A devastating critique of postmodernism

This is a must watch video. In just 15 minutes Jordan Peterson passionately and convincingly rips postmodernism and Marxism to shreds:

Canda's first family of Marxist totalitarian "justice" and hypocrisy

Rex Murphy: On Stephen and Avi Lewis:

One of the more forceful lines of Stephen Lewis’s speech in Edmonton in support of the Leap Manifesto last weekend was his forceful takedown of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the question of the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia. After complimenting Trudeau for his florid embrace of feminism, he gave a quite deft turn of the knife by asking how Trudeau the feminist could justify selling arms to Saudi Arabia, a “regime steeped in misogyny.”

An equally just critique may be made of a certain Leap-authoring social justice activist. So it is fair, I think, to borrow the rhetorical firecracker Stephen Lewis tossed at Trudeau and lob it toward his son, Avi Lewis. Here the question is: can someone with an advanced social conscience work as a “journalist” for the kingdom of Qatar, as Avi did?  ...

... what we had in Edmonton last weekend was two white, old-stock, privileged, celebrity males global-warming-splaining oil-cursed Alberta to its pioneer NDP, female premier.

Mandatory indigenous studies at Canadian universities

Jason Agnew notes the absurdities and the exciting possibilities:



Since what's good for the goose must be good for the gander, let's force indigenous students to take mandatory courses in the foundations of Western civilization, say, in CAPITALISM. That would do them a hell of a lot more good than "indigenous studies" would do us.

And while we're at it lets make that course in capitalism mandatory for all non-aboriginal students as well. They won't get it any other way. That might help offset the brain damage being done by those studies in the-rosy-side-of-Marxism that most of them are getting now.

Friedrich Hayek's interview by James Buchanan

From "The Hayek Interviews", an interview by economist James M. Buchanan: Part I, Part II

On Marxism, a clip from Part II:

Buchanan: How do you explain the revival of Marxist notions in so much of Europe now and to some extent in this country?

Hayek: I don't know ... it's difficult to understand what makes people believe these things ... I can't see that it is intellectually respectable at all.

Pope Francis - economic naif / dunce

Peter Foster on the Pope’s economic naivete and ignorance:

 ... the serious issue of whether the Pope knows what he’s talking about when it comes to his professed concern for the poor. 

The appropriate approach to poverty is not to sanctify it but eradicate it . ... if Pope Francis really is concerned about relieving poverty, his reflexive anti-capitalist attitudes are pointing precisely in the wrong direction.

Pope John Paul II actually praised the free market as “the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs. ... his successors  ... returned to the Church’s more traditional anti-capitalist stance, now larded with environmental concerns and support for UN-based global governance. ... Pope Francis came out of the Vatican gate in March sounding like the theological wing of the Occupy movement ...

... if the poor are truly his priority, then surely what is important is not “the gap” but the massive reductions in levels of absolute poverty in recent decades ... one can’t help asking whether the Pope is more concerned with relieving the poor or bringing down the rich.

he exposed his own economic confusion, first in implying that social benefits come only from charitable intention  ... and second in peddling the canard that promotion of markets represents some kind of quasi religious faith...

The Marxist cat-fight in Toronto Centre

Terence Corcoran: Linda McQuaig and Chrystia Freeland stage Marxist battle in downtown Canada

On the left running for the NDP stands journalist Linda McQuaig, co-author of The Trouble With Billionaries, a book that plays to ancient leftist theories of alienation ... She prescribes tax rates of up to 70% and radical confiscation of the assets of the wealthy ...

Ms. McQuaig came out swinging Monday with a direct video challenge to her opponent, Liberal candidate Chrystia Freeland. “Hi Chrystia. It’s Linda McQuaig!”  says Ms. McQuaig in her best innocent-friendly trap-setting manner. “You’ve written a book on income inequality and I’ve written a book on income inequality.” But they are very different books, she says, with very different policy prescriptions.  So let’s have a debate, one on one, “any time, anywhere.”

