ELSEWHERE
Ratzinger is right: "A leading contender to become the next Pope has launched a fierce attack on the forces of secularism, arguing that they were fostering intolerance in Europe and forcing Christianity underground. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 77, one of the Vatican's most powerful figures, said that liberal consensus had now evolved into a "worrying and aggressive" ideology. As a result, "Catholic and Christian religion" had been pushed out of the public debate and was being "driven into the margins". Coming shortly after European Parliament MPs refused to approve the Italian politician Rocco Buttiglione as European justice commissioner because of his strong Catholic views on gays and women, his statements might be seen by some as something of a manifesto.... Describing the development of a "secular ideological aggression" across the continent as "cause for concern", the cardinal said: "In Sweden, a Protestant minister who preached about homosexuality on the basis of an excerpt from the scriptures was put in jail for a month. "Secularism is no longer that element of neutrality, which opens up space for freedom for all. It is beginning to change into an ideology which, through politics, is being imposed."
Antisemitic Norway: "Norway managed to forbid Jews from marking the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a step the French haven't yet taken. The local TV2 News reported that no Norwegian Jews participated in Oslo's commemoration of Kristallnacht."TV2 also reported that the authorities, saying they didn't want trouble, forbade any Jewish symbols, including Stars of David and Israeli flags," according to Israel's Arutz-7 radio station. "On the TV2 evening news, a group of Jews and their friends who wanted to take part in the commemoration were shown being firmly told by a policeman to 'please leave the area,'" according to a dispatch from an American journalist living in Norway, Bruce Bawer, on AndrewSullivan.com. "This in a city where Muslim demonstrations take place on a regular basis, and include signs and banners bearing hateful, barbaric slogans.""
When an England football team that included some blacks played in Spain recently, some Spanish fans chanted racist epithets at the England team. See here for the righteous wrath over it. One of my readers however doubts that the motivation was really racist. He writes: "First of all it was really useful that it happened right next to the commentators microphones. Next, these "racists" seemed to only target one black player and not all the black players. Odd behaviour for diehard racists".
Jim Bennett's book about the Anglosphere is out at long last. See here. We might think that the co-operation between the USA, the UK and Australia is just a matter of "blood is thicker than water" but Bennnett shows it is much more than that. There is also a related site here.
One in the eye for those who say GWB is a puppet of the neocons: "Because Ignatieff originally supported the invasion of Iraq, there are people who think he's become some sort of apologist for the administration. Not so. Ignatieff is no fan of the president or, for that matter, the entire Bush clan, whom he refers to as "the Corleones of American politics." It is simply that "it never pays, never, to underestimate this president, intellectually or politically," he says. "He is not the cipher of Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice. He is the boss. There is absolutely no question about it. Sorry." [Ignatieff is a Harvard history professor]
Lileks is good on the Leftist hatred of the Boy Scouts: "Move over, OBL - our new national threat comes from the BSA. They're a strange, religiously oriented group that's stated purposes ought to make your blood run as cold as chilled mercury. We've had remarkable success in recent years keeping them from undermining American power, thanks to the U.S. military. But now it's official, and what was once a shadowy war is out in the open. The Pentagon has informed all bases not to sponsor the Boy Scouts of America.... Boy Scouts haven't been suing anyone for the right to hold compulsory God and country rallies in schools across the land. The American Civil Liberties Union is forcing the issue. The people barging into the courts are the ones obsessed that Boy Scouts might be using public school rooms after hours to learn knot tying"
There is a particularly amateurish version of Carnival of the Vanities up at the moment -- overdue as well.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
Monday, November 22, 2004
Sunday, November 21, 2004
SOME BAD NEWS FOR DO-GOODERS
Hunger campaigners help warlords: "When Michael Buerk's first report on the Ethiopian famine was transmitted on BBC News on 23 October 1984, the idea immediately took hold that this was a natural disaster - `a biblical famine', in Buerk's words - which would be alleviated by massive food aid. There was a severe drought in the region, but the creation of famine was a military tactic of the Dergue government of Colonel Haile Mariam Mengistu. For journalists like Buerk and activists like Geldof, the wars in Ethiopia were an inconvenience which were complicating relief efforts. Yet the wars were the principal cause of the tragedy... As it turned out, Mengistu knew a hawk from a handsaw. In 1984-85, up to a billion dollars' worth of aid flowed into Ethiopia. Thousands of Western aid workers and journalists flew in with it. The regime ensured that the visitors converted their Western dollars to the local currency at a rate favourable to the government: in 1985 the Dergue tripled its foreign currency reserves. It used this influx of cash to help build up its war-machine, it commandeered aid vehicles for its own purposes and, by diverting aid supplies, helped feed its armies.... Above all, the government used the aid operation to support its military strategy: it saw food aid as both a tool for consolidating control over disputed territory and as bait for luring people from rebel-held areas into government territory. One point is certain: the war which we helped fuel continued for another six years, claiming many thousands more lives.
Post-colonial Africa: "Today there is no public security. Slavery is found once more in Sudan, and sinister forms of domestic enslavement that involve the trafficking of children exist elsewhere too. Fiscal management is a farce- and Nigerian misappropriation of public funds is a farce played on a global stage. Transport is haphazard and unreliable. Education and public health struggle on in deplorable conditions. And nothing can be done without lies and bribes and payoffs at every step and every social and political level, all public revenues tending to leak away into private hands. Corruption is universal, malignant, and destructive"
Most poor people in our society would not be made better off by more money -- which is why lottery millionaires constantly end up broke.
How do you waste half a billion dollars worth of poverty-alleviation funds? Easy! You give it to a city government to spend. Excerpt: "City Hall squandered much of the half-billion dollars in federal aid it received over the past 30 years to revitalize its downtown and neighborhoods and to recharge its ailing economy, a Buffalo News investigation has found. Buffalo gets more federal community development block grant aid per resident than all but one city in the country because of its pervasive poverty. But three decades and $556 million later, there is scant evidence of the federal government's largess".
*******************************
Hunger campaigners help warlords: "When Michael Buerk's first report on the Ethiopian famine was transmitted on BBC News on 23 October 1984, the idea immediately took hold that this was a natural disaster - `a biblical famine', in Buerk's words - which would be alleviated by massive food aid. There was a severe drought in the region, but the creation of famine was a military tactic of the Dergue government of Colonel Haile Mariam Mengistu. For journalists like Buerk and activists like Geldof, the wars in Ethiopia were an inconvenience which were complicating relief efforts. Yet the wars were the principal cause of the tragedy... As it turned out, Mengistu knew a hawk from a handsaw. In 1984-85, up to a billion dollars' worth of aid flowed into Ethiopia. Thousands of Western aid workers and journalists flew in with it. The regime ensured that the visitors converted their Western dollars to the local currency at a rate favourable to the government: in 1985 the Dergue tripled its foreign currency reserves. It used this influx of cash to help build up its war-machine, it commandeered aid vehicles for its own purposes and, by diverting aid supplies, helped feed its armies.... Above all, the government used the aid operation to support its military strategy: it saw food aid as both a tool for consolidating control over disputed territory and as bait for luring people from rebel-held areas into government territory. One point is certain: the war which we helped fuel continued for another six years, claiming many thousands more lives.
Post-colonial Africa: "Today there is no public security. Slavery is found once more in Sudan, and sinister forms of domestic enslavement that involve the trafficking of children exist elsewhere too. Fiscal management is a farce- and Nigerian misappropriation of public funds is a farce played on a global stage. Transport is haphazard and unreliable. Education and public health struggle on in deplorable conditions. And nothing can be done without lies and bribes and payoffs at every step and every social and political level, all public revenues tending to leak away into private hands. Corruption is universal, malignant, and destructive"
Most poor people in our society would not be made better off by more money -- which is why lottery millionaires constantly end up broke.
How do you waste half a billion dollars worth of poverty-alleviation funds? Easy! You give it to a city government to spend. Excerpt: "City Hall squandered much of the half-billion dollars in federal aid it received over the past 30 years to revitalize its downtown and neighborhoods and to recharge its ailing economy, a Buffalo News investigation has found. Buffalo gets more federal community development block grant aid per resident than all but one city in the country because of its pervasive poverty. But three decades and $556 million later, there is scant evidence of the federal government's largess".
*******************************
ELSEWHERE
Patrick Cox has a fascinating article in TCS showing that the vote for John Kerry was highly correlated with population density. The "Red" states do of course have generally lower population densities. He also quotes research showing that people in more crowded environments (like NYC) are less kind, caring and responsible towards one-another. He resists drawing the obvious conclusion so let me spell it out: Crowding makes you less "caring" and less caring people voted for Kerry. Why? Dead simple: Leftists are people who want government to do the caring rather than do it themselves. So of course city-dwellers voted for someone who promised more government welfare. It lets them personally off the hook. All the Leftist talk of "caring" is camouflage. They are really people who DON'T care. One look at how they behave when they get unrestricted power (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) tells you that. And they have lately become very vocal about their detestation of ordinary people. See Leftists as Elitists for many examples of that.
Wow! The Australian Left is learning even if the U.S.Left is not: "Mark Latham has dumped key Labor policies and embraced small business, the self-employed and the "upwardly mobile" as he attempts to reinvent the Labor Party and bolster his leadership.... Jettisoning the ALP's traditional preference for public-sector delivery of social services, Mr Latham embraced upward mobility in the workforce and promised the party would be driven by pragmatism, not ideology. In a key shift to its approach to the workplace, Mr Latham said Labor had to realise that workers were no longer just people on a job site that could be unionised. Instead he called on the party to make a philosophical shift to embrace "the upwardly mobile".... "The new middle-class is here to stay with its army of contractors, consultants, franchisees and entrepreneurs," Mr Latham told the Fabian Society in a speech in Melbourne.... Among the election commitments ditched yesterday were key pledges to provide free hospital care for over-75s, an $8-a-week tax cut for people earning under $52,000, and its $800million compensation and protection blueprint for Tasmania's old-growth forests.... Labor's policy soul-searching came as influential ALP figures called for the party to move back to the centre to embrace ordinary Australians. Australian Workers Union national secretary Bill Shorten warned the federal ALP would be consigned to more election defeats unless it widened its appeal beyond the nation's left-wing intelligentsia".
I thought that having values was "intolerant": "European interior ministers have signalled a tougher line on immigration by agreeing to bring in new requirements to ensure immigrants integrate into their new society. At a ministerial meeting in Brussels, all 25 European countries agreed to make newcomers learn the local language and what they described as "European values"."
The huge FDA bureaucracy failed to protect people so this galoot wants more of the same: "At least five medications now sold to consumers pose such risks that their sale should be limited or stopped, said a government drug reviewer who raised safety questions earlier about the arthritis drug Vioxx. In testimony yesterday before the Senate Finance Committee, Food and Drug Administration Reviewer David Graham cited Meridia, Crestor, Accutane, Bextra and Serevent. The nation is "virtually defenseless" against a repeat of the Vioxx debacle, he said." [Dismantling the failed bureaucracy concerned would make more sense]
LOL. The poor petals!: "Canadian censors are likely to approve Fox News Channel for airing on digital television starting next year, reports Toronto's Globe and Mail. The far-left newspaper describes Fox as "the Canada-baiting house organ of the U.S. right."
Father Mike Walsh of the Maryknoll organization has done another dissection of Leftism that is worth reading.
Right Dominion has some derisive remarks about the new Bill Clinton library and its contents.
A note from a reader about my second post yesterday: "Congratulations....a milestone indeed and best wishes on his university studies. Our 5th grade son [my new step-son] goes to a Catholic School and we couldn't be more pleased....especially since it's about 1/3rd the cost of his old "elite" Episcopal school. We like the religious instruction, albeit Catholic instead of our Presbyterian/Methodist bent and the firm but fair discipline and even Jack likes wearing a uniform. And no surprise the parents are involved in everything. I went to 'hotdog' day at lunch and almost every kid had a parent or grandparent there."
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
Patrick Cox has a fascinating article in TCS showing that the vote for John Kerry was highly correlated with population density. The "Red" states do of course have generally lower population densities. He also quotes research showing that people in more crowded environments (like NYC) are less kind, caring and responsible towards one-another. He resists drawing the obvious conclusion so let me spell it out: Crowding makes you less "caring" and less caring people voted for Kerry. Why? Dead simple: Leftists are people who want government to do the caring rather than do it themselves. So of course city-dwellers voted for someone who promised more government welfare. It lets them personally off the hook. All the Leftist talk of "caring" is camouflage. They are really people who DON'T care. One look at how they behave when they get unrestricted power (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) tells you that. And they have lately become very vocal about their detestation of ordinary people. See Leftists as Elitists for many examples of that.
Wow! The Australian Left is learning even if the U.S.Left is not: "Mark Latham has dumped key Labor policies and embraced small business, the self-employed and the "upwardly mobile" as he attempts to reinvent the Labor Party and bolster his leadership.... Jettisoning the ALP's traditional preference for public-sector delivery of social services, Mr Latham embraced upward mobility in the workforce and promised the party would be driven by pragmatism, not ideology. In a key shift to its approach to the workplace, Mr Latham said Labor had to realise that workers were no longer just people on a job site that could be unionised. Instead he called on the party to make a philosophical shift to embrace "the upwardly mobile".... "The new middle-class is here to stay with its army of contractors, consultants, franchisees and entrepreneurs," Mr Latham told the Fabian Society in a speech in Melbourne.... Among the election commitments ditched yesterday were key pledges to provide free hospital care for over-75s, an $8-a-week tax cut for people earning under $52,000, and its $800million compensation and protection blueprint for Tasmania's old-growth forests.... Labor's policy soul-searching came as influential ALP figures called for the party to move back to the centre to embrace ordinary Australians. Australian Workers Union national secretary Bill Shorten warned the federal ALP would be consigned to more election defeats unless it widened its appeal beyond the nation's left-wing intelligentsia".
