THE DILEMMA OF THE POST-SOVIET LEFT

After the collapse of the Soviets, the Left have no alternative to capitalism so they deny reality instead. Some excerpts below from an article by George Watson on their sad state:

The commonest form of subjectivism in our times, moral or cultural, is to deny that any value judgment counts as knowledge. Moral scepticism in that familiar style is most commonly multiculturalist, and holds that all judgments are born of circumstance and conditioning. In departments of literature, by now, it is difficult to hear any other view. Gender studies and black studies are its children, not to mention gay studies, and by now the children have grown middle-aged. Such are the views of many who once assured the world, and with enormous certainty, that capitalism was wicked-which certainly sounds like a value judgment-or that America was wrong to be in Vietnam or Iraq, which sounds like another. It is a cosy place the Left has retreated to, as to a Masada, in the hope of finding it impregnable. Subjectivism is the last bunker of the intellectual Left.

Consider this counter-instance to subjectivism. A mindless murder occurred a few years ago in Dunblane, in Scotland, when sixteen schoolchildren were shot dead by a maniac who then committed suicide. Worldwide condemnation was instant and universal. Did anyone, at that moment of anguish, stop to consider what the theoretical basis for that judgment might be? Did those who insist that there is no moral agreement in the world ever admit that they might have been mistaken? To be a subjectivist, at least for long, you have to shut your mind, and keep it shut. It is like being a solipsist, or believing that nothing exists but yourself.

Years ago, in Human Knowledge, Bertrand Russell told how he once had a letter from an eminent American logician, Mrs Christina Dadd Franklin, explaining that she was a solipsist: why were there so few of them? But if she had noticed there were so few, she must have noticed, or thought she had noticed, something that was not herself. Russell was content to tell his little story ungarnished, leaving the point to sink in, and you could do the same with moral and cultural subjectivism. Just think about it. If you cannot judge anything, then you cannot judge that you cannot judge. As a great philosopher once said centuries ago-he was called Pascal-it is not certain that nothing is certain.

Subjectivism, it is widely believed, means tolerance and openness. Nobody can say you are wrong: it all depends on where you are coming from. It is a cosy place to be-until, that is, somebody points out that belief in social justice is a judgment; so if all judgments are merely personal, so is that.

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ELSEWHERE

I have just put up here a small correspondence for and against Rush Limbaugh.

Official chemophobia: "The first startling thing Joy White saw out of her bedroom window was a man running toward her door with an M16. White's husband, a physicist named Bob Lazar, was already outside, awakened by their barking dogs. Suddenly police officers and men in camouflage swarmed up the path, hoisting a battering ram. 'Come out with your hands up immediately, Miss White!' one of them yelled through a megaphone, while another handcuffed the physicist in his underwear ... The target of this operation, which involved more than two dozen police officers and federal agents, was not an international terrorist ring but the couple's home business, United Nuclear Scientific Supplies, a mail-order outfit that serves amateur scientists, students, teachers and law enforcement professionals."

Book Review: "Sociologists, anthropologists, and television commentators tell us that race is biologically meaningless, that the physical differences between Danes and Pygmies are insignificant evolutionary accidents. Race, we are told, is an artificial concept white people invented only a few hundred years ago to justify colonization and slavery. If we free ourselves from this delusion, we can all march hand in hand into a future free of "racism." Everything about this view of race is obviously wrong, but since so few of the people who know better are willing to say so, this nonsense is beginning to tighten its grip on the popular mind. Now a book has finally appeared that blows to bits every one of these tendentious arguments. Race is a long overdue corrective that deserves wide circulation".

Blacking out speech -- Comment by Newt Gingrich: "In the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson became president and swept his party into power due, in part, to the country's overwhelming opposition to the Sedition Act of 1798. This act was a deliberate attempt by the Federalists in power to silence their political opponents. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law enacted in 2002 is an equally dangerous modern-day assault on the First Amendment. It could more accurately be called the McCain-Feingold censorship law because it stifles political speech, protects incumbent politicians and consolidates power in Washington. This law is of the Congress, by the Congress, and for the Congress, because it protects members of Congress by silencing opposing points of view."

Beware of oil pundits: "Those who espouse clever government-led solutions to high oil prices should bear in mind that new discoveries have outpaced consumption for a number of years, but too much bureaucratic interference has hampered supply. Restrictions on building new refineries and pipelines in the U.S. have kept prices up and increased America's dependence on foreign energy. Half of Europe's motorists already use diesel fuel, but the lack of refining capacity to turn heavy crude into diesel has made the rest of the world rely a lot more on light crude, pushing up its price. And, of course, supply would be higher if almost 80 percent of oil reserves did not belong to incompetent government-owned companies around the world, such as in Russia, Sudan and Nigeria. Not to mention that huge tariffs on imports of Brazilian sugar cane have hampered the development of ethanol in the U.S. (Brazil's use of ethanol as an energy source has been a huge success.) Why make matters worse by meddling further?"

Will the Senate impose race-based government on Hawaii?: "America's motto is "E pluribus unum," Latin for "Out of many, one." Some U.S. senators seem to be reading it backward. This week the Senate will consider legislation that would create an independent, race-based government for Native Hawaiians. If the bill becomes law, it would create a racial spoils system that would hand special privileges to up to one-fifth of the state's population--including many with only a trace of Hawaiian blood. It could inspire mainland groups such as Hispanic separatists to seek similar spoils, should they ever gain enough political leverage. The notion is the obsession of Sen. Daniel Akaka, an 81-year-old Democrat whose 16-year Senate record has been so undistinguished that Time magazine listed him in April as one of the five worst senators"

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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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