A round-up of the usual suspects and others less usual

Let’s face it. Between birth control and abortion, the European parts of the world are shrinking, if not in absolute numbers just yet, but certainly as a proportion of the world’s population. The territories we have inhabited, some for as long as humans have lived upon the planet, are being ceded to others. Here is a straw in the wind, invisible because social change is so slow that most people are just too unaware to register it is even happening. Titled 45 Signs That China Is Colonizing America, it begins:

Just because you were once the most powerful nation on earth does not mean that you will always be the most powerful nation on earth. Every single year, hundreds of billions of dollars leaves the United States and goes to China. This enormous transfer of wealth has had a dramatic effect on both countries. In case you haven’t noticed, many of our formerly great manufacturing cities such as Detroit are rotting away while shining new factories and skyscrapers are going up all over China. If you go into any major retail store today and start turning over products, you will find that hundreds of them have been made in China and that very few of them have been made in America. As a nation, we buy far, far more from China than they buy from us. As a result, China is absolutely swimming in cash and they have been looking for things to do with all that money. One thing that China has done is loan the U.S. government over a trillion dollars and this has given the Chinese a tremendous amount of leverage over us. China has also started to buy up businesses, real estate and natural resources all over America. This kind of “economic colonization” is similar to what China has already been doing in Africa, South America and Australia. The formula is actually very simple. We send them our money and then they use it to buy us. With each passing day China’s ownership over America grows, and it is frightening to think about where all of this could end.

You can read the 45 listed items for yourself. But if colonised we must be, this is the least worst of the options now before us, although I would have preferred that we could stay as we were. But that is the one option that is out. Fifty years from now, our once great civilisation may be as isolated as the state of Israel is today.

Gramscian prescriptions

Posted on January 5, 2015 by lawofmarkets

This is from a much longer post on Gramscian Damage by Eric Raymond which is interesting even if you don’t know what “Gramscian” means. It’s a wicked world out there, as he explains:

The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the “leading elements” of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals) This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.

Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

Koch shows us that the worst-case scenario was, as it turns out now, the correct one; these ideas, like the “race bomb” rumor, really were instruments deliberately designed to destroy the American way of life. Another index of their success is that most members of the bicoastal elite can no longer speak of “the American way of life” without deprecation, irony, or an automatic and half-conscious genuflection towards the altar of political correctness. In this and other ways, the corrosive effects of Stalin’s meme war have come to utterly pervade our culture.

He also linked to an earlier post of his, Suicidalism, which has a convenient list of ways in which we are ruining our own culture by adopting ideological positions that no other society would ever come close to copying. Why we create such rabid enemies from among our own citizens, I do not know. But all this is much too familiar to need to have to argue about since you can come across each of these sentiments pretty well everywhere across the West:

There is no truth, only competing agendas.

All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal.

Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying
with poor people and criminals.)

For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But “oppressed” people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

But we might still save our selves in the end, since none of these are true while all are pernicious as more and more people are beginning to find out. In the meantime, read both of his posts.

A vile and disgusting film

Posted on December 31, 2014 by lawofmarkets

To actually know the Biblical account of The Exodus in the modern world of the once-Christian West requires someone to have actually had a religious upbringing of some sort. But we made it through Noah all right, and survived the endless battle scenes of The Hobbit with only a mild case of ennui, so why not go see Exodus as well. How bad could it really be. Turns out, really, really bad. And you get nothing of the true flavour of this film by merely knowing that the critics at Rotten Tomatoes gave it 29% and the audience 39%. Bad films are common, although this went beyond bad, about which no review I read warned me even in the slightest.

There is a Book from which the story is taken. And when the Ten Commandments was made in 1956, which I still remember vividly, along with where I was and who I was with, they began with Moses in the bullrushes, put there by his mother because Pharaoh had decreed the death of every Jewish baby. Instead, we start with Moses as a co-leader of the Egyptian army against the Hittites, leaving out this small detail. And why was that. Just so that after the tenth plague struck down the first-born children of the Egyptians, Pharaoh can deliver this line without recognition that this is the work of a just G-d, who has tried using every means possible, to persuade Pharaoh to let his people go:

Is this your god, killer of children?

