Tracking down the nutbars

Do yourself a favour and discover David Horowitz's current project: to help you 'track down all the Ward Churchills on campus' and all the networks of all the US nutbar activists that are fit to print.

Horowitz, described as “the left’s most brilliant and articulate nemesis,” has a filing cabinet even more well-stocked than Trevor Loudon's since, unlike Trevor, Horowitz was once a nutbar himself -- and there's just more nutbars to expose in the US! -- and he's made it all available at DiscoverTheNetwork.Org

[Cartoon brought to you by Students for Academic Fredom]

Linked Site: Discover the Network

Eggs are people too? Really?

According to a former presidential front-runner, this below is a human being:

                                                        

Let me be more specific: according to Mike Huckabee, this  fertilised human egg you see before you is in reality an actual human being that deserves full constitutional protection "guaranteeing the right to life, liberty, equality of justice and due process of law." 

Just to repeat: he insists there should be rights guaranteed to "equality of justice" ... to "due process of law" ... to life, liberty and the pursuit to property and happiness ... for eggs.   That's like confusing an acorn with an oak, caviar with sturgeon, and a car wrecker's yard with a fleet of automobiles.  Talk about confusing a potential with an actual.

No wonder the Denver Post derisively dubbed the proposal before the Colorado senate as the "egg as person" amendment. [Hat tip, you know who.]  This is not "pro-life," it's pro-idiocy.  Eggs are people, evolution is a myth ... next thing you know he'll be telling us the world is only six-thousand years old and the Pharoahs were all dinosaur farmers. 

What does it actually mean to grant "full constitutional protection" to an egg?  To something that is merely a 'potential'?  What it would do is to obliterate the rights of actual, living human beings.  As Ayn Rand observes, "by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives."

The task of raising a child is a tremendous, lifelong responsibility, which no one should undertake unwittingly or unwillingly. Procreation is not a duty: human beings are not stock-farm animals. For conscientious persons, an unwanted pregnancy is a disaster; to oppose its termination is to advocate sacrifice, not for the sake of anyone's benefit, but for the sake of misery qua misery, for the sake of forbidding happiness and fulfillment to living human beings.

Looks like Republican voters have saved us by a narrow margin from having a genuine fruit loop having the chance to carry the nuclear football.  Bless them.  ;^)

UPDATE: Not that the choices without the nutbar are any better.  On the question of which of the two main presidential candidate "will pose the more far-reaching threat to individual liberty," Robert Bidinotto puts the choices thus:

1. Barack Obama, who will put forth a sweeping leftist agenda domestically, fill the courts and bureaucracies with leftists, and retire from the War on Terrorism abroad -- assuming Congress will let him have his way, or
2. John McCain, who will continue the War on Terrorism abroad -- to the extent Congress permits it -- but who will hand over the U.S. economy to the environmentalists and anti-business regulators domestically, while committing the formerly pro-capitalist Republican Party to "progressive" statism?

Talk about Tweedledum and Tweedledumbarse.

The futile sacrifice of 'Emissions Trading'

News just in that Al Gore fainted when he heard that despite truckloads of CO2 being belched into the atmosphere there is still no evidence to support his hysterical profit-making, and that nutbar scientist James Lovelock -- who invented the "Gaia" nonsense so beloved of climate witchdoctors, and who wails "Before this century is over, billions of us will die"  -- says that New Zealand's proposed Emissions Trading Scheme is "a waste of time." 

"New Zealand, says Lovelock, "is wasting its time passing an Emissions Trading Scheme." Listen here.

Fact is that any ETS from either big party, is little more than a futile sacrifice -- government action that will stop private action, and have no other effect.  If Al Gore actually were right and the worst does happen, the best thing governments could do is get the hell out of the way so free people could adapt to changing circumstances, just as free people always have.  Shackling prosperity now not only doesn't do anything to avert the supposedly coming catastrophe, it makes us much less able to adjust, and much poorer withal.

Could someone please listen?

Does calling a spade a spade dig your own hole?

Amid a blogosphere brimful of bickering and a polis rife with passions, Burgess Laughlin comes out on his own blog in favour of ... reasoned debate!  What on earth?

    In the last few years, I have frequently examined many advocacy websites. One of my purposes was to identify the manner in which the authors made their points. In some weblogs, one element of style stands out: insults to opponents. These writers call their opponents names such as: nutbars, nutjobs, morons, cowards, idiots, goat herders, ragheads, and scum. They also use adjectives such as: moronic, idiotic, stupid, nuts, crazy, loony, insane, delusional, and childish.

I plead guilty.  Meanwhile, Laughlin continues.

