Dated 1874, a year after his death, but it does sound exactly like something he would say:

To suppose that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized nations and barbarians, is a grave error, and one which no statesman can fall into, however it may be with those, who from a safe and unresponsable position, criticize statesmen.

Among the many reasons why the same rules cannot be applicable to situations so different, the two following are among the most important. In the first place, the rules of ordinary international morality imply reciprocity. But barbarians will not reciprocate. They cannot be depended on for observing any rules. Their minds are not capable of so great an effort, nor their will sufficiently under the influence of distant motives. In the next place, nations which are still barbarous have not got beyond the period during which it is likely to be for their benefit that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners. Independence and nationality, so essential to the due growth and development of a people further advanced in improvement, are generally impediments to theirs. The sacred duties which civilized nations owe to the independence and nationality of each other are not binding towards those to whom nationality and independence are either a certain evil, or, at best, a questionable good. The Romans were not the most clean-handed of conquerors; yet would it have been better for Gaul and Spain, Numidia and Dacia, never to have formed part of the Roman Empire?

To characterize any conduct whatever towards a barbarous people as a violation of the law of nations, only shows that he who so speaks has never considered the subject. A violation of great principles of morality it may easily be, but barbarians have no rights as a nation, except a right to such treatment as may, at the earliest possible period, fit them for becoming one. The only moral laws for the relation between a civilized and a barbarous government are the universal rules of morality between man and man.

A very puzzling story I cannot seem to make sense of: Nation divided at school gate as progressives lead white flight. Here are the details:

Since 2002 the City of Yarra council has proclaimed Melbourne’s inner north “a Refugee Welcome Zone’’.

But in this ardently Greens-voting area — and in left-leaning suburbs in Sydney’s inner west — progressive, middle-class families have been accused of avoiding schools with high refugee, ­indigenous or non-English-speaking student populations.

“They are fleeing,’’ African community leader and former refugee Abeselom Nega says of white families who appear to be shunning inner Melbourne schools with large African-Australian student cohorts, many of whom live in social housing. . . .

Ms Ho agrees that even in progressive inner-city areas, parental support for diversity “stops at the school gate’’. Ms Ho says a recent study she co-wrote, focusing on public schools in Sydney’s inner-west suburb of Glebe, revealed how “there’s an acceptance of diversity that stops when it comes to ‘my own kids’. We saw that a lot.’’

Reading the comments section to the story does help me make some sense of it, but mostly it is hard to fathom.

There is another discussion, picked up at Instapundit, on folk songs and in particular, on Pete Seeger. Where we find:

What passed for “folk music” in the 1940s and 1950s, by contrast, was the remnant of English ballad preserved in isolated Appalachian communities, as rediscovered by musicologists. Joan Baez made a specialty of such things. John and Alan Lomax gathered Appalachian music, African-American music, and other scraps and shards distant from the American mainstream as an expression of authentic “folk” culture. The entire “folk” movement was Stalinist through and through (including Woody Guthrie, who was a Communist Party hanger-on and probably a member. How do I know this? My late mother was Arlo’s nursery-school teacher in the Red Brooklyn of the 1940s).

Of course, it was all a put-on. Woody Guthrie was a middle-class lawyer’s son. Pete Seeger was the privileged child of classical musicians who decamped to Greenwich Village. The authenticity of the folk movement stank of greasepaint. But a generation of middle-class kids who, like Holden Caulfield, thought their parents “phony” gravitated to the folk movement. In 1957, Seeger was drunk and playing for pittances at Communist Party gatherings; that’s where I first met him, red nose and all. By the early 1960s he was a star again.

To Dylan’s credit, he knew it was a scam, and spent the first part of his career playing with our heads. He could do a credible imitation of the camp-meeting come-to-Jesus song (“When the Ship Comes In”) and meld pseudo-folk imagery with social-protest sensibility (“A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall”). But he knew it was all play with pop culture (“Lone Ranger and Tonto/Riding down the line/Fixin’ everybody’s troubles/Everybody’s ‘cept mine”). When he went electric at the Newport Festival to the hisses of the folk purists, he knew it was another kind of joke.

Pathetic stupidity. Here is the top comment which captures my mood although he is not hard enough on these cultural vandals.

You know, sometimes I think we overthink these things. John Steinbeck was never an Okie, but he wrote a good book about them, and followed that with a lot of other good books about people he wasn’t. And sure, he was an Upton Sinclair socialist (at least) but he grew up, and his Nobel Prize address is something everyone should read.

Woody Guthrie was a child of the middle class, but he also spent some years as a hobo, and he wrote some good songs that people still love.

Bobbie Zimmerman wrote a helluva lot of songs people loved, and if he was *ever* a lefty, he’s over it now. And he clearly isn’t taking this Nobel Prize thing seriously, unlike, say, Sartre, who practically made a second career out of declining.

What purpose is served by the agita?

