Apocalyptic Daze - secular elites prophesy a doomsday

Pascal Bruckner’s article in City Journal:

Horseman of the Apocalypse

... so many people in both Europe and the United States have recently convinced themselves that the End is nigh.

... Earth will be uninhabitable, natural disasters will multiply, the climate will bring us to war, and nuclear plants will explode ...

... My point is not to minimize the dangers that we face. Rather, it is to understand why apocalyptic fear has gripped so many of our leaders, scientists, and intellectuals, who insist on reasoning and arguing as though they were following the scripts of mediocre Hollywood disaster movies.

... Environmentalism has become a global ideology that covers all of existence—not merely modes of production but ways of life as well. We rediscover in it the whole range of Marxist rhetoric, now applied to the environment ...

An excellent piece. More on Pascal Bruckner from Robert Fulford.

[Via]

The NDP and its socialist delusions

Robert Fulford:

Jack Layton led the NDP more successfully than anyone else but what he led was as much a fantasy as a political party. ...

...the central function of the NDP is to help members and supporters pretend that they are not living in a society built on capitalism. Democratic socialism is a fairy tale that they tell themselves as consolation for having to exist in a distressingly grubby, money-driven world. ...

... In their dreams they can inhabit the country they believe they deserve, a place run by nice people, as nice as themselves, from which unfairness is banished. New Democrats all believe in social justice. (Do they assume Liberals and Tories believe in social injustice? Probably.) Above all, they can depend on the NDP to keep alive the most influential delusion of the 19th century, the belief that societies can be planned by idealists without the messy chaos of buying and selling....

Pitiful Palestinians

Speaking of contemptible Muslims, here's Robert Fulford's excellent take on the perennially pitied Palestinians:

... only the Palestinians cling to their “refugee” status decade after decade. They present themselves as helpless victims of Israeli aggression. They await rescue .

..Members of other history-battered groups choose to live by an urgent ethic: Get up, get going, make a new life. Palestinians have a different approach: Sit down, wait, stay angry till the world provides for you.

... Arab governments “are rich enough to have economically solved the Palestinian refugee problem decades ago.” The 5,000 or so members of the Saudi royal family could probably handle it by themselves.

... Why haven’t they done so? They much prefer to let Palestinians remain poor. Every wretched, ill-fed and ill-housed Palestinian can be used as a living rebuke to Israel.

...The enemies of Israel have taught the world to pity the Palestinians and grant them an almost sacred position among the victims of colonialism. They deserve pity, of course, but pity for what their fellow Arabs have done to them.

However, as scummy as the Arabs have been towards them, the Palestinians are authors of their own fate. They have the power to improve their own lot, but don't because they have the same motives as their Arab sponsors and manipulators.

The UN: A vast international embarrassment

Robert Fulford:

... One of the wonders of the world is the reputation of the United Nations. ... Year after year it embarrasses itself through everything from deep bureaucratic corruption to utter failure in dealing with global crises like the genocide in Darfur. Yet somehow its opinions and "facts" still carry weight.

... When the UN was founded in 1945, only a deep-dyed pessimist would have guessed that it would decay over 64 years into a vast international embarrassment.

Plus, some thoughts on U.N. peacekeeping from Mark at the Torch.

Taboo terms: “Quebec separatism”, “Islamic terrorism”

All through this week’s "crisis", the Anglo and Quebec media punditry, the Lib/NDP/BQ coalition, the BQ, the PQ and other sensitive souls have been waxing alarmed about the use of the word "separatist" inflaming Quebec separatism. Here are some sensible responses to that loopy line of thinking:

Ezra Levant: Separatists aren't the separatist threat. People who point out they're separatist are

...the new line is that it's "divisive" to point out that the coalition contains 49 avowed Quebec separatists.

...The separatists are divisive by definition -- they literally want to divide Canada.

Robert Fulford: The Normalization Of Separatism

Jeffrey Simpson wrote in The Globe and Mail yesterday that Harper, under threat of defeat, "whipped up anti-Quebec sentiments outside the province."

No, he didn't. He whipped up anti-separatist sentiments, a quite different matter -- though for some people, the new eminence of the Bloc has made the distinction hard to remember.

This is reminiscent of media "sensitivity" to Mohammedan hyper-sensitivities to references to "Islamic terrorism" and the consequent p-c sanitizing of the term by the media - as in Mark Steyn’s "Jews get killed, but Muslims feel vulnerable" in yesterday’s OC Register.