    Why do these writers [ie., me] use insults? Judging from their statements of purpose and the contents of their weblogs, these writers want the world around them to adopt certain views. Do these writers think that insulting their opponents will persuade their opponents to revise their values? I am not sure of the answer. I have only a "working hypothesis."?"

Answering for myself, I have two answers:

1. Colour.
2. Calling a spade a spade.

We're not having a debate in a university lunch room here.  If I can entertain, inform and enlighten by using reason and emotion, then all the better for both my readership and my advocacy.

What say you, dear readers?

[Hat tip Objectivist Carnival at Rational Jenn's]

Wishart "a creep"

Helen Clark has called Ian Wishart a "scandal monger" and a "creep." She once called John Campbell, deservedly in my view, a "little creep," so presumably Wishart is less vertically challenged. "Miss Clark went on to say that if you want to meet the Wishart test of public life you had better be one of the vestal virgins."

Is Wishart a scandal monger? No doubt of that. A fundamentalist nutbar? For sure. Conspiracy peddler. Big tick. Creationist and anti-evolutionist? Sure is. Intellectual dwarf? Clearly. A creep? Well, I wouldn't drink with him.

Hard working and energetic for sure, and in New Zealand's lack-lustre (read near non-existent) world of investigative journalism he stands out for both uncovering evidence and, in what I've read, assuming it -- his brain and his magazine remain the toxic dumping ground for everything dreamed up by anyone who ever wore a layer of tin-foil inside their hats. Like many other journalists he is never one to give the whole story when a partial one will sound better, he is Winston Peters with a magazine; Nicky Hager with subscriptions; Dan Brown without the sales; John Grisham with cliches. (This last is irony by the way.) Of Wishart, NBR's Nevil Gibson once said, ""Not one to use a telling phrase where a cliche will do; Mr Wishart's purple prose detracts from an otherwise fascinating account ... a conspiratorial tale of greed and excess ... created in the milieu of the X Files ... "

To call his work yellow journalism would be too kind. The overwhelming majority of what I've read of Wishart's work and of what appears in his magazine takes a breathless join-the-dots approach to a story, but with too few dots to make a full picture -- suggesting what isn't known, and taking denials by protagonists as evidence that they're hiding something. The sad thing is that this muck sells. You lot buy it.

Among some of his gems, if you remember, were the claims that George W Bush was secretly planning to abolish income tax (I wish!); that soy milk causes homosexuality; that condoms don't work and the 'safe-sex' campaign promoting their use is intended only to spread AIDS and increase the power of the "gay lobby"; that Bill Clinton was a cocaine smuggler "in an operation that was turning over billions of dollars a year"; that "ruins" have been found on the moon, "artifacts" on Mars and "lost cities" in Antarctic lakes (and the US Government has presumably been covering up ever since); that the Kyoto Treaty was all the work of "the boys from Enron"; that abortion causes breast cancer; that NZ defence researchers are "helping perfect" US missile systems, nuclear submarines "and even space warfare craft"; that China is about to launch a surprise biological attack on the US...

As proof for most of the stories I've read there is little more than conjecture, imagination, supposition, denials (as proof of veracity) and a demand that you, the reader, prove they're not true. This may be one occasion where I have to agree with the Prime Minister, as I did on her assessment of John Campbell and his 'analysis by ambush. ' Feel free to post below more examples of Wishart's cliche-ridden conspiracy claims over the years.

UPDATE: I'll post more of Investigate's amusing claims over the years as people send them in. These include: African famines caused by "a biotech industry plan to control world food supply"; exposés of "Al Qa'ida's pacific hideaway"; constitutional crises aplenty, including "an income tax revolt by ordinary taxpayers" already under way "with the potential to bring down the current system of government," and a claim that "New Zealand's future as a democracy is in the balance this summer" due to the "uncovering" of a "missing link" Treaty of Waitangi (there's a missing link here allright, but not where Wishart thinks); that the death penalty for treason was dropped so a cabal of political conspirators could "deliberately steal sovereignty from the public"; that people were living in Auckland more than 30,000 years ago...

More to come, I'm sure.

LINKS: PM calls Investigate editor "a creep" - Newstalk ZB
Investigate the editorship - Simon Pound
When partly true is untrue - Not PC

Tags: Nonsense

The very best of this week's 'Not PC'

Here's just some of the scintilating, sparkling and occasionally excoriating writing you've missed at 'Not PC' this week by not tuning in as regularly as you should. Don't let it happen again!

Freezing their globes off in Montreal - when warming meets cooling
If you've been wondering why the UN's Montreal mega-conference on Global Warming has received little coverage -- "what f'ing conference?" I hear you cry -- Rex Murphy has the answer. "Probably because of the cold weather," he says half seriously...

