NO POSTINGS?

IF there are no recent postings here it is because blogger.com has lost touch with blogspot again. Try here instead in that case. Sorry to be repetitious but all those who work with blogger.com know how unpredictable it can be. They have �lost� two of my sites so far already.

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LEFTIST RAGE AT THE LIGHT

I have just received an interesting email from Shishir Yerramilli that tells us a lot about Leftists:

"I emailed your excellent, eloquent blog's link (i.e. http://psychleft.blogspot.com) to a Leftist Canadian friend of mine in his 40's (I'm in my early 20's) who, like me, lives in the U.S. His rants against the U.S, Bush are quite typical of those of his ideology, so I won't bore you with them. We were pretty good friends ... until today. He emailed a furious response comparing me to white trash (I'm a Hindu from India) and called me a degenerate idiot, unmotivated, a leech on this country etc., etc. This has exposed not just his unstable nature which is incapable of withstanding criticism (like most Leftists) but perhaps more to the potency of your views. The tone of the mail leaves no doubt that the chasm between us is final and was politically motivated. I would genuinely like to thank you for your blog. It cost me a friend but clearly one I didn't need. The experience was quite an eyeopener. I hate to just have friends who share my (conservative) views but I want to maintain friendships and not have them end in this ugly fashion. Just thought you'd be interested to know the impact of your blog :-)"

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LIBERTARIAN BUMPER-STICKER

Taxation WITH representation isn't so hot, either!

Thanks to Chris Tame for that one.

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WELFARE THEORISTS

Leftists try to put it about that only they care about welfare measures for the more needy of our fellow-citizens (ignoring such great Rightist welfare innovators as Bismarck, Disraeli, Teddy Roosevelt etc). The truth is, of course, that conservatives are interested enough in welfare to deal with the issue in all its complexity rather than seeing welfare as being just ever-increasing handouts for anybody who wants a handout. The debate described here sums it all up rather nicely.

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LEFTIST TROGLODYTES

The Summary from my recent article in �Front Page�, which showed that modern-day Leftism consists largely of recycled Fascist ideas, was reprinted by the glamorous Sylvia Finlayson in her corner of �Meridian�, a Mormon magazine. It evoked a furious response from CC, one of her readers, which she forwarded to me. CC�s response is an amazing example of the troglodytic inability to learn anything that still seems to characterize many Leftists out there in the big wide world so I thought I might quote part of it. He objects to my claim that modern Leftism was prefigured by Mussolini by saying:

� Fascism nationalizes industry by giving ownership to the state, socialism nationalizes industries by giving ownership to the workers in that industry.�

So to him Leftism is socialism and socialism is unreconstructed Marxism. It was Russia�s Lenin who gave the ownership of all industry to the State so even Lenin would have been a Rightist to him! His version of Leftism exists only in his own mind. Curiously, by his definition, Mussolini was actually more Leftist than Lenin. The Russian workers had precious little say in the running of the Soviet industries in which they worked but Mussolini�s �corporations� did give the Italian workers some say.


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YOUNG HAWKS

Very interesting October 16th post from Jim Miller in case you missed it:

Young People and the Vietnam War: Andrew Sullivan makes a common error in his post on the Bali bombing, when he argues that young people were more likely to oppose the Vietnam war than older people. In fact, polls at the time showed that young people were "more supportive of the war than older people" [John E. Mueller, "War, Presidents and Public Opinion", p. 137]. Even more surprising to some, the more educated a person, the more likely they were to support the Vietnam war. There were similar patterns of support in World War II and the Korean War. The current tendency of young people to be more inclined to support a war with Iraq is consistent with the patterns in past wars, contrary to what Sullivan thinks.


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POSTMODERNISM EXPLAINED

An interview with Stephen Hicks seems to give a very clear exposition of what postmodernism is all about:

"The contradictions they [The postmodernists] embrace are so obvious: "All cultures are equal, but the West is uniquely evil. Values are subjective, but sexism and racism are really evil. Technology is bad, but it's unfair the West has more of it ...... [Post-modernists are] driven not by a desire to discover or advance truth but primarily by the desire to hurt the enemy. If all you want to do is destroy, it doesn't matter to you if the words you use contradict each other."

Good Leftist stuff.

Roger Scruton makes a similar point:

Hence, in Rorty, Derrida, and Foucault, we find a shared duplicity of purpose: On the one hand to undermine all claims to absolute truth and on the other hand to uphold the orthodoxies upon which their congregation depends. The very reasoning that sets out to destroy the ideas of objective truth and absolute value imposes political correctness as absolutely binding and cultural relativism as objectively true.

Good old-fashioned Leftist hypocrisy, in short.

Thanks to Arthur Silber and Peter Cuthbertson for suggesting the links.

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SPOONERISMS

I am glad nobody fell into the trap of chiding me for saying �skinger of forn� in one of my recent posts. Though one lady who was the victim of a postmodern education did politely ask me what I meant by it. It is one of my favourite Spoonerisms. But I think the best Spoonerism is one attributed to the Rev. Spooner himself. He was dealing with a wayward student at Oxford and said:

�Sir, you have tasted three whole worms. You have hissed all my mystery lectures and been caught fighting a liar in the Quad. You will leave by the next town drain�.

For those unfamiliar with British railway history, the �down� train was the train to London.

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ARTISTS AND THE LEFT

I must be thick. The following question seems to have stumped both Steve Sailer and Jason Soon. The quote is from Steve Sailer:

�I'm reviewing the new biopic "Frida," about the glamorous pair of Mexican painters Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera. They were wealthy, self-indulgent sensualists and dedicated Communists. Exactly what was it about Lenin and Stalin, who don't seem like fun people to party with, that so attracted hedonistic artists like Kahlo, Rivera, Picasso, and the like?�

To me the answer seems obvious. The artists concerned and Stalin were all big egos who hated conventional Western �bourgeois� society and thought they knew better. Where is the puzzle in that?

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CENTRE PARTIES

There is a good article on �Slate� showing convincingly that the major political parties in a democracy both have to stay very close to the centre. This is particularly marked in Australia where the policy differences between the two major parties are so minute that even a dedicated anti-Leftist like myself would not see it as an important change if the Australian Labor Party won the next Federal election (though they won�t).

So where does that leave parties that proclaim themselves as centre parties? In a mess. Australia�s alleged centre party has just imploded because their desperate search for something different to say had driven them to the extreme Left -- which upset a lot of their members who really were centrists.

The really interesting implication of centrism, however, is that you can only get big change by moving the whole political agenda in one direction or the other. This happened very markedly after the implosion of the Soviet Union --- after which socialism went out the window worldwide and market-based economic arrangements (particularly privatization of former government-owned businesses) were brought in by parties of every political stripe from Britain to Bangladesh -- not even excepting �Communist� China.

This rightward shift in the economic management agenda has been enormously beneficial -- with world poverty now becoming steadily �Africanized� (i.e. with India and China both rapidly becoming more prosperous under their new, more capitalist arrangements, populations stuck in dire poverty are now very largely restricted to Africa).

So the job of conservative/libertarian ideologues like myself is now to try to expose the destructiveness of government activism in ALL spheres. If we can convince enough people of that, we will have moved the agenda in a way that the major political parties (whether Right-leaning ot Left-leaning) will have to follow.

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PRESIDENT BUSH AND SEXISM

I have often remarked that most Leftists seem to have absolutely no regard for the truth. So what is the Left now trying to imply about a President who has appointed a record number of women to senior positions in his administration? Yes. You guessed it: He is a sexist. Orrin Judd has the story in his post of 28th.

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DISAPPEARING GLACIERS

I normally leave Greenie debunking to Aaron Oakley but I cannot resist pointing people to this story. It deals with the recent scare that the glaciers of Kilimanjaro are disappearing because of global warming. It turns out that the receding of the glaciers concerned has actually SLOWED in recent decades!

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KRUGMAN THE LIGHTWEIGHT

�Paul Krugman, ostensibly an economist, but actually a polemicist, although not a particularly good one. He writes in a puffed-up way about things he knows very little about, and he is a leading contender for lightweight columnist of the year. �

See here for more.

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POSTMODERNISM

I am amazed that postmodernism in literary studies seems to have become a hot topic among Australian bloggers at the moment -- with Quiggin, Soon and others getting into it.

Postmodernism was not around when I was studying English at the University of Queensland in the �60s so I know it only secondhand but it does seem an awful lot of tosh to me. What I wonder, however, is whether or not it matters. Do literary studies matter?

