncritically the press treat environmental stories and scares : "It often turns out that an idea that sounds like a hot controversy on the news is actually old hat to scientists, and long since discredited: saccharin as a danger to humans, electric and magnetic fields as a brain cancer cause, and on and on."

What Fun! The latest scientific findings are that burning fossil fuels has a measurable cooling effect on the climate. So those naughty fossil fuels both warm us up and cool us down. No wonder there is a lot of doubt about there being any overall effect at all!

Recent computer-model based claims of massive species extinction due to global warming have a serious flaw: Previous climate changes of similar magnitude were not associated with notable extinctions. So much for such "models" (in reality just a fancy name for guesswork).

Is wind power viable? Howard Hayden, Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Connecticut says: "With the right subsidies, wind could become a viable energy source. And, with the right subsidies, gasoline could be made free, and 2-carat diamonds could be given away in cereal boxes.

Some "global warming" news just in from one of my American correspondents: "Over the past 24 hours, much of the central US has been blanketed with snow -- and it's still falling. We're talking snow depths of 12 - 24 inches in some places. This storm hasn't been exceptionally powerful; it's just a slow moving, long lasting weather system that isn't forecast to leave our area until some time this evening. Having spent a good part of yesterday and this morning moving enough snow so our Australian Terrier could go out for her calls to nature, I can say that we haven't had snows like this in several years."

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ELSEWHERE

With lots of examples from Europe, Steve Sailer has pointed out the obvious -- that where you get your immigrants from matters a hell of a lot more than how you treat them when they arrive. Steve does not stress the point but immigrants of African and Muslim origins are the problem groups. So America's Latinos are not terribly likely to be a big problem in the long run.

Thomas Friedman says that the huge unemployment among Muslim youth is a major cause of their disaffection and thinks we can somehow solve that. I think Friedman is looking at a symptom (unemployment) rather than the cause (a medieval culture). And to modernize Muslim culture is a RATHER big job with so many Ayatollahs and Mullahs and Muftis and Imams pushing in the opposite direction.

Another bunch of Leftist fakes revealed: "The war in Iraq cannot be justified as an intervention in defence of human rights even though it ended a brutal regime, Human Rights Watch said Monday". Don't they realize how ridiculous they make themselves sound? Their "concern" for human rights is not even clever fakery.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

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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THE POPULATION "PROBLEM"

I have been having fun reading Mein Kampf again. You can open almost any page of it at random and hear echoes of the modern-day Left and Greens. I have a large article on Hitler's Leftism (with a good quote from Goebbels recently added) already up on the net but that is just a sampling. I could fill a book with examples showing that Hitler was not only a Leftist in his day but that he was also a pretty good Leftist by modern standards. His antisemitism would certainly pass unremarked by much of the Left today.

Among students of the Nazi period it is well-known that Hitler's most central concern after getting rid of the Jews was Lebensraum for Germany -- i.e. taking over the lands of Eastern Europe for Germans. But WHY did Hitler want Lebensraum (literally, "life-space") for Germans? It was because, like the Greenies of today, he was concerned about overpopulation.

Greenie Paul Ehrlich wrote in his 1968 book The population bomb:

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..."

Hitler shared Ehrlich's pessimism:

"Germany has an annual increase in population of nearly nine hundred thousand souls. The difficulty of feeding this army of new citizens must grow greater from year to year and ultimately end in catastrophe, unless ways and means are found to forestall the danger of starvation and misery in time... Without doubt the productivity of the soil can be increased up to a certain limit. But only up to a certain limit, and not continuously without end..... But even with the greatest limitation on the one hand and the utmost industry on other, here again a limit will one day be reached, created by the soil itself. With the utmost toil it will not be possible to obtain any more from it, and then, though postponed for a certain time, catastrophe again manifests itself". (Mein Kampf pp. 121 & 122).

Both Prof. Ehrlich and Hitler were intelligent but overconfident Green/Left ignoramuses who knew nothing of the economics concerned -- as is shown by the almost hilarious wrongness of Ehrlich's predictions -- but Hitler unfortunately had the means to do something about his ill-informed theories. He concluded that rather than let Germans starve, he would grab more land off other people to feed them -- and the rest is indeed history.

