Feel the suck!

And Britain's circling of the drain hole brings it a little closer to the abyss.

The Trojan horse of British secularism

Posted by Melanie Phillips

Once again, the impression has been created that secular values are a) the embodiment of civilisation and b) value neutral. Both assumptions are mistaken.

A senior English judge, Sir James Munby, President of the Family Division, has rejoiced in his view that Christianity no longer informs the judgements handed down in the courts, which now must serve a multicultural community of many faiths.
Judges, he said, must not weight one religion against another. The courts had now ‘by and large moderated their claims to speak as the defining voices of morality and of the law of marriage and the family’ because there was no longer one definition of right and wrong in the wake of the sexual revolution. He observed:

‘Happily for us, the days are past when the business of judges was the enforcement of morals or religious beliefs.’

 

The learned judge does not seem to realise that – as he himself unwittingly demonstrates – today’s judges see it as very much their business to enforce secular beliefs.
The idea that ‘oppressive’ Christian morality and ethics have been replaced – hurrah! – by a nirvana of freedom and tolerance is very wide of the mark. Traditional moral codes have merely been replaced by the modern religion of human rights, of which the English judiciary is its high priesthood.

For far from secularism being value-neutral, it promotes hyper-individualism. And far from expanding freedom, this diminishes it. For it sets up a perpetual fight for supremacy between interest groups, arbitrated in the courts by judges promoting secularism.
This actively and aggressively destroys the common bonds of history, tradition and morality that keep a society together. And it means that the weakest groups, of whom Christians are paramount, often find that their rights to uphold their own religious traditions are trampled down. For as a former Lord Chief Justice once remarked, human rights law inescapably favour minorities over the majority, which is seen (wrongly) as innately oppressive. Thus blind justice is replaced by a culture of human wrongs.

The reality – counter-intuitive as it may seem to some – is that individual liberty is only upheld and safeguarded by legal, social and cultural traditions embedded in the ethics of the Bible. Indeed, western liberty is unique in the world precisely because of those biblical roots.
Contrary to Sir James’s implication, the courts never acted as if Britain was a theocracy. But they did play a vital role as informal guardians of that Biblically-based western culture, helping transmit the common values which, as everybody understood, bound society together and helped form its identity.
If the courts have abandoned that role and are promoting instead the creed of secularism which divides rather than unites, social cohesion will inevitably fracture and the identity of a shared culture based on individual liberty will disintegrate. And onto that vacated terrain will come another creed altogether – one bent on cultural colonisation and the destruction of human rights – which will seize its opportunity to use secularism as its Trojan horse.

This is already happening. Yesterday the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced that Britain would become the first western country to issue a government-backed, Shariah-compliant ‘sukkuk’ Islamic bond.

Like Gordon Brown before him, the Prime Minister David Cameron has said he wants London to become the global centre of Islamic banking. All these men can see are the £ signs dancing before their eyes. As the FT reports:

‘The government hopes the £200 million Sharia-compliant bond or sukuk will enable the City to grab a major slice of the Sharia investment market which is estimated to be worth more than $1 trillion globally.’

 

But this money comes with a price. And that price is Britain’s identity as a western country. For ‘sharia-compliance’ is not like, say, compliance with health and safety rules. Sharia is the Islamic system of jurisprudence which does not acknowledge any legal authority other than itself and demands adherence to its own precepts.

As UKIPDaily comments:

‘For the Sukuk to remain Sharia compliant, it necessarily surrenders itself away from the jurisdiction of the UK civil courts to the Islamic courts.’

 

As Paul Goodman has so aptly observed on Conservative Home, sharp and urgent questions and concerns aired in Parliament when the power to issue such bonds was first mooted have never been addressed. Those questions and concerns were aired by the then Conservative opposition to a Labour government which seemed indifferent to the fact that it was proposing to sell Britain to Islam. Now those Conservatives are in power and are proposing to do just that – and their own questions still remain unanswered.

Maybe Sir James Munby would maintain that his secular courts would see off any such threat. But what odds would you give Sir James Munby and his fellow judges against the forces of shariah?

Posted on: Oct 30th

Warmy nutters

Another interesting take on the psychosis that appears to grab global warming alarmists by the throat:

By Peter Smith.
On the whole, I generally lean on the hopeful side when it comes to the current crop of existential threats. I think H L Mencken had it about right:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
 

For example, I don’t take too seriously concern about resource depletion or impending worldwide food shortages. Others do. I don’t think government debt will bring economic catastrophe, as some do; only more prolonged economic stagnation than would otherwise occur. I tend to be more sanguine about combating the threat of pandemics decimating populations than do some people.
On the other hand, I am not hopeful about everything. I am concerned when it comes to the threat Islam represents to our enlightened Western way of life. Others are not nearly as concerned.
We live in a plural society. There is often disagreement about the magnitude and extent of potential threats to our wellbeing, to our prosperity, to our way of life. But whatever our different views about the magnitude and extent of particular threats we all usually share the same hope that the threats, whatever they are, will not be realised.

I don’t believe the ban-the-bomb protesters in the 1950s hoped for nuclear holocaust. This boils down to self-preservation. It would be bizarre if numbers of people wanted bad things to happen simply to be proved right. It would amount to a death wish. We would have reason to suspect the motives and perhaps the sanity of those hoping for the worst. For example, I fervently hope that my concerns about Islam will prove to be unfounded. Why in the world would I hope to be proved right when the consequences would be potentially devastating for my children and their children?
OK then; we can say, can’t we, that people of goodwill and sound mind, who might disagree about whether this or that development represents an existential threat, nevertheless come together in hoping the threat will prove empty? Well, not always, seems to be the correct answer, if the threat of global warming is any guide.

I am not a psychologist but it seems to me that global warming shows that there is a tipping point where those warning about a particular threat become so attached to the realty of the threat that their worst fear is that it will prove empty. This phenomenon goes way beyond stubbornness in the face of contrary facts, in the manner of a Galbraithian ‘conventional wisdom’. It has much closer resonance with the world of Dr Strangelove.

The Greens, most politicians of any hue, many climate scientists and academics, ABC and Age journalists, and countless others, seem to show all the signs of having effectively fallen in love with global warming, just as Strangelove fell in love with the Bomb. Each cyclone, flood, bushfire, or drought seems to whet their appetite for yet more destructive havoc to be wreaked on the crass material world by the wrathful god of global warming. We told you so, springs readily to their salivating lips.

