Category Archives: Conservatism

UPDATE II (3/6/023): China’s Disease-Breeding, Barbaric Wet Markets Are Hell On Earth For Animals

China, Conservatism, Culture, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Media, Science

China’s “wet markets,” set up by immigrants in the US too, are hell on earth for animals: They are tied up, stacked in cages and slaughtered on the spot for “freshness.”

UPDATE II (3/6/023): And no, Tucker Carlson, wet markets are not only for fish, as the host asserted in the first week of March, 2023.

A wet market (also called a public market[4] or a traditional market[5]) is a marketplace selling fresh foods such as meat, fish, produce and other consumption-oriented perishable goods in a non-supermarket setting

Here is an objective news report-–yes, these still exist—of the nature of the typical Chinese “wet market” scene, where filth and unfathomable barbarity combine to breeds diseases like the coronavirus syndrome, which came out of Wuhan Province.

AP: “Virus renews safety concerns about slaughtering wild animals“

The Wuhan market was also like many other “wet markets” in Asia and elsewhere, where animals are tied up or stacked in cages. Activists say it’s difficult to distinguish between those that were legally farmed and those that may have been illegally hunted. The animals are often killed on site to ensure freshness. The messy mix raises the tiny odds that a new virus will jump to people handling the animals and start to spread, experts say.

“You’ve got live animals, so there’s feces everywhere. There’s blood because of people chopping them up,” said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, which works to protect wildlife and public health from emerging diseases.

UPDATE (2/17): Where’s the moron US media?

Some ethical truths can’t be denied: However well-regulated and legal, abattoirs are also hell-on-earth for animals.

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UPDATED (2/17): NEW COLUMN: Incompetent, Imperial Neocons And The Permanent State (Part 1)

Conservatism, Culture, Donald Trump, Government, Neoconservatism, Politics

New column is “Incompetent, Imperial Neocons And The Permanent State (Part 1).” It’s now on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

An excerpt:

Mr. French, on the other hand, appears to take a bow for a philosophical bent that belongs to classical conservatism: “The culture is upstream from politics.” Or, as Russell Kirk, the father of American conservatism, put it, “At heart, all political problems are moral and religious problems.”

Relinquish the ego. Quit letting your reptilian brain lead you, and allow, in a sentence or two, that the stuff “I THINK” in “MY WRITING,” to parrot Mr. French, belongs to a proud conservative tradition.

That tradition might need revision. For the world, political and cultural, has changed, metaphysically.

Although a man of the left, Canadian columnist Rick Salutin had, without doubt, advanced astute observations about the relationship between culture and politics. Because they comport with the metaphysical changes alluded to, Salutin’s observations are the better ones.

Back in 1998, Salutin offered up a prescient, if distressing, view of politics as culture, following “the capitulation of most sources of opposition to the neoconservative … agenda.”

Wrote Salutin: “In a culture of imagery and spectacle, politics has become mostly a show, entertainment.”

“[F]or the moment, politics in the democratic, electoral sense, is no longer about making choices [left or right] regarding social and economic direction.”

“What’s increasingly clear to voters is that they are not choosing the direction of their society—that has already been settled; they are voting for a cast of characters who will play the role of The Government on television and on [Capitol Hill] for the next [couple of] years.

The scrip is set, but you get to decide who plays the parts on TV.”

If Deep State durability has proven anything, it is that not even a fire-breathing political dragon like our president can fumigate the snake pit that is the Permanent State. …

… READ THE REST. The complete column is “Incompetent, Imperial Neocons And The Permanent State (Part 1).” It’s now on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

UPDATE (2/17): Glad you liked it!

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UPDATED (7/11/020): Education: UK & US Much More Radically Egalitarian Than Europe

America, Britain, Conservatism, Education, Egalitarianism, Europe, Intelligence

The two Anglo-American countries, as I have surprisingly come to realize, are fundamentally more radical on many fronts than the Europeans.

Take education. Germany has a “The three-tiered German education system—which sorts children on the basis of ability at the age of ten into either university-preparatory schools or vocational ones.” It “has always been criticized for fostering social segregation.” (The Economist: “The dignity of all the talents: A battle over gifted education is brewing in America.”)

