liberals – praag.org

Liberal South Africans are ‘good-hearted racists’

White liberal South Africans may have expressed a desire to see justice done, but as “good-hearted racists” they did not want to give up any of their wealth and privileges, says Micheal Hiltzik, columnist for the LA Times.

Hiltzik admitted earlier to posting under false names on multiple sites, using pseudonyms to smear people, but he is nevertheless still writing for the newspaper.

During the waning days of apartheid, I had dinner with a group of liberal South Africans.

And they were liberals in relative terms: Cape Town residents of Anglo descent, they had lived and done business in the closest thing to a multicultural community South Africa offered, geographically and socially remote from the Afrikaner traditions prevailing in Johannesburg and Pretoria, some 900 miles to the north.

They were optimistic about the future of their country and about building a multiracial nation, and free of evident resentment about the political ambitions of their black fellow citizens. They agreed that the blacks deserved equal opportunity and a representative voice in government.

And yet, listening to them talk, I couldn’t avoid reflecting that the tenor of their discussion would have been treated as profoundly objectionable in any but the most reactionary, racist precincts of the United States.

It’s not that they sounded like Bull Connor or members of the Klan. It was more their well-meaning and unapologetic condescension. They wholeheartedly endorsed black majority rule — in principle. But they were also convinced that it would take years, even generations, for black South Africans to gain the education and experience necessary to lead their country in the modern world — to grow up, in other words. In the interim, of course, the blacks would continue to be dependent on the knowledge and support of my dining companions’ own tribe of white Africans.

My hosts were hopeful and uneasy, confident in the rationality of a black community they didn’t really know but which, they were certain, shared their desire for a peaceful transition of power.

The root of their uneasiness was economic. South Africa, which for so long had considered itself a rich, economically thriving country, was just then coming to grips with the fact that it was a small economy that only seemed big because its wealth had been concentrated in a very few white hands. There was simply not enough money in the country to bring black educational standards up to the level of white schools after decades of systematic impoverishment; the only path to equivalence involved diminishing the resources provided to white pupils while improving those for black kids, meeting somewhere in the middle. Would either race be happy with the consequences?

Covering Cecil John Rhodes in black poo

Chumani Maxwele threw human faeces at the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town on Monday in order to eradicate the white liberal scourge he says.

“It is not about me; it is about change. We as black students do not feel at home at UCT,” he said.

Maxwele says blacks want to end the divide between black and white students at UCT since the whites who come to black protests do not “ask us back to their big mansions”.

It appears that the ultra left-wing Max Price is not the most progressive vice chancellor UCT has ever had after all.

“We want whites to be more accommodating of us, to try to understand us,” Maxwele declared.

Maxwele, a 30-year-old political science student, said he threw faeces at the statue to highlight “our shame”.

“We want white people to know how we live – we live in poo.

“I am from a very poor family; we are using portaloos. Are you happy about that? In order for me to bring evidence, I have to give Cecil John Rhodes a poo shower and whites will have to see it.”

“Whose land was it in the first place? I have no problem with the history of Rhodes but it can stay in the books or in a museum.

“I don’t want him at UCT and I don’t want to sit in a hall named after [Leander] Starr Jameson, a brutal racist.”

George Soros funded Ferguson riots

Liberal billionaire gave at least $33 million in one year to groups that emboldened activists

There’s a solitary man at the financial center of the Ferguson protest movement. No, it’s not victim Michael Brown or Officer Darren Wilson. It’s not even the Rev. Al Sharpton, despite his ubiquitous campaign on TV and the streets.

Rather, it’s liberal billionaire George Soros, who has built a business empire that dominates across the ocean in Europe while forging a political machine powered by nonprofit foundations that impacts American politics and policy, not unlike what he did with MoveOn.org.

Mr. Soros spurred the Ferguson protest movement through years of funding and mobilizing groups across the U.S., according to interviews with key players and financial records reviewed by The Washington Times.

In all, Mr. Soros gave at least $33 million in one year to support already-established groups that emboldened the grass-roots, on-the-ground activists in Ferguson, according to the most recent tax filings of his nonprofit Open Society Foundations.

The financial tether from Mr. Soros to the activist groups gave rise to a combustible protest movement that transformed a one-day criminal event in Missouri into a 24-hour-a-day national cause celebre.

“Our DNA includes a belief that having people participate in government is indispensable to living in a more just, inclusive, democratic society,” said Kenneth Zimmerman, director of Mr. Soros‘ Open Society Foundations’ U.S. programs, in an interview with The Washington Times. “Helping groups combine policy, research [and] data collection with community organizing feels very much the way our society becomes more accountable.”

