Category Archives: Cultural

Mark Steyn discusses Bill Leak and the HRC

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It only occurred to me in writing the heading that HRC are also the initials for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Unbelievably appropriate, but in this case we are dealing with the Human Rights Commission. It’s an obscure title – Complications and Curating – so let’s get to the point:

One of the reasons I’m in favor of Hillary Clinton being decisively defeated next month is because a Democrat victory, bolstered by a five-four (or six-three, or seven-two) majority on the Supreme Court, will be disastrous for free speech in the United States. President Obama has just declared that the “wild wild west” of the Internet has to be “rebuilt” to “flow” through “some sort of curating function” – because apparently the ever less subtle filtering of Big Social (the Twitter and Facebook monopolies, the Standard Oil of our time) are no longer enough. What’s next? As I had cause to remind the Democrats during my Senate testimony, too many prominent members of their party are already wholesale enthusiasts for the criminalization of dissent – a position that renders politics both irrelevant and impossible. Think of the most repressive safe-spaced college campus in America: that’s where the whole country’s headed.

And some advice on how The Australian should run its case:

The likes of Commissar Soutphommasane are not interested in a debate with you; they’re interested in eliminating you from the debate, banishing you from public discourse, and shriveling that discourse to the ever tighter bounds of a state ideology. I hope Bill Leak and The Australian fight this outrageous system not through narrow lawyerly arguments but out in the open – shining a bright cleansing sunlight on an ugly regime that cannot withstand exposure to the light of day.

Fascism and state socialism are not two sides of the same coin, they are the same coin on both sides. They pretend to be about equality and economic justice but it is essentially about achieving power and grinding opposition into the dust. Free speech is all you have to keep you safe and when it’s gone, so is pretty much everything else.

Our rendezvous with oblivion

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That anyone thinks of Hillary Clinton as presidential is the genuinely most astonishing outcome of the American election. She can only be viable if the problems that beset the United States are invisible to the majority of the people who will be voting. She offers no solutions to any existing problems, she has failed to deal with every major political issue she has ever faced, and she has no policies that would in any way address any of the issues that are confronting the United States and the Western world.

Victor Davis Hanson has written another piece trying to alert others to the catastrophic future that lies right before us if Hillary is elected. I am now astonished at the meme that has developed about how awful the two candidates are, as if one is as bad as the other. That is a Democrat talking point that is aimed at those who might vote Republican. Why bother? Trump is just as bad as her, so what’s the difference? Might as well vote for Hillary.

All I can say is that if you don’t know what difference it will make, you are about as dumb as any of the people described by Hanson, who are our predecessors from the past. His article is titled, America’s civilizational paralysis. Here’s the analogy – this is us:

Given the hardship and sacrifice that would have been required to change the late Byzantine mindset, most residents of Constantinople plodded on to their rendezvous with oblivion in 1453.

It is, to mix metaphors, step by step until we are over the waterfall. He is filled with a kind of weariness about our collective attitudes that will be our doom.

Under the Obama administration, the old postwar order led by the security guarantees of the United States abruptly ended—the vacuum filled by ascendant regional (and often nuclear) hegemons. Russia is expanding control, or at least influence, over the old Soviet republics and Eastern Europe. China carves out a new version of the old Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere at the expense of the democracies in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia. Iran is on the path to be the nuclear adjudicator of the Persian Gulf’s oil depot. Radical Islamic terrorism has made the Middle East a wasteland.

America’s “lead from behind” abdication is variously explained by financial weakness, anti-imperial politics, or simply exhaustion. But the result is not so ambiguous: to restore deterrence as it existed before 2009 could be in the short-term as hazardous and costly as the long-term consequences of appeasement are fatal.

What would once have been seen as radical neglect of our existential problems is now the normal way of getting by one more day. What destroys civilizations are not, as popularly advertised, plagues, global warming, or hostile tribes on the horizon, as much as self-indulgence, self-delusion—and, finally, abject paralysis.

