RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/swedens-totalitarian-face/print/

On April 4 2014, in Malmö District Court in Sweden, the provocative artist Dan Park was sentenced to three months in jail for hate speech (“hets mot folkgrupp”) for his works of art. The prosecutor even wanted the artist examined for mental illness, similar to the way Communist dictatorships have treated dissidents. The court did not support this suggestion, however. Park and his defense lawyer have indicated that they will appeal the verdict.

Ingrid Carlqvist, the editor of the newspaper Dispatch International, commented that the verdict essentially amounts to a ban on satire in Sweden, at least if the satire involves ideologically protected immigrant groups.

At the same time, and with a heavy heart, Carlqvist announced her own decision to leave her native Sweden. The repressive and totalitarian atmosphere in the country has simply become intolerable, especially if you happen to be a critic of Islamization, Multiculturalism or mass immigration. You then run a real risk of physical attacks. The level of political violence as well as street crime is only rivaled by the level of ideological censorship and repression. In combination, this has created a society plagued by levels of tension that are growing increasingly dangerous.

Malmö is Sweden’s third largest city. It is set to become the first Scandinavian town with a Muslim majority population. In recent years, it has achieved a certain notoriety for its crime problems.

The wave of robberies the city has witnessed is part of a “war against Swedes.” This was the explanation given by young robbers with immigrant background for why they are robbing native Swedes. The sociologist Petra Åkesson interviewed boys between 15 and 17 years old, both individually and in groups. “When we are in the city and robbing, we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes.” This argument was repeated several times. “Power for me means that Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet.” The boys explained, laughingly, that “We rob every single day, as much as we want to, whenever we want to.”

Yet suggesting that the ongoing rise in violent crime might have something to do with mass immigration of alien and aggressive cultures is quite literally banned by law. In March 2007 during a rally supported by SSU (the Social Democratic Youth League) a man carried a sign reading, “While Swedish girls are being gang raped by immigrant gangs the SSU is fighting racism.” He was promptly arrested and later sentenced to a fine. His crime? He had “expressed disrespect for a group of people with reference to their national or ethnic background.” The local court rejected the man’s free speech argument because even free speech has its limits, and he had clearly acted in too provocative a manner.

So-called “Islamophobia” is treated as a serious offense. In August 2013, Swedish prosecutors charged a 22-year-old non-Muslim Swedish man for honking his car horn outside the Fittja mosque near Stockholm, citing his intention to disturb the Muslim congregation there during prayers.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/just-win-baby/print/

The folks at Brietbart.com are advertising a new online magazine by putting up posters around LA. They include one of Nancy Pelosi’s face photo-shopped onto Miley Cyrus doing her tongue-lolling twerk, and another of Mark Zuckerberg adorned with women’s breasts. We can pass over the usual left-wing suspects indulging their hypocrisy with squeaks of “misogynist” and “sexist tropes.” Nothing but progressive crickets have greeted the much more vicious assaults on Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin. More interesting is the reaction of some conservatives, one that suggests why Republicans lose elections.

Over at NRO Jim Geraghty gives a reasoned argument for maintaining civility: “But when do efforts to expose the Left’s double standard reach the point where the Right doesn’t have a standard? At some point we’re going to have to decide what we want: a political culture in which Sarah Palin . . . can be depicted in sexist, humiliating and derogatory ways, as well as Nancy Pelosi and Hillary and anyone else, or one in which that’s considered out of bounds. We can’t say it’s only wrong when they do it.” But is the “political culture” we want one that maintains decorum or wins races? Isn’t it rather the one that endorses the philosophy of Oakland Raiders owner-coach Al Davis––“Just win, baby”?

