Giving Nietzsche Eyes

In my previous post, commentator Nietzsche made the following comment:

"I'll provide another scenario. A secluded island of peoples that have no contact with Christian missionaries or the bible. Are they born Christian? Do they believe in Jesus or Jehovah? No, again goes to prove that without teachers or missionaries, Christianity like other pagan religions will die out. The only people who perpetuate the "faith" is its followers." 

                              
Consider a community of blind men who are strict empiricists. From their perspective, lacking the sense of sight, they would be unable to verify the existence of colours, and any statements with regard to colour, shape or pattern would be,from their point of view, unempiric and hence unscientific.  Statements concerning visual phenomenon would be unable to be verified and hence would be articles of faith; a body of knowledge belonging to the category of superstition.

Now suppose a sighted man, literally a visionary, told them about the phenomenon of colour, how could they discern if they were telling him the truth or not? They can't, because they lack the sensory capacity to confirm the subject in question.

The core idea behind empiricism is that perception is the window to reality, and that any understanding of reality must be perceptually confirmed. 

People say that seeing is believing. But seeing is not believing; thinking is believing. Seeing is knowing; everything else is emotive hope, probabilistic guess or reasoned theory.

Commentators Brockmann and Neitzsche have put forward the argument that without sensory input of any kind, a man would fail to be Christian, and that religious belief is conditional upon personal circumstances. Their view is partially correct. Men inherit their faith from their ancestors and certainly, for the unreflective man, faith is a circumstantial habituated practice.

The reflective man however has a problem. He questions and challenges his faith, and if logically consistent, finds that there is nothing in the Universe which supports his view. Thieves prosper, the good are murdered,  and the completely innocent suffer tremendously.  Empirically, there is no way he can confirm that Gay Marriage and Adultery are objectively wrong.  Statistically he may be able to find data that supports a respective religious vision, but he cannot find any data the confirms a creed. As commentators Brockmann and Neitzsche imply, ought cannot be derived from is and hence the implication that transcendent truths are unknowable, and therefore arbitrary fairy stories; cognitive products of the imagination for whatever reason.

They are, of course, logically correct.

And yet they are wrong.

Because their understanding of the human perceptual capacity is in error.

I wish to illustrate what I mean by starting off with a passage of biblical text. Not because I want them to believe in the veracity of the Bible, but because the text succinctly explains the difference between believers and non-believers and problem of Modernity.

As it is written: God hath given them the spirit of insensibility; eyes that they should not see; and ears that they should not hear, until this present day. 

(Romans 11:8 Douay-Rheims)

Note the term insensibility, the inability to sense or perceive. This is not a play on words, as different translations of text refer to same phenomenon. The Christian fathers did not think of faith as a cognitive process but a sensory modality. In their view,  unbelief was not the product of faulty thinking, it was the product of insensibility; a perceptual failure.

To them, faith was a sixth sense; an eye or ear-like faculty which allowed us to perceive non-physical realities. When the Christian fathers asserted that men should not commit adultery, they were not plucking something out of thin air or making a rational calculation based up their value preferences; they were being empirical.

Where the strict empiricists(and quite a few Christians) go wrong, is in assuming that the phenomenon of faith is a cognitive process, the end point of some form of emotive or faulty rationalisation, instead of a sensory phenomenon.

A great example of this "perception"sense in operation, as opposed to cognitive effect, was the motive force behind C.S. Lewis' own conversion to Christianity:

"You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England" (Surprised By Joy, ch. 14, p. 266). (My italics)

Lewis was no gullible idiot. Here, what we see in this passage, is  Lewis wanting to rationalise away a perception or experience that he was having. Like someone suffering  a sore tooth, which forces itself to their attention,  Lewis was being nagged by some form of unwilled sensory stimulus.  His conversion was not the product willed rationalisation but of an unwanted experience: The intruding sense of "Him" was felt/percieved rather than willed. Lewis had no choice in the matter, in the same way he had no choice in choosing the colour of the sky.

When a man of faith says murder is wrong, it's akin to him saying an apple is red or the sky is blue. It's a statement of fact rather than opinion. Of course to the "blind" man who believes that all men are blind, there is no such objective thing as redness, saying that the apple is red or the sky is blue is purely arbitrary.

The Church fathers recognised that the "faith-sense" was the weakest of all senses, through which we saw "through a glass darkly", much like looking through a cataract affected eye; broad shapes can be detected but the detail eludes us. I imagine that a very undeveloped form of this faith sense is what explains humanity's default morality.  All people have a crude understanding that murder and theft are wrong, and they understand that they are wrong at a deeper level than cognitive explanation, they percieve them to be wrong.

It's this lack of sensory acuity which probably explains the profusion of religions, men have felt the pull of transcendence or mistaken an experience as transcendent, and interpreted the sensation incorrectly, in the same way that a group of nearly blind man can discern human forms but disagree with regard to the identity of them.

The atheist mistake is in assuming that the divisions amongst the religious are due to differing rationalisations instead of differing interpretations. To use our nearly blind group of men analogy, the atheist or rationalist blind man thinks that the man affected with the severe cataracts is making things up, whilst the man with the cataract is trying to understand what is going on. If you were to take a group of men with cataracts and present them with a the image of a person at a distance, one will say its Fred, some will say its Bill and the others will say its Judy, they will all know that they have percieved something even if they are not sure what it is, but the blind men, being unable to perceive, will assume that the cataract affected, are making things up.

What separates the  Moderns from the rest of humanity is in this perception of "something else" beyond the five-sense barrier. And Christians ,in particular, should understand that from the atheist perspective (those who lack the faith sense), religion is logically ridiculous. And it is this fact that poses a huge practical problem for conservatives and it also gives an inkling of what we are up against.

When Christopher Hitchins or his ilk argue that faith is just superstition and "fairy stories", they are absolutely correct from their objective point of view.  You see, Hitchins et al, live their life assuming with certitude, that there is no such thing as "faith-sight" and any statements with regard to "faith-colours or forms" are arbitrary. The honest ones amongst them are like blind men, who truly and honestly believe that there is no such thing as sight, and any statements regarding such are rubbish. Trying to convince these men, by rational argument, of the existence of transcendent moralities is by logical necessity, going to fail. In order to get the get the militant atheists on side you've got to get them to "see". They literally can't think their way towards religion because good thinking without faith is irreligious.   Or to put it another way, arguing with them is like arguing with a blind man about the nature of colour, there is no way you can get him to "see" red.

This "faith-sense", not being a renationalisation process, cannot therefore be experienced by acts of rationalisation. Blind people cannot experience colours by study or by rational argument; they have to sense them.

