The difference between left and right

Posted on March 6, 2014 by lawofmarkets

Andrew Bolt has quite a neat list of what divides left and right, socialists and conservatives, progressives and small-l liberals, or however you might like to name and frame the differences between the two sides of politics. This is in answer to the ABC’s Jonathan Green who thinks that he, like the rest of the ABC, represents the middle ground. This is the list to which no doubt others might be added.

– restrictions on free speech
– the retribalising of our nation
– changing the constitution to effectively divide us by race
– our high levels of immigration
– massive overspending on entitlements and welfare schemes
– workplace restriction which employers say cost jobs and investment
– government handouts to prop up companies from Qantas to car-makers, involving billions of dollars and thousands of jobs
– preventing illegal immigration, which under Labor was reaching levels approaching 40,000 people a year
– the global warming faith and its carbon tax, responsible in part for the loss of thousands of Australian jobs
– the Renewable Energy Target, who helps make electricity a luxury for the poor without doing anything for the environment
– the green bans on nuclear power and on dams to water our growing cities.
– appeasing or defying rising Third World or developing powers such as China
– surrendering elements of our self-government to multinational fora such as the United Nations
– limiting the reach and bias of our massive state media
– green restrictions on the use of our natural resources, costing possibly tens of thousands of jobs
– how to fight Islamist extremism, already responsible for the loss of hundreds of Australian lives

For more on these issues, there is an interesting article, naturally written by someone on the left, that deals with Are left and right a feature (or bug) of evolution?. It’s a review of two books that look at politics and evolution. You should read it all, but this I thought was precious:

Liberals and conservatives, conclude Hibbing et al., “experience and process different worlds.” No wonder, then, that they often cannot agree. These experiments suggest that conservatives actually do live in a world that is more scary and threatening, at least as they perceive it. Trying to argue them out of it is pointless and naive. It’s like trying to argue them out of their skin.

I, of course, see this in exactly the reverse way. It is the Candides of the left who see no danger and create havoc through their ignorance and blindness to actual problems they ignore. Every one of the issues raised on Andrew’s list is a minefield for which so far as I can see there is not a single realistic solution being offered by the left.

Democrats and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee

Posted on March 6, 2014 by lawofmarkets

Let’s see if anything is missing here. This is taken from the Wikipedia entry on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC):

The House Committee on Un-American Activities became a standing (permanent) committee in 1945. Representative Edward J. Hart of New Jersey became the committee’s first chairman. Under the mandate of Public Law 601, passed by the 79th Congress, the committee of nine representatives investigated suspected threats of subversion or propaganda that attacked “the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution.”

What’s missing? The political party to which Representative Edward J. Hart of New Jersey belonged. For that, you have to go to the next level where we find:

Edward Joseph Hart was an American DEMOCRATIC PARTY politician who represented New Jersey’s 14th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 1935-1955.

So we are seeing nothing new here these seventy odd years later. It’s the same party bringing it all back again.

The modern progressive movement admires their predecessors’ stand against McCarthy so deeply that references to that inauspicious period of American history are regularly deployed in liberal publications and media outlets.

Those noble principles apparently go right out the window when Democrats face what increasingly appears to be a catastrophic political landscape heading into the 2014 midterm election cycle. Political handicappers beginning to suggest Republicans have better than even odds of recapturing the upper chamber of Congress in November as Democratic officeholders struggle to defend the political millstone that has become of the Affordable Care Act. Rather than surrender to their fates, Democrats have taken to identifying their own shadowy boogeyman wrecking America from within.

So it is to be the Koch Brothers who will be used as the focus, under the Alinskyite prescription of personalising the enemy which is the approach one takes when supporters are generally not very bright and abstract thought eludes them.

And to go back just a bit, the predecessor to HUAC was the Dies Committee

On May 26, 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established as a special investigating committee, reorganized from its previous incarnations as the Fish Committee and the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist or fascist ties. It was chaired by Martin Dies Jr. (DEMOCRAT-TX), and therefore known as the Dies Committee.

In 1946, the committee considered opening investigations into the Ku Klux Klan but decided against doing so, prompting known anti-black committee member John E. Rankin (DEMOCRAT-MS) to remark, "After all, the KKK is an old American institution."[12] Instead of the Klan, HUAC concentrated on investigating the possibility that the American Communist Party had infiltrated the Works Progress Administration, including the Federal Theatre Project and the Federal Writers' Project.

