I began on 23 September and a month later I find that I have put up 99 posts on the things that interest me and this is the 100th. So far I have told about a dozen people that I do this and I have a known readership of one – hi Joshi. But it has been fun and I will keep going. Hopefully post 125 will be about Romney becoming the 45th President of the United States and post 300 will see me welcoming Tony Abbott as the new Prime Minister of Australia.
Rowan Atkinson, the genius behind Mr Bean and Black Adder in an article in the UK’s Daily Mail:
Rowan Atkinson is demanding a change in the law to halt the ‘creeping culture of censoriousness’ which has seen the arrest of a Christian preacher, a critic of Scientology and even a student making a joke.
The Blackadder and Mr Bean star criticised the ‘new intolerance’ behind controversial legislation which outlaws ‘insulting words and behaviour’.
Launching a fight for part of the Public Order Act to be repealed, he said it was having a ‘chilling effect on free expression and free protest’.
He went on: ‘The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.’
Oh how we know it here. And how right he is.
As I noted yesterday, the AFR ran a number of articles on misogyny particularly one by Susan Sheridan. It seems that piece must have been a step too far. Here is an editorial that says much the same as I did although not quite in the same sort of way. And I must say I am happy to find that there still is a step that is too far.
Dr Sheridan, an adjunct professor in English and women’s studies at Flinders University, argues that Mr Abbott is a misogynist because he inhabits and reflects a culture “with a long tradition of hatred and fear of women”. She claims even women who do not consciously resist our modern society’s long tradition of sexism may speak and act in ways that are misogynist. This type of feminist fundamentalism bears similarities to other fundamentalist ideologies including Marxism, green environmentalism and religious fanaticism, all of which draw on notions of oppression and hierarchical power structures that jar with the reality of our modern pluralist culture.
Dr Sheridan’s suggestion that even women can unconsciously act and speak in a misogynist manner harks back to the Marxist idea of “false consciousness”, whereby even the consuming middle classes don’t understand they are being oppressed. The proletariat may have been “oppressed” in the early industrial revolution that prompted Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to publish The Communist Manifesto in 1848. Rather than revolting, however, the working class has long ago mostly morphed into a prosperous middle class that itself increasingly owns the means of production. As Paul Keating notes, Labor has failed to embrace the aspirational class that its own economic reforms encouraged in the 1980s.
Reading the Australian Feminist Review (AFR for short) and there are four – count them – four articles on misogyny. To me it seems to reveal a certain state of mind. The dread dangers of misogyny are being displayed across the paper:
on page 2: “MacMisogyny with fries” by Jennifer Hewitt;
on page 3: “Defining moment in war of words” by Gemma Daley;
on page 67 “Rural blokes lap up Julia’s bit of biffo” by former Labor Senator John Black;
and the pièce de résistance, on page 66 “The ugliness of misogyny” by Susan Sheridan.
The killer quote from Ms Sheridan, taken from Germaine Greer, is this:
Women have very little idea how much men hate them.
No man I have ever known has expressed nor shown a hatred of women, not ever. But in discussing over the past week this business about misogyny with quite a number of women of my acquaintance, the amazing part is that what is much closer to reality is this:
Men have very little idea how much women hate them.
Sheridan equates misogyny with racism – “the parallel with racism is clear” – and calls Tony Abbott a misogynist, in her eyes a completely damning characterisation. And why is he so? Because all men are equally guilty of this same crime:
Because he inhabits a culture with a long tradition of hatred and fear of women – and he reflects that culture. He mirrors it, as Prime Minister Julia Gillard so rightly said.
Of course, the parallel with racism is complete nonsense. Men and women live together, raise children together and have daughters for whom their fathers want to ensure the finest possible outcomes that they can assist in bringing about. Not much of a parallel with Nazis and Jews, is it?
My thanks to the AFR for bringing these views to our attention.
How behind the times our PM is: Just found this from The Daily Express Online. The title is “Feminism is over . . . say women”. Here is the most interesting passage especially given Ms Sheridan’s views:
FEMINISM in the modern world is viewed as outdated and aggressive and is being shunned by women, research has found. . . .
They believe single mother turned multi-millionaire author JK Rowling is a better example of a strong independent role model than feminist icon Germaine Greer.
In fact, almost a third (28 per cent) of British women describe the radical feminism of Ms Greer as ‘too aggressive’ towards men and a quarter no longer view it as a positive label for women.
My posting below, Dealing with the ideologically deaf has now been posted at Quadrant on Line under the lovely title, Gillard’s Feminine Mystique.
