Category Archives: Cultural

Kafka as a how-to book

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“Once you have gone through this process you never want to go through this again.”

“The day you realise your government doesn’t actually care about you is the day you grow up.”

“The day you realise your government will actively prosecute you for non-existing crimes, that is a very bad day for you and your country.”

The background to the story is told here by David Solway: ‘Social Justice’ Is About Anything but Justice, where the events take place in Canada.

Most people are blissfully unaware of the havoc wrought by our misnamed “Social Justice” and “Human Rights” ideology until they are themselves hit by a summons, a legal suit or a ruling in law that deprives them of their peace of mind, robs them of productive time and leaves them substantially out of pocket. It is like being struck by a bolt of lightning while believing oneself to enjoy adequate shelter. My wife and I have been struck by such unexpected intrusions into our lives on three separate occasions over the last few years.

Read David’s article and then watch the video. The people who now make it to the top of the political process, mainly on the left but not just on the left, hate middle-class society and culture and are doing everything they can to bring it down. We may have more technical gadgetry today, but philosophically we are a decadent society of losers who hate and envy those who achieve and use pseudo-forms of compassion for the disadvantaged to create wreckage wherever they can.

In episode 73 of The Fiamengo File professor Janice Fiamengo describes her experience, and the significance for all citizens of once-free and just countries, of being dragged through a protracted and expensive quasi-judicial process on false claims easily discredited by even a casual observer.

This Social Justice Tribunal stand as an example of what can happen to a law abiding citizen in a society pushed far off the course of justice by the SJW tyrants now wreaking havoc in the west.

 

“Welcome refugees” is the craziest political slogan of all time

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From The Other McCain

‘Europe Is Already Under an Invasion’

 

On the occasion of the anniversary of the 1848 revolution, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban gave a powerful speech in Budapest:

The situation, my dear friends, is: They want to take away our country! . . . They want us to hand it over willingly to others. To strangers from another continent, who do not speak our language, who do not respect our culture, our laws and our way of life. Who want to replace our way of life with theirs. From now on they do not want us and our descendants to live here, but someone else. . . .

There is no exaggeration in this! We can see it day by day, as great European peoples and nations, step by step, area by area, from city to city, lose their homeland. The situation is such that those who do not stop the migration at their borders will be lost. Slowly but surely they will be consumed. All of this by external forces, international powers that are trying to force it upon us, with the help of their local allies, and they see the upcoming election as a great opportunity for this.

Europe is already under an invasion. If we let it, in the coming decades, tens of millions will begin to move into Europe from Africa and the Middle East. Western Europe is watching this with their hands in the air. Whoever puts his hands up is disarming himself. He is no longer making decisions about his fate. The history of the losers will be written by others in the years ahead. The young people in Western Europe will see it, when they become a minority in their own country and they lose the only thing in the world they can call home. Such forces as now reveal themselves have not been seen in the world for a long time.

Africa will have ten times more young people than Europe. If Europe does nothing, they will kick down the doors, and Brussels will not protect Europe. They do not want to stop the migration, but rather to support it and organize it. They want to dilute and replace the people of Europe!

You may be wondering, who are “they”?

Media financed by foreign groups, and a domestic oligarchy, professional activists . . . agitators, organizers of riots, chains of NGOs paid by international speculators, which can be summed up with George Soros’ name, since he personifies it. This is the world we must fight against, to defend our own.

 

Last July, I reported how Orban’s anti-Soros rhetoric was condemned by some (including the Israeli ambassador) as anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, it is a fact that “professional activists” funded by Soros, along with other “external forces,” do support unlimited immigration to Europe, and havesought to undermine Hungary’s government, which opposes this Islamic “invasion.” Hungary faces an election on April 8 — about three weeks from now — and Orban’s speech could be seen as an effort to rally support for his party and to counter the challenge of the Jobbik party, which is even farther to the right than Orban’s nationalist Fidesz party.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is concerned by a passage of Orban’s speechwhich “reads like a checklist drawn from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” but it must be asked: What is the alternative? That is to say, if the meddling activists funded by Soros have inflamed public opinion in Hungary, so that the nationalist government of Orban is threatened by openly anti-Semitic rivals, do we expect Orban to ignore this threat? And if Orban does a bit of dog-whistling about the “crafty” Soros who “speculates with money,” is that worse than what would happen in Hungary if Orban were to fall, and Jobbik were to gain power?

