SORRY! I HAVE MOVED



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I was getting constant error messages when loading to this site so it seemed at risk of grinding to a halt altogether. So I have decided to get out while the going is good. Pyra did make attempts to fix it but the errors kept recurring. Problems with their template servers, I gather.....

PILGER: AN INTERESTING CASE-STUDY...

TIM BLAIR in the THE BULLETIN (4 March 2003, p. 18) recently published these two quotes side by side:-

"No one can doubt its cruelty and atrocities, but comparisons with the Third Reich are ridiculous." - John Pilger on the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, Nov 15, 1999

"The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times." - John Pilger on the government of George W. Bush, Jan 29, 2003.

I feel rather sorry for Pilger. He has flashes of sanity and realism at times (as in his film about Pol Pot) but his desperate need for attention causes him to say ever more outrageous and unreasonable things -- to the point where he is basically just laughable. He is a good study in how the Leftist mind works. That juvenile need for attention overrides almost everything else.

There is a very good brief demolition of Pilger's film about Iraq here.

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IRAQ

Daily Rant points out that Clinton was at least as "unilateral" about Iraq as is Bush. In saying that I am recognizing that Leftists now use "unilateral" to mean "without universal approval" -- which is an example of the way Leftists have always loved to play with words rather than face reality. Of course any national leader who waited for universal approval before he did anything would never do anything at all. And having the approval of the corrupt French is certainly no honour either.

�Now please stop this preposterous charade of pretending to need the imprimatur of that exclusive club for mass murderers, thieves, thugs and tyrants (The United Nations) to justify anything whatsoever�. From Samizdata.

What a laugh: Some of the peace activists who went to Iraq to serve as human shields in the event of war returned home, fearing for their safety, a spokesman said Sunday. Via Hoosier Review

The Swedish Nazis are supporting Saddam! That must be comforting to the Lefties! There�s an old saying: �You know a man by the company he keeps�. Via Dean�s World.

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SOME INTERESTING QUOTES

Two good quotes from Peggy Noonan�s letter to the Democrats:

There is another problem. You have become the party of snobs. You have become the party of Americans who think they're better than other Americans.

and

This is the Democratic paradox: You want so much to run America and yet you seem not so fond of Americans.



There is a good analysis of Australia�s anti-Americans here. Excerpt:

Anti-Americanism should be studied as a serious psychological affliction, a pathological condition which paralyses the mind's analytical capacity.



OTHER READING

Gloom! There is an election campaign on in Australia�s most populous State and even the conservatives are promising an indefinite �moratorium� on genetically-modified crops if elected. And the Leftists have weighed in too, of course. Just when Australia has almost entirely got rid of the impoverishing stupidity of socialism from its politics we now have the impoverishing stupidity of the Greenies to contend with. Superstitious fear is all that is behind the GM ban. I guess we are still not far away from our caveman ancestors.

Here is an Arab-American who LIKES airline security checks.

A big international survey has found that: Christian religions are more positively associated with attitudes conducive to economic growth. Orrin Judd will like that one.

Black community leaders don't want their kids going to all-black schools. I can't say I blame them.

Chris Brand turns a cynical eye on claims that relationships between younger teenage girls and older men must always be a bad thing.

Today's academic paper from my past is here. It deals with some technical questions about how best to measure differences in people�s personalities.

Michael Darby documents more bungling in the government-run railway system of Australia�s largest State.

The Wicked one has a laugh at the �black� college degrees produced by Affirmative Action and gives three reasons why talk radio is Rightist.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its usual big range of reading.

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LEFTIST �BIG LIES� AND THE �STOLEN GENERATION�

The CounterRevolutionary has recently argued (with obvious truth) that what influence Leftists have stems from their being better at propaganda rather than from their capacity to deliver desirable results. He argues therefore that conservatives should do more to press their arguments rather than just respond to Leftist claims. He is undoubtedly right but I think that conservatives will never be as good at propaganda because we do not have the Leftist�s carelessness about the truth.

The greatest triumph of the Leftist �big lie� technique in recent times would have to be the way they have persuaded almost everyone that Hitler was a Rightist when he was in fact one of them -- an extreme socialist. He was to the Right of Stalin but that is about all.

But there are many smaller examples of successful Leftist deception and the �stolen generation� story in Australia is one of them. The story is that wicked white racists early in the 20th century tore black children out of their mothers� arms and farmed them out to cruel white foster parents to be brought up in white ways rather than in black ways.

The truth is that it was white do-gooders and social workers just like the Leftists of today who ran the programme concerned. The children concerned were all half-castes (of partly white ancestry) and the wiseheads of the day felt that �for their own good� such children would have �a better chance� if they were brought up in white families. Like the Leftists of today, the �welfare� workers of that time felt that they knew what was best for other people -- regardless of what the people concerned might want. Disgusting!