The only way past this impasse is by some way granting them the ability to "see". The Church fathers also recognised that this faith sense was not "intrinsic" to our being but was rather a bestowed gift of God.* That means petitionary prayer; asking God to give our enemies "sight". This is why there will be no HBD or atheistic conservative revival (they may be able to give the appearance of conservative revival but it will eventually degenerate into leftist decay, it's a movement trying to empty a bathtub with a seive). They are operating within the same sensory frame of reference as do the atheists.

The West is doomed unless men start praying to God for revival and conversion of their enemies.  When the monasteries start reappearing, that's when you know it'll all be right.



*(Personally I'm not so sure of this,  I sometimes wonder if we all have this sense but that it becomes dulled either by Divine will or by evil human habit or will, i.e the sense is intrinsic to our being.)

Flowers amongst weeds.

I'm warning the Atheists that this is a religious post.

I don't think that many of my American readers realise just how hostile the contemporary cultural climate has become with regard to religion outside the U.S.  Amongst polite society, religious belief is not just intellectually mocked, but it has become a social vice, much like not washing or belching in public. The result of this twin pronged attack is that religion tends not to be mentioned at all in public discourse (except when discourse is critical of it.) Conservatives of the HBD bent--the most successful conservatives and the ones scoring the most social points--do their bit as well, denying religious insight any legitimacy(except where it is subordinate to evolutionary concerns). Amongst the dynamic conservatives at the moment, religious matters are touched briefly and with some embarrassment. The conservative argument is fought on empirical basis alone.

I suppose this areligious flavour of conservatism has its roots in the debates with the left. Conservative thinkers have tried to debate the Left on the Left's terms in the mistaken belief that while Leftist's were irreligious, they were at least objective on more worldly matters.  This view of course was false. The Left were never objective. Their objectivity was subjective, subjective to their own prejudices and they simply ignored argument which conflicted with their preferred version of reality. There was no dialogue but lots of debate. Conservatism, shaped by this endless dialogue with the Left, became publicly, practically irreligious.

This is a shame because without religious insight Conservatism is dead.

The Left is the killing the West, and thinking people of all persuasions realise that something is wrong. Detroit just one example of the malignancy of the Left disease and yet unless it is stopped, Detroit is the future for all of us. 20th Century Conservatism has the failed to stop the disease. Indeed God-lite Conservatism is part of the disease. There will be no revival of the West without a religious revival.

I've been meaning to put up this post for a while but could not find a good example to illustrate what I meant till I came upon this post. (Hat tip. The Black Death).  Amongst Detroit's cancer is something that refuses to die. (These are images of the surrounding area)

There are only 12 parishioners seated in the pews at the front. There’s room behind them for almost 2,500 more.

There’s no place else like it in Detroit. The way its tattered beauty still shows despite its age, the way a handful of people keep it going despite the challenges, the way its past was wild and sometimes even violent, it’s a lot like the city it has stood in all these years.

“This place is not only a statement about God; it’s a statement about us,” says Bob Duda, 64, part of the Polish American Historic Site Association, the group that takes care of St. Albertus. “It’s like a skyscraper — here we are folks, we’re important, just as important as anybody else. We’re going to be proud of ourselves. That’s why they built churches like this; otherwise they could’ve done it in tents*. It’s a testimony to us and our history and our heritage.   

*(Note to Modernist Architects)

Just imagine the effort and personal sacrifice that went into the building of this church. The care and artistry that lavished upon it, a time when infant mortality was shocking, hunger real and destitution, an ever present reality.  That a bunch of peasant Polaks,  Europe's rejected, could build such a church in what was effectively the wilderness and against the odds was testimony to the power of their culture to create something magnificent from nothing. As opposed to the modern culture of Detroit, which corrodes everything it touches, their culture was a culture of vitality: The force of life.

It's this "force" that gave the West its vitality and without this force the West will die. The world has gone through prolonged periods of darkness before and on a purely logical level there is no reason why the West go the way of other cultures.

That such a church, built up with much effort, toil and sacrifice; the drama for life's great events and a thing of beauty itself, could be sold for one hundred dollars is proof that the current Catholic church is run by downright morons and cultural aesthetes. The natural way of things when governed by such men is for self destruction. That the Church survives is not due to human agency, as clearly it is manifestly lacking, but is supported by something Divine. As some cardinal, whose name I forget said, "the Devil will never destroy the Church, our own priests have been trying to do it for nearly two thousand years without success." It survives despite the idiocy of its supposed guardians.

The force that keeps this church alive is the force that shaped the West and when this force leaves this church it will die. The name of this force is caritas. In English, the word is frequently translated into the terms charity and love. But these terms do not do concept justice. The best way I can think of it as a will to perfection. (perfection in the Aristotelian sense). This force, expressed in the real world, improves upon it. Reality is not only better, but reality thrives in its action.

If I had to distill the big ideas of the West, the qualities which gave it its unique character, it would be caritas and veritas.  Of these two, caritas is more important. Without caritas, veritas is impotent. The world thrives suboptimaly when it has caritas, but caritas becomes supercharged in the presence of veritas. (The West rocked in the 19th Century, it's when the two forces became aligned in Western society) And that's is why conservatism has failed, its concentrated on the veritas instead of the caritas; it's got its priorities wrong.

Looking at Paul's letter to the Corinthians in this light, it assumes a different message. Instead of it being an exposition on love, it becomes a sociological insight. Our society, no matter how technologically gifted it is, no matter what feats it can perform, is doomed to nothingness without charity. The technological fix, no matter how well informed, is doomed to failure. The HBD movement is a dead end. That's not to say that it does not have valuable insights(veritas), but on its own it's not enough. Standing in modern Detroit, St Paul could clearly identify the malady. Where is the love? Would be his comment. Detroit is decaying because of idiocy and indifference, failures of both veritas and caritas. In a sea of desolation, St Albertus survives because of love.

Before you can save Detroit or the West, you've gotta care. Without the love, no matter how informed you are,  you don't give a shit.

Civilisation doesn't always move forward.

A sobering website that's worth looking at.

Merry Christmas.

I know it's not politically correct, but neither am I. None of this "Happy Holidays" crap.

It's Merry Christmas and best wishes to my small band of readers.

Intellectual Ebola and HIV.

The Ebola virus was first recognised in 1976 and is one of the most deadly viruses on earth. It has a mortality of close to 80% (depending on the figures) and cuts a spectacular path of destruction. Spread is through the exchange of bodily fluids(including semen). The illness initially resembles a a typical cold but rapidly progresses to altered consciousness, bloody vomiting and diarrhea, bleeding, and a quick and gruesome death.