The Left has sown the wind and is reaping the whirlwind, including an ugly resurgence of anti-Semitism. It is a mistake to blame the reaction in Europe without acknowledging the Left’s role in provoking that reaction. The crisis in Europe is a result of two decades of misguided policies promoted by the elites in Brussels and elsewhere, policies that were supported by many American politicians in both parties. It is reasonable to hope that, if Orban wins a solid victory in next month’s election, this will relieve the pressure against his government, and thereby help suppress the more extremist elements in Hungary.

It is a shame, and also highly ironic, that George Soros has managed to rekindle the toxic politics of European anti-Semitism. It will be recalled that Soros was a Nazi collaborator in World War II, and is it anti-Semitic to despise a self-hating Jew? Yet no one could imagine that the Jews of Europe will benefit from an influx of Muslim immigrants. So it appears that once again, Soros is collaborating with the enemies of the Jewish people, while at the same time causing his own enemies to hate Jews!

What is happening in Europe could be a harbinger of our own future, unless more Americans wake up to the danger of cultural Marxism.

Not only will they sell the rope used to hang them they will feel virtuous in making the sale

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I knew enough of these corporate CEO bureaucrats from my days in the Chamber of Commerce, who are in reality no different from public servants. Unlike the genuine entrepreneurs who built their enterprises from the ground up, the ones who have taken over these large enterprises are often as left wing as a university professor in the humanities. This is Rita Panahi quoting Jordan Peterson on corporate virtue signalling.

“People who are doing this at the corporate level will rapidly get their comeuppance … If you’re operating within a capitalist environment like let’s say the executives and management of Qantas, who are being paid disproportionately well, you don’t also get to be a social radical. And you don’t get to salve your conscience for receiving a pay cheque that’s 300 times the pay cheque of the average worker by pretending you’re a social revolutionary. It’s an appalling sleight of hand.

“In addition, you don’t get to invite the radical leftists into your corporate utopia without opening the door to a major fifth column. If you are naive enough to think that the demand of the radicals for the transformation of your company is going to end with a few requests for language transformation then you’re a complete bloody fool.

“It’s staggering to me to watch the corporate elite types kowtow to the radical Marxists. They do it to virtue signal or because they’re feeling guilty or maybe because they’re facing genuine pressure and don’t want to stand up against it. But they’re playing a game that will punish them intensely.”

“In the early 1970s when it became absolutely untenable for anyone with any moral intellectual pretensions to be on the side of the Communists … the same doctrine went underground and transmuted into this postmodern dogma that completely dominates the humanities and social science end of the university curriculum and increasingly plays a determinative role in the legislative process at every level of government in the West. It’s the same old wolf in new sheep’s clothing.”

Lindsay Shepherd and Mark Steyn

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On the off chance you think the generations coming through to replace us are in some sense onside with the notion of free speech and an open society, then watch this video. As they discuss, argument from the left is reduced to ad hominem forms of personal attack. Since everything is socially constructed everything must be socially deconstructed. White males believe what they believe because it is in their personal interests to believe it. Therefore, nothing white males have to say has the slightest value so far as understanding the world is concerned. Non-white, non-males have the answers and are the only ones anyone should pay attention to, all the more so since truth is relative and never absolute.

In the video, Mark Steyn talks to Lindsay Shepherd, the Teaching Assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada who became internet famous at the end of 2017, when three members of the WLU faculty attempted to destroy her life for having shown a short Jordan Peterson public television clip to her students. She had, however, recorded her interview and then released the recording to the media which stopped them in their tracks, and has, in fact, made her famous. Articulate beyond her years, a product of the modern left though she is, she is a bridge between us and the millennial generation. She describes herself as “the most left-wing member of her family”.

Here as well is the original recording of Lindsay’s inquisition by the faculty at Wilfred Laurier, worth every minute of the 43 minutes it takes to listen to it through.

And if you want to see where this is heading, you should look at this and this. More people in “the shut up business”, as Steyn describes it. However, as one commenter on the MS/LS video said:

Peterson’s command of facts, deep understanding of human nature and group behaviour, and wealth of experience with people in need is a reality the SJWs and post modernists cannot deal with. And it rings true to those who listen to him. And gives them something real to anchor too.

So there is hope, as faint as it may well be.

The Mark Steyn interview comes via Expression, Identity, and the Corruption of the Academy.

