Welcome To Our New World

The Endless Present


". . . every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.  And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.  History has stopped.  Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

George Orwell, 1984

No Middle Ground

You Can Either Be A Christian Or  You Can Be A Marxist

But You Can't Be Both . . . 

Collective guilt ideology that’s incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Joshua Lawson
The Federalist

It’s unclear how many Christians are going along with the current neo-Marxist collective guilt movement out of fear, a misunderstanding of what they’ve signed onto, or an authentic conversion to the cause. What is clear, however, is that you can’t be a Christian and a Marxist at the same time—not without irresolvable contradictions.

Whereas traditional garden-variety Marxism views history as a struggle between the wealthy and the working class “proletariat,” neo-Marxism cranks up the heat and redefines the fight to incorporate biological sex, race, ethnicity, and a whole gambit of various “identity” badges.

The grand unifying principle for the Marxists behind the Black Lives Matter movement is that everything—and they mean everything—can be reduced to “oppressors” versus the “oppressed.” If you happen to be a member of one of the “oppressor” groups, then expect to see all sorts of punishments heading your way until the neo-Marxists are satisfied. Except they never are.

Too many Christians are falling into a trap of expressing solidarity with an ideology that is completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. Right now, they need our prayers. Then, they need to wake up.

Collective Guilt Is Not Biblical

Whether the sins were committed yesterday, last week, or 400 years ago, all Caucasians are now told to bear the guilt for the sins committed by all other Caucasians; if they remain silent, Caucasians are accused of “violence.”

This is the opposite of Christianity as it is revealed in the Bible.  Christianity states you are accountable to God alone for your sins and inequities. You must go to Jesus to atone for the sins that result from your reality as a flawed human being. As for my brother, it is up to him to reconcile his sin with God or any specific individuals that he directly slights, attacks, or transgresses.

While the Old Testament tells of entire peoples or nations found guilty and castigated, they are punished by God, on His direct orders, or through His power, not by the whims of other individual men or women. Scripture does not instruct believers to thrust their guilt, sins, or suffering on to others.

When we read of “group solidarity” in the Old Testament it is important to remember it is always entirely voluntary and covenantal in nature. When God freed the Israelites from Egypt and then gave him His law, he didn’t force it upon them.

The concept of collective guilt is explicitly rejected in Ezekiel 18:20:

The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.

We receive salvation one at a time, through a solitary and sincere prayer to God. Those who take Christ as Lord and Savior are saved personally, not collectively with others. Only Jesus Christ can provide the ultimate forgiveness for the sins of our fellow brothers and sisters. Thankfully, on the cross at Calvary, he did just that.

Christianity Rejects the Materialism of Neo-Marxism

Historical Marxism peddles the materialistic notion that if everyone could just be wealthy enough so that economic status is meaningless, then the earth could be transformed into a utopian fantasy. Neo-Marxism adds the dimension of “identity” to this formula, but the problem of inequality remains.

Yet Christ teaches us not to concern ourselves with questions of wealth, who has it, and how we can “reclaim” more of it for ourselves. To the contrary, in Matthew 6, Jesus says:

That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food and drink, or enough clothes to wear. Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing? … So don’t worry about these things, saying, ‘What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?’ These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.

In truth, we can never be satisfied with earthly possessions, or have enough “comfort.” Indeed, too much comfort can breed the circumstances for sin just as easy as hard times. There’s a reason for the maxim “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”

All this isn’t to say we shouldn’t try to better our conditions on this side of heaven. But this world is never meant to be anything approaching paradise. Courting that goal brings disaster. The millions killed at the hands of Marxist totalitarian dictatorships are all the evidence one should need.

Marxism Fuels Covetousness, Envy, and Resentment

Instead of spreading peace and forgiveness, the neo-Marxists running the Black Lives Matter movement have exacerbated anger and resentment. Instead of preaching thankfulness, the movement has caused many Americans to covet their neighbor’s status.

