Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?

Excerpt below from  Robert Nozick, considered by some to have been the foremost libertarian intellectual.  I have some coments at the foot of the excerpt

It is surprising that intellectuals oppose capitalism so. Other groups of comparable socio-economic status do not show the same degree of opposition in the same proportions. Statistically, then, intellectuals are an anomaly.

Not all intellectuals are on the “left.” Like other groups, their opinions are spread along a curve. But in their case, the curve is shifted and skewed to the political left.

By intellectuals, I do not mean all people of intelligence or of a certain level of education, but those who, in their vocation, deal with ideas as expressed in words, shaping the word flow others receive. These wordsmiths include poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, and many professors.

Wordsmith intellectuals fare well in capitalist society; there they have great freedom to formulate, encounter, and propagate new ideas, to read and discuss them. Their occupational skills are in demand, their income much above average. Why then do they disproportionately oppose capitalism? Indeed, some data suggest that the more prosperous and successful the intellectual, the more likely he is to oppose capitalism. This opposition to capitalism is mainly “from the left” but not solely so. Yeats, Eliot, and Pound opposed market society from the right.

Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution “to each according to his merit or value.” Apart from the gifts, inheritances, and gambling winnings that occur in a free society, the market distributes to those who satisfy the perceived market-expressed demands of others, and how much it so distributes depends on how much is demanded and how great the alternative supply is. Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus.

The Schooling of Intellectuals

What factor produced feelings of superior value on the part of intellectuals? I want to focus on one institution in particular: schools. As book knowledge became increasingly important, schooling—the education together in classes of young people in reading and book knowledge—spread. Schools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher’s favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better.

The schools, too, exhibited and thereby taught the principle of reward in accordance with (intellectual) merit. To the intellectually meritorious went the praise, the teacher’s smiles, and the highest grades. In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.

The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority “entitled” them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?

In saying that intellectuals feel entitled to the highest rewards the general society can offer (wealth, status, etc.), I do not mean that intellectuals hold these rewards to be the highest goods. Perhaps they value more the intrinsic rewards of intellectual activity or the esteem of the ages. Nevertheless, they also feel entitled to the highest appreciation from the general society, to the most and best it has to offer, paltry though that may be. I don’t mean to emphasize especially the rewards that find their way into the intellectuals’ pockets or even reach them personally. Identifying themselves as intellectuals, they can resent the fact that intellectual activity is not most highly valued and rewarded.

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school’s hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals. Rather, it produces anti-capitalist feeling among verbal intellectuals. Why do the numbersmiths not develop the same attitudes as these wordsmiths? I conjecture that these quantitatively bright children, although they get good grades on the relevant examinations, do not receive the same face-to-face attention and approval from the teachers as do the verbally bright children. It is the verbal skills that bring these personal rewards from the teacher, and apparently it is these rewards that especially shape the sense of entitlement.

Central Planning in the Classroom

There is a further point to be added. The (future) wordsmith intellectuals are successful within the formal, official social system of the schools, wherein the relevant rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. The schools contain another informal social system within classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards, wherein rewards are distributed not by central direction but spontaneously at the pleasure and whim of schoolmates. Here the intellectuals do less well.

It is not surprising, therefore, that distribution of goods and rewards via a centrally organized distributional mechanism later strikes intellectuals as more appropriate than the “anarchy and chaos” of the marketplace. For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway.

This unintended consequence of the school system, the anti-capitalist animus of intellectuals, is, of course, reinforced when pupils read or are taught by intellectuals who present those very anti-capitalist attitudes.

Stated as a general point, it is hardly contestable that the norms within schools will affect the normative beliefs of people after they leave the schools. The schools, after all, are the major non-familial society that children learn to operate in, and hence schooling constitutes their preparation for the larger non-familial society. It is not surprising that those successful by the norms of a school system should resent a society, adhering to different norms, which does not grant them the same success. Nor, when those are the very ones who go on to shape a society’s self-image, its evaluation of itself, is it surprising when the society’s verbally responsive portion turns against it. If you were designing a society, you would not seek to design it so that the wordsmiths, with all their influence, were schooled into animus against the norms of the society.

More HERE

I have put up this essay from 1998 because I think Nozick is describing and explaining a problem that is still a big one for conservatives. If all the big talkers are against us, how do we get our points across? I have myself previously looked at the problem here and my conclusions are similar. It may help to neutralize Leftist intellectuals if we repeatedly accuse them of being mean souls motivated by jealousy

A small personal note:  I have exactly the background that should make me a Leftist intellectual -- doing well at school etc.  So how come I did not become one?  An important fact, I think, is that I am totally devoid of envy.  I am PLEASED to see other people doing well.  I don't get burnt up by it

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Terrorism is the symptom, ideology the disease

By John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the United Nations

THE DEMOCRATIC and Republican presidential primary campaigns are now approaching the ultimate reality: voters actually voting. Given the priority of international terrorism in their minds, this is a critical opportunity to test whether the candidates truly understand the threat of radical Islam.

The central question for US policy makers is how the terrorists (and their state sponsors and other accomplices) see us, and how we should see them. Too often, especially among Democrats but also for some Republicans, there is serious confusion about radical Islam’s true ramifications, thereby blinding us to the magnitude of its danger. Even worse, our misperceptions tie our hands in developing ways to protect innocent civilians at home, and our interests and allies abroad.

Although communism and radical Islam differ in countless ways, they share one critical element: they are ideologies driven by an obsession to force the real world to match their preconceptions, whether of class conflict or superior religious belief. Terrorist attacks are simply manifestations of the ideology, the symptoms of the threat, not the threat itself. Accordingly, US policies that ignore the ideological driving force will fail, because they are not addressing the real menace.

In his classic work, “Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin,’’ George Kennan observed, “Many people in the Western governments came to hate the Soviet leaders for what they did. The Communists, on the other hand, hated the Western governments for what they were, regardless of what they did.” Even considering the profound differences between communism and Islamism, Kennan’s insight is a lodestar for would-be presidents.

In the West, there is nearly universal revulsion at the bestiality of Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, and Hezbollah, and their mass murdering of innocent civilians, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. But their barbarism extends beyond slaughtering noncombatants. It also includes forced marriages, selling women and children into slavery, medieval punishments for alleged heresy and apostasy, and beguiling and then brainwashing the unwary. As heinous as these acts are, however, they are not isolated aberrations. They are symptoms of the underlying radical-Islam disease itself, and it is that disease which should be our principal target.

Similarly, terrorist propaganda against the West is filled with hatred for specific targets: Mohammed cartoons and videos, the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, women’s education, and more, all of which supposedly offend the radicals’ tender sensibilities. “Offensive” though these examples may be, they are merely pretexts. If they were eliminated, there would be others: the presence of US forces in Muslim lands (even when protecting Muslims from terror and oppression), for example.

Those who neither recognize nor understand the terrorist ideology react to the radical Islamists at the capillary level, and their perception of how the West should respond also reflects an instinct for the capillary. Like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, they believe that if we only stopped referring to “Islamic terrorism,” if we only closed Gitmo, or stopped making offensive cartoons and videos, the terrorist threat would recede.

This approach is pure fantasy. Our actions did not cause radical Islamists to hate us. Western efforts at appeasement will not induce more “moderate” policies from them.

We cannot remain crouched in the fetal position, hoping not to offend anyone, or respond to terrorism’s global reality only after we are attacked. We could make innumerable “reforms” to Western behavior that the radicals deem offensive, but it would not alter their ideology. If anything, it would only convince them that many in the West have lost faith in their basic values and philosophy of freedom. Our efforts at appeasement, in this uncomfortably accurate light, are simply evidence of the underlying decay of Western culture itself.

Similarly, ad hoc law-enforcement responses to individual terrorist acts are insufficient. There are simply too many aspiring San Bernardino shooters; too many Tsarnaev brothers; too many Major Nidal Hasans; too many Boko Harams; too many terrorists in Benghazi, the Islamic State, and Afghanistan. Even legitimate law-enforcement surveillance efforts, themselves under assault, will never suffice to protect the United States and our allies against an army of hostile, ideological terrorists.

Refusing to acknowledge that we face an ideologically motivated foe is not a grand strategy. It has already failed for almost 30 years, even as the radical ideology fueling terrorism has spread, gaining countless new adherents. In the war we are in, not of our choosing but because we are being attacked, the only long-term strategy is to destroy the enemy, not try to appease it. That is what the voter should be demanding to hear from the presidential candidates. For as Winston Churchill said, confronting the Nazi ideology, “without victory, there is no survival.”