Conservatives are everywhere

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Another completely dense article from Janet Albrechtsen, this time on Where have all the conservatives gone? Her first half sentence: “It is premature to read the last rites to Australian conservatism”. As if she’d know. Oddly, just the other day this same issue came up in a letter I was writing, in which I wrote in reply to someone else:

“Conservative” is not a list of policies but a state of mind that values the past and wishes to preserve what we have learned by heart so that it can be passed on to future generations. Border protection is the single most conservative policy of the present day. Lose on that, and everything else disappears. Zero tariffs is not a “conservative” policy in any sense I can think of.

So here is Janet going on about the same thing, but with hardly a sense of what that elusive thing called conservatism is. I will come to the comments in a minute, but first will take you to her last para:

Just as Ronald Reagan was once described as an optimist in a party that had acquired a habit of pessimism, Australian conservatives need a good dose of optimism before they can man up for a long battle over ideas that still matter today.

Missing entirely in her empty screed is mention of Donald Trump, the most conservative political leader of the past thirty years anywhere in the world, and a living example of what a conservative looks like and does. And then these, from the top down, in comments on her article at The Oz.

Mandy6 hours ago
For a prime ministership cut short by Turnbull, the Labor way, Abbott’s legacy is impressive :

stopping the boats, beginning budget repair (getting regulations & spending down), completing beneficial trade deals with Japan, South Korea and China, scrapping the mining and carbon taxes, agreeing to a second Sydney airport, ending wasteful corporate welfare, reducing the public service by 12,000, and abolishing hundreds of unnecessary government boards and agencies.

And, he has said he’s sorry for reneging on the pledge to repeal 18C. He’s acknowledged the wall of opposition he faced at the time – within the parliament and the lobby groups outside of it.He’s said he’s sorry for reneging, what more do you want?

Cultural leadership, no other contemporary parliamentarian can top this -Abbott’s memorable speech, self-penned, for the 2015 dawn service at Gallipoli. A snippet, “So much has changed in one hundred years but not the things that really matter. Duty, selflessness, moral courage: always these remain the mark of a decent human being. They did their duty; now, let us do ours.They gave us an example; now, let us be worthy of it. They were as good as they could be in their time; now, let us be as good as we can be in ours”.

And he’s still providing leadership to this day.From the backbench.Raising the parliamentary bar with contributions via interviews, self penned newspaper articles and speeches such as the Sydney Institute speech on immigration levels (and energy) and his “Daring to Doubt” speech for Global Warming Policy Foundation in London. And the toxic Turnbull and his Team’s reaction to Abbott speaking the truth? They attempt to shoot-the-messenger Abbott, because as Richo has noted, many resent the man they have already knifed, Tony Abbott, because he dares to demonstrate, day after day after day, that the man they chose to replace him as prime minister is a political dud.

sue14 hours ago
We had Abbott and you Janet worked against him in favour of Turnbull. If you have done some research and changed your mind, how about you say so.

Susan12 hours ago
Abbott did not walk meekly away from reforming Free Speech. You omit to tell what we all now know and that it was voted down multiple times in the Liberal Partyroom by your mate Malcolm and his Black hand gang. It was just another little game out of their long planned play book to undermine their PM (Abbott). You still refuse to give any credit to Abbott but it sticks in your craw Janet that Turnbull turned out to be such a vindictive dud, however had he not screwed you over in regards to the position on the Board over one article where you didn’t act as his cheer squad , I wonder if we would be hearing as much criticism of Turnbull from you as we do now?

I’m surprised you too are not making excuses and blaming Abbott, BJ and everyone and everything else for Turnbull’s bad polling. Fact is the man has no Political Judgement, has well and truly alienated what was once the Liberal (Now Turnbull Party) base and seems comfortable and happy for being responsible for driving up power prices, on steroids, now out of the reach of many struggling Families. Young kids and their parents in Australia, not a third world Country (yet), Australia in 2018 who are living without electricity thanks to Malcolm, Bishop, Frydenberg et al’s signing/ratifying the UN Paris agreement.

This is what happens when both Major Parties in Australia are left of centre and it is NOT in the best interest of Australia and its citizens.

Jon13 hours ago
Well Janet it looks like your push to depose Abbot has backfired. I’m pleased you have the grace to cover Turnbull as he is now and not as you hoped he’d be.

Unfortunately Abbot has been trashed so badly it is difficult for him to make a comeback. Who will you anoint this time?

