HOW DESPERATE CAN THE LEFT GET?

Post about MSM columnist James Carroll excerpted from NewsBusters

Carroll was just clearing his throat with his obligatory Vietnam riff. The heart of his column is a condemnation of capitalism. According to Carroll, since the days of [Martin Luther] King: "economic justice . . . if anything, is even further from fulfillment."

Really? In the America of 4.5% unemployment? Where colleges fight for the privilege of awarding scholarships to minority high school students with decent grades? Where the biggest food-related problem for our poor is not hunger but obesity?

Carroll goes so far as to predict the end of capitalism:

"If the 20th century seemed a time of capitalism's ascendancy, the new century seems an era of its certain self-destruction."

Can I get another "really" on that? Capitalism certain to self-destruct? That same capitalism that is exploding in India and China, literally lifting billions out of poverty? What does Carroll posit as an alternative to capitalism? You guessed it: "socialism, compared with the possible anarchy, is benign."

But why the false choice between socialism and anarchy? Why not the real choice: between the grinding hopelessness of socialism and the freedom and opportunity of free markets?

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BBC ISRAEL-HATRED

One of the biggest stories in the Middle East is the civil disorder in Gaza. Last week on his website, the journalist Stephen Pollard reproduced an internal memo from the BBC's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, to his colleagues. It contained a passage in which Bowen explains "the way that Palestinian society, which used to draw strength from resistance to the occupation, is now fragmenting.

"The reason is the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel's military activities, land expropriation and settlement building - and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas-led Government which are destroying Palestinian institutions that were anyway flawed and fragile."

Now this is certainly one explanation of the reason why members of Fatah and Hamas are killing each other. No one can object that this argument is put before the BBC's audience. But for the BBC's Middle East editor to believe that it constitutes the sole explanation and to offer it up alone to his colleagues? Now that's a different matter.

Here are a few alternatives to Bowen's offering. Some of us argue that instead of the tough Israeli security measures causing Hamas and Fatah militants to kill people and each other, the killing of people by Hamas and Fatah militants causes the tough security measures. Hamas in particular is a dangerous, intolerant, murderous organisation that threatens the lives of innocent people and needs to be resisted.

And what about this? Fatah and Hamas are engaged in a power struggle and an ideological dispute. Fatah claims that its rivals have been plotting to assassinate President Mahmoud Abbas because the President supports the so-called Prisoners' Document. This document proposes a unified resistance to Israel, but Hamas is suspicious of the terms of such unity and believes that its vague language could mean recognition of Israel.

Or this? In a superb column last week in the Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell pointed out that are there are 67 countries in the world where 15 to 29-year-olds make up more than 30 per cent of the population and 60 of them are undergoing some sort of civil war or mass killing. Gaza has just such a youth bulge. Perhaps the violence has no political cause; it is just, well, boys being boys.

I know, I know. You may regard these alternatives as absurd, even offensive. I don't, but that's not my point. If you want to report the Middle East in an unbiased fashion, then these arguments must be put before the BBC audience. And how can they be if the Middle East editor doesn't even acknowledge them?

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Was antisemitism the catalyst for the Great Depression? There is a post here suggesting that it was the trigger, though not the total cause.



The above is of course a reference to Speaker Pelosi and the usual leftist claim to be innovators.

Reply to the pessimists: "Last week was not a good one for America's detractors. The price of oil fell to US$56 a barrel. The same financial markets that swooned in July while Israel fought Hezbollah have forgotten the meaning of risk. The question the world should ask George W Bush is, "If you so dumb, how come you ain't poor"? The US economy and US markets are looking more buoyant than ever. As I wrote last week, the whole Iraq debacle might disappear from the public's radar screen in time for America's next presidential election.... There has been an inordinate amount of nonsense written about US decline, complete with Russian and Chinese designs to benefit from America's embarrassment in Iraq. The reality could not be more different. Neither Moscow nor Beijing has the remotest desire to see the US withdraw from the region or lose power, for two reasons. The first is that America's presence in the region ensures that little wars will remain little. The second is economic. America's economy and particularly the appetite of American consumers for imports remains the locomotive of the world economy, most emphatically of China's. China's trading relationship with the United States is an irreplaceable pillar of national prosperity, and the means to generate the national savings China requires to establish what President Hu Jintao calls "the harmonious society".

Damned if you do, damned if you don't: "For years, liberals have hectored President Bush for not committing enough troops to Iraq. Now, peanut-gallery liberals pivot 180 degrees and browbeat him for proposing precisely that. Appearing May 30, 2004 on NBC's 'Meet the Press,' for instance, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi flatly and repeatedly told Tim Russert that 'we need more troops on the ground.' In fact, Speaker Pelosi suggested that we commit 300,000 troops (President Bush's current proposal would raise the level to merely 160,000)."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason -- Details here and here

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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G*OGLE DANGERS

I am very careful not to post any language on any of my sites that could fall foul of G*ogle's "wipe-off" rules. Certain content on a site causes them to erase that site from their database. And it's not just political sites that suffer. The technical site Javalobby was wiped by G*ogle recently because spammers had posted huge amounts of pornographic links in their Comments facility. When I read it, I felt rather thankful that I do not allow comments on this site. And on other sites where I do allow comments, I have maximum precautions against comment spammers.

I suspect that G*ogle don't even like criticism of themselves, so I use a strategic asterisk in their name -- hoping that might stymie the search for their own name that they undoubtedly do.

Another problem: G*ogle fosters antisemitism. If students ever use G*ogle to search for "Zionism" for a school or university project they will find that the top articles are anti-Zionist, and indeed antisemitic. Web guru Andre Oboler has tackled the problem in: Expert Search to combat antisemitism and racism. People can use this tool if they need to undertake research.

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The left's intellectual disintegration.

There used to be a time when the left proudly carried the banner of reason and science; and disdainfully viewed religion as a superstition or at best an antiquated myth. In the name of science they advanced an agenda on several fronts. In economics, central planning was described as a rational systematic alternative to the chaotic free-for-all of the market. In human relations, what was previously viewed as a moral failing was now a condition amenable to social engineering. Social science, we were assured there was such a thing, would provide the guidance and justification for the socialistic regulations required for a better world. To maintain this stance, left-wing intellectuals felt compelled to provide substantiation, evidence, and rational arguments. That time has long since past.

