I'd like to recommend that you read the intelligent and sympathetic review of Jim Kalb's new book that you'll find here.It's best to read it in its entirety, but there are a few bits that particularly appealed to me. Here, for instance, is Kalb explaining why the liberal understanding of inclusiveness harms real community:In fact inclusiveness destroys community by reducing the importance of personal ties, making us interchangeable with others and making our goals as much a matter of individual choice as possible. There is nothing special...
Monday, September 9, 2013
Sunday, September 8, 2013
Anthony Burrow, an assistant professor at Cornell University, has conducted an interesting experiment on Chicago trains.He had a group of 110 volunteers ride on the trains and record their moods during the journey. The result was that psychological distress increased when people became a minority within the carriage regardless of what race the volunteer was.In other words, people of all races felt discomfort being a minority:Participants' negative mood heightened as the ratio of people from different ethnic backgrounds aboard the train increased,...
Saturday, September 7, 2013
In 2009 Toys R Us got into trouble in Sweden for "sexism." They were charged with producing brochures showing girls playing with girls' toys and boys with boys' toys.Here we are a few years later and Toys R Us have declared that they will not market toys by gender in the UK either:Toys R Us today bowed to anti-sexist marketing demands and pledged to drop gender labelling for its products.The retailer declared that it would be more “inclusive” when marketing toys for girls and boys, and said it would draw up plans in the long term to remove “explicit...
The breaking up of political orthodoxy is a good thing for us. So I was interested to read that a new German party, the Alternative for Germany, has been formed. The party is challenging the status quo by calling for the abolition of the euro and for changes to the immigration system. At the moment the party is only polling at around three per cent which is unfortunate as you need at least five per cent to get seats under the German system. However, what's interesting is that the founders of the party are very highly educated people. Six of the...
Friday, September 6, 2013
The liberal team has done better than our team over a long period of time. Therefore, we have to carefully consider where they have managed to get an advantage over us, so that we can learn to improve our game.So how have liberals managed to do better? There are a range of answers that have been given to this question. 1. Class interestsIt helps if your political philosophy serves the class interests of an influential and wealthy class of people in society.Historically, liberalism had support from the Whig aristocracy (who wanted to contain royal...
I had a go at completing a political compass that supposedly tells you where you fit on the political spectrum. As I suspected the compass could not cope with someone who does not belong within the current left-liberal vs right-liberal political framework. I ended up close to the very centre of the compa...
Thursday, September 5, 2013
When I write a post describing a positive political strategy or some political work that is happening on the ground I often get comments that assert grandly that some factor beyond our control renders all activity useless.It's a bleak attitude, one that denies the effect on the world of our own creative spirit. It is this creative spirit that is mostly responsible for making history (though factors such as the economic organisation of a society or technological changes can influence things as well.)For all their materialism, liberals are very...
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