Monthly Archives: May 2019

The fantastical project of yesterday

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Two articles which support each other, but written 140 years apart. First the modern one, just from the other day: Ladies, Stop Trying to Have Sex Like Men which comes with these introductory words:

From college campuses to our nation’s boardrooms, women try to pursue sex the way men often do: no commitment necessary. And they’re getting burned.

Then there is this from 1871: Women’s Rights Women. The first few paras are amazing since, apart from the linguistic style, might have well have been written, like the article above, just the other day.

In our day, innovations march with so rapid a stride that they quite take away one’s breath. The fantastical project of yesterday, which was mentioned only to be ridiculed, is to-day the audacious reform, and will be to-morrow the accomplished fact. Such has been the history of the agitation for “women’s rights,” as they are sophistically called in this country. A few years ago this movement was the especial hobby of a few old women of both sexes, who made themselves the laughing-stock of all sane people by the annual ventilation of their crotchet. Their only recruits were a few of the unfortunates whom nature or fortune had debarred from those triumphs and enjoyments which are the natural ambition of the sex, and who adopted this agitation as the most feasible mode of expressing their spitefulness against the successful competitors. To-day the movement has assumed such dimensions that it challenges the attention of every thoughtful mind.

If we understand the claims of the Women’s Rights women, they are in substance two: that the legislation, at least, of society shall disregard all the natural distinctions of the sexes, and award the same specific rights and franchises to both in every respect; and that woman while in the married state shall be released from every species of conjugal subordination. The assimilation of the garments of the two sexes, their competition in the same industries and professions, and their common access to the same amusements and recreations, are social changes which the “strong-minded” expect to work, each one for herself, when once the obstructions of law are removed from the other points….

The advocates of these “women’s rights” may be expected to win the day, because the premises from which they argue their revolution have been irrevocably admitted by the bulk of the people.

People have been writing about “modern” women since the days of the Roman Empire. I wish everyone the best of luck in pursuing the ends they seek in that brief time we have allotted to ourselves, and I mean that with absolute sincerity. I found this quite apt, although the modern example would be to postpone marriage until well into one’s thirties while still hoping for children, but you will see what I mean.

The philosophy of the Yankee mind is precisely that of the Yankee girl who, when she asked for leave to marry at seventeen, was dissuaded by her mother that she “had married very early and had seen the folly of it.” “Yes; but, Mamma,” replied the daughter, “I want to see the folly of it for myself.”

But if you think that’s up-to-date, try this.

It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.

Not everything works for everyone, so no matter what the fashion is, there will always be many who want something else. What seems perennial is the desire to experiment with one’s life, a very good thing but dangerous as well.

A boy with a broad, vacant smile revealing a missing tooth

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“Me — Worry?” cartoon, Stuff & Wilson print, 1914

 
That’s right, the date on that picture, along with the caption, are correct: 1914! The illustrator was Harry S. Stuff and that was his real name. For more, read here, which includes this:

Of all Stuff’s graphic design works, the one that that he is best remembered for was a poster he called “The Eternal Optimist.” On June 24, 1914, a federal Register of Copyright was granted to “Stuff and Wilson” for this illustration of what would later be described as: a “picture of a boy with a broad, vacant smile revealing a missing tooth, and large outstanding ears and uncombed hair, which make him appear half-witted. The words ‘Me — Worry?’ appear directly underneath the illustration”

This has all come out because PDT compared one of the Democrats running for President to Alfred E. Neuman.

POLITICO: What do you think about [South Bend Mayor] Pete Buttigieg? I know you mentioned him once in your rally, but do you think he’s a threat in any way?

TRUMP: Alfred E. Neuman cannot become president of the United States.

Weirdly, when asked, Buttigieg [pronunciation unknown] said he had never heard of A.E.N. which led to this comment:

“Not having heard of Alfred E. Neuman is arguably more disqualifying than resembling him.”

Absolutely un-American.

Jeopardising the ability of civilisation to continue to function

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This is the brilliant picture that comes with this story: After Academia. It begins with a quote from Bret Weinstein that captures much of the intent, but if you have time, read it all.