Am I going too far? Am I misrepresenting the situation? I don’t think so. In any event, this is my impression gained from listening to, watching, and reading, the warmists. They have boxed themselves in by accepting honours, privileges and riches; by castigating sceptics as deniers; and, most critically, by establishing global warming as an article of faith. What else is ‘settled science’ but faith? “Tony Abbott is a climate change criminal”, according to Adam Bandt. Well he should know as one of the high priests of warmism.

This is not about whether the threat of global warming is real or exaggerated or confected. It is about how and why the tipping point was reached where numbers of otherwise rational people show all the signs of (desperately) wanting it to be real. I have no ready explanation for this.....

UPDATE 16.12.13
Britain’s Mail on Sunday on the great green gravy train:

A three-month investigation shows that some of the most outspoken campaigners who demand that consumers pay the colossal price of shifting to renewable energy are also getting rich from their efforts…

Four of the nine-person Climate Change Committee, the official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until very recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions.
A new breed of lucrative green investment funds, which were set up to expand windfarm energy, are in practice a means of taking green levies paid by hard-pressed consumers and handing them to City investors and financiers.

Tales of Leprechauns & unicorns and green things at the bottom of the garden!

Those that 'administrate' the Global warming scam are making out like bandits.
No wonder they fight tooth and nail against the ever increasing body of scientific proof that shows how much of a scam it all really is. It isn't about truth its about careers, money, power and digging deep into the taxpayer funded trough. Thats the real distribution!

So, how much of that $7,555,000 - and our $513,000 - has actually gone on what the UN says the fund is for - ”providing support to developing countries to limit or reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the impacts of climate change”?

Willis Eschenbach does the sums:

When you do this kind of thing, first you have to hand out the plum jobs. Among those are the Members of the Board. Of course, then you have to pay for their travel, and a place for them to meet, for their meetings. And it turns out that three Board Meetings cost just under a million dollars....

Oh, can’t forget the Board Committees, Panels, and Working groups. They cost just under four hundred thousand. Total, a million three …
The next round of plum jobs are the people who make up the “Interim Secretariat"… [T]here’s two million in the budget to hire fifteen people…
It gets worse. They actually hire themselves to do the work, at incredible rates. For example, from the UN FCCC they are hiring one full-time and one part-time person, plus some administrative support … for a cool half million dollars. One and a half people. Half a megabuck.
And from the UN GEF, same deal, one full-time and one 60% time person, cost, another half million…
[The] Green Climate Fund has three-quarters of a million bucks in the budget for consultants, to make sure something gets done. Oh, and did I mention $200,000 per year for the Executive Director?
Now, you gotta know that you can’t have fifteen pluted bloatocrats, plus 3.1 loan-drones from other UN agencies, and three-quarters of a million dollars worth of consultants, without renting some executive-type hive to house the worker bees. Plus phones and faxes and the like, that’s a million two …
Gotta have a travel budget … three hundred grand.
Add all that up, and the “Interim Secretariat” costs $5.3 million …
Lastly, a Trust Fund needs an Interim Trustee. The Green Climate Fund hires that service from the World Bank for just under three-quarters of a million dollars per year … one trustee …IT costs … I can hardly believe it myself, but by a strange coincidence, what it costs them to run the Green Climate Fund adds up to … well … about seven and a half million dollars.
And that means that of the $7.5 million dollars donated by taxpayers all over the world, the people in the developing countries will get.......None.

Reverse gear is our only hope

The (Gramscian/Fabian) left are quite brazen about their  campaign to revolutionise education in Australia (a.k.a. the long march/gradualism) and our current scholastic malaise is both the consequence and symbol of their victory.

The new government in Australia is being attacked already for imagined system overhauls and the left are laying the groundwork (a.k.a. propaganda) for stopping any such conservative 'rebellion' from ever seeing the light of day. These generations of 'community organisers' have learned their lessons well and have secured the higher ground (a.k.a. the professional media).

The truth is that the educational establishment has become so compromised that I think it will take more than a new government to make the necessary substantial changes. It needs a completely new paradigm and that can only come through revival.

Perhaps in a new age of barbarism knowledge will retreat into the monasteries once again.

The change of government, argues Taylor, means state and territory schools will be forced to teach a “triumphalist view of the past that uncritically highlights the achievements of a free market economy, Western civilisation and Christianity”.

There is nothing surprising or new about such outbursts. Australia’s educationalists, along with those in other English-speaking nations, embarked on the cultural left’s long march through schools and universities during the late 60s and early 70s.

This was a time of the cultural revolution epitomised by Vietnam moratoriums, flower power, sexual liberation and attacks on established authorities represented by the universities, the Church and the nuclear family.

Marxists such as the Brazilian Paulo Freire argued that education had to be about liberation, in the US Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis argued that the education system reinforced inequitable capitalist hierarchies, and in England MFD Young concluded that the established disciplines are social-cultural constructs without any inherent value of meaning.

In Australia Joan Kirner, one time Victorian premier, argued that the purpose of education was to bring about the socialist transformation of society [Orwell anyone?] and the Australian Education Union argued against the traditional academic curriculum, funding to non-government schools and competitive Year 12 examinations where some passed and some failed.

Such was the cultural-left’s success that in 2005 the then-president of the Australian Education Union, Pat Byrne, boasted at the union’s annual conference “we have succeeded in influencing curriculum development in schools, education departments and universities. The conservatives have a lot of work to do to undo the progressive curriculum”.

One reason why the cultural-left has been so successful in controlling the education system is because the majority of Australia’s professional bodies, subject associations and teacher training academics are hostile to a conservative view of education epitomised by choice and diversity, an academic curriculum, meritocracy and traditional styles of teaching.

In 1998 the Australian Curriculum Studies Association published Going Public, described in the preface as “an unashamedly partisan book”, where public education is described as “under siege” as a result of a more market driven approach. Complaints about falling standards are rejected as a “manufactured crisis” employed to “undermine the legitimacy of public belief in state schooling and, at the same time, to deflect attention away from material problems such as youth poverty and unemployment”.

In 2000, the Australian College of Education published School Resourcing wherein Alan Reid, an academic from the University of South Australia, attacked the Howard government’s support for non-government schools.

Instead of accepting parents’ right to choose, Reid argues that school choice represents a “culture of selfish individualism where the dominating motif is competition and greedy self-interest rather than cooperation and mutual benefit.”
Reid goes on to argue that only government schools, as they are secular and supposedly open to all, serve the common good and promote social cohesion. Non-government schools on the other hand “promulgate specific or narrow points of view or represent sectional interests”.

