I don't have a dog in this fight

Politics in 2017 has degenerated into a Fascism vs Marxism fight

Last week I read a tweet by Mark Steyn about the toppling of Confederate statues and he said that he didn't have a dog in that fight - it was today's Democrats arguing about statues of yesterday's Democrats. The comment is true, of course - it may surprise the historically challenged to learn that the slavery-supporting political party of the Confederacy was the Democratic Party, and if you think that the old Democratic Party is so far removed in time from the progressive Democratic Party of today, then consider that the Democrats had a segregationist presidential candidate (Governor George Wallace) as recently as 1976, and as Steyn pointed out, the last-but-one Democratic president, Bill Clinton, spoke at the funeral of a former Ku Klux Klan 'Exalted Cylcops' (Senator Robert C Byrd).

Steyn's comment about not having a dog in the fight is true for me as well but in a much broader sense than he meant it. I don't have a dog in the fight between the political right and left. Both sides believe that violence is justified in human relations where it serves their particular view of the collective good. They differ on their meaning of collective good - the right usually defining it as the interests of a nation or race, and the left as that of a class or other identity group - but both are prepared to resort to violence in pursuit of their interests. This isn't something that is confined to the extreme ends of the spectrum but is characteristic of mainstream politicians on both sides - like the Missouri state senator who called for Trump's assassination.

I believe that violence has no place in the interactions between human beings and that force may only be used to defend against the initiation of violence by others. This central tenet of my political philosophy means I fit into neither the right or the left of the spectrum. Some have described my views as extreme because my application of the non-aggression principle means the state should not force people to pay tax or to go to war, but I find it is somewhat oxymoronic to be considered an extremist for my non-violent philosophy and I take some comfort from the fact that many considered Mahatma Gandhi's and William Wilberforce's views extreme at the time.

I posed a question on Twitter last week about how in hell has politics degenerated into a Fascism vs Marxism fight in 2017, but the question was rhetorical. In any real dog fight, it is always the most aggressive dog that wins. We have watched the left and right resort to violent protests in recent months and it was inevitable that this would escalate to the point where we are now beginning to see deaths - and the violence isn't all coming from one side. Once the debate turns violent, you can't be surprised that those who are willing to use violence prevail.

Marxism and Fascism are equally repugnant, misanthropic and inherently violent philosophies, and any reasonable person should stand up against those who advocate for either of them. If we allow them to set the rules and the language of our political debate then the discussion will be over and violence will prevail.

The problem isn't Islam, it is us.

Another day, another terrorist attack, this time at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. I have the deepest sympathy for those who have lost loved ones and others who will have to nurse broken and maimed bodies back into some semblance of a normal life. 

The Islamic State has claimed credit for the bombing, which was carried out by a 'Briton of Libyan descent', but unlike others I am not going to blame the Islamic faith, even though I have written before about my concerns about the tenets of that religion. The fact that so many of these terrorists are home-grown, often second or third generation descendants of immigrants who came to the West in search of a better life, should tell us something about the roots of the violence. These killers are not the advance guard of an external enemy, they are fifth columnists who want to destroy their own societies from within. The problem is not Islam, the problem is us.

I believe we in the West have incited this wave of Islamic terrorism in our midst at least in part because we have become cringing apologists for our own way of life. We teach our children that Western nations are the cause of every grievance of non-Western people all over the world. We maintain we were responsible for slavery, even though slavery was a universal fact of pre-Enlightenment human society and it was Britain that led the world in stopping the slave trade. We maintain we are racists and misogynists, despite the fact that we have built our modern societies on equal rights for all and have emancipated minorities throughout the world. We maintain that we entrench inequality, despite the fact that it is the Western values of free enterprise, property rights and the rule of law that are responsible for the vast majority of the world's population being lifted out of poverty over the last century.

A few days ago I listened to an excellent interview by Mark Steyn of Hollywood screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd that shed some light on the nature of the problem. Chetwynd served in the Black Watch regiment of the Canadian Army before going on to write dozens of scripts for films and television series and he talked about Hollywood's need to internalise the enemy. Thus, Tom Clancy's novel The Sum of All Fears, which was about Palestinian terrorists getting hold of an atomic weapon, became a film in which the bad guys were neo-Nazis. If you are watching the current Netflix series, Designated Survivor, you'll see a similar transformation. Hollywood is a magnifying lens for our culture and the fact that it always makes us the bad guys simply reflects our societal self-hatred.

