Monday 31 October 2011

Pray!

There are some young people who stand against the flow...they need our support. Pray!
Please do not get me wrong.  I am not suggesting that Tim Tebow walks on water.  I am saying that in our culture, which celebrates crudeness and the lowest common denominator, it is extremely refreshing to see this young man boldly standing up for traditional wholesome principles and values.
Unquestionably, the American left has launched a war against Christianity.  We are lectured and threatened with political correctness to respect every religion under the sun except Christianity (and, increasingly, Judaism).  It is open season on trashing Christians in movies, political interviews, etc.  The Christian is portrayed as the nutjob, the loser, or the nerd.
Rumor has it that Tebow is an extremely hard worker and a born leader -- sounds similar to a fireball from Wasilla, Alaska who is also despised in the liberal media for similar reasons.

The numbers game

For those who fear a population explosion read this website and its links, you will see that numbers are not to be feared, only the manipulations of faceless bureaucrats. Thus ends the scare campaign...with a whimper not a bang!
http://www.pop.org/content/lies-damned-lies-statistics-and-population-graphs

Saturday 29 October 2011

Idiotic PC

With enviable erudition Dalrymple describes the crimes imposed upon us all by the controlling lunacy of our politically correct comrades:

What was the likelihood that an elderly man in a business suit was a bomber? And if he were a bomber, how would not allowing him to leave his case near the entrance to the cathedral, but allowing him to take it round the cathedral with him (with a hundred opportunities to leave it hidden somewhere), conduce to safety? The women (at the entrance) were not allowed to use their common sense, for fear that they might be discriminatory. But there is no intelligence without discrimination, even if judgment is necessarily uncertain and always prone to error. The church preferred to dehumanise the women by subjecting them to a rule they knew to be idiotic. Thus we injure ourselves with lies, to which we apply the bandage of unctuous platitude.
ho hum another day at the asylum.

In the green zone!

Another unintended consequence of the mad green religion that has hypnotized our 'elites':
Finally, did Flint use any money from Obama's last trillion-dollar stimulus bill to hire more police in order to prevent rape and murder? No, Flint spent its $2.2 million from the first stimulus bill on buying two electric buses.

Even if what Flint really needed was buses and not cops, for $2.2 million, the city could have bought seven brand-new diesel buses and had $100,000 left over for streetlights.

Rather than reducing the rate of rape and murder, blowing money on "green" buses is likely to increase crime, since people will be forced to spend a lot more time waiting at bus stops for those two buses.

It's going to be a long wait: The "green" buses were never delivered because the company went out of business -- despite a $1.6 million loan from the American taxpayer.
Welcome to our Brave New (Green) World. 

If it works, do it!

The philosophical mantra of the elite is perfectly articulated in the following excerpt. It doesn't matter to them if promoters on 'their' side lie, exaggerate, abuse and/or act hypocritically...as long as they get their own way!
Professor Richard A. Muller made clear in 2008 that he was a warmist who was happy if some alarmists exaggerated in the right cause:
Q:  I know you drive a Prius. What else are you doing to reduce your carbon emissions?  
A:  My house is lit by compact fluorescent light bulbs. Let me just tell you, though: Suppose I drove an SUV and lit my house with the worst kind of light—I could still be an environmentalist. Al Gore flies around in a jet plane—absolutely fine with me. The important thing is not getting Al Gore out of his jet plane; the important thing is solving the world’s problem. What we really need are policies around the world that address the problem, not feel-good measures. If [Al Gore] reaches more people and convinces the world that global warming is real, even if he does it through exaggeration and distortion—which he does, but he’s very effective at it—then let him fly any plane he wants

Thursday 27 October 2011

History repeats!

Western civilisation as dictated by the elites has truly taken the road to madness.

A rather pertinent definition of madness states that: Madness is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result each time...in other words; an extreme denial of what is real.

We currently have Michael Moore denying he is rich because: "I don't associate myself with those who do well". Of course the reality is that he is rich. He is worth squillions of dollars which were generated by spinning fantastical lies to gullible dupes and conspiracy theorists but in his mind because he doesn't 'associate himself" with the rich, he's not!
We have Al Gore preaching a false Armageddon and making billions of dollars as a result. He predicts that the sea levels are going to swamp all coastal cities and then proceeds to buy a mansion on the water, as did Australian fear monger (and wealthy as a result) Tim Flannery who also buys a house on the water.
We have Julia Gillard making dumb decisions and blaming Tony Abbott for them...blatant mendacity.
We have lilly white Caucasians 'identifying' with their 1/16 Aboriginal heritage, calling themselves black and advancing their careers in academic or political domains 'set aside' for the exclusively 'black' (a system we used to call Apartheid!).
We have Western Governments passing laws which promulgate a persons freedom to call themselves whichever sex they identify with. So a man can call himself a woman and be supported in his/her/its madness in a court of law. Recent new reports identify an 11 year old boy with lesbian parents who wants a sex change because he identifies as a girl! Surprise, surprise!
We see prosperous and famous philosophers appearing on TV stating that it is OK to indulge in
 'interspecies sex' i.e. sex with animals, and that getting rid of the 'useless' in society (i.e.:euthansing the old and disabled) is a 'kindness'.
We observe the rich and famous berating the ordinary and poor for living 'extravagent' lifestyles, that is; being told that we in Australia are the world greatest 'polluters'(per capita), and that we should ameliorate our guilt by accepting punitive taxes on our prosperity...then these paragons of virtue jump into their Lear jets and fly off to exotic locations for an extended holiday and never even contemplate the hypocrisy of their actions; thus illustrating the narcissistic blindness of the truly self-absorbed.

There exists a seemingly endless supply of increasingly bizarre examples and all the while our self-satisfied, neo-Marxist elite castigates our prosperity (capitalism) deconstructs our history (Post-modernism) and makes new developments increasingly difficult (enviromentalism) thereby restricting our cultural mandate. Meanwhile a philosophical tornado gathers momentum within the apocalyptic Muslim world. Crouched by the door of an ever weakening culture it waits patiently to unleash its demons on an imploding civilisation so that a new and super World Caliphate might emerge from the ruins of the decadent Western experiment.

