The dastardly downsizer of Doncaster

  While the British National Party and the UKIP have been raising alarm bells in Britain’s left-of-centre media, the English Democrats have been raising a fair of bit controversy in the northern English town of Doncaster.

Recently elected Mayor Peter Davies, has introduced a series of politically incorrect cost-cutting measures which would make Thatcher blush with their audacity.

 Not surprisingly, his left wing opponents aren’t happy.

Switzerland’s conservative populist response to Islam

 Yes, the Swiss have finally bitten the bullet and become the first western European country to restrict the building of Muslim minarets.

For those of us in other parts of the Western world we now finally get to see what happens when there is a genuine conservative response to creeping Islamisation – will there be an increase in extremism, as the left and the progressive Muslims claim, or will the threat of a Muslim backlash turn out (hopefully) to be a damp fizzer?

The Islamists claim the terrorist actions against the U.S, Spain and Britain were a reaction to Anglo-American actions in the Muslim world, particularly the occupation of Saudi Arabia by the United States, and that the West has nothing to fear from Islam if it doesn’t invade Muslim countries. This sounds like a reasonable deal, but what about the behaviour of Muslim minorities in western and non-western countries that haven’t invaded Muslim countries. Why are Muslims rioting in France or causing insurections in India and Thailand if these countries aren’t interfering in the Middle East?

Like western conservatives and nationalists, the Islamists are opposed to the liberal new world order, but unlike western nationalists and conservatives they argue the way to oppose the NWO is to replace it with an ‘Islamic new world order.’ If that means trying to take over peaceful western countries with alien Muslim values then who can blame these countries for trying to defend themselves?

As well as giving us a chance to see how Muslims react to conservative western policies, if may also put pressure on the Muslim world to put nation-building ahead of international terrorism and agitation. If communist China can put nationalism ahead of globalist Marxist subversion, and Central Asia can put nation-building over supporting the Islamic Jihad, then perhaps more of the rest of the Muslim world can be influenced in a more nationalistic (ie, nation-state respecting) direction also.

Oh, and the sticky beaks at the UN, have quickly stuck their noses into Switzerland’s democratic business, remind me again why this organisation deserves western tax dollars?

Some middlebrow thoughts on the ‘conservative metal’ debate

A while back Taki’s Magazine ran an article from a contemporary heavy metal music fan who claimed that niche heavy metal genres such as ‘black metal,’ folk metal and ‘viking metal’ convey conservative ideas and values appealing to traditional conservatives and other alternative right wingers. Several commentators then wrote critical commentaries dismissing the idea that their was anything conservative about heavy metal music without providing any real intellectual justification for their claims.

Simply to dismiss heavy metal music as un-conservative just because it is loud and heavy, and people over 30 don’t like that kind of stuff, isn’t really a very good argument. After all there are plenty of heavy classical composers like Shostakovich and Prokofiev, who are recognised by conservative music critics as serious musicians. Similarly, a lot of these generation Y metal fans do seem to be a bit more sophisticated that the generation X hard rock fans of the 1980s. These days a heavy metal fan is more likely to be a web designer listening to Opeth on his i-pod than a panel beater named Shane in a Guns n’ Roses t-shirt.

 To my mind the difference between classical music and modern heavy metal, isn’t really the heaviness factor or even necessarily the sophistication factor, but the fact that heavy classical music still has a melodic sensibility not found in extreme heavy metal. This lack of melody is a crucial factor because music because the key role of art in conservative terms is that it should reflect beauty, and heavy metal which is focused around monster vocals, roughly distorted guitars and ridiculously fast drumming can’t really convey much of a sense of beauty.

In terms of popular rock and pop music the idea of art of beauty was arguably most popular during progressive rock era of the late 1960s and ealy 70s, with hit songs like Procol Harum’s Lighter Shade of Pale and The Moody Blues’ ‘Nights in White Satin’ displaying an intense melodic sound rarely found in the beat band songs of the early 60s, or the commercial rock of the 1980s. Indeed, in the early 1970s it apparently wasn’t uncommon for rock fans to make comments like, ‘if  Wagner were alive today, he’d be playing with King Crimson’ and such like.

