SOME OLDIES BUT GOLDIES

A great Orwell essay. He says Leftists are a type of nationalist: "By "patriotism" I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.... Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movments and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one's own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted". (Via the Bunyip).

There is a great column by Thomas Sowell from a few years back of which I have to say what I rarely say: "Read the whole thing". Excerpt: "Over the years, the phrase "unintended consequences" has come up with increasing frequency, as more and more wonderful-sounding ideas have led to disastrous results. By now, you might think that people with wonderful-sounding ideas would start to question what the consequences would turn out to be -- and would devote as much time to discovering those consequences as to getting their ideas accepted and turned into laws and policies. But that seldom, if ever, happens. Why doesn't it? Because a lot depends on what it is you are trying to accomplish. If your purpose is to achieve the heady feeling of being one of the moral elite, then that can be accomplished without the long and tedious work of following up on results."

A great quote from a distinguished conservative: "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves." -- T.S. Eliot, in his play "The cocktail party" (1950).

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ELSEWHERE

LOL: I mentioned yesterday a Leftist/feminist blogger who changed her tune when she had a baby. She ended one of her posts on the subject with "I'd rather be sharing this with someone I love than doing it alone". I therefore commented about her: "She even wishes she was married!" -- which seemed a fair comment on what she said. Marriage can of course be de facto as well as de jure and I drew no inferences about which she preferred. She now refers to my comment as a "baldfaced lie". So judge for yourself who the liar is. She may have moderated her feminism but she is obviously still a Leftist.

Leftists, of course, call anything "lies". They are such liars themselves, they need to accuse others of it to cover up for themselves. The pathetic attempt to pin the "lie" accusation on President Bush seems to have depended mainly on his report of what the British government had been told about uranium purchases from Niger. That the information the British spooks obtained was contradicted by other sources got a lot of press a while back. Now, it seems, the British spooks got it right. No apologies for calling Bush a liar on such flimsy grounds can be expected of course. A loud silence from the former accusers in the Left-leaning American mainstream media is very much in evidence. I guess that's the Leftist version of journalistic ethics. (Don't laugh! There IS supposed to be such a thing as journalistic ethics!).

A Leftist not taking his pills: "Al Qaeda is not linked to Saddam but is in fact a creation of the CIA" (Via William Webb)

A good comment on the "International Court" ruling against Israel: "How ironic that the judge who read the ruling declaring Israel's security barrier illegal comes from China - the country that ate Tibet whole and has a human rights record somewhere South of Attila".

Subhuman Muslims: "Suspected Muslim guerillas sliced off the nose, ears and tongue of a 14-year-old girl in Indian Kashmir today, believing her to be an informer for the Indian army, police said."

Does abortion undermine the Democrat voter base? Tabarrok is perfectly correct that you cannot calculate the effect easily but given that Democrats favour abortion a lot more than Republicans do, it would be most surprising if Republicans used it as much as Democrats do. And that should give SOME tendency for Republicans to have more children. And children do tend to follow their parents' politics -- not uniformly of course, but largely so. Conservatism is in fact strongly hereditary. So, overall, easy abortion availability should in the long run increase the proportion of conservatives in the population.

A good libertarian comment: "The problem with personal injury lawsuits is not the core principle, which a true libertarian would be hard-pressed to deny. Rather, liability for injuries has been extended beyond any reasonable definition of causation. People who stupidly bring on harm to themselves have nevertheless been allowed to blame others with deep pockets. The tort system has been corrupted by the infusion of a welfarist, redistributionist, soak-the-rich ethic".

I almost never check such things but in an idle moment last night I looked at where this blog ranks in the NZ Bear ecosystem and was rather pleased to see that I have made it into the fourth highest category ("large mammal"). Being 305th out of 3 million blogs seems pretty good to me. I don't understand this search, though. It says there are nearly 10,000 links to this blog on the internet. I suspect a bug somewhere. The NZ Bear system has a big bug too: It counts self references. Even the erratic Technorati.com does not do that.

Maybe I shouldn't laugh but one of the other blogs that links to this one is a Japanese blog called Shitfit! Truth is stranger than fiction.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights.

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