Saturday, 30 June 2018

'Trump and the Invasion of the West'

I cannot read the future and nor can you, but Donald Trump's decision to arrest illegal immigrants as they crossed the American border, therefore of course separating them from any children accompanying them, will almost certainly win him a lot of votes in 2020 and very possibly the White House. 

His standing in the opinion polls rose after the arrests, though his standing among the high-minded and soft hearted fell even further.

Why will this help him?

First, children being incarcerated (rather comfortably, as it happens) is a very memorable picture. Donald Trump likes to create mental pictures, as when he said 'Build the Wall'. It will convince people who were not convinced before (including me) that he is serious

Friday, 29 June 2018

The morality of the Guardian

This short article, by someone called Udham Singh, is worth reading. It makes a rather persuasive case that writers for The Guardian newspaper are intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt, rather than simply deeply misguided.  

He thinks the Guardian is flat-out wicked, rather than mistaken, but I am not sure what the distinction is. Lenin, Stalin and Hitler were misguided but sincere in their ideals. 

Mr Singh says:
When it comes to straight, white men, no generalisation is sweeping enough, no bad statistic is dodgy enough, no amount of abuse is severe enough when directed at The Guardian’s favourite enemy. However, when it comes to non-

Thursday, 28 June 2018

The moon rose blood-red and a two-headed cow was born that night

Germany was apparently knocked out of the World Cup last night - and by a weak team. The Guardian report says:
"There are certain events so apocalyptic that it feels they cannot just happen. They should be signalled beneath thunderous skies as owls catch falcons and horses turn and eat themselves.
Pastiching auguries from Livy, etc, is a joke I trot out regularly, so next time I do so do not imagine, gentle reader, that I cribbed it from a Guardian sports writer.

Italy did not even qualify. Are these things a parable for the world of Trump, Brexit, Salvini, migrants, etc, etc? 
Not really - it's the dear old sympathetic fallacy.

Wednesday, 27 June 2018

Former German Chancellors on immigration

"We need to consider very carefully at what point our society's absorptive capacity has been reached." Willy Brandt in a government policy statement in 1972.

"Chancellor Kohl said...that it would be necessary over the next four years to reduce the number of Turks by 50 percent - but he could not say that publicly... It would be impossible for Germany to assimilate the current number of Turks." (Minutes of meeting on 28 October 1982 between Helmut Kohl and Margaret Thatcher, reported in Spiegel Online on August 1, 2013.)


"The idea that a modern society would have to be able to establish itself as a multicultural society, with as many cultural groups as possible, I think is outlandish.  After all, one can not turn Germany into a melting pot after a thousand-year history since Otto I. . " - Helmut Schmidt Frankfurter Rundschau, September 12, 1992

"We have to stop further immigration from foreign cultures."
Helmut Schmidt (2005)

"Europe can not become a new home for millions of people worldwide in need."
Helmut Kohl


"We reject a widening of immigration from third countries, because it would overwhelm the ability of our society to integrate." 

(CDU Party Program 2002)

"If we continue to deny control of the asylum problem, one day we will be swept away by the voters, including our own, and we will be turned into whipping boys. I tell you, in the end, we are complicit when fascist organizations become active. It is not enough to warn against xenophobia; we have to tackle the causes because otherwise the population will deny us the intention, the will and the strength to get the problem under control. "
SPD elder statesman Herbert Wehner (1982)



Tuesday, 26 June 2018

More immigration quotes

After the former first ladies criticised the Trump Administration for separating illegal immigrants from their children Ralph Nader:
"Would be nice if Laura Bush and Michelle Obama had expressed similar heartfelt concern for the tens of thousands of children killed or seriously maimed by the wars of their husbands in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere"

Quotations


"Your naked body should only belong to those who fall in love with your naked soul." Sir Charlie Chaplin writing to his daughter.