Admittedly, the lyrics of ‘viking metal,’ may well be more right-wing than that of the left -liberal baby boomer music of the early 70s, but popular music is primarily judged by the overall sound of the music and the image of its practioners rather than a close analysis of the political orientation of its lyrics.

Similarly, just because a musical style adheres to the ‘art as beauty ‘principle doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good, and there’s plenty of both classical and popular music which is melodic and well-intentioned, but cheesy, overblown and uninspired. The popular ‘AOR’ bands of the late 1970s and 1980s (Air Supply, Asia, later Genesis etc) provide a good example of popular music following the art as beauty principle in a half-arsed and commercial and manner and floundering badly.

Globally illiterate globalists

 It’s interesting how globalist advocates of carbon taxes fail to take into account how internationally interdependent global trade is today and how this impacts on emissions of greenhouse gases.

In New Zealand’s case nearly half its emissions come from methane emission in agriculture (ie, farm animals), and over 90 percent of the country’s agricultural production is exported. Therefore to accurately assess New Zealand’s methane emissions it’s necessary to detract the emissions that other countries would have had to emit if they were to produce out exports locally instead of importing them.

It’s also likely that if they had to produce them locally, they would generated greater emissions doing so, as New Zealand’s agriculture isn’t very energy-intensive by the standards of most industrialised countries. This failure to take account of the big picture, reminds me of the local environmentalists who believe the Tiwai aluminium smelter should be closed down to save electricity, despite the fact that it is far more energy efficient than most other alumium smelters in the Pacific region and would probably be replaced by a dirtier plant in a developing country.

Feminism and the family in New Zealand

 Recently I was on Google looking for statements about family formation by former PM Helen Clark. Although I didn’t find much, I did come across a good book on family-related issues called The Family in the New Millenium Strenghtening the family ( About half the book is available online in PDF form).

 This international collection of articles issues deals with the issue of family formation from a conservative perspective and includes an excellent chapter on second wave feminism in New Zealand and its impact on the family (Chapter 12, ‘New Zealand – The First Feminist Nation’ by Alexis Stuart).

According to the author of the article, 80 percent of women in New Zealand still put family formation ahead of a career, yet the feminists in New Zealand primarily focuses on issues relevant to career women like equal pay and the so-called glass ceiling in the corporate sector. If the government wants to help the majority of women who put family formation over careers, then it should turn its attention to more pervasive issues like housing affordability and student debt rather than worrying about exaggerated claims of pay inequality in white collar work, which only affect a minority of women.

The Clash of Civilizations or the Suicide of the West?

“Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.” Arnold Toynbee

“A great civilization is not destroyed from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” Will Durant

“Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.”
—James Burnham, Suicide of the West, p. 25

 

Samuel P. Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations?” which appeared in Foreign Affairs in Summer 1993, is considered to be one of the most important works on the Post-Cold War world situation. Contrary to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992), Huntington did not prognosticate that the world would accept liberal democracy and thus bring conflict, and hence history, to an end. Obviously, even if the world should end tomorrow, 9/11 and the events that followed would give the lie to Fukuyama’s thesis: the world has not reached a “consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government.” In the above mentioned essay, Huntington argued that the global conflicts of the future will not be between ideologies, but rather between cultures, or civilizations. He delineated the following cultures in his analysis: “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African civilization.” Several of his candidates represent religions (Confucian, Islamic, Hindu, Orthodox), while the rest represent ethnic or geographical entities, with the exception of the West, which includes not only Europe, but those areas of the world that were formerly colonized by Europe and continue to identify as descendents of European civilization. It is to Huntington’s credit that he recognized the future importance of Western-Islamic conflicts despite that fact that the nations of Islam do not include a major, central world power, and lack both dominant economic and military power, the major exception being their control of petroleum reserves. Huntington stated: “Muslims increasingly see America as their enemy. If that is a fate Americans cannot avoid, their only alternative is to accept it and to take measures necessary to cope with it.” (Remember, Huntington wrote his essay in 1993.)

