The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australian History

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Luke Ford

Historian Geoffrey Blainey writes in the 2001 edition:

* The wide ocean parting Australia and Europe impeded the export of Australian commodities. The same wide ocean was also a barrier to the migration of people from Europe. Whereas one powerful cause of the United States’ rapid growth of population in the nineteenth century was its closeness to Europe, the most powerful brake on Australia’s growth of population was its distance from Europe. Historians of the United States often overlook this obvious fact, preferring to concentrate on the natural resources of their land and the enterprise of their people as the dynamos of national growth. In Australia we also overlook this obvious fact, concentrating on Australia’s deficiency of natural resources as the only reason why Australia was not a serious rival to the United States.

* Of all the countries in the new world to which Europeans in mid-century were flocking, the two where new land was dearest were Australia and New Zealand, the two countries most distant from Europe.

* In the egalitarian bushman’s society of the nineteenth century, education was often seen as a form of snobbery and a way of social advancement which broke up the camaraderie of working men.

* Australia’s emergence in the nineteenth century as one of the most sports-crazy nations of the world…was more to be expected in a society dominated by men…

* By the mid-nineteenth century thousands of Australian working men, in their quest for improved conditions, were giving a higher priority to shorter working hours and longer leisure than to higher wages…[because they frequently did not have families to support].

* Without the intervention of American military strength in 1942 Australia would probably have been invaded or blockaded by Japan. Furthermore, in stemming and then repelling the Japanese thrust in New Guinea and the Solomons, America played the major part and suffered heavy casualties. …While in the nineteenth century Australians had erected, by public subscription, many statues to General Gordon, the British general who lost a skirmish on the banks of the Nile, it was perhaps significant that they erected no statues to General Douglas MacArthur.

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The price of checking your ‘white privilege’ may be high

Posted on June 26, 2020 by Luke Ford

Jonathan Tobin writes: “American Jews have elevated social justice above every other aspect of Jewish life. However, they have forgotten that justice is impossible without the rule of law. Checking their privilege in this manner is itself an example of how disconnected they are from reality. They’re also having trouble understanding that they are still living in a world where security is a necessity for Jews, and that their community cannot defend itself with good intentions and virtue signaling.”

June 17, Tobin wrote: “Civil-rights groups used to understand that the best guarantee for the defense of liberty was to protect free speech, even when it came from people they opposed. But now groups like the ADL are on a crusade to shut down speech and, based on the records of social-media companies and their left-leaning algorithms, the most likely victims are conservative voices, including Jews like Dennis Prager or Ben Shapiro, whose widely shared posts infuriate their opponents.”

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The Principle Of Charity

Posted on June 26, 2020 by Luke Ford

I just discovered this principle and it is awesome. According to Wikipedia: “In philosophy and rhetoric, the principle of charity or charitable interpretation requires interpreting a speaker’s statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation.[1] In its narrowest sense, the goal of this methodological principle is to avoid attributing irrationality, logical fallacies, or falsehoods to the others’ statements, when a coherent, rational interpretation of the statements is available. According to Simon Blackburn[2] “it constrains the interpreter to maximize the truth or rationality in the subject’s sayings.””

“The first to state this hermeneutic principle was Rabbi Meir, a tanna of the fourth generation (139–163), who declared, in Arachin 5b: ‘A person does not say things without reason’.”

Out of all talkshow hosts, I think Dennis Prager does the best with applying this principle. Out of the livestreamers I hear, Richard Spencer does the best.

Operating under this charitable framework, we reduce the perils of the e-personality: “against this background of disinhibited, dissociated personhood, five psychological forces will vie to assert themselves: grandiosity, or the feeling that the sky is the limit when it comes to what we can accomplish online; narcissism, or how we tend to think of ourselves as the center of gravity of the World Wide Web; darkness, or how the Internet nurtures our morbid side; regression, or the remarkable immaturity we seem capable of once we log on; and impulsivity, or the urge-driven lifestyle many fall into online. Those are the transformations (and fractures) that occur in our identity as we sit in front of our browsers, and that is the “Net effect.””

Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal wrote in his 1997 work, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority: Canon, Meaning and Authority:

The principle of charity is an interpretative method that would yield an optimally successful text. For example, although a person’s words might be read as self-contradictory and thus meaningless, they should not be interpreted in that way. If someone tells us he feels good and bad, we should not take his statement as meaningless but rather understand by this that sometimes he feels good and sometimes bad, or that his feelings are mixed. 28 In Quine’s usage, the principle entails quite a limited amount of charity. He discusses problems of translation that involve the use of basic logical rules. In cases of radical translation a charitable attitude is adopted so that a speaker’s words will make sense and the sentence he utters can have meaning, any meaning. Charity is not used here to interpret the other’s statements in the best possible light, but simply to shed some light on them. The other limit of charity is that use of the principle is not based on any assumptions of the speaker’s talent and capability but is simply the precondition for understanding any discussion. Charity amounts to seeing the other as a user of a language, and it is necessary for holding a conversation. The following example will help clarify the distinction between the level of charity required for shedding any light at all on a sentence and the level of placing it in the best light. A given conversation might be fraught with suspicion; for various reasons the speaker may think that his interlocutor is lying and is therefore totally uncharitable in this sense. Sometimes we just take it for granted that the other is lying, so we apply the principle of “liar until proved truthful.” But even so, we must employ the sort of charity that Quine defines, for in order to tell a lie, the other must make sense and speak a shared language.

