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I am a liberal, and therefore am a conservative

 

I am linking you to a long and heartfelt article by a former American Democrat who, over the course of 25 years, has become inclined to vote Republican without any change in his political views. How can this be?

I think many people who once voted liberal or for left-wing candidates have experienced the same emotions and the same evolution. They may smoke dope; they may support abortion rights, limited or not; they may even sort their garbage and take global warming seriously, but they have one thing in common with me, George Orwell, and you, dear reader. They can smell the totalitarianism emanating from the political left these days, the “smelly little orthodoxies” as Orwell called them.

In the 1930s these virulent intolerances and dreams of social control were in some fashion channelled by the Communist Party and its near equivalents. After the fall of Soviet Communism, we found that the same human impulses to control and domination were liberated from the discipline, such as it was, of Marxist thought. Thus without the discipline of Marxism and the Party, leftist totalitarian behaviour and thought spread out of its Petri dish to infect wider and wider sectors of society. The impulse to grievance and victimhood remains, even as the theory that gave it a semblance of coherence lies rotting in its grave. Which only demonstrates the truth that Leftism is an urge of the soul and ontologically prior to Marxism, which was a particular economic theory seeking to justify the Leftism.

I quote from Brad Torgerson’s article (the one I recommend you read):

 

A good friend of mine, who also happens to be an outstanding author, once quipped, “If I am forced to choose a side, I choose the side which is not forcing me to choose sides.”

Seldom have I ever encountered phrasing more apt. Because that’s precisely how I feel. I’ve been feeling that way, for years now. It was not a sudden thing. It was a gradual realization. The slow clarity of an underlying sentiment, incrementally surfacing…..

And later in his essay –

And I have been reminded every single day, just how far I’ve been pushed away — by so-called progressives in this country.

Sure, some of that is me walking my talk. I am not exactly the same guy I was 25 years ago. And not because I don’t think some of the idealism of liberal thought is not worthy, or even evocatively beautiful.

It is.

Liberalism — the kind I was attracted to in my teens, and early twenties — mostly focuses on brighter futures with better choices.

Yet at many points over the past quarter century, that shining picture of what the Left supposedly stands for, has been undermined again, and again, and again, and again, by the behavior of self-styled Leftists.

Maybe it all comes down to the fact that I decided Alinsky’s ballyhooed rules are pernicious. Not once do they involve self-reflection, nor questions of higher moral obligation to a power or a need beyond simple political expediency. Like with the 2004 Washington State governors race, the ends justify the means. If you’re a Leftist and you have to lie to get what you want, then lie. If you’re a Leftist and you have to cheat to get what you want, then cheat. If you’re a Leftist and you have to hurt people to get what you want, or if you have to frighten people into not opposing you, then hurt and frighten people.

Never doubt that everything you — the Leftist — says or does, is done justifiably.

Everyone and everything is a fair target. Lash out. Incriminate. Slander. Punish. Make them quake in their boots. They deserve it, the jerks. “If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists!” Oops, Leftists excoriated Bush 43 for saying that. Now they themselves live it every day. “If you didn’t vote for Hillary, you’re with the KKK and the Nazis!”

Torgerson’s article speaks for itself. He joins a long list of people disillusioned with Leftist totalitarianism: if you are interested in the 1930s version I recommend “The God that Failed”, written by several important former European communists, and if the 1960s is your thing, you can try David Horowitz’ “Radical Son”.

I would say that, now, more than ever, we need an Orwell,  to remind us once again that patriotism and loyalty to one’s own people trumps (yes, that word) abstract professions of loyalty to the future, the road to which is made of human skulls.

 

Bourgeois Dignity: Why economics can’t explain the modern world

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Deirdre McCloskey is a phenomenal writer, economist, and thinker. Visit her website for an explosion of academic productivity and a highly intelligent viewpoint. We share one thing in common. Both of us have had the gravest doubts that economics as it is usually practiced is capable of explaining much. My friend Oban calls it the anorexic profession: not merely starved, but self starving. Its insights are few, but powerful, but it has become wedded to asking very narrow questions and getting very narrow, if important, insights.