In any case, civility has always been the exception rather than the norm in democratic politics, and those who worry over decorum in political speech don’t understand democracy. The political history of ancient Athenian democracy shows that once a political culture exists that gives a wide variety of people and interests the right to speak publicly, civility ends up being the first casualty. Democratic speech in Athens was rough, vulgar, and insulting, often at a level far beyond beyond what we today consider acceptable. Politicians were slandered and vilified publicly by name, on stage in comedy, in public speeches in the courts, and in the assembly and council, the equivalent of our Congress. Taking bribes, incest, sordid sexual behavior, and homosexual prostitution were favorite charges. As classicist K.J. Dover writes about comedy, “There is not one [politician] who is not attacked and ridiculed,” and “all these leading men, and many minor politicians besides, are uniformly treated by the comic poets as vain, greedy, dishonest and self-seeking,” and accused of being “ugly, diseased, prostituted perverts, the sons of whores by foreigners who bribed their way into citizenship.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/eric-holders-race-baiting-attack-on-congress/print/

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder played the race card in front a friendly audience at the annual convention of Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, held in New York on April 9th. He complained that members of Congress seeking to hold him accountable for his gross dereliction of duty were engaging in “unprecedented, unwarranted, ugly and divisive” attacks on him and the Obama administration. He delivered this poppycock a day after he sparred with Republican congressmen over his truth-challenged behavior.

“The last five years have been defined by significant strides and by lasting reforms even in the face, even in the face of unprecedented, unwarranted, ugly and divisive adversity,” Holder said. “If you don’t believe that, you look at the way — forget about me, forget about me. You look at the way the attorney general of the United States was treated yesterday by a House committee — has nothing to do with me, forget that. What attorney general has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment? What president has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?”

Holder has only himself and the president whom he serves to blame. Their stonewalling makes Richard Nixon look like an amateur.

Tough, calm, and principled, Scott Walker should be the GOP’s standard-bearer in 2016.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375552/print

Today’s chatter about nominating former governor Jeb Bush of Florida for president confirms a borderline-tragic lack of imagination among establishment Republicans. Yet another Bush? Beyond being hopelessly royalist, a Bush-45 administration would disinter the “kinder/gentler” and “compassionate” strains of conservatism. Translation: One more heaping helping of low-sodium socialism — the Bush family’s signature dish.

Meanwhile, New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s Blunt Talk Express now looks more like the Blustermobile. Despite some spending restraint, the Garden State’s economy remains stuck in neutral. Unemployment is 7.1 percent, above America’s 6.7 percent joblessness. Standard & Poor’s downgraded the state’s credit rating one level on Wednesday, from AA- to A+. “New Jersey continues to struggle with structural imbalance and stands in stark difference to many of its peers who registered sizeable budgetary surpluses in fiscal 2013,” S&P scolded.

Meanwhile, Bridgegate’s clouds darken the path from Trenton to Pennsylvania Avenue. It cannot help Christie’s ambitions that a federal grand jury now is searching for his fingerprints on the traffic cones that graced the George Washington Bridge.

GOP senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Marco Rubio of Florida are brave, smart, eloquent free-market heroes. They would be even more appealing if they had run something beyond their Capitol Hill offices.

Against this backdrop, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin should be the Republican standard-bearer. The Badger State’s 46-year-old chief executive possesses priceless assets:

A stalwart commitment to fiscal conservatism and limited government. In his inaugural address, Walker warmly invoked his state constitution’s Frugality Clause: “It is through frugality and moderation in government that we will see freedom and prosperity for our people.” In his book Unintimidated (with Marc Thiessen), Walker approvingly cites Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Milton Friedman. “There’s a reason why in America we take a day off to celebrate the Fourth of July and not the fifteenth of April,” Walker writes. “In America, we value independence from the government and not dependence on it.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375539/print

‘If all you have is a hammer,” the old saying goes, “everything looks like a nail.” Left unsaid is the fact that the real problem isn’t the possession of a hammer, but the certitude that all you need is the hammer. In other words, it’s a failure of the imagination — which is a kind of arrogance — that’s really to blame. “I’ve got my hammer, and that’s all I need. Besides, have you ever seen a problem that didn’t look like a nail?”

This is a version of what academics call “confirmation bias” — the tendency to accept only the facts that buttress your closely held views. It’s a hot topic these days. Ezra Klein, a young liberal writer, has launched a news website, Vox.com, that purports to be the vanguard of something called “explanatory journalism” (which is something of a redundancy, like culinary cooking or belligerent war). In his inaugural essay, Klein argues that conservatives and liberals alike are prone to confirmation bias, which he is here to fix.