If we keep telling ourselves that our society is the root of all the world's evil, is it any wonder that a few of the children and grandchildren of those to whom we are supposed to have done evil will nurture those grievances to the point where they want to destroy us? If we don't believe our society is worth defending, how can we possibly expect them to value it?

I don't think I have ever listened to an Ariana Grande song and I dare say I would find her music a little too saccharine for my tastes, but her concerts are very much part of the culture I value and want to defend. She would never be allowed on a stage in Riyadh or Khartoum and that is an indictment of those societies, not ours. The fact that millions of people from Islamic nations want to come and live in our countries, but not the reverse, is all the proof we need that our society is better than theirs. 

We need to stand up and defend Western society and values. We need to say that Islamic State and the like will never drag us down to their level and will never defeat us. Doing so won't necessarily stop the terrorist attacks, but at least it will make the battle lines clear and people will know what we are paying the price of terrorist attacks to defend. And it might just help a few of those second and third generation potential terrorists figure out who are really the good guys.

Milo, Berkeley and Fascism

Last week Milo Yiannopoulos was due to speak at University of California, Berkeley, as one of many speaking engagements on his 'Dangerous Faggot' (really!) tour of academic institutions that started during the 2016 presidential election campaign. Yiannopoulos is a British journalist and a senior editor with Breitbart News, the conservative news and opinion website that was run by Steve Bannon, who is now Assistant and Chief Strategist to President Trump. As the title of his speaking tour suggests, Yiannopoulos is gay and his views are considered by some people to be dangerous. His speaking engagements have attracted criticism and protest but none until now on the scale of what happened at Berkeley, where the protest became violent with masked, black-suited agitators smashing windows, tearing down crowd barriers, starting fires and throwing Molotov cocktails.

Yiannopolous burst on to the United States' political landscape last year like some British actors break into Hollywood - sort of a political version of Tom Hiddleston. He was a minor blogger specialising in technology and computer gaming (and was best known then for his articles on the 'Gamergate' controversy), before moving to America and latching onto the Trump campaign. The fact that he is gay, English, and highly articulate are all factors in his rise to prominence but undoubtedly it is his support for Trump that is the most significant reason why people started paying attention (after all, 'Gays for Trump' was a somewhat unexpected adjunct to the campaign of a Republican presidential candidate).

I have listened to several of Yiannopoulos's podcasts and I found it difficult to determine exactly what he believes because everything he says is delivered in a highly satirical manner. He has been accused of being homophobic, racist, sexist and Islamophobic, however, as a gay man who claims to prefer black men (at least sexually), it seems unlikely that he is guilty of the first two of these crimes. Women, or more precisely lesbians, are the target of much of his humour, but again he doesn't appear to be seriously misogynistic and the fact that young women are some of his most ardent supporters bears this out. He is certainly strongly critical of Islamic fundamentalism and he is a supporter of Trump's immigration ban, but in those views he is no more extreme than more mainstream conservative commentators like Mark Steyn and Douglas Murray.

In any event, even if he is seriously homophobic, racist, sexist and Islamophobic, that doesn't mean he doesn't have a right to express his views when he is invited to do so by student groups on American campuses. After all, the right to free speech is not there just to protect those whose views everyone agrees with.

Yiannopolous has been described, inevitably, as Fascist, but no behaviour seems so Fascist as that of the uniformed agitators who took over the Berkeley campus last week.

Castro's Apologists Reveal Their Anti-democratic Tendencies

A while ago I was doing some work for a government agency and I was surprised to see one of the staff had a picture of Che Guevara as the screen background on his PC. I somewhat facetiously asked him whether he alternated the image with others of murderous secret police chiefs such as Heinrich Himmler, Lavrentiy Beria and Erich Mielke. He seemed unaware that Che Guevara was the head of Fidel Castro's secret police and ran the Cuban dictator's concentration camps and that he personally killed hundreds of Castro's political opponents.

I recalled this incident while reading some of the tributes to Castro over the weekend, particularly the fawning eulogies from left-wing politicians like Justin Trudeau and Jeremy Corbyn, and it got me thinking about why so many on the left seem to be wilfully blind to the crimes against humanity of Communist dictators like Castro, Stalin, Mao and Kim Il-Sung. I say wilfully because, unlike the public servant above, I cannot believe these Western politicians are unaware of the crimes of those they admire.