In the book The History Wars, published in 2003 and co-authored by the ex-communist historian Stuart Macintyre, the argument is put that the then Howard government’s “conservative polemic” about a black armband view of history is simply an example of wedge politics and the desire to counteract Paul Keating’s Big Picture approach to government policy.

In 2004, the then editor of the journal of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, Wayne Sawyer, argued that the re-election of the Howard government proved that English teachers had failed to teach ex-students how to think.

After describing the conservative government’s education policies as “like Thatcher’s, ironically Stalinist”, Sawyer goes on to argue that English teachers must redouble their efforts to teach young people how to think correctly on the basis that English classrooms have “failed not only to create critical generations, but also failed to create humane ones”.

Such was the opposition to the Howard government’s concerns about falling standards that a ‘whose who’ of Australian educrats met twice in 2006 to campaign against what was described as a “conservative backlash in the media” and a “backlash in the policies of the conservative parties”.

The seminars were organised by the Australian Curriculum Studies Association and involved representatives from peak professional bodies such as the Deans of Education, state based curriculum bodies and the Australian Education Union.

The August, 2006, seminar was titled Approaches to National Curriculum Work and over 65 representatives from across Australia met to develop strategies to direct what was described as “approaches to national curriculum work between all stakeholders”.
Significant is that Tom Bentley, one-time advisor to England’s Secretary of State for Education under the Labour government and former head of Tony Blair’s favoured think tank, Demos, was invited to attend the ACSA seminar. Bentley went on to work as a senior advisor to Julia Gillard, when education minister, and is partly responsible for importing Blair’s failed education polices involving increased government regulation and micromanagement.

Given ACSA’s campaign, it shouldn’t surprise that the Rudd/Gillard inspired national curriculum provides further evidence of the cultural-left nature of Australia’s education establishment. Every subject has to be taught through environmental, Indigenous and Asian perspectives where new-age, 21^st century generic skills and competencies undermine academic content.

Instead of acknowledging that “direct instruction”, championed by Noel Pearson and endorsed by the US study Project Follow Through, is the most effective way to teach, the national curriculum embraces an inquiry-based, child-centred view of learning.
Unlike in Finland, a world leader in international tests, where teachers adopt a more formal approach to classroom pedagogy, Australian teachers are told to be facilitators, to base learning on the child’s world and to embrace open classrooms and activity based learning.

The draft civics and citizenship curriculum air brushes Christianity from the nation’s civic life and institutions and adopts a postmodern, subjective definition of citizenship, one where “citizenship means different things to people at different times and depending on personal perspectives, their social situation and where they live”.

The history curriculum, in addition to uncritically promoting diversity and difference instead of what binds us a community and a nation, undervalues Western civilisation and the significance of Judeo-Christian values to our institutions and way of life.

As previously reported in The Australian, the English national curriculum adopts an exploded definition of literature, one where classic works from the literary canon jostle for attention along side SMS messages, film posters, graffiti and multi-modal texts.
While nodding in the direction of teaching phonics and phonemic awareness, where children are taught the relationship between letters and groups of letters and sounds in a more formal, structured way, the English curriculum also favours “whole language”, where children are taught to look and guess.

In addition to subject associations and professional bodies, another factor explaining the cultural left’s success is the fact that education in Australia is controlled by a handful of educrats whose disposition, if not hostile, is unsympathetic to the conservative cause.
Tony Mackay, appointed by the ALP government as head of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership and deputy-chair of Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, has close connections with the London based think tank Demos favoured by Tony Blair. Mackay also was involved in introducing the discredited outcomes-based education (OBE) model of curriculum when the US-based father of OBE, William Spady, visited Australia to conduct a number of seminars.

Barry McGaw, appointed by Julia Gillard as chairman of ACARA and similar to Alan Reid from the University of South Australia, also questions the existence of non-government schools when he argues they contribute to social fragmentation and loss of social capital.
In a 2006 speech titled Education and Social Cohesion McGaw argues that the increase in non-government school enrolments is leading to an unsatisfactory situation where schools “frequently divide on the basis of gender, faith, social background, wealth, geography and so on”.

Also of interest, during the 2007 federal election campaign, is that McGaw was involved in the launch of Kevin Rudd’s education policy at The University of Melbourne and that he is a strong advocate of the cultural-left’s argument that socioeconomic background is the main reason why disadvantaged students underperform.

Geoff Masters, the head of the Australian Council for Educational Research, also displays a cultural-left disposition when, as a participant at the February 2006 ACSA sponsored conference, he argues the profession must recapture the debate from those seeking to “manufacture a feeling of crisis”.

At the height of concerns about Australia’s adoption of outcomes based education, a model of curriculum the then Howard government education minister Brendan Nelson described as a cancer, Masters leapt to its defence. In a comment piece in The Australian, published on November 23, 2005 (and available here), Masters argues there is no substance to the claim that “standards are plunging” or that Australia’s adoption of OBE “should lead to a decline in standards”.

In the months before the September election, shadow education minister Christopher Pyne argued in favour of Direct Instruction and criticised the national history curriculum for embracing a cultural-left bias.
The Coalition also supports the existence of non-government schools and agrees that they should be properly funded. Much to the chagrin of cultural-left critics the Coalition’s education policy supports a phonics and phonemic awareness approach to teaching reading and greater diversity and choice in education where there is less government regulation and control.

The reality, like the ABC, is that those in control of Australia’s education system exhibit a PC group mentality and a cultural-left disposition. With Christopher Pyne as education minister it looks as if the educrats are about to be challenged and Australian schools will be freed from ideological interference and unnecessary centralised and bureaucratic control.
 

Let us hope that the last paragraph is true and that Pyne will be able to crack the ideological carapace that has formed around education in this country...he is going to need much prayer and moral support.

Aesthetics down the gurgler.

More on the increasing irrationality of what is termed the 'art-world' today. I blame Marcel Duchamp!

It is a tad sad and very depressing to those of us who not only believe in art and its benefits, but also in craftsmanship, talent, hard work and finding a market for ones work.

The tax payer funded roundabout where 'artists' indulge their fantastical/narcissistic/obtuse/immoral impetuses to seek the frisson of the ‘outlaw'(anti-bourgeoisie); an impulse that devalues art in the eyes of the public which then leads to the public rebelling against original art which then leads to the public’s taste becoming a little more devalued which leads to the elite (taxpayer funded) artist accusing ‘ordinary folk’ of being 'philistines'.