SOURCE

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Obama Announces Radical Executive Order on immigrants‏

The President has just announced a new executive order to rewrite immigration law and bring even more foreigners here to compete with Americans for jobs. Not only that, but it will save immigrants slated for deportation and give them work permits as well.

The new executive action is going to explode the number of work permits and green cards given to foreign aliens. It will allow hundreds of thousands of foreigners to come here with little-to-no questions asked!

Here is the regulation that was added to the Federal Register today. It is 181 pages long. It will open the floodgates and automatically grant work permits to foreign college graduates. Not only that, but it will spare immigrants already ordered to be deported.

It is hard enough for Americans to find jobs. Now, with the stroke of a pen, Obama is making American workers compete with hundreds of thousands of skilled foreigners.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Good Riddance To 2015, The Year Of The Big Lie>/b>

Thomas Sowell

How shall we remember 2015? Or shall we try to forget it? It is always hard to know when a turning point has been reached, and usually it is long afterwards before we recognize it. However, if 2015 has been a turning point, it may well have marked a turn in a downward direction for America and for Western civilization.

This was the year when we essentially let the world know that we were giving up any effort to try to stop Iran — the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism — from getting a nuclear bomb. Surely it does not take much imagination to foresee what lies at the end of that road.

It will not matter if we have more nuclear bombs than they have, if they are willing to die and we are not. That can determine who surrenders. And ISIS and other terrorists have given us grisly demonstrations of what surrender would mean.

Putting aside, for the moment, the fateful question of whether 2015 is a turning point, what do we see when we look back instead of looking forward? What characterizes the year that is now ending?

More than anything else, 2015 has been the year of the big lie. There have been lies in other years, and some of them pretty big. But even so, 2015 has set new highs — or new lows.

This is the year when we learned, from her own e-mails, after three long years of stalling, stonewalling and evasions, that Secretary of State Clinton lied, and so did President Barack Obama and others under him, when they all told us in 2012 that the terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans was not a terrorist attack, but a protest demonstration that got out of hand.

"What difference, at this point, does it make?" as Mrs. Clinton later melodramatically cried out at a congressional committee hearing investigating that episode.

First of all, it made enough of a difference for some of the highest officials of American government to concoct a false story that they knew at the time was false.

It mattered enough that, if the truth had come out, on the eve of a presidential election, it could have destroyed Barack Obama's happy tale of how he had dealt a crippling blow to terrorists by killing Osama bin Laden (with an assist from the Navy's SEALS).

SOURCE

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No, leftists don't think like conservatives. Blame Plato

Liberals do not think like conservatives. You have probably noticed this.

Liberals [claim to] believe that human nature is essentially good, while conservatives believe that man is a flawed creature, and that we must exert great effort to be good.

The first Western philosopher who left a significant paper trail was a liberal. His name was Plato, and what modern liberals believe to this day can be traced back to his ideas.

Plato's Republic is the earliest written defense of the idea that men are basically good, and that they are prevented from doing good by, “Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil."

This is why people on the Left call us on the Right stupid or evil. Obviously, if you were smart, you would not disagree with them, and if you were good, you would be one of them.

Since liberals believe that human nature makes us good and ignorance make us bad, they seek to purify the world of ignorance. This is their rationale behind everything from “sensitivity training” for those who dare to dissent from political correctness to state-sponsored "re-education" camps and gulags.

The Left's fear of ignorance explains why they tend to oppose the free exchange of ideas: Some of those ideas might be "bad" and therefore dangerous. (Whereas conservatives are usually more worried about bad actions, not thoughts.)

The Left's obsession with criminalizing "hate speech" is an example of their fear of bad ideas. Professor Richard Moon -- whose name might be familiar -- told me that "hate speech" deserves less Charter protection because it does not "positively contribute to social discourse." He was referring to R. v. Keegstra.

Then he raised Bill Whatcott’s case, in which the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that since truth can be used to spread lies, truth is no defence, either. The Left says truth does not add value to the marketplace of ideas if that truth is inconvenient.

The Left’s fear of "ignorance" is also why they wish to control your child’s education. Plato suggested taking children from their parents to be raised away from their parents' contaminating influences.

In the recent past, a child’s education focused upon learning from the experience of the preceding generations -- not just abstract traditional moral truths but also hands-on skills, passed on through apprenticeships.

Today, however, children are separated not just from their parents, but from children of different ages and even from society itself, and all formal education takes place in a classroom rather than an artisan's workshop. (Nowhere are ideas more important and actions less significant than in a place where there is little action and lots of thought.)

Which is why the State is so concerned about homeschoolers “poisoning” their children with incorrect thinking. In State schools, kindergarteners can be taught to accept “gay marriage," and shielded from the "historical racism" of Huckleberry Finn; you can now graduate with a degree in English from UCLA without having ever taken a course on (potentially offensive) Shakespeare.

(And notice what the "corrupting influences" are currently considered to be? “Homophobia”, Euro-centrism and the past.)

It's not surprising that my transition from liberal to conservative began a few years ago, after I read about how the modern education system, a la Plato, was designed to turn children against their parents' values. Learning about how I and so many others had been brainwashed was the first step in rejecting this aspect of my "education."

Today's fashionable, Plato-inspired “Values Clarification” education doesn't teach children about the difference between right and wrong. In fact, teachers must even refrain from making comments such as "That’s good" or "That’s bad" when responding to a child’s idea. The rationale for “values clarification”? Again, the Left's presumption that people basically good, and when they use reason, they will choose good values because good values are more rational.

And of course, if you fail to "choose good values," the Left will pressure you to do so whether you want to or not.
Conservatives do not believe in this approach and neither did Aristotle, Plato’s student

SOURCE

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Has America’s social fabric been torn asunder?

The government depends upon mass, voluntary compliance with the law for it to be able to enforce the rules on society as a whole.

Simple things like a general agreement that if the speed limit says 55 miles per hour, that we will travel somewhere in the general proximity of that posting, with the outliers risking a ticket.

The understanding that we drive on the right hand side of the road and that slower vehicles stay to the far right on multi-lane highways make the free flow of traffic possible.

But events over the weekend make a reasonable person wonder whether the constant fraying of the social contract has finally created a tear that is rapidly becoming irreparable.

In malls across the country, thousands of people congregated, not for the purposes of shopping, going to a movie or simply enjoying each other’s company, but instead with the goal of disrupting people from using the already hard pressed brick and mortar stores for their intended purpose.

At Minneapolis’ Mall of America, the radical Black Lives Matter group even went so far as to feint a protest so there would be a heavy police presence, allowing them to shut down part of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport during the height of the Christmas travel season.  Beyond the obvious problem that their actions caused hundreds of people to miss their flights home, they deliberately placed thousands at an additional risk of a terrorist attack due to distracted security.

Mall disruptions also were reported in New Jersey, Kentucky and elsewhere around the country.  When combined with flash mob convenience store robberies and random assaults by mobs playing the “knockout game”, it would be hard to not notice that something is badly amiss.

Even our assumed driving rules are under attack.  On the Washington, D.C. Beltway, a group of approximately fifty motorcyclists caused a delay as they uniformly slowed down across all the lanes bringing traffic to a standstill. As they got moving again, they aggressively cut cars off from passing, and even went so far as to drive north bound up the south bound lanes.  There did not appear to be any political or other message in the motorcycle foolishness, but instead the mass act of civil disobedience seems to have been done just because they could. However, it reveals the fragility of our common understanding about the need to follow the rules.

While it is usually dangerous to draw broad societal assumptions based upon flash mobs at malls, roadways or even political protests blocking bridges, it is safe to note that these occurrences are becoming significantly more frequent.

And it is fair to tie this civil disobedience to President Obama’s continued attack on the law as a whole.  When the President doesn’t enforce the nation’s immigration laws, people naturally believe that if the law isn’t going to be enforced then it is null and void, and the fabric of our nation’s social contract is torn.

When Obama nullifies sentencing decisions for thousands of drug dealers and others, releasing them back into their former neighborhoods it sends a message that the system was wrong and the fabric tears a little more.

When Democrats in Congress urge Obama to use his pen and phone to circumvent Congress, they send a powerful message to their constituents that the rule of law doesn’t matter, and the tear grows.

