Monthly Archives: March 2016

Why does no one know this about Donald Trump?

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Here’s the heading: Trump insisted on including Jews and blacks at Palm Beach golf course in 1990s and here’s what it says:

“When Donald opened his club in Palm Beach called Mar-a-Lago, he insisted on accepting Jews and blacks even though other clubs in Palm Beach to this day discriminate against blacks and Jews. The old guard in Palm Beach was outraged that Donald would accept blacks and Jews so that’s the real Donald Trump that I know.”

Is there more to the story? There always is, but not a bad place to start. Read the full article, but it’s the kind of principled position that makes him so unusual in the world of politics as it has become.

Mass immigration and the end of Western civilisation

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Here is the question, posed in the title: Does Immigration Mean The End Of Western Civilization?

Once you get beyond the handwringing about racism and fascism, Raspail’s polemical—at times frantic—novel is really about this collective loss of soul. A culture is in the end a way of life, even an identity. When one grows to love all the particular customs and traditions of one’s culture, it can be very much like loving a person. It is something unique in the world, and it belongs to you.

And soon the territory will belong to others of an alien culture. Little of what we once knew will survive. Why it will matter less than it might have is that the generation to come are already barbarous, so will meet the invaders half way and eventually split the difference. As for Mozart and Shakespeare, where are they now anyway?

Which would you rather be: highly intelligent, extremely good looking or very wealthy?

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We were talking on the weekend about which of the following attributes we would choose if we could choose only one while the other two were in the normal range: intelligence, good looks or wealth. Most of us chose intelligence, which shows the kind of people I typically hang out with. Nor do I think a review of this book on The Curse of High IQ would have made any of us change our minds.

The book makes the point that high IQ people have a harder time in the world since much of society is set up for the average. Those with a high IQ end up wasting a lot of time because the average person wants to buy lottery tickets with a check or doesn’t seem to mind standing in line or wasting time. Because of this, a high IQ person’s time is wasted since they spend much of it waiting or being annoyed by those who are average. Friends are hard to make because high IQ people have fewer people statistically to choose from. And marriage or partnership? Clarey says it is difficult. For example, abnormally intelligent men face two unique problems when it comes to dating:

1. Very few equally-intelligent women to choose from
2. Not caring because their hormones are rendering their massive IQs completely useless.

These men end up choosing a “hot, crazy matrix” until they are 30 and more experienced.

But this ends with a lot of pain and difficulty. Had the man been average, he might have had more choices and partners to choose from–and not suffered from as much angst and difficulty.

Not that, in my experience, most people of high intelligence are any the happier for it, whereas wealth and beauty can do many things that make for a very nice life. Yet each can also be a curse. But possibly the most intriguing part about having high intelligence is that unless you are recognised as such – you are an Einstein, say – most other people will think you’re an idiot, while no matter how smart you are or you aren’t, you will think your intelligence is superior to everyone else around you.

I bet it’s more than say the same about Hillary

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For these people it is life and death so they have a reason to get this one right. And this is the story: Poll: 61% of Israeli Jews say Trump is Good for Israel.

A new poll by the Independent Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University reveals that Jewish Israelis prefer a Republican to be the next U.S. president — and that 61% say that Donald Trump is friendly to Israel.

If the other 39% really believe the opposite they are also unlikely to know which way is up.

Nikki Savva and journalistic ethics

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I still recall my amazement when Peter Costello chose Nikki Savva as his media advisor. She was the ideological twin sister of Michelle Grattan, Michelle at The Age, and Nikki at the Herald Sun. Media advisor was, I suppose, different from actual policy but nonetheless, she was every inch a know-nothing leftist. It is why I have never paid attention to a single thing she writes and am always surprised to see her as a supposed spokesperson for the right side of the political divide. Everything she has written about Abbott might as well have been written by the ALP media team. And now she has written a book about Abbott’s years as PM and the role that Peta Credlin played, without bothering to talk to either! This is how Credlin has replied to Nikki this morning: Niki Savva’s Road to Ruin: politics is now unsourced gossip.

I always thought a dignified ­silence was the best way to deal with Niki Savva’s attacks. They were personal, invariably founded on unsourced gossip and rarely made any attempt at balance.

I have always just got on with the job. I felt my 16 years of service to four Howard cabinet ministers and time in opposition, including as deputy chief of staff to Malcolm Turnbull, said more about my ­record than any bile from Savva but she was never interested in the facts.

Then, like now, she hasn’t ever wanted to speak with me — including in preparation for her book. Her colleagues in the Canberra press gallery would often ask me what I had done to warrant her attacks. People were often taken aback when I responded that I barely knew her.

It is one of the golden rules of journalistic ethics to provide a right of reply to anyone you’re going to criticise. In the end, journalists are supposed to weigh up the contributions and seek their own truth, but to not want to hear the other side of the story is extraordinary.

It is extraordinary. It also makes her book worthless as an objective account of what went on.

FROM THE COMMENTS: This is a direct quote from Nikki Savva picked up by Aaron:

“As a journalist I lied often, usually about my sources, but about other things, too.”

Not even occasionally but “often“. How weird it is to confess to this in print. The story is by Laurie Oakes as well, definitely not someone out to get her.

