Monthly Archives: May 2017

The captive and empty minds of the left

Posted on by
Reply

Peter Smith discusses the posturing of the left, giving us a brief list of leftist idiocies, of which, he notes, there are far more to add:

Ever more generous provisions of welfare, health and education are ‘rights’, the denial of which on the basis of affordability is unconscionable.

Taxing the rich is a bottomless wallet for making affordable the unaffordable.

Palestinians are willing to live in peace with Israel, even though their children are taught from infancy to hate, despise and kill Jews.

Islam is a peaceful religion no matter how much godless violence is preached and practised in its name; no matter how clear are the violent riding instructions in the Koran and Sunna.

Our Western past is shameful and we must be penitent in the ways of Obama.

All refugees must be welcomed across our open borders and everything will be fine.

Free speech is a right provided no-one outside of white men is offended; in which case it is hate speech.

Traditional marriage, and male and female demarcations, are dispensable affectations of less enlightened times when gender fluidity was not so de rigueur.

The problem is we are just talking among ourselves. The crucial need is to find some way to get past the sentinels guarding the captive and empty minds of the left from ever having to hear a dissenting word. The question then is whether such minds can be changed which id discussed here. But I do have to say that if watching the news from Manchester doesn’t make someone on the left think again about their political views, I don’t know what will. The closest I can come to a strategy is merely to point out that almost all of the political evils in the world, from the KKK who were uniformly Democrats, to the National SOCIALISTS, to the Italian fascists, to the Stalinists, to the Maoists, to the followers of Castro and Kim, and so on, were people of the left. Wanting a better world is not even the first baby step in knowing how to achieve it, and it is truly the case that no leftist I have ever known has had much of an idea how to go about making this a better world. The aim is always to grab power in the name of the people and the practice is thereafter to keep it for themselves.

June 6th is D(-for Donald) Day when Andrew Bolt will launch The Art of the Impossible

Posted on by
Reply

A reminder: Andrew Bolt has very kindly agreed to launch my book, The Art of the Impossible, in Melbourne on June 6. The details of when and where are found both here and below.

Andrew and I are both bloggers and this book is the first blog history ever published. The book is entirely made up of the posts I wrote along the way to Donald Trump’s election, beginning in July 2016, when I heard him speak in public, right through to the day of the election on November 9, 2016, at least that was the day in Australia.

I will discuss what I think are the merits of the book and why you should read it. What Andrew will discuss we will know only on the day. So come along to hear his views and mine on Donald Trump, his election and his prospects. As it says at the link:

Join Tim Wilms from The Unshackled who will act as chair and moderator followed by two important speakers, Andrew Bolt from the Herald Sun and Steven Kates, author of The Art of the Impossible: A Blog History of the Election of Donald J. Trump as President. Both will discuss the topic of Dr Kates’ book, the lead up to the election of Donald Trump and what has happened since. Patrons can order themselves lunch at an affordable price while listening to the speakers discuss this very important topic. There will be also an opportunity to purchase The Art of the Impossible and have it signed after the event.

The launch is at 12:00 noon on Tuesday June 6. The venue:

Il Gambero
166 Lygon Street
Carlton, VIC 3053

You will also need to pre-purchase a ticket for the nominal price of $6.22 which you can use towards the purchase of the book.

And for good measure, you will also be able to buy copies of Economics for Infants on the day as well and even meet the artist.

Big Brother is monitoring you

Posted on by
Reply

QoL is back up leading off with this: Patriotism, Nationhood and Globalisation. The intro:

Nationalism belongs to the times when humans lived in an associative way and in a familiar and cherished environment, and it has brought mankind to where we are today, god and bad. The future our descendants will have to live in -or survive in- will demand much more from us … and from them.

Even that is more than 140 characters. And somehow related, for those who think they can depend on social media they might want to check out this: Facebook Bans Anti-Migrant Videos After German Woman Shows Beating By Refugees. And you might then like to have a look at Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to become Big Brother.

The Guardian recently published details from a leaked copy of the manual that Facebook gives its thousands of “content moderators,” the people who effectively monitor, police, and determine what we see in our Facebook feeds. What the document revealed is a deeply arbitrary set of guidelines that confuse the moderators who are helping to shape the civil society that millions of people rely on to, as Zuckerberg has put it, find meaning in their lives.

There’s a lot in the specific rules that is problematic, but the biggest problem is that these guidelines were secret at all. In fact, it appears to go against one of the very suggestions Zuckerberg outlined in his manifesto: “The Community Standards should reflect the cultural norms of our community,” he wrote. “The approach is to combine creating a large-scale democratic process to determine standards with AI to help enforce them.”

