Monthly Archives: May 2016

Julie Burchill on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party in the UK

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On the continuing discussion of anti-Semitism in the UK, this, of course, gets right down to it: Labour Party “Jew-hatred” is cynical bid for Muslim vote.

The strange fruit which was allowed to blossom by a Labour Party, smug in its anti-racist credentials, has turned the party into a rotting edifice fatally riddled with the ancient disease of anti-Semitism.

The long, lonely road here started with the perfectly ­reasonable desire to be anti-racist and ended up poisoned by what I call Paint-Chart Politics.

PCP is the equally illogical inversion of conventional racism – in this case, the furthest-from-white is always right.

And, hence, the Labour Party has found itself supporting a sexist, homophobic, nihilist death cult – Islamism – just because the majority of those who practice it are dark skinned and the majority of Jews white.

Not an ounce of decency in it, nothing moral or fair-minded, similar to Labor in Australia. It’s only the votes that matter and values go up in smoke.

Where the triumphs of human genius may lead

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I’ve been reading my way through at a quite leisurely pace a quite instructive book by John Simmons with the title, The 100 Most Influential Scientists: a Ranking of the 100 Greatest Scientists Past and Present. What did amaze me was how many I had never heard of, including one Rudolph Virchow, ranked 17, who had discovered, if that is the right word, the biological cell sometime during the nineteenth century. Quite an amazing man (which left me wondering about my own education in that I had never before heard his name). But it was this passage by Simmons that really made me stop:

Virchow became politically engaged after investigating a typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia, home to the oppressed Polish minority in Prussia. As part of a commission formed by the government after revelations in the press, Virchow travelled to the region and issued a report which found that the fundamental causes of the epidemic were social. This was the first of Virchow’s political thrusts, and he prescribed for the epidemic “democracy, education, freedom and prosperity.” He asked rhetorically a question that resonates no less clearly today than in the nineteenth century: “Are the triumphs of human genius to lead only to this, that the human race shall become more miserable?” (Simmons 1997: 90)

It is something I have been thinking about as I work on the third edition of my Free Market Economics, since whatever else prosperity has or has not done, it has not brought happiness and contentment. Not good, but perhaps also not possible.

Trump is also helping us work out which commentators should be ignored from now on and into the farthest future

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Conservative is not defined as idiots who prefer a socialist of the opposite party in government than a person closer to their own perspective representing their own party if not every conservative box is ticked. This is George Will – quoted at Powerline – demonstrating that he is long past his use-by date:

Were [Trump] to be nominated, conservatives would have two tasks. One would be to help him lose 50 states — condign punishment for his comprehensive disdain for conservative essentials, including the manners and grace that should lubricate the nation’s civic life. Second, conservatives can try to save from the anti-Trump undertow as many senators, representatives, governors and state legislators as possible.

This man is a certifiable loony and to think he has been seen as a respected commentator for two generations. These are the same people who prefer Labor to the Libs if the more conservative party is led by someone on the left. Here is a reply to what Will has written from the Powerline comments section in relation to Trump. Something similar could be written about Australia. You know, like how perfection is the enemy of the good.

George Will is a prissy little girl in a bow-tie. He is the future of nothing. His views on Trump, like those of the worthless National Review, are foolish, exaggerated and wrong. The certitude folks express here about Trump losing 50 states. Jeez. Is that wishful thinking, or do you all have dead people whispering in your ears? I think it is just as likely Trump wins in a landslide.

I get the negatives on Trump. Who can miss them? He wears them like a billboard on his orange head. But stop dismissing Trump supporters or rather, voters who might vote for Trump over Hillary as idiots and uninformed imbeciles. That simply isn’t true, certainly not in all cases.

I tire too of the conservative purity test. Reagan granted amnesty to illegals, got Marines killed in Beirut because at the time he was as ignorant of the middle east as Obama is today; Nixon invented the EPA; Romney was never a conservative; George W. Bush? One of America’s worst presidents. I get that he’s a nice guy. He’s also a Christian proselytizer, who looked in Putin’s eyes, and saw his soul (Putin gave it up long ago), found democracy in the beards of tribal crazies, got us into two wars he managed to lose, passed a prescription drug benefit for old white people that still costs billions. Did I mention that he spent money like a sailor in a whorehouse?

