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“Taxing wealth reverses the relationship between citizen and state: rather than it being in charge of protecting our life, liberty, and property, we now work for it. There are no more proud freeholders; citizens become meek leaseholders with the government in charge. Our property becomes a temporary privilege, to be used until accumulated taxes return to the ultimate owner, the state.” – Allister Heath, Daily Telegraph, 1 June. (Behind a paywall.) June 2nd, 2017 | 60 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Inculcating guilt as a tool of power and control. This is a time-honored tactic of manipulative mothers, of many religions, and of political ideologies, like socialism, progressivism, and environmentalism. It works because self-respect is one of our most basic psychological needs: We all need to feel that we are basically good, right, valuable, worthy of esteem. So if you can make someone ashamed of themselves and defensively wallowing in remorse, you can get them to do pretty much anything you want, because they’ll be desperate to make amends and redeem their self-esteem. And you can also cash in on their guilt-driven quest for redemption, as they surrender to you their money and control over their lives. As written by Robert Bidinotto on his Facebook page. He links to this item about the current nonsense around “white privilege” – another of those daffy ideas which seem designed to fill the pockets of shakedown artists of various types. May 31st, 2017 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
The true mark of the civilized society is not that it defends the rights of people who are loved by the bulk of the population, for those people need no defense. No one, after all, will arrest a popular person for saying or doing popular things. The true mark of the civilized society is that it defends the rights even of those who are universally reviled. Indeed, in a truly civilized society, there would be no question but that you would defend the rights of people who disgust you provided they do no violence to others. Our society is not civilized. March 30th, 2017 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
One can not get an “ought” from an “is” said Mr David Hume, and he also said “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions”. So Mr Hume denies what we, in fact, do every day – for example when we say to ourselves or others “this is wrong, so I ought not to do it” (an “ought” from an “is” – it is IS wrong so I OUGHT not to do it), and then he does this himself “reason IS, and OUGHT to be, the slave of the passions”. “Ah but Paul – Mr Hume puts the word “and” in there so that makes it O.K.” Fine so I should use my reason to bring Mr Hume back to life, as I have a “passion” to torture him. Perhaps Mr Hume led a sheltered life and did not understand what sort of Hell-on-Earth people create if they let their moral reason became the slave of their passions, rather than have their moral reason control their passions. David Hume inverted the moral tradition for amusement (“look how clever I am – I am going to reverse the traditional answer that moral reason should control the passions” is what he is really saying), but the results are not good. “But he does not mean this – he really means that you can not get the first “is”. Please no one play that game – Davy Hume knew what he was doing (behind the gentle language and the endless pages of “philosophical argument”), he was playing the “shock the suffered shirts” game, but it is not funny when it is now treated as “great philosophy”. March 4th, 2017 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
The British Whig tradition, and the Tory tradition also (Dr Johnson and all that), starts from the principle of moral personhood – the ability of human beings, with effort, to tell moral right from wrong and, again with effort, to choose to overcome our evil passions and do what it is morally right. To choose do other than we do. As Ayn Rand reminded us in the 20th century – one can be an atheist (and hold that the soul, the human person. dies with the body) and still hold to these principles. Typical Whig thinkers including Thomas Reid and the Scots “Common Sense” School of Philosophy who dominated the Scottish Enlightenment (the modern association of the Scottish Enlightenment with David Hume is bizarre, considering he was the arch critic of it), but the Whig tradition and (in this) the Tory tradition also, reached back to Ralph Cudworth (he enemy of the determinist and political absolutist Thomas Hobbes) and in law to Chief Justice Sir John Holt and Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke (the enemy of Sir Francis Bacon – whose servant Thomas Hobbes was). For law is based on the “metaphysical” assumption that people can choose NOT to commit crimes – if they can not choose to do other than they do, then punishment is unjust. And, of course, to the Christian (and Jewish) understanding of man – seen, for example, in the work of the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker (and Joseph Butler much later) and the Christian Talmudist and Common Law thinker John Selden. This view of what a human is (a human being) goes back, at least, to