But here is David Gelernter with the now typical Republican, pass the smelling salts and vote for Trump. How pathetic this is:

I’ll vote for Mr. Trump—grimly. But there is no alternative, no shadow of a responsible alternative.

Mr. Trump’s candidacy is a message from the voters. He is the empty gin bottle they have chosen to toss through the window.

Are there no positive reasons to vote for Trump? Is there nothing in his policies or ambitions that overlap with the kinds of things you want? He mentions Trump’s stand on open borders and migration as if it’s just a fluke that he was the only candidate who wishes to do something. So in the end, this is what he writes:

There is only one way to take part in protecting this nation from Hillary Clinton, and that is to vote for Donald Trump. A vote for anyone else or for no one might be an honest, admirable gesture in principle, but we don’t need conscientious objectors in this war for the country’s international standing and hence for the safety of the world and the American way of life. It’s too bad one has to vote for Mr. Trump. It will be an unhappy moment at best. Some people will feel dirty, or pained, or outright disgraced.

But when all is said and done, it’s no big deal of a sacrifice for your country. I can think of bigger ones.

It’s better than saying it will make no difference, but only by a bit.

Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature

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As you no doubt all know, Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for literature, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. Possibly the greatest lyricist of our time, and if not the most melodic voice, you can listen to others sing his songs if you prefer. This is my favourite Dylan song, sung by Peter, Paul & Mary. If you prefer the simpler, more heavy-hearted version by Dylan himself, you can find it here. It seems I was already nostalgic about my past almost before I had even had one.

Once again they are coming for the Jews first

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An article by Jonathan Sacks on Antisemitism and the End of Europe picked up at Quadrant Online. The cliche how first they came for the Jews is an actual truth. First they come for the group least able to protect itself and with the perennial outsider status. The most ironic part is that the new antisemitism is driven by the left’s deranged hatred of Christianity, which causes it to join in with the most dangerous ideological menace in the world. One part of the article below, but read it all, long though it may be.

If Europe lets itself be dragged down that road again, this will be the story told in times to come. First they came for the Jews. Then for the Christians. Then for the gays. Then for the atheists. Until there was nothing left of Europe’s soul but a distant, fading memory.

There will, by then, be nothing left of “Europe” other than a bit of geography and a few ancient monuments, assuming even they are allowed to remain.

Welcome home, Mark, all is forgiven

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janita-brodderick-and-clinton

This is just to let you know Mark Steyn is back. His new post is dated October 9 and titled, As I Was Saying…. And what is it he’s saying? The picture above might give you a clue. This is from his post.

P*ssygate? Sorry, I decline to play by Washington Post rules. Every GOP nominee is a sexist pig: last time round, it was poor blameless Mitt with his “binders full of women” and his long track record of giving cancer to laid-off workers’ wives. The fact that this particular nominee for once actually is a vainglorious sexist is not even interesting in a media stopped-clock kind of way – because Trump has more or less been advertising the fact on the Howard Stern show for a quarter-century. So the story is chiefly of note as a near parodic example of the ludicrously lop-sided standards applied to Democrats and Republicans: I mean, the alternative to a Trump victory is the restoration to the White House of a credibly accused rapist and serial abuser, accompanied by the woman who has gleefully trashed his victims for 40 years. This race would be very different if Juanita Broaddrick and “You might want to put some ice on that” had received a thousandth of the media coverage given to Alicia Machado and “Miss Piggy”.

And to get down to brass tacks, Mark has left off where he was when he went:

Meanwhile, there’s a gazillion-and-one emails piled up demanding to know what I make of Trump vs Hillary in the final stretch. My view of Hillary hasn’t changed in decades (she’s the stinkingly corrupt enabler of a depraved sexual monster) and my view of Trump hasn’t changed since I wrote about him a couple of weeks after he entered the race.

You can read what he said then, but even if he says his view hasn’t changed, if you ask me what he believed then he believes now to the power of ten.