The facade of science is gone - reality stubbornly refused to go along. Socialism was a glaring failure that brought poverty, misery, and wholesale death. Yet, despite this, the dream remains. The left seems strangely indifferent to evidence that undermines their worldview. Communism was responsible for over 100 million deaths and the enslavement of over 1 billion more. But on the left, this hasn't hurt the popularity of communism's remaining standard-bearer: Fidel Castro.

Rational debate no longer exists among the vanguard of today's left. Exposing a flawed argument engenders few signs of discomfort. Contradictions curiously fail to perturb in the slightest the left's steadfast adherence to fixed doctrine. For example, America and Britain are singularly condemned for the sins of slavery as if it were unique to our history or a particularly egregious example. However, it was Anglo-American tradition of individual liberty which is exceptional in history, not the remnants of slavery which existed everywhere and through out history. Islam, which invented the race-based slave trade centuries before America's discovery, condemned people to slavery from Africa, India, and Europe, exceeding the British slave trade by orders of magnitude. And it was the West that led the abolitionist movement worldwide. But the left shrugs. All of this is deemed irrelevant since in absolute terms the West's history remains blemished.

Not only is evidence summarily dismissed, but what spews forth often has little relation to the subject matter. By being barraged by "rhetorical spam" the listener is overwhelmed with dubious claims in the hope that something will stick. No shame accompanies wrong, arbitrary, or ridiculous statements. This technique was ubiquitous in response to recent military actions in Iraq. For example, every major intelligence agency, including France, Germany and Russia, incorrectly believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Yet, leftists continually repeated the mantra that Bush is a liar. On top of that, they yammer about Rumsfeld meeting with Saddam, Iraqis getting bio-agents from "us", and nefarious neocon Zionist conspiracies. It becomes impossible to have an intelligent discussion under these circumstances.

Not surprisingly, civil and reasonable discussions are now the exceptions. The far left is reduced to chanting: racist imperialist war-mongering America. No they won't say they hate America - they realize you can't say that yet. But are we to believe that imperialist, racist, and war-mongering describe a country one could love? Of course not, but apparently most imagine a confession is required before you can point to the obvious conclusion.

Much more here

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ELSEWHERE

Second thoughts in Iran: "Amid the chaos of confused global weather fronts, uncommonly cold temperatures have gripped Tehran in recent weeks. This freeze provides a suitable metaphor for the rapidly cooling feelings many Iranians have towards President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Just as the Iranian capital has been shivering in the winter freeze Ahmadinejad has started to feel the unmistakable chill of public disaffection. Having become accustomed to the warmth of mass acclaim at a series of nationwide open-air rallies, the Islamist firebrand is now discovering the limits of his popularity.... voters have started to turn against a man whose political strength lay in his populist appeal. Last month, rising discontent over his government's failing economic policies led to a drubbing at the polls. In nationwide council elections, candidates supporting the president gained just 20% of the vote. Only two Ahmadinejad loyalists - including his sister Parvin - won seats on the 15-member Tehran city council, often seen as a key indicator of political trends across the country. The results coincided with a political comeback for Hashemi Rafsanjani, Ahmadinejad's most powerful rival and his defeated opponent in the 2005 presidential election. Rafsanjani, a sharp critic of the president's strident anti-Western rhetoric, topped the poll in elections to the experts' assembly, a clerical body empowered to supervise and appoint Iran's supreme leader."

When will they ever learn? "The 2006 midterm elections confirmed once again a truism of American politics: American Jews remain overwhelmingly devoted to the Democratic party. According to exit polling, the tilt this year was, if anything, even more pronounced than it has been in the past. Some 88 percent of Jewish votes went to Democratic candidates, while a mere 12 percent went to the GOP. Along with this lopsided outcome, a historical extreme, comes the news that the number of Jewish representatives in Congress has itself reached an all-time high. Although Jews represent a marginal sliver-a mere 2 percent-of the U.S. population, they now hold 13 seats in the U.S. Senate, all but two of them-Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Norm Coleman of Minnesota-Democratic. (Bernard Sanders of Vermont, elected as an independent, has pledged to vote with the Democratic caucus.) In the House of Representatives, Jews, all but one of them Democrats, now occupy 30 seats."

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts on his usual themes of race, IQ and political correctness -- with particular emphasis on the British scene.

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason -- Details here and here

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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LEADING MUSLIM SAYS LIBERALISM IS THE ENEMY

Excerpt below from Riehl World followed by an extended extract of the speech concerned. The translation is in rather mangled English but you should get the idea:

Reports are surfacing that Hassan Abbasi is one of the Iranians recently arrested in Iraq. See Gateway Pundit, the Jawa Report and American Thinker for links and news.

Hassan Abbasi known by his friends as "The Dr. Kissinger of Islam," is the guru of the Islamic Republic's revolutionary guard corps which puts volunteers and recruits through rigorous training in four camps funded and run by the Revolutionary Guard.

This is said to be a translation of a speech by Abbasi, also available in pdf. It's a must read for Liberals, as Abbasi explains that the real enemy of the jihadists is Western Liberalism. So if you know any Liberals who can read and might actually understand it for those few seconds each day when they aren't hating on President Bush ... pass the link on.

The Speech:

The Anglo-Saxons, the English, the Americans, the Australians and the Canadians have a doctrine. Every nation's proverbs are its doctrine. This doctrine is convulsively dirty. They say if they tried to invade you, and you felt you can not resist, greet it, so that you can enjoy it!!!!

You be surprised, the basis of the knowledge of the international relations in the circle of Anglo-Saxons is this filthy English reportage and sayings!!! They instill this to nations that when you are being invaded, you know you can't resist, so therefore, greet it, so that you can enjoy it. Today the mechanism of invasion and attack on nations and people has four key topics:

The first key topic is: Human rights.
The second key topic is: Liberalism. They have translated it into freedom.
The third key topic is democracy and acceptance of people's vote.
And the fourth key topic is Civil Society.

They invade countries with these four key slogans. You need to pay attention when they(Iraqis) attacked Iran, there was nothing to fool our people to itself. The background of the invasion had no accepting premise, therefore our youths went, stood up, resisted and threw out the enemy. There is not a single span of our homeland in the hand of the enemy now.

But why is the groundwork for the West invasion has been accepted in the Islamic world now? Because many of the Islamic countries' leaders are screaming the same four mottos that are groundwork for invasion. There is no basic difference between the democracy which America talks about and those that our leaders speak of. There is no difference between the civil society that Jacque Chirac talks about than those that the Islamic leaders speak of. There is no difference in liberalism and freedom loving of what they say and what is happening in our homeland.

