Category Archives: Politics on the left

Anonymity on the net

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I don’t often find myself disagreeing with Mark Steyn about things, but on this one I am completely on the other side. I will let Mark present his case:

Kathy Shaidle and Gavin McInnes have been discussing online anonymity. I agree with them. You’re not in the battle unless you put your name to it – and don’t give me that Scarlet Pimpernel stuff: you’re not riding out after dark on daring missions, you’re just reTweeting some bloke’s hashtag.

Mr McInnes is withering about the cyber-warrior ethos – the butch pseudonym, the graphic-novel avatar. But, cumulatively, it’s making the Internet boring and ineffectual for everyone other than Isis. Speaking of which, notice how few of their followers have reservations about enthusiastically liking and favoriting and reTweeting their Islamic snuff videos, apparently indifferent as to whether Twitter, Facebook or the NSA know their IP numbers.

Let me say that I am sensationally grateful when people take on serious anti-PC issues and use their own names. It is crucial that someone like Andrew Bolt is identifiable and that their blogs, columns and media presentations allow those of us in more vulnerable positions to see these views presented in public. It is important for each of us to understand that we are not alone. We are not at the samizdat stage of our cultural development but we’re not that far away either. The police will not come for you in the middle of the night, and you are very unlikely to be shot down in the street by those who disagree with your views. But for all that, there are large risks for which there is no compensation to any of us in being identified as holding unpopular opinions. With the left, they will come after you to deprive you of your job and your income, and for them, there will be no holds barred. They are not debaters, they are haters. They want to shut you up and they have no qualms about it. There is no value to them in free speech and open debate. They are totalitarians who value nothing but their collective power which they ruthlessly use to do harm to others who step outside their predetermined bounds of acceptable opinion. No one on the left is permitted to be heretical on so much as even a single oissue. You are either all in or you are out.

Think about the testimony offered by Laura Rosen Cohen, who runs a blog I admire, in which she describes the kind of reality most of us are not prepared for. First she writes this:

Having written professionally for a number of years, I also blogged anonymously.

I was scared that I would be harassed at work (or worse) for having “controversial” opinions. So, I published a lot of articles in “mainstream” publications under my own name, and saved my more raucous, obnoxious, super-Jewy stuff for my anonymous blog.

Then, some evil, anonymous and cowardly twerp, sitting at a computer somewhere in the world made a comment on my blog that was mildly threatening. An ‘I know who you are’ kind of thing, kind of threatening to ‘expose’ me. It freaked me out, despite the fact that I was becoming less and less comfortable with anonymity.

Shortly after that, Andrew Breitbart died suddenly of a heart attack. I remember the exact moment when I read about his death and decided right then and there that I was not going to be scared anymore of putting my own name to everything I write. Within a week or so, I had closed the anonymous blog, and started a brand new one with my own name on the masthead, front and centre.

That was also my way of telling that anonymous troll to shove it up his (or her-who knows) ass.

As Gavin, Kathy and Mark say-if you don’t put your name on it, you have no skin in the game.

Excellent. Brave. Forthright. But after all that comes this immediately after:

I have been passed over for many opportunities because my views are not mainstream. I’ve been eased out of jobs, rejected for others, and even asked off-record questions at interviews about my ability to “get along” with ‘people of diverse backgrounds’.

So you see, free speech of unpopular opinions – meaning opinions that are unpopular on the left – is not so free after all, but comes with a huge potential cost. The anonymity of the net allows many of us to say things in public that we are very aware may have us receiving modern versions of being burned at the stake or sent to the gulag. The same people who will sniff at the Catholic Church for arresting Galileo and preventing him from repeating that the sun was at the centre of the solar system are now prepared to jail people who are sceptical about global warming. There are some people who have made a career out of expressing unpopular opinions (of which there are literally none on the left), and I say again how grateful to them I am. But the dangers remain to us folk in the trenches who do not have fame and position to protect us. Anonymity is crucial for many of us and should be protected at all costs by everyone on the net.

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 gravedigger’s picnic

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Some people have no shame. Read this and marvel.

It is sad that with humanity facing catastrophic climate disruption as part of an existential threat that there are still people willing to attack Mike Mann, one of the real heroes of climate science, outrageous lies. But one must admire the well-funded denier campaign, carried forward by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and his “False News” network, for the campaign’s persistence in the face of massive evidence, its success in confusing much of the public, and creating a propioganda [sic] triumph equivalent to that of creationism in keeping Medieval nonsense embedded in the brains of many Americans. Unhappily the “triumph” may prove doom for many of our descendents [sic]. Mike Mann is admired by all real climate scientists, even those who may have same disagreements with him (there is no certainty in science, unlike in the world of denial propogandists [sic]) — and I know many of the leading players and follow the field closely. The best one can say of this silly collection of comments from hacks and has-beens, mixed with quotes-out-of-context, is that it is NOT a disgrace to the profession of its perpetrators, nor to their pimps.

Let Mark Steyn tell you who wrote it:

We have our first celebrity thumb’s down, from “P Ehrlich” – and yes, it’s that Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. . . .

