Identity Politics

In his 2015 book, Key Concepts in Politics and International Relations, Andrew Heywood wrote:

All forms of identity politics nevertheless exhibit two characteristic beliefs. First, group marginalization is understood not merely as a legal, political or social phenomenon, but is, rather, a cultural phenomenon. Second, subordination can be challenged by reshaping identity to give the group concerned a sense of (usually publicly proclaimed) pride and self-respect – ‘black is beautiful’, ‘gay pride’ and so on.

While identity politics can be traced back to the emergence of the black consciousness movement in the early decades of the twentieth century, it has had its greatest impact since the 1970s. The upsurge in identity politics occurred in the light of growing attacks on liberal universalism, as greater emphasis was placed on the issues of difference and diversity, and the decline of socialism , which, until the 1970s, had been the dominant means through which the interests of subordinate groups had been expressed. The potency of identity politics derives from its capacity to expose and challenge the deeper processes through which group marginalization and subordination take place. As such, it goes beyond conventional approaches to social advancement, based on the politics of rights (liberalism) and the politics of redistribution (social democracy), and instead offers a politics of recognition, based on an assertion of group solidarity.

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Human Rights

In his 2015 book, Key Concepts in Politics and International Relations, Andrew Heywood wrote:

In certain parts of the world, human rights have come to be accorded a near-religious significance. Supporters of human rights argue that they constitute the basic grounds for freedom , equality and justice , and embody the idea that all human lives are worthy of respect. In that sense, human rights can be said to give political expression to moral values found in all the world’s major religions and these transcend conventional ideological divisions. As such they have been accepted as one of the cornerstones of international law , sometimes being viewed as superior to state sovereignty and thereby being used to justify humanitarian and even military intervention (as in cases such as Iraq and Serbia in the 1990s).

…human rights are merely moral assertions and lack any empirical justification; that it is difficult to view them as absolute because rights, such as the right to life and the right to self-defence, are often balanced against one another; and that it is not always clear when a person should be regarded as ‘human’ and therefore entitled to human rights (which is particularly controversial in relation to abortion). Political objections come from conservatives and communitarians, who point out that it is nonsense to suggest that individuals have rights that are separate from the traditions, cultures and societies to which they belong.

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What Is Conservatism?

In his 2015 book, Key Concepts in Politics and International Relations, Andrew Heywood wrote:

* The central themes of conservative ideology are tradition, human imperfection, organic society, authority and property. For a conservative, tradition reflects the accumulated wisdom of the past, and institutions and practices that have been ‘tested by time’; it should be preserved for the benefit of the living and for generations yet to come. Conservatives view human nature pessimistically in at least three senses. First, human beings are limited, dependent and security-seeking creatures; second, they are morally corrupt, tainted by selfishness, greed and a thirst for power; third, human rationality is unable to cope with the infinite complexity of the world (hence conservatives’ faith in pragmatism and their preference for describing their beliefs as an ‘attitude of mind’ rather than an ideology). The belief that society should be viewed as an organic whole implies that institutions and values have arisen through natural necessity and should be preserved to safeguard the fragile ‘fabric of society’. Conservatives view authority as the basis for social cohesion, arguing that it gives people a sense of who they are and what is expected of them, and reflects the hierarchical nature of all social institutions.

…conservatives argue that they merely advance certain enduring, if at times unpalatable, truths about human nature and the societies we live in. That human beings are morally and intellectually imperfect, and seek the security that only tradition, authority and a shared culture can offer, merely underlines the wisdom of ‘travelling light’ in ideological terms. Experience and history, conservatives warn, will always provide a sounder basis for political action than will abstract principles such as freedom, equality and justice.

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France Faces A Camp Of The Saints Invasion From Africa (7-2-23)

01:00 CROB: Mass immigration’s self-destructive effects, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=149006
02:00 CROB: Ungovernable France: A divided country lurches toward nationalism, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=149011
08:00 The Camp of the Saints, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_tjK4R-1HM
10:30 COLIN LIDDELL: “SUICIDE BY COP TRIGGERED THE FRENCH RIOTS”, https://neokrat.blogspot.com/2023/07/colin-liddell-suicide-by-cop-triggered.html
Crime and the Democrats, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=149022
41:00 Ron DeSantis released an anti-LGBTQ ad, https://twitter.com/search?q=ron%20desantis%20ad&src=typed_query&f=video
46:20 John J. Mearsheimer: Has Putin been weakened? https://rumble.com/v2x7via-system-update-show-109.html
50:50 France faces another night of race riots
53:30 Usage Limit Reach on Twitter – Richard Hanania talks to Michael Tracy
1:07:30 John J. Mearsheimer starts a Substack, https://substack.com/profile/11197444-john-j-mearsheimer
1:12:00 Ukraine’s disastrous offensive
1:24:40 Golden Dawn party in Greece is ruled illegal
1:32:00 The Origins of US Interventionism | Robert Wright & Sean Mirski, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unA_SnZoAQc
1:42:50 Frederic Luskin: Forgiveness: What It Is & What It Is Not., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_UZcz6PN88
1:58:00 If Books Could Kill podcast, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-books-could-kill/id1651876897
1:59:25 Rich Dad, Poor Dad book, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rich-dad-poor-dad/id1651876897?i=1000607676544
2:06:30 The Rules book, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rules/id1651876897?i=1000618727942
2:11:00 The natural order of things
2:13:00 From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America, https://www.amazon.com/Front-Porch-Back-Seat-Twentieth-Century/dp/0801839351

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Crime and the Democrats

William Voegeli writes:

Take the contention that no other advanced democracy has an incarceration rate approaching America’s. It is rhetorically powerful but intellectually shoddy to make international comparisons of incarceration practices without also comparing countries’ crime situations. Doing so implies that a nation’s prison population depends simply and solely on how punitively it chooses to respond to a generic level of criminality. No serious person would contend that Anchorage spends an excessive amount on snow removal by pointing out how well Miami gets by without spending anything at all.

Data provided at World Population Review’s website allows for comparing nations’ incarceration rates to their murder rates. If we treat the latter as an imperfect but serviceable proxy for the severity of a nation’s crime problem, then the ratio between the two gives us an interpretation of incarceration rates that takes crime levels into account. Thus, for every person who is a murder victim in the United States, the number of people incarcerated is 127. Is that a little or a lot? It turns out to be near the middle of the distribution. Switzerland, widely considered a humane and well-governed nation, has a ratio of 124-to-1: America’s incarceration rate is 8.6 times as high as Switzerland’s—but our murder rate is 8.4 times as high. Other countries in which the prison population is less than 127 times as high as the number of murder victims include the United Kingdom (117), France (99), Germany (74), and Canada (59); while those with a higher prisoner-to-murder-victim ratio than the U.S. include Japan (142), Italy (160), Australia (188), and New Zealand (222).

Some nations have higher murder rates and lower incarceration rates than the U.S. But this combination is more plausibly ascribed to civic dysfunction than enlightened forbearance in the face of mayhem. Mexico, for example, imprisons just six people for every one that is murdered. While some Americans will be impressed that Mexico’s incarceration rate is only one fourth of ours, I submit that a much larger number will be alarmed that its murder rate is nearly six times as high. Nigeria is an extreme case, with an incarceration rate of 32 per 100,000 and a murder rate of 34.5 per 100,000. In other words, you’re more likely to be murdered in Nigeria than you are to be sentenced to prison for any crime. The simplest explanation for this phenomenon is that Nigeria has so many murderers largely because it has so few prisoners.

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