But to this day most Australians believe it was all just racism -- with no awareness of the do-gooder motivation for it all.

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ANTISEMITISM AMONG THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT

There is an interesting account here of the prevalence of antisemitic beliefs among members of the US Christian Right. I think it is wise to keep this phenomenon in proportion, however. As the article also points out, the same people are often among the strongest supporters of Israel. In this they differ greatly from the antisemites of the Left who want to destroy Israel.

The Judaic religions (Judaism+Christianity+Islam) all tend to the view that their particular sect is the one and only possessor of the truth. So anybody of the "wrong" sect will tend to be condemned. So while Protestant fundamentalists may condemn Jews for their "wrong" beliefs, they would also condemn (say) Catholics with at least as much fervour -- because Catholic beliefs are "wrong" too.

At least Christian fundamentalists have usually evolved beyond the stage where they physically attack people with the "wrong" beliefs -- unlike Muslim fundamentalists.

And as for the anti-Israel attitudes of the current Pope -- well he IS a Pole. The Poles were generally delighted to help the Nazis round up the Polish Jews during World War II.

(Crossposted on Israpundit)

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MORE GRIEF FOR THE GREENIES

I noted some days ago that young Australians are less Green than their elders and also noted that, from what my 15-year-old son tells me, the kids get so much pro-Green and pro-black propaganda these days that it bores them silly and they react against it. I also see now that Tech Central Station has a name for the the young people concerned: "South Park Republicans"

The Swedish Greens have at last woken up to the fact that most recycling is in fact wasteful of energy and other resources and so are now OPPOSING recycling. (If the article fails to load, Instapundit has a big extract here)

Details here of just how ridiculous and wrong-headed recycling is. Here's just one little excerpt:

We are not running out of trees or forests. America has three-and-one-half times more forest land today than it had in 1920. America is growing 22 million new acres of forest annually while harvesting but 15 million acres, for a net gain of 7 million acres each year.

A classic article by SLATE magazine's economics columnist Steven Landsburg on "Why I am not an environmentalist". And the subtitle is: The Science of Economics Versus the Religion of Ecology. Excerpt:

The naive environmentalism of my daughter's preschool is a force-fed potpourri of myth, superstition, and ritual that has much in common with the least reputable varieties of religious Fundamentalism. The antidote to bad religion is good science. The antidote to astrology is the scientific method, the antidote to naive creationism is evolutionary biology, and the antidote to naive environmentalism is economics.

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OTHER READING

Chris Brand discusses the present state of the nature/nurture debate.

The Wicked one tells is what a vague and wimpish character Abraham Lincoln was and how little respect he had from those who knew him.

Michael Darby has a rather horrifying story about how a white tourist was treated by black Zimbabwean �police�.

Today's academic paper from my past is here. It deals with the rather hilarious claim made by Leftist psychologists to the effect that conservatives are too pro-authority. The paper shows that there is in fact no such thing as a general attitude to authority -- i.e. approving of one type of authority does not mean that you will therefore approve of other types of authority.

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DEMOCRACY NATURAL?

A recent book by Rubin is summarized by a reviewer as arguing that:

Autocratic society violates human nature for most of those who belong to it and therefore is inherently unstable. Rubin also argues, however, that libertarianism is unstable because it entails extremes of individuality that equally violate evolved human tendencies and thus cause social breakdown.

And the conclusion from that is that the compromise represented by modern democracy best suits human nature.

That may be a comforting conclusion but I think one of the assumptions is wrong. The plain historical fact is that human beings have almost always lived under a tyranny of some sort. Ancient Athens emerged from tyranny for about 100 years and then self-destructed and the Roman republic was never more than an oligarchy until it too became an empire. And the supremacy of Parliament in England dates only from 1649. So if autocracy is against human nature we have had an amazing amount of it. Some governments of the past were more consultative than others but there was almost always a king, Pharaoh, emperor or the like running the show.

I think it is much more obvious to argue that autocracy is what in general comes naturally and the love of big government exhibited by Leftists is the modern-day evidence of that inclination.

So modern democracy is in fact a painfully learned lesson in overcoming human nature that only a minority of humankind seem to have learned to this day. Human nature is powerful and I would be the last to underestimate it but it is not a straitjacket. Wearing clothes is not natural but we all do it. Let�s hope that we will all also practice democracy one day.

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A CONFUSED GREENIE

There is an interview with a rather confused "feminist critic" of environmentalism here. She rightly sees people-hating impulses at work among the Greens and says that is Right-wing. Then she endorses the optimistic perspectives of free market anti-Green economist Julian Simon. So Left is Right and Right is Left to her. Maybe she has been converted to conservatism but has not realized it yet.