The Old Testament, however, implores us in Exodus 20:17 not to covet anything our neighbor possesses that we do not. The New Testament renews that sentiment in Philippians 4:11-13, which encourages us to be content “in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little.”

Because it is steeped in neo-Marxist ideology, the Black Lives Matter movement sees every disparity as a sign of racism and every inequality as evidence of injustice. But not only is this demonstrably false, even if all inequalities could be eliminated evil and malevolence would still exist in the world. Due to our sinful nature, we would still fight with our family, our friends, and strangers.

Instead of keeping the anger flowing as the neo-Marxists require, the Bible offers a guide on how to combat the fallen nature of the world as well as the evil we’ll inevitably encounter in our lives.

Ultimately, Marxism has no answer for questions of purpose, meaning, and what we’re to do here on earth. For its adherents, everything is a struggle for power; one to be resolved either by redistribution or the sword.

Christianity Seeks to Unify, Neo-Marxism Seeks to Divide

One’s “group identity” is everything in neo-Marxism. The key idea is that “majority” identity groups in any nation have historically oppressed those in the “minority” position. Therefore, a revolution is needed to create the type of society where no majority group holds all the power.

What Christians cajoled into supporting this ideology have temporarily forgotten is that this was accomplished at the cross.

In Christianity, you are seen as an individual. Christ has already done the work of erasing all cultural or ethnic barriers to God. Grace is available to all those who put their faith in Jesus Christ, regardless of status, race, ethnicity, or sex. The only “group” that should matter to Christians is the multi-ethnic world community of believers: the Body of Christ.

As the Apostle Paul writes in Galatians 3:28-29, “There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. And now that you belong to Christ, you are the true children of Abraham. You are his heirs, and God’s promise to Abraham belongs to you.”

Christians supporting neo-Marxist viewpoints should remember what Karl Marx himself had to say about religion. For Marx, the abolition of religion was “the first requisite for the happiness of the people.” Perhaps most famously, Marx slandered religion by comparing it to opium. Worse, like Satan himself, Marx claimed, “My object in life is to dethrone God.” This is not a man Christians should have anything to do with.

In every nation that adopted Marxism as its ideological model, Christians have been oppressed. But Christians conned into neo-Marxist group-think can be comforted in the reminder that they don’t need a divisive ideology to fulfill Christ’s teachings to be charitable, care for the poor, and love thy neighbor as thyself.

Christians can take up their cross and follow Jesus, or they can pick up a hammer in one hand, a sickle in the other, and seek to create the permanent revolution sought by today’s radical leftists. But to spout neo-Marxist talking points while claiming to walk with Jesus Christ does a gross disservice to the Good News of the Gospel.

Joshua Lawson is managing editor of The Federalist. He is a graduate of Queen's University as well as the Van Andel School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College where he received a master's degree in American politics and political philosophy. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaMLawson.

The New Joan of Arc

Greta the Teenage Climate Puppet Goes Full Marxist

James Delingpole
Breitbart London


Greta Thunberg the teenage Climate Puppet has gone full Marxist.  In her latest public statement, she says that the ‘climate crisis is not just about the environment’:

It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all. 

To anyone familiar with the workings of the green movement, Greta’s statement will come as no surprise whatsoever.  That’s why I called my book on the subject Watermelons.  Environmentalists are often green on the outside, red on the inside. Their movement is essentially a global socialistic redistribution exercise hiding behind a mask of green righteousness.

Meanwhile, the consequences of little Greta’s hissy fits are being felt across Europe and hitting ordinary people hard.

In Germany the car industry is ailing badly:

The Fallacies of Circular Argument

Fundamentally Flawed

The Chinese version of totalitarianism flowered under Mao Zedong.  But, then, the poisonous consequences of totalitarianism started to bud and flower.  After his death, China appeared to want to "modernise" and move toward more liberal doctrines of the State and government.

Now, a Second Mao has emerged.  Xi Jinping has begun a purge and a crackdown upon Chinese churches and Christians. 

The Communist Party will retain absolute control over religious activities in China, wrote Beijing’s religion czar in a Communist Party journal this week, in the midst of talks with the Vatican to reestablish diplomatic relations.

