Politics – Page 4 – Barrel Strength

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Elites and Brexit

There is a strange notion going about, which has only been gathering strength for twenty years or more, that common people do not have a right to be concerned, let alone express concern, for the enormous hidden (to the upper classes) costs of living with aggressively intolerant minorities, of having one’s peace disturbed by the over-privileged spokespeople for those minorities, for the decayed social trust, the increased need to lock your house, for the inability to enforce social norms – like taking out the garbage in a timely way or keeping the common halls clean – for fear of being accused and taken away to the police station for racist incitement. Not to mention the costs of de-Christianization in terms of tribal/national solidarity, and the increasing atomization of society under the impact of multi-culturalism, and its intolerant legal requirements imposed on the native population. What else? A general contempt for the native working classes and an apparent desire to see them replaced with cheaper foreign workers.

There has been, and continues to be, a stupefaction as to why people are becoming upset, and Marie-Antoinette’s “Qu’ils mangent du gâteau” seems to be a widespread reaction among the beneficiaries of these changes.

The people have just told the elites to stuff it, and the elites are flabbergasted at their effrontery.

Tribe

Sebastian Junger has written several books of lasting importance, including War and his latest, Tribe, on Homecoming and Belonging. I recommend you read both.

This from Tribe:

The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a non-working underclass has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. By the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded and the unlucky. In today’s terms that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. These two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of year in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs –and more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought — will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.”

Sex: we are having more of all kinds

A statistically robust study reports that more Americans are engaging or have engaged in homosexual activity over the course of the last forty years. The change is caused by people who report having had sex with both men and women and not by the growth of the exclusively homosexual.

“People over time are reporting more same-sex sexual experiences than ever before,” said Brooke Wells, a social psychologist at Widener University’s Center for Human Sexuality Studies.

The behavioral trend, reflected in an annual survey conducted between 1973 and 2014, was fueled largely by people who had sex with both men and women. There has been little change in the number of people reporting exclusively homosexual behavior.

The changes were reported Wednesday in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. The research team included faculty from Widener, Florida Atlantic and San Diego State universities. A total of 33,728 people answered the survey over the 41-year period.

The number of U.S. adults who said they had at least one same-sex sexual partner doubled between the early 1990s – that question wasn’t asked earlier – and the early 2010s, from 3.6 to 8.7 percent for women and from 4.5 to 8.2 percent for men. Bisexual behavior rose from 3.1 to 7.7 percent, accounting for most of the change.

The survey found that only 1.7 percent of men and 0.9 percent of women said they had exclusively homosexual sex.

This study discredits the figure of 10% that was given for homosexual population, which was a political fiction of the gay lobby.

The surprise for some will be how to reconcile ideas of gay and straight with the fact that some people, a growing minority, report engaging in sex with both men and women. The difficulty lies in deep- rooted ideas which are held by the straight and the gay alike.

People have been brought up in a language that defines us as either gay or straight, like an immutable Platonic ideal. Some are spheres, some are cones. No cross over, ever. So sexual orientation is a category, a classification, rather than an activity. The gay movement has never, to my knowledge, deviated from this ideological stance, and neither has the Anita Bryant crowd.

The line the Gay Lobby peddles is that people are immutably gay or straight, that homosexuality is an innate condition, that one is born that way, and that to deviate from this view is a heresy.

I recall Cynthia Nixon, a star of the late series Sex and the City, once dared to offer some non-conforming views. She has had both male and female lovers. She expressed herself this way about it:

She recently caused controversy among the gay community when she told The New York Times that homosexuality was a personal choice for her.

The notion that she had a choice in the matter outraged the ideological orthodoxy of the gay movement. [Yes, Dorothy, there is such a thing}.

But now, Cynthia Nixon has sought to clarify her comments further in a statement to The Advocate, telling them that bisexuality is not a choice, but her decision to be in a homosexual relationship is.

