Friday, December 27, 2013

What isTolerance

Harriet (3,243 comments) says: 

“…….“We’re Getting More Tolerant”
The problem is that too many posters here don’t see this as good news….”
And why on earth would we Watty:
“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” – Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)
Tolerance isn’t productive. It’s statism for the current generations and degenerative for the next. It’s not a standard, a value[as it holds evrything to the same value] a moral, or even a hope. Tolerance is crap. Immature crap.
It’s for fucken dreamers. Tolerance is ‘utopia’ – where busy bodies in every crook and nanny of society run around telling other people how to behave so they don’t ever ever offend someone.
That can’t end well, but then making sausage meat out of humans never did. :cool:

wat dabney (3,149 comments) says: 

Harriet,
You are very confused.
Toleration has nothing inherently to do with the state, it simply means allowing others to pursue their own happiness according to their own lights.
Harriet (3,243 comments) says: 
“……Harriet,…..You are very confused…………Toleration has nothing inherently to do with the state, it simply means allowing others to pursue their own happiness according to their own lights…..”
No I’m not.
And stop talking shit. Most drug addicts, and homosexuals too for that matter, could hardly define ‘happiness’ much beyond that of ‘addiction’! :cool:
Anyway, gays got the government to steel from hetrosexuals the most important hetrosexual relationship title that they had: Marriage.
Now it doesn’t exist at all as a hetrosexual title, but a homo/hetrosexual relationship title. The dismanteling of the ‘recognition of an intergenerational pillar that is the foundation of all societies. A biological matter.’.
And all done in the name of tolerance, or in truth, the ‘emotional word ‘equality’.
You are very confused. And the 120 or so in Wellington who voted for it.
Fletch (5,304 comments) says: 
“We’re Getting More Tolerant”
That really just means we are getting so apathetic that we don’t stand for anything.
What does it mean to be tolerant or to tolerate something? It means to put up with it. Tolerate your neighbour’s loud music, or tolerate the heat. Tolerate the perversities of your neighbour’s lifestyle – better that than confrontation. The thing is, society is so “tolerant” now that we tolerate perversity rather than kick up a fuss where we should. And the tolerance only goes one way – look at what happened to Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson. You’re tolerant as long as you toe the liberal line.
Where are the people tolerant of the Christian lifestyle?
Along with that goes the statistic about less wars. Well, of course! If the West does not stand up for it’s beliefs and traditions, if it bends over backward in submission, of course there will be more ‘peace’ and less war. Even militant Islam believes in peace – once the world is under Sharia law and the infidels and been swayed or suppressed. The same kind of ‘peace’ that North Korea has – the same kind of peace under any dictator.
Nukuleka (42 comments) says: 
wat dabney:
“it simply means allowing others to pursue their own happiness according to their own lights.”
This presumably includes pedophiles, rapists etc
‘Tolerance’ is a warm fuzzy word that means absolutely nowt.
wat dabney (3,149 comments) says: 
Harriet,
The gays stole marriage from straight people?
Do you realise just how stupid you reveal yourself to be with such laughable rants?
Harriet (3,243 comments) says: 
“…..The gays stole marriage from straight people?
……Do you realise just how stupid you reveal yourself to be with such laughable rants?…”
I never said that. And no, it’s not stupid or a rant. It is fact.
I said “the gays got the government to steel the Marriage label off straight people.”
They never asked us. Nearly all said no anyway at the thought of it. They didn’t give us anything in return for taking it.
We don’t have our hetrosexual title anymore. It no longer exists. The government simply took the title off us.
Yes – most people would call it stealing.
-----------
“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair…the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” ― Dorothy L. Sayers

People who are tolerant deny what is good, best and truthful. 


Thursday, December 26, 2013

Is this the truth of Sweden's Finances? ?

http://mises.org/daily/6619/How-Government-Cutbacks-Ended-Swedens-Great-Depression