Soros-sponsored organizations helped mobilize protests in Ferguson, building grass-roots coalitions on the ground backed by a nationwide online and social media campaign.

Other Soros-funded groups made it their job to remotely monitor and exploit anything related to the incident that they could portray as a conservative misstep, and to develop academic research and editorials to disseminate to the news media to keep the story alive.

The plethora of organizations involved not only shared Mr. Soros‘ funding, but they also fed off each other, using content and buzzwords developed by one organization on another’s website, referencing each other’s news columns and by creating a social media echo chamber of Facebook “likes” and Twitter hashtags that dominated the mainstream media and personal online newsfeeds.

All were aimed at keeping the media’s attention on the city and to widen the scope of the incident to focus on interrelated causes — not just the overpolicing and racial discrimination narratives that were highlighted by the news media in August.

“I went to Ferguson in a quest to be in solidarity and stand with the young organizers and affirm their leadership,” said Kassandra Frederique, policy manager at the Drug Policy Alliance, which was founded by Mr. Soros, and which receives $4 million annually from his foundation. She traveled to Ferguson in October.

“We recognized this movement is similar to the work we’re doing at DPA,” said Ms. Frederique. “The war on drugs has always been to operationalize, institutionalize and criminalize people of color. Protecting personal sovereignty is a cornerstone of the work we do and what this movement is all about.”

Ms. Frederique works with Opal Tometi, co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter — a hashtag that was developed after the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida — and helped promote it on DPA’s news feeds. Ms. Tometi runs the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, a group to which Mr. Soros gave $100,000 in 2011, according to the most recent of his foundation’s tax filings.

“I think #BlackLivesMatter’s success is because of organizing. This was created after Trayvon Martin, and there has been sustained organizing and conversations about police violence since then,” said Ms. Frederique. “Its explosion into the mainstream recently is because it connects all the dots at a time when everyone was lost for words. ‘Black Lives Matter’ is liberating, unapologetic and leaves no room for confusion.”

With the backing of national civil rights organizations and Mr. Soros‘ funding, “Black Lives Matter” grew from a hashtag into a social media phenomenon, including a #BlackLivesMatter bus tour and march in September.

“More than 500 of us have traveled from Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Nashville, Portland, Tucson, Washington, D.C., Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and other cities to support the people of Ferguson and help turn a local moment into a national movement,” wrote Akiba Solomon, a journalist at Colorlines, describing the event.

Colorlines is an online news site that focuses on race issues and is published by Race Forward, a group that received $200,000 from Mr. Soros’s foundation in 2011. Colorlines has published tirelessly on the activities in Ferguson and heavily promoted the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag and activities.

Mr. Soros gave $5.4 million to Ferguson and Staten Island grass-roots efforts last year to help “further police reform, accountability and public transparency,” the Open Society Foundations said in a blog post in December. About half of those funds were earmarked to Ferguson, with the money primarily going to OBS and MORE, the foundation said.

OBS and MORE, along with the Dream Defenders, established the “Hands Up Coalition” — another so-called “grass-roots” organization in Missouri, whose name was based on now-known-to-be-false claims that Brown had his hands up before being shot. The Defenders were built to rally support and awareness for the Trayvon Martin case and were funded by the Tides Foundation, another recipient of Soros cash.

Hands Up Coalition has made it its mission to recruit and organize youth nationwide to start local events in their communities — trying to take Ferguson nationwide.

Hands Up Coalition has dubbed 2015 as “The Year of Resistance,” and its outreach program strongly resembles how President Obama’s political action committee — Organizing for Action — rallies youth for its causes, complete with a similarly designed Web page and call to action.

Mr. Soros‘ two largest foundations manage almost $3 billion in assets per year, according to their most recent respective tax returns. The Foundation to Promote Open Society managed $2.2 billion in assets in 2011, and his Open Society Institute managed $685.9 million in 2012.

In comparison, David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers whom liberals often call a threat to democracy — and worse — for their conservative influence, had $308 million tied up in their foundation and institute in 2011.

One of the organizations that Mr. Soros funds, and which fueled the demonstrations in Ferguson, is the Gamaliel Foundation, a network of grass-roots, interreligious and interracial organizations. Mr. Obama started his career as a community organizer at a Gamaliel affiliate in Chicago.

The Rev. Traci Blackmon of Christ the King United Church of Christ in Florissant, Missouri, which is part of the Gamaliel network, said in one of the group’s webinars that clergy involved with Gamaliel must be “protectors of the narrative” of what happened in Ferguson.

Source: Washington Times

Pew: Next US generation more than 50% non-white

For the first time in American history, non-whites will make up half or more of the next generation, likely pushing Washington toward a bigger government — and the GOP better tone down their anti-government rhetoric if they want to win them, according to a top polling outfit.