First recognised in 1981, the HIV virus is also spread by bodily fluids.  Infection initially causes a cold like illness and then the virus apparently seems to do nothing for a long period of time. The host, bearing no stigmata of the disease or any ill effects, carries on with the same behaviours that initially caused infection. Slowly the individual realises that something is wrong as opportunistic infections take hold. Without treatment, the mean time to death is ten years. Untreated, mortality is close to 100%.

The mode of death between the two illness is worth noting. In Ebola, the stigmata of the disease become readily apparent and the patients death is spectacular. In HIV, death's ensnarement is more leisured. For a long while the individual appears unaffected, even healthy initially, dying only years after infection.

The HIV virus is estimated to have killed approximately twenty five million people. Ebola, on the other hand, has killed roughly 1,800.

Two viruses, roughly discovered at the same time and with approximately the same mortality, yet the the death toll of one is four orders of magnitude greater than the other. Why?

Ebola's spectacular viciousness in claiming its victim alerts those unaffected of the danger in their midst. The malignity of Ebola is obvious and individuals can easily recognise the danger approaching and take appropriate steps to stop it. The afflicted are obviously unwell and the unaffiliated flee from them. Ebola consumes it's host before it is able to spread. It path of destruction thwarted by its obvious efficiency in killing.

HIV, on the other hand, is a more congenial fellow. After a mild illness, it leaves its host alone for years, minding its own business and slowly spreading. Bearing no stigmata of illness, the afflicted does not affront anyone and normal precautions are not implemented by others, allowing the virus to silently spread. The threat of HIV is not obvious, yet it kills to a greater degree than Ebola. It's evil is subtle as opposed to Ebola's gaudy display.

HIV is a less apparently obvious killer than Ebola, and its this subtlety which makes it far more dangerous. It's subtlety allows complacency.

Ideas can resemble viruses as well. Some, such as fascism, are seen as malignant early on and thwarted.  Others, such as communism, are just as malignant but for many years not recognised as such by huge swathes of the community. Over a hundred million dead trying to implement the Communist idea, that superficially, was meant to make the better place.

What got me thinking about this topic was this comments thread over at Jim Kalb's. Commentator Thursday wrote.

Yes, they do. Slumlord/The Social Pathologist, he who has posited absolute truth as the sole basis for conservatism, and the one who pointed out the Feser article to me, has made the argument that everybody is always the worse for having sex outside marriage. Plus, being raised in church and going to church schools, we were always being told about how the minute you had premarital sex, your life would just fall apart and you would be permanently damaged by it.

Perhaps the most dangerous ideas are the ones, which in the short term, seem harmless or are beneficial but which are toxic in the long run. The aim of diabolical genius is to allow tactical victories whilst aiming for strategic defeat.  The bovine populace, fixated as it is on the "here and now", never sees anything in particular going wrong in any single or particular act, yet not being able to see the big picture, wonder why society is crumbling around them.

Take radical liberalism for instance. It seems to have wilted both the identity of the West and its ability to respond to external threats. This comment by Steve Sailer deserves quite a bit of reflection.

In WWII and the Cold War, we faced enemies the caliber of Wernher von Braun and Andrei Sakharov. In the War on Terror, however, a strikingly large fraction of Muslim would-be terrorists, such as the recent Underpants Bomber and the Times Square Fizzler, are screwups.

Criminal masterminds turn out to be more common in movies than in real life. Even Osama bin Laden got lucky. A video shows him admitting gleefully that he hadn’t expected the World Trade Center towers to come down. And without George W. Bush’s campaign against airport profiling of Arabs, Mohammed Atta likely wouldn’t have even made it onboard.

Conservatives of all stripes bemoan the rise of Islam, but they look at the problem the wrongly. Sailer has got it right. Objectively, the Islamic world would be utterly crushed by a determined West. Islam is only relatively strong because the West's current cultural ideology renders it weak. Islam is opportunistically expanding in the West.


Secular democratic liberalism may yet  prove to be Western Society's cultural HIV.

(Image from Life magazine)

Intelligence and Wisdom.

Ferdinand Bardamu has put up quite a good post on the subject of intelligence. For the most part I agree with his views but it has got me thinking on the subject of wisdom and intelligence.  I suppose want to start with a few definitions.

Intelligence: The capacity to process information.
Wisdom: The ability to get things right. (I've chosen this definition because by implication the wise man always chooses the correct course of action, while the foolish man gets it wrong)

Now, I disagree with Ferdinand, in that I think we can measure intelligence. From the moment Binet started measuring intelligence, naysayers had always found "flaws" in his testing and all sorts of objections were raised against them. Binet's response to his critics was that the people who society considers intelligent are the ones who do well at his tests. I think this is fairly self evident.

The HBD crowd place a great deal of emphasis on the faculty of intelligence, seeing it as a some sort genetic Calvinism, separating the elect from the damned. Personally, whilst I think it is very important, I feel it's uber-elevation in amongst the HBD crowd is misplaced.

To make crude analogy IQ can be rougly compared to computing power. The high IQ man having a supercharged Intel processor, the common dullard, a simple transistor.

Now the quality of the processing is only as good as the data being fed to the processor, as the old computer adage goes, "garbage in, garbage out". What's happening right now amongst many of our high IQ set is that many of their input variables are simply rubbish.  Despite their high IQ, the conclusions that they form from their thought processes are wrong.

In a specialist fields such as physics and maths, reasoning is constrained by hard data, universally agreed upon constants and formulae,  and the rules of logic. There is very little "garbage in". As such the quality of the output is contingent upon the quality of the processor. Ultimately the test of any theory is its concordance with reality, and amongst the physical sciences this is easy to demonstrate.
Smart people have it easy in these fields and thrash their lesser endowed competitors.

The problem of the clever sillies really starts to rear its head when it comes to less defined subjects or subjects requiring data from broad spread of seemingly unrelated inputs. Here data does not resemble X=y, rather I believe X=y or let us assume that X=y. Here the predicate data may or may not have any bearing on reality. Crappy inital data produces crappy output, no matter how good the processor and the problem with many of the "high intelligence" advocates don't seem to recognise is many of the high IQ crowd have problems when it comes to non-rigidly defined input data.

The silly physicist does not approach the subject of the weight of carbon as an opinion, but as a fact. On the other hand, that same physicist's love life may be miserable because his assumptions about women, which are completely wrong, are treated and processed like facts. Likewise his finances may be a mess because of his financial beliefs, i.e house prices always go up, which are similarly treated as facts. In my experience, many of the intelligent people I know are usually very smart within their fields but go along with the crowd for everything else(SWPL). High intelligence is no protection against unrecognised erroneous assumption.