Why are democratically-elected Western leaders so keen to embrace and legitimise dictatorial thugs? I think the answer is obvious and revealing, like a political Freudian slip. Most Western leaders believe in big government as the solution to all the world's problems and there is no bigger form of government than brutal dictatorship. In praising Castro, they are revealing their secret pining for the free hand he had to do whatever he wanted. As Mark Steyn put it, 'if you believe in big problems that demand big government solutions, democracy just gets in the way.'

The distrust of democracy amongst Western leaders has been all too evident this year in their responses to the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election. Their churlish dismissal of the voters as ignorant, racist and xenophobic has revealed their distaste of the reality of democracy. They like the pretence of having a democratic mandate but only when voters stick to the script they have written.

The very worst thing about the reaction of these Western apologists to Castro's death is their arrogance in thinking they can speak for the Cuban people, such as Trudeau's observation that the dictator 'served his people for almost half a century.' It takes a particularly weasel-like hypocrisy to label Castro's extra-judicial killing of thousands of his countrymen and his imprisonment of tens of thousands of his political opponents as 'serving his people'.

The only aspect of Castro's death that is regrettable is that he died in his sleep and thereby denied his oppressed people the opportunity of seeing him hang for his crimes.

2015 in Review - More Delusion and a Dose of Reality

Two Thousand and Fifteen has been an interesting year.

Internationally, we've seen a shattering of some myths - the most striking example being that terrorist incidents perpetrated by people shouting Allahu Akbar are 'nothing to do with Islam'. This has been asserted ad nauseum by so-called world leaders such as Obama, Cameron and Hollande after every attack by Islamic terrorists in recent years, including following the murders of those who worked for the French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and the patrons of a Jewish supermarket in Paris. But by the end of the year the body count from the Islamic terrorist attacks at a Paris sports stadium, a concert venue and several cafés was so large that these dishonest deflections were wearing a little thin even amongst those for whom 'diversity' triumphs any concept of objective morality. France's Socialist president, Francois Hollande, grew a backbone and launched airstrikes on ISIS strongholds in Syria, whereas Barack Obama did a Neville Chamberlain, achieving 'peace in our time' with the evil Islamic regime in Iran.

The only world leader who consistently showed backbone was Vladimir Putin, shrugging off criticism of his support for Ukrainian separatists to take charge in Syria by supporting President al-Assad's fight against ISIS. A bomb that brought down a Russian airliner was ISIS's retaliation and Turkey and Russia nearly came to serious blows after Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet in November.

Socialism seemed to be on the rise again around the world. The Greeks voted in a Socialist government led by Alexis Tsipras and subsequently voted 'no' in a referendum on whether they should pay back their debts. Reality dawned later in the year when Tsipras went to the polls again to gain a mandate for his newly-negotiated debt repayment plan. 

Meanwhile in Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, the Marxist MP who had never held any office in his party, was elected leader of the UK Labour Party, and in the United States, the only credible alternative candidate to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination for the 2016 US presidential race is the former Socialist Party stalwart, Bernie Sanders. The Australian Liberal Government defenestrated Tony Abbott in favour of the oleaginous Malcolm Turnball and Canadian voters followed suit by ousting their sound but uncharismatic prime minister Stephen Harper in favour of the impeccably bien-pensant Justin Trudeau and his left-wing Liberals.  On the other hand, the awful Chauvistas of Venezuela and Kirchner of Argentina were defeated.

Scientifically, we saw some significant advances including liquid water found on Mars and the fly past of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft with its stunning images of that most remote world. There were signs of yet another mysterious particle from the Large Hadron Collider and the human epigenome (the molecular switches that can turn on or off individual genes in DNA) was mapped. But we also saw the triumph of pseudo-science in the signing of a global agreement to limit global temperatures to 2℃. Two hundred King Canutes and tens of thousands of their fellow travellers flew into shell-shocked Paris to delude themselves into thinking they can control the the world's climate. Good luck with that, fools!