Someone who was a killer of children, and a slave owner and oppressor, really isn’t in much of a moral position to say that line. There is more like it in the film. But when I see that Ridley Scott and his backers have spent tens of millions to produce such a vile political statement, not about Egypt in 1400 BCE, but about the Middle East today, I am filled for the first time with a genuine fear for the future.

China’s Christian future

Posted on December 30, 2014 by lawofmarkets

The world does move in mysterious ways. Think of this: Christians Now Outnumber
Communists In China.

Though the Chinese Communist Party is the largest explicitly atheist organization in the world, with 85 million official members, it is now overshadowed by an estimated 100 million Christians in China. It is no wonder Beijing is nervous and authorities are cracking down on Christian groups.

Christianity is growing so fast in China that some predict that it will be the most Christian nation in the world in only another 15 years. By far, the greatest growth is coming outside the official state-sanctioned churches, which are rightly considered subservient to the Communist Party. Numbers are increasing, rather, in unofficial Protestant “house churches” and in the underground Catholic church.

Tell me about the world in a hundred years, with this factored into the story:

Unrecognized Christian groups have been subject to crackdowns for years, but observers say the atmosphere is getting worse as their numbers increase and the governing Communist Party takes a more nationalist tone under President Xi Jinping.

Particularly hard hit has been a Beijing Christian group called Shouwang. “Things have got worse this year because the police started to detain us. I was detained for a week,” said Zhao Sheng, 54, musical organizer for the group’s Christmas service.

“But Christmas is still a happy time. No matter what happens, God is with us,” he added with a smile.

Not everything has to be for the worse.

UPDATE ON JANUARY 15: Another report: Christianity Is Exploding In China And The Communist Party Isn’t Happy.

While Christianity is waning in many parts of the world, in China it is growing rapidly – despite state strictures. The rise in evangelical Protestantism in particular, driven both by people’s spiritual yearnings and individual human needs in a collective society, is taking place in nearly every part of the nation.

Western visitors used to seeing empty sanctuaries in the United States or Europe can be dumbfounded by the Sunday gatherings held in convention center-size buildings where people line up for blocks to get in – one service after another. In Wenzhou, not far from Hangzhou, an estimated 1.2 million Protestants now exist in a city of 9 million people alone. (It is called “China’s Jerusalem.”) By one estimate, China will become the world’s largest Christian nation, at its current rate of growth, by 2030.

Indeed, an acute problem facing urban churches in China is a lack of space. Chongyi Church is building a million-dollar underground parking lot to replace one that worshipers under age 30 have taken over as a meeting place.

“I come because I found a love here that isn’t dependent on a person,” says Du Wang, a young businesswoman in Hangzhou. “It is like a river that doesn’t go away.”

There is hope yet for the world.

Winston Churchill on our Judaic inheritance

Posted on December 30, 2014 by lawofmarkets

A fascinating article by Steve Hayward of Powerline on Winston Churchill and Islam, in the midst of which he brings up this quote:

We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilization.

With his views today, he could not survive in public life. Read the article.

The Green Prince

Posted on December 29, 2014 by lawofmarkets

I meet people all the time who tell me what a great film The Green Prince is, but until someone tells me something to still my conviction that Moab is anything other than a double agent working for Hamas, I will think it made perfect sense for the Israelis to have let him, and his Mossad handler, go their own way. And among the various issues that keep me sceptical to the hilt is that Moab lives free, travels back and forth, and makes a great show of everything, except support for the Israeli state. Here is the reality of a Palestinian youth who comes out in support of Israel.

Palestinian threats against Mohammad Zoabi and why there is no peace

He’s hiding in the U.S., while his anti-Israel Knesset member cousin is lionized in Western media.

The contrast in the story is between him and his cousin, Haneen, who is an actual member of the Israeli Parliament.

A few weeks ago Haneen Zoabi enjoyed a mostly sympathetic portrayal in The Washington Post. According to the Post, “To her supporters, Zoabi, 45, is a Palestinian lioness speaking truth to the Israeli establishment by asserting the rights of the 20 percent of Israel’s population who are Arab Muslims and Christians.” Because that, of course, is what an Israeli Arab is supposed to do. But the politician Zoabi has legal channels to fight her fight. So maybe she’s an underdog, but she’s a pretty well-protected one.

