Unintended consequences

Doesn't this excerpt (replace America with Australia) perfectly encapsulate our current 'human rights' confusion as articulated by the Greens/progressive/left-wing fools in government?

So many "rights" have been conjured up out of thin air that many people seem unaware that rights and obligations derive from explicit laws, not from politically correct pieties. If you don't meet the terms of the Geneva Convention, then the Geneva Convention doesn't protect you. If you are not an American citizen, then the rights guaranteed to American citizens do not apply to you.

That should be especially obvious if you are part of an international network bent on killing Americans. But bending over backward to be nice to our enemies is one of the many self-indulgences of those who engage in moral preening.

But getting other people killed so that you can feel puffed up about yourself is profoundly immoral. So is betraying the country you took an oath to protect.

Adam Smith many years ago said that showing undue mercy towards criminals actually heaps cruelty onto their victims. Unfortunately most of our 'leaders' will not learn the truth of this adage until something happens to them or theirs; God grant that this is not so!

Airy fairies

Thomas Sowell writing about the generally odious impact that 20th Century intellectuals have had on our society.

If there is any lesson in the history of ideas, it is that good intentions tell you nothing about the actual consequences. But intellectuals who generate ideas do not have to pay the consequences.

Academic intellectuals are shielded by the principles of academic freedom and journalists in democratic societies are shielded by the principle of freedom of the press. Seldom do those who produce or peddle dangerous, or even fatal, ideas have to pay a price, even in a loss of credibility.

Who blames Rachel Carson, an environmentalist icon, because her crusading writings against DDT led to the ban of this insecticide in countries around the world — followed by a resurgence of malaria that killed, and continues to kill, millions of people in tropical Third World countries?

...Intellectuals and their followers have often been overly impressed by the fact that intellectuals tend, on average, to have more knowledge than other individuals in their society. What they have overlooked is that intellectuals have far less knowledge than the total knowledge possessed by the millions of other people whom they disdain and whose decisions they seek to override.

Patient vultures

Melanie Phillips excoriates the 'Honours roll' list in  England where knighthoods and other 'awards' are given to the 'worthy'. This small extract speaks about the prize awarded producer Peter Bazalgette (producer of Big Brother) for ‘services to broadcasting’.

His knighthood is a symptom of a culture in which excess has been normalised, brutalisation lionised and coarseness idolised. 

Such an honour also perfectly mirrors the political scene, in which principle is nowhere to be found and all that matters is winning power by pandering to the whims of fashion.

And so our Western culture circles the drain while those of a more, shall we say, 'rigorous' nature wait expectantly in the wings to pick over the remains at some future moment.
In 1999 Thomas Sowell said:

The late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put his finger on the problem when he said: "The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles."

Purity provokes hate.

More on Tim Tebow, this time by Linda Chavez:

Tim Tebow harms no one when he bends a knee to thank Jesus for giving him the athletic gifts that have served him so well. And he's never said anything publicly about saving anyone's soul. So how is it offensive that his piety inspires others -- even his opponents on the field -- to join him in prayer? In an era when other famous athletes are better known for sexting, criminal assault or even murder, it's a mystery why humility and faith would be viewed negatively.

True tolerance means allowing others to believe what they choose and to express those beliefs, so long as they do not interfere with the liberty of others. Tebow does not insist that his teammates join him in prayer, nor does he interfere with those who choose a different religious -- or non-religious -- expression of joy and gratitude.

But illiberals want religion out of the public square altogether. They want to reinterpret the First Amendment to deny religious freedom, not to protect it. They want to force religious people of all faiths to keep their religion in the closet, while at the same time enforcing the open acceptance -- indeed, encouragement -- of behaviors that conflict with traditional religious tenets. The illiberal religious bigots believe putting a creche on public property is unconstitutional; but displaying a crucifix in a in a tax-supported museum is just fine, just so long as it's stuck in a jar of urine.

Tim Tebow is not the problem. The real problem is our willingness to be bullied into thinking that prejudice masked as tolerance is acceptable.

Amen!

