Category Archives: Cultural

One learns from the past only what one already believes

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An article on the universalisation of Anne Frank as an example to us all of the dread of racism, not of what she actually represents which is the versatility of anti-semitism which can bring together so many diverse groups. This is the final para and the final sentences sum up all too accurately what has come before:

The most questionable connection of all, I find, is made between Anne Frank’s fate as a Jew and the need to tolerate each other in a diverse society. Sadly, modern anti-Semitism is not a negation of multi-culturalism, but in some respects a result of it. Perhaps the only occasion when the extreme right and extreme left sit down together in harmony is when they combine to descry the power of international Jewry (sometimes thinly disguised as ‘Zionism’). Here, diversity is not the solution, but part of the problem, because an extreme desire to respect it often means tolerating extreme intolerance. The exhibition could easily have ended with a poster containing portraits of the white extreme right-wing politician Jean Marie le Pen, the black comedian Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala, an Iranian Mullahs, and assorted other extremists, with the question: “Which one of these is an anti-Semite?” Answer: “All of them.”

To survive life after Hockey, the ABC must change — if it can

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In actuality, the headline comes from the Canadian National Post and really reads, To survive life after hockey, the CBC must change — if it can. In this case, however, it is the rights to broadcast the hockey (I don’t have to tell you which kind, do I?) which is why they discuss “life after hockey”. But with some luck we will be saying the same in a few months’ time except with the capital “H”. And from Small Dead Animals there is this assessment from The Friends of the CBC which I hope to see the Friends of our local media commune repeating in the near future:

From the Friends of the CBC

The full brunt of Stephen Harper’s hostility to our CBC is now in full view.

Today is a very bad day for those of us – and that includes the vast majority of Canadians — who believe in and support public broadcasting.

Please stand with me now in support of public broadcasting and to hold Harper accountable for what he has done.

Earlier today, the CBC announced it faces a $130 million shortfall. This is largely the consequence of Harper’s punitive cuts to the CBC’s budget which as of April 1st are now fully phased in.

As a result, the creative energy of 657 CBC people who make programs will be lost to our national public broadcaster and the damage to every program CBC audiences see and hear will be obvious. Sadly, the layoffs will be concentrated among CBC’s younger, digitally savvy staff with less seniority.

Harper is attacking our CBC from the outside. But he also has an insidious strategy to undermine our national public broadcaster from within.

Seven years ago, Harper handed the reins to our most important cultural institution to someone with no senior level broadcasting or management experience whatsoever.

That lack of experience is now painfully clear to see as the CBC – knowing this day would come – has failed to prepare.

CBC’s President Hubert Lacroix owes his job to Harper and, as Harper’s man inside the CBC, appears to us to be doing the Prime Minister’s bidding.

Public broadcasting in Canada desperately needs your help right now.

Please help FRIENDS mount a major campaign to hold Harper accountable and to deter the next attack, which is looming on the horizon.

Harper’s fingerprints can also been seen [sic] in a Senate Committee study of “challenges facing the CBC” that has turned into a campaign to strip all public funding from the CBC and give that money to the private broadcasters.

This is nothing less than a trial balloon straight from Harper that must be shot down immediately. We need your help now to expose this chicanery to public scrutiny.

Just days ago, Senator Leo Housakos, the Conservative Vice-Chair of the Senate Standing Committee on Transport and Communications – a man with close ties to Prime Minister Harper – placed this agenda firmly on the Committee’s plate.

Here is the question Housakos asked at the Committee’s hearing on last Tuesday:

“Is there a way to take the money we spend right now on a broadcaster (the CBC) and re-route that money to give that $1 billion-plus dollars to filmmakers and producers of Canadian content so they can make quality content and films? Once they make that quality Canadian content, wouldn’t there be an easier appeal made to the private broadcasters to start running it more.”

That last suggestion, by the way, seems like a good one that should really be looked at.