the Arisototelian Alexander of Aphrodisias – see his “On Fate”. As for “compatibilism” – determinists (those who deny the existence of the soul, in the Aristotelian not just religious sense, and hold humans to be flesh robots) should at least state their doctrine openly, rather than hide it. The words of Immanuel Kant and William James (whatever their other faults) are just on this matter – it is a contemptible subterfuge leading to a wretched quagmire. Of course Dr Johnson would not even waste words on the doctrine – and when he heard that his “fellow Tory” (the quote marks are because Johnson did not really recognise Hume as a Tory) it just confirmed his low opinion of the man. But at least David Hume did not claim to be a Whig – unlike some of his more recent followers. In America the determinist Johnathan Edwards was less influential than the libertarian (libertarian = believer in Free Will, sometimes I suspect people do not remember even this) Samuel Johnson (not to be confused with the British Dr Johnson, although their opinions were similar on this matter). It is a sign of our evil and degenerate times that Edwards is remembered as a “great philosopher” and people who were more influential among the American Founders (most importantly Thomas Reid) are almost forgotten. → Continue reading: The British Whig tradition and Mr John Stuart Mill March 2nd, 2017 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
There has been much huffing and puffing recently about gender neutral pronouns. In principle, I rather like the idea. The fact that I dislike some of the other people who like the idea ought not to affect that. Not, I hasten to add, that I feel any animus against anyone purely on the grounds that they prefer to be referred to by one sound rather than another, or that their gender is difficult to specify externally, or that they feel that neither “he” nor “she” describes them, or that they advocate for lexical change. While it is true that the set of people currently talking loudest about gender-neutral pronouns would, if displayed on a Venn diagram, have considerable overlap with the set of people who wish to get others arrested for using the wrong word, that is a symptom of the addiction of our society to the use of force rather than persuasion, not a logical necessity. The cause of the gender-neutral pronoun is ill-served by many of its current advocates. But in itself, it would be handy. That’s “it” as in “having a third person singular pronoun available to use to describe human beings without specifying gender”, not “it” as in “it”. It (as in the situation, not a person) tends to get an itty-bit hairy when one person refers to another (by which I mean another person, not another situation) as “it”. Thus, if I may reiterate, using “it” (as in “‘it'”) as a gender-neutral pronoun to refer to a person would put the user in a bad situation, even if they (here used in the singular) were not a singularly bad person. Wouldn’t it? OK, I got drunk on words there. Sobering up, I am not seeking perfect “representation” for every one of Facebook’s 71 gender options. They can represent themselves. I just think it would be nice to have one more option, and to settle on one. That way those prone to being easily offended, and the subset of them that resort to bullying, could be kept from unhappiness and the occasion of sin. I do think that the traditional use of “he” and “man” to include the female is a little, y’know, presumptuous. I am not one to go through old documents cutting out every offending “he-including-she” with a razor, but I would just as soon have some more inclusive style in new documents. It is tedious have to write “he or she” every time. Singular “they” sounds all right when the subject is indefinite (e.g. “If anyone wants more details, give them a brochure”) but sounds wrong if the gender is known. At this point someone usually pipes up to say that Shakespeare used it in their plays. Only they don’t say their plays, they say his plays, unless they (gender unspecified here: no problem) are making some sort of claim that Shakespeare was a collective, a Borg or a woman. The distinction between singular and plural third person is useful. We feel its lack in the second person. The singular/plural distinction keeps trying to creep back in with “youse” and “y’all”. In some dialects spoken in Northern England, “thou” never went away, merely faded a little into “tha”. If making no difference between singular and plural is sometimes confusing when talking to people, it is a swamp when talking about people. Imagine an action scene in a novel where all the characters including the protagonist were referred to as “they”. This link takes you to a piece called “The Need for a Gender-neutral Pronoun” which lists some of the leading contenders for a new pronoun. By clicking on the suggested pronoun itself (or the title of the set in the case of the Spivak pronouns named after their creator), you can read an extract from Alice in Wonderland using that set of pronouns. The author also rates the proposed words by ease of pronunciation, distinctiveness, and how truly neutral they are. The author prefers the set of pronouns based on “ne” in the nominative case. If you agree that a gender neutral pronoun would be desirable, which option would you like to take hold in the language? If you object to the whole idea, what would you like to see become dominant – strict use of “he” (or “she”), or “they”, or “s/he” and variants? The thing is, I will not be the first in my circle of acquaintance to start writing “xe” or “ne” in any other context but science fiction for the same reason that I will not be first in my circle to start taking a daily stroll in the nude. I would if you would, but I know and you know, neither of us will. February 25th, 2017 | 81 comments - (Comments are closed)