This is a very old idea. Legendary journalist and one-time progressive intellectual Walter Lippmann argued the same sort of thing nearly a century ago. Like many progressives, Lippmann was an often deeply ideological advocate of purging competing ideologies from public life. We needed “disinterested” servants who were free of the partisan or ideological bias.

The problem, as we discovered, was that disinterested public servants were deeply interested in their jobs and expanding the power of the state. The government was their hammer and we the people were the nails.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/can-valls-deliver/?print=1

François Hollande, the French socialist president, nominated a new prime minister on March 31 — the day after his party lost 155 cities and scores of lesser municipalities in the local elections. Constitutional issues were not at stake: local elections are local and do not interfere, theoretically, with national politics. However, the debacle confirmed what polls had repeatedly foretold for months: both the president and his administration were sinking to an unprecedented popularity low, down to 25% or less in overall approval according to the latest surveys [1].

In 2012, the motto for Hollande’s successful presidential campaign had been “Time for change!” (Le changement, c’est maintenant”). Ironically, he must now undergo a complete change of course in order to survive until the 2017 election.

It was certainly the right move to pick Manuel Valls, hitherto the Interior minister, as the new premier. Jean-Marc Ayrault, the outgoing prime minister, was said to be “a poor, bland, copy and paste of Hollande.”

Valls, in terms of image and profile, is everything Hollande is not. He has a square, skinny, Napoleonic, face with piercing eyes, which is the opposite of Hollande’s roundish and bespectacled face. While Hollande was born in Northern France in a conservative upper middle class family, Valls is the son of a Spanish painter who settled in France in the late 1940s, and he was not naturalized until the age of 20. Hollande, a graduate of the elite ENA (National School for Administration), is a high-ranking member of France’s statist elite. Valls just attended college, and then served for years as a socialist party underling and petty official.

Hollande has always had rather “complicated” relationships with women, as they say on Facebook (last January, he dropped almost overnight Valerie Trierweiller, his semi-official companion for seven years, presumably for Julie Gayet, a much younger mistress). Valls looks more like a classic male: half Iberian macho, half Latin lover. Hollande has always been eager to promote compromise and consensus among socialists and leftwing allies, while Valls sticks proudly to his own views. Last but not least, Valls has been very popular as Interior minister over the past two years — not just the most popular socialist minister, but the most popular French political leader as well, whereas Hollande’s popularity has steadily declined from his first day in office.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/nazi-gun-control/?print=1

Over the last twenty years, Stephen P. Halbrook’s scholarly work on gun control has become more polished, nuanced, and methodical. His latest book, Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State,” [1] is an astonishing piece of scholarship: complete, careful, and thoughtful.

For a very long time, Americans opposed to gun control have used the example of Nazi Germany’s gun control laws as a warning of what might happen here. Regrettably, not everyone has been careful enough. There is a quote purportedly from Hitler about gun control that starts out “1935 will go down in history” that used to float around the Internet; it does not appear so often anymore because a number of people, including me, demonstrated its falsity.

Part of what allowed bogus quotes like this to survive was that few historians had bothered to research the real history of the Nazis and gun control. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership did a nice job of obtaining and translating the 1928 and 1931 Weimar Republic gun control laws and the 1938 Nazi gun control law [2] some years ago. But as useful as those translations are, they simply do not compare to what Halbrook has done with his new book.

Halbrook traces the development of German gun control law from the collapse of the Kaiser’s government in 1918 through the post-war chaos, the Weimar Republic’s efforts to prevent the violence of the Nazis and the Communists in the 1920s and early 1930s, and then the ways in which the Nazis used those laws to disarm anyone who they regarded as “enemies of the state” (which of course included all Jews).

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

I never dived to the bottom of the ocean, nor have I ever ascended Everest. I never ran a marathon, nor did I (or will I) make a billion bucks. I never sang at the Met, nor did I ever ski the Matterhorn. But together, Caroline and I made it through fifty years of marriage – a feat more daunting than those listed, and certainly one more cherished.