Makes a good script for a Hollywood blockbuster don't you think? Trouble is, even a cursorary glance at world history (not the reconstructed Pomo history...the real history!) shows how realistic it could be.

Roller-coaster?

Some wise observations from a former 'left-leaning-luvvie' and motivated by the outbreak of 'occupations' by morons world-wide:
The radicals misunderstand the nature of reality.  They believe that life should be fair, that hierarchy and differences among people shouldn't exist.  It is a form of delusion to embrace utopia and perfection in this human realm.
But, again, this secular society has trashed religion and deconstructed history, the realms of which would explain the way life works.  Instead, people on the left live in a fantasy world;  and they go ballistic on opponents because truth threatens their dreamworld. 
Occupying the streets allows participants to feel good about themselves, noble, as though they are saving the world.  In contrast, it's a buzz kill to realize how little control one has over this life.  To feel insignificant, like a little cog in the wheel, is depressing.
When I reflect on what we have to look forward to regarding the next generation; many of whom have been thoroughly indoctrinated into left-wing ideological fantasies during their school years, I shudder.

My prayer is that I am wrong, wrong wrong, and that this new generation will turn the slippery slope into a momentous ramp of possibility.
But I fear not!

Tuesday 25 October 2011

Expert opinion!

The following small excerpt from an interesting,(and well worth a read) article, supports the growing disquiet I experience every time somebody uses the word 'expert' to convince me to walk a dangerous/suicidal/stupid/nonsensical/incoherent path towards self-destruction:
In short, we are, as individuals and as groups, riddled with cognitive biases that go with being human. This is not, let me emphasise, confined to the poor and uneducated. Experts remain susceptible and can be very resistant to accepting their fallibility. In a wonderful book titled Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Philip Tetlock remarks: “Human performance suffers because we are deep down deterministic thinkers with an aversion to probabilistic strategies that accept the inevitability of error. We insist on looking for order in random sequences.” The book explains that political and geopolitical experts perform abysmally in making predictions in their own fields of expertise, but are overwhelmingly disinclined to acknowledge this fact
I can think of few things more effective in preventing excessive civilizational errors than to eradicate 'experts' from decision making positions and to handball that privilege instead to those deemed 'wise' not by their education (even though I am a believer in education!), but through lived and learned experience.

I particularly liked this comment about monkeys in the article:  "In reality, Tetlock discovered in longitudinal studies, even the best experts he could find performed not much better than chimps throwing darts at a board."

The article worth a read is found at: http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2011/10/learning-to-see-the-gorilla

Monday 24 October 2011

One World; Totalitarian rule.

A 'confession' and its consequences by one-time AGW honcho David Evans:
The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic.
And with that he begins a demolition of the theories, premises and methods by which the AGW scare has been foisted on the public.
The politics:
The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.
...At this point, official “climate science” stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.
...We are now at an extraordinary juncture. Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government — how exciting for the political class!
Indeed. How extraordinarily unexciting for the proletariat who will be the ones stuck with the bill if these governments ever succeed in finding a way to pass the taxes they hope to impose and extend even more government’s control over energy.
As Vaclav Klaus has said repeatedly, the struggle is not against differences in environmental policies. It is about who will rule in the future...your future!

Post Modern dualism...

From the pen of Mark Musser:
This subterfuge has also allowed the greens to criticize Christianity from two directions at the same time.  On the one hand, Western Christianity has allegedly created the scientific revolution that has raided the ecology of the planet.  On the other hand, since many Christians refuse to bow to Darwinism, Christianity is also considered anti-science.  This incongruent criticism should cause much more pause about the relationship between Christianity and science than is typically given.  Darwinism does not have a monopoly on science.  What's more is that if leftists are so into science, then why have so many of them embraced the environmental movement, which is loaded with Romantic, anti-scientific views?

Anti-Green.

In the spirit of Socratic questioning; why are the anti-scientific Greens so opposed to Christianity?
It was the Old and New Testaments, which time and time again stress the practical import and value of knowledge, which helped form the basis for applied modern science.  Moreover, since people believed that God created the universe, this made nature not only tangibly real and rational, but also something worthy of serious investigation.  In other words, the Christian scientist expected to learn from nature precisely because he assumed that God intelligently designed it.  Once the assumption of God's intelligent design is removed from nature, it becomes very difficult to understand just exactly what scientists are intending to learn these days.  Neither can they explain why it is that they have indeed learned so much from nature.  The Darwinian descent of man fully submerged into a purposeless natural world of unintelligent outcomes has only compounded this problem further.  Contrary to popular opinion, a mixed up post-Christian, postmodern world is anything but a good foundation upon which to build an epistemological basis for scientific knowledge.
...As Lynn White, Jr. showcased throughout his speech, the green movement has little regard for the scientific revolution precisely because it associates that movement with Christianity's dominating view over nature.  Christianity has allegedly ransacked the ecology of the planet with a heavenly imperialistic worldview which has had little sympathy for the feelings of plants, animals, and indigenous peoples.
...Modern ecology appears to be attempting to return to the "sciences" of the Greco-Roman world, replete with all of its pagan hesitation and superstition, yet dressed up in holistic scientific language that forbids many of the consequences of the scientific revolution.
Read the entire article at :
www.americanthinker.com/2011/10/the_greens_religion_and_science.html

...its illuminating.

Serve you right!

On the moral posturing of many left-wing (and a few conservative) politicians:
Leftist politicians, unlike those of a more laissez-faire disposition, require an extraordinary degree of moral knowledge to do the job they advertise for themselves.
When a politician makes a show of his virtue, when he adopts the exalted language of fairness, compassion and love of his fellow man, it is a safe bet that he seeks permission to push us around. If you are stupid enough to think that Ed Miliband, Barack Obama or any other human being is qualified for the job, you may deserve what you get.
That we get the politicians we deserve is  moral certainty!

Saturday 22 October 2011

The gag becomes the bandits mask.