I keep being invited to talk about free speech on college campuses and every time I’m invited I make the same point: that this isn’t about free speech and this is only tangentially about college campuses. This is about a breakdown in the basic logic of civilisation, and it’s spreading. College campuses may be the first dramatic battle but of course this is going to find its way into the courts; it’s already found its way into the tech sector. It’s going to find its way to the highest level of governance if we aren’t careful, and it actually does jeopardise the ability of civilisation to continue to function.

I will only add that the academic world is mostly about preserving and passing on ancient learning and culture, which it could do so long as universities were repositories of our Christian civilisation. Now they can still teach physics, medicine and perhaps the law, but the social sciences and humanities are a dead zone for original thought and cultural depth. Here is a bit from near the start of the actual article to give you a taste.

Premchand Brian, a friend of mine from Singapore, was until recently studying for a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh. By his own account, he joined the UoE’s Black and Minority Ethnic Liberation Group but was ejected within a couple of months for wrongthink. “I said that ‘cultural appropriation’ is an invalid concept,” he told me, “because 1) nobody can own a culture, 2) even if ‘stolen’ the original owners still have it, and 3) cultural exchange was historically important in human progress and still helps combat bigotry. I was told my ideas were ‘triggering,’ ‘offensive,’ and ‘making people of colour feel ‘unsafe,’ so I was told to retract them. I refused and got kicked out.”

It really is gruesome.

Mark Steyn on Mueller’s conscious sham

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Mark Steyn on village and other forms of idiot. It wasn’t Alexander Downer after all.

The Mueller investigation was a conscious sham: an investigation into foreign interference in the 2016 US election created to cover up high-level domestic interference in the 2016 US election. Which is far more serious. Mueller’s report dutifully did its part, asserting belatedly that it was the so-called tip from a friendly ally (ie, Alexander Downer’s g&t with George Papadopoulos in the Kensington Wine Rooms) that led to the unprecedented “counter-intelligence” operation against a major-party candidate in the presidential election.

The ever expanding FBI/DoJ paper trail suggests otherwise. The FISA applications relied on Christopher Steele, and the FBI knew the Steele dossier was a crock even as they laid its garbage before the FISA judge. It’s not just a lack of candor before the tribunal, but outright perjury. Ten days before the Feds obtained their first warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, the Deputy Secretary of State, Kathleen Kavalec, had Steele’s number, and put it in writing:

Kavalec’s handwritten notes clearly flagged in multiple places that Steele might be talking to the media.

“June — reporting started,” she wrote. “NYT and WP have,” she added, in an apparent reference to The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Later she quoted Steele as suggesting he was “managing” four priorities — “Client needs, FBI, WashPo/NYT, source protection,” her handwritten notes show.

Indeed. He was a hopelessly conflicted MI6 guy. But a foreign spook obsessed with Trump was vital to the FBI – because they had nothing else. Perhaps the most pitiful yet damning part of Ms Kavalec’s memo is this:

She quoted Steele as saying, “Payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami,” according to a copy of her summary memo obtained under open records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United. Kavalec bluntly debunked that assertion in a bracketed comment: “It is important to note that there is no Russian consulate in Miami.”

We shall have more on this in the days ahead.

This election is a character test for Australia

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Scott Morrison gives flowers to his mother Marion and wife Jenny as he takes the stage at the Liberal party’s 2019 Australian federal election campaign

I have just watched the Coalition policy launch in Melbourne, and each party leader delivered an absolute stemwinder of a speech.

The choice right now is whether we preserve what we have or throw it away on unaffordable waste while preserving us from a global warming (aka climate change) that is non-existent.

Mostly on the economy, both what the Coalition will do – like balancing the budget – and what Labor will do – which is drive us into the poor house while plundering every cache of money they can get their hands on. In the PM’s words: “To spend well, you have to know how to manage money”. That is definitely not the ALP’s long suit.

And just for me, at the end the PM added in that they will keep our borders secure: “only the Liberal-National parties can be trusted”. Absolutely right.

It is game on and the election remains a toss up, but now leaning slightly, but only slightly, towards the Libs.

Here is the description from Channel Nine.