“There is no affiliate relationship between our country’s religions and foreign religions,” wrote Wang Zuoan, director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA), in the latest issue of the bi-monthly journal Qiushi.  “Our country’s religious groups and religious matters do not accept domination by foreign forces,” he said.  [Breitbart News]

For the Chinese State there is no higher power or authority than the State.   This notion of course is profoundly circular.  Who says that there is no higher power or authority than the State?  Why, the Chinese State says it, of course.  And pray tell, on what authority can such a claim rest?  On the authority of the Chinese State, naturally.  By relying upon, and appealing to circular arguments, the Chinese government defames and disgraces itself.  It is an embarrassment.

The official communist party has pronounced that no party member must be a Christian--or a believer in any other religion, apart from a believer in the religion of Chinese Statism, or Chinese Marxism.

Remember the Uyghurs

China’s Marxist Tyranny

J. J. McCullough
National Review Online

. . . Today, our culture of Chinese normalization has become so smothering that encountering unvarnished information about how the regime actually works can be a jarring experience.

Canada’s Globe and Mail recently published a horrifying exposé on the persecution of China’s Uyghur minority. As Jay Nordlinger summarized for National Review last May, the Uyghur are a Muslim ethnic minority who constitute a plurality in China’s enormous western province of Xinjiang. Beijing considers them an Islamist menace waiting to happen, and perhaps those Westerners who worry about Islamism will be inclined to sympathize. Yet the Stalinist measures employed in response make even the most hardened American Islamophobe look tame.

Citing exceedingly dubious suspicions, the Chinese state has detained, by some estimates, hundreds of thousands of Uyghur for forced indoctrination. The Globe described the testimony of a typical victim:

The woman, whose name is not being used by The Globe and Mail for her protection, was put through regular self-criticism sessions. Part of the content was cultural. “My soul is infected with serious diseases,” she would repeat. “There is no God. I don’t believe in God. I believe in the Communist Party.”

Other content was more explicitly political. Day after day she would say out loud that she was a traitor, a separatist and a terrorist.

“I am so blind not to see the greatness of our strong country’s laws. I am so stupid that I was not thankful for our President Xi Jinping,” she would be told to recite.

The piece describes Beijing’s brainwashing techniques in lurid detail.

Tearing Communities Apart

Cultural Marxism is Marching Into All Areas Of Our Lives

Karl Du Fresne
Stuff


A significant anniversary passed recently with surprisingly little fanfare.  News stories marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx focused on the fawning tribute paid to him by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping.

There was a large dollop of irony here, since the modern Chinese communist party is highly selective in its application of Marxism. It has combined Marxist-style political totalitarianism – brutal suppression of dissent and absolute obeisance to the party – with a largely unfettered capitalist-style economy.

As an economic model, Marxism stands totally discredited. The few remaining outposts of communist ideology, such as North Korea and Cuba, are economic basket-cases, as well as notoriously repressive.  And of course Marxism's record has been irrevocably blighted by two of the most monstrous figures in history, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao – proud Marxists who carried out mass exterminations without blinking an eye.

In view of all this, it's grimly ironic that a form of Marxism not only survives, but is rampant across the democratic Western World.

Karl Marx--A Horseman of the Apocalypse

Titan of Terror

The left-wing acolytes who say Karl Marx can't be blamed for the millions slaughtered in his name are deluded - bloodshed was at the heart of his philosophy.

Karl Marx, founder of communism, was born in Germany 200 years ago today.  His ideology was used by mass killers like Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong.  Fans claim he's not responsible but his name is synonymous with death.  Millions were killed by communist leaders across the world last century

By Dominic Sandbrook
Daily Mail

Two hundred years ago today, the most controversial thinker of the modern age was born in the German city of Trier.

When, on May 5, 1818, Heinrich and Henriette Marx welcomed their little boy into the world, they could never have imagined the utopian hopes and blood-soaked horrors that would become associated with his name.