Ageist, racist, sexist

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Having been brooding on this for two weeks now, I feel I have no choice but to refer to the Human Rights Commission an egregious and unacceptable case of ageist, racist and sexist public comment, found on the ABC of all places. As an elderly, Caucasian male, I am disturbed that someone is able to make these kinds of comments in the public space without the Human Rights Commission coming down on them like a tonne of bricks. This is taken from the Q&A transcript dated 31st of March 2014, and as will be seen, Ms Eltahawy is already being prosecuted in the United States for infringing the free speech of others.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Well, you’re talking to someone who got arrested for spray-painting over a racist and bigoted ad in the New York subway and I’m going to stand trial very soon in New York soon for this and I – so I have many thoughts on this. First of all, in the United States, the people who go on the most about freedom of expression and it’s my right to say this and my right to say that are usually old, rich, white men who parade under the term libertarian. And what it ends up basically meaning is: I have the right to be a racist and sexist shit and I’m protected by the first amendment. And it’s utterly ridiculous. Because when you look – if you look at this ad that I sprayed over – now, I’m – I love the first amendment. As a US citizen, because I am Egyptian-American, I love the first amendment. I love that it protects freedom of expression and freedom of belief. But here is the thing: if a racist, bigoted ad is protected as political speech, which it was – the New York subway didn’t want this very racist and bigoted ad but a judge deemed it protected political speech?

TONY JONES: What did it say? Are you allowed to tell us?

MONA ELTAHAWY: I can tell you because it – I mean it’s outrageous. It said: “In the war between the civilised man and the savage, always choose the civilised man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” And I thought: are you fucking kidding me? In my subway? How can you put this up? And the subway – the subway authorities did not want this ad, because they said it was going to incite people and so they took it to the hate group and it’s been classified as a hate group by the – it’s the Southern Law Centre, right, Ken? Is that what they’re called?

KENNETH ROTH: Southern Poverty Law Centre.

MONA ELTAHAWY: That’s it. They have deemed it a hate group. They have deep pockets, these libertarian, you know, old rich white men. And they took it to a judge and the judge deemed it protected political speech. I am fine with protected political speech but surely it should be my right to protest racism and bigotry? I am the one who got arrested. When you have an ad like that, you know, can you imagine, under any circumstances, in the New York subway that you would have an ad like that that either talked about the black community, the Jewish community, the gay community? Absolutely not. The reason that I protested it was because I believe, as a US citizen who has lived in the US for the past – I now live in Egypt but I was in the US for 13 years, Muslims are fair game. So let’s talk about who the subjects or, like, who were the people targeted by this: it’s my right to say and do whatever I want?

Of course, you can vilify and demean old, white males all you like and Gillian Triggs won’t turn a hair. We are not amongst her protected groups. As she said, the law should “retain the impact on the victim’s group as a relevant consideration when assessing whether something is ‘reasonably likely’ to intimidate or vilify.” I suspect nothing that could ever be said to me or about me would lead to a moment’s concern since she has made her judgment and that is that. But also from this same interview, there was this:

Accusing the Coalition of hypocrisy, Professor Triggs said: “One of the disturbing aspects of the freedoms debate … is the inconsistency in approach.

“Those who emphasise individual freedoms have remained curiously silent in the face of the mandatory detention currently of about 4700 asylum seekers in remote detention centres in Australia and Christmas Island.”

Obviously not the sharpest knife in the drawer since she confuses the right to free speech with saying nothing at all. But even worse cannot see that having manadatory detention for illegal migrants is not a human rights issue. You do not have a right to enter another country illegally when you have already landed in an intervening port, i.e. Indonesia. And if they really were in fear of their lives, Manus Island, Indonesia or Cambodia would each work just as well.

Andrew Bolt on “The Left is the natural home of the bigot”

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No one wants to be on the wrong end of a racist rant but more importantly, since so much of modern day racism comes from minorities who would like to see their bigotry protected, the only way through this mess is to allow free speech and discussion. If the decency or the Australian public will no longer protect you, then nothing else will either. This is from Andrew Bolt in a post he titled, Carr is a warning to Jews: the Left is the natural home of the bigot.

Many of Australia’s most prominent Jews face a terrible reality that I’ve warned about for almost a decade: the natural home of the anti-Jewish bigot is now the Left. Too many prominent Jewish intellectuals here have pampered their enemy.

ABC chairman Jim Spigelman concedes the point:

Spigelman: My father was a bit of a lefty from his Polish days because Jews in Poland tended to be on the left ‘cause all the anti-Semites were then on the right. That’s exactly the reverse today.

Throsby: Is it?

And, right on time, former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr takes the stage.

Carr is not an anti-Semite, but his views on the Jewish lobby are absurd and dangerously close to an anti-Semitic trope:

BOB CARR: … And what I’ve done is to spell out how the extremely conservative instincts of the pro-Israel lobby in Melbourne was exercised through the then-Prime Minister’s office…. I found it very frustrating that we couldn’t issue, for example, a routine expression of concern about the spread of Israeli settlements on the West Bank….