As for Pete Seeger, this is what I wrote when he passed away. If you don’t like folk music, or the 1960s folk revival, or folk singers or their politics, well that’s great. If you can think what purpose is served by any of this rummaging through the political past of some of the greatest folk musicians who ever lived, well I would like to hear it. Whatever you might think about their politics, their music is among the treasures of our culture which we must do what we can to preserve and protect. Listening to these critics, I am reminded of Islamists as they topple ancient monuments in the Middle East to prove some political point of their own.

I get asked all the time how I can go to Woody Allen movies when he married his step-daughter and he’s such a lefty. And while I won’t deny that I have my own personal index of Hollywood types I won’t see at the movies, Woody Allen is not on it. I like his movies because they make me laugh and because they are often extended example from a course in Philosophy 101. I also like his movies because they are so conservative. I actually think he crossed the divide into my side of the political divide some time ago, but can never say it since it would ruin his reputation among those who he depends on. If you can go to Cafe Society and not see that he is raising moral dilemmas in a funny way – “you can’t kill someone just because they play their music too loud” was one of the funniest lines I have seen in a movie in a long time, specially since he sets up the situation where you might just think that there is a case. Anyway, this is all in aid of directing you to an article of mine at Quadrant Online, The Left’s Gag Reflex which is a discussion on why all genuine humour is conservative. The left likes to laugh at people and show how superior they are. But for true funny, you have to go to the conservative side. Here is a bit from the article with an extension of the point I make there:

Here is an excerpt from Ann Coulter’s In Trump We Trust:

The media successfully smeared Romney as an out‐of‐touch multimillionaire, whacking working‐class Americans with his polo mallet. He was helpless. Tasteful people don’t talk about themselves, and they certainly don’t talk about money. Not Trump! Early in Trump’s campaign, journalist Mark Halperin asked him about the “backlash against rich candidates like Mitt Romney—any chance of that with you?” Trump said, “First of all, he wasn’t rich.”

And that was that. How do you attack someone for being rich who is constantly bragging about how rich he is? Yes, yes, I’m a WASP, too—it’s appalling, embarrassing, awful—but oh, my gosh, does it work! Luckily, voting machines register only yes or no—not yes, but I hate myself.

I see this as a series of factual statements interlaced with jokes. Various statements or observations, each of which is followed by a funny bit. Here is what she wrote as a set of assertions.

The media successfully smeared Romney as an out‐of‐touch multimillionaire. He was helpless. Tasteful people don’t talk about themselves, and they certainly don’t talk about money. Not Trump! How do you attack someone for being rich who is constantly bragging about how rich he is?

I find her writing pure genius. And because I write other things with the same kind of background research, I appreciate how much goes into it, and even more how much goes into making it look like nothing has gone into it. I wish I could write like that, but such is life. I’m just happy enough that she can write like her, which no one else can, and certainly no one on the left.

ADDING A BIT MORE: I really liked this bit from Faye in the comments and I wish I had said what she said, which is what I certainly think. She was commenting on where I had written, “The left likes to laugh at people and show how superior they are. But for true funny, you have to go to the conservative side.” She then wrote:

I thought you were going on to say that conservatives laugh at themselves and are happy to set themselves up as the joke. I love this. It means they aren’t afraid.

If not being afraid is part of the conservative ethos, I am certainly not that. But laughing at oneself and the ridiculous nature of life is a conservative trait. If you would like to see an example of what I mean, you can go back to an earlier post of mine from four years ago on The best shower scene since Psycho.

I don’t know what to make of this.

One of the differences between conservatives and we classical liberals is that we do humour better than they do. And way better than the left.

Libertarian humour is a fantastic idea, one that would never cross my mind, but at least I can see the funny side in saying it. I definitely do not read Ayn Rand or Mises for their lighter bits. Humour is essentially the preserve of conservatives. You might say Woody Allen or Seinfeld are funny and they are on the left. But that’s just their politics and here we are discussing what makes what they write funny. Where have you seen humour as conservative as in, let us say, Midnight in Paris or Annie Hall or almost any Seinfeld episode? Portrayed is the world as it is, in which we see life with a comic touch. Here is the list put together by The Guardian of the 100 best novels ever written in English. I will pull out the ones that are comic (and note they are in date order only). Almost all the authors are conservative by nature, and even where you might associate them with the left, there is no utopian madness found in any of these.

3. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
5. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
6. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)
7. Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
9. Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (1818)
14. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
18. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
23. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
25. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
49. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925)
57. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)
60. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
61. Murphy by Samuel Beckett (1938)
66. Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
72. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
80. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
86. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
88. Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
96. Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1988)

Now find me anyone funnier than Mark Steyn today or Ann Coulter. The left just laugh at people from their smug superior view from above. To be conservative means not just to understand the human condition but to show sympathy with life’s victims, which is everyone. I was asked the other day for a joke about the Scotch which led me to this (and please also note that final bits of dialogue in the story must be in a Scottish accent):

An Australian goes into a shop selling tartans somewhere in Glasgow and asks for a length of MacIntyre tartan. The shop assistant says that he’s terribly sorry but they have sold out of the MacIntyre tartan. This Australian grabs the shop assistant by the collar, shakes him around a bit, and says look, I didn’t come all this way to Scotland not to be able to buy my clan tartan when I got here.