The same people who would be outraged to hear that intelligence is 75% inherited, for instance, foam at the mouth when it is suggested that some people might exercize choice in the sex of their partners. How can bisexuality not be a choice, when the sex of one’s partner is a choice? How can free will have a role if the one’s sexual orientation is 100% inherited?

The only way to make sense of this distinction between an inherent ‘bisexuality’, and a free choice of a person to bed a man or a woman, is that ‘bisexuality’ is being abstracted into another kind of Platonic essence distinct from one’s actual choice of bed partner, which is an activity. So we are back to the Platonic solids again, and we simply add a dodecahedron to the sphere and the cone.

I object to the abstracting of an essence from a pattern of activity.

At various times and places, in various cultures and religions, homosexual and heterosexual relations have been practiced by one and the same person without any social stigma, and at other times and places, in other cultures and religions, homosexual activities and desires have been repressed by force of law, religion and culture, and self-repressed in consequence.

We happen to be in one of those rare moments in time when we can observe that our culture, for better or worse, is transforming from an extremely homophobic one to something somewhat more tolerant. But we are still carrying around two incompatible ideas in our heads: that homosexual activity is not a choice, but is the expression of an immutable pre-existing condition, and that somehow the fact that it is not really a choice makes it all right. It is okay to have same-sex sex if we belong to Team B, but not if we belong to Team A. That would be wrong. Team A should never cross over into Team B. That would be like going to the dark side. If people choose to have homosexual sex, then somehow it is wrong, but if they have no choice in their orientation, then somehow it is okay.

The gay political movement has accepted this specious argument. So have most straight people. The data reveal that, as sexual attitudes change, and repression lifts, more people either admit to homosexual activity or, as I think, feel free enough to indulge in it. There cannot be a near doubling of ‘bisexuals’ in forty years if sexual orientation is genetically immutable, like eye colour. But if our behaviour is mutable according to fashion, and levels of repression, or the absence of repression, then we can and do change. To ascribe the propensity to have sex with one sex rather than with the other as ‘genetic’ seems a completely unnecessary stretch.

Our language and thinking are still embedded in the previous era. Even if we have become more accepting of ‘gays’, we still firmly believe that people ought to be one or the other.

To use the word ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ in this sense is to use the language of Platonic abstractions. I do not think for second that all those men and women , those 8.2 percent of men and 8.7% of women in 2014, are ‘gay’. Neither does calling them ‘straight’ add to our understanding. They are just people having sex.

Except for that small minority of people who are exclusively homosexual (1.7% of men and 0.9% of women), I think it is misleading to categorize people who have had sex with their own as well as with the opposite sex as ‘gay’. Sex is an activity, not a condition. Something we do, not something we are.

This is Heresy #1 to both Team A and Team B. If sex is something we do, rather than a condition that we are, then sexual activity is rather more like preferring golf to tennis, than it is like being Protestant rather than Catholic, and more like both of them than it is to be blue-eyed or brown eyed. “He’s a golfer, but plays good tennis too”. Why do we have no trouble with this formulation, but feel awkward with “he likes women, but plays with the men too”? Why is sexual orientation treated as the Big Deal of identity politics? Because we are uncomfortable with sex.

I can see a strictly Christian view of the matter would say that sex should only occur inside marriage. (I do not agree but I can see the consistency of the claim). I can see a socially conservative view that would prioritize the claims of children to a stable home environment over the claims of parents to sexual freedom, and thus that, regardless of sexual activities, child-rearing must prevail over all other claims. I agree with this view.

That society must give priority to child raising is not in question. What ought to be in question is our either/or attitudes, held by Team A and Team B alike, that one’s choice of sex partner is the exclusive result of an immutable genetic disposition. The right of people to engage in sex with their own sex, or with the opposite sex, should be a free choice of the will and not, as gay identity politics would have it, an expression of something as unchangeable as eye colour.

