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‘Death Sentence’ – a film worth seeing

The film Death Sentence is worth seeing.

As the saying goes “Warning! spoilers below”… → Continue reading: ‘Death Sentence’ – a film worth seeing

Daily Telegraph – misreporting as an excuse for disgraceful editorial?

Normally I am wary of claims that “trying to please actual or potential readers” is a reason for why newspapers go in for pro ‘liberal’ elite content (I suspect that the desire to seem ‘modern’ and ‘with it’ is far more powerful than the desire for more readers – indeed may even lead people who control publications to drive away actual or potential readers).

However, the Iraq war is so unpopular that I am inclined to think that the choice of the Daily Telegraph to rat on its support for the war may indeed have been to try and please actual or potential readers.

So the editorial yesterday about how the “American involvement in Iraq limps to its inevitable and ignominious conclusion” was not much of shock to me – although I do find the language disgraceful. I, unlike the Daily Telegraph, did not support the judgement to go to go into Iraq in 2003 – but I would not use sub-Marxist death-to-America language like “inevitable” and “ignominious”.

However, there was an excuse for the editorial. The Daily Telegraph reported that a retired American General had suggested that the British army send more troops to Iraq – being either too stupid or too dishonest to understand that the British had no more troops to send. General Keane‘s comments were, according the Daily Telegraph, just an effort to use the British as an excuse for the failure of the Americans.

“The trouble with this was….” I heard the retired American General’s comments (on BBC Radio 4’s “Today Programme”) and far from being too stupid or too dishonest to understand the small size of the British army he actually said that the British army should be “grown” – i.e. made bigger, as he also said the American army and Marine Corps should be and he hoped would be. Of course one can argue about whether the British army really does need to be bigger (for example why are there over twenty thousands British troops in mainland Europe?), but the basic point here is clear.

The Daily Telegraph misreported the retired American General’s comments – in order to have an excuse for a standard ‘liberal’ elite death-to-America editorial.

The Indian version of the ‘Fairness Doctrine’

This is some talk of bringing back the ‘fairness doctrine’ in the United States. This, before President Reagan got rid of it, allowed the powers-that-be to force broadcasters to have when was deemed to be ‘balanced’ news and current affairs coverage.

In reality, of course, ‘balanced’ means either leftist opinions (the establishment, produced by the universities, do not see their opinions as opinions, they see them as ‘objective’ or even ‘scientific’ journalism – even when they formally do not believe that there is any such thing as objective truth), or a pointless mess of people shouting debating points at each other.

In reality it takes several minutes to explain a point of view, and the reasons for it, about most political matters – exchanges of debating points do not achieve much. The destruction of such things as talk radio (by demanding a “right of reply”) would leave the leftist shows, both serious and comic, untouched. Who wants to bet that the “fairness doctrine” would be applied in some God like “fair” way to them? As for “hard news” as opposed to “comment” (not that I fully accept this distinction).

The left often attack “Fox News” for claiming to be “Fair and Balanced” and (whilst a lot of FNC is not conservative at all) it is perfectly clear where, for example, Brit Hume’s political loyalties are, which one can tell by his choice of words, tone of voice, body language and in other ways, but the left fail to see, or pretend to fail to see, that their own people (i.e. all the other news networks) are also not “fair and balanced” – because this is not in the nature of man (sorry “humanity”), and that all that the ‘fairness doctrine’ would do is to give their side a monopoly of news presentation.

Still, the whole thing is far from confined to the United States.

For example, in Britain we have a version of the ‘fairness doctrine’ – which means, in practice, that broadcasters (government owned or private) represent the ‘liberal’ (i.e illiberal) left. Indeed it is almost universal outside the United States. The most recent example I have came upon concerns India:

A couple weeks ago I watched a brief report on NDTV about the new ‘content code’. According to this compulsory code stories that were against the Indian “national interest” would be spiked, and broadcasters would not be allowed to “highlight” (i.e. favour) certain opinions. In practice it is a safe guess that the opinions that broadcasters would not be allowed to highlight would be opinions opposed to the Congress party and to the various leftist parties who support in government. However, the NDTV report did not say that broadcasters should be allowed to favour any opinion they wished and that people should be allowed to choose between them.

No – the line was that “self regulation” should be supported. The Indian newspapers, the report said, practice this via the “Press Council of India” and broadcasters should be allowed to the same. The government will force its line into regulations – because no one is really opposing this “fairness” line as a matter of principle.