At a briefing for congressional aides hosted by the moderate Republican Ripon Society, Pew Research Vice President Michael Dimock said that the trend among younger Americans is support for government programs and acceptance of Democratic Party policies.

“Their tendency is more liberal, their tendency is bigger government,” he said of so-called “millennials” born between 1979 and 1995. They will likely set the trend for the still-unnamed next generation.

“This is a generation that is 41 percent non-white; the generation behind it is likely to be close to 50 if not more than 50 percent non-white, and the anti-government kind of tone is one that really doesn’t resonate with that non-white sector in particular,” said Dimock at the Ripon retreat.

His advice to the GOP: “Try to take as much of the anti-government rhetoric out.”

Ripon provided Secrets with a video of his recent presentation. In it, he said that younger voters are both pro-government and pro-business, split over gun control, back abortion and believe welfare does more good than harm. What’s more, they are not angry voters and are still politically diverse.

“I think he confirmed what a lot of Republicans already know, that the party has a lot of work to do with younger Americans, who view the GOP as politically rigid and ideologically out of step. If there’s a bright spot, it’s that millennials are increasingly untethered to either party, which means there’s a chance for Republicans to win them back,” said Ripon’s Lou Zickar.

Pollster John Zogby, who has dubbed millennials First Globals in his new book, said those born after 1979 already number 75 million and will grow to become bigger than the 78-million strong Baby Boom generation, and that should be good for Democrats.

We asked him about Dimock’s prediction and characterization of the current and coming generation.

Said Zogby, who does our weekly report card on President Obama: “The 41 percent non-white figure is right on the money and so is the projection. There is a strong libertarian streak, but they largely do not hate government if it can prove to be a problem-solver. They have no patience for loud debates and for bureaucratic entropy, favoring quick and streamlined forms of problem-solving and decision-making — just as they have learned in video games. There is also an upside to their all having received a trophy: They are great believers and practitioners in teamwork. This is potentially great news for Democrats and liberals (34 percent call themselves such), but mainly it is worse news for the GOP, who have no meaningful outreach or connectivity with them.”

Source: The Washington Examiner

The twisted motives behind political correctness

by Brandon Smith

As I have confessed in the past, in my early years I found myself active in the Democratic Party and the general liberal methodology. I had no understanding of the concept of the false left/right paradigm. I had no inkling of the dangers of globalism and central banking. I had no concept of decentralization or non-participation. I had never even heard of libertarianism. I knew only that George W. Bush was a criminal (and I was right), but the problem went far deeper than the GOP. I was astoundingly ignorant of the bigger picture.

However, what I did have going for me was an almost violent sense of nonconformity. I hated collectivists, yet I found myself surrounded by them while working within the leftist culture. It was the insanity of self-proclaimed “liberals” that taught me the true nature of the facade of politics. When I realized that the Democrats were essentially the same corrupt entity as the neoconservatives, everything in my life changed.

One aspect of liberalism with which I am now very familiar is political correctness. I didn’t understand it at the time, not until I stepped outside the cultism of it and looked in from a wiser place. It always bothered me, but I couldn’t quite grasp why until later. Then, it hit me like a revelation. Political correctness was not a political ideology. No, it was a religion, a full-fledged spiritual con, a New Age ghetto of frothing mishmash that is sociological voodoo. And the leftists were eating it up like steak night at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

These people were rationally retarded. Every idea they proposed they merely parroted from books and articles they had read. They were like malfunctioning automatons trapped in a cycle of discontented social criticism. Their desperation to invent meaning in the midst of their irrelevant lives made me feel ill. If they could not find a legitimate cause to champion, they would create one out of thin air and defend it relentlessly, regardless of how shallow it truly was.

When I outline my analysis of economic destabilization within the United States or I write about the rise of the police state, I am driven by a fundamental sense of concrete concern. There are indeed real problems in the world, swirling in a storm of obvious factual conflicts. But the warriors of the PC culture don’t see any of it. Rather, they fantasize about injustices that don’t exist, trespasses that are ultimately fictional. They imagine themselves champions of some greater purpose that, in the end, doesn’t matter.

Recently, I read a news story about a “transgendered teen” in Maine. When the boy was in the fifth grade, he decided to dress as a girl and demanded to use the girl’s bathroom at his public school, despite having the biological apparatus of a male. This story was international news, folks! Why? I can’t say, except that the mainstream media have made a point to focus on “gender optional” issues as if they represent some kind of civil rights uprising.

The issue perfectly illustrates the disturbing nature of politically correct culture.