The essay by Mr Palmer is entitled “A New, Old Challenge: Global Anti-Libertarianism”. The article examines three broad threats, which are serious, to classical liberalism: radical Islamism, the post-Gramsci Far Left, and what is called the “Alt Right”:
December 8th, 2016 | 70 comments - (Comments are closed)
The story of the demise of slavery I take to have great significance for our evaluation of capitalism. The system is not to be judged purely by its material consequences. Relative or temporary happiness brought about by productive efficiency or growth cannot be the last word. Absent liberty and self-government, the situation would be inexcusable. We now can see that capitalism has as its essence individual freedom-rights. Without respect for these rights the system is in danger of turning into a monstrosity, as it would have in an unchecked antebellum South. It did so in Wilhelmine Germany and could do so still in crypto-communist China. Again, as in the case of the developing regions of today, liberty-rights are of the essence of capitalism as an improving force for humanity. If we do not see this we run the danger of suffering from the same tunnel vision of colonel Nicholson at the River Kwai. December 7th, 2016 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
In her 1993 paper “Causality Then and Now: Al Ghazali and Quantum Theory” Karen Harding makes the point that what is now called the “Occasionalism” of the 11th century Islamic thinker Al Ghazali is similar to the 20th century “Copenhagen Interpretation” of Quantum Theory. Al Ghazail’s position being to deny cause and effect, to claim that things just happen because God (in the Copenhagen Interpretation “the observer”) make them happen. For example that dropping a pot on a stone floor does not make the pot smash – that God first makes the pot drop (no law of gravity as such) and then makes the pot smash, with no necessary connection to the dropping of the pot. In the “Copenhagen Interpretation”, in Schrodinger’s famous attack upon the theory, a cat in a box is neither alive or dead till we open the box and “observe” the cat. David Hume, back in the 18th century took God out of this form of thinking and just made it “ideas” associating in “the mind” – although Mr Hume also denied the existence of the mind, the “I”, at least in the ordinary common sense meaning of the term. Karen Harding was not led by all the above to doubt the “Copenhagen Interpretation”, on the contrary she wrote to praise Al Ghazali (and thinkers like him) in spite of the effect of such thinking in closing the Islamic mind to science, to objective reality, and thus ending the “Golden Age”. And Douglas Haig? As a Calvinist General Haig, like Al Ghazali (and other mainstream thinkers of Sunni Islam) was a Predestinationist – whatever happened was the will of God. If 20 thousand British soldiers were killed and 30 thousand wounded on one day (July 1st 1916) this is clearly what God wanted to happen and was, therefore, not the fault of Douglas Haig. And as General Haig was part of the “Elect” (Predestined for Salvation) he was, by definition, a good man. Therefore he, Haig, showed no shame over his conduct – as his conduct was, by definition, good (as he was part of God’s Elect), whatever he did. Backstabbing his commanding officer to get his job? Getting hundreds of thousand of British soldiers killed in offensives such as the Somme and Passchendaele? Picking incompetents such as Gough to conduct parts of the Passchendaele offensive in 1917 and the defence of the Western Front in 1918? Supporting calling off the war in 1918 just as the Allies were stating to win? Sending ten thousand men on a suicide attack on the second day of the Battle of Loos (eight thousand British soldiers either killed or wounded – German dead? what German dead?) in 1915? None of this was anything to be ashamed of, as it was all part of the Divine Plan – Divine Providence, the Will of God. The only commanders to be punished were those commanders who resisted Divine Providence – by, for example, not sending their men into suicide attacks on July 1st 1916 – such men were sent home in disgrace for not showing sufficient “fighting spirit”. The tactics were wrong? The plan could not work? That form of thinking assumes objective reality and cause and effect – for example a connection between the orders of Douglas Haig and 20 thousand British soldiers being killed and 30 thousand being wounded on one day (July 1st 1916). But if objective realty does not exist, and there is no law of cause and effect – then reality is just what God (or “the observer” – in this case Douglas Haig) want it to be. So people such as Paul Marks – who “combine the obsessive intellectualism of a Jew, with the wild temper of a Irishman” are just silly to get upset about it. November 1st, 2016 | 95 comments - (Comments are closed)