The teen Zoabi, on the other hand, had to run away because he had no effective protections against those who hate Israel like his cousin. The lack of attention to his plight means that the media only favors certain underdogs – the underdogs who espouse their own approved views. The irony is that Haneen’s career would not be possible if Israel wasn’t the beacon of freedom Mohammad praises. Mohammad Zoabi has displayed real courage in fighting his lonely fight in an intolerant society; he’s not a phony like Haneen, who gets her hateful screeds excused as “speaking truth.” When will his courage get the attention it deserves?

When I hear “The Green Prince” say the same as this young boy, then I will trust him, but not until.

[Via Legal Insurrection]

The most educated ignoramuses in history

Posted on December 28, 2014 by lawofmarkets

On Christmas Day we were at friends who had other friends we had not met before. And one of these friends – wearing the largest diamond ring I have ever seen, not that it is relevant – brought up in conversation that she never read. Nor did she bring it up after some prodding, or as part of an explanation for anything else. She brought it up as a matter of some pride, as if this were some kind of evidence of a higher intellect and refined taste. So, I asked her about this. Was it true that she never read any fiction, ever? And if not, why was this a good thing? No never, she said, had never read Dickens, or Shakespeare, and never wanted to and never would. So I asked – but only once I had reached the staircase – whether she would admire someone who had told her that they hated travel, and never wanted to go anywhere? But we know the answer to that, and would she anyway have seen the point?

I was reminded of this in reading Hal Colebatch’s article at Quadrant Online dealing with Celebrity Culture and Literacy’s Decline, which is mostly about the UK. This is not from Colebatch, but from someone he quotes, who was teaching would-be journalists:

These were people who were mostly studying for A-levels in media studies … The standard of literacy in their written work was roughly what I would have expected to find 25 years ago in the work of one of the less-able classes of nine-year-olds in an inner-city state school.

I cannot tell if this is a form of “these kids today”, or whether we are on the edge of some kind of descent into much worse. We may have enough people to run the technology, and if the rest of the population is pig ignorant, how does it matter? I am, of course, with Colebatch in seeing these trends not just as a disgrace but as a fearsome menace, although I would happily listen to someone who told me otherwise. I think this is the part of what he wrote that worried me most:

In June 2007 the think-tank Civitas claimed that issues and knowledge vital to education had been scrapped in schools in favour of trendy subjects and fashionable causes. No major subject area had escaped, its report, The Corruption of the Curriculum, claimed. The authors included Chris McGovern, chairman of the History Curriculum Authority. It said traditional subject areas had been hijacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender-awareness, the environment and anti-racism. In science-teaching controversial reforms had made fewer, not more, pupils interested in the subject. The new science curriculum replaced laboratory work and scientific probing with debates on abortion and nuclear power. In geography, it concluded, children were no longer taught facts about the world but how to be global citizens.

The state education system apparently paid little regard to teaching mathematics, physics or science. Only 7 per cent of pupils were educated in private or fee-paying systems (including the last remnant 164 grammar schools) but these comprised 40 per cent of pupils specialising in maths and physics at A-level. In 2005 there were only 3000 undergraduates studying physics and eighteen university physics departments—nearly one third—had closed since Labour came to power in 1997. By 2006 chemistry departments had also closed at some of Britain’s best universities, including Exeter, King’s College London, Dundee, and at Sussex, which had previously produced two Nobel chemistry laureates.

In my own area – the history of economic thought – the major issue of the moment is whether we should shut the entire enterprise down as a component of economics, and move it over into the history and philosophy of science. Till now, HET has been about the historical development of economic theory, and has been almost entirely undertaken by economists, who are the only people who know enough about economic theory to actually do it. This shift would turn it over to the sociologists of knowledge, who would have no need to know in dealing with any economics question, which way was up (for supply and demand curves, say), but could endlessly pontificate on power relations and white privilege.

But that is only mentioned as an example. This is not the informed citizenry the enlightenment wished to create. These are the fodder for a succession of revolutionary mobs, know-nothings about everything other than global warming, social injustice and their own desires.

Progressive internationalism and the withering away of the state

Posted on December 27, 2014 by lawofmarkets

I was reading a book that has turned out as good as I thought it might be before I started, Mind vs. Money: The War between Intellectuals and Capitalism by someone I had never heard of, Alan S. Kahan. And there on page 145 I came across this sentence:

For Marx, the ideal form of politics is not the state, which he famously predicted would wither away, but free association.