Conservatives? Really? Conservatives have done NOTHING in almost 60 years to curb the growth of government. Trump is no damn white knight. But right now America is run by a big-eared ignorant ass, who gets his advice from people of color Marxist ideologues he met in Chicago or college, and twenty-something pinheads who never worked outside of government.

On his worst day, Trump would be better than them. Try looking at it this way. Cruz thinks the system works, that he can fix it. You want idiocy? There it is. The system can’t be changed. It will roll along, getting bigger and bigger and more inept until it caves in.

Trump may even be the only man in the race who understands this. And he will in no way, no matter what he does, be worse that pompous self-absorbed ass Americans put two times into the white house.

Doesn’t look so tiny to me

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Alerted by Andrew Bolt, there is a throwaway comment in Miranda Divine’s column today in the Daily Telegraph: RAGE OF THE TINY DELCONS.

Just 14 per cent say they are less likely to vote for the Turnbull-led Coalition. That’s the delcon community, small but noisy.

Since there are no Green or Labor people in that number, only those who might vote Coalition, that seems like 14% of the 50% of the country likely to vote for the Libs, that is around a quarter of those who voted for the Libs last time who are now thinking about other options.

See what happens when you make public assistance temporary

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Here’s the question: IS THIS THE ONLY FEDERALLY SUBSIDIZED HOUSING PROGRAM THAT ACTUALLY WORKS?. This is the answer:

It’s in Delaware and it turns hundreds of subsidy receivers into independent, working, productive citizens. It’s called “Moving to Work” and Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group found it.

“’Before we started Moving to Work, we had people who were on their third or fourth generation of the same family who were at the same site,’ Rebecca Kauffman, social service senior administrator at the Delaware Housing Authority’s Moving to Work program, told The Daily Caller News Foundation,” Watson reports.

“More than 850 families have completed the program to enter assistance-free living, and 30 percent of program participants became homeowners when they left,” according to Watson. Key to the program’s success is putting a time-limit on how long people can live in subsidized housing, and requiring them to work an increasing number of hours during their tenure.

The Delaware program is one of only 39 pubic housing authorities in the country that doesn’t allow tenants to remain in subsidized housing permanently. There are more than 3,000 pubic housing authorities in the country. Moving to Work was created as an experiment during the Clinton administration. Ya think it might be time to expand it?

There is something radically wrong with the incentive structure facing governments if this really is the way it is in only one percent of programs. And since we have the template, and it is known to work, why does it stop at these 39?

More on the left’s hatred of Jews

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Yesterday I wrote about anti-Semistism on the left in the UK, A reflection on the hatred of Jews, and now there’s another article on the same topic, this one about the United States where the first line reads: Why does the Left hate the Jews?.

The Israeli Jews commit the double crime of insisting upon being Jews and refusing to be sacrificial victims. They were okay, in the Left’s estimate, for about five minutes, back when Israel’s future was assumed to be one of low-impact kibbutz socialism. History went in a different direction, and today Israel has one of the world’s most sophisticated economies.

For the Jew-hater, this is maddening: Throw the Jews out of Spain, and they thrive abroad. Send them to the poorest slums in New York, and those slums stop being slums. Keep them out of the Ivy League and watch NYU become a world-class institution inspired by men such as Jonas Salk, son of largely uneducated Polish immigrants. Put the Jewish state in a desert wasteland and watch it bloom, first with produce and then with technology. Israel today has more companies listed on NASDAQ than any other country except the United States and China. The economy under Palestinian management? Olives and handicrafts, and a GDP per capita that barely exceeds that of Sudan.

I quote this because it has a positive slant but the hatred remains as dangerous as ever since nothing stands still and a downward descent can be very sharply down once it begins. As he says at the end:

Israel isn’t my country, but it is my country’s ally, and it is impossible for a liberty-loving American to fail to admire what the Jewish state has done. And that, of course, is why the Left wants to see the Jewish state exterminated.

And it’s not just the Jewish state they seek to have exterminated. On this issue, there is no reasoned debate and for some no case for the defence.

YET EVEN MORE OF THE SAME: This back to the UK in an article by Nick Cohen: I saw the darkness of antisemitism, but I never thought it would get this dark. Yet this from the first para seems so off base that I found the whole article discredited even before I read the rest:

If you show me an anti-Muslim bigot, I will be able to guess his or her views on the European Union, welfare state, crime and “political correctness”.