You guys have the free trade zones in this country. The free trade zone means the base of operations for liberal democracy!!! There is a marked difference between what our leaders say and what they do. You saw our great supreme leader, in the past three days, attacked liberal democracy three times!!! And that shows, no one, has belief in what he is saying!! The free trade zone, the free economic zones, that are being opened one day after another in our country, these are the main bastions of liberalism!!! One who has the smallest economic knowledge has to know that the innate nature of these free zones is liberalism!!! In regard to these free trade zones, it looks like what ever our leaders say, the rest do whatever they please!!! Why acceptance of the enemy's attack plan has become a normalcy? Because our President talks of civil society!!! And civil society is exactly that same excuse that the west has come here for!!! And it says we have come to bring reforms to everyone. Reforms in the Greater Middle-East.

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ELSEWHERE

Why Europe is only good for talk: "Defense budgets in Europe are dropping. The US defense budget is larger than the next 20 largest defense budgets in the world combined. The European solution is to solve problems multilaterally, and not by military means. Why? If a military solution is required, then Europe must follow the American lead and be in America's shadow. This is a dignity issue. If international problems are addressed multilaterally, then Europe has 27 EU nations, and in international forums like the UN, Europe has more than 30 votes, and the US just one."



Saddam Half Brother, Ex-Official Hanged: "Saddam Hussein's half brother [above] and the former head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court were both hanged before dawn Monday, Prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon said, two weeks and two days after the former Iraqi dictator was executed... Barzan Ibrahim, Saddam's half brother and former intelligence chief, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court, had been found guilty along with Saddam in the killing of 148 Shiite Muslims after a 1982 assassination attempt on the former leader in the town of Dujail north of Baghdad. "They (the government) called us before dawn and told us to send someone. I sent a judge to witness the execution and it happened," al-Faroon said. The executions reportedly occurred in the same Saddam-era military intelligence headquarters building in north Baghdad where the former leader was hanged two days before the end of 2006"

A Christian Exodus from the Arab World: "Violence, terrorism and the Islamists' growing influence pose a threat to Christianity in the Middle East. In some countries, members of an unpopular Christian minority are already fighting for their survival -- or fleeing for their lives. In New Baghdad, the driver of a minibus, a Shiite named Ali, set out at 7 a.m. on the last Sunday before Christmas. A few hours earlier he had received a call on his mobile phone with instructions to pick up five passengers for a long trip outside the city... The five young men traveling in Ali's red Kia were the last seminary students at the Chaldean Catholic Babel College to leave Baghdad. Four priests have been abducted since mid-August, and two others were murdered. Father Sami, the director of the seminary, was kidnapped in early December. The community managed to raise $75,000 to buy his freedom, but after hesitating for weeks, Emmanuel III, the Chaldean patriarch, decided to withdraw the teaching institutions of his community from Baghdad. He ordered the evacuation of the city's four Catholic churches, the Hurmis monastery and the college in the city's Dura neighborhood, but chose to remain behind in the city as the lonely shepherd of a rapidly shrinking congregation."

A Democrat "Watergate" the MSM mostly ignore: "The more we learn about Sandy Berger's brilliant career as a document thief, the clearer it becomes that there is plenty we still don't know and may never learn. On Tuesday, the House Government Reform Committee released its report on Mr. Berger's pilfering of classified documents from the National Archives. The committee's 60-page report makes it clear that Mr. Berger knew exactly what he was doing and knew that what he was doing was wrong. According to interviews with National Archives staff, Mr. Berger repeatedly arranged to be left alone with highly classified documents by feigning the need to make personal phone calls, and he used those moments alone with the files to stuff them in his pockets and briefcase. One incident is particularly suggestive. By his fourth and final visit to review documents and prepare for testimony before the 9/11 Commission, the Archives staff had grown suspicious of how Mr. Berger was handling the documents, so they numbered each one he was given in pencil on the back of the document. When one of them--No. 217--was apparently removed from the files by Mr. Berger, the staff reprinted a copy and replaced it for his review. According to the report, Mr. Berger then proceeded to slip the second copy "under his portfolio also." In other words, he stole the same document twice."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason -- Details here and here

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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THE ESSENCE OF LEFTISM

Excerpt from Sam Wells

America is in the midst of a giant ideological war between the Left and the Right, and it has been for some time. What is the fundamental nature of that conflict? It is a battle of ideas - very different ideas and strongly opposing ideas. What, then, are the fundamental differences in the main ideas in this war we are in between the "Left" and the "Right" in the United States of America today?

On the most fundamental level and very broadly we say that it is the conflict between collectivism versus individualism -- but that is pretty abstract. What specifically does it mean in terms of differences between overall policy prescriptions and political platforms and actual enacted programs? What is the essence of the agenda of the Left as opposed to that of the Right?

The fundamental essence of political leftism is not merely its snarling antipathy to "big business" or corporations or the idea of a market economy in general, or even its abiding contempt for and resentment against "bourgeois values " (thrift, honesty, work ethic, punctuality, a desire to make a better life for oneself and ones family, etc.). The essence of political leftism is in its opposition to the concept and institution of private ownership of property. To the extent that someone disrespects private property rights - either personally or through the political policies he advocates - to that extent he is a left-winger. Likewise, to the extent that a person consistently upholds and respects the private property rights of others, to that extent he is a "right winger" (in America).

As Ayn Rand reminded us, without property rights, no other rights are possible. Without private property boundaries, both in our persons and in our external possessions and in land, commercial trade or voluntary relationships in general could not function. An advanced culture based on contract and choice -- rather than feudal birth status or socialist top-down commands - could not exist.

Freedom and free markets presuppose and depend on the security of private property rights. Only when property boundaries are clearly defined and property rights are secured from coercive violation, either by criminals or by arbitrary government intervention, can incentives for long-term private planning develop, calculated risks undertaken, opportunities made available, and a sophisticated capitalist economy emerge and flourish....

The Left often postures as being in favor of "tolerance" - but only in such superficial matters as skin color, not in the realm of ideas. The Left's long-time and continuing ideological monopoly in America's universities seethes with anti-conservative and anti-libertarian bigotry and intolerance much uglier and much more unrelenting than the personal prejudice of any stereotyped Southern racist.