SARAH FERGUSON: You’re saying that the Melbourne Jewish lobby had a direct impact on foreign policy as it was operated from inside Julia Gillard’s cabinet?

BOB CARR: Yeah, I would call it the Israeli lobby – I think that’s important. But certainly they enjoyed extraordinary influence. I had to resist it and my book tells the story of that resistance coming to a climax when there was a dispute on the floor of caucus about my recommendation that we don’t block the Palestinian bid for increased non-state status at the United Nations.

SARAH FERGUSON: They’re still a very small group of people. How do you account for them wielding so much power?

BOB CARR: I think party donations and a program of giving trips to MPs and journalists to Israel. But that’s not to condemn them. I mean, other interest groups do the same thing. But it needs to be highlighted because I think it reached a very unhealthy level. I think the great mistake of the pro-Israel lobby in Melbourne is to express an extreme right-wing Israeli view rather than a more tolerant liberal Israeli view, and in addition to that, to seek to win on everything, to block the Foreign Minister of Australia through their influence with the Prime Minister’s office, from even making the most routine criticism of Israeli settlement policy using the kind of language that a Conservative Foreign secretary from the UK would use in a comparable statement at the same time.

Carr is not wrong to say there is a Jewish lobby, or Israel lobby, just as there are other ethnic and religious lobby groups, including Aboriginal ones. The Jewish lobby is more organised that most, and on certain issues speaks with more unity than most, too.

This can come with a risk, as we now see in the debate over the Abbott Government’s plans to reform the Racial Discrimination Act to allow more free speech. Jewish community leaders have been the strongest opponents of this change, and base much of their argument on an issue of particular concern to Jews: that such a change would permit Holocaust denial. I suspect most non-Jews also loathe Holocaust deniers but would not be so quick to say they should be gagged by law – and that the rest of us should be gagged from arguing other propositions as a consequence. The danger here is that Jewish leaders are seen to be arguing for an illiberal ban to the benefit of their own community, but at the cost of the wider one. Such tribalism comes at a risk in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith nation.

I think it is fair to make these points. But Bob Carr’s comments go further – dangerously further.

He is singling out the “Israel lobby” as having had a more “unhealthy” influence than other such groups in that it had “influence with the Prime Minister’s office” under Labor, seeking “to block the Foreign Minister of Australia” from aiding Palestinian interests. This influence, claims Carr, is exercised through “party donations and a program of giving trips to MPs and journalists to Israel”, trips which indeed both Gillard and I have received.

Here is where Carr oversteps.

Carr completely ignores the reality that many supporters of Israel in the case he raises have not been bought, bribed or otherwise influenced by “unhealthy” lobbying, but have reached their opinion by judging on the merits of the argument. They see a democracy threatened by terrorism, an open society challenged by a closed one, and they decide accordingly. Yet this difference of opinion is portrayed by Carr as just the evil product of “unhealthy” Jewish influence peddling.

It is a joke to believe Gillard as prime minister could be further influenced by the offer of trips from Melbourne Jews. Politicians and journalists are also offered trips to the Muslim Middle East, yet Carr does not declare those “unhealthy”.

And how much influence did those Melbourne Jews have really? Carr boasts that he actually defeated Gillard on the issue by leading a caucus revolt against Gillard’s position.

That raises Carr’s dangerous double standards – to decry a “unhealthy” a Jewish influence he defeated while saying nothing about the more troubling Muslim influence to which he surrendered – and Labor with him.

Labor politicians have done dangerous favors for Islamist extremists like Sheik Hilali, revoking moves to throw him out in exchange for votes, but Carr has not criticised that as “unhealthy”. Labor made a politician of a Muslim ethnic boss and supporter of the Syrian dictator in exchange for votes, but Carr did not say this was “unhealthy”. Nor did Carr say it was “unhealthy” when even Liberal Prime Minister John Howard appointed a Muslim Community Reference Group to advise him – one third of whose members were supporters of the pro-terrorist Hezbollah.

Carr did not denounce this “unhealthy” influence, either:

Australia’s senior Islamic cleric threatened to withdraw community support for federal Labor in Western Sydney if union leader Paul Howes replaced Bob Carr in the Senate, a leaked email reveals.

The email, written on behalf of the Grand Mufti of Australia, Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, by his chief political adviser, accused Mr Howes of a “blind bias for Israel” and said that if he was appointed to the Senate, community support for Labor that was mustered for the federal election would be withdrawn.

