Category Archives: Cultural

Will the US last until 2048?

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In an earlier post I speculated on just how unstable the mix of ideologies and cultural differences in the United States now is.

Nothing lasts forever, but the fracturing of the United States is happening before our very eyes, something I never thought even remotely possible not all that long ago. The question is no longer will it fall apart, but how can it be made whole again?

So now we have this, Exclusive: Angry with Washington, 1 in 4 Americans open to secession.

Some 23.9 percent of Americans polled from Aug. 23 through Sept. 16 said they strongly supported or tended to support the idea of their state breaking away, while 53.3 percent of the 8,952 respondents strongly opposed or tended to oppose the notion.

Only just over half are opposed! When the most decisive issue on everyone’s mind when voting is abortion, Americans really are living in a fantasyland. And it’s not just anger with Washington but it’s anger with their fellow citizens in other states, to which is added, no doubt, a large hispanic desire to return the south west of the United States to Mexico. There was a time I could tell you what the United States stood for, what its ideals are, but no longer. It is fractured and hard to see how it could be made whole.

The 48th best movie ever made

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We just came back from the pictures where we saw Boyhood.

According to IMDb it is rated as the 48th best movie ever made in their list of the Top 250.

An exceptional film in every way. No spoilers from me other than if you like the movies, this is a film you should see. Will only say that the actors age during the film because they really are getting older as it was filmed across twelve years.

The thoughts of Frank Furedi on our latest troubles

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Frank Furedi wrote the best book on World War I that I know and has now bought in on our most recent episode of attempted terror. Having been part of a generation that had the same sense of alienation that he uses here to explain, I am somewhat sympathetic to this assessment. But my own conclusions from my days on the très-très bored left of my student “rebellion” has left me with the firm conviction that the only way to deal with such people – the kind of people that I was myself – is to provide no leniency of any kind. Do you want to protest? Fine, but you should also understand there are real risks to your life and future. Not that we are here dealing with the kind of larks we were on protesting in front of the American embassy or whatever. These people are violent criminals, and while we can try to understand them, there should be not an ounce of tolerance for any of this. This is from his article in today’s Oz, Youth rebellion that embraces authority:

In Australia and elsewhere the attraction of radical Islamist ideology is preceded by a rejection of society’s Western culture. Many young people who find it difficult to gain meaning from their lives in their wider community life react by rejecting it. Their Muslim peers sometimes go a step further and express their alienation through the medium of a jihadist outlook. The appeal of this is that it provides a coherent and edgy identity. It offers the cultural resources for the constitution of a distinct Islamic youth subculture.

Radical young Muslims self-consciously distance themselves from the moral and social conventions of a society they claim to loathe. However, their rebellion against the way of life of their community is coupled with a rejection of the customs and behaviour of their elders and family members.

Invariably such a response bears the hallmark of a generational reaction against the behaviour and way of life of the parents. That reaction is also directed ­towards the way their elders express their cultural and religious identity. One manifestation of this reaction against the conventions of their elders is the adoption of the outward markings of an in-your-face Islamists cultural iden­tity. That is why young Australian Muslims are likely to be more religious and anti-Western than their parents. They are likelier to sport a beard as symbol of piety, wear the veil or go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. They are likelier to perceive the West as a threat to Islam.

Well as long as they understand in return that we now see Islam as a threat to the West then they will understand where we are now at. This is a two-way street. No one attacks them first in any part of the world so what they think of as “attacks” are complaints along the lines of “I hit him when he hit me back”. Whatever they may feel about the glories of their own way of life, no one can see it from the outside looking from our own worldview in our very sweet, kind and gentle westernised communities.

No religion is a religion of peace

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Buying into these controversies is so fraught with difficulty given how massive the various sensitivities are, that the dangers are nearly too large even to wish to say anything at all. But saying nothing is the way of cowardice.

There is no religion that has never killed someone else because their religion was different and unacceptable, or because they wished to convert others to their own. But one of the great advances made in the West, and it is recent and it is even here still tentative, is that everyone’s religion is no one else’s business but their own with, however, this one additional provision: everyone must live their lives in conformity with the civil law of the nation they are in.

