THE READER'S DIGEST

I bought my first subscription to the Reader's Digest out of my pocket-money in 1956 when I was 13 so I appreciate the truth of the comments below. The only downside is that I am still getting mail from them!

"Imagine, if you will, someone who read only Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman," said the late Susan Sontag in 1982. "Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?"

These were surprising words, spoken by a surprising source. Supposedly high-brow intellectuals such as Sontag weren't supposed to credit the supposedly low-brow Reader's Digest with anything - and especially not moral clarity. Indeed, Sontag's remarks ignited a firestorm of controversy on the Left, whose guardians of political correctness usually viewed condemnations of Soviet totalitarianism as provocative and suspicious.

Sontag's remarks were possible because her enemies were right, and Reader's Digest was a bastion of anti-Communism during the Cold War. Friedrich Hayek once credited the popular success of his book The Road to Serfdom to the fact that the Digest had published a condensed version of it.

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ELSEWHERE

Sometimes American conservatives can be utterly ignorant. Jim Kalb insults all conservatives who are not religious: "Can there be a secular conservatism? My answer is no, at least if conservatism is to be more than the view of a few comfortable intellectuals. "Conservatism" can mean many things, but it always involves a sense that in the most basic ways life can't be understood or controlled. At bottom, we have to accept and cooperate with things as they have been given us by God, nature, history or chance". [How then does he explain that Australia is at once one of the world's most irreligious countries and also one of the world's most conservative countries?. More on this issue here]

The New York Times rediscovers race: "Last fall, the prestigious journal Nature Genetics devoted a large supplement to the question of whether human races exist and, if so, what they mean. The journal did this in part because various American health agencies are making race an important part of their policies to best protect the public - often over the protests of scientists. In the supplement, some two dozen geneticists offered their views. Beneath the jargon, cautious phrases and academic courtesies, one thing was clear: the consensus about social constructs was unraveling. Some even argued that, looked at the right way, genetic data show that races clearly do exist. The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." ... Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong."

Hot climates cause poverty? Groan! Nobody told the Singaporeans or Northern Australians: "Jeffrey Sachs, a prominent US economist and a special adviser to the UN secretary general, argues in a new book that extreme poverty could be eradicated by 2025.... Professor Sachs is the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the head of the UN's Millennium Project, formulating anti-poverty goals. In an excerpt from his book published in Time magazine, he says there is little evidence that corruption has been the main obstacle to development in Africa, where extreme poverty is concentrated. Rather, he blames the geographical and climatic conditions that have contributed to drought and disease..."

VAWA ignores epidemic of violent women: "In the past few weeks newspapers all over the country have been brimming with accounts of women who engaged in monstrous crimes. To avoid giving offense, I provide only the sketchiest of details here: Dena Schlosser severed off both of her daughter's arms with a knife. Nathshay Ward starved her three children to death. Kim Tran mutilated her boyfriend in a gruesome act of revenge. These women don't exist, and these gruesome crimes never happened. At least that's what the Violence Against Women Act would have us believe."

"DEAth" for disabled pain-sufferers: "Question: What is the greatest barrier to proper healthcare for most people suffering from chronic pain or debilitating injuries? Answer: The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Picture if you will: You were born with some genetic malformations [and] bad hereditary traits. ... Then, from your late teens into your early thirties, you've [had] excruciating headaches and other pains, and have spent your life since mostly searching for some relief for either. [Y]ou finally discover a pain-management specialist truly worthy of the name. ... Enter the DEA: Your doctor can only prescribe so large a dose, [or] be ... investigated for 'drug-trafficking'! ... Moreover, all your prescriptions are tightly controlled ... each two-week/one-month period they may not be refilled until the day after the previous ones run out. If there is any delay in [procuring them] ... you must go without until it (or they) arrive(s)."

The Palestinian pathology: "Terrorism is a Palestinian tradition that must end. But in order to bring about this desperately needed change, not only must the Palestinian people cease to show sympathy with their indigenous terrorist organizations, so too must Westerners, both in Europe and in the United States. Sympathy with the Palestinian people is in order, but not sympathy for the institution that has held them back from all progress toward a genuinely responsible civic polity. For that is what terrorism has become among the Palestinians -- it is their peculiar institution, the way slavery was the peculiar institution of the American South in the nineteenth century. For, like the slave system, terrorism, deployed as a means of achieving political goals, ends by poisoning the society that permits it to flourish in its midst".

Hollywood dummos as heroes: "Arguably, the biggest problem in American culture today is the fact that mere entertainers are its heroes.... Prior to the rise of American popular culture, entertainers could never even dream of being the most important members of a society, engaged as they were in a frivolous past-time that helped the folks escape their solemn responsibilities for a short time. In our time, however, the incredible has happened. The court jester has become the king. Those who play the heroes have become the culture's actual heroes. Those who direct fantasy movies are directing the direction of our youth. And with entertainers as the principal people we look up to, so much of our society has become silly and trivial..... The consequences for the elevation of people who perform inconsequential tasks to the center of national attention are enormous. Even if our Hollywood celebrities were not the most damaged people in our society - drugged up, divorced, with even their kids in rehab - the results would still be tragic. By making fashion models our role models, Hollywood heroines our heroes, and singers into saints, we have created a shallow and vain society, distinguished not by sacrifice, but by indulgence. We have created a culture known not for virtue, but for vanity."

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx despised even his fellow Germans. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" has more on the day of judgment.

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

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 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.

Leftist ideologues 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 and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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