Teachers at the school did not deny the student the use of restroom facilities. In fact, they allowed him to use the teacher’s bathrooms to avoid any confusion. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court, on the other hand, had other ideas. It ruled that the school’s refusal to allow the boy to use the girl’s facilities constituted a violation of the State’s anti-discrimination law. The ruling has been heralded as a massive victory for the politically correct narrative.

Now, let me make one thing clear: I could not care less about this boy’s sexual orientation (if he even has one). I do think the very idea that a fifth-grader at about the age of 10 is sexually conscious enough to develop a sense of gender dissuasion is absurd. Children who haven’t even experienced puberty yet, proclaiming they are transgendered? Utter nonsense. I find it far more likely that the student’s PC-obsessed parents influenced him to come to such a decision despite his naivety.

Is it not rather mentally backward for any person to base his public persona solely on his carnal compulsions? Do I dance around on the sidewalk bellowing to strangers how much I love the curves of women? Do I require a sociopolitical legal apparatus to vindicate my existence? Do I feel the need to shame gay people into publicly embracing my straight man’s libido? No, I do not.

The PC culture demands that we, as individuals, openly accept the sexual orientations of anyone and everyone; otherwise, we are labeled prejudiced monsters. It is not enough that we object in a logical manner. No, we must fall to our knees and thank the stars for the very existence of gender chameleons.

In the end, the psychological gender position of any particular person does not overrule his biological features. A child with a penis is a boy. Period. He will never be a girl. Ever. Not without surgical aid. And even then, he will never have the ability to give birth, which is the very hallmark of femininity. (Sorry, feminists, but that’s how it goes.) A boy, no matter his mental orientation, does not belong in a girl’s lavatory. The privacy rights of the girls outweigh the gender confusion of the boy. If I were a girl (why not play some gender games since everyone else is), I would beat the living hell out of any boy gallivanting in a dress in a bathroom I was using and make sure he never dared come back. And, by extension, if I were a rather mischievous boy with an aptitude as a peeping tom, why not dress up in a tutu in the hopes of getting a glimpse of the forbidden while being legally protected by the State?

The warped conflicts that arise, though, are not the creation of the child in question. A fifth-grader has no concept of gender rights or political correctness. This issue was a creation of the PC cult and its acolytes. These people don’t actually care about the children they involve in their legal dramas. They exploit them, with every intent to abandon them once they have chiseled their agenda into the gray matter of every American.

What truly motivates these people? Why do they do what they do? I think my experience with leftists makes me a well-positioned observer of the psychology of the culture. Here are the hidden thought processes I have witnessed while dealing directly with the PC army.

PC Elitism

One of the unfortunate side effects of religion is that proponents often use it as a means to feel superior to others. I have seen it in Christianity as much as I have seen it in any other belief system. It is the primary reason why I refuse to subscribe to organized and establishment-sanctioned spiritualism. Religion should be a personal experience first and foremost, not an easy way to fit in with the collective. Communing with others who share one’s beliefs should be secondary. Hypocritically, politically correct adherents often criticize Christians for their collectivist elitism while suffering from the same problem themselves.

PC culture allows participants to pretend as though they have some greater understanding of the world, an elevated knowledge of life that makes them superior to the uninitiated. It is important to understand that when a person pursues the methodology of zealotry, he doesn’t do it to make the world a better place; he does it to feel better about his place in the world.

The politically correct are so violent in the assertion of their ideals because they crave the subjugation of the mainstream and a recognition of their “rightness.” They don’t want people to “accept” their beliefs as tolerable. They want people to adore their beliefs as supreme. They want every man, woman and child to reinforce their ideals without question.

The malfunction of this philosophy is that zealots are never finished. They must always find new ways to feel superior to others. So they continuously engineer new taboos and new sins, no matter how ridiculous, so that they can forever look down upon the laymen. Because of this, there will never be an end to PC law. It will go on forever, labeling numerous social interactions and stances as “aberrant” — never satiated and never satisfied.

PC Futurism

The young are always searching for ways to feel wiser than the old. This is just the natural way of things, at least in America. Now, I know from ample experience that age does not necessarily denote intelligence. I’ve met plenty of idiotic people who had decades of time to learn from their mistakes but didn’t. But the young, many of whom lack time and struggle, have a terrible tendency to either pretend that they have “seen it all.” Or they pretend that the very atmosphere of the day somehow gives them a greater insight than generations past. The reality is that most of them know very little of import. This attitude comes from a philosophy called “futurism” (popular with the Nazis and the Soviets), which holds that all the beliefs and discoveries of the past mean nothing compared to the beliefs and discoveries of the present. This ideology is alluring to the young, because it gives them a way to feel intellectually dominant over older and more “ignorant” people who are “behind the times.”