The email was sent to MPs and ­officials on September 9… Mr Howes, the national secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union, withdrew from the contest …

Note that the Mufti has shown support for Hamas.

But let’s talk about the truly unhealthy influence in the very case Carr discusses – a bid by Palestinians for greater recognition.

Labor ditched Israel in that instance not so much out of principle but out of Labor self-interest. As former Labor speech-writer Troy Bramston wrote at the time after talking to the players, Labor feared the influence of the Muslim lobby and the votes it could muster in key Sydney marginal seats:

And, critically, there is the growing Muslim and Christian make-up of several key western Sydney Labor seats, which have exposed MPs to different points of view on the Middle East.

Some sections of the party suggest Victorian Labor is too close to the Israel lobby and does not fully understand the underlying changes in Sydney’s outer suburbs.

Did Carr denounce that “unhealthy” influence? No. He in fact was among the first to give in to it:

BUT of all reasons given, the worst and most repeated was as the Daily Telegraph said: “NSW Right MPs … were more concerned a no vote at the UN would offend Middle East and Muslim communities in their fragile southwest Sydney seats.” The Sydney Morning Herald heard the same: “Many MPs in western Sydney, who are already fearful of losing their seats, are coming under pressure from constituents with a Middle East background.”…

Carr reportedly stressed “the electoral problems in Sydney” to Gillard, and The Australian reported the “demographically challenged” Water Minister, Tony Burke, insisted on not rejecting the Palestinian resolution.

Burke’s “demographic challenge” is that the proportion of Muslim voters in Watson, his Sydney seat, has rocketed to an astonishing 20 per cent… In fact, of the 20 seats with the most Muslim voters, Labor holds all but one.

That’s why Carr’s attack on the Jewish lobby is so sinister. He exaggerates its power, falsely assumes those who agree with the lobby have been bought, and meanwhile is silent on the rise of more troubling lobby that has influenced Labor – the Muslim lobby, which includes supporters of extremists.

Something sick is at work in the Left. It’s not just Jews who should be alarmed.

UPDATE

What a disgraceful breach of confidence and a shameless betrayal:

Bob Carr has published private text messages between himself and Julia Gillard to reveal the “extraordinary” level of influence the pro-Israel lobby had on the former prime minister’s office.

In a remarkable disclosure of private conversations, Mr Carr said he chose to publish the text messages in his book – Diary of a Foreign Minister – without getting Ms Gillard’s permission, because to do so was in the national interest.

Carr wasn’t the foreign minister of Australia, seeking to advance the nation’s interests. It seems to me he was merely an embedded journalist, seeking material to advance his own.

The exchange:

Reproducing private text messages, Mr Carr suggests Ms Gillard’s support of Israel was so immovable that she would not even allow him to change Australia’s vote on what he considered to be a minor UN motion.

“Julia – motion on Lebanon oil spill raises no Palestinian or Israel security issues. In that context I gave my commitment to Lebanon,” Mr Carr writes in a text message.

“No reason has been given to me to change,” Ms Gillard reportedly replies.

“Julia – not so simple,” Mr Carr responds. “I as Foreign Minister gave my word. I was entitled to because it had nothing to do with Palestinian status or security of Israel.”

Ms Gillard shuts him down in a final terse message: “Bob… my jurisdiction on UN resolutions isn’t confined to ones on Palestine and Israel.”

UPDATE

Mark Liebler responds, during an aggressive interview with Tony Jones:

Just unpick for a moment what he’s saying. He’s talking about the Jewish lobby, he’s talking about a difference of opinion between him and the Prime Minister. Why can’t they have a difference of opinion on a matter related to Israeli policy? No, if there’s a difference of opinion, the Prime Minister has to be controlled or influenced by someone. So the Prime Minister has to be wrong ‘cause she’s controlled by the Jewish lobby. How does the Jewish lobby control the Prime Minister? Through donations to the ALP and sending people to Israel. I mean, give me a break. I mean, would anyone sort of seriously accept that? I mean, I’m very flattered.

By the way, the Jewish lobby he’s referring to is the Australia-Israel and Jewish Affairs Council. He’s referred to it in The Australian newspaper, so he’s referring to me directly. But, you know, as flattered as I am, this is really a figment of his imagination. I mean, Julia Gillard is an independent-thinking woman. She can come to her own conclusions without being influenced by the Jewish lobby and I suppose the Jewish lobby, according to Bob, … has the current Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, under its influence. After all, he’s adopted a very pro-Israel attitude.

