THE RIGHTFUL PRESIDENT. He gave us a reprieve from Leftist authoritarianism and hate. He was defeated not by a majority of American voters but by a flood of fraudulent postal votes. Some Lessons from history in support of Trump thinking: http://jonjayray.com/trumpism.html
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Sunday, July 17, 2016
Latest Terrorist attack demolishes Obama's crusade against guns
Every time there is a terrorist attack, Obama blames not the terrorist but guns. But there was huge slaughter caused in Nice by a simple truck. Should we ban all trucks? In Obama's crazy world we would. Will anything drag him into contact with reality? There are none so blind as those who will not see
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On Nice attack, Trump gets it, Clinton doesn’t
A view from Boston:
One man driving a truck, 84 people dead. Donald Trump wants to declare war on that. It isn’t real policy. It’s rhetoric, a direct appeal to the gut, to the anger and fear people experience when they watch the reports from Nice.
Hillary Clinton wants us to be smarter, talk to our allies, and maybe hold a summit. Her typically wonky response reflects little understanding of what average Americans feel when they see bodies, strollers, and a stuffed animal strewn along a beach promenade.
Those families in France were celebrating a holiday with fireworks and fun, just as Americans did less than two weeks ago. It could have been the Boston Esplanade, or anywhere we gathered with children and friends to celebrate Independence Day. Trump gets that and he instinctively knows how to play to that dread. If Clinton gets it too, it didn’t come through in the aftermath of the latest horrific attack.
Statistically, the likelihood of a terror attack may still be small, but at a certain point, statistics don’t matter. After terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels, and Istanbul, such violence feels possible in any major city. And attacks at home, in San Bernardino and Orlando, instill fear of the lone wolf terrorist next door, making us suspicious of each other. Last week’s murders of five Dallas police officers were not inspired by any foreign terrorist cause, but elevate the fear and suspicion.
Calling for gun control doesn’t work when a truck is the weapon of mass destruction. Calling for voters to try to understand the motivation behind such attacks is fine. But a presidential candidate must also understand those voters who aren’t students of psychology or advanced international relations. As they watch that long white truck roll down a palm-tree lined boulevard, the relations they are thinking of are their mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, and grandchildren. Clinton needs to get out of her cerebral bubble and start thinking about Chelsea and the grandkids, and how she would feel if they were in the path of that truck-turned-deadly-missile.
Liberals aren’t exactly pro-law and order, except for the TV show, one of the most left-wing on TV. Anything else and they are ready to storm the barricades and sing like a bad version of “Do You Hear the People Sing” from “Les Miserables.” From Occupy Wall Street to Ferguson to Black Friday to Hands Up, Don’t Shoot to Freddie Grey to Black Lives Matter, liberals love to protest, hate cops, spit at cops, attack cops and riot. For the left, it’s an altogether fun time.
This week they showed their true colors (red, just not the red idiot journalists use on their maps).
Making a Glass Out of Yourself:
If you don’t like something, break it. Sounds like the beginnings of a new liberal motto. The left is doing its best to Taliban America, removing statues, graves and anything else it doesn’t like. In their eyes history is, well, history.
It’s only appropriate that this erasure of history hit college campuses like Yale. Only it’s stained glass and not academia that’s getting smashed. “A black cafeteria worker at Yale has been arrested for shattering a glass dining hall window that showed slaves carrying bales of cotton,” wrote Slate. Thanks libs. Actual quote: “I would guess that many members of the Yale community appreciate Menafee’s precise surgical excision of a malignant image that once glowed balefully down upon their heads as they tried to enjoy the dining hall’s famous tofu apple crisp.”
Cops Are Like Communist Dictators. Or Something:
I’m color blind like many men and a few women. Even then I can tell the difference between red and blue. Of course, I don’t work for Huffington Post. The Posties are like many on the left, they hate cops and pretend they don’t. This week, they took a carefully manufactured liberal event and showed their disdain for the men and women in blue.
HuffPo highlighted a photo of a young African-American woman standing in the street getting arrested by police. Naturally, it was just like the famous Tiananmen Square tank man to the left. The site ran the actual headline: “Woman’s Peaceful Act of Resistance Becomes BLM Movement’s Tiananmen Square Moment.” HuffPo quickly changed the headline, but even then it linked to a story making the same comparison. Wonder if someone robbed the HuffPo offices, who you gonna call? Ghostbusters?
No, I Wasn’t Kidding. They Hate Cops II:
Racist black terrorist guns down police – killing five in an event so horrific that two presidents preside over the memorial service. The normal human reaction is to have A) sympathy for the slain and celebrate their lives or B) trash the white guy. If you work for the left, you probably chose B. And that’s what they did. Based on inference, Facebook likes and their interpretation of tattoos, liberals decided to savage heroic Senior Cpl. Lorne Ahrens. Actual headline: “Slain Dallas Cop Might’ve Been A White Supremacist: Still A Hero?” Moronic author Jesse Benn let it be known where he was going right away. Actual quote: “Naturally, bootlickers across the globe are unquestioningly celebrating the slain officers as heroes, innocents, and protectors.” Probably because they were heroes, innocents and protectors.
But hey, Jesse also advocated for violent protest as “logical” and somehow still is allowed to write for HuffPo. Benn attacked Ahrens because he didn’t like his tattoo choices including a “Crusader’s Shield tattoo.” Scary. After piling inference on top of inference, Benn concluded: “So, is he still a hero? He never was to me.” Benn’s Twitter profile photo makes him appear as a lame, hipster wannabe. Probably the bravest thing he has ever done is play Pokemon Go. OK, even that might be too much for HuffPo.
If Cops Are Bad, America Is Worse:
For you geezers out there (ahem), remember the scene in Animal House where Eric Stratton talks about how problems at Delta House equal an indictment of the entire educational system? That’s how the left views America. It hates the nation in micro and in macro. Salon delivered the macro, blaming America and our allies for problems with Russia and China. Actual headline: “The West escalates with Russia: Make no mistake, a second Cold War is now official NATO policy.”
Yeah, and Russia didn’t invade several of its neighbors and steal land, which is official Russian policy. If it’s a new Cold War, it’s only because Russia is the one doing the climate change. Actual quote: “Russia has signaled no intention whatsoever of doing anything more than defending its borders.” Assuming you extend Russia’s borders into the Crimea, Georgia and possibly Alaska. (We might offer them Detroit, but them’s fightin’ words.)
Let’s Make Up Nazi Stuff About Trump:
Liberals complain conservatives don’t like facts and then turn around and make up news more ridiculous than The Onion. Slate’s Shon Arieh-Lerer, a “freelance production associate,” (Hint: Not a word guy.) made up a whole piece about: “If Donald Trump Tweeted About Triumph of the Will.” Arieh-Lerer is part of what purports to be a comedy troupe, but if this piece is any indication, they won’t be getting an SXSW invite any time soon.
The piece is a bunch of made-up Tweets depicting Trump as pro-Nazi. So edgy. Arieh-Lerer’s problem is the piece reads like a typical Salon/Slate piece attacking the right. It’s phony and stupid, pretty much defining what liberal sites do. Actual made-up quote: “My wife @MELANIATRUMP made a very funny joke: “Trump of the Will.” Very good, Melania! Good girl!” HuffPo wants to be the original Producers or even Hogan’s Heroes. Instead, it’s as funny as a bad Nazi zombie flick. And about as lively.
You Thought No One Would Go There:
Just when you thought you’d heard enough Pokemon Go trend stories, the left goes one step further – “Pokemon Go Erotica.” According to Esquire, (Esquire?), “what's a phenomenon without a little bit of weirdly pitched porn.” Actual quote: “Pokebutt Go: Pounded By 'Em All is Kindle Edition erotica which is highly NSFW and only possibly taking itself seriously.” Actual quote from the promotional material for whatever this is: “This erotic tale is 4,000 words of sizzling human on gay Pokebutt action, including” and I’m going to cut to the chase here and spare you, gay “digital monster love." I’m sure this is just more about the conventional Modern Family lifestyle the media tell us all about.
For Obama, Leftist Rhetoric Is Always Innocent and Conservatives Are Always Guilty
When it comes to the linkage between violence and rhetoric, I abide by a fairly simple rule: If you're not advocating violence, you're not responsible for violence. That doesn't mean your rhetoric is decent or appropriate; it may be vile, awful and factually incorrect. But it isn't the cause for violence.
President Barack Obama also abides by a simple rule when it comes to linking violence and rhetoric: If he doesn't like the rhetoric, it's responsible for violence. And if there's violence associated with rhetoric he likes, then the violence must have been caused by something else.
This shining double standard was on full display this week after an anti-white racist black man shot 14 police officers in Dallas just hours after Obama appeared on national television explaining that alleged instances of police brutality and racism were "not isolated incidents" but rather "symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system." Obama was happy to label the shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota, without evidence, as part of a broader racist trend in law enforcement across the country.
Then Micah Xavier Johnson opened fire on white police officers — and anti-police racist radicals attacked officers in Minnesota, Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia and Texas again — and Obama suddenly got amnesia. Now, it turned out, rhetoric had nothing to do with their actions. In fact, said Obama, he had no idea why Johnson — who explicitly said he wanted to murder white cops — would do such a thing. "I think it's very hard to untangle the motives of this shooter," Obama said while in Poland. "What triggers that, what feeds it, what sets it off — I'll leave that to psychologists and people who study these kinds of incidents." He did blame one element for the attack, however: lack of gun control. "If you care about the safety of our police officers," he lied, "you can't set aside the gun issue and pretend that that's irrelevant."
Odd how this works. When a white racist shoots up a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, Obama targets America's legacy of racism, and the entire media call for a national fight against Confederate flags; when a nut tries to shoot up a Planned Parenthood building in Colorado, the left emerges to claim that the pro-life movement bears culpability. But when an Orlando jihadi shoots up a gay nightclub, Obama and company declare the motives totally mysterious and then impugn Christian social conservatives and the National Rifle Association.
Here's the truth: Obama's rhetoric isn't responsible for murder, but it's certainly responsible for death. That's because Obama's racist rhetoric has led to the greatest rise in racial polarization since the 1970s. In 2010, just 13 percent of Americans worried about race relations, whereas in April 2016, 35 percent of Americans did. That racial polarization has, in turn, led to distrust of police officers, many of whom respond by pulling out of the communities that need their help most. Crime rates go up, including murder rates. Ironically, Obama's supposed rage at white officers killing blacks leads to more blacks killing blacks in cities no longer policed by whites.
But there's good news: Obama can always blame everyone else. When you're held responsible for your feelings rather than your actions, it's always simple to direct attention toward the evil conservatives who insist that all lives matter rather than care enough about black lives to save them by endorsing the police who work to protect black men and women every day.
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Friday, July 15, 2016
Obama wants a government-run health insurer
President Obama is apparently not done lying about his health plan. Having pushed Obamacare with false claims such as the infamous lie “if you like your plan, you can keep it” the President is now calling for the return of the public option without admitting the real goal of the program from the start was to crowd out private insurance and usher in single-payer.