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LEFTIST WAFFLE

What a lot of waffle and nonsense America's "liberal" intellectuals come up with! The latest NYT column by Robert Kagan is typical of their breastbeating. America is said to be in a fight for "legitimacy". What rot! Who cares? And where is this "legitimacy" (whatever that may be) to be decided? In the corrupt political circles of Paris, perhaps? What a laugh!

The average American is an isolationist -- he just wants be left alone. He knows next to nothing about the outside world and cares less. America was dragged into two world wars with great reluctance (remember Pearl Harbour?) and it is only after the 9/11 attack on America that American troops went in to Afghanistan and Iraq to cauterize at least some of the support for any further Islamic madness. Anyone who thinks that the average American enjoys hearing of their young men dying in Iraq on a daily basis needs a brain transplant. If the world leaves America alone, America will leave the world alone. Many Americans think their system is best and think the rest of the world should adopt it but (aside from very limited humanitarian interventions) it is only a perceived threat to America itself or to America's future that will drum up any enthusiasm for risking the spilling their young men's blood.

Repeated and large-scale American bombings of any community that harbours or supports terrorists would do a lot more good than any waffle about "legitimacy". Clinton's bombing of the Serbs set a good example there. And the notable backpedalling in the Islamic world after the capture of Saddam is also proof of the need for action rather than talk. The exercise of power is one thing the Islamic world DOES understand and respond to. I am sure that the average Islamicist would be highly amused about Kagan's idea that America could somehow gain "legitimacy" with them. And it is only the Islamicists that America has to worry about these days. Who else is going to attack America? France? They wouldn’t have the time: They’d be too busy telling one-another how clever they are.

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ELSEWHERE

A fat lot of good Australia's gun bans do: "Five people are in hospital with gunshot wounds after two shooting incidents in Sydney overnight, including one where shots were fired at people queuing to enter a nightclub."

Germans pride themselves on their racial tolerance and their acceptance of homosexuals these days -- but what if the two don't mix? One German newspaper has at last condescended to notice that "Orientalen" (people from the Middle-East rather than from the Far-East) often bash German homosexuals to within an inch of their lives. How awkward!

"The poor": What do you do when you don't have as much of something as you need? One of the things you can do is stretch it out to make it last as long as it can. That is what the political left is doing with the poor. A lot of noise is made about how we are 'running out' of this or that natural resource -- almost always falsely -- but the real problem of the left is that they are running out of the poor, who serve as a justification of the left's drive to extend their power over all the rest of us. ... What is the left to do when they find themselves running out of the poor? They must stretch the poor to make them last -- even if that requires stretching the truth."

Ayn Rand's ideas seem to be getting more well known: "In addition to the encouraging growth of Rand references in scholarly circles, there has been a remarkable growth in such references throughout popular culture. That development is not measured solely by her influence on authors in various genres _ from bodybuilder Mike Mentzer (the late author of Heavy Duty) to fiction-writers Ira Levin, Erika Holzer, Kay Nolte Smith, James Hogan, Karen Michalson, Edward Cline, and so many others. It is measured also by the number of Rand-like characters or outright references to Rand that have appeared in fictional works of various lengths and quality."

Arlene Peck finds antisemitism even in popular magazines.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

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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GREENIE WATCH

"The environmental lobby now stands charged with direct responsibility for millions of needless deaths, mostly of children in the Third World, from malaria. At issue is the banning of DDT. Bjorn Lomborg, of The Skeptical Environmentalist fame, puts the basic science briskly. "Our intake of coffee is about 50 times more carcinogenic than our intake of DDT before it was banned ... the (cancer) risk for DDT is about 0.00008 per cent." Ted Lapkin insists in November's edition of Quadrant that it's "still widely regarded as the single most powerful weapon at our disposal in the war against malaria" and that its disuse has been a scandal of public policy".

"Contrary to the public image of an everyman's movement, environmentalism is in fact big business, raking in more than $8.5 billion per year. ... Environmentalist group income is larger than the Gross National Product (GNP) of about five-dozen nations worldwide. ... Only a small portion of these immense revenues comes from the checkbooks of concerned individual donors. ... Each year, hundreds of foundations earmark thousands of grants totaling hundreds of millions of dollars for environmentalist groups. Many of these foundations are part of an informal coalition called the Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGA) .... Occupying a prominent place at the EGA meetings is the Ford Foundation, which has a long history of donating enormous sums to environmentalist causes."