Neither of our parents made it to fifty years of marriage. Death intervened. Of our four sets of grandparents, only one made it to fifty years, my paternal grandparents. Ironically, they were the oldest of that batch to marry, both being in their 30s, something unusual when they were married in 1907. There was a small family party for them in 1957 in Wellesley, which was good fun. But they seemed pretty old to me at the time. Consequently, I do my best to act young and be vigorous as possible when around my own grandchildren!

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was standing at the altar in the chapel of the Church of the Heavenly Rest on New York’s Fifth Avenue. My brother Frank was at my side, as were two cousins and Caroline’s brother. My sister Betsy and the wife of Caroline’s cousin were her attendants. The rector, Floyd Thomas stood behind us. I was 23 and nervous. And then Caroline Elliott appeared coming down the aisle – a vision of beauty – on her reluctant father’s arm. And why wouldn’t he be reluctant? He was 71 years old, a Princeton and Harvard Law School graduate. I was a boy from New Hampshire with a year to go in college – the University of New Hampshire – from which I had dropped out for a couple of years to work and to go into the army. I was not what one would have called a promising prospect. On the other hand, I have been blest with an innate sense of optimism. I am one who prefers “what might be” to “what could have been.”

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2014/04/climate-papers-without-peer/
Want your, er, highly innovative research to get lots of attention, the sort that keeps those grants coming? You could do worse than start with some kind words from a peer-reviewer whose work is glowingly cited in your own paper. After that, apply for the next batch of grants.

Peer review is claimed to be the gold standard for scientific papers. Yet in the establishment climate science world, “peer review” operates differently. Professor Stephan Lewandowsky’s now-retracted paper Recursive Fury, about conspiracy-mindedness of “deniers”, raises a few issues about peer reviewing.

The background is that in 2012 Lewandowsky, Winthrop professor of psychology at the University of Western Australia, wrote a paper on climate “denialism” with the provocative title “NASA Faked the Moon Landing-Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science”. This caused an outcry on climate sceptic blogs, where it was alleged, among other things, that the survey was based on only 10 anonymous internet responses. Lewandowsky, now at Bristol University, surveyed and analysed the outcry and created last year a new paper, “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation”.

I won’t go into this paper’s merits, except to note that its host journal, Frontiers, has retracted the paper, saying,

As a result of its investigation, which was carried out in respect of academic, ethical and legal factors, Frontiers came to the conclusion that it could not continue to carry the paper, which does not sufficiently protect the rights of the studied subjects. Specifically, the article categorizes the behaviour of identifiable individuals within the context of psychopathological characteristics.[1] [2]

Lewandowsky is undeniably a heavy hitter in his psychology patch. He’s been publishing scores of papers for nearly 30 years (20 in the past three years alone) since gaining his Ph.D. He has taught at UWA for nearly 20 years and was awarded the UK Royal Society’s Wolfson Research Merit Award last year.

So who peer reviewed his Recursive Fury paper? It was an ambitious paper, and when published,it got 30,000 online views and more than 9000 downloads, a record for the journal. The editors would hardly have selected as a peer reviewer a mere post-graduate Sydney student in journalism, would they?

Step forward Elaine McKewon, student at the sub-august Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney, one of the three reviewers. (Check the output of its star researcher Wendy Bacon here).[3]

McKewon’s academic lustre shines with a BA (Hons) in Geography, UWA, and a Grad Dip in Journalism at UTS.

Her studies for a PhD involve, a la Wendy Bacon, “examining coverage of climate science in Australian newspapers during 1996-2010.” The primary aim, she says, “is to explain how the scientific consensus on climate change was reconstructed as a ‘scientific debate’ in the Australian news media.” In other words, how and why have evil sceptics been casting doubt on the certain, absolutely settled case for catastrophic human-caused global warming that will occur in the late 21st century. Or in her own words, “I am developing an interdisciplinary model of the social production of scientific ignorance — the process whereby a coalition of agents from different social fields constructs a false scientific controversy at the public level in order to undermine authoritative scientific knowledge.”[4]

Here also speaks McKewon, terrifying the horses at a journalism education conference in Perth:

“The latest report of the (IPCC) in 2007 raises the prospect of unthinkable scenarios over the coming century: millions of people without adequate water supply, devastating droughts and bushfires, mass starvation, catastrophic floods, more frequent extreme weather events, rising sea levels, millions of people displaced in an environmental refugee crisis and one-third of the world’s species committed to extinction…”[5]

I’m not surprised that the Australian Psychological Society (which adores Lewandowsky’s papers) has put out a special bulletin on how to educate kiddies about climate change without traumatizing them permanently.[6]

Lewandowsky is a fan of McKewon’s work. In a 40-minute video he did last month at Bristol University, he quotes (at 28:04) from his Recursive Fury conclusion about “a possible role of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of science”. He adds that this “is a finding that aligns well with previous research”. His graphic then pops up alongside, reading “Other research aligns with our basic thinking, e.g. McKewon 2012.”[7]

McKewon published two studies in 2012. Lewandowsky is probably referring to both of them: “The use of neoliberal think tank [i.e. Institute of Public Affairs] fantasy themes to delegitimise scientific knowledge of climate change in Australian newspapers” and “Conspiracy theories vs climate science in regional newspaper coverage of Ian Plimer’s book, Heaven and Earth”.

In the Recursive Fury paper, Lewandowsky cites McKewon’s two papers no less than five times.[8] I imagine McKewon would have noticed the citations she was getting, but not let that affect her objectivity as peer reviewer. As it happened, she seems to have missed, as reviewer, the ethics issues identified by Frontiers’ journal management.

McKewon’s own account is: “Satisfied that the paper was a solid work of scholarship that could advance our understanding of science denial and improve the effectiveness of science communication, I recommended publication. Two other independent reviewers agreed.”[9]

_______________________________

UPDATE: The Recursive Fury paper was edited by Viren Swami, University of Westminster. Strangely, he is also one of the two peer reviewers of the paper, along with McKewon. The Sydney Morning Herald reported on April 2, that McKewon was one of “three independent reviewers”.
Dr Swami’s Ph.D was on body-size ideals across cultures. His papers include :
>Female physical attractiveness in Britain and Malaysia: A cross-cultural study
>Female physical attractiveness in Britain and Japan: A cross‐cultural study
>The missing arms of Vénus de Milo: reflections on the science of attractiveness
>A critical test of the waist-to-hip ratio hypothesis of women’s physical attractiveness in Britain and Greece
>Unattractive, promiscuous and heavy drinkers: Perceptions of women with tattoos.

Anti-Zionism is an annihilationist ideology. They don’t want an entire people, the people of Israel, to live

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4872/anti_zionists_want_the_israeli_people_to_die

Contrary to the old wisdom about history — that it repeats itself — more often it moves in patterns. And where history goes, human progress, or regress, cannot be far behind.

Look at the pattern followed by human rights. From the dawn of recorded history to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and beyond, more rights have been recognized for more people in more conditions; so that today every living human is covered, notionally…Or nearly every human. In its opaque wisdom History ordained for one collective a different lot. Progressive rights were not for the Jews. Briefly consider how the powers of different epochs treated that people.

Effectively the Greeks and Romans decreed, “You have no right to live among us as Jews.”

After them came the Church: “You have no right to live among us.” And finally Hitler, and the Nazi decree: “You have no right to live.”

Today who decrees what for the people of Israel? Brace for it. Anti-Zionism, the axis of two religions and a secular movement, decrees no more rights than Hitler did. Effectively anti-Zionists tell the people of Israel, ‘You have no right to live.’

We may cast a disdainful look at Al Qaeda or Hezbollah, or even the Mullahs of Iran. Forget those anti-Zionists. The fiery placards in Durban or Gaza City might be worth a chuckle: ‘Kill the Zionists’; or ‘If only Hitler had finished the job’.

Forget the hotheads. Think BBC; think the Guardian; think CNN and the UN General Assembly; think the Human Rights Council and Europe’s Parliament; think Amnesty and Oxfam; think of the boycott movement; and yes – think of some homegrown Israeli academics and NGO schemes.

Those are the anti-Zionists to bear in mind. Attend carefully and we’d catch their verdict on the people of Israel, ‘No right to live.’