Thursday, May 28, 2009

They Expected The Spanish Inquisition?

NNW points out that the critics of religiously-motivated child abuse only ever seem to get motivated about one particular religion. True enough, but there's an even bigger humbuggery about it all here.

Consider this: the hipsters are enraged! that the Catholic Church tried to rehabilitate paedophile priests instead of handing them over for punishment.

Say what?

Wasn't the whole 'punishing paedophiles' thing supposed to be the litmus test that separates us knuckle-dragging socio cons from our sofistikeyted betters? Weren't us proles supposed to be the crazed lynch mob demanding punishment, while our natural ruling class rolled their eyes and explained patronisingly that 'good' and 'evil' were social constructs?

Bottom line: strip out the metaphysical aspects and the Vatican's 'talk it over' policy sounds mightily like our elite's preferred Therapy Nation strategy. So just what is it that they actually object to?

Monday, May 25, 2009

The Highly-Skilled Migrants What We Need

Say, how come we need so many immigrants if we're encouraging British graduates to work abroad?

Hey, Liberals: This Is What A Theocracy Looks Like

Who'd have thunk it? After approximately 800,000 movies, books, plays and operas about paedo-priests, the left has decided we're all being too cruel to Catholics.

But wait... what's else do I find at Ross's place? Why, yes, it's a reference to one paedo-priest scandal the left will never make a movie about. Actually, I'm pretty sure this is just variant six on the same theme but, like I say, there's a virtual news blackout on all this.

This is the anti-matter version of victimhood poker. Call it villain poker. Normally, the left loves to bag the Catholic Church. Hell, an alien watching TV would conclude that The Faith was a nonce's organisation infiltrated by religious kooks (in between all those shows in which flawed-but-loveable sexual predators are harassed by crazed Jesus freaks). Still and all, no matter how evil Catholics are, that doesn't justify saying anything nice about Ulster Unionists.

The MSM has spent years depicting Ulster Unionists - or Ulster Protestants in their absurd formulation - as bowler-hated, taig hating illiterates. Yet we keep coming across cases proving that, yes, the Republic was an utterly corrupt theocracy after all. What the priests did to those alter boys is what the Republic wants to do to Ulster. No bigotry required - the Unionists are motivated by a perfectly respectable disgust at a pre-Reformation basket case state beyond the imaginings of Hollywood's most crazed Palin-haters.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Steyn D'Jour

On why conservatives should treat with contempt liberal charges of 'extremism':
The aim of a large swath of the Left is not to win the debate but to get it canceled before it starts. You can do that in any number of ways – busting up campus appearances by conservatives, "hate speech" prohibitions, activist judges' more imaginative court decisions, or merely, as the Times does, by declaring your side of every issue to be the "moderate" and "nonideological" position – even when, in many cases, the "extreme" position is supported by a majority of voters.

Friday, May 15, 2009

"Brazilian"

Yep, must have been driven too it by all that beach volleyball.

Don't be shocked but you can't find that story here. You have to search for the vic's name to find the story of a sadistic homicide filed unlinked under....London?

Yes, indeed. A trendy tat emporium going up in flames is the Biggest Story Evah! but this story goes in with the talking dogs and miracle babies.

Meanwhile, a vote of thanks too to all our hipster friends who can't refer to St Jean the Martyr without reminding us he too was from down there as though the concept of a Brazilian terrorist was self-evidently absurd.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

'Respectable Conservatism' Goes Down In Flames

Regular readers will know that I don't have any respect for those folks who keep claiming that conservatives should crave the good opinion of liberal thugs. I think it's a fools errand, and NNW demonstrates exactly why.

Hey, libs, there's your 'bread not bombs' right there. But no: even carrying food into a starving city is just a cunning ploy by the Anglosphere to hide its inherent evil. Heads we're evil, tails we toss again.

Seriously, why even bother trying to reach out to these loons? There's no middle ground we can reach with people who call everyone who supports school vouchers a Nazi, even as they borrow talking points from actual, real Nazis.

Liberalism: Where Even The Intellectuals Are Morons

Yep, it's a real mystery why the right doesn't respect our self-appointed intellectual class.
IF YOU liked George W. Bush, it wasn't because of his brain
Say, would that be Yale grad, Harvard MBA, ex-fighter pilot George W Bush? 'Cause I'm thinking that the whole 'facts' thing used to be kind of important in science.

Then again, you'd think intellectuals would be familiar with the fallacy of begging the question:
The Bush administration's extensively documented attacks on science (discussed in my book The Republican War on Science, among other places), and his exaltation of Jesus as his "favourite philosopher", further cemented the idea that here was not a mind to be respected.
Hey, did I sleep through the bit where we decided that liberals incessantly claiming something makes it true? Creationism is 'extensively documented' too. But it gets better:
Add to that the malapropisms, the apparent uneasiness with any kind of verbal improvisation, and the scripted debating, and one could easily conclude the US was being governed by the consummate anti-intellectual.
Well, at least that's over with!

I'd love to ask Freud what he made of this strange desire amongst liberals to pay fulsome tribute to the genius of Captain 57 even in the teeth of all the evidence? Then again, I wouldn't understand him anyway - I don't speak Austrian.

But don't go thinking that this guy is merely ignorant of current affairs. He's ignorant of history too. That's why we get this:
As expertise grew in stature in an increasingly science-dominated world, smarts came to be resented - at least in the eyes of the burgeoning modern conservative movement: its adherents saw intellectuals putting themselves above everybody else, speaking with dripping disdain and walling themselves off in ivory towers where their liberal politics made them even more suspect. This is very much what the Reagan revolution was all about, and George W. Bush was its heir.
Considering that the 1980s was the decade when the American economy boomed and the USSR went bang, just think what could have happened if Reagan hadn't been such a moron?