A self-fulfilling prophecy married to a downward spiral.

Worth Every Penny.....by David Thompson

Readers may have noted the NowhereIsland art project, in which assorted radical freeloaders – referred to as a “think tank” - were shipped to the Arctic at public expense to ponder the possibilities of progressive utopia and generally engorge their cultural glands. While moored at Nyskjaeret, an apparently unclaimed island the size of a football pitch, our merry band of thinkers gathered sand and rock and loaded it onto a barge, thereby creating a floating “visual sculpture” of tremendous, indeed profound, political significance. Said work will subsequently “tour” the south coast of Britain, leaving better, more enlightened people in its wake.
The project’s intellectual lynchpin, artist Alex Hartley, has explained why his subsidised trip was so imperative:

It will gather ideas around climate change, land grab, colonialism, migration… all of these issues that can be put onto the blank canvas of this new land… My plan is to take a part of the island into international waters and declare it as a micro-nation so people can register to become citizens… We have just declared our statehood. This moment marks seven years of work inspired by a simple question: What if an Arctic island went south in search of its people?

If this all sounds a little familiar, you may be thinking of this comedic excursion from 2009.
The project’s mission statement tells us,

NowhereIsland is established in response to the failure of nation states to adequately address interconnected global crises, such as environmental exploitation… NowhereIsland embodies the global potential of a new borderless nation, which offers citizenship to all; a space in which all are welcome and in which all have the right to be heard.

Others have taken a less sympathetic view. Among them, Geoffrey Cox, Conservative MP for Torridge and West Devon, who referred to the project as an “extraordinary folly”:

I think my constituents are going to find it quite astonishing that… we are spending half a million pounds digging up earth from somewhere in Norway and floating it down the South West coast.

Having survived this two-week taxpayer-funded odyssey in radical conjecture and dirt relocation, Laurie Penny - for ‘tis she - shares her thoughts:

I met a polar bear, a whale, some reindeer, several fat seals, an arctic fox, many drunk Russians, a statue of Lenin, and a very dear and well-meaning collection of British academics, activists and journalists… Crammed on a ship trying to teach everyone consensus decision-making whilst we held down our lunches as the Noorderlicht dived through the waves, trying to group-write a theoretical constitution for a speculative nation.

Good times. Though there were of course a few issues to contend with.

Every single one of us was white and middle-class.

Luckily, rote identity politics soon gave way to the romance of it all.

As we discussed our ideal society… it really did feel like the last colony ship off a burning planet - like we were the chosen, special ones strapped to a cosy life-shuttle, looking for a new world at the touching point of symbol and substance. This, surely, is how the privileged will experience the end times.

The chosen, special ones. And not, say, the ‘B’ Ark.

I found myself becoming more and more committed to our airy utopia, as we talked and talked and talked about what this NowhereIsland society might look like.

Time is money, people. Tick, tock. Can we cut to the good stuff? Share we us, please, the insights we’ve paid for.

I discovered that the world is full of bright, decent people doing important, beautiful things, and because of that, it might not be too late to build a better one. I also discovered that Geography professors CAN dance to dubstep.

We’ll sleep easier tonight, then.
Laurie’s reflections are, however, tinged with sadness. Not least regarding the notes of public disapproval:

Of all the myriad problems with the NowhereIsland project, the press have inevitably focused on the most anodine [sic] and inconsequential: the money… I believe in art, and folly, and dreams. I believe that if we can’t collectively subsidise artists to imagine new worlds for us, we have no business speaking of social progress.

Yes, I know. It’s so unexpected. Pretentious taxpayer-funded noodling is vital, says beneficiary of pretentious taxpayer-funded noodling. Because Laurie believes in folly, see, ideally when done at someone else’s expense and regardless of their objections. And because without the Arts Council and its politically generic freeloading caste, all human progress would simply grind to a halt. Besides, grumbling about the extortion and misuse of other people’s money - half a million pounds of it - is anodyne and inconsequential.
Out of her way, you little people.

Update, via the comments:
A reader, Newbie, asks: “If money is so ‘inconsequential,’ why do these parasites always expect to be given loads of someone else’s?”
Why indeed? Presumably, taxpayers shouldn’t trouble themselves with how their earnings are expropriated and pissed away by their betters. Artists, it seems, are visionaries, not made of mortal flesh, and so sacrifice is necessary - yours, of course, not theirs. Laurie illustrates this point unwittingly and with her usual grandiose sorrow: “Is this what human progress has come to? Fighting over the scraps of money left as the markets crumble?” Oh, the indignity of not being given all the money you want just because you want it.
There are two things worth noting here. Firstly, Laurie equates the fatuous, self-aggrandising relocation of dirt with “human progress.” Apparently, NowhereIsland is exactly the kind of progressive project that will drag us in its wake to a brighter, more enlightened tomorrow. (It only looks like the usual cliquey freeloaders’ talking shop, in which the same self-selected caste of middle-class lefties pretend to be pivotal to human advancement. Because, hey, they’re that important.)
Secondly, the notion that artists might actually consider earning a living doesn’t register at all. There’s not even the briefest flickering of that possibility. The idea that artists might endeavour to produce work that their customers would pay for voluntarily, without Arts Council coercion and political vetting, appears to be unworthy, and perhaps unthinkable. Artists are much too important to waste their time making beautiful things that people want to buy. According to Laurie, their role is political and much, much grander - to “imagine a culture beyond the control of capital and the nation state.”
This, of course, is simply asserted. As so much is in Laurie’s world.

As the World turns...

"Nothing sums up the demented nature of the modern left better than a soi-disant socialist party that supports taxing janitors in Leeds to give money to millionaire luvvies in London, so they can make films about how folk in Yorkshire are ignorant bigots."[David Thompson January 15, 2012]

At the Altar

An interesting excerpt from an important article discussing the tendency of lefties to worship at the altar of fame, celebrity and conformity and how it is clear to see what those on the left oppose, but less clear to see what they encourage:

Our criticism of Butler was quite independent of the merits or lack thereof of Derrida - but perhaps a criticism of his defender amounts to a criticism of him and is therefore not allowed. At any rate, Butler's open letter to the Times is a classic example of precisely this evasive non-substantive suggestion of impropriety that you mention. It's basically an argument from celebrity. 'How dare you publish such a snide obituary, Derrida was hugely influential, he was celebrated, he was a big deal.' Well - an impartial observer might think, reading her letter, that if she is an example of his influence, it wasn't much to boast about. It's a shocking thing to read, in a way - the combination of evasiveness, empty rhetoric, in-groupy outrage, and gormless awe at fame is not what one wants to read in someone who is routinely described as 'an academic star' (and to her shame she doesn't repudiate the description).