Sadly it appears that no one really stands for anything like the US First Amendment, or for freedom in general, in India. On the one side we have Congress and the various leftist parties (trying to gradually introduce more welfare spending), and on the other side we have the religious nationalist BJP (i.e the saffron fascists). The old days when the Independence party stood for freedom (yes it lost every election – but it was there) are long over.

The above is not meant as attack on India – things are much the same in Britain. No major political party really stands for freedom here either. Not only not in a strict libertarian sense – not even in a general sense.

What they will not be telling you: Nehru was not good for India

With the 60th anniversary of the end of British rule in the sub continent, there is the normal talk of whether the vast numbers of rapes and murders during partition could have been prevented. The British will, perhaps quite rightly, get the blame for not delaying independence and for not using enough force to try and prevent the violence on partition.

However, it is almost forgotten that Nehru (the leader of the Congress party and first Prime Minister of India) was demanding that the British leave (every day we stayed was a day too many for Nehru), and even claimed that it was mainly where the British were that violence took place.

This was the exact opposite of the truth (and Nehru knew it) – as it was where British forces went in (sadly much too rarely) that the mass rapes and killings were prevented. Nehru had “form” in letting his “get the British out of India” obsession cloud his judgement.

For example, in 1942 he had gone along (whatever doubts he must have had) with the demented “Quit India” campaign. Had the British actually “quit India” the Japanese would have come in (they were at the gates of India) and the Congress party would have found out what “slavery to an Imperial power” really was.

As Prime Minister of India Nehru followed a policy of armed aggression (so much for “non violence”) against such places as Portuguese Goa. But also did not bother to prepare against real threats to national security.

The classic example is relations with Red China. Nehru ordered a policy of confronting China in the border area – but did not send a decent level of troops or equipment (the Indian troops did not even axes to cut down trees and where forced into trying to use spades for the task – much to amusement of the watching People’s Liberation Army). Nehru also refused to approach the United States for aid – he could handle matters.

When the Chinese invaded in 1962 the Indian force fought bravely, but was hopelessly out-numbered and out-equipped – their defeat was inevitable. The Chinese captured the entire disputed area (which they had no legal right to) and Nehru was left begging the United States for aid – in case the Chinese decided to take any more of India.

But the worst aspect of Nehru was his domestic policy:

Nehru loved talking of “five year plans” and an industrial revolution for India. However, his policies condemned the population of India to poverty, often extreme poverty. Not only was overseas competition virtually banned (for almost all goods and services), but the “permit Raj” meant that almost all domestic competition was crippled as well.

The “freedom” that the Congress party promised India turned out to be so many rules and regulations that it made the British Raj look almost libertarian by comparison (although the British Raj was bad in many ways).

I doubt that most of the above will be mentioned in many places, but people deserve to know.

The most stupid thing said at the ABC Republican debate

Many intelligent things were said at the Republican debate broadcast by the American Broadcasting System the other week. But, being of a negative cast of mind, I was more interested in the stupid things that were said.

Ron Paul listed “Korea” as one of the wars that American should not have fought and “lost” (well there goes the Korean American vote).

Mitt Romney said that government should back “universal healthcare”, as he had introduced in Massachusetts, because otherwise “people turn up to Emergency Rooms and this is expensive” – of course people are still turning up to Emergency Rooms and demanding free treatment in Massachusetts – in spite of Mitt Romney’s expensive new government scheme (which will get more and more expensive over time).

However, I believe that the most stupid thing said at the debate was from Mike Huckabee (a big tax increaser from Arkansas) who said that health care would be fixed if “everyone in America had the same healthcare as the members of Congress were given”.

There are 100 members of the United States Senate, and there are 435 members of the House of Representatives. And there are about 300 million Americans.

Paying the health costs costs of 535 politicians is a rather smaller burden than paying the health care costs of 300, 000,000 people.

Yet this piece of populist bullshit (for that is what it was) was cheered and applauded.

A reason to be proud of Kettering Conservatives

As people involved in this blog know I am not exactly shy about attacking Conservative party policy either nationally or locally. So it is only fair that I present good news when there is some.

The other night the MP for Kettering, Mr Philip Hollobone, was formally readopted as the Prospective Conservative Party candidate for election as member of the House of Commons for Kettering.

Why is this “good news” or a “reason to proud”?

Because of what he said.

Mr Hollobone informed the score or so people who had come for the meeting of the Executive Council, of the local Conservative Association, that he believed that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland should leave the European Union – and that he had said this publicly and would continue to do so (which is why I can mention it here) whatever Mr Cameron thought about this matter (although, in the interests of fairness, I must make clear that Mr Cameron has not said that a person may not hold this opinion).