Free speech is under attack from many quarters in  the West today, but perhaps the most insidious and dangerous for the future is the way freedom of speech is being eroded within what used to be the bastions of free speech; the Universities:
ONE of the most disturbing developments in the cultural life of the West is the casual acceptance of the policing of language.
These days people who should know better - even artists and academics - devote far more energy towards justifying measures that limit free speech than advocating its expansion. Sometimes one can even pick up a sneering sense of contempt towards those who seek to counter the policing of speech.
Just listen to the tone in which Greg Barnes, a barrister and president of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, dismisses the claim that the Federal Court’s ruling against Andrew Bolt represented a serious threat to the exercise of the right to free speech. “Has it not occurred to Bolt and those who are busy mouthing similar platitudes that freedom of speech is not an absolute right?” he asks.
The tendency to treat free speech as a platitude and to mock those who take this right seriously as puerile is symptomatic of a fundamental shift in the conceptualisation of the relationship between freedom and the state....
Sadly, the one institution where linguistic policing has become most entrenched is in universities. Historically, institutions of higher education were in the forefront of upholding academic freedom and freedom of speech. Today, communication on campuses is filtered through an elaborate system of speech codes and censorship. The Inclusive Language Guideline of the University of Newcastle reads like a medieval censor’s manual. ...
... the academy has become linguistically infantilised. Students and staff are treated like infants with the warning “Mind your language”. Once self-censorship has become a habit, the addiction to it becomes difficult to break.... It is worth noting this is the environment that shapes the linguistic universe and imagination of the legal professionals of the future, including judges and legal scholars.


What I have highlighted in bold is the development I believe represents the most dangerous result of 'politically correct' speech. In time self-censorship becomes accepted as the norm and freedom as the aberration, and when that happens civilisation has capitulated to barbarism and anarchy is the logical result.

Oops!

Another of those 'inconvenient truths' about Green totalitarianism:
One of the most embarrassing environmental facts of the 1930s was that between 60% and 70% of the German greens were Nazi Party members, compared to only 10% of the population at large. In fact, German greens outperformed even medical doctors and teachers, with Nazi foresters and veterinarians leading the charge. Somehow, the so-called independent German wandervogels (German word for "wandering free spirits") found themselves at the footstool of Der Führer. Their wandervogel attitudes about civilization and the wild forestlands found a political niche in the isolationist biology of the Nazi Party. Furthermore, their strong beliefs in holism found a political voice in the totalitarian Social Darwinism of the Nazis, which was largely rooted in Ernst's Haeckel's ecology  of the 1800s. (The Original Enviro-Nazis: By Mark Musser)

Thursday 20 October 2011

Sorry Soros!

An eye-opening account of the real villains of Wall Street:
http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2011-10-19.html
read it because it exposes the lies of the 'hate-all-things-capitalist(except: iphones, ipads & itunes!!)-neo-marxist-Gramscian mob.

Tuesday 18 October 2011

Liar, liar pink batts on fire!

Why do we believe anything these people say?
A carbon tax is “a hysterically inaccurate claim being made by the coalition”—Wayne Swan, 12/8/10
“We have made our position very clear, we have ruled it out” —Wayne Swan on carbon tax 12/8/10
“There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.”—Julia Gillard, 16/8/10
“What we rejected is this hysterical allegation that somehow we are moving towards a carbon tax” —Wayne Swan 18/8/10

Monday 17 October 2011

Spin baby spin!!

 When I returned to study for a teachers degree some years ago the college I attended had a ruling of only using reference books of  a relatively recent 'pedigree', I think the limit was 20 years.

I remember having a problem with it at the time simply because in my opinion post-modern scepticism towards truth has damaged the 'objectivity' of research immeasurably, particularly within the past few decades, and as a consequence many/most of my references stretched back further than was 'offically' sanctioned. As far as I was able to discern only one academic punished me for my sin and the subject was of little consequence to me so I chose not to make a big issue.

Any insertion of the subjective impulse into research (usually in the form of a political or personal 'narrative' [a word which in its current usage makes me want to scream]) has afforded me grave misgivings regarding 'contemporary' reliability in academics and it appears I am not alone:
 The politicisation of history—in the words of Henry Reynolds, history “should aim to right old injustices, to discriminate in favour of the oppressed, to actively rally to the cause of liberation”—is the major cause of a decline in interest in the subject by the current generation of students at school and university, and a consequent decline in the number of jobs for historians.
We have unfortunately arrived at a place where it is hard to know what, who or why to believe anything anyone says publicly anymore. People are too scared to speak truth in case they are sued over some discriminatory imagining, or leaders say one thing to one group of people and the opposite to another all the while quoting from 'research' or 'statistics' churned out by tame scientists and which have been altered to suit their argument.

Its a mess.

Sunday 16 October 2011

T.O.T.A.

The carbon dioxide tax is coming, the mining tax is coming, the boats are coming—and Labor is going.
But the theatre of the absurd that is Canberra keeps on keeping on:
The most ridiculous moment of the week was revealed on website thetelegraph.com.au on Thursday, when Gemma Jones reported that “several of Ms Gillard’s backers in caucus sent a warning to MPs who might be considering swinging behind Kevin Rudd to take back the leadership, threatening she would quit parliament and vacate her seat if they tried to blast her out of the job”.
Sounds like the scene from Blazing Saddles in which the sheriff of Rock Ridge takes himself hostage and threatens to shoot himself unless he is released by a vigilante mob.

Friday 14 October 2011

A diatribe

The post-modern chant; 'there is no such thing as truth', rings out every time PoMo president Obama opens his mouth: "President Obama blames Republicans for the collapse of his latest government jobs bill. But in the end, he has only his tall tale-telling tongue to blame."
A remarkably similar tune is whined by Australia’s head-bobbing, erstwhile PoMo prime  minister: "Julia Gillard says the latest boats show that Tony Abbott should pass her amendments to rescue her Malaysian solution, and that any boats to come are his responsibility."

As with most irresponsible children, when issues are not resolved to their satisfaction their default position is to blame someone else. We make excuses for children because their cognitive resources are still being formed, but these morons are supposedly leaders of the 'free world'! 

Both of these hopelessly incompetent 'leaders' whose ascension to power illustrates most profoundly the 'progressives' inability to manage an advanced economy other than ripping off honest taxpayers to subsidise their sycophantic 'entourages'. A kindly perspective might be to perceive them as mere victims of our shallow 'youth culture', where lived and learned wisdom counts less than 'whipper-snapper-smarts'. However, as a growing sceptic I count it more likely that these ideological grandchildren of Marx, Lenin and Stalin are merely repeating history...just as Harry Truman said they would.

