White privilege as a Nazi concept

Hostility to people purely on the basis of their race

Hitler called himself and acted like a socialist.  And those people today who preach white privilege would, I think, usually embrace gladly the claim that they are socialists.  So the transmission of an idea from a socialist of the past to modern-day socialists is not surprising.  But first, some background:

A large part of Hitler's success in getting Germans to follow him is that he was a sentimentalist.  He was in fact sentimental about something that was a idea in the heads of many Germans of the 19th century:  The idea of Ein grosses Deutschland (a greater Germany).  As far back as one could go, there had been many German states, some of which were even at war with one-another at times.  Religion was one reason for that but that had been ended by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. And like the leftist idealists of today who revere the European Union or the United Nations, a lot of Germans were dissatisfied with German disunity and dreamed of a new German union that would replace conflict with peace.

In the early 1870s the dream was partly realized by the creation of a Deutsches Reich: (German Empire) under the aegis of Bismarck.  But that was a kleindeutsches solution that left outside the important German lands of Austria.  And Hitler was an Austrian.  So the dream of Germans united in one big happy family lived on in Hitler and in many Germans generally.  And absolutely anathema to that dream was anything which disunited Germans.

But in the immediate period after WWI, Germany was very disunited indeed.  Leftist ideas of all sorts dominated the place.  And prominent in the ferment were Marxist revolutionaries.  And in some parts of Germany, Communist regimes were set up. and Hitler was in the middle of it all.

While he was growing up in Linz, Hitler saw few Jews and regarded them as just another religion.  In Mein Kampf he described himself as being a "cosmopolitan" in Linz.  He had no racial consciousness.  It was only when he moved to Vienna that he began to notice Jews. And he particularly noticed that they were very prominent among Marxist agitators. They were the extremists of a generally Leftist scene.  And Hitler hated that.  The Marxists were preaching class war among Germans whereas Hitler wanted Germans to be one big happy family.  The old German dream of unity still lived on in an Austrian who had been left outside Bismarck's "Deutsches Reich".

So it is then that Hitler became an antisemite.  He  retained his romantic ideal of a happily united Grosses Deutschland  so saw in the Marxist preachers of Vienna enemies of that ideal.  And it was something of a godsend that the preachers concerned were mainly members of a group who had been outsiders since the Pharaohs: The Jews.  So it seemed obvious to Hitler that German unity was being undermined by a group who were not really German:  The enemies of the German dream were Jews. Hitler tells us all that in Mein Kampf, where he even lists the names of the Marxist Jewish agitators of Vienna in immediate postwar Vienna.  He documents what he saw as Jewish perfidy. Mein Kampf is not terribly reliable as objective history but it is Hitler's best effort at describing his own emotional history.  And his emotions were what drove him.

As time went on, however, Hitler  noted something else.  Jews were having it both ways. They were destroying Germany but also exploiting it.  They were not only revolutionaries but also sat at the top of every pyramid in Germany.  They were not only prominent in politics but were also the bankers, businessmen, professionals and artists.  That seemed very suspicious to Hitler.  How did an anti-German group of outsiders get to run everything in Germany?  It had to be some sort of conspiracy.  And Hitler thought he knew exactly how that conspiracy worked:  Jewish clannishness:  Jews stuck together and gave one another a leg-up into positions of power.  

So was Hitler right?  Was the prominence of Jews in Germany earned or unearned?  These day, just about every commentator on the period would say that Hitler was wrong.  Jews had gained their positions of prominence fair and square. They were an elite within Germany by dint of intelligence, energy and hard work.  And much the same accounts for very similar Jewish prominence in the Western world to this day.  The Jewish bankers of Wall St are legendary -- Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, for instance -- and even the head of Australia's largest bank is Jewish -- Ian Narev.  You just can't keep Jews down for long.  Ian Narev's parents were refugees but in one bound he overcame that.

So I don't think envy of Jews is reasonable any more.  They have earned their prominence. Their personal characteristics are what reliably brings them to the top of every heap every time.

So I have a radical proposal:  It is the same with whites generally. Whites generally have earned whatever positions of prominence and privilege that they hold.  There is nothing nefarious about white privilege, any more than there is anything nefarious about Jewish eminence.  Whites do better than  most minorities for good reasons, for personal reasons.  They have, for instance, greater self discipline, greater intelligence and a greater tendency towards deferment oif gratification.  Not all whites have such attributes any more than all Jews have Jewish tendencies but, on average, whites do better.

But why does that matter?  Should we not judge each person on their own individual merits, as the United Nations charter proclaims?  I think we should.  But the Left do not.  They commit exactly the same error that Hitler did.  They see people not as individuals but as a race.  They are just as racist as Hitler.  And, as with Hitler, there is some reality underlying their hatred.  Whites really do seem privileged compared to blacks.  Whites run the show while blacks are confined to just a few areas of success  in sport and entertainment.