Because there is not a single policy or decision that has not turned absolutely sour on her causing the polls to indicate a Labor wipeout at the next election, she has decided to scrape the bottom of the political barrel by arguing that the Leader of the Opposition is not merely a sexist – that is, someone who believes women are different from men and for that reason might take different roles in society – but is a full flown misogynist – an actual hater of women and womankind. She is thus poisoning political debate by dragging in arguments which aside from being beside the point on every major issue of significance at the moment, are also absolutely untrue. That she cannot distinguish between:
(a) I don’t like your policies
(b) I don’t like you because of what you stand for, and
(c) I don’t like you because you are woman
is merely par for the course given how obtuse she has shown herself to be in every other regard. By invoking (c) when what is being said is (a) is, moreover, destructive of politics and political debate, creating animosities where none had existed before. Pandering to the worst instincts and dredging up the badge of victimhood merely for her own political advantage, she is debasing our politics and making Australia a worse place than it was. But it is a reminder just how out of her depth she is adding another example of how destructive she has been to our social peace.
My article at Quadrant Online deals with Gillard burrowing into this pile of dirt because for her it is the only answer she has to the criticisms she so rightly receives. Since Little Miss Perfect cannot believe she is personally at fault about anything, the flaw must lie within her critics. That is what my article tries to say. Here is one para and you can go to QoL if you would like to read the rest:
For someone such as myself, who felt as strongly and positively about Margaret Thatcher as I did about Ronald Reagan, the notion that behind my disgust at the policies of such as astonishingly incompetent Prime Minister as Gillard has proven to be are attitudes based on her sex is both insulting and ridiculous. But for her such beliefs are a talisman that protects her from every criticism since she never has to take them seriously because to her they are based on biological facts on not on her personal incompetence.
Or to put it differently, if she hadn’t run up the deficit why producing nothing worthwhile, created an immense debt where none had existed before, fatally weakened our border protections by dismantling the system that had been carefully put in place by John Howard, brought in a carbon tax after promising in the week before the election that she would not, introduced the NBN that is likely to make our communications system far worse than if she had merely left it alone, and now intends to direct the media so that she will not have to read criticisms of her policies over the Weetbix in the morning, I might have had a different view of both her policies and her persona. But if she believes that either Tony Abbott or anyone else would have been happy had a male done all of this instead, then she is exactly as dense as I actually think she is.
I mentioned a few days back that the American Enterprise Institute had put together a contest for the best short video showing the moral case for free enterprise. They have now announced the winners.
This one – The Joke of the Day – only came in third but I really liked it. If you would like to see the video that actually won and the runner up, in fact all of them, you can go here to the AEI website. Defending free enterprise, not just as a system that delivers the goods but also as the most moral and ethical system ever devised to provide for our material welfare, is an even greater necessity today than it has ever been.
It is only now, in watching the Prime Minister in her latest episode with Peter Slipper, that it has occurred to me that when she goes into political battle she carries with her a magic gender shield so that no matter what anyone says about her policies or incompetence, all she hears is that you’re useless because you’re a woman. No one actually ever thinks it or certainly ever says it, but that is what she always transmutes every form of criticism into so that nothing is personal, everything is ideological, and the ideology is some antique disdain for women that was already out of date in the 1960s.
For someone such as myself, who felt as strongly and positively about Margaret Thatcher as I did about Ronald Reagan, the notion that behind my disgust at the policies of such as astonishingly incompetent Prime Minister as Gillard has proven to be are attitudes based on her sex is both insulting and ridiculous. But for her such beliefs are a talisman that protects her from every criticism since she never has to take them seriously because to her they are based on biological facts on not on her personal incompetence.
There must be no end of such people in politics. It now strikes me that Obama is of a similar kind, transmuting every political criticism into a statement on race. The colour of his skin provides a psychological shield against taking criticism to heart since such criticisms are, in his own mind, racially based and not based on political disagreement.
The question then is what is one to do to convince such people that what is being said about them is unrelated to various existentially biological facts but to their political decisions. And it may turn out that there is nothing that can be done. But if so, it is a warning to us that to elect people such as Gillard or Obama to high office carries the risk that they are incapable of responding to normal political debate since they are incapable of interpreting criticism as based on policy difference unrelated to biology. They will therefore never respond to the criticisms they receive in the way a person – male or female, black or white – would if they were in a similar position without such beliefs about others. This will, moreover, only affect politicians on the left side of the ideological divide since the right has by and large discarded categorisation by race or gender. They are, in fact, so far outside the normal thought processes of the right that it has become almost impossible to engage in debate with such people since we are never quite capable of understanding why they are so resistant to the criticisms we make.