In a piece published by the Journal for the American Medical Association (JAMA) Obama writes:
"…the majority of the country has benefited from competition in the Marketplaces, with 88% of enrollees living in counties with at least 3 issuers in 2016, which helps keep costs in these areas low. However, the remaining 12% of enrollees live in areas with only 1 or 2 issuers. Some parts of the country have struggled with limited insurance market competition for many years, which is one reason that, in the original debate over health reform, Congress considered and I supported including a Medicare-like public plan. Public programs like Medicare often deliver care more cost-effectively by curtailing administrative overhead and securing better prices from providers. The public plan did not make it into the final legislation. Now, based on experience with the ACA, I think Congress should revisit a public plan to compete alongside private insurers in areas of the country where competition is limited. Adding a public plan in such areas would strengthen the Marketplace approach, giving consumers more affordable options while also creating savings for the federal government"
The public option is being framed in terms of choice and competition. In reality, it was always intended to be a glide-path to the single-payer system the president and many Democrats really wanted. This isn’t a supposition. The person who created the public option, Jacob Hacker, admitted he would be happy to see it crowd out private insurers over time:
Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber put it even more bluntly, equating the public option with single-payer:
This was fully understood to be the purpose of the public option back in 2009-2010, at least among Democratic insiders. Here’s a spokesman for Health Care for America Now, the lobbying group assembled to help pass the ACA, framing the public option and an achievable path to single-payer in May 2009:
The reason the public option didn’t make it into the bill, ultimately, is because democrats got careless about expressing their real goals in public:
I’m rehashing all of this now because you’ll notice none of it was mentioned by President Obama in his argument for giving the public option a 2nd look. He’s claiming this is about choice and competition when he knows this has always been about shifting America toward single-payer.
Over the weekend, Hillary Clinton also embraced the public option. Don’t expect her to be any more forthcoming about its real goals.
Democrats shouldn’t have to cheat to win. If they want single-payer, let them stand up for it openly the way Bernie Sanders does. If they want a path to single-payer, they should admit it and let the public judge it openly. But that hasn’t been the pattern with this president. He’d still prefer to sell this using marketing slogans.
It started off well enough. Barack Obama’s speech at the memorial for the five slain Dallas police officers began with appropriate solemnity and sorrow, complete with Scripture references and gratitude for the work law enforcement officers do all over the country. He told personal stories about each of the five officers.
But then, as he always does, he got to himself (45 first-person mentions) and his political agenda. After proclaiming “we are not as divided as we seem,” he proceeded to divide everyone by their tribal grievances. He again accused police departments of racism. And he ticked off a few of his agenda items:
“As a society, we choose to underinvest in decent schools.” Actually, we spend more on education per capita than any other nation. But spending does not automatically equal success.
“We allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment.” Those are the cities run for decades by leftist policies that we call Democrat urban poverty plantations.
“We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.” What foolish nonsense. But at the same time, Obama said nothing about the thousands of people shot this year — mostly blacks by other blacks — on the aforementioned poverty planation in Chicago.
In any case, this was an inappropriate venue for a stump speech. As Charles C.W. Cooke observed, “This, remember, was a funeral — a funeral for one of the police officers who was murdered last Thursday. It wasn’t a rally. It wasn’t a White House press conference. It wasn’t a public statement, hastily arranged on the airport tarmac. It was a funeral.” Unfortunately, Obama has a repugnant habit of standing on coffins to give his moralizing lectures.
If Black Lives Matter, then why have entrenched members of the Congressional Black Caucus spent more time enriching themselves than taking care of their neglected constituents?
Too many social justice protesters are busy throwing shade, rocks, bottles, concrete blocks and vicious death threats at police officers of all colors trying to keep the peace.
Instead of moaning about “#WhitePrivilege,” I invite radical racial identity warriors to join me in taking on the black political elites selling out their people. Help expose the most crooked members of the caucus of Congressional Black Corruption:
Corrine Brown: This 12-term Democrat from Florida received a 24-count federal indictment last week while her Congressional Black Caucus colleagues tried to drown out the news with diversionary gun-control theatrics. Brown and her chief of staff are charged with creating a fraudulent education charity to collect over $800,000 in donations from major corporations and philanthropies for their own private slush fund between 2012 and early 2016.
The director of the hoax group, dubbed One Door for Education, Inc., pleaded guilty last year to fraud and conspiracy. Prosecutors say two relatives of Brown and her chief of staff steered tens of thousands of dollars in cash deposits to their accounts. The charitable contributions paid for lavish galas, NFL tickets, concert luxury box seats, golf tournaments and apparently Brown’s tax bills.
Despite raising nearly a million bucks, Brown’s “charity” only issued two measly educational scholarships for minority students. So while shamelessly claiming this week to be a martyr akin to the murdered Dallas police officers and victims of the Orlando jihad, Brown is embroiled in a sordid scandal that exploited black children’s lives to line her own pockets.
You can’t blame righty or whitey this time, Crooked Corrine.
Chaka Fattah: This 11-term Pennsylvania Democrat was convicted in late June on 23 charges of racketeering, money laundering and fraud, along with four other co-defendants. His son was sentenced earlier this year to a five-year prison term after being found guilty of 22 counts of separate federal bank and tax fraud charges related to his misuse of business loans and federal education contracts to pay for designer clothes, massive bar tabs and luxury cars.
Fattah the Elder’s crimes are tied to schemes to repay an illegal $1 million campaign loan. Like his rotten apple of a son, Fattah siphoned off federal grant money and nonprofit funds (including donations to his educational foundation — sound familiar?) to pay off political consultants.
The con artists inside your own communities are your own worst enemies.
Eddie Bernice Johnson: 12-term Democrat from Dallas, similarly helped steer thousands of dollars in Congressional Black Caucus Foundation college scholarships for four family members and two of her top aide’s children in violation of the nonprofit’s rules.
Maxine Waters: This 13-term Beltway swamp queen from California and past chair of the Congressional Black Caucus walked away with a slap on the wrist from the toothless House Ethics Committee in 2012 after being charged with multiple ethics violations related to her meddling in minority-owned OneUnited Bank.
The banks' executives donated $12,500 to Mad Maxine’s congressional campaigns. Her husband, Sidney Williams, was an investor in one of the banks that merged into OneUnited. As stockholders, they profited handsomely from their relationship with the bank.
And vice versa. After Waters' office personally intervened and lobbied the Treasury Department in 2008, the financial institution received $12 million in federal TARP bailout money — despite another government agency concluding that the bank operated “without effective underwriting standards” and engaged “in speculative investment practices.” Top bank executive Kevin Cohee squandered money on a company-financed Porsche and a Santa Monica, California, beachfront mansion. After the federal bailout of Fannie/Freddie, OneUnited’s stock in the government-sponsored enterprises plunged to a value estimated at less than $5 million. Only through Waters' intervention was OneUnited able to secure an emergency meeting with the Treasury and its then-Secretary Henry Paulson.
Waters' government cronyism earned her a “Most Corrupt member of Congress” designation from the left-wing Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Then there’s Alcee Hastings, the 12-term Florida corruptocrat impeached while a federal judge in 1989 for making false statements and producing false documents in a 1983 criminal trial accusing him of seeking a $150,000 bribe. He went on to win a seat in Congress in 1992 and used his position to enrich his various lady friends, including paying one girlfriend-turned-congressional deputy district director more than half a million dollars in salary and another he calls a “staff assistant” to accompany on his endless junkets abroad.
Those three are just the start. There’s Texas' Sheila Jackson Lee and the Medicare fraud racket involving a local hospital in her district; Greg Meeks and his $400,000 earmark for a fake health clinic in New York City and Caribbean resort jaunts underwritten by convicted financier Allen Stanford; and Wisconsin’s Gwen Moore and her lucrative friends and family. And, of course, the ethics violations, shady business deals and tax troubles from New York’s Charlie Rangel deserve their own encyclopedia.
My message for BLM? Put down your black power fists and weapons. Give the “#BlueLivesMurder” and “Fry ‘em up like bacon” chants a rest. Aim your outrage at self-serving black leaders and their abject failure to improve black people’s lives.
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Thursday, July 14, 2016
Good news: Justice Ginsburg to move to New Zealand if Trump wins
No wonder they call her Notorious RBG. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has just declared war against Donald Trump, announcing that if he is elected president, she’d consider moving to New Zealand.
It would be a good place for her. I haven’t done a double-blind study, but it’s hard to recall — or find on the web — an instance of another Supreme Court justice diving into politics quite the way Ginsburg has just done.
Ginsburg’s comment came in an interview with the New York Times’ Supreme Court scribe, Adam Liptak. He was so astounded that he warned his readers before he reported her comments that normally justices “diligently avoid political topics.”
Ginsburg, Liptak notes, “takes a different approach.” Then he quotes her as saying in her Supreme Court chambers: “I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president.”
President Obama’s knee-jerk reaction to the Dallas shootings brings into clear relief his biases and double standards on racially or religiously motivated violence. Have we ever had a president as blinded by his ideology and as oblivious or dismissive about his own biases and the double standards he invokes?
If blacks or Muslims commit acts of violence, Obama calls for unity and demands we not rush to judgment. He bends over backward to deny the racial or religious motives of the actors. In countless acts of Islamic terrorism, before he has even expressed outrage or sorrow over the victims' deaths, Obama lectures us on the immorality of blaming actors of a single religion, tells us how wonderful and peaceful the religion is, and admonishes us against drawing inferences based on indisputable facts.
If, on the other hand, blacks or Muslims are even arguably the victims of racial or religious violence, he immediately rushes to judgment and attributes racial or religious motives to the actors.
In Warsaw, Poland, during a news conference, one journalist asked Obama to address the motives of Micah Johnson, the shooter who massacred police officers in Dallas. She said: “Help us understand how you describe his motives. Do you consider this an act of domestic terrorism? Was this a hate crime? Was this a mentally ill man with a gun?”
Obama replied, “First of all, I think it’s very hard to untangle the motives of this shooter.”
No, it’s not hard to untangle the motives of the killer, because they weren’t tangled. He made them quite clear both on Facebook and in his exchanges with cops during the standoff. Troubled or not, he appeared to hate white people and was livid at cops. Indeed, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said Micah Johnson “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
Obama simply ignored the question of whether the Dallas shootings were a hate crime, yet he had no difficulty in so characterizing the recent police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota. Nor in these cases did he call for unity and restraint. Instead, he reflexively detailed the evidence that allegedly demonstrates law enforcement discrimination against minorities, though the evidence of such bias is hotly disputed, as shown by Heather Mac Donald’s thorough examination of the data in her new book, “The War on Cops.”
Obama’s flagrant double standard has been on display throughout his tenure in office.
When Nidal Hasan, with known ties to radical Islam, fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others while screaming “Allahu akbar,” Obama said, “We don’t know all the answers yet, and I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts.”
When police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, arrested black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home, Obama sprinted to judgment, wholly without benefit of all the facts, and condemned the police, who he said “acted stupidly.”
After George Zimmerman was acquitted for the shooting of Trayvon Martin, Obama couldn’t resist the urge to identify with Martin, saying, “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” He couldn’t pass up a chance to lecture us on the “history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws,” even though Zimmerman is Hispanic.
When the Tsarnaev brothers planted bombs at the Boston Marathon and killed three people and injured hundreds more, Obama said: “In this age of instant reporting … there’s a temptation to latch on to any bit of information, sometimes to jump to conclusions. But … it’s important that we do this right. … That’s why we take care not to rush to judgment — not about the motivations of these individuals, certainly not about entire groups of people.”