Investigating communists was an afterthought when the Democrats refused to investigate the Ku Klux Klan! What a shameful history the Democrats have but what is even more shameful is the way history is distorted to make it seem that it was all Republican and all by themselves. And the interesting part about Dies is that he was as much an anti-communist as Joe McCarthy. He is saved from modern contempt on the left only because of his party affiliation.

[The Mediate story on McCarthyism and the Koch Brothers is via Instapundit]

Of course the Nazis were socialists

Posted on March 2, 2014 by lawofmarkets

It is only on the say so of Joseph Stalin that Hitler and the Nazis have not been identified as socialists. The modern left naturally wants to be spared the connection. Anyway, this issue has come up in a debate in the UK that has been discussed by Jonah Goldberg in an article titled, Nazis: Still Socialists. This is how Goldberg sums up:

Conservatives, libertarians, and other champions of free-market economics must constantly put pressure on politicians to fend off the natural human tendency to fight innovation as a threat to the status quo and the powers that be. Across the West there’s a tendency among bureaucrats, politicians, academics, and other members of the New Class to convince the people to hand over the major decisions of their lives to the “experts.” These experts aren’t all in the government, but they all collude with government to convince people that the experts have all the answers and that the people need to hand the reins over to them. They will tell us what to eat, what to drive, what to think. It’s an approach that puts politics before economics. Because it is an attempt to politicize peoples’ lives. Or as Hitler put it, “Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.”

Personally I prefer the Otto Strasser version, a leading Nazi and therefore in a position to know, also quoted in the article:

We are socialists. We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, its unfair wage system, its immoral way of judging the worth of human beings in terms of their wealth and their money, instead of their responsibility and their performance, and we are determined to destroy this system whatever happens!

That’s the Greens. That’s the left. That is a quite accurate summary of socialism going all the way back to its first origins, just as it will continue to be as far forward as the eye can see. Tactics may differ but the rhetoric will always remain the same.

In this debate on the affirmative was Daniel Hannan who has himself written an article, Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism. All the more important, therefore, to continuously remind them of it. From his article:

Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.

So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.

The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.

Hannan for some reason wishes to absolve the modern left from Nazi tendencies. I am more willing to leave it an open question. But what he writes is how to seriously get under the skin of the modern left:

Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order.

His aim, he told his economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” – by which he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state. “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish,” he told Wagener, “we shall be in a position to achieve.”

Leftist readers may by now be seething. Whenever I touch on this subject, it elicits an almost berserk reaction from people who think of themselves as progressives and see anti-fascism as part of their ideology.

And when before has Hannan touched on this. Here, in this article from February 16, 2013 titled, So total is the Left’s cultural ascendancy that no one likes to mention the socialist roots of fascism. It has certainly touched a nerve given it had 1357 comments at the Daily Telegraph in London.

Some bit of order restored to the universe

Posted on February 24, 2014 by lawofmarkets

Efficiently done. Sweden was completely outclassed. 3-0.

The Radosh-Horowitz riddle

Posted on February 21, 2014 by lawofmarkets

Suppose Diana West had written the worst book ever on Roosevelt, Stalin and the Cold War. She hasn’t – she’s crafted one of the best books on this issue ever written – but suppose she had written one of the worst. Suppose the facts didn’t stack up. Suppose there were large gaps in her logic and in the analysis. Suppose it was a pot boiler badly crafted and convincing to no one. Suppose she had done that.

Well so what if she had. Throw it out there for others to deal with. Let it be refuted by those on the left if they have the nerve and the knowledge to do it. Let them unpick her errors and mistakes. Let them take the time and the trouble. If she can establish a case, even on really flimsy grounds, that Roosevelt’s White House was riddled with Soviet agents and that America’s strategy during World War II was shaped in major ways to suit the Soviet Union and Stalin, well, where’s the problem with that? It is an idea worth pursuing and even if the evidence had been thin, it’s not for people on our side to knock it over. There is nothing to be gained by doing the left’s work for them. Put it out and let it be debated.

And the fact is that there is no value whatsoever on the conservative side of politics for anyone on the right to attack West’s book, whether it is good, bad or mediocre. This is politics at its most dangerous, not some useless academic tearoom debate. This really matters if we are to understand the world we live in. Who cares whether there are some obscure errors in what she wrote that no one can see unless they have spent thirty years in an archive. How moronic and politically stupid do you have to be to challenge such a book, even if it is badly done. Whose interests are being served, and exactly why are they being served by seeking some pristine purity and perfection that no one else has ever achieved or could be expected to.