Political correctness is basically an appendage of futurism. By labelling elders as social bigots and products of a barbaric era who don’t understand the “lingo” of the PC elite, liberalism draws in and collectivizes the fledgling left. Younger generations are given a cultural avenue toward high priesthood, a right of passage usually reserved for the aged. They get to skip ahead past all the trials and tribulations of life and announce their deep awareness of the so-called greater good.

The values of forefathers past become archaic scrawlings of racist and prejudiced cavemen who could never appreciate the “brilliance” of today’s academia. The inherent freedoms of natural law that have existed since time began are nothing more than obstacles to them, standing in the way of a new and better world where they have somehow outsmarted human instinct and centuries of history.

PC Collectivism

The very foundation of political correctness is solidified in a desire for the perpetual reinforcement of one’s worldview. PC people need every other person around them to sing the praises of their pure virtues. If I happen to disagree with the idea of gender bending, for instance, as some kind of socially persecuted subculture that needs overt government protection, then I am, of course, labelled a hateful Neanderthal. If I stand in opposition to the concept of victim group status in general, in which the state demands that designated “minorities” be given special treatment regardless of the status of the individual, then I become a racist political fossil ignorant of the bigger picture. You see, if you disagree with PC culture in any way (even if that way is rational), you cannot win. To refute political correctness is to refute the god of the New Age; and to refute their god, even with concrete logic, is blasphemy.

This kind of blind faith in political correctness lends itself entirely to collectivism. The average person begins to think that without a viable appreciation of the philosophy, he may be left out or cast aside. Most people do not know how to function without the approval of others. Therefore, even if a father happens to have a healthy skepticism over the idea of a make-up wearing fifth-grade boy waltzing into his daughter’s school bathroom, he is likely to keep his mouth shut, because to speak out would be a risk to his position within the group, or the community.

PC Control

The prevalence of PC philosophy is not subtle. I have always found it interesting that political correctness seems to consistently support the demands of the state. Our system smothers children with it in public school, our workplaces are rife with the propaganda for fear of lawsuits and colleges are veritable breeding grounds for the PC oligarchy. Politically correct culture goes out of its way to constantly test others to make sure they are also true believers.

The truth is some discrimination is healthy, and some discord is needed for a society to remain balanced. As long as we don’t allow our disagreements to end in the physical harm of others, then those disagreements are our natural-born right. If you are a racist (this goes for non-whites as well), that’s fine. Just don’t act out your racism in a violent way around me, or I will have to put you down permanently. If you have a distaste of homosexuality (or asexuality, as seems popular nowadays), then whatever, I don’t care. You shouldn’t have to have organizations like GLAAD (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) in your face attempting to force you to put on a smile for gaydom, coordinate man-on-man heavy-petting protests in your favorite restaurant (Chick-fil-A) while you’re trying to eat a damn sandwich, push boys into the girl’s bathroom, or trying to shut down your favorite TV shows because the stars happen to share your views (“Duck Dynasty”).

Now, PC proponents will argue that the very existence of bigotry does harm to society as a whole, and it must be educated out of individuals. Frankly, I see that kind of utopian fascism as a far greater threat to society as a whole than bigotry ever will be.

Look at where we are today because of the PC nightmare! We have a Nation on the verge of industrial and economic collapse, partly because companies are forced by law or persuaded by government subsidies to hire people with victim group status, even if they are unqualified, while ignoring highly qualified people who just happen to have lighter skin. We have children not even old enough to discover their own inherent character being clinically diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” by a psychiatric community of quacks, which conjured most PC terminology out of thin air. We have boys who are told that they are stunted for acting out their natural male impulses and girls who are told that true femininity is weakness and that they should act more masculine. We have a mainstream culture that coddles and infantilizes young adults, young girls who think promiscuity is the key to womanhood and that motherhood is disgusting (which I find rather ironic), and young men who have no testicular fortitude and no clue how to take charge of their own lives.

The American family unit has been completely destroyed. We have women who are ashamed to set aside careers to raise children because feminism frowns upon “breeders” who bring down the whole gender. We have men who abandon their children and refuse to take responsibility. And we have a weak-minded population addicted to collective affirmation and unwilling to think outside the box for fear of being shunned and shamed. Honestly, I can’t see a single redeeming quality to political correctness other than the fact that those people who espouse it do so loudly and obnoxiously, making it easier for me to identify and avoid them or to take special note of them as an obvious zombie threat in an America swiftly declining into mundane oblivion.

Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com

The end of MSM: Liberal NYT editorials irrelevant, dull

“I think the editorials are viewed by most reporters as largely irrelevant, and there’s not a lot of respect for the editorial page. The editorials are dull, and that’s a cardinal sin. They aren’t getting any less dull. As for the columnists, Friedman is the worst. He hasn’t had an original thought in 20 years; he’s an embarrassment. He’s perceived as an idiot who has been wrong about every major issue for 20 years, from favoring the invasion of Iraq to the notion that green energy is the most important topic in the world even as the financial markets were imploding. Then there’s Maureen Dowd, who has been writing the same column since George H. W. Bush was president.”

