Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

The Enlightenment and everything the Left claims to value is unquestionably on the line

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It is probably too late to do anything about it, but this is an article of astonishing insight and depth. I agree with everything he says and I have seldom seen it said better: Migrant crisis: Europe must close borders to refugee influx. The sub-head in the actual paper reads: “A flood of Muslims into the continent could lead to civilisational catastrophe”. There is no could about it, and it is probably already too late. The article is by Peter Baldwin, a Minister in the Hawke and Keating governments, that is, a Minister when Labor was still reasonably sane. There is no single best bit, but this gives you some of what is said. You should read it all.

Any suggestion there might be any problem intrinsic to Islam has to be made with extreme care to avoid being accused of “Islamophobia”, an ill-defined term that is routinely conflated with racism. The penalties for transgressions in this area can be severe and may become more so — before Britain’s general election this year Labour leader Ed Miliband undertook to make Islamophobia an aggravated offence.

A realistic debate needs to acknowledge that Islam is not a race but a belief system, with tenets that many of its followers take extremely seriously. Key among those tenets is the requirement Muslims fight to make Islam dominant over other creeds and belief systems, the latter to survive only with an acknowledged subordinate status.

Islam does not recognise separate civil and religious spheres. The modern notion of diversity is ­utterly foreign to it, at least in the sense of different belief systems coexisting as equals. How many, if any, of the several score Muslim-majority countries grant genuine civil and religious liberty and equality to non-Muslims? How many more severely persecute followers of other belief systems? Anyone who asks what this would mean for Europe’s Judaeo-Christian tradition is branded a right-wing nativist, but the Enlightenment and everything the Left claims to value is on the line too.

There is such visceral hatred on the left, built out of massive levels of ill-will, envy and bile that there truly is a wish to pull our civilisation down found across left-side parties everywhere. Anyone who loves our way of life, with its openness, freedom and prosperity, long ago abandoned the left side of politics, who are now perfectly represented by Barack Obama.

The first to say “racist” loses the argument

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trotsky racist

I came across the above poster the other day, which seems to be a widely held belief although I wouldn’t know myself. Since he spoke Russian it’s a hard one to confirm. Yet the point is clear enough. Those without an actual argument just say “racist” and then let the thought-police do the rest. As an example of almost an infinite number that might be found, I did come across this today on Drudge which is a story from last night’s Emmy Awards in the US:

ATTACK: Trump Called ‘Racist’ in Opening Monologue…

Which is all related to Donald Trump’s off-handed reply to a query from the stands the other day on what religion he thought Obama followed. In the wake of this non-story, which has, of course, become explosive in the hands of the American media, here is what we can also find on Drudge:

CARSON: A Muslim should not be president…
Video…
Stephanopoulos Grills Trump: Why Can’t You Say That Obama Is Not Muslim?
FLASHBACK: Obama ‘My Muslim Faith’…

This business about Obama’s religion has led to plenty of advice over what Donald Trump ought to have said, and has now extended to the entire Republican field who are also being asked to answer what no one can possibly know, what religion does Obama really follows in his heart of hearts. Mark Steyn has his own views which he has addressed to the American media and is thus filed under the heading, Get Lost, You Palace-Guard Creeps. Naturally you need to read it all where he provides seven different possible answers. This is number six.

As to whether he’s a Christian, have you asked him whether he has attended even semi-regularly any church other than that of Jeremiah (“God damn America”) Wright? A man is free to attend the Westboro Baptist Church but if he chooses to do so I’m not obligated to defend his Christianity. And frankly, whatever the President’s personal faith, there is no dispute that his leadership of the western world has been an utter catastrophe for Christians around the planet. Some of the oldest Christian communities on earth have been entirely extinguished on Obama’s watch: in Mosul, Iraq, which was an American protectorate on the day he took office, not a single Christian remains. Every single one of them is dead or fled. So, instead of jumping through your preposterous hoops and speaking up for the most powerful man in the world, I would rather speak up for the powerless – for the Nigerian schoolgirls, for the Yazidi, for the Copts in Egypt, and for all the other beleaguered Christian communities in the world this feckless president has set alight and watched burn.

When you think about all this, what possible difference does it make what he believes. What he has done, or not done, is what counts. What religion he follows matters not at all.

And as a general principle, the first to call someone else a racist loses the argument immediately.