I thought that having values was "intolerant": "European interior ministers have signalled a tougher line on immigration by agreeing to bring in new requirements to ensure immigrants integrate into their new society. At a ministerial meeting in Brussels, all 25 European countries agreed to make newcomers learn the local language and what they described as "European values"."
The huge FDA bureaucracy failed to protect people so this galoot wants more of the same: "At least five medications now sold to consumers pose such risks that their sale should be limited or stopped, said a government drug reviewer who raised safety questions earlier about the arthritis drug Vioxx. In testimony yesterday before the Senate Finance Committee, Food and Drug Administration Reviewer David Graham cited Meridia, Crestor, Accutane, Bextra and Serevent. The nation is "virtually defenseless" against a repeat of the Vioxx debacle, he said." [Dismantling the failed bureaucracy concerned would make more sense]
LOL. The poor petals!: "Canadian censors are likely to approve Fox News Channel for airing on digital television starting next year, reports Toronto's Globe and Mail. The far-left newspaper describes Fox as "the Canada-baiting house organ of the U.S. right."
Father Mike Walsh of the Maryknoll organization has done another dissection of Leftism that is worth reading.
Right Dominion has some derisive remarks about the new Bill Clinton library and its contents.
A note from a reader about my second post yesterday: "Congratulations....a milestone indeed and best wishes on his university studies. Our 5th grade son [my new step-son] goes to a Catholic School and we couldn't be more pleased....especially since it's about 1/3rd the cost of his old "elite" Episcopal school. We like the religious instruction, albeit Catholic instead of our Presbyterian/Methodist bent and the firm but fair discipline and even Jack likes wearing a uniform. And no surprise the parents are involved in everything. I went to 'hotdog' day at lunch and almost every kid had a parent or grandparent there."
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
Saturday, November 20, 2004
BERKELEY SOCIOLOGISTS DREAM ABOUT VOTER FRAUD IN FLORIDA
The "voter fraud" explanation that many Leftists give in explanation for their loss of the recent U.S. Presidential election has already been pretty thoroughly debunked but Leftists are still not giving up on it. Given their own efforts to rig the vote by enrolling dead people etc., one can understand their conviction that there was foul play. It's another example of their chronic "projection" (seeing their own faults in others). And I am sure that one place where the fraud explanation is almost universally treated as gospel would be the People's Republic of Berkeley. So it is no surprise that a group of Berkeley sociologists have done a statistical analysis (PDF) which they believe offers proof that voting-machine fraud took place in the Florida voting.
The method they adopted is amusing, however. I myself taught sociological statistics at a major Australian university for many years so maybe I can explain simply what they did. They took a large number of things that normally predict the vote and combined them to produce an estimate of what the vote SHOULD have been. They then show that this estimate of the Republican vote was lower than the official Republican vote in precincts where voting machines were used. They then conclude that the official figures were "rigged" because they diverged from the theoretical figures.
To show how ridiculous this procedure is we only have to ask why the USA had an election at all if the result was predictable with such certainty? Surely it would have been easier to leave the whole business of electing the President to the sociologists and their computer models! The plain fact, however, is that there are many things -- most of them not easily meaasurable -- that could have influenced the vote but which were not included in our sociologists' model. And even the data that were used are subject to error.
What one of the omitted factors could have been is suggested by econometrician Newmark's Door. He points out that there is a large Jewish population in the "suspect" counties and that Jews who quietly switched to Bush because of his support for Israel and his strong opposition to Islamic terrorism could account for at least part of the "wrong" voting. And it may be noted that the percentage of Jewish voting for Bush is one of those variables that could be particularly hard to estimate. Given the strong historic tradition of Democrat voting in the Jewish community, Jews who did switch to Bush might not be keen to go public about it.
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A MILESTONE
I went to my son's graduation from High School yesterday. He has already been accepted for admission to Queensland's most prestigious university and I will be paying his fees so the occasion was just a formality. But the school is a Catholic one so I was pleased to hear a great deal of mention of Christian themes and Christian values. It was not at all politically correct! I am very pleased that I was in a position to give my son a private education where he would get good exposure to the sort of influences that have made our culture great. A sign of the quality of the school is that about half the teachers are male. Male teachers are of course rare so can pick and choose where they want to teach. And my son's school is obviously seen as a desirable environment. There certainly seem to be minimal discipline problems and there is a high level of civility generally. It is however a very multi-ethnic school so my son was one of the few blond heads in the crowd. His best friend is Chinese. My son is much more of a Mathematics whizz than I am, however, so the Math Dept. at the University of Queensland gave him a small scholarship to entice him to study there. Scholarships of any kind are rare in Australian universities.
***************************
The "voter fraud" explanation that many Leftists give in explanation for their loss of the recent U.S. Presidential election has already been pretty thoroughly debunked but Leftists are still not giving up on it. Given their own efforts to rig the vote by enrolling dead people etc., one can understand their conviction that there was foul play. It's another example of their chronic "projection" (seeing their own faults in others). And I am sure that one place where the fraud explanation is almost universally treated as gospel would be the People's Republic of Berkeley. So it is no surprise that a group of Berkeley sociologists have done a statistical analysis (PDF) which they believe offers proof that voting-machine fraud took place in the Florida voting.
The method they adopted is amusing, however. I myself taught sociological statistics at a major Australian university for many years so maybe I can explain simply what they did. They took a large number of things that normally predict the vote and combined them to produce an estimate of what the vote SHOULD have been. They then show that this estimate of the Republican vote was lower than the official Republican vote in precincts where voting machines were used. They then conclude that the official figures were "rigged" because they diverged from the theoretical figures.
To show how ridiculous this procedure is we only have to ask why the USA had an election at all if the result was predictable with such certainty? Surely it would have been easier to leave the whole business of electing the President to the sociologists and their computer models! The plain fact, however, is that there are many things -- most of them not easily meaasurable -- that could have influenced the vote but which were not included in our sociologists' model. And even the data that were used are subject to error.
What one of the omitted factors could have been is suggested by econometrician Newmark's Door. He points out that there is a large Jewish population in the "suspect" counties and that Jews who quietly switched to Bush because of his support for Israel and his strong opposition to Islamic terrorism could account for at least part of the "wrong" voting. And it may be noted that the percentage of Jewish voting for Bush is one of those variables that could be particularly hard to estimate. Given the strong historic tradition of Democrat voting in the Jewish community, Jews who did switch to Bush might not be keen to go public about it.
****************************
A MILESTONE
I went to my son's graduation from High School yesterday. He has already been accepted for admission to Queensland's most prestigious university and I will be paying his fees so the occasion was just a formality. But the school is a Catholic one so I was pleased to hear a great deal of mention of Christian themes and Christian values. It was not at all politically correct! I am very pleased that I was in a position to give my son a private education where he would get good exposure to the sort of influences that have made our culture great. A sign of the quality of the school is that about half the teachers are male. Male teachers are of course rare so can pick and choose where they want to teach. And my son's school is obviously seen as a desirable environment. There certainly seem to be minimal discipline problems and there is a high level of civility generally. It is however a very multi-ethnic school so my son was one of the few blond heads in the crowd. His best friend is Chinese. My son is much more of a Mathematics whizz than I am, however, so the Math Dept. at the University of Queensland gave him a small scholarship to entice him to study there. Scholarships of any kind are rare in Australian universities.
***************************
ELSEWHERE
There has now been quite a bit of commentary (e.g. here) saying that "Red" states get more back from Uncle Sam than they put in by way of taxes -- with "Blue" states being the losers. One part of the reason for that is that the top 50% of U.S. income earners pay 96% of all the income tax. But living by the sea (preferably with a water view) has always been a very desirable luxury item. So most rich people (and hence most taxpayers) will be found in the "Blue" coastal states (or Great Lakes states) where that luxury is available. A second major reason for the difference, however, is that the U.S. government spends up hugely on agricultural subsidies -- and the big farms tend to be inland in the "Red" states. The irony in that, however, that it is only free-traders who oppose such subsidies and free-traders are mainly to be found in the GOP. The Democrats tend to be protectionists. With all his complaints about "outsourcing" of jobs, John Kerry was certainly a protectionist. So, in a sense, the Democrats have themselves to blame for their disproportionate tax burden. If they had put their weight behind the free-traders, it might have been possible to at least reduce America's economically indefensible farm subsidies. But they did not. So the "Blue" subsidy to the "Red" states is in fact a deliberate "Blue" policy! You've gotta laugh!
The Berlin wall fell only 15 years ago: "Reagan's experience in winning the Cold War provides a model of strength and offers hope. In 1980, no one expected to see the Berlin Wall come down that decade. By bringing the same tenacity to the War on Terror, America may be able to defy expectations again by creating a stable democracy in Iraq that acts a beacon of hope for the Middle East"
United Nations pervasively corrupt: "With estimates soaring of graft and fraud under the United Nations Oil for Food program in Iraq, we are hearing a lot about the need to "get to the bottom" of this scandal, the biggest ever to hit the U.N. To get to that bottom will need a much harder look at the top--where Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself resides. That violates all sorts of taboos. But so, one might suppose, does a United Nations that allowed Saddam Hussein to embezzle at least $21.3 billion in oil money during 12 years, with the great bulk of that sum--a staggering $17.3 billion--pilfered between 1997-2003, on Mr. Annan's watch."
Reliapundit thinks the USA should threaten to withdraw from the UN if they don't start co-operating with investigations into Saddam's oil-for-food scam.
Philosopher Will Wilkinson has gritted his teeth and tried to makes some sense out of the latest evidence-free claims of black Leftist Cornell West -- a book with the remarkably unoriginal title: Democracy Matters. One excerpt: "The tu quoque is cheap. But it's hard to resist the thought that West's animosity toward the market is projection of his own ideologically fundamentalist impulses. It is perhaps fitting that West, a man who says he is committed to the truth of teachings of Jesus Christ because his sanity depends on it, should level the charge that advocates of the free-market are animated by blind faith. We see in others our weaknesses enlarged. But faith in markets in not West's complaint so much as is the reluctance of Americans to adopt his faith in socialist democracy (which we could only love, if we were exposed to it)".
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
There has now been quite a bit of commentary (e.g. here) saying that "Red" states get more back from Uncle Sam than they put in by way of taxes -- with "Blue" states being the losers. One part of the reason for that is that the top 50% of U.S. income earners pay 96% of all the income tax. But living by the sea (preferably with a water view) has always been a very desirable luxury item. So most rich people (and hence most taxpayers) will be found in the "Blue" coastal states (or Great Lakes states) where that luxury is available. A second major reason for the difference, however, is that the U.S. government spends up hugely on agricultural subsidies -- and the big farms tend to be inland in the "Red" states. The irony in that, however, that it is only free-traders who oppose such subsidies and free-traders are mainly to be found in the GOP. The Democrats tend to be protectionists. With all his complaints about "outsourcing" of jobs, John Kerry was certainly a protectionist. So, in a sense, the Democrats have themselves to blame for their disproportionate tax burden. If they had put their weight behind the free-traders, it might have been possible to at least reduce America's economically indefensible farm subsidies. But they did not. So the "Blue" subsidy to the "Red" states is in fact a deliberate "Blue" policy! You've gotta laugh!
The Berlin wall fell only 15 years ago: "Reagan's experience in winning the Cold War provides a model of strength and offers hope. In 1980, no one expected to see the Berlin Wall come down that decade. By bringing the same tenacity to the War on Terror, America may be able to defy expectations again by creating a stable democracy in Iraq that acts a beacon of hope for the Middle East"
United Nations pervasively corrupt: "With estimates soaring of graft and fraud under the United Nations Oil for Food program in Iraq, we are hearing a lot about the need to "get to the bottom" of this scandal, the biggest ever to hit the U.N. To get to that bottom will need a much harder look at the top--where Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself resides. That violates all sorts of taboos. But so, one might suppose, does a United Nations that allowed Saddam Hussein to embezzle at least $21.3 billion in oil money during 12 years, with the great bulk of that sum--a staggering $17.3 billion--pilfered between 1997-2003, on Mr. Annan's watch."
Reliapundit thinks the USA should threaten to withdraw from the UN if they don't start co-operating with investigations into Saddam's oil-for-food scam.
Philosopher Will Wilkinson has gritted his teeth and tried to makes some sense out of the latest evidence-free claims of black Leftist Cornell West -- a book with the remarkably unoriginal title: Democracy Matters. One excerpt: "The tu quoque is cheap. But it's hard to resist the thought that West's animosity toward the market is projection of his own ideologically fundamentalist impulses. It is perhaps fitting that West, a man who says he is committed to the truth of teachings of Jesus Christ because his sanity depends on it, should level the charge that advocates of the free-market are animated by blind faith. We see in others our weaknesses enlarged. But faith in markets in not West's complaint so much as is the reluctance of Americans to adopt his faith in socialist democracy (which we could only love, if we were exposed to it)".