It’s not clear from P Ehrlich’s flaccid generalities whether he actually read the book, but, if he did bother to pick it up, I do hope he got as far as page 240, where he and his hero “Mike Mann” make a joint appearance:

Mann, Ehrlich, and Rahmstorf: What a scurrilous bunch. My sympathy to you and anyone else who has to deal with them. They’re gravediggers of science.

Or maybe he did get that far and this is one of those “quotes out of context” he’s complaining about.

Still, always nice to hear from one of the gravediggers. Keep digging, Professor.

Not evidence, not fact, not theory, not anything seems to deter these people. And why? Because there are idiots everywhere who lap it all up.

Venezuela on the Thames?

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I have friends on the left who used to say that the best thing that ever happened to their political desires was the fall of the Soviet Union. It would make it possible for socialists to win and hold governments without the example of the USSR there to scare the children. And so things seem to be turning out. To go with Bernie Sanders in the US we now have Socialist Corbyn wins UK Labour leadership in landslide.

Radical leftwinger Jeremy Corbyn on Saturday won the crown of Britain’s main opposition Labour party in a landslide victory, becoming the nation’s most left-wing political leader for over 30 years.

The 66-year-old socialist, whose policies have been compared to those of Greece’s Syriza and Spain’s Podemos, was named leader after clinching 59.5 percent of the 422,664 votes cast by Labour party members and supporters.

The newly-elected leader condemned “grotesque levels of inequality” and “an unfair welfare system” in his victory speech to party members in central London.

The world is heading in a very strange direction. Every country has a large proportion of its population who wish to repeat the success of Chavez in Venezuela. I don’t therefore believe that this is even remotely right:

Despite the “Corbynmania” of his grassroots campaign, Tony Blair — Labour’s most electorally successful leader who is now deeply unpopular over Iraq — has warned that his victory would split Labour and consign the party to electoral oblivion.

I hope he’s right but we live in very strange times.

Media ignorance and America’s alignment with the Nazis of the 21st century

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Socialism is a viral belief system that attacks people when they are young, and is especially destructive of people with university degrees in the arts and humanities. It is a kind of equaliser, that makes smart people effectively stupid. You hardly have to go very far in reading the media to see it. Which brings me to this: The world just changed forever, but you’d hardly know it from the media

It is now official. On Thursday, the Senate let the Iran deal go through – a deal that will forever change the landscape of the world in terrifying and unthinkable ways. I need not enumerate how this collaboration with Iran (and it is a collaboration) will affect Israel, the Middle East, the United States, and indeed the entire world.

Readers know all too well.

And yet, you’d hardly know how our fate was sealed on Thursday. America’s alignment with the Nazis of the 21st century hardly made a dent in media coverage.

That’s because Nazis were National Socialists. The only consistency on the left are: (1) their attacks on anyone with wealth earned by producing things (i.e. they do not to attack the wealthy as such which allows them to ignore actors and sports stars, corrupt union officials or extremely well paid media people) and (2) to attack anyone who actually bases their values on the Judeo-Christian tradition which allows them to ignore the faults that might be found in the value systems of any other religious groupings (which, of course, includes atheists).

Media ignorance is so pervasive that everyone, other than fellow socialists, is perfectly well aware of it. Watching news shows on the ABC for people without this socialist warping is astonishingly painful which is why so few people do it.

As to the specifics about media making the population ignorant of anything, the most astonishing evidence was the reaction across the world to that picture of a single drowned child. Where have these people been for the past five years not to have come across many many photos just like it and far worse. Where they have been is watching the news and reading our papers, that’s where they’ve been, the perfect recipe for becoming as ignorant as the people who present and distort the news. How else does an Obama get elected or a Bill Shorten become competitive looking forward to our next election?

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.

Who is the ABC to preach to us about anything?

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Did Jonathan Green really say this? From Andrew Bolt:

The other thing here on the point of shame and advertising your evil is that IS [Islamic State] depend on the likes of Tony Abbott to do that job for them – to exaggerate their evil, to continually talk about their death cultness, to parade this in front of us, this is doing their promotional work for them.

No doubt he can look himself in the mirror and see a fine, upstanding representative of the highest morality. The fact that others see him in a different way is merely because we are unable to see his virtues and deep insight into the human condition. Let me therefore also bring across the picture that Andrew put up.

isis murder

Pathological and psychotic, and that goes for anyone who does not condemn such barbarity to the absolutely fullest extent. Tell me how to exaggerate this kind of evil. This is sick and disgusting, and if there is anyone who does not agree, then what words shall we use to describe them? Who is the ABC to preach to us about anything?

Can he really be that stupid? Yes he can

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Can he really have said this?

“If we do nothing, Alaskan temperatures are projected to rise between six and twelve degrees by the end of the century.”

Yes he did! It’s four paras down after the picture, and I can only hope that this is another parody website I haven’t picked up on. The only question I ask is why I had not heard this before until I read this. But it’s not he who is deranged, although the possibilities are immense, but the media who cover his every action who have not said a word. Does anyone believe anything like this? Does no one in the media think it is outrageous that this can be said by a President of the United States at an international conference? There is no adult free press in the United States, and if there is, the media are as whatever as their president. I really honestly don’t have the words to describe them or him.