“The unprotected, the vulnerable, have a right and a reason to worry”

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For the first time in ages, Peggy Noonan has written a column that is right on the money: The Migrants and the Elites. In it we find this:

The gap between those who run governments and those who are governed has now grown huge and portends nothing good.

Rules on immigration and refugees are made by safe people. These are the people who help run countries, who have nice homes in nice neighborhoods and are protected by their status. Those who live with the effects of immigration and asylum law are those who are less safe, who see a less beautiful face in it because they are daily confronted with a less beautiful reality—normal human roughness, human tensions. Decision-makers fear things like harsh words from the writers of editorials; normal human beings fear things like street crime. Decision-makers have the luxury of seeing life in the abstract. Normal people feel the implications of their decisions in the particular.

The decision-makers feel disdain for the anxieties of normal people, and ascribe them to small-minded bigotries, often religious and racial, and ignorant antagonisms. But normal people prize order because they can’t buy their way out of disorder.

People in gated communities of the mind, who glide by in Ubers, have bought their way out and are safe. Not to mention those in government-maintained mansions who glide by in SUVs followed by security details. Rulers can afford to see national-security threats as an abstraction—yes, yes, we must better integrate our new populations. But the unprotected, the vulnerable, have a right and a reason to worry.

More on Samuelson and the damage he has done to economic theory

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I received a note from a friend and colleague on the note I did on the most damaging graph in the history of the sciences. He wrote:

Thanks for your blog on Samuelson. Only about twelve months ago did it dawn on me just how much damage Samuelson has done. I was thinking then of the Foundations, but of course you are right: his introductory textbook has been much more influential. Because his first degree was in physics, I don’t suppose he ever encountered a course in the History of Economic Thought in his life.

Samuelson’s first degree was in physics! This was news to me. So I did a bit of hunting, and now I am not sure that my colleague wasn’t right, and that Samuelson’s Foundations may have done as much harm as his introductory text and the Keynesian-cross. None of the standard online biographies mention physics, but there was then this on Paul Samuelson which is an entry in the online Encyclopedia of Human Thermodynamics, a link I shall certainly preserve. This is part of what it says about Samuelson:

In hmolscience, Paul Samuelson (1915-2009) (CR:89|#52) was an American economist noted, in economic thermodynamics, notable for his circa 1940 to 1970s efforts to derive economics via what he refers to a “mathematical isomorphisms” of the thermodynamics of Willard Gibbs, as communicated to him via his mentor Edwin Wilson and the so-called Harvard Pareto circle.

Economic stability | Equation 133
In 1938, Edwin Wilson, amid various letter communicates on his steam engine/physical chemistry based “mathematical economics” course, he was teaching at Harvard, wrote the following to Samuelson with critical comments on a paper by Samuelson:

“Moreover, general as the treatment is I think that there is the possibility that it is not so general in some respects as Willard Gibbs would have desired. [In] discussing equilibrium and displacements from one position of equilibrium to another position [Gibbs] laid great stress on the fact that one had to remain within the limits of stability. Now if one wishes to postulate the derivatives including the second derivatives in an absolutely definite quadratic form one doesn’t need to talk about the limits of stability because the definiteness of the quadratic form means that one has stability. I wonder whether you can’t make it clearer or can’t come nearer following the general line of ideas [that] Gibbs has given in his Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, equation 133.”

The very impressive mention of “equation 133”, from Gibbs’ subsection “Internal Stability of Homogeneous Fluids as indicated by Fundamental Equations”, is the following:

U – TS + PV – M_1 m_1 – M_2 m_2 … – M_n m_n \,

Wilson, in other words, is suggesting, as it seems to be, to Samuelson that he use the Gibbs fundamental equation to formulate a theory of economic stability. Very hilarious indeed. Even the best of the best top dozen of the three dozen or so known human free energy theorists have been barely able to get a handle on this very intricate problem. No wonder Samuelson, into the 1970s, would become so irritated when people queried him about entropy and or sent him entropy-based economic papers to look at.