Ronald Dworkin extends Quine’s principle of charity in interpretation to the second level. Dworkin claims that the choice between competing interpretations is governed by the criterion of which interpretation shows the work in the best light. In literary interpretation we will choose the one that accounts for all the aspects of the narrative. An interpretation that seems to leave a portion of the story unconnected and therefore superfluous will be ruled out. In legal interpretation the standard for the best possible interpretation is not aesthetic but moral. We will select the interpretation that makes the best moral case of the legal material. According to Dworkin, even those who claim that we must discover the original intention of the legislator base their opinion on the belief that this is the best possible way of reading a legal text. The writer’s intention does not provide an independent criterion for establishing the meaning of the text; Dworkin rejects that standard and argues that those who adopt it do so for political reasons. In their view, this is the only way that the legal system can achieve stability and be freed from the arbitrariness of the interpreter-the judge. Their prime guiding principle of interpretation is a value judgment concerning the optimal interpretative strategy, not an objective standard for interpretation. Moreover, according to Dworkin, in reconstructing the writer’s intention we attempt to present it in the best possible light. Interpretation is thus closely linked to evaluation, and value serves as the ultimate standard for interpretation.

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Does Israel train America’s police forces?

Posted on June 26, 2020 by Luke Ford

Dominic Green writes for the UK’s Spectator:

Show me who you lie about and I’ll tell you what you are. The big lie in this, our season of historical illiteracy and gratuitous destruction, is that the Jews are responsible for police killings of black Americans. How? The racist police of Amerikkka are trained by the Zionists.

That’s right. America has no history of violence against blacks and no history of anti-black policing. In the new blood libel, America was one big interracial paradise before the Jews taught Derek Chauvin to put his knee on George Floyd’s neck.

‘Israel security forces are training American cops despite history of rights abuses,’ tweeted Charlotte Greensit in 2017. Greensit, an editor at the left-conspiracist website the Intercept, was promoting a demi-literate promotion of this conspiracy theory by Alice Speri. Greensit is now the managing editor of the New York Times’s opinion page. As she slithered up the greasy pole, Greensit deleted thousands of old tweets, this one included. But the snail-trail of slander is quite clear, and not at all new.

As soon as the Ferguson, Missouri protests began in August 2014, the slogan ‘Ferguson is Palestine’ appeared on the placards. When the Movement for Black Lives, a group affiliated with Black Lives Matter, promulgated a common platform in August 2016, its only foreign policy was that Israel must be shunned and destroyed as an ‘apartheid state’ that commits ‘genocide’ against the Palestinians. Another big lie.

In the same month, Amnesty USA claimed that ‘hundreds’ of American law enforcement officials from many states had received ‘training on crowd control, use of force and surveillance’ from Israel’s ‘national police, military and intelligence services’. That’s not true.

Amnesty’s claims are routinely cited as fact by the hard left and radical black identity groups. Its report and the libel it fosters have filtered into outlets as varied as the the British communist newspaper the Morning Star, the Washington Post and the website of the New York Review of Books.

‘The Israeli military trains US police in racist and repressive policing tactics, which systematically targets Black and Brown bodies,’ tweeted the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which rejects Israel’s existence, in late May.

This is also inaccurate. As Amnesty itself admitted, the programs that took American officers to Israel were for ‘police chiefs, assistant chiefs, and captains’. Amnesty’s report contained no evidence that American officers received any information, let alone ‘training’, from their Israeli peers on relevant matters such as the militarising of the American police, targeting minorities for traffic stops and minor violations, or using deadly force in routine encounters.

Nor is there any evidence to suggest that American police chiefs have retrained their officers to copy any Israeli policing techniques. But why let the facts get in the way when you’ve got a big lie to push?

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BLM Activism & Your Work Prospects

Posted on June 26, 2020 by Luke Ford

I suspect many employers won’t hire people who’ve supported BLM just as they won’t hire people who support BDS.

From the WSJ:

Workers may run some employment risk if they participate in protests or other forms of activism. Most U.S. workers are at-will employees, meaning they can be fired without notice and for any reason. There are exceptions, such as those provided under the National Labor Relations Act, which protects employees who are protesting working conditions. Some states also have laws that prevent employers from firing someone for taking part in lawful off-duty activities.

Perhaps most misunderstood is what the First Amendment does and doesn’t provide, said Prof. Hawkins. While the First Amendment protects a person’s rights to free speech and assembly without government interference, it doesn’t prevent a private employer from firing or disciplining a worker for actions such as engaging in political speech at work.

“The idea that we lose those rights in any context is shocking to most people,” she said.

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