And when the left and some on the right make those who seek to enforce the laws, targets for attack and murder, creating a schism of fear between the protector and the protected, the fabric itself becomes unrecognizable.

The social fabric that binds America together as one has always been fragile, and to complete the fundamental transformation that Obama strives to achieve, it must be torn asunder from top to bottom in a wholesale surrender of the current rule of law to another set of laws composed not through consent, compromise and agreement, but instead through forced acquiescence.

America should not worry about getting on a slippery slope away from rule by the consent of the governed, because we are already half-way down the slide and few have noticed.

As more and more people read the news and wonder what is happening to their country thinking that the craziness that seems to ooze from our government is an anomaly rather than the forced new normal under Obama, a ballot box response erupts if there is a trusted alternative.

Something to think about as we head into the presidential primary season.

SOURCE

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The Greatest Murder Machine in History

When one thinks of mass murder, Hitler comes to mind. If not Hitler, then Tojo, Stalin, or Mao. Credit is given to the 20th-century totalitarians as the worst species of tyranny to have ever arisen. However, the alarming truth is that Islam has killed more than any of these, and may surpass all of them combined in numbers and cruelty.

The enormity of the slaughters of the "religion of peace" are so far beyond comprehension that even honest historians overlook the scale. When one looks beyond our myopic focus, Islam is the greatest killing machine in the history of mankind, bar none.

"According to some calculations, the Indian (subcontinent) population decreased by 80 million between 1000 (conquest of Afghanistan) and 1525 (end of Delhi Sultanate)". -- Koenrad Elst as quoted on Daniel Pipes site

80 Million?! The conquistadors' crimes pale into insignificance at that number. No wonder Hitler admired Islam as a fighting religion. He stood in awe of Islam, whose butchery even he did not surpass.

Over 110 Million Blacks were killed by Islam.  "... a minumum of 28 Million African were enslaved in the Muslim Middle East.  Since, at least, 80 percent of those captured by Muslim slave traders were calculated to have died before reaching the slave market, it is believed that the death toll from 1400 years of Arab and Muslim slave raids into Africa could have been as high as 112 Millions.  When added to the number of those sold in the slave markets, the total number of African victims of the trans-Saharan and East African slave trade could be significantly higher than 140 Million people". -- John Allembillah Azumah, author of The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue

Add just those two numbers alone together, and Islam has surpassed the victims of 20th-century totalitarianism. However, it does not end there. Add the millions who died at the hand of Muslims in the Sudan in our lifetime.

Much of Islamic slavery was sexual in nature, with a preference for women. Those men who were captured were castrated. The mulatto children of the women were often killed, which explains why Islam was not demographically shifted towards the black race, unlike slaves in the West, who bore children to breed a mestizo class. Add in those dead children; and we arrive at well over 200 million.

Remember that in the 7th century, North Africa was almost totally Christian. What happened to them?

We know that over 1 million Europeans were enslaved by Barbary Pirates. How many died is anybody's guess.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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She's got no taste at all

Marrying Bill was bad enough ....



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Myth: Antioxidants are good and free radicals are bad

I have been pointing out for years what a crock the antioxidant theory is so I was pleased to read the expose below in "New Scientist"

In December 1945, chemist Denham Harman's wife suggested that he read an article in Ladies' Home Journal entitled 'Tomorrow You May Be Younger'. It sparked his interest in ageing, and years later, as a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley, Harman had a thought "out of the blue", as he later recalled. Ageing, he proposed, is caused by free radicals, reactive molecules that build up in the body as by-products of metabolism and lead to cellular damage.

Scientists rallied around the free-radical theory of ageing, including the corollary that antioxidants, molecules that neutralize free radicals, are good for human health. By the 1990s, many people were taking antioxidant supplements, such as vitamin C and β-carotene. It is "one of the few scientific theories to have reached the public: gravity, relativity and that free radicals cause ageing, so one needs to have antioxidants", says Siegfried Hekimi, a biologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Yet in the early 2000s, scientists trying to build on the theory encountered bewildering results: mice genetically engineered to overproduce free radicals lived just as long as normal mice4, and those engineered to overproduce antioxidants didn't live any longer than normal5. It was the first of an onslaught of negative data, which initially proved difficult to publish. The free-radical theory "was like some sort of creature we were trying to kill. We kept firing bullets into it, and it just wouldn't die," says David Gems at University College London, who started to publish his own negative results in 2003 (ref. 6). Then, one study in humans7 showed that antioxidant supplements prevent the health-promoting effects of exercise, and another associated them with higher mortality8.

Nutrition: Vitamins on trial

None of those results has slowed the global antioxidant market, which ranges from food and beverages to livestock feed additives. It is projected to grow from US$2.1 billion in 2013 to $3.1 billion in 2020. "It's a massive racket," says Gems. "The reason the notion of oxidation and ageing hangs around is because it is perpetuated by people making money out of it."

Today, most researchers working on ageing agree that free radicals can cause cellular damage, but that this seems to be a normal part of the body's reaction to stress. Still, the field has wasted time and resources as a result. And the idea still holds back publications on possible benefits of free radicals, says Michael Ristow, a metabolism researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. "There is a significant body of evidence sitting in drawers and hard drives that supports this concept, but people aren't putting it out," he says. "It's still a major problem."

Some researchers also question the broader assumption that molecular damage of any kind causes ageing. "There's a question mark about whether really the whole thing should be chucked out," says Gems. The trouble, he says, is that "people don't know where to go now".

SOURCE

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Finding the Real Conservative

As yet another primary election season heats up, how do we cut through the rhetoric and evaluate candidates? One sure way is to have a measuring stick based on more than personal opinion.

One such standard is the word "conservative." I hear candidates and elected officials use it all the time. What does it really mean? In my opinion, the late Russell Kirk spelled it out better than just about anyone. This all-but-forgotten man laid out ten principles of conservative thought many seem to have forgotten. See how many you recognize.

First, conservatives believe in an enduring moral order. This concept is much broader than religious dogma. Kirk said that human nature was a constant, and moral truths were permanent. That’s not surprising considering that 94% of Americans believe in God, according to pollster George Barna. Surprisingly, Kirk said that a society in which men and women are governed by an enduring belief in moral order—by a strong sense of right and wrong—and by personal convictions about justice and honor—that would be a good society, regardless of the political machinery. Politics do not determine the trajectory of a nation—the people do. Nancy Pearcy put it well when she said that politics is downstream from culture.

Second, tradition in a culture is important and should not be tossed out on a whim. Kirk actually calls this "continuity." What he meant is that order and justice and freedom are the result of centuries of trials and reflections and sacrifice. Change should be gradual and calculated—never undoing traditions as a knee-jerk reaction. Often times, an election cycle bring cries for "change," but true conservatives should always be wary of change. Wary doesn’t mean completely closed to some change though. It just means "slow change." If you look at how our bi-cameral system of government loaded with checks and balances was designed, clearly our founders thought "slow" was good. For this reason, Presidential Executive Orders should be used sparingly.

Third, conservatives adhere to Edmund Burke’s mantra that the individual is foolish, but the species is wise. Using that advice, real conservatives stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before them and look to enduring wisdom. That means not only the Ronald Reagans, but other great thinkers and statesmen beyond our lifetime like T.S. Eliot, Adam Smith, Sir Walter Scott, and of course, Burke himself. Not sure you will see any of these authors on display as you walk in your local library.

Fourth, true conservatives look at the long-term consequences of laws and policies. I fear this principle frequently gets tossed in favor of re-election. Kirk said that rushing into legislation or policies without weighing the long-term consequences will actually create new abuses in the future. We should slow down and look as far as we can into the future.

Fifth, conservatives know good and well that you can’t totally level the economic playing field, and in fact, we should not aspire for it. Robbing one taxpayer to pay another truly violates conservative thought because it is not sustainable. In our society, we have tried to make charity the government’s job, and true conservatives have to take issue with that practice. Churches and non-profits should take serious their role in culture.

Sixth, mankind is messed-up. Kirk didn’t exactly quote the Bible, but conservatives believe that because man is flawed from birth that no perfect social order can ever be created. All that we can reasonably expect, Kirk said, is a tolerably ordered, just and free society, in which evil and suffering continue to lurk. Can morality be legislated? Kirk would say that all laws are an effort to legislate morality, and that is okay.