It was whilst trying to debunk Simon's work that Green heretic Lomborg realised Simon may after all be correct. For more on Simon see here. The story of Simon's influence on Lomborg is here

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MORE GREENIE NEWS

Hooray! Exposing Greenie dishonesty works! After a lot of publicity of their lies, the Greenies in Brazil have given up opposing nuclear power (the safest, cleanest and cheapest form of energy generation there is) and new nuclear power stations are now being built there. Via Aaron Oakley.

Hooray again! It looks like Russia too will refuse to ratify the nutty Kyoto �Greenhouse� treaty. Death knell! Via Country Store

There are two quality articles here and here from the CIS detailing the growing threat of old fashioned trade protectionism disguised as new fashioned environmentalism.

Dioxin has long been one of the great Greenie swear-words. All sorts of health disasters have been blamed on it and anything that produces dioxin is supposed to bring us all a slow and painful death -- and deform our babies too, of course. But it has just been discovered that the peat fires that the Scots and Irish have used for millennia to keep themselves warm in winter also give off lots of dioxin! How awful for those poor Scots and Irish! They must not realize how ill and deformed they are.

And it does look like the poor old Greenies are gradually having global warming chipped away from them too. Note this:

Data compiled from the journals of early Arctic explorers casts doubt on the assumption that recent thinning of Arctic ice is the result of human-induced climate change. Via Cronaca.

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OTHER READING

When the US attacks Iraq, could it spare a few bombs for Riyadh? The way the Saudis torture Westerners to extract false confessions puts them in much the same league as Saddam. A lovely lot, those Arabs.

Revealed Truth thinks that the current Leftist hatred of the Jews may be motivated by a feeling of betrayal. Minorities are supposed to be uniformly Leftist.

Chris Brand notes some encouraging signs of realism among Muslims.

The Wicked one has had a couple of good jokes lately.

Michael Darby has a link to the persecution of Christians by Moslems and another report on the incompetence of a government-run railway

Today's academic paper from my past is here. I show that middle-America tends to be �authoritarian� in the sense used by psychologists but also point out that this essentially means no more than that middle-Americans have old-fashioned values.

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THE NAZIS ARE BACK -- AND STILL ON THE LEFT

This article by David Brooks -- already noted on Israpundit -- must be one of the saddest articles I have read for a long time. An old and cruel folly has roared back into life. Although I am an atheist with not a shred of Jewish ancestry, I have been writing on antisemitism for over 30 years (e.g. Ray, 1972). When I started out, antisemitism was vestigial and no Leftist in the Western world would have a bar of it but now it really is a major phenomenon on the Left worldwide -- including the �liberals� of the USA. The battle with irrationality is unceasing, I am afraid.

Just listen to this bit of poison from Yale university:

But does the prevalence of Jews in American media, business and politics help explain America's steadfast support for Israel, whose 35-year occupation of Palestinian lands is an affront to human decency? Of course.

It�s Hitler�s �National Socialism� all over again. That a decent person of any religion might support a people trying to defend itself against persecution, outside military attacks and internal terrorism is obviously beyond the ken of the hate-filled writer (Sahm Adrangi).

Reference:
Ray, J.J. (1972) Is antisemitism a cognitive simplification? Some observations on Australian Neo-Nazis. Jewish Journal of Sociology 15, 207-213.

(Crossposted on Israpundit)

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LEFTIST CHILD-HATERS

An appalling quote from a Feminazi professor who objected to her female colleagues taking leave to have babies:

"Having babies is a choice -- already, people who have babies are getting tax breaks, getting hugely discounted insurance (forcing those more reproductively responsible to subsidise them), and often getting to slack off work for some 15 years using children as an excuse to reschedule meetings and avoid heavy committee work. This is NOT a women's issue -- it is a matter concerning a specific group of people taking advantage of the rest of their department."

More here

Who does she think will support here in her old age through their taxes? Those selfsame people who are now babies. If everybody was "reproductively responsible" in her sense, she would die of hunger and disease in her old age -- and justly so.

Speaking of feminism, I am no feminist but I do like and respect women so I would have a strong urge to put a .50 calibre slug through the guy in this picture.

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HUMAN SHIELD MOTIVATION

A good summary of "human shield" motivation below:

Hi, I'm Special Ed and I'm a human shield. I come from a country with many freedoms and opportunities, all of which I take for granted. I suffer from a God complex, low self-esteem, a desperate need to feel better about myself at the expense of others and I crave attention like a three year old. I feel the need to take time out from my job and leave my family so that I may deny you - the Iraqi people - the same freedoms and opportunities I do not appreciate in my own country. I am committed to preserving Saddam Hussein's brutal and oppressive regime. Why? Because I'm a socialist and I know what is best for the Iraqi people.

From The Ville (Post of 26th)

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THE "PEACE" MARCHERS

Spiked argues that the British "peace" marchers are not interested in peace or anything else much. They are simply alienated -- they do not trust government or politicians. The anti-government factor does help explain why there are some antiwar conservatives and libertarians.