This is one of the big media voices on the state of the New York Times. The dreadful liberal editorial section is run by Andrew Rosenthal.

Yet another former Times writer concurred. “Andy is a wrecking ball, a lot like his father but without the gravitas. What strikes me about the editorial and op-ed pages is that they have become relentlessly grim. With very few exceptions, there’s almost nothing light-hearted or whimsical or sprightly about them, nothing to gladden the soul. They’re horribly doctrinaire, down the line, and that goes for the couple of conservatives in the bunch. It wasn’t always like that on those pages.”

One former business reporter remarked that the entire business section viewed the editorial page as “irrelevant” and went on to say, “Their business editorials were relatively rare and really bad.”

The Times declined to provide exact staffing numbers, but that too is a source of resentment. Said one staffer, “Andy’s got 14 or 15 people plus a whole bevy of assistants working on these three unsigned editorials every day. They’re completely reflexively liberal, utterly predictable, usually poorly written and totally ineffectual. I mean, just try and remember the last time that anybody was talking about one of those editorials. You know, I can think of one time recently, which is with the [Edward] Snowden stuff, but mostly nobody pays attention, and millions of dollars is being spent on that stuff.”

Asked by The Observer for hard evidence supporting a loss of influence of the vaunted editorial page, the same Times staffer fired back, “You know, the editorials are never on the most emailed list; they’re never on the most read list. People just are not paying attention, and they don’t care. It’s a waste of money.”

Multiple attempts to reach Mr. Rosenthal were rebuffed, and emails directly to him were responded to instead by the Times publicity operation.

A Times spokesperson defended the page, telling The Observer, “The power of the editorial page is in the strength of the ideas it expresses. Some editorials are read more widely than others, but virtually all generate discussion and response among our readers, policy-makers and thought leaders. Recently, the editorial series on STEM Education and the editorial on Mr. Snowden sparked a great deal of discussion among readers and policy-makers.”

Asked for data, she added, “We do not share statistics or traffic numbers at the individual article or section level.” In a list of 2013’s most read stories the Times sent over, no editorials or columnists appeared (two guest editorials, from Angelina Jolie and Vladimir Putin, did make the cut).

Another sign of a loss of influence may have been revealed this past fall. A member of then Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s inner circle who remained in City Hall until the end of Mr. Bloomberg’s term told The Observer that the entire administration was “shocked” by the Times’ inability to drag its endorsed candidates over the goal line, referring to Christine Quinn in the mayoral primary and Dan Garodnick in the City Council speaker race. “When was the last time The New York Times lost both? Those are both essentially Democratic primaries, and the Times couldn’t carry any water.” The Times also endorsed Dan Squadron for advocate; he was defeated by Letitia James.

This charge was amplified by a different member of Mr. Bloomberg’s kitchen cabinet who left the administration a few years ago. He reports that Ms. Quinn’s political team viewed the Times endorsement as “critical” to her cementing the nomination, which led them to allow the Times to follow Ms. Quinn around making a documentary. What resulted was Hers To Lose, a behind-the-scenes look that was clearly supposed to show the historic win of an out lesbian but instead turned into an awkward and sometimes excruciating look at a campaign that finished in third place, despite the Times endorsement.

According to this source, “Chris worked very hard to get the endorsement. Ask yourself: Why did she allow the Times movie? Why would any campaign ever do that? They were so focused on the editorial [endorsement] that when Executive Editor Jill Abramson personally called over and asked Chris to do the movie, it was seen within the Quinn campaign as something they’d better say ‘yes’ to in order to get the endorsement.”

As for the charges that Mr. Rosenthal is a despot, one writer provided a funny example that others interviewed for this story immediately recognized. “Rosenthal himself is like a petty tyrant, like anytime anyone on the news pages uses the word ‘should’ in their copy, you know, he sends nasty emails around kind of CCing the world. The word ‘should’ belongs to him and his people.”

Also coming in for intense criticism were the opinion-page columnists, always a juicy target. Particularly strong criticism, to the point of resentful, was directed at Thomas Friedman, the three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize who writes mostly about foreign affairs and the environment.

One current Times staffer told The Observer, “Tom Friedman is an embarrassment. I mean there are multiple blogs and Tumblrs and Twitter feeds that exist solely to make fun of his sort of blowhardy bullshit.”