How Government Cutbacks Ended Sweden’s Great Depression

Mises Daily: Wednesday, December 25, 2013 by 
A
A

During the recent financial crisis, Sweden has emerged as one of very few financially sound economies. The country’s strong position, setting it apart from most Western nations, makes it an interesting example of what could — or should — have been done. Indeed, Paul Krugman, the former economist and Nobel Prize laureate, has repeatedly pointed approvingly at how the Swedes handled their depression in the early 1990s as the reason for their recent success. Specifically, he notes the nationalization of some banks at the time of the crisis. While he misses the point by focusing exclusively on a narrow selection of short-term measures rather than longer-term changes, as is the hallmark of a Keynesian, Krugman is right that Sweden has done some things right.
In September of 1992 the Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, raised the interest rate to 500 percent in a vain attempt to save the fixed exchange rate of the Swedish krona (Sweden’s currency). This drastic measure was taken in conjunction with large spending cuts and tax increases to address the free-fall of the nation’s economy. The economic meltdown was the culmination of two full decades of decline, and it fundamentally changed the political situation in Sweden.
Since 1992, Sweden has, across the board, seen consistent government cutbacks while increasing restrictions on welfare policies, deregulating markets, and privatizing former government monopolies. The country has instituted an overall new incentive structure in society making it more favorable to work. The national debt tumbled from almost 80 percent of GDP in 1995 to only 35 percent in 2010.
In other words, Sweden successfully rolled back its unsustainable but world-renowned welfare state. Despite Krugman’s wishful thinking, this is the real reason for Sweden’s success in riding out the present financial crisis.
The Rise and Fall of the Welfare State
Sweden experienced a century of high economic growth from approximately 1870 to 1970, which literally made one of Europe’s poorest countries into the world’s fourth-richest. The first half of this period of growth was marked by extensive free-market reform, and the latter half is notable for Sweden’s staying out of both world wars and thus benefiting from intact industrial infrastructure when the rest of Europe lay in ruins. While a welfare state was established and expanded during the post-war period, it was generally built around capitalist institutions and therefore had limited impact on economic growth.
But the political situation changed. The 1970s and 1980s saw a welfare state run amok with a greatly expanded scope with new government benefits, the introduction of very rigid labor market regulations, active propping up of stagnating sectors of the economy, and drastic increases in tax rates with some marginal rates in excess of 100 percent. In an attempt to fully nationalize the economy, löntagarfonder (“employees’ funds”) were instituted in 1983 to “reinvest” private companies’ profits in stock ownership and to be administered by the national labor unions.
During this period government deficits abounded and the national debt increased almost ten-fold from 1975 to 1985. Sweden also saw high price inflation, a situation aggravated by repeated devaluations of the currency’s exchange rate to boost exports: in 1976 by 3 percent; in 1977 by 6 percent at first, and then an additional 10 percent; in 1981 by 10 percent, and in 1982 by 16 percent.
Overall, the rapid expansion of the welfare state can be illustrated by the ratio between tax-financed and private-sector employment, which rose from 0.386 in 1970 to 1.51 in 1990. Sweden was heading for disaster.
Explaining Sweden’s Great Depression
A popular explanation of the meltdown in the 1990s blames deregulation of the financial markets that occurred during November 1985. But as our research (still in progress) suggests, deregulation was an attempt to solve increasing problems to finance the Swedish government’s already weak and deteriorating financial situation. In the fiscal year 1984-85 alone, the interest payments on Sweden’s national debt amounted to 29 percent of tax revenue — equal to the government’s total spending on social security. The country’s unsustainable financial situation made deregulation necessary.
The increased access to financial markets made a desperate situation somewhat more tenable. But Sweden then experienced an immense increase in credit. Our numbers show that the volume of bank loans to non-financial businesses increased from 180 billion in late 1985 to 392 billion in late 1989, an increase of 117 percent total or 21 percent annually. Where did all this money come from? Some of it can be explained by deregulation and the inflow of funds that followed. But it was also made possible by monetary inflation.
Several factors were at work during the 1986-1990 credit-infused boom that ended in the depression of 1990-1994. Some factors had no inflationary effect or even a deflationary effect, but other factors, especially those that relate to government policy, or are driven by government policy, were strongly inflationary and quite substantial. These include increases in the Riksbank’s advances to banks (a 975-percent increase from 1985 to 1989) and purchases of government debt and securities (a 47-percent increase from 1985 to 1987, followed by a 7-percent decrease from 1987 to 1989).
Sweden is an interesting case to study. We do indeed, as Krugman repeatedly tells us, have much to learn from it: from the long-lasting era of economic growth thanks to free markets to the rise and fall of the welfare state. The country’s recently regained financial strength and its ability to resist a global recession are due, not to a strong welfare state as Krugman claims, but to the long-termrolling back of the expansive welfare that Keynesians so often praise.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Who controls who now?