Time after time, again and again, in numerous countries, on multiple continents, and under countless differing conditions the repeated failures of this Utopian vision illustrate its inability to prosper and its tendency towards tyranny. It is a mendacious and dangerous worldview suitable only to be embraced by those who favour repression, degradation and totalitarianism because chief amongst its prodigious flaws lays the problem most ignored by rulers to their peril. It does not take into account the devious and ‘fallen’ nature of human kind.

The misanthropes who pursue this philosophy do so because they either believe in the unworldly theory of Locke’s tabula rasa; and Rousseau’s ‘corruption through civilisation’(hence the crippling taxes to bring down the economy) or they are hell-bent on the Nietzschean ‘will to power’ and care for nothing or no one other than this goal.

Either way these idiots are forever trying to turn water into wine, base metals into gold, and sows ears into silk purses.

Amusing, Ja?

If you are a rugby fan and/or enjoy a good laugh (at the expense of herr hitler) then you should click on this link: http://video.news.com.au/2152702652/THE-ALL-BLACKS-DOWNFALL

Thursday 13 October 2011

Viva la révolution?

With reference to the French conniption and in anticipation of a similar revolt against the elites (though hopefully a democratic one, i.e. absent la guillotine); I modify a line from Percy Bysshe Shelley's essay A Defense of Poetry with:  'The elite have become more contemptuous, and the everyman more desperate as the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism'.

bob leading the 'people'

Anarchy & Despotism: the bedfellows of Watermelon philosophy.

Theodore Dalrymple: 'The British revolution, however, has been carried out neither by the proletariat nor in the name of the proletariat: it is, rather, the revolution of the ambitious but ungifted, of whom there is a gross oversupply. For everyone is persuaded these days that there is only one thing worth having, and that thing is power'.
Anyone recognise familiar players in Australia?

Monday 10 October 2011

Irony!

The versatility of actor David Caruso.

Theodore Dalrymple

His life is what makes Theodore Dalrymple such an insightful essayist, and worth reading:
Dalrymple, whose real name is Anthony Daniels (a byline he has used more often in recent years), is a doctor and psychiatrist who practised for 20 years in a prison and an NHS hospital near Birmingham.  
His calm, sardonic voice became well-known thanks to his "If Symptoms Persist" column in the Spectator. He was discovered  in 1983 by the then editor Charles Moore, who says: "Daniels is the only lasting contributor I have ever found from unsolicited manuscripts. His wit and originality were immediately obvious." 
One of the things that make Dalrymple's dispatches and analyses so powerful is that he could not be further from the stereotype of the "little Englander" conservative. His father, a Communist, grew up in an East End slum; his mother was a German refugee. He brings to his observations a wisdom gained from extensive travel, wide and deep reading, and having worked for long periods in places that most middle-class readers and commentators know only at second-hand.
Indeed the richness of his work proves how right Kipling was when he pondered, "Who knows England who only England knows?" Doctors often make observant writers and Dalrymple has practised medicine in places as exotic as the Gilbert Islands in the Western Pacific. Soon after qualifying as a physician, Dalrymple went out to work in Rhodesia, and spent much of the next decade in Africa. The politically-correct types who have reflexively labelled him a bigot would be shocked by his respect for Africans and unillusioned depiction of the last years of colonial rule. Back in the UK, he chose to work in deprived areas when he could have catered to the afflictions of the affluent. Reporting assignments took him to perilous places like Peru during the worst of the Shining Path uprising where teenaged cadres disembowelled government officials: "As a doctor I am accustomed to unpleasant sights," he wrote with typical restraint, "but nothing prepared me for what I saw in Ayacucho."
He is understandably loathed by lockstep-liberals and what he calls "the bureaucratic caste", but those in charge of Britain's agenda-setting TV and radio programmes would do well to listen to him. Theodore Dalrymple brings to his arguments a combination of philosophical sophistication, genuine humanity and real-world experience that is unique.

Sunday 9 October 2011

The Imperial Judiciary.

Isn't it instructive that the leader of the lawyers comes out in favour of drugs?
But even more crassly opportunistic than Rudd last week were Australian drug legalisation advocates declaring the boy’s arrest proved that the war on drugs was failing.
Australian Lawyers Alliance president Greg Barns issued a statement, describing the arrest as “ludicrous. Too many of the wrong people are being jailed as a result of a policy that keeps the drug trade underground.”
When various negative issues plaguing Western society are examined dispassionately, often we discover lawyers and their elder 'brothers' judges, positioned at the core of the trouble-making.
Why is that?
Why do we observe judges making the law rather than interpreting what the government has decreed?
What does it mean?

It means the disenfranchisement of the electorate.
It means that the people who have been elected by the majority of the population for the express purpose of debating, making and defending those laws deemed most suitable by the representatives of the majority are over-ridden by an unelected elite:
“In a shocking and historically unprecedented suppression of political expression, a staggering four thousand five hundred Australians have had their voices silenced by Australia’s political elite in the Labor-dominated Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Clean Energy Future Legislation.”(11/10/11)
What we are witnessing throughout the western world is an insidious revolution by an unelected elite or as Francis Schaeffer put it; rule by an Imperial judiciary.
However, in Australia we have the added wrinkle of a sympathetic political 'overseer' who is not only keen on rule by elite, but he wants the elite to be centered in another country altogether; i.e. The UN.

UPDATE 11.10.2011
Further evidence that the 'elites' seek to curtail voices raised against their excesses:
Just listen to the tone in which Greg Barnes, a barrister and president of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, dismisses the claim that the Federal Court’s ruling against Andrew Bolt represented a serious threat to the exercise of the right to free speech. “Has it not occurred to Bolt and those who are busy mouthing similar platitudes that freedom of speech is not an absolute right?” he asks.
The tendency to treat free speech as a platitude and to mock those who take this right seriously as puerile is symptomatic of a fundamental shift in the conceptualisation of the relationship between freedom and the state....

Saturday 8 October 2011

The royal court of Australia.

