Category Archives: Cultural

OK you cowards at the ABC – why don’t you invite him?

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Now here’s a Q&A that would get a record audience. As Andrew Bolt has asked, Margaret, why didn’t you invite me?. The invitations that were extended come 58 seconds into the presentation, saving you more than an hour of tedium. Here is Andrew’s comment:

Margaret Simons, head of Melbourne University’s journalism course, introduces ABC boss Mark Scott by noting that News Corp people had declined to debate him.

Funny, I didn’t get an invitation. Nor did Simons mention I’d invited Scott to put his case on The Bolt Report and he has refused.

Now this would be a heavyweight division contest. My suspicion, though, on why Andrew wasn’t invited is because they know that one-on-one and over the course of an hour he would absolutely take Scott to the cleaners even with Tony Jones in the chair.

Are these really the people we trust to bring us the news?

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I get to the papers at the end of the day and when I saw the story that the “ABC’s Scott warns on News Corp’s position of power” on page 5 of today’s AFR, I went searching back through all of the other normal websites to see if anyone else had focused on such blithering idiocy but it seems not. It appears that whatever may be Mr Scott’s strengths, irony is not amongst them. The first two paras of the story:

ABC managing director Mark Scott hit out at Rupert and Lauchlan Murdoch’s News Corporation, arguing its newspapers have been never been [sic] more assertive in exercising their power through “aggressive editorial positioning”.

In a carefully worded attack, Mr Scott claimed News’s share of newspaper sales in Australian capital cities could rise from “70 per cent” to “80 per cent” and predicted that print titles which survive the digital revolution will be more powerful than ever.

Although this has been pointed out on endless occasions, he apparently still cannot see the difference between the number of newspapers and the number readers. For the kinds of things Scott would like to concentrate on, there is still The Green-Left Review which is another title although one without the circulation of The Australian say. Thus, two titles but a different number of readers. Should not be all that hard to see the difference. But then Mr Scott entered a zone of his own with the following:

He also predicted a rise in ideologically slanted news.

He is predicting this! This is the future someday but not yet! What a discerning mind he has! A national treasurer without a doubt. From someone at the ABC to say this is beyond the realms of normal out-to-lunchness and into some kind of stratospheric zone previously never encountered. But meanwhile back at the ABC ranch house:

Mr Scott defended the ABC’s role and hit back at allegations of a left-wing bias at the corporation as it braces for the Abbott government’s May budget.

One can only hope that the aftershocks he is bracing for will be even beyond anything he is capable of imagining today.

What it takes to make a culture a great culture

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The article by Charles Murray, at least according to its title, is about whether America is past it, but is in reality about what it takes to make a culture a great culture great in the sense of innovation and historically significant achievement.

Human achievement has clustered at particular times and places, including Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Sung China, and Western Europe of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. But why? What was special about those times and places? In the book’s final chapters, I laid out my best understanding of the environment within which great accomplishment occurs. . . .

To guide the discussion, I’ll provide a running synopsis, in language drawn from Human Accomplishment, of the core conditions that prevailed during the glorious periods of past achievement. I’ll focus in particular on science and technology, since these are the fields that preoccupy our contemporary debates over the present course and future prospects of American innovation.

Of course it is not just America’s prospects which are now being submerged but the prospects more or less across the globe. I will provide the five headings Murray uses but the whole article is worth the time to read:

1. WEALTH, CITIES, POLITICS

2. RAW MATERIALS

3. THE NEED FOR PURPOSE AND AUTONOMY

4. TRANSCENDENTAL GOODS

5. HOW AMERICA MATCHES UP

The US is being used as a case study. It was the most advanced of our various cultures but its rot is also happening more rapidly than anywhere else. Decline of the West is an old story but it takes a long time for the fall to complete itself given the heights from which it begins. Still declining and not a single reason anywhere on the horizon to think that any of it can be reversed.

A clear case of racial vilification returns

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I should say straight out that I am a free speech absolutist. If we think governments have a role in licensing what we say to each other, there really is a slippery slope we have embarked upon. Given the world as it is, there is almost no danger of any kind for someone on the left to say whatever it is they want since none of the speech codes and rules of PC apply to them. Only to us on the right. But as dangerous as it often can be to say certain things, the government should not be in a position to restrict the kinds of things we say to each other.

The post found below was put up this morning and then taken down by me. I could see where the conversation was going and I was not interested in fostering a discussion over whether Australian women on an international scale are or are not slatterns. What I was really interested in was this example of a comment made about Australians that annoyed me not a little but whether it was protected free speech. It is not just minorities that can find themselves on the wrong end of comments that do insult whether or not that was the intention. Kathie Shaidle, writing on her blog in Toronto, wrote about her own relatively constrained sexual experience that “my ‘number’ (as the kids call it these days) is so low that in certain Australian provinces I would still be considered a virgin.” And in Toronto, where the Australian ex pat community is both small and non-violent, no one would really have been offended and therefore taken her to court never mind taken out a contract on her life. Try that remark with any one of a hundred-plus other national, racial or ethnic groups and we’ll see how you go.