When white police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed African-American Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, after his robbery of a convenience store, his resisting arrest and his storming of the officer, Obama didn’t calm activists who were wrongly claiming that Wilson had shot Brown in the back without provocation. He deliberately exploited the incident as an example of the “gulf of mistrust (that) exists between local residents and law enforcement.” He said, “Too many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement — guilty of walking while black or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness.” Maybe so, but it was highly inappropriate for Obama to mention those matters in connection with the Brown shooting, which had nothing to do with race. And it was reckless for Obama to fan the flames of racial animosity in that way. He expressed no similar indignation when riots ensued, and the havoc resulted in injured people and millions of dollars of property damage.
Obama didn’t demand restraint when Muslims were shot in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He said the FBI was taking steps to determine whether federal laws were violated. “No one in the United States of America,” he said, “should ever be targeted because of who they are, what they look like or how they worship.”
When African-American Freddie Gray died one week after riding without restraints in a police van after his arrest, Obama, again rushing to judgment while pretending not to, said: “We have some soul-searching to do. This is not new. It’s been going on for decades.”
Immediately after Dylann Roof allegedly shot black Christians in Charleston, South Carolina, Obama said: “The fact that this took place in a black church obviously also raises questions about a dark part of our history. … We know that hatred across races and faiths (poses) a particular threat to our democracy and our ideals.”
About the terrorist shootings in San Bernardino, California, Obama insisted we go along with his patronizing charade that the slaughter may have been the handiwork of disgruntled office workers. He said: “It is possible that this was terrorist-related, but we don’t know. It’s also possible that this was workplace-related.”
Concerning the recent jihadi murder of 49 people in Orlando, Florida, Obama said: “We are still learning all the facts. This is an open investigation. We’ve reached no definitive judgment on the precise motivations of the killer.” Never mind that the killer clearly expressed his motives.
If Obama were to apply a consistent standard to these incidents and not reveal his own biases, he might have some credibility in those cases where he calls for unity. Instead, he has been a catalyst for racial and religious division in his words, actions and policies.
These 3 Conservative Policies Have Allowed Indiana’s Economy to Flourish
Last month, America’s economy added just 38,000 jobs, the weakest growth in five years.
We should expect more than the lackluster 2 percent growth we’ve grown accustomed to under President Barack Obama. Luckily, there is already a successful working model in my home state of Indiana to accomplish this.
The recession hit Indiana harder than most states. While then-Gov. Mitch Daniels’ prudent fiscal policies helped the state absorb much of the impact, the recession and its aftermath took its toll. For example, unemployment peaked at 10.9 percent at the beginning of 2010.
However, today, Indiana’s economy is quite different. Employers are investing in the state and in our workers. More Hoosiers are working than ever before, and over 150,000 jobs have been added in the last four years alone. The Tax Foundation now rates the state’s business climate in the nation’s top 10.
What caused Indiana’s transformation? Daniels, and later, Gov. Mike Pence, a Republican, saw the consequences of overregulating, overtaxing, and overspending. They did not like the direction the state was headed and set about to reverse course.
Here are three policies that are working in Indiana:
1. Reduce Bureaucratic Red Tape
Republican leaders made it easier to do business in Indiana. They reduced bureaucratic red tape and eliminated many unnecessary regulations. Rather than burdening employers and trying to micromanage how businesses operate, Republicans put in place policies that have allowed our state to grow.
2. Balance the Budget
The state put its fiscal house in order. Statehouse leaders cut government spending, balanced the budget, created a surplus, and built a near record reserve fund.
Indiana earned a triple-A credit rating in 2010 and has maintained it ever since. These strategies help put the state in a better position to weather a future financial downturn.
3. Largest Tax Cut in Indiana History
Finally, and most recently, Indiana enacted the largest tax cut in state history. Lawmakers cut taxes for corporations, small business owners, and individuals. They eliminated personal property taxes for half of filers and simplified the tax code.
These sound policies played an important role in encouraging private sector growth. Earlier this year, Chief Executive magazine named Indiana one of the top five states in the nation for business. Executives cited the state’s low costs, low taxes and limited regulations for making it easier to grow their businesses.
Compare Indiana’s model to the Obama model.
Compare Indiana’s model to the Obama model. Since Obama took office, the amount of new regulations tying the hands of employers has skyrocketed, taxes have increased, and our deficit has nearly doubled. These policies limit opportunity and stunt growth.
We can replicate Indiana’s success at the national level. I’ll continue to work to enact pro-growth policies during my time left in office, but we need a president willing to recognize that failed policies of overregulating, overspending, and overtaxing are major obstacles to economic growth.
Limited opportunity and stunted economic growth cannot be our new normal. Americans deserve better.
Rep. Jim Jordan: Hillary Clinton Lied to Congress Under Oath
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) said Wednesday afternoon that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had misled Congress, under oath, when testifying to the House Select Committee on Benghazi in October 2015. Jordan was speaking to Washington Watch with Tony Perkins on American Family Radio, guest-hosted by Breitbart News legal editor Ken Klukowski.
The Ohio congressman referred to the statements of FBI director James Comey, who had announced Tuesday that he would not recommend prosecuting Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information, but whose findings prove that much of what Clinton told the Benghazi committee about her emails was false.
Specifically, Clinton told the Benghazi committee that she had turned over “all my work related emails” from her private email server to the government; that there was “nothing marked classified on my e-mails”; and that her attorneys “went through every single e-mail.”
According to Comey, all of those statements were false.
Jordan said that while he would leave the decision as to whether Clinton should be prosecuted for perjury to others, “what I do know is the questions I asked and the answers she gave didn’t square with what Mr. Comey said yesterday.”
He added: “And that should not happen in a country as great as ours, where people under oath in positions of real leadership and real importance in our government aren’t giving it to us straight. And again, it’s not my words — that’s what Director Comey said yesterday about Secretary Clinton, and the responses she gave to some of the questions that we asked her back in October.”
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Wednesday, July 13, 2016
How Pokémon GO Brightened a Dark World
All weekend, I’ve fielded texts from people who are despairing about the state of the country. Is some kind of unsolvable civil war developing between police and people, even between races? And how can politics solve this when the candidates seem to have every interest in actually exploiting and even exacerbating the problem? The opinion pages overflowed with expressions of deep sadness and warnings that, once again, the center is no longer holding. The nation is falling apart.
The integration between digital and physical in the Pokémon GO game go beyond anything most people have ever experienced.
What could possibly be the solution here? These problems seem so deep as to be insoluble.
Oddly, the answer might be in your pocket. Through our smartphones and the app economy, we are being given tools to allow us to reach the world and connect with others in ways that were previously unimaginable. This is not a political solution; in fact, it might be solution precisely because it is not political.
Pokémon Brings Us Together
Poetically, it was exactly this weekend – following so much terrible news and after a season in which two-thirds of Americans report being alarmed by their coming presidential choices – that millions downloaded and played one of the most delightful digital apps to yet appear: Pokémon GO.
It has broken all records on the numbers of downloads in such a short time. In only a matter of a few days, the mobile app had nearly as many real-time users as Twitter. It now lives on more smartphones that even Tinder. As a term, Pokémon is top trending. If you follow your Facebook home feed, you know all about this. If any application could be described as having swept the nation, this was it.
How can a silly game lift up our hearts and give rise to the better angels of our nature?
That something marvelous had happened was obvious to anyone living in dense population areas. Parks filled up with people playing the game. They were hanging out in public areas around malls, at bus stops, in parking lots, and just about everywhere.
People were holding their phones, playing the game, laughing and moving around. Crucially, people were meeting each other with something in common – people of all races, classes, religions; none of it mattered. They found new friends and came together over a common love.
And there was a common feature to all the people doing this. We smiled. We smiled at each other. Even now, even in the midst of a world in which “the center no longer holds,” we actually found that center again: a heart-felt affection for something we love and an awareness that others share that same aspiration.
It was absolutely beautiful to watch. With an element of fantasy and the assistance of marvelous technology, we experienced the common humanity of our neighbors and strangers in our community. This kind of experience is key for building a social consensus in favor of universal human rights.
Why We Love It
What was created through code started to become just as substantial and meaningful in our lives as anything that took up physical space and we could touch.The integration between digital and physical in the Pokémon GO game go beyond anything most people have ever experienced. Turn on your camera and you suddenly find opportunities for catching and collecting pocket monsters all around you. Head outdoors and chase them around, going up level after level and eventually find yourself at a gym where you can digitally battle other players in real space.
Dazzling doesn’t quite describe it. It is fun and imaginative, tapping into the inner kid of all of us. All the technological and intellectual discoveries over the last decades are on display. It all feels so real, all this capturing, collecting, and battling.
The industry calls it “augmented reality.” It’s a new level of gamification, not just something that happens on a screen. It reveals a layer of fantasy within the existing structure of reality itself, meaning that it brings to life the most delightful imaginings of our hearts. It helps us see what we would otherwise not see, and allows us to interact directly with the digitally existing thing.
In this way, Pokémon embodies something that we’ve all begun to intuit but haven’t been able to frame up completely. It is this: there is no longer a separation between what we once called real and what we think of as being a pure Internet fiction. The two are blending in ways that are dramatically enhancing our lives. We are to the point where we can no longer even imagine how the world even worked – and how our minds worked – before market forces blessed humanity with digital innovations.
The Great Blurring
Market-driven technology is not some invading imposition that makes people change the way they live without their permission. Instead it seeks to serve us and make our lives better; that’s its whole purpose and ethos. In the whole course of the digital revolution that began some twenty years ago, we’ve seen the gradual blurring between the physical and digital realms. What was created through code started to become just as substantial and meaningful in our lives as anything that took up physical space and we could touch.
We see this not only in games but also in health care, in finding our way around cities, in opening businesses, in driving, in dating, and in millions of life activities. Crucially, such apps are available to everyone regardless of life station. They spread capital and productivity across all classes of people, and more and more of our lives are migrating to this realm to escape the frustrating limits of physical space.
Of course the doubters have kvetched for two decades now. Old timers have screamed about how all this fascination with the Internet was causing a breakdown in human relationships, how the old-fashioned letter was so much better, why ebooks could never replace the glorious romance of physical books, how online music would kill the industry, how dating apps were killing romance, how time-killing blather on Facebook and Twitter were killing productivity, and so on.
Oh, and remember how video games were going to wreck our health by making us all sedentary? Now we have Pokémon GO players romping over hill and dale to “catch ‘em all.” As a wit on Facebook said, “Pokemon GO has done more for childhood obesity in the last 24 hours than Michelle Obama has in the past 8 years.”
Indeed, none of these fears have panned out. In fact, the opposite has proven true. The digital revolution has connected people as never before and given rise to more of what we love in life, whatever that happens to be.
Such doubters were missing something crucial. The key to the digital realm is its unrelenting adaptability to consumer preferences, thanks to the capacity of innovators to learn from the successes and failures of others. Digital innovation allows the crucial element of discovering and innovating to be crowd sourced, creating an environment of exponentially fast progress.
Market-driven technology is not some invading imposition that makes people change the way they live without their permission. Instead it seeks to serve us and make our lives better; that’s its whole purpose and ethos. Whatever it is we want to do – read, listen, play, study, create – the technology is there to make it easier and more widespread. It democratizes the tools we need to live better lives.
And what does it make possible? Whatever the human mind is capable of creating. And the element of surprise is always there. Just when we think we’ve reached an insuperable limit to the possible, something appears that surpasses that limit.