So, yes.  There is white privilege but it is earned.  And it is not only the product of white success but also the product of black failure. Why is it that a cop who pulls up a black motorist will be on hair-trigger alert while he will be much more relaxed if he pulls up a white?  Because blacks are in general far more hostile to the police and more likely to attack the cop. And with the cop on hair-trigger alertt, the black sometimes gets shot for no good reason.  One false move and the black is dead.  Let me tell of my own white "privilege" in that connection:






So the important thing is how the individual and others like him will behave. There are all sorts of "privileges" in the world but individual behaviour is the key to it and talk of race entirely misses the point.  Ranting about white privilege is no different than Hitler ranting about Jews. The privilege exists but it is earned.  And the Leftist obsession with race is obnoxious. So my advice to the Left: Talk about privilege and try to understand it all you like -- but skip the race-hate.


The word that controversial free speech advocate Milo Yiannopoulos regrets uttering















Mr Trump's manner of speaking

Mr Trump's language has been much criticized.  It is said to be disjointed, illogical and to ignore all rules of English grammar.  Against that, it has just won the man the Presidency of the United States.  What is going on?

Various people have noted some strengths in the way Trump communicates.  For instance, he uses very simple words and simple sentences.  He repeats himself a lot so that you will be sure to get his point.  But there is more to it than that.  For a start he uses concepts that have a lot of emotional power -- patriotism and safety from danger in particular.

Most important of all, however, he speaks not as a polished intellectual but as a man of the people.  He speaks like a welder or a farmer or a burger flipper.  Yet he has a degree in economics and has long moved in the most exalted circles.  How come he speaks in such a strange way for his background?

I think it is partly learned.  A couple of Australian examples are, I think, enlightening.  Bob Hawke was one of Australia's most popular Prime Ministers. He had been a Rhodes scholar and came from an educated family.  Yet in his speeches he always spoke with a broad Australian accent and used a lot of slang and colloquial expressions.  Like Trump, he sounded like a worker, though he was nowhere nearly as disjointed as Trump.

So it was very amusing when he retired.  When interviewed after his retirement, he would speak in an educated way -- both in accent and in vocabulary.  He had been "putting it on" as Australians say.  He had been pretending to be what he was not.

So where did he learn to do that?  He had long involved himself in the union movement.  And a lot of unionists were genuine working class people.  Over the years, Hawke had learned to model his speech on theirs so that he would seem "One of us".  It worked.  It got him the Prime ministership of Australia for eight years.

Another instructive example was a long-serving Premier of the Australian state of Queensland:  Sir Johannes Bjelke Petersen.  Sir Joh's speech was even closer to Trump's speech:  Very similar indeed.   He also had a messy speech delivery that the elite all dismissed as being beyond  comprehension.  Journalists and others claimed it was just impossible to understand what he was saying.  But Joh was a farmer and he spoke like a farmer, not like an educated man. And ordinary farmers and working people generally understood him just fine.  He kept getting their vote and ended up running Queensland for nearly 20 years -- from 1968 to 1987. So who was the fool?

The Honourable Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, KCMG

Trump comes from the opposite end of the socio-economic scale from Sir Joh so how come he talks in a working class manner?  He grew up in the Queens borough of NYC, which is a very diverse place so he would have heard working class speech there pretty often and it would have become part of normality for him.  He knew how to speak that way if he wanted to.

And he has always had a hands-on attitude to his building projects and has often been on site talking to the workers doing the building.  So it would seem that his conversations with them have reinforced a liking not only for them and their views but also for some of their speech patterns.  Their patterns became his patterns. And those speech patterns sound to large numbers of Americans as "like us".  Powerful stuff. He talks to the people in their own language. His accent is New York Queens and that too conveys an image of the blunt, no-nonsense New Yorker.

So on those two Australian precedents, Trump should easily get his second term in office.


Do as I say, not as I do (1)

The Left love preaching civilized behaviour even while they behave in the most offensive manner possible. The election of Trump has seen them sink to the very depths of offensive words and behaviour.  So what has Amnesty International got to say about that behavior?  Crickets.  They criticize Mr. Trump only.

There is no doubt that Mr Trump's policies have tended to make Muslims and Hispanics feel unwelcome but that is just a reflection of the fact that Muslims and Hispanics have made themselves unwelcome by their egregious behaviour. If Amnesty wants to seen as more than a Leftist propaganda mouthpiece they will have to start looking at both sides of the matter

The Left-leaning Amnesty International has accused President Trump and other “anti-establishment” politicians of “wield[ing] politics of demonization that hounds, scapegoats and dehumanizes entire groups of people to win the support of voters.”

“Donald Trump’s poisonous campaign rhetoric exemplifies a global trend towards angrier and more divisive politics,” Amnesty International said in a new annual report covering 159 countries and territories.