McCloskey breaks the mould. Here is how she begins Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010) “Sixteen. The magic number is sixteen. The world is on average sixteen times wealthier than it was in 1800.” She finds that the economic discussion fails to comprehend or explain why ‘the largest revolution in human affairs since the invention of agriculture’, as she puts it, has occurred in the past two hundred years. She looks at all the explanations proferred by the economics profession , and finds them inadequate to explain the scale of the transformation from $3 a day world average in 1800 to $48 a day world average (or $147 a day in formerly impoverished Norway).

After demolishing the usual explanations (rule of law, expansion of trade, rise of the middle class – without reference to ideas, war, slavery, imperialism, or population growth) she settles on changed ideas and social attitudes towards innovation.

Changing social ideas, in short, explain the Industrial Revolution. Material and economic factors – such as trade or investment or exploitation or population growth or the inevitable rising of classes or the protections to private property – do not. They were unchanging backgrounds, or they had already happened long before, or they didn’t actually happen at the time they are supposed to have happened, or they were weak, or they were beside the point, or they were consequences of the rhetorical change, or they required the dignity and liberty of ordinary people to have the right effect. And it seems that such material events were not in turn the main causes of the ethical and rhetorical change itself.

Most of the book consists of a careful elimination of the causes usually offered for the Industrial Revolution, and involves naturally a series of disputes with the standard materialistic explanations offered by the economics profession. Many if not most of the economists with whom she disputes  have been at various times her teachers, mentors or students, and on the whole the arguments are kept at the friendly tone with which old friends argue.

I grant that I am inclined to non-materialist explanations. Materialism is the doctrine that there is only matter and its motions, and that mind is an epiphenomenon, as a shadow is to the body for example, and not a primary cause in its own right. Yet anything we know to be important in our own lives has occurred by decisions we have made, that led to actions on our part.

McCloskey argues in this book that the standard sets of explanations for the huge rise in human wealth since 1800 are insufficient, when they are not merely wrong. Bourgeois Dignity is the second of a series of six books she has planned. The next in the series, Bourgeois Equality (2015) is already out. I have already ordered it.

McCloskey is one of those writers who are so enlightening and well argued that you need not fully agree in order to profit from them greatly.

She may think it relevant, but I do not, that she underwent a sex change from man to woman in 1995. More pertinent, in my view, was that she was an atheist and is now an Episcopalian, and was an acolyte of Milton Friedman and now entertains a broader conception of her profession.

 

Chronicle of Folly: Hedy Fry and the Internet

“Chronicle of folly” is the name that could just as well be attached to any serious blog. The world is too much with us and the follies are gigantic and continuing, on this we are all agreed. No sooner do we rid the world of a serious belief in the state’s owning the means of production (communism) than it resuscitates itself as the global warming panic, which calls for anti-market governance by bureaucrats seeking to adjust our carbon outputs, as if carbon dioxide were not one of the bases of life. There will be no end to it as long as humans are in charge.

But to today’s sermon will address a smaller and more parochial aspect of the march of folly: local news. It appears to our federal parliamentarians that there is a crisis in local news which needs fixing, and probably by state intervention.

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Certifiable nut-job Hedy Fry, chairman of the House Committee on Heritage (which covers such matters as the CRTC, broadcasting, newspapers) is launching an inquiry. The CBC reports:

The Commons committee will embark on an expansive study of “how Canadians, and especially local communities, are informed about local and regional experiences through news, broadcasting, digital and print media,” according to a motion passed Tuesday.

It will also delve into media concentration, and its impact on local news reporting, and how digital media fits into the whole picture. The MPs have committed to no less than 10 meetings for the study.

Now here’s the rub:

The fear is that with the decline of a strongly Canadian news industry, any shared sense of national identity is also in peril.

Fry says the study will take a close look at the shifting information consumption habits of Canadians, and whether they are getting enough Canadian content online.