The individual human mind is not capable of outsmarting the brilliance of a market process that operates without limits.The challenge became very intense when Bitcoin came about in 2009, and the cryptocurrency gradually took on monetary properties. Economists claimed this could never happen, since money absolutely had to originate in a form of real-world scarcity of something you could hold.
I recall a conversation I was having with one skeptic on Skype who kept saying that Bitcoin can’t be money because it doesn’t exist. Frustrated, I asked him if the conversation we were having right then really existed. He said yes. I reminded him that I was not standing next to him and everything we were looking at and hearing was nothing but code.
Our conversation was purely fictional by his standards, simply because its only existence was in the digital realm. And yet it seemed to me to be actually happening. He was speechless.
The lesson here is that the individual human mind is not capable of outsmarting the brilliance of a market process that operates without limits. And within digital spaces today, we experience the closest thing we have to a free market. It is making things no one thought possible, and doing it daily, and doing it for everyone.
Overcoming Power with Humanity
Mobile apps like Pokémon GO can of course be dismissed as just another game, distractions that do not address serious life problems like race conflict and the tit-for-tat killings between police and citizens. But actually there is more going on here.
A few weeks ago, Facebook rolled out its live video functionality for all users – and keep in mind that this is free for everyone on the planet to use. When a police officer shot Philando Castile with four bullets during a routine traffic stop, his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds took out her phone and live streamed one of the most dramatic and powerful moments yet seen on the subject of police power.
It shocked the consciences of millions. Facebook was her 911. Had private enterprise not been there, the world would not have known. Now that we do, change is made more likely.
That’s the serious side of technology while Pokémon GO represents the delightful side. They work together, each making a valuable contribution to enabling a better life. What they have in common is that both are non-state solutions to crying human needs. No politician in history has ever achieved so much for the cause of human rights and human happiness.
Did Comey Actually Destroy Hillary Clinton by ‘Exonerating’ Her?
I may be alone in saying this, but when the proverbial dust settles, James Comey may have hurt Hillary Clinton more than he helped her in his statement Tuesday concerning the Grand Email Controversy. He may have let her off the hook legally, but personally he has left the putative Democratic candidate scarred almost beyond recognition.
By getting out in front of the Justice Department, the FBI director, speaking publicly in an admittedly unusual fashion, was able to frame the case in a manner that Attorney General Loretta Lynch in all probability never would have.
Read this portion of Comey's transcript and ask yourself how this person (Clinton) could ever serve successfully as president of the United States:
Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.
In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.
To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.
Look at that last paragraph again, because, if the Republicans have any brains at all, they will be quoting it ad infinitum. "To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions." What Comey is clearly saying (and leaving for us to "decide now") is that--whether you agree with his decision not to indict or no (I don't)—in a normal, real-world situation Clinton would face consequences, quite probably be demoted or even fired, certainly not promoted to the presidency of the United States, for what she did.
FBI Director Comey's Remarks Were Devastating to Hillary
My purpose here is not to exonerate Comey. In all probability he was a more than a bit of a coward, looking for a way out. But that way out may prove to have powerful ramifications. A Hillary indictment, in all likelihood, would have meant a new and more scandal-free Democratic candidate, a Joe Biden perhaps, far more potent than the seriously wounded Clinton who now has even more explaining to do. It's an endless case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for. And if we are to believe Judicial Watch (and I do), it's only just begun.
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Tuesday, July 12, 2016
When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism: And how moral psychology can help explain and reduce tensions between the two
JONATHAN HAIDT is, as usual, the soul of moderation below and I agree with much of his analysis. He makes a point few Leftists make: That "racists" are not usually objecting to the race or skin color of another group but rather to things that go with that race or skin color. So he sees most ascriptions of "racism" to non-Leftists as missing the point. It is an avoidance of the real issues.
Where I think Haidt goes wrong is in his trust of the work of Karen Stenner and her odd concept of "authoritarianism". The scale she uses to measure that concept may not measure anything at all. For a start, its internal reliability is disastrously low. Where a coefficient alpha of .70 is normally required in a research instrument, the Stenner scale has shown alphas of less than .30. In normal psychometric practice, that indicates that a scale does not measure ANYTHING.
But that is not the only fault of the Stenner intrument. The questions they used to assess authoritarianism were "forced-choice" questions. A typical question was:
"Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved?".
The option you chose was supposed to indicate whether you are authoritarian or not. But what if you thought that BOTH attributes are important? What if you wanted a kid who was BOTH considerate AND well-behaved? The form of the question prevents you from saying that. So the answers given might not well represent what the person actually thinks.
So is that naive form of question construction actually misleading? It is. If the people don't like the choices they are offered, what is likely to happen is that a "Donkey vote" effect will result: If the choices in a forced-choice scale are labelled "a" and "b", the Donkey voter will, at the extreme, simply tick all the "a"s. And I showed in my own survey research years ago that forced choice questions can push the results in a direction more or less opposite to what occurs with more straightforward questions
So Stenner's "findings" do not show what she thinks they do. If her findings show anything at all, it may arise from the fact that she in fact asks about child-rearing attitudes in her scale of "authoritarianism". But scales measuring child-rearing attitudes correlate very highly with fundamentalist Christian beliefs. By Stenner's measures, most Republicans look like “authoritarians” because so many are conservative Christians who advocate strict child-rearing practices. This is also why Bernie Sanders’s supporters are so much less "authoritarian" than Hillary Clinton’s — “Berners” are much less religious than other Democrats.
So I respectfully suggest to Prof. Haidt that the "authoritarians" he talks about may in fact just be Christians. That surely requires a re-think. Although Leftists customarily assume the opposite, I list here 16 studies -- with references -- that show that child rearing attitudes and experiences do NOT predict authoritarianism.
So I think Haidt is right in saying that conservatives have good and rational reasons for objecting to mass immigration of incompatible people.
Curiously, however, he looks at the psychology of conservatives only. When it comes to the internationalists he eschews any psychological enquiry at all. He gives sociological reasons only to explain why internationalists think what they do. Although he is a psychologist, he makes no attempt to look into their minds.
But their behaviour reveals clearly what is in their minds. They are very hostile and angry people, as Yancey documents in his book. And the thing they hate most is their own society. They want to "fundamentally transform" it, in Mr Obama's words. And what better way to attack the existing society than to bring into it large numbers of people who will disrupt it in various ways? The very lax attitude to immigration during the Blair regime in Britain was eventually admitted to be a conscious attack on British "complacency". The big immigration problems both the UK and the USA have at the moment are entirely traceable to the haters of the Left.
Finally, let me suggest that it is fitting that the first decisive break with the internationalists, Brexit, should have come from Britain. Britain has much to be proud of and no other country retains and displays her national traditions so opulently and to such popular acclaim. See below for one sketch of it:
What on earth is going on in the Western democracies? From the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and an assortment of right-wing parties across Europe through the June 23 Brexit vote, many on the Left have the sense that something dangerous and ugly is spreading: right-wing populism, seen as the Zika virus of politics. Something has gotten into “those people” that makes them vote in ways that seem—to their critics—likely to harm their own material interests, at least if their leaders follow through in implementing isolationist policies that slow economic growth.
Most analyses published since the Brexit vote focus on economic factors and some version of the “left behind” thesis—globalization has raised prosperity all over the world, with the striking exception of the working classes in Western societies. These less educated members of the richest countries lost access to well-paid but relatively low-skilled jobs, which were shipped overseas or given to immigrants willing to work for less. In communities where wages have stagnated or declined, the ever-rising opulence, rents, and confidence of London and other super-cities has bred resentment.
A smaller set of analyses, particularly in the United States, has focused on the psychological trait of authoritarianism to explain why these populist movements are often so hostile to immigration, and why they usually have an outright racist fringe.
Globalization and authoritarianism are both essential parts of the story, but in this essay I will put them together in a new way. I’ll tell a story with four chapters that begins by endorsing the distinction made by the intellectual historian Michael Lind, and other commentators, between globalists and nationalists—these are good descriptions of the two teams of combatants emerging in so many Western nations. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French National Front, pointed to the same dividing line last December when she portrayed the battle in France as one between “globalists” and “patriots.”
But rather than focusing on the nationalists as the people who need to be explained by experts, I’ll begin the story with the globalists. I’ll show how globalization and rising prosperity have changed the values and behavior of the urban elite, leading them to talk and act in ways that unwittingly activate authoritarian tendencies in a subset of the nationalists. I’ll show why immigration has been so central in nearly all right-wing populist movements. It’s not just the spark, it’s the explosive material, and those who dismiss anti-immigrant sentiment as mere racism have missed several important aspects of moral psychology related to the general human need to live in a stable and coherent moral order. Once moral psychology is brought into the story and added on to the economic and authoritarianism explanations, it becomes possible to offer some advice for reducing the intensity of the recent wave of conflicts.
Chapter One: The Rise of the Globalists
As nations grow prosperous, their values change in predictable ways. The most detailed longitudinal research on these changes comes from the World Values Survey, which asks representative samples of people in dozens of countries about their values and beliefs. The WVS has now collected and published data in six “waves” since the early 1980s; the most recent survey included sixty countries. Nearly all of the countries are now far wealthier than they were in the 1980s, and many made a transition from communism to capitalism and from dictatorship to democracy in the interim. How did these momentous changes affect their values?
Each country has followed a unique trajectory, but if we zoom out far enough some general trends emerge from the WVS data. Countries seem to move in two directions, along two axes: first, as they industrialize, they move away from “traditional values” in which religion, ritual, and deference to authorities are important, and toward “secular rational” values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering based on rational considerations. Second, as they grow wealthier and more citizens move into the service sector, nations move away from “survival values” emphasizing the economic and physical security found in one’s family, tribe, and other parochial groups, toward “self-expression” or “emancipative values” that emphasize individual rights and protections—not just for oneself, but as a matter of principle, for everyone. Here is a summary of those changes from the introduction to Christian Welzel’s enlightening book Freedom Rising:
…fading existential pressures [i.e., threats and challenges to survival] open people’s minds, making them prioritize freedom over security, autonomy over authority, diversity over uniformity, and creativity over discipline. By the same token, persistent existential pressures keep people’s minds closed, in which case they emphasize the opposite priorities…the existentially relieved state of mind is the source of tolerance and solidarity beyond one’s in-group; the existentially stressed state of mind is the source of discrimination and hostility against out-groups.
Democratic capitalism—in societies with good rule of law and non-corrupt institutions—has generated steady increases in living standards and existential security for many decades now. As societies become more prosperous and safe, they generally become more open and tolerant. Combined with vastly greater access to the food, movies, and consumer products of other cultures brought to us by globalization and the internet, this openness leads almost inevitably to the rise of a cosmopolitan attitude, usually most visible in the young urban elite. Local ties weaken, parochialism becomes a dirty word, and people begin to think of their fellow human beings as fellow “citizens of the world” (to quote candidate Barack Obama in Berlin in 2008). The word “cosmopolitan” comes from Greek roots meaning, literally, “citizen of the world.” Cosmopolitans embrace diversity and welcome immigration, often turning those topics into litmus tests for moral respectability.
For example, in 2012, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave a speech that included the phrase, “British jobs for British workers.” The phrase provoked anger and scorn from many of Brown’s colleagues in the Labour party. In an essay in Prospect, David Goodhart described the scene at a British center-left social event a few days after Brown’s remark:
The people around me entered a bidding war to express their outrage at Brown’s slogan which was finally triumphantly closed by one who declared, to general approval, that it was “racism, pure and simple.” I remember thinking afterwards how odd the conversation would have sounded to most other people in this country. Gordon Brown’s phrase may have been clumsy and cynical but he didn’t actually say British jobs for white British workers. In most other places in the world today, and indeed probably in Britain itself until about 25 years ago, such a statement about a job preference for national citizens would have seemed so banal as to be hardly worth uttering. Now the language of liberal universalism has ruled it beyond the pale.