Now before anyone points the skinger of forn at me over that question let me add that I myself have always been a pretty literary type: I read almost the entire Greek canon in my teens; I understand that I got the highest mark awarded for the poetry paper in English I -- out of about 1000 students; and I still know large slabs of Chaucer by heart -- in the original Middle English, of course.

But I have never seen my literary proclivities as any great virtue -- which is why I did not continue with literary studies but went into social science instead. To me literature is to be enjoyed not studied and if you do not enjoy it go and read The Phantom and good luck to you. The high moral tone of The Phantom would certainly leave most of French literature for dead, at least.

So the postmodernists would appear to be doing a good job of destroying literary studies but so what? Maybe I am on their side!! An amazing thought considering that postmodernism seems to have its origins on the extreme Left.

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NO POSTINGS?

IF there are no recent postings here it is because blogger.com has lost touch with blogspot again. Try: here instead in that case.

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COATHANGERS AGAIN!

The sequel to the hilarious coathanger story here

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ILLEGAL ALIENS

It looks like the USA could learn a lot from Australia. There is a bill at present before Congress that would legalize millions of illegal immigrants -- people who have broken US law and should not be rewarded for it.

Australia locks such people up until they can be sent back to where they came from!

See: here


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POST-MODERNISM

Joe Willingham has emailed me with the thought that "post-modernists" are Fascists in the Mussolini mould too:

"Postmodernists (pomos) claim that there is no objective truth, there is only interpretation, and that it all depends on who is in power. According to the pomos, we are so biased by our race, class, and gender that knowledge is impossible. The postmodernists allow freedom of speech only for those who share their leftist political views in issues like feminism, affirmative action, and free enterprise versus socialism. They hire and fire on the basis of ideology rather than scholarship, and they try to prevent speakers of whose views they're don't approve from appearing on campus.

The subjectivist epistemology, the idea that power and not reason is the key to the "construction of reality" - all that is classic fascism. It is no accident that one of the pomos' favorite philosophers is the German Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger. Nor is it an accident that anti-Semitism is becoming trendy in European and American leftist circles".

I do not think I have ever met a post-modernist so cannot say how right Joe is -- but I would welcome any emails on the subject. I certainly hear echoes of D'Annunzio (Mussolini's predecessor) in what Joe describes. Maybe Cinderella Bloggerfeller
will enlighten me. He seems to be the No. 1 expert on literary and cultural Leftism.


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RUSSIA�S PUTIN AND ISLAM

I am in total agreement with Bovination�s post on President Putin�s handling of the Chechen terrorists. And I love his conclusion: �Thank you Allah�

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ROGER SAUSE ON �DEZIS�

Don�t miss my exclusive here on the latest thoughts of Roger Sause. He is the author of Left for Dead... A Digital Manifesto in which he brings his unusual perspective as a Los Angeles musician to bear on the Fascism of the modern-day Left.

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GOVERNMENT ILLITERACY

We all know how appalling governments can be most of the time but they are clearly getting worse and worse. I think it is indicative of the low level of care now being exercised by the Australian government bureaucracy that they do not even bother to get basic grammar right these days. The literature you get with your tax return forms from the Australian government this year includes a leaflet that offers in large letters on its front cover: �Get your tax back quick�. Yes, I am not making it up. There was no-one in a vast government bureaucracy that knew when to use �quick� and when to use �quickly�! We have government by ignoramuses. No doubt they were all educated in government schools too.

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E. TIMOR NOT ISLAMIC

After the recent Bali bombing of mainly Australians, the BBC broadcast a video in which it is claimed that Bin Laden ordered an attack on Australians because:

"The crusader Australian forces were on Indonesian shores . . . and they landed on East Timor which is part of the Islamic world,"

Nobody yet seems to have mentioned that most E. Timorese are Roman Catholics.

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SOCIALIZED MEDICINE ANYONE?

Meadow Lake Hospital in Saskatoon, Canada: The hospital is being sued by a woman who says she was left completely alone in the delivery room with no one monitoring her or her baby as the baby came out and fell onto the floor. The baby was flown to another hospital for observation but luckily appears to be fine. And those kind socialists did not even give her an apology!

Source: http://tinyurl.com/2967

Thanks to Jerry Lerman for that one!

BLOGSPOT WARNING:

Blogspot and Blogger.com are pretty erratic. Many of my fellow bloggers report that and I have not been immune either. I now have two blogspot sites that I am completely unable to access via Blogger. They just sit there with me being completely unable to add anything to them.

So if this site goes dead (i.e. there are no recent postings) I am probably still alive and posting elsewhere. Try: here instead. That is a site I usually use to put up longer quotes from other people but I will make it my main site if I have to. There is a good new posting there at the moment in which Roger Sause points out disturbing parallels between �moderate� Leftists of today and historical Nazism.

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KRUGMAN DEMOLISHED AGAIN

Paul Krugman may once have been a good economist but he is now a political loony -- as Orrin Judd demonstrates in his post of 26th.

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LEFTIST STEREOTYPING

Some good sarcasm here about Leftist stereotypes of human motivation.

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PINKER ON NATURE-NURTURE

Prof. Stephen Pinker has put up here a brief and very readable summary of the state of our scientific knowledge about how much of ourselves we owe to our genes. My behaviour geneticist friends have been telling me the answer to that for decades but the answer will still probably shock most people.

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said: "A man's character is his fate." Pretty spot-on for such a long time ago.

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MOSCOW AFTERMATH

Rather a good speech by President Putin after the end of Moscow�s encounter with Islamic terrorism. Silent Running has the speech in his post of 27th.

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RADICAL FEMINISM

Cynical though I certainly am, I still find it hard to get used to the way those who claim to oppose discrimination so often practice it themselves. I find it quite breathtakingly hypocritical. The way those who fought to end discrimination against blacks now routinely practice discrimination against whites (�affirmative action�) is the most obvious instance of the phenomenon but feminists are not far behind. I am sure we all know of various instances where private clubs and organizations that were once �men only� were subjected to enormous pressure, legal and otherwise, to force them to abandon their exclusiveness. Yet where I live there is now a �women only� golf club that is allowed to continue on its merry way with only token protests and there are also large billboards up around the place advertising a �health club� which appears to have its main claim to fame the proud boast that �No Toms, Harrys or Dicks� are allowed there. Where are the street marches and demonstrations protesting against this blatant and contemptuous discrimination against men? There are none. Even a lady I know remarked on it and said: �I don�t know how they get away with it�. But get away with it they do. Equality before the law is obviously not even attempted where groups favoured by Leftists are concerned.

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OSAMA IN HELL

On the lighter side:

One day in the future, Osama bin Laden has a heart attack and dies. He immediately goes to hell, where the devil is waiting for him. "I don't know what to do here," says the devil. "You are on my list, but I have no room for you. You definitely have to stay here, so I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I've got a couple offolks here who weren't quite as bad as you. I'll let one of them go, but you have to take their place. I'll even let YOU decide who leaves."

Osama bin Laden thought that sounded pretty good, so the devil opened the first room. In it was Richard Nixon and a large pool of water. He kept diving in and surfacing empty handed. Over and over and over. Such was his fate in hell. "No," Osama bin Laden said. "I don't think so. I'm not a good swimmer and I don't think I could do that all day long."

The devil led him to the next room. In it was Tony Blair with a sledge hammer and a room full of rocks. All he did was swing that hammer, time after time after time. "No, I've got this problem with my shoulder. I would be in constant agony if all I could do was break rocks all day" commented Osama bin Laden.

The devil opened a third door. In it, Osama bin Laden saw Bill Clinton, lying on the floor with his arms staked over his head, and his legs staked in a spread eagle pose.
Bent over him was Monica Lewinsky, doing what she does best. Osama bin Laden took this in disbelief and finally said,"Yeah, I can handle this."

The devil smiled and said "OK, Monica, you're free to go".

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HATE MAIL

Hooray! I have just got my first hate-mail -- about my series of posts on race and IQ of course. It shows that I am doing my job of propagating unpopular truths. The emails concerned were simply hate-filled abuse plus an amusing mixture of "ad hominem" argument and a demonstration of not having read what I had written: Standard Leftist stuff. Facts and logic usually seem to be the last things that Leftists resort to when they want to get anyone to concur with them. Intimidation suits them a lot better. Stalin's heirs are among us. I am afraid that we will always have to do battle with the forces of unreason.