Sometimes the assumption is not erranous, but deliberately willed and information which directly contradicts it is filtered away. (See Orwell. Crimestop and Thoughtcrime). Paging Phil Jones.  Sometimes the assumption is simply not investigated because of time or dispositional constraints. The bottom line here is that no matter how good your brain is, if the underlying assumptions under which it operates are false then its conclusions are going to be wrong. The implicit assumption by the  HBD crowd seems to be that universal data objectivity is somehow correlated with high IQ. That assumption is tenuous at best.

These assumptions, with which a person operates with on a day to day basis, can best be thought of as a person's weltanschauung, and the average upper middle class man's assumptions can be thought of as conforming to the Liberal world view. As I have argued before, many of the liberal assumptions are wrong. It's no wonder that our managerial class gets it wrong on so many issues, despite it being the best and brightest.

Wisdom in a certain sense, precedes intelligence. Since wisdom requires an accurate(and reality conforming) weltanschauung. Wisdom's quality, lies not so much in an ability to process information, but rather, in not having faulty premises which will corrupt reasoning. It is a form of knowledge, and its correlate with age, simply a result of false assumption being "mugged by reality". It's also why simple people with modest intellects can frequently get things right whilst their smarter "betters" get things wrong: They don't start off with stupid premises. Wise people have a global grasp on reality.

Klaus Fuchs was without doubt a brilliant nuclear physicist. But his naivete about the rest of the world was astounding. He confessed in the false hope that he would be allowed to return to top secret nuclear weapons research work (after being found out as a spy for the Soviets!). His confession, an excellent example of the clever sillies.

A Cautionary Tale for PUA's

German man castrates teenage daughter's 57-year-old boyfriend 

Sometimes it's not the girlfriend that's the problem.

Fundamentals of Conservatism: Empirical Problems.

It may be worthwhile for some readers to read this post before proceeding.

Empiricism is the theory that the only valid knowledge is knowledge that is confirmed by sense data, and the strict empiricists leave no room for knowledge that is inspired by faith. As mentioned in the above linked post, a graphical representation of the strict empiricists conceptual schema can be represented as thus:

The green area and white areas represents knowledge which can be independently verified by way of sense data, the yellow are is falsehood. As mentioned previously, anything which lays outside the "sense barrier" is dismissed as unscientific knowledge. 

However, let us consider the following situation. Suppose there are two strict empiricists, one of whom has the faculty of sight, the other, is blind from birth. 

Now let us consider the proposition P, where P= raspberries are red in colour.

Now if we map P onto "epistemolgical space"we find that P lays within the Non-Blind empiricist's perception of reality and is outside the blind empiricist's perception.

Now, from the blind empiricist's frame of perception, there is no way he can verify that raspberries are red. On the other hand, the non-blind empiricist can easily verify that raspberries are red.

Now if our blind empiricist is a strict empiricist(in the Dawkins sense) he will declare the Proposition P= "that raspberries are red" is false as he is unable to independently verify the proposition. This of course is a logical error. Since  the correct answer from the blind person's perspective is that P is unverifiable. The blind empiricist can only be agnostic on the matter of the colour of raspberries. Any blind empiricist who dogmatically asserts that raspberries are not red is not being empirical about the matter at all. By saying that raspberries are not red he is making a positive statement about reality which exists beyond his sense barrier, a reality which he can in no way verify.

Now,  our blind empiricist may acknowledge that he is limited in some way, and defer to his sighted colleagues on the matter of the colour of raspberries. But his knowledge of colour is then not based on any "empirical" observation but is based upon the truthfulness and his trust in his colleagues. He is not being "empirical" about the matter at all.

On the other hand, our blind empiricist may be a Marxist or Postmodernist, and believe that the whole concept of colour and sight is an oppressive mechanism by other blind empiricists to keep him subjugated. He would be logically consistent though, because being unable to verify sight, he-- being a strict empiricist--would have to accept that the phenomenon is not real. In order to liberate himself from the chains of oppression he would have to wage war against those who claimed that they could see.

The point that point that I am trying to belabour here is that realities can exist beyond the "sense barrier" which we have no way of proving. This is and was the conservative view. The acceptance of "religion"as a valid source of knowledge stems from this conception of reality. How men gain knowledge of what's on the other side is a subject which I will deal with later, but suffice to say that whatever's happening on the other side of the sense barrier is empirically "unprovable".

As I have said before, Conservatism is the philosophy of living according to the truth of things. People who are intellectually, as opposed to dispositionally, conservative motivate their actions according to a perception of reality. As their knowledge of reality is improved, their behavior is modified. Conservatism is about living rightly, not living "oldly".

Conservatism therefore does not have a problem with logically consistent empiricism, where the problem lays is with logically inconsistent empiricism. An empiricism that makes positive claims about what exists beyond the "sense barrier" is logically inconsistent, since according to Empiricism, it's the senses which either positively confirm or deny a theory of reality. Atheism therefore represents a series of statements which resemble religion more than the scientific method. The only honest statement an Empiricist can make about what exists beyond the sense barrier is that it is unverifiable: Agnosticism.

It's this logical inconsistency which places Atheists outside the Conservative camp. The Atheist's conception of reality is at odds with the Conservative's one.  Conservatives accept that valid knowledge can exist "beyond the sense barrier",  this for an Atheist is intolerable since such knowledge is empirically unverifiable and therefore arbitrary or false.


The question is then, how do you rationally determine what is beyond the sense barrier? The answer is you can't.

Yes Vladimir, it's all About Transparency.

Mr Assange seems to have some pretty powerful friends.

Vladimir Putin has chimed in for the cause.

Yeah...........Vladimir is all about openness and accountability.

Just ask Anna Politskovkaya and  Alexander Litvinenko. 
(Notice, no Russian cables.)

Perhaps he will support him financially. The Batcave needs a Batmobile.

Anyone for some polonium?

Something's Not Right.

I don't like Julian Assange. I feel that his compromise of the U.S. diplomatic cables should earn him a spot in prison. I know many people disagree with me, but I have a feeling that his supporters will end up with egg on their faces.  Whilst I think he should go to prison, it should not be on the grounds of rape, as clearly his actions in Sweden in no way constitute rape.  Roissy's take on the motivations of probably spot on. These "victims" are spurned groupies who want their "revenge". The fact that a country like Sweden has criminal prosecutors who can construe rape out of what many people would consider consensual sexual relations, shows just how politically correct Sweden has become. Sweden is ruled by a Feminist Taliban.

Whilst many people are hot under the collar about the rape charge against Assange(justified) I'm more interested in the man and his motivations. Several stories have been slowly been bubbling up on the internet, and whether this is a third party source of disinformation, I don't know, but they seem to point to a less than savoury character and someone who is not entirely objective when it comes to "transparency"

The first article is from Der Spiegel. ( I regard this as a reliable source of information):


Wikileaks Spokesman Quits.