Two centuries later, the very words 'Karl Marx' still carry an unmistakable charge. No modern intellectual, no economist or philosopher can match the combustible power of the rabbi's grandson who fled into poverty-stricken exile in leafy North London.

Most of the regimes based on Marx's ideas may have crumbled, yet his name remains synonymous with violent revolution, idealistic utopianism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.   It conjures up images of chanting crowds and glowering statues, collective farms and prison camps, tanks in Red Square and red flags over the Kremlin.

To his critics, Marx was a fanatic whose ideas inspired some of the cruellest regimes in history, from Stalin's Siberian gulags to the killing fields of Cambodia.  Yet, to his admirers — who include the current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who recently called him a 'great economist', and the Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, who has named Das Kapital as his favourite book — he remains a visionary prophet whose ideas will, one day, lead mankind to a classless utopia.

Western Intelligentsia and the New Jerusalem

Omelettes, Eggshells, and Propaganda

We have commented upon this subject before--yet in our view it is a topic which needs to be revisited constantly, lest (as the saying goes) we forget.  We have in mind the near wholesale acceptance of the Left in the UK in the 1920's and 30's to the propaganda issuing forth from Soviet Russia.  

Strikingly, these are the very same folk whom the media, and the establishment viewed as the intelligentsia of the country.  It is one of the most degrading instances of "groupthink" seen in modern times.  Here was Uncle Joe, systematically grinding the bones of millions of people in his beloved Gulags, whilst the clever, educated, and sophisticated elites in the United Kingdom clapped and cheered the Soviet Union as representing the great promise and glorious future of mankind.

Many of these sophisticated folk believed Marxist doctrine, of course.  In 1929, the great stockmarket crash was followed by the Depression.  This, to many a Marxist mind in the UK, confirmed the Marxist dialectic: capitalism would fall apart to be replaced by the reign of the working classes, the Proletariat.

Communism . . . especially after the Wall Street Crash, attracted many intellectuals, not a few with public-school, Tory and Oxbridge backgrounds, dazzled by the contrast between a "successful" Soviet Russia and a faltering capitalist world.  The Communist Party never attracted more than a few thousand full members in England, but progressives--led by an elite of economists, political scientists, composers, actors, artists and writers--hailed Moscow as the New Jerusalem.  [Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), p. 672.]

It is not that all these talking heads were unaware of the horror and oppression, the famines and the cannibalism.  Many were, but rationalised them away as being little more than teething problems.  H. G. Wells went further and admitted the Soviet Union's  permanent Terror, yet he still believed that the Soviet Union represented the glorious future of mankind.  The USSR remained "something splendid and hopeful".

Tombs continues the indictment:

Only Fools and Horses.

Why Marxist Teleology Failed in England

Karl Marx believed he had profound insight when it came to predicting what would happen throughout the West (and, indeed, the world).  Drawing from Hegel, Marx and colleagues developed the theory that human history would progress by means of a "dialectic" of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

Marx argued that the West would develop according to this pattern.  The property owners and employers (the "capitalists") would eventually be overthrown by means of a violent revolution of the oppressed and exploited "working class".  Then the synthesis would emerge: peace like a river would flow over all.  Marx, living in England, had high hopes that it would lead the way.  After all, England was the leading economic power in the nineteenth century; the capitalists were clearly exploiting the working classes.  The prospects for violent overthrow of the wealthy classes were excellent.

Except, Marx's theories failed to emerge in reality.  One wonders why the dialectic of capital versus labour failed to deliver, not only a violent revolution  in England, but the eternal synthesis of Communism.  Doubtless there were many reasons.  One, however, is striking.  The poor in England did not hate the rich.  In other words, the "dialectic" of capital versus labour failed to materialise.   Historian A. N. Wilson--a self-professed Marxist--gives an insight into why Marxism failed to take hold in England:

There Is a New Redeemer in Town

Guilt and Pity: The Marxist "Horse and Carriage"

When Dostoevsky penned his famous novel, Crime And Punishment, it seemed to all reasonable folk that, like the horse and carriage which always went together, crime and punishment were but two sides of the one coin.