“Across the world, leaders and politicians wagered their future power on narratives of fear and disunity, pinning blame on the ‘other’ for the real or manufactured grievances of the electorate,” it added.

The group offered a gloomy outlook on the state of the world.

“The world in 2016 became a darker and more unstable place,” Amnesty International secretary-general Salil Shetty wrote in the report’s foreword. “The reality is that we begin 2017 in a deeply unstable world full of trepidation and uncertainty about the future.”

In a statement, Shetty named Trump, Islamist Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the provocatively outspoken Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, and Hungary’s right wing prime minister Viktor Orban as politicians who he said demonize and dehumanize entire groups.

“2016 was the year when the cynical use of ‘us vs. them’ narratives of blame, hate and fear took on a global prominence to a level not seen since the 1930s,” he said. That was the decade the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, leading to World War II.

“Too many politicians are answering legitimate economic and security fears with a poisonous and divisive manipulation of identity politics in an attempt to win votes,” added Shetty, an Indian activist who has headed the organization since 2010.

Amnesty International USA executive director Margaret Huang also weighed in, saying that “President Trump’s policies have brought the U.S. to a level of human rights crisis that we haven’t seen in years.”

“As the world braces itself for a new executive order, thousands of people inside and outside of U.S. borders have had their lives thrown into chaos as a result of the president’s travel ban,” she added.

The reference was to Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order, which barred entry to the U.S. of all refugees for 120 days and refugees from Syria indefinitely; as well as to all citizens of seven countries carrying a high terrorism risk – Syria, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Libya and Yemen – for 90 days.

Amid protests, federal courts issued temporary stays on enforcement of the order. The administration is preparing to issue what Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly described as a “more streamlined version.”



Do as I say, not as I do (2)

Further to my comments above, see below a clipping from the Washington Post of Feb. 1st.  It's from an editorial headed "Breaking the unwritten rules of governing" and criticizes Mr Trump's firing of Sally Yates -- an Obama relic heading the Justice Department -- when she refused to do her job.  What was he supposed to say other than "You're fired"?  Once again the Leftist rag is preaching the highest standards of civilized behavior -- oblivious that the Left themselves constantly do the opposite.  They have the brass to say that we should not demonize political opponents.  So "Trump = Hitler" and all the rest is wrong?  It certainly is but the Post does not mention that.

I have not made any attempt to do a search of their own articles but I note that in yesterday's issue they had an article written by an Obamabot which was headed "The White House’s thoughtless, cruel and sad rollback of transgender rights".  That's a pretty good effort at demonization  -- particularly because Trump didn't roll back anything.  He just reverted the matter to the States, who may or may not do something about it.

Ethics, morality, principles and decency are all alien to the left.  They just haven't got it in them.  Their only constancy is their hatred of others.


How different is the reaction to Trump?




Hate from the anti-hate brigade








Strange science



Prolonged California aridity linked to climate warming and Pacific sea surface temperature

Glen M. MacDonald et al.





Are there costs which outweigh the benefits of free trade?

Below is an argument from a prominent British libertarian -- Sean Gabb -- which argues for trade policies similar to those advocated by President Trump.  It is in a sense Trumpian economics -- though it does not make one mention of Trump and uses British  examples exclusively.

Gabb writes very simply but he does to a degree assume a knowledge of economics and its language.  Trump has a degree in economics too. Nonetheless, a careful reading should  make Gabb's arguments comprehensible.  In any case, I think I should highlight a few points.

For many years now, economists have pointed out that free trade increases wealth.  It does so by making everything cost less.  Older Wal-Mart customers will be acutely aware of that.  I remember when an electric fan cost around $100.  Now they can be had for around $10 -- because they are now made in China.

So the assumption on both sides of politics has long been that we should free up trade as much as possible. And it took the Donald to question that. He hasn't shattered the consensus yet but his  is a huge innovation in policy and a big sign of unconventional thinking.  Trump as innovator!  And now that Trump has challenged the consensus by talking of higher tariffs and other policies designed to increase the "Made in USA" label on goods sold in the USA, other people are beginning to say:  "Hey!  Maybe he has got a point".  And Sean Gabb below makes a very erudite argument in favour of broadly Trumpian policies.

So an argument now being made by many is that price is not the only test of how good or wise a policy is. There may be benefits of making a good in the USA that justfies a higher price for that good.  Money is not everything.

That is not an entirely new argument.  Economists have always allowed some exceptions to the benefits of free trade,  The infant industry argument and the defence industry argument are well known and there also the less known but equally cogent case known as the Australian case.  And Gabb gives further examples of potential non-price benefits from home manufacture.  I think he makes the best argument yet for that case, in fact.