Seventh, conservatives know that great societies are built upon the foundation of private property. We see it in the Ten Commandments. Policies that seek to redistribute wealth and property should be an anathema to the real conservative. That is one of my issues with COP21, the Paris Agreement on the reduction of climate change, and the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. Both are a form of wealth redistribution. While getting rich should not be the conservative’s chief aim, the institution of private property has been a powerful instrument for teaching responsibility, shaping integrity, creating prosperity, and providing the opportunities for people to think and act. It is the opportunity to go from rags to riches. This opportunity has given us the Truett Cathys (of Chick-fil-a fame) and others who worked their way up from nothing.

Eighth, conservatives favor smaller government at a federal level, and champion small governments such as county commissions and city councils. Decisions most affecting the lives of citizens should be made locally, and as Kirk would say, voluntarily. That is how I got started. I ran a city council race for a friend. A strong, centralized, and distant federal government tends to be more hostile to human freedom and dignity.

Ninth, the conservative believes in flattening the power —or limiting government. Real conservatives know the danger of power being vested in just a few even it is called benevolent. Constitutional restrictions are necessary, political checks and balance a must, and enforcement of the law a must—all the while balancing the claims of authority with the claims of liberty.

Finally, conservatives should be slow to change. Any thinking conservative would be resistant to hastily throwing out the old way of doing something in favor of something completely new —even in the name of "positive change." Progress, or change, is important—for Kirk said a society would stagnate without it. Change has to be reconciled with the permanent though, and both are important.

When Kirk revised these ten principles in 1993 before his death in 1994, he said that the word "conservative" was being abused. If alive today, he probably wouldn’t be surprised that the distortion has not stopped.

The bottom line is that being "conservative" best describes how you feel about "truth," and whether it is an old thing or a new thing. "Conservative" means you see great value in permanent things. It sounds old-fashioned, and I guess in a way it literally is.

As you evaluate political candidates who use the word "conservative" to describe themselves, ask them what it means and see how close they get to the real definition. I think you will be surprised.

SOURCE

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Time to Do Away with the FDA

For individuals suffering from hepatitis C, a blood-borne virus causing liver inflammation, life can be difficult. For 70–85 percent of those with the virus, the condition is chronic, with effects ranging from liver infection to cirrhosis to death.

The nearly 3.2 million Americans suffering from this illness received hope in 2014 with the release of a new drug, Sovaldi. The medicine is nothing short of a godsend for patients. While older treatments are long and not very effective and have a variety of nasty side effects, 90 percent of people taking Sovaldi can expect to be cured in as little as 12 weeks.

The catch? Each pill costs $1,000. A typical course of treatment runs about $84,000.
People have been quick to point out that the price of the drug is prohibitively expensive for many individuals, especially those without adequate medical insurance.

However, before we go pointing the finger at “capitalistic greed,” it’s important to ask some additional questions. Why is only one company allowed to make this product? Why have other competitors not come to the market with cheaper alternatives?

The culprit isn’t capitalism; it’s government, in particular, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The FDA ensures that medicines are “safe,” but the process is agonizingly slow. Currently it takes years to bring new drugs to market. One study found that from 1938 to 2014 the FDA approved only a fraction of the drugs submitted. More important, many approvals were given to but a few companies, namely, Merck, Roche, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, and Pfizer.

This process generates three important effects. First, it effectively grants a government-protected monopoly to those companies. The FDA approval process is so expensive that many smaller companies without the necessary financial resources are prevented from competing. By preventing competitors from coming onto the market, the FDA eliminates the market forces that preclude monopolies. The results are higher prices and fewer drugs, that is, fewer options for patients. For hepatitis patients facing a $1,000 pill, this may literally be a life-and-death issue.

Second, the FDA-approval process can increase drug costs by hundreds, even thousands of dollars. Take Provenge, a prostate-cancer drug. Despite its proven efficacy, FDA mandates have prevented it from going on the market for a full eight years. Researchers estimate that as a result of this delay, patients lost a total of 82,000 years of life. The multiple clinical trials required by the FDA to bring the drug to market meant that the drugmaker needed to increase the price substantially to cover its losses. When the drug was finally released, the therapy cost some $93,000.

The third problem is perhaps counterintuitive. The FDA is said to be necessary to keep unsafe and ineffective drugs off the market because doctors, swayed by pharmaceutical reps or lacking proper information, would prescribe dangerous drugs or worthless to their patients. Actually, in a free market, drug companies and doctors would face strong incentives to make and prescribe medicines that are both effective and safe. If a company manufactured an ineffective drug, it would quickly lose customers in a competitive marketplace. Similarly, if a company created unsafe drugs, it would not only lose customers but would likely be sued. In the same way, a doctor looking to maintain his reputation and practice would face strong free-market incentives to prescribe only safe and effective medicines.

In contrast, FDA regulations encourage both doctors and patients to get lazy about their care. If the FDA is presumed to vouch for the safety of drugs, patients and doctors have less incentive to be concerned about safety themselves. However, the FDA’s track record gives us scant grounds for confidence in the safety of drugs. Between 2004 and 2014 the FDA recalled more than 4,200 medicines. Some 362 were Class I recalls, meaning exposure to drugs could cause serious health consequences and even death.

It’s time to rethink the FDA. While regulating drugs for the sake of the public may sound appealing, it arguably does more harm than good. Ultimately, the FDA increases prices to consumers, slows the production of life-saving drugs, and is alarmingly ineffective.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Understanding the Jihadis

If Western Leftists despise modern Western culture, how can we expect respect for it from Muslims?  The Western Left sows the seeds of bitterness and the Imams reap the crop by offering a more confident and more heroic vision

This was the year when a growing section of the public began to regard the threat of homegrown terrorism as far more real than at any time since 9/11. In Europe, the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January stoked initial fears about the rising terror threat. These were heightened when two people were shot dead by an Islamist in Copenhagen, Denmark in mid-February. And the slaughter of 30 British tourists on holiday in Tunisia showed that jihadis viewed any kaffir as a target. But it was the scale of the murderous attack in Paris on 13 November that really frightened Europeans. For Americans, the murder of 14 people in San Bernardino, California, a few weeks after the Paris attacks, proved equally terrifying.

In the global scheme of things, a relatively small number of terrorist incidents in Europe and the US do not add up to a significant threat to society’s way of life. But what makes them appear more menacing is that they seem to be linked to a wider global jihadist struggle making headway on the battlefields of Afghanistan, north Africa, Libya, Iraq and Syria. Western intervention on these battlefields has proved singularly ineffective. The only forces that have succeeded in containing and, on occasion, overwhelming ISIS have been the highly committed Kurdish militias and Iranian-led fighters in Iraq.

The situation on the battlefield of ideas is, if anything, of even greater concern. The willingness of thousands of young Western Muslims to travel to Syria and risk their lives for the radical jihadist cause shows how influential ISIS has become. Think of that photo of the three British Muslim teenage girls, clutching their bags as they prepared to board their flight on their way to Syria. This image captures something Western governments and societies are reluctant to acknowledge: namely, that many normal and idealistic Muslim teenagers are drawn towards a cultural outlook that loathes Western society and its values.

Losing the battle of ideas

What is truly significant about the high-profile terrorist incidents in Paris is the reaction of sections of the Muslim community. No doubt many Muslims were horrified by the massacres committed in the name of Islam. But some Muslim youths were more ambivalent.

This was clear in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo killings. In many of Paris’s banlieues, there was little mourning for the victims. Numerous teachers in France reported that some immigrant children expressed deeply hostile sentiments towards the terrorists’ victims. Others said some children refused to believe the official version of events. And many French teachers were at a loss to know how to react when many Muslim children refused to respect the minute’s silence for the dead.

The reaction of many young Muslim schoolchildren to the Charlie Hebdo incident is quite consistent with the research into public attitudes towards ISIS. A poll of over 2,000 British adults, conducted by ICM in July, showed that nine per cent of respondents viewed ISIS in a positive light; three per cent held a ‘very favourable view’ of ISIS; and six per cent held a ‘somewhat positive view’. Despite the numerous atrocities reported in the media, the proportion of those with a positive view of ISIS has increased by two percentage points since last year.