But Marxism and its step-children have long since departed from this rather obvious position.  Instead, Marxism and its derivatives have created an alternative universe.  In this universe man is fundamentally righteous: sin and evil is not intrinsic to the human condition.  Rather, evil exists only because there is a handful of exploiters at the top of the socio-economic pile.  These "capitalists"--to use the old term--have controlled and rigged the system to exploit the downtrodden, the worker, the powerless.

One by-product of such suffering and exploitation is that the exploited can end up in anti-social behaviour.  The exploited comes to hate the system which is rigged against him.

A Morally Perverse Myopia

Western Progressives Continue to Romanticise Communism

Liam Hehir
Stuff

Fifty years after his death, Che Guevera, the Butcher of la Cabana, remains a romantic icon of radical chic.

 Ever seen an ordinary young person in a T-shirt bearing the visage of Benito Mussolini? Ever dined at a restaurant bedecked with Third Reich propaganda? Ever listened to a new recording of the Horst Wessel song by a popular contemporary folk singer?

It would be unthinkable for the National Party leader to quote Alfred Rosenberg, ideological architect of National Socialism. No prime minister would ever declare a sympathetic treatment of Reinhard Heydrich to be his or her favourite movie. No credible political figure would argue that the problem with fascism is that it has never been tried properly.

Yet on the centenary of The October Revolution – the coup d'etat that saw the creation of the Soviet Union – communism retains a grasp on the imaginations of Western progressives.

I went out to dinner in Wellington recently.

Those Who Do Not Learn From the Past Condemned To Repeat It

Idealising Communism 

Tom Switzer
Centre for Independent Studies

Next week marks the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution. November 7, 1917 was not just one of the most influential events of all time, it ushered in the most terrifying period in human history. In the matter of scale, the Russian revolutionaries and their later successors in China and elsewhere achieved a record of far more deaths than either world war. According to the London-based project to create a Museum of Communist Terror, 15-18 million people died in World War One; 40-80 million died in World War Two; and 80-100 million died under communist regimes.

Yet 100 years later, many young people in the West are ignorant of the ideology that inspired Lenin, Trotsky and millions of their worldwide followers. According to YouGov surveys, only 55% of American millennials think communism was, and still is, a problem. A third of young people believe US president George W. Bush murdered more people than Soviet dictator Josef Stalin did. And about 70 per cent of young British people have never heard of Mao Tse-Tung, the communist revolutionary whose regime murdered tens of millions of Chinese.

The British Labour Opposition’s treasury spokesman, John McDonnell, identifies with the Marxist cause — even once waving Mao’s Little Red Book in parliament.

Antifa Thugs are the New Brownshirts

Antifa Just Showed Its True Colors. Again.

There is no apologetic for Marxist violence.

By David French
National Review Online

If 2016 is the year when our political parties failed, inflicting on America arguably its worst presidential choice in our nation’s history, then 2017 is when our broader institutions began to lose their collective minds. This is the year when reasonable men surrendered to unreason — when political tribalism trumped human decency.

The primary tragedy of Charlottesville was the loss of a young woman’s life. The secondary tragedy was the distortion of our political culture. The president of the United States actually declared some portion of a collection of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and alt-right white nationalists to be “very fine people.” He just couldn’t bring himself to completely disavow men and women who’d supported him since the day he descended down the escalator at Trump Tower.

Yet rather than doing the easiest and most sensible thing in the world — condemning white supremacy while also condemning political violence on the far left — some portion of the left-wing intelligentsia actually decided to embrace their own thugs. They supported Antifa. They decided to lionize some of the worst people in American life. And in so doing, they actually compared them to the American heroes who stormed Omaha Beach. The tweets below, as the saying goes, did not age well.

Haters of Mankind

The Grubby Basement

Why has capitalism "triumphed" in the West, but languished in most other nations around the world?  Doubtless the reasons are many, but one in particular stands out.  Western nations have developed and deployed systems of universal recognition of property, and sanctioned them with property law and rights of ownership.