The one man global human rights defendant

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Mark Steyn has a look at our troubled dealings with free speech and doesn’t like what he sees.

No two situations are identical, but Australia’s Section 18 is very roughly analogous to Canada’s Section 13, with Andrew Bolt and The Herald Sun playing the roles of me and Maclean’s magazine and various aboriginal persons in the parts of Khurrum Awan and the Canadian Islamic Congress Sock Puppets. Thanks to Brian Storseth’s private member’s bill, Section 13 was final repealed by the Canadian Parliament last year, after a somewhat protracted path to Royal Assent. By contrast, it’s not clear our Aussie cousins’ efforts to repeal Section 18 will get out of the starting gate.

Steyn is so unique that it is only he who has been able to see through to the core issues and then set himself against the gale force winds that come his way. Here the legal precedent went the other way and was not appealed beyond the initial court decision. But let’s face it. No one wants to take these issues on; we all have other things to do with our lives and no one is made of money. So this may be more than a bit of whimsy.

I hope the Section 18 campaign picks up a bit of steam soon. But I did take the precaution of threatening The Australian‘s readers:

I might have to fly in and do it myself.

I mean that. We’re currently mapping out plans for my Aussie tour later this year. In ideal circumstances, I’d fly in in time to attend the Governor General’s Section 18 Repeal cocktail party at Government House. But I have the glum feeling that the case for free speech might still be far from won.

Meanwhile on Steyn’s other adventures in the world of law, there is the latest episode of Mark v Mann, Mann of course being the man with the hockey stick who sued Steyn for slander. The only trouble is actually trying to get the case before a court. This is where the process is now at after more than a year of Mannoeuvering:

On Saturday, I noted that Mann had yet to join me in filing an objection to National Review‘s Motion to Stay Discovery. He did so today:

Defendant Mark Steyn opted not to appeal the denial of the motions to dismiss the amended complaint. Rather, Mr. Steyn has filed an answer and counterclaims and has expressed his intention to move forward with discovery, regardless of the fact that his co-defendants have opted to appeal.

Indeed, I have. So what’s Dr Mann’s position? Well, it’s a two-part response.

On the one hand, he’s in favor of his proceeding with discovery against me:

The fact that Mr. Steyn has not appealed the denial of the motions to dismiss counsels further against a discovery stay. Mr. Steyn, like Dr. Mann, has made clear his desire to have this Court resolve this lawsuit and to move forward with discovery immediately. As such, there is no reason for this Court to delay discovery further.

On the other hand, he’s totally opposed to my proceeding with discovery against him:

While Dr. Mann agrees with Mr. Steyn that discovery should move forward on Dr. Mann’s claims, discovery cannot move forward on Mr. Steyn’s counterclaims.

Oh, my. You do surprise me.

An errand taken by a fool

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Jonathan Tobin writes about Why Did Kerry Lie About Israeli Blame? Why do any of the lying swindlers in the Obama administration lie about everything? Here are the issues as set out by Tobin:

Kerry knows very well that the negotiations were doomed once the Palestinians refused to sign on to the framework for future talks he suggested even though it centered them on the 1967 lines that they demand as the basis for borders. Why? Because Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas wouldn’t say the two little words —“Jewish state”—that would make it clear he intended to end the conflict. Since the talks began last year after Abbas insisted on the release of terrorist murderers in order to get them back to the table, the Palestinians haven’t budged an inch on a single issue.

Thus, to blame the collapse on the decision to build apartments in Gilo—a 40-year-old Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem that would not change hands even in the event a peace treaty were ever signed and where Israel has never promised to stop building—is, to put it mildly, a mendacious effort to shift blame away from the side that seized the first pretext to flee talks onto the one that has made concessions in order to get the Palestinians to sit at the table. But why would Kerry utter such a blatant falsehood about the process he has championed?

The answer is simple. Kerry doesn’t want to blame the Palestinians for walking out because to do so would be a tacit admission that his critics were right when they suggested last year that he was embarking on a fool’s errand.

Meanwhile the Palestinians remain the second most prosperous people in the Middle East, supported to the nines by the UN, while places like Egypt, Libya and Syria fall to bits. A few more fool’s errands he and his President can run if that is their wont.