Leftists also claim they are for freedom - but it is not the freedom from coercive interference with peaceful adults for which libertarians stand. No. The leftists clamor for freedom from want, freedom from deprivation, freedom from poverty, freedom from being disadvantaged, freedom from discrimination, freedom from having one's feelings hurt, freedom from the real world, and other such bogus "freedoms" which, if they can be achieved at all, come only at the forced expense of productive peaceful adult citizens....

The attack on America, on rational moral values, and on individual freedom comes almost entirely from the Left in this country - from the limousine "liberal" leftists who live in San Francisco and Marin counties to the hard-left socialists who have dominated the Democrat Party since 1972, and the semi-literate America-hating Hollywood leftists who have contempt for even the middle-class audiences they entertain on TV and the silver screen.

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"Left Fascists" are fascists too...

The Fascists of history were ALL Leftists but so deeply ingrained is the opposite myth that stressing the similarity of the modern day Left to the Fascists of history may require a new phrase in order to get much attention. Post below from The American Thinker

J.R. Dunn points out today that leftists cannot be fascists, at least according to leftists. That's nonsense, of course, and it deprives political taxonomy of a perfectly useful term created by the Left itself, i.e., "left fascist". I think the phrase was first applied by Trotskyites for Stalinists, or possibly the other way around. It doesn't matter. The UK Telegraph uses "left fascist" to describe the (racist) British National Party. It also makes a useful retort to bizarros like the New York Times writer who just wrote ,

"Of course there are Christian fascists..."

That sounds a lot weirder to me than Left fascists. I'm not aware, for example, of the last time Christians ran concentration camps, tortured people, and murdered one hundred million of them, as the Left did in the last hundred years. So "Left fascism" fits the bill, all right.

The Left conveniently forgets that real fascists, like the Nazis and Mussolini type, had the same passionate hatred for traditional religion that the Left harbors. Some coincidence!

We should use "left fascist" as an intellectually accurate term, not just another way of shouting "You mother wears combat boots!" "Left fascism" should be a standard part of our vocabulary, because it's so obviously accurate in real life. It was the Left fascists who drove Larry Summers out of the presidency of Harvard University, because he uttered an Incorrect Thought. Thought crimes are typically fascist devices to control human beings.

As George Orwell had it, our first responsibility in a time of lies is to tell the truth. "Left fascist" nails it. We cannot let the Left define the terms, and in this case it's the Left that came up with it! So they can't disown it.

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ELSEWHERE

A good sarcastic comment: "Barbara Boxer's `Freudian Slip' is telling. First, she accused Condaleeza Rice as being a flawed decision maker. Then Ms Boxer insinuated that because she has no children, Condaleeza Rice cannot be as empathetic or sympathetic to those Americans who might lose a loved one. Of course, that would mean Ms Boxer could possibly understand the evil or significance of racism, because she isn't black and thus her positions on race cannot be taken seriously. Ms Boxer can opine on with some credibility on the matter of corruption. Among other things, she funneled $115,000 to Douglas Boxer & Associates, from a PAC for Change, her leadership political action committee. Douglas Boxer calls the Senator, `Mommy.`"

Vietnamizing Iraq: "On Monday I asked, "How many people will the peace movement kill this time?" and pointed out the last time America deserted a a battlefield, millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians died in the wake. It was a victory for tyranny that should bring shame to those senators and congressmen who were responsible. Instead they puff their chests and a few of them want to do the same thing in Iraq."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason -- Details here and here

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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EUROPEAN ARROGANCE AGAIN

An excerpt from THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Anyone who watched Saddam Hussein being led to the gallows without any knowledge of who he was would have concluded that a dignified, decent, and upright man was being informally executed by a gang of criminals. After all, it was he, not they, who showed his face to the world; he, not they, who refused to disguise himself.

And the revelation that he was taunted by his gaolers immediately before his execution, and not allowed to sleep the previous night, has rendered his execution less than optimal, from the public-relations point of view. Anything he might have suffered as a result of mistreatment was, of course, trivial by comparison with the suffering he inflicted on thousands, perhaps millions, of others; but a sense of proportion in moral outrage has never been among the Middle East's great cultural virtues.

The same, alas, is now true of Europe, or of the European official class and its tame intelligentsia. Everyone was agreed, of course, that Saddam was a very bad thing, a dictator who used every method of political persuasion from torture to a bullet in the neck and poison gas. But very few missed the opportunity to express an unctuous self-righteousness about the death penalty.

The editorial of Le Monde on the day following, for example, was entitled "No to the Death Penalty," and said that while President Bush may have claimed that the execution was a step on the path to democracy, "our," that is to say the French and superior, concept of democracy was different. The British foreign secretary and Irish foreign minister took the opportunity to express British and Irish opposition to the death penalty; the position of the Italian prime minister was even stronger (or weaker, depending on how you look at it); the Vatican also took the opportunity to express its opposition to the death penalty; and the European commissioner for foreign aid, M. Louis Michel, former foreign minister of that land of irreproachable integrity, Belgium, said, "You don't fight barbarism with acts that I deem as barbaric. The death penalty is not compatible with democracy."

In general, Europeans of the official class spoke as if the death penalty had been abolished in Europe in about 479 b.c., when it was abolished in Britain in 1965 and in France in 1981, not exactly historical epochs ago, even in the baby-boomers' truncated historical perspective. Whatever the practical political consequences of the execution of Saddam, which are inherently uncertain, the fact is that the European leaders are so entirely, parochially, and narrow-mindedly enclosed within their own worldview that they are now unable to conceive of any opinion but their own.

The egregious M. Michel seems to be implying that the two largest and most important democracies in the world, the U.S.A. and India, cannot actually be democracies at all because they have the death penalty. He also seems to be saying that New Zealand, Britain, Australia, Canada, and France were not democracies until 1961, 1965, 1973, 1976, and 1981, an odd reading of history, to say the least. Such is the ignorant arrogance of the great ones of Europe, who must have been confirmed in their decision not to allow any kind of democratic intervention in their deliberations by learning that in fact a clear majority of Europeans believed that Saddam ought to have been executed. If that is what people think, they clearly ought to be abolished.

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ELSEWHERE

Democrat America-hatred: "One thing that has become painfully clear in the new Congress' opening hours is that the mainstream of the Democratic Party is desperate for the Iraq war effort to fail. For those who have monitored liberalism's inner demons the past few years, this is no surprise. Every American setback has been gleefully greeted as a portentous sign of imminent disaster. Actually, every event whether a setback or not has been gleefully greeted as a portentous sign of imminent disaster. So, too, has every non-event."