One reason this has occurred in the West, but not elsewhere, is a consequence of  the Christian faith.  Property, according to the Christian world-and-life view, is not just sanctioned by the eternal omnipotent God: it is protected by His holy law.  To the extent that a society does not comply with the rights of ownership, of private property, and attendant due penalties against theft and covetousness, property ownership will be undermined and under attack.

One consequence of such beliefs is the necessity of registering title to property, which in turn requires accurate and widely recognised definitions and descriptions of the property in question.  Think motor-vehicle registers, along with number or registration plates for example.  Or reliance upon serial numbers, for another.  It is hard--impossible--for private enterprise and capitalism to develop in nations which have no way of representing, defining, and describing what is owned by whom.

As De Soto puts it:

Modern Mouthpieces for Marx

Deformed Charities

It seems that more-than-a-few charities end up morphing into partisan hucksters promoting Leftist propaganda.  It is understandable, if deeply regrettable.   More than a few Christian based charities have travelled this road to corruption, which is even more deeply regrettable.

Those charities with a global horizon end up being confronted by genocides, famines, and gross injustices.  Of wars and rumours of wars there is no end.  Relying upon faithful donors in the "private sector" (that is, non-state parties) means that every such charity has to live with the dissatisfaction of never being able to make a difference in a global sense.  That is, they can only "win" in a micro, isolated sense.  They cannot win globally.

Faced with this perpetual failure many such charities go over to the dark side.  That is, they seek more and more support and funding from governments.  Why?  Because governments have the big bucks; with support from state-parties they can really make a difference--or so they tell themselves.  Within a decade or so, these now-State-dependant charities become fronts and mouthpieces for Leftist propaganda.  They increasingly look to governments to fulfill their mission.

The Institute of Economic Affairs profiles one such compromised charity: Oxfam.

World View Wars

Offensive Questions

"White Privilege" is a construct--a concept to support a particular race-based ideology.  But is it just an imaginary construct to buttress a particular cause?  Is is just a cover, a pretext which allows the same-old, same-old Marxist and neo-Marxist narrative to be re-run on an endless loop?

The gentleman in the clip below asks a relevant question.  Don't all the "White Privilege" warriors speak up at once.



Ah, the politics of Guilt and Pity.  What an inexhaustible reservoir it has proved to be.  It has never failed to quicken the proletariat into a mindless, reflexive response.  Never.  And it has never failed to make the zealots feel so self-righteous whilst being manipulated.

As for the interlocutor in the clip--he is just a privileged oreo--coloured on the outside, white on the inside.  Traitor.  Neo-revisionist.  White Russian.  We could go on, but you know the drill.

[Hat Tip: Whaleoil]

Letter From the Land of Cotton

Why The Left (And Donald Trump) Are On A Never-Ending Witch Hunt

George Fields
The Federalist

Leftism always identifies some group as the source of all problems in society, some class that makes all mankind choke.

My kid sister, who does Twitter, took it upon herself to propagate my last article. Several of her friends reacted negatively. One was so utterly silly that I took to the typewriter to concoct a response; but then realized my critic was 14 years old. So I thought better of it and went to bed.

As I arose in the morning, my sister had sent me another critique of my article. It read as follows: “Guys this is cis white male trolling people. Just report block, and move on.” At first, I was thrilled to think leftists had finally determined that my sister and I, being of Sicilian and Vietnamese ancestry, had graduated into being white (the master race, as the Democratic primary would suggest), as opposed to being genetically inferior racial toxins requiring forced sterilization, as Madame Sanger and the Progressives of yesteryear contended.

As I spent the better part of the day waiting eagerly for the official diploma informing me of my change in status, I began to contemplate that, although I had been promoted to society’s ruling class, I had also been demoted to the Left’s newest object of hatred.  I say newest, because “white people” are surely not the first.