We have bought into the existence of pain-inducing and false abstractions, which hinder our understanding of ourselves and the human species. Both sides of the gay/anti-gay debate seem to have accepted these Platonic abstractions as real . Contrary to ideology, many more people seem to be acting on the realization that one’s sex partner is a choice of the heart and the will, and not the expression of an immutable biological condition. A future age will wonder what on earth we meant to do when we divided the world into ‘gay’ and ‘straight’. We are just human. We can be sexually attracted to almost anyone in some conditions, and attracted to no one in others. Dividing the world into the Platonic abstractions of gay and straight hinders us from understanding both ourselves and other people.

The violence at Trump rallies

For years, in the Obama regime, naturally, blacks have been attacking whites and Asians in sudden but premeditated assaults, which came to be called “the knockout game”. You can read all about it here. Have you just heard about it? In that case you may have been dwelling on the planet of liberal media.

But one Trump supporter attacks a black agitator being removed from a Trump rally, and we have a national crisis of violence? No, what we have is a member of the white race punching a member of the liberal mascot victim group, American blacks. That is the crisis. Liberal victim groups are sacred! It is the only sacredness admitted by the Left to exist. And when whites, the most despised social group in Obama’s America, finally summon the courage to react to anti-white racism and discrimination, to the flooding of their country with uncontrolled immigration, to the decline of their living standards, and most important of all, to the endless attacks on their moral integrity for the crime of simply being white, well, folks, that is a a crisis of the most serious kind in the hegemony of leftist thought.

Here is a link to Ezra Klein’s heavy breathing on Trump’s “ideology of violence”. Klein writes:

The topic was protesters, and Trump’s frustration was clear. “They’re being politically correct the way they take them out,” he sighed. “Protesters, they realize there are no consequences to protesting anymore. There used to be consequences. There are none anymore.”

“Our country has to toughen up folks,” he continued. “We have to toughen up. These people are bringing us down. They are bringing us down. These people are so bad for our country, you have no idea.”

This is more than an aside; this is the core of Trump’s ideology. The protesters who interrupted his rally, the political correctness that kept the police from cracking their skulls, the press that takes the hippies’ side — this is why America has stopped being great. We were strong, and we were tough, and we didn’t take this kind of shit from anybody. And now we are weak, and we are scared, and we take this kind of shit from everybody.

I know intimately the tactics of the Left. They demonize, since rational opposition to their views is impossible. They never argue; they only seek one’s social exclusion. They incite the violence and then blame the victim of their violence for causing it. Trump had to shut down a rally in Chicago because of the threat of violence from a Left-wing organization, funded by Soros, yet that lickspittle National Post is blaming Trump.

This will continue and intensify until Trump wins the election. Make no mistake what this election is about: it is the reaction of the white race (and all other sensible people, but whites especially) to its systematic denigration and exclusion from its place in the moral universe. The Left wants a racial fight? It has got one, and it is going to get more vicious, because it MUST be won, for the future of the American people. America will not long survive if its founding political culture is destroyed by the destruction of the white race. Since the Left insists there is something particularly evil in being white, I am allowed, and Americans are allowed, to insist there is some particular virtue in the political order it upholds. Race-ism is a grievous moral distortion, but as a short-hand way of saying it, the political culture that made America great will not long survive the moral extinction planned for whites by the political Left. The attack on political correctness by Trump is an attack on everything that is wrong with America under Obama: of which the ideology of Saul Alinksy, Michael Moore, and Black Lives Matter are but exemplars.

You wanted this fight, you commie nihilists. You got one. Let liberals deplore all they want. This is a fight that must be allowed to play out.

Toeing the line: such are the joys of a controlled broadcasting sector

One of my animating passions is the importance of the Internet for freedom of expression. You do not have to get your blogging licence renewed annually for $56.00 from the CRTC (just send your money by credit card to the Minister of Finance – they make it so easy and convenient to pay). Nor do you have to conform to the CRTC’s broadcasting exemption order, which gives you the right to “broadcast” across the Internet without a licence if you conform to its provisions.