Kiwi attractiveness (or lack of)

Stuff reports that a European dating website has rated New Zealand men as more attractive than kiwi women.

Beautifulpeople.com, which claims it only allows beautiful people to join, says only 17 percent of New Zealand women appliants have been accepted, while 33 percent of Kiwi men have successfully joined. This compares with 20 percent of Australian males and 21 percent of Australian females. The sample size is reasonably large, with more than 4900 New Zealanders having applied to join the site, and 1274 being accepted.

Thinking about this finding, reminded me about Steve Sailer’s post about why human evolution hasn’t weeded out ugly people – different views between the sexes about what constitutes attractiveness in the opposite sex. Big bones and a square jaw for example, may be considered attractive in a welll-toned male, but less so in a female. Hence New Zealand, with its burly Anglo-Celtic farming stock and big-boned Polynesians, may well turn out more attractive-looking males than females.

By contrast, Australia, with fewer Polynesians and more Latin and Eastern European immigrants, probably has a slightly higher proportion of lightly-built, fine-featured women (perhaps another reason why a lot of New Zealand males have migrated across the Tasman?).

A difficulty with this theory though, is that some groups may be coming across as less attractive, because they have an inflated opinion of their own attractiveness. A cursory look at your average dating site will tell you that most average looking people describe themselves as attractive and most relatively attractive people describe themselves as highly attractive. It could be the case then, that New Zealand males are less likely to consider themselves attractive than New Zealand females, resulting in a lower rejection rate.

According to the site, the lowest rejection rates are for Scandinavian countries (65 percent of Swedish men were accepted and 76 percent of Norwegian women) which are also known for relatively high levels of introversion and modesty.

Some of the comments on the Stuff site are quite interesting, with a number of Kiwi males complaining about a lack of  femininity and style among young New Zealand women.

Economic blast from the past

 Russia’s post-communist economy has received a fair amount of negative labels from mainstream Western observers, from ‘crony capitalism’ to ‘anarcho-capitalism,’ and ‘the Wild East.’

Russian blogger Matt Rodina however says his country’s system is basically just good old fashioned mercantilism – the economic system that used to be dominant in the West until the mid 19th Century. He argues that the economic system in Russia is working relatively well, but western observers deride it because it represents a challenge to the reigning free-market economic orthodoxy supported by the U.S and Great Britain.

Rodina points out that one of the leading intellectual adcovates of mercantilism, Philipp von Hornick, described the key principles of this protectionist economic system, way back in the late 1600s – nearly a hundred years before the publication of Adam Smith’s treatise on free-trade, The Wealth of Nations.

In the 20th Century, mercantilism’s popularity has shifted from West to East, as former supporters like the United States and Germany have shifted to a more liberal economic model based on promoting free trade and attracting foreign investment. Subsequently, mercantilism’s main supporters today are East Asian nations like Japan and Korea, with China opting for a third way combining laissez-faire development zones with state support for industry.

 In contrast to neoliberal capitalism, mercantilism pays little regard to economic transparency, which is both a strength and a disadvantage. The lack of transparency tends to encourage higher sayings rates and less dependence on foreign capital, but also leads to higher levels of corruption and secrecy.

The downside of Russia’s secretive economy was bought into focus a few months back with the calamitious disaster at one of the country’s biggest hydro-electric power stations, which has left over 60 people dead and western observers wondering what other cock-ups the Russian government may be trying to sweep under the carpet.

In comparison to protectionist states like Russia, economically neoliberal countries like New Zealand tend to have very low rates of corruption, and receive highly favorable coverage in the international business media. The downside of this openess and transparency though, is a low savings rate, lack of freedom in economic decision making, and ongoing balance of payment problems from a hollowed-out industrial sector.

Over the next few decades it’s going to be interesting to see whether mercantilism’s emphasis on the long-term health of the national economy, wins out over the short term focus on individual prosperity that characterises contemporary western capitalism.