UPDATE: This is from the Republican Jewish Coalition in the American Congress:

After almost nine months of negotiations, during which Israel took concrete steps to advance the process, including the release of 78 prisoners – many of them terrorists – it is outrageous for Secretary Kerry to blame the Jewish state for the apparent failure of the diplomatic process undertaken at his insistence.

The simple fact is that while Israel has supported the peace talks, the Palestinians have consistently undercut them. Most recently, Israel has pledged to continue talks past Kerry’s original deadline and the Palestinian side has refused to do the same.

Secretary Kerry’s testimony today is a troubling consequence of the Obama administration’s assumption that increasing the pressure on Israel will bring the Palestinians back to a process they have repeatedly rejected.

Even here the statement pretends to see goodwill and genuine good intentions in Obama and Kerry. Only a complete moron would think that the side that has no pressure on it to concede a thing will concede a thing. Everyone knows there is no intention to reach an agreement, and this is an intention that is as firmly held by Obama and Kerry as it is by Abbas. The only intention is to weaken Israel. And let me finally ask, where is the Democrat Jewish Coalition? You don’t really have to ask, do you?

FURTHER UPDATE: And now there’s this, Israel ‘Deeply Disappointed’ by Kerry’s Remarks on Peace Talks.

In an unusually pointed rebuke of its ally, the United States, Israel said on Wednesday that it was “deeply disappointed” by Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks a day earlier that appeared to lay primary blame on Israel for the crisis in the American-brokered Middle East peace talks.

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute that has brought the talks to the brink of collapse appeared to be developing into an open row between Israel and the United States, even as Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were said to be planning a third meeting here this week with American mediators to try to resolve the crisis.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Mr. Kerry said that both the Israeli and Palestinian sides bore responsibility for “unhelpful” actions, but that the precipitating event of the impasse was Israel’s announcement of 700 new housing units for Jewish settlement in an area of Jerusalem across the 1967 lines, in territory the Palestinians claim for a future state.

“Poof, that was sort of the moment,” Mr. Kerry said. “We find ourselves where we are.”

In what is being referred to here as “the poof speech,” Mr. Kerry laid out the chain of events that led to the verge of a breakdown.

Clearly stung by Mr. Kerry’s version and his focus on the settlement issue, Israel countered on Wednesday that it was the Palestinians who had “violated their fundamental commitments” by applying last week to join 15 international conventions and treaties.

Mr. Kerry’s remarks “will both hurt the negotiations and harden Palestinian positions,” said an official in the office of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The thing here is that Israel has basically said that Kerry is incompetent at his job and has washed its hands of the whole “peace process”. This is quite a stand to have taken and suggests Israel is looking at other options than having to depend on the United States.

About parasites and other vermin

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Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

I came upon two articles one after the other about start-up companies in San Francisco which I discussed here. These start-ups create enormous wealth for those who build them, but they also create enormous resentment amongst those who envy others for their success. I have therefore written a post that may be found at Quadrant Online that deals with the resentment such success has created. This was the flyer distributed in the neighbourhood of one of the truly successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that started me thinking about these things [very bad language alert!]:

kevin-rose-flier

The entire article can be found here under the title, The Enemies of those who Create.

The will to create meets the will to destroy

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Being on the left is in part a fashion statement for our elites so it’s interesting to see how this is coming back to bite amongst the techno geeks in San Francisco. This really is a story about the cultural mayhem overtaking the US where once upon a time achievement was actually admired. Kevin Rose has been a successful funder of start-ups so now he finds that Anti-Tech Protesters Are Telling Kevin Rose’s Neighbors That He’s A “Parasite”. Here’s the leaflet being distributed outside his home:

kevin-rose-flier

Kevin is, of course, amongst the one percent, the point-one percent, but that is the nature of achievement. It brings its rewards and if he is going to be drinking coffee someone else will have to serve it to him. What Kevin Rose does is demonstrate most definitively that some people are actually better at things, smarter, more gifted, hard working. Others are less so of each and possibly all of these and therefore do not receive the material and social rewards that seem to accrue to Kevin. Envy, resentment, dissatisfaction all accrue instead and make up the majority of the Obama constituency. You can tell these people all you like that their own good fortune relative to every past civilisation is a result of the efforts of Kevin Rose and those like him but they could not care less. They wish only to destroy not what they cannot have themselves, but what they cannot be themselves. It is an existential recognition that others are better than them and therefore the promise of fairness and equality is exposed, so far as they are concerned, in all its emptiness. These are people of the deepest hatreds and nothing can be done to make those hatreds go away.