It is inevitable that this kind of political exercize will wring its hands about national identity and bemoan the fact that we are not getting enough Canadian content on line. How much is enough? Even to ask that question is to posit a point of view from which to judge the matter, and that point of view is statist, or dirigiste. It assumes there is a “we” that knows, or can ever know, and that “we”, in the context of a federal government inquiry, consists of the chattering class opinion, largely Liberal, that will submit its report and call for “dialogue”, a “conversation” on national identity, and suggest means of controlling the Internet for the betterment of Canadian national identity.

This vision of the anointed will have to face the wrath of the Canadian people. We have moved on, while our governing classes seem locked in a worldview that we need the state-licensed, advertizing-supported video of the broadcasting industry . We have become used to getting our information in new ways. Even I, still a subscriber to a physical newspaper, have become used to gleaning information and opinion from twenty or thirty sources, and occasionally perusing another fifty blog sites. I do not feel I am underinformed. I do not feel the lack of fifteen pounds of newspaper accumulating every month for disposal. My biggest concern for the future of the news paper is to find a source of kindling material for my woodstoves in the country.

The legal hook that will become apparent is that the Internet is not regulated by the CRTC and the broadcasting industry is.  The CRTC claims jurisdiction over the Internet to the extent it carries full motion video. Full motion video = “programming” and “programming” = “broadcasting”. That is how their interpretation of the law works.  They have maintained that view  since they first heard of the Internet back in the nineteen nineties. No technical reality of any kind has been allowed to interfere with their interpretation of the law. The Commission has chosen not to regulate the Internet solely on the basis that they have been unable to detect the harm done to the Canadian broadcasting system by the Internet.

Clearly the economic harm is mounting. It is as if the farriers, saddlemakers and ostlers got to determine whether the automobile was a threat to horse-centric transportation.

This recondite legal matter would have no importance but for one huge thing. To “broadcast” is to require a legal licence from the CRTC. To “broadcast” without a licence is to engage in a very serious crime, with enormous financial penalties and possibilities of jail time. According to the CRTC’s interpretation, this blog and the rest of the sites on the Internet within Canadian jurisdiction become licensable undertakings at the Commission’s discretion a) if they use video and b) are found in their collective economic effects, as a matter of fact, to be harming the licensees of the regulated broadcasting industry.

The advocates of the program production industry in Canada will tell us that they have just a little “Netflix” tax for us to help sustain the Canadian broadcasting industry. It won’t hurt and it will only apply to some minuscule part of the Internet.

Wait until you see the jihad (crusade if you prefer) unleashed by the Canadian public on the government and the CRTC when they try this. But as to the newspaper owners, who significantly overlap broadcast television owners, will they rise in revolt, or apply for “broadcasting” subsidies for their “local” news outlets?

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PS: This is Dr. Hedy Fry, she of the accusations of cross-burnings on the lawns of interior British Columbia towns. She would not know how to find where the interior of British Columbia is, from her riding in downtown west-end Vancouver. The BC interior begins at Coquitlam, for this lady, if not Burrard Street.

The National Review attacks Trump

This morning I read the National Review’s attack on Trump. It would have been devastating, had I cared for Conservatism Inc.’s views on the matter.

 

Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

Maybe.

We need more fencing at the border, but the promise to make Mexico pay for it is silly bluster

Yes, probably.

As for illegal immigration, Trump pledges to deport the 11 million illegals here in the United States, a herculean administrative and logistical task beyond the capacity of the federal government.

Yes, it is impossible, but can you get  80%? The first 20%? Can the US at least enforce its current laws on immigration, as Obama conspicuously refuses to do? Very likely? Can you slowly begin to change the direction of the ship of state? Absolutely.

Indeed, Trump’s politics are those of an averagely well-informed businessman: Washington is full of problems; I am a problem-solver; let me at them. But if you have no familiarity with the relevant details and the levers of power, and no clear principles to guide you, you will, like most tenderfeet, get rolled.

The problem that Trump poses for the Republican intelligentsia is that of a man who seems disinclined to listen to their professional soothsaying. He does not care for them and they do not care for him.