The issues at stake in Australia today.
Just as Australia has serial welfare families over generations, it now also has serial teacher, welfare services and public servant families, members of which have no memory of ever being off the public purse, and have few worries about financial security. Lacking an understanding of economics beyond their own cosseted employment position, they support policies that help themselves and their sector, such as higher taxes, government intervention, job security, tough dismissal laws and protectionism, claiming these are good for everyone. This sector is a primary constituency of the ALP.
Those who go to school (which is everyone) are taught that environmental degradation is the world’s worst evil. The ALP gets many recruits from this source. The conservative Coalition once had its own easy pool for recruits, ordinary families. But the Coalition base is threatened because to get on in modern society many people, apart from the tradesman sector, have to go to tertiary institutions, which have been taken over by the conventional anti-American and anti-Western wisdom. This creates a new captive market of true believers. As a result the second sector now has to recruit refugees from the first one—those who are smart enough to unlearn what they learnt at university, and to discard group-think. This is a very fluid situation—there are fewer rusted-on party allegiances.
ALP activists, who increasingly have had no career outside politics, have to use the political system to get employment for themselves and their allies. They foster new constituencies (for example, welfare recipients, the disadvantaged, multicultural and artistic elites, the education industry), which are not like the old natural ones based on class and economic status, but are artificially formed lobby groups. The ALP collects their votes and in turn bankrolls them, a cosy self-enclosed arrangement. As a result the ALP turns to the state as a source of self-supply. Its operatives in government often blur the line between party and state: in-group aggrandisement becomes one of the aims of government. Gillard described her last budget as a Labor budget, not one for all Australians. After a life spent in politics Labor activists arrange for themselves public service positions, sinecures, university posts and other generous benefits rarely available to non-government toilers who pay the taxes which subsidise these advantages. In contrast the second group does not depend on employment in the public sphere. 
The first lessons ALP apparatchiks learn during their early climb up the political ladder is that the party is everything, and virtually anything (“whatever it takes”) can be done to advance its cause. This entails among other things becoming a control freak and a media manager. (The popular term “control freak” is a current version of what used to be known technically as the “proto-totalitarian personality”, that is, those who have intuited in a personal, petit mal form the control techniques which first appeared in a grand mal form last century.) These primal, habit-forming lessons they never relinquish. They have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. They resemble nothing so much as eighteenth-century courtiers, hanging round the throne looking for a patron, retailing current court gossip, hoping to get on by connections, by influence rather than merit, having jobs arranged for themselves, so caught up in their ambition bubble they are oblivious to the worries of the great mass of people outside.
So when they eventually get into power, the only basic principle they have is to serve the party. The state is a honeypot to be raided. They expand the honeypot by taxing successful businesses such as mining and energy-producing companies, and then redistribute the windfall via the schools building program to education, a poor performer but one of their prime constituencies.
The text in bold encapsulates what I  believe to be the central problem in Australian society at this moment in time. These excerpts are taken from the following article: http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2011/10/government-by-control-freaks

Friday 7 October 2011

Deceptional!

The following statement from Theodore Dalrymple encapsulates the 'human rights' creed.
People who stand on their rights are seldom much concerned with the rights of others. There is no logical reason why this should be so, but it is a fact of human psychology. ‘It’s my right!’ is a call not of freedom, but of egotism. 
Extreme selfishness is what motivates most people today wrapped in the guise of 'my rights' and it is something learned predominantly (in my opinion as a parent & a teacher) through the school system.

I remember after having lived in this country for a short time and my children attending an independent school (which we thought had better ethics than most!) my son declaring, after he had been disciplined for some misdemeanour, that I could not follow the course of action that I chose because he (my son) had 'rights'. I was flabbergasted to hear such ideological claptrap from a little fellow of about 8 or 9.
We know he had learned this at school because our lives were fairly narrowly circumscribed at the time.
Over the years since we have fought similar ideological battles with both older children (the youngest is home schooled) over 'human rights' issues.
I do not dispute the need for a humane and free environment for all people including children but as Dalrymple has articulated, as currently defined the issue of 'rights' is not one of freedom but of selfishness.

A classic deception to the biblical adage of surrendering/giving up ones personal 'rights' in order to be truly free with the end result of such 'human' conferred 'gifts' being greater pain and heartache...:
This expansion of rights has led to both a paralysis of the public service and to a rapid and terrible deterioration in the character of the population — not of everyone, of course, but of substantial numbers of people.
It is easy to see why. Once something is declared or believed to be a right, it carries with it a metaphysical connotation of inalienability. This again is a matter of psychology rather than of philosophy or logic, but it is so and likely to remain so. Thus, by definition in the minds of many, a right imposes not duties, for if it did, it would not be a right. Rights are unconditional; and even if they were granted by Parliament they cannot be abrogated.
The idea of rights to tangible benefits sets up a deeply unattractive and psychologically damaging dialectic between ingratitude on the one hand and grievance and resentment on the other. If you receive what you believe yourself entitled to, you are not grateful, precisely because you were entitled to it in the first place. If, on the other hand, you do not receive what you believe yourself entitled to, you are doubly aggrieved, first at not receiving what you want, and second at the violation of your supposed right to it.
...and ultimately greater control over you by those who sole mission is the Nietzchean impulse:
 Moreover, it is quite clear that the extension of rights has the effect, and no doubt the intention, of turning the population into a rabble of dependants and petitioners. It extends the power of bureaucrats, adjudicators of rights and lawyers over the rest of society. If you believe yourself entitled by rights to something that you do not receive, what do you do? You spend your time and energy seeking redress from the very people who have failed you in the first place, rather than seeking a constructive solution for yourself. Your independence is sapped, which is precisely what a state dominated by lawyers and administrators wants. And so you are enticed into the administrative labyrinth, from which you will never emerge.
Considerations of rights, which are deemed by much of the population to be inalienable, unconditional and metaphysically unassailable, drive out considerations of kindness, decency, tolerance, mutual obligation and so forth: all the considerations, in fact, that make civilised or dignified existence in a crowded society possible. Everyone becomes an atom of an inert gas in a vacuum, whose rights act as physical forces to prevent him from combining sociably with other such atoms

Wednesday 5 October 2011

Do unto others...