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
Friday, November 19, 2004
THAT CONSERVATIVE "RACISM" AGAIN
"President Bush and diversity: Against expectation, and without divisive debates over affirmative action and quotas, he has built an extraordinary record of minority appointments to his inner circle. He did it by sneaking them in the front door while everybody was watching. Condoleezza Rice's nomination yesterday to be secretary of state is the latest and most dramatic example. That she would be the first black woman to hold the post - and that she would succeed Colin Powell, the first black man - is a groundbreaking moment in American racial history. Our original sinners would be shocked. But we're not, and that, too, takes the breath away. America clearly is ready for a black official to be our representative to the world. And both Powell and Rice are so obviously qualified that it's as though race is not a factor for or against them....
Limousine-liberal Democrats and their media poodles, many of whom send their children to near-segregated private schools, have basically ignored the racial triumphs Powell and Rice embody. Just as they have barely noted that Rod Paige, the departing secretary of education, is the first black to hold that job. Or that Ann Veneman, the departing secretary of agriculture, is the first woman to hold that job. Or that Alberto Gonzales, if confirmed, will be the first Hispanic attorney general. Or that Bush has an Arab-American and two Asian-Americans in his cabinet. Had a Democratic President made those appointments, the celebratory coverage would invoke Harry Truman's integrating the armed forces or Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson's battle for civil rights. Talk about your double standards.
No matter. Bush isn't looking for applause. And my guess is that his trailblazing days are not finished. Given William Rehnquist's failing health, Bush likely will get to nominate an associate justice and a chief justice of the Supreme Court. There has been talk that Clarence Thomas might get the top job. I don't see it. A more likely scenario is that whoever Bush adds to the panel, he would elevate Sandra Day O'Connor to chief justice. She is the one true swing vote on the court and thus the perfect leader to guide its deliberations and jawbone for consensus. Did I mention she would be the first woman to hold the job?"
More here.
And British conservatives have twice chosen a Jew to lead them: Benjamin Disraeli in the 19th century and Michael Howard in the 21st century
***********************************
"President Bush and diversity: Against expectation, and without divisive debates over affirmative action and quotas, he has built an extraordinary record of minority appointments to his inner circle. He did it by sneaking them in the front door while everybody was watching. Condoleezza Rice's nomination yesterday to be secretary of state is the latest and most dramatic example. That she would be the first black woman to hold the post - and that she would succeed Colin Powell, the first black man - is a groundbreaking moment in American racial history. Our original sinners would be shocked. But we're not, and that, too, takes the breath away. America clearly is ready for a black official to be our representative to the world. And both Powell and Rice are so obviously qualified that it's as though race is not a factor for or against them....
Limousine-liberal Democrats and their media poodles, many of whom send their children to near-segregated private schools, have basically ignored the racial triumphs Powell and Rice embody. Just as they have barely noted that Rod Paige, the departing secretary of education, is the first black to hold that job. Or that Ann Veneman, the departing secretary of agriculture, is the first woman to hold that job. Or that Alberto Gonzales, if confirmed, will be the first Hispanic attorney general. Or that Bush has an Arab-American and two Asian-Americans in his cabinet. Had a Democratic President made those appointments, the celebratory coverage would invoke Harry Truman's integrating the armed forces or Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson's battle for civil rights. Talk about your double standards.
No matter. Bush isn't looking for applause. And my guess is that his trailblazing days are not finished. Given William Rehnquist's failing health, Bush likely will get to nominate an associate justice and a chief justice of the Supreme Court. There has been talk that Clarence Thomas might get the top job. I don't see it. A more likely scenario is that whoever Bush adds to the panel, he would elevate Sandra Day O'Connor to chief justice. She is the one true swing vote on the court and thus the perfect leader to guide its deliberations and jawbone for consensus. Did I mention she would be the first woman to hold the job?"
More here.
And British conservatives have twice chosen a Jew to lead them: Benjamin Disraeli in the 19th century and Michael Howard in the 21st century
***********************************
ELSEWHERE
Great news! Republican Dino Rossi won the governorship of Washington State by 261 votes over Democrat Christine Degregorie after 2 weeks of counting. Bush was defeated in this state but Rossi won in a state that is one of the most irreligious in the U.S.
Jeff Jacoby has a good tribute to John Ashcroft and a reply to the hysterical Leftist slurs about him.
"Reed Irvine, the indefatigable founder of Accuracy in Media and one of the very first people to question the received wisdom of the news media, passed away last night. He was 82. As a media critic, Reed Irvine was a trailblazer. While much of America was still blinded to the still fairly new notion that journalists could rise above their human nature and deliver the news without even a scintilla of bias, Irvine knew better".
From "The Australian": "With our US and Thai trade deals effectively overcoming their final hurdles, yesterday was a red-letter day for Australian trade. It was also a big day in sustaining the prosperity that two decades of economic reform have already brought us.... This is good news for our exporters, which means good news for employment, growth and living standards overall. But the other side of the coin, an increased range of cheaper imports, is just as important. Reduced protection on imports means local producers become smarter, more innovative and more efficient - just as we have seen with the local car industry, which rather than taking its begging-bowl to Canberra each year is now taking its products into niche export markets in Asia and the US. Cheaper shirts for our backs and refrigerators for our kitchens leave us with more money for the big things - our homes, our health, our kids' education. As former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating pointed out last week, the anti-trade Left has yet to demonstrate how forcing people to pay more for the necessities of life contributes to a fairer society".
News from another planet: "Berkeley tolerates its homeless people, and takes good care of their stuff when they abandon it in shopping carts. Not only does the city pack carts and other belongings into a huge container in case folks want it back -- it also deep-freezes them for as long as 90 days."
This must be a classic case of doing the right thing for the wrong reason: Brazil's Leftist President Lula is decriminalizing drugs. Why? It looks like it is in part a payoff to the drug barons that backed Lula financially during his rise to power.
Very encouraging: According to Pew Research, 41% of voters said that they used the web to obtain campaign news with 21 percent saying that they used the internet as a primary news source. And 40% said that media coverage of George Bush's campaign was unfair.
Tyrrell: "At the heart of the liberal crack-up, which I first diagnosed in 1984, is the impulse to politicize everything from food to sex to happenstance -- and to moralize. The liberal of the liberal crack-up is a free-floating moralizer. Such liberals are also dramatists of the most adolescent variety. No human experience is beyond their melodrama. There is no misfortune that they will not exploit for votes. Their politics is built on a world of extremes. The conservatism of President George W. Bush, a conservatism that has been governing America for most of the past 24 years, remains to these liberals shocking, dangerous or "extremist," as they say. The liberalism of the liberal crack-up is what is "extremist." Even a sensible idea or a fine principle is exaggerated to the point that it becomes preposterous and untenable. Thus in the last election, the perfectly sensible and tolerant solution for stable homosexual couples' legal difficulties, namely, civil unions, was not sufficient"
Dodging Federal speech restrictions: "The FCC has no jurisdiction over radio broadcasts that come from satellites in the sky. Regulators can scare executives worried about their million-dollar bonuses and small station managers struggling to get by. But satellite radio takes programming decisions out of the hands of individual stations with their individual prejudices."
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
Great news! Republican Dino Rossi won the governorship of Washington State by 261 votes over Democrat Christine Degregorie after 2 weeks of counting. Bush was defeated in this state but Rossi won in a state that is one of the most irreligious in the U.S.
Jeff Jacoby has a good tribute to John Ashcroft and a reply to the hysterical Leftist slurs about him.
"Reed Irvine, the indefatigable founder of Accuracy in Media and one of the very first people to question the received wisdom of the news media, passed away last night. He was 82. As a media critic, Reed Irvine was a trailblazer. While much of America was still blinded to the still fairly new notion that journalists could rise above their human nature and deliver the news without even a scintilla of bias, Irvine knew better".
From "The Australian": "With our US and Thai trade deals effectively overcoming their final hurdles, yesterday was a red-letter day for Australian trade. It was also a big day in sustaining the prosperity that two decades of economic reform have already brought us.... This is good news for our exporters, which means good news for employment, growth and living standards overall. But the other side of the coin, an increased range of cheaper imports, is just as important. Reduced protection on imports means local producers become smarter, more innovative and more efficient - just as we have seen with the local car industry, which rather than taking its begging-bowl to Canberra each year is now taking its products into niche export markets in Asia and the US. Cheaper shirts for our backs and refrigerators for our kitchens leave us with more money for the big things - our homes, our health, our kids' education. As former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating pointed out last week, the anti-trade Left has yet to demonstrate how forcing people to pay more for the necessities of life contributes to a fairer society".
News from another planet: "Berkeley tolerates its homeless people, and takes good care of their stuff when they abandon it in shopping carts. Not only does the city pack carts and other belongings into a huge container in case folks want it back -- it also deep-freezes them for as long as 90 days."
This must be a classic case of doing the right thing for the wrong reason: Brazil's Leftist President Lula is decriminalizing drugs. Why? It looks like it is in part a payoff to the drug barons that backed Lula financially during his rise to power.
Very encouraging: According to Pew Research, 41% of voters said that they used the web to obtain campaign news with 21 percent saying that they used the internet as a primary news source. And 40% said that media coverage of George Bush's campaign was unfair.
Tyrrell: "At the heart of the liberal crack-up, which I first diagnosed in 1984, is the impulse to politicize everything from food to sex to happenstance -- and to moralize. The liberal of the liberal crack-up is a free-floating moralizer. Such liberals are also dramatists of the most adolescent variety. No human experience is beyond their melodrama. There is no misfortune that they will not exploit for votes. Their politics is built on a world of extremes. The conservatism of President George W. Bush, a conservatism that has been governing America for most of the past 24 years, remains to these liberals shocking, dangerous or "extremist," as they say. The liberalism of the liberal crack-up is what is "extremist." Even a sensible idea or a fine principle is exaggerated to the point that it becomes preposterous and untenable. Thus in the last election, the perfectly sensible and tolerant solution for stable homosexual couples' legal difficulties, namely, civil unions, was not sufficient"
Dodging Federal speech restrictions: "The FCC has no jurisdiction over radio broadcasts that come from satellites in the sky. Regulators can scare executives worried about their million-dollar bonuses and small station managers struggling to get by. But satellite radio takes programming decisions out of the hands of individual stations with their individual prejudices."
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
Thursday, November 18, 2004
FROM BROOKES NEWS
A journalist libels President Bush over Iraq War Paul Sheehan of the Sydney Morning Herald, aka the Saddam Times, is an excellent example of the left's pathological hatred of President Bush
China's insane one-child policy is crumbling What is not generally recognised is that China's fertility rate was already falling before the one-child policy was implemented. So why the policy?
Why must Israel negotiate with the Palestinians while Beijing refuses to negotiated with the Tibetans? The idea of Palestinian people was born in the mid of 1960s, after Arab states realized that it was impossible to destroy Israel using military force
Lefty journalist thinks President Bush more evil than terrorists According to the leftwing Matt Price of The Australian, President Bush and Prime Ministers Blair and Howard are more evil than Saddam, bin Laden and Zarqawi
Journalist uses Democratic Party Judge to slime President Bush The Bush-bashing Phillip Coorey of the Herald and Weekly Times couldn't wait to hammer out the story of how a judge challenged Bush on military tribunals
What a Difference a Day Makes in the life of Arafat and President Bush I will never forget the creepy feeling Arafat gave me standing only a couple of feet away from him. Truly, it felt like I was in the presence of Satan
Details here
********************************
A journalist libels President Bush over Iraq War Paul Sheehan of the Sydney Morning Herald, aka the Saddam Times, is an excellent example of the left's pathological hatred of President Bush
China's insane one-child policy is crumbling What is not generally recognised is that China's fertility rate was already falling before the one-child policy was implemented. So why the policy?
Why must Israel negotiate with the Palestinians while Beijing refuses to negotiated with the Tibetans? The idea of Palestinian people was born in the mid of 1960s, after Arab states realized that it was impossible to destroy Israel using military force
Lefty journalist thinks President Bush more evil than terrorists According to the leftwing Matt Price of The Australian, President Bush and Prime Ministers Blair and Howard are more evil than Saddam, bin Laden and Zarqawi
Journalist uses Democratic Party Judge to slime President Bush The Bush-bashing Phillip Coorey of the Herald and Weekly Times couldn't wait to hammer out the story of how a judge challenged Bush on military tribunals
What a Difference a Day Makes in the life of Arafat and President Bush I will never forget the creepy feeling Arafat gave me standing only a couple of feet away from him. Truly, it felt like I was in the presence of Satan
Details here
********************************
ELSEWHERE
Well, I am still capable of being surprised. Top Left-of centre blog Daily Kos (400,000 hits per day) denies it is a liberal blog: "But it's not a liberal blog. It's a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory. And since we haven't gotten any of that from the current crew, we're one more thing: a reform blog. The battle for the party is not an ideological battle. It's one between establishment and anti-establishment factions. And as I've said a million times, the status quo is untenable. But it has nothing to do with ideology". I have always said that Leftists are interested in power only and that any beliefs or principles that they espouse are just whatever sounds good at the time but I really did not expect to see it so openly admitted in such a major Leftist source. But then I also did not expect that so many passionate advocates of equality would suddenly declare themselves as elitists, either. I have always argued that what the Left say only makes sense psychologically rather than philosphically but even my cynicism seems to have been inadequate for the reality. The Kos author is however showing a typical psychopathic trait: Making amazingly damaging admissions about himself without the slightest awareness of how damaging such admissions are.
