Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

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.

The Greatest Economist of the Millennium

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The following article on the greatest economist of the millennium was published on January 4, 2000 as one of the last of my regular columns in the Canberra Times. It was a follow up to the article on the ten most influential economists of the century that had been published two weeks before.

The Greatest Economist of the Millennium

To choose the greatest economist of the past thousand years to some extent invites the question whether the study of economics has even existed over that span of time.

Economic questions have certainly been matters of the deepest consideration for as long as humans have had commercial relations. Hammurabi’s Code, the first recorded attempt at a written system of law, sought to fix prices. Aristotle’s arguments against the charging of interest remained an obstacle to economic development for more than fifteen hundred years.

But the actual attempt to isolate an economic system from within the on-going blur of events, and then make judgements about what ought to be done, is probably no older than the sixteenth century. It was not until then that the first pamphleteers attempted to understand the structure of the economies in which they lived and to persuade governments about the policies they ought to adopt. These were the ancestors of the economists of today.

Who then was the greatest economist of the millennium? In my view it was John Stuart Mill (1806-73) whose great work, his Principles of Political Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, was first published in 1848. There were to be seven editions during Mill’s life and it was used as a text, with few concerns about its antiquity, well into the twentieth century.

The year of publication of Mill’s Principles is one of the most significant in world history. It was the year of European revolution and in that year and for that reason Karl Marx (who is definitely not the runner up) published his Communist Manifesto. The contrasting visions of Marx and Mill were to reverberate down the succeeding years in a battle for the allegiance of the whole of the human race, a battle which has not ended even to this day.

To Marx the unit of analysis was the economic class to which one belonged. To Mill, what mattered was the individual.

The world of Marx was a world of class conflict in which the capitalist class, the owners of the means of production, exploited those who laboured but earned barely enough to keep alive.

The world as seen by Mill was strangely similar to the one inhabited by Marx, but with a recognition that an economic system based on personal liberty was one in which even those ground down by the burdens of poverty could have their material wellbeing vastly improved and their political freedoms at the same time preserved.

In one of the most remarkable passages ever written, listen to Mill’s judgement on whether the world as he knew it, if it could not be made to change, was preferable to a system in which all property was communally held.

If, therefore, the choice were to be made between Communism with all its chances, and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices; if the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a consequence, that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in an inverse ratio to the labour … if this or Communism were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance.

The twentieth century has been a war of ideologies in which the rights of the individual have been crushed time and again by the dictates of the state. Both the Nazis and the Communist dictatorships ruthlessly suppressed human rights in the name of a higher truth.

The cold war was fought over little more than the structure of the economic system. Massive damage was inflicted on large swaths of the world’s political landscape due to the attempts made to turn collectivist economic theories into a living reality.

Indeed, much of what is now called the third world continues to live in desperate poverty because of the introduction of central direction into their economies, an approach to solving the economic problem which has never yet worked in practice and whose continuation will guarantee poverty for so long as such attempts persist.

There is, of course, much we have learned since his time that makes Mill an imperfect guide to the operation of the economic system, although there are many worse being written even now. His theory of value, to which he believed nothing need ever be added, is the most famous instance of Mill having been superseded by the subsequent work of a later generation of economists.

Yet at the start of the new millennium, we live in the world bequeathed to us by Mill. The politics of On Liberty united with the basic propositions of his economics of limited government, free contract and individual initiative provide the blueprint for a future filled with hope and the promise of a lasting prosperity.

The future of Mannkind

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Having watched Mark Steyn pick apart the human rights industry in Canada was merely a prelude to his evisceration of the American injustice system as a whole. Steyn has decided to go it alone in his suit and counter-suit with Michael Mann, and they are at the “discovery” process, or would be if anyone allowed the case to go forward. So where are we up to now:

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.

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.

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.
____

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.

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.

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.