An opportunity to find out for yourself what passes for modern thought

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There is an article of mine in the latest Quadrant which has been put up online. It is a review of Roger Scruton’s latest book, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. It is as good a book as you are likely to read on political theory in the modern age. How good? This good, taken from a review in The Guardian:

This polemic adopts the abusive and paranoid style it decries in its leftwing opponents.

Abusive, absolutely. It’s a short book and has to cover much territory by cutting to the chase. Paranoid, if this book doesn’t scare you, you must already be on the left. I, on the other hand, describe the book like this:

The book has a specific purpose. It is to provide a way of escape to students who are caught up in various versions of a modern humanities course, where they are fed an endless mind-numbing postmodernist gruel. The book goes through the various manifestations of the modern Left to explain their idiocies and unravel the Newspeak in which they are encoded. But the book does more. It opens up to those of us who are only vaguely aware of the ways in which the humanities are now taught, our own entry into the depths of a problem most of us are, at best, only dimly aware of. . . .

Scruton explains why everything you know, believe and understand about the world can be instantly dismissed by these people through the revolutionary perspective of Grand Theory. And here we are discussing nearly every one of the major philosophical thinkers of the modern age: Hobsbawm, Thompson, Dworkin, Sartre, Foucault, Habermas, Althusser, Lacan, Deleuze, Gramsci, Said, Badiou, Žižek and many others still who do not make it into chapter titles.

Unless you are a specialist in postmodernist philosophy, you will know next to nothing about most of them. Yet these are not just the major authors who people the reading lists of courses in Cultural Studies, but it is their views that underpin the content of the media and political discourse across the West. These people may be as loopy as it is possible to be, and their works near-unreadable nonsense, but they inform our debates and are the essence of politically correct discourse. You cannot avoid any of it. What Scruton offers in Fools, Frauds and Firebrands is an opportunity to find out for yourself what passes for modern thought, provided in a way that you will understand not just their content, not just their dangers, but also their incredible idiocy. This is where one of the most crucially important battles of our time is being fought, and unless you understand what is taking place, you will be unable to do a thing. That is why you should read this book. If nothing else, you will understand the nature of the icebergs that have ripped through the hull of the cultural ship of the West and why it may soon sink into oblivion.

The aim of this post is to get you to read the review. The aim of the review is to get you to read the book. But all of it is to get you to understand the intellectual world in which we live and the dangers we collectively face. Roger Scruton is one of the very few who can explain the depths of these problems in a way you can understand. But he can only do that if you read what he has written which is what you should do.

Progressive institutionalism and the National Review

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An article that lays out the retreat from conservatism, as exemplified by the National Review.

The central question of our time is not who is or what is conservative. The real question is the National Question. And Donald Trump has risen to that challenge better than any candidate since Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The truth is that Donald Trump has filled an enormous political vacuum—one that National Review has refused to acknowledge even though they helped to create it in the first place.

Contains a video of Robert Welch from 1958 who I had never seen speak before.

About those nonadmitted foreign workers and farmers

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Ludwig von Mises, in his The Clash of Group Interests published in 1945, looks at open borders as if the only issue revolved around economic returns. It is over the question of open borders that the left and right completely coalesce. It is where grand theory utterly obliterates reality and common sense. Australia and New Zealand, in the passage below, are mere examples, the best he could find at the time. Today it is the United States and Europe, to the extent that anything is left of their original structures, that are specifically under assault by such thoughts.

The root causes of present-day group antagonisms must be seen in the fact that we are on the point of going back to a system of rigid castes. Australia and New Zealand are democratic countries. If we overlook the fact that their domestic policies are breeding domestic pressure groups fighting one another, we could say that they have built up homogeneous societies with equality under the law. But under their immigration laws, barring access not only to colored but no less to white immigrants, they have integrated their whole citizenry into a privileged caste. Their citizens are in a position to work under conditions safeguarding a higher productivity of the individual’s work and thereby higher wages. The nonadmitted foreign workers and farmers are excluded from enjoyment of such opportunities.

I don’t know what can any longer be done about such stupidity other than to recognise that there it is, and take the appropriate actions to save what you can while you can.

We have reached peak insanity. Repeat: peak insanity

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refugees in greece

Refugees break down a gate on the Greek-Macedonia border.

Here is The Guardian Subhead that goes with the picture and its caption:

I can insist this is an image of heroic, defiant, brave refugees, trying to make us live up to our liberal values. But to terrified European eyes they are the other, the enemy

It comes via Five Feet of Fury who calls the post We have reached Peak Guardian. Repeat: Peak Guardian. I am generally at a loss anyway observing the judgements of others about politics, but is it really that hard to accept that maybe, just maybe, those of us who worry about border protection might have a point?

The hand of God

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And it’s not just the hand: Scientific paper which says the human hand was designed by a ‘Creator’ sparks controversy:

It says human hand coordination “should indicate the mystery of the Creator’s invention,” and concludes by again claiming the mechanical architecture of the hand is the result of “proper design by the Creator.”

The evidence of design is all around us. But if you think it is all just random chance you are welcome to your belief in the multiverse which has got to be the least probable outcome anyone has ever conceived.