Much more innovatively, he makes an argument that I have not seen before which downplays the price disadvantage from home manufacture.  He points to what is the undoubtedly high cost of transporting goods.  A farmer can get 10c for an apple he has  grown which retails in the shops for $1.00.  Why?  There are several reasons but a major one is the cost of transporting it to your local supermarket.  The transport industry can easily take a bite out of the $1.00 that you pay which is 2 or 3 times what the farmer gets.  And there is no escaping that.  Truck drivers are not usually highly paid unless they work very long hours and most of what could be done to make cheaper trucks has been done.

Gabb takes up that situation and notes something that is seldom mentioned but which is quite extraordinary when you think about it.  He says that transport costs are heavily subsidized by governments.  Almost all of the costs of freeways, railroads, local roads and defence against piracy at sea are borne by taxpayers, not the users of those facilities.  Trucking firms do pay road use levies of various sorts but such levies are tiny compared with the huge cost of building just one mile of freeway, for instance. So from that, Gabb argues that the high costs of transprt would be even higher without the extensive government provision of almost "free" transport infrastrucure.

So in an ideal world where everybody paid for what they used, high transport costs would encourage goods to be made at home. A  thing might be made cheaper in China but the costs of getting it to you might make its total final cost dearer. It is an innovative and clever argument and there is undoubtedly some truth in it -- but I don't fully buy it.  I am not in a position to do the numbers but I doubt that transport costs could account for the recent reduction in costs of electric fans (for instance).  Most of the transport of goods from China is seaborne and that is very cheap per cubic meter on today's huge container ships.  And containerization makes most of the remaining trip (on land) pretty cheap too.

But there is clearly SOME "unfair" advantage given to remote manufacturers by subsidized transport, so the remaining question is how do we account for or allow for that advantage given to those manufacturers?  It would take some sophisticated econometrics to find out but there is clearly no likelihood that national trade policy will be set by econometricians.  We may simply have to hope that whatever tariff Mr Trump and Congress decide on will not be too far wide of that mark.

From all the considerations given below, however, it is clear that Mr Trump's tariff proposals have substantial intellectual support. They are in no way the sheer ignorance that Leftists claim

Briefly stated, the claim is that, since about 1970, shifts in comparative advantage [under freeish trade] have brought about a swift and fundamental deindustrialisation of Britain; and that this has impoverished millions of working class people.





























Australia's new political divide: 'globalists' versus 'patriots'

There is often talk that the old Left/Right divide is inadequate.  Eysenck made a big deal of that in his 1954 book. And libertarians too think a two dimensional description is needed.  A fairly typical example is below:

So the claims below are not very new.

I paid considerable attention to the matter in my research career, as you will see here but my conclusion was that a second dimension of attitudes did not emerge from the survey results.  Only the old Left/Right division could be found.

An important qualification to that is that OBLIQUE factors could be found.  In other words, the Left/Right domain was not totally homogeneous.  For example, there is a dimension of economic conservatism plus a dimension of moral conservatism.  Statements within those two domains correlate highly with one another but the correlation between moral conservatism overall and economic conservatism overall was weak:  Weak but not non-existent.

In other words, economic conservatives also tended -- somewhat -- to be conservative on moral issues.  And those two dimensions are the chief sub-dimensions of the Left/Right continuum.  They emerge repeatedly in survey research.  Despite some wrangling, Economic and moral conservatives do find common cause in everyday politics.  They have enough in common to co-operate with one-another.

So what are we to make of the findings below?  Clearly, they have identified two distinct factors.  But how oblique are those factors?  We are not told.  I am almost certain that the two factors will in fact be very oblique, very highly correlated.  Patriotism is normally a strong component of conservatism and internationalism is normally a Leftist ideal. Leftists continue to salute the United Nations despite the gross corruption in that body.

So all that I think the authors below have done is rediscover the old Left/Right divide. They have identified a group of statements that conservatives strongly agree with -- patriotic statements -- and a group of statements that get strong support from Leftists -- globalism. Two particular subsets of Left/Right attitudes have come under sharper focus and gained greater importance recently

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Openness. That is the word Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe chose to emphasise at his first public outing this year.

In Australia there is an "openness and transparency" not always found elsewhere, he told a high-powered business gathering at the Opera House on Thursday night.

And openness to trade and investment has been fundamental to the nation's prosperity.  Australia is "committed to an open international order," Lowe said.

Those sentiments might have seemed routine a few years back. But in the wake of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump "openness" to the world economy – often referred to  as globalisation – is now a hotly contested political issue.

A little over a year ago Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's far-right Front National party and a presidential contender, cast political battlelines as being no longer "between the left and the right but the globalists and the patriots". The globalists, she sneered, are for the dissolution of France into a "global magma".

Greg Ip, a Wall Street Journal economics commentator, wrote last month that Le Pen's remarks foreshadowed "the tectonic forces that would shake up the world in 2016".