The election’s main non-issue gets a mention

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Here’s the story: “Refugees” on Nauru everywhere hope for border policy change.

Refugees on Nauru and Manus ­Island have told officials they are hoping a new government will be elected and tough border security policies overhauled, delivering them a pathway to resettle in ­Australia and New Zealand.

The story comes with this: Parent visa ‘could see 200,000 applications’.

More than 200,000 parents of overseas-born Australians may arrive under Labor’s generous temporary visa, putting pressure on future governments to allow them to stay for good, demographer Bob Birrell has warned.

I’ve always thought that entry into Australia should be similar to applying to be a student at a university where you don’t just show up and demand to be admitted.

Global stocks have tumbled to a six-week low

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taming_the_dragon

It’s the American president being quoted: ‘THEY BROKE THE DEAL’.

He pledged to hike tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods from Friday – rocking equity markets across the world.

US negotiators also want China to clamp down on the alleged theft of US technology.

“For 10 months, China has been paying tariffs to the USA of 25% on 50 billion dollars of high tech, and 10% on 200 billion dollars of other goods,” Mr Trump said in his tweet.

“These payments are partially responsible for our great economic results. The 10% will go up to 25% on Friday. 325 billions dollars of additional goods sent to us by China remain untaxed, but will be shortly, at a rate of 25%.

“The tariffs paid to the USA have had little impact on product cost, mostly borne by China. The trade deal with China continues, but too slowly, as they attempt to renegotiate. No!”

Analysts have now pointed out that the President’s message cost the markets more than $13bn for each of the 102 words in the tweet.

Global stocks have tumbled to a six-week low.

A six-week low. Not quite the end of the world. Free trade must work on both sides, not just on one. That’s what the WTO is there to remind us of. And while you consider the above, you might add this into the equation: China’s Communist Dictatorship Targets American Creativity. And no doubt all of the above is related to this.


ROCKETMAN

 

Inventing the individual has a long history

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Here’s a book you might consider if you are interested in seeing the world in a different way: Inventing the Individual.

Here, in a grand narrative spanning 1,800 years of European history, a distinguished political philosopher firmly rejects Western liberalism’s usual account of itself: its emergence in opposition to religion in the early modern era. Larry Siedentop argues instead that liberal thought is, in its underlying assumptions, the offspring of the Church. Beginning with a moral revolution in the first centuries CE, when notions about equality and human agency were first formulated by St. Paul, Siedentop follows these concepts in Christianity from Augustine to the philosophers and canon lawyers of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and ends with their reemergence in secularism―another of Christianity’s gifts to the West.

Inventing the Individual tells how a new, equal social role, the individual, arose and gradually displaced the claims of family, tribe, and caste as the basis of social organization. Asking us to rethink the evolution of ideas on which Western societies and government are built, Siedentop contends that the core of what is now the West’s system of beliefs emerged earlier than we commonly think. The roots of liberalism―belief in individual freedom, in the fundamental moral equality of individuals, in a legal system based on equality, and in a representative form of government befitting a society of free people―all these were pioneered by Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages who drew on the moral revolution carried out by the early Church. These philosophers and canon lawyers, not the Renaissance humanists, laid the foundation for liberal democracy in the West.

And there is more here as well.

Trump and his tax returns

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Losing money in business is part of the risk of entrepreneurship. For the left in America to raise tax losses as an example of anything only shows their ignorance, and the ignorance of the people who follow them.

This is Rush Limbaugh: Trump Discussed His Business Losses on The Apprentice!. In fact, he wrote them up in one of his books where he discussed the importance of luck in getting things to turn out right. The left are repulsive in so many ways, with this just one more. The video, by the way, is a treat.

RUSH: I have here a show open from Donald Trump on The Apprentice. I want you to listen to how Trump introduced himself as The Apprentice debuted on the NBC network.

TRUMP: My name is Donald Trump, and I’m the largest real estate developer in New York. I own buildings all over the place, model agencies, the Miss Universe pageant, jetliners, golf courses, casinos, and private resorts like Mar-a-Lago, one of the most spectacular estates anywhere in the world. But it wasn’t always so easy. About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back, and I won, big league. I used my brain. I used my negotiating skills, and I worked it all out. Now my company’s bigger than it ever was and stronger than it ever was, and I’m having more fun than I ever had.