The shift that Goodhart notes among the Left-leaning British elite is related to the shift toward “emancipative” values described by Welzel. Parochialism is bad and universalism is good. Goodhart quotes George Monbiot, a leading figure of the British Left:
Internationalism…tells us that someone living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington…. Patriotism, if it means anything, tells us we should favour the interests of British people [before the Congolese]. How do you reconcile this choice with liberalism? How…do you distinguish it from racism?
Monbiot’s claim that patriotism is indistinguishable from racism illustrates the universalism that has characterized elements of the globalist Left in many Western nations for several decades. John Lennon wrote the globalist anthem in 1971. After asking us to imagine that there’s no heaven, and before asking us to imagine no possessions, Lennon asks us to:
"Imagine there’s no countries; it isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will be one"
This is a vision of heaven for multicultural globalists. But it’s naiveté, sacrilege, and treason for nationalists.
Chapter Two: Globalists and Nationalists Grow Further Apart on Immigration
Nationalists see patriotism as a virtue; they think their country and its culture are unique and worth preserving. This is a real moral commitment, not a pose to cover up racist bigotry. Some nationalists do believe that their country is better than all others, and some nationalisms are plainly illiberal and overtly racist. But as many defenders of patriotism have pointed out, you love your spouse because she or he is yours, not because you think your spouse is superior to all others. Nationalists feel a bond with their country, and they believe that this bond imposes moral obligations both ways: Citizens have a duty to love and serve their country, and governments are duty bound to protect their own people. Governments should place their citizens interests above the interests of people in other countries.
There is nothing necessarily racist or base about this arrangement or social contract. Having a shared sense of identity, norms, and history generally promotes trust. Having no such shared sense leads to the condition that the sociologist Émile Durkheim described as “anomie” or normlessness. Societies with high trust, or high social capital, produce many beneficial outcomes for their citizens: lower crime rates, lower transaction costs for businesses, higher levels of prosperity, and a propensity toward generosity, among others. A liberal nationalist can reasonably argue that the debate over immigration policy in Europe is not a case of what is moral versus what is base, but a case of two clashing moral visions, incommensurate (à la Isaiah Berlin). The trick, from this point of view, is figuring out how to balance reasonable concerns about the integrity of one’s own community with the obligation to welcome strangers, particularly strangers in dire need.
So how have nationalists and globalists responded to the European immigration crisis? For the past year or two we’ve all seen shocking images of refugees washing up alive and dead on European beaches, marching in long lines across south eastern Europe, scaling fences, filling train stations, and hiding and dying in trucks and train tunnels. If you’re a European globalist, you were probably thrilled in August 2015 when Angela Merkel announced Germany’s open-door policy to refugees and asylum seekers. There are millions of people in need, and (according to some globalists) national borders are arbitrary and immoral.
But the globalists are concentrated in the capital cities, commercial hubs, and university towns—the places that are furthest along on the values shift found in the World Values Survey data. Figure 1 shows this geographic disjunction in the UK, using data collected in 2014. Positive sentiment toward immigrants is plotted on the Y axis, and desire for Britain to leave the EU on the X axis. Residents of Inner London are extreme outliers on both dimensions when compared to other cities and regions of the UK, and even when compared to residents of outer London.
But if you are a European nationalist, watching the nightly news may have felt like watching the spread of the Zika virus, moving steadily northward from the chaos zones of southwest Asia and north Africa. Only a few right-wing nationalist leaders tried to stop it, such as Victor Orban in Hungary. The globalist elite seemed to be cheering the human tidal wave onward, welcoming it into the heart of Europe, and then demanding that every country accept and resettle a large number of refugees.
And these demands, epicentered in Brussels, came after decades of debate in which nationalists had been arguing that Europe has already been too open and had already taken in so many Muslim immigrants that the cultures and traditions of European societies were threatened. Long before the flow of Syrian asylum seekers arrived in Europe there were initiatives to ban minarets in Switzerland and burkas in France. There were riots in Arab neighborhoods of Paris and Marseilles, and attacks on Jews and synagogues throughout Europe. There were hidden terrorist cells that planned and executed the attacks of September 11 in the United States, attacks on trains and buses in Madrid and London, and the slaughter of the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris.
By the summer of 2015 the nationalist side was already at the boiling point, shouting “enough is enough, close the tap,” when the globalists proclaimed, “let us open the floodgates, it’s the compassionate thing to do, and if you oppose us you are a racist.” Might that not provoke even fairly reasonable people to rage? Might that not make many of them more receptive to arguments, ideas, and political parties that lean toward the illiberal side of nationalism and that were considered taboo just a few years earlier?
Chapter Three: Muslim Immigration Triggers the Authoritarian Alarm
Nationalists in Europe have been objecting to mass immigration for decades, so the gigantic surge of asylum seekers in 2015 was bound to increase their anger and their support for right-wing nationalist parties. Globalists tend to explain these reactions as “racism, pure and simple,” or as the small-minded small-town selfishness of people who don’t want to lose either jobs or benefits to foreigners.
Racism is clearly evident in some of the things that some nationalists say in interviews, chant at soccer matches, or write on the Internet with the protection of anonymity. But “racism” is a shallow term when used as an explanation. It asserts that there are some people who just don’t like anyone different from themselves—particularly if they have darker skin. They have no valid reason for this dislike; they just dislike difference, and that’s all we need to know to understand their rage.
But that is not all we need to know. On closer inspection, racism usually turns out to be deeply bound up with moral concerns. (I use the term “moral” here in a purely descriptive sense to mean concerns that seem—for the people we are discussing—to be matters of good and evil; I am not saying that racism is in fact morally good or morally correct.) People don’t hate others just because they have darker skin or differently shaped noses; they hate people whom they perceive as having values that are incompatible with their own, or who (they believe) engage in behaviors they find abhorrent, or whom they perceive to be a threat to something they hold dear. These moral concerns may be out of touch with reality, and they are routinely amplified by demagogues. But if we want to understand the recent rise of right-wing populist movements, then “racism” can’t be the stopping point; it must be the beginning of the inquiry.
Among the most important guides in this inquiry is the political scientist Karen Stenner. In 2005 Stenner published a book called The Authoritarian Dynamic, an academic work full of graphs, descriptions of regression analyses, and discussions of scholarly disputes over the nature of authoritarianism. (It therefore has not had a wide readership.) Her core finding is that authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. It is rather a psychological predisposition to become intolerant when the person perceives a certain kind of threat. It’s as though some people have a button on their foreheads, and when the button is pushed, they suddenly become intensely focused on defending their in-group, kicking out foreigners and non-conformists, and stamping out dissent within the group. At those times they are more attracted to strongmen and the use of force. At other times, when they perceive no such threat, they are not unusually intolerant. So the key is to understand what pushes that button.
The answer, Stenner suggests, is what she calls “normative threat,” which basically means a threat to the integrity of the moral order (as they perceive it). It is the perception that “we” are coming apart:
"The experience or perception of disobedience to group authorities or authorities unworthy of respect, nonconformity to group norms or norms proving questionable, lack of consensus in group values and beliefs and, in general, diversity and freedom ‘run amok’ should activate the predisposition and increase the manifestation of these characteristic attitudes and behaviors"
So authoritarians are not being selfish. They are not trying to protect their wallets or even their families. They are trying to protect their group or society. Some authoritarians see their race or bloodline as the thing to be protected, and these people make up the deeply racist subset of right-wing populist movements, including the fringe that is sometimes attracted to neo-Nazism. They would not even accept immigrants who fully assimilated to the culture. But more typically, in modern Europe and America, it is the nation and its culture that nationalists want to preserve.
Stenner identifies authoritarians in her many studies by the degree to which they endorse a few items about the most important values children should learn at home, for example, “obedience” (vs. “independence” and “tolerance and respect for other people”). She then describes a series of studies she did using a variety of methods and cross-national datasets. In one set of experiments she asked Americans to read fabricated news stories about how their nation is changing. When they read that Americans are changing in ways that make them more similar to each other, authoritarians were no more racist and intolerant than others.
But when Stenner gave them a news story suggesting that Americans are becoming more morally diverse, the button got pushed, the “authoritarian dynamic” kicked in, and they became more racist and intolerant. For example, “maintaining order in the nation” became a higher national priority while “protecting freedom of speech” became a lower priority. They became more critical of homosexuality, abortion, and divorce.
One of Stenner’s most helpful contributions is her finding that authoritarians are psychologically distinct from “status quo conservatives” who are the more prototypical conservatives—cautious about radical change. Status quo conservatives compose the long and distinguished lineage from Edmund Burke’s prescient reflections and fears about the early years of the French revolution through William F. Buckley’s statement that his conservative magazine National Review would “stand athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’”
Status quo conservatives are not natural allies of authoritarians, who often favor radical change and are willing to take big risks to implement untested policies. This is why so many Republicans—and nearly all conservative intellectuals—oppose Donald Trump; he is simply not a conservative by the test of temperament or values. But status quo conservatives can be drawn into alliance with authoritarians when they perceive that progressives have subverted the country’s traditions and identity so badly that dramatic political actions (such as Brexit, or banning Muslim immigration to the United States) are seen as the only remaining way of yelling “Stop!” Brexit can seem less radical than the prospect of absorption into the “ever closer union” of the EU.
So now we can see why immigration—particularly the recent surge in Muslim immigration from Syria—has caused such powerfully polarized reactions in so many European countries, and even in the United States where the number of Muslim immigrants is low. Muslim Middle Eastern immigrants are seen by nationalists as posing a far greater threat of terrorism than are immigrants from any other region or religion. But Stenner invites us to look past the security threat and examine the normative threat. Islam asks adherents to live in ways that can make assimilation into secular egalitarian Western societies more difficult compared to other groups. (The same can be said for Orthodox Jews, and Stenner’s authoritarian dynamic can help explain why we are seeing a resurgence of right-wing anti-Semitism in the United States.)
Muslims don’t just observe different customs in their private lives; they often request and receive accommodations in law and policy from their host countries, particularly in matters related to gender. Some of the most pitched battles of recent decades in France and other European countries have been fought over the veiling and covering of women, and the related need for privacy and gender segregation. For example, some public swimming pools in Sweden now offer times of day when only women are allowed to swim. This runs contrary to strong Swedish values regarding gender equality and non-differentiation.
So whether you are a status quo conservative concerned about rapid change or an authoritarian who is hypersensitive to normative threat, high levels of Muslim immigration into your Western nation are likely to threaten your core moral concerns.
But as soon as you speak up to voice those concerns, globalists will scorn you as a racist and a rube. When the globalists—even those who run the center-right parties in your country—come down on you like that, where can you turn? The answer, increasingly, is to the far right-wing nationalist parties in Europe, and to Donald Trump, who just engineered a hostile takeover of the Republican Party in America.