But if it were any one of these hundred-plus national, racial or ethnic groups she would have been shunted before some tribunal who would adjudicate her right to have said what she said. And if they had decided that some group had been vilified, humiliated or even merely made uncomfortable, some penalty would have been assessed. So she chooses Australians as her target and really there was only me to get upset, hurt, disgusted, perturbed, shamed, since how many people in Australia read a Canadian blog?

But what’s the answer? How should Australians react to this slur on Australian women? Well, you know what. This is what we do. We get on with life. We don’t make a federal case out of it. We don’t go to some court for redress for our hurt feelings. We just get on with life, which is how it ought to be. Anyway, what follows is the post I put up this morning, now perhaps put in its proper context. Bear in mind that this was originally posted on the first of April.
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I am reluctant to bring this up, but if ever I have seen need for a Racial Discrimination Act this is it. Kathy Shaidle, a Canadian blogger, is entitled to advertise her book in any way she likes, but still there is a certain profiling that leaves me somewhat nonplussed and decidedly uncomfortable. This is from her advertising promotion for her new book, Confessions of a Failed Slut:

As the only female columnist at controversial, conservative Taki’s Magazine, Kathy Shaidle soon found herself covering an unlikely beat: sexuality.

“Unlikely” because as the married, 50-year-old Shaidle explains, “my ‘number’ (as the kids call it these days) is so low that in certain Australian provinces I would still be considered a virgin.”

I take it that one’s number is the number of sexual partners one has had. And, of course, to refer to our political divisions as “provinces” is quite provincial but what would you expect from a Canadian? But if I understand the comparison she is making, the implication is that Australians are so sexually out there that an Australian maid with as few liaisons as Kathy has had would not even think of herself as ever having had sex at all.

It’s not even that I am insulted by the implication, although I am, but my main curiosity is where did such an analogy come from? Do Australian girls in Canada, or anywhere else for that matter, have a reputation somewhere along these lines. I am thankfully well past the age and inclination of ever having to enter into the sexual wilderness of the present day to find out for myself, but there is nothing I know of that makes me think of our local maidens as anything other than innocent, modest and pure, or no less so than anyone else.

There was a joke when I was young about a particular ethic group which went, what’s a virgin in such-and-such country, and the answer was the fastest girl in Grade 2. But we used to tell ethnic jokes in those days and it was just a joke without much more than a bit of fun (except for people of that ethnic group who didn’t find it funny at all). But Australians? I must do a bit of research.

In the meantime, I think there needs to be a reference to our Human Rights Commission so that if Kathy ever sets foot on these shores down under that she will end up facing the same kind of tribunal faced by her Canadian mates Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn.

Posted on the first of April 2014.

The voting class and the working class

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Watching Q&A last night, and especially the discussion on stopping the boats, reminded me of a post I put up in 2012. I repeat it here.

Ann Coulter does the numbers and it is now a demographic battle in the US about who comes and who votes. It wasn’t the young after all who had voted to subvert the America of individual effort and personal responsibility. Ann tells a quite disturbing story:

On closer examination, it turns out that young voters, aged 18-29, overwhelmingly supported Romney. But only the white ones. . . .

What the youth vote shows is not that young people are nitwits who deserve lives of misery and joblessness, as I had previously believed, but that America is hitting the tipping point on our immigration policy.

The youth vote is a snapshot of elections to come if nothing is done to reverse the deluge of unskilled immigrants pouring into the country as a result of Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act. Eighty-five percent of legal immigrants since 1968 have come from the Third World. A majority of them are in need of government assistance.

Whites are 76 percent of the electorate over the age of 30 and only 58 percent of the electorate under 30. Obama won the “youth vote” because it is the knife’s edge of a demographic shift, not because he offered the kids free tuition and contraception.

There is even this, which does seem to show there is a way out, as difficult as it may be:

Nearly 20 percent of black males under 30 voted for Romney, more than three times what McCain got.

It is working and paying taxes that may be the divide that matters. As she points out, it is immigration policy that is in the middle. And it will be the big issue of the future as the US does or does not submerge itself under a flood of migrants from places where no one can even conceivably be employed in a high tech, English speaking nation as the US for the time being now is. This is how she concludes:

Romney got a larger percentage of the white vote than Reagan did in 1980. That’s just not enough anymore.