RUSH: So the New York Times is breaking these news stories three years ago and then yesterday that Trump lost a billion dollars, that Trump didn’t pay any taxes, that Trump’s a lousy businessman. Trump admitted it all! He admitted it all when doing his intro to the TV show The Apprentice. Trump has never hidden this, by the way.

And yet the New York Times twice now has acted like they have uncovered and discovered the biggest secret Donald Trump wants no one to know, when in fact Donald Trump has bragged about it, talked about it, written books about it. The New York Times has hailed him as the comeback kid. I’ll tell you, folks, the desperation on the part of the left is getting tough to watch here.

RUSH: By the way, that Trump sound bite we just played from The Apprentice in 2004, like 15 years ago. People are making fools of themselves and don’t know it yet, so they’re gonna keep doing it. And we’ll keep monitoring and pointing it out to you.

There is also a discussion of this same idiocy at Ace of Spades: New York Times Bombshell Nothingburger: During the Period When Four of Trump’s Businesses Notoriously Declared Bankruptcy, Trump Himself Suffered Losses and Paid Little Income Tax on the Money He Was Not Actually Making (Due to the Bankruptcies). This comes at the end:

If memory serves, when Twitter and FaceBook-approved Conspiracy Theorist Rachel Maddow announced her BLOCKBUSTER! (nothingburger) Trump tax leak, it turned out that much of the losses in some years was just carried-forward losses from earlier YUGE years of losses.

The idea of this is simple: Let’s say in one year you are absolutely wiped out. You lose one hundred million, and pay no tax.

The next year you earn $100 million.

How should you be taxed? You weren’t taxed that one year you lost $100 million. But should you pay normal tax rates for the next year — say, $50 million in federal taxes.

Or would a rational tax code look at these two years together and say that really, for both years combined, you actually made about zero dollars cumulatively?

Legislators have decided taxing half your money that second year wouldn’t be a fair representation of your actual multiyear-term income, and so they let you take the losses from that one year and carry them over to reduce your income in later years.

But you know, we’re in the End Times now, the Time of Chaos, and Democrats and their media masters (yeah, it’s the media calling the shots now, especially social media tech monsters) will decide that following the law is now against the law.

“No surrender in trying to take back our country”

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UPDATE: With thanks to duncanm who has found the speech online.

Mark Latham unleashes in maiden speech: How did our nation come to this? This is only one passage in a much longer speech.

“Like so many parts of our politics that have changed quickly in recent times, there are voices here who do not believe in the virtues of the West, who do not acknowledge the nation-building achievements of our culture and our country.

“It’s like a scene from The Life of Brian, a case of: What has Western civilisation done for us? Only advanced healthcare and education; architecture, engineering, information technology, free speech and the rule of law.

“ In fact: this chamber, this parliament, in this city, all our public institutions and the material comforts we take for granted — none of them could exist without the greatness of the West. Without the advances that began with the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution and continue to this day.

“Yet still, among the Leftist elites, among the social engineers and cultural dietitians, sneering at our civilisation and its achievements has become their new pastime.

“They preach diversity but practice a suffocating cultural conformity, wanting everyone to be just like them.

“They argue for inclusion but as soon as a Christian, a conservative, a libertarian, a nationalist, a working class larrikin, an outsider from the vast suburbs and regions of our nation disagrees with them, they crank up their PC “outrage machine to exclude them from society. “

They are tolerant of everything except dissenting values and opinions — meaning, of course, they are tolerant of nothing that matters, only themselves.”

Mr Latham said this was a “Leftist curse through the ages: the recurring history of those who so badly crave control over others, they lose control over themselves.”

Lots more along the same lines with this the final para:

“ For those of us who believe in the virtues of Western civilisation, who treasure the advances and values of the Enlightenment … this is the fight of our lives. Our ethos, sir, is simple: No surrender. No surrender in any debate, in any institution, on any front. No surrender in trying to take back our country, That, Mr President, is why I’m here and what I’m fighting for.”