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CHECHENS

After the outrage in Moscow I hope the Russians bomb Chechnya flat. They are quite likely to. And death seems to be the only language that Moslem thickos understand. I was once sympathetic to the demand for Chechen independence but no more. Their mass attack on innocents has shown the Chechens as the Moslem barbarians that they are and deserves as much mercy as they showed. My praise to the Russian special forces who took on an impossible job when the foul Muslim �martyrs� started killing prisoners.

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NICE CURMUDGEON!

Everybody likes compliments and The Curmudgeon has been most uncurmudgeonly in his kind comments of October 25th about me. It is much appreciated. And he includes another one of his amusing graphics too!

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PERON, FASCISM AND ANTISEMITISM

I was afraid that my post on Argentinian dictator Juan Peron might be greeted by a big yawn but it seems to have attracted some positive response so I thought I might mention a few more interesting facts.

The big suprise for many will probably be that Fascism is not intrinsically antisemitic. Like other Leftists, Fascists may or may not be antisemitic. Hitler�s Fascist regime was of course enormously antisemitic but one swallow does not make a summer. And the other swallows are interesting. As I have pointed out at length elsewhere, Italy�s Mussolini was not initially antisemitic until he was virtually forced into adopting some antisemitic measures by his alliance with Hitler -- and Italy was even then one of the safer places for Jews to be in World War II Europe.

And most people have probably forgotten that prewar Britain had a large Fascist movement too -- under Sir Oswald Mosley. And Sir Oswald initially used to EXPEL from the British Union of Fascists anybody who made antisemitic utterances! When his meetings came under constant attack from Jewish Leftists, however, he had something of a rethink. (Just parenthetically, it might be noted that although Sir Oswald was a great champion of the ordinary man, he was of such high social rank in the Britain of his day that the King actually came to his wedding -- limousine liberals eat your heart out!).

And Peron, too, was not systematically antisemitic, although Jews were subjected to some attacks under his rule. So Peron�s lack of interest in the �final solution� made him a typical Fascist rather than an atypical one.

And Peron�s Fascism does of course explain why so many former German Nazis found a safe haven in Argentina after World War II. Peron was simply helping out his old friends.

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CHICKENBLOGGERS

�Chickenblogger� is a term that Leftist bloggers often give to �Warbloggers� -- i.e. bloggers who support a pre-emptive attack on one of the world�s most dangerous rulers -- Saddam Hussein. What the Leftists are saying is pretty incoherent and is undoubtedly an example of one of the most disreputable forms of argument -- an ad hominem attack -- but it keeps getting trotted out. James Morrow has reported another example of it in his post of 21st. Insofar as the criticism has any content it seems to be saying that only those who are prepared to don a uniform and go to war themselves should be allowed to argue for war. A dubious assertion indeed! But anyway, I support a war on Saddam�s regime and I did join the Australian Army in the Vietnam era and did volunteer for duty in Vietnam so it looks like everybody should listen to me by Leftist standards. I am not holding my breath.

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LEFTIST SIMPLICITY

Aaron Oakley has been pondering lately what it is that makes a Leftist. Below is an extract from a very insightful recent email from him:

"Picture this: Young idealistic person sees problem. Young idealistic person realises he/she can't fix said problem. Natural response? THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD DO SOMETHING! I used to be like this.

Leftism is a knee-jerk response to the problems of the world, and is based on the fallacy that we can bring about utopia through the dictatorial fiat of the state.

Part of the problem is that the arguments for free markets, limited government etc are complicated but correct. The Left have it easy. Their philosophies are simple but wrong. The public grasp simple ideas much more easily than complicated ones... "

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Sunday again and time to update the list of blogs I am following regularly at the moment:

Australia:
Dr Bunyip
James Morrow
Scott Wickstein
Slattery
Alex Robson.
Gareth Parker
Tim Blair
TANSTAAFL
Ken Parish
Alan McCallum
Bizarre Science
Bovination


New Zealand:
NZ Pundit
Silent Running

Israel:
IsraPundit
Not A Fish

UK:
Cinderella Bloggerfeller
England's Sword
Steven Chapman
Conservative Comment.
Samizdata

USA:
Light of Reason
Pejman Pundit
Dr Weevil
Clayton Cramer
Common-sense and Wonder
Judd Brothers
Vodka Pundit
Instapundit
Rottweiler
ParaPundit
Philosoblog

Canada:
Enter Stage Right

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And more sites:

Ring of Conservative Sites JOIN! [ Prev | Skip Prev | Prev 5 | List | Rand | Next 5 | Skip Next | Next ]

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THE PERON �PUZZLE� AND ARGENTINA

Hands up anyone who knows the song �Don�t cry for me, Argentina�!
All hands shoot up.
Andrew Lloyd Webber has done a great deal to make the whole world aware of Evita Peron. The man she married, Argentine dictator Juan Peron, is however much less well-known and most people would not be aware that historians and political commentators often describe him as what Latin Americans sometimes call a �Fenomeno� (paradox). The paradox or puzzle is that he first came to power in Argentina as part of a military coup, so should have been �Right-wing� -- yet he became the champion and hero of working class Argentines, and to this day the major Leftist political grouping in Argentina (the �Peronistas�) is named after him. How come?

Anybody who has been reading all that I have written recently about the strongly Leftist nature of both German Nazism and Italian Fascism will not be surprised. Both Nazism and Fascism won power largely through claiming to be the champions and glorifiers of the ordinary worker and both Nazism and Fascism are routinely described as �Right-wing� too. Peron was just another one of that bunch. Peron in fact soon got kicked out by his fellow participants in the military coup and finally gained power -- as did Hitler and Mussolini -- through primarily political means.

And that is only the beginning of the resemblance: The doctrines Peron preached (e.g. giving the workers and managers equal say in running industry) were almost exactly what Peron had learned from Mussolini when he lived in Italy for some years in the 1930s. Peronism is Fascism. Also like Hitler and Mussolini, Peron was a great patriot and nationalist who got the foreign business interests out of Argentina and tried to make Argentina independent of foreigners generally. With the able help of his wife Evita, Peron made the Argentine people feel special and persuaded them that he was on their side and would lead them to greatness. And they loved him for it!

The only major difference is that Peron was clever enough to stay neutral instead of joining Hitler�s war. Mussolini stayed neutral for a couple of years too but finally made the fatal mistake of joining in.

So what it all shows is what most modern-day Leftist intellectuals passionately deny: That you can be an extreme Leftist and an extreme nationalist too. And it shows something very troubling too: That the combination of Leftism and nationalism is POPULAR! The popularity of that combination is also shown in the way Germans fought to the end for Hitler. Perhaps we should be thankful that modern-day Leftists (who are often anything but patriotic) have not learned all that their Fascist brethren might have taught them.

So the only puzzle or paradox of Peronism is one that modern-day Leftist intellectuals have artificially created for themselves. They refuse to accept that you can be BOTH a Leftist and a nationalist so are basically just lost for words (or sensible words anyway) when confronted with great historical figures such as Peron who prove by their living example that you CAN be both.

And Peron was of course almost as bad for Argentina as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Mussolini were for the countries that they led down the extreme Leftist path. Before Peron came to power, Argentina was one of the world�s richest countries but Peron sent it broke and it has never recovered -- largely because, although Peron is dead, Peronism (Fascism) is still the strongest single force in Argentine politics.

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ANTI-GUN NUTS

I love this imaginary conversation pinched from Bovination. You will not want to believe it but it shows how opposition to private gun ownership is similar to racism. Now that is REALLY killing sacred cows!

The people in the dialogue are supposed to be discussing the recent tragedy at Monash University where a student from China used a handgun to kill two fellow-Chinese students:

Larry Leftie: One thing this incident proves is the need to ban guns.
Rudi Redneck: Rubbish it demonstrates the need to ban Asians.
LL: But Asians didn't cause this - guns did.
RR: An Asian did cause this.
LL: But if there were no guns this incident couldn't have happened.
RR: If there were no Asians this incident couldn't have happened.
LL: But you can't judge all Asians on the actions of a few.
RR: You can't judge all gun owners on the actions of a few.
LL: Even if you did ban Asians, gun deaths would still occur.
RR: Even if you banned guns, crimes would still occur.
LL: But guns are inherently evil.
RR: Why?
LL: Because they kill people.
RR: An Asian killed people on this occasion - does that make Asians inherently evil?
LL: Of course not - very few Asians kill people.
RR: Very few guns kill people.
LL: You don't agree with me, therefore you are evil!
RR: Leftie Loser!
LL: Redneck!