If people are such idiots that they actually think that the interests of the conservative side of politics are served by ridiculously high standards of scholarship that no one can meet, then they should get out of the political arena and sit in their archive and stay in the tearoom because they are useless to any kind of political debate.

The only interests that are served in attacking Diana West’s book are the interests of the left. No other. If that is not 100% obvious then these people are political fools of the highest order. And if they do understand that, who are they really and where are we then?

Occasionally you win one but the trends are still bad

Posted on February 20, 2014 by lawofmarkets

This is from Andrew Bolt, under the heading, No discount for the Jew from Israel:

It is increasingly hard to tell the difference between the Greens-backed Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement and old-fashioned anti-Semitism.

Australian company Cinematic Strings advertises a product:

Cinematic Strings 2 is a completely redesigned and updated version of the original orchestral strings sample library. Whilst retaining the warm luscious tones produced in the world class Verbrugghen Hall of the Sydney Conservatorium, the new version features a sleek new interface and even smoother legato.

It offers a discount to students:

Supporting Students and Institutions Worldwide

We believe that the latest technology should be readily available to the education sector to facilitate learning and to keep training up-to-date and relevant to industry requirements. For this reason we offer a range of individual educational discounts to both teachers and students; we also have tailored packages available for universities and colleges that seek to incorporate a professional-level string library into their program.

And then it sends this reply to a Jewish student placing an order:

Hi Yossela,

I am very, very sorry but I will not be able to provide you with a student discount. We support the BDS movement worldwide and the cultural boycott against Israel until Israel ceases its illegal settlement activities in the West Bank and ceases its discrimination against the Palestinian people. Please see this website for further information http://www.bdsmovement.net/activecamps/cultural-boycott.

Please understand that this is not in any way directed at you personally and we have heard from many Israeli students who have been very sympathetic towards the Palestinian people. However we are fairly powerless here in Australia to act on behalf of the victims of oppression and so the BDS is the only way we can have a voice.

We wish you all the best in your future musical endeavours.

Kindest regards,

Alex and the CS team.

For the company to say this decision “is not in any way directed at you personally” is to actually explain one of the offensive things about it. Yossela is not being judged as an individual but as an Israeli, and specifically a Jewish Israeli. (Would the ban apply to him were he an Israeli Arab?) This is the tribalism of the Left – a tribalism that strips us all of our individuality and our individual worth.

Moreover, when that tribalism is then put into the service of a movement aimed at only one side in a conflict involving at least two parties, the other of which uses terrorism and preaches a religious hatred of its enemy, we must ask what truly lies behind this BDS movement. It smells like something very old and putrid.

But good news: it didn’t take long after this issue hit the Internet for Cinematic Strings to think again:

While we stand by our reasons, we can see now that this action itself may be construed as discriminatory, and therefore we will make discounts available to all students regardless of location. If Yossela would like to contact us again we will make the discount available to him

.

And here is the full story of why they thought again:

For any who think we can’t fight BDS: here’s a result. Within hours of the original blog post kicking off a Facebook viral avalanche from our readers, the company behind Cinematic Strings has, at least technically, backed down.

As I was writing a follow up post, the owners of Cinematic Strings posted the following in various places on Facebook and in emails (my emphasis). They appear to have backed down on refusing a discount to an Israeli.

We have seen it reported in the past few hours that we do not sell our product in Israel or to Jewish people and it is simply not true. We have always allowed anyone anywhere in the world to purchase CS2; we have sold many copies to Jewish composers both within and outside Israel.

However we have historically allotted discounts case by case, at our discretion. We did withhold a discount in support of an academic and cultural boycott; we did this in order to promote dialogue aimed at ending state-sanctioned discrimination against the Palestinian people. While we stand by our reasons, we can see now that this action itself may be construed as discriminatory, and therefore we will make discounts available to all students regardless of location. If Yossela would like to contact us again we will make the discount available to him.

Thank you to those who have contacted us personally and with whom we have had polite and constructive discussions. I hope this outcome will be satisfactory to all concerned.

Kind regards,

Alex Wallbank

Answering the first paragraph: we certainly never claimed they wouldn’t sell to Jews or Israelis: only that they wouldn’t give a discount that was available to any other nationality.