Firstly, I wasn't aware that there was such disagreement amongst the staff. I understand that employees can disagree with the boss and his style of management but this quote seems to indicate something else at play.

Take the US Army Afghanistan documents at the end of July, for example. The video of the air strike in Baghdad in 2007, "Collateral Damage," was an extreme feat of strength for us. During the same period of time we also could have published dozens of other documents. And through our rising recognition in the last six months, we have again received a lot of material that urgently needs to be processed and published. 

and,

Schmitt: No, pressure from the outside is part of this. But this one-dimensional confrontation with the USA is not what we set out to do. For us it is always about uncovering corruption and abuse of power, wherever it happens -- on the smaller and larger scale -- around the world. 

It appears that "employees" want to expose corruption around the world, Assange seems more intent on highlighting the U.S.'s shortcomings.  I'm not an uncritical supporter of the U.S. but why the slant? Why don't the Russians, French, Polish, etc feel the heat?


More of the same from this article.

The next article is,  TIME's Julian Assange Interview: Full Transcript/Audio.
(I regard time as a less reliable source than Der Spiegel, but reliable still)

JA: Let me just talk about transparency for a moment. It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it's our goal to achieve a more just society. And most of the times, transparency and openness tends to lead in that direction, because abusive plans or behavior get opposed, and so those organizations which tend to commit them are opposed before the plan's implemented, or it's an exposure or something previously done, the organization tends to lose a [inaudible], which is then transferred to another, and then we [inaudible] organization. For the rise of social media, it's quite interesting. When we first started, we thought we would have the analytical work done by bloggers and people who wrote Wikipedia articles and so on. And we thought that was a natural, given that we had lots of quality, important content. Surely it's more interesting to write an article about top-secret Chinese [inaudible] or an internal document from Somalia or secret documents revealing what happened in [inaudible], all of which we published, than it is to simply write a blog about what's on the front page of the New York Times, or about your cat or something. But actually it turns out that that is not at all true. The bulk of the heavy lifting — heavy analytical lifting — that is done with our materials is done by us, and is done by professional journalists we work with and by professional human-rights activists. It is not done by the broader community. However, once the initial lifting is done, once a story becomes a story, becomes a news article, then we start to see community involvement, which digs deeper and provides more perspective. So the social networks tend to be, for us, an amplifier of what we are doing. And also a supply of sources and for us.

That's right. Julian decides what's necessary to achieve our Just society and in collaboration with Journalists feeds it to the proles. The social media merely a mechanism to spread prole feed. He is about controlling information to achieve a "just society". This isn't an orginisation meant to "energize" and empower the people, it's an organisation designed to control the people. Note, the important role the official media gets to play in this. This type of selective reporting to achieve a "just society" has been seen before.

Then there is this article in the Haaretz (Reliable source but left wing.)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Wednesday defended his disclosure of classified U.S. documents by singling out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an example of a world leader who believes the publications will aid global diplomacy. 

"We can see the Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu coming out with a very interesting statement that leaders should speak in public like they do in private whenever they can," Assange told Time Magazine in an interview on Wednesday, days after his online whistleblower published thousands of secret diplomatic cables. 

Look, even Israeli's regard their politicians as corrupt. No matter what your position on Israel, Julian's blessing of Netanyahu is a bit rich. This from one of the leaked cables.

Binyamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, is “elegant and charming” but never keeps his promises, according to a cable from Cairo.

The "corrupt" Americans think him a liar but Julian is pushing him as some kind of fellow traveller.
What gives?

Normally I would regard articles from the Syria Truth as pure tinfoil, but as several commentators have pointed out, damaging cables concerning Israel have been rare. Particularly, comments concerning the recent war in Lebanon against Hezbollah. This is odd, given the enormous interest that the U.S has in Mideast politics. Sometimes what's interesting is not what's in the cables, but what's not.

This article seems to suggest that Assange met with the Israelis in Switzerland and they bought him off. (Use Google translate) Perhaps Assange's desire to negotiate with the U.S. state department was not only based on a desire for harm minimisation. You sort of wonder? It could all be bullshit.

I want to make it perfectly clear that I don't think that Assange is an Israeli agent, rather, he is a "businessman" who is prepared to do deals. I think that had the U.S. state department been a bit more "pragmatic" far fewer cables would have been released.  Maybe this is all unwarranted and my distrust of Mr Assange unfair.

But check out Wikileaks new headquarters.  
Clearly, they're doing it tough.

I think his supporters will be disappointed.

(Note. Any Anti-Semitic comments will be immediately deleted. Fair criticism of Israel is acceptable, but if I feel it crosses the line, it's deleted. No argument will be entered into. I'm quite happy to censor.)

David Hicks Has a Friend.

The majority of my readership hails from the U.S. and given the U.S centric nature of its media, many of my readers would not know who David Hicks is.

A brief bio of the man can be found here.

The pertinent point is that Mr Hicks has admitted that he trained with a muslim militant camp linked with Al Qaeda, fought on their behalf, and was a member of their organization at the time of his capture in Afghanistan. When he was captured, he was a combatant of a proclaimed enemy of the U.S. and by implication, Australia, who is it's ally.

Americans have a chequered history with regard to the treatment of their captured combatants, though in the past their behaviour to prisoners was far better than nearly all the other nations of the world. I imagine the decline in their current treatment of prisoners mirrors the decline in their societal moral standards and the gradual re-acceptance of the use of torture as a legitimate intelligence gathering technique.

I personally feel that captured Al Qaeda, by forsaking the conventional rules of warfare, forsake the right to claim POW status ( and its legal protections). Though this does not mean that I approve of torture of prisoners. However, on the balance of probability, I imagine that that some of the captured Al Qaeda were tortured at Guantanamo and Mr Hicks probably was as well.

As an Australian citizen, I am concerned that an Australian is being mistreated whilst in a U.S. prison but on the other hand I'm appalled that he is in league with the enemies of my country, our allies  and my religion. The moral question then is what should Australia have done upon knowledge that he was captured by the U.S. forces and sent to Guantanamo?

Idiotic right wing commentators in Australia seemed to think that any form of punishment or torture is justified against Al Qaeda members. They fail to understand that torture doesn't only dehumanise the victim, it dehumanises the torturer as well. By accepting the practice of torture, we are corrupting ourselves.

Lefty commentators on the other hand, seem to think that the government should have petitioned more vigorously for the release of Mr Hicks from Guantanamo, as if his membership of Al Qaeda was an irrelevance. Their continual harping for his release showed their total unconcern for his membership of a terrorist organisation. An organisation which tortures, kills and treats prisoners appallingly and pushes its policy of expansion through deliberate non-distinction between civilian and military targets and whose purpose if realised, would trample those very liberties which the Left holds dear. By being a mistreated prisoner of the U.S. he gained moral legitimacy. His willingness to take up arms against the West was ignored, never mind his just deserts.