Public-opinion polls are always difficult to interpret. But what the ICM poll suggests is that a significant minority of British Muslims may be sympathetic to some of ISIS’s ideals. The majority of those are likely to be passive sympathisers with no desire to journey to Syria. However, what their sympathies signify is that radical jihadist ideas have gained a foothold in British society. At the very least, the poll suggests a sizeable group of British Muslims expresses its everyday frustrations with the world, and particularly the West, through a favourable attitude towards ISIS.

Elsewhere, researchers investigating support in France and Spain for ISIS reported:

‘Among young people in the hovels and grim housing projects of the Paris banlieues, we found fairly wide tolerance or support for ISIS’s values, and even for the brutal actions carried out in their name. In Spain, among a large population sample, we found little willingness to fight in order to defend democratic values against onslaught.’

At present, the willingness actively to fight for ISIS is confined to a tiny minority. But the fact that there is a significant body of passive support is ominous.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the way 9/11 is now perceived and understood by many sections of European society. Many members of Muslim communities readily believe 9/11 conspiracy theories, especially the idea that it was all a Jewish plot. Claims about the world made by the Islamic State and other similar groups exercise a far greater influence today than they did three or four years ago. There are now far more people living in Europe who silently applaud or approve of an event like the Paris attacks.

The growing influence of radical Islamic sentiments is paralleled by a growing moral and political disorientation within European public life. European society is finding it very difficult to respond to what has now become a war against its way of life. This is especially clear in education, where numerous teachers have said how tough it is to discuss such ‘controversial’ subjects as 9/11 or the Holocaust in the classroom. Some teachers avoid these topics altogether.

Both France and Britain are failing to socialise a significant section of young people. Many of these youngsters embrace an Islamist counter-narrative that calls into question Western Enlightenment values and celebrates jihadist identity politics. One of the aims of the Paris attacks is to turn these anti-Western sentiments into a more active force in European society.

For a minority of young people, radical jihadism provides an outlet for their idealism. It also offers a coherent and edgy identity, a variant of the ‘cool’ narrative used by other online subcultures. The behaviour of young people who are attracted to jihadist websites is not all that different to the numerous non-Muslim Westerners who visit nihilistic websites and become fascinated by destructive themes and images. It just so happens that the destructive images and themes on jihadist websites are also linked to a destructive political cause.

Perils of multi-moralism

Why are so many young Muslims hostile to the society into which they were born? Many blame anti-Muslim prejudice, economic deprivation or the conflict in the Middle East. It may well be the case that such issues have caused bitterness in Muslim communities. But Muslims are not the only group to have experienced prejudice or economic deprivation. One distinctive feature of European Muslim subcultures is that they are relatively self-sufficient and have a strong impulse to maintain a clear boundary between themselves and others.

Sociological research shows that the way that members of a subculture talk to one another and the views they hold are often different to the outlook of the rest of society. That is true for radical Muslims, as it is for other groups. Muslim subcultures possess their own pool of knowledge – that is, ideas and sentiments that are distinct to such cultures. Unfortunately, distinctive, culturally defined pools of knowledge create a fertile terrain for the construction and circulation of disturbing views and rumours. In such circumstances, rumours about a Jewish or American conspiracy can swiftly mutate into a taken-for-granted fact. Worse still, such ‘facts’ and beliefs are rarely tested in the wider public sphere and can therefore turn into deeply ingrained prejudices.

The absence of debate about the sensitive issues that divide Muslim subcultures from other sections of society is, in part, an inadvertent consequence of the policies of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism has failed to develop a moral and cultural outlook to which all sections of society can sign up. Instead it has encouraged cultural segmentation where, in effect, we now have a system of multi-values: numerous values existing side by side, none of them being properly discussed or challenged. That is why the image of a beheading can appear to some as an inspiration and to others as unspeakably horrendous. Such morally polarised reactions to the same event are the outcome of a society in which cultural segmentation prevails.

Years of lost opportunities

At first sight, it is difficult to account for the growing influence of radical jihadist sentiments among young Muslims living in Western societies. In the aftermath of the 2001 riots in Oldham, in the north west of England, I talked to Muslim students about their impression of life in Britain. Most of them spoke in a language that conveyed a strong sense of bitterness and, in some cases, hatred. In the early 2000s, however, their response was couched in a language of disappointment and disillusionment. Their criticism was not directed at ‘manmade law’ or democracy, but at the failure of society to live up to its promises.

Since 2001, the attitudes of some young Muslims towards their society have hardened and altered in character. Some no longer want society to accommodate their grievances; they want to inhabit a different moral universe. There are many reasons for this radical shift in attitude. For many Muslims, the military and terrorist success of jihadist forces has been emboldening. Stories about how an individual or a couple of ‘fighters’ – such as the Boston bombers – terrified the US appeal to some young men and women in search of a hero.

However, the most powerful driver of jihadist influence in the West is the culture of victimhood. In recent decades, the victim has acquired a quasi-sacred status. Competitive claims-making about victimisation has become widespread. Little wonder, then, that one of the most powerful themes promoted in radical jihadist propaganda is the representation of Islam as the universal victim of Western aggression. Jihadists frame virtually every dimension of local and global misfortune afflicting Muslims as the outcome of a permanent war waged by Western crusaders.

The jihadist media present Muslims as eternal victims. From this standpoint, any behaviour that does not accord with the worldview of jihadist political theology can be represented as an act of victimisation – an insult to Islam. In such circumstances, the reaction to a provocation is legitimised both by jihadist ideology and the Western cult of the victim. Even ISIS’s claim to recover Islam’s golden age is shot through, as Edward Said put it, with the ‘sanctimonious piety of historical or cultural victimhood’. Arguably, the jihadists travelling to Syria are as much a product of contemporary Western global culture, within which victimhood is sanctified, as they are of traditional Islam.

However, jihadists are not simply reacting against the Western way of life. In recent years, the likes of ISIS have appealed to the idealism of many young people. What Westerners perceive as a barbaric, medieval institution, some young people perceive as a movement that offers them a sense of purpose and meaning. That the Caliphate is now perceived in such positive light by some young Muslims is an indictment of the inability of Western society to inspire people with its own vision of the world.

Until now, Western governments, the media and intellectuals have more or less opted out of the battle of ideas. Efforts at preventing radicalisation have proved singularly ineffective because they are by definition reactive. What is required is not a reaction to the latest threat, but a moral and intellectual assertion of values that are worth fighting for.

That is the real challenge facing secular democracies: to gain popular support for the values of the Enlightenment and an open society. Western society needs to provide a positive account of itself, and to take its own ideals far more seriously than it does at present. And Western intellectuals, who, at the moment, are conspicuously silent on this matter, need to take their vocation and public role far more seriously. As the experience of the past 15 years shows, it is the failure to advance any vision worth supporting that has helped radical jihadists gain a measure of moral authority over sections of Muslim youth.

SOURCE

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When higher taxes REDUCE revenue:  Laffer must be laughing at a spectacular proof of his curve

Government actions have unintended consequences, as New York State is learning.

Years ago the Empire State endeavored to curb smoking by slapping an onerous tax on cigarette consumption. This was part of a nationwide trend, but New York's tax is obscenely high, and it appears that now, there are consequences:

New York is reaping the whirlwind of sky-high cigarette taxes with a wave of smuggling decimating the state’s revenue.

New York holds the dubious honor of having the highest cigarette taxes in country, with the average pack of smokes in New York City costing as much as $10.60.

New York raised taxes on cigarettes to $4.35 in 2010 from $2.75. In total, cigarette taxes have increased by 190 percent since 2006. The sharp rise has resulted in a raft of unintended consequences which are dealing a significant blow to the state’s finances.

New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli reports New York’s revenue from cigarette taxes has plunged by $400 million over the past five years.

According to the The New York Post, a separate study by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine shows the state lost a hefty $1.3 billion in uncollected taxes each year because smokers switched to cheaper alternatives.

Smokers responded to higher prices not by shelling out more cash at the store but by turning to the black market, crossing state lines and buying cheaper brands, such as Seneca, from Native American outlets.

The last 10 years have a been a boon to organized crime, with 58 percent of New York’s cigarettes supplied from out-of-state, according to the Tax Foundation. The number of packs bought paying the full tax has also collapsed by 62 percent.

In addition to all the lost revenue, the state's black market has proven to be an enforcement nightmare, leading to disagreements with other states and Native American groups; and the artificially high price has created a black market that some suggest has created a revenue stream for terrorists.