As a blogger you do not belong to the regulated universe of broadcasting. You sit down to the computer and write, post pictures, upload videos, and voilà, your blog is ready for however many or few people can be attracted to it.

Broadcasting is a different matter. From the beginning, broadcasting has been heavily regulated by the state for cultural, economic and political purposes, everywhere in the world. The original justification was that broadcasters used precious radio spectrum, which is a public resource, and that signal channels needed to be assigned to particular uses and users so that interference would be prevented.

But once the hand of regulation was laid on broadcasting, the grip has never ceased nor its hold lessened.

Take for example, the leading issue of our time: the role of Islam in our future. Europe has been convulsed with a refugee migration, numbering in the millions, of young males who have been taught by their religion and society that they are conquerors of women and that non-Muslims are fair game for assault and rape. Mixing young Muslim men from unreformed societies into the modern world of Europe: what could possibly go wrong?

Just about everything. But you are not going to hear about “Asian” sex slavery gangs in Britain, or mass sexual assaults in Europe from your carefully controlled state broadcasters. No sirree! The carefully controlled public and private broadcasters exercize restraint and discretion in how they treat outrages committed by Islamic street trash.

Breitbart London reports the a top German journalist has admitted that the state broadcasters take their orders from the “political class”.

A retired media boss at a major German state broadcaster has admitted his network and others take orders from the government on what — and what not — to report.

National public service broadcaster Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), which was recently forced into a humiliating apology for their silence on migrant violence and sex assault is being drawn into a fresh scandal after one of their former bureau chiefs admitted the company takes orders from the government on what it reports. He said journalists received instructions to write news that would be “to Ms. Merkel’s liking”.

Former head of ZDF Bonn Dr. Wolfgang Herles make the remarks during a radio event (from minute 27) in Berlin where journalists discussed the media landscape. Moving on to the freedom of the press, the panel chair asked Dr. Herles whether things in Germany had got “seriously out of whack”. With an honesty perhaps unusual in Germany, Dr. Herles replied that ordinary Germans were totally losing faith in the media, something he called a “scandal”. He said:

“We have the problem that – now I’m mainly talking about the public [state] media – we have a closeness to the government. Not only because commentary is mainly in line with the grand coalition (CSU, CDU, and SPD), with the spectrum of opinion, but also because we are completely taken in by the agenda laid down by the political class”.

“We are completely taken in by the agenda of the political class”.

There is nothing unusual or surprizing in this admission; German media are no more directed by government than are Canadian, and if they are, it is irrelevant to the argument I am making.

Broadcast media are the slaves of the agenda of the political class. Their enslavement is manifested by government regulation, by whose grace and favour they hold their licences, and to government funding, which keeps them alive. And no one should imagine that private broadcasters are any the less enslaved to government licences because they are also enslaved to private sources of advertizing revenues.

[Take our own broadcasting system as a case in point. We have only to consider Lisa LaFlamme of CTV news hyping every story of political incorrectness and victim-mongering versus the relative calmer national broadcaster, to see the truth of that assertion].

Can you think of one issue of importance in contemporary life where the broadcast media have not toed the line laid out by the political class? Islam? Anthropogenic global warming? Mass uncontrolled immigration?(in the US), multiculturalism? Political correctness?

Toeing the line: all feet come forward the same distance and height

And can you think of a single important political issue since 1990 where the contest against it did not start in the unregulated blogosphere? Certainly talk radio in the United States has assisted the expression of non-conforming thought. Yet the overwhelming case against the preferred positions of the political class have had their origin and found their audience through the blogosphere.

The most important function of the controlled media, here and elsewhere, is to persuade you that opposition is useless, vain, even insane, and that despite what is before your eyes, you must doubt what you experience and conform to the vision laid out by the media. You are alone; you are powerless to resist. No one thinks like you. You do not speak in public what you feel in private. I call it the Iron Mask of political correctness. It is placed over all of us, and it is our duty to notice it and take it off.