Gawker has been particularly hard on Mr. Friedman, with Hamilton Nolan memorably skewering him in a column entitled “Tom Friedman Travels the World to Find Incredibly Uninteresting Platitudes,” as a “mustachioed soothsaying simpleton”; another column was titled “Tom Friedman Does Not Know What’s Happening Here,” and the @firetomfriedman Twitter account has more than 1,800 followers.

The mainstream media is in a state of collapse, the New York Times’s own writers admitt that the NY Times opinion pieces are now seen as “irrelevant” and have no impact on public discourse whatsoever.

Source: The New York Observer

Liberals have false sense of uniqueness

New research published in the scientific journal Psychological Science has found that people who identify themselves as liberals tend to underestimate the amount of actual agreement among those who share their political views, while people who are conservative tend to overestimate agreement among those who share their views.

To test this, 300 different participants were given a series of political (ex: “I support unionization”) and non-political (ex: “I like juice”) statements, and were told to respond with either agreement or non-agreement. They were then asked how much they thought other people who shared their political views would agree with their answers to the previous questions; by doing this, researchers could see how much consensus each person thought there was within their ideology.

The results?

Liberals showed what the researchers call ‘truly false uniqueness,’ perceiving their beliefs as more divergent from the beliefs of other liberals than they actually were. Moderates and conservatives, on the other hand, showed evidence of ‘truly false consensus,’ perceiving their beliefs to be more similar to those of other members of their political group than they actually were.”

Scientists hypothesize this has to do with the fact that in general, liberal desire uniqueness more than conservatives.

Chadly Stern, a psychological scientists from NYU who led the research, hopes that these findings will help us to understand the emergence of social movements:

Liberal social movements might struggle to develop solidarity and formulate shared goals within their ranks, both because liberals want to maintain unique beliefs and because they underestimate the amount of agreement among their members… Conservative social movements might initially capitalize on perceiving agreement to galvanize their ranks, but their inaccurate perceptions could impair group progress when actual agreement is necessary.”

Mugabe understands democracy well

by Dan Roodt

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Is it not astounding that so many people are criticising the outcome of the Zimbabwean elections, when that country went through an official poll in which Zanu (PF) won a clear majority?

In addition, Robert Mugabe’s view of democracy is entirely commensurate with that of most western leaders, especially those of Britain and the US. There exists a dichotomy between the spectacle of campaigning and voting – the soap opera of elections – and the real business of power that is normally settled outside of public scrutiny, in proverbial smoke-filled rooms.

Democracy is what follows a “state of exception” (Carl Schmitt) during which one regime is replaced by another. Both the American and French revolutions were examples of such states of exception. In the case of Zimbabwe, Britain virtually appointed Mugabe as permanent president during the state of exception known as the Lancaster House Conference of 1979. Every election since in Zimbabwe has merely confirmed Britain’s support for revolutionary change in the ex-Rhodesia, hence the hypocrisy of complaints about largely minor deficiencies in the Zimbabwean electoral process.

Writing in the UK Daily Mail two days ago, columnist Stephen Glover said:

“Instead of expressing his anxieties, the Foreign Secretary could offer the Zimbabwean people a heartfelt apology on behalf of the British Government for inflicting Robert Mugabe on them in the first place, and then standing aside as he pillaged his country, murdered his enemies and ruined the economy… What has happened in Zimbabwe is to Britain’s eternal shame.”

Mr Mugabe is a self-styled “strong leader”. In so doing, he is simply displaying the “leadership” that everyone talks about, and that they even teach in business schools.

Modern democracy is indeed a process whereby the voter surrenders his freedom of action to members of the elite who may act on his behalf, tax him and even impoverish him to their heart’s content. During the banking crisis, we have seen how Western governments did the same and have burdened future generations with mountains of debt, simply to save their sponsors and cronies among members of the corrupt banking fraternity.

In most third-world countries, including Zimbabwe, you first queue to vote and then you stand in line for bread or some or other hand-out. The one is good practice for the other.

In South Africa, of course, those who queue to vote are rewarded with poverty, joblessness and grants of R250 a month, enough to buy beer and air time. Just look at the 10 biggest companies by market capitalisation on the JSE, and you will notice that smoking and drinking beer dwarf all other forms of economic activity, followed by mobile telephony.

Democracy is all about talking, drinking, smoking and making babies, for which you get child-support grants. The notion of freedom as defined by the philosophers of the western enlightenment is, of course, slightly more complex and subtle than subsisting for the sake of a pay-as-you-go cellphone connection.

Sadly, such classical ideas of freedom and what some people refer to as “higher ideals” have been derided by so-called “liberals” and Marxists as being tantamount to fascism. Taking pride in one’s language or culture, showing patriotism or constructing a society where people are not sheep to be lorded over by professional politicians, are all very suspect notions that are regularly denounced as “right-wing extremism”.