Thu, Dec 8, 2005

A public health guide for blokes:
Christmas parties, Christmas gifts, Christmas holidays -- all have their attendant dangers for the average bloke. For instance, you can lose a girl's interest in just ten seconds at that Christmas party if you say the wrong thing. Fortunately, Lauren Weiss tells you what not to say. If you're successful at this hurdle and you're still seeing her over Christmas...
Thu, Dec 8, 2005

Questions, rhetorical & otherwise, about Reserve Bank meddling
In just under an hour, Alan Bollard will announce the Reserve Bank's new Official Cash Rate. Am I the only one who wonders why the announcement of a bureaucrat should be listened to with so much interest? Why should he have so much power? And why...
Thu, Dec 8

Wananga, waste, and voucher failure
The report on Rongo Wetere's Te Wananga o Aotearoa is rife with stories of profligacy and nepotism, of first class air travel, million dollar contracts to family members, and tales of money wasted on failed IT projects. 'Shocking,' declare all the usual suspects. 'Outrageous.' ACT leader Rodney Hide told NZPA that Mr Shirley had been vindicated. 'The wananga was out of control...
Wed, Dec 7

Showing what God made
Some attractive young German church-goers have put together a calendar showing rather more of God's creation than young church-goers are normally known to show...
Wed, Dec 7

Scalping U2
Leaving aside that, in my view, people who like U2 deserve to be taken for a financial ride just as far as their musical taste has been, we have here a promoter - who you would think would have at least a modicum of financial sense - bleating about people re-selling their tickets, poor lamb, and whinging that the asking price for some is 'beyond their fair value.' The poor lamb is economically illiterate, and he doesn't understand a good thing when he sees it...
Tue, Dec 6

Depoliticise Creationism!
All the political arguments about Intelligent Design, and about how much teachers are paid and what their hours should be -- on all these issues Tibor Machan makes short and perfect sense...
Tue, Dec 6

Having a whack
A textbook anti-Rand smear job has appeared at 'New West' that's worth a read just for the many sober responses. Here's a sample...
Tue, Dec 6

Unions v children
Kindergarten teacher strikes in NZ raise again the question of what teacher unions actually bring to the table...
Mon, Dec 5

Game Theory - "it's a bust"
Martin Kihn, the author of House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time, has been investigating Game Theory, and guess what...
Sun, Dec 4

Tracking down the nutbars
Do yourself a favour and discover David Horowitz's current project: to help you 'track down all the Ward Churchills on campus' and all the networks of all the US nutbar activists that are fit to print. Horowitz, described as “the left’s most brilliant and articulate nemesis...
Sat, Dec 3

Murder by state okay?
[Cartoon by Nick Kim, courtesy of 'The Free Radical.'] The execution yesterday of twenty-five year-old Australian drug smuggler Van Nguyen by the Singaporean state has re-opened the debate on capital punishment...
Sat, Dec 3

Free Radical #69. " Best yet."
I've been devouring my new copy of the 'Free Radical' since it arrived in my letterbox, and I have just two words to describe it. Wow. Twice...
Sat, Dec 3

SOLO Passion!'
Lindsay Perigo has a new project -- well, you might say a re-existing project. SOLOHQ has morphed into SOLO Passion...
Fri, Dec 2

A fairy tale of a leaky house or two
NZ HERALD: A multimillion-dollar claim against the former Building Industry Authority (BIA) over an Auckland apartment complex with leaky building syndrome [picture right] has been struck out by the Court of Appeal...
Fri, Dec 2

Architect v Bureaucrats
A Seattle architect recounts his battles with his local bureaucrats when trying to deposit permit applications...
Fri, Dec 2

Bush was right - but I wasn't

You know, I'm flabbergasted. Truly bowled over. Over the last day or two I've posted a number of pieces, but based on recent experience there were two in particular which I'd assumed would create some controversy and some debate: one saying GE is great, and one saying George Bush was right.

The post on GE and its subsequent follow-ups here and here have generated twenty-two comments to date - for the most part all reasonably argued, even if in my estimation often greatly misguided; the post arguing that George Bush was right to invade Irag has generated just one comment - and that from a nutbar. Even publishing the latter post in my weekly column on Scoop has failed to generate any outrage.

That's NO outrage. None. For a post on Scoop. Arguing that George Bush was right to invade Iraq. None so far, at least. :^)

What that suggests to me - so far at least - is that many people have now accepted however reluctantly that Bush was right to invade Iraq, and the "long-frozen political order ... cracking all over the Middle East" is due to GWB's own foreign policy; and also that despite my own observations on the matter, feelings on the GE issue still run high, and are highest among those I would least expect.

So as I said, I'm flabbergasted. Fortunately my brain-cells were sufficiently regenerated last night that I'm able to think about this phenomenon properly this morning. You'll be the first to know when I've got an answer.