Opposition to globalisation – the increasing movement of goods, money and people across international borders – was a key theme of Trump campaign to become president of the US. From now on it is going to be "America First", he says repeatedly.

In Australia, Pauline Hanson has globalisation in her sights. In her maiden speech to the Senate in September she accused national leaders of giving away our sovereignty, our rights, our jobs and even our democracy.  "Their push for globalisation, economic rationalism, free trade and ethnic diversity has seen our country's decline," she said.

In pitting globalists  against patriots Le Pen neatly summed up a new and unpredictable political fissure that cuts across old divisions between left and right.

Ip predicts the tussle between globalism and nationalism "will shape the coming era much as the struggle between conservatives and liberals has shaped the last".

This political split has emerged during a period of rapid global economic integration. In the two decades before the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007 international trade in goods and services grew by 7 per cent a year on average – a much faster rate than global GDP.

This has been a period of great prosperity for Australia, which has not experienced a recession for a quarter of a century. But there has also been a marked shift in the structure of the economy. Since the mid-1990s manufacturing's share of Australia's economic output has fallen from 14 per cent to about 7 per cent.

Meanwhile, the importance of knowledge-intensive service industries such as finance and professional services has grown significantly. Similar trends have been at work in other advanced economies.

The flow of migrants to Australia – another factor many associate with globalisation – has also been strong. The proportion of Australians born overseas reached 28 per cent in 2014-15, the highest proportion in more than 120 years.

There are now signs the tussle Ip describes between globalist and nationalist sentiment has become an important political fault line in Australia.

Polling for the Political Personas Project commissioned by Fairfax Media and conducted by the Australian National University and Netherlands-based political research enterprise Kieskompas, shows public opinion is divided over the merits of trade liberalisation, one of globalisation's fundamentals.

The statement "free trade with other countries has made Australia better off" could not muster support from the majority of the 2600 voters surveyed – 44.7 per cent agreed (but only 7.1 per cent strongly), 27.5 per cent disagreed and 27.8 per cent were neutral.

There is a similar split when voters are asked to assess the impact of globalisation.

A separate Ipsos survey released in December found 48 per cent of Australians considered globalisation a "force for good" while 22 per cent said it was a "force for bad", with 29 per cent undecided.

Carol Johnson, professor of politics and international studies at the University of Adelaide, said many voters have, over time, become more aware of globalisation's drawbacks.

"Twenty years ago, the electorate seemed prepared to believe that while there were some risks to opening up the economy, there would also be benefits," she said.  "Part of what happened is that people are now more aware that many of our competitor countries, including Asian countries, are more than capable of developing these [high-tech and service] industries themselves.

"The assumption that Western countries will always be superior has started to come undone and voters are becoming worried that government hasn't got right the mix of balancing the benefits and downsides of globalisation."

Polling for the Political Personas Project found more than eight in 10 voters believe "we rely too heavily on foreign imports and should manufacture more in Australia". This statement received more support than any other proposition in the survey, which covered dozens of hot-button political issues.

Jill Sheppard, a researcher from the ANU's Centre for Social Research and Method who was involved in the project, said public concern about the decline of manufacturing was linked to perceptions of globalisation.

"Globalisation seems to manifest in people's minds as manufacturing and jobs going offshore. They think about cheap labour in Asian countries, which seem like a direct threat to us."



More on the Bates revelations about the NOAA paper by Tom Karl




So let’s wind forward…





Referring back to the Science Insider piece…




  • publicly funded trustee of information gets “sloppy”

  • concern is expressed

  • those at fault are defended

  • the ‘concerned’ are attacked

  • conversation derails

  • nothing is fixed

  • rinse and repeat




What the elite mean by Fascism

Brendy is pretty right about current usage below but his definition of historical Fascism is weak.  As a retired Marxist, he relies largely on Trotsky for a definition of it.  And that definition is conventional rather than history-based.  The classic Marxist lie is that Fascism/Nazism was middle class.  Yet the most fanatical Nazis -- the "Sturmabteilung" -- were overwhelmingly working class.  And Hitler's origins as a hobo are also not middle class.

The defining characteristics of Fascism are socialist rhetoric and extensive government control of industry.  And those things are true of most developed nations to this day. Control of industry these days is done by laws and regulations rather than by having a party representative on-site at major business  establishments but the result is very similar.  There is great government control in both cases.  So does Fascism still exist in the world today?

It does to a considerable degree.  The overt hostility to other countries is gone but that is about it.  Historical Fascists had great national pride and tried to take over territory from other nations  -- but America's many wars abroad are not so different.  The propaganda is better but there has been an obvious intention to reform other nations along American lines.  America has tried to Americanize the world.