The inflexibility of both Gillard and Obama – over the NBN or boat people here in Australia and in America over such matters as health care and the budget – means they plough on relentlessly in the face of innumerable facts and arguments that demonstrate how wrong such policies are. They don’t listen, they are incapable of listening, because they disregard all criticisms as based on dislike of women in the one case or of black people in the other.
In June, the American Enterprise Institute launched a $50,000 video contest to illustrate the moral case for free enterprise.They have posted the finalists and the winners will be announced on 9 October.
I have put up the above video because it explains Say’s Law about as well as anything I could hope to. Watch Susie turn her desire for some object into an ability to buy it by first producing something herself. It also shows the crucial role of prior saving to finance investment.
[My thanks to Gab for drawing this to my attention and shame on me for not having seen it myself.]
The following was written on the last day of the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Prague, where I was writing from inside Prague Castle, the guest amongst many many others, of the Czech Republic President, Vaclav Klaus. It was originally posted here.
All during the meeting I have found myself drawn to those who have been involved in practical politics. Having spent a quarter of a century as a lobbyist, the importance of separating out the urgent from the less important is an essential part of the job of anyone involved in politics.
In the question period after his presentation Klaus was asked about “free banking”, one of the primary issues pressed by many of the Austrian persuasion. The idea of free banking is to root out the role of the state in money supply and control by letting any bank that chooses to print its own money do so. The idea, I suppose, is to get rid of the state monopoly on money creation. Klaus gave the idea short shrift.
This is not a relevant, realistic idea.
In a world that is drowning in centralising ideas of state control, free banking ought to be so far off the agenda that it would never be raised by anyone. Instead, it is a constant thread from amongst those who see themselves speaking on behalf of the free market.
What Klaus did speak on he titled, “We Are Not on the Winning Side”. It is a genuinely worrying and in my eyes quite accurate summary of the state of play at the present time.
I had a brief conversation with him and told him about going into a bookshop in central Prague where the fellow behind the counter was wearing a Ho Chi Minh tee shirt.
If certain ideas are not beyond the pale in Prague where then are they out of bounds? They are, in fact, evident everywhere you go.
Klaus’s paper is readable from end to end. Six pages single spaced, so it is short but every sentence tells. He had always understood, even when behind the Iron Curtain before the Wall fell in 1989, that the West was overrun by many who did not fully appreciate the nature of the problem of socialism and collectivist thinking.
Since then, he has learned to his astonishment, that it was always worse than he had thought. What’s worse, he now finds matters have deteriorated further since then. I will quote only a single paragraph because it is the most directly related to economic issues, but this is only one part of a paper of supreme excellence.
I did not expect such a weak defence of the ideas of capitalism, free markets and the minimal state. I did not imagine that capitalism and the market would become inappropriate, politically incorrect words that a ‘decent’ contemporary politician should better avoid. I had thought that something like that was only some kind of compulsory coloratura of the Marxist or communist doctrine. Only now do I see the real depth of hatred towards wealth and productive work, only now do I realise the role of human envy and of a completely primitive thought that other person’s wealth is solely and purely at my expense.
Just how true this is becomes all too clear to anyone who must negotiate in a political environment on behalf of the private sector. Market forces, in many circles, is a near equivalent to highway robbery. It is no longer seen as the source of our prosperity and a necessary ingredient in giving us our personal freedom. These are ideas which are weakening and giving way to others of a more sinister kind.
The advice I used to give couples as they were about to marry was to tell the bride that she should expect to do most of the cleaning and most of the cooking. But since it was always badly taken, I have stopped giving this advice although I think it still. On the cooking side I can see that I was wrong – although I did take my own advice on that one. With cooking, it is astonishing the number of fellows I know who cook almost all of the time, and this is even in households where the woman either works only part-time or not at all. Seems OK for them so who am I to say anything.
But this article is about cleaning house and this is what the study found:
In what appears to be a slap in the face for gender equality, the report found the divorce rate among couples who shared housework equally was around 50 per cent higher than among those where the woman did most of the work.
‘What we’ve seen is that sharing equal responsibility for work in the home doesn’t necessarily contribute to contentment,’ said Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study entitled ‘Equality in the Home’.
The lack of correlation between equality at home and quality of life was surprising, the researcher said.‘One would think that break-ups would occur more often in families with less equality at home, but our statistics show the opposite,’ he said.
The figures clearly show that ‘the more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,’ he went on.
It’s only a probability thing, of course, but on this one, if you want a stable marriage, I would go with the odds.
Law of Markets 