Ironically, Romney was the first Republican presidential candidate in a long time not conspiring with the elites to make America a dumping ground for the world’s welfare cases. Conservatives who denounced Romney as a ‘RINO’ were the ones doing the bidding of the real establishment: business, which wants cheap labor and couldn’t care less if America ceases to be the land of opportunity that everyone wanted to immigrate to in the first place.

The parties of the left are actively ruining their countries for political advantage. Many of these people will never pay more in taxes than they take in welfare. But they’re not being brought here to work. They are being brought here to vote.

Living life to the fullest

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There is an article today in the Wall Street Journal with the intriguing title, “Advice for a Happy Life by Charles Murray” that has as its sub-title, “Consider marrying young. Be wary of grand passions. Watch ‘Groundhog Day’ (again). Advice on how to live to the fullest”. Sensible all the way through but I will just highlight one of the five and you can read the rest for yourself, which you should do. You might then be interested in the book he’s written, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead, which I assume expands on the five points made in the article. This is Point 4:

Take Religion Seriously

Don’t bother to read this one if you’re already satisfyingly engaged with a religious tradition.

Now that we’re alone, here’s where a lot of you stand when it comes to religion: It isn’t for you. You don’t mind if other people are devout, but you don’t get it. Smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore.

I can be sure that is what many of you think because your generation of high-IQ, college-educated young people, like mine 50 years ago, has been as thoroughly socialized to be secular as your counterparts in preceding generations were socialized to be devout. Some of you grew up with parents who weren’t religious, and you’ve never given religion a thought. Others of you followed the religion of your parents as children but left religion behind as you were socialized by college.

By socialized, I don’t mean that you studied theology under professors who persuaded you that Thomas Aquinas was wrong. You didn’t study theology at all. None of the professors you admired were religious. When the topic of religion came up, they treated it dismissively or as a subject of humor. You went along with the zeitgeist.

I am describing my own religious life from the time I went to Harvard until my late 40s. At that point, my wife, prompted by the birth of our first child, had found a religious tradition in which she was comfortable, Quakerism, and had been attending Quaker meetings for several years. I began keeping her company and started reading on religion. I still describe myself as an agnostic, but my unbelief is getting shaky.

Taking religion seriously means work. If you’re waiting for a road-to-Damascus experience, you’re kidding yourself. Getting inside the wisdom of the great religions doesn’t happen by sitting on beaches, watching sunsets and waiting for enlightenment. It can easily require as much intellectual effort as a law degree.

Even dabbling at the edges has demonstrated to me the depths of Judaism, Buddhism and Taoism. I assume that I would find similar depths in Islam and Hinduism as well. I certainly have developed a far greater appreciation for Christianity, the tradition with which I’m most familiar. The Sunday school stories I learned as a child bear no resemblance to Christianity taken seriously. You’ve got to grapple with the real thing.

Start by jarring yourself out of unreflective atheism or agnosticism. A good way to do that is to read about contemporary cosmology. The universe isn’t only stranger than we knew; it is stranger and vastly more unlikely than we could have imagined, and we aren’t even close to discovering its last mysteries. That reading won’t lead you to religion, but it may stop you from being unreflective.

Find ways to put yourself around people who are profoundly religious. You will encounter individuals whose intelligence, judgment and critical faculties are as impressive as those of your smartest atheist friends—and who also possess a disquieting confidence in an underlying reality behind the many religious dogmas.

They have learned to reconcile faith and reason, yes, but beyond that, they persuasively convey ways of knowing that transcend intellectual understanding. They exhibit in their own personae a kind of wisdom that goes beyond just having intelligence and good judgment.

Start reading religious literature. You don’t have to go back to Aquinas (though that wouldn’t be a bad idea). The past hundred years have produced excellent and accessible work, much of it written by people who came to adulthood as uninvolved in religion as you are.

A Canadian view of Australian girls

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shaidle - confessions of a failed slut

I am reluctant to bring this up, but if ever I have seen need for a Racial Discrimination Act this is it. Kathy Shaidle, a Canadian blogger, is entitled to advertise her book in any way she likes, but still there is a certain profiling that leaves me somewhat nonplussed and decidedly uncomfortable. This is from her advertising promotion for her new book, Confessions of a Failed Slut:

As the only female columnist at controversial, conservative Taki’s Magazine, Kathy Shaidle soon found herself covering an unlikely beat: sexuality.

“Unlikely” because as the married, 50-year-old Shaidle explains, “my ‘number’ (as the kids call it these days) is so low that in certain Australian provinces I would still be considered a virgin.”