This perhaps seems like a side path, but I think it isn't. I think the whole subject is mixed up with celebrity-worship, fandom, star-hugging, fashion, trendiness, attention-seeking, in a truly depressing and distasteful (albeit morbidly fascinating) way. I think there wouldn't be those bizarre reactions of affront and indignation otherwise.

But what on earth is 'left' about that? Nothing, I would say. The only connection I've been able to come up with is that the left is generally a fan of reform and change and improvement and therefore drawn to the new, the best latest thing, thus susceptible to being over impressed by the trendy. But that doesn't really satisfy - it's not as respectable as that. It seems more like just plain childish fandom and star-worship. I have no idea what is 'left' about that.

DT:  Well, as to what’s ‘left’ about the worship of dubious figures, I’m inclined to cough and mutter “Marx”, “Castro”, “Chavez” and “Che Guevara T-shirts.” Communist societies are surprisingly big on idolatry, aren’t they? It seems to be a practical consequence of egalitarian philosophy applied in the real world. Keeping everyone equally miserable requires some kind of deity, usually one with a firm hand. How many times have we seen Mao depicted as a god, complete with radiation beaming from his head, like some Communist Godzilla?

As a teenager I remember seeing CCCP badges and the people wearing them didn’t seem too concerned with the connotations of that project. Likewise, those on the left who seem smitten by Castro or Guevara don’t seem unduly bothered by the Cuban concentration camps for roqueros and other “bohemian elements.”

I suppose it’s not too much of a leap from identifying with Castro or Chavez because of their opposition to capitalism or American “hegemony” and identifying with the contortions of Derrida and Foucault for not dissimilar reasons. Both are postures of rebellion with no obvious moral foundation or practical usefulness. Ditto the white middle-class lefties who wave placards announcing “We are all Hizballah now.” I guess it’s something to do with “giving it to the man” or not liking one’s parents or something. It all seems a tad narcissistic to me, and just a little depraved.
 

....... I’ve some sympathy with Stephen Hicks, whose Explaining Postmodernism I read alongside Why Truth Matters. Crudely summarised, Hicks sees the rise of relativism, obscurantism and censoriousness on the left as marking a crisis of faith and a retreat from reality. As a practical blueprint, Socialism has been refuted. The question is what’s been left in the space it used to occupy, other than confusion, narcissism and a state of denial.
 

http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2007/02/pomo_terry_eagl_1.html

Over hyped under achiever

The diminished legacy of that towering intellect who goes by the name of Barack Obama:

The current situation in the Middle East is a product of the efforts of four Obama aides: Samantha Power, a strange and unsettling woman with two apparent goals in this world: the exaltation of the Arab Islamists and the abject destruction of Israel. Susan Rice is a career diplomat who lacks, along with other basic talents, an ability to lie convincingly. Hillary Clinton is the exact female equivalent of Obama: a woman of no ability apart from a certain feral cleverness boosted to high status for purely ideological reasons. (We're omitting Huma Abedin to this list due to the fact that she's Hillary's). Valerie Jarrett has a past even more opaque than that of Obama himself -- about all we know is that she is Obama's closest aide and is Iran-born.

 No person of even normal perceptiveness would have hired this coven, or would have stood by as they left a wake of destruction and misery across the Near East and the Mediterranean littoral. No person of decency would tolerate the results. But Obama doesn't even seem aware that anything is wrong. He does not appear to grasp that things have changed for the worse and require correction.

....and..... 

Another characteristic of stupidity is that it is neverending. Once it starts rolling, it continues onward until it at last finds a cliff to go over.Back to Cocteau, who had a lot to say about the subject: "The problem with the modern world is that stupidity has begun to think."

Cocteau was referring to the brute ideologies of the 20th century, ideologies that required, first and above all, the truncation of the questing and questioning facets of human nature in order to operate. Liberalism has long since joined that lineup, long enough ago for intellectual sclerosis to have reached its peak. Obama is the perfect representative of this final collapse of the liberal black hole: the leading ideologue who believes just a fervently as his most doltish follower, because he has never been exposed to an alternative. Liberalism today is a collection of slogans vague enough to be slotted into just about any given situation. Obama mastered those slogans long ago, and believes that's all he needs to do. His cult, the media, and half the country believe it too. The chief error of ideologues of this type is that they truly think that they'll remain immune to the consequences of folly. But this is something not granted to any man. Stupidity twinned with arrogance creates its own nemesis. Obama has just about reached that point.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/10/the_obamacare_black_hole.html#ixzz2iWh7716K

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Reducto absurdum

This blogger effectively illustrates the absurdities inherent in the contemporary art-world.

Unfortunately like most things over-the-top, such irrationalities inoculate the perspicacious from the world of art thus proving the (pseudo)intellectuals cry of 'phillistinism' a self perpetuating prophecy.

Its worth a read if only to highlight how easily creativity can be reduced to 'destructivity'[sic].

http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/culture/

Lamentations

Leftard lament: “I am better than you because I pretend to feel worse.”

Ponder well

As always Theodore Dalrymple provides not only food for thought, but an veritable cornucopia:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/10396937/Facebook-executions-are-a-freedom-too-far.html

Euthanasia

For those who may be undecided on euthanasia the following article might provide some answers.

http://www.mercatornet.com/careful/view/12936

Hustlers in every country

There is a lesson in the following article to be learned about Australia's 'race hustlers' as well:

Race-Hustling Results By Thomas Sowell

Years ago, someone said that, according to the laws of aerodynamics, bumblebees cannot fly. But the bumblebees, not knowing the laws of aerodynamics, go ahead and fly anyway.

Something like that happens among people. There have been many ponderous academic writings and dour editorials in the mainstream media, lamenting that most people born poor cannot rise in American society any more. Meanwhile, many poor immigrants arrive here from various parts of Asia, and rise on up the ladder anyway.

Often these Asian immigrants arrive not only with very little money, but also very little knowledge of English. They start out working at low-paid jobs but working so many hours, often at more than one job, that they are able to put a little money aside.