But this Leftist pundit recognizes what the Democrats are too: "We must stop the Democrats from being a party that simply wants to win elections and back into a party that actually stands for something important, something more than "not the other guy"."
Wicked Thoughts has just done another attack on the illogicality of Law professor Brian Leiter and his claim that America is becoming a "theocracy".
Australians abroad: "A former State Department official is known to refer jocularly to the power wielded around the world by the "axis of ocker". By that, she means the Australian diaspora - the large community of Australians who live offshore on a permanent or long-term basis.... Given our small population, the rollcall of Australians in top international positions is impressive. They head up businesses such as McDonald's and British Airways; they edit leading international newspapers; they run international organisations and cultural institutions and teach at the world's best universities. Together with other expatriates, they constitute our worldwide web of ideas and influence".
The official seal of Los Angeles county features a large pagan goddess and a tiny Chriistian cross. Leftists want to remove the cross. Dennis Prager comments: "I fear intolerance. And the move to expunge the singular Christian contribution to an American county and city is intolerant to the point of bigotry. No religious Christians, despite their deep opposition to paganism, ever objected to the pagan goddess that is many times larger than the cross. I have found over and over that most Christians who preach faith are more tolerant than most leftists who preach tolerance."
Are CBS learning? "CBS News fired the producer responsible for interrupting the last five minutes of a hit crime drama with a special report on the death of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat". Maybe not. They also said that they should have been MORE critical of the Bush administration prior to the election. I wonder how? Weren't barefaced lies enough?
Selective support for choice: "The bulk of liberals are an inconsistent lot. Take, for example, their support of the pro-choice position in the abortion controversy. These same people are almost uniformly hostile to choice in many other areas of life -- just ask them if they support choice in whether one may develop one's own property as one likes, or whether one has the authority to decide on what to spend one's own money (instead of having it taxed away by government).The fact is that this very tiny sphere of authority is all these folks tend to wish to keep out of government's reach."
Dummies not so dumb: "As the furor over the election dies down, with more unseemly whining from sore losers and some unseemly gloating from sore winners, certain stereotypes of Bush voters continue to have a lot of currency among disgruntled liberals. One of them is that Bush supporters, and conservatives in general, are dumb, ignorant and out of touch with reality. This notion has been bandied about with quite a bit of smugness. Some on the left have humbly taken to calling themselves 'the reality-based community.' .... David Bernstein, a libertarian who was highly critical of both candidates in the past election, points out on the Volokh Conspiracy blog that in other surveys, Republicans have on average scored higher than Democrats on knowledge of political issues than Democrats -- though voters across the board tend to be woefully ill-informed."
Liberals in the UK: "What all liberals have in common is a touching certainty that they are right. Liberalism is a missionary faith, and proselytising zeal is not normally conducive to sceptical inquiry. Whatever the core values of liberalism, they can surely conflict with one another - and with other goods such as social cohesion. Yet it rarely occurs to liberals to ask themselves whether their values - however vaguely or inconsistently defined - are viable in the long term."
Blair smarter than his party: In a paroxysm of their traditional class envy, the British Labour Party has again legislated to ban all foxhunting -- against the wishes of their Prime Minister. It remains to be seen whether Blair will ever take the legislation to the Queen for her signature, though.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
Well, I am still capable of being surprised. Top Left-of centre blog Daily Kos (400,000 hits per day) denies it is a liberal blog: "But it's not a liberal blog. It's a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory. And since we haven't gotten any of that from the current crew, we're one more thing: a reform blog. The battle for the party is not an ideological battle. It's one between establishment and anti-establishment factions. And as I've said a million times, the status quo is untenable. But it has nothing to do with ideology". I have always said that Leftists are interested in power only and that any beliefs or principles that they espouse are just whatever sounds good at the time but I really did not expect to see it so openly admitted in such a major Leftist source. But then I also did not expect that so many passionate advocates of equality would suddenly declare themselves as elitists, either. I have always argued that what the Left say only makes sense psychologically rather than philosphically but even my cynicism seems to have been inadequate for the reality. The Kos author is however showing a typical psychopathic trait: Making amazingly damaging admissions about himself without the slightest awareness of how damaging such admissions are.
But this Leftist pundit recognizes what the Democrats are too: "We must stop the Democrats from being a party that simply wants to win elections and back into a party that actually stands for something important, something more than "not the other guy"."
Wicked Thoughts has just done another attack on the illogicality of Law professor Brian Leiter and his claim that America is becoming a "theocracy".
Australians abroad: "A former State Department official is known to refer jocularly to the power wielded around the world by the "axis of ocker". By that, she means the Australian diaspora - the large community of Australians who live offshore on a permanent or long-term basis.... Given our small population, the rollcall of Australians in top international positions is impressive. They head up businesses such as McDonald's and British Airways; they edit leading international newspapers; they run international organisations and cultural institutions and teach at the world's best universities. Together with other expatriates, they constitute our worldwide web of ideas and influence".
The official seal of Los Angeles county features a large pagan goddess and a tiny Chriistian cross. Leftists want to remove the cross. Dennis Prager comments: "I fear intolerance. And the move to expunge the singular Christian contribution to an American county and city is intolerant to the point of bigotry. No religious Christians, despite their deep opposition to paganism, ever objected to the pagan goddess that is many times larger than the cross. I have found over and over that most Christians who preach faith are more tolerant than most leftists who preach tolerance."
Are CBS learning? "CBS News fired the producer responsible for interrupting the last five minutes of a hit crime drama with a special report on the death of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat". Maybe not. They also said that they should have been MORE critical of the Bush administration prior to the election. I wonder how? Weren't barefaced lies enough?
Selective support for choice: "The bulk of liberals are an inconsistent lot. Take, for example, their support of the pro-choice position in the abortion controversy. These same people are almost uniformly hostile to choice in many other areas of life -- just ask them if they support choice in whether one may develop one's own property as one likes, or whether one has the authority to decide on what to spend one's own money (instead of having it taxed away by government).The fact is that this very tiny sphere of authority is all these folks tend to wish to keep out of government's reach."
Dummies not so dumb: "As the furor over the election dies down, with more unseemly whining from sore losers and some unseemly gloating from sore winners, certain stereotypes of Bush voters continue to have a lot of currency among disgruntled liberals. One of them is that Bush supporters, and conservatives in general, are dumb, ignorant and out of touch with reality. This notion has been bandied about with quite a bit of smugness. Some on the left have humbly taken to calling themselves 'the reality-based community.' .... David Bernstein, a libertarian who was highly critical of both candidates in the past election, points out on the Volokh Conspiracy blog that in other surveys, Republicans have on average scored higher than Democrats on knowledge of political issues than Democrats -- though voters across the board tend to be woefully ill-informed."
Liberals in the UK: "What all liberals have in common is a touching certainty that they are right. Liberalism is a missionary faith, and proselytising zeal is not normally conducive to sceptical inquiry. Whatever the core values of liberalism, they can surely conflict with one another - and with other goods such as social cohesion. Yet it rarely occurs to liberals to ask themselves whether their values - however vaguely or inconsistently defined - are viable in the long term."
Blair smarter than his party: In a paroxysm of their traditional class envy, the British Labour Party has again legislated to ban all foxhunting -- against the wishes of their Prime Minister. It remains to be seen whether Blair will ever take the legislation to the Queen for her signature, though.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
A GREAT LETTER FROM A CENTRIST TO THE LEFT
Just a few excerpts from Dean's World
"A lot of us grew up being told to question authority, and a lot of that authority we now question is the left-wing orthodoxy of your generation, an orthodoxy many of us bought into as it was taught to us in school, in the books we read, and especially in the universities, not to mention in a lot of what we see out of Hollywood today. We came to reject a lot of that orthodoxy as we got older and learned to think better for ourselves--not because we "embraced the establishment," but because we were questioning the establishment. You may laugh, but a whole lot of what's "questioning the establishment" to you seems like the establishment itself to a hell of a lot of people like me. Culturally, at least.
You also, in your missive, speak of watching "Fahrenheit 9/11." I hope you're aware that that movie uses all the same propaganda techniques as used by the great Fascist and Stalinist film producers such as Goebbels and Eisenstein. Indeed, I must tell you that after I finally watched that film, my hands were literally shaking. Not because of my great love and devotion to Bush (which I'm sure the left-wing stereotypers would love to believe) but because I had not seen such concentrated hatred and dishonest propaganda put to film in my lifetime. By comparison, Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" seemed tame.....
I've experienced firsthand just how hateful, intolerant, and irrational you guys can be when someone dares to question your beliefs. You guys often come off exactly like the theocratic mullahs and the lock-step fascists you claim to hate (but which you, oddly enough, don't seem willing to use American power to try to overthrow)......
We saw a good, decent, moderate man in Bush who decided to take a big gamble and do the right thing for both America and Iraq and finally, finally, finally bring down the monster Saddam. Which would have been done a long damned time ago if we'd had any decency as a country. You don't agree. Fine. You don't have to. But don't think that acting like an asshole about it gets you my vote. You guys may have whipped a bunch of dumbass kids into a rage by feeding them Michael Moore style hate-propaganda, but you equally pissed off a bunch of other folks in the process who showed up to vote just to spite you guys for being such mean-spirited, reactionary, paint-by-numbers, bigoted, closed-minded jerks.
I don't know. Maybe you guys on the left need the stereotyping and the rage in order to motivate people to the polls. But from where folks like me stand, it's your ideas that need to be questioned, and it's you guys who have been on the wrong side of human rights and progress these last couple of years. It's you guys who are the reactionaries.
********************************
Just a few excerpts from Dean's World
"A lot of us grew up being told to question authority, and a lot of that authority we now question is the left-wing orthodoxy of your generation, an orthodoxy many of us bought into as it was taught to us in school, in the books we read, and especially in the universities, not to mention in a lot of what we see out of Hollywood today. We came to reject a lot of that orthodoxy as we got older and learned to think better for ourselves--not because we "embraced the establishment," but because we were questioning the establishment. You may laugh, but a whole lot of what's "questioning the establishment" to you seems like the establishment itself to a hell of a lot of people like me. Culturally, at least.
You also, in your missive, speak of watching "Fahrenheit 9/11." I hope you're aware that that movie uses all the same propaganda techniques as used by the great Fascist and Stalinist film producers such as Goebbels and Eisenstein. Indeed, I must tell you that after I finally watched that film, my hands were literally shaking. Not because of my great love and devotion to Bush (which I'm sure the left-wing stereotypers would love to believe) but because I had not seen such concentrated hatred and dishonest propaganda put to film in my lifetime. By comparison, Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" seemed tame.....
I've experienced firsthand just how hateful, intolerant, and irrational you guys can be when someone dares to question your beliefs. You guys often come off exactly like the theocratic mullahs and the lock-step fascists you claim to hate (but which you, oddly enough, don't seem willing to use American power to try to overthrow)......
We saw a good, decent, moderate man in Bush who decided to take a big gamble and do the right thing for both America and Iraq and finally, finally, finally bring down the monster Saddam. Which would have been done a long damned time ago if we'd had any decency as a country. You don't agree. Fine. You don't have to. But don't think that acting like an asshole about it gets you my vote. You guys may have whipped a bunch of dumbass kids into a rage by feeding them Michael Moore style hate-propaganda, but you equally pissed off a bunch of other folks in the process who showed up to vote just to spite you guys for being such mean-spirited, reactionary, paint-by-numbers, bigoted, closed-minded jerks.
I don't know. Maybe you guys on the left need the stereotyping and the rage in order to motivate people to the polls. But from where folks like me stand, it's your ideas that need to be questioned, and it's you guys who have been on the wrong side of human rights and progress these last couple of years. It's you guys who are the reactionaries.
********************************
ELSEWHERE
The poor old Guardian! They are trying to cope with the IQ issue and the "dumbness" of the "red" states but they just don't get it. They quote the well-known table of the average IQs of American States and then admit it is discredited. To soften that blow, however, they also say: "Educational statistics also seem to support the (attractive to people like us) smart/dumb divide between the parties. The District of Columbia, which the census records as having the nation's highest population of college graduates (42%), turned in the nation's lowest number of votes for President Bush (9%)." So was it because of all the graduates that DC gave such an amazingly skewed result? Not at all. It is because Washington is one of the world's biggest black cities and we all know how most blacks vote. And we know how many (or few) blacks have degrees too. But perhaps the Guardian doesn't. And a willingness to regurgitate Leftist propaganda is as big an influence as intelligence over who gets one of the many trashy American college degrees.
James Glassman has a splendid piece of sarcasm about how to make the Democrats a winner at the next election.
Anti-religious bigotry: "Liberals scoff, but the balm that comes with being part of a religious community -- the Bible study, youth groups, choirs and, yes, the moral absolutes that often accompany such communion -is real and comforting, unlike the promise of complicated and expensive government programs.... The liberal hostility to funding faith-based social programs- which are provided mostly by poor black and Latino congregations who need the financial help - is a witlessly secularist reaction against some of the most successful antipoverty efforts in the U.S."
Blair did his best: "Jacques Chirac dealt a blow to Tony Blair's attempt to heal the wounds between the US and Europe last night by saying that the Prime Minister had won nothing for supporting the war against Iraq. As Mr Blair used a keynote speech to present Britain as a "bridge across the Atlantic", President Chirac doubted whether anyone could play the "honest broker". Speaking before he visits London on Thursday, he said that it was not in the nature of this Administration to return favours."