Our idiot lefty media, even arranged for him to confront the Prime Minister and I suppose the irony was lost on them; championing the man, who, if successful in his aims, would of have ruthlessly suppressed their very freedom of expression. Their idiot glee further proof that most men do not have the common sense to ensure even their own survival.

In my mind the Australian Government were excessive in their concern for Mr Hicks. They pressured the U.S. government for an early trial (he was fist cab off the rank) and argued for his humane treatment. I would have only argued for his humane treatment and kept his in prison till Al Qaeda was defeated. As it turned out, he was transferred to Australia where the predictable legal response occurred. He served just under seven months. The judiciary can be counted on always.

David Hicks is a evil man who was mistreated by the U.S. government, any moral evaluation of Mr Hicks must incorporate both these factors. The deliberate refusal to weight both aspects of his situation is an example of bias. To make him out as some type of martyr is Anti-American or Anti-West bias. It's as simple as that.

So which idiot has now come out in support of David Hicks? That's right Julian Assange. 

Mr Assange, 39, said his treatment by the federal government raised questions about what it meant to be an Australian citizen. ''Are we all to be treated like David Hicks at the first possible opportunity merely so that Australian politicians and diplomats can be invited to the best US embassy cocktail parties?''

That's right, he feels that David Hicks was wronged, which in my mind quite clearly illustrates the direction of Assange's moral compass. Al Qaeda laughs at the idiot West.

More Social Progress.

It's coming to a jurisdiction near you.

And remember if you oppose it, you're a bigot.

And on a another note,

I personally think Julian Assange should be put in prison. With the current tensions in Korea, the release of the these diplomatic cables was probably not in the public interest.

I've always thought the Chinese have had far less influence over the Norks than is commonly believed. I have also always thought that the North Koreans were more a danger to China than to South Korea. If the Norks believe that the Chinese are prepared to "stab them in the back", it's probable that the the Norks may want to aim some of their nukes at China.

A pen and paper analysis shows that North Korea would easily be defeated by China in an all out war. The question is, would China want to go to an all out war with North Korea?  Especially as it has recently modernised after much hard won effort . Modern China is different to Mao's China, and I'm not so sure that China is prepared to loose 3 or 4 cities in order to fight North Korea. North Korea does not need have to have the capacity to destroy China, only enough capacity to deter the Chinese. I mean would G.W Bush have attacked Saddam if Saddam had the proven capacity to nuke Houston? Hmmm.

The North Koreans clearly don't play by the rules and I can imagine several horrible scenarios with regard to North Korea. I've got a sinking feeling that I'm going to be right about this one. I hope I'm wrong.

Oh, and by the way, U.S. document security is a joke.

PC: The Theology

Bruce Charlton has been writing quite a bit on the subject of PC. On his post, Pure Abstract Altruism: the underlying ideal principle of political correctness he writes:

The argument in brief:

Political correctness is a logical extension of a this-worldly (secular) and materialist (not spiritual) perspective of pure abstract altruism - untainted by personal feelings.

In other words, PC aims at the attainment of altruism in this world.

And the altruism aimed at is abstract - not the altruism of individuals. 

PC aims at the submission of the (inevitably selfish) individual to abstract systems of pure altruism.

Submission, ideally, even unto the destruction and death of everything that is valued. The test of ultimate sincerity. 

I would argue that he is close to an understanding the symptoms of the phenomenon, he in the end does not understand the nature of the disease.  PC can't be reduced to one overriding principle, instead it is a convergent product of several human and cultural influences. Still, if one had to had to identify the big idea behind PC, it is not altruism but its antecedent, Utopianism. PC altruism is directed towards achieving its Utopian vision.

Religion told men that heaven was unable to be achieved on earth, Socialism told them that they could do it. With the demise of religion, Socialism's Utopianism, if not Socialism itself , has assumed the moral imperative in modern "ethical" Western societies.  I think this is an important point to recognise as it reflected a fundamental shift in Western man's understanding of the cause of problems in the world. Christian religion, particularly the doctrine of original sin, placed the locus of evil in our world squarely in the hearts of men. The implication of the doctrine of original sin implied that there never was going to be a perfect world since man was imperfectable. Lurking in the heart of every man was the capacity to go bad.

With the effective demise of religion, several ideas converged to replace man's metaphysical understanding of evil and the problem of suffering in this world. These were:

1) Atheism which mainly came about as a consequence of strict empiricism and from which the denial of any transcendental value originates.
2) The idea of scientific progress. The spectacular advances of science led weak minds to believe that every problem was solvable with this method .
3) Socialism, with its own version of original sin, "structuralism". Now socialism taught that the inequities of this earth were due to power structures which exploited one group for the benefit of another.  Hence the PC crowd tend to view the world within this context. They view the world as comprising  of victims, oppressors and "good people". The "good people" being the elect, those building the better world.
4) Socialistic understanding of social pathology. According to socialism, evil was the result of "oppressive" power structures which placed one group above the others in an exploitative relationship. Socialism tends to view life within a zero-sum frame.
5) Consequently "heaven on earth" could only be achieve by the elimination of exploitative structures.
6) Furthermore, Socialism taught that man's misery was due deficiencies in his environment and that with rectification of his educational and material means, he would become perfectible.

In effect, PC is the secular religion of materialistic Utopianism.  This religion's most toxic component however is its understanding of evil; structuralism. It's this understanding of "evil" that motivates the most destructive aspects of PC. Anything that claims that it is better than anything else is seen to be an instrument of oppression as it is attempting to introduce a "hierarchical structure". Any claim that man is better than women, is oppression. Any claims that white is better than black is oppression. Any "exclusion" is oppression. Any claim to absolute truth is an oppressive mechanism. What PC is aiming at is the elimination of any hierarchical structures (except its own).  It's only when all hierarchy is destroyed will a new age of universal happiness bloom.

It is why PC is such a difficult to recognise (and kill) Hydra. People think it is about feminism, racism, economic socialism and so on. Where in reality its about destroying any system of values (apart from its own) that can show that A is better than B.  It's inimical to Christianity since Christianity aggressively asserts there is a good and a bad.

According to the PC crowd, the people who share their view clearly "get it". Any one who does not get with the program is clearly a reactionary and appropriate target of censure or opprobrium.(The reaction is dependant on the host culture. In North Korea you get shot, in Sweden you get counseling) Anyone who puts forward that A is better than B is clearly a racist, sexist, homophobe, evil capitalist and so on. So like all religions PC has its "saved" and its "damned".

