AUSTRALIAN CONSERVATIVES SUPPORT THE ARTS

I can only hope and pray that some wealthy Conservative Australians take note and heed this advice:

"Further, the film’s success reminds us that investors on the right are leaving a hunk of change on the table. This may ultimately be the most important takeaway from Eastwood’s movie. Right-tilting investors are way overdue to establish film and television companies with conservative or libertarian leanings. The problem here, of course, is that conservatives have long been suspicious of culture. Some of this is dumb prejudice, but much of the skepticism makes sense. The arts have been dominated by the Left for so long that it’s difficult to see them as anything but treacherous. But right-wing investors should get over themselves. The local symphony is not the only cultural endeavor worth supporting. Popular culture is a far more powerful way of reaching the public, and films, as American Sniper proves, remain one of the most potent—and remunerative—of those avenues." 

http://www.city-journal.org/2015/bc0130rs.html

Fraudulent is as fraudulent does.

Theodore Dalrymple an essayist who is called by some; the greatest living social commentator and who is a man of extensive worldly experience as both a psychiatrist and a doctor, who has made an impact as a writer for many years, and is in most senses of the word a 'refined' man of taste, says about art critics that they are frauds who write about frauds for frauds to read.

I am sure that there are exceptions to that 'rule' but in my experience he has hit the nail on the head.

The bell tolls...

The left-wing of politics are so consistently wrong in their attacks and in their predictions on everything from 'climate change,' to terrorism, to economics, it is a miracle that they are still taken seriously. The fact that they are only betrays the notion that facts are not important in ideological terms...only being in the right 'tribe' or 'appearing' to be the right 'type' is.

I have experienced this even from people I have thought were friends. They will not change their allegiances no matter what the facts are before them. This I cannot understand other than to believe that such thinking belongs at best to a misguided Utopianist view of the world or at worst to pagan tribalism.

The attached declaration from the much maligned George W Bush has proved its accuracy over time as have so many other 'conservative opinions' (I think in Australia of Cory Bernadi). However, no matter how accurate these commentators may have been there is never ever even the inkling of an apology from the press nor from the politicians who have slimed these people and their reputations.

Worst still are the gullible populations of the West who have swallowed the lies and manipulations of these snake-oil carpetbaggers, who when the you-know-what hits the fan cry: "Oh dear, I never considered that!" It will be too late.

"In September 2001, little more than a week after Islamic terrorists killed nearly 3000 people in attacks on New York and Washington, US President George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress.

“Americans are asking ‘Why do they hate us?’” Bush said. “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

For his accurate statement, Bush has ever since been ridiculed by sophisticated types who don’t buy into such simplistic formulations.

“‘They hate our freedoms’ was possibly the dumbest, most insulting piece of bullshit ever to escape the lips of an American president,” wrote US leftist Matt Taibbi in his book The Great Derangement. “The United States is a symbol of domestic freedom and democracy, but that is not why Islamic terrorists – and others – hate us,” claimed lightweight historian David Wallechinsky. “The longer the American people delude themselves into thinking that Bush’s explanation is sufficient, the longer it will be before we can seriously begin to reduce terrorism. The real reasons why they hate us are more complex and varied.” Australia’s Jeff Sparrow denounced Bush’s “braying jingoism” as “phoney and crass”.

Well, we’re now nearly 14 years on from Bush’s statement and Islamic extremists are still doing and saying everything they possibly can to prove him exactly right. Two weekends ago, Hizb ut-Tahrir Australia spokesman Wassim Doureihi told an audience of 200 or so in Lakemba that Islam’s struggle against the west was “a struggle to resist the imposition of values like freedom and democracy.”

........and

Last week Hizb ut-Tahrir held another anti-freedom rally, this time before a crowd of around 800. The numbers aren’t great for Hizbie gatherings, possibly because much of the movement’s support base is presently occupied in a large-scale Syrian soil enrichment program. Also, previous Hizb ut-Tahrir Lakemba rally attendee Man Haron Monis was unavailable due to being dead. On Friday night, speaker Sufyan Badar told his followers:

“We rejected freedom yesterday, we reject freedom today and we reject your freedom tomorrow.”

