RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/churchills-admirable-self-restraint/

In April 2002 The Atlantic published an essay by the Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens on Winston Churchill (“The Medals of His Defeats”), which reviewed some of the prominent and recent Churchill biographies and more broadly attempted to critically evaluate his career and legacy. After expounding on what he saw as the “Churchill cult”, fostered by sycophantic, sentimental historians whose works are riddled with turgid prose and hopelessly mixed metaphors, even the arch-contrarian Hitchens was unable to avoid the conclusion that Churchill was a great man.

This view, unsurprisingly, comes down to the events of May and early June 1940. These were the crucial few weeks in which, with the imminent fall of France and the threat of a German invasion of the British Isles, Churchill rallied a defeatist War Cabinet, spurned Hitler’s offers of a negotiated peace and resolved to commit his people to fight on to the end—events that may be fresh in readers’ minds after the recent release of the Churchill biopic Darkest Hour. So despite, for example, pointing to Churchill’s part in battlefield defeats like Gallipoli in the First World War, the ignominious retreats from Norway, France, Greece and Crete in the Second World War, or the inevitable dissolution of the now debt-laden British Empire by 1945, Hitchens writes:

I find that I cannot rerun the tape of 1940, for example, and make it come out, or wish it to come out, any other way … Alone among his contemporaries, Churchill did not denounce the Nazi empire merely as a threat, actual or potential, to the British one. Nor did he speak of it as a depraved but possibly useful ally. He excoriated it as a wicked and nihilistic thing. That appears facile now, but was exceedingly uncommon then … Some saving intuition prompted Churchill to recognize, and to name out loud, the pornographic and catastrophically destructive nature of the foe. Only this redeeming x factor justifies all the rest—the paradoxes and inconsistencies, to be sure, and even the hypocrisy.

To what hypocrisy is Hitchens referring? This is surely Britain’s wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, which he alludes to several times:

The argument about World War II and its worthwhileness is the most apparently settled and decided of all major questions in our culture … Even the standby argument of some anti-Churchill Tories (and others, including George Orwell), about the callous collusion between Churchill and Stalin, seems almost anachronistic in view of the eventual implosion of the Soviet system.

A Time special edition, Dec., 2018. It has been published in two other forms over the past few years, e.g., hardcover and has received rave reviews.

I reviewed this special issue of the magazine Time, published last month,as well as the book from two years ago with the same content.
This is the paperback edition of a volume issued two years ago, more than enough time for it to have had its numerous factual errors corrected. Unfortunately, Time has not done so. Perhaps it assumes this to be unnecessary since three-quarters of the Amazon reviews of that edition gave it five stars. Apparently, these reviewers, like those at Time, know nothing about the history of photography or the U.S.A. The main critique of the book on Amazon was that it contains too many depressing photos.

As stated on the cover, these photos have been extremely influential. The problem is that “The stories behind the pictures” noted on the cover are often erroneous and will merely augment the influence of the bogus photographs. I will deal with only a few of the most egregious of the work.

The famous “Migrant Mother” by the notorious Dorothea Lange, is a prime example. The viewer is supposed to pity the Depression era migrant worker who is meant to represent the dreadful sadness of all of them. Dorothea Lange had promised the woman when she took the photos of her that they would not be shown to anyone. She lied. Copies soon appeared in newspapers around the country, infuriating the “migrant mother.” In truth, she had been playing with her six children and had merely sat down for a moment to rest. As one of the New Deal’s left-wing photographers, Lange’s primary interest was to shake up the American public to gain more support for Depression era federal projects and to show what a horrible country the U.S. was. According to Frances Thompson and her children, she had a joyful family life and lived until the age of eighty.

http://nautil.us/issue/67/reboot/yuval-noah-harari-is-worried-about-our-souls

Just a few years ago Yuval Noah Harari was an obscure Israeli historian with a knack for playing with big ideas. Then he wrote Sapiens, a sweeping, cross-disciplinary account of human history that landed on the bestseller list and remains there four years later. Like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Sapiens proposed a dazzling historical synthesis, and Harari’s own quirky pronouncements—“modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history”— made for compulsive reading. The book also won him a slew of high-profile admirers, including Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg.