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QUIGGIN ON GUNS

Because he is such a rare beast -- a Leftist who seems interested in the facts of the matter --- quite a few non-Leftists seem to read and comment on Prof. John Quiggin�s blog. I did so myself once before (on October 2nd). His latest idea is pretty wacko, though. He asks libertarians to give a principled defence of gun-ownership as if that were difficult. Firearms are not a big interest of mine (my brother writes enough on that for both of us) and I have never owned one but it seems to me that the basic tenet of libertarianism -- that you should be free to do what you please as long as you do not harm others --- makes the right to own guns automatic. It is only using them to harm others that is proscribed. Semi-libertarians like Jason Soon may twist themselves into knots to justify why they OPPOSE private gun ownership but a true libertarian just finds nothing to discuss in the issue. Conservatives, on the other hand, feel the need to justify gun ownership in various ways -- usually by saying that it does and should equalize their chances with the criminals -- so perhaps Quiggin has just picked his argument with the wrong people.

Or perhaps he has mislabelled what he wants. Maybe it is not a �principled� defence he wants but a pragmatic one. In that connection I rather like the old saying that �an armed society is a polite society�. But Quiggin does not want to hear arguments like that. He has defined his ground and intends to fight only on it. Very naughty of me not to argue with Quiggin in the way he wants me to. I suspect that we both know that Napoleon won at Austerlitz by being the one to choose the ground on which he would fight.

I suspect that Quiggin also feels that he has delivered a rhetorical masterstroke in asking if the right to gun ownership should extend to a right to possess heavy weapons (machine-guns, bazookas etc.). He obviously thinks that everybody would regard that as a nightmare scenario never to be permitted and hopes to show from that that ALL firearm possession is therefore bad. I have news for him: There are already plenty of heavy weapons in private hands in Australia and I have yet to hear of ONE of them being misused. So his supposed nightmare scenario is already here and it is no nightmare at all.


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RACE AND IQ

I am pleased that my recent posting on the matter of race and IQ has not attracted any hate mail. The issue is super-sensitive and I spent a long time trying to get what I wanted to say just right before I posted it. But I do think that the truth of the matter has to be said -- even if some good people are regrettably upset by it.

One writer challenged me on whether IQ tests measure intelligence and the answer of course is that everybody defines intelligence in their own way. I know some people who think that owning a bull-terrier dog is highly intelliegent.

But if the concept of intelligence is not precise the concept of IQ is. IQ is general problem-solving ability. As Binet discovered over a century ago, it just happens that people who are good at solving one sort of problem tend to be good at solving all sorts of other problems -- and it is that ability which IQ tests measure.

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KRUGMAN DEMOLISHED

Last Monday, I pointed out some of the weaknesses in the argument by Leftist economist Paul Krugman to the effect that inequality was increasing. I also said that I would leave it to people with better access to the statistics to do a real job on Krugman. That has now been done.

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HOW LEFT IS LEFT?

One of the readers of my article about Fascism on �Front Page� made the interesting comment that, when we talk about whether Fascism is of the Right or the Left, we need to remember that there are many extreme Rightists who would regard more moderate conservatives as Leftists. So who really is a Leftist?

In answer, I think a major point is that the further Left we go, the more government intervention in people�s lives is demanded and practiced. All governments exercise power over people�s lives in one way or another but the more Leftist you are, the more pervasive and all-encompassing you will want that government meddling, influence and direction to be. And by that criterion, Mussolini and the Fascists were FAR to the Left.

Note, however, that the intrusiveness of government into our lives is now very well advanced worldwide. ALL modern governments are more interventionist than they were 100 years ago. The 20th century was broadly a century of ever-advancing Leftism and we live at the end of that process. Government meddling and regulation CAN be rolled back -- Reagan and Thatcher showed us that -- but so far we have seen only a small amount of such rolling back. And, for all the Reagan/Thatcher efforts, the Western world is now more regulated and bureaucratized than it ever has been in history. Part of this is the work of the �Greens� -- who have managed to get an utter torrent of fresh regulation unleashed upon us. At least, however, government is not yet all pervasive and all-powerful in the modern-day Western world -- the way it was in extreme Left regimes such as Stalin�s, Hitler�s, Mao�s and Mussolini�s.

Although all the authoritarian governments that were responsible for megadeaths in the 20th century were Leftist, it must be noted that not all authoritarian governments are Leftist. Most governments throughout human history have in fact been authoritarian. They were usually called Kings or Emperors. And they were all pretty ferocious with those who were a challenge to their power. And they often came to power via military means. But, with very few exceptions, nobody would ever call them Leftist. Why not? Because it is WHAT THEY DO with their power that makes them Leftist or not. If they are just happy to stay in power they are neither Right nor Left but simply historically normal. But if they want to use their power to transform the whole of society and vastly reorganize everyone�s lives, however, they are Leftist.

Such military-based governments still pop up in the modern world too. The regimes of Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal, for instance, had a security apparatus that ensured that they stayed in power regardless of what their people might want but, aside from that, they just let people get on with their lives as before and in fact resisted change of most kinds.

Pinochet in Chile and Suharto in Indonesia were also undemocratic, military-based regimes that were unscrupulous in protecting their power but many of their other policies were more like Western conservative governments: They encouraged gradual and cautious change. They used their power to free up their economies --- thus extending the liberties of their citizens in important respects. Thus they were clearly not Leftists either.

Both the static Franco/Salazar type of regime and the progressive Pinochet/Suharto type of regime are often referred to as conservative but that simply reflects the fact that both opposed the large-scale forced reorganization of society that is associated with Leftism. Neither type of regime shows much respect for human rights or any other of the philosophies that characterize conservatives in the Western democracies.

As a libertarian, I deplore all government meddling in people�s everyday lives but one has to recognize that it is a matter of degree. And while all governments are tyrannical to some degree, Rightist governments are intrinsically less so. A Rightist philosophy does embody respect for the individual and his rights and choices. The mass murders of Stalin, Mao and all of the many other Communist regimes show us, however, how much respect for the individual is built into a Leftist philosophy. Once they obtain absolute power, Leftists have no respect for other people at all.


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BELAFONTE THE STALINIST

Scratch a Leftist and you will find a Stalinist underneath. Harry Belafonte certainly is a Stalinist. See Ronald Radosh. It makes more understandable Belafonte�s jealous attacks on influential black conservatives. Odd that it is conservatives who have mostly put US blacks into positions of power! Leftists only TALK about �empowerment�. Leftist talk is cheap. It is the same in Australia. Our first black Senator (Neville Bonner) was put into the Senate by the conservative side of politics.


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COATHANGERS

This is the best laugh I have had for a while -- in case you have not yet seen it elsewhere.

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CHANGES IN IQ

As psychometrics is my academic specialty, I have always taken an interest in studies of IQ. And a recent debate on �Slate� brings it all back to mind. One of the most interesting things to have turned up in recent years is the �Flynn effect� -- named after Jim Flynn, who first noted it. What Flynn noted is that average IQ scores have been rising steadily over the last century. The young people of today seem to be much smarter than their grandparents.

How do we explain that? The participants in the �Slate� debate did not think that they could explain it but I think I can if I put my sociologist�s hat on (I also taught sociology for 12 years at a major Australian university):

I see the Flynn effect as just one example of the way modernization has improved various indexes of people�s physical health and wellbeing. People also now (for instance) live longer and grow taller than they did a century ago. And IQ is related to general physical functioning. If the body as a whole is working well, the brain should in general be working well too. The brain is after all just another part of the body. And the Terman & Oden (1947) �Genetic studies of genius� did show that high IQ children grew up to be taller, healthier, better adjusted etc.

But why has modernization improved many health and wellbeing indices? The obvious factor is improved medical care generally but two areas of medical care may be particularly important: Mass vaccination campaigns and improved perinatal care. Many illnesses can have a damaging effect on the brain as well on the rest of the body so preventing major illnesses through vaccination should be generally beneficial. And by improved perinatal care I mean better obstetric services (including a now very high rate of caesarians) and more advice and support for new mothers to enable them to look after their babies better. But better nutrition, more widespread hygiene practices, piped water, efficient sewerage systems, basic public health measures, more stimulation by way of modern entertainment media and more years spent in the educational system could also of course play a role. The infant brain is known to develop more complex connections when subjected to a high level of stimulation and there is much in the modern world that is far more stimulating than the village or small-town life of yesteryear.