Aspiring to be one’s own master, holding one’s leaders accountable for public expenditure and the quality of their decision-making is reminiscent of the Tea Party programme in the US.

As the New York Times has assured us, the Tea Party is a racist movement of soon-to-be-outnumbered white Americans who hanker after the halcyon days of the Ku Klux Klan.

Private property, too, is a decidedly reactionary concept, which Mr Mugabe has “democratically” dispensed with. Most white-owned farms in Zimbabwe were bought after 1990 and after ZANU (PF)’s accession to power, yet the rights of these property owners were forfeited in favour of a revolutionary “land-reform programme”.

Most university professors in the West and in SA probably applauded him for trampling upon private property. Not to mention the nongovernmental organisations for whom starvation is big business and whose customers, the voters, will queue up again for hand-outs.

The destiny of man is to be a shopper. Everything else is Nazism, even though German Chancellor Angela Merkel still attends the annual Wagner Festival in Bayreuth.

No doubt the professors and media pundits will soon have Wagner banned worldwide and then everybody will just listen to Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. Democracy entails the lowering of intellectual and aesthetic standards down to the basest level.

The verbiage of Barack Obama on “democracy” resembles the kitsch of fast food, wearing track suits and sports caps in public and the obsessive, banal voyeurism of most TV programmes. We are living through a modern version of Nero’s mob rule whereby a few powerful political and financial dictators occupy the minds of the masses with “bread and circuses”, an election being the ultimate circus, of course.

As Pat Buchanan has said somewhere, democracy cannot be foisted on people by carpet-bombing them from 40 000 feet. Zimbabwe is but one among a number of societies that have been destabilised by so-called democracy. In North Africa and the Middle East, the West has not balked at supporting Al-Qaeda and related fundamentalist movements in a kind of anti-modern fervour. The paradox is that modern democracy so often leads to fundamentalism, mayhem and even primitivism.

Systems of ethnic domination whereby one group is victimised by another are routinely approved as “democratic”. In fact, there is an element of sadism in South African democracy with its endemic violence, torture and persecution of ethnic minorities about which international silence is maintained. Far from making people free, democracy often leads to greater coercion and oppression than more traditional forms of rule. It seems that democracy may only be established through terror, coercion and war, while the most democratic countries, such as the U.S. and the U.K., are also the most aggressive when it comes to foreign military adventures and attacking other countries.

Not for nothing did the Russian leader Mr. Vladimir Putin state that he was revolted by the “pro-democracy rebels” of Syria who devoured the organs of their enemies. Under democracy, more and more such cannibalistic incidents are also occurring in South Africa.

Not only does Mr Mugabe understand democracy and its empty theatrics well, but his wife Grace has mastered the art of shopping better than any New York socialite.

Surely the elected leader of Zimbabwe deserves a better press?

This is an extended version of a letter published today in Business Day.

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SA Communist boss Nzimande attacks ‘liberals’

South African liberals were waging an “ideological offensive” at the tripartite alliance, SA Communist Party secretary-general Blade Nzimande said on Monday.

“Here we see a very clear convergence between the liberal ideological offensive and what we have characterised as the new tendency,” he told the Congress of SA Trade Unions’ 11th national congress in Midrand.

“Our leadership and movement is being judged… through a targeted attack on the movement as a whole, especially Cosatu and the ANC, with a particular focus on the president of the ANC and the republic, comrade Jacob Zuma.”

He said liberals, led by the Democratic Alliance, often “opportunistically” wanted to be seen as friends of the working class.

“They will stand up against e-tolling in Gauteng, not because they really care about the working class, but in opposition to the ANC government, and yet be completely silent about the fact that the DA has tolled Chapman’s Peak in Cape Town and seeks to build more physical structures there,” Nzimande said.

“They will take the ANC government to court over textbooks in Limpopo, but not go to court when the DA is unilaterally closing schools in the Western Cape.”

He said the offensive was being waged against the alliance to promote the idea that it was leaderless, and the print media was supporting it.

“The SACP has consistently raised this matter, and again warning that none within our ranks should be confused by this liberal agenda and be tempted to form alliances blindly.”

The DA was “flirting with anarchy” and would help form non-governmental organisations to oppose the government but not against the brutality against farm workers and labour brokers.

“They opportunistically seek alliances with the working class in order to advance elite interests, embarrass the ANC government, but tell the working class to go jump when it comes to challenging established capitalist interests,” Nzimande said.

“But, of course, not all NGOs are retrogressive either. We, the alliance as a whole, need to actively engage in this terrain of ‘civil society’ and contribute to the building of a progressive NGO movement.” – Sapa