In his new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari offers a grab bag of prognostications on everything from new technology to politics and religion. Although he’s become a darling of Silicon Valley, Harari is openly critical of how Facebook and other tech companies exploit our personal data, and he worries that online interactions are replacing actual face-to-face encounters. Much of the book speculates on the revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence. If computer algorithms can know you better than you know yourself, is there any room left for free will? And where does that leave our politics?

Harari is a rapid-fire conversationalist who seems to have an opinion about everything. He’s remarkably self-assured and clearly enjoys the role of provocateur. We began by agreeing that something feels very different about this moment in history. We are on the precipice of a revolution that will change humanity for either our everlasting benefit or destruction—it’s not clear which. “For the first time in history,” Harari said, “we have absolutely no idea how the world will look in 30 years.”
HOMO MACHINA: We are no longer afraid of the machine, Harari says, we have become it: “We no longer search for information. We Google. We trust the Google algorithm and we lose the ability to search for information independently.”Daniel Naber / Wikimedia

What’s different about this moment in history?

What’s different is the pace of technological change, especially the twin revolutions of artificial intelligence and bioengineering. They make it possible to hack human beings and other organisms, and then re-engineer them and create new life forms.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/12/26/the-year-of-trans-tyranny/

Who could have guessed, even a decade ago, that in 2018 the word ‘woman’ would be treated as an expletive? It’s become a dangerous word, either erased from public life altogether or discussed in apologetic, hushed tones. Bizarrely, what ‘woman’ signifies now needs explanation. But anyone brave enough to define women in relation to biology, to make reference to ‘sex’ or ‘female’, risks vilification and public shaming. In a very short space of time we have moved from the premise that men and women exist as fundamentally distinct biological entities with tolerance shown to a small minority of people who chose to live differently, to transgenderism as an ideology that insists all aspects of public life must comply with its demands.

2018 was the year the government consulted over proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act. The consultation was never intended to question the right of transgender people to exist, still less to threaten legal rights and protections women have won. It did, however, ask about the processes individuals should have to go through in order to be legally recognised as a member of the opposite sex. The proposed changes will do away with the necessity for medical diagnoses, surgery, or living as member of the preferred sex for a substantial period of time. Instead, self-identification, a simple declaration, will be enough for a man to become a woman in the eyes of the law. As many women have pointed out, this erodes all meaning from the concept of sex and permits biological males entry into women-only spaces, such as public toilets, refuges and prisons.

Unsurprisingly, women wanted to discuss the impact that the changes to the Gender Recognition Act might have on their lives. But even having this discussion, just the suggestion that ‘woman’ might mean more than a feeling (however apparently innate or supposedly genetically determined), was seen by activists as denying the right of trans people to exist. All hint of debate had to be wiped out. Women wanting to meet had to plan in secret, revealing venues only at the last minute and risking violent attack if they were discovered. Even then, public meetings, such as one planned to take place at a council building in Leeds, were cancelled following accusations of transphobia. A spokesman said the feminist group’s values were ‘not in line with Leeds City Council’s values and policies on equality and inclusion’.

At every point, public officials, members of the establishment, have acquiesced to the demands of the trans lobby without pause for reflection. When Maria Maclachlan appeared in court to give evidence against Tara Wolf, a young male trans activist who had physically assaulted her ahead of a meeting on the Gender Recognition Act, the judge stopped proceedings to insist Maclachlan refer to the defendant as ‘she’ throughout the trial.

http://politicalmavens.com/

In her hagiographic review of “Becoming,” Michelle Obama’s journey to the White House, Isabel Wilkerson chooses to emphasize the number of previous First Ladies who were daughters of wealthy merchants, showing how far the black First Lady had to climb. (Sunday Book Review NYT 12/22/18)

She fails to mention some of the 20th century First Ladies such as Bess Truman, whose father killed himself because of mounting debt; Betty Ford, whose father was a traveling salesman for Royal Rubber Co., who ironically died of carbon monoxide poisoning while fixing his car; Rosalynn Carter, whose father was a mechanic and farmer. She neglects to add that no First Lady before Michelle had the privilege of attending Princeton and Harvard Law School and that her chances for both admissions were undoubtedly enhanced by her minority status.