They really do, as Bush said, hate our freedoms. Badar continued: “Freedom is the smokescreen with which Western politicians and media conceal the underlying issues. In reality free speech is one of the many political tools that are used to maintain dominance over the Muslims.”

Brand roasted

Nick Cohen writes a scathing review of Russell brand's new 'book'. This is an excerpt:

" I would not mind the airtime the broadcasters on BBC Newsnight and Start the Week have given Brand if its interviewers had presented him with the same detailed, contemptuous questions they fire at politicians. Instead, they revealed a dismal double standard.

Broadcasters, print journalists and the ever-growing army of voyeurs on social media have cramped the space for conventional politics. They turn minor mistakes or jokes into "gaffes" — Freudian slips that allegedly reveal a politician's true perverted ideas, although more often than not they reveal nothing at all. A gaffe will have a "gate" added to it within seconds and will fill the news schedules for 36 hours. All forms of news media pay obsessive attention to the character and faults of party leaders, which ignores the collective nature of governments in parliamentary democracies. (Whether a man is "strong" or "gets it" is a simple story the viewers can grasp, they reason, as they elevate a pale 21st-century version of the Führerprinzip.) They refuse to let politicians speak at length without interruption — and then, without a blush of shame, complain that politicians speak in soundbites. They treat disagreements as "splits" — regardless of whether they are or not — and complain, again unblushingly, that politicians have become boring.

To try to keep an audience, which understandably has lost interest, television fills the hole where politics ought to be with celebrities, usually comedians, or "refreshing" politicians such as George Galloway and Nigel Farage. Broadcasters never apply to them the standards they apply to conventional politicians.

They do not mind that your average comedian on Have I Got News for You has no ideas beyond one-liners or that Galloway and Farage are ugly extremists. They are outrageous and "fun" and can hold the wavering audience's attention. Newsnight, a supposedly serious current affairs programme, never exposed Russell Brand. Nor did it wish to. Like an old man swallowing Viagra, it wanted him to boost its limp ratings and revive its flagging appeal. You can hide on a television show, but you cannot hide in a 100,000-word book. If your thought is vacuous, it will reveal your vacuity, however much gibbering you deploy to conceal it.

Revolution is so bad it has finished Brand's political career, such as it was. But  he will move on and the celebrity system which puffed him up will remain: anti-intellectual, anti-democratic because it shuts out real argument, incurious and dishonest. No good can come from it for Left or Right."

The full essay can be found @  http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/overrated-december-14-russel-brand-nick-cohen-revolution

Deflection syndrome

 An interesting take on left-wing 'journalism' (if it can be called that anymore) by Arjun Rajkhowa:

"Instead of dealing with the issues at hand head-on, some journalists and writers engage in a kind of a prevarication and obfuscation that most readers would find difficult to recognise and from which it would be difficult to disengage. Further, such reporting usually involves to some degree a strategy that I will discuss in the rest of this essay: the shifting of focus onto a demonised right-wing conceived of as being perpetually threatening and on the verge of eruption. As Islamist outrages proliferate, it is this phantom army of the right that is offered, ultimately, as the real threat that needs to be confronted.

By positing the generalised “right” as the real problem, discussion of the crisis at hand is pre-empted and public outrage  defused (or channeled in another direction). A close reading of instances of such reporting is necessary because the extent of manipulation of public discourse we find today is so great that it is difficult to challenge. This affects political consciousness in ways whose impact we cannot yet fully understand."

To the chicken little's

The only climate we ought to be worrying about is the current cultural one.

To wish upon a star conservative....

 I thought I would share with you a passage from an e-mail I sent to an acquaintance. This gist of the conversation concerns shared perspectives about the over regulation of society with interfering laws that strangle economic growth whilst hampering criminal prosecution: "You need a society with minimal economic intervention, but maximum law and order. There is no use having laws unless they are enforced. You don’t need many laws, but you do need a system that enforces them, from police through courts through to the prison system". 