After posting earlier about the company in Australia that makes the software “Cinematic Strings 2” and who wouldn’t give an educational discount to an Israel, I fired off an email to a friend of mine. He just happens to be a top Hollywood music producer. I specifically asked him for alternatives. This is the answer I received (reproduced with permission):

I am horrified.

I am about to start a new movie and have been sourcing new library.

Cinematic Brass was on my shopping list. It is now OFF.

I will do everything in my power to alert other composers to this abomination. Divestment cuts both ways and Hollywood is a place where many well known Jewish composers reside.

Your email and its unlikely subject matter arrive on the cusp of my purchase decision, and was beshert.

As far as strings are concerned, I have invested in the product of a German company – Orchestral Tools – who make a brilliant library named Berlin Strings. They also have a woodwind library called, not too surprisingly, Berlin Winds. Now, I have no way of knowing whether OT are involved in BDS or not, but would suggest applying the same approach as was used with the Ozzie mumsers.

If anything of a similar nature occurs, let me know.

With fond regards,

So there you have it. One sharp email back to an Israeli asking for a perfectly reasonable student discount which would be offered to any other nationality in the world and repercussions can start.

I just want to say this to the owners of Cinematic Strings. This is not personal, it’s business. I have a theory, expanded here, that boycotting Israel (in this case unfairly refusing an academic discount purely on national origin) will harm the boycotter more than Israel. In his speech the other night Netanyahu very clearly laid out why boycotting Israel and Israelis is so evil:

“In the past, anti-Semites boycotted Jewish businesses and today they call for the boycott of the Jewish state. And by the way, only the Jewish state. Now, don’t take my word for it. The founders of the BDS movement make their goals perfectly clear. They want to see the end of the Jewish state. They’re quite explicit about it. And I think it’s important that the boycotters must be exposed for what they are. They’re classical anti-Semites in modern garb. And I think we have to fight them. It’s time to delegitimize the delegitimises.”

I’m very pleased Cinematic Strings have understood how their actions looked discriminatory but concerned about “we stand by our reasons”. I still feel slightly sorry for “Alex and the CS team”. They’ve been deceived into hating Israel by many years of brilliantly executed propaganda financed by an enormous amount of money. You’ve bought into lies that say we oppress people for fun, steal their land and build big walls to ensnare them. I’m sorry about those lies and that so many believe them, and I’m sorry the far less exciting truth hasn’t been explained properly.

As a business owner myself, I’d be upset if my Arab customers chose to boycott me. Fortunately the Arabs (including many in the disputed territories) have no trouble trading with my Israeli company to our mutual benefit.

Perhaps, through this process of us highlighting their BDS against Israelis (and only Israelis) they’ll come to see that we’re not evil, we don’t kill or steal for sport and we dearly would like to lay down our arms and tear down our walls. We’d do all that in an instant providing we can remain a Jewish nation and sanctuary for Jewish people while accepting any willing to live peacefully alongside us. Just like the Israeli Arabs I ate my lunch with today. We’d love to pull out our troops (they’re our children!) as soon as we know we won’t be blown up on buses and in pizza parlours. But right now, they’re trying to do this almost every day and they’re trying to fire rockets almost every day.

So the walls and the security devices stay in place and, at least on our side, we still yearn for a realistic peace and security.

And I’d like to see BDS against Israelis become just as unacceptable in polite society as antisemitism, which really should be called Jew hatred, used to be.

Opinions on the cheap

Posted on February 20, 2014 by lawofmarkets

Left and right is more than just opinion about what ought to be done. There is something else about being on the left, which is the emotional rush it seems to give. In an article at Quadrant Online I list the odd reality that, so far as I can tell, even though the temperatures have not risen for fifteen years, there are no warmists who have become sceptics, and even with the disastrous outcomes of the Keynesian stimulus, there have been no economists I know of who have given up their Keynesian faith.

But that was the lead into what I thought was an interesting post from a Canadian blogger about the nature of those on the left, the kinds of people they are and the way they wish to experience the world through their emotions in ways that reason cannot touch.

The majority of people are weak-minded. They are also lazy. However, they are also egotistical . . . and so their mind reaches for something that will not only allow them to claim some kind of intellectual “superiority” or “achievement,” but also allow them to do so with no work.

Going green. Protesting. Claiming they’re a caring liberal. Joining a religion. Going vegan. Becoming a professor, etc.