Brian6 hours ago
Cory Bernardi obviously concluded, fighting for Conservative/Christian values within the LP was a pointless exercise.Without conviction at the top, nothing can be achieved. While Turnbull remains, nothing will change. I have concluded that unless a messiah appears on the horizon, (to lead us out of the moral & political wilderness) the abyss is beckoning for Australia

Glencoe12 hours ago
As everyone knows Tony Abbott is the best fighter the Conservatives in the Liberal Party has but Turnbull is too hateful and paranoid to let him loose and people like you, Savva, Van Oneselen and media have hounded him to death each time he starts a topic or comments on poor government policy. If let loose he would be eating Shorten and the Unions but making Turnbull look weak and we cannot have that.

Michael6 hours ago
I attended Jordan Peterson’s excellent event in Sydney last night. We oldies were well and truly outnumbered by young people, particularly young men. When he made a joke about ‘safe spaces’ at universities, the kids erupted with applause. There is hope yet, Janet.

Jordan Peterson in Australia

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Sounds just like JBP everywhere else. And here he is talking to Bettina Arndt.

And if you are just looking for the highlights.

And with Leigh Sales on the ABC.

And on a supposed comedy interview.

This is how this last interview is described.

Controversial Canadian psychologist Dr Jordan Peterson explains to Tom why keeping his room clean is important, why identity politics suck, and why the ABC should be less Marxist.

And the heading is absolutely right: “Jordan Peterson DESTROYS Tom Ballard.”

And this is the audio from his presentation in Melbourne.

Jordan Peterson with Mark Steyn

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From June 2017. About Free Speech. You might even wonder whether this conversation could happen today, never mind a decade from now.

Some quotes from JBP but you need to watch it all for yourself. And there is also Mark Steyn!

“I’ve studied the development of totalitarianism for a very long time and one of the things I know is the issue of ceding control over language, and the Government has carelessly made a precedent and the precedent is compelled speech essentially.”

“I think I am a classical liberal in the old school sense. I am an individualist.”

In reference on the form of sex and gender education that is happening in schools, “people have no idea it is happening. . . . The average person has no idea that it is happening.”

“We take free speech for granted, we actually take our whole civilisation for granted and we don’t understand that it rests on certain foundation blocks and if you remove those blocks all hell will break loose. And I think our civilisation is a whole lot more fragile that people understand and it is also in a lot more peril than people understand.”

“We’re also in a situation right now where your right to say anything about religious beliefs, unless they’re Christian, is seriously in danger, and that’s so dangerous that it’s almost beyond comprehension. It puts us back in Mediaeval times.”

“The patriarchy is just Western Civilisation. Patriarchy is just a code word for that. Governed by their Marxist dogma and post-Marxist dogma, they think it needs to be re-tooled from the bottom up. It makes them natural allies of any other system that opposes our system.”

“Jacques Derrida may be is the most dangerous person of the last forty years.” His writings are the basis for “an all out assault on Western categories of thought. . . . Categorisation is the basis of cognition. And so he has basically made the claim that thought itself is an agent of oppression.”

“As the politically correct movement inches forward. . . . [The Social Justice Warrior types] find a hypothetically vulnerable group – it doesn’t matter what it is – and then they use them as a protective shield while they move incrementally forward and so if you object you are targeted as if you are picking on the poor vulnerable people.”

Why I had stood out was not that I was speaking in generalities but that “I had said there was something I would not do and so had drawn a line so it was the combination of generalities with specificity that made the issue real for people.”

“Many of the kids on the left equate argument for free speech with racism.”

“Why I took these issues on now is because I believe it will be worse later.”

Peterson on how culture wars are fought with some advice of my own

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I went along to hear Jordan Peterson speak last night, and went early since I did have it in my mind that our own ANTIFA types might show up. I suppose it was this story that spooked me. This happened in Kingston, Ontario on the Monday of the same week he spoke in Melbourne on the Thursday.

A woman in eastern Ontario is facing numerous charges after taking part in a protest against a lecture by a controversial Toronto professor.

Police say a 38-year-old woman was arrested near Queen’s University in Kingston Monday evening. . . .

Officials say officers searched her backpack and found a weapon — a metal wire with handles commonly known as a garrotte.

But as it happened, no demos and a very very pleasant night. I won’t discuss anything of what he said during his presentation since he has a couple more to give, but will say he received the loudest applause I have ever heard for anyone, both when he came in and when he finished up. A wonderful evening of reflective thought.