Sadly for those who hate the idea of genetic influences, however, the IQ increases have not closed the usual big gap between average black and white IQ levels. Negroes have forged ahead but whites have forged ahead too.

References:
Ray, J.J. (1988) IQ gain as an outcome of improved obstetric practice. The Psychologist, 1, 498.
Terman, L. M., & Oden, M. H. (1947). Genetic studies of genius: Vol. 4. The gifted child grows up. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.


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JEWISH IQ

I have recently had an interesting correspondence with Richard Lynn about Israeli IQ. He notes that Israelis of European origin (Ashkenazim) have an average IQ of about the European norm (100) whereas Israelis from the Arab lands (Sephardim) have the quite low average IQ of 88.

What does that say about Arab IQ? Seeing that those Jews who are racially mainly Arab ought to be at least no thicker than the parent Arab population, it suggests to me that Arabs in general are pretty thick. That would certainly go a long way towards explaining what I suggested (in my post of 18th October) was their stupid reaction to negotiation with Israel.

The other question is why the Israeli Ashkenazim are not well ABOVE the European norm. As Rushton summarizes the recent American data: �The average IQ for African Americans was found to be lower than those for Latino, White, Asian, and Jewish Americans (85, 89, 103, 106, and 115, respectively)�. So why do not Israeli Ashkenazis average 115 too? I am afraid that the obvious explanation is that it was mainly the foolish (idealistic?) Jews of European origin who have ended up in Israel. The smart ones are in New York.

Lynn points out, however, that the figure for Jews quoted by Rushton is based on limited sampling. Lynn believes that a figure of 108 is better substantiated. In statistician�s terms, however, 108 is still quite a high figure (around half a standard deviation above the mean).

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BLACK IQ

There is an impressively scholarly article here by Glayde Whitney summarizing the results of the Minnesota study of transracial adoption.

Researchers always find a huge gap (of about 15 IQ points) between the average IQ of American blacks and the average IQ of American whites -- and American Leftists always attribute this to the poor upbringing that black children receive (and since that is not very complimentary to black mothers they then blame black �culture� -- and that, of course, is the fault of whites!).

So the obvious experiment to test the Leftist theory is to have black children adopted into white families and see what happens. Will they grow up with IQs at the same average level as whites? If upbringing is the key, they should. Some well-intentioned whites actually did just such an adoption program on a fairly large scale in Minnesota in the 1970s. The result years later? There was still that same old black/white gap in IQ when the children concerned had grown up. The implication is, as so many other studies suggest, that it is the African gene pool that is responsible for the lower black IQs.

The only policy implication that I see as flowing from an acceptance of this in a decent society is that we may often have to treat some blacks as we do any other handicapped people -- kindly. On the other hand, a policy founded on the assumption that the differences do not exist -- as �Affimative action� is -- must in the circumstances be a cruel hoax that imposes unrealistic expectations on many blacks, discriminates unfairly against many individual whites and discredits the achievements of the many blacks who can achieve well under their own steam.


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MORE ON MUSSSOLINI

My article showing that modern-day American Leftism is largely the same as Mussolini�s prewar Italian Fascism -- but minus Mussolini�s patriotism -- got top billing in yesterday�s �Front Page� online magazine.

One very telling point that I somehow omitted to include was that F.D. Roosevelt, found in Mussolini�s policies part of his inspiration for America�s semi-socialist �New Deal� and referred to Mussolini in 1933 as "That admirable Italian gentleman�.

Various people have reminded me that Ayn Rand too was outspoken in identifying the Leftist nature of Nazism and Fascism.

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BRING ON THE UGLIES

Nature imitates art, as Oscar Wilde used to say. On various occasions (e.g. here and here) I have pointed out that categorizing and discriminating against people is something that we all do -- and asked mockingly if the Leftists who say that we should not categorize and discriminate also think that we should stop preferring beauty to ugliness (for instance). A very politically correct nutty professor from Norway has now taken me at my word and claimed that we should have more ugly people on TV!

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GLOBAL NON-WARMING

I normally do not comment on Greenie claims. They are generally just too crazy for me to bother with. Pandering to Greenies costs us a fortune, however, so when even the Left-leaning BBC is publicizing scientific findings showing that human activity is irrelevant to global temperature, I think I should do what I can to publicize it. Pity that human-caused global warming is taught as gospel in our schools! It would not be the first time that utter nonsense has been taught in schools though. For more of the science on global warming see Aaron Oakley.

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HOFFER

I have finally got around to reading a bit of the famous thesis, "The true believer" by Eric Hoffer. He attempts to analyse what is general to fanatical followers of any extreme movement, political or religious but he wrote it in 1951 so the primary model for such people in his mind was obviously Nazism. He saw true believers as in need of both excitement and direction from a powerful leader. He saw them as weak people who needed to belong. I think the need for excitement and belonging does apply to Leftists but I am very doubtful that they need direction from others. They are in fact a very fractious lot who are just as likely to murder one-another as anything else. If anybody would like to email me their ideas on the matter I would be interested.

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LEFTIST ENVY

There has been quite a flurry of discussion on the blogs over the last few days over what motivates people to become Leftists. Jim Ryan of Philosoblog claims that Leftists are envious failures (my paraphrase) while others claim that Leftism looks prettier and sexier (again my paraphrase). There can of course be many reasons for people joining such a broad church as Leftism but I still like my explanation better -- that most Leftists are motivated by ego needs -- a strong need for power and self-aggrandisement.


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FEMINAZIS

I have just had an interesting email from an academic reader in Finland:

�One thing that came to my mind is the question of the feminist personality. To me, it seems evident that hardcore feminists exhibit much frustration, bitterness and the like. Maybe it is a major factor explaining the phenomenon. As this is a question related to your area of interest and expertise, I want to ask you whether you are aware of any research on the subject, or perhaps have some ideas on the question yourself�.

His query is a bit outside my field, although I have had one research paper published which tested (and found wanting) a major feminist theory. Anybody else have any ideas?

Reference:
Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1984) �The great androgyny myth: Sex roles and mental health in the community at large.� Journal of Social Psychology, 124, 237-246.

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HITLER, MUSSOLINI AND WORLD WAR 2

Religious US conservative, Patrick Buchanan knows his history. He uses it to support the isolationist views that were once common among US conservatives before the world became a global village. He points out (as I have done in today�s �Front Page� online magazine) that Mussolini was initially anti-Nazi and blames the Western Allies for Mussolini�s going over to Hitler�s side eventually. He omits to mention that Hitler would probably have been a lot better off if Mussolini had stayed neutral. Mussolini�s alliance with Germany gave Germany so many additional problems that it is probably the best thing that Mussolini could have done for the Allied cause!

But Buchanan�s conclusion -- that Britain and the USA should have stayed out of the war with Hitler -- I have to disagree with. England could not afford to let Hitler grab the whole of Europe unopposed. Once Hitler had wrapped up Europe, the world would have been his oyster.

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IRAQ AND OIL

Opinion Journal was fabulous yesterday (21st). I don�t want anyone to miss this paragraph:

�For the Norwegian Nobel Committee, as The Weekly Standard points out, it's all about oil. Norway is the world's No. 3 oil exporter, and "Norway's non-oil economy slipped into recession in the second quarter of this year," so Oslo has a strong interest in preventing a decline in oil prices--which would be the result of a successful invasion of Iraq. The director of the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate is Gunnar Berge, who is also the head of the Nobel Committee and the man who said Jimmy Carter's Peace Prize was meant as "a kick in the leg" to President Bush�.

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BALI ATROCITY

It had to happen. Again according to Opinion Journal, some Leftist apologists for the Islamofascists have now said that the Bali bombing was the work of the US government:

�Up at Berkeley, meanwhile, they've got another theory. The Daily Californian reports that "members of a panel" at a "campus round-table discussion" said that "the United States may have had an active role in carrying out last week's bombing of an international nightclub." Among those floating the America-did-it theory are Jeffrey Hadler, a Berkeley professor of South and Southeast Asian studies and Sylvia Tiwon, a "Professor of Indonesian."

It is time we stopped listening to all the crap and started doing some bombing of our own. Sometimes reason does not work. Then you need a big stick.