And it may be noted that most of America's wars have been entered into by people who also espouse socialistic rhetoric.  Socialistic rhetoric was joined with war by Hitler and the same is largely true of the USA. Democrat President Woodrow Wilson got America into WWI. FDR got it into WW2.  Kennedy got it into Vietnam.  Only the Iraq intervention was the work of a Republican and that was in response to a direct attack on the U.S. homeland -- so was essentially a defensive war.

And, as with past Fascist military adventures, American interventions abroad have had very poor success.  The last clear success was in Korea and even that succeeded only in the South.

But in a sense America's military efforts are incidental to American dominance.  American mass culture has conquered the world.  Guns and bullets are a crude instrument of influence compared to that.

So I do think that real Fascism is not only alive and well but is the dominant form of government today.

Having divorced politics from popular opinion as a way of keeping in check the presumed fascist tendencies of the masses, it is not surprising that the political class views the public’s recent attempts at ‘taking back control’, at joining back together opinion and democracy, as a return of fascism. Their great fear is that the lid they put on the masses’ latent fascism, their distancing of the political machinery from public prejudices, has been lifted. They are screaming ‘fascism’ because they see fascism in us, in ordinary people. Thus the accusation of fascism expresses a profound hostility towards democracy itself, and to the demos. It is pure elitism to see fascism in the new politics. Which is why the most elite sections of society — archbishops, princes, heads of global institutions — are often to the fore in the fascism frenzy.

And of course, what they describe as ‘fascism’ — Brexit, people worried about immigration, Trump — is nothing of the sort. These things don’t even come close to fascism. As Weismann argued, even ‘dictatorship, mass neurosis, anti-Semitism, the power of unscrupulous propaganda, the hypnotic effect of a mad-genius orator on the masses, and so on’ do not necessarily constitute fascism. Fascism, he said, was something different to all that, something more than all that. Fascism, in essence, is a mass, paramilitary movement that acts as a stand-in for normal politics and normal statehood when that politics and statehood cannot deal with a threat it faces, primarily the threat of revolution or of organised, agitating labour. As Trotsky put it, fascism occurs when the ‘police and military resources’ of a society, and its parliamentary process, ‘no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium’. In such circumstances, as happened most notably in Italy and Germany, the rulers of society give way to, or rather push to the front, a mass violent movement fashioned to crush the threatening force. Fascism, basically, is when a society in crisis green-lights civil war as a means of stabilising itself in the longer term.

This fascist movement is made up from the ‘crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralised lumpenproletariat’, in Trotsky’s colourful, cutting phrase. Brought to ‘desperation and frenzy’, this mass, paramilitarised section of society sets about ‘annihilating’ workers’ movements and of course executing anti-Semitic savagery. The consequence is that ‘a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallisation of the proletariat’ — ‘therein precisely is the gist of fascism’, said Trotsky. This is why those who say ‘the Nazis were left-wing, you know’ are wholly wrong. Fascism fundamentally represents the violent marshalling of a certain strata of society to the end of crushing the left and the working class. Yes, the Nazis in particular used socialist terms, even calling themselves the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. But as Trotsky says, that was merely the means through which a mass movement could be built. Fascism’s leaders ‘employ a great deal of socialist demagogy’, he said, for this is ‘necessary to the creation of the mass movement’.

Nothing even remotely like this exists today. None of the conditions or groups that make fascism, and which make it distinct from hatred and demagoguery and even from dictatorship, exist in Europe or the US in 2017. There is no powerful workers’ movement posing such a threat to the stability of capitalism that it needs to be destroyed. No ‘crazed’ petty bourgeoisie is being armed and goaded into civil or class war as a means of ‘annihilating’ vast numbers of their fellow citizens. People — well, ordinary people — have not been whipped into a frenzy. Indeed, it is the patience of Brexit and Trump voters in the face of incessant defamation by the media and political set that is most striking.

It is a fantasy to claim fascism has made a comeback. And it’s a revealing fantasy. When the political and media elites speak of fascism today, what they’re really expressing is fear. Fear of the primal, unpredictable mass of society. Fear of unchecked popular opinion. Fear of what they view as the authoritarian impulses of those outside their social, bureaucratic sphere. Fear of the latent fascism, as they see it, of the ordinary inhabitants of Nazi-darkened Europe or of Middle America, who apparently lack the moral and intellectual resources to resist demagoguery. As one columnist put it, today’s ‘fascistic style’ of politics is a creation not so much of wicked leaders, as of the dangerous masses. ‘Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you’, he says. ‘Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you.’ In short, not leaders but the led; not the state but the people. This, precisely, is who terrifies them. This, precisely, is what they mean when they say ‘fascism’. They mean you, me, ordinary people; people who have dared to say that they want to influence politics again after years of being frozen out. When they say fascism, they mean democracy.





























What fun! John Cook rides again!

He is the author of the famous 97% claim and a most energetic defender of Warmism.  And he certainly is a crook Cook.  He makes a great pretence of science by reporting known facts but ignoring or leaving some things out. He then pretends that he has proven global warming.

