THE INTELLECTUAL POVERTY OF LEFTISM

I mentioned recently the low quality of the emails that I and other conservative bloggers receive from Leftists. There is normally no attempt at rational argument -- just rage and abuse. I thought I might publish the most recent correspondence I have had with a Leftist to show readers what I mean. Reproduced below are emails from one Mr Charles Giacometti of cosmo39@hotmail.com. They are mercifully brief and my replies are even briefer. I have not kept the initial email but it expressed incredulity at the heading on my blog which points out the origin of the word "Nazi" and said that surely I did not mean that Nazism was Leftist. Read on:

CG: Wow, sorry. I continued reading your blog. You are seriously fucking crazy. Please don't write me back.
JR: Your ignoring the facts is seriously fucking crazy
CG: I forwarded your Web site to some friends. They thought it was hilarious too.
JR: Thank you. It might stir doubt about their certainties one day
CG: No, it merely confirmed that you are crazy... Don't bother to write back. You are on my ignore list now. I don't have time for people with mental illness. Seek some professional help. Quickly.
JR: I will publish this correspondence

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ELSEWHERE

Mr Giacometti is not the only one to engage in low-quality debate. I see that Stuart Buck is having the same problems with Leftist law professor Brian Leiter that I had. Leiter makes sweeping and imprecise generalizations that turn out to be arrant nonsense however you interpret them. I think Stuart is wasting time on the ladder-man, though ("Leiter" is German for ladder). Leiter writes to make Leftists feel good, not to engage in the careful argument that one would expect of a lawyer. He is to law what the Jug Man (Krugman -- "Krug" is German for Jug) is to economics: He tries, however irrationally, to find bits that comfort Leftists.

Laws against Hate crime "are not aimed at hate, but at particular kinds of hate found disagreeable by particular political groups, chiefly on the left. (Note that the groups granted special privilege invariably vote Democratic.) That is, we all understand that a woman who kills a man because she hates men will not be guilty of a hate crime, as neither will a black or Hispanic who kills a white from hostility to whites, or a homosexual who, furious at heterosexuals for their lack of respect, kills a heterosexual."

Tom Barrett has some good Father's Day reflections -- e.g. "You dads who are at home, pay attention to your kids. Talk to them, get involved in their lives. Tell them that you love them every day – several times a day. If you’re too busy for this, you are too busy. If you have to take a different job with less hours, move into a smaller house, drive an older car, do it! As a minister I have been with many men as they died. I never heard one say, “I wish I had spent more time at the office.” I have heard many say, “I wish I had spent more time with my kids.”"

What feminist complainers forget: ""Being male is now the single largest demographic risk factor for early mortality in developed countries," said Daniel Kruger, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. "The magnitude of the sex difference is most starkly summarized by the numbers of deaths before age 50," Kruger said. "For every 10 premature female deaths, 16 men died prematurely.""

Hezbollah connections in Australia: Leftist politicians, of course. Hardly mentioned in the press for some obscure reason.

I have just put up a brief posting on Leftists as Elitists

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

Comments? Email me 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

Vladimir Putin backs Bush on Saddam's terrorist links but media continues to lie The mainstream media's accusation that President Bush lied about terrorist links between al Qaeda and Saddam were blown out of the water by President Vladimir Putin
Beijing's militarists push for more spending The Pentagon's 2004 report on Chinese military power confirmed that China's military was impressed with the American military's performance
Anonymous Bush-hating 'CIA analyst' maligns President Bush Bush-hating ' Guardian', a British newspaper, has claimed that a "senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of President Bush
The media lied about President Bush and the 9/11 Commission findings The 9/11 Commission has found no "credible evidence" linking Saddam to the 9/11 atrocity. Why this statement does not add up
Government plans massive house price rise Australians had better look out, our politicians are planning to attack one of our most precious institutions - the family home
The ABC collective's little commissar Last May David Marr used Media Watch to provide a bully pulpit for the socialist Ramona Koval, a staff-elected director of the ABC

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

Hilarious! This is John Kerry's "religious outreach director": "Mara Vanderslice was raised without any faith and didn't become an evangelical Christian until she attended Earlham College, a Quaker school known for its adherence to pacifism. When in college, Mara was active in the Earlham Socialist Alliance, a group that supports the convicted cop killer Mumia Abu- Jamal and openly embraces Marxism-Leninism. After graduating, Mara spoke at rallies held by ACT-UP, the anti-Catholic group that disrupted Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1989 by spitting the Eucharist on the floor. In 2000, she practiced civil disobedience when she took to the streets of Seattle in a protest against the World Trade Organization.. etc." She sounds more like a slice of Satan to me.

Weep for John Kerry's "poor": "In 1999 a quarter of US households were poor (with less than $25,000 pa)... In this context of US poor households, 45.9 percent own their own home, 72.8 percent have a car, and 77 percent have air conditioning. Their average living space is 1,200 sq ft per household. The European average including both rich and poor is 1,000 sq ft".

Psychologists are mostly Leftists and we know what miserable sods Leftists are so their finding fault with happiness should come as no surprise: "As the British psychologist Richard P. Bentall has observed, ''There is consistent evidence that happy people overestimate their control over environmental events ... Bentall has proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder". See also here and here. Some think Bentall meant it as a joke and maybe he did but it also seems to be seen as insightful.

Dennis Prager lists the moral monstrosities who hate America and says it is a badge of honour to be hated by such people.

