A SMALL VICTORY FOR FREE SPEECH IN BRITAIN

The prosecution of two British National Party men for hate speech has failed. The jury acquitted them on some charges and failed to agree on others. It seems that you may now say critical things about Islam in private conversations in Britain. It's not much and even that limited freedom is still under attack: The British government says it is going to try the men again on the charges that the jury could not agree about. There is a good comment on the case and the verdict at Majority Rights.





ANOTHER HISTORIC NAZI POSTER

This one would be from the March 5, 1933 election when Hitler had become Chancellor but Marshall Hindenburg was still President



Translated, the poster reads: "The Marshall and the corporal fight alongside us for peace and equal rights"

Can you get a more Leftist slogan than that? Modern-day Leftists sometimes try to dismiss Hitler's socialism as something from his early days that he later outgrew. But when this poster was promulgated he was already Chancellor (Prime Minister) so it was far from early days. Once again we see what a barefaced lie it is when Leftists misrepresent Hitler as a Rightist. He campaigned and gained power as a democratic Leftist. The March 5, 1933 election was the last really democratic election prewar Germany had.

Another example of the easy transition from Fascism to modern Leftism: "Where have we seen this story before? An influential European writer and thinker, celebrated in his mature years for works of sophisticated philosophical nuance, turns out to have been an anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler creep in his 20s. The standard query immediately presents itself: Will the nefarious politics destroy the reputation? Marta Petreu's An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), inevitably hurtles humanists of a certain age back to other names and scandals - de Man, Heidegger, Eliade - with its expos, of the expatriate Romanian anointed by Susan Sontag in her 1968 introduction to The Temptation to Exist as "the most distinguished figure" then writing in the lyrical, aphoristic, antisystematic tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein".

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ELSEWHERE

A reader writes: "Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain states that "All human lives ought to be equally valued". Meanwhile Allah's Last Testament is bursting full of vivid declarations of the utter worthlessness of the lives of unbelievers, and invocations to fight and slay them; and the military career of the Prophet was rich in examples of putting those principles into practice. Can I therefore take it as read that the MCB accepts that the Qur'an is not the word of God/Allah and that the Prophet's personal example is incompatible with the MCB's own conception of human rights? Or is the Prophet's well-documented approval of deceit involved here?

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts. Among his news is that the masterly essay by philosopher Neven Sesardic on fraudulent argument among philosophers is now available online. As Sesardic says, there is no topic on which philosophers of science go so conspicuously off the rails as the issue of racial differences in IQ. The philosophers concerned are positively Stalinist in the way they lie about the subject. But I guess there are other ways in which they like Stalin too. They essentially claim that the psychometricians ignore differences in environment, whereas psychometricians have always gone to great trouble to account for the role of the environment! Even my 1972 paper on the subject addressed that issue from the outset. The most surprising thing is that Sesardic did actually get his article published in an academic journal of philosophy. I guess truth still interests some philosophers. Update: I was delighted to receive an email from Neven Sesardic advising me that a revised and expanded version of his essay is now one chapter in his recent book Making Sense of Heritability.

Chris also notes that the book Affirmative Action Hoax now has a companion site here. Both book and site use impeccable science to expose the lie that blacks and whites have the same genetic potential. As the book shows, affirmative action is a huge fraud on whites.

Prager on the Hamas victory: "It is a sad day for humanity when a people choose to elect terrorists as their leaders. But for those of us who believe that clarity is the prerequisite to moral progress, the landslide victory of the terrorist organization Hamas in Palestine has a silver lining.... the Palestinian vote reveals the falsity of the worldwide Left's view of the Palestinians as committed to peace. It likewise reveals the falsity of the Left's belief that Palestinian terror is supported by a small minority of the Palestinian population. That is one reason why the Bush doctrine -- we need to spread democracy everywhere possible, including, or even especially, in the Arab world -- is so valid. You cannot deal with any problem in life -- from the most personal to the most macro -- by engaging in wishful thinking and denying reality. Thanks to this election, the mask has been removed. When given the opportunity to express themselves, most Arabs and many Muslims elsewhere support terror and seek the annihilation of Israel. That is why the Hamas victory is such a defeat for the world's Left -- university professors, news media, socialist parties, the European Union, the United Nations, "peace" activists, editorial writers, and all other apologists for the Palestinians.... On just about every issue, the Left lives in a childlike fantasy realm. Their views are expressions of what they wish for, not what actually is".

Jonah Goldberg on the Hamas victory: "Today, various pragmatists, optimists and apologists for the Palestinians say they weren't voting for mass murder and terror, but for honest government and efficient social services. Fatah, the "party" of that terrorist carbuncle Yasser Arafat, was corrupt and incompetent while Hamas has successfully delivered much-needed social services. Hamas ran on "change and reform," proclaim the apologists, not terrorism. Fine, but that was equally true of the Nazis, who traded soup kitchens for indoctrination. Fascist movements have always gained popularity by delivering for the needy, the forgotten and the left out. They have always captured the imagination of the middle class by promising to reform the government, root out corruption, make the trains run on time. And fascist movements have always promised, as Hamas has, to bring about a moral and national restoration."

China Hand has just put up some new posts about Hainan, the big island off the China coast that, unlike Taiwan, remained under Communist control. The contrast with Taiwan is stark, even though Hainan has obvious potential. China Hand's site has been "hacked" in some way, however, so you would be best to load the mirror site.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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