Same Oppression, Different Name
It wasn’t so long ago when being black in America was a crime. Rich white men with fancy educations controlled the lives of virtually every minority in the country. If the white patriarchy decided you were in the way, they made a call and the next thing you knew, you were out of a job. They regularly ruined the lives of gays, Jews, women, academics, and artists whose work they deemed offensive. They didn’t merely hate visible minorities; they didn’t want them to be born in the first place. They were especially hard on race mixers, presumably because these people were responsible for sullying the “perfect white race.”
We like to pretend we live in a post-racial America, but despite having a black president, these forces of oppression still reign supreme. In fact, a brief glance at the top stories of the past couple of years shows that the exact same rich white fascists who were in control a generation or two ago are still the ones calling the shots today. The only difference is that they’re shooting from an entirely new angle.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Chomsky review

Noam Chomsky’s half-truths and distortions are still loved by the British Left

The Guardian has given one of its great heroes a platform to spout forth on the decline of American power and the manifold sins of its past, but it’s all subterfuge

585bc87169f190769fac2cd1e57fb640d25b9ff0
Shine a light on Chomsky's arguments and they're likely to look a little different
Robin_shepherd
Robin Shepherd, Owner / Publisher
On 17 February 2012 17:28
But, coming to the second noteworthy item, look how he presents a veneer of “evidence” to gloss over the absurdity of the comparison. Who says Suharto is like Hitler, Stalin and Mao? Why, none other than the CIA!
Usually, the CIA is presented as a propaganda machine. But when it suits his purpose – to promote Western self-loathing – it has suddenly become a reliable source. And yet, even that doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Assuming Chomsky didn’t just make it up, who in the CIA said this and under what circumstances? A low level desk officer with left-leaning sympathies? A lone, but more senior staffer, making the comparison for shock value? Chomsky never tells us, rendering the evidential value of an already false proposition useless.

Monday, December 9, 2013

Education, what is the curriculum of learning

The Redemption of E. D. Hirsch
I do not know what is exactly wrong with education, but the number of young people I have meet certainly have views on things that are programmed into them, but just do not seem to have the facts or the basics to really learn.
Also unfortunately for kids from lower socio-economic  families are not being educated with the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic and becomes evidencal   when they ask me for help and guidance or when working with them and I am explaining and  a common retort is "why doesn't the teachers teach this". 

How my kids’ progressive school helped teach me the value of a content-rich curriculum
6 December 2013
E. D. Hirsch is the most important education reformer of the past half-century. I came to this conclusion after writing about schools, teachers, and education policy for almost two decades. But the truth is, I first turned to Hirsch’s writing for practical and personal reasons. I was baffled by the educational practices I witnessed at PS 87, the famous New York City public school my sons attended from 1987 to 1997.
Also known as the William Tecumseh Sherman School, PS 87 is located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. My wife and I were delighted when our older son was admitted to the school. It had just been ranked by Parents magazine as one of the country’s ten best elementary schools—public or private—and the New York Timesprofiled it as one of the few city schools that middle-class parents still clamored to get their kids into. PS 87 had a reputation for adhering to the “progressive education” philosophy, but this didn’t concern me. I had little understanding of what progressivism would mean for my children in the classroom, other than that PS 87 seemed committed to providing a nurturing and minimally restrictive environment for its students. For example, I noticed that instead of sitting in rows facing the teacher, as I did when I attended the New York City public schools, the children in the early grades sat in circles on a rug and often worked together in groups. I was told that this was the “open classroom” reform, introduced in the 1970s. The new seating arrangement seemed harmless enough. Indeed, I thought it was quite charming.
I soon received a crash course in educational progressivism. Many of the school’s teachers were trained at such citadels of progressive education as Columbia University’s Teachers College and the Bank Street College of Education, where they learned to repeat pleasant-sounding slogans like “teach the child, not the text” and were told that all children are “natural learners.” PS 87 had no coherent, grade-by-grade curriculum. Thus, my son’s third-grade teacher decided on his own to devote months of classroom time to a project on Japanese culture, which included building a Japanese garden. Each day, when my son came home from school, I asked him what he had learned in math. Each day, he happily said the same thing: “We are building the Japanese garden.” My wife and I expressed our concern to the teacher about the lack of direct instruction of mathematical procedures, but he reassured us that constructing the Japanese garden required “real-life” math skills and that there was nothing to worry about. But I worried a lot, and even more so when my son moved up to fourth grade. His new teacher assigned even more “real-life” math problems, including one that asked students to calculate how many Arawaks were killed by Christopher Columbus in 1492 during his conquest of Hispaniola.

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Early Questions to Nelson Mandela


Additional Titles

THE NERVE OF  NELSON MANDELA


Emanuel McLittle
September 19, 2002
NewsWithViews.com

All men are not created equal. There is but one single explanation for the 6,000 years of strife, the spilling of an ocean of blood, the sacrifice of light years of progress, and the basis for the current global power struggle. All of this is the result of at least two unalterably opposing types of souls, one vicious and animal like, the other enlightened and human, fighting. Both are wrapped in an immortal struggle to dominate one planet.