Jim Lindgren has a comprehensive debunking of all the "voter fraud" myths of the 2004 election.
Reasonable: "Though the economy was sluggish in Bush's first three years in office, it has been quite strong in 2004, with solid growth and low inflation. Using those data, Yale economist Ray Fair expected Bush to garner 56 percent of the presidential vote. But in fact, he gained only 51.5 percent. Why did Bush do so poorly despite the resurgent economy? What happened to those 5 million missing Bush votes? We must conclude that Iraq is the reason for Bush's subpar performance."
Affirmative action hurts blacks. Conservatives have said it for years but now a Left-leaning law professor has produced research confirming it. You can read the man himself on the Volokh blog. He found that AA actually reduces the number of successful black lawyers.
Leftist judge defies the law: "John Morganelli, District Attorney for Northampton County, PA, probably had no idea what he was in for last week when his office appeared before Judge Leonard Zito for the conviction and sentencing of 27 individuals accused of using false and stolen social security numbers. Morganelli's investigators had worked for months to prosecute the group, 14 of which had not simply used false social security numbers, but had stolen and used the social security numbers of law-abiding people. But although every one of the defendants pleaded guilty, Judge Zito refused to impose any period of incarceration, nor did he fine the defendants. Zito based his decision on the fact that the defendants were all illegal aliens, remarking that they should never have been arrested in the first place because the men committed the crimes 'strictly for the purpose of working.'"
Harvard researcher surprises Leftists only: "In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin,"
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
The poor old Guardian! They are trying to cope with the IQ issue and the "dumbness" of the "red" states but they just don't get it. They quote the well-known table of the average IQs of American States and then admit it is discredited. To soften that blow, however, they also say: "Educational statistics also seem to support the (attractive to people like us) smart/dumb divide between the parties. The District of Columbia, which the census records as having the nation's highest population of college graduates (42%), turned in the nation's lowest number of votes for President Bush (9%)." So was it because of all the graduates that DC gave such an amazingly skewed result? Not at all. It is because Washington is one of the world's biggest black cities and we all know how most blacks vote. And we know how many (or few) blacks have degrees too. But perhaps the Guardian doesn't. And a willingness to regurgitate Leftist propaganda is as big an influence as intelligence over who gets one of the many trashy American college degrees.
James Glassman has a splendid piece of sarcasm about how to make the Democrats a winner at the next election.
Anti-religious bigotry: "Liberals scoff, but the balm that comes with being part of a religious community -- the Bible study, youth groups, choirs and, yes, the moral absolutes that often accompany such communion -is real and comforting, unlike the promise of complicated and expensive government programs.... The liberal hostility to funding faith-based social programs- which are provided mostly by poor black and Latino congregations who need the financial help - is a witlessly secularist reaction against some of the most successful antipoverty efforts in the U.S."
Blair did his best: "Jacques Chirac dealt a blow to Tony Blair's attempt to heal the wounds between the US and Europe last night by saying that the Prime Minister had won nothing for supporting the war against Iraq. As Mr Blair used a keynote speech to present Britain as a "bridge across the Atlantic", President Chirac doubted whether anyone could play the "honest broker". Speaking before he visits London on Thursday, he said that it was not in the nature of this Administration to return favours."
Jim Lindgren has a comprehensive debunking of all the "voter fraud" myths of the 2004 election.
Reasonable: "Though the economy was sluggish in Bush's first three years in office, it has been quite strong in 2004, with solid growth and low inflation. Using those data, Yale economist Ray Fair expected Bush to garner 56 percent of the presidential vote. But in fact, he gained only 51.5 percent. Why did Bush do so poorly despite the resurgent economy? What happened to those 5 million missing Bush votes? We must conclude that Iraq is the reason for Bush's subpar performance."
Affirmative action hurts blacks. Conservatives have said it for years but now a Left-leaning law professor has produced research confirming it. You can read the man himself on the Volokh blog. He found that AA actually reduces the number of successful black lawyers.
Leftist judge defies the law: "John Morganelli, District Attorney for Northampton County, PA, probably had no idea what he was in for last week when his office appeared before Judge Leonard Zito for the conviction and sentencing of 27 individuals accused of using false and stolen social security numbers. Morganelli's investigators had worked for months to prosecute the group, 14 of which had not simply used false social security numbers, but had stolen and used the social security numbers of law-abiding people. But although every one of the defendants pleaded guilty, Judge Zito refused to impose any period of incarceration, nor did he fine the defendants. Zito based his decision on the fact that the defendants were all illegal aliens, remarking that they should never have been arrested in the first place because the men committed the crimes 'strictly for the purpose of working.'"
Harvard researcher surprises Leftists only: "In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin,"
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
NOTE: Hotmail has been playing up a bit on me lately. They seem to be under attack from someone. I got nearly 1000 big spam emails yesterday. So if you have emailed me and I seem to not have got your email, it might be a good idea to resend
"DUMB" CONSERVATIVES AND INCONSISTENT LEFTISTS
As an amusing post about John Kerry on Majority Rights reminds me, Leftists are hugely inconsistent in their attitude to intelligence. Just mention the word "IQ" and they will immediately say that there is really no such thing and all men are equal anyhow. And any attempt to measure differences in intelligence (which is what IQ is) is Fascist, racist and all the usual Leftist terms of abuse. Yet here they all are in the post-election period saying that they are heaps more intelligent than conservatives and that their superiority in that regard is enormously important! If I could be bothered, I would be going around all the comments boxes on Leftist blogs and accusing the blog authors of Fascism and racism every time they say how superior they are and how dumb conservatives are. And how they can proudly admit to being elitists (for some examples see Leftists as Elitists) while at the same time believing in equality really quite escapes me. At any event, below are a few more comments on the current Leftist claims:
"A. Barton Hinkle": "Us here in Bush Country sorry. We sorry for being so dumb, voting for dumb President Bush. We know we not so smart. But ain't nothing we can do about it. We try hard. Honest injun! Stay up on current events. Watch Fox News and "Entertainment Tonite." Read Weekly World News - and not just stuff about Bat-Boy, neither. But we no match for likes of you in brains department. Heck, we barely just learn to walk upright. Grandparents' knuckles still all red and swole up.... It true, as recent poll show, that perty near seven out of 10 Bush fans think U.S. have "clear evidence" Saddam Hussein worked with al-Qaeda. We admit we fooled on that score. Vice President always hint at connection. Him probably thinking of grand jury indictment sought by Clinton U.S. attorney Mary Jo White back in 1998. Indictment said - we quoting here - "[A]l-Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al-Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq." Guess she not so smart either." (Via Keith Burgess-Jackson)
Mark Steyn: "How soon after election night would it be before the Bush-the-chimp-faced-moron stuff started up again? 48 hours? A week? I was wrong. Bush Derangement Syndrome is moving to a whole new level. On the morning of Nov. 2, the condescending left were convinced that Bush was an idiot. By the evening of Nov. 2, they were convinced that the electorate was..... If you don't want to bother plowing your way through Alterman and Smiley, a placard prominently displayed by a fetching young lad at the post-election anti-Bush rally in San Francisco cut to the chase: "F--- MIDDLE AMERICA." Almost right, man. It would be more accurate to say that "MIDDLE AMERICA" has "F---ed" you, and it will continue to do so every two years as long as Democrats insist that anyone who disagrees with them is, ipso facto, a simpleton"
Steyn again: "In my time, I've known dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and other members of Britain's House of Lords and none of them had the contempt for the masses one routinely hears from America's coastal elites. And, in fairness to those ermined aristocrats, they could afford Dem-style contempt: A seat in the House of Lords is for life; a Senate seat in South Dakota isn't"
Keith Burgess-Jackson: "In my discipline, philosophy, there are as many theists as there are atheists. The ratio of atheists to theists may be higher among philosophers than among people generally, but if the hypothesis of stupidity is correct, shouldn't the ratio be extraordinarily high in a field such as philosophy, which attracts people of such impressive intelligence? Shouldn't it be extremely unusual to find a theist in a philosophy department? I can assure you that it's not. Many of the best philosophers in the world today are theists: William P. Alston, Peter van Inwagen, Marilyn McCord Adams, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Philip L. Quinn, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne. See here. They work not just in philosophy of religion but in epistemology and metaphysics. They are as hard-headed, rigorous, and intellectually demanding as anyone, anywhere, in any field. Liberals are going to have to face the fact that religious belief is independent of intelligence. It is a function of other things, such as upbringing"
A message to the Left from a truthful bear: "George Bush is President, and he is going to keep being President for another four years. That's not going to change. So telling us how much he sucks is irrelevant. Telling us how stupid the portion of America which voted for him is: also irrelevant. Discussing secession and to hell with those red states: well that's just plain stupid, forget about irrelevant. What is relevant are answers. Solutions, not a list of problems. Declaring that Iraq is a mess is easy, and worthless. Telling us what we should do to fix it is harder, but far more worthwhile. Don't like the operation in Falluja? Fine: how else would you stop the terrorists? Think we should involve allies more in Iraq? Great. How?
*******************************
"DUMB" CONSERVATIVES AND INCONSISTENT LEFTISTS
As an amusing post about John Kerry on Majority Rights reminds me, Leftists are hugely inconsistent in their attitude to intelligence. Just mention the word "IQ" and they will immediately say that there is really no such thing and all men are equal anyhow. And any attempt to measure differences in intelligence (which is what IQ is) is Fascist, racist and all the usual Leftist terms of abuse. Yet here they all are in the post-election period saying that they are heaps more intelligent than conservatives and that their superiority in that regard is enormously important! If I could be bothered, I would be going around all the comments boxes on Leftist blogs and accusing the blog authors of Fascism and racism every time they say how superior they are and how dumb conservatives are. And how they can proudly admit to being elitists (for some examples see Leftists as Elitists) while at the same time believing in equality really quite escapes me. At any event, below are a few more comments on the current Leftist claims:
"A. Barton Hinkle": "Us here in Bush Country sorry. We sorry for being so dumb, voting for dumb President Bush. We know we not so smart. But ain't nothing we can do about it. We try hard. Honest injun! Stay up on current events. Watch Fox News and "Entertainment Tonite." Read Weekly World News - and not just stuff about Bat-Boy, neither. But we no match for likes of you in brains department. Heck, we barely just learn to walk upright. Grandparents' knuckles still all red and swole up.... It true, as recent poll show, that perty near seven out of 10 Bush fans think U.S. have "clear evidence" Saddam Hussein worked with al-Qaeda. We admit we fooled on that score. Vice President always hint at connection. Him probably thinking of grand jury indictment sought by Clinton U.S. attorney Mary Jo White back in 1998. Indictment said - we quoting here - "[A]l-Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al-Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq." Guess she not so smart either." (Via Keith Burgess-Jackson)
Mark Steyn: "How soon after election night would it be before the Bush-the-chimp-faced-moron stuff started up again? 48 hours? A week? I was wrong. Bush Derangement Syndrome is moving to a whole new level. On the morning of Nov. 2, the condescending left were convinced that Bush was an idiot. By the evening of Nov. 2, they were convinced that the electorate was..... If you don't want to bother plowing your way through Alterman and Smiley, a placard prominently displayed by a fetching young lad at the post-election anti-Bush rally in San Francisco cut to the chase: "F--- MIDDLE AMERICA." Almost right, man. It would be more accurate to say that "MIDDLE AMERICA" has "F---ed" you, and it will continue to do so every two years as long as Democrats insist that anyone who disagrees with them is, ipso facto, a simpleton"
Steyn again: "In my time, I've known dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and other members of Britain's House of Lords and none of them had the contempt for the masses one routinely hears from America's coastal elites. And, in fairness to those ermined aristocrats, they could afford Dem-style contempt: A seat in the House of Lords is for life; a Senate seat in South Dakota isn't"
Keith Burgess-Jackson: "In my discipline, philosophy, there are as many theists as there are atheists. The ratio of atheists to theists may be higher among philosophers than among people generally, but if the hypothesis of stupidity is correct, shouldn't the ratio be extraordinarily high in a field such as philosophy, which attracts people of such impressive intelligence? Shouldn't it be extremely unusual to find a theist in a philosophy department? I can assure you that it's not. Many of the best philosophers in the world today are theists: William P. Alston, Peter van Inwagen, Marilyn McCord Adams, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Philip L. Quinn, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne. See here. They work not just in philosophy of religion but in epistemology and metaphysics. They are as hard-headed, rigorous, and intellectually demanding as anyone, anywhere, in any field. Liberals are going to have to face the fact that religious belief is independent of intelligence. It is a function of other things, such as upbringing"
A message to the Left from a truthful bear: "George Bush is President, and he is going to keep being President for another four years. That's not going to change. So telling us how much he sucks is irrelevant. Telling us how stupid the portion of America which voted for him is: also irrelevant. Discussing secession and to hell with those red states: well that's just plain stupid, forget about irrelevant. What is relevant are answers. Solutions, not a list of problems. Declaring that Iraq is a mess is easy, and worthless. Telling us what we should do to fix it is harder, but far more worthwhile. Don't like the operation in Falluja? Fine: how else would you stop the terrorists? Think we should involve allies more in Iraq? Great. How?