The Green enemy being recognized: "A vote for exploration of Alaska's National Wildlife Reserve is a vote for environmental responsibility, Jerry Hood, Local Alaska Teamsters leader, said on July 31, 2001. When the Teamsters announced support for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to create jobs, many commentators claimed that the nadir of the relationship between environmentalists and the labor movement was reached. Halting drilling in ANWR is the No. 1 defensive priority of the largest environmental organizations in the country, and creating new jobs is the top priority for many labor unions."

What fun! "An unusual alliance of immigration foes and animal-rights activists is attempting to take over the leadership of the Sierra Club, America's oldest national environmental group, in what is emerging as a bitter fight over the future of the 112-year-old organization founded by Scottish immigrant John Muir. Leaders of a faction that failed to force the club to take a stand against immigration in 1998 are seeking to win majority control of the group's 15-member governing board in a spring election -- this time, as part of a broader coalition that includes vegetarians, who want the club to denounce hunting, fishing and raising animals for human consumption."

Biased schools: "Some material taught in NSW [Australia] public schools was anti- farmer and 'blatantly deep green,' Acting Prime Minister John Anderson said today. Prime Minister John Howard this week sparked a political debate on education when he said government schools were too politically correct. Mr Anderson welcomed the debate on public schools, saying teachers' unions and government school curriculums were sometimes too ideological. He said some lessons on sustainable development given in NSW schools were biased against farmers."

Phoney panic: Again the UK authorities find no evidence that mobile phones are a threat to health - and again they warn us to be cautious anyway.

Environmentalism as the new socialism: "The International Socialist Party, which is intent upon continuing to press countries into socialism, is now headed up by people within the United Nations. They are the ones in the UN environmental program, and they were the ones sponsoring the so-called Earth Summit that was attended by 178 nations.... One of the main organizers of the program, Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway was the assistant executive for the conference. She is also the vice-president of the World Socialist Party. When she was questioned by Brazilian reporters after her talk and asked if what they were proposing didn't have a peculiar resemblance to the agenda of the World Socialist Party she said, "Well, of course." That was reported in Brazil but not picked up by the American press".

A useful summary of the Left/Right difference over global warming here. Its conclusion: "When it comes to global warming, conservatives are not convinced there is a problem, are convinced the left's expensive solution wouldn't work, but are willing to consider the matter further".

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ELSEWHERE

Amusing: In response to my post yesterday about "too much" choice, Gary Gravett emailed me: "People are going to say that you are "irritated" at diversity and discriminate against minorities. You should treat all jams equally!" To which I replied: "Good point. All jams are equal!"

An EXCELLENT post on Right Nation under the heading: "Prejudice is Good". An excerpt: "As someone who was born to a black father and grew up in white community, I have often been asked, "How do you deal with racism?" The answer is racism has never been a big issue with me. I have experienced prejudice. But that's not the same thing. Prejudice is good. Prejudice is an instinct; it's unavoidable. It is through prejudice that we determine how to approach a situation. Our prejudgment is not always correct. But that does not mean we shouldn't prejudge. For example, when you're walking along a downtown street and decide to take a shortcut through an alley, and spot a group of four young black men, wearing "dew rags" and baggy pants, while barking foul-mouthed grunts at each other, what do you do? If you're smart, you turn around, take the long way".

Walter Williams looks at the evidence and says that it is high levels of discipline that black High School students need in order to achieve -- just the opposite of what Leftists prescribe for them.

About time: "A well-known conservative is reaching out to state lawmakers to beat back what he claims is rampant political bias against students and faculty who do not agree with a pervasive liberal orthodoxy in state schools across the country. As a result, leaders in several states are reportedly working on anti-bias legislation, including Colorado state Sen. John Andrews. Andrews told Foxnews.com that lawmakers in the state General Assembly plan to introduce a bill in coming weeks that would require state college and university officials to educate students and faculty better about their rights against political and ideological bias by other professors and administrators."

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

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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TOO MUCH CHOICE?

I suppose I should comment on the latest psychology findings just gleefully paraded in the NYT -- to the effect that too much choice can be bad for you. Too much choice is said to be confusing, paralysing and dissatisfying. This is actually a very old idea -- one made much of in Alvin Toffler's 1971 book, Future shock -- and it is ideal fodder for Leftists who want to dictate to people. As good totalitarians have always said, they can say: "See. Choice is bad for you. WE will make all your decisions for you".