On the other hand, maybe the Reagan boom came about precisely because Ronaldus Magnus was up to speed on the latest thinking in economics, even while his supposed betters were still firmly mired in the intellectual equivalent of British Leyland....

Hmmm, where are these 'smarts' parked anyway? And isn't there something ridiculous about a guy whining about anti-intellectualism even while he calls a fighter pilot stoopid! I guess flying a fighter must be easy, or they'd teach it at university, right?

That's point number one right there. All this talk about how supa smart these people are is strictly blathersgate. "Smart' maps exactly to 'leftist'. But there's more to it than that:
John McCain and Sarah Palin certainly did try out the rhetoric of anti-intellectualism on Obama. Palin mocked the fact that he'd made much of his personal wealth through the sale of books and sneered at research on fruit flies and grizzly bears in a bid to make science sound like a self-indulgent pursuit that spends money but doesn't produce anything useful.
Actually, this is one for the intellectuals (real ones): is it ironic, or just stupid, that people who jabber endlessly about their 'smarts' come up with such moronic arguments? Maybe they ought to research getting some new lines? Never mind that Palin mocked Obama because his books were all about himself, complaining about calling researchers self-indulgent would work better if it wasn't followed by approvingly quoting this:
If the message makes its way through the vacuous, dollar-driven media, Obama will have changed America
Yep: Nasty old dollars. Fancy producing stuff people actually choose to spend their money on. Far better to be a taxpayer-funded parasite.

This is point two. Not only is the whole distinction between smart people and idiots every bit as scientific as gossip columnists drawing up lists of who's hot and who's not, it betrays an underlying contempt for the public at large.

You can talk all you want about the need for blue skies basic research, how the space program produced teflon and how studying the sex lives of dung beetles could lead to a cure for the Welsh and how.... No, enough already. They truly believe that producing stuff that people want is squalid and demeaning and, as a corollary to that, that they - the enlightened! - have the right to waste other people's money on scientific stamp collecting.

See, that's the bottom line. The right isn't attacking science. We just don't believe in paying good money to support the self-indulgent hobbies of an incestuous cesspit of bigoted loonies.

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Dhimmis D'Jour

Clearly, another one of those quakers:
'In this case, it's likely that there will be overlapping motives - anger, control, base male brutality and a significant sexual dimension,' the lawyer said.
Mr, we could use some 'base male brutality' round here.

What He Said

NNW rightly ridicules the social shirkers latest tantrum. NNW correctly nails the argument that it's only a tiny minority of bad apples (hmmmm.... why does that sound familiar)? Even if it is a minority, the 'vast majority of peaceful social workers' sure aren't bending over backwards to root them out.

On the contrary, this campaign is evidence of just what a loony bizarro world social work is. They're trying to rebut the image of social workers as Marxist thugs by demanding retribution against people who publish stuff they disagree with? After all, stripped of blather, this is surely what they mean when they talk about holding their critics 'accountable'. Who except for a bunch of Stalinist nutters could ever think this sounds reasonable?

Hey, if social workers were really worried that the public was misinformed about their role, they could always campaign against the already ludicrous restrictions on press reporting of their activities. Funnily enough, they aren't. As ever with liberals, you have the right to their opinion or else!

Bombings Vs Radio: I Always Get Those Two Confused

In so far as Jackie Smith justified banning US radio talker Michael Savage with this...
"I think it's important that people understand the sorts of values and sorts of standards that we have here, the fact that it's a privilege to come and the sort of things that mean you won't be welcome in this country,"
...I guess that means we now have tougher criteria to visit Britain than to move here. Up until ten minutes ago, the merest mention of British values would have liberals foaming at the mouth about The Racism.

True, for those of us outside the loony cult of open borders, there's a certain superficial logic to the government's position, but only if you don't think about it.

Nope, the left's position is absurd, but it does neatly expose just how bogus the whole 'right-wing extremism' thing is. Liberals were specifically searching for right-wing loons to balance up the jihadis and they came up with.... a guy on the radio?

Really? How did that intelligence briefing go then?
"The next extremist is a Mr Michael Savage. We consider him highly dangerous, with a record of biting commentary, sharp words and pointed commentary. Furthermore, sources inform us that he is experimenting with funny voices, which will give him the capability to produce a range of caricatures. In particular, we suspect he'll soon be unveiling a greedy bureaucrat called 'Mr Taxey', an Obama-loving news anchor called Joe Grovel, and an unhinged gay rights activist who keeps threatening the life of anyone who opposes him...

No, wait, sorry I was reading Alan Duncan's file."
Hey, that's an actual fact. Alan Duncan has threatened the life of more people than Michael Savage, so how come Al's just a loveable jack-the-lad, and Mike's a dangerous extremist?

Hmmmm... isn't it the open borders lobby that keeps insisting the whole citizen/non-citizen thing is an evil right-wing trick - even to the point of absurdity? If Michael Savage is being discriminated against while British citizens get away with far harsher rhetoric, isn't that kind of.....racist?

Sounds like a job for Cherie!

Sunday, May 03, 2009

Friday, May 01, 2009

Liberals In Hell

Heh. The Obamamessiah has cited Sir Winston as proof that nations don't need to use torture in time of war. Libs just won't know what to do. They've been trying to push the 'Churchill as war criminal' line for years. No wonder the Guardian's commenters are having a melt down.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

As noted in the comments, Ealing General has been having a little trouble with 'gangs'. Who can it be behind this?