I don't get this at all: "President Bush plans on Wednesday to designate Vietnam as a new focus for his $15 billion plan to combat AIDS globally, expanding the initiative from Africa to Asia for the first time, congressional sources said. By designating Vietnam a "focus country," eligible to share in the $15 billion, the United States can sharply increase funding to nongovernmental organizations that provide AIDS services there. "It will make Vietnam eligible for a huge increase in funding," one congressional aide said."

The media still love old Communists: "But the tributes to this un-American symbol of Hollywood subversion just don't stop... Let me tell you about the real John Randolph. He was a member of the Communist Party USA during its heyday. This was during the time that Josef Stalin was murdering millions in the name of communism in the Soviet Union. And the Communist Party USA took its orders and received its funding from Moscow".

Further to my post about modern drugs being worth the cost, one of my medical correspondents commented: "Most young people just don't remember - almost no one went to public swimming pools in the early 50s because of the polio epidemic; Procedures to burn facial nerves to eliminate pain are no longer needed; drugs are effective; Procedures to block or cut nerves to the chest wall for shingles are no longer done; drugs are effective; Modern drugs to treat blood pressure and psychiatric disease have very few side effects; in contrast, side effects of older drugs often led to discontinuation of drugs; Years ago, patients with severe ulcers had their stomachs removed - bleeding ulcers could be fatal - now, we hardly ever see stomach surgery for ulcers; drugs are effective; Of course, many cancers are "cured" by modern drugs". And fancy those evil drug companies CHARGING for all that! Drugs should be devised for free by workers' collectives, of course. Odd that none are, though.

France vs. USA: "the core of all French-American differences can be traced to the contrast between Bonaparte and Washington, the former seeking to become "emperor," the other willing to "give up his power." He's aware that French leaders, more than American ones, typically exhibit imperial temperament... "

Gnu Hunter has an interesting extract from "Alliance Voices" (PDF) -- the Socialist Alliance Discussion Bulletin Vol. 4 no. 6, April, 2004 -- the bulletin of an Australian far Left activist organization. It shows graphically how the far Left carefully organize most demonstrations and "protests" in Australia. Demonstrations are what they do.

Another amusing extract from the same document: "This pre-conference discussion takes place in revolutionary times. Revolutionary times because the United States wages nuclear war in Iraq and Afghanistan. We witness not the doomsday stuff of a mushroom cloud, not the Cold War, mutually assured destruction (MAD) bogey but the extermination -- genocide -- of selected humans, untermenschen -- the Nazi term for those they considered sub humans -- through the use of depleted uranium (DU) warheads." How you can wage nuclear war using uranium from which the radioactivity has been REMOVED, they do not explain. I guess "depleted" is a hard word for them.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

Comments? Email me 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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ARE LEFTISTS ALL THE SAME?

I do from time to time get emails from Leftists -- mostly consisting of screams of rage and abuse. I am sure that most conservative bloggers will know what I mean. Amid the abuse and insults, however, there is the odd glimmer of intelligent comment and the chief such comment seems to be that Leftists are not all the same. American "liberals" in particular sometimes claim not to be Leftists at all! ("If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then ..."). It is certainly my view that the motivations for Leftism vary widely and I have a large article on the net which goes through those various possible motivations. And the article emphasizes that the motivations and thinking of those who vote for Left-leaning political parties at election time can be very different from the motivations and thinking of Leftist intellectuals. And it is overwhelmingly the thinking of Leftist intellectuals and preachers of Leftism that interests me. They are the ones who get their hands on the levers of power if they win an election. Even among leftist intellectuals, however, there seems to be a variety of motivations -- from the naively idealistic at one extreme to the elitist haters who want all power, success and fame for themselves at the other extreme.

To understand Leftism, however, it seems essential to me that one NOT accept the Leftist's own account of what his/her motivation is. In the case of the naive idealist, the account may be fair and accurate but in the case of the ruthless lovers of power (Stalin and the Communists anyone?) it would clearly be foolish to do so. Lies and dishonesty are a necessary subterfuge for the power-seeking haters so we have to judge them by deeds, not words. The problem, is, of course, that one can not usually know what sort of Leftist one is dealing with. To judge from what one can see of history and current events, hiding the most dismal motivations behind a mask of "compassion" seems to be only too commonly Leftist. So claims of humane motivations must in my view always be treated skeptically. And I do just that, of course. I assume that the Leftist I am dealing with is one of the dismally motivated kind. Sometimes I will be wrong of course. Some Leftists do move rightwards as they get older (Ronald Reagan for example) and it is my view that all of the idealistically motivated Leftists will eventually make that journey given sufficient information about the world.

So I don't think that Leftists are all the same but they have done so much evil and destruction in the world that I think we have to assume the worst of them until proved otherwise. We CERTAINLY cannot believe their own account of their thinking. And coming to realize that is an important thing for conservatives to do -- which is why I spell it out repeatedly. If you assume that the Leftist is motivated primarily by a desire to make himself look good rather than by a desire to do anybody else any good, all the shallow thinking that they come out with will become a lot more understandable. I have an extended discussion here of what Leftism is and what Leftists have in common with one-another.

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SECULARISM AND CONSERVATISM

The "church of secularism": "In the controversies surrounding the Pledge of Allegiance and the L.A. County seal, what we're seeing is an unacknowledged interreligious civil war. Centuries ago in Europe and the Middle East, intolerant faiths sought to suppress one another, erasing symbols of their rivals wherever possible. Churches were converted to mosques, their crosses removed. Synagogues were converted into churches, their Jewish symbols effaced. Today the church of secularism agitates against its rival, the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the interest of honest debate, at the very least it would be of benefit to recognize secularism for what it is: an aggressive religion competing for converts, a faith lacking the candor to speak openly of its aims."