Mr Hollobone then left the room and a secret ballot was held. It is a rule that numbers can not be given. However, in this case they are not needed – as there were no spoilt ballot papers and no opposing votes (work it out).

Both good news and a reason to be proud.

By the way, in case anyone thinks I had something to do with any of the above, I did not say a word in the entire Executive Council meeting. As the meeting was not public I will not mention what other people said. However, there were no comments opposing Mr Hollobone’s position.

The use of two very old methods of deception by the Economist

In one of several articles supporting ‘universal’ (i.e. tax funded) health care in the United States in last weeks Economist magazine (the people who control it call it a ‘newspaper’ for tax reasons), the line “nobody denies” that the lack of a “universal health system” undermines “economic security” in the United States was used.

It was the words “nobody denies” that interested me. A very obvious obvious lie, as a great many people deny this, but I had heard this sort of lie somewhere before. In another article it was said that some Conservatives wished to “do nothing” about health care – good ‘conservatives’, like Mitt Romney, of course wished to go along with the demands supported by the Economist for ‘universal health care’ (see above).

In reality many American conservatives have long argued for less government subsides and regulations, what with government subsidies and regulations being the main reason that health care is expensive in the United States today. But the idea that anyone could want less statism was not even mentioned, let alone refuted – a ‘conservative’ (of the bad sort – i.e. someone who did not want more statism) was simply someone who wanted to “do nothing”.

I had seen that lie someone before as well. And then I remembered – these are the methods of John Stuart Mill.

In, for example, Principles of Political Economy (1848) whenever J.S. Mill comes out with a demand for more statism, whether it be for police, or for government supply of water or other things, he tends to say something like “nobody denies” that the government should provide X, Y, Z. It was a lie as Mill knew perfectly well at the time as many of his contemporaries did did indeed deny these things – but it was a useful lie in that it meant that he did not have to refute their arguments because he pretended that opponents of his statist views did not exist.

J.S. Mill did a similar thing with the theory of economic value. He did not refute the arguments of such writers as Richard Whately and Samuel Bailey who had largely discredited the labour theory of value in the English speaking world (it had never been the main theory of economic value in the no- English speaking world), he just defended the theory of his father James Mill and his friend David Ricardo by saying the labour theory of value was “settled”, no one denied it. Again a blatant lie – but a very effective one when dealing with young people whose first (and in many cases last) book on Political Economy would be J.S. Mill’s work.

As for ‘conservatives’, J.S. Mill was careful to avoid writing much about conservative minded people who had ideas to roll back the size and scope of government activity, such as Edmund Burke (although the word “conservative” was not used in Burke’s time, J.S. Mill knew of him via the Mill family and friends membership of the “Bowood Circle” a informal grouping of people who were sympathetic to some of the ideas of the French Revolution and hated Edmund Burke). It was much better to either write about poets like Coleridge, or to pretend that conservatives were just ‘stupid’ people, who wanted to ‘do nothing’.

J.S. Mill wrote and spoke like this because he was a utilitarian, i.e. he defined right and wrong in terms ‘good’ and ‘evil’, defining ‘good’ as nice consequences and ‘evil’ as nasty consequences. It is quite true that he did think in terms of “higher and lower” pleasures, but that “good” might not mean pleasant or that “right” might not mean “good” was not something he was willing to concede.

In short he was a man without an ethical basis for honour (I do not mean that as abuse – I mean it as statement of fact). To such a man such old sayings as “death before dishonour” are simply the ravings of mad people, and refusing to break faith even at the cost of one’s life is irrational. If to lie produced good consequences (with “good” being defined as the greatest happiness of the greatest number) then he lied. And his followers follow in this tradition – right to the writers in the Economist to day.

“We are proud to be associated with the founder of modern liberalism” is the sort of response I would expect from such folk (although no response at all would be more in their tradition). This shows the vast gulf between modern ‘liberals’ and conservative minded people. Although, almost needless to say, there are few such folk in the British Conservative party.

‘Riverdance’ as propaganda for Red China?

I was switching from television station to television station when I came upon a show (on “Sky 3”) called Riverdance In China.

OK, I thought, a group of athletic Irish people dancing in China – I will see what the show is like.

And then an Irish women’s voice said something close to the following:

“The Chinese Emperors tyrannically isolated the country from the outside world, but in the first years of the 20th century the Communists under Chairman Mao overthrow the Emperors and the lives of hundreds of millions of people gradually improved…”

Perhaps it got better after this, but I do not know because I turned it off.