Ms. Freeland’s book is Plutocrats:  The Rise of the New Global Super-rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.  The premise is false—everyone else has not fallen. ... To say that Plutocrats is “very different” from Ms. McQuaig’s The Trouble with Billionaires is somewhat misleading. ...  Both books are identical in their foundations, political tracts that popularize class warfare ... her analysis is no less Marxist in its origins.  She frequently quotes Karl Marx, the granddaddy of state socialism. Marx, she says, understood the dangers of a capitalist class ... 

... The poor voters of Toronto Centre are about to get a heavy dose of such crypto-Marxist revivalism. ...

On Marxism, Obama and gun control

Self-admitted former "brain dead liberal", David Mamet:

Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.

For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”

... President Obama, in his reelection campaign, referred frequently to the “needs” of himself and his opponent, alleging that each has more money than he “needs.”

But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining “needs”? And note that the president did not say “I have more money than I need,” but “You and I have more than we need.” Who elected him to speak for another citizen?

And on to gun control ...

... it is ... only the Marxists who assert that the government, which is to say the busy, corrupted, and hypocritical fools most elected officials are (have you ever had lunch with one?) should regulate gun ownership based on its assessment of needs. ...

[via]

Jeremy Rifkin - Maurice Strong on stilts

Peter Foster:

... Mr. Rifkin is the archetype of that creature known as the policy entrepreneur. He is a consistent generator of bad ideas, and it is bad ideas, more than anything, that help governments grow.

... For decades, he has been exploiting technophobia, junk science, postmodern psychobabble and folk economics to peddle a long list of anti-capitalist, anti-corporate scares, along with matching Big Government “solutions.”

... Mr. Rifkin, like his predecessors since Karl Marx, is very keen to “retire Adam Smith,” which in fact amounts to the continued rejection of a bunch of ideas that Smith never promoted, such as an alleged “conventional, top-down, centralized approach to organizing economic activity.”

... He teaches in the executive education program at the Wharton School of Business, and is an advisor not just to Chancellor Merkel but to the whole European Union. He is likely to get an enthusiastic hearing tomorrow from all those Queen’s Parkers supervising Ontario’s Green Energy Act.

Rifkin sounds like Maurice ("Mo") Strong on stilts, big stilts. Given that list of "buyers" he's unquestionably a master "visionary" snake-oil salesman.

False prophets

David Warren sees Marxism/socialism, economics and environmentalism as bad parodies of Biblical religion:

Marxism was an elaborate, and really bad, parody of Christian and Jewish teachings. (To say nothing of idolatrous.)

.... in the latest permutations -- "green" ideologies have been replacing "red"

... Marx, Engels, and all the other luminaries of the left, have persistently cast themselves as prophets, pointing the way to this radiant future.

... At Davos, Switzerland, this week, where the world's most self-regarding prophets were assembled for their annual Pentecostal parody, which they call the World Economic Forum, a session was devoted to discussing why economic forecasts always turn out wrong.

... the Messianic prophecy, that "no man can know the day or the hour" -- nor even the angels -- is not a prediction, but a statement of deep fact. It is the way things are. There are more things in heaven and Earth, than economists can dream of, and there is no model that can begin to incorporate all the "geists."

And yet we have constructed vast bureaucracies, that work on the premise that these forecasts will come true. The sheer idiocy of it, takes one's breath away. Centuries of "the triumph of reason," and it comes to this.

All too true.  Friedrich Hayek called it "the fatal conceit".

Update: Speaking of "the fatal conceit", Hunter (in the comments) recommended this rap video:

Marx, Lenin, Gore

Mark Gillar and Brian Sussman on blogtalkradio discuss Brian's recent book "Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam".  There's lot's of discussion of Al Gore, his monumnetal hypocrisy and the monumental pile of bullcrap that he's spewed.

"The Revolutionary Holocaust - Live Free or Die"

Glenn Beck's powerful documentary exposes modern leftist mass murderers and their boosters. Marx, Stalin, Hitler, Ché, Mao, Shaw, Duranty - he hits them all. It's a must see.

Part 1 of 6


Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Backgrounder.