It is also the case that everyone else’s religion looks ridiculous to people who were not brought up within it. Each of us was fortunate to be born into the one true religion, but the people who ended up being born to the wrong parents with the wrong religion will have to wait until they have passed on into the next world to have their errant ways explained to them in the afterlife. In the meantime, it is the cause of the greatest imaginable destruction of civic peace for others to seek to convince us of the righteous path in any other way but through words and example.

There are now low IQ pathological nutters running loose who believe it is their religious duty to kill others on behalf of their own religion. It should not just be illegal to try to kill other people for their religion, it should be illegal to say it should be done or advocate such acts or in any way imply that it is a personal virtue to harm others of a different religion because of their belief in that religion. The potential for a year or two in jail would fit right in with the needs of the times in which we live.

Someone here is crazy

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Here is what seems to have happened:

7News reporter Robert Ovadia has received information about an alleged plot to kidnap a random person from the streets of Martin Place in Sydney’s CBD, execute them by beheading …

AFP swooped in pre-dawn raids to disrupt plans to commit a violent attack on Australian soil.

They executed 25 search warrants in Sydney, arresting 15 people, one of which has been charged with serious terror offences.

And this has been the reaction:

A Facebook page has been launched today calling on Muslims to attend a “snap protest” at Lakemba station tonight.

The page has invited 1500 people to attend to “stand as one tonight” to “denounce this demonisation and oppression of Muslims”.

Is this a normal reaction? Do they know it is not true? How can they know anything about any of it? Madness and insanity.

No longer any excuse for apathy, distraction or ignorance

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I was a second generation Canadian brought up in the 1950s, the grandchild of Eastern European Jews. But from my earliest days I was a Canadian to my very roots and when I went to visit Crecy and Agincourt last month, I went to visit the battlefields in which “we” had won, the first time in 1346 and the second in 1415. I felt just as much pride in going to Vimy Ridge, the Canadian memorial in World War I, as I did in going to Villers-Brittoneaux, which is where the Australian memorial is found. I am a citizen of the West and my culture is the culture that channels back through European history as far as the eye can see. It is perhaps an odd notion, but there were Jews in Europe long before there were Christians. If I have a cultural homeland, that is where it is. One cannot think outside one’s own self, but what we have established in our cultural traditions – the freedom, the prosperity, the ethical dimensions that have been derived from our Judeo-Christian history – is what I value and want to see continue.

There is therefore a very sharp article I would draw your attention to by David Solway, The New Colonizers. We are dealing now in the West with new migrant communities who do not value what they find but disdain everything about our way of life. These are the final paragraphs but you should read it all.

Anyone with a modicum of perceptiveness must be cognizant by now that Islam is advancing its millennial agenda in two ways, that is, via a classic pincer movement: the tactic of terrorism, and the strategy of immigration as elaborated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the latter project an immensely powerful force owing to its stealthy and insidious nature, abetted by leftist and liberal sympathies and policies. By this time its cover should have been blown, and we must begin to speak out, to agitate for legislation to revise our immigration protocols, to reject outright the social camouflage of political correctness, to expose “outreach” and “interfaith” programs for the confidence games they are, to investigate the hotbed mosques spreading like bunkers throughout the land, and to lobby our congressional and parliamentary representatives to pass laws militating against the depletion of our welfare resources, the exploitation of our legal system to silence critics of Islam (known as “lawfare”), and the use of our human rights tribunals that deprive us of our…human rights.

It is obviously an uphill battle, not less because our politicians and political parties, themselves responsible for the immigration debacle, are deliberately trawling for votes among the burgeoning Muslim enclaves and boroughs. Yet it is equally obvious that failing such a reformation — or revolution — in our concessionary attitudes, the result will be that what we once took for granted as a social habitus founded on mutual recognition and a civic arena accessible to all will shrink to an uneasy and perhaps soon intolerable confinement in our own domain.