The liberation that came with the Internet – an unlicensed and democratic medium – was to allow people to identify themselves and not be alone, to make it easy for small groups to form who could share their disbelief in the false gods set before them by the national media to worship.

Some views expressed on the net are crazy, some bad, some vicious. Of this there is no doubt. But the negatives are eclipsed by the enormous increase of freedom of opinion made possible by the freedom, efficiency, and ubiquity of the Internet. The means of expression has been liberated from government licensing, for the time being. Let’s keep it that way.

Toeing the line: Government regulation of the broadcasting sector

All Trump, all the time…part(3)

Wow, things are moving fast. I drew attention to the attack on Trump from National Review magazine and the Great Pundit of Pundits, Scott Adams’, analysis of it. In his Master Persuader theory, he added another layer at the BOTTOM of the pile, that of capitulation. That is, after Identity, Analogy, and Reason have all failed to convince, capitulation means throwing the empty gun at the monster. That was NR’s anti-Trump issue and their capitulation to Trump.

Now, NR produces another screed which is nothing but a dumpster full of insults for Trump fans and supporters. For example:

“…[T]he candidacy of Donald Trump is something that could not happen in a nation that could read.
This is the full flower of post-literate politics.
Thomas Aquinas cautioned against “homo unius libri,” a warning that would not get very far with the typical Trump voter stuck sniggering over “homo.” (They’d snigger over “snigger,” too, for similar reasons.)”
…blah, blah, blah.
John Nolte at Breitbart takes this to task admirably(National Review Goes Full-Snob). For me, I have not seen quite such a spiteful, arrogant and contemptible assault on voters from any political party from any source over many years. Further, it’s not the political left, for we expect it from them, it’s the GOP Establishment, the GOPe, doing it, showing their inner contempt for ordinary folk who actually do real work in this world. It really is the final proof that they have totally lost it. NR is now cat box liner. A sad end for a once influential magazine.
Allow me to pay homage to the Master Persuader theory by adding yet another layer at the BOTTOM of the list below capitulation—self-immolation. To illustrate this, the first rule when stuck in a hole is,…stop digging. Not content with “throwing the empty gun at the monster”, NR sets about furiously digging a deeper hole for its own grave, standing in the pit, and spontaneously self-combusting. And, may I add, to the cheers and applause of the onlookers.
One has to wonder what these folks in the GOPe have between their ears, because it sure ain’t brains. If they want to alienate a huge chunk of their base vote, they’re going the right way about it. If they want to win the White House, make an alliance with the most powerful asset, do not antagonize it. If they want voters to support their program do not tell them they are idiots. Lord have mercy, these folks have the political IQ of a sack of hammers.
There’s nothing special about me, I fit pretty clearly on the right wing of the Republican Party. But when I see the GOPe trashing the most dynamic candidate EVAH, I throw my hands up in despair. Whatever misgivings I have about The Donald, I’m even more in favor of him now, and I’m willing to bet that there are a lot of others like me.
Rebel Yell

Immune deficiency disease

A friend sent me an article asking if Europe was bent on self-destruction, and as you may be sure, answered to the effect that it is. You do not have to look far to find it: decline of faith, decline of mission, Muslim invasion, hatred of Israel,covering up Islamic atrocities, blaming white people for everything are among the symptoms. David Goldman, who blogs as Spengler, is a firm exponent that Germany in particular is spiritually sick and demographically ruined.

Since my time in college, back in the late sixties, an eruption of anti-intellectual, anti-white, anti-male and anti-Christian thought has marched through the learning institutions, such that kids graduating from school are firmly in the grip of Marxian opinions without the bother of actually knowing anything, as it seems. While the economic claptrap of Marx has been abandoned, the mindset inculcated in universities is largely hostile to those institutions, beliefs and customs that make life as rich and free as it is in the West. Spineless self-hatred seems to be the order of the day.