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KRUGMAN ON INEQUALITY

I have noticed a few mentions of the latest NYT rant by Leftist economist Paul Krugman but have yet to see much in the way of a reply -- so I thought I might point out a few things. He is pushing the old Leftist wheelbarrow that inequality is once again on the rise in the United States. �The rich are getting richer ..... � You know the tune! Anyway, to quote:

�Over the past 30 years most people have seen only modest salary increases: the average annual salary in America, expressed in 1998 dollars (that is, adjusted for inflation), rose from $32,522 in 1970 to $35,864 in 1999. That's about a 10 percent increase over 29 years -- progress, but not much. Over the same period, however, according to Fortune magazine, the average real annual compensation of the top 100 C.E.O.'s went from $1.3 million -- 39 times the pay of an average worker -- to $37.5 million, more than 1,000 times the pay of ordinary workers

and

�the top 10 percent contains a lot of people whom we would still consider middle class, but they weren't the big winners. Most of the gains in the share of the top 10 percent of taxpayers over the past 30 years were actually gains to the top 1 percent

So that is his beef. The average American is gradually getting richer -- not poorer -- but the corporate top dogs are really getting obscene. And he is of course right. As a company shareholder myself, I think that something has gone wrong when those who run companies can pay themselves whatever they like out of company funds without shareholders having any effective say in it. But corporate governance in the USA is acknowledged by all and sundry to be in a mess and the collapses at Enron etc have exposed that for all to see. And the first steps are now being taken to make CEOs more accountable. Nobody needed Krugman to tell us that there is a problem there that needs fixing.

But Krugman sees it all as a deep problem in American society -- which it clearly is not. It is a problem like many others but a problem-free society has yet to be invented. And a problem affecting only 1% of society is surely the sort of problem all governments would like to have. Mass poverty, for instance, would be a much harder problem -- and by far a more common problem worldwide.

I will leave a major dissection of his rant to people who have better access to current economic statistics than I do but I cannot resist also noting the superficiality of his argument about Sweden. He thinks Sweden is a much better place than the USA, of course. He admits that the average Swede produces 16% less of goods and services per hour worked than the average American does but then goes on to say that this is only an average and that people at the bottom end of the income scale in Sweden actually do a lot better than people at the bottom end of the income scale in the USA.

Of course they do! The whole reason people find the comparison between Sweden and the USA interesting is that huge slabs of the Swedish national income are diverted out of the pockets of those who earn it and into government coffers. Much of that income gets eaten up feeding bureaucrats of course but the whole rationale of the exercise is to equalize incomes no matter what a person does -- and that does happen on a much much larger scale in Sweden than it does in the USA. So Krugman is really telling us only what we already knew. Incomes are more equal in Sweden not because the sub-rich earn more but because they are given more out of everybody else�s pocket. The real issue -- what effect does this destruction of incentives have on national productivity -- he glides over. But that 16% difference suggests the answer. The Swedish system just does produce a much smaller pie to share out.

Krugman also makes much of life-expectancy statistics. He says that Swedes have a life expectancy three years longer than Americans, for instance. But what that has to do with economics he does not tell us. So maybe Americans die younger through eating more junk-food. But if so, that is their free choice. It is, however, unlikely to mean that they are less well-off -- as Krugman implies.


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LEFTIST RELIANCE ON LIES

I have never quite managed to get used to the way many Leftists seem to be completely uninterested in the truth. Stalin�s old Soviet production statistics are of course the classic example of Leftist lies but chronic misrepresentation was also confirmed by the revelations made possible in Russia by former President Gorbachev's policy of "Glasnost". From what has been revealed, there can surely now be no doubt that for most of last century the Soviet system literally floated on a sea of lies. This was so extreme that even the maps produced by official Soviet cartographers were fraudulent. Even an accurate Moscow street map was unavailable! And note that the great cartographical capacity that U.S. spy satellites have had for many years renders any explanation of this in terms of defence considerations quite laughable. And note that this attachment to lies is not confined to the Soviet bloc and China. I myself remember well the pre-Khrushchev times when most Western Leftists dismissed accounts of Stalin's mass murders as "inventions of the capitalist press". There are none so blind as those who will not see.

A more subtle form of dishonesty is the great absurdity of the policies that Leftists have often advocated. Policies such as rent-control and nationalization of industry have a superficial attraction that guaranteed that they would be widely tried but who could honestly advocate them once it is apparent how badly they work? Certainly not a person who had the welfare of the people at heart. Such policies have only ever delivered poverty and housing shortages. Why have Leftists advocated such nostrums for so long?

If their motives were benevolent, it would make no sense to advocate so much misery. If their real motives were, on the other hand, a need for power and a desire to concentrate in the hands of their clique extensive power over the lives of others it makes very great sense indeed.

And the famous Leftist call for abolition of wealth and income differentials would surely lead one to expect that Leftists would reject materalistic ambition in their own lives. But it is not so. Although Leftists seem to decry the scramble for private material possessions (conservatism is smeared as "the politics of greed"), they themselves on the personal level seem to be just as keen for the scramble as anyone else. There has been a lot of research reported in the literature of academic psychology on the subject of achievement motivation but the various measures of materialistic achievement motivation have been shown to have negligible correlation with Leftism -- where a high negative correlation might on theory have been expected (Ray, 1981; Ray & Najman, 1988). In other words, in their own lives Leftists are just about as apt as Rightists to seek personal material gain. Once again the Leftist emerges as being hypocritical and as not honest about his/her real motives and values.

And we do not really need psychological research to see what the motivations of Leftists are actually like in their daily lives. Johnson (1988), himself a former prominent Leftist, explored at length the actual lives of various prominent Leftist intellectuals -- including Karl Marx himself. He found that while such intellectuals claimed to love humanity, their actual deeds in their own lives and their detailed exhortations to their followers suggested a loathing of and contempt for their fellow man. For them it was no joke that "I love humanity. It is just people I can't stand".
Dishonesty of various kinds just seems to be inherent in Leftism.

References:
Johnson, P. (1988) Intellectuals. London: Weidenfeld
Ray, J.J. (1981) The politics of achievement motivation. Journal of Social Psychology, 115, 137-138.
Ray, J.J. & Najman, J.M. (1988) Capitalism and compassion: A test of Milbrath's environmental theory. Personality & Individual Differences, 9, 431-433.


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ISRAEL

I normally say little on this blog about the terrible plight of Israel (they suffer regularly from what we Australians have just suffered once) because I feel that many others say it better than I could. But amid the growing Leftist hatred of Israel and her people I feel I have to speak up. So, as my contribution, I reproduce below a brief report of a recent speech by Haim Divon -- the Israeli ambassador to Canada. Thanks to Israpundit for the report. And by the way, I am myself of WASP background, not a Jew.

"Every day, an Israeli meets and confronts a very hostile environment," he said.
Israel has tried "everything" to live peacefully with Palestinians, Divon said, but nothing has worked, and that is why they have turned to reprisal attacks on refugee camps to counter suicide bombers.

"If there's another way, tell us about it," he said.

"No one is holding (Palestinian chairman Yasser) Arafat accountable. I think Israel is the only country in the world where there are mortar and missile attacks daily. Where else in the world would you tolerate such attacks from neighbours?"

Divon said that until the "Iraq issue" is solved, there won't be a major breakthrough between Israel and Palestine, and charged Iraq has been funding Arafat. "No one wants to live in such a crazy situation. The international community shouldn't be so soft on Arafat," he said.

Divon said there are so many Palestinians living in refugee camps because the Palestinian government wants to use them "to better bash Israel." He said that since the Second World War, there have been 50 million refugees and most have been resettled, "except the Palestinians."


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HITLER IN A EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE

Hmmm.... I am having a lot of trouble convincing Jiri that Hitler was a Leftist. I have just received a long email from him once again pointing out the many nationalist elements in Hitler's appeal and pointing out how widely he diverged from the various Marxist movements of Europe. My reply to him is of course that Hitler was BOTH a nationalist AND a socialist -- as the full name of his political party (The National Socialist German Worker's Party) implies. I have expanded my argument on how it is that Leftism and nationalism are far from incompatible in my forthcoming article on Mussolini and, for convenience, I reproduce that section of my forthcoming paper here.

And I might add that, although many modern-day US Democrats often seem to be anti-American, the situation is rather different in Australia and Britain. Both the major Leftist parties there (the Australian Labor Party and the British Labour Party) are perfectly patriotic parties which express pride in their national traditions and achievements. Nobody seems to have convinced them that you cannot be both Leftist and nationalist. That is of course not remotely to claim that either of the parties concerned is a Nazi party. What Hitler advocated and practiced was clearly more extremely nationalist than any major Anglo-Saxon political party would advocate today.