After a few years, they have enough money to open some little shop, where they still work long hours, and still save their money, so that they can afford to send their children to college. Meanwhile, these children know that their parents not only expect, but demand, that they make good grades.

Some people try to explain why Asians, and Asian-Americans, succeed so well in education and in the economy by some special characteristics that they have. That may be true, but their success may also be due to what they do not have — namely "leaders" who tell them that the deck is so stacked against them that they cannot rise, or at least not without depending on "leaders."

Such "leaders" are like the people who said that the laws of aerodynamics showed that the bumblebee cannot fly. Those who have believed such "leaders" have in fact stayed grounded, unlike the bumblebees.

A painful moment for me, years ago, when I was on the lecture circuit, came after a talk at Marquette University, when a young black student rose and asked: "Even though I am graduating from Marquette University, what hope is there for me?"

Back in the 1950s, when I was a student, I never encountered any fellow black student who expressed such hopelessness, even though there was far more racial discrimination then. We knew that there were obstacles for us to overcome, and we intended to overcome them.

The memory of that Marquette student came back to me, years later, when another black young man said that he had wanted to become a pilot, and had even planned to join the Air Force in order to do so. But then, he said, he now "realized" that "The Man" would never allow a black guy to become a pilot.

This was said decades after a whole squadron of black fighter plane pilots made a reputation for themselves in World War II, as the "Tuskegee Airmen." There have been black generals in the Air Force.

Both these young men — and many others — have learned all too well the lessons taught by race hustlers, in their social version of the laws of aerodynamics, which said that they could not rise.

You don't hear about racial "leaders" like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson among Asians or Asian-Americans. Here and there you may see some irresponsible academics peddling that line in the classroom — some of whom are of Asian ancestry, since no race of human beings is completely lacking in fools.

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But they do not get the same attention, or draw the same following, as race hustlers operating in black or Hispanic communities. By and large, Asian youngsters rise and fly.

Other groups in times past also arrived on these shores with very little money and often with very little education, at least during the immigrant generation.

A poem by Carl Sandburg, back during that era, referred to a Jewish fish peddler in Chicago: "His face is that of a man terribly glad to be selling fish, terribly glad that God made fish, and customers to whom he may call his wares from a pushcart."

This fish peddler probably had not gone to college, and so had no one to tell him that he couldn't make it, and that his children couldn't rise, because this was such a terrible country.

No one can claim that there was no anti-Semitism in America, any more than they can claim that there was never any anti-Asian discrimination. There was plenty of both. But that is very different from following "leaders" whose message would only keep them grounded, after the skies were open to them as never before.

[un]Intended consequences!

As with most religious myths, its adherents are very reluctant to let go even when faced with incontrovertible truths. In the case of the AGW myth it has not only been proved to be the fabrication of a few but dangerous as well:

In fact, the death rate from droughts, floods and storms has dropped by 98 per cent since the 1920s, according to a careful study by the independent scholar Indur Goklany. Not because weather has become less dangerous but because people have gained better protection as they got richer…

[But] climate policy is already doing harm. Building wind turbines, growing biofuels and substituting wood for coal in power stations — all policies designed explicitly to fight climate change — have had negligible effects on carbon dioxide emissions. But they have driven people into fuel poverty, made industries uncompetitive, driven up food prices, accelerated the destruction of forests, killed rare birds of prey, and divided communities. To name just some of the effects. Mr Goklany estimates that globally nearly 200,000 people are dying every year, because we are turning 5 per cent of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel instead of food: that pushes people into malnutrition and death. In this country, 65 people a day are dying because they cannot afford to heat their homes properly, according to Christine Liddell of the University of Ulster, yet the government is planning to double the cost of electricity to consumers by 2030.
 

Perhaps the fact that more people are dying is in keeping with the myth-makers view of humanity as a 'virus', and a 'cancer' on this earth (Gaia).
UPDATE:
http://fakenobellaureates.com/
An interesting site exposing green ideologues claiming fake Nobel Peace prizes...it would be funny if it were not that these morons and others like them have wasted billions upon billions of taxpayers money and raked in pretty pennies themselves.
Intellectual vanity of vanities!

The Global Warming scam...

Enlightening [not]statisitcs from an article by Norman Rogers:

Usually, in science, you need 95% probability for evidence to be considered significant. Delworth and Knutson have only 4.8%. There is a 95.2% probability that their theory is wrong. Their paper was published in Science only because all concerned, including the editors of Science, are true believers in global warming and will embrace any evidence that supports their belief, no matter how weak. (It is also an unproven assumption that chaotic variation in climate models mimics the chaotic variation in the Earth's climate.)

Einstein said on more than one occasion that God does not play dice with the universe. The global warmers seem to think that the dice are loaded in their favor. Chaotic variation is invoked to explain the recent absence of global warming as well as the robust early-century warming. Whenever it is convenient, chaotic variation is used, and whenever it is inconvenient, it is ignored.

Protocols for the proper use of computers, computer models, and statistics do exist. The temptation to abuse those protocols is irresistible. Scientists are tempted by the desire to manufacture scientific progress, the desire to publish, and the desire to justify ideological visions like global warming. Science, which should be an objective interpreter of the world, is reduced to a crude tool of politics and is put to political use by scientist trade unions, like the National Academy of Science.

When bad science is buried in computerese, it becomes difficult for anyone to figure out what is real and what is nonsense.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/10/computer_games_and_global_warming.html#ixzz2i1tZDAuI

 

Feeling Green yet?

An interesting article on the thinking within the 'Green' ideologies. Anyone who dismisses such thinking as 'something from the past' is not keeping up-to-date with the Green icon Peter Singer's current philosophies on sexual 'freedom'.
The Green ideologies and the people behind them are an abomination and for Christians to vote for this party is an abdication of all that is sane.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/opening_up_the_dark_history_of_the_german_greens

This is another article by Martin Durkin on the origins of The g\Green ideologies

http://www.martindurkin.com/blogs/nazi-greens-inconvenient-history

The attack on family

The following is an excerpt for those who are blind to the reality that current left-wing oligarchies who wield the power in most Western countries (thank goodness no longer Australia, for a little while at least) and influence 85% of all journalistic endeavours, are implacably anti family:

[MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry's] statement wasn’t an aside on live television. She didn’t misspeak. The spot was shot, produced, and aired without, apparently, raising any alarm bells. No one with influence raised his or her hand and said, “Should we really broadcast something that sounds so outlandish?”
The foundation of the Harris-Perry view is that society is a large-scale kibbutz. The title of Hillary Clinton’s bestseller in the 1990s expressed the same point in comforting folk wisdom: “It Takes a Village.”
As the ultimate private institution, the family is a stubborn obstacle to the great collective effort. Insofar as people invest in their own families, they are holding out on the state and unacceptably privileging their own kids over the children of others. These parents are selfish, small-minded, and backward. “Once it’s everybody’s responsibility,” Harris-Perry said of child-rearing, “and not just the households, then we start making better investments.”
This impulse toward the state as über-parent is based on a profound fallacy and a profound truth. The fallacy is that anyone can care about someone else’s children as much as his own. The former Texas Republican senator Phil Gramm liked to illustrate the hollowness of professions to the contrary with a story. He told a woman, “My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.” She said, “No, you don’t.” Gramm replied, “Okay: What are their names?”