This deduction could be the effect of reading too many conservative blogs, or it could be an actual phenomenon out there in the real world. The Islamic refugee invasion permitted by Chancellor Merkel testifies to the fact that what I am talking about is out there in the real world.

To cite Herbert Marcuse’s seminal article, Repressive Tolerance, from 1965:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: … it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word.

And so forth. The malign effects of the Frankfurt School seems to have gained an impressive victory over everything standing in its path. Its influence is the lasting inheritance of largely German, and almost exclusively Jewish, Marxists or Marxians. (Jürgen Habermas is an exception).

It is not unusual for there to exist powerful alternatives to the dominant ideology in a liberal society. What is unusual these days is that the dominant ideology seeks the destruction of the society that tolerates it in our universities and guardian institutions. Many tenured intellectuals seem to be generating the rot on which they feed, as termites take down the house in which they dwell.

Western self-hatred and self-disgust is not, I would argue, a natural phenomenon, or the waking up to the sins of the past, but is the calculated result of the poison we have allowed to drip into our veins from the writings of Marxists and their successors. But why have we allowed it? And why has it been so successful?

The difference in post World War 2 western societies is that the cultural anti-bodies have been so weakened that we have no longer have sufficient defences against these poisons. In my view, however mistaken it may be, multiculturalism is not in substance tolerance – which is a worthy state of being in certain circumstances – but is used and promoted as an antidote to remedy the whiteness of our civilization, which is a defect that needs fixing. Anyone familiar with a truly multi-cultural society, such as Lebanon, India, or the Balkans, knows that truly different cultures are not a source of strength, but act as much as fissures for sectarian and cultural strife. Look at French and English Canada, Walloon and Flemish Belgium. These are mild compared to serious religious differences. When two cultures in the bosom of one state cannot agree that God is powerless to make 2+2=5, then the differences go to the root of one’s apprehension of reality.

And how did we arrive here?

I blame Adolf Hitler. His poisonous ideology of racial supremacy and his wars of annihilation had to be defeated and stopped, as they duly were. But the reaction against Hitlerism and its associated white supremacism has been endless. In every department of inquiry, the inherent differences between and among people, sexes, races, nations and cultures have been ignored, and discussion of them made too expensive, too risky. Thus for instance, despite all the strong and unequivocal evidence for the predominant influence of genes on intelligence, such findings are systematically discounted. The mention of male-female differences by a Harvard President cost him his job and the possibility of being US Federal Bank Chairman, yet, for example, the most important woman mathematician ranks 140th in the list of the world’s most important mathematicians.

As Charles Murray demonstrates in his Human Accomplishment, the overwhelming preponderance of important scientists, musicians, authors, and artists who have ever lived were white, and came from very specific regions of Europe, which have changed over time, from around Florence to the Low countries and England. Don’t believe me? Read the book. The detail, the maps, the facts will persuade you. As Murray observed, the entire scientific output of Islamic civilization is ranked less by scientific encyclopedias than that of Michael Faraday.

So why then, have our cultural anti-bodies become so weak? Every being in nature is constantly beset and invaded by germs, and would-be parasites. Likewise every society is constantly exposed to ideas hostile to its beliefs,customs, and institutions. What is decadent and abnormal is that we accept the views of ourselves promulgated by our enemies, internal and external. And of the two kinds, the internal are the more serious long term threat.

I know that my liberal friends may think this is nuts; they believe that we are strong because we are so open. I say we are open because we are strong, but that the source of our strength lies not merely in openness, but a belief that we are right. And that belief has been systematically sapped for generations by leftist spiritual termites.

Where is the can of Raid?

Trump?

Scott Adams on Trump

Periodically I can do you no better service than refer you to an article that makes better sense than anything I could write.

This is Don Surber, commenting on how only Scott Adams of Dilbert has captured how Trump is succeeding in blowing everyone’s brains out.

Here is Scott Adams talking about how we make political decisions. Observe this picture. Which tool reminds you of Trump?