What I will reprint however, as best I can, is his answer to the question that was asked by the lad sitting next to us, who is a trainee teacher, dismayed to the farthest extent about the cultural Marxism he finds at every turn. So his question (one of only five among the around 100 who were still queuing up when the Q&A ended) was how to push back when surrounded by ideological enemies. This, to the best of my recollection and according to my notes, was how he replied.

You are in a war.

If you go along with them you are going to lose.

If you try suicidal forms of resistance you are also going to lose.

The question is how do you fight “ideological possession”*?

You pay attention looking for alternatives and ways to oppose what you see.

But do not make any unnecessary enemies.

If you are going to move forward you need to make a plan and think strategically.

Don’t burn yourself up early. Play for the long run. Do it intelligently and move forward step by step.

You have to always think about what the people you are fighting can take away from you.

And while all that is right, the bit that is missing is a recognition of the crucial importance to help your friends. I am amazed and no little angered by the lack of mutual support for those who take largely the same side but have some difference which becomes all it requires for all too many to separate themselves and declare a fundamental discontinuity between their views and yours.

To take what ought to be a trivial example but is not, Donald Trump deciding for a variety of reasons to place tariffs on aluminium and steel. As it happens, his reasons are sound and sensible – starting from the imperative of ensuring that basic requirements for its war industries, along with shoring up electoral support in potential swing states. But even if you don’t like this particular policy, why join his and our enemies in building an anti-Trump case?

The left never ever on any issue allows the slightest deviance from its core policy front. There are no end of issues for which there is exactly one answer permitted. On our side, it is one thing to explore an issue and wonder about the pros and cons. It is quite another to be subject to some kind of reflex reaction – ideological possession if you will – which does nothing other than help tear down the side you need to succeed if we are not going to be swamped by the next turn of the election cycle.

*Ideological possession = Rote and unthinking answers to genuine social questions. Or as described by someone unnamed somewhere else on a comment on a Peterson video:

“The noise made by a person that has been so fanatically indoctrinated into an ideology that they’re able, quite without conscious thought, to generate a constant stream of sterile, inoffensive, thoroughly orthodox and politically correct platitudes that are almost (but not quite) wholly removed from real meaning and (by design) totally devoid of any visceral human feeling.”

Here are examples from that same Peterson presentation at Queens – but first turn the volume down.

Many of these are apparently students studying at the university.

Jordan Peterson on how to fight the culture wars

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jordan peterson melbourne

I went along to hear Jordan Peterson speak last night, and went early since I did have it in my mind that our own ANTIFA types might show up. I suppose it was this story that spooked me.

A woman in eastern Ontario is facing numerous charges after taking part in a protest against a lecture by a controversial Toronto professor.

Police say a 38-year-old woman was arrested near Queen’s University in Kingston Monday evening. . . .

Officials say officers searched her backpack and found a weapon — a metal wire with handles commonly known as a garrotte.

But as it happened, no demos and a very very pleasant night. I won’t discuss anything of what he said during his presentation since he has a couple more to give, but will say he received the loudest applause I have ever heard for anyone, both when he came in and when he finished up. A wonderful evening of reflective thought. But I will reprint, as best I can, his answer to the question that was asked by the lad sitting next to us, who is a trainee teacher, dismayed to the farthest extent about the cultural Marxism he finds at every turn. So his question (one of only five among the around 100 who were still queuing up when the Q&A ended) was how to push back when surrounded by ideological enemies. This, to the best of my recollection and according to my notes, was how he replied.

You are in a war.

If you go along with them you are going to lose.

If you try suicidal forms of resistance you are also going to lose.

The question is how do you fight “ideological possession”?*

You pay attention looking for alternatives and ways to oppose what you see.

But do not make any unnecessary enemies.

If you are going to move forward you need to make a plan and think strategically.

Don’t burn yourself up early. Play for the long run. Do it intelligently and move forward step by step.

You have to always think about what the people you are fighting can take away from you.

*Ideological possession = Rote and unthinking answers to genuine social questions. Or as described in one of the comments in the video below,

“The noise made by a person that has been so fanatically indoctrinated into an ideology that they’re able, quite without conscious thought, to generate a constant stream of sterile, inoffensive, thoroughly orthodox and politically correct platitudes that are almost (but not quite) wholly removed from real meaning and (by design) totally devoid of any visceral human feeling.”