Free at last – all the goods and services they could possibly want free at last

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Via Mark in the comments of a previous post: Vienna’s benefits system acts as a ‘magnet for refugees’. You cannot be surprised if this is making people really angry:

Reinhold Lopatka, political leader of the ÖVP parliamentary group recently said the social system is especially unfair in Vienna and that refugees who have been granted asylum status in Austria get more money from the authorities than farmers receive in pension benefits.

“A farmer who has been working hard his whole life has spoken with me. He now receives pension benefits of €620 and his son has to subsidise him so that he can feed himself. Currently migrants in Vienna receive €837.60, although they have never contributed to our benefits system”.

Nor will they ever.

Just how unique is Australia!

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aussie-mussies

For those who need translation: this is a cover story from The Australian Spectator on the Australian Muslim community. Nowhere else in the world would such a cover be possible. Australia must save itself. It really is the best country in the world in so many ways, but there is a lot of downside potential if we are not very very careful. The rest of the world seems to be a case study in lack of care.

Diversity is our weakness

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The video is from London and this is the note that comes with it:

Published on Sep 17, 2016

Footage of a flashmob dancing on Park Lane, central London, in front of a group of refugees who have arrived in the UK. Part of the Welcome Refugees campaign. **NB: Unable to play on some devices due to music copyright claim**

Thousands of protesters marched on Downing Street to demand the British Government takes in more refugees as thousands of men, women and children continue to drown in desperate attempts to reach Europe. #refugeeswelcome

This is the post I took the video from, with the quite interesting title, How Did it Happen?. And here is the para that the video was mentioned in which is about our attitudes to immigration in the wake of the bombings and various attacks in the US:

Now, obviously we’re angry at the Muslims responsible. Dahir Adan was the Somalian who did the stabbings in Minnesota, while Afghan Ahmad Khan Rahami appears to be responsible for the ten bombs surrounding NYC. They were both immigrants who became even more radical after moving here, and their shitty culture is what drove them to attack ours. I’ve hated their kind since 9/11, but I have a new enemy: us. We keep inviting this terror by pretending it’s not there. While we were at the game, infantile ethnomasochists in London were holding a parade to welcome refugees. They danced to babysitter music, chanting “I really, really, really like you” while hideously twerking sideways and pointing to a crowd of refugees holding the Syrian flag. To call the footage of this cringefest the gayest thing imaginable is an insult to gays everywhere. It is miles below faggoty. It is willfully naive virtue-signaling that haplessly gyrates through the victims of Britain’s numerous child prostitution rings, honor killings, genital mutilation, and Sharia horror. Despite this, London elected a Muslim mayor with ties to radicalism and David Cameron committed to 20,000 more refugees (a number the castrated dancers claim is way too low). Let’s reserve some of our hatred for the Westerners who enable Middle Eastern violence.

Anyone who thinks diversity is our strength is a fool. Here’s the last para that wraps it up:

Like Britain, we assume everyone will eventually become Western and enjoy the same liberties we do if we can just get through this rough patch. The time for this level of naïveté has passed. We are no longer importing “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” We are importing people who want to choke us to death. As Sadiq Khan himself proudly stated, “Social integration does not work.” To hell with them for coming here with that attitude—but to hell with us, too, for allowing them.

Now go read it all.

Our business leaders speak out

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This is the story heading Business bosses slam Pauline Hanson ‘divisive’ speech and this is what it’s about:

The nation’s business leaders have blasted the “divisive and intolerant” rhetoric coming from federal parliament in the wake of Pauline Hanson’s claim that Australia was being “swamped” by Muslims, sending a message to others to speak out against the new senator.

Chief executives from more than 120 of the country’s biggest companies are backing the call to “set the right tone” in the debate over religion or immigration, days after a dispute over the welcome given to Senator Hanson after her contentious remarks.

It is therefore interesting to read the ten “top comments” on the story.

(1) It’s at last good to see that Senator Hanson is getting a reaction from our business and political readers which is just what we all want. Well done Pauline. Now, perhaps we will see if they have the gumption to initiate an open an honest debate on religion and immigration in this secular country of ours. Everything should be on the table including Sharia Law, Halal certification, polygamy, under age marriages, FGM, enclaves, lessons to be learnt from European and other countries with significant Muslim populations. We need to closely look at cause and effect of Muslim immigration. Bring it all on as we desperately need this debate now for the sake of future generations.