Useful Idiots

The Syndrome of the Embarrassing Advocate

Both the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States are learning all about the Syndrome of the Embarrassing Advocate.  It's that feeling of hollow victory when someone who is a few sandwiches-short-of-a-picnic starts to advocate for a position you hold dear.

We have seen Republicans wincing when Donald Trump, a celebrity politician, has started to espouse conservative causes.   We in New Zealand can afford to laugh at Trump because none of the avian excrement is likely to foul our nests.  So he has been good for us--as a comedic figure can be.  After all, laughter is the best medicine, they say.  Thus, we were heartily amused when, being confronted by his ideological and philosophical about-faces, Trump (with a straight face, no less) justified them by saying, "Well, look, back then I was a business man,  Now I am a politician."  What a deliciously ironic turn of phrase.

And don't get us started on Hillary Clinton.  Democrats and Independents all over the country must be wincing every time she opens her mouth to change feet.  It pays to be sanguine about it all.  As Mr Bennett has said, "What do we exist for, eh Lizzy, but to make sport for our neighbours, and for us to laugh at them in their turn."

We have had our own Kiwi incident of the embarrassing advocate right here in NZ.

Snake-Oilers Extraordinaire

 Deceived and Deceiving

Watching Al Jazeera news the other day, we were treated to a doomster (er . . . spokeswoman) from Oxfam telling us that more and more wealth is being concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer plutocrats, whilst the poor are getting poorer.  The terms of description were profoundly apocalyptic. 

One is left wondering what on earth is going on the minds and hearts of these doomsters.  Surely they know better.  Surely their thinking and reasoning cannot be that purblind and stupid.  Surely they are pulling a confidence trick--and doing so self-consciously.  If that were the case it would be more understandable and (in a perverse way) more respectable than the only other option--which is, that Oxfam personnel really believe their own propaganda.  If the latter were to be the case, it makes them pitiable.

One thing is clear: there is a great confusion involved when spokespeople conflate two quite distinct and separate things together, as if they were the same.  On the one hand, there is the issue of poverty in the world--absolute poverty, no less--and on the other, there is the issue of the discrepancy in wealth between the most wealthy and the least wealthy.  A growing discrepancy or gap between the two tells us precisely nothing about the incidence of poverty in the world. 

The Oxfam spokeswoman, taken in the full flight of apocalyptic dooming, assumed that these two things are the same.  Why, it's so obvious, it need not be debated.  Another grand suppressed premise is that the world's wealth is fixed, finite, and unchangeable, such that the more wealth plutocrat A holds in his Scrooge McDuck-vault, the less wealth is available for the poor. 

Oxfam's nonsense was too much for The Telegraph editorial writers.  Their headline cut to the chase:

Clinging to A Long Exploded Canard

Marx the Prophet of Choice When It Comes to Islam

We were reading a post from another Kiwi blogsite, when we came across this representation of a book on Islam:

In the book 'Islamic Imperialism - A History' (Efriam Karsh, Professor of Mediterranean Studies, King's College, London) it is explained thus .... "As a universal religion Islam envisages a global political order in which all humankind will live under Muslim rule as either believers or subject communities.   In order to achieve this goal it is incumbent on all free, male, adult Muslims to carry out an uncompromising struggle in the path of Allah or jihad.   This in turn makes those parts of the world that have not yet been conquered by the House of Islam an abode of permanent conflict (Dar al-Harb, the house of War) which will only end with Islam's eventual triumph". 

There it is in black and white ... radical Islam's end game.  [Italics, ours.]

Actually, "there it is" should be applied to the intellectual sleight of hand that has just occurred in the above quotation, with the insertion of the word "radical" by the blogger to denote a sub-set of Islam--a denomination, if you will--whereas Karsh's piece deals with Islam's historical and traditional position.  It is the most common mindset towards Islam found throughout the West.  Efraim Karsh has written a piece on historical Islam's imperialist ideology arising out of its religious doctrines.   He argues that the goal of world conquest by Islam is the doctrinal norm, not the exception, when Islam is considered in its historical manifestations.

But the West has different received wisdom.