Just one minute, says the shop assistant, I will check with my boss out the back. So he goes into the backroom, and says to his boss that there is this mad Australian out the front, who insists on having MacIntryre tartan even though I told him we had run out.

OK, says the boss, give him this, and throws him a piece of cloth.

But that’s not MacIntyre tartan, says the shop assistant, that’s Dunlop tartan.

That’s OK, says his boss, Dunlops have been MacIntyres for years.

What is quite interesting about the story is that in this very short narrative there are three different personalities involved, each one of whom is as real as anyone you might meet. It’s the world as it is. No one is trying to prove some kind of subtle political point, although there’s no reason why they couldn’t. It’s really no more than a pun, but the humour is situational. You could actually imagine this as a real-life event.

It is this same absurdist humour you find in Steyn and Coulter. It is essential that you agree with their politics before you find what they write funny, but they both write about the world of politics in ways that make you see reality differently, but also more accurately.

Ann Coulter is the more difficult to appreciate because she is so hard hard edged. There is no writer I admire more since what seems just off the top of her head polemics is actually very well researched analysis of what is going on around us. But her style is brilliant but only someone with the most highly developed sense of irony could pull it off. This is what she does:

1. Make a factual statement

2. Make a joke about what she has just said.

Here is an excerpt from In Trump We Trust from which I have taken the following.

The media successfully smeared Romney as an out‐of‐touch multimillionaire, whacking working‐class Americans with his polo mallet. He was helpless. Tasteful people don’t talk about themselves, and they certainly don’t talk about money. Not Trump! Early in Trump’s campaign, journalist Mark Halperin asked him about the “backlash against rich candidates like Mitt Romney—any chance of that with you?” Trump said, “First of all, he wasn’t rich.”

And that was that. How do you attack someone for being rich who is constantly bragging about how rich he is? Yes, yes, I’m a WASP, too—it’s appalling, embarrassing, awful—but oh, my gosh, does it work! Luckily, voting machines register only yes or no—not yes, but I hate myself.

You know, I laughed when I read it for the first time in August and I laugh at it again now. This is funny even with a serious point. What is there on the left that is the equivalent of that? As for libertarians, I won’t even ask you to look since why search for unicorns when there are other things to do with your life.

BTW if you haven’t read Ann Coulter, or Thomas Love Peacock, it’s time you did.

Ancient ‘thinking person’ statuette unearthed in Israel, ancient as in 3800 years old.

The Israel Antiquities Authority said on Wednesday the jug, dating back to what archaeologists refer to as the Middle Bronze Age, had been found during an excavation in Yehud, a Tel Aviv suburb.

“It seems that at first the jug, which is typical of the period, was prepared and afterwards the unique sculpture was added, the likes of which have never before been discovered in previous research,” said Gilad Itach, who directed the excavation, which included teenage diggers.

The statuette is about 18 cm (7 inches) tall.

“One can see that the face of the figure seems to be resting on its hand as if in a state of reflection,” he said.

This is Peter Smith at Quadrant Online:

Among other things, commonsense tells you that the private sector creates wealth not government; that we can’t go on spending more than we earn: that wind and sun cannot generate base load power; that free speech is a bulwark against despotism; that marriage is between a man and woman; that children should not be confused into believing that their evident gender is a societal construct; that all cultures are not nearly equal; that a religion whose creed preaches supremacism, intolerance and violence is not benign or peaceful; that civilised society cannot exist without borders; and that there are bad people who wish to do us harm and have to be deterred by force of arms.

I’m not sure if there is any constituency left for these kinds of views. In this regard, I might mention this posting under the heading All Cultures are Equal at SmallDeadAnimals in which it might be said that she is taking the same side as Peter. Obviously they share a view that is on its way out. The teaser in this second story reads:

“The monkey pulled off one of the girls’ head scarf, leading men from the Awlad Suleiman tribe to retaliate by killing three people from the Gaddadfa tribe as well as the monkey…”

I’m not sure what we are supposed to make of that, but there you have it.

The title of the article is Alexander Hamilton, Immigration Skeptic, and if this quote is accurate, he was certainly that. It is therefore interesting that the non-white-by-design cast of Hamilton of all things decided to give the VP-elect the benefit of their views on diversity. Here is the real Alexander Hamilton.

“The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family.

“The opinion advanced in [Jefferson’s] The Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? There may, as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule. The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities. In the composition of society, the harmony of the ingredients is all-important, and whatever tends to a discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency.

“The United States have already felt the evils of incorporating a large number of foreigners into their national mass; by promoting in different classes different predilections in favor of particular foreign nations, and antipathies against others, it has served very much to divide the community and to distract our councils. It has been often likely to compromise the interests of our own country in favor of another. The permanent effect of such a policy will be, that in times of great public danger there will be always a numerous body of men, of whom there may be just grounds of distrust; the suspicion alone will weaken the strength of the nation, but their force may be actually employed in assisting an invader.”

And whether he was right or wrong, these are views at least fifty years out of phase with the time in which we live.