(2) “Chief executives from more than 120 of the country’s biggest companies are backing the call to “set the right tone” in the debate over religion or immigration”. Yet when the ALP and Greens want to push high tax, spend and anti-business policies all you here is the sound of crickets chirping. If CEO’s saved their passions for issues that impact shareholders instead of trendy and progressive distractions they would better earn their large salaries.

(3) It’s begun again. The demonisation of Pauline Hanson. The ABC and Fairfax have their co-agenda of ridicule and hatred in place and have begun delivering it. Religious leaders, particularly Christian ones whose pews are becoming emptier and emptier each week, are quick to damn her and her followers. And now, somewhat surprisingly, the Business Council. My guess is their latest outbursts do not reflect the views of the majority of their members. A bit like the AMA went for some years under leftist leadership.

(4) I’m sure all these members of the BCA live near the mosque at Lakemba or in Dandenong and have lived in the middle east to experience the “rich” islamic culture and the barbarism that goes with it! These are the people who earn more in bonuses each rear than the average person can save in a lifetime. How dare they speak for us! You either believe in free speech or you don’t.

(5) I don’t personally agree with all of Senator Hanson’s comments, but I’m absolutely shocked that at last the business ‘leadership’ of our country has finally said something. The modern management era in Australia is well and truly deserved of Mr Husic’s Spineless Award. I’ve had a Laryngectomy and my voice box was removed, as has the voices of our wimpish business leaders.

“We support a culture of free speech and parliamentarians ­expressing their views. However, we note that freedom of speech within democratic debate is only constructive when it is balanced by the responsibility of others to speak up when they disagree,” the BCA said.

So why don’t you speak out to support tax cuts, the ABCC, Union governance, productivity reforms, etc.? Why do you only support social issues such as Same Sex Marriage, Gender Diversity and the like? Why do you allow those who advocate the social causes you support to call those who oppose them “bigots”, “homophobes”and the like. Whilst their is nothing wrong with these issues, they are a far cry from business specific priorities and returns to your employees, suppliers and shareholders.

Time you guys (deliberate use of that word) found your spine and voice box.

(6) Many of these people who call themselves business leaders are busy getting it all mixed up with positive discrimination and other useless causes. They can be seen talking about celebrity causes with their mates in the elite classes at Davos. Stuff like climate change with George and all those flying in on private jets. These are the people that love the EU and caused Brexit. You know them, always pontificating when they never get down to the lower levels. Never being seen in anything less than the Chairmans lounge or business class. Always agreeing on new forums to mix in and say the same things they did last year in a different way.

I will not invest in any company led by the above types. They always end up being bled with huge salaries not earned but gouged from others by their leaders. They are not in touch with their customers and end up in trouble like a certain huge retailer whose staff played the books.

Hanson learned more about life, hard work and community in the fish and chip shop in outer suburban Ipswich that these people ever will.

(7) These self styled business leaders who have turned into latter day PC advocates can go and jump in the proverbial lake. We are not going to take elitist lecturing from main party politicians and we won’t take it from elitist business leaders either.

Why don’t you people go and get a tailor made cardboard box and sleep rough again just to sympathise with the homeless experience you ignore for the rest of the year.

Hypocritical silver tails who they know better than anyone else. These idiots are as bad as union bosses. They have too much money and influence. I fear they are turning into maniac greens.

(8) “Chief executives from more than 120 of the country’s biggest companies are backing the call to “set the right tone” in the debate over religion or immigration, ”

Who are they? You have a consumer base. You have employer base. You have shareholder base.

Ultimatey, you have your local constituency to answer to. Explain how you provide emploment opportunities, harmonise the woriforxe,deal with radixals, etc etc.

Do you have answers?

(9) those business leaders are most likely among the elites, their common sense is out of touch with ordinary people like their salary package

(10) Name your business sir and we will boycott for your blindness and lack of savvy.