The goal of any confidence game is to create a sense of doubt about the obvious. Sociopaths, the leaders of more than three billion of the earth's people, operate through the veins of nations, its political structure. But the swindling of retirees out of their savings, or the smooth tongue needed to motivate others to commit immoral or illegal acts is child's play compared to the international drama currently being acted out on the world stage. Let there be no doubt, the draw stings that open and close the intermission curtain, the lighting to control perception (the media), the actors whose lies boggle the mind, all hang from a ventriloquist's string. They want to fool us all.

Even when the plot is hidden, the international players reveal enough for us to figure out the motive, as well as who is pulling their strings. This said, let us focus on Nelson Mandela, who recently emerged from retirement, at 85-years-old, to play a pivotal role in yet another scrimmage between the two great sides. Today the stage is set in the Middle East. The names are only coincidental. In every age there was an American viewpoint and an Iraqi viewpoint, with every man and woman in the world on one side or the other.

Mandela's job is to use his reputation as a persecuted black man, freed from a dungeon in the dessert, in 1990. His very presence impugns a conviction. White people, all white people, locked him away for 26 years of his life. He was branded a hero for all the dark people of the world for opposing white domination.

International brokers, his soul brothers in "high places," took control of Africa's wealthiest nation, placed a living martyr on its throne to reign over an idea far beyond the borders of South Africa. People of color, in this case, the Iraqis, are said to be the perpetual victims, Mandela implies, of nation-thieves, white, western Christians out to rule the world, a desire of their own hearts.

Mandela was strategic. South Africa was merely the staging ground for the false guilt used all around the world, for various scrimmages. Mandela's impact on the rest of the world is psychological and works like a silent weapon. When Mandela speaks, as he did recently, when he accused, "America of introducing chaos in international affairs," it is a strategic chess move. With little to no experience in politics, except the killing of whites and rival Zulu tribesmen, Mandela has no legitimate claim to greatness. There are no intelligent papers penned by Mandela. Others wrote all the speeches he delivered. His thoughts belong to others. He solved none of South Africa's internal problems. He is of average intelligence and has no money other then what was given to him for his role in South Africa's fall. So, how did he become a hero?

Mandela is called one of the world's "tallest" statesmen even before he emerged from his prison cell. Fellow Marxists around the world who created Mandela now want him to use his racial capital

Friday, December 6, 2013

Educational Changes

How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses
BY JOSHUA DAVIS10.15.136:30 AM

You can read a version of this story in Spanish here. Pueden leer una versión de esta historia en español aquí.

These students in Matamoros, Mexico, didn’t have reliable Internet access, steady electricity, or much hope—until a radical new teaching method unlocked their potential.  Peter Yang
JosĂ© Urbina LĂłpez Primary School sits next to a dump just across the US border in Mexico. The school serves residents of Matamoros, a dusty, sunbaked city of 489,000 that is a flash point in the war on drugs. There are regular shoot-outs, and it’s not uncommon for locals to find bodies scattered in the street in the morning. To get to the school, students walk along a white dirt road that parallels a fetid canal. On a recent morning there was a 1940s-era tractor, a decaying boat in a ditch, and a herd of goats nibbling gray strands of grass. A cinder-block barrier separates the school from a wasteland—the far end of which is a mound of trash that grew so big, it was finally closed down. On most days, a rotten smell drifts through the cement-walled classrooms. Some people here call the school un lugar de castigo—“a place of punishment.”

For 12-year-old Paloma Noyola Bueno, it was a bright spot. More than 25 years ago, her family moved to the border from central Mexico in search of a better life. Instead, they got stuck living beside the dump. Her father spent all day scavenging for scrap, digging for pieces of aluminum, glass, and plastic in the muck. Recently, he had developed nosebleeds, but he didn’t want Paloma to worry. She was his little angel—the youngest of eight children.