In sum, onerous taxes fail when you have black markets and mobile consumers.  It's a lesson New York should know all too well. The state, which is almost completely reliant on Wall Street for revenue, is regularly listed as one of the worst states to own  a business, and its across the board onerous taxation and regulation has made it one of the states best known for bleeding people. Pretty soon, it will have more than cigarette tax revenue to worry about.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Scrutinizing Scruton



Roger Scruton is Britain's foremost conservative intellectual.  He is not much like an American conservative, though he does think highly of America, unlike British Leftists. He has just released a new book:  "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left", in which he gives Leftist intellectuals a well deserved lashing.

I take my hat off to him in that regard. How he could wade through the turgid and largely meaningless tosh that passes for thought among Leftist intellectuals rather escapes me. As I see it, Leftists in fact have no ideas at all other than: "If I don't like it, ban it, kill it or control it". All the rest is persiflage (or camouflage), an unending series of vague and often incomprehensible assertions and complaints designed to legitimate that hate in some way.

Scruton rightly says that conservatism is at base simply an instinct of caution and stresses the importance of culture.  He wants to preserve inherited British culture as being demonstrably beneficial in all sorts of ways and is critical of multiculturalism.

All that is OK but he also has a reverence for high culture, which I question.  As it happens, I am as big a high culture fiend as you would be likely to find.  My favorite composer is Bach and I can recite large slabs of Chaucer in the original Middle English, for instance.   But I see no virtue in that.  It is just what entertains me.  There is an old Latin proverb: "De gustibus no disputandum est".  And I agree with that.   There can be no disputes about taste.  If you find football as entertaining as I find Chaucer, good for you.  I don't think of you as in any way lesser for that.   Scruton seems to. But he was originally a professor of aesthetics so maybe he has to think that way.

Another oddity is that Scruton rarely mentions the importance of liberty.  And he has in fact a conception of liberty that has a lot in common with Hegel.  He defines it somewhere as fitting in with traditional arrangements -- or something to that effect.  He has little time for libertarianism.  [UPDATE:  I see that he has acknowledged being somewhat Hegelian, particularly in his 1980 book "The meaning of conservatism"]

So I think he misses the point of most current political conflicts -- which are largely about money.  Simplistically, the Left never stop devising reasons to take our money off us while conservatives think that they should be able to hang on to what they have worked for.  Most of the big political questions revolve around that sooner or later.

But I think Scruton is helpful at the margins so I reproduce below an essay he wrote for the WSJ shortly after the 9/11 attacks

There is a useful interview with Scruton about his new book here and a review here.  There is a relatively brief account of his views on Leftist philosophers here.  He gives his account of the meaning of conservatism here

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A Question of Temperament:  Conservatism is not about profit but about loss.

BY ROGER SCRUTON

LONDON--Here and there in the modern world you can find countries with conservative parties. Britain is one of them. But the U.S. is the last remaining country with a genuine conservative movement.

This conservative movement is expressed in politics, in social initiatives among ordinary people, in the media and in intellectual journals with an explicitly conservative message. True, political philosophy in the American academy has been dominated by liberals, and by the project to which the late John Rawls devoted his life, of producing a theory of justice that would vindicate the welfare state. Nevertheless, even in American universities, you can come across conservatives who are prepared to defend their beliefs.

In Britain there are very few academics who will publicly confess to conservative convictions. And we have only two noteworthy conservative journals: the weekly Spectator, and the quarterly Salisbury Review, which I edited (at enormous cost to my intellectual career) for its first 18 years of life, and whose tiny circulation is maintained almost exclusively by private subscription. In the U.S., by contrast, conservative journals spring up constantly, find large and sympathetic readerships, and frequently attract funding from foundations and business. Yet another conservative journal has appeared recently, and the high profile of its editor--Patrick Buchanan--will lead to much speculation about what is really meant by the journal's name: The American Conservative. Maybe a British conservative can cast a little light on this.

It is a tautology to say that a conservative is a person who wants to conserve things; the question is what things? To this I think we can give a simple one-word answer, namely: us. At the heart of every conservative endeavor is the effort to conserve a historically given community. In any conflict the conservative is the one who sides with "us" against "them"--not knowing, but trusting. He is the one who looks for the good in the institutions, customs and habits that he has inherited. He is the one who seeks to defend and perpetuate an instinctive sense of loyalty, and who is therefore suspicious of experiments and innovations that put loyalty at risk.

So defined, conservatism is less a philosophy than a temperament; but it is, I believe, a temperament that emerges naturally from the experience of society, and which is indeed necessary if societies are to endure. The conservative strives to diminish social entropy. The second law of thermodynamics implies that, in the long run, all conservatism must fail. But the same is true of life itself, and conservatism might equally be defined as the social organism's will to live.

Of course there are people without the conservative temperament. There are the radicals and innovators, who are impatient with the debris left by the dead; and their temperament too is a necessary ingredient in any healthy social mix. There are also the instinctive rebels of the Chomsky variety, who in every conflict side with "them" against "us," who scoff at the ordinary loyalties of ordinary people, and who look primarily for what is bad in the institutions, customs and habits that define their historical community. Still, by and large, the future of any society depends upon the solid residue of conservative sentiment, which forms the ballast to every innovation, and the equilibriating process that makes innovation possible.

Sept. 11 raised the question: Who are we, that they should attack us, and what justifies our existence as a "we"? American conservatism is an answer to that question. "We the people," it says, constitute a nation, settled in a common territory under a common rule of law, bound by a single Constitution and a common language and culture. Our primary loyalty is to this nation, and to the secular and territorially based jurisdiction that makes it possible for our nation to endure. Our national loyalty is inclusive, and can be extended to newcomers, but only if they assume the duties and responsibilities, as well as the rights, of citizenship. And it is reinforced by customs and habits that have their origin in the Judeo-Christian inheritance, and which must be constantly refreshed from that source if they are to endure. In the modern context, the American conservative is an opponent of "multiculturalism," and of the liberal attempt to sever the Constitution from the religious and cultural inheritance that first created it.

American conservatism welcomes enterprise, freedom and risk, and sees the bureaucratic state as the great corrupter of these goods. But its philosophy is not founded in economic theories. If conservatives favor the free market, it is not because market solutions are the most efficient ways of distributing resources--although they are--but because they compel people to bear the costs of their own actions, and to become responsible citizens. Conservative reservations about the welfare state reflect the belief that welfare generates a dependency culture, in which responsibilities are drowned by rights.

The habit of claiming without earning is not confined only to the welfare machine. One of the most important conservative causes in America must surely be the reform of the jury system, which has allowed class actions and frivolous claims--including claims by non-nationals--to sabotage the culture of honest reward, and to ensure that wealth, however honestly and diligently acquired, can at any moment be stolen from its producer to end up in the pocket of someone who has done nothing to deserve it.

It is one of the great merits of America's conservative movement that it has seen the need to define its philosophy at the highest intellectual level. British conservatism has always been suspicious of ideas, and the only great modern conservative thinker in my country who has tried to disseminate his ideas through a journal--T.S. Eliot--was in fact an American. The title of his journal (The Criterion) was borrowed by Hilton Kramer, when he founded what is surely the only contemporary conservative journal that is devoted entirely to ideas. Under the editorship of Mr. Kramer and Roger Kimball, The New Criterion has tried to break the cultural monopoly of the liberal establishment, and is consequently read in our British universities with amazement, anger and (I like to think) self-doubt.

Eliot's influence has been spread in America by his disciple, Russell Kirk, who made clear to a whole generation that conservatism is not an economic but a cultural outlook, and that it would have no future if reduced merely to the philosophy of profit. Put bluntly, conservatism is not about profit but about loss: It survives and flourishes because people are in the habit of mourning their losses, and resolving to safeguard against them.

This does not mean that conservatives are pessimists. In America, they are the only true optimists, since they are the only ones with a clear vision of the future and a clear determination to bring that future into being.

For the conservative temperament the future is the past. Hence, like the past, it is knowable and lovable. It follows that by studying the past of America--its traditions of enterprise, risk-taking, fortitude, piety and responsible citizenship--you can derive the best case for its future: a future in which the national loyalty will endure, holding things together, and providing all of us, liberals included, with our required sources of hope. This is the message that has been put across vividly by New York's City Journal, and it is interesting to compare its optimistic articles about the American underclass with the bleak vision of our English equivalent expressed in the same journal by Theodore Dalrymple.