Worse, I think, than any of Trump’s anti immigration stances is his complete rejection of the free-trade orthodoxy of the past forty years. This orthodoxy has held that America is best off when it can get China and Japan to make its goods, and as the States has not enough to pay for the imbalance of trade, the US can sell them Treasury Bills (debt) in exchange. Thus, as Trump points out, the Asian powers take American jobs, we get their consumer goods, US factories shut down and move out, and the American working class is left in a crisis of despondency, which is reducing their lifespans in somewhat the same way that Russian men are dying earlier. Labour force participation is also dropping as more and more people find they can get by on disability pensions.

If it had been any other ethnic group than whites, the recent news that there is a huge die-off of the American working class male would have been declared a national crisis. But in a world where Black Lives Matter, white lives do not – or so it appears.

All this is well described in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, the State of White America, 1960-2010, which should be  reading for anyone reading Barrelstrength, and for opinion writing in the National Review.

The proposition advanced by white nationalists like Pat Buchanan is that you cannot really have the United States without a significant, probably majority, core of white people; that the United States is a nation, not just an assemblage of factories and suburbs, tied together by laws, and that the policies of free trade and mass immigration as well as a host of other policies which are anti-white, anti-productivity, and against social order,  are threatening the social core that makes the United States work, as a society, as a nation, as the great experiment in republican government that it is.

We have wandered far from Trump into the basic issues that are confronting the United States, and in many cases they are racial, in the sense not of black versus everyone else, or white versus everyone else, but what is the United States going to be in fifty years? Will it persist in any recognizable form?

The questions that lie below the level of free trade and walls against Mexico, and the objections of the Republican intellectual class, derive from basic anxieties about the fate of the country that cannot be discussed in polite company, but which everyone knows are the real issues.

Here is where Trump is generating support, and it goes far deeper than trade policy and immigration. He is acting as the icebreaker for the rest of us, plowing through the frozen seas of Marxist thought control known as political correctness, shattering one shibboleth after another. The effect is to free up society to have the discussions which are prevented by the iron masks to which people have submitted, or which have been placed upon their heads, by the actions of left-wing intelligentsia trying to make society “safe” from white people and their attitudes and beliefs.

When Chinese dynasties changed they had a period called “the rectification of names”, when all the politically correct labels were replaced and people could go back to calling things by their real or habitual names again. Inevitably the new dynasty would create its own set of prohibited terms and changed expressions. For a brief few years, people could talk freely.

We have not been able to talk freely for fifty years about race, religion, class, sex, or any of the important issues of life. The promise of Trump is that for a little while, maybe even longer, it will be possible to talk about what most people think are the real issues, not those chosen for us by the increasingly fatuous National Review.

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Post script: Rush Limbaugh said the same yesterday.

LIMBAUGH: It’s something really simple . . . They’re fed up with the modern day Democratic Party . . . The Republican Party establishment does not understand this. They do not know who their conservative voters are. They’ve over-estimated their conservatism . . . They’re not liberals. They’re not Democrat. Many of them do not want to be thought of as conservatives for a host of reasons. So somebody who comes along and is able to convey that he or she understands why they’re angry and furthermore, is going to do everything to fix it, is going to own them. What’s happening here is that ‘nationalism’–dirty word, ooh people hate it–and ‘populism’–even dirtier word. Nationalism and populism have overtaken conservatism in terms of appeal.

Life is about life, which is biological and inherently racial, tribal or national (depending on the scale of aggregation you consider). It is not essentially about markets, trade, or technical innovation, though we hold these to be naturally good things. When the underlying anxieties of people start to concern themselves with the question”will we exist in 50 years?”, then the kind of anti-white racialist talk and action which is tolerated by the official conservatives and encouraged by the Left start to become the issue. Thus to discuss Trump is often to discuss issues that the post-World War 2 consensus had banished, and wished would go away, but will not.

And this is what has official conservatism concerned. The topics of which they are masters have been declared irrelevant, and no one gives a damn for their views. National Review could banish the brilliant British mathematician John Derbyshire from its pages for his frank discussion of what white people must do to be safe against black criminality, but National Review cannot banish the issue he raised or the anxieties Americans experience for their continued existence.