I think the above article makes a lot of sense in that it accurately identifies the non-religious (secular) world as what Christians feel most threatened by. And in the USA the allegedly non-religious world is in fact often quite religious -- worshipping the addled creeds of Leftism. I myself am however REALLY secular in that I am a complete atheist and worship neither Jesus Christ nor Karl Marx (and many of my former academic colleagues in sociology clearly DID assign almost godlike status to old Karl). So I think it needs to be added that while some secularists (the more insecure ones in my view) do actively menace Christianity, not all secularists do and some -- such as myself -- think highly of Christianity. And secular people can CERTAINLY be conservative. For more on that see here

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ELSEWHERE

I have had Booker Rising on my blogroll for a little while now but I think it deserves special mention. It is a site by and for conservative American blacks. From its authors: "We began Booker Rising to counteract negativity, victimology, and defeatism, which is too often thrust upon black Americans by the media, schools, and so-called leaders. We're concerned about eroded values, hopes, and dreams, even though overall we're living better than ever. Booker Rising wants to help stop the sacrilegious assault of our grandparents' (and ancestors') legacy, as if little to no progress has been made and the civil rights movement was almost for naught. Inspired by Booker T. Washington's work, our website promotes self-help, education, enterprise, democracy, and society as the seeds for Black America's future. We won the civil rights movement. It's now time for Stage II: further propelling black American success in this increasingly globalized era, via our "seeds.""

Jeff Jacoby has a roundup of the good news from Iraq

Medicines are worth the price we pay: "Like other products resulting from research and creativity, medicines are really made of knowledge -- a kind of intellectual property capable of preventing and curing diseases as well as relieving the pain of a headache or hip transplant. This knowledge does not come cheap. Discovering, developing, testing, and gaining regulatory approval for new medicines is expensive, time-consuming, and risky."

Drug Prohibition: "None of these officials was able to cite any study that demonstrated the beneficial effects of drug prohibition when weighed against its costs. The leaders of the war on drugs are apparently unable to defend on rational cost-benefit grounds their 70-year-old policy, which costs nearly $10 billion per year (out of pocket), imprisons 75,000 Americans, and fills our cities with violent crime.... the period of greatest availability in the United States was the 19th century. For most of the century, opium, morphine, and cocaine were legally and cheaply available without a prescription at drugstores and grocery stores and through the mail. And yet, far from being marked by drug-crazed criminals and drug-paralyzed workers, that period was a time of unprecedented economic growth and productivity".

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

Comments? Email me 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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RATING THE PRESIDENTS

Buchanan on U.S. Presidents. Whatever else you think about Buchanan, he does know his history:

"Certainly, Washington is our greatest president, the father of our country and the captain who set our course. But Lincoln is great only if one believes that preventing South Carolina, Georgia and the Gulf states from peacefully seceding justified the suspension of the Constitution, a dictatorship, 600,000 dead and a resort to a total war that ravaged the South for generations. As for FDR, he was the greatest politician of the 20th century. But why call a president great whose government was honeycombed with spies and traitors, and whose war diplomacy lead to the loss of 10 Christian countries of Eastern Europe to a Muscovite despot whose terrorist regime was the greatest enemy of human freedom in modern history?

Now consider one of the men whom all the raters judge a "failure" and among our worst presidents, Warren G. Harding. Harding served five months less than JFK, before dying in office in 1923. Yet his diplomatic and economic triumphs were of the first order. He negotiated the greatest disarmament treaty of the century, the Washington Naval Agreement, which gave the United States superiority in battleships and left us and Great Britain with capital-ship strength more than three times as great as Japan's. Even Tokyo conceded a U.S. diplomatic victory. With Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, Harding cut Wilson's wartime income tax rates, which had gone as high as 63 percent, to 25 percent, ended the stagflation of the Wilson presidency and set off the greatest boom of the century, the Roaring Twenties. When Harding took his oath, unemployment was at 12 percent. When he died, 29 months later, it was at 3 percent. This is a failure?

Harding, Coolidge, Eisenhower and Reagan were men who kept us out of war and presided over times of peace, security and often of soaring prosperity. Yet, the 20th century presidents who took us into war and who lost the fruits of war - Wilson, FDR, Truman - are "great" or "near great." These ratings tell us less about presidents than they do about historians, scholars and journalists.

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This anti-Moore site makes it pretty clear that Michael Moore is just an entertainer who is proud of his success in the marketplace: "Michael Moore is a ... millionaire who boasts of wealth as proving his value -- "I'm a millionaire, I'm a multi-millionaire. I'm filthy rich. You know why I'm a multi-millionaire? 'Cause multi-millions like what I do. That's pretty good, isn't it?" So it's the horde of Leftists (particularly in Germany) who treat his glop as revelation who are the suckers. I wonder how many realize that he is a member of the NRA and sends his kids to a private school? He must be laughing all the way to the bank.

Amusing: "House Democratic leadership is pitching a law that would prohibit Pennsylvania doctors from refusing to treat a patient based on the patient's job, political opinions or litigation history." Why? Because some doctors have started to refuse to treat lawyers. Even if the law passes, it will just drive the phenomenon underground: Doctors could send lawyers for heaps of invasive and unnecessary diagnostic tests, for instance -- or refer them to specialists unnecessarily etc. I imagine the law would run into constitutional problems too. Didn't America outlaw slavery somewhere there way back? I myself have in the past refused to take on lawyers as tenants. The less you have to do with them the better, in my view.