This fellow is really becoming a pain in the you-know-where,(excuse the pun your 'honour').
He personifies the elitist view that they are more educated, more intelligent and far more moral than we hoi-poloi (some call us the proletariat, but well give him the benefit of the doubt shall we?) and are therefore more suited to rule us.
IT sounds very kind to swear off eating meat because you looked into the eyes of a cow, which former High Court Michael Kirby explains as the reason for his latter day vegetarianism.
“Look into the eyes of a cow and you will see most of the same sentient responses as we see in a fellow human being,” he wrote last week.
“Animals, raised for slaughter, cannot explain the suffering, pain and fear that they feel. But humans who empathise sufficiently, can do so.”
In other words, those of us who eat meat do not have sufficient empathy. Thanks, your worship (Miranda Devine)
However some awkward new 'scientific' discoveries to sort out the vegans (the priestly caste) from the mere vegetarians:
Then came news that scientists had discovered plants have feelings too. Vegetables could be sentient beings which respond to classical music and feel pain when chopped up or boiled alive. Prince Charles famously talked to his garden.
And it is said that, when acacia plants in Africa are being eaten by elephants, they exude tannin into their leaves to make them taste bitter, while altruistically releasing a scent into the air to “warn” neighbouring acacias of imminent danger, prompting them, too, to exude tannin.
When I asked my mother what was left that I could eat, she replied, deadpan: “Salt”. Soon my squeamishness disappeared under the burden of a rumbling tummy.
The point is that if you take sentimental thoughts about food to their logical conclusion you wouldn’t eat at all.
Oops. And what about the logical conclusions of other things such as eggs, chicken etc.
Dr Greg Hertzler, Associate professor of Agriculture at Sydney University, said yesterday: “It is seriously difficult to be a farmer. You actually have to kill things every day.”
What, asks Hertzler, who grew up on a farm in Wyoming’s cowboy country, do people think happens to the hen who laid the eggs for a vegetarian omelette, when she has run out of eggs?
And he points out that the vegetarian-friendly bread we eat may have caused the deaths of thousands of mice, as happened recently when NSW farmers had to control the rodent plague.
“I hypothesise that the number of animals killed per loaf of bread, per peach, per egg and per pork chop are all about the same ... Regrettably, pigs and chickens are grown by humans who intend to eat them. If not food, they become pests such as the cattle not exported to Indonesia.”
I have often said that I am so glad I don't have to kill to eat, but the reality is that someone does. The irony of it all is that many of these 'activists':
Just last weekend, vegetarian author Jonathan Safran Foer was being feted at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House, for his gruesome new book Eating Animals, which so affected actor Natalie Portman it “changed me from a 20-year vegetarian to a vegan activist”.
...are the same who advocate late term abortion, euthanasia, mercy killings  and more recently, infanticide.
It seems to me that what is really being said is that killing is bad only if done to animals not humans.
Welcome to our Brave New Babylonian world!

Fiddler on the ship

You don't need to be a clairvoyant to see that the Western economy's are in trouble. You just have to be a participant in the daily grind to notice how income is stretched and costs are rising astronomically. The Green binge that the West has been on for some 2 decades now has taken its toll...not enough by watermelon standards though, hence the misanthropic new uber-exise; the 'clean energy tax'.

To judge by Hollywood standards it all sounds so reasonable, so meritorious, so friendly, after all what greater calling could there be than to 'save the planet?' (Gaian evangelism!)
However the moment we remove our rainbow coloured spectacles, turn down the 'spin' volume and look past the celebrity endorsments the real truth hits us like a sledgehammer blow to the genitals.

We are fiddling around while the ship around us is sinking and sinking fast!

Tuesday 4 October 2011

Down the gurgler!

These are the hypocrites who tailor their movies to preach the latest left-wing shibboleths to the 'great unwashed'.
In Hollywood, they deplore censorship. Yet they embrace tyrants such as Hugo Chavez who use their power to censor opposition voices. They sneer at Wall Street even as they fall all over themselves running to see how many millions their movies have grossed. They think Obamacare works nicely for poor people in the “flyover states,” yet they would never accept anything but the top doctors for themselves.
They think socialism is a novelty – a nicety whose time has come. Yet how odd to imagine their lot under a Chavez or a Castro or a Stalin. Just picture the collapse of Hollywood’s playground – the redistribution of their wealth, the despotic squelching of their free speech, the strangling of their rights and riches.
and........
The liberal Hollywood elite, who stand firmly on their right to be heard, their right to express, their right to persuade through art, arrogantly deny that same freedom to anyone who may disagree with them. And like most liberals, they have a blind spot for their own intolerance.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/2011/09/living-amid-hollywood-hypocrisy#ixzz1ZljSaEDi

Unfortunately due to the 5th rate education(indoctrination) now being experienced by the majority of school children in the West, most on the receiving end of this cultural/intellectual garbage believe Hollywood's version of 'real life'.
Onward marches the downward spiral of this civilization...and we do not have to look far afield to discover that the barbarians are not crouching at the door; they are in our midst!

Given that Australia has deteriorated so rapidly in just three years I cannot foresee the spiral taking too long before chaos in extremis breaks forth.

I hope I am wrong.

Monday 3 October 2011

Clear the decks!

The cogency of Keith Windshuttle's research and argumentation with regards to left-wing ideological claims leads one to the inescapable conclusion that soon academics in power will begin to apply the methods of Orwell's 'The Ministry of Truth' to historical records, i.e. eradication.
Perhaps the idea is already in motion because I believe that certain important University library's are  throwing out books and scholarly articles: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/books-get-the-shove-as-university-students-prefer-to-do-research-online-20110307-1bl8b.html