Is Britain run by a deaf man? "Tony Blair has pledged to investigate the care of discharged soldiers after being challenged by a veteran of the Iraq conflict. During a televised exchange last night the Prime Minister apologised to Justin Smith after hearing that he had been left homeless and paying for medical care after two tours in Iraq. Mr Smith was discharged from the Army after suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In the discussion, broadcast from the Royal Marines Training Centre in Lympstone, Devon, he told Mr Blair: "I have lost my house, my security, my self-belief." He had struggled to find temporary accommodation in Cornwall to be with his wife and had had to pay for some of his medical treatment. Mr Blair initially said that he could not believe that this was typical. But when members of the Royal British Legion insisted that it was, he said he would investigate." [Blair must be the only one who did not know of this problem. "The Times" and other newspapers have been highlighting it for months, if not years]

The minimum wage kills jobs in Samoa only??: "As part of their first 100 hours plan, Democrats are pushing a hike in the minimum wage. It's going to happen, with several Republicans and even President Bush prepared to go along with it. But did you know that American Samoa...a Democrat stronghold...is being exempted from the minimum wage increase?... The average wage for tuna workers in American Samoa is $3.60 an hour. One of the biggest employers there is Starkist Tuna...which is headquartered in San Francisco...Nancy Pelosi land. Anybody care to take a closer look at the campaign contributions of Democrats in the last election? One thing is for sure, the delegate from American Samoa, a Democrat, is loaded down with campaign cash from the tuna industry. So there you have it...a double standard. On the one hand, we're told you can't raise a family on $5.15 an hour and the minimum wage must be raised to $7.25 an hour. But for the right price in campaign contributions, the tuna industry in American Samoa can avoid the minimum wage altogether...they just have to stuff the pockets of the right Democrats. Where is the media on this one?"

More proof that Leftists really believe in nothing -- not even feminism: "Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is being criticized by members of the black leadership network Project 21 for implying that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice lacks a proper perspective on the War on Terror in Iraq because she does not have children. "Barbara Boxer is a feminist who is attacking the feminist dream," said Project 21 member Kevin Martin. "But Condoleezza Rice's achievements are disqualified because she is a black conservative, and her rise was not blessed by the liberal establishment. Former attorney general Janet Reno was also unmarried and childless, but I don't remember insulting questioning like this regarding her handling of Elian Gonzalez or the deadly raid on the Branch Davidian cult."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason -- Details here and here

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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THE NON-WATERGATE

Something's a scandal only if the newspapers make it one. On the matter below they have averted their eyes. The NY Sun (excerpt below) is the one paper to have mentioned the matter -- although the blogosphere has known of it for years

That was quite a scoop yesterday by our Josh Gerstein in respect of how the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in its investigations of leaks of our national secrets, has been stonewalled by none other than agencies of America's own government. The disclosures on which Mr. Gerstein reports came in response to litigation Mr. Gerstein filed under the Freedom of Information Act. He obtained FBI documents indicating that our intelligence agencies have been "uncooperative" in investigating leaks. The FBI documents refer to unreturned phone calls, cancelled meetings that weren't rescheduled, and the concern that lawyers from the agency whose information was leaked would "stonewall." And it looks like cases were dropped rather than force government officials and agencies to cooperate with the investigation and produce evidence.....

All this underscores the likelihood that we have had agencies of the American government breaking the law to defeat a military campaign into which the American Congress, by an overwhelming vote, sent our GIs. These implications were sensed immediately by the blogosphere, where Powerlineblog.com lit up on Mr. Gerstein's story at the crack of dawn, and on the airwaves, where Rush Limbaugh devoted part of his broadcast to Mr. Gerstein's story. Said Mr. Limbaugh, "It's become more and more obvious that there is a symbiotic relationship between these agencies - we're talking about State, we're talking about the Pentagon, CIA - there's a symbiotic relationship between these agencies and the drive-by media now, and they're not going to let an election get in their way . They've got their own agendas. . If they have to destroy the policies of a particular administration, they'll do it via leaks, and then when these criminal leaks are investigated, they don't participate."

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IRAN STRIKE COMING?

Excerpt below from a comment by Australian columnist Greg Sheridan

A US military strike against Iran must now be considered formally on the international agenda, following George W. Bush’s sombre, calm, but in substance extraordinarily bold address on Iraq. Bush accused Iran of providing material assistance for attacks on US troops in Iraq. It is hard to imagine a more serious accusation. What’s more, Bush promised to stop such Iranian actions. Whatever you think of Bush, he has a very high level of credibility when it comes to carrying out any threat he makes of military action.

No matter how scornful Bush’s Western critics may be, the powerbrokers in Tehran, and tosome degree in Damascus (forhe also called out Syria), aretoday contemplating the President’s words with sombre apprehension.

In a broader sense, Bush’s speech was aimed at all of America’s enemies and potential enemies in the Middle East and beyond. My presidency may be wounded, he was saying, but it is not dead. Bush will not leave the initiative to the terrorists or to the US’s other enemies. As President, he still wields enormous power and he intends to use it.

This was an unusually calm and direct speech from Bush. It eschewed soaring rhetoric and grand statements. It is likely to be more effective for that. It laid out the consequences of US defeat in Iraq and said that the Bush administration simply refuses to accept defeat. It was a very Ronald Reagan speech in the way it defied every arbiter of conventional wisdom and even public opinion....

The substance of Mr Bush’s speech was encouraging, more for the change in US emphasis than for the sheer increase in troop numbers. It is moving the US much closer to a classic counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq. Such a strategy always gives its top priority to providing security for the civilian population. Amazingly, this is the first time such an objective will be the top priority for the US military in Iraq. The Bush speech represents neither the eclipse nor the triumph of the fabled neo-conservatives. Rather, it represents the liberation of American policy following the departure of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld....

America’s enemies know that democracies tend to be impatient and certainly, after all the misery of Iraq, the American electorate appears impatient. Yet it is highly unlikely that even the Democrat-controlled Congress will actually cut off funding for US troops in Iraq. It may be too late, it may be too little, but Bush has given US strategy at least a fighting chance of success.