And immediately as I read those words, the entire matrix of ideas that sit behind the progressive internationalist of our day, the elites who wish to subvert the nation state, the kinds of people who set up the EU, or open the borders on the American southern frontier, presented itself to me as a completely closed circle of ideas. This is the utopian vision of the far left, is and has always been. Obama is an empty vessel, generally with no serious wit and depth. But the animating ideas that drive those who fund and fill his head with the rhetoric he reads, that is their vision, the end of the nation state and the mixing of us all in one global village.

It is a nightmare vision, where the worst will ultimately pull the framework down, because the best will be drowned in the flood. And whatever you may wish for yourself, it is the outcome that is step by step being put into place, and cannot be stopped because the only answer is to recognise the problem, and then put that problem into words that will shape the politics of a people. And the fact is that there is virtually no place on the face of the globe where such politics is allowed to prevail, and where it is – Israel say – the enmity of the world, driven by its progressive elites, makes impossible a defence of any social order built on the historic circumstances of a particular people over the longer term.

Morality and the rise of the capitalist west

Posted on December 25, 2014 by lawofmarkets

Mary Thoreau at the Independent Institute on If You Like Rights, Liberty, and Economic Opportunity, Celebrate Christmas.

Those of us enjoying the multiple benefits of societies built upon respect for our human and economic rights ought especially to pause to give thanks for God’s incarnation as Christ, celebrated this week.

There is thankfully now a rich literature from which we can learn how the many principles and laws we take for granted today would have remained undiscovered had Christ not lived.

Joseph Schumpeter, Murray Rothbard, Alex Chafuen, and others have well documented the earliest roots of modern-day Austrian economics in medieval Christian scholarship—including the development of just price theory, the subjective theory of value, support for capitalism and free trade, and sophisticated thinking on money and banking (including fierce criticism of fractional-reserve banking).

[The Spanish Scholastics] taught morals and theology at the University of Salamanca, a medieval city located 150 miles to the northwest of Madrid, close to the border with Portugal. They were mainly Dominicans or Jesuits, and their view on economics closely parallels that stressed by Carl Menger more than 300 years later.

A short overview is in this excellent interview with Jesús Huerta de Soto, and Rothbard’s “New Light on the Prehistory of the Austrian School”.

These findings by Christian scholars were no accident: their discoveries were possible only because of their theology: believing that the universe was created and ruled by a just, loving, and rational Creator who had endowed His creatures with minds with which to come to know Him, they set out to discover His laws.

The sociologist Rodney Stark’s accessible ouvre traces the history of Christianity and its myriad contributions to the well-being of humanity. Among my favorites is his showing why women were especially drawn in great numbers to convert, as, for example, Roman noblewomen. The early Christian church accorded women unusual status and rights, in stark contrast with Roman society, where women were subject to their families and husbands, often forced to abort (generally a death sentence to the mother as well), and married off prepubescently to much older men. Romans also widely practiced infanticide, especially of girls. Christian women held positions of authority in the early church, chose whom they married (and married much later, as adults), and could hold title to and control of their own property.

Early Christian practice of charity and care for the sick, as during frequent plagues, also contributed to growing segments of Roman society converting, alarming the Emperor Julian so much that he ordered pagan priests to emulate their practices:

The impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.

Stark also shows Christian theology as the font of reason, and lays lie to the claim that Christianity, reason, and science are somehow at odds. He documents, for example, that as with the politicization of science around today’s global warming hysteria, the much-repeated dispute between Galileo and the pope was largely a matter of political power, rather than scientific debate. (Similarly the “flat earth” myth, largely a construct of the late-nineteenth century debate over evolution. The primary medieval astronomy textbook was titled, On the Sphere.)

A short version of Stark’s thesis is in “How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and the Success of the West”.

None of this, of course, is a denial that much cruelty and stupidity has been carried out in the name of Christianity. Thus the need to look primarily to the source: Christ, his life and teachings, and their implications for how we each ought to lead our lives.

We are fortunate to have many great thinkers’ assistance in doing so, but, ultimately, it is a matter between God and each of us. This week we celebrate His making that relationship more possible, reaching out to all His creation in coming to earth as man.

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