But his latest is a superb example of psychological projection. He takes some well-known examples of psychological defence mechanisms and purports to find examples of them among climate skeptics.  But exactly those same mechanisms are common among Warmists.  An excerpt:

I’m a cognitive psychologist interested in better understanding and countering the techniques used to distort the science of climate change. I’ve found that understanding why some people reject climate science offers insight into how they deny science. By better understanding the techniques employed, you can counter misinformation more effectively.

Every movement that has rejected a scientific consensus, whether it be on evolution, climate change or the link between smoking and cancer, exhibits the same five characteristics of science denial (concisely summarized by the acronym FLICC). These are fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry picking and conspiracy theories. When someone wants to cast doubt on a scientific finding, FLICC is an integral part of the misinformation toolbox.

He points to no specific examples of each fallacy among skeptics so, very briefly, let me point out how those fallacies apply to Warmists:

* Fake experts:  Al Gore

* Logical fallacies:  Some extreme weather events imply a general increase in extreme weather events

* Impossible expectations:  No change is too small to be worth noticing.  Even temperature changes in the hundredths of one degree mean something.  No change is small enough to prove temperature stasis

* Cherry picking:  Looking at only a short run of temperature records.  The Central England Temperature record goes back to 1659 and shows no trend

* Conspiracy theories:  Big oil is behind climate skepticism

Perhaps most amazing in Cook's latest screed is the way he refers to his own 97% paper.  He accurately describes it as showing that:

"Among the papers stating a position, 97 percent agreed that humans are causing global warming"

He completely skates over the fact that two thirds of the papers he examined took no position on global warming.  So only ONE THIRD of all scientists, and not 97%, agreed with global warming.  It's typical Cook.  He quotes facts but ignores their full implications.

And, as far as I can see,  that goes for all of the other claims in his paper.  For instance:  He wades in to the uproar generated by the David Rose article which questioned a paper by NOAA's Tom Karl.  He implies that Rose is wrong and the Karl paper is right.  So there has been no C21 temperature "pause".  He "forgets" to mention that, in the Fyfe et al. paper, some prominient Warmist scientists also distanced themselves from the Karl paper.  Cook is so unbalanced it is a wonder he doesn't fall over.

Cook really is a crook Cook.


'Gender disappointment'







Kate suffers from what is known as gender disappointment.
























Donald Trump backs down over 'one China policy' in call with China's Xi Jinping

By first making it clear that U.S. policy cannot be taken for granted, Trump has gained kudos by agreeing to the status quo after all.  Good negotiation tactics.  China does now to a degree owe him a favor.

The Leftist media don't or won't understand his tactics so are  full of scare stories about what Trump MIGHT do.  But his actions have been very conservative -- including his immigration restrictions, which are little different from actions by previous Presidents, such as Obama and Carter

There is a long article here by Daniel McCarthy, editor at large of The American Conservative which is headed: "Donald Trump: the method behind the madness. How the unorthodox US president may be one step ahead of his critics".  So some people at least do get how Trump works

Note also the following comment on Trump's travel ban order:

"Trump could have executed this better, and the courts absolutely got it wrong. But it's important to realize that this was also strategically calculated to play out in one of two ways: Either Trump got his way with the order (he didn't), or his base is (rightly) fired up about an activist judiciary just in time for Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Trump wins either way. And along the way, Trump successfully diverted media attention to a very temporary travel moratorium - i.e., not the most critical issue. The charitable view is that this is an example of one of Trump's deal-making trademarks, "managed chaos," in which he keeps his opponents off balance, distracted and unaware of the right hook that is, ultimately, going to win the match"

Donald Trump has backed down over his confrontational stance towards Beijing, committing to the `One China policy' in his first phone call with Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, since taking office.

In a move that is certain to ease tensions between the United States and China, the US president "agreed, at the request of President Xi, to honour our `one China' policy," the White House said in a statement.

The "lengthy telephone conversation" on Thursday evening was "extremely cordial" and the two leaders "extended invitations to meet in their respective countries," the statement added.

Mr Xi told Mr Trump that he appreciated the president's reaffirmation of the policy, China's state news agency Xinhua reported.

Mr Trump angered Beijing by accepting a congratulatory call from the President of Taiwan in December, breaking decades of diplomatic protocol.

He has since suggested there could be a renegotiation of the One China policy, in which the US recognises Beijing's rule over the island. Beijing views Taiwan as a breakaway province, which will be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary.

Observers had questioned Mr Trump's apparent willingness to use the Taiwan issue as a `bargaining chip' with China, and they believe his decision to back down over the issue is the correct one.

Paul Haenle, director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Centre for Global Policy in Beijing, said: "Trump played with the notion of using this arrangement as leverage, but I think he ultimately came to the right conclusion that this is not where the US Administration can get leverage.  "The One China Policy is not a card on the bargaining table - it is the table itself.