Green mendacity

Martin Durkin examines the Green claims:

In a recent popular green book called Do Good Lives Have to Cost The Earth, a host of green authors stick the boot into free markets and call for more State powers.  Tom Hodgkinson rails against the ‘sick and bloated private sector’, Caroline Lucas attacks privatization and deregulation, Andrew Sims and Joe Smith tell us, ‘This is a call for the politicians to get their hands on the big levers again.’  In his book Heat, the radical green George Monbiot says bluntly, ‘It is a campaign not for more freedom, but for less.’

But hold on a minute.  How does the environment in the despised free capitalist West (air quality, water quality, etc) compare with that of the heavily planned, State-controlled Soviet Union, or Cuba or Communist China?  To take just one example, the economist Julian Simon quotes a Soviet official who said that ’50 million people in 192 cities [in the Soviet Union] are exposed to air pollutants that exceed national standards tenfold.’  The term the Russian official used was ‘catastrophic pollution’.  In Magnitogorsk, a coroner complained in 1991, ‘Every day there is some new disaster … a worker in his thirties dead from collapsed lungs, a little girl dead from asthma or a weakened heart.’  Shockingly, the coroner said that ‘over 90 percent of the children born here suffer from some pollution-related illness.’ 

Why are the Greens so rabidly keen on more State control?  No doubt they would argue that all their green concerns lead naturally to demands for more regulations and public spending and government restrictions. 

Or is the other way round?  Is there a class of bureaucratically-minded folk who favour more State control, for whom green concerns provide what they regard as a justification?  In other words, are the Greens looking after the dolphins, or are the dolphins looking after the Greens?

There is, I believe, a solid, self-interested, class basis for environmentalism.  Green is the natural world view of what sociologists call the ‘New Class’.

The noble savage.

Billionaire Fat Al strikes a blow for Gaia again. Here he is preaching from one of his 6 houses mansions about how much better it is to be poor.

In his Earth in the Balance, former vice-President Al Gore has come up with a chilling idea.  He says what is needed is ‘The imposition of export controls in developed countries that assess a technology’s ecological effect, just as the Cold War technology control regime (known as COCOM) made careful and usually accurate analyses of the potential military impact of technologies proposed for export.’

COCOM, let’s remind ourselves, blocked the export of advanced technology to poor countries, just in case they made weapons.  Al Gore suggests we do the same again, to prevent ‘ecologically damaging’ technology from reaching them. Can you imagine Al trying to pull that stunt with the State of Texas.  Sorry guys, we’ve made it illegal for anyone to sell you pesticides, herbicides, inorganic fertlizer, gas-guzzling SUVs and various types of industrial equipment.  I wonder what the State of Texas would have to say.  Thanks for keeping us out of harm’s way Al.

There is real violence in these calls for restrictions.  The fat Green imperialists are dictating the terms of development for the world’s poorest people:  You must not aspire to be rich.  ‘Gaia’ will not accept it.  It will cause Global Warming.  In any case you are better off as peasants, and we will ensure, by restricting trade, that you stay as you are.  You may not buy this, you may not sell that.  You will enjoy this standard of living, but not that.   

There is something ugly and sinister behind the apparently benevolent, fashionable attempt to preserve charming, traditional peasant life.  And also behind their gushing concern for ‘the planet’.   Barely concealed behind the jargon of ‘sustainability’ is the dark, reactionary prejudice of nasty, well-to-do people who would deny material progress to others.

Its in the genes

Full marks to channel nines 60 minutes program last night (1.1.12). The Gillard/Ludwig disaster of closing down the cattle industry was shown at its incompetent worst. A government should not be allowed to do what this one did to its own citizens. Only Soviet style rule can account for debacles such as this.

Windshuttle nails the political DNA underpinning this government:

Apart from delivering on the big debt she owes to the trade union movement, Gillard’s most ambitious left-wing agenda item is to make the population conform to state-approved codes of taste, speech, sexual behaviour, parenting, body fat, and gambling habits. Gillard also has a target for 40 per cent of young people to go to university, a piece of social engineering designed, as she says, to produce more people like herself. The Left’s main objective today is no longer democracy or liberty but conformity. In short, while leftists can adopt conservative reforms on some issues, they still cannot jettison their conviction that they are superior beings who have the right to dictate to others how they should live.