There is of course some truth in saying that choice can be "blinding", as Toffler put it, but everything has its costs and the key question to ask is what if YOUR particular choice (of jam or anything else) were taken away? You would not like it. I myself feel irritated by the vast range of jams, mayonnaise etc that I have to go through in the supermarket to find just the one I want -- but I get REALLY irritated if my particular favourite is not among those on offer. The basic conclusion is that if we want our OWN choice of something, we have to tolerate OTHER people being given their choice too. Freedom has its costs. Nobody has ever pretended otherwise. But take that freedom away and you run into REALLY big costs -- in happiness and much else besides.

And there is the larger question of whether getting what you want makes you happy. Often it may not. As Oscar Wilde memorably wrote in his 1892 play Lady Windermere's Fan: "In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it". And having choices and options may be an instance of something that people seek but which does not make them happy. But surely only someone who thinks he is a very superior being (e.g. the typical Leftist) would see that as a reason to stop giving people what they want. Who are we to sit in judgment on other people's choices and on what will make them happy? As Queen Elizabeth I asked the King of Spain centuries ago: "Why cannot Your Majesty let your subjects go to the Devil in their own way?"

There is another thoughtful comment -- by Peg Kaplan -- on the issues involved here

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ELSEWHERE

I have just posted here another email from one of my scientific correspondents about unscientific scientists.

I liked the dry comment on FEE (post of 22nd) about this news item: "The US Commerce Department has said it may impose tariffs of up to 123% on Chinese, Malaysian, and Thai plastic shopping bag producers." FEE commented: "Finally, someone recognizes the threat from plastic-bag imports"

This comment from Jane Fonda suggests that the combination of Leftism and feminism is REALLY bad for the brain: "Fonda became involved after attending her first "Vagina Monologues.'' -- "I had resisted it. You know with my kind of controversies, I don't need to add vaginas and c -- . But it changed my life. I began to own my vagina, and I realized the extent to which I hadn't owned it before.'' (Via Opinion Journal)

All that addled French philosophy seems to be bad for the brain too. Witness this statement: "French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie criticized "certain radical, neoconservative ideas" in the United States as harmful to U.S. relations with Europe. She singled out what she called American aspirations for economic supremacy". How can you aspire to be something that you are already? How can you unlock an unlocked door? I guess you can in French philosophy. (Via Opinion Journal)

As a group called Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch (MLAW) points out: 'lawsuits, and fear of lawsuits, have prompted many manufacturers to issue warnings against even obvious misuses of consumer products.' MLAW has announced the winners of their 'Wacky Warning Label Contest' -- and the results remind us why ambulance chasers are increasingly viewed with disdain."

North Korea shooting starving people. That's a Leftist "worker's paradise" for you.

Actress Gwyneth Paltrow gets a very thorough fisking from Michelle Malkin over Paltrow's dislike of America.

A few members of the multiculturalist police, always on the alert for real or imagined dissent, have condemned "Lord of the Rings" as racist. Maybe they should read Tolkien's own stinging rejection of racism -- written well before modern multiculturalism had even been invented

Mike Tremoglie has an article on the very strange American phenomenon of Anti-Catholic Catholic Schools. Another demonstration that most of the leadership of the old mainstream churches is Christian in name only these days. It's on a par with the atheist bishops in the Anglican churches. Ask the average Anglican clergyman whether he believes in God and you will rarely get a straight-out "Yes". The most likely response will be, "What do you mean by "God"?". And from there on you will get waffle about God being the "ground of our being", or some such gibberish.

Stopping the police from doing racial profiling seems to be effective at killing blacks. If saving lives were the aim, black areas would get extra-heavy policing! But since when have Leftists ever cared about human life?

PID says that a huge majority of Americans would like their government to be as tough on illegal immigration as Australia is. Australia locks them all up so not many bother coming these days. The failure of the U.S. elites to heed the popular will does tend to show that Australia is a much more democratic country.

This is one of the most amusing examples of our weird English language that I have seen.

Chris Brand wraps up his big coverage of the controversy in Britain about censorship by the BBC of anti-Muslim comment.

The Wicked one has recent posts about surveillance cameras and Russian beer plus some new jokes.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

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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