Some good comments from a "liberal" supporter of the Iraq war: "Abu Ghraib, in all its horror, shows how much has changed in post-Saddam Iraq. Scrutiny and accountability are possible now. But judging from the tone of much of the comment, you'd think that Abu Ghraib makes the coalition morally indistinguishable from the mass-murdering regime it deposed. Critics of the war also display a creeping sympathy for the coalition's foes. We often hear that Iraqi insurgents are "nationalists", which sounds comfortingly like the French Resistance. But the main rebel factions are the opposite of freedom fighters: former Baathists and religious extremists, who mostly slaughter fellow Iraqis, beat or murder alcohol vendors, and threaten women displaying a strand of hair".

Surprising. Australia's most Leftist newspaper gives Australia's Left a blast for its kneejerk "ban everything" approach to obesity: "A ban on TV advertisements selling junk food to children is no substitute for policy".

Interesting point from Fred Barnes: "The Clinton presidency was, in effect, an extension of the Reagan presidency, though Clinton would be loath to admit this. Completing the Reagan agenda was not his intention".

Michael Duffy on Leftist hypocrisy in Australia: "Before 1996, it was all right to detain boat people because it was a Labor government that was doing it. After 1996, when John Howard started doing it, it became a crime against humanity. Pauline Hanson argued for a reduction in immigration numbers and advocated economic policies that would have destroyed our standard of living. She was widely derided as a racist and an economic illiterate. Peter Garrett supports similar things and, hey, he's welcomed into the Labor Party with open arms. Imagine if the Liberal Party took on someone with Garrett's views on immigration. The sneers and denunciations would still be running on the front pages."

I have just noticed something interesting in this academic survey of Canadian university professors by Nakhaie & Brym. Professors rated themselves on a scale of 1 to 7 in terms of Right to Left -- meaning that a score of 3.5 would mean neither Right nor Left. Table 5 shows that the only subgroups that averaged below 3.5 (i.e. were slightly Rightist) were professors of accounting, finance and mechanical engineeering. Professors in all other disciplines tended Left. The most far-Left group was, of course, the sociologists -- the most meaningless of all the disciplines. I taught in a university school of sociology for 12 years so I have some cause to know the emptiness of most sociology. Leftism sure is pervasive in academe. I explain why here.

A former cop on why drugs are here to stay: "What would a serious attack on drugs require in the US? Most conspicuously, an assault on the black ghetto, where drugs are most obviously sold. This is politically impossible. It would also mean jailing large numbers of influential whites in the suburbs, who use lots of drugs, but not too obviously. It would also mean jailing their children, who use copiously in the high schools. These things also are politically impossible."

I have just put up two good new postings on Leftists as Elitists

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

Comments? Email me 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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V.D. HANSON: BIN LADEN IS THE SANE ONE

"Like Hitler, bin Ladenism has an agenda: the end of the liberal West. Its supposedly crackpot vision is actually a petrol-rich Middle East free of Jews, Christians, and Westerners, free to rekindle spiritual purity under Sharia. Bin Laden's al Reich is a vast pan-Arabic, Taliban-like caliphate run out of Mecca by new prophets like him, metering out oil to a greedy West in order to purchase the weapons of its destruction; there is, after all, an Israel to be nuked, a Europe to be out-peopled and cowered, and an America to be bombed and terrorized into isolation. This time we are to lose not through blood and iron, but through terror and intimidation: televised beheadings, mass murders, occasional bombings, the disruption of commerce, travel, and the oil supply....

It was hard for the Islamic fascists to find ideological support in the West, given their agenda of gender apartheid, homophobia, religious persecution, racial hatred, fundamentalism, polygamy, and primordial barbarism. But they sensed that there has always been a current of self-loathing among the comfortable Western elite, a perennial search for victims of racism, economic oppression, colonialism, and Christianity. Bin Laden's followers weren't white; they were sometimes poor; they inhabited of former British and French colonies; and they weren't exactly followers of the no-nonsense Pope or Jerry Falwell. If anyone doubts the nexus between right-wing Middle Eastern fascism and left-wing academic faddishness, go to booths in the Free Speech area at Berkeley or see what European elites have said and done for Hamas. Middle Eastern fascist killers enshrined as victims alongside our own oppressed? That has been gospel in our universities for the last three decades....

While all Westerners prefer the bounty of capitalism, the delights of personal freedom, and the security of modern technological progress, saying so and not apologizing for it - let alone defending it - is, well, asking a little too much from the hyper sophisticated and cynical. Such retrograde clarity could cost you, after all, a university deanship, a correspondent billet in Paris or London, a good book review, or an invitation to a Georgetown or Malibu A-list party....

No, bin Laden is quite sane - but lately I have grown more worried that we are not." More here.

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LEFTIST NON-THINKING

"The gymnastics of mind and imagination required to be a liberal should be enough to keep even the most corpulent among them trim... Perhaps the most amazing of liberal axiomatic thought is the notion that it is safer to surrender and do nothing when confronted by a roaring lion. To be liberal, one must believe that the lion, hungry and violent, will do nothing to such an attractive meal as a cowering, simpering and obviously defenseless man-steak.... This is the attitude, however, of the liberal mind when it comes to terrorism. It is at once required, and an article of faith, for the liberal to believe that the woes of the civilized world befall it because of its insufferable bad manners and excess. Consequently, when confronted by a culture bent on the demise of the civilized world, liberals are bound to find no fault in the attacker, and only failing and turpitude in the civilized world... in the liberal mind, the pagan can do no wrong. Why is it necessary for modern, sophisticated, and intelligent society to wait for the barbarian to be literally at the door to recognize that this is not a war of persecution, as Radical Islam proclaims, but a war of expansion waged by radical Islam itself against modern civilization?