*******************************
ELSEWHERE
Does the blogosphere have a memory? Not much of a one, I would guess. In mid-December of 2002 a big blog topic was the defamation case brought by Australian Jewish businessman Joe Gutnick against Dow-Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal and various other papers. My main contribution to the debate is here. The fuss arose because Dow Jones published most gross accusations against Mr Gutnick and then absolutely refused to retract them. Mr Gutnick was advised that he would have little redress under American law because American law takes little heed of the truth of such accusations. He therefore sued before the High Court of Australia. Dow Jones cried foul because they did not like being sued under law that required them to be truthful. The outcome of the case has recently been announced: After 4 years and 27 court appearances, Mr Gutnick finally got his public apology and retraction from Dow Jones plus $180,000 in damages and $400,000 in costs. Common decency and a respect for truth would have saved Dow Jones a lot of money. I hope that they learn from it and am pleased that Australian law administered the lesson.
The Dutch pratfall: "The recent assassination of Dutch author and moviemaker, Theo van Gough, by a Muslim extremist in Amsterdam should come as no surprise to those familiar with the condition of multiculturalism in Holland. Earlier this year, the Dutch government became the first Western state to admit that the multicultural experiment, the biggest socialist fraud ever to be foisted on countries since the Soviet one, is a colossal failure. This admission came in the form of an all-party parliamentary report that basically concluded, among other things, that Muslim immigrants, who make up almost one million of Holland’s 16 million inhabitants, are refusing to integrate.... Ironically, it is the emphasis Dutch governments have placed on multiculturalism that has helped lead to its inevitable downfall. The report states that, in planning their ‘perfect’ society, the biggest mistake the lib-left multiculturalists made was to have immigrant children educated in their own languages, which has resulted in an ethnic separatism in society. This voluntary apartheid from the mainstream has reached the point where it is dangerous for white Europeans to venture into some immigrant neighborhoods where they are regarded as either “an enemy or victim.” The growth of this parallel world has also corresponded with a growth in discomfort among the native Dutch toward the newcomers and a loss of a feeling of security, which is largely due to the new immigrants’ propensity for crime, violence and overrepresentation in the criminal system. The report concludes that the ethnic ghettos must be broken up and the immigrants made to become Dutch if the country is not to come apart. But it is probably already too late for that.... And what is the response of the oh-so-clever Dutch leftists to the multicultural mess they have created? Like after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, they have been either silent or offered only more of the same." More background on the Dutch situation here.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
Does the blogosphere have a memory? Not much of a one, I would guess. In mid-December of 2002 a big blog topic was the defamation case brought by Australian Jewish businessman Joe Gutnick against Dow-Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal and various other papers. My main contribution to the debate is here. The fuss arose because Dow Jones published most gross accusations against Mr Gutnick and then absolutely refused to retract them. Mr Gutnick was advised that he would have little redress under American law because American law takes little heed of the truth of such accusations. He therefore sued before the High Court of Australia. Dow Jones cried foul because they did not like being sued under law that required them to be truthful. The outcome of the case has recently been announced: After 4 years and 27 court appearances, Mr Gutnick finally got his public apology and retraction from Dow Jones plus $180,000 in damages and $400,000 in costs. Common decency and a respect for truth would have saved Dow Jones a lot of money. I hope that they learn from it and am pleased that Australian law administered the lesson.
The Dutch pratfall: "The recent assassination of Dutch author and moviemaker, Theo van Gough, by a Muslim extremist in Amsterdam should come as no surprise to those familiar with the condition of multiculturalism in Holland. Earlier this year, the Dutch government became the first Western state to admit that the multicultural experiment, the biggest socialist fraud ever to be foisted on countries since the Soviet one, is a colossal failure. This admission came in the form of an all-party parliamentary report that basically concluded, among other things, that Muslim immigrants, who make up almost one million of Holland’s 16 million inhabitants, are refusing to integrate.... Ironically, it is the emphasis Dutch governments have placed on multiculturalism that has helped lead to its inevitable downfall. The report states that, in planning their ‘perfect’ society, the biggest mistake the lib-left multiculturalists made was to have immigrant children educated in their own languages, which has resulted in an ethnic separatism in society. This voluntary apartheid from the mainstream has reached the point where it is dangerous for white Europeans to venture into some immigrant neighborhoods where they are regarded as either “an enemy or victim.” The growth of this parallel world has also corresponded with a growth in discomfort among the native Dutch toward the newcomers and a loss of a feeling of security, which is largely due to the new immigrants’ propensity for crime, violence and overrepresentation in the criminal system. The report concludes that the ethnic ghettos must be broken up and the immigrants made to become Dutch if the country is not to come apart. But it is probably already too late for that.... And what is the response of the oh-so-clever Dutch leftists to the multicultural mess they have created? Like after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, they have been either silent or offered only more of the same." More background on the Dutch situation here.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
Monday, November 15, 2004
ON NOT QUITE GETTING IT RIGHT:
I can't help myself: I have got to have a laugh at the follies of the Leftists instead of just letting them dig themselves into a hole. Take this article from beautiful downtown Portland, Oregon. The author looks at the map of "blue" counties and draws the correct conclusion that the Kerry vote came overwhelmingly from the big cities. But that's the last thing he gets right. He immediately jumps to the laughable conclusion that everyone in the big cities is like him and it is people like him who won the cities for Kerry. It is the old Leftist trick of claiming to speak for far more people than they actually do. They once used to claim to speak for "the worker", but they never did, of course. In this case the cities were won for Kerry not because of the Leftists there but because that is where minorities concentrate. It is minorities that are characteristic of the big cities, not bourgeois whites. Bourgeois whites are scattered everywhere these days. Material comfort and options in life are available to almost any American anywhere who is prepared to work hard in fact.
And the fact that minorities and Leftist whites vote for the same candidate does NOT mean that the two groups share the same values. The minority vote is a "bought" vote -- bought with the promise of welfare dollars. On social values such as attitude to homosexuals etc, the two groups have long been known to be poles apart. In a public-opinion-polling sense, then, "city values" would be just about the opposite of what our author claims. To put it vividly, you would almost certainly get a bigger vote in favour of castrating homosexuals in the big cities than you would get anywhere else. So our poor old Leftist would actually find more solace among the kindly souls of middle America than among a true random sample of his acclaimed big city Americans. His Leftist cities exist only in his imagination.
And another amusing point he makes is that the "raving neo-Christian idiots" of Wyoming got roughly twice as much per head spent on them by the Federal government as the good citizens of Washington State did. And he calls the Wyoming people idiots? They sound like the winners to me! What a fool the guy is.
And there is an article by Malanga which nicely detonates yet another common Democrat fallacy -- that the GOP support for basic cultural values has distracted the workers from economic realities. The underlying Leftist claim is that the economy is in a mess and poor people are going backwards and the Democrats would fix all that! If that were true it would indeed be foolish for working people to be seduced away from voting Democrat by issues such as abortion and homosexual marriage. The inspiration for the claim is Thomas Franks' recent book What's the Matter With Kansas? and the book claims that Kansas is an example of such folly. As usual with Leftist claims, however, this one is fact-free too. Kansas is in fact doing particularly well economically so sticking with conservatives who have helped bring that about is entirely logical and in the best interests of all Kansans.
But let Leftists believe all these silly explanations for their failure. Let them waste their energy fighting imaginary enemies! They will never cure their sickness if they keep misdiagnosing its cause.
****************************************
I can't help myself: I have got to have a laugh at the follies of the Leftists instead of just letting them dig themselves into a hole. Take this article from beautiful downtown Portland, Oregon. The author looks at the map of "blue" counties and draws the correct conclusion that the Kerry vote came overwhelmingly from the big cities. But that's the last thing he gets right. He immediately jumps to the laughable conclusion that everyone in the big cities is like him and it is people like him who won the cities for Kerry. It is the old Leftist trick of claiming to speak for far more people than they actually do. They once used to claim to speak for "the worker", but they never did, of course. In this case the cities were won for Kerry not because of the Leftists there but because that is where minorities concentrate. It is minorities that are characteristic of the big cities, not bourgeois whites. Bourgeois whites are scattered everywhere these days. Material comfort and options in life are available to almost any American anywhere who is prepared to work hard in fact.
And the fact that minorities and Leftist whites vote for the same candidate does NOT mean that the two groups share the same values. The minority vote is a "bought" vote -- bought with the promise of welfare dollars. On social values such as attitude to homosexuals etc, the two groups have long been known to be poles apart. In a public-opinion-polling sense, then, "city values" would be just about the opposite of what our author claims. To put it vividly, you would almost certainly get a bigger vote in favour of castrating homosexuals in the big cities than you would get anywhere else. So our poor old Leftist would actually find more solace among the kindly souls of middle America than among a true random sample of his acclaimed big city Americans. His Leftist cities exist only in his imagination.
And another amusing point he makes is that the "raving neo-Christian idiots" of Wyoming got roughly twice as much per head spent on them by the Federal government as the good citizens of Washington State did. And he calls the Wyoming people idiots? They sound like the winners to me! What a fool the guy is.
And there is an article by Malanga which nicely detonates yet another common Democrat fallacy -- that the GOP support for basic cultural values has distracted the workers from economic realities. The underlying Leftist claim is that the economy is in a mess and poor people are going backwards and the Democrats would fix all that! If that were true it would indeed be foolish for working people to be seduced away from voting Democrat by issues such as abortion and homosexual marriage. The inspiration for the claim is Thomas Franks' recent book What's the Matter With Kansas? and the book claims that Kansas is an example of such folly. As usual with Leftist claims, however, this one is fact-free too. Kansas is in fact doing particularly well economically so sticking with conservatives who have helped bring that about is entirely logical and in the best interests of all Kansans.
But let Leftists believe all these silly explanations for their failure. Let them waste their energy fighting imaginary enemies! They will never cure their sickness if they keep misdiagnosing its cause.
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ELSEWHERE
Another laugh: The frantically Leftist Maureen Dowd of the NYT is now defending a senior Republican Senator to whom GWB gave his personal support in the recent campaign! Nobody is saying so but I presume that the price of that support was a promise from Senator Specter not to actually vote against any of the administration's judicial nominees.
An excellent defence of conservative policies from Australia's last Labor Party Prime Minister: "In a fiery defence of Labor's opening up of the economy in the 1980s and 1990s, Mr Keating crowed that ordinary Australians now had cheaper cars, higher wages, near-full employment, and easy access to home loans and the stock market. "When the government I led abandoned general centralised wage fixing ... productivity went off," Mr Keating said. "Productivity went to 3 per cent through the 90s, the highest rate of any of the OECD countries." The result was a 20 per cent increase in incomes, or "the highest growth in real incomes in any decade of the 20th century", Mr Keating said. "You can't believe that we still have critics for this policy," he said.... Mr Keating scorned critics who have cast Labor of the 1980s and 1990s as "not really Labor governments" or "Labor fakers of some kind who passed the parcel on government and the markets". "You can buy a reasonable quality small car for under $15,000 today," he said. "(Before tariff reduction) that would have been nearer to $30,000." Materialism was under attack for hollowing out social values, however Mr Keating said: "One has to ask, will people have better values and be better put together if their car costs twice as much? "Is that extra call on their disposable income going to produce some astringent moral effect on them?""
Leftists still celebrate the Scopes "monkey" trial of 1925 in which fundamentalist Christians fought a rearguard action against the teaching of the theory of evolution in the schools. Evolution was considered a "progressive" or Leftist cause at the time and -- predictably -- had the overwhelming support of the press. It is interesting therefore that Jim Lindgren has recently put up some excerpts from the school textbook that the Christians were attacking and which the "progressives" were defending. The excerpts make a case for eugenics that could have come straight from Hitler himself. So it seems that those silly old Christians were not so silly after all and that the Leftists and the media were, as usual, on the side of depriving people of their liberties in the name of whatever theory might happen to be fashionable at the time.
Islamic primitivism: "Ironically, a cult of the warrior has defined the Muslim worldview throughout the period of Muslim decline. Muslims have had few victories in the last two centuries, but their admiration for the proverbial sword and spear has only increased. .Textbooks in Muslim countries speak of the victories of Muslim fighters from an earlier era. Orators still call for latter-day mujahedeen to rise and regain Islam's lost glory. More streets in the Arab world are named after Muslim generals than men of learning. Even civilian dictators in the Muslim world like being photographed in military uniforms, Saddam Hussein being a case in point. While the Muslim world's obsession with military power encourages violent attempts to "restore" Muslim honor, the real reasons for Muslim humiliation and backwardness continue to multiply".
Abortion worse than the KKK: "In America today, almost as many African-American children are aborted than are born. A black baby is now more than three times as likely to be murdered in the womb than a white baby. Since 1973, abortion has reduced the black population by over 25 percent. Twice as many African-Americans have died from abortion than have died from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined. Every three days, more African-Americans are killed by abortion than have been killed by the Ku Klux Klan in its entire history. Planned Parenthood operates the nation's largest chain of abortion clinics and almost 80 percent of its facilities are located in minority neighborhoods. About 13 percent of American women are black, but they submit to over 35 percent of the abortions."
There is a good Rothbard article here summarizing three major Papal encyclicals. It shows that the Popes have advocated economic authoritarianism to go with their religious authoritarianism and that they have been no friends of the free market. My reading of a more recent encyclical led me to similar conclusions.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
Another laugh: The frantically Leftist Maureen Dowd of the NYT is now defending a senior Republican Senator to whom GWB gave his personal support in the recent campaign! Nobody is saying so but I presume that the price of that support was a promise from Senator Specter not to actually vote against any of the administration's judicial nominees.