Does he mean, show me someone who holds a conservative position on any one of these issues and I will show you someone who holds a conservative position on the others? Anti-Semites attack Jews who are merely citizens who go about their business in no way different from anyone else. If Jews were blowing up buses and murdering Christians in the Middle East in the name of their religion, not only would there be “anti-Semitism”, you would even understand why it might arise. And I doubt I would call such people bigots. So see if you can work out what identifier is missing from his penultimate para:

Allow me to state the moral argument as baldly as I can. Not just in Paris, but in Marseille, Copenhagen and Brussels, fascistic reactionaries are murdering Jews – once again.

These are not, whatever he may believe, “fascistic reactionaries”. If he cannot call them by their real name, he is just as bad as the rest.

STILL MORE: This is why the issue has become so important in the UK just at the moment:

Within a week, Britain’s Labour party leadership was forced to suspend one of its newest MPs and one of its oldest grandees — and both for the same reason.

Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Livingstone both say that they condemn anti-Semitism. They always tend to add that they also condemn “Islamophobia and all other forms of racism,” a disclaimer that always seems a deliberate attempt to hide a hatred of Jews under the skirts of any and all criticism of Islam. What is most fascinating is that all the while they are saying this, they stoke the very thing they claim to condemn.

They pretend that the Jewish state does such things for no reason. There is no mention of the thousands of rockets that Hamas and other Islamist groups rain down on Israel from the Gaza Strip. The comment turns a highly-targeted set of retaliatory strikes by Israel against Hamas in the Gaza Strip into a “brutal” attack “on the Palestinians” as a whole. While mentioning those death-tolls, Livingstone has no interest in explaining that the State of Israel builds bunkers for its citizens to shelter in, while Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields and useful dead bodies for the television cameras, to help Hamas appear as an aggrieved “victim.”

It is the narrative of the “left” on Israel that is causing the resurgence of anti-Semitism. It is not coming from nowhere. It is coming from them. If the left wants to deal with it, they first have to deal with themselves.

Listen Brooks, aren’t Donald’s trousers creased well enough for you?

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There are some people whose views you never forget, and for whom one statement becomes the one thing everyone remembers because it is so grotesque. This is from an article from The New Republic dated August 31, 2009. It is about David Brooks, who The New York Times chooses to call its columnist from the right

In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”

Now there’s a man with acute political judgement, someone you can turn to if you want to see past the superficial and get to the heart of the matter. “His perfectly creased pant” is now often quoted as the most perfect example of stupid in a political analyst in the United States, and there is a lot of stupid to compete. But he won it hands down. And now, showing just how unerring his judgement is, he is back with this: another article that says vote Hillary in that ever reliable more in sorrow than in anger column criticising Trump. To catch the flavour, here are the first two paras:

Donald Trump now looks set to be the Republican presidential nominee. So for those of us appalled by this prospect — what are we supposed to do?

Well, not what the leaders of the Republican Party are doing. They’re going down meekly and hoping for a quiet convention. They seem blithely unaware that this is a Joe McCarthy moment. People will be judged by where they stood at this time. Those who walked with Trump will be tainted forever after for the degradation of standards and the general election slaughter.

This from someone who endorsed Obama and has never rescinded a word of it. It will be the brain dead such as Brooks who may yet get Hillary over the line, but to call Brooks a “conservative” is worse than repulsive and disgusting, it is merely to realise he is a journalist, the modern synonym for liar. There will be not a voter in the United States influenced by a word he says but there are plenty around who think it. But what’s amazing is that he still has the nerve to say anything at all.

BTW does anyone know who the owner of The New York Times happens to be?

AND THIS JUST IN: Here’s a story that won’t surprise a soul: Poll: Not a Single White House Reporter Is a Republican.

Not a single member of the White House press corps is a registered Republican, according to survey results recently published by Politico.

Those results are buried in a story this week on President Barack Obama’s relationship with the press. An infographic posted in the story reveals that not a single one of the 72 members of the White House press corps surveyed by the Virginia-based trade publication identifies with the GOP.

And the more you think about it the more astonishing the bias becomes. Its therefore no surprise to find that “eighty-six percent said they expect Clinton to win” which is the outcome they intend to bring about if at all possible.