How to stop people working: "It all goes back to liberal first principles. Nobody, to the liberal, has a valid claim on anything, even his or her talents. Those who produce or acquire wealth do so not because of effort, initiative, creativity, or sacrifice. They're just lucky. They were born healthy and into loving families. Others are unlucky. They were born unhealthy or into indifferent families. Since none of us is entitled to what we have at birth, none of us is entitled to anything we produce thereafter. We might call this, to borrow a term from the criminal law, the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine. Wealth, to the liberal, belongs to all of us in common, not to any of us in particular. There are possessions, but not property."

Dalrymple: Why Leftists condone terrorism: "The idea that if someone is prepared to do something truly horrible, he must have a worthy cause remains attractive to liberal intellectuals, who perhaps envy those who take up arms against the sea of troubles that is human existence".

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ELSEWHERE

"Gun control has not worked in Canada. Since the new gun registration program started in 1998, the U.S. homicide rate has fallen, but the Canadian rate has increased. The net cost of Canada's gun registry has surged beyond $1-billion -- more than 500 times the amount originally estimated. Despite this, the Canadian government recently admitted it could not identify a single violent crime that had been solved through registration. Public confidence in the government's ability to fight crime has also eroded, with one recent survey showing only 17% of voters support the registration program."

Welfare state unfair: "Two academics - Dr Alan Tapper of Perth's Edith Cowan University and Dr David Thomson of New Zealand's Massey University - have confirmed that, across much of the Western world, the 60-year-old welfare state is in crisis. The welfare state has come to be not so much a straight-out redistribution from the haves to the have-nots, as was originally intended. Rather it has been, in Tapper's words, "one generation imposing costs on its successor".... Dr David Thomson's study, Selfish Generations? How Welfare States Grow Old (Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 1996), has produced evidence from Britain, Europe and the USA, that the welfare state is increasingly unable to satisfy the conflicting demands for "intergenerational justice". Australia's young generation is burdened, not only by heavy taxation and reduced welfare entitlements, but also soaring property prices and poor job prospects... The plight of Generation X caused the ANZ's chief economist Saul Eslake recently to exclaim that he could not understand why the young were not rising up".

Peg Kaplan is appalled at the half-hearted reaction of the Leftist media to the recent beheading in Saudi Arabia. The Abu Ghraib harassment can be shown endlessly but not the terminal brutality of Muslims.

Reagan and the "homeless" "In 1987, Reagan signed into law the Stewart B. McKinney act, a collection of programs that provided health care, shelter and transitional housing for homeless people, and saved many lives"

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

Comments? Email me 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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ARNOLD KLING ON THE DANGEROUS NEW TACTICS OF THE LEFT

The Left's tactical weapons: "The last 25 years have seen an intellectual victory by the Right over the Left on the topic of central planning. ... Thus, conservatives might be lulled into thinking that we have beaten back the argument for big government. However, the Left has not gone away. It has mutated, and as Sebastian Mallaby suggests, those of us who advocate small government may very well be losing...

The left uses the Corruption weapon to attack the legitimacy of business enterprises, conservatives, and Republicans... Faced with the Corruption charge, the Right faces a dilemma. Nobody wants to defend mistakes or adverse results. However, if the Right caves in to every demand, then the corporate profits that do not disappear under a mountain of regulation will be extracted via shakedowns (called "settlements"). If business and war had to be conducted perfectly to be conducted at all, then we would have not have any private enterprise in our economy and we would not have won a single war in our history.... In order to reduce the abuse of the Corruption weapon, we need to make a habit of always pointing out cases where it is used to attack rather than to strengthen our society. Our goal should be to help sensitize the public to the difference between constructive criticism on the one hand and efforts to undermine our economy and our foreign policy on the other... We also need to emphasize to the public the large costs of Nader-esque crusades. Hasty legislation, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, tends to penalize decent, well-run corporations a great deal, for very little benefit in constraining the future behavior of unscrupulous individuals.

The other banner under which the Left marches is Compassion. If you favor more market-oriented approaches to health care, education, or Social Security, you will be accused of a lack of compassion -- of throwing grandma out of her wheelchair.... Instead of trying to placate the Left on Compassion, I believe that we ought to emphasize the ways in which government compassion is an oxymoron. In particular: The taxes to fund government compassion create new groups of needy people. For example, many of the young families without health insurance pay thousands of dollars a year in Social Security taxes.... Government compassion does not target the needy, but instead leads to state control of everyone's education, health care, and retirement security. In Thomas Sowell's phrase, "The left uses the poor as human shields".. For reducing the population of the needy, economic growth works better than government aid. As Robert Lucas (Nobel, 1995) put it recently, "of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor. The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production."

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ELSEWHERE

A touching memoir by Father John, a former Anglican who grew so disgusted with the secularism of his church that he left it and joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. "Our decision to leave was difficult, and not made easily. But, by the mercy of God, we had found the Orthodox Church, and faith, and way of life; and what had started as a way of fleeing from the coming apostasy of ECUSA became an increasingly powerful desire to embrace the faith of the Church that has existed since the day of Pentecost, her continuity unbroken, her faith unchanged. We started out as refugees; and found ourselves coming home. There are not words, nor time enough, to adequately say "thank you" to God for His mercy and favor in bringing us home. If any Anglicans happen to stray across this page, let me say again to you that the faith you desire is safe, and secure, and found today where it has always resided: in the Orthodox Church."