Thanks for capitalism

To mark the approach of Thanksgiving weekend William Watson has penned an excellent column, "Giving thanks for capitalism":

... Maybe in the end material circumstances are not important. Maybe poverty would not prevent spiritual wealth. Maybe if we were poorer, we'd be happier, or more fulfilled. Most of us seem unwilling to take that chance, however. Thanks to the effort of those who came before us, thanks to our own efforts, we don't have to take that chance.
... Life might be better all round if as a species we weren't acquisitive. But we do seem to be acquisitive. And it has brought hundreds of millions of us to a standard of living that while probably pitiful by the standards of the future is astounding by the standards of the past.
... Excessive acquisitiveness we usually call "greed." Critics of capitalism, from Marx to Moore, see it as a system founded on greed. Acquisitiveness and self-interest are clearly key to capitalism. But is most people's acquisitiveness really excessive? Is the desire to work hard, to save and to better oneself really "greed"?
... who's to say what's excessive? One man's obsession is another man's passion. We admire obsession in sports, entertainment and the arts. [And let’s not forget science and the obsessions of people like Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman.]
... The only place such obsession is regarded as hurtful or evil is business. Outside business it's regarded as "dedication."
... some participants in capitalism probably are motivated by "greed." But the acquisitiveness that motivates the rest of us is normal and healthy and something we should be thankful for.

Amen!

Kill the CBC

The National Post has recently run a number of opinion columns debating the state of the CBC. Conrad Black thinks it has a valuable role to play but isn’t fulfilling it. Today, Robert Cushman boosts the ‘CEEB’ and Lorne Gunter, in about half as many words, much more convincingly demolishes it.
Cushman, having been weaned under the influence of the BEEB, has a fondness for government subsidized broadcasting and, amazingly, doesn’t see the CBC’s ideological bias, referring to:

... the supposed "liberal bias" of the CBC.

Lorne Gunter, on the other hand, has no difficulty detecting the CBC’s pronounced leftward list and what to do about it:

The CBC will never be able to exorcize its left-wing missionary zeal -- for global warming, for Islam, for big government, Barack Obama, multiculturalism, public health care, human rights commissions and so on.
... If the left-right "balance" at the CBC were as close as 10-1, I would be surprised.
... the CBC Web site no better represents a diversity of opinion than the workers' central committee at Karl Marx Widget Factory #6.
... So the only thing to do with Mother Corp is to pull down its office buildings and stations and pour salt in their foundations.

Lorne Gunter is absolutely correct. It’s why I no longer tune into CBC TV or radio. My blood pressure is already too high.
I have only one point to add to Mr. Gunter’s. Governments should not be permitted to subsidize ANY enterprise that competes directly with private enterprise; or in other words, private enterprise should not be required to subsidize its competition.

"Loony-liberalism" a threat to liberty

George Jonas at his best:

... the force with the greatest capacity for becoming a threat to liberal democracy is liberalism itself -- meaning loony-liberalism, a kind of ideological menage a trois between Timothy Leary, Karl Marx and Al Gore, at once passionate and arid, that in Western societies has all but captured the educational and judicial machinery of the state.
In some, it's a virtual state religion, whose matriarchal, environmentalist, multicultural, anti-male, anti-family, anti-individual and public-hygiene shibboleths are enforced by Orwellian regulatory agencies, commissions and tribunals, better known as the smoke-, smut-, seat-belt-, thought-, language-and calorie-police.
... Democracy, far from being eco-fascism's enemy, seems to be its friend. Its enemy is liberty. That's why I think liberty has as much to fear from democracy as from autocracy.
... I wouldn't rule out anything, not even peace and tranquility, albeit more likely as a result of repression than of good government.
... I'd give individual liberty the worst odds. I think it will continue to decline in the 21st century.

Short, sharp and to the point.

The lefty mind

In an excellent discussion between David Thompson and Ophelia Benson (co-author of ‘Why Truth Matters’) we get some insight into what goes on in lefty heads.