After school, Paloma would come home and sit with her father in the main room of their cement-and-wood home. Her father was a weather-beaten, gaunt man who always wore a cowboy hat. Paloma would recite the day’s lessons for him in her crisp uniform—gray polo, blue-and-white skirt—and try to cheer him up. She had long black hair, a high forehead, and a thoughtful, measured way of talking. School had never been challenging for her. She sat in rows with the other students while teachers told the kids what they needed to know. It wasn’t hard to repeat it back, and she got good grades without thinking too much.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

self feeding victimization

Because Lying and Resenting is What Angels Do

Many moons ago, in a post on classroom radicalism and the grooming of students, I wrote
The problem is that adversarial role-play, like that of leftist academics Grover Furr and Rhonda Garelick, has little to do with reason, refutation or how the world actually is. It does, however, have a great deal to do with how those concerned wish to seem. In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism - and in order to justify funding, influence and status - great leaps of imagination or paranoia may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of exploitation and injustice have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untutored eye. Thus, the rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t. As mainstream society becomes less fixated by race, gender, sexuality, etc., so peddlers of grievance and victimhood must search out - or invent - something to oppose. Overstatement and escalation are all but inevitable.
This last point was illustrated with the ‘scholarship’ of Barbara Barnett, a graduate of Duke’s infamous humanities department, who claimed that college campuses have a rate of rape and violent sexual assault almost 1000 times higher than any credible calculation. Other, equally bizarre examples of activist ‘scholarship’ can be found in the archives, starting with this gem. You can imagine my dismay on discovering that my thoughts were not at all original, as Jeff Goldstein had demonstrated three years earlier
An obvious problem with the grievance aspect of identity politics is that the grievance needs to be perpetually maintained in order to justify the identity aspect of the politics. And in an era of academic specialisation wherein just about every individual identity group has its own set of researchers and theoretical champions - as well as a widely accepted generic narrative of grievance - the observation that continued relevance (which translates into political power) is contingent upon the nursing and care of the grievance is something that too often goes unexamined by a society that, at base, really does wish to understand and fix the problems and frustrations expressed by individual identity groups.
That nursing of grievance – from hoax hate crimes to hallucinated racism - is a subject that’s cropped up here many times since. It’s a trend that’s becoming increasingly surreal. As, for instance, when Kerri Dunn, a psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College, slashed her own tyres and defaced her own car with abusive and racist messages, before walking over to puzzled onlookers and asking if they’d seen who was responsible. Despite being witnessed vandalising her own vehicle, Dunn protested her victimhood to faculty and police, citing a “crisis of hate” on campus, while students held rallies for “tolerance and diversity.”
With an eye to the latest such fabrication, involving an imaginative lesbian waitress named Dayna Morales, Daniel Greenfield takes it from there
An identity defined in terms of victimhood needs fresh injections of oppression to sustain its existence. Those African-Americans who define “blackness” not in terms of positive values but in terms of negative values, need white racism, the real thing or the fake one, to remind them of who they are. And the same holds true for other minorities who define themselves not by their culture or values, but by their resentments…  
The left’s need for victimisation means that increasing levels of tolerance actually lead to escalating confrontations with these manufacturers of intolerance. The assertion that all white people are innately racist because of their privilege is one such response to increasing tolerance. By claiming that whiteness itself is racist, the left gets back to political identity, rather than actual discrimination, as the source of conflict, and redefines even the most tolerant university multicultural spaces as racist.
The manufacturers of intolerance, whether they’re tenured academics like Ward Churchill, professional politicians like Barack Obama or angry waitresses like Dayna Morales, respond to tolerance with provocations. Their goal is to elicit evidence of intolerance to sustain their political identity. The more tolerance they encounter, the more they escalate their provocations. Their goal is not a tolerant society. It’s not a multiracial society or a post-racial society. It is a society perpetually at war over identity politics. That conflict is what gives them power.
We’ve seen the kinds of personalities to whom that endless psychodrama, and browbeating and attention, typically appeals. And for whompassive-aggression is both a lifestyle and matter of expertise. Habitual unrealism and opportunist dishonesty are apparently a small price to pay for being professionally aggrieved and therefore interesting, if only as a cartoon, a parody of a person. And even if the basis for that grievance is absurdly exaggerated or didn’t actually occur.
It’s no coincidence that these dramas usually originate in and around the clown quarter of academia, where the left holds court, and where pretentious victimhood is encouraged as a credential. Given the scrupulously PC environment of the typical campus, this creates a big problem for enthusiasts of identity politics and grievance leverage. There won’t be nearly enough actual racism or misogyny or homophobia to justify the inflated rhetoric and pre-booked outrage, on which so many egos and careers depend. And so what’s a warrior for “social justice” to do? The inflated rhetoric isn’t going away – for many it’s now the standard rhetoric, and its users can get quite upset if you dare to question them. And so liberties have to be taken – whether by denouncing grammatical correction as a racist “micro-aggression” or slashing your own tyres and blaming someone in your class. It’s a lot to ask, I know. But for heroes – for warriors – it’s the path to utopia. A world in which everyone is tolerant. And WrongThought™ has been scolded out of existence. 
Via the invaluable Protein Wisdom