I think, however, that the real stumbling block for Jiri is that he has a very European perspective on what constitutes Leftism whereas I have a very Anglo-Saxon one. To Jiri you have to be some sort of Marxist to be a Leftist and Hitler was very clearly opposed to any form of Marxism so cannot have been a Leftist. I write for the Anglosphere, however, and in my experience the vast majority of the Left (i.e. the US Democrats, The Australian Labor Party, the British Labour Party) have always rejected Marxism so it seems crystal clear to me that you can be a Leftist without accepting Marxist doctrines. So Hitler's contempt for Marxism, far from convincing me that he was a non-Leftist, actually convinces me that he was a perfectly conventional Leftist! The Nazi Party was what would in many parts of the world be called a "Labor" party (not a Communist party).

And the moderate Leftists of Germany in Hitler's own day saw that too. The Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) who, like the US Democrats, the Australian Labor Party and the British Labour Party, had always been the principal political representatives of the Labor unions, on several important occasions voted WITH the Nazis in the Reichstag (German Parliament).


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OTHER BLOGS

Many of my fellow bloggers have a very long list of other blogs down the Left-hand side of their pages. Lists giving links to over 100 other blogs are common. This is very useful in many ways but seeing that so many others are doing it, I thought I might risk being a bit different and instead list only the blogs that I myself am reading regularly at the moment. Being a gentleman of leisure, I read quite a few. My plan is to update the list every week or so. The idea is that people who like my blog will be given an idea of where they might find other writing that they might like. My list is of course only a personal preference and is not meant to reflect on the many other good conservative blogs that I am not following regularly at the moment:


Australia:
Dr Bunyip
James Morrow
Scott Wickstein
Slattery
Alex Robson.
Gareth Parker
Jason Soon
Tim Blair
TANSTAAFL
Ken Parish
Alan McCallum
Bizarre Science

New Zealand:
NZ Pundit
Silent Running

Israel:
IsraPundit
Not A Fish

UK:
Cinderella Bloggerfeller
England's Sword
Steven Chapman
Conservative Commentary

Samizdata
Oxblog -- Americans at Oxford U.

USA:
Sabertooth Journal
Light of Reason
Pejman Pundit
Dr Weevil
Clayton Cramer
Common-sense and Wonder
Rightwing news
Judd Brothers
Vodka Pundit
Instapundit
Rottweiler
Daniel Drezner
ParaPundit

Canada:
Enter Stage Right

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MUSSOLINI: ANOTHER LEFTIST DICTATOR

Good news! I have just heard from David Horowitz that he intends to publish my article on the parallels between modern-day Leftism and Mussolini�s prewar Italian Fascism. It should come out some time early next week in Front Page Magazine. I put the first draft up here some time ago but the final version is about twice as long.

It is no wonder people get confused about Mussolini. He was a pretty curious character even for a Leftie. One thing that I rather relate to is that he was a terrible dresser. He was very fond of spats and would even wear spats with evening dress. I don�t suppose many people these days even know what spats are. Mussolini liked them because they kept his ankles warm. When the King summoned him and asked him to form a government he arrived wearing his Fascist uniform plus a bowler hat on his head and spats around his ankles. Even he must have realized that his getup was probably a bit odd for calling on the King so he excused himself by saying, �I have just come from the front�. In fact he had just come from his office! He was so obviously full of bull that it actually endeared him to a lot of people. And the Fascist way of dealing with political opponents was almost laughable when compared with Hitler�s piano wire and Stalin�s Gulags. What the Italian Fascists used to do was to grab their political enemies and make them drink a big dose of Castor oil! Again, I suppose that many people these days do not know what Castor oil was generally used for. It is a potent bowel opener.

And would you believe? Mussolini was even ahead of the Greenies. He put Italy onto gasohol (industrial alcohol mixed with petroleum products to make motor fuel) around 70 years ago! In most of the Western world we are only now seeing that.

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While we are having a laugh, let�s be a bit politically incorrect as well:


IT MUST BE GREAT TO BE A MAN, BECAUSE ........

Your ass is never a factor in a job interview.
Your orgasms are real - always.
Your last name stays put.
You never feel compelled to stop a friend from getting laid.
A razor never comes near your pubic area.
The garage is all yours.
Wedding plans take care of themselves.
Chocolate is just another snack.
You can be president.
You can wear a thin, white tee-shirt to a water park.
Car mechanics tell you the truth.
You don't give a hoot if someone notices your new haircut.
If you retain water, it's in a canteen.
Porn movies are designed with you in mind.
You can open all your own jars.
You never have to drive to another gas station because this one's restroom is too icky.
Wrinkles add character.
Wedding dress $5,000; tux rental $100.
People never stare at your chest when you're talking to them.
New shoes don't cut, blister, or mangle your feet.
One mood, ALL the damn time.
Phone conversations are over within 60 seconds.
A week-long vacation requires only one suitcase.
You can leave the motel bed unmade.
You can kill your own food.
You get extra credit for the slightest act of thoughtfulness.
If someone forgets to invite you to something, he or she can still be your friend. Your underwear is $5.95 for a three-pack.
You can quietly enjoy a car ride when not driving.
Three pairs of shoes are more than enough.
You can quietly watch a game with your buddy for hours without ever thinking: "He must be mad at me."
You can drop by to see a friend without having to bring a little gift.
If another guy shows up at the party in the same outfit you just might become lifelong friends.
You're not expected to know the names of more than five colors.
You don't have to stop and think of which way to turn a nut on a bolt.
You almost never have strap problems in public.
You are unable to see wrinkles in your clothes.
The same hairstyle lasts for years, maybe decades.
You don't have to shave below your neck.
You can get a dime or your keys in 3 seconds.
You can get out of bed and be out the door in 5 minutes.
One wallet and one pair of shoes, one color, all seasons.
You can do your nails with a pocketknife.
You have freedom of choice concerning growing a moustache.
Christmas shopping can be accomplished for 20 relatives, on December 24th, in 45 minutes.

Inspired by the above, I mentioned to a lady I know how lucky men were that they only have to remember about five colours whereas women have to remember about 100. Her reply was good: "We don't have to remember them. We KNOW them!"

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BE A BLOGGER

Want to be a blogger? Dave of SABERTOOTHJOURNAL is looking for helpers to add content when he is too busy. He is looking for other people able to write from a free-market perspective. Email him on sabertoothjournal@yahoo.com if you are interested. He has a good site going there so it would be an easy way into blogging.

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GOVERNMENT CHILD ABUSE

Thank goodness for Britain�s House of Lords!
Unbelievable but true: The British government passed a law through the House of Commons permitting homosexual couples to adopt children! Talk about neglecting children in the name of political (read: Leftist) correctness! The good old House of Lords blocked the bill however. We can only hope it stays blocked. Thanks to Conservative Commentary for the report.

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MODERATES

An interesting email from Ed Ziegs:

"I hope that one day you might consider including "moderates" in your ongoing thesis. Moderates to me are like "tits on a boar hog". They are there but timidly go about their busisness of making friends on both sides and betraying both sides and just getting in the way. I detest moderates. They refuse take a stand on anything. They tell you, "There are two things I never talk about with friends and relations and they are politics and religion." Imagine, two of the most important issues in life and they won't discuss them except with strangers and I would bet they don't even then. Everything is a grey area to them. Name the great moderates in history. Neville Chamberlain is the first that comes to mind. It does however, take a great deal to find them because they never accomplish anything. I don't think that God likes moderates either -- Read Revelation 3:15 and 16"

The Revelations reference is pretty vivid:

"I know thy works that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth"

Ed might also have added another scriptural reference:

He that is not with me is against me: And he that gathereth not with me scattereth" (Luke 11:23).

I understand Ed's feelings but wonder if moderates might not be the price we pay for our good old Anglo-Saxon tradition of seeing compromise as being the best solution to many problems. Most of the troubles in the world seem to me to exist precisely because most people in the world do NOT have the maturity to compromise. They all just want to win. But where you have winners you also have losers and so resentments can go on forever. Northern Ireland would seem to be a case in point. If only they were less Celtic and more Anglo-Saxon there .....