Dear Professor Robson,
Thank you for your letter, which I will publish in the October edition of Quadrant. I’m afraid you overlook the main point of my article, which was not concerned with the help the three Milroy sisters have given Aboriginal people. I wrote about the decision of a group of Aboriginal activists to sue journalist Andrew Bolt in the Federal Court for racial vilification because he questioned the authenticity of their Aboriginal identity. My article provided a number of examples, from the 1960s to the present, to demonstrate that many Aboriginal people have long questioned the identity of others claiming to be Aborigines. My intention was to show that, while Aboriginal people can question others’ identity with impunity, when non-Aboriginal Andrew Bolt did the same he found himself in court. In short, there is a racial double standard on this issue.
As you note, one of my examples was an article by Aboriginal academic and political figure Jackie Huggins challenging the identity of one of the three Milroy sisters, Sally Morgan. In a review of Morgan’s book My Place, Huggins complained that the author did not grow up in an Aboriginal community: “I could not identify anything which told me Morgan was an Aboriginal person except the part about our common Aboriginal study grant.” Morgan’s claim, “we had an Aboriginal consciousness now”—made when, aged thirty, she and her mother discovered they were descended from Aborigines of Western Australia’s north-west—was dismissed by Huggins. Genetic inheritance alone did not make someone an Aborigine. “Solely swallowing the genetic cocktail mixture,” Huggins wrote, “does not constitute ‘being’ an Aboriginal as so many Johnny-come-latelies would have whites believe.”
These comments were made not in some nondescript publication but in an academic journal—peer-reviewed no less—Australian Historical Studies, April 1993 edition. If you find this argument so disappointing, instead of reproaching Quadrant for reproducing it, you might have sent a letter to the editors of the journal who published the original, Professors Stuart Macintyre and Marian Aveling, plus a copy to Huggins herself at the University of Queensland where she is adjunct professor in the School of Social Work.
I accept your assurance that your institution followed all proper procedures when it appointed the three Milroy sisters to academic positions in Aboriginal affairs. My article never made any suggestion to the contrary. Still, I was surprised when Sally Morgan was made Professor and Director of your university’s Centre for Indigenous History and the Arts, since her only formal academic qualification is a BA pass degree with a major in psychology. Even though her book My Place seems to me more a family memoir than a work of academic history, it must have been the major reason she won the position, since she had published little other historical research when she gained her appointment.
If her book was that important, there is an issue I would like to take up with you. As you may be aware, My Place has been subject to serious criticism, which Sally has so far failed to answer. In an interview on the Nine Network in 2004, Judith Drake-Brockman described the book as “absolute fabricated tripe” that made her “disgusted and sick”. She called it “a fiction of our relationship and a caricature of history”.
Judith is a member of one of the two families at the centre of the book. Sally claims her half-caste grandmother Daisy Corunna was the illegitimate daughter of Howden Drake-Brockman, the white pastoralist who ran Corunna Downs, near Marble Bar. Judith, one of Howden’s legitimate children, denies this, and much else besides, in her own family memoir Wongi Wongi, published in 2001 by Hesperian Press.
Judith provides considerable evidence, including family photographs, to disprove Sally’s claim that Daisy was one of the “stolen generations”. Rather than being stolen, Daisy was employed as the Drake-Brockman children’s nanny, and she spent her teenage years in this position—the summer months in Perth and the rest of each year on Corunna Downs, where Daisy’s own mother still lived. Moreover, Judith argues Daisy’s father was not Howden but Maltese Sam, the station cook, originally from the Torres Strait islands. Indeed, Judith challenges Sally’s entire characterisation of Daisy. In real life, Daisy did not speak the way Sally records in My Place, and never had the “poor fella black” attitudes the book gives her. Judith also dismisses My Place’s account of the childhood of Sally’s mother Gladys, whom she knew from birth. In her 2004 interview with journalist Helen Dalley, Judith called upon Sally and Gladys to take DNA tests to establish whether they really were descended from Howden. They declined to co-operate. “We respect the right of others to hold different views to ourselves,” Sally said, “but my family does not wish to participate in the program.”
In my own book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three: The Stolen Generations (2009), I discuss all these issues at length and argue Sally’s response is unsatisfactory. Her book on the two families’ relationship has given her an influential position in a public institution. State education authorities around Australia require thousands of students to read My Place every year—the book has sold more than 600,000 copies, mainly to school students. Hence the issue is far more than a private dispute between families.
If Sally took a DNA test and published the results she would immediately resolve one of the most contentious issues, whether she and her two sisters really are the great granddaughters of Howden Drake-Brockman—not to mention her book’s insinuation that Howden might also have been the father of their mother Gladys, and thus their grandfather too.
In the interests of transparency of scholarship, Sally should also place the original tape recordings of her interviews with Daisy and other family members in a public library or archive where other researchers can double-check the accuracy of her transcripts. As I’m sure you are aware, it is normal practice across a range of academic disciplines to make source data available in such a way to other scholars.
I urge you to ask Sally to take both courses of action. Her academic position and the influence of her book on school children throughout Australia give her a public responsibility to defend her work. I hope you will agree that a response in these terms would meet the academic and scholarly standards your university was founded to uphold.
Yours sincerely, Keith Windschuttle, Editor

Apartheid Australia

A travesty of justice and a precedent of woe to come. And the world thought that with the end of Apartheid in South Africa, race divisions were defeated!
I should hastily point out that Wesley Aird is Aboriginal, which should give him more social licence to argue the same case, and to point out some hypocrisy:
In my experience politically active Aboriginal people are experts when it comes to dishing out abuse. Fighting hard and dirty has been turned into quite an art form by indigenous people across the country trying to protect their slice of the $3.5 billion that the government spends each year on indigenous affairs.
Instead of actually overcoming disadvantage, indigenous affairs has sunk to a transactional arrangement in which the government hands over billions of dollars each year for “dismally poor returns”, to quote the federal Department of Finance.
Yet try to threaten a person’s funding and you will experience firsthand what it feels like to be offended, insulted, humiliated and intimidated; and unlike the Bolt case, this will be the desired intent. The real professionals in race-based intimidation are Aboriginal people whose vocation is to divest the commonwealth of funds.
I know of communities where the government directly finances invented tribes, fabricated history, waste, petty corruption and the occasional threat of violence or death. There are no lawyers to contrive affront; there is no judge; just more government money going to the usual suspects for no benefit.
In court last week, Bolt’s loss was unfortunately a victory for indigenous exceptionalism. The result sends a message to the rest of Australia that any non-indigenous person who dares to comment on the indigenous industry had better watch out.
I can’t help but form the view that the court case was intended to use the Racial Discrimination Act to intimidate non-indigenous Australians.
The result in court (for now at least) has most likely severely damaged Australian race relations for some time to come.
Tim Blair reminds the gloating David Marr what a real mistake looks like in writing about race:
So Bolt was out by one generation. Not exactly spectacular. Probably not even as spectacular as Marr’s own identification blunder, back in the days when he was opposed to the same sort of anti-vilification laws that have ensnared his ideological rival.
 