 

George Jonas

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George Jonas exceeds my capacity properly to eulogize him: my acquaintance with him was exclusively through his newspaper writings and a very occasional video.

I will venture to say that he has been Canada’s most important public intellectual, exceeding even Conrad Black. Jonas has served as a pillar of right thought and action for his entire career. He has opposed Naziism, Communism, and the latter’s home-grown derivative, political correctness. He has stood for freedom when it was unfashionable and inconvenient, as it almost always is.

His was a life of action and reflection. Much of his practical reflections were based on flying and motorcycles, his passions, and I can relate to any man whose life encompassed more than just ideas, but speed, flight, danger, and, in his younger days, picking up attractive girls, and in even younger days, escaping Communist Hungary.

I am told he was the best of friends, and a fine poet. I regret that I have not been acquainted with him personally, while an appreciation of his poetry may lie in the future.

Guy Gavriel Kay wrote this obituary in the Globe.

 

His sort of brother-in-law Conrad Black [they had both been married to Barbara Amiel]  had a few words this week in the Post, as a sort of preliminary to his full eulogy.

Others have written eloquently, in the National Post and elsewhere, of the sadness of the death and greatness of the character and achievements of George Jonas, poet, writer, and intellectual, who died last weekend. There will be a secular remembrance occasion in due course, at which he asked me to give a eulogy; so I will not pre-empt myself here, but only repeat what I said when his family asked me to say a few words at his burial. Though we met and were brought together because, decades apart, we married the same woman, and that would not normally seem a matrix for close friendship, George became one of the dearest and wisest friends I, and I think anyone, ever had. He was a great man, who can never be forgotten or replaced.

Let me speak for a moment about Hungarians and the country they come from. Jonas was a refugee from the 1956 uprising against Communist rule in his native country. I think the Hungarians are a special people. Among them are numbered some of the most important mathematicians and scientists of the 20th century, including Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Albert Szent-Gyorgy and not dozens, but verily hundreds more. I do not know what is in the genes or in the water, but I have not met an ordinary-seeming Hungarian. I have met Jewish Hungarians, Catholic Hungarians, and Protestant Hungarians. I have yet to meet stupid Hungarians. Its culture allows a free rein  brilliance and eccentricity.

If there is one thing I could wish for the future of this country, it would be that Canada could nurture such brilliance and mental rigor as a matter of course. George Jonas found his home here, for which we may all be grateful. Where shall we find another of his likeness? Only by encouragement of talent, and by educational discipline,  are such people nurtured and found.

So let us do one thing in memory of George Jonas: let us recognize and encourage such independence of spirit and breadth of mind in our fellow man, and if that means we suffer fools less gladly, it might be a start, though by no means the whole, of an approach to developing a national culture of merit. For surely Jonas had great merit, which can be appreciated in the depth of his wisdom that we were privileged to have known.

__________________________

His website is here.

Kai Murros

This man must not prevail! But not before you see his lecture. No pussy-footing with this guy. A genuine white nationalist.

Quotes:

“psychopathic capitalist class and their parasitic minions”.

“complete annihilation of the decadent academic class.”

“to become a monster to protect those you love”.

‘the epicentre of the global capitalist system must in the coming years suffer the violent convulsions of the national revolution”

“the iron will to rebuild, recreate, and rejuvenate the nation”

He apparently means what he says and I am interested, if not baffled, why he has not come to the attention of thought control authorities. Oh well. Genuine national socialism must be so powerless as to leave the authorities amused by its presumption.

Murros preaches an unadulterated Nazism, a term which is seldom applied correctly: a combination of racial romanticism, utopian fantasy, anti-capitalism and anti-Marxism, and appeals to violence. I can hear Ferric Jaggar and the Iron Dream in the distance.

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It has nothing to do with Islam! You racist!

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Dilbert – An Elbonian start-up invented a new kind of computer mouse.

Angry Green Guy – Wait until I tell the world that you compared Elbonians to mice, you racists!

Angry Green Guy- Hi. I’m Dick. From the Internet.

Wally – We’re familiar with your work.