Sept. 11 was a wake-up call through which liberals have managed to go on dreaming. American conservatives ought to seize the opportunity to utter those difficult truths which have been censored out of recent debate: truths about national loyalty, about common culture and about the duties of citizenship. You never know, Middle America might actually recognize itself at last, when addressed in this way.

Source.

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Obama's Cuba policy makes life worse for Cubans

by Jeff Jacoby

WHEN PRESIDENT OBAMA declared 12 months ago that he intended to normalize relations with Cuba, he claimed that rapprochement with the Castro regime would uphold America's "commitment to liberty and democracy." Liberalizing US policy, the president predicted, would succeed "in making the lives of ordinary Cubans a little bit easier, more free, more prosperous."

He affirmed that message seven months later, as he announced the reopening of the US embassy in Havana. Life on the island might not be "transformed overnight," Obama conceded, but he had no doubt that more engagement was the best way to advance democracy and human rights for Cuba's people. "This," said the president, "is what change looks like."

Reality-check time.

The Obama administration's year-long outreach to Cuba has certainly been frenetic. The American flag was raised over the US embassy in August, and in Washington the Cuban embassy was reopened. President Obama held a face-to-face meeting with Raul Castro during the Summit of the Americas in Panama. The State Department removed Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Restrictions were eased on travel to Cuba by Americans, resulting in a 54 percent increase in trips this year. Three Cabinet members — the secretaries of state, agriculture, and commerce — were dispatched on separate missions to Cuba. And plans have been announced to resume direct mail service and commercial air travel between the two countries.

The Castro brothers snapped up all these treats. They will gladly pocket more of them. But there has been no hint of the expanded freedom and democratic reforms that Obama's engagement was supposed to unlock.

Cuba remains the only dictatorship in the Americas, as repressive and hostile to human rights as ever. More repressive, in fact: Over the past 12 months, the government's harassment of dissidents and democracy activists has ballooned. In November, according to Amnesty International, there were nearly 1,500 political arrests or arbitrary detentions of peaceful human-rights protesters. That was the highest monthly tally in years, more than double the average of 700 political detentions per month recorded in 2014.

On Dec. 10 — International Human Rights Day — Cuban security police arrested between 150 and 200 dissidents, in many cases beating the prisoners they seized. As is usually the case, those attacked by the regime's goons included members of the respected Ladies in White, an organization of wives, mothers, and sisters of jailed dissidents. The women, dressed in white, attend Mass each week, then walk silently through the streets to protest the government's lawlessness and brutality. Even the United Nations, which frequently turns a blind eye to the depredations of its member-states, condemned the Cuban government's "extraordinary disdain" for civil norms, and deplored the "many hundreds" of warrantless arrests in recent weeks.

But from the Obama administration there has been no such condemnation. One might have thought that the White House would make it a priority to give moral support and heightened recognition to the Cubans who most embody the "commitment to liberty and democracy" that the president has invoked. But concern for Cuba's courageous democrats has plainly not been a priority. Particularly disgraceful was Secretary of State John Kerry's refusal to invite any dissidents or human-rights advocates to the flag-raising ceremony at the US embassy in August. To exclude them, as The Washington Post observed, was a dishonorable gesture of appeasement to the hemisphere's nastiest regime — "a sorry tip of the tat to what the Castros so vividly stand for: diktat, statism, control, and rule by fear."

For all the president's talk about using engagement and trade to promote the cause of liberty and civil rights in Cuba, his policy of détente has been wholly one-sided. In an interview with Yahoo! News this month, he was asked what concessions Havana has made over the past year. He couldn't think of any.

"Look," he said with an exasperated sigh, "our original theory on this was not that we were going to see immediate changes or loosening of control of the Castro regime, but rather that, over time, you'd lay the predicates for substantial transformation."

Cubans aren't holding their breath. Tens of thousands of them, realizing that normalization will do nothing to loosen the Castros' grip, have fled the country. More than 45,000 Cubans arrived at US border checkpoints in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30; thousands more are trying to reach the United States by traveling through Central America or taking to the sea. It is the largest wave of Cuban migrants in decades. The American president may believe in "predicates for substantial transformation" and other such amulets and charms. Cuba's people know better.

We should know better too.

As a candidate for president, Obama promised a Cuba policy that would "be guided by one word: Libertad." If the regime in Havana wanted the benefits of normalization, he vowed, it would first have to accept democratic reforms. But Obama's foreign policy toward Cuba, like his policies toward Iran and Russia and Syria, turned out to be far more about accommodating despots, far less about upholding Western norms. His years in office have coincided with a worldwide retreat of democratic freedoms; why would Cuba be an exception?

It is clear now that the only change Obama craved in Cuba was a change in America's go-it-alone stance. Normalization was desirable for its own sake, not as a means to leverage freedom for Cuba's people.

Last week, 126 former Cuban dissidents wrote a letter pleading with Obama to reconsider his approach. Showering the Castro regime with so many benefits, they warned, will "prolong the life of the dictatorship," even as it "marginaliz[es] the democratic opposition." Alas, that doesn't trouble the president nearly as much as it troubles them. He's on his way out, and no longer has to pretend to care about the fate of beleaguered democrats.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Leftist group releases video comparing Trump to Hitler

The video consists of very brief grabs from Trump speeches intercut with old movie footage of 1930s Nazi rallies.  As even a moderate and sentimental Christian gentleman like George Bush II was often called a Nazi by the Left, that is no great surprise.  And comparing Trump's immigration proposals to Hitler's immolation of 6 million Jews also has plenty of precedent, idiotic though it obviously  is.

But the video released by the Agenda Project carries the slander to a whole new level.  If Trump becomes the GOP nominee we can expect it to be very widely aired.  There will be no shortage of Leftist donors coming forward to finance that. So some comment on it seems warranted.

The only substantial thing they have to hang the advertisement on is Trump's proposal for a temporary halt to Muslim immigration.

An obvious immediate response is to note that Muslims are not a race but a religion.  Muslims can be of any race. But a more important response is to ask what immigration restrictions have in common with killing Jews.  They do in fact have some historical connections.  That great Leftist hero, FDR, refused to admit to America Jews fleeing Hitler, the St Louis episode, thus sealing the fate of many of them.  So if Trump is a Nazi so was FDR.  When a Democrat President had the opportunity to confront and oppose Hitler, he actually aided and abetted Hitler. It was only when Hitler declared war on the USA that FDR went to war with him.

It could be argued that the Muslims concerned are also refugees fleeing death but that is not at all true.  The refugees Trump wants to keep out do not come directly from Muslim countries.  Muslim countries won't have them.  They come from Western Europe where they already have refuge.  So there is no threat to their lives and Trump's policies fully implemented would kill no-one.  So much for the comparisons with Hitler. The comparison is fundamentally dishonest, like so much of Leftism.

But I liked this sentence in the screed below:

"The modern Republican Party has historically incorporated both racist and fascist elements in its political strategy".

The mention of history is perhaps unfortunate.  A more accurate version of the sentence would be:

"The modern Democratic Party has historically incorporated both racist and fascist elements in its political strategy".

The KKK was composed of Democrats and Southern segregationists like George Wallace and Orval Faubus were Democrats.  And FDR praised Mussolini and held him up as an example to be emulated.

And Democrat attempts to control everything that moves are very similar to what Mussolini did. See here. Judged by their policies, the Democrats are modern-day Fascists


The Agenda Project Action Fund released a new ad Tuesday blasting the Republican party, particularly Donald Trump, for "anti-Muslim" rhetoric. The ad is part of a yearlong campaign against the "fascist and racist rhetoric" the group says the Republican party has been spewing and promoting thus far in the 2016 presidential election.

"We have to ask ourselves: what kind of country do we want to be? One that stands up to hatred and lives up to the principles enshrined in the Constitution and inscribed on the Statue of Liberty or one that rules by fear and subjugation of individuals we deem different," said Erik Altieri, president of the Agenda Project, a progressive policy organization aimed at ensuring that politicians work in the interest of everyday Americans. "We must unite against this bigotry or we risk losing everything we represent as a nation."

The ad, which can be seen here, likens Trump's proposed ban on the immigration of Muslims to the U.S. to 1930s Germany. The Agenda Project Action Fund finds that the policy proposals of some Republicans harken back to the nation's long-embedded racial tensions.