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Brookes News Update

Kevin Rudd's economic illiteracy and his attack on Hayek: Firmly convinced of his moral and intellectual superiority Kevin Rudd slime free market economics tells us that Friedrich Hayek hated charity and lacked compassion. And this ignorant bigot wants to be Australia's Prime Minister
The audacity of apostasy: Barack Obama's Muslim links: So far the media have avoided drawing attention to Obama's Muslim past. But sooner the later the media will have to deal with this complication. If they don't - Hillary will
Augusto Pinochet: Chile's reluctant dictator: General Pinochet and his administration were possibly the most reluctant authoritarian regime in all of history. Nevertheless, the left and their corrupt supporters in the media wages a relentless campaign of vilification against the regime. These are the same people who refuse to condemn the sadistic Castro's crimes against women and children
Australian Labor Party's welfare fallacies and interventionism: Although Kevin Rudd now leads the ALP the social democratic myths that Mark Latham promoted still underpin Labor's domestic policies - particularly those relating to welfare and economics
President Bush ain't no friend of Israel's. And Olmert: With the total lack of leadership in Israel, the Islamofascist murderers have reason to celebrate. And, they already are. Fatah is now able to use the kidnapping and killings of IDF soldiers as a precedent to achieve the release of all prisoners
Managing the consequences of Iraq: It is becoming increasingly likely that some form of break-up will be the fate of the nation-state of Iraq. Such a break-up will reflect the relationships among Iraq's Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish groups, and the relationships of these groups to the central government, which in turn should have major consequences for the region.

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason -- Details here and here

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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LEFTISTS LIVING IN THE PAST

Excerpt from Richard Miniter

By the way, aren't you tired of the whole "you're-a-fascist" line? The Fascists and the Nazis are only on the right if you yourself are communist-and therefore, they are barely to the right of you on the political spectrum. To the rest of us, Fascists, Nazis and communists are different sub-species of the same murderous monster, a blood-drenched beast that believes in the power of the state and seeks to dismember or murder every individual and every group in society that refuses to bend to its will.

Those of us who believe in free speech and, its economic equivalent, free trade, limited government, tolerance, the equal freedom of the artist and the entrepreneur, the separation of church and state, and so on, are the enemies of fascists and, their ill-clothed counterparts, communists. Indeed, capitalism is the opposite of fascism, which favors government control of the every economic decision. Calling us (liberals and conservatives) "fascists" simply reveals the Left's nostaglia for truly evil enemies (like Nazis) and its current reluctance to engage in a battle of ideas. So Bush is a fascist and so is Heinlein.

I was covering a anti-globalization street demonstration in Prague in 2000 for the Wall Street Journal and noticed that the crowd was chanting loudly in Spanish. I asked a demonstrator why this pan-European crowd was reciting Spanish slogans instead of Czech. "Don't you know it?" he asked. "This is one of the great anti-Fascist chants from the Spanish Civil War." In other words, it was from the 1930s.

Even the young communists think like old men, living in a glorious past that has long since passed. This is why they still want to talk about McCarthy, Nixon, Vietnam, "the 1960s," the minimum wage, the draft, the United Nations.

Their solution for the Iraq war and the Iran A-Bomb? Get France, Britain, Russia and China to agree. In other words, get our World War II allies to join us. Hasn't the world changed in 60 years? The French and British have given away their empires and forfeited a role in global affairs. They have one aircraft carrier each. Russia is failing state that could not rescue the crew on one of their own submarines. China could play only a bit part in the tsunami relief effort and is actively involved with two members of the axis of evil (Iran and North Korea). Surely India, Japan and Turkey are more important to us now?

The Left's one relatively new concern is global warming. Yes, they have been threatening an environmental catastrophe since the late 1950s and climate change since the early 1970s, but it, nonetheless, is among their fresher concerns. Still, it is worth pointing out that worrying about the weather is principally a concern of the aged. The rest of us are too busy hurrying to work.

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ELSEWHERE



The above cartoon refers in part to this story about an actual ban on Santa hats.

Sunnis target shitheads in DETROIT: "As they repaired the broken windows of at least a dozen businesses and mosques along Warren Avenue in Detroit, many Iraqi Shi'ite Muslims wondered Monday if the vandalism was retaliation by local supporters of Saddam Hussein who resented that they celebrated the hanging of the Iraqi dictator. Sometime late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, someone vandalized at least nine businesses and three mosques, all but one Shi'ite, according to Ali Zwen, manager of the Kufa Cultural Forum, a mosque at Warren and Archdale that sustained $4,000 in damage."

New book shows U.S. involvement in the Middle East long preceded 'Israel lobby' : "In 1844, a biblical scholar and professor of Hebrew at New York University published a pamphlet urging the establishment of a Jewish state in the place then known as Palestine. The name of this early Zionist who argued for the recreation of Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel: George Bush. But the astonishing thing about this manifesto is not just that the author was a forebear of two later U.S. presidents of the same name. It was that his advocacy of a theological/political position known as "restorationism" - support for the "restoration" of the Jewish people to their historic homeland - was common in 19th century America."

Moronic "Guardian" writer: "Talking of ignorance, where would we be without Guardian columnists? My old boss, Peter Shore, the late Labour Cabinet minister used to read the Daily Express every morning just to get angry. I prefer The Guardian. Yesterday Zoe Williams informed us that "there is no precedent for a country to be diamond [or petroleum] rich and not spend the rest of its history bogged down in civil and/or external war." I suppose that she has never heard of those two obscure countries, the US and the UK".

Wacky Britain: "`The government's latest wheeze is to raise the legal age for buying cigarettes from 16 to 18. So let me see if I have this straight. You will be able legally to have sex at 16 - or younger, according to senior policemen - but the law won't allow you a postcoital cigarette until two years later. Not even if you are married"

France to cut business taxes? "French president Jacques Chirac has proposed slashing France's corporation tax rate from 33pc to 20pc to relaunch its flagging economy, a move that could leave Britain behind as the high-tax laggard in Europe. ‘We have to take action on corporation tax to save our businesses and help create new ones. The goal should be to reduce it to 20pc in five years,’ he said in his New Year speech, proposing a long-term goal of just 10pc. Mr Chirac also stepped up his attacks on the strong euro policy of the European Central Bank, calling for political intervention to force down the exchange rate. ‘Europe must take its destiny in hand,’ he said. ''It is time that it exercised its economic sovereignty by setting an exchange rate policy and a change in trade policy to take account of globalisation".