And where does all this lead:

Samuelson’s general economic model, in particular, was influenced by Gibbsian equilibrium criterion. His 1947 book Foundations of Economic Analysis, from his doctoral dissertation, is based, in theme, on Gibbs’ 1876 On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances. [1] Samuelson was the sole protegé of the polymath Edwin Wilson, who had himself been the sole protegé of Yale’s great physicist Willard Gibbs. During these formative years, Gibbs’ theories on equilibrium and chemical thermodynamics influenced them both in their ideas on the equilibrium of economic systems. In his seminal Foundations, Samuelson suggested, for example, that variation of the demand for a factor with a change in its price was analytically similar to thermodynamic variation in the pressure, volume, and temperature of an ideal gas. [9] All of this is pure Gibbsian. In fact, one may argue that the terms “foundation” and “variation” were plucked directly from the first page of the abstract to Equilibrium, wherein Gibbs states:

“Little has been done to develop the principle [of entropy] as a foundation for the general theory of thermodynamic equilibrium, which may be reformulated as follows: for the equilibrium of any isolated system it is necessary and sufficient that in all possible variations of the state of the system which do not alter its energy, the variation [δ] of its entropy shall either vanish or be negative.”

In short, Samuelson seemed to have adopted the variational logic of differential equations employed in thermodynamics, where variation goes by the mathematical name of “derivative”, to be applied in economics. Samuelson, however, maintains that his borrowing of thermodynamics to application in theoretical economics is only as “mathematical isomorphisms” between the maximum-minimum structures of thermodynamics and the cost-profit-utility systems of economics.

A very interesting idea in 1947, certainly worth pursuing. That we now can see it is a dead end is neither here nor there to all of world’s economists who have taken the trouble to learn maths rather than looking at the way an economy works.

Maybe they’re just ignorant and dumb

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I cannot get used to all this global warming climate change nonsense in every paper and in all the news shows. And it is almost always representatives of the left side of politics and their media mates that carry the virus. But why is it? Why do they so consistently fall for the most blatant con job in the history of politics, or at least the second most blatant, with socialism being Number One.

Maybe they are just ignorant, or gullible, or stupid, or shallow or fools or dishonest. But it has to be something because this is so consistent that it defies reason. Why is it a certainty that Obama, for example, thinks global warming climate change is a problem while Ted Cruz or Donald Trump can see it is just junk science masquerading as social justice.

Really, it does defy explanation.

Refugees are the last patriotism of the scoundrel

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There are different sorts of refugees, some of which are related to the times in which they were born and raised. We refugees from the 1950s have found ourselves in an alien place, which at first we mistook for the places from which we had come. First this from Peter Hitchens, We won’t save refugees by destroying our own country.

Thanks to a thousand years of uninvaded peace, we have developed astonishing levels of trust, safety and freedom. I have visited nearly 60 countries and lived in the USSR, Russia and the USA, and I have never experienced anything as good as what we have. Only in the Anglosphere countries – the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – is there anything comparable. I am amazed at how relaxed we are about giving this away.

Our advantages depend very much on our shared past, our inherited traditions, habits and memories. Newcomers can learn them, but only if they come in small enough numbers. Mass immigration means we adapt to them, when they should be adapting to us.

So now, on the basis of an emotional spasm, dressed up as civilisation and generosity, are we going to say that we abandon this legacy and decline our obligation to pass it on, like the enfeebled, wastrel heirs of an ancient inheritance letting the great house and the estate go to ruin?

We are now like squatters living in a stately home with no concept of what it took to build or how easy it will be to bring it to ruin. Let us, however, go on a bit further with what Peter had to say:

Having seen more than my share of real corpses, and watched children starving to death in a Somali famine, I am not unmoved by pictures of a dead child on a Turkish beach. But I am not going to pretend to be more upset than anyone else. Nor am I going to suddenly stop thinking, as so many people in the media and politics appear to have done.

The child is not dead because advanced countries have immigration laws. The child is dead because criminal traffickers cynically risked the lives of their victims in pursuit of money.

I’ll go further. The use of words such as ‘desperate’ is quite wrong in this case. The child’s family were safe in Turkey. Turkey (for all its many faults) is a member of Nato, officially classified as free and democratic. Many British people actually pay good money to go on holiday to the very beach where the child’s body was washed up.

It may not be ideal, but the definition of a refugee is that he is fleeing from danger, not fleeing towards a higher standard of living.