The Authoritarian Dynamic was published in 2005 and the word “Muslim” occurs just six times (in contrast to 100 appearances of the word “black”). But Stenner’s book offers a kind of Rosetta stone for interpreting the rise of right-wing populism and its focus on Muslims in 2016. Stenner notes that her theory “explains the kind of intolerance that seems to ‘come out of nowhere,’ that can spring up in tolerant and intolerant cultures alike, producing sudden changes in behavior that cannot be accounted for by slowly changing cultural traditions.”
She contrasts her theory with those who see an unstoppable tide of history moving away from traditions and “toward greater respect for individual freedom and difference,” and who expect people to continue evolving “into more perfect liberal democratic citizens.“ She does not say which theorists she has in mind, but Welzel and his World Values Survey collaborators, as well as Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, seem to be likely candidates. Stenner does not share the optimism of those theorists about the future of Western liberal democracies. She acknowledges the general trends toward tolerance, but she predicts that these very trends create conditions that hyper-activate authoritarians and produce a powerful backlash. She offered this prophecy:
"[T]he increasing license allowed by those evolving cultures generates the very conditions guaranteed to goad latent authoritarians to sudden and intense, perhaps violent, and almost certainly unexpected, expressions of intolerance. Likewise, then, if intolerance is more a product of individual psychology than of cultural norms…we get a different vision of the future, and a different understanding of whose problem this is and will be, than if intolerance is an almost accidental by-product of simple attachment to tradition. The kind of intolerance that springs from aberrant individual psychology, rather than the disinterested absorption of pervasive cultural norms, is bound to be more passionate and irrational, less predictable, less amenable to persuasion, and more aggravated than educated by the cultural promotion of tolerance"
Writing in 2004, Stenner predicted that “intolerance is not a thing of the past, it is very much a thing of the future.”
Chapter Four: What Now?
The upshot of all this is that the answer to the question we began with—What on Earth is going on?—cannot be found just by looking at the nationalists and pointing to their economic conditions and the racism that some of them do indeed display.
One must first look at the globalists, and at how their changing values may drive many of their fellow citizens to support right-wing political leaders. In particular, globalists often support high levels of immigration and reductions in national sovereignty; they tend to see transnational entities such as the European Union as being morally superior to nation-states; and they vilify the nationalists and their patriotism as “racism pure and simple.” These actions press the “normative threat” button in the minds of those who are predisposed to authoritarianism, and these actions can drive status quo conservatives to join authoritarians in fighting back against the globalists and their universalistic projects.
If this argument is correct, then it leads to a clear set of policy prescriptions for globalists. First and foremost: Think carefully about the way your country handles immigration and try to manage it in a way that is less likely to provoke an authoritarian reaction. Pay attention to three key variables: the percentage of foreign-born residents at any given time, the degree of moral difference of each incoming group, and the degree of assimilation being achieved by each group’s children.
Legal immigration from morally different cultures is not problematic even with low levels of assimilation if the numbers are kept low; small ethnic enclaves are not a normative threat to any sizable body politic. Moderate levels of immigration by morally different ethnic groups are fine, too, as long as the immigrants are seen as successfully assimilating to the host culture. When immigrants seem eager to embrace the language, values, and customs of their new land, it affirms nationalists’ sense of pride that their nation is good, valuable, and attractive to foreigners. But whenever a country has historically high levels of immigration, from countries with very different moralities, and without a strong and successful assimilationist program, it is virtually certain that there will be an authoritarian counter-reaction, and you can expect many status quo conservatives to support it.
Stenner ends The Authoritarian Dynamic with some specific and constructive advice:
"[A]ll the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness….
Ultimately, nothing inspires greater tolerance from the intolerant than an abundance of common and unifying beliefs, practices, rituals, institutions, and processes. And regrettably, nothing is more certain to provoke increased expression of their latent predispositions than the likes of “multicultural education,” bilingual policies, and nonassimilation"
If Stenner is correct, then her work has profound implications, not just for America, which was the focus of her book, but perhaps even more so for Europe. Donald Tusk, the current president of the European Council, recently gave a speech to a conclave of center-right Christian Democratic leaders (who, as members of the educated elite, are still generally globalists). Painfully aware of the new authoritarian supremacy in his native Poland, he chastised himself and his colleagues for pushing a “utopia of Europe without nation-states.” This, he said, has caused the recent Euroskeptic backlash: “Obsessed with the idea of instant and total integration, we failed to notice that ordinary people, the citizens of Europe, do not share our Euro-enthusiasm.”
Democracy requires letting ordinary citizens speak. The majority spoke in Britain on June 23, and majorities of similar mien may soon make themselves heard in other European countries, and possibly in the United States in November. The year 2016 will likely be remembered as a major turning point in the trajectory of Western democracies. Those who truly want to understand what is happening should carefully consider the complex interplay of globalization, immigration, and changing values.
If the story I have told here is correct, then the globalists could easily speak, act, and legislate in ways that drain passions and votes away from nationalist parties, but this would require some deep rethinking about the value of national identities and cohesive moral communities. It would require abandoning the multicultural approach to immigration and embracing assimilation.
The great question for Western nations after 2016 may be this: How do we reap the gains of global cooperation in trade, culture, education, human rights, and environmental protection while respecting—rather than diluting or crushing—the world’s many local, national, and other “parochial” identities, each with its own traditions and moral order? In what kind of world can globalists and nationalists live together in peace?
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Monday, July 11, 2016
The conclusions from the study below are borderline insane
Orthodoxy must be defended by hook or crook, I guess. The study below not only showed tiny effects but achieved those effects only by throwing out four fifths of the data. Using extreme quintiles for your analyis is a confession that there are no actual effects in the data as a whole. The only statistically defensible conclusion from the results below is to eat as much fatty food as you like, because it will have no effect on your health either way
Association of Specific Dietary Fats With Total and Cause-Specific Mortality
Dong D. Wang et al.
ABSTRACT
Importance
Previous studies have shown distinct associations between specific dietary fat and cardiovascular disease. However, evidence on specific dietary fat and mortality remains limited and inconsistent.
Objective
To examine the associations of specific dietary fats with total and cause-specific mortality in 2 large ongoing cohort studies.
Design, Setting, and Participants
This cohort study investigated 83?349 women from the Nurses' Health Study (July 1, 1980, to June 30, 2012) and 42?884 men from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (February 1, 1986, to January 31, 2012) who were free of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and types 1 and 2 diabetes at baseline. Dietary fat intake was assessed at baseline and updated every 2 to 4 years. Information on mortality was obtained from systematic searches of the vital records of states and the National Death Index, supplemented by reports from family members or postal authorities. Data were analyzed from September 18, 2014, to March 27, 2016.
Main Outcomes and Measures
Total and cause-specific mortality.
Results
During 3?439?954 person-years of follow-up, 33?304 deaths were documented. After adjustment for known and suspected risk factors, dietary total fat compared with total carbohydrates was inversely associated with total mortality (hazard ratio [HR] comparing extreme quintiles, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.81-0.88; P?
Conclusions and Relevance
Different types of dietary fats have divergent associations with total and cause-specific mortality. These findings support current dietary recommendations to replace saturated fat and trans-fat with unsaturated fats.
Recent shootings: Donald Trump blames Barack Obama for race divide
Obama has repeatedly taken the side of black criminals and blamed the police. No wonder blacks are angry. They have no reason to doubt him. Obama and his ilk PROVOKE black anger.
Donald Trump attacked President Obama yesterday, saying that America's first black president had only worsened racial tensions. "Our nation has become too divided," the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said after five white police officers were shot dead by a black gunman in Dallas.
Mr Trump, who has repeatedly been accused of "dog-whistle" politics, added: "Crime is harming too many citizens. Racial tensions have gotten worse, not better. This isn't the American Dream we all want for our children."
As the presidential campaign was interrupted by a mass shooting for the second time in less than a month, Mr Obama called for calm after a three-day spasm of racial violence.
The president had reprimanded police on Thursday after video footage emerged of the deaths of Philando Castile, who was shot by an officer in Minnesota on Wednesday, and Alton Sterling, a black man who was shot dead by police in Louisiana on Tuesday.
Mr Obama said: "There's a big chunk of our citizenry that feels as if, because of the colour of their skin, they are not being treated the same, and that hurts."
Even as the president was speaking, Micah Xavier Johnson, a 25-year-old black man, was preparing to unleash hell on the streets of Dallas.
Johnson shot a dozen police on Thursday night, five fatally, at what had been a peaceful protest march against the deaths of Mr Castile and Mr Sterling. Hours later Mr Obama found himself making yet another set of remarks after a mass shooting. At a Nato summit in Warsaw, he said that all Americans "stand united with Dallas".
Both Mr Trump and Hillary Clinton called off campaign events yesterday. Mr Trump had planned to address Hispanics in Florida but instead issued a statement calling the Dallas shootings "a co-ordinated, premeditated assault on the men and women who keep us safe".
He said that the deaths of Mr Castile and Mr Sterling were a reminder of "how much more needs to be done" to restore public confidence in the police.
After a mass shooting claimed 49 lives at an Orlando nightclub last month Mrs Clinton put calls for controls on assault rifles at the heart of her campaign. Mr Trump retaliated by alleging that she would scrap the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.
The likelihood of progress on gun control is small. A tweet sent by Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, signalled how charged the atmosphere has become.
"This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you," he wrote after the Dallas attack.
Mr Walsh deleted the post but stood by the sentiment. "There's a war against our cops in this country, and I think Obama has fed that war and Black Lives Matter has fed that war," he said.
The post-Brexit ugliness of the left: Report from Britain
Money-obsessed and anti-working class – the liberal left has revealed its ugly side
Those on the liberal left have always prided themselves on being more caring and compassionate than conservatives. People on the right, they insist, are narrow-minded and selfish, beholden to vested interests. They only care about money and themselves. They are bad people.
This is one of the most persistent myths of modern times. I’ve never believed it. Selfishness transcends politics. Those on the left are just as given as conservatives to self-interest, bigotry and dislike of people different to themselves. And, my word, over the past couple of weeks, following Britain’s vote to leave the UK, haven’t we seen just how. The illusion of the liberal-left’s inherent and exclusive capacity for compassion has truly been exploded.
Consider the recent March for Europe in London, to demand that the will of the people be revoked and that corporate-backed oligarchy be restored. Rich, metropolitan types have shamelessly complained about the result because their holidays in Europe will henceforth become more expensive. They fear for their second homes in Tuscany and the south of France. People have been saying this openly. The burghers of north London fear they might no longer get dirt-cheap nannies and au pairs from Eastern Europe. They fret about the staff on the sainted NHS, staff trained at the expense of poorer countries who we in the UK have since hired on the cheap. Corporate types fear for the future of immigrant workers, those magnificently exploited souls who live six to a room on three-month contracts being paid a minimum wage or less. Such outrageous displays of greed haven’t been witnessed since the heady days of Thatcherism.
Consider, too, the ceaseless insults hurled at the stupid, poor white people who voted to leave the EU. These are folk who struggle to maintain a first home, let alone a second – people who can barely afford to go on holiday at all. These are the fishermen, from Aberdeen to Hull to Ramsgate to Hastings to Cornwall, whose livelihoods have been devastated by the EU – the same fishermen taunted by Bob Geldof and his champagne-swilling chums. These are the people living in Peterborough and Boston who can’t get doctor’s appointments or find school places for their children because hospitals and schools are overwhelmed.