I take it that one’s number is the number of sexual partners one has had. And, of course, to refer to our political divisions as “provinces” is quite provincial but what would you expect from a Canadian? But if I understand the comparison she is making, the implication is that Australians are so sexually out there that an Australian maid with as few liaisons as Kathy has had would not even think of herself as ever having had sex at all.

It’s not even that I am insulted by the implication, although I am, but my main curiosity is where did such an analogy come from? Do Australian girls in Canada, or anywhere else for that matter, have a reputation somewhere along these lines. I am thankfully well past the age and inclination of ever having to enter into the sexual wilderness of the present day to find out for myself, but there is nothing I know of that makes me think of our local maidens as anything other than innocent, modest and pure, or no less so than anyone else.

There was a joke when I was young about a particular ethic group which went, what’s a virgin in such-and-such country, and the answer was the fastest girl in Grade 2. But we used to tell ethnic jokes in those days and it was just a joke without much more than a bit of fun (except for people of that ethnic group who didn’t find it funny at all). But Australians? I must do a bit of research.

In the meantime, I think there needs to be a reference to our Human Rights Commission so that if Kathy ever sets foot on these shores down under that she will end up facing the same kind of tribunal faced by her Canadian mates Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn.

Posted on the first of April 2014.

It was fated to be a hit

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Doris Day’s greatest song. It’s origins are completely unimaginable from the tune or the lyrics. This is from Mark Steyn:

It was written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans.

“Que Sera Sera” was a deal-clincher: Alfred Hitchcock wanted Jimmy Stewart for The Man Who Knew Too Much, his 1956 Hollywood remake of one of his early British films. But Stewart’s agency, MCA, told Hitchcock they’d only give him Stewart if he took another of their clients, Doris Day, as co-star. So Hitch agreed. Then Doris demanded a song. So Hitch caved again.

“We had never met him before,” Ray Evans recalled a few years ago. “And Hitchcock said, ‘I don’t know what kind of a song I want, but it’s got to be the kind of song that a mother would sing to a little child.’ The picture takes place in Europe and North Africa. Jimmy Stewart is a diplomat-” Mr Evans’ memory was a little faulty here: Stewart was playing a doctor. “-and Hitchcock said, ‘I’ve written it into the plot because it’s the part when the little boy is kidnapped, when Doris Day finally finds him. She finds him by singing the song and hearing him echo her in the distance and she knows where he is.’ But we got the title ‘Que Sera, Sera’ and wrote it on that basis and then we had to play it for Mr Hitchcock and he said, ‘Gentlemen’ – and Jay could imitate him very well. I can’t do that – he said, ‘Gentlemen, when I first met you, I didn’t know what kind of a song I wanted. That’s the kind of a song I wanted.’ He said, ‘Thank you very much. Goodbye.’ And we never saw him again.”

In the picture, with Doris Day singing to a young child, you can sense the director doesn’t know what he’s got – the artlessness of the song seems to have thrown poor old Hitch. Miss Day didn’t like it. She thought it was a child’s song and would never be a hit, so she did it in one take and said “That’ll do”, and it became the biggest hit of her career.

But aside from the genealogy, there is the philosophy behind the tune which is discussed by Steyn at the end of his piece:

The philosophy is bunk. Whatever will be is not what will be: We have the capacity to shape events and, if we don’t, they may well turn out to be far less congenial for us than they were for Doris Day.

For myself, I am a great believer in trying to steer events in the right direction but looking at how things are going, I’m not sure that Doris Day didn’t get it right after all.

Obama and the creation of a socialist state

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This was a comment on my Delusional Liar post on Obama. I thought I knew about Alinski but if that is a direct quote from somewhere it is a truly explosive find. Even if not a direct quote, it is a quite nice summation of what is going on even if it has happened only opportunistically.

Obama is not delusional at all. He knows exactly what he’s doing. I’d like to single out the first and fifth of these rules but Obama really has them ALL covered.

How to create a social state by Saul Alinsky:

There are eight levels of control that must be obtained before you are able to create a social state. The first is the most important.

1) Healthcare – Control healthcare and you control the people

2) Poverty – Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.

3) Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.

4) Gun Control – Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state.

5) Welfare – Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income)

6) Education – Take control of what people read and listen to – take control of what children learn in school.

7) Religion – Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools

8) Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.

Amazingly the book is more plausible than the film

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Went to see Noah last night. Let me put it this way. There was a chap named Noah and he had three sons named Shem, Ham and Japteth. There was a flood. As for the animals trooping in two by two, in over two hours that part might have taken up three minutes of movie time. But at least the film showed how Noah was able to find the labour needed to build a boat big enough to carry two of every kind of animal in the world. I can only think a film like this is possible today because no one any longer actually knows the story. More evidence, as if it were needed, that our Judeo-Christian culture will not hold and something else will be arriving very soon.