It is a higher standard of living for them, but not for the people whose countries are being invaded. They will pay and never stop paying, with their own prosperity, with no doubt at all, torn away by these invasions. And at the end Peter has some sensible things to say about us here in Australia:

Can we stop this transformation of all we have and are? I doubt it. To do so would involve the grim-faced determination of Australia, making it plain in every way that our doors are open only to limited numbers of people, chosen by us, enduring the righteous scorn of the supposedly enlightened.

Of course, if you already get the point, you hardly need it said to you over again. Still, there is this that may be worth keeping in mind, from The Diplomad, The Threat: Is Hungary’s PM the Only One Who Understands?

The so-called “refugee” crisis in Europe is more than alarming. It, of course, is much more than a “refugee” crisis. All across the Old Continent we are seeing massive flouting of law and order as thousands, tens-of-thousands, maybe more, of so-called refugees flood into Europe and then slosh about from one country to another looking for the best deal. The UK has become a particular target as “refugees” try to make their way to Britain’s generous public benefits.

None of us writing about such things have the slightest belief that anything can be done. Australia may hold out for now, but Labor may yet be only a year from government.

Ensuring the end of Western Civilisation

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This is the title: Western Civilization: The Final Frontier?. Here is what she said in her text, with the word “practically” inserted so as not to rule out divine intervention or some such thing:

What is particularly appalling about the ill-informed Western elites is how their policies are practically ensuring the end of Western Civilization. They refuse to acknowledge the need for border security –sovereignty — and allow, if not encourage the wholesale influx of third-world immigrants (who do not wish to assimilate) into states with generous welfare policies.

I’m sure what comes next will be an improvement on what we have done. We obviously don’t know what’s good for us anyway. Here’s another perspective: How Mainstream Media and Social Media Present COMPLETELY Different Views Of Syrian Immigrant Crisis. Its opening statement:

The “Great Replacement” has begun, and social media is showing what the “refugees” from Syria are really all about.

It’s not the world I was born into so I wouldn’t be expected to like it. But others are being born into this one so maybe they’ll like it better. But it is amazing to be there at the end, although it may limp along for a bit longer still. Read The Swerve. Think about just how well this passage from a hostile review fits the world we are on the threshold of entering:

It is possible for a whole culture to turn away from reading and writing. As the Roman Empire crumbled and Christianity became ascendant, as cities decayed, trade declined, and an anxious populace scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the ancient system of education fell apart. What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work, scribes were no longer given manuscripts to copy.

The most haunting part of the book was the description of fifteenth century Rome, the centre of an empire a thousand years before. It was not until the middle of the 14th century, perhaps even the 15th, that living standards in Europe rose to where they had been in the 2nd. You think it can’t happen until it does, and it does now look like it might.

This is a movie you gotta see

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Being in some ways a follower of Leo Strauss, I get it when he says that there are, in politically difficult times, two interpretations of a text. There is the superficial meaning, and there is the actual message that the author has in mind but cannot say what he thinks just like that. Or maybe I’m just reading too much into it. In either case, an amazing film that had me in for the whole two hours plus.

The movie is Straight Outta Compton. At Rotten Tomatoes 90% from the critics and 95% from the audience. A respectable but lower 8.3 at IMDb.

The Islamic State and the Nazis

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Here is the Nazi propaganda film.

And here was the truth.

The point? The Nazis understood what they were doing was evil and could not be exposed to the public. With ISIS, they are actually proud of what they do. They see nothing evil or immoral in any part of their program. And they are winning, not losing. Indeed, they are right this minute invading Europe with virtually no one at all trying to stop them.

How is this not the death of the West?

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The only part of the globe in which individual freedom is among the highest and most important values is being inundated by people for whom individual freedom has next to no value within their cultural norms. Listening to the chants of “freedom, freedom” from people who have no idea what freedom means in a Western context makes me worry about the future like nothing else I have seen in my own lifetime. The virtually unknown lessons of Palmyra make you even wonder whether the architectural glories of Europe will remain a century from now.

And then there is the deal with Iran, a minor item on Drudge today, already old news.

ARMS RACE: Kerry Promises Billions in Weaponry to Israel, Saudis in Wake of Nuke Deal…

TOP BRASS: Deal INCREASES Likelihood of War…

You give the most belligerent and ideologically crazed nation in the Middle East the right to build nuclear weapons, and what else can you expect other than an increased likelihood of war. If we thought the twentieth century was the bloodiest in history, wait till we count up the dead at the end of this one.