And as for the material rewards of success, it is likely we don’t know the half of it. This article on Mike Judge, a pillar of the Silicon Valley establishment, who worked his way up through hard work, endeavour mixed with an inordinate amount of genius, shows what extraordinary rewards there are for success. The article begins:

The Goolybib party is well under way, and you can smell the self-congratulatory excess. The company, which says it “disrupts digital media” to “make the world a better place,” has just been purchased by Google for $200 million, and its cofounders are celebrating their good fortune with an extravagant bash in a sleek modern mansion. The place is packed with signifiers of contemporary success: reflecting pools, floor-to-ceiling windows, white leather sofas. Venture capitalists work the crowd, chatting up billionaires. Guys in hoodies are slurping liquid shrimp from test tubes (it’s a Wylie Dufresne concoction, $200 a quart). A dozen twentysomething dudes play Battlefield 4 on an ultrathin 55-inch flatscreen. Kid Rock gyrates in a fog-machine cloud atop an elaborately lit stage in the backyard.

Someone has got to mix and serve the liquid shrimps in those test tubes if these others are to drink $200 a quart concoctions. Such is the unfairness of life. But beneath it all, there is the creative will that underpins the entrepreneurial drive and talents that set those who make it apart from those who don’t, mixed of course, with a heavy dose of luck. Judge was the inventor of Beavis and Butthead and much else. His life was the farthest thing imaginable from having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It is instead about the genius and insight that allowed someone who was just no one at all to make himself into what he is today. The final paras of an article you should read in full.

Judge himself has become something of a startup CEO. But Judge does it his way. His indie production company, Ternion Pictures, which he cofounded with Altschuler and Krinsky, runs lean. When Judge made Extract for a modest $8 million—one-fifth the budget of a typical Hollywood comedy—he raised private financing so he could retain more control.

“I started out making these little cartoons, working on my own, and suddenly I’m in charge of 60 people,” Judge says. “I don’t like telling people what to do. But I do really like building something and making it work.”

He likes to build and make things work. Others, as Kevin Rose has discovered, like only to destroy.

Apocalyptic idiocy

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This comes from the advertising notice for the latest Spectator which is an interesting summary of where we now are. For myself, I remain the deepest kind of sceptic, having cut my teeth on predictions of famine, resource depletion and ecological disasters for over fifty years, not a single one of which has ever turned out to be remotely true. Both of The Spectator authors unfortunately accept there may be something to this global warming creed. Seems a weak position from which to start but maybe when in the grip of such delusion, that is the only available course.

The hype around Monday’s IPCC global warming report was the usual alarmist nonsense. The real story lay in the small print. In our cover piece this week, Matt Ridley has done the digging and found that the authors of the UN climate consensus have now accepted what Nigel Lawson has argued for years: that we may not be able to do much about the planet warming, but we can adapt to it. The apocalyptic scenarios need never emerge, as long as we take the right action.

Meanwhile, Bjørn Lomborg exposes the true green scandal. When Rowan Williams talks about climate change, his assumption is that it hurts the poorest hardest. There’s much truth in that, says Bjørn, but what the alarmists don’t realise (or don’t want to accept) is that green policies inflict far more harm on the poor than the global warming they are trying to avert. Access to cheap and plentiful electricity is one of the most effective ways to escape poverty; green energy is neither cheap nor plentiful.

But for more of this apocalyptic doomsaying, let me take you to a book written exactly a century ago, and to its introduction dated 21 March 1914. Reading the economics of the past is beneficial for a hundred reasons (see my Defending the History of Economic Thought) but one of the most important is that it takes you out of the time in which you live and allows you to look at things in a wholly different way. This is from the preface of a book titled, The Nation’s Wealth which was written by L.G. Chiozza Money:

That the conditions of British wealth are static is a common and dangerous assumption. That assumption is challenged in this volume. The British national economy is revealed as a thing of uncertain equilibrium, the future of which it may be beyond the power of the British people to determine. From a careful examination of the facts of the case, the conclusion emerges that as modern British wealth depends upon a peculiarly good supply of coal, and as the duration of the Coal Age is uncertain, it is the supreme duty to regard the present as a preparation, during which it is necessary to train our people, and so to mould our social and industrial institutions, that the nation may be fortified for that scientific future as to which, while are many uncertainties, there is one absolute certainty – that Coal will pass. [My bolding]

Those absolute certainties! Six months later, his world would be plunged into a different kind of disequilibrium but in the meantime the absolute certainty was that coal would run out and soon. A century later, coal has not run out, there is something like 500 years’ worth of the stuff in easy reach, never mind all of the other forms of carbon-based energy. The effort is therefore being made to rid us of carbon-based energy through another kind of apocalyptic vision, one about as accurate as the one held by L.G. Money a century ago.