And what a difference it would make if the Palestinians were prepared to compromise! Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered them a huge compromise a little while ago but Arafat turned it down flat. So now the Palestinians just exist. You couldn�t call it life under the PA. More fools them. They must live in a totally unreal world if they think the Israelis will just go away one day. I would not like to have the problem of dealing with such numbskulls as the Palestinians appear to be. If the Israelis bombed the Palestinian population centres massively every time they bombed the Israelis, that would not only be just (�An eye for an eye ....) but it might also be the only thing that would get through their thick skulls.

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RELIGION IN POLITICS

Richard Cook takes issue with my observation that a true follower of Christ would do as Christ did and keep out of the politics of his day:

� If you take a stance on an issue (treatment of the poor, hypocrisy of the elites, etc.) it will be impossible for you to stay out of politics any more than it was for Jesus. While Jesus did not politic as we understand the term (electioneering, issue statments and the like), he did not hesitate to point out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and Sadducees, thereby introducing himself into the politics of that era in the Jewish community.

What he gave us is an example in courage, even to the point of death. Part of preparing for salvation is telling the truth fearlessly and setting the example for others, both believer and not, in love. What is preparing for salvation? It is what Jesus said - love the Lord your God with your heart, soul and mind, and, loving your neighbor (all you are in the world with) as yourself. I think your last two sentences are grievous. Why would one withdraw from the world when you are commanded to act as a beacon of Christ - why hide your light under a bushel basket? It is better to let all men and women see the light of Christ reflected in the way you live your life. Scripture is not on their side in withdrawing from the world. Scripture sets its hand against them. You cannot withdraw from the world and win people to Christ. There is simply a preponderence of evidence that Christ intended us to live in the world, but, not be of the world, not conformed to its values�.

I have some sympathy with this sort of thinking. It seems obvious that if you treat your fellow man kindly as part of your highroad to Christ�s Kingdom of Heaven you will also want to support political policies that are kindly towards your fellow man. But note here that what Christ said was to give your OWN possessions to the poor -- not to give OTHER PEOPLE�S possessions to the poor. So Catholic �Liberation theology� -- which preaches the latter course -- is simply bad theology. And the Holy Father (who is in general no great friend of capitalism) has proclaimed that too, of course.

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Three great quotes via the �Fed�:

THE CARTER PEACE PRIZE

"There is an ex-President who not only sought peace but who achieved peace, who reduced the threat of nuclear annihilation dramatically and liberated tens of millions of people from dictatorship. His name is Ronald Reagan�.

COMEDIANS COMMENT ON CLINTON

Bill Clinton spoke Wednesday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center about his recent trip to Africa. He said Africa is home to 70 percent of the world's AIDS cases. Most business travelers just check the weather forecast before they go someplace.

Today is Bill and Hillary's 27th wedding anniversary!
27 years ago tonight Bill cheated on Hillary for the first time.


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NAZIS VERSUS �REDS�

When I point out how far to the Left most of Hitler�s policies were, a strong reaction I get from many who know something of history is to say that Hitler cannot have been a Leftist because of the great hatred that existed at the time between the Nazis and the �Reds�. One such challenger has been Jiri -- to whom I am greatly indebted for a lively and erudite correspondence about the politics of the interwar years. One of Jiri�s observations seems to me a very good one indeed:

I am surprised that you have not seized on Hitler's anti-semitism as a
proof that he was a socialist. So widespread had been anti-semitism among the
Leftists in Europe that Lenin himself denounced it as "the socialism of the
stupid man"

My reply to Jiri and others was of course that there is no hatred like fraternal hatred and that hatreds between different Leftist groupings have existed from the French revolution onwards. That does not make any of the rival groups less Leftist however. And the ice-pick in the head that Trotsky got courtesy of Stalin shows vividly that even among the Bolsheviks themselves there were great rivalries and hatreds. Did that make any of them less Bolshevik, less Marxist, less Communist? No doubt the protagonists concerned would argue that it did but from anyone else�s point of view they were all Leftists at least.

Nonetheless there still seems to persist in some minds the view that two groups as antagonistic as the Nazis and the Communists just cannot have been ideological blood-brothers. Let me therefore try this little quiz: Who was it who at one stage dismissed Hitler as a "barbarian, a criminal and a pederast"? Was it Stalin? Was it some other Communist? Was it Winston Churchill? Was it some other conservative? Was it one of the Social Democrats? No. It was none other than Benito Mussolini, the Fascist leader who later became Hitler�s ally in World War II. And if any two leaders were ideological blood-brothers those two were. So I am afraid that antagonism between Hitler and others proves nothing. If anything, the antagonism between Hitler and other socialists is proof of what a typical socialist Hitler was.

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CATHOLIC LEFTISM REVISITED

I have just received the following counterblast to the email I published yesterday about Catholic Leftism:

� Christianity is a monarchy with Christ the King. It does not promote individuality in terms of doctrine, scripture or history. Why then should the Catholic Church? If Catholicism promotes statism, why did John Paul II fight the Commies so hard? The writer is comparing apples to oranges. If you want to talk religion, if the Catholic Church promotes Statism then Protestantism promotes chaos. Who interpetes scripture for the Protestants? At least with the Catholics its the Church and the Magisterium. With the Protestants it�s �Do your own thing�.

I must say that, as far as I can see, Christ was most emphatic in his lifetime that he was not concerned with the politics of his day but rather with preparation for the afterlife. I have quoted some of the scripture concerned here. Surely those who really follow him would also keep out of politics and concentrate on salvation. Some extreme Protestant sects (e.g. Jehovah�s Witnesses) do in fact withdraw as far as they can from the affairs of the secular world. I think they have scripture on their side in doing so.


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CATHOLIC LEFTISM

Some interesting thoughts sent to me by Ed Mick of Revealed Truth. As I send my son to a Catholic school, I suspect that I am a bit more sympathetic to the Church of Rome than Ed is but he does have some very good points:

I read with interest your comments on the intermingling of Catholicism and socialism. While I certainly agree that you've hit on something as far as the confusion between theological and secular imperatives, I wonder if there isn't something else at work.

The structure and theology of the Catholic church seem to me to provide fertile ground for statism. Not so much by direct extrapolation from theological doctrine to economic doctrine, though, as by laying an epistemilogical and social foundation for statism's ready acceptance.

Consider the contrast between the Catholic view of Truth and the Protestant view. The Catholic view is that Truth is revealed by scripture in part; but also by the writings, interpretations and rulings of church fathers. On top of this, the Priest is a necessary intercessor between the deity and the individual. Add a universally understood symbology that provides for countless other intercessors and obligatory rituals, and you have a flock that's well accustomed to communitarian trappings and philosophy.

The essence of Protestant duty is to get onesself right with the Almighty. Denominational doctrine might well specify how one should go about doing that - but with rare exceptions the church itself isn't a necessary instrument for salvation. The Protestant imperative is intensely personal. Have faith. Honestly believe that Jesus is the son of God. And only you and the Almighty know whether you have fulfilled your part of the bargain. Its fairly obvious, on the other hand, whether or not you've performed all of the Sacraments of the Catholic Church.

Finally, we have the uniquely Catholic notion that one's earthly works plays a role in determining one's disposition in the hereafter. Add this to doctrinal fealty to an earthly administrative infrastructure and you have a group of people well disposed to arguments that: a) they are morally obliged to sacrifice for the good of their fellows, b) there is a group of select individuals who have the wisdom to know what the nature of that sacrifice should be, and c) that group of select individuals are appropriately empowered with enforcement mechanisms to ensure that "the good" is done.

Thy Will Be Done. On Earth. By the Church or the State. What's the difference?


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When Political Correctness Collides With Political Correctness:

The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) is demanding that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) tear down a billboard showing a picture of a fat Elvis Presley captioned, "Don't Be Cruel To Your Heart and Body," an apparent implication that eating meat makes one fat.

NAAFA says the billboard is a "cheap and mean-spirited publicity stunt, which works at the expense of fat people." And that PETA should "show respect for people as they show for animals."

PETA says they will not respond because NAAFA's concerns are "not legitimate" and accepting fat is a disservice to society.

Source
Thanks to Jerry Lerman for that one!

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I now have a rather large number of internet sites so it occurs to me that I should do a complete list of them so that anyone who likes this blog can read further if they wish:

My big monograph on the psychology and sociology of Leftism
A much briefer, academic presentation of the core contentions of the monograph:
Leftism in the churches:
Racism among Leftists:
My original presentation of a theory of Leftism:
A follow-up paper on the psychology of Leftism:
The first draft of my article on the roots of Leftism to be found in Mussolini�s Fascism:
The site for my academic papers up to the year 2000:

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