You will see what he thinks you should see and not see what he doesn’t think you should see. We really should do what we can to protect our own while we still can.

Why is English so eccentric?

Posted on by
Reply

Discussed here. This is a bit but read it all.

English’s weirdness began with its transformation in the mouths of people more at home with vastly different tongues. We’re still talking like them, and in ways we’d never think of. When saying ‘eeny, meeny, miny, moe’, have you ever felt like you were kind of counting? Well, you are – in Celtic numbers, chewed up over time but recognisably descended from the ones rural Britishers used when counting animals and playing games. ‘Hickory, dickory, dock’ – what in the world do those words mean? Well, here’s a clue: hovera, dovera, dick were eight, nine and ten in that same Celtic counting list.

We need to better understand how to defend our own

Posted on by
Reply

This is in re Roger Franklin. I begin with this modern parable for our times:

Republican body slams reporter. This is how it begins.

The Republican candidate for Montana’s congressional seat slammed a Guardian reporter to the floor on the eve of the state’s special election, breaking his glasses and shouting, “Get the hell out of here.”

This is how it continues:

A statement by campaign spokesman Shane Scanlon blamed Jacobs for the altercation, saying that he “entered the office without permission, aggressively shoved a recorder in Greg’s face, and began asking badgering questions”.

“Jacobs was asked to leave,” the statement reads. “After asking Jacobs to lower the recorder, Jacobs declined. Greg then attempted to grab the phone that was pushed in his face. Jacobs grabbed Greg’s wrist, and spun away from Greg, pushing them both to the ground.

“It’s unfortunate that this aggressive behavior from a liberal journalist created this scene at our campaign volunteer BBQ.”

This is what happened next: Body-slamming a reporter just made Greg Gianforte a whole lot of money:

Montana Republican Greg Gianforte’s congressional campaign has raised $100,000 and counting in the hours since he allegedly “body-slammed” Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs.

And this is how it ended:

Republican businessman Greg Gianforte won Montana’s sole House district in a special election Thursday, keeping a seat in Republican hands despite facing assault charges for allegedly attacking a reporter who’d asked him about the GOP’s health-care bill.In his victory speech, Gianforte admitted to the attack and apologized for it. “I shouldn’t have treated that reporter that way,” he told supporters at his rally here.

And for a complete wrap-up of events, there is now this to be read in full, which adds this special feature that you cannot know from being so far away but is easily imaginable:

All presses were stopped, every other story swept aside for continuous coverage of the story in the hopes that it would bring about the Democratic victory they all so desperately wanted.

The media cannot be trusted to get a single political story right. They are of the left and so everything that is said or written by a journalist (with a handful of exceptions) must be read in that light. They will lie, hide and distort as a matter of course. So let me translate what Roger Franklin said the other day into plain English, not obscured by the satirical intent which the left is too obtuse to follow:

If a bomb had gone off during the taping of Q&A, no one at the ABC would say that such bombs are merely part of modern life and you are more likely to be killed by a falling refrigerator than a terrorist bomb.

No one on our side of the fence makes light of any of this. No one wants to see some teenage theologian blowing up anyone, not here, not there and not at the ABC. We are the ones who take all of this as a genuine problem. We are the ones who are disgusted by anyone else taking these things lightly. We are dealing with a deadly enemy who really will roll us over if they can. What part does the ABC play in defending our way of life? I know the part Quadrant plays. So far as the ABC goes, it is a cypher.

And let me finally say this. Anyone who thinks Quadrant has rolled over because they took down the post doesn’t understand a thing about the world in which we live. I have defended anonymous blogging against Mark Steyn who thinks everyone should do what they do under their own name. We have anonymous bloggers here and our comments are also anonymous, and for good reason. As is plain as day, there are dangers by the bushel-load for anyone on the right putting a hair out of line, and there are few enough ready to defend them. No one at the ABC has ever been fired for a thing they said, but to raise your head above the line for a conservative cause has become almost as dangerous as going to a pop concert filled with teenage girls.

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing

Posted on by
Reply

Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.

John Stuart Mill (1867)

This is quite the opposite from “the best advice I can give is for good men and women to bite their tongues and to carry on”.