An excellent defence of conservative policies from Australia's last Labor Party Prime Minister: "In a fiery defence of Labor's opening up of the economy in the 1980s and 1990s, Mr Keating crowed that ordinary Australians now had cheaper cars, higher wages, near-full employment, and easy access to home loans and the stock market. "When the government I led abandoned general centralised wage fixing ... productivity went off," Mr Keating said. "Productivity went to 3 per cent through the 90s, the highest rate of any of the OECD countries." The result was a 20 per cent increase in incomes, or "the highest growth in real incomes in any decade of the 20th century", Mr Keating said. "You can't believe that we still have critics for this policy," he said.... Mr Keating scorned critics who have cast Labor of the 1980s and 1990s as "not really Labor governments" or "Labor fakers of some kind who passed the parcel on government and the markets". "You can buy a reasonable quality small car for under $15,000 today," he said. "(Before tariff reduction) that would have been nearer to $30,000." Materialism was under attack for hollowing out social values, however Mr Keating said: "One has to ask, will people have better values and be better put together if their car costs twice as much? "Is that extra call on their disposable income going to produce some astringent moral effect on them?""
Leftists still celebrate the Scopes "monkey" trial of 1925 in which fundamentalist Christians fought a rearguard action against the teaching of the theory of evolution in the schools. Evolution was considered a "progressive" or Leftist cause at the time and -- predictably -- had the overwhelming support of the press. It is interesting therefore that Jim Lindgren has recently put up some excerpts from the school textbook that the Christians were attacking and which the "progressives" were defending. The excerpts make a case for eugenics that could have come straight from Hitler himself. So it seems that those silly old Christians were not so silly after all and that the Leftists and the media were, as usual, on the side of depriving people of their liberties in the name of whatever theory might happen to be fashionable at the time.
Islamic primitivism: "Ironically, a cult of the warrior has defined the Muslim worldview throughout the period of Muslim decline. Muslims have had few victories in the last two centuries, but their admiration for the proverbial sword and spear has only increased. .Textbooks in Muslim countries speak of the victories of Muslim fighters from an earlier era. Orators still call for latter-day mujahedeen to rise and regain Islam's lost glory. More streets in the Arab world are named after Muslim generals than men of learning. Even civilian dictators in the Muslim world like being photographed in military uniforms, Saddam Hussein being a case in point. While the Muslim world's obsession with military power encourages violent attempts to "restore" Muslim honor, the real reasons for Muslim humiliation and backwardness continue to multiply".
Abortion worse than the KKK: "In America today, almost as many African-American children are aborted than are born. A black baby is now more than three times as likely to be murdered in the womb than a white baby. Since 1973, abortion has reduced the black population by over 25 percent. Twice as many African-Americans have died from abortion than have died from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined. Every three days, more African-Americans are killed by abortion than have been killed by the Ku Klux Klan in its entire history. Planned Parenthood operates the nation's largest chain of abortion clinics and almost 80 percent of its facilities are located in minority neighborhoods. About 13 percent of American women are black, but they submit to over 35 percent of the abortions."
There is a good Rothbard article here summarizing three major Papal encyclicals. It shows that the Popes have advocated economic authoritarianism to go with their religious authoritarianism and that they have been no friends of the free market. My reading of a more recent encyclical led me to similar conclusions.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
Sunday, November 14, 2004
SSSHH! DON'T TELL THE LEFT THIS:
I find it difficult to restrain my amusement at the way the American Left is at present relentlessly shooting itself in the foot. Their bile and hate has so overcome them that they are saying almost insane things about their election defeat. They seem to be almost uniform in blaming evangelical Christians for their defeat and the abuse they are pouring out at those much-abused people is quite amazing. "Dumb" and "stupid" are just the mildest of the adjective hurled out. "Jihadists", "Theocrats", "American Taliban" are some of the more imaginative descriptions.
Great! Is all I can say. Hurling gross insults at people whose votes you need if you are to win next time is so stupid that it almost confirms the Left as children of Satan. Does the Left really think that Christians will not notice what the Left thinks of them? I think the Left are at the moment doing far more to send the Christian vote to the GOP than George Bush could ever do in his wildest dreams.
And that is the big laugh! A lot of the Christian vote is still up for grabs. The swing to Bush actually had nothing to do with the Christian vote. If any particular demographic is to be blamed for Bush's victory it is actually Catholics and women. The Left are abusing an entirely innocent party!
But I will say no more on the matter. Let us all keep an amused silence about the matter from now on. To check up on what I have just said, however, you could (for instance) read the following:
"The Economist": "Look at the figures: the moralists' share of the electorate was only 22%, just two points more than the share of those who cited the economy, and three points more than those who nominated terrorism as the top priority. A few points difference (and the exit polls are, after all, not entirely reliable) and everyone would have been saying the election was about jobs or Iraq. Moreover, that 22% share is much lower than it was in the two previous presidential elections, in 2000 and 1996. Then, 35% and 40%, respectively, put moral or ethical issues top, and a further 14% and 9% put abortion first, an option that was not given in 2004. Thus, in those two elections, about half the electorate said they voted on moral matters; this time, only a fifth did".
Mick Hume: "Bring on the most influential myths of the post-election debate so far: that the Republicans won by scaring stupid redneck voters, and by mobilising a powerful block of Christian fundamentalists to vote for their conservative moral values on abortion and gay marriage. It is not hard to see why this should be an attractive explanation/excuse for the Democrats and their supporters on the international left. After all, how can they be blamed for losing to Bush, if the voters are just too ignorant or too bigoted to appreciate their sophisticated arguments? This sort of contemptuous attitude towards the electorate reveals rather more about the left than it does about American voters. Apart from anything else, it is a bit rich to blame Bush for emotive scaremongering when the Kerry campaign was just as guilty... But, as Guardian/Observer columnist David Aaronovitch points out, on closer inspection the 'populist uprising' of Christian conservatives turns out 'to be more or less a mirage, a self-inflicted liberal nightmare':
Krauthammer: "Ten years and another Democratic defeat later, and liberals are at it again. The Angry White Male has been transmuted into the Bigoted Christian Redneck. In the postelection analyses, the liberal elite just about lost its mind denouncing the return of medieval primitivism. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times achieved the highest level of hysteria, cursing the GOP for pandering to "isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism" in its unfailing drive to "summon our nasty devils." Whence comes this fable? With President Bush increasing his share of the vote among Hispanics, Jews, women (especially married women), Catholics, seniors and even African-Americans, on what does this victory-of-the-homophobic-evangelical rest?"
Jill Stewart: "But as national Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin noted, President Bush increased his support among occasional churchgoers more than among regular churchgoers. That speaks to support untethered from intense religiosity..... In California, he notes, Bush improved with swing voters: white Democratic men, Republican working women, Latinos with children. Nationwide, women split between Bush and Kerry. Just four years ago, Al Gore won an 11- point female advantage, thanks to a 20-year trend in which women went Democratic. The vanishing gender gap and other trends cannot be blamed on Kerry's failure to pray".
And I love this comment:
"It is not true that the Democrats didn't show sympathy toward fundamentalists during the campaign. They did -- just to the wrong ones. Islamic fundamentalists received a great deal of understanding and tolerance from the Democrats. John Kerry made a point of showing sensitivity to the Islamic community and for it earned numerous endorsements from Muslim Imams. Perhaps herein lies a new strategy for the Democrats: What if they treated Christians as respectfully as they treated Yasser Arafat? What if they extended to Christianity the tolerant understanding they extend to Islam? Maybe from time to time the Democrats could refer to Christianity as a religion of peace. One would think a party that can canonize a de facto terrorist and jihadist like Arafat could tolerate a Southern preacher or two. Jerry Falwell has never blown up an airplane like Arafat, but Democrats wouldn't be caught dead in his company".
*************************************
I find it difficult to restrain my amusement at the way the American Left is at present relentlessly shooting itself in the foot. Their bile and hate has so overcome them that they are saying almost insane things about their election defeat. They seem to be almost uniform in blaming evangelical Christians for their defeat and the abuse they are pouring out at those much-abused people is quite amazing. "Dumb" and "stupid" are just the mildest of the adjective hurled out. "Jihadists", "Theocrats", "American Taliban" are some of the more imaginative descriptions.
Great! Is all I can say. Hurling gross insults at people whose votes you need if you are to win next time is so stupid that it almost confirms the Left as children of Satan. Does the Left really think that Christians will not notice what the Left thinks of them? I think the Left are at the moment doing far more to send the Christian vote to the GOP than George Bush could ever do in his wildest dreams.
And that is the big laugh! A lot of the Christian vote is still up for grabs. The swing to Bush actually had nothing to do with the Christian vote. If any particular demographic is to be blamed for Bush's victory it is actually Catholics and women. The Left are abusing an entirely innocent party!
But I will say no more on the matter. Let us all keep an amused silence about the matter from now on. To check up on what I have just said, however, you could (for instance) read the following:
"The Economist": "Look at the figures: the moralists' share of the electorate was only 22%, just two points more than the share of those who cited the economy, and three points more than those who nominated terrorism as the top priority. A few points difference (and the exit polls are, after all, not entirely reliable) and everyone would have been saying the election was about jobs or Iraq. Moreover, that 22% share is much lower than it was in the two previous presidential elections, in 2000 and 1996. Then, 35% and 40%, respectively, put moral or ethical issues top, and a further 14% and 9% put abortion first, an option that was not given in 2004. Thus, in those two elections, about half the electorate said they voted on moral matters; this time, only a fifth did".
Mick Hume: "Bring on the most influential myths of the post-election debate so far: that the Republicans won by scaring stupid redneck voters, and by mobilising a powerful block of Christian fundamentalists to vote for their conservative moral values on abortion and gay marriage. It is not hard to see why this should be an attractive explanation/excuse for the Democrats and their supporters on the international left. After all, how can they be blamed for losing to Bush, if the voters are just too ignorant or too bigoted to appreciate their sophisticated arguments? This sort of contemptuous attitude towards the electorate reveals rather more about the left than it does about American voters. Apart from anything else, it is a bit rich to blame Bush for emotive scaremongering when the Kerry campaign was just as guilty... But, as Guardian/Observer columnist David Aaronovitch points out, on closer inspection the 'populist uprising' of Christian conservatives turns out 'to be more or less a mirage, a self-inflicted liberal nightmare':
Krauthammer: "Ten years and another Democratic defeat later, and liberals are at it again. The Angry White Male has been transmuted into the Bigoted Christian Redneck. In the postelection analyses, the liberal elite just about lost its mind denouncing the return of medieval primitivism. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times achieved the highest level of hysteria, cursing the GOP for pandering to "isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism" in its unfailing drive to "summon our nasty devils." Whence comes this fable? With President Bush increasing his share of the vote among Hispanics, Jews, women (especially married women), Catholics, seniors and even African-Americans, on what does this victory-of-the-homophobic-evangelical rest?"
Jill Stewart: "But as national Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin noted, President Bush increased his support among occasional churchgoers more than among regular churchgoers. That speaks to support untethered from intense religiosity..... In California, he notes, Bush improved with swing voters: white Democratic men, Republican working women, Latinos with children. Nationwide, women split between Bush and Kerry. Just four years ago, Al Gore won an 11- point female advantage, thanks to a 20-year trend in which women went Democratic. The vanishing gender gap and other trends cannot be blamed on Kerry's failure to pray".
And I love this comment:
"It is not true that the Democrats didn't show sympathy toward fundamentalists during the campaign. They did -- just to the wrong ones. Islamic fundamentalists received a great deal of understanding and tolerance from the Democrats. John Kerry made a point of showing sensitivity to the Islamic community and for it earned numerous endorsements from Muslim Imams. Perhaps herein lies a new strategy for the Democrats: What if they treated Christians as respectfully as they treated Yasser Arafat? What if they extended to Christianity the tolerant understanding they extend to Islam? Maybe from time to time the Democrats could refer to Christianity as a religion of peace. One would think a party that can canonize a de facto terrorist and jihadist like Arafat could tolerate a Southern preacher or two. Jerry Falwell has never blown up an airplane like Arafat, but Democrats wouldn't be caught dead in his company".
*************************************
ELSEWHERE
Wicked Thoughts has just put up a sweeping demolition of the thoughts of Brian Leiter, the influential far-Left law professor and blogger.
European economic growth only 11% of U.S. growth: "Figures for the third quarter have punctured French delusions of growth altogether. The French economy crawled along at an annual pace of just 0.4% between July and September.... As for Germany, its economy grew by just 0.4% last quarter, at an annualised rate". [For comparison, the most recent GDP growth-rate figure for the USA was 3.7%]
Happiness: "A new survey of national wellbeing has found the people happiest about their lives are those earning more than $150,000 a year. Those least happy earn less than $15,000 a year". [See also my post of Sept. 14th]
Arlene Peck is a bit disturbed at the conciliatory attitude towards the Palestinians coming from the post-election White House.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
Wicked Thoughts has just put up a sweeping demolition of the thoughts of Brian Leiter, the influential far-Left law professor and blogger.
European economic growth only 11% of U.S. growth: "Figures for the third quarter have punctured French delusions of growth altogether. The French economy crawled along at an annual pace of just 0.4% between July and September.... As for Germany, its economy grew by just 0.4% last quarter, at an annualised rate". [For comparison, the most recent GDP growth-rate figure for the USA was 3.7%]
Happiness: "A new survey of national wellbeing has found the people happiest about their lives are those earning more than $150,000 a year. Those least happy earn less than $15,000 a year". [See also my post of Sept. 14th]
Arlene Peck is a bit disturbed at the conciliatory attitude towards the Palestinians coming from the post-election White House.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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.