As Scott Adams explains:

My hypothesis predicts that you laughed when you saw the huge drill next to the other tools because you instantly knew it was the Trump tool. No thinking required. But I’ll bet you started feeling your rational mind kick-in to identify Cruz and Rubio. And that’s my point.

Trump is operating on the reflex part of your brain, and intentionally. The other candidates are appealing to your reason. That’s the phenomenon I saw back in the summer, and why I predicted Trump will win in a landslide. He isn’t winning the game so much as playing an entirely different one.

You know Trump’s babbling, repetitive, content-free, happy-talk? Every bit of it is engineered persuasion. While the other candidates talk statistics and reason, Trump speaks to your emotions. He knows people will pick the strong, decisive, optimistic leader over the candidate that agrees with their own views. We are wired that way. Reagan didn’t win over so many Democrats because his arguments were strong. He won them by emotion. After the fact, people assumed his policies must have been brilliant too. (Cognitive Dissonance.)

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.

Carbomania

Periodically the public seems to put its wrists together and asks government to handcuff it to higher taxes and more regulation. Such was the news this morning as Prime Minister Trudeau and his provincial counterparts gather to devise fresh ways to make us poorer through taxation and regulation.

I would say that, as a legitimator of collective action, global warming hysteria has been the most successful left-wing plot of all time. It makes Marxism look like the kludgy effort it really was.

Why bother with dreary economic ideas of “exploitation” – the Marxist equivalent of sin – when the very air you breathe out is filled with minute quantities of CO2? Sin! Now it is not merely the capitalist class which is to be supplanted; today everyone is guilty. So everyone can pay up! Genius!

So tax us more, please, to end anthropogenic global warming.

A warming that, so far as we can tell, has not been occurring for 19 years.

A warming that, so far as we can tell, is wholly within the range of normal climatic variation.

A warming that is producing longer crop seasons, shorter winters, and receding ice in the Arctic- though not the Antarctic.

The young think we deniers and skeptics will disappear and then we will live in a carbon-neutral utopia, with no more voices of dissent – dissent about anything really.

Sometimes it is necessary to live long enough to know that some cycles are just that, some processes work themselves out over time. If you have not lived sixty years, you will not have seen the rise and fall of cholesterol.

If you have not read history you will be unaware that almost every conscious being in the 1940s assumed that capitalism was on its way out and that a planned economy was the only way to go.

In 1940, Friedrich Hayek published “The Road to Serfdom”. No writing at the time more thoroughly disagreed with the consensus that planning was the way of the future.

Hayek’s argument was that the substitution of commands (regulations) for prices led inevitably to social and political tensions and distortions, which led to conflicts that would eventuate in the rise of the Strong Man who would come to power on the promise of putting an end to the chaos. In part it was an explanation of what happened in Germany, but in the main it was an attack on central planning, the consensus belief of its time, and hence on the Soviet Union.

I cite Hayek because we need to remind ourselves of the importance of cycles in thought. Today it seems that the central planners have fashioned a fool-proof legitimation for themselves, their rule, and the taxes to support them, for ever. To disagree is to be a heretic; to be against “carbon” regulation is to be against every belief of the bien-pensant establishment.

To be against carbon taxation and the massive global warming-inspired (oops! climate change) energy policy errors which we are about to make is to isolate oneself socially, not just intellectually. One does not want to turn oneself into a bore for the sake of truth – any more than is absolutely necessary. Some errors are just too large to fight in a social context.

I have been here before, in the pro-Communist 1970s, when Soviet agents of influence like Gwynne Dyer droned on about how we were all going to have to get used to a future where the Soviet Union was a permanent feature of life, and the Great Powers, the USA and the USSR, were morally equivalent.

There are days when I have to remind myself that the Soviet Union was actually taken seriously by Western intellectuals, to encourage me to face the coming dark age of carbon regulation and government sponsored poverty-creation with something approaching equanimity.

Barrel Strength

Over-Proof Opinion, Smoothly Aged Insight

Category: Politics