These are people whose small businesses have been ruined by Operation Stack in Kent, whereby lorries clog up the roads for miles, the result of Schengen Area free movement that has led to the mayhem in Calais. Consider those people in Wales who faced the daily, humiliating reminder that their economy was dependent on hand-outs from the EU. Consider, too, all these English people in Dover and Folkestone who know Poles and Latvians, not as cheap domestic staff but as neighbours, parents of their children’s schoolfriends, as equals. All these people slandered as vermin and racists.
The metropolitan left sneered at them from their secluded London villages or their homes in rural Derbyshire. Cloistered writers and academics seem oblivious to the negative effects of the EU, not least because none has experienced first-hand the adverse effects of EU policy. No newspaper editor has opted for a cut-price, cutting-edge columnist from Romania. As for people working in the building trade, in decorating, in plumbing, I can introduce you to many who have been undercut or seen their businesses go under. There are countless here in Kent who have left costly and crowded London for that reason. If you have a house, a mortgage and children to look after, you simply can’t live as a footloose twentysomething singleton with no responsibilities.
I’m not sure how much the liberal-left realise just how repellent their brattish behaviour has been. But this has been coming for some time. Ever since the libertine cultural revolution of the 1960s, Labour and the orthodox left in the Western world have been in a long process of abandoning the working class, withdrawing into identity politics, rights for the self, for affirmation of the self. Hence, so-called progressives now care above all for their image as ‘good people’. Virtue signalling is the epitome of the new faux-compassionate, egocentric left.
Hence the needy rhetoric about ‘the world hating us’ for leaving the EU, the exhortations to ‘hug an immigrant’ or wear safety pins to boast of one’s non-racist credentials. Everything’s about ‘me’. The liberal-left couldn’t understand why people would vote in the name of abstract principles such as ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘self-determination’, because they view everything in terms of their own money and their own public image.
There was a time when it was Tories who sneered at the poor, who deplored them as stupid and feckless. This was in the loadsamoney era of the 1980s, during which the market ruled and we were beholden to the whims of capitalists and the sainted market. There was even a time, many years ago, when the left spoke of principles, of democracy and liberty. How the roles have been reversed. How strange that it’s mostly conservatives who now talk in abstractions, and it’s the left that obsesses about the markets and worry about the FTSE 100, about their own money. They oppose democracy. They hate the poor and the old. They are despicable.
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)
Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party. And now a "Deplorable"
When it comes to political incorrectness, I hit the trifecta. I talk about race, IQ and social class. I have an academic background in all three subjects but that wins me no forgiveness
The sidebar entries here had become very extensive. I have therefore divided them into two. The first half is below and the second half is here -- including some comments on Jews
References to "Leftists" below are to preachers of Leftism, not the ordinary Leftist voter
As a good academic, I define my terms: A Leftist is a person who is so dissatisfied with the way things naturally are that he/she is prepared to use force to make people behave in ways that they otherwise would not.
So an essential feature of Leftism is that they think they have the right to tell other people what to do. They see things in the world that are not ideal and conclude therefore that they have the right to change those things by force. Conservative explanations of why things are not ideal -- and never can be -- fall on deaf ears
That Left and Right are so hostile to one-another is most unfortunate. Broadly, the world needs Leftists to highlight problems and conservatives to solve them. But the Left get angry with conservatives when conservatives point out that there are no good solutions to some problems
Conservatism is as much a respect for reality as a respect for tradition. But tradition summarizes a lot of reality. So conservative thinking must change as reality changes. There is no unchanging body of doctrine in conservatism. Conservatism is an attitude, a realistic attitude. Leftists, by contrast, believe whatever suits them, reality regardless
Giorgia dal Italia -- my favourite politician
What the Left routinely forgets: As Henry Hazlitt pointed out: “The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.”
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities,” -- Voltaire.
Social justice is injustice. What is just about taking money off people who have earned it and giving it to people who have not earned it? You can call it many things but justice it is not
But it is the aim of all Leftist governments to take money off people who have earned it and give it to people who have not earned it
Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, 'social justice.’ - Thomas Sowell
At the most basic (psychological) level, conservatives are the contented people and Leftists are the discontented people. Conservatives don't think the world is perfect but they can happily live with it. And both those attitudes are largely dispositional, inborn -- which is why they so rarely change
Revolution is the ultimate desideratum for Leftists
Patriotism is a happy thing. No wonder Leftists have difficulties with it
Leftists' manifest desire is to destroy their country from the inside with division and hatred
Former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo switched from Democrat to the Republican Party, saying, “A conservative is a liberal who was mugged the night before.”
Who is this Leftist? Take his description of his political program: A "declaration of war against the order of things which exist, against the state of things which exist, in a word, against the structure of the world which presently exists". You could hardly get a more change-oriented or revolutionary programme than that. So whose programme was it? Marx? Lenin? Stalin? Trotsky? Mao? No. It was how Hitler described his programme towards the end of "Mein Kampf". And the Left pretend that Hitler was some sort of conservative! Perhaps it not labouring the point also to ask who it was that described his movement as having a 'revolutionary creative will' which had 'no fixed aim, _ no permanency, only eternal change'. It could very easily have been Trotsky or Mao but it was in fact Hitler (O'Sullivan, 1983. p. 138). Clearly, Nazism was nothing more nor less than a racist form of Leftism (rather extreme Leftism at that) and to label it as "Rightist" or anything else is to deny reality.
A rarely acknowledged aim of Leftist policy in a democracy is to deliver dismay and disruption into the lives other people -- whom they regard as "complacent" -- and they are good at achieving that.
As usual, however, it is actually they who are complacent, with a conviction of the rightness and virtue of their own beliefs that merges into arrogance. They regard anyone who disagrees with them with contempt.
Leftists are wolves in sheep's clothing
Liberals are people who don't believe in liberty
Leftist principles are as solid as foam rubber. When they say that there is no such thing as right and wrong they really mean it.
There is no dealing with the Left. Their word is no good. You cannot make a deal with someone who thinks lying and stealing are mere tactics, which the Marxists actually brag about
Montesquieu knew Leftists well: "There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice."
Because they claim to have all the answers to society's ills, Communists often seem "cool" to young people
German has a word that describes most Leftists well: "Scheinheilig" - A person who appears to be very kind, soft natured, and filled with pure goodness but behind the facade, has a vile nature. He is seemingly holy but is an unscrupulous person on the inside.
The new faith is very oppressive: Leftist orthodoxy is the new dominant religion of the Western world and it is every bit as bigoted and oppressive as Christianity was at its worst
There are two varieties of authoritarian Leftism. Fascists are soft Leftists, preaching one big happy family -- "Better together" in other words. Communists are hard Leftists, preaching class war.
Equality: The nonsensical and incoherent claim that underlies so much Leftist discourse is "all men are equal". And that is the envier's gospel. It makes not a scrap of sense and shows no contact with reality but it is something that enviers resort to as a way of soothing their envious feelings. They deny the very differences that give them so much heartburn. "Denial" was long ago identified by Freud as a maladaptive psychological defence mechanism and "All men are equal" is a prize example of that. Whatever one thinks of his theories, Freud was undoubtedly an acute observer of people and very few psychologists today would doubt the maladaptive nature of denial as described by Freud.
Socialism is the most evil malady ever to afflict the human brain. The death toll in WWII alone tells you that
“Hanlon’s razor”: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
American conservatives have to struggle to hold their country together against Leftist attempts to destroy it. Maduro's Venezuela is a graphic example of how extremely destructive socialism in government can be
The standard response from Marxist apologists for Stalin and other Communist dictators is to say you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. To which Orwell retorted, ‘Where’s the omelette?’
You do still occasionally see some mention of the old idea that Leftist parties represent the worker. In the case of the U.S. Democrats that is long gone. Now they want to REFORM the worker. No wonder most working class Americans these days vote Republican. Democrats are the party of the minorities and the smug
"The tendency of liberals is to create bodies of men and women — of all classes — detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion — mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined." —T.S. Eliot
We live in a country where the people own the Government and not in a country where the Government owns the people -- Churchill
"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others" -- Cicero. See here
The Left have a lot in common with tortoises. They have a thick mental shell that protects them from the reality of the world about them
Definition of a Socialist: Someone who wants everything you have...except your job.
Leftist writers usually seem quite reasonable and persuasive at first glance. The problem is not what they say but what they don't say. Leftist beliefs are so counterfactual ("all men are equal", "all men are brothers" etc.) that to be a Leftist you have to have a talent for blotting out from your mind facts that don't suit you. And that is what you see in Leftist writing: A very selective view of reality. Facts that disrupt a Leftist story are simply ignored. Leftist writing is cherrypicking on a grand scale
So if ever you read something written by a Leftist that sounds totally reasonable, you have an urgent need to find out what other people say on that topic. The Leftist will almost certainly have told only half the story
Leftists commonly have the Cyclops syndrome: to see with only one eye, in only one dimension and only half of reality.
We conservatives have the facts on our side, which is why Leftists never want to debate us and do their best to shut us up. It's very revealing the way they go to great lengths to suppress conservative speech at universities. Universities should be where the best and brightest Leftists are to be found but even they cannot stand the intellectual challenge that conservatism poses for them. It is clearly a great threat to them. If what we say were ridiculous or wrong, they would grab every opportunity to let us know it
A conservative does not hanker after the new; He hankers after the good. Leftists hanker after the untested
Just one thing is sufficient to tell all and sundry what an unamerican lamebrain Obama is. He pronounced an army corps as an army "corpse" Link here. Can you imagine any previous American president doing that? Many were men with significant personal experience in the armed forces in their youth.
'Gay Pride' parades: You know you live in a great country when "oppressed" people have big, colorful parades.
A favorite Leftist saying sums up the whole of Leftism: "To make an omelette, you've got to break eggs". They want to change some state of affairs and don't care who or what they destroy or damage in the process. They think their alleged good intentions are sufficient to absolve them from all blame for even the most evil deeds
In practical politics, the art of Leftism is to sound good while proposing something destructive
Leftists are the "we know best" people, meaning that they are intrinsically arrogant. Matthew chapter 6 would not be for them. And arrogance leads directly into authoritarianism
Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian. Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?
And note that an American President is elected to administer the law, not make it. That seems to have escaped Mr Obama
That Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian is not a new insight. It was well understood by none other than Friedrich Engels (Yes. THAT Engels). His clever short essay On authority was written as a reproof to the dreamy Anarchist Left of his day. It concludes: "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means"
Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out
Insight: "A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him." —Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
Leftists think of themselves as the new nobility
Many people in literary and academic circles today who once supported Stalin and his heirs are generally held blameless and may even still be admired whereas anybody who gave the slightest hint of support for the similarly brutal Hitler regime is an utter polecat and pariah. Why? Because Hitler's enemies were "only" the Jews whereas Stalin's enemies were those the modern day Left still hates -- people who are doing well for themselves materially. Modern day Leftists understand and excuse Stalin and his supporters because Stalin's hates are their hates.
"Those who see hate everywhere think they're looking thru a window when actually they're looking at a mirror"
Hatred has long been a central pillar of leftist ideologies, premised as they are on trampling individual rights for the sake of a collectivist plan. Karl Marx boasted that he was “the greatest hater of the so-called positive.” In 1923, V.I. Lenin chillingly declared to the Soviet Commissars of Education, “We must teach our children to hate. Hatred is the basis of communism.” In his tract “Left-Wing Communism,” Lenin went so far as to assert that hatred was “the basis of every socialist and Communist movement.”
If you understand that Leftism is hate, everything falls into place.