"I am born into a situation that I did not create, and am encumbered from birth with obligations that are not of my own devising. My basic debt to the world is not one of justice but of piety, and it is only when I recognize this fact that I can be truly myself." Sir Roger Scruton



England's senior divorce judge welcomes end of traditional sexual morality

Sir James Munby, the judge who is President of the Family Law Division in England and Wales, in a speech at the Eleanor Rathbone Social Justice Public Society on 30th May:
“What is the family?
“Time was when most people probably thought the answer was not merely clear but obvious. Today it is more complex.

Monday, 25 June 2018

Recent immigration quotes

Viktor Orban:

"There is no document ... which states that if you enter the EU you must become an immigrant country...We tolerate the fact that some Member States ... admit migrants .. they should tolerate the fact that we do not wish to do so". 
Scandinavia is egalitarian and conformist partly because the most independent-minded people went to America via possible England is so unreligious for a similar reason

Saturday, 23 June 2018

Gideon Rachman wants a world government

Nothing is more old fashioned than a future that has failed.

Gideon Rachman, who writes for the Financial Times, is an intelligent man who nowadays still thinks Brexit can be prevented. 


I stumbled by chance across this article from 2008 by him, arguing for world government.

He quotes Geoffrey Blainey, an eminent Australian historian, who has written:

“For the first time in human history, world government of some sort is now possible”
and Jacques Attali, who founded EBRD and advised President Sarkozy:

Mary McAleese: Infant baptism breaches fundamental human rights

How much Southern Ireland has changed. Former Irish president Mary McAleese now says that infant baptism breaches fundamental human rights.

I can't see how she can stand up that argument but her remarks might be pointing towards the future. She would have more of a case, I suppose, if she argued against bringing children up in a religion. It is Muslims and Hindus who will prevent that idea ever being implemented. 

The second biggest social change since the 1980s in Europe (after single sex marriage) is that comparative religion, before the 1980s something only studied at post-graduate level, is now taught to children as young as five.

Friday, 22 June 2018

Nil nisi bono - not necessarily

I do not like to speak ill of the dead, unless it is someone like Edward Kennedy, but I do not share the widespread admiration for American journalist Charles Krauthammer, who died recently. 

I have to say that he was on the important things disastrously wrong, not a conservative at all, but like many in the post-1952 Republican Party a right-wing liberal internationalist.

In a 2005 speech he called neoconservatism

"a governing ideology whose time has come."

Thursday, 21 June 2018

Quotations

"I do not support the Irish ban [on abortion], and it is easily evaded by taking the ferry to England but, if and when it collapses, Ireland as a country with a distinct moral culture of its own is finished; Ireland will have become a mere off-shore island." Christie Davies, 'The Strange Death of Moral Britain" (2004)
"Feminism is poison." Margaret Thatcher

Quotations

When all the objectives of government include the achievement of equality - other than equality before the law - that government poses a threat to liberty. Margaret Thatcher

No-one can build the bridge on which you, and only you, can cross the river of life. 
Nietzsche

Sunday, 17 June 2018

In praise of Sir Christopher Chope

Sir Christopher Chope MP has provoked outrage in England by crying out 'Object' and thus sabotaging a private member's bill criminalising taking 'upskirt' photographs of women. 

Such pictures are yucky and reprehensible, but does this mean it is useful to make them illegal and with a penalty of up to two years' imprisonment? Whatever your view, one has to admire a conservative who wants to limit the power of the state and insist on Parliamentary scrutiny of legislation.

What the papers say - I have found four plums

In his upcoming book on US immigration, my brilliant friend Reihan Salam — himself the son of Bangladeshi immigrants — makes a bold argument: America must either restrict immigration or risk civil war as rising inequality and racial tension combine.
I hope Salam is right that the American melting pot can somehow be salvaged. But I have no such hope for Europe. No one who has spent any time in Germany

Friday, 15 June 2018

Bucarest, mon amour

“There's not a city in the former Soviet Union [she meant Bloc] which hasn't been christened The New Prague (apart from Bucharest, and if you've been there you'll know why).”
Guardian travel article by Joanne O'Connor


I remember the 1989 Lonely Planet Guide to Eastern Europe (individual countries didn't merit their own guides) included Bucharest in its list of ten things to avoid in Eastern Europe. I don't remember what the other nine were but they were things not places.