Europe wants to tax Britons: "Brussels politicians have drawn up proposals to create a European income tax which would leave Britons shelling out 510 pounds a year to the superstate. The rumbling row over the size of Britain’s rebate from Europe resurfaced as an influential committee of MEPs received recommendations for sweeping reforms to the Union’s current funding system. The Committee On Budgets is facing calls to scale back the current system in favour of a form of direct taxation when Britain’s rebate is re-negotiated in 2008.

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts on his usual themes of race, IQ and political correctness -- with particular emphasis on the British scene.

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason -- Details here

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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FOOD FADDISM DEMOLISHED FOR ONCE AND FOR ALL

Not that the food faddists will take any notice

Food faddism is important to many people because it gives them both the illusion of control and an ego boost. One of the few things they have absolute control over is what they put into their mouths so they like to think that gives them some larger control over their lives. Food faddism also gives them a feeling of wisdom and righteousness because they attribute some universal truth and validity to their fads. It makes them feel wiser than the poor sods who do not share their "enlightenment". This latter has become particularly pernicious in recent years as the faddists have increasingly been able to force their beliefs on others -- via the demonization of "obesity" -- which they (falsely) claim shortens lifespans.

So it is a timely corrective that one population which has a characteristically "unhealthy" diet has recently been shown also to be one of the longest lived! Details on FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC.

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POLITICAL SUPERSTITIONS

Excerpt from Christopher Chantrill

How do you spell superstition?  The professional atheists have been busy spelling it out lately, especially Richard Dawkins with The God Delusion and Sam Harris with The End of Faith. There is almost certainly no God, according to Dawkins.

The atheists worship a different God.  For Dawkins, it seems to be the power of Darwin's theory of natural selection.  For Sam Harris it seems to be the value of meditation and a rational ethics.  And don't think you can talk them out it.

We can thank the atheists at least for this: They are magnificently applying the principle of  "motivated skepticism" to the human God project.

Motivated skepticism?  That's the concept from the paper "Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs" by Charles S. Taber and Milton Lodge. (Hat tip to TCS Daily Arnold Kling.)

Taber and Lodge observe that we humans have lots of faith in our own ideas and plans but not in other peoples' ideas.

"Physicists do it...Psychologists do it...Even political scientists do it...Research findings confirming a hypothesis are accepted more or less at face value, but when confronted with contrary evidence, we become "motivated skeptics" ... picking apart possible flaws in the study, recoding variables, and only when all the counterarguing fails do we rethink our beliefs[.]"

To understand the power of faith we have only to look at the 100 hour legislative marathon of the newly empowered House Democrats.  They are intent upon passing an increase in the minimum wage.  But the science is in on this, and it has been for over a century.  The minimum wage puts low-skilled people out of work.  Democrats are also intent upon adding new subsidies to college students.  But the science is in on subsidies. And the science is also in on drug price controls.

Why do they do it?  Faith, that's why.  Blind faith in the power of government and their own good intentions.

When a faith has been utterly exploded by science, rational folks like you and me usually call it "superstition."

...

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ELSEWHERE

Iranian brain-drain. I wonder why? "According to the IMF more than a 150,000 of the best young minds in Iran are leaving every year."

China now battling Muslims: "China has revealed the depth of its fear of Islamic-linked violence with police disclosing that they had killed 18 terrorists and captured another 17 after a fierce battle at a secret training camp in a remote northwestern region. It was the first time that China had announced the discovery of such a camp in its territory. Officials said that they had uncovered links between the activists and international terrorist groups, hinting at connections to al-Qa'ida. The clash in the Pamir mountains on Friday was one of the deadliest for years in the restive Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region, where 8.5 million Muslims make up most of the population. One policeman was killed and a second wounded.... Liu Jianchao, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said: "There is a large amount of evidence, including evidence from this raid, that shows the movement is associated with international terrorist forces, and that it planned, organised and carried out a series of violent, terrorist activities in China."

Bungling British spooks: "The Director-General of Britain's security service MI5 told senior MPs there was no imminent terrorist threat to London or the rest of the country less than 24 hours before the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings in London, in which 56 people were killed. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller gave the assurance at a private meeting of Labour whips at the House of Commons on the morning of July 6. Last month Dame Eliza announced she was to retire in April. That announcement came weeks before details are expected to be made public of an MI5 operation in which two of the July 7 bombers were kept under surveillance but not arrested."

Australia: Huge rise in job openings after recent labour-market deregulation: "Australian total job vacancies in the three months to November rose 5.9 per cent, seasonally adjusted, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Job vacancies rose 21.4 per cent over the year to November. Seasonally adjusted job vacancies totalled 163,700 in the three months to November compared with an upwardly revised 154,600 in the previous quarter.

More Jimmy Carter deceit: "I became embroiled in a controversy with former President Jimmy Carter over the use of two maps in his recent book, "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid." While some criticized what appeared to be the misappropriation of maps I had commissioned for my book, "The Missing Peace," my concern was always different.... In his book, Mr. Carter juxtaposes two maps labeled the "Palestinian Interpretation of Clinton's Proposal 2000" and "Israeli Interpretation of Clinton's Proposal 2000." The problem is that the "Palestinian interpretation" is actually taken from an Israeli map presented during the Camp David summit meeting in July 2000, while the "Israeli interpretation" is an approximation of what President Clinton subsequently proposed in December of that year. Without knowing this, the reader is left to conclude that the Clinton proposals must have been so ambiguous and unfair that Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was justified in rejecting them. But that is simply untrue."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

****************************

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: A FLAWED FIGURE

There is a neocon eulogy of the recently deceased Prof. Seymour Martin Lipset here. Despite the usual adjuration de mortuis nil nisi bonum, I feel that I should say a few words to set the record straight. Lipset was a very popular sociologist and political scientist but that which is popularly believed often turns out to be wrong in the long run and I believe that the positive view of Lipset's contribution is formed by his Leftist origins rather than by the lasting value of his ideas. He started out as a Trotskyite, as did the neocons.

I should perhaps declare a personal interest before going on. Despite the effusions about Lipset's good character, my own encounter with him was unimpressive, to say the least. He agreed to mark my Ph.D. dissertation and then not only failed to do so after many reminders but also failed to return his copy of the dissertation when requested to do so. This created such delays that my Ph.D. was not awarded until 1974, even though the dissertation was handed in in 1970. And why did he behave so badly? I guess it wouldn't be because the dissertation reported research results which undermined ideas that he was identified with, would it? Rather than use new data to develop his views -- as a real scientist would -- he resorted to the old Leftist strategy of denial, just as other Leftists for decades denied the evils of the Soviet State.