My reply captures some of my wishful thinking of the moment:

Perhaps we need an entirely new political party? The Libs are becoming Labor-lite whilst Labor has morphed into Green-lite. 

We also need some brave pollies to stand up for stricter law enforcement...perhaps along the lines of Bill Bratton's zero-tolerance approach. And while I'm engaged in some imaginary spit-balling...why not set up a fund for 'intellectual/cultural missionaries' to breach the barriers erected by the Gramscian elite who have completed their march and now control the universities and general education, and do it before the greater population has become (more) inured to the differences between right and wrong?

To know or not to know, that is the question

Ah!!!!!!
Been away, been side-tracked, been more interested in my 365 project (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mike-McMeekan/1518545865089227?ref=aymt_homepage_panel) to blog...this is about to change. I am thinking of fusing both the blog and the project....don't quite know how to do it yet, but I will meditate on the viability as well as the desirability of it.
In the mean-time these words from Ayaan Hirsi Ali are foreboding, and to be honest, I don't quite know what to do with such information. Lots of I don't knows today...a state of being perhaps? I really don't know!

"In today’s Australian a bit of sanity prevailed with someone who knows exactly what she is talking about, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She says in part:

If there is a lesson to be drawn from such a grisly episode, it is that what we believe about Islam truly doesn’t matter. This type of violence, jihad, is what they, the Islamists, believe. There are numerous calls to violent jihad in the Koran. But the Koran is hardly alone. In too much of Islam, jihad is a thoroughly modern concept. The 20th-century jihad bible, and an animating work for many Islamist groups today, is The Quranic Concept of War, a book written in the mid-1970s by Pakistani general SK Malik. He argues that because Allah himself authored every word of the Koran, the rules of war contained in the Koran are of a higher calibre than the rules developed by mere mortals.
In Malik’s analysis of Koranic strategy, the human soul — and not any physical battlefield — is the centre of conflict. The key to victory, taught by Allah through the military campaigns of the prophet Mohammed, is to strike at the soul of your enemy. And the best way to strike at your enemy’s soul is through terror. Terror, Malik writes, is “the point where the means and the end meet”. Terror, he adds, “is not a means of imposing a decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose”.
Those responsible for the slaughter in Paris, just like the man who killed the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, are seeking to impose terror. And every time we give in to their vision of justified religious violence, we are giving them exactly what they want.
In Islam, it is a grave sin to depict visually or in any way slander Mohammed. Muslims are free to believe this, but why should such a prohibition be forced on non-believers?
In the US, Mormons didn’t seek to impose the death penalty on those who wrote and produced The Book of Mormon, a satirical Broadway send-up of their faith. Islam, with 1400 years of history and about 1.6 billion adherents, should be able to withstand a few cartoons by a French satirical magazine. But, of course, deadly responses to cartoons depicting Mohammed are nothing new in the age of jihad.
Moreover, despite what the Koran may teach, not all sins can be considered equal. The West must insist that Muslims, particularly members of the Muslim diaspora, answer this question: What is more offensive to a believer — the murder, torture, enslavement and acts of war and terrorism being committed today in the name of Mohammed, or the production of drawings and films and books designed to mock the extremists and their vision of what Mohammed represents?

She concludes:

We appease the Muslim heads of government who lobby us to censor our press, our universities, our history books, our school curriculums. They appeal and we oblige. We appease leaders of Muslim organisations in our societies. They ask us not to link acts of violence to the religion of Islam because they tell us that theirs is a religion of peace, and we oblige. What do we get in return? Kalashnikovs in the heart of Paris.
The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets. There can only be one answer to this hideous act of jihad against the staff of Charlie Hebdo. It is the obligation of the Western media and Western leaders, religious and lay, to protect the most basic rights of freedom of expression, whether in satire or any other form. The West must not appease, it must not be silenced. We must send a united message to the terrorists: Your violence cannot destroy our soul.