— From Rich Lowry in April at NRO. “Your Kids Aren’t Your Own — The family is a stubborn obstacle to the great collective effort.”
Related: Blogger “Dalrock,” exploring some of the ideas in Dr. Helen’s new Men on Strike book asks, “How should we replace marriage as our organizing philosophy of the family?”

Simply put, the purpose of child support is to replace marriage. Discussing how it should be implemented is discussing how to replace marriage. Some might argue that this is a good thing, either as a rare exception (say for a husband who abandons his family) or as a rule (as practiced in the western world). But this doesn’t change the fact that child support is working exactly as designed, and exactly as should be expected. Child support crowds out marriage, and even in cases where weddings still technically occur the option for the wife to unilaterally convert the family from a marriage based family to a child support based family always exists. This is part of the threatpoint designed to empower wives and dis-empower husbands. Men simply don’t have the option to choose the marriage based model over the child support model.
 

Welcome to the collective Utopia [not].

Something to look forward to...

The following short excerpt is from a report on the Anti-abortion rally/march held in Melbourne over the weekend. It was a shocking example of hate against Christians and the inability/lack of desire from the powers-that-be (police) to interfere...quite possibly because the majority of the police are sympathetic to ideals expressed by the hate-filled anarchists. A position which augers badly for the future and although Meuhlenberg falls prey to 'Godwin's Law' in the latter part of his analysis, I fear he might be right.

“‘What we saw today was literally a public mugging on the streets of Melbourne and Victoria Police let it happen. We had people being assaulted, being kicked, being stomped on and they sat back and watched.’ Victoria Police played down the protests, saying there were a couple of scuffles between opposing groups but these stopped once police intervened.”

Make no mistake: yesterday we saw open warfare on the streets of Melbourne. What we witnessed there was something we would expect to see on the streets of Beirut or Mogadishu. We would expect there to see such anarchy, violence, open warfare, and riotous behaviour – but on the streets of Melbourne?

The hate-filled anarchists were allowed to intimidate, harass, assault, disrupt and torment a group of lawful marchers, including many babies, children and elderly people. Incredibly, basically nothing was done to prevent this. And as I described in the article I linked to above, these anarchists have now even become so brazen as to enter private functions and seek to shut them down as well.

Be forewarned: as the police stand by and do nothing about all this, this will simply embolden the radicals and activists to do even far worse in future events like this. Indeed, that is exactly what is now happening. If you go to their websites and FB pages, you can read right now about how they plan to be even more ruthless and effective in entirely shutting down any event they disagree with.

My friends, this is simply the death of freedom and democracy in this nation. And when the police, who are supposed to prevent this kind of anarchy and social chaos, stand back and do nothing, then you know the end is near. By doing almost nothing to stop the troublemakers, they are effectively siding with them.

And we have seen this sort of thing before sadly. Just think of Germany in the 1930s. First the police did nothing to prevent Jews and others from being harassed and intimidated and bullied. Soon the police were on the side of those attacking these innocent victims.

Will that become our fate here?
 

Indeed, will that become our fate here, or has it already arrived?
UPDATE:
A truly frightening article on America:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2013/10/the-crusade-against-liberty-gathers-pace

Uh oh Obama!

I know of good Christian men and woman who voted for Obama at the last election. Surely even the most hopeful of those will have now learned that such a vote was a huge error in judgement. Consider this extract from an article on Obama care:


Religious freedom and freedom of conscience are especially under attack with Obamacare. The threats are well known, but let me offer a nice summary by Rick Phillips:
“The conflict is arising over the matter of contraceptives in health care plans. The Roman Catholic Church holds that all contraceptives are immoral. Most Evangelical Christians do not forbid all contraceptives, but hold that abortifacient contraceptives are sinful. (These are contraceptives that destroy a fertilized embryo, which we regard as destroying a human life.) The current issue is the mandate under the Affordable Care Act (popularly known as ‘Obamacare’) for businesses, including those owned by Christians and formed to uphold Christian values, to provide abortifacient contraceptives in the insurance plans of their employees….
“Christian businesses have faced heavy government fines for refusing to obey the Obamacare mandate. Hobby Lobby, for instance, faces $1.3 million per day for refusing to provide abortifacient contraceptives to its 13,000 employees. These and legions of other Christian organizations, including seminaries, book publishers, and Christian schools, may be forced out of business, with thousands of jobs lost, by the government fines.
“In my view, it is important for Christians to realize the grave nature of this new threat. What is at stake is our freedom to participate in the public life of our nation while upholding our religious convictions and our fidelity to Jesus Christ. The book of Revelation speaks of the ‘mark of the beast’ without which ‘no one can buy or sell’ (Revelation 13:17).
“This mark was given to those who bowed and worshiped the image of Caesar, and those who received it are judged by God (Revelation 14:11). I would not say that the Affordable Care Act is the mark of the beast, nor that our government leaders are intending to serve the Antichrist. Yet the principle informs Christians that we must not obey civil leaders who command us to disobey Christ, whether they intend this or not, at the expense of our jobs and businesses.”
But some rather naive and uninformed Christians might say, well, as long as I can preach the gospel, it does not matter about these other things. They think all these crackdowns on religious liberty and freedom of conscience are inconsequential, and we can still evangelise and so on. They are dead wrong.
Several years ago Eric Metaxis wrote an important piece called “What Would Bonhoeffer Do?” He writes, “To some Christians the idea of asking anything but ‘What would Jesus do?’ is blasphemous. But God wants us to look at the lives of those who have gone before us – whom the writer of the book of Hebrews called that ‘great cloud of witnesses’ – who have run the race of faith successfully. That’s an important part of how we learn what it is to live the Christian life. We need to see other Christians in action, to see what the Christian faith looks like when it’s lived out in difficult circumstances by others. And when we need to see how we should deal with persecution amidst encroaching fascism, Bonhoeffer is the best role model there is.”