'Public officials have a duty to direct propaganda at the population'

Speaking before an audience at an event held by the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Stengel, head of the office for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department from 2013 to 2016, argued that governments have a responsibility to direct propaganda at their domestic populations and ultimately control the political narrative.
“Basically, every country creates their own narrative story and, you know, my old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the ‘chief propagandist’ job....We haven’t talked about propaganda… I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population, and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”

Some Americans find these remarks shocking because, unlike people in Europe, Americans still believe, by European standards, in limited government.

Move along, nothing to see.

John McDonnell supported the IRA's use of ‘the ballot, the bullet and the bomb’


According to a story in The Times in 2015 John McDonnell, who will be Chancellor of the Exchequer (Minister of Finance) if the Labour Party come to power in England, told a public meeting at a pub in South London in 1985, attended by Sinn Fein and left-wing Labour Party members, that ‘the ballot, the bullet and the bomb’ would end British rule in Northern Ireland. He then called local Labour councillors who had boycotted the meeting ‘gutless wimps’ and said ‘a kneecapping might help change their minds’. A kneecapping means having their kneecaps shot off.

Thursday, 14 June 2018

You can't generalise

No-one esteems aphorisms any more. Were Wilde around today (and not in gaol for going to bed with underage boys), every quip he made would get the response: Oscar, you can't generalise.

Or rather it was so until Twitter. A very useful achievement of Twitter was to relaunch the aphorism, before they increased the maximum number of characters in a tweet.

Quotations

"It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom)."
Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Society is a shared inheritance for the sake of which we learn to circumscribe our demands, to see our own place in things as part of a continuous chain of giving and receiving, and to recognize that the good things we inherit are not ours to spoil" Sir Roger Scruton, How To Be a Conservative




Sunday, 10 June 2018

An empty wish

I am far from being a huge admirer of Mr Trump (though his presidency is enormous fun) but I do wish England (by which I mean the UK) had him to lead us out of the EU, not the pygmy we have.

I hope pygmy is not a racist expression.

Boris Johnson has come round to the same futile wish, to judge by his recent speech made

Wednesday, 6 June 2018

Ivano-Frankivsk in balmy summer weather

After Bucacs we went on, through green countryside glowingly fertile, to one of my favourite towns, Ivano-Frankivsk, known till 1962 as Stanislau or StanisÅ‚awów. 

It was founded as a Polish fortress in 1663 and was named after the Polish hetman StanisÅ‚aw "Rewera" Potocki. Like Bucsacs, it became a largely self governing city and was later incorporated into the Austrian empire in the first partition of Poland.




Tuesday, 5 June 2018

Loss of belief in Man is a consequence of loss of belief in God

It is very sad that many people think animal lives are as important as human lives. Worse, they feel that this is a noble sentiment. 

Loss of belief in Man is a consequence of lack of faith in God.

Love of animals is beautiful but often strongly felt by misanthropes, sentimentalists and extremists. Goering wept whenever one of his dogs died, despite all the indications that he was a psychopath.

I spoke to a friend who is Green Party member who thinks animals as important as humans. He much prefers to put it this way, rather than the other way around. He is not alone in thinking this in the Green Party, a party that attracts many very worrying people and is much the most extreme and frightening mainstream-ish party in European countries, whether Germany, England or elsewhere. 


It is not benign at all, but people think it is.

Saturday, 2 June 2018

Buczacz

I blogged about Buczacz last year and Professor Omer Bartov's excellent and searing book about the murder of the town's Jews. I have now visited the pretty little town. In warm weather on the first day of June it brought to mind Sherlock Holmes' remark about the vilest alleys not hiding as much sin as the smiling and beautiful face of the countryside

Buczacz was founded in the seventeenth century by Polish nobles in what was effectively the Wild East. The  nobles who started towns encouraged the settlement of Jews, desirable immigrants because of their commercial expertise. The Jews came east tired of constant friction with Poles. The Jews lived in their own community and were largely preoccupied by their own religion until the nineteenth century. In the 1920s 60% of the townspeople were Jewish.