Nick Cohen is one of those socialist writers I read because he has a core of decency – he is right on the money around Islamism – although he is uneven and his spit-the-dummy turn over the Brexit vote did not impress me one jot. He has an article out about the awfulness of Jeremy Corbyn and his circle, and of course he is right, but he has lacunae of his own:
These four men’s reputations are greatly overblown. All of these men were or are capable of producing work and comments of quite outstanding levels of imbecility. Thompson was a prominent supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament during the 1970s and 1980s at a time when the Cold War was very far from being obviously won; his Marxian treatment of English history, for example, while not without its merits, infected a generation of students. Hobsbawm, whose treatment of history could be equally tendentious, to the end of his long life was an unrepentant defender of the Soviet Union; Stiglitz, while he might produce good work (I cannot think of any off the top of my head), is not renowned for his judgement, as his praise for Venezuela’s catastrophic socialist regime a few years ago attests. And finally, we have Thomas Piketty, whose immense book on inequality, while it gives a sort of spurious intellectual cover for leftists looters, contains fundamental conceptual errors and its policy prescription of massive wealth taxes would be catastrophic. In other words, some of the people on the Left may sound as if they have more intellectual gravitas than, say, Jeremy Corbyn. This is not exactly difficult. But the fact is that in varying degrees, these men were/are deeply wrong and their ideas are dangerous nonsense. As an aside, Dr Roger Scruton has issued an updated edition of his excellent study, Thinkers of the New Left, which goes into a lot of detail about this sort of intellectual. By the way, he has praise for some aspects of their work and tries to see merit where it exists (he is fond of EP Thompson on his understanding of the English working class, for example). Recommended.
September 23rd, 2016 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
Brendan O’Neill, the editor of the publication Spiked, and who is an ardent Leaver when it comes to the European Union, has been writing about how the exit vote last week can be largely explained in terms of class and attitudes of elites. (O’Neill is, or is recovering from being, a Marxist, so his economics still seems a bit suspect to me, even though I like the cut of his jib generally, especially on other issues around liberty and government). I think the class analysis has some validity; it is worth noting that there is more to class-based interpretations of what is going on than the Marxian version. There are, in the classical liberal/conservative traditions of political philosophy and approach, uses of class as a way of seeing how the world works. One person’s essay that I am reminded of is the famous one by William Graham Sumner, The Forgotten Man. Or perhaps a riff on the same tune is Nixon’s “great silent majority”. These approaches aren’t really about proletarians versus “bosses”. They are, in my view, more about those who are broadly self-reliant, deriving the bulk of their earnings from their own efforts and who aspire to have, and retain, capital, and those who do not. The latter can be those who subsist on state benefits, or grander folk working in the public sector paid for largely by the first group. (There are fuzzy boundaries between all types.) And I think that sort of split maps better in explaining whether you are going to be liberal or protectionist, for a big State or a smaller one. But it doesn’t necessarily help on explaining all the voting on the Brexit debate. I wrote this in response to one of O’Neill’s posts on Facebook, and I reproduce it here with some light edits:
June 29th, 2016 | 53 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Liberalism was always counterintuitive. The less society is ordered, the more order emerges from the ground up. The freer people are permitted to be, the happier the people become and the more meaning they find in the course of life itself. The less power that is given to the ruling class, the more wealth is created and dispersed among everyone. The less a nation is directed by conscious design, the more it can provide a model of genuine greatness. Such teachings emerged from the liberal revolution of the previous two centuries. But some people (mostly academics and would-be rulers) weren’t having it. On the one hand, the socialists would not tolerate what they perceived to be the seeming inequality of the emergent commercial society. On the other hand, the advocates of old-fashioned ruling-class control, such as Carlyle and his proto-fascist contemporaries, longed for a restoration of pre-modern despotism, and devoted their writings to extolling a time before the ideal of universal freedom appeared in the world.” May 24th, 2016 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
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