 He looks at his later life as he resisted Hitler and the Nazis. Bonhoeffer “understood the proper roles of the church and the state, and he recognized the Nazi threat to religious liberty from the beginning. . . . The Nazis wanted to bully Christians into accepting a place of such diminished stature in the culture that they had no real voice. But whenever the Nazis trespassed on God’s property, as it were, Bonhoeffer met the challenge. He drew a line in the sand and then passionately rallied his fellow Christians to stand with him on that line, to defend it at all costs….

“But while Bonhoeffer was trying to wake up the German Church to stand boldly and decisively against the Nazis, another Christian was taking a different tack. Frank Buchman was a prominent American evangelical who headed up something called the Oxford Movement. He hoped to convert Hitler and the other top Nazis to the Christian faith, believing that this would solve everything.
“Bonhoeffer knew that Buchman’s goal was laudable in principle, but in reality it was a fool’s errand. Buchman failed to discern the times in which he was living. While he was trying to arrange lunches to talk with Himmler about Jesus, the very liberties that made it possible to preach the Gospel in Germany were brutally being kicked down the stairs and out the door.
“But Buchman’s idea is alive and well in America today. One often hears Christians say that they don’t want to get involved in political or cultural battles; they just want to ‘preach the Gospel.’ They think that by avoiding political and cultural battles they will retain the credibility necessary to be effective in preaching the Gospel.
“But according to Bonhoeffer, this is tragically mistaken. If your ability to speak the truth is itself under attack – if you cannot say that certain sexual behavior is wrong, or that taking unborn life is wrong – your ability to be a Christian is itself under attack. The Gospel you will be preaching has been fatally compromised.
“Bonhoeffer struggled to get his fellow Christians to see that if one didn’t stand up for religious freedom, every possibility to preach the true Gospel would soon be gone. Time and again he drew a line in the sand and tried to rally other Christians to stand with him and hold that line.”
When we see things like Obamacare directly threatening our very Christian conscience and liberties, then we must take a stand and we must speak out. We too must draw a line in the sand and say “no further”. Every advance by the Big Brother State is another retreat from, and an assault on, freedom in general and the Christian faith in particular.
We dare not go along with the radically anti-Christian agenda Obama is seeking to foist upon us. For the sake of the gospel, and out of loyalty to Christ, we must resist the Leviathan, and remain true to biblical principles. Bonhoeffer gave up his life in doing this. Are you willing to do the same?
www.renewamerica.com/columns/baldwin/131011

In the beginning...

CMI reporting:

Mandating the teaching of evolution the worldview as part of a national curriculum contravenes the Constitution because the idea that everything on earth originated by evolution over billions of years is a religious belief. Sir Julian Huxley, first Director General of UNESCO described evolution in his address to Darwin’s Centennial Convocation this way:

“In the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created; it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and soul, as well as brain and body. So did religion.”¹

Note that Huxley describes evolution as a “pattern of thought”. It’s not a scientific observation but a metaphysical belief. Note that evolution makes clear pronouncements about God, the creation, the nature of man, our minds and our souls, none of which have been established empirically by scientific observation. These are the doctrines of the evolutionary worldview. Evolution thus is not an objective, scientific fact but a metaphysical, religious belief system. That is why evolution is such a controversial issue, and why the Fact Sheet is totally inappropriate.

A human catastrophe

When you observe a person arguing victimhood from social circumstances know that they are influenced either consciously or unconsciously by Marxist paradigms and not, as is generally believed, by compassion:

Theodore Dalrymple on the delusions and dishonesties of Marxist fathers:

Marxism was replete with heresies and excommunications that tended to become fatal whenever its adherents reached power. There was a reason for this. Marx said that it is not consciousness that determines being, but being that determines consciousness. In other words, ideas do not have to be argued against in a civilised way, but rather the social and economic position of those who hold them must be analysed. So, disagreement is the same as class enmity – and we all know what should be done with class enemies… A genre of apologetic literature grew up in the Twenties and Thirties. I have a collection of it; perhaps my favourite is Soviet Russia Fights Neurosis. How could intelligent people not have laughed? They didn’t laugh, though; they believed it, because they wanted to. What they did not want to believe was the abundant evidence that, from the start, the Bolshevik Revolution was a human catastrophe. Contrary to what many think, Solzhenitsyn revealed nothing in the Seventies that had not been known from the Twenties on. I have a contemporary account of the famine in the Ukraine, complete with photographs of piles of cadavers. Intellectuals devoted great dialectical effort to showing either that the evidence was false or that its meaning was different from that given it by “bourgeois” people.

 

 

 

 

 

Heroes

Makes you think:

“It is the soldier, not the minister, who has given us freedom of religion.

“It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.

“It is the Soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.

“It is the Soldier, not the campus organiser, who has given us freedom to protest.

“It is the soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.

“It is the soldier, not the politician, who has given us the right to vote.

“It is the soldier who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.”

Thank God for those who lay their lives on the line to protect the majority, heroes all.

Hearing is believing

I am continually irked by religious people (usually left-wing types) speaking for 'all Christians', that's why I found the following excerpt amusing. See what happens when people take you at your 'word' bishop!

But there's a problem here too. As we saw in the case of the University of Sydney women's collective, leftists might experience a feeling of moral exaltation at first, but it's soon followed by a loss of moral status, which then leads to being held in contempt by those occupying the "victim" role.

Which means that the leftist approach to solidarity works best when the leftists and the victim group don't actually have to have dealings with each other, but can maintain a suitable distance.

This "solidarity from a distance" is illustrated by a recent incident in France. A group of Roma gypsies had set up an illegal camp which the authorities dismantled. A French bishop, Jean Luc-Bronin made a vigorous appeal on regional television for solidarity with the Roma..."Be careful, let us not turn our backs on fraternity."

What happened then is that some of the Roma gypsy families decided to take up the Bishop on his offer of solidarity. They went to live in his front yard. The Bishop then denounced the Roma's use of "force" and demanded that their camp be dismantled:

"I cannot accept this use of force...The Church alone cannot be made to settle the question of these families."
 

Hypocrite.