"Taiwan is also a vital US partner and thriving democracy of 23 million people. Its future is not ours to bargain away," Mr Haenle, who served on the National Security Council under Mr Bush and Barack Obama, told The Telegraph.

Bonnie Glaser, senior advisor for Asia at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said: "The US-China relationship has been on hold as Beijing waited for Trump to make this statement.

"Now the two countries can get down to business and discuss how to manage their differences on a wide range of issues," she told The Telegraph.



If  conservatives want to copy Trump, embracing Putin is the worst place to start (?)

Like Mr Trump, I see some virtue in Vladimir Vladimirovich and I have written to that effect on several previous occasions. (See here. Scroll down). I like Mr Putin nearly as much as I like Mr Trump, in fact.  So I am one of those evil people that the Leftist Australian  journalist  below is inveighing against. Vladimir Vladimirovich is in fact an exceptionally enlightened ruler by Russian standards.

The Leftist writer below, David Wroe, tries to make the case that Putin and Russia generally are dangerous, evil and should be shunned.  Which is amusing.  A few decades back Leftists would hear no ill about Russia -- at a time when there really was cause for concern about Russia. The points made below are however specious and are typical of the Leftist habit of telling only half the story.

Mr Putin is somehow blamed on the shooting down of a Malaysian airline over Ukraine. But the Ukraine was at the time in a civil war and was known as dangerous airspace -- and most airlines kept away from it even though that increased their costs.  It was penny-pinching bureaucrats running the Malaysian airline who took the big risk of flying their plane over Eastern Ukraine.  It is they who are to blame

It took Russia's intervention to set in train the now almost complete destruction of ISIS but our friend below can only complain that the defeat helps the Syrian government.

The Syrian government is certainly brutal but dictatorships seem to be the only sort of regime that works in Muslim lands. Islam is an authoritarian religion.  "Submit or die" is its historic message. Democracy didn't last long in Egypt. Turkey  has once again returned to a version of the authoritarian rule that has characterized most of its history and vast American efforts to democratize Iraq and Afghanistan have certainly been an abject failure.

I could go on but I think I have said enough to show that it's just the usual dishonest Leftist propaganda below.  You believe anything in it at your peril>

David Wroe

The Trumpification of the right wing of Australian politics has begun.

On Sunday night, Coalition backbencher George Christensen defended Vladimir Putin's Russia, saying on Twitter it had been "demonised unfairly" and asking, "What threat do they cause us or the West?"

This is a startling message to a country that lost 38 people in the shooting down of flight MH17 in the skies above Ukraine. In his tweets, Mr Christensen distanced Moscow from involvement in MH17 and said only that separatists "allegedly" shot down the plane, though on Monday morning he clarified that he accepted most investigators' conclusion that "separatists backed by Russia" were responsible.

But his string of tweets point to an affinity with the US President's foreign policy view that strong men who pursue their country's national interests with scant regard to the international system are to be admired and emulated.

Pauline Hanson did much the same on Monday morning, saying "I've got no problems with Vladimir" because he is "a strong leader" who is "standing up for his nation" and that's what Australians want of their leaders too.

Newsflash to them both: Australia is not the US or Russia. It is a middle power that needs rules and a level playing field. As one of our finest foreign policy thinkers, former Department of Foreign Affairs head Peter Varghese, put it in a 2015 speech: "Australia can neither bully nor buy its way in the world, so an international, rules-based order is in our best interests."

Take another one of Christensen's Sunday night tweets: "Russia [is] the real reason ISIS is losing."

Moscow has propped up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad but has targeted a wide range of anti-regime forces, not just the Islamic State, and has indiscriminately bombed civilians, killing thousands.

Its intervention has removed any incentive for Assad to compromise and allow a political solution in Syria, ensuring that Syrian Sunnis will feel aggrieved for at least another generation. That will help seed the next generation of sectarian fighters and jihadists that will replace the Islamic State when it is defeated.

By contrast, the Australian Defence Force has for more than two years carefully targeted Islamic State forces in airstrikes while advising and training Iraqi forces on the ground. Not one civilian is known to have been killed in Australian air strikes, and the ADF's efforts alongside the US have tried to avoid empowering the Assad regime.

Mr Christensen also called Russia "a democracy" and branded the hacking of US political parties "fake news", even though Mr Trump himself has admitted Russia was responsible for the hacking and US intelligence agencies have stated in a public report that Russia hacked political parties for the express purpose of tilting the election in Mr Trump's favour.

Russia is working to break up Europe and tear up the international system of rules and norms that has made the last 70 years the most prosperous and stable the world has seen. It wants to return the world to spheres of influence around powers that use might to make right.

That is the threat Russia poses to us all.