Curiously, the democratic idea is in "synch" with the PC program. While democracy is not essential to PC, it does condition men to moral relativism by asserting that all men are equal. Everyone's "lifestyle" choices are the same.

A Traditional View of Conjugal Relations.

It's all meant to be a bit of a joke, but I suspect that it was close to the truth for "respectable" people.

Sometimes it's Hard to be Pope.

As a conservative Catholic, I've been quite intrigued by the latest comments by the Pope on the use of condoms in the prevention of AIDS. Personally, I think the comments were both nuanced and overdue. The Catholic Church has received a lot of heat with regard to the subject, especially with respect to the AIDS epidemic in Africa and it's opponents frequently beat it over the head with the issue. Despite the Left wing's positive reporting on the matter, the reality is--at least in my mind--that there is nothing doctrinally new in his statements. Rather what I detect is a shift away from traditionalism to what I would call doctrinalism, applying our understanding of the faith(doctrine) to current circumstances rather than apply what previous men thought about the faith to current circumstances. There is a difference.


The Pope has not "approved" the use of condoms, rather he has simply stated that the use of them in the context of where deadly infection would be spread by the sexual act, is a lesser sin than knowingly not using a condom and infecting the other person. And a lesser sin is not a virtue. However by "considering" the welfare of another person, the Pope concedes that the "act" of using a condom shows that person may be developing the rude beginnings  of a moral conscience; something which may grow over time. Really there is nothing new over here and I've always thought that this is the way that the Church should of approached the whole AIDS in Africa issue.

What has been interesting is the public commentary with regard to the issue. The Left Wing Press has generally been highly supportive of the Pope. It's interesting to note that even the photographs used in the story have been more flattering than usual. As usual the "open minded" left wing press are happy to lay on the charm when the Pope is in "sync" with their views but the love ends soon as there is disagreement. The more interesting response has been from the very traditionalist Catholic community. The hard core Catholics seem to be having some problems with the comments. What's interesting with regard to the Conservative criticism is their arguments resemble the arguments Liberals use when dissing papal Authority.  The same guys who hold a fairly hard line with regard to Papal authority seem to have a bit of a hard time with it when the Pope says something they don't want to hear.

That's the problem with the Papacy, The liberals think you're too hard, and the trads think that you're too soft. Sometimes it's hard to be Pope.

On PC motivation

Bruce Charlton has recently been contemplating the phenomenon of PC.   I'm rather lukewarm on Mr Charlton, especially since he is a bit negative on my "homie", and especially as he hasn't posted several of the comments I have made on his site. But hey, his blog, his rules. I'll live.

He is close (but not there yet) to a good understanding of the PC phenomenon and he does have some valuable insights. He has put up a rather good post which conservative thinkers need to take heed of.  Why is political correctness utterly immune to evidence is a very good post. I think the pertinent quote from that post is this one:

My point is that political correctness has now reached such a level of abstraction that no evidence could ever challenge it. Reform is impossible, on principle.

This means that those who oppose political correctness should not waste time and energy on rational argument with people who are truly PC.

There is no way into the system of sincere PC, no possibility of modifying or moderating it - merely of delaying it.

Of course, political correctness will destroy itself, but in doing so it will inflict damage upon its host societies - the scale of which damage increases with every passing year. 

I think Charlton is absolutely correct,  there is no point in arguing with the PC crowd as they simply do not admit any evidence which will falsify their world view.  My interest is why and what does this mean for conservatives?


Our world is full of injustices and miseries. The desire to rid the world of them is laudable and noble. Utopianism is a desire to make the world a better place, and it's from this messianic Utopianism that the PC crowd get their sense of moral superiority. They are always on the "side of angels" and therefore better than the "non-believers".  It should not be underestimated of just how powerful a motivant is this sense of belonging to a Utopian creating movement is. As Orwell repeatedly reminds us, the best fighters for socialism weren't the apparatchiks, but the men who honestly believed they were building a better world.

One of the great themes of the end of the Belle Epoque was the sense of "boredom" amongst the youth. When World War 1 erupted, men suddenly had a purpose to their lives. Several commentators on Fukuyama's End of History expressed regret that their were no more enemies left to battle. I sometimes wonder whether the continual allure of Utopianism is because and women generally lead boring lives. It is an escape from the monotony and gives them a sense of meaning. Amongst these individuals, any attack on the "Utopian vision" is not just a logical refutation of the dream, but a negation of self worth and hence there is a powerful incentive to counter arguments or outright refusal to acknowledge the error.


The other operating factor at play here amongst the more intelligent PC crowd is their innate sense of intellectual superiority and subsequent pleasure in themselves. This sense of superiority is expressed as a dismissal of any "inferior" opinions. These individuals latch onto socialism for the same reason that tradesmen and the peasantry do, it's a simple idea for simple men.  It's ready made for the credulous and half-educated, particularly those with "book-smarts" as opposed to "street-smarts". And by half educated, I mean credentialed as opposed to "educated". There is a big difference between the two and it's an important distinction. Many of our universities are nothing more than colleges of advanced technical training and as such our universities are designed around producing skilled thinkers graduates, not thinkers. The effect in a left wing academic environment is that the skilled technicians leave with left wing views  under the impression that they are "educated", and hence intellectually superior to the proles. Where in fact the prole may be less skilled but is perhaps more "real world educated" than the university graduate.

This combined sense of messianic utopianism and intellectual superiority are probably the most common motivant factors in the high caste PC crowd.  This "priest caste " is so sure of its intellectual superiority and so sure of the moral rightness of its vision that any attempt to dissuade them is going to fail. I agree with Charlton, there is no point, it's a waste of time. The conservative movement needs to circle the wagons, not negotiate with the scalpers.

Give Me the Child at 7 and I will..............

Modern social policy reaching it zenith.

Understatement of the day.

If I’m going to do it, Mum would rather I did it at home with her or at a house party with friends, than go down the park like some chav,’ says Sophie.

That's right, a proper young lady has standards.

England, Oh England

Even in enmity past admired
Thy glory has departed
The fair rose is a whore.

Orwell On the Intellectual Mechanisms of PC

It is a shame that Orwell is appreciated as a great writer instead of a profound cognitive scientist. But that's the danger of being a good writer;  people enjoy your prose instead of grasping your ideas. Orwell is the "go to" man for an understanding of the mob cognitive mechanism and the "intellectualism" of the Left.

In my post, Dalrymple on Sentimentality I wrote:

In some instances their refusal to "see" what they are doing is a product of habituated thought-filtering, but most of them are just stupid.  Not stupid enough to be what Catholic theologians would call "invincibly ignorant", and therefore morally inculpable,  rather men and women who can't think past the obvious. Essentially, they are capable of first order thought, thoughts which stop when they feel right about a solution.  The best (and therefore least culpable) simply cannot comprehend how something that feels so intuitively right is so utterly wrong. The worst, suspect that they are wrong but fear of psychic pain stops them from pursuing their thoughts. Their intellect is constrained by their feelings. They can't think past the pain and hate those who make them do it. 

