“The West has become irrational. By turning truth and lies, victim and aggressor, justice and injustice upside down, it cannot even recognise, let alone deal with, the threats being mounted to its own values and civilisation.”

Blind ideology is dancing on the grave of reason
Melanie Phillips  
The Australian
May 15, 2010
IN Britain, the benefits of diversity are apparently boundless. Now that the Pagan Police Association has received government recognition, police officers can take a string of pagan festivals as official holidays.

These include celebrating the festival of lactating sheep, and drinking mead and dancing naked to celebrate the harvest. In court, pagan officers will be allowed to pledge to tell the truth not before God but by what "they hold sacred", including, presumably, the Sun God or Kriss Kringle, the Germanic god of yule.

In Australia, as historian Keith Windschuttle has chronicled in his new book The Stolen Generations - volume three of his tireless evisceration of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History - the allegedly monstrous theft of 100,000 Aboriginal children by Australian officials just because they were Aboriginal never actually happened.

In the US, when a car bomb was planted recently in New York's Times Square by a man later revealed to be a Muslim trained in bomb-making in Pakistan's Waziristan region, there was an initial stampede to declare the attempted atrocity was unconnected to Islamic terrorism.
It was said to be most likely the work of a Tea Party member, right-wing militiaman or lone nut. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg even suggested the bomb could have been placed by "somebody with a political agenda who doesn't like the healthcare bill or something".

What has Britain come to when its police officers are given leave to dance about naked? How can generations of Australians have been taught the egregious falsehood of the Stolen Generations as fact? And how many times have Tea Party members or people opposed to a piece of legislation tried to commit mass murder against their fellow Americans, compared with the number of recent attempts by Muslim terrorists?

Such intellectual perversity can be understood only in the context of a far wider and profound retreat from reason throughout the West.
Across a broad range of issues, the progressive intelligentsia appears to have junked the rules of evidence, objectivity and rationality in favour of fantasy, irrationality and upside-down thinking.
Take man-made global warming, for example.
The belief that the planet is on course for carbon Armageddon is now embedded in Western politics. Yet the evidence that the climate is warming to an unprecedented and catastrophic degree just isn't there. The seas are not rising, the ice is not shrinking, the polar bears are not vanishing, and there has been no significant climate warming since 1995.

Or take the Middle East. Israel is the victim of six decades of exterminatory aggression from the Arab and Muslim world. Yet it is Israel that is expected to make concessions to its attackers, who are said by the West to deserve a state of their own. Meanwhile, the US extends its hand of friendship to Iran, which is building a nuclear bomb to commit another Jewish genocide.

Closer to home, "minority rights" mean activities previously marginalised or considered transgressive are now privileged through "family lifestyle choice" or multiculturalism.
Dissenters from these creeds are socially and professionally ostracised. Academics are hounded as racists for upholding the true historic origins of Western civilisation. Scientists sceptical of man-made global warming find funding is withheld. And those sounding the alarm about the true scope of the Islamic jihad are demonised as warmongering neo-cons or part of a Jewish conspiracy.

Such irrationality, intolerance and, indeed, bigotry run counter to the cardinal tenets of a free society based on reason and the toleration of dissent.
This is because these dominant ideas are all rooted in ideologies: environmentalism, anti-racism, anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, egalitarianism or scientism, the belief that scientific materialism alone explains everything.

Rather than going where the evidence leads, ideology wrenches the evidence to fit a prior idea. Not only is ideology inimical to reason, it sacrifices truth to power as it attacks those who try to uphold reality in the face of dogma.

This is because the progressive mindset believes it is synonymous with virtue itself. All opposition is therefore not just wrong but evil. Since progressives also believe anyone who opposes them is a right-winger, it follows that all dissent is right-wing and evil, and so must be shut down.
In other words, these are not propositions to be debated in a rational way but are seen as self-evident truths with the infallibility of religious dogma.

They also smack of the political totalitarianism of communism and fascism, as well as resembling, ironically, the fanatical doctrines of militant Islam. Curiously, they also display religious motifs of sin, guilt and salvation. Odder still, they all exhibit features of millenarianism: the religious belief in the perfectibility of life through the collective redemption of sin. Contemporary secular ideologies identify the sins committed by humanity - oppression of the people of developing nations, despoliation of nature, bigotry, poverty, war - and offer salvation by a return to righteousness.

Thus the greens believe they will save the planet. The leftists believe they will create the brotherhood of man. The anti-Zionists believe they will turn suicide bomb-belts into cucumber frames. The atheists believe they will create the Garden of Reason. And the Islamists believe they
will create the kingdom of God on earth.
Dissenters are dismissed because they deny the unchallengeable truths of anti-imperialism, environmentalism and scientific materialism. The explanation for the frustration of Utopia must therefore lie in conspiracies by the neo-cons or the Jews, Big Oil or the creationists.

The result is not merely that the West has become irrational. By turning truth and lies, victim and aggressor, justice and injustice upside down, it cannot even recognise, let alone deal with, the threats being mounted to its own values and civilisation.
With ideology eroding the principles of rationality and freedom, truth and justice on which it rests, the West is failing to understand what it is that it cannot understand, and so cannot grasp the mortal danger in which it stands.

The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power by Melanie Phillips is published by Encounter, New York.

Technorati Tags: Keith Windschuttle,Pagan Police Association,The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,The Stolen Generations,Tea Party,Muslim terrorists,man-made global warming,Middle East

Australia: Comrade Lu Kewen’s aka. Kevin Rudd’s Internet censorship almost complete

 

Access Denied Pt 1.

“The idea that the Internet is this scary place that parents don't understand, that everybody needs protection from, isn't a view that's held by most of society.

What it actually is, is a scary place that politicians don't understand, that politicians need protection from and that's why we're having this debate now.”

Access Denied Pt.2

 

Beijing’s highest ranking official in Australia, Australian Prime Minister Lu Kewen, aka. Kevin Rudd.

ATLAS EXCLUSIVE: Trevor Kelway on the EDL Website Shutdown

Lu Kewens’ internet censorship plans “unworkable” says Google

Rudds’ Australia: Iran,Australia and North Korea a threat to internet via censorship regulation

Update on Rudd's internet censorship laws

Americans BEWARE Australian internet to be CENSORED by Australian Labor Party

 

The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com
______________________________

__________
U.N. group seeks control of Internet
By John Zarocostas

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Published November 18, 2003
________________________________________
GENEVA -- Governments spearheaded by China, Brazil, India, Russia and Saudi Arabia are trying to place the Internet under the control of the United Nations or its member governments, a move that the United States and other developed countries are determined to resist.

The issue has cropped up in preparatory talks for a world summit on the information society to be held from Dec. 10 to 12 in Geneva, with the stated goal of advancing the management and worldwide use of the Internet, especially in poorer nations.
Delegates from rich and developing nations remained divided on the matter at the end of the latest round of talks on Friday, senior diplomats said.

"We will continue to fight hard to ensure that Internet governance remains a balanced enterprise among all stakeholders and continues to be private-sector-led," said the chief of the U.S. delegation, Ambassador David A. Gross.
Pierre Gagne, executive director of the world summit, earlier identified control of the Internet as one