The myth of the egalitarian Nietzsche

Recently somebody gave me one of those budget books of famous quotations, in this case one by Nietzsche. The difficult nature of many of the quotations in the book got me thinking about what a complex and idiosyncratic thinker this guy is. Give someone a book of quotations from say, Marx or Darwin, and they would have a reasonable idea about all their key ideas, but give them some elementary book on Nietzsche, and they may well end up knowing even less than when they started.

Admittedly, I probably just as confused about many aspects of Nietzsche as most moderately intelligent people who’ve read a few bits and pieces of his writings, but one thing I do feel pretty confident about is that he wasn’t an egalitarian.  Despite the mountain of clues to indicate that Nietzsche was an unsentimental elitist, many left-liberal intellectuals on the one hand, and Christian traditionalists on the other, have gone to implausibe and convoluted lengths to claim that he was some sort of radical egalitarian leftist.

The attempt by the religious right to paint Neitzsche as an egalitarian leftist seems to be based on the logic that because, he’s anti-Christian, he must be opposed to traditional social orders, and ideas like Medieval man’s equivalent of the Bell-Curve, the ‘chain of being.’ However, Nietzsche’s anti-Christian views weren’t, as he is keen to point out, based on egalitarianism, but on classical elitism, specifically the idea that Christianity is an impediment to the strong and successful with its idea that ‘the weak shall inherit the earth.’

The left-wing argument that Neitzsche was a progressive egalitarian in even more inplausible, and seems to be based on nothing more than the snobbish idea that because he was anti-Christian and highly intelligent, then their must be something deeply left-wing and progressive about him. The modern left seems to be attached to salvaging Nietzsche because failing to do so would be to admit that it’s actually possible for an intelligent and innovative thinker to be a right-winger.

 Just because Neitzsche was an elitist though, doesn’t mean he was much of a traditional conservative. According to Cate, there was much in his anti-sentimental thinking to appeal to the Fascists and revolutionary conservatives of the 1920s and 30s. Like today’s pagan nationalists for example, he believed that Christianity was an exotic and destructive import from the Near-East that needed cleansing from the West. However, there are also a lot of ideas in Nietzsche’s thinking that might appeal to right liberal technocrats. For example, he was very fond of Napoleon and was a strong supporter of the idea of uniting Europe into a political and economic federation with a rational, technocratic government.

Again though, just because he believed in rational leadership and large-scale confederations doesn’t mean he was a colour-blind internationalist in the modern mould. According to descriptions of Nietzsche’s views of international politics, he is perhaps best described as a civilisationist who believed in race-mixing, free trade and international governance, but only as far as the continental level.  Helping the improverished third world through the UN and Christian aid agencies for example, would have been seen as decadent sentimentality, unworthy of what he considered great European leaders like Napoleon ane Julius Caesar.

Among modern political movements, the most  Nietzschian-like would probably be the (now largely defunct) U.S. Paleoconservatives, and among modern thinkers, Nietzsche views seemed to be echoed in some of the ideas of Samuel Huntington, John Gray and Murray Rothbard.

It’s the Culture, Stupid!

I had planned to write an article called “It’s the Culture, Stupid!” not because I enjoy calling people stupid, but because, although it seems the next election might be a replay of the Clinton era “It’s the economy, stupid!” campaign, on a deeper level it’s really about the culture. In other words, with the media, schools, and universities dominated by Marxists and fellow leftists, how can conservatives and libertarians even get the message out that our Keynsian economic policies of out of control government spending will not get us out of this economic crisis? These policies are only making things worse. But Tom Piatak in an article reviewing Paul Weyrich’s and William Lind’s The Next Conservatism in the November issue of Chronicles magazine has beat me to the punch. However, I will soldier on and stick to my thesis: yes, it is the culture and it is the economy, but if we don’t fix the culture, the economy will eventually self-destruct anyway. Nevertheless, events have determined that we may have to deal with the economy first.