The central findings of the large and international program of resarch that I undertook to test a popular Lipset idea -- that working-class people are "authoritaraian" -- were finally published in Sociology and Social Research in 1983. Lipset had used selected public opinion poll data to test his ideas but I used much more closely targeted psychometric methods. I found that there was some tendency for the workers to be conservative on some social issues but NO evidence of them being "authoritarian". See here

Lipset's idea that America was saved from its "bad side" by great men is a typical example of selective Leftist attention to group differences. Leftists will trumpet how blacks have been damaged by slavery or how homosexuals need to be protected from discrimination but acknowledging that another group -- Americans of British and Northern European origin -- have particular strengths and virtues is absolutely taboo.

One only has to look at one of the "great" men that Lipset believed "saved" America -- Frankin Delano Roosevelt, the Fascist sympathizer who turned a normal cyclic depression into the Great Depression by his attacks on business and then delivered whole nations into the hands of the Soviets at Yalta. For some of the less-publicized facts about FDR see here and here and here. The truth of the matter is that America's prosperity and pre-eminence is the product of many millions of decent and hard-working individuals. To be even more precise, the success of America comes from the respect for the individual and for the rule of law which America's immigrants from Britain and Northern Europe brought with them and which they enshrined in America's way of life and institutions. But it is "racist" to say that, of course.

And Lipset's saying that "The United States is the only Protestant sectarian country in the world" is also absurd. "Sectarian" implies severe intolerance and discrimination towards people holding to other belief systems. In fact, America would have to be one of the countries with greatest freedom of religion. It is even safe to be a real conservative in America -- though not in American universities, of course.

I could go on to say more about Lipset's twisted ideas but I have no taste for cleaning out Augean stables.

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AN INTERESTING DEMOGRAPHIC HYPOTHESIS

Gangland slayings in the Palestinian territories this week have pitted the Islamist gunmen of Hamas against the secular forces of Fatah. The killings defy civilised norms: in December even children were targeted for murder. But the killings also defy political common sense. Ariel Sharon's wall cuts terrorists off from Israeli targets and what happens? The violence - previously justified with the cause of a Palestinian homeland - continues as if nothing had changed, merely finding its outlet in a new set of targets. This makes it appear that Palestinian violence has never really been about a "cause" at all. The violence is, in a strange way, about itself.

Gunnar Heinsohn, a social scientist and genocide researcher at the University of Bremen, has an explanation for why this might be so. Since its publication in 2003, his eccentric and eye-opening Sons and World Power* (not available in English) has become something of a cult book. In Mr Heinsohn's view, when 15 to 29-year-olds make up more than 30 per cent of the population, violence tends to happen; when large percentages are under 15, violence is often imminent. The "causes" in the name of which that violence is committed can be immaterial. There are 67 countries in the world with such "youth bulges" now and 60 of them are undergoing some kind of civil war or mass killing.

Between 1988 and 2002, 900m sons were born to mothers in the developing world and a careful demographer could almost predict the trouble spots. In the decade leading up to 1993, on the eve of the Taliban takeover, the population of Afghanistan grew from 14m to 22m. By the end of this generation, Afghanistan will have as many people under 20 as France and Germany combined. Iraq had 5m people in 1950 but has 25m now, in spite of a quarter-century of wars. Since 1967, the population of the West Bank and Gaza has grown from 450,000 to 3.3m, 47 per cent of which is under 15. If Mr Heinsohn is right, then Palestinian violence of recent months and years is not explained by Israeli occupation (which, after all, existed 30 years ago) or poverty (the most violent parts of the Muslim world are not the poorest) or humiliation. It is just violence.

Mr Heinsohn's point is not that the West is "outnumbered". Nor is it that a Malthusian battle for scarce resources is under way. In El Salvador, for instance, the explosion of political killing in the 1970s and 1980s was preceded by a 27 per cent rise in per capita income. The problem, rather, is that in a youth-bulge society there are not enough positions to provide all these young men with prestige and standing. Envy against older, inheriting brothers is unleashed. So is ambition. Military heroism presents itself as a time-honoured way for a second or third son to wrest a position of respectability from an otherwise indifferent society. Societies with a glut of young men become temperamentally different from "singleton societies" such as Europe's, where the prospect of sending an only child to war is almost unthinkable. Europe's pacifism since 1945, in Mr Heinsohn's view, reflects an inability to wage war, not a disinclination.

Mr Heinsohn's theory accounts for the way "idealistic" wars of national liberation can shift imperceptibly into "pointless" civil wars - as in Ireland 90 years ago or in Africa after decolonisation or in Latin America in the 1980s or in Palestine in recent months. In a broader historical perspective, it explains how a half-dozen fast-growing European countries gradually seized control of almost the entire known world after 1485 and why the fast-growing North American colonies revolted in the 1770s, using as a pretext their "rather silly outrage over taxation without parliamentary representation in London".

If you follow this argument to its logical end point, then the religion of Islam, the focus of so much contemporary strategic discussion, is a great red herring. Islamic countries are certainly growing in importance. They will make up a quarter of the world a decade from now. Of the 27 biggest youth-bulge nations, 13 are Muslim. But if there is a clash between civilisations, it is not a civilisational clash. Religion can be a convenient rationalisation for violent people who do not want to think of themselves as conventional criminals, but this problem is not unique to Islam. In the New World 500 years ago, Mr Heinsohn notes, Spanish conquistadores, too, bowed down and prayed before carrying out slaughters.

In an interview with the Neue Zuercher Zeitung last autumn, Mr Heinsohn noted that if Germany had had the same kind of population growth as Gaza (9 children per woman) over recent decades, it would now have 550m people and 80m young men aged 15 to 30. "Do you think these 80m young Germans would be 10 times as pacifist as the 7m we have today?" he asked. "Or is it not much more likely that they would be throwing bombs in Prague and Gdansk and Wroclaw and - just like the Palestinians - saying: 'This is our land, and it was taken from us for historical reasons that we had nothing to do with'?"

Such a demographic perspective on the global unrest gives us grounds for optimism: In a few decades, the era of youth-bulge wars could be over. It is the meantime that poses problems. Should the west just wait for this wave to burn itself out? When the world is at peace, will it have been better to have kept our nose out of other people's business? Will it have been better to say we at least tried to steer the developing world through this crisis in a humane way? Iraq and Palestine are not the only places where these questions ought to be approached with a good deal of intellectual modesty.

Source

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

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