Well once the Emperors of China may indeed have isolated China from the outside world, but that certainly was not true in the “early years of the 20th century”, when one could, for example, buy Chinese railway bonds on all the major exchanges of the world.

The Chinese Communists did not overthrow the Emperors – the Chinese Communist Party did not even exist in 1911 when Sun Yat-Sen (and his protégé, Chiang Kai Shek) overthrew the Qing Dynasty.

And as for the life of the Chinese people gradually improving under the Communists, in reality tens of millions of them starved to death during the collectivist ‘Great Leap Forward’ and the rest of it. About 60 million people were murdered under Mao, so perhaps ‘gradually improved’ might not have been the most appropriate choice of words.

Also even the most statist Emperor never demanded that people make steel in their back yards (you can guess what this steel was like) or launched a campaign to exterminate birds in the demented hope that it would improve the harvest (surprise, surprise, there was a plague of insects).

Perhaps the show introduction was, unintentionally, amusing for people who have read books like Mao: The Untold Story, but remember – a lot of young people (and not so young people) get what knowledge of the world they have from sources like the introduction to this show, which is a great pity.

Lord Black convicted

Conrad Black has been convicted of some of the charges that were directed against him.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case (my own view is that the whole case was bullshit and the jury convicted him because of envy of his ‘lavish lifestyle’) it underscores the old point that being a director of corporation is a very dangerous thing to be in the United States. Far more managers go to jail in the United States than in any other Western country (even as a percentage of the total).

Perhaps the first Henry Ford had it right. After losing some civil cases against him by minority shareholders, he bought them out – every one of them. Only if owned 100% of the company could he feel secure against someone saying he was not doing right by the shareholders.

As for the other shareholders, the campaign against Lord Black has cost them vastly more than his pay and perks ever did. Too late perhaps some of them now understand that he was the company and, without him, it was nothing.

All the above should not be held to mean that I now accept Lord Black’s opinions. For example, I still do not agree with his opinion that FDR was a moderate man or a good President. However, it is possible that Sir Conrad may now revise his opinion of the person who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to help create the vastly powerful (almost arbitrary) American government that was directed against him.

National Death Service

Nice to hear that all eight suspects arrested concerning the recent attempted Islamic terrorism in the United Kingdom worked for the National Health Service (and the person arrested in Australia was recruited by the Queensland Department of Health), so perhaps Michael Moore will entitle his next film Bombo.

Still, it could be argued, that is just as well that they were NHS people. Had they not been their enterprise might have successful.

Proud to be English

In the Daily Telegraph of Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 there is the following letter from Lesie Watson of Swansea (in Wales).

Ireland, Scotland and Wales have all introduced smoking bans without problems. But we read “thousands of smokers defy [English] ban” (report, July 2). What does this say about the English?

If the report is true Lesie, it means that there is still sometimes a reason to be proud to be English.

Opposing super-statism does not make one a ‘nationalist’

Yesterday I happened to see the Sunday Telegraph and Niall Fergusson’s contribution was ‘interesting’ (in the sense of the old Chinese curse).

Niall Fergusson is a Scottish conservative who sold out and got a high paid job at Harvard (perhaps he just went along with the leftist stereotype of the conservative as someone who puts his personal financial interest above everything else). He sometimes still writes decent stuff, but normally his writings are designed to not offend his new ‘liberal’ friends (and employers) and today was no exception.

Professor Fergusson was not writing in support of Islamic terrorists in Somalia (which he has done in the past), or declaring that the West should submit to (sorry engage in ‘diplomacy’ only with) the Iranian regime (regardless of how many British and American people this regime kills in Afghanistan, Iraq and the streets of Western cities). No today he had a different subject – the European Union (remember in establishment circles in the United States wanting to take powers away from the EU is considered as wicked as it is in establishment circles here).

The great historian has decided to put his support behind the superstate and denounce its evil ‘nationalist’ foes.

Supposedly 30% of the population of the United Kingdom think membership of the EU has been harmful. I think it is rather more that 30%, but perhaps Professor Fergusson is correct.

What were Professor Fergusson’s arguments against those people who think that the tidal wave of EU regulations has been harmful?

He presented no arguments at all. It was just taken as obvious that anyone who opposed this layer of government was both stupid and evil.

Professor Fergusson is clearly a true establishment man and no doubt will continue to be welcome at all the social events in Harvard.