Which brings me to the subject of Western fatuity, and Mark Steyn’s brilliant observation, on hearing people argue about safe spaces and trigger warnings, a few weeks ago, that “this is what we will be debating when the mullahs nuke us”.

And the best one of all is from Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, an Iraqi-born secular humanist out of Washington DC, who dissects the western response to Islam deliciously as follows:

“It must be incredibly frustrating as an Islamic terrorist not to have your views and motives taken seriously by the societies you terrorize, even after you have explicitly and repeatedly stated them,” the author began.

The author then launched into a mock Monty Python-type exchange between a “self-loathing” liberal and an Islamic terrorist about exactly who is responsible for Islamic acts of terror — and what the motivations are.

It began with the Islamic terrorist’s declaration that “we did this because our holy texts exhort us to …”

The liberal is having none of that: “No, you didn’t.”

And then things get really interesting:

“Wait, what? Yes we did…”

“No, this has nothing to do with religion. You guys are just using religion as a front for social and geopolitical reasons.”

“WHAT!? Did you even read our official statement? We give explicit Quranic justification. This is jihad, a holy crusade against pagans, blasphemers, and disbelievers.”

“No, this is definitely not a Muslim thing. You guys are not true Muslims, and you defame a great religion by saying so.”

“Huh!? Who are you to tell us we’re not true Muslims!? Islam is literally at the core of everything we do, and we have implemented the truest most literal and honest interpretation of its founding texts. It is our very reason for being.”

“Nope. We created you. We installed a social and economic system that alienates and disenfranchises you, and that’s why you did this. We’re sorry.”

“What? Why are you apologizing? We just slaughtered you mercilessly in the streets. We targeted unwitting civilians — disenfranchisement doesn’t even enter into it!”

“Listen, it’s our fault. We don’t blame you for feeling unwelcome and lashing out.”

“Seriously, stop taking credit for this! We worked really hard to pull this off, and we’re not going to let you take it away from us.”

“No, we nourished your extremism. We accept full blame.”

“OMG, how many people do we have to kill around here to finally get our message across?”

 

Britain wants every book people read recorded

Sorry, wrong headline but what if that was true? How does that differ from this headline “Britain wants every website people visit recorded”?

The British government plans to make telecommunication firms keep records of every website that customers visit under a new law regulating cyber-snooping.

The draft Investigatory Powers Bill is designed to regulate authorities’ access to Internet activity, replacing a patchwork of laws, some dating from the Web’s infancy.

Steyn nails it

The immaculate Mark Steyn on freedom of speech:

Alas, we have raised a generation of But boys. Ever since those ridiculous Washington Post and AP headlines, I’ve been thinking about the fellows who write and sub-edit and headline and approve such things – and never see the problem with it. Why would they? If you’re under a certain age, you accept instinctively that free speech is subordinate to other considerations: If you’ve been raised in the “safe space” of American universities, you take it as read that on gays and climate change and transgendered bathrooms and all kinds of other issues it’s perfectly normal to eliminate free speech and demand only the party line. So what’s the big deal about letting Muslims cut themselves in on a little of that action?Why would you expect people who see nothing wrong with destroying a mom’n’pop bakery over its antipathy to gay wedding cakes to have any philosophical commitment to diversity of opinion? And once you no longer have any philosophical commitment to it it’s easy to see it the way Miliband and Cotler do – as a rusty cog in the societal machinery that can be shaved and sliced millimeter by millimeter.

The point of all the Islamic outrage is to render Islam beyond discussion. This effort is abetted by liberal stooges. Two facts it is dangerous and soon to be illegal to notice aloud.

Pat Condell on our precious little twits in universities

The precious benefits of free speech, even if they have to be uttered alone to a camera in an upstairs room. Thanks to the Internet, Pat Condell competes with US loudmouths.

“Intellectual moral vermin”

“A poisoned crop spray”

“Progressive bubbles of righteous intolerance that we still call universities”

“Militant progressive puritan bigots.”

“A valet parking of the mind.”

Suck on that, Allan Rock, you creepy enabler of progressive bigotry.