But The Tocquevillian thinks that the American peaceniks are just the old Communist-sympathizers revived.

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OTHER READING

There is an article here on the Left's 'unholy alliance' with Islamic extremism

Anti-business bureaucrats have twisted Bill Clinton's medical leave law so that you can now take sick-leave for all sorts of minor ailments and still have your job protected.

Who says there is free speech in America? Not at Michigan State University, there�s not. How can someone in the US get a criminal record for doing something that is protected by the US Constitution? I would really like to know. And particularly since blacks can do exactly the same thing with impunity. America sure is a classically racist society. There is one law for whites and another for blacks. It�s a mockery of justice.

Chris Brand thinks that �paedophile� Roman Polanski has done no harm and that better nutrition can prevent a lot of crime.

Michael Darby has a reflection on socialism being inimical to families.

Today's academic paper from my past is here. In it I again review Altemeyer�s claims about Right-wing authoritarianism -- this time in the context of the overall lack of a scientific orientation among modern academic psychologists.

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ENGLAND OR THE USA?

Over at England's Sword there is quite a good debate going on in the Comments about whether the USA or England is the better place to live. I have spent time in all the English-speaking countries and my first preference is Australia (my country of birth) but after that I choose England. The US is clearly better off in almost every material respect but I just LIKE England better -- mainly because it is a much more relaxed place, I think. Also, I think that the English have by far the best patriotic songs (I am listening to an infinite loop of "Jerusalem" as I write this). On the other hand, I think that the greatest and truest gentleman who has ever lived is an American -- Ronald Reagan.

Some thoughts from others on the countries concerned ....

In the UK, one snowflake is enough to bring the country to a standstill.

There is a good article from Britain on the stupidity of America-bashing here

Gregory Hlatky has an interesting post on how much more Fascist Europe is when compared to the USA.

"Damn Americans. . . . I hate those bastards." The words of a "liberal" Canadian member of Parliament. What is that if it is not left-wing racism? And a particularly stupid form of racism at that. More here.

There is a fun article here which argues that instead of making Britain's House of Lords less hereditary, it should be made WHOLLY hereditary. He makes a good case too.

Interesting impressions of a newcomer to Southern California here. I had similar impressions when I first went there over 25 years ago.

Chomsky's virulent hatred of America has apparently made him insane. He actually says "East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise" More here.

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LEFTIST DENIAL OF REALITY

Freelance Radical has some interesting ideas about:

Why people might become ignorant liberal-lefty's:

DENIAL

These are individuals who so deeply desire to never become identified with any form of aggression, that they'll dissociate themselves from its reality and completely deny its existence in an attempt to perceive themselves, others, and the rest of the world, as being tolerant, peace-loving, and rational. It's a really sad and ironic truth, however, that their unwillingness [when confronted with aggression] to assert their own authority, while at the same time curtailing that of others, causes the proliferation of that very same evil aggression they so much abhor.

FEAR

People who spent their childhood with parents who were either violent, psychotic, or both, would be unable to admit to themselves, when young, that they were at the mercy of adults they could not trust. Acknowledging this violence or craziness as being real, could invoke such catastrophic fear in a child, that it might literally be unable to survive. So it blinds itself to what its parent really is. But this blinding terror continues to operate long after such people have become adults, making them unable [or unwilling] to acknowledge similar truths in the real-life world of political matters.

BELONGING

For many people, life is boring and nobody seems to care about anything too much and so they get kinda depressed just getting up in the morning. That is, until they decide to join the anti-war crowd and suddenly they're part of a group, a gang, an organization, and they've got a "home" and others care about where they go and how they'll get there and they're invited to join a bus trip, a flight to another city, a sign-making group, discussion forums, strategy planners.......wow!! life is no longer boring and they don't want this to end - not ever - and so, these liberal-lefty anti-war marchers have zero interest in ever finding out about any political truth that might ruin their new-found sense of belonging!

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UNIVERSITY ANTISEMITISM

There is often a temptation among right-wingers to think, "Why can't this problem of anti-Semitism just go away? It's such a distraction from more vital concerns." But the problem is, as much as you would like it to, the problem of anti-Semitism doesn't go away, and if you ignore it, it just gets worse. Furthermore, as cannot be said often enough, the Jews are the canaries in the coal mine. When a society starts veering into moral nihilism, the first target is almost always the Jews. But they're only the first target.

More here

(Crossposted on Israpundit)

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OTHER READING

Today's academic paper from my past is here. In it I expose the almost bovine stupidity of a famous Leftist psychologist who tries to pin authoritarianism onto conservatives.

Chris Brand has more on C.R.A.C.K. and Britain's ethnic problems.

The Wicked one tries to explain the popularity of Hitler in British schools.

Michael Darby has a retort to John "Third Reich" Pilger.

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