I don't follow New Zealand news very much because most of it is of the 'village pump' variety - quaint and unimportant - but the biggest stories here were the Rugby World Cup win by the All Blacks and John Key's quixotic referendum to change the flag. More important in terms of New Zealand's future was our signing of the TPP free trade agreement involving 12 countries including the United States. 

In the blogosphere, while I wasn't personally as regular with my posts as I would have liked to have been, my favourite bloggers were as prolific as usual. I particularly enjoyed Lindsay Mitchell, Peter Cresswell, Mark Steyn, James Delingpole and Thomas Sowell this year. I was sad to see Mark Hubbard signing off this week - I trust this does not mean he has surrendered to the forces of darkness in the Fortress of Legislation. To all of you on the rational side of the debate, keep up the good work.

All that remains is to thank those who read my occasional posts, the few who commented, and those generous folk that linked to me from their blogs. Merry Christmas (in the most secular sense of that phrase) and a very prosperous 2016 to you!

The Imperial Presidency

US blogger Mark Steyn often writes about how the US presidency has become more and more imperial in its affectations - the 40-car motorcades, the clearing of entire golf courses so the US president can play a round, and how the current president requires over 4,000 hotel rooms for his entourage when he travels to Australia.

I experienced some of this excess when I was in Cambodia recently. My trip to the South-east Asia nation happened to coincide with the US First Lady's visit, during which she demonstrated that she can blow the US taxpayers' dollars at a rate that is every bit as impressive as her husband's self-indulgence. It seemed that Michelle Obama was determined to dog our every step during the few days we were in Cambodia. Our aircraft was late arriving in Siem Reap because, we were informed, Michelle Obama's aircraft was ahead of ours. Then we discovered whole sections of Siem Reap were barricaded off, necessitating a slow and circuitous route wherever we went.

The next day when we visited Angkor Wat we were informed that we could not climb to the top of that magnificent structure because (yes, you guessed it) Michelle Obama was planning to visit some time that day. This was in the morning and no one seemed to know at what hour the US First Lady would actually arrive, but someone (presumably the US Secret Service) had decided it was necessary to close the entire historic site on the off-chance that she might turn up at any time. It was only when I complained loudly that the embarrassed Cambodian officials relented and allowed my wife and I to climb the structure and we were the last allowed to do so. The next day we flew to Phnom Penh and our aircraft was delayed again as the entire airport waited for Her Royal Highness Michelle's airplane to depart. Contrast this pretentious, monarchical spectacle with the genuine article - the heir to the British throne, Prince William, humbly flying 'coach'.

Here in New Zealand, where we can still run into our politicians walking unaccompanied along Lambton Quay (the main shopping thoroughfare of Wellington), we think there is something very unsavoury about elected leaders affecting all the pretensions of imperial rule. Of course leaders need to be kept safe, but that can be done without the theatre that accompanies the US president and his court whenever one of them ventures out into the world.

On Innovation

Two articles in the Wall Street Journal this week have got me thinking about the subject of innovation, or the lack of it, in Western economies today. The first was this article in the Wall Street Journal quoting molecular geneticist Jan Vigj in his book The American Technological Challenge who said that the number of inventions in America has dropped markedly since 1970 [and hat tip to Mark Steyn who said a similar thing in his book America Alone]. The second article was this one about Uber, the Internet-based taxi booking service that is challenging regulators and established taxi companies in 100 cities and 36 countries around the world.

To understand why the West is not innovating, we need to go back to the Renaissance to appreciate why the West has been so economically successful in the first place. Economic historian Niall Ferguson has identified six 'killer apps' that he believes underly the enormous growth of Western economies over the past 500 years, viz. political and economic competition, the scientific revolution, the rule of law, modern medicine, education and the work ethic. Ferguson expounds on his theory in his book, Civilization, and goes on to say that the erosion of these achievements is responsible for the decline of the West in recent decades relative to emerging economies such as China, which have increasingly adopted these values.

In my view Ferguson's six killer apps can be further reduced to just three things - individual rights, capitalism and the rule of law. In other words, the classical liberal values that became entrenched in the political and economic systems of Britain and the Netherlands in the 17th Century through the writings of John Locke, and that were picked by in the 18th Century in America by the likes of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

The innovative human mind is like a packet of dried seeds - without the right soil, water and sunshine, they will either remain inert or any shoots that do sprout will soon wither and die. The environmental conditions in which the human mind flourishes are the freedom to live and work as one chooses (subject only to the right of others to do the same), the freedom to enjoy the fruits of one's labour, and the protection of laws that guarantee these freedoms for all people. These are the classical liberal values mentioned above that we have so abrogated in the West today. It is little surprise, therefore, that we are losing our innovative edge.