Like Chirlane McCray, First Lady of New York who has written about her feelings of resentment at being an outsider at Wellesley College, Michelle writes about Princeton where she picked up “the quiet, cruel nuances of not belonging.” How different both these women are from Sonia Sotomayor who expressed enormous gratitude for the tutoring and mentoring she received at Princeton to bring her up to a level where she could properly compete with the other students and continue to make it all the way to the Supreme Court on her own merits. Although I haven’t read “Becoming” yet, I am struck by there being no mention in Wilkerson’s rave review of an America that could jettison the cruel legacy of slavery, devote itself to affirmative action to help the victims of segregation mingle with the best and brightest in the country and incredibly, elect a bi-racial man as president for two terms. The pride in being an American should properly have been felt by the future First Lady at her own graduations from two of the most prestigious schools in the world. I doubt there’s another black woman who had the opportunity to earn comparable degrees and achievements anywhere else on this planet.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/20/normal

Kurt Schlichter is funny. Really funny. Unlike so many commentators on the Right—especially those staid NeverTrump harpies—Schlichter has a wry, cutting sense of humor that animates his radio and television interviews, his Townhall columns, and his latest book, Militant Normals.

The book expands on what Schlichter—a retired Army colonel and California-based trial attorney—has been saying about the Trump era for more than three years: The election of Donald Trump was as much about an uprising by the “normals” against the ruling elite as it was about the man himself. In Trump, millions of Americans found a leader who, for the first time in years, actually spoke to their deep concerns about the current condition of the country they fiercely love. “The Normals chose Trump. And it was not okay with the Smart Set.”

While Republicans and Democrats spent the past decade jockeying for props on global issues like climate change and peddling the myth of unbounded “free trade” between nations, working-class voters became increasingly nervous about the rise of illegal immigration; the unseen and ignored toll of international trade agreements; a deadly tide of illicit drugs; a fixation on unwinnable foreign conflicts; and the breakdown of trusted institutions from trade unions to academia to the Catholic Church.

Then along came a brash billionaire from Manhattan who could speak to soybean farmers and masonry workers in Des Moines better than anyone. “The Elite did not just fail to do its job running our institutions and providing us a stable society and economy, though it has failed to do those things,” Schlichter writes. “The Elite has decided to declare war on the people who make up the backbone of this country because it just cannot live knowing the Normals are out there living free and uncontrolled. And in doing so, the Elite ignored the conflict we are living through today.”

Like me, Schlichter was not an early Trump supporter. His epiphany occurred exactly three years ago this week during an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon. (You can watch the clip here.) Lemon became agitated when Schlichter refused to condemn Trump for using the word, “schlonged.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/the-tyranny-of-experts/https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/the-tyranny-of-experts/

One of the many virtues of Salvatore Babones’ The New Authoritarianism is its dissection of ‘progressive’ liberalism, a political philosophy that assumes the task of ‘administering freedom’. When it comes to re-engineering society as the Left would prefer, there is no shortage of solons or arrogant presumption.

The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts
by Salvatore Babones
Polity, 2018, 128 pages, $21.95
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Salvatore Babones’s The New Authoritarianism is an important book. The central proposition is that a class of experts, an illiberal liberal elite, has hijacked representative democracy in America (and Western nation-states in general). Our new masters, though tyrannical and radical, are not Marxist or Fabian in the customary sense of championing ordinary working people. They despise ordinary people or “everyday great American patriots” as Donald Trump refers to them. The new authoritarians, well-travelled, well-educated and well-heeled, are intent on refashioning the West according to their own “liberal worldview”. Brilliantly insightful and always fair-minded, The New Authoritarianism is a compelling insider’s account of how the liberal-minded became close-minded.

Babones must be something of a class traitor, given that he himself belongs to the expert class as Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. The New Authoritarianism, remarkably, is an expert casting a coolly authoritative eye over latter-day liberalism and finding it tarnished by a desire to dominate, adjudicate and legislate every aspect of our lives. The customary role of liberalism, according to Babones, was not to vanquish the other two strains of political thought, progressivism and conservatism. Liberalism, as one-time stalwart of the British Liberal Party Winston Churchill opined, should be an integral part of a constructive tension between the status quo/stability and change/progress. The true liberal thinker, sophisticated and broad-minded, appreciates that not all change creates progress and that reactionary intransigence does not guarantee stability.