We live in the best civilisation the planet has yet been able to construct – more free, more prosperous, more tolerant than any that has ever before existed – yet we are very near to descending into a dark age none of us or our children or our children’s children will then ever live to see end of. Just this, going on right now, should scare you into some clear thinking about what is before us and what we need to do: BA BANK HOLIDAY CHAOS British Airways cancels ALL flights from Heathrow and Gatwick after systems go down across entire world causing havoc for British holidaymakers – but airline denies cyber attack. Nihilism is a genuine force in the world. This lovely life we have constructed has enemies as depraved and determined as any we have ever faced, some outside the wall and some within, who would see our way of life obliterated. And make no mistake, they will do it if they can. And they can and will if we let them. And unless we become determined to fight them at every turn, we will lose.

In the world we are in there is one big issue, so large the others near enough do not count.

Donald Trump is our last line of defense. Tony Abbott was on the same path but without the strength of purpose. The Coalition is now led by its own version of Tanya Pliberseck. An inane incompetent fool without a single feature worthy of respect. He is now being pushed against his will to do what needs to be done by others who see what needs to be done. Peter Dutton is emerging from the pack as our own man of vision and character. Our own domestic political miracle, like Trump’s win in the US, was that the Coalition did not lose the last election. We, too, will have one more try.

And it’s true, it’s not anger we need but a clear-headed resolve. We need this to be just the start: Dutton says ‘best outcome’ for Australians fighting in Syria is to get ‘killed over there’ and he didn’t mean our soldiers. I am happy to welcome Janet onto this side of the fight. This was the pull quote in The Australian:

Trump offered up the kind of moral clarity that drove the West to defeat Nazis and Soviet communists.

Trump has offered moral clarity and much else. He offers a will to resist and the means to fight back. We will not get a second chance.

A modern political parable told in four parts

Posted on by
Reply

Fascinating story. This is how it begins.

The Republican candidate for Montana’s congressional seat slammed a Guardian reporter to the floor on the eve of the state’s special election, breaking his glasses and shouting, “Get the hell out of here.”

This is how it continues:

A statement by campaign spokesman Shane Scanlon blamed Jacobs for the altercation, saying that he “entered the office without permission, aggressively shoved a recorder in Greg’s face, and began asking badgering questions”.

“Jacobs was asked to leave,” the statement reads. “After asking Jacobs to lower the recorder, Jacobs declined. Greg then attempted to grab the phone that was pushed in his face. Jacobs grabbed Greg’s wrist, and spun away from Greg, pushing them both to the ground.

“It’s unfortunate that this aggressive behavior from a liberal journalist created this scene at our campaign volunteer BBQ.”

This is what happened next: Body-slamming a reporter just made Greg Gianforte a whole lot of money:

Montana Republican Greg Gianforte’s congressional campaign has raised $100,000 and counting in the hours since he allegedly “body-slammed” Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs.

And this is how it ended:

Republican businessman Greg Gianforte won Montana’s sole House district in a special election Thursday, keeping a seat in Republican hands despite facing assault charges for allegedly attacking a reporter who’d asked him about the GOP’s health-care bill.In his victory speech, Gianforte admitted to the attack and apologized for it.“I shouldn’t have treated that reporter that way,” he told supporters at his rally here.

Surely this is a form of insanity

Posted on by
Reply

Trump talks terrorism while Europe shouts ‘Climate!’:

While terrorism may top President Donald Trump’s agenda, European leaders keep pressing him on climate change and the environment.

French President Emmanuel Macron worked on Trump during lunch Thursday, urging the U.S. president not to ditch the 196-nation Paris Agreement on climate change before getting on a plane to Sicily, Italy.

“My wish is that the United States takes no hurried decision,” Macron said Thursday after meeting with Trump in Brussels. . . .

The Trump campaign pledged to pull out of the deal, which Trump has criticized as being bad for American workers. And he called climate change a “hoax” created by China.

The administration delayed its decision until after its five-country, nine-day foreign trip through the Middle East and Europe. Allies have taken the opportunity to try to take the administration’s temperature on the issue and press him during their time in this beautiful ancient city on the importance of protecting the earth.

Senate Democrats joined the push. In anticipation of the conference, 40 Senate Democrats signed a letter to the president urging him not back out of the international agreement.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters on Air Force One on Wednesday that a decision on the agreement had yet to be made.

He called it a “difficult balancing act” to address climate change while keeping the economy thriving.

“We’re still thinking about that,” Tillerson said. “He hasn’t made a final decision.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who will also be at the G7, told supporters Tuesday at a meeting on the environment that she would press the administration.

“I am still trying to convince the doubters,” Merkel said.

Wanting to protect the environment is not in any way the same as being taken in by the global warming swindle.