The exception over the past decade or two has been in the realm of information technology and the Internet. Often compared to the 'Wild West', the on-line world has remained lightly regulated with few barriers to entry or innovation. On-line businesses like Uber are able to innovate precisely because they sit outside the highly-regulated traditional markets they are challenging. In the West we have in effect two parallel operating environments - the traditional political and economic environments in which innovators face huge regulatory hurdles in getting their products and services to market, and the on-line environment in which heavy-handed government involvement has been largely absent until now.

The United States provides the starkest example of this dichotomy. Traditional 'bricks and mortar' markets such as banking, manufacturing, transportation and medicine are subject to overbearing bureaucratic control and as a result American companies in these sectors are struggling to maintain their global leadership. Most economic growth in the United States in the last couple of decades has come from lightly-regulated 'digital' sectors such as software, entertainment and on-line services. But this is starting the change. The desire of Western governments to heavily regulate even the on-line world is starting to choke innovation in these sectors.

Western governments, including that in my own country, New Zealand, like to think the answer is more government. They like to think they can pick winners and encourage innovation through government investment and subsidies to certain industries. But history shows us that governments are poor gamblers when it comes to innovation. The clearest example of this in recent years is government investment in so-called 'green' businesses such as solar panel manufacturers. In the United States and Europe in particular, such investments have been disastrous.

Governments have a role to play in providing the fertile environment for innovation, i.e. in maintaining the institutions that uphold the classical liberal values that are responsible for Western political and economic success, but the most important thing they can do to encourage innovation is simply to get out of the way.

Big Data, Big Brother and Donald Sterling

This week I read an article about a Princeton sociology professor, Janet Vertesi, who tried to hide the fact that she was pregnant from those who use 'big data', which sounds really scary but is really just a silly neologism for an old concept - trawling databases to find correlations that are useful to marketing people, researchers, intelligence agencies and the like. This woman seemed to be most concerned about marketers targeting her with product offers, but that is not something that particularly worries me. The worst that can result from receiving emails or telephone calls from people trying to sell you things is that you buy something.

The real concern is not big data but Big Brother, such as when Vertesi's husband tried to buy $500 worth of Amazon gift vouchers on her behalf and was told the transaction would be reported to the authorities. I am aware that in New Zealand any financial transaction of more than $10,000 is required to be reported to government under the AML-CFT (Anti-Money Laundering - Counter-Financing of Terrorism) laws and I understand this is the same in most Western countries, but obviously in America the threshold is now so low it covers transactions that are the equivalent of a modestly-priced suit of clothing or a good restaurant dinner.

Why would the government be interested in such trivial transactions? In this case it was clearly the anonymity of the transaction that led to the government's interest. The purpose of AML-CFT laws, as the name suggests, is terrorism and money laundering, but as we know from the recent revelations of the likes of Edward Snowden the US Government has used the powers it has garnered under anti-terrorism laws for all manner of purposes. Initially the expanded purview of such laws was serious crime such as drug trafficking, but ultimately governments cannot resist using such powers for any purpose they deem fit. In the case of Kim Dotcom, we saw the full power of New Zealand's state security apparatus including our GCSB spy agency used in a case of alleged copyright infringement.

Another interesting case this week was that of Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team. Sterling came to our attention because his mistress released private communications in which Sterling objected to her bringing black men to Clippers' games. Clearly Sterling is a racist and, by all accounts, a sterling asshole, but as Mark Steyn points out in his blog, as bad as the comments Sterling made were, what the National Basketball Association has done to him is worse. Sterling made the comments in private and the NBA (which has fined him $2.5m and banned him from attending his own team's games for life) should have no interest in the matter. Neither should the media, especially the New Zealand media (many of which ran the story as their lead).

In the novel 1984, Winston Smith discovered that there is no freedom without privacy. If you cannot express your thoughts even to those whom you most trust without fear that you will be subject to a public witchhunt, or make a small, innocent purchase without inviting the surveillance of the authorities, then you don't have the freedom to think at all. And everything follows from that.