BRAVO for Michelle Malkin!: I thought that what the WSJ says about immigration -- it champions open borders -- was pretty strange but Michelle really gives it to them.

Job-stealers almost all American: "Quite often we see headlines about U.S. jobs being "lost" overseas or even "stolen" abroad. Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a report that said that just a small fraction of U.S. jobs lost were lost to overseas workers. "Of the 239,361 private sector nonfarm workers who were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days in the first quarter of 2004, the separations of 4,633 workers were associated with the movement of work outside of the country""

But what about the farm vote! "Eliminating global trade tariffs and other protective barriers would lift at least 500 million people out of poverty over 15 years, according to a new study released on Thursday.... In the study, titled "Trade Policy and Global Poverty," Cline also argues that lifting trade barriers would enable rich industrial nations to convey about twice as much gain to developing countries as they currently provide through foreign aid -- at a benefit rather than cost to their own consumers"

I guess it is worth something that "Britain fought a successful rearguard battle to preserve national vetoes on key policy areas such as taxation, social security, foreign and defense policy and criminal law" in the EU constitution negotiations.

Norm Weatherby points out that we COULD stop terrorist kidnappings and beheadings in their tracks if we really wanted to.

Bureaucracy at work: The Minnesota Commerce Department, believing that discount gasoline is worse for consumers than ridiculously inflated gasoline prices, hit Arkansas-based Murphy Oil with a $70,000 fine, and Kwik Trip Inc. with a $5,000 fine, for not making sufficient profit on their gasoline, i.e., for charging too little for their gasoline.

Reagan the racist: "So, how did blacks fare under Ronald Reagan? From the end of 1982 to 1989, black unemployment dropped 9 percentage points (from 20.4 percent to 11.4 percent), while white unemployment dropped by only 4 percentage points. Black household income went up 84 percent from 1980 to 1990, versus a white household income increase of 68 percent. The number of black-owned businesses increased from 308,000 in 1982 to 424,000 in 1987, a 38 percent rise versus a 14 percent increase in the total number of firms in the United States"

Gipper? A reader explains: "George Gipp was a famous and very successful football player. Reagan played him in "Knute Rockne, All American". Rockne was the coach at Notre Dame college, played in this case by Pat O'Brein, a pro Irishman. When Gipp, known as the Gipper, was dying from pneumonia and a strep infection he is supposed to have said as encouragement to Notre Dame against Army - "win one for the Gipper." This is a high note in the movie, of course.

Another communist absurdity: Mongolians lost their surnames under Communism and are only now getting them back

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

Comments? Email me 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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REALISM IN SOCIOLOGY!

Highly respected sociologist Peter Berger notes a big upsurge of Protestantism in Latin America and says it will lead to a big increase in democracy and capitalist prosperity there: "our research has estimated that there may be between forty and fifty million Protestants south of the United States border. And something like eighty percent of them are first-generation Protestants, so we are dealing with a massive phenomenon- most of them, by the way, again somewhere around eighty percent, are Pentecostal, so it's a very particular kind of Protestantism that is exploding.

I would say there are a number of consequences one can already see. If you talk about social institutions, we have here an incredible replication of some of the values and habits that Max Weber was describing in terms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and North America, the Protestant ethic.... Economically, again one can say the same thing, it's creating a group of people with very strong entrepreneurial interest.... They tend to favor democracy, because it's very much a people's movement. ... . The Protestant ethic-hard work, saving, discipline, basically not enjoying life very much and saving for the next generation- these kinds of values and behavior patterns are very conducive to success. ...

Socialism is no longer just an idea, it's a form of economic and political organization that has been tried in many countries, not just in the Soviet Union. It has unfailingly produced economic disaster, and in most cases, pretty odious political tyrannies. So the idea that socialism is the way to personal liberation is, empirically speaking, a horrendous mistake"

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ELSEWHERE

Amusing: "A new book by a prominent Washington psychoanalyst says President George W. Bush is a "paranoid meglomaniac" as well as a sadist and "untreated alcoholic.... Dr. Frank has been a psychiatrist for 35 years and is director of psychiatry at George Washington University. A Democrat, he once headed the Washington Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility". So a Leftist shrink thinks GWB is nuts. I am sure the feeling is mutual. Leftist psychiatrists said much the same thing about Ronnie. Yet all the psychiatrists in the world put together would be lucky to have one millionth of the popularity of Ronald Reagan. If psychiatrists can mistake one of history's greatest human beings for a nut, it shows who the real nuts are. Being despised by Leftist psychiatrists puts GWB in very good company indeed.

"Self-impressed protesters who wanted to 'shut down' the BIO 2004 conference in San Francisco last week could take a lesson in morality and courage from Emeryville's Chiron Corp. The protesters engaged in their cheap stunts knowing there would be no real consequences for their actions -- not in San Francisco. Chiron employees, on the other hand, endured personal abuse and vicious harassment for months because they believe their work to develop new medicines and therapies is too important to abandon. The harassment began in 2003, when animal-rights activists began targeting Chiron because it had contracted with the animal-research firm, Huntingdon Life Sciences. The campaign -- which included yelling obscenities in front of workers' homes, following workers' children and jamming employees' home phone lines -- is the handiwork of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, an animal-rights group dedicated to shutting down Huntingdon for using animals in research."