“Anti-vilification laws aren’t the answer,” Marr wrote in 2005.
“In Victoria, two hellfire Christian preachers, Danny Nalliah and Daniel Scot, are facing jail after preaching against Islam in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Ever since, they’ve been fighting an action brought by the Islamic Council of Victoria under the state’s new Racial and Religious Tolerance Act.

“That’s the pesky thing about these laws that show almost zero tolerance for religious and racial intolerance: they can be turned against decent white folk.”

One small problem with Marr’s piece: he assumed that because Nalliah and Scot were “hellfire Christians”, they were also white. Nope. Wrong. They’re black. The ABC’s Media Watch characterised this as a mere “stumble”, but perhaps they weren’t reading hard enough between the lines, which is the approach advocated by Justice Bromberg.

In his findings against Bolt, Bromberg took issue with words Bolt didn’t actually use: “It is language which invites the readers not only to read the lines, but to read between the lines.” This is remarkable.

Reading between the lines of Bromberg’s ruling, Bolt seems to have been condemned for a form of thought crime.

We’ve now witnessed a legal procedure about race involving racial differences nobody could see and words nobody could read.

Pork-pie Bob.


Sideshow Bob appears (once again) to speak with a forked tongue:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2011/09/bob-brown-please-explain
Another of his pork-pies uncovered.
Who in their right mind would want such a mendacious ideologue in charge of an ice-cream vending machine, never mind a political party?

Hypocritic oath!

The double standards employed by the left-wing media should surprise no one, but it still rankles.
What Tony Abbott did 30 years ago is highly relevant:
Susan Mitchell in The Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday:
IT is important to remind ourselves that Tony Abbott is a 53-year-old former trainee Catholic priest . . . Can we believe in his political separation between church and state?
What Julia Gillard did 16 years ago is not relevant:
Hannon rightly says that the allegations about Julia Gillard that Milne - and as we’ll see, several others - have been tossing around this week “are ancient, and have been rehashed numerous times by critics of Labor and Gillard over the past 16 years” ... The allegations concern Gillard’s relationship, while she was a lawyer at Slater and Gordon in the early 90’s, with a union official, Bruce Wilson.

Brave new future!

Give Senator Brown an inch..............................

Sunday 2 October 2011

Doublespeak

Welcome to the continuing disenfranchisement of the 'ordinary' Australian citizen.
Manne wants debate to be between the elite, the 'core' (i.e. the ideologically pure chosen ones!) and to exclude the opinions of 'ordinary' people.
Burnside tweets some of the foulest and most offensive slander about a popular politician and suffers no consequences, and yet it was he who pushed for Bolt's trial on the basis that Bolt's remarks were 'offensive. He calls Abbott a man with no moral compass and a hypocrite...the very things he exemplifies in those tweets and writings in which he slanders Abbott; and yet no journalist or 'human rights' campaigner calls him to task.

  • Tony Abbott is pilloried in a new book which describes him as a sore loser and as someone afflicted by ‘innate and deeply embedded sexism and misogyny’. No one apologises. 
  • The Footy Show once again comes up with a sketch jam-packed with deeply-embedded sexism and misogyny – and St Kilda Football Club is forced to apologise for this. 
  • A male shop assistant bullies, insults and vilifies female customers who don’t buy his store’s products, and the store’s management defends him and tells the women to stop wasting their time shopping there. 
  • Wayne Swan reports a deficit of $48 billion for the 2010-11 financial year, despite taking government in 2007 to a surplus. He is praised because the deficit is fractionally smaller than expected. 
  • Andrew Bolt is found guilty of racial vilification and may be ordered to apologise because someone didn’t like his ‘tone’.



Australia under the current administration has descended into chaos and confusion in every arena; leadership, economic, immigration and moral.
As a former citizen of the 3rd World it has been very instructive to observe in real time how rapidly a '1st World' country can deteriorate into the wilderness of 3rd world mediocrity and  it illustrates how dangerous it is for the electorate to experiment with left-wing ideology. Marxist fundamentalists have little to zero moral barriers which might prevent them from using any and every underhand trick to gain a political ascendancy even when that advantage might beggar the economy and/or disadvantage the country either diplomatically or militarily. These people are consumed with the Nietzschian impulse and will go to any lengths to achieve it...and the truly absurd factor in all of this is that the spokespeople for this worldview accuse someone like Tony Abbott as having no morals, or being hypocritical. If it were not so outrageous and dangerous it could almost be amusing.

Saturday 1 October 2011

Gen Y on the edge.

Think of how our current government mounts its 'policies'...er...sorry its entire policy seem to be one of blaming Tony Abbott for everything. Whatever happens, even on the world stage..."its Tony Abbott's fault".

Enter the one 'bright' spot at England's Labour Party conference, and what do we see? Another dissembler. The Left-wing (and its sychophantic 4th estate) of the Western world have so manipulated the language of debate that what was once the acknowledged 'left-wing' position has now become the centre position, the 'moral high-ground', and what was once the centre/conservative position is now the 'radical' right-wing position.
... it was Rory Weal who gave them the rallying call, the three-word code, the mantra of hate that gives the left its entire purpose in life – to demonise ‘vicious right-wing’ Tories, and thus reinforce their own galvanising illusion that it is the Labour party which is the engine of decency and social justice.
In fact, Rory Weal was hailed as a hero for saying something that should have chilled the marrow. For he said:
‘I owe my entire well-being and that of my family to the welfare state.’
In the real world, what that means (if true) is that his entire life has been spent as a kind of state serf, that he and his family are wholly lacking in independence, that their entire subsistence has been funded by the state.
Worse still, it would appear that in the mind of 16 year-old Rory Weal he has never gained any benefit to himself from anything other than the state. No mention, note, of what he owes to his parents’ own efforts for his well-being. Indeed, to him they appear to have made no such contribution since he told us that he owes his ‘entire well-being’ to the welfare state. To Rory Weal, all good things appear to come from the state – and so anyone who dares suggest otherwise is vicious and right-wing. Is that not terrifying?
It is, unfortunately a position occupied by an increasing percentage of gen Y.