Well it appears that Orwell recognised the phenomenon as well.  He even gave it a name, Crimestop. According the Orwell the characteristics of Crimestop were:

"The faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. In short....protective stupidity."

It needs to be understood that phenomenon is observed amongst the unthinking right as well and is a characteristic of individuals who prefer an ideology (of any persuasion) over the truth. The cognitive mechanism at play here is a preference of an ideology above reality. The practical operation of the mechanism results in either reality avoidance or reality suppression when it challenges ideology.  That's why PC is a form of cognitive censorship, a policing of thoughts.

It's why the HBD crowd (I'm a lukewarm supporter) is so despised on the left. Whilst the Left can dismiss the religious, attributing to them superstitious beliefs and intellectual stupidity the HBD crowd are far harder to cognitively dismiss. Being atheists, the HBD crowd argue with the Left on the Left's term's, i.e through secular methods.  It's the ugly head of reality prodding the PC conscience.

Hat tip, Parapundit.

Prole Feed.

I'm no foodie. Unlike many hipsters and gourmets I find excessive fussiness in food off putting. On the other hand, I find most junk food revolting. It's not that I have anything against junk food, it's just it tastes bad and that with a little bit of effort, home cooking clearly surpasses it in flavour. That doesn't mean that I don't eat junk. If I'm running late or its been a psychologically exhausting day I'll order some takeaway or gets something from Mc Donalds.

I think the whole "healthy eating" thing is a bit overblown, the worst fanatics approach a meal like an industrial chemist, analysing it for its chemical composition. I like to enjoy my food, watch my portions and have the occasional indiscretion. As they say, everything in moderation.

With that in mind, I'd like to say that I'm a great fan of Jamie Oliver. I find his whole approach to food appealing. He's not to fussy, his flavours are great and most of his recipes can be fit into a busy family schedule.  He seems cognisant that most families are time pressured and food has to taste in a way that appeals to the whole family. I have nearly all his books and my kids by and large like his meals.

I applaud his school dinners project and its been a fascinating to see what the public response to it has been. Conservative commentators should study the phenomena as it exposes what I think are the weak spots in the modern conceptions of democracy and mainstream conservatisms lauding of the "common man"

For those who are unaware, the Oliver initiated the  school dinners program after witnessing first hand the appalling "junk" that British kids were fed at school. His aim was to improve the nutrition of kids at school (and help the fight against obesity) by offering more healthy and flavoursome choices. Oliver was not attempting to force some weird vegan diet on the children, "look kids dried soy, yummy", rather he wanted them to stop eating rubbish continuously. Given what we know about nutrition you would imagine that he would be lauded for his efforts. Not so.

If you imagine that the prole class are just like you and I only just a bit poorer , you're sadly mistaken.

While he was given lots of support by government officials and the media, he was reviled by the people he was intending to help. In fact his school dinners program has failed  in the U.K. and he was pilloried in the U.S. His harshest critics being the proles and the libertarians.

What's going on here?

Even if you don't agree with what Oliver serves up, you've got to agree that it is better than most of the rubbish that children are fed at school. So why is he on the receiving end of so much heat? Why are the very people he is trying to help his harshest critics?

The modern American democratic model, the model upon which most of the modern Western states are based on, is premised on the assumption that the choice that the public makes is inherently good.  Yet how legitimate is a democracy when it starts to make objectively bad decisions? Most of my middle class friends stared in horror at the Jamie Oliver episodes, aghast at the pig ignorance of the parents and children who demanded it as their "right", to eat whatever they wanted and not to be coerced into eating reasonably healthy food. How can people be so stupid? How is it that they want to fight for the right to destroy themselves?

Conservative commentators, especially those with a belief in universal democracy and hatred of "elites" should study this phenomena closely. While our current "elites" are rotten, the prole class is not much better. Disestablishment of our governing class is unlikely to give birth to a world of classicism and high art, instead a dictatorship of the capitalist proletariat is likely to see a "Burger King on every corner" and free porn on every TV.

Many conservative commentators believe that the "elites" are responsible for the mess that the West is in at the moment. They fail to see the elephant in the room. The West is rotting from the top and the bottom.

An insistence on totally free market economics and the legitimacy of consumer choice in a moral vacuum results in a market that reflects the value of the lowest common denominator. The dumbing and coarsening down of mainstream culture is not a product of elite conspiracy, more an end result of proletarian demand in capitalistic culture.  Jamie's school dinners project is not failing because of elite conspiracy, it's because the proles won't eat his food. They prefer to pay for Mc Donalds. Pearls before swine.

Dalrymple on Sentimentality.

Political Correctness has many causes, but at its core, it is the elevation of sentimentality as a legitimate end of actions. What matters is not being good but acting to "feel" good.  It is the real world manifestation of the philosophy of Utilitarianism. Dalrymple gets to the heart of the matter:

Sentimentality is hardness of heart, or even contempt, masquerading as feeling. It is to sympathy what incontinence is to urination (except, of course, that it is voluntary, and is vastly more destructive). It is mental and emotional laziness, a refusal to discipline the gratifying glow of self-regard by deeper reflection. It has rotted us through and through; it is the reason why it is necessary to remind our rulers that the protection of the population from crime is not an optional extra for the state once it has paid for the sex-change operations of those who want them, etc, but comes very close to the state’s whole raison d’être, and that rulers who fail in this regard are no longer legitimate, but parasites upon the body politic.

Where I disagree with Dalrymple is in the comment "a refusal to discipline the gratifying glow of self regard". That comment would seem to imply that many of PC are conscious of what they are doing, that they are fully aware of what they are doing. They are not. Many of the PC crowd are "nice" well mannered people who are "concerned" about others. Their motives are not malign and they are capable of making great sacrifices for their cause. They are not consciously plotting evil, rather they are hoping in their own eyes to build a better world.

In some instances their refusal to "see" what they are doing is a product of habituated thought-filtering, but most of them are just stupid.  Not stupid enough to be what Catholic theologians would call "invincibly ignorant", and therefore morally inculpable,  rather men and women who can't think past the obvious. Essentially, they are capable of first order thought, thoughts which stop when they feel right about a solution.  The best (and therefore least culpable) simply cannot comprehend how something that feels so intuitively right is so utterly wrong. The worst, suspect that they are wrong but fear of psychic pain stops them from pursuing their thoughts. Their intellect is constrained by their feelings. They can't think past the pain and hate those who make them do it.