Wednesday, July 1, 2015

TAQIYYA AS A CONCEPT;  Alinsky made a perfect Muslim.

BUSH AS A PROGRESSIVE;  Yeah and he's a big spender too.   The only thing he was better than was any democrat.

HISTORY OF COFFIN NAILS: An interesting story of a deadly product.

THE BLUMENTHAL/CLINTON ALLIANCE: Because this tidbit is published in The Examinar, it will be ignored by cognoscenti everywhere.

HRC'S EMAIL FRAUD: This will never happen. MSM is too far in the Clinton tank.

WHY OBAMA'S A FRAUD: So what changed in 11 years? Was he really not a racist 11 hers ago, or just a liar.

ADMINISTRATIVE JUSTICE VERSUS JUDGES: An important case study for the future of freedom as we know it.

PUBLIC VERSUS PRIVATE: This is a real insight on what's going on today.

 Potboiler and jejunosity are my two takeaways from this "review".INTERESTING READING LISTS:

ALL TOO PLAUSIBLE:  Too bad more people don't read history or willfully ignore its lessons.

WHAT IS WITH THE CAVILING POLITICIANS: Somewhere along the line these people should either lead the war against this barbarity or admit they are frightened of Muslim retaliation.

THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Through a Glass, Dishonestly

Thoughts on the attacks in Tunisia and elsewhere

June 30, 2015

PHOTO BY JEFF J. MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES

The attack on a tourist beach in Tunisia, which left 38 tourists dead, had a certain logic from the Leninist as well as from the Islamist point of view. The worse the better, said Lenin: the worse being the wretchedness of the condition in which people were forced to live, the better being the revolution consequent upon those conditions.

Tunisia is largely dependent economically on its tourist industry, which had already been much affected by political upheavals of the Arab Spring and the attack in March on the Bardo Museum that left 22 tourists dead. Arrivals from France, the most important market for Tunisian holidays, were already down 65 percent from the previous year; tourists like sun, sea and sites, but not at the cost of their lives.

Tourism can survive a dictatorship such as that of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who ruled the country until 2011, but not a democratically elected government that cannot guarantee security. This attack will therefore achieve two goals for the Islamists: it will make the government more repressive, but in all likelihood ineffectually so, thus earning it the hatred and disdain of the populace. And it will cause severe damage to the Tunisian economy, rendering the economically desperate more likely to listen to extremists and believe that Islamism is a solution to their problems. When chaos comes, people prefer anyone or anything that can re-impose order; where there is anarchy, the most ruthless get to rule. And no one can deny the Islamists their ruthlessness.

Whether or not a connection can be proved between the beheading in France and the attacks on a Shia mosque in Kuwait that were done on the same day as the butchery in Tunisia, few people will resist the idea that theywere connected, ideologically if not organizationally, and that such terrorists pose a worldwide threat.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack in Tunisia, the British Prime Minister (whose compatriots were the most numerous among the dead), David Cameron, made a statement in which he reiterated, among other things, that Islam was a religion of peace. He was under no pressure, except that of his own pusillanimity, to say any such thing, which is in flat contradiction both to history and to the state of the world today. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt would not have said anything as stupid or as cowardly.

Supposing that, after the attack on the church in South Carolina by Dylann Roof, someone had said, “This had nothing to do with real racism; real racists are peace-loving people who would never dream of such an attack. All they want is a peaceful world in which whites rule and blacks know their place as racial dhimmis.” What would we think of such a person? What would we think of the implication that, even were it not for his racist ideology, Dylann Roof would still have attacked the church and killed nine people? It is indeed the case that most racists do not attack black churches—otherwise, such attacks would be far more numerous than they are. But to say that Dylann Roof was not motivated by his racism would be absurd.

At the very least, leadership should not knowingly propound blatant untruths. Of course it is true that most Muslims are peaceful and want to get on with their lives; the same is true of almost everyone, including Marxists. It is blatantly obvious that not all terrorists are Muslim; but when they are Muslim, their religious ideas are a necessary precondition of their acts.

Theodore Dalrymple is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of Not with a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline.

Monday, June 29, 2015

TED CRUZ INTERVIEW WITH COURIC+Very interesting video.

VDH WEIGHS IN ON CURRENT EVENTS: The Congressional Black Caucus existence is manifestly racist.

KINDA SCARY STUFF: Worrying about tho stuff can make a person grow old.

VDH PROVIDES THE HISTORIANS' PERSPECTIVE: This woman is a witch of the first order.

THIS STUDY IS ON TO SOMETHING RE: LIBS VS CONSERVATIVES.

THE LEFT-RIGHT GAP IN LANGUAGE: Liberals and conservatives use much different sets of words, according to an extensive textual analysis of chat rooms, news websites and State of the Union speeches. The analysis, published in the current Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, draws on a psychological distinction between the basic needs for “affiliation” and “power.” Liberals manifest their yearning for social connectedness by using words likecare, help, kind, neighbor and volunteer more often than conservatives do.  Conservatives more frequently use power words like boss, coerce, hero, strong and victory. 

The team of German and American researchers say this is the first study to reveal this difference. And, as usual in social science, the difference is presented in a way that looks bad for conservatives. Citing previous research, the authors write:

These results, although novel, seem intuitive in capturing a fundamental difference by political ideology.
For example, the policies more greatly favored by liberals include social welfare programs and affirmative action, both of which appear affiliation-oriented from a broader perspective. By contrast, the policies more greatly favored by conservatives include increased defense spending and the death penalty, both of which are consistent with a desire to be powerful. Indeed, conservatives are often more invested in the trappings of power such as wealth and status.

Ah, those good-hearted liberals, uninterested in status and money. (The Obamas and their fellow liberals vacation on Martha’s Vineyard only because the beaches are so pretty.) And those deadly power-crazed conservatives, reluctant to even utter nice words like volunteer. (Never mind the studies showing that conservatives actually do more volunteer work than liberals do.)

But here’s another way to look at the results. Liberals talk about politics in language that appeals to our primal socialist instincts, developed on the savanna when we belonged to small clans of hunter-gatherers who really did look out for their kin. Conservatives discuss politics in language that reflects modern reality: socialism doesn’t work in groups larger than a clan, because people do not behave selflessly when they belong to a large group of unrelated strangers. Liberals believe in what the economist Daniel Klein calls “The People’s Romance,” but that fallacy has been exposed by Adam Smith, de Toqueville and Darth Vader, among others. 

When liberals say that “government is the word we give to the things we choose to do together,” they score high on affiliation, and some of them may even believe government is one big happy collaboration among equals. But conservatives know that philosophy just means giving one small group of people in the capital more power to boss and coerce the rest of us.