********************************
Saturday, November 13, 2004
THE SEMI-SOVIET EU
Peter Hitchens "The E.U. is a top-down creation, an elitist idea with its roots in the branch of European social democracy whose features were internationalism, a loathing of the nation-state, a belief in the benevolent intervention of the state in almost all areas of life, and a belief that capitalism untamed was necessarily evil. Remember that many of the founders of the Soviet Union were well-intentioned and didn't mean to end up where they did.... I'm not saying it's like Stalin and the gulag, but I think the end result could well be quite like Brezhnev, and what some Russians still refer to as the golden time. There was plenty of vodka, plenty of sausage, national pride, but from the point of view of someone who wanted a free society, it was disastrous. The Brezhnev regime, though it wasn't Stalinist, was very nasty to those who persisted in dissenting. The European Union hasn't a gulag, but it also doesn't have habeas corpus, it doesn't have jury trial, or due process as it is understood in the U.S. and the U.K. It has no concept of opposition"
Seceding from the EU: "All of the various secession proposals fail to consider the possibility that no permission should be needed to drop out of the EU. Yet that is the question that needs to be asked first. Should some nation be forced to continue its membership in the EU if it cannot persuade some supermajority of member nations to let it go? Forcing an unwilling nation to remain part of a political association that it does not want goes against all theories of fairness, not to mention human rights. Permission to leave should not be required. Any nation that wants to leave should be able to leave without asking permission of other member nations.... One also needs to consider that failure to allow a group of dissatisfied citizens to leave a political union that they did not want led to the completely unnecessary deaths of more than 600,000 Americans. So bloodshed can happen when people cannot peacefully exit from a political association that they feel no longer represents them".
More on secession here.
But even the French are getting disillusioned: "Like Britain, France will be holding a referendum on the proposed EU constitution. A bout of stress over both this plebiscite and the separate prospect of Turkey joining the EU has now so diminished French aspirations for Europe that the old passion looks altogether spent. Enter Blair. For a root cause of Gallic anguish is Britain. While Blair will have his own tough struggle to win a UK referendum, what haunts France on both the constitution and Turkey is that Britain has apparently prevailed in making the EU an ever-expanding zone of liberal mercantilism that obstructs political union. An initial heart tremor was diagnosable in early autumn, when Laurent Fabius, a Socialist Party heavyweight and former prime minister, astonished France by bidding that the opposition left vote No to the EU constitution in the referendum next year.... The chief argument Fabius advances for rejecting the EU constitution is that it institutionalises Blair's liberal, free-market economic programme, in disregard of social welfare and jobs lost to cheaper, low-wage neighbours. The French now talk of the "English Europe" with the same disdain as Michael Howard's Conservatives talk of "Brussels". Fabius baldly asserts: "The British concept has won." And he does not see why it should be allowed to stand".
Europe from an American viewpoint: "Roughly speaking, I think Americans see the world in this way. A crazy European ideology, Fascism, tried to replace democracy with dictatorship, and ended in concentration camps and a pagan Europe aflame. Meanwhile, another wild ideology, Communism, proposed a Mickey Mouse vision of economics and, except for a powerful military, kept the many nations forced into the Soviet Union at the level of a fourth-world economy, until the whole project collapsed. Americans find it hard to understand what Europeans find plausible in socialist economics. Americans have experienced the great advantages of owning their own property, building their own businesses, inventing and discovering new goods and services. Enterprise is the second secret to American life -- enterprise springing from creative economic imagination and personal initiative".
And Germany's media are DELIGHTED with Bin Laden as he appears on the recently-released videotape: "Osama bin Laden presents himself as less warlike. ...Bin Laden's latest message gives the impression that the bearded man with the soft voice is looking for a new image, away from the jihad rhetoric to a more factual political message ... Not much is left of his usual flaming Islamist rhetoric. The usual tones of "battle against the infidels" are missing this time. Instead he speaks of the ambitions of the "Islamic nation" for "freedom" and "security" and disproves President Bush with political arguments... Instead of martial armed polemics, Bin Laden uses irony to attest to the failures of George W. Bush. ..." (Via Davids Medienkritik)
Robert Kagan: "Europeans do not fear that the US will seek to control them; they fear that they have lost control over the US and, by extension, the direction of world affairs. If the US is suffering a crisis of legitimacy, then it is in large part because Europe wants to regain some measure of control over Washington's behaviour. The vast majority of Europeans objected to the US invasion of Iraq not simply because they opposed the war. They objected also because US willingness to go to war without the UN Security Council's approval -- that is, without Europe's approval -- challenged Europe's world view and its ability to exercise even a modicum of influence in the new unipolar system".
And the German left-wing media report glowingly on the "America says sorry" site set up by a few disgruntled Kerry voters.
***********************************
Peter Hitchens "The E.U. is a top-down creation, an elitist idea with its roots in the branch of European social democracy whose features were internationalism, a loathing of the nation-state, a belief in the benevolent intervention of the state in almost all areas of life, and a belief that capitalism untamed was necessarily evil. Remember that many of the founders of the Soviet Union were well-intentioned and didn't mean to end up where they did.... I'm not saying it's like Stalin and the gulag, but I think the end result could well be quite like Brezhnev, and what some Russians still refer to as the golden time. There was plenty of vodka, plenty of sausage, national pride, but from the point of view of someone who wanted a free society, it was disastrous. The Brezhnev regime, though it wasn't Stalinist, was very nasty to those who persisted in dissenting. The European Union hasn't a gulag, but it also doesn't have habeas corpus, it doesn't have jury trial, or due process as it is understood in the U.S. and the U.K. It has no concept of opposition"
Seceding from the EU: "All of the various secession proposals fail to consider the possibility that no permission should be needed to drop out of the EU. Yet that is the question that needs to be asked first. Should some nation be forced to continue its membership in the EU if it cannot persuade some supermajority of member nations to let it go? Forcing an unwilling nation to remain part of a political association that it does not want goes against all theories of fairness, not to mention human rights. Permission to leave should not be required. Any nation that wants to leave should be able to leave without asking permission of other member nations.... One also needs to consider that failure to allow a group of dissatisfied citizens to leave a political union that they did not want led to the completely unnecessary deaths of more than 600,000 Americans. So bloodshed can happen when people cannot peacefully exit from a political association that they feel no longer represents them".
More on secession here.
But even the French are getting disillusioned: "Like Britain, France will be holding a referendum on the proposed EU constitution. A bout of stress over both this plebiscite and the separate prospect of Turkey joining the EU has now so diminished French aspirations for Europe that the old passion looks altogether spent. Enter Blair. For a root cause of Gallic anguish is Britain. While Blair will have his own tough struggle to win a UK referendum, what haunts France on both the constitution and Turkey is that Britain has apparently prevailed in making the EU an ever-expanding zone of liberal mercantilism that obstructs political union. An initial heart tremor was diagnosable in early autumn, when Laurent Fabius, a Socialist Party heavyweight and former prime minister, astonished France by bidding that the opposition left vote No to the EU constitution in the referendum next year.... The chief argument Fabius advances for rejecting the EU constitution is that it institutionalises Blair's liberal, free-market economic programme, in disregard of social welfare and jobs lost to cheaper, low-wage neighbours. The French now talk of the "English Europe" with the same disdain as Michael Howard's Conservatives talk of "Brussels". Fabius baldly asserts: "The British concept has won." And he does not see why it should be allowed to stand".
Europe from an American viewpoint: "Roughly speaking, I think Americans see the world in this way. A crazy European ideology, Fascism, tried to replace democracy with dictatorship, and ended in concentration camps and a pagan Europe aflame. Meanwhile, another wild ideology, Communism, proposed a Mickey Mouse vision of economics and, except for a powerful military, kept the many nations forced into the Soviet Union at the level of a fourth-world economy, until the whole project collapsed. Americans find it hard to understand what Europeans find plausible in socialist economics. Americans have experienced the great advantages of owning their own property, building their own businesses, inventing and discovering new goods and services. Enterprise is the second secret to American life -- enterprise springing from creative economic imagination and personal initiative".
And Germany's media are DELIGHTED with Bin Laden as he appears on the recently-released videotape: "Osama bin Laden presents himself as less warlike. ...Bin Laden's latest message gives the impression that the bearded man with the soft voice is looking for a new image, away from the jihad rhetoric to a more factual political message ... Not much is left of his usual flaming Islamist rhetoric. The usual tones of "battle against the infidels" are missing this time. Instead he speaks of the ambitions of the "Islamic nation" for "freedom" and "security" and disproves President Bush with political arguments... Instead of martial armed polemics, Bin Laden uses irony to attest to the failures of George W. Bush. ..." (Via Davids Medienkritik)
Robert Kagan: "Europeans do not fear that the US will seek to control them; they fear that they have lost control over the US and, by extension, the direction of world affairs. If the US is suffering a crisis of legitimacy, then it is in large part because Europe wants to regain some measure of control over Washington's behaviour. The vast majority of Europeans objected to the US invasion of Iraq not simply because they opposed the war. They objected also because US willingness to go to war without the UN Security Council's approval -- that is, without Europe's approval -- challenged Europe's world view and its ability to exercise even a modicum of influence in the new unipolar system".
And the German left-wing media report glowingly on the "America says sorry" site set up by a few disgruntled Kerry voters.
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ELSEWHERE
The main reason some conservatives do read the sneering Yglesias is that he does sometimes make sense -- as here -- where he advises Senate Democrats to go easy on the obstructionism. He does not know the difference between "horde" and "hoard", though. Is he dyslexic or just a hopeless speller?
Transatlantic Intelligencer has a most comprehensive demolition of the utterly stupid Democrat claim that America's actions in Iraq are responsible for European anti-Americanism. You would have to be brain-dead not to know that anti-Americanism was rife in Europe long before 9/11/2001 but Democrats still lie in their teeth about it. The blog author uses hard words like "otiose" and "metonym" (I would have said "superfluous" and "substitute-word") but he makes up for that with heaps of documentation.
An amusing suggestion from a reader that alludes to the likelihood of Arafat having died of AIDS: "I could never understand Hollywood's, the Leftist (progressive) Church's and the Catholic Church's seeming love affair with the PLO and Yasser Arafat. I have to wonder: Is there some sort of an underground gay Mafia connection here?"
Australia's Cardinal Pell says that Islamic fundamentalism is to some extent a reaction against the values-free amorality promoted by the Western Left. (For a pic of the good Cardinal, see here or here).
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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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The main reason some conservatives do read the sneering Yglesias is that he does sometimes make sense -- as here -- where he advises Senate Democrats to go easy on the obstructionism. He does not know the difference between "horde" and "hoard", though. Is he dyslexic or just a hopeless speller?
Transatlantic Intelligencer has a most comprehensive demolition of the utterly stupid Democrat claim that America's actions in Iraq are responsible for European anti-Americanism. You would have to be brain-dead not to know that anti-Americanism was rife in Europe long before 9/11/2001 but Democrats still lie in their teeth about it. The blog author uses hard words like "otiose" and "metonym" (I would have said "superfluous" and "substitute-word") but he makes up for that with heaps of documentation.
An amusing suggestion from a reader that alludes to the likelihood of Arafat having died of AIDS: "I could never understand Hollywood's, the Leftist (progressive) Church's and the Catholic Church's seeming love affair with the PLO and Yasser Arafat. I have to wonder: Is there some sort of an underground gay Mafia connection here?"
Australia's Cardinal Pell says that Islamic fundamentalism is to some extent a reaction against the values-free amorality promoted by the Western Left. (For a pic of the good Cardinal, see here or here).
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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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Friday, November 12, 2004
EUROPEAN ANTI-AMERICANISM
More here
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"Bush was loathed by the British and European Left-liberals before he had done anything in office. He was detested purely and simply for what he was - a point to which I shall return. But the idea that the most recent wave of rabid anti-Americanism stems from mistakes in Iraq is simply absurd. Anyone whose historical memory goes back more than 10 minutes should recall the extraordinary effusion of hatred that spewed from sections of the opinion-forming class as a consequence of America being attacked.
Like most expatriate Americans living in Britain, it was a phenomenon I am unlikely ever to forget. The response to the deaths of 3,000 civilians, by comment writers in the Left-wing newspapers and the producers of "flagship" BBC current affairs programmes, was to orchestrate abuse of the bereaved country....
So, no - George W Bush is not hated here and in Europe because he removed a genocidal tyrant in Iraq and failed to anticipate the chaos that followed.
He is hated because he is the embodiment of everything that the United States is, and Europe is not: not just enormously powerful, militarily and economically, but brashly confident and fervently patriotic. Where Europe is steeped in historical guilt and self-loathing - so immersed in its own unforgivable past that it is trying to fashion a constitution that actually prohibits national pride - America is profoundly proud of the success of its own miraculous achievement.
What it has succeeded in doing is cracking the great dilemma of modern history: how can disparate and ethnically diverse people live together?....
The answer lies not in the post-religious, anti-clerical mania of the European Union which has just rejected a commissioner for espousing mainstream Catholic principles, but in that patriotism so despised by European elites. It is the unifying force of national self-belief with all those ridiculed school rituals - pledging allegiance to the flag, reciting the preamble to the Constitution - that makes America whole and at one with itself. Bush is the personification of that unashamed America and that is why Europe cannot bear the sight of him".
More here
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