The strongest way of influencing people is to convince them that you will do them some good. Leftists and con-men misuse that
Leftists believe only what they want to believe. So presenting evidence contradicting their beliefs simply enrages them. They do not learn from it
Psychological defence mechanisms such as projection play a large part in Leftist thinking and discourse. So their frantic search for evil in the words and deeds of others is easily understandable. The evil is in themselves.
Leftists who think that they can conjure up paradise out of their own limited brains are simply fools -- arrogant and dangerous fools. They essentially know nothing. Conservatives learn from the thousands of years of human brains that have preceded us -- including the Bible, the ancient Greeks and much else. The death of Socrates is, for instance, an amazing prefiguration of the intolerant 21st century. Ask any conservative stranded in academe about his freedom of speech
Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Leftists don't understand that -- which is a major factor behind their simplistic thinking. They just never see the trade-offs. But implementing any Leftist idea will hit us all with the trade-offs
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley"[go oft astray] is a well known line from a famous poem by the great Scottish poet, Robert Burns. But the next line is even wiser: "And leave us nought but grief and pain for promised joy". Burns was a Leftist of sorts so he knew how often their theories fail badly.
Mostly, luck happens when opportunity meets preparation.
Most Leftist claims are simply propaganda. Those who utter such claims must know that they are not telling the whole story. Hitler described his Marxist adversaries as "lying with a virtuosity that would bend iron beams". At the risk of ad hominem shrieks, I think that image is too good to remain disused.
Conservatives adapt to the world they live in. Leftists want to change the world to suit themselves
ABOUT
Many people hunger and thirst after righteousness. Some find it in the hatreds of the Left. Others find it in the love of Christ. I don't hunger and thirst after righteousness at all. I hunger and thirst after truth. How old-fashioned can you get?
The kneejerk response of the Green/Left to people who challenge them is to say that the challenger is in the pay of "Big Oil", "Big Business", "Big Pharma", "Exxon-Mobil", "The Pioneer Fund" or some other entity that they see, in their childish way, as a boogeyman. So I think it might be useful for me to point out that I have NEVER received one cent from anybody by way of support for what I write. As a retired person, I live entirely on my own investments. I do not work for anybody and I am not beholden to anybody. And I have NO investments in oil companies, mining companies or "Big Pharma"
UPDATE: Despite my (statistical) aversion to mining stocks, I have recently bought a few shares in BHP -- the world's biggest miner, I gather. I run the grave risk of becoming a speaker of famous last words for saying this but I suspect that BHP is now so big as to be largely immune from the risks that plague most mining companies. I also know of no issue affecting BHP where my writings would have any relevance. The Left seem to have a visceral hatred of miners. I have never quite figured out why.
I imagine that few of my readers will understand it, but I am an unabashed monarchist. And, as someone who was born and bred in a monarchy and who still lives there (i.e. Australia), that gives me no conflicts at all. In theory, one's respect for the monarchy does not depend on who wears the crown but the impeccable behaviour of the present Queen does of course help perpetuate that respect.
I imagine that most Americans might find this rather mad -- but I believe that a constitutional Monarchy is the best form of government presently available. Can a libertarian be a Monarchist? I think so -- and prominent British libertarian Sean Gabb seems to think so too! Long live the Queen! (And note that Australia ranks well above the USA on the Index of Economic freedom. Heh!)
The Australian flag with the Union Jack quartered in it
Throughout Europe there is an association between monarchism and conservatism. It is a little sad that American conservatives do not have access to that satisfaction. So even though Australia is much more distant from Europe (geographically) than the USA is, Australia is in some ways more of an outpost of Europe than America is! Mind you: Australia is not very atypical of its region. Australia lies just South of Asia -- and both Japan and Thailand have greatly respected monarchies. And the demise of the Cambodian monarchy was disastrous for Cambodia
Throughout the world today, possession of a U.S. or U.K. passport is greatly valued. I once shared that view. Developments in recent years have however made me profoundly grateful that I am a 5th generation Australian. My Australian passport is a door into a much less oppressive and much less messed-up place than either the USA or Britain
Following the Sotomayor precedent, I would hope that a wise older white man such as myself with the richness of that experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than someone who hasn’t lived that life.
"Remind me never to get this guy mad at me" -- Instapundit
It seems to be a common view that you cannot talk informatively about a country unless you have been there. I completely reject that view but it is nonetheless likely that some Leftist dimbulb will at some stage aver that any comments I make about politics and events in the USA should not be heeded because I am an Australian who has lived almost all his life in Australia. I am reluctant to pander to such ignorance in the era of the "global village" but for the sake of the argument I might mention that I have visited the USA 3 times -- spending enough time in Los Angeles and NYC to get to know a fair bit about those places at least. I did however get outside those places enough to realize that they are NOT America.
"Intellectual" = Leftist dreamer. I have more publications in the academic journals than almost all "public intellectuals" but I am never called an intellectual and nor would I want to be. Call me a scholar or an academic, however, and I will accept either as a just and earned appellation
Some personal background
My full name is Dr. John Joseph RAY. I am a former university teacher aged 65 at the time of writing in 2009. I was born of Australian pioneer stock in 1943 at Innisfail in the State of Queensland in Australia. I trace my ancestry wholly to the British Isles. After an early education at Innisfail State Rural School and Cairns State High School, I taught myself for matriculation. I took my B.A. in Psychology from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. I then moved to Sydney (in New South Wales, Australia) and took my M.A. in psychology from the University of Sydney in 1969 and my Ph.D. from the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University in 1974. I first tutored in psychology at Macquarie University and then taught sociology at the University of NSW. My doctorate is in psychology but I taught mainly sociology in my 14 years as a university teacher. In High Schools I taught economics. I have taught in both traditional and "progressive" (low discipline) High Schools. Fuller biographical notes here
I completed the work for my Ph.D. at the end of 1970 but the degree was not awarded until 1974 -- due to some academic nastiness from Seymour Martin Lipset and Fred Emery. A conservative or libertarian who makes it through the academic maze has to be at least twice as good as the average conformist Leftist. Fortunately, I am a born academic.
Despite my great sympathy and respect for Christianity, I am the most complete atheist you could find. I don't even believe that the word "God" is meaningful. I am not at all original in that view, of course. Such views are particularly associated with the noted German philosopher Rudolf Carnap. Unlike Carnap, however, none of my wives have committed suicide
In my teenage years, however, I was fortunate to be immersed (literally) in a very fundamentalist Christian religion. And the heavy Bible study I did at that time left me with lessons for life that have stood me in good stead ever since
Very occasionally in my writings I make reference to the greats of analytical philosophy such as Carnap and Wittgenstein. As philosophy is a heavily Leftist discipline however, I have long awaited an attack from some philosopher accusing me of making coat-trailing references not backed by any real philosophical erudition. I suppose it is encouraging that no such attacks have eventuated but I thought that I should perhaps forestall them anyway -- by pointing out that in my younger days I did complete three full-year courses in analytical philosophy (at 3 different universities!) and that I have had papers on mainstream analytical philosophy topics published in academic journals
IQ and ideology: Most academics are Left-leaning. Why? Because very bright people who have balls go into business, while very bright people with no balls go into academe. I did both with considerable success, which makes me a considerable rarity. Although I am a born academic, I have always been good with money too. My share portfolio even survived the GFC in good shape. The academics hate it that bright people with balls make more money than them.
I have no hesitation in saying that the single book which has influenced me most is the New Testament. And my Scripture blog will show that I know whereof I speak. Some might conclude that I must therefore be a very confused sort of atheist but I can assure everyone that I do not feel the least bit confused. The New Testament is a lighthouse that has illumined the thinking of all sorts of men and women and I am deeply grateful that it has shone on me.
I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age. Conservatism is in touch with reality. Leftism is not.
I imagine that the RD are still sending mailouts to my 1950s address
Most teenagers have sporting and movie posters on their bedroom walls. At age 14 I had a map of Taiwan on my wall.
A small personal note: I have always been very self-confident. I inherited it from my mother, along with my skeptical nature. So I don't need to feed my self-esteem by claiming that I am wiser than others -- which is what Leftists do.
As with conservatives generally, it bothers me not a bit to admit to large gaps in my knowledge and understanding. For instance, I don't know if the slight global warming of the 20th century will resume in the 21st, though I suspect not. And I don't know what a "healthy" diet is, if there is one. Constantly-changing official advice on the matter suggests that nobody knows
As well as being an academic, I am an army man and I am pleased and proud to say that I have worn my country's uniform. Although my service in the Australian army was chiefly noted for its un-notability, I DID join voluntarily in the Vietnam era, I DID reach the rank of Sergeant, and I DID volunteer for a posting in Vietnam. So I think I may be forgiven for saying something that most army men think but which most don't say because they think it is too obvious: The profession of arms is the noblest profession of all because it is the only profession where you offer to lay down your life in performing your duties. Our men fought so that people could say and think what they like but I myself always treat military men with great respect -- respect which in my view is simply their due.
It would be very easy for me to say that I am too much of an individual for the army but I did in fact join the army and enjoy it greatly, as most men do. In my observation, ALL army men are individuals. It is just that they accept discipline in order to be militarily efficient -- which is the whole point of the exercise. But that's too complex for simplistic Leftist thinking, of course
It's amusing that my army service gives me honour among conservatives but contempt from Leftists. I don't weep at all about the latter. I am still in touch with some of the fine people I served with over 50 years ago. The army is like that
This is just a bit of romanticism but I do have permanently located by the head of my bed a genuine century-old British army cavalry sword. It is still a real weapon. I was not in the cavalry but I see that sword as a symbol of many things. I want it to be beside my bed when I die
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day and there is JUST ONE saying of Hitler's that I rather like. It may not even be original to him but it is found in chapter 2 of Mein Kampf (published in 1925): "Widerstaende sind nicht da, dass man vor ihnen kapituliert, sondern dass man sie bricht". The equivalent English saying is "Difficulties exist to be overcome" and that traces back at least to the 1920s -- with attributions to Montessori and others. Hitler's metaphor is however one of smashing barriers rather than of politely hopping over them and I am myself certainly more outspoken than polite. Hitler's colloquial Southern German is notoriously difficult to translate but I think I can manage a reasonable translation of that saying: "Resistance is there not for us to capitulate to but for us to break". I am quite sure that I don't have anything like that degree of determination in my own life but it seems to me to be a good attitude in general anyway
And something that was perceptive comes from the same chapter. Hitler said that the doctrines of the interwar Social Democrats (mainstream leftists) of Vienna were "comprised of egotism and hate". Not much has changed
I have used many sites to post my writings over the years and many have gone bad on me for various reasons. So if you click on a link here to my other writings you may get a "page not found" response if the link was put up some time before the present. All is not lost, however. All my writings have been reposted elsewhere. If you do strike a failed link, just take the filename (the last part of the link) and add it to the address of any of my current home pages and -- Voila! -- you should find the article concerned.
COMMENTS: I have gradually added comments facilities to all my blogs. The comments I get are interesting. They are mostly from Leftists and most consist either of abuse or mere assertions. Reasoned arguments backed up by references to supporting evidence are almost unheard of from Leftists. Needless to say, I just delete such useless comments.
You can email me here (Hotmail address). In emailing me, you can address me as "John", "Jon", "Dr. Ray" or "JR" and that will be fine -- but my preference is for "JR" -- and that preference has NOTHING to do with an American soap opera that featured a character who was referred to in that way
There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)
NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here
