"REDNECKS" FOLLOW-UP

A good comment from a reader about my post yesterday on "Rednecks": "Something I have observed for a while that I don't think I have seen in any of your writings is the Right's ability to laugh at themselves -- while the left seems to have no tolerance what-so-ever for anyone making fun of them. The Redneck comedy is a good example - but even better is a classic TV show called All In The Family. The series was created by a super Liberal, Norman Lear, and although his intention was to mock conservative views, it became a big hit among conservatives, and I guess among liberals too. The fact is, it's just damn funny... but somehow I don't think it would have ever made had it been mocking liberal views.

Another reader thinks I should have mentioned "cracker" as another bigoted term often used by Leftists. He summarizes: "Cracker is a pejorative term used by Northerners (Yankees, aka blue states) to describe people of the South (red states). It is ante-bellum in origin. The civil war between the North and South was more a conflict of cultures than anything else and was a conflict that was already centuries old at the Revolution (see the Mel Gibson movies Braveheart or The Patriot), it being the conflict between the Anglo-Saxon English and the Celtic peoples or Scotland, Ireland, Wales, etc. The Yankees being predominantly of English stock considered themselves to be industrious, well bred, civilized people. They considered the people of the South to be a temperamental, emotional lot who would rather spend their days screwing their women and running through the woods with their hound dogs than working. This idea of Southerners remains to this day."

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

More on immigration, wages and other myths, part II Does immigration drive up profits while driving down wages?
The Age slimes the free market - again Tim Colebatch and Kenneth Davidson must be among the worst of Australia's economic commentariat - and that's saying something
Unions, wages and labor surveys Outworkers are not the victims of callous market forces and greedy capitalists. They are the victims of callous ideologically motivated economic illiterates
Professor John Quiggin slimes Windschuttle John Quiggin's specialty appears to be moral posturing, character assassination and personal abuse
Holland and Islamic terrorism: Disaster in waiting How ludicrous that the legislators of Holland are so afraid of the violent Arabs, who are taking over their community, that they can't sleep safely in their homes for fear that one of them might come in and behead them

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

There is an excellent article here on the multiple links between the far Left and the Islamists. Such links make no logical sense at all given the way Islamic attitudes to women and to sexual licence run directly against long-cherished Leftist causes but, as usual, Leftist attitudes can only be understood psychologically rather than logically and the alliance makes great sense psychologically. Both Leftists and Islamists want to tear down existing society and put themselves in the drivers' seat instead. So at a basic level the two groups have identical aims. It is only power that Leftists really want. All the rest of what they say is just posturing -- and there could be no clearer evidence of that than the way they have abandoned the various "rights" they have always stood for by co-operating with the world's most notable opponents of such rights.

This is pretty disgusting. Young Japanese women living in Paris get so shocked by constant French rudeness towards them that some of them end up hospitalized with depression. I am sure my own manners are a bit rough at times but I always try to treat the invariably polite people of Asia with the courtesy that such politeness deserves. But like all elitists, the French think everyone else is scum, particularly Americans of course.

Lots of young educated Arabs LIKE George Bush! "The same ideas came up again and again: he is a strong leader, an honest man, and, most of all, a believer. Like the winning margin of American voters this year, these Middle Easterners related to Bush's sense of religious conviction and his confident steering of a nation and culture they admired... In addition, some of the most articulate students expressed intense misgivings about central Democratic electoral platforms, including gun control, limitation of the death penalty and especially abortion and gay rights. Just the word "homosexual" made many of them cringe and click their tongues in that uniquely Arab way of showing disapproval. A final piece of the puzzle fell into place when I learned that more than half of the students in my advanced class, among them a third-year medical student and daughter of a Western-based diplomat, rejected the theory of evolution. "I just can't believe that we came from monkeys," she said".

Mobsters have a point "Italian mobsters jailed on the island of Sardinia, apparently outraged by terrorism, beat up an Algerian terror suspect and threatened to kill him unless he got himself transferred to a new prison. The same threat was made against at least one other Algerian inmate. "You guys set off bombs and do massacres. If you don't change prisons, you're dead," the criminals were reported to have told Saadi Nassim"

A good post on the British welfare State. One excerpt: "State education began in 1870 with the Forster Act, which allowed the creation of government schools. Its purpose was not to wipe out the existing private and charitable schools. The whole idea was to catch those few people who were missing out. It was reckoned in 1861 that 95 percent of children were getting between five and seven years of education. State education was started to save that missing 5 percent or less. Now, 134 years later, with the state dominating education, a government survey reveals that 20 percent of the adult population is functionally illiterate. State education, instead of saving the bottom 5 percent, has quadrupled the number of those left out"

Watching the signs: "Not since 1952 has a presidential election lacked a sitting president or vice president as a contestant, and Ike was about as close as one could get to non-official incumbent. Before that, it was the 1928 race, and there, too, Herbert Hoover was, like Ike, a figure of towering popularity. In other words, there has never not been a front-runner in at least one party in the modern scrambles for the presidency. Here is a bit of evidence that the race for 2008 also has a leader, one along the lines of Eisenhower and the Great Engineer.... Giuliani swept more than three-quarters of the votes"

The Carnival of the Vanities is up again with enough good reading to keep you busy for a long time.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

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