This not only results in them living in a delusional, non-real world, but also makes them emotionally and egotistically invested in keeping up their ideological facade. Thus, when you make passionate, logical, stoic arguments of fact, math, and statistics you (consciously or not) pierce their ego, expose their charade, and therefore trigger a visceral, emotional, and often hate-laden response.

It’s the notion of having an opinion on the cheap that must be so pleasant, specially when you can use that opinion to go around blaming others for the woes of the world without actually having to do any work in finding out what’s going on. Left wing ranting is a species unto itself. His entire post was I thought quite insightful look at the nature of political argument.

The art and science of debate

Posted on February 14, 2014 by lawofmarkets

Let me start by taking up a couple of issue as examples of the lack of reasoned debate in our society.

The first of these is global warming. There has been an across-the-world debate on whether the planet is in the midst of unsustainable warming due to increased greenhouse gases. Even though I have had my doubts from the start, what you do is examine the arguments others bring up to see what truth content there is and you look at the evidence that’s presented along with the theoretical explanations. And OK, for a while, the temperatures were going up, which was a correlation but not proof. I, like others, therefore kept an open mind and watching brief. But then, around fifteen years ago, temperatures stopped rising even while atmospheric carbon continued to increase. As a result, my scepticism has been maintained and I think of such scepticism as fully justified. Yet I do not know of a single person of the green persuasion who has come to the conclusion that perhaps they might have been wrong?

Or take another of my areas of interest, Keynesian economics. I have, for theoretical reasons, strong doubts about modern macroeconomics and its focus on aggregate demand. In my view, Say’s Law is valid while the whole of modern macro is built on a well known classical fallacy. And what is the the fallacy: that increases in public spending will increase aggregate demand and therefore return an economy to low unemployment and faster growth. OK, comes the stimulus, I set down in print my expectation that it would fail on a grand scale, that it would make economic conditions far worse than they were, and would not return our economies to strong growth and full employment. And had our economies, contrary to my expectation, recovered I would have had to give up my opinions, not least because everyone would have reminded me of what I had written. But instead, the world’s economies have unfolded almost exactly as I expected they would. But has any Keynesian actually said that, well, you know, perhaps modern macroeconomics is wrong after all. If there is, I have not heard of a single instance.

This brings me to a very high level and interesting discussion on why arguing with people on the left is not the same as debating, more like talking to a wall. Beyond that, as Captain Capitalism, the name he calls himself, points out, a proper debate is about advancing the truth, whereas dealing with the left merely ends up with abuse but little advance of knowledge. A long post on the art and science of debate but here is one part of which the whole is well worth the effort:

Aurini . . . delves into detail explaining the “debate” structure of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Grammar basically meaning you all have to agree on the definitions and meanings of words. Logic meaning you have to be intellectually honest and adhere to associative rules and other logical concepts that ensure integrity. And rhetoric meaning you apply it in the real world or test one another’s arguments with anecdotes from reality. If both parties in a debate or even a discussion have these three things, then the conversation/debate is much more productive and progresses towards an inevitable “conclusion,” “reality” or agreement.

What’s funny though is for the longest time I never viewed debate as a cooperative effort, but rather an adversarial one. One of competition. One where you had an enemy that needed to be defeated. Of course, this was the sad consequence of growing up with the mentally deficient people that populated my generation. Parties I attended in my 20’s I was regularly attacked and berated for being a conservative. Debates in college (or even post college) were filled with emotion and vitriol. And in nearly 100% of the cases my opponents degraded into name calling, ad hominem attacks, accusations of “ism,” or being a nazi, etc.

And then a little later in his article there is this:

The majority of people are weak-minded. They are also lazy. However, they are also egotistical . . . and so their mind reaches for something that will not only allow them to claim some kind of intellectual “superiority” or “achievement,” but also allow them to do so with no work.

Going green
Protesting
Claiming they’re a caring liberal
Joining a religion
Going vegan
Becoming a professor
etc.

This not only results in them living in a delusional, non-real world, but also makes them emotionally and egotistically invested in keeping up their ideological facade. Thus, when you make impassionate, logical, stoic arguments of fact, math, and statistics you (consciously or not) pierce their ego, expose their charade, and therefore trigger a visceral, emotional, and often hate-laden response from them.

The left tend to deal in feelings rather than facts and proof. It actually seems that facts and proof are no part of anything they propose. They believe what they wish to believe because it makes them feel better, not because it is actually valid or demonstrable to reason and common sense.

Rand Paul and the surveillance state

Posted on February 12, 2014 by lawofmarkets

I wonder what this was about