Interesting that France still has influential Fascists who seem to have been lifted straight out of the 1930s. Variously called "villieristes" and "sovereignists", they are socialists who are also strong nationalists -- just like Hitler and Mussolini. They have at least one representative in the EU parliament -- best known for proposing that France give nuclear weapons to the Arabs to "even things up" between them and the Jews. Hitler would have loved it. See here for more.

Churchill once advocated using gas on rebellious Iraqi tribesmen, but what gas was he talking about? Another Leftie lie exposed.

Tribal morality: "Why do nice people do evil acts? In the old South, White folks who were polite to their families and neighborhoods would gang up to hang innocent Blacks. Germans who listened to classical music and were kind to their children would turn around and send Jewish children to death camps. Why? It is because human beings compartmentalize their thinking. We mentally divide the world into categories with different standards. There is a human propensity to put our own tribe into the human category, to be treated with politeness and respect, and to put an enemy or a perceived inferior group or those who do disapproved acts into a separate category, 'them.'"

"human beings discriminate every day. You do it, and I do it. And it doesn't mean we're close-minded. It means we care about the situations we put ourselves into. We choose our friends carefully, for example. For whatever reason -- be it the way they're dressed, the way they smell, the way they walk, or whatever -- we choose not to befriend a large majority of the people we meet. That's discrimination. Maybe they should sue?"

Oliver Kamm had a recent post that made me laugh. This is the whole of it: "On my way home last night I noticed that my local cinema is showing a film entitled "The Prince and Me". I have no idea what it's about, but me am incredulous and appalled." He is obviously more of a stickler for Latin grammar than I am. For those who take an interest in British politics, Kamm seems to be the scourge of Britain's most wishy-washy political party -- the Lib-Dems. We have a similar political party in Australia -- the Australian Democrats -- so I sympathize.

The new N-word among the Democrats: "Just the mention of defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, attorney general John Ashcroft or vice-president Dick Cheney will set diatribes in motion. But if you really want to see them in a rage wait until the Bushwhacking stops and someone admits that they voted for Ralph Nader, the anti-corporate crusader, in the 2000 presidential elections. The N-word should not be spoken in polite liberal company. Once his name has been uttered all camaraderie and bonhomie evaporate as readily as if the miscreant had confessed to relieving himself in the host's sink. There is a ready-made vocabulary Democrats use to describe how they feel about George Bush. When it comes to Nader, and by association those who voted for him, words fail them."

Shaun Bourke has posted the following comment on Catallaxy: "Over many years I have found that,in relation to homosexuality,women can be found in basically two camps. Those that are happily married and those that are not or are divorced. It is in the latter group that you will find the most profound approval of homosexuality" He would like to know if anybody else has noticed that.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

Comments? Email me 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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SOME INCONVENIENT HISTORY

Was it conservatives or progressives who were responsible for the Tuskegee experiment? "The Tuskegee syphilis study ranks almost with slavery and lynching as a symbol of America's racist past. There is probably not one black American adult who does not know-or thinks he knows-about an experiment from the 1930s in which government health authorities deliberately withheld treatment from 400 black syphilitics just to see what would happen to them.... Anthropologist Richard Shweder of the University of Chicago has just published a detailed analysis of the Tuskegee study in which he shows that virtually every popular assumption about it is false. (Tuskegee re-examined, January 8, 2004) The study was undertaken by "progressives" who wanted to fight a disease that afflicted many blacks, it had the full support of black medical authorities to the end, and- most important- it probably caused no harm to the 140 men (not 400) who took part.

Windschuttle has posted a recent summary of the history wars. He gives many examples of blatant and deliberate lies by Leftist Australian historians who try their hardest to foster white guilt. Just two excerpts: "Lyndall Ryan cites the Hobart Town Courier as a source for several stories about atrocities against Aborigines in 1826. However, that newspaper did not begin publication until October 1827 and the other two newspapers of the day made no mention of these alleged killings" and "Lloyd Robson claims the settler James Hobbs in 1815 witnessed Aborigines killing 300 sheep at Oyster Bay and the next day the 48th Regiment killed 22 Aborigines in retribution. However, it would have been difficult for Hobbs to have witnessed this in 1815 because at the time he was living in India. Moreover, the first sheep did not arrive at Oyster Bay until 1821" What total crooks Leftist historians are!

Any Leftist will tell you that the Nazis were really bad guys compared to those lovable well-intentioned Soviets. The truth however appears to be very different. Read this account of how the Nazis surrendered to the wives of imprisoned Jews in Berlin itself. A public demonstration against Nazi policy actually caused the top Nazi leadership to release Jews who had been destined for the concentration camps! Sad though it is, Nazism was actually popular in Germany -- as any number of pre-war writers (such as Roberts and Heiden) attest -- and the Nazis were keen not to jeopardize that. Any idea that Stalin cared for public opinion in Russia is merely laughable. Unlike Stalin, Hitler came to power by democratic means (details here) rather than revolution and so started out as a rather extreme democratic Leftist rather than a Marxist. Once he escaped democratic restraints, however, he, like Stalin, showed what all Leftists are really made of.

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ELSEWHERE

Money can buy happiness: "Two studies released yesterday shed new light on the importance of economic circumstances, and undermine earlier findings that poor people are just as happy as the rich. Money doesn't buy Happiness - or Does It? by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, at Melbourne University, shows that when wealth - not just income - is measured, the rich are indeed happier than the poor. Earlier research that focused only on income found very little difference in the reported happiness of high-income and low-income people. Mark Wooden, the study's co-author, said: "This has led some people to say money is not that important, relative to other things." However, when people's assets were taken into account - the value of their houses, cars, art works, even stamp collection - a different picture emerged."