"The modern Republican Party has historically incorporated both racist and fascist elements in its political strategy, the most prominent of which have been the so-called 'Southern Strategy' initiated in the 1968 and in the first post-civil rights movement election at the national level, with appeals to the 'White Vote' and, more recently, to 'real America' as articulated by such figures as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman," reads a statement from the group.

"Previously, they were politically savvy enough to hide their bigotry, wrapping it in innuendo and alluding to it using dog whistle politics. Now, with Donald Trump as the party's front runner for their nomination for president, the gloves are off and the smoke screen has been cleared, leaving only the ugly reality."

SOURCE

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Silent majority is toasting Trump as Left wallows in its vitriol

Political scientist Jennifer Oriel comments from Australia

The political year is ending as it began, with a sustained attack on conservatives and their replacement by a populist Right less willing to compromise on free speech and immigration. The New Right, embodied by political figures such as Donald Trump, is a counterforce to the continuing campaign of censorship and vilification by leftists determined to remove all traces of conservative thought from public life.

When Tony Abbott [former Australian PM] proposed a secular reformation of Islam, the Left compared him to Trump in a contorted campaign of guilt by association. Rather than address the problem of Islamist theocracy and the terrorism it produces, the Left urged Abbott to self-censor, framing him as a divisive element in society and the Liberal Party.

Network Ten's The Project [TV program] ran its coverage with the words "Abbott the Wrecker" splashed across the screen. SBS went into full scold mode, chiding: "Mr Abbott had promised to sit quietly on the backbench . but he's already causing problems."

Abbott certainly is causing problems - for theocrats and terrorists. The establishment Left did not complain so loudly when Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz called for a reformation of Islam, but Abbott embodies a combination of traits deemed intolerable by self-appointed political elites: he is white, male and Christian. From the lofty bureaucracy of the left clerisy, however, Abbott's cardinal sin is conservatism.

The editor of the University of Adelaide's student magazine "On Dit", Leighton McDonald-Stuart, described the corrosive effects of left bigotry on campus in The Courier-Mail: "The attitudes of . social justice warriors . is not conducive to (free) speech . You risk being labelled `fascist scum' if you happen to be of conservative ilk . If you seek to express a view that doesn't conform to . the revolutionary socialist groups on campus, then you are `racist'."

Across US campuses, the Left's campaign to impose its ideology by censorship has turned violent. Radical minority groups are attacking people whose skin colour is deemed politically incorrect. A multi-university group called the Afrikan Black Coalition stated: "White people need to be stopped. Period."

Last month, The Dartmouth Review reported a large group of Black Lives Matter activists storming the university library and attacking students while screaming: "F..k you, you filthy white f..ks!" They pinned one woman to a wall, shouting "filthy white bitch!" at her. Vice-provost of student affairs Inge-Lise Ameer responded not by condemning the violent racism of Black Lives Matter activists but the media that criticised it: "There's a whole conservative world out there that's not being very nice."

The Left's systematic and increasingly violent campaign of bigotry is fuelling the rise of political figures such as Trump. One cannot understand the Trump effect and the emergent populist Right without analysing the forces that produced them.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the odious treatise that produced the modern Left: Herbert Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance. Marcuse was a neo-Marxist who prescribed two methods to eliminate conservatism: censorship of free speech and the introduction of majority rule. The new majority would comprise Marcuse's "radical minority" and come to power by dominating public debate.

The neo-Marxist equation for equality is: "Not equal but more representation of the Left." The old standard of universal equality was superseded by a new formula to force the Right into political oblivion by engineering an over-representation of Left-approved minorities across public institutions. Media, academe and politics were all targets of the New Left's doublethink formula for social justice: inequality = equality.

Trump has crashed through the apex of neo-Marxism. His carefully crafted target group, the "silent majority", is a two-fingered salute to the Left's censorious activists. Trump's success rests on the premise that the silent majority is so angered by the decades of censorship and oppression devised by neo-Marxists that it will support any man whose free speech most offends their manufactured minorities.

Unlike the genuinely perse-cuted minorities of the Islamist and communist worlds, the minority groups of the Western Left have been manufactured primarily for political purposes. They enjoy equal and often greater rights under law than their fellow citizens. Affirmative action policy offers them privileged places in education and employment. They can access a range of special benefits under welfare, health and housing schemes. And the state shields them from words that may offend by encoding anti-free speech provisions in anti-discrimination legislation.

Minority politics may help some people genuinely in need, but it is also an expression of codified bigotry against the only group wholly excluded from its benefits: white men.

Trump is wielding such devastating effect because he embodies everything neo-Marxists have oppressed for a half-century.

He is white, male and capitalist. A determined freethinker and free speaker. A politically incorrect pundit who does not resile from attack but ups the ante after every blow. He pursues targets so aggressively that Republicans are at pains to disown him, especially after his call to halt Muslim immigration while America learns to manage the jihadist threat. But to everyone's surprise, Trump continues to dominate.

While public poll results vary, a Fox News poll held in South Carolina across four days showed that two days before Trump proposed a halt to Muslim immigration, his rating was at 30 per cent. He polled 38 per cent for the two nights following it. He is poll favourite to lead Republicans into the next election. And despite media portrayals of Trump followers as rednecks, a Rasmussen poll last week found the majority of Americans (46 per cent) support a temporary ban on Muslim immigration with 14 per cent undecided.

Trump is voicing the politically incorrect concerns of the silent majority and, for better or worse, they are rewarding him for it.

Trump is a middle finger aimed squarely at the establishment and the backlash against him has come from both sides of the political divide. It was The New York Times columnist David Brooks who distilled the complex issue into a sound bite, accusing Trump of bigotry. Brooks may be right, but the main challenge Trump's ascendancy leaves the Left is less to prove his bigotry than to disprove its own.

SOURCE

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The Democratic Candidates Do Their Best to Preserve ISIS

The Democratic debate Saturday focused as advertised on how to deal with ISIS and the growing threat of Islamic terrorism, but absolutely no new ground was broken.

Although there were minor difference between the candidates, it came down to this:  foreign -- build a coalition of Muslim states to fight ISIS;  domestic -- work with our Muslim community to weed out the potential radicals. (That latter hasn't been working too well lately.)

In other words, no change from the Obama policy that has gone nowhere for years.

The candidates were most allergic to "boots on the ground." America wasn't going to be drawn again into a ground war in the Middle East.  Yet there was no explanation how we could possibly win without troops.  Nor was there an explanation of why the Muslim armies would suddenly coalesce against ISIS without us, without, in Lee Smith's famous words, "the strong horse" -- that is, without real U.S. on the ground participation.

The fact is they won't.  And there will be no American victory, no defeat of ISIS, without our troops on the ground. Without the strong horse, nobody fights.  Ask bin Laden. He knew. He was their strong horse, now it's al Baghdadi.

Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley looked clueless about how the Middle East works and they probably are.  I would doubt they had read Smith's book or know much about that theory or anyone else's for that matter. I doubt too they would  be able to answer serious questions about the roots of  the Sunni-Shia conflict.  The whole Islamic uprising is an inconvenience to them. They'd rather be talking about how bad Wall Street is.

For Hillary it's an embarrassment -- or should be.  She's the woman who refused as head of the State Department to name Boko Haram (now pledged to ISIS) a terrorist organization at the very time they were raping and kidnapping girls in the name of Allah.  Now she's telling us we have ISIS where we want it -- or something like that.  Her remarks to that effect during the debate are being explained away or placed "in context"by Democrats, but that she could even claim something close to that is reprehensible.  She and Obama are, if not the mother and father of ISIS, at least their aunt and uncle.

Hillary, during the debate, accused Donald Trump of being ISIS's best recruiter, specifically that they had already used him in a propaganda video.  That turned out not to be true.  You will be amazed to hear that Hillary lied.

Meanwhile, ISIS goes its merry way, issuing fatwas in Afghanistan, producing 20 videos threatening Saudi Arabia, performing multiple executions in Syria and and various attacks all through Africa.

Closer to home, the beleaguered Isis pharmaceuticals of San Diego has finally decided to change its name. (Wouldn't you?)

All of this is in the last twelve hours or so. During the same time frame, that would-be strong horse Bernie Sanders was assuring us this was the Muslims' business and they should be going to war against ISIS.  It's probably just as well he didn't offer himself as commander-in-chief.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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