The impetus to “to eliminate separatism in secondary education” began in … you guessed it, England and America, where the very idea that some individuals are more intelligent than others is anathema, apparently.

“The debate over whether education of gifted children segregates them on the basis of pre-existing privilege rather than cognitive ability is neither new nor uniquely American. The number of selective, state-run grammar schools in Britain reached its zenith in 1965, before the Labour government of Harold Wilson embarked on a largely successful effort “to eliminate separatism in secondary education”.

In New York City, Bill de Blasio, the city’s left-wing mayor, wants to eliminate what he deems unjust programmes and school screening for gifted and talented students. … “Mr de Blasio floated the idea of scrapping the entrance test and admitting the top 7% of students from each middle school (roughly, for pupils aged 11 to 14) to specialised schools. … One problem is that at some middle schools this would include students who had not passed the state maths exam. This infuriated many Asian parents, who do not see why their children should be punished for studying hard.” Or, for being more intelligent.

An astonishing 40% of high schools in the city do not teach chemistry, physics or upper-level algebra, notes Clara Hemphill, the founding editor of InsideSchools, an education-policy website. “The problem is not learning linear algebra in schools, but not knowing arithmetic.” …
… Only 6% of high-school pupils attend one of the eight sought-after specialised high schools. Because admissions are based on high-stakes tests …

“Some advocates yearn for an egalitarian model like Finland’s—where comprehensive schools and a focus on special education (or disabilities) rather than giftedness coincide with high rankings on international measures such as PISA scores.”

I suspect Finland is so much more homogeneous a society, down to its education system, than the US.

“But even in Finland, more than 10% of upper-secondary schools (those before university) are specialised. Other attributes, such as high education spending and extreme selectivity of applicants to become teachers (only 10% make it), are probably also critical to the education system’s success. Removing programmes for the gifted will not suddenly turn New York into Finland.”

* Image courtesy Stuyvesant High School, for the gifted, 345 Chambers Street, New York (Photo By: Susan Watts/NY Daily News via Getty Images)

MORE: “The dignity of all the talents: A battle over gifted education is brewing in America.”

UPDATE (7/11/020):

 

Suleimani: America Is Judge, Jury And Executioner; Decides Who Lives, Who Dies

America, Argument, Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iraq, Republicans

“Suleimani deserved to die.” That’s the consensus on Fox News. It’s also how assorted commentators on the channel prefaced their “positions” on the killing of this Iranian.

Major General Qassim Suleimani was assassinated by a US drone air strike at the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP).

Even the great Tucker Carlson—the only mainstream hope for us Old Right, America First, anti-war sorts—framed the taking out of Suleimani as the killing of a bad guy by good guys:

“There are an awful lot of bad people in this world. We can’t kill them all, it’s not our job.”

However you finesse it, the premise of Tucker’s statement is that the American government, and the cognoscenti who live in symbiosis with it, get to adjudicate who’s bad and who’s good in the world. The debate is never over right or wrong, but over whether our universal American Judges should or shouldn’t act on their immutably just moral calls.

Even Tucker, whose antiwar sentiments are laudable, conceded that this Suleimani guy probably needed killing, which is the same thing Iraqis old enough to remember America’s destruction of Iraq, circa 2003, would say about President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld.

So who’s right? Or must we accept that it is up to the United States government and its ruling elites to determine who lives and who dies around the world.

The atavistic argument—“Suleimani deserved to die”—made on Fox News holds true only if you believe that the US is the repository of an international and universal code of law and is deputized to uphold this code of law.

This primitive argument is true ONLY if you believe the US government is universal judge, jury and executioner, deciding who may live and who must die the world over.

As to whether the US government has a right to eliminate a state actor by declaring him a “terrorist”:

Like it or not, Suleimani was an Iranian state actor, the equivalent of our Special Operations Commander.

We would not tolerate Iranians designating America’s Special Operations Commander, Gen. Richard D. Clarke, as a terrorist, although they may have plenty reasons to do so.

Our Special Operations forces and their command encroach on the Iranian neighborhood much more so than Iranians and their special forces encroach on American territory.

If Iranians took out America’s Special Operations Commander somewhere in North America—we would definitely consider it an act of war by Iran.

* Image courtesy BBC News.