Good stuff! "I have long written about how adherence to the Modern Liberal philosophy requires a childish mentality. The grown up mind, forged in the real world, quickly dismisses the infantile "tooth fairy" mentality of the left where riches are bestowed to one, without labor or merit, in their sleep. Those who mature soon grow out of the Democrats' disdain for personal responsibility, seeing it as more befitting an angry teenager looking for someone to blame than grown men and women seeking to make a better life and a better world.... Anyone who has raised a teenager recognizes the ridiculous hyperbole that has become the standard fare in stump speeches and personal appearances by today's Democratic Party "leaders... Today's Democrats, like small children, see only their own immediate gratification and the chance to advance their short-term personal wants." (Via Dick McDonald)

I have just done an extensive revision of my big monograph on the motivations of Leftists. I have greatly expanded my coverage of the claim that Leftist intellectuals suffer from a milder form of a psychiatric condition known as psychopathy. The best bit is here.

Appeals court reinstates petition drive against affirmative action: "Giving a boost to the beleaguered campaign to end the use of race in government hiring and university admissions decisions, the state Court of Appeals has reinstated a petition drive aimed at placing the issue before Michigan voters. A unanimous three-judge appeals panel, in a seven-page opinion dated June 11 and obtained Saturday by the Free Press, overturned a March ruling in Ingham County Circuit Court that the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative was improperly worded and likely to confuse voters."

A column here by David Brooks points out that America's highly educated elite is divided between the professions and the business managers, with the former usually Democrat and the latter usually Republican. He omits to say that both are graduates of roughly the same universities. So how come the first lot have stayed true to what they learnt at university and the business-people have not? Easy. It's a lot harder life in business -- dog eat dog -- so illusions don't last long. It's yet another example of how experience teaches conservatism.

Even the NYT has never managed to muster much enthusiasm for John Kerry. But they do have some good advice for him here: "For months, Senator John Kerry has been among the loudest in the chorus criticizing President Bush for not persuading our allies to shoulder more of the Iraq burden. But now it is time for Mr. Kerry to start admonishing the allies.... One way to persuade voters that he is presidential is for Mr. Kerry to put the country's interests ahead of his own, narrowly construed. Turning his considerable critical attention, however briefly, onto the failings of others (besides President Bush's) would be a great place to start."

After last week's debacle (which I did not think worth linking to) Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its usual convenient range of good posts all in one place.

Wicked Thoughts has a post suggesting that Ronald Reagan was a gambler.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

Comments? Email me 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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AFRICA

Amazing! "Amid chronic fuel, food and currency shortages and a contracting economy, Zimbabwe has secretly placed a 200m order for fighter jets and military vehicles from China". While millions of Zimbabweans are going hungry at the same time, of course. Obviously a Leftist government! And how will they pay for it? Maybe with all the farms they have just "nationalized" somehow?

There is a graphic description here of the disaster that is socialism in Ethiopia today. It was a totally foreseeable disaster and is a perfect example of the fact that Leftists are not even interested in thinking ahead -- something also seen in the Muslim-appeasers of today's "antiwar" American Left. Only the instant gratification of appearing praiseworthy in the present matters to them. A small excerpt: "Abraham Tekelgne's family couldn't have been happier when a socialist government swept to power, seized the country's private farmland and allotted it to rural peasants... Today the family often gets by on one meal of toasted corn a day. Too poor to buy fertilizer and with few trees left to cut, they're not sure how they will make it another year... The stakes are highest in Ethiopia, where the number of people dependent on international food aid is growing by 2 million a year"

William Shawcross on the current Darfur holocaust: "Since early last year, this vicious campaign has claimed an estimated 30,000 civilian lives; international aid agencies say that over 1.2m people have been displaced within Sudan and at least 120,000 have fled to neighbouring Chad, making Khartoum's conduct a grave threat to regional as well as internal stability. USAID estimates that another 350,000 could die due to the desperate situation in Darfur. In short, the government of Sudan is conducting a scorched-earth, near-genocidal war against its own citizens. Again... But the time for the international community to stand by and hope is long past. The government-supported atrocities in Darfur are too horrific and widespread to ignore. The roaring silence from the Arab League and the Muslim world over Darfur is inexcusable. Both the Arab aggressors and the black African victims are Muslims. So one might have expected to hear something from those quarters, at least a call from the former for Arab brethren to show restraint, if not condemnation from the latter of the massacre of Muslims. The European Union has not fared much better, offering weak words at best"

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USING RACE TO DESTROY EDUCATION

Dave Huber has another post up about thedesperate twists and turns of the education authorities in Delaware. They do and say ANYTHING rather than admit that blacks do less well at school because blacks are different. To admit to any differences would take away one of their favourite propaganda tools -- the claim that all men are equal. The tragic thing is that blacks COULD do well at school if given the high-discipline environment that the Left are determined to deny them. But if you understand that hatred of other people's success is the real Leftist motive, what they do makes perfect sense. When they forcibly "integrate" blacks into low-discipline classes of white students, they destroy the education of BOTH blacks AND whites. Bravo! Well done!

In a rational system, both high and low discipline schools would be readily available and students would end up in one or the other according to which helped them most. And if it were mostly blacks who ended up in the high discipline schools, so what? Leftists once advocated that official policy should be colour-blind. Now they advocate the opposite. Which shows again what sort of principles and guiding philosophy they have: None. As long as they can use a policy to create havoc, they will.

There is a full exposition here of how Leftists use government to create and perpetuate racial discrimination, disharmony and disadvantage.

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