So if there is one absolute certainty it is this: these same apocalyptic the-end-is-nigh types will be forecasting the end a hundred years from now just as they will be there two hundred years from now and so on ad nauseam ad infinitum.

Gnostic Noah

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Noah, at least as a film, was an incoherent mash, or so I thought. But here is an analysis that provides an actually insightful look at the film and what it was about that goes off in a direction I would have neither the knowledge nor the background ever to have recognised. This is what good criticism is about. You learn something you didn’t know before and some work of art is interpreted in a way that takes you closer to what the artist had intended. The review is titled Sympathy for the Devil. This is the core insight:

In our day and age we are so living in the leftover atmosphere of Christendom that when somebody says they want to do “Noah,” everybody assumes they mean a rendition of the Bible story. That isn’t what Aronofsky had in mind at all. I’m sure he was only too happy to let his studio go right on assuming that, since if they knew what he was really up to they never would have allowed him to make the movie.

Let’s go back to our luminescent first parents. I recognized the motif instantly as one common to the ancient religion of Gnosticism. Here’s a 2nd century A.D. description about what a sect called the Ophites believed:

“Adam and Eve formerly had light, luminous, and so to speak spiritual bodies, as they had been fashioned. But when they came here, the bodies became dark, fat, and idle.” –Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, I, 30.9

It occurred to me that a mystical tradition more closely related to Judaism, called Kabbalah (which the singer Madonna made popular a decade ago or so), surely would have held a similar view, since it is essentially a form of Jewish Gnosticism. I dusted off (No, really: I had to dust it) my copy of Adolphe Franck’s 19th century work, The Kabbalah, and quickly confirmed my suspicions:

“Before they were beguiled by the subtleness of the serpent, Adam and Eve were not only exempt from the need of a body, but did not even have a body—that is to say, they were not of the earth.”

Franck quotes from the Zohar, one of Kabbalah’s sacred texts:

“When our forefather Adam inhabited the Garden of Eden, he was clothed, as all are in heaven, with a garment made of the higher light. When he was driven from the Garden of Eden and was compelled to submit to the needs of this world, what happened? God, the Scriptures tell us, made Adam and his wife tunics of skin and clothed them; for before this they had tunics of light, of that higher light used in Eden…”

And just one more bit but if these things interest you, read the full text:

The world of Aronofsky’s Noah is a thoroughly Gnostic one: a graded universe of “higher” and “lower.” The “spiritual” is good, and way, way, way “up there” where the ineffable, unspeaking god dwells, and the “material” is bad, and way, way down here where our spirits are encased in material flesh. This is not only true of the fallen sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, but of fallen angels, who are explicitly depicted as being spirits trapped inside a material “body” of cooled molten lava.

Admittedly, they make pretty nifty movie characters, but they’re also notorious in Gnostic speculation. Gnostics call them Archons, lesser divine beings or angels who aid “The Creator” in forming the visible universe. And Kabbalah has a pantheon of angelic beings of its own all up and down the ladder of “divine being.” And fallen angels are never totally fallen in this brand of mysticism. To quote the Zohar again, a central Kabbalah text: “All things of which this world consists, the spirit as well as the body, will return to the principle and the root from which they came.” Funny. That’s exactly what happens to Aronofsky’s Lava Monsters. They redeem themselves, shed their outer material skin, and fly back to the heavens. Incidentally, I noticed that in the film, as the family is traveling through a desolate wasteland, Shem asks his father: “Is this a Zohar mine?” Yep. That’s the name of Kabbalah’s sacred text.

I disliked the film because it did not conform to the biblical text either in relation to the story or the message. But as it turns out there is a lot more not to like than one would have ever known. The message of the film will pass everyone’s understanding other than the vegan nonsense so it is really not much more than an empty frame with no more influence on our culture than any other science fiction pot boiler. It is not its influence on anything that is troubling but as one further sign of our already existing decadence that makes the film notable. And I doubt that had those who financed the film known its true underlying message that it would have led them to hesitate for a second. Undermining the religious teachings of the West is the temper of the times in which we live which is a large part of the reason why our civilisation is in such peril.