Ms. Benson insists that postmodernism, for example, has little to do with the left. David Thompson, argues very coherently to the contrary:

OB: ...There are core ideas and allegiances that do place people firmly and openly on the right or the left, but a sceptical view of postmodernism is not one of them....
[...]
DT: ... pomo’s key contemporary figures – its architects and advocates - are almost all leftwing and often pointedly so. I’m guessing this isn’t just a coincidence…
[...]
OB: ...I think the whole subject is mixed up with celebrity-worship, fandom, star-hugging, fashion, trendiness, attention-seeking, in a truly depressing and distasteful ..... But what on earth is 'left' about that? Nothing, I would say.
[...]
DT: Well, as to what’s ‘left’ about the worship of dubious figures, I’m inclined to cough and mutter Marx", "Castro", "Chavez" and Che Guevara T-shirts." Communist societies are surprisingly big on idolatry, aren’t they? .... Ditto the white middle-class lefties who wave placards announcing "We are all Hizballah now." I guess it’s something to do with "giving it to the man" or not liking one’s parents or something. It all seems a tad narcissistic to me, and just a little depraved.
[...]
OB: Yes, but is the idolatry of known Communist societies a feature of their Communism or of something else? .....Maybe it's just groupthink; maybe it's that simple and that obvious and there's nothing more profound to be said about it.
[...]
DT: It seems to me that your idea of what a left ought to be is rather at odds with what much of the left, perhaps most of it, has become. ...
[...]
DT: It’s easy to see what much of the left is against, if not the reasons why. It’s much harder to see what the left is for. I don’t see a coherent set of ideas. I see a patchwork of contradiction, often for its own sake, or the sake of appearance, or in some cases to enact some kind of personal psychodrama.

Here's the whole piece.

‘Sustainable development’ - Kyoto’s close cousin

Stéphane Dion, Mr. SD

Sustainable development (SD) is another of those 'big ideas' that is apparently beyond question. Like Kyoto it’s been effectively sold and is now widely accepted. SD is ‘the answer’ to all issues of conservation, resource management and ... you name it. Every government and every corporation touts SD as part of its 'corporate social responsibility' agenda.

Although SD is widely accepted, few have any real idea what it is. And on close inspection the concept is so fuzzy as to have little meaning at all. But, as with most platitudes, it sounds virtuous, so it must be good.

Peter Foster, in an excellent column in today’s National Post highlights newly minted Liberal leader Stéphane Dion's attachment to the notion and exposes it for the nonsense that it is:

The problem is that sustainable development is an anti-concept -- designed semantically to be beyond question or even fundamental discussion. After all, who speaks for unsustainable development?

That definition sure has a familiar ring to it. And SD, naturally, suffers the same difficulty as Marx’s dictum. Mr. Foster explains:

Sounds reasonable. But only a moment's reflection demonstrates insurmountable problems. What are "needs?" Are they synonymous with "wants?" If not, who decides which is which? And what are "the needs of the present?" .....it would be impossible to calculate or express the needs of even one person, let alone compare the needs of two. .....One thing is for sure, not all present needs are being met, so why should we consider catering collectively to those of the future, assuming, of course, that we have any idea of what "future needs" might be, which we don't, and can't.

The implicit assumption of the Brundtland formulation is that we live in a manageable, tribal world where needs are clearly defined and "collective-action problems" (as left-wing intellectuals love to call them) can be hashed out around the campfire.

And, finally, referring to Mr. Dion:

....anybody who embraces the glib nostrums of sustainable development is not merely at best a conventional thinker, he is not much of a thinker at all.

....the bland formulation provided by the socialist-packed UN Brundtland commission in 1987, that SD is "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

Socialist Fantasy vs. Reality

Worth quoting: from Alan Charles Kors, "Can There Be an 'After Socialism'?"

The cognitive behavior of Western intellectuals faced with the accomplishments of their own society, on the one hand, and with the socialist ideal and then the socialist reality, on the other, takes one's breath away. In the midst of unparalleled social mobility in the West, they cry "caste." In a society of munificent goods and services, they cry either "poverty" or "consumerism." In a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives, they cry "alienation." In a society that has liberated women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians to an extent that no one could have dreamed possible just fifty years ago, they cry "oppression." In a society of boundless private charity, they cry "avarice." In a society in which hundreds of millions have been free riders upon the risk, knowledge, and capital of others, they decry the "exploitation" of the free riders. In a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth, they cry "injustice." In the names of fantasy worlds and mystical perfections, they have closed themselves to the Western, liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction. Like Marx, they put words like "liberty" in quotation marks when these refer to the West.