There is no longer any excuse for apathy, distraction or ignorance, for the evidence of our approaching dispossession is all around us. It is equally an affront and a tragedy to find ourselves colonized in our own land. To paraphrase the prophet Ezekiel (33: 2-6), those who hear the sound of the warning trumpet and do not take the warning, their blood shall be upon them. Regrettably, far too many of us still cannot or do not or will not hear the trumpet.

There are two models from the Middle East I think are broadly likely looking out fifty years, although others are possible. There is the Israeli model where its Muslim population live in an uneasy peace with the non-Muslim majority. And there is the Lebanese model where the two sides have ended up as two warring camps, the two sides never mix, with the territory divided between the two. The fact of the matter however is that our “political elites” intend to establish a world without borders in which everyone lives with everyone else since history and cultural traditions make no difference. That has been the aim for a long time and we are seeing the world they have created. It will never work in practice but the potential for a protracted Dark Age as the outcome is a very real possibility given how things are now progressing.

Closing shop

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There is a kind of glibness in this presentation of “The Great Unravelling”. They don’t really believe it, but I do.

Then there is this article about a CBC program warning Canadians that cash may be seized from them by “law enforcement” officers in the US and is quite an eye opener. The title says it all: Canadian News Outlet Warns Canadians That US Law Enforcement Officers Will Pull Them Over And Seize Their Cash. Thus in answering the question posed in the video, this is from the comments:

this country is closing up shop. won’t be here 50 years from now

The wolves are circling but no one seems to be paying attention. Nothing lasts forever, but the fracturing of the United States is happening before our very eyes, something I never thought even remotely possible not all that long ago. The question is no longer will it fall apart, but how can it be made whole again? To this I cannot think of any answer at all. And while the decay is not as advanced in Australia, without the US where do we go from there? What’s fifty years in the scheme of things? Most people alive today will still be alive then. Lots of surprises but there is a brutality in history that you would not want to ignore.

[Both the video and the story from Instapundit]

Ideology makes young men dangerous

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This is very well stated, from Theodore Dalrymple:

Youth, as everyone knows who has passed through it some time ago, is the age not of idealism but of self-importance, uncertainty masked by certitude and moral grandiosity untouched by experience of life — or, of course, the age of total insouciance. It is not surprising that ideology makes young men dangerous, for it is in the nature of ideology to answer all the difficult questions of human existence while giving believers the illusion of special understanding and destiny not available to others.

With the downfall of the Soviet Union, Marxism lost almost all of its appeal for hormonally disaffected young men of the West, leaving them bereft of significance and purpose. Except for one group among them, they now had only a potpourri of causes (sexism, racism, the environment, etc.), none of which quite met the need or filled the gap.

To find out what filled the gap, you need to go the article. And then there is this from an article by David Gelernter on Free Speech at Yale:

We all know that true free speech means freedom to shut up, especially if you disagree with your betters. And true free thought means freedom to stop thinking as soon as the official truth is announced by the proper Authorities — and freedom to wait patiently until then.

Now take this Ayaan Hirsi Ali. First of all, she’s a black woman, and they’re not quite ready for prime time, know what I mean? And she’s against the systematic abuse of women in Muslim societies. What about people who are for the systematic abuse of women in Muslim societies? Furthermore, she lacks “representative scholarly qualifications.” Want the whole campus flooded with quacks expressing their so-called opinions based on “experience” and “knowledge” instead of academic authority? And she’s Dutch. More or less. Enough said.

You can read the entire article as well along with this background piece.

The Versailles of Economics

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Auchy-lès-Hesdin

say filature

New Lanark

new lanark

I fear, based on the thread of commentary that followed my earlier posting on the Societies for the History of Economics discussion thread, that the astonishing uniqueness and historical significance of J.-B. Say’s textile mill at Auchy-lès-Hesdin is not fully appreciated. I have now therefore put up a follow-up posting. I fear from the comments there may not be an appreciation of what is found at the site nor the will to see it preserved if it can be done. J.-B. Say was one of the greatest economists of all time, mentioned in virtually every history of economics text ever written. He was not only amongst the first economists to insist on the importance of the entrepreneur in the study of economics, he was himself an entrepreneur and we have almost intact the remains of the factory he commenced. The textile mill he built at Auchy-lès-Hesdin in 1805 remains along with the house he had commissioned. It was while he was living at Auchy that he completed the second edition of his Treatise and it was there that he provided the first ever textbook treatment of what we now call Say’s Law. There is nothing like it on the face of the earth. The nearest approximation are the buildings at New Lanark, where Robert Owen, who was not an economist, tried his own experiments in entrepreneurship, and the Thünen Museum in Germany.

These three sites are exceptional in their interest, but only one at the moment remains unattended and in near ruins. Please do look at the three websites below to see the comparison:

Jean-Baptiste Say

Robert Owen

Johann Heinrich von Thünen

This is the note I have received from M. Zéphyr Tiliette, the archivist at Auchy, based on my posting:

We have to remain modest but we agree with you : Auchy-lès-Hesdin is a very special place given its history and particularly the association of the presence of Jean-Baptiste Say, an already great figure and a famous economist, and the industrial revolution he introduced in this remote place of the north of France. Strictly speaking, he went not there into exile but he certainly enjoyed more freedom there about 200 km away from Paris and distant from the Napoleon’s government. He also prepared in Auchy the 2d edition of his « Traité d’Economie Politique » published in 1814 ; as he wrote, he had some time for that in 1811 / 1812.

Locally, it is still easy to imagine how was the site 200 years ago when Jean-Baptiste Say lived there with his family : the abbey church, park limits, surrounding walls, river, waterfall, are practically unchanged. Most of the industrial buildings have been rebuilt, their equipment continually modernized and the hydraulic power device has been rearranged in order to continue to generate some electric power additional to the main steam and electric power systems. It is under maintenance presently.

The massive « Château Blanc » was built shortly after the Jean-Baptiste Say‘s departure by the Grivel family. Our economist lived right in the same area, probably in the best abbey’s appartments, likely as his partner Grivel. Auchy « a kind of Versailles for economists » as you say !! Thank you very much for Auchy !! But a lot of things would be to be done to approach this designation. Nevertheless, the presence and the work of J-B Say there corresponds to an event very significant by many aspects related to an example of industrial revolution in a rustic place at that time. This would deserve an historical research including regional human consequences and may be the other factory of the « Say C° » in Abbeville (35 km away ) ( of the brother Louis Say ), also in relation with other industrial developments nearby.

The future of the existing industrial buildings of Auchy is a concern, of course. But I entirely agree with you : the site deserves a significant place of memory devoted to J-B Say, to his history, his work, the economy science and so on, a kind of « museum for the history of economic thought » as you write. May be such a concept could collect a part of « archives » related to studies on J-B Say carried out at the Lyon 2 University as Pr. André Tiran, the Say expert, mentioned at Auchy on August 30th. It also could be combined with a valuable, historical documentation about the regional history and with antique library pieces for instance concerning « The Âge of Enlightenment », the XVIIIth century, J-B Say being a heir of it. We also could emphasize the great interest of J-B Say in the people’s education.

Such a project has to be discussed ; it is not yet finalized. Cognizant people and officials should be met. Auchy needs money for that.

Surely it would be an attractive place to visit « midway between Azincourt and Crécy » !! as you say.

This is not some graveside or an office in an economics department of some other flotsam and jetsam from the vast history of economics. This is a living, existing embodiment on a vast grounds within an industrial estate that was the work of one of the greatest economists who ever lived who also built a factory at the very start of the industrial revolution. This is not, moreover, a pin factory. This was a cotton mill built at the very dawn of a new age. You can stand on the site and see across the last two centuries.

This is something that historians of economics should be interested in. It is something that all economists should be interested in. It is something anyone with an interest in history should be interested in. It is here now, and there are many possibilities for the site including demolition in some fit of distraction. As M. Tiliette states, the restoration is in need of money, but it is not a vast ocean of money. And until you wander the park surrounding the buildings you will not see why I have described this place as the Versailles of Economics. If you are close, you should go and look. There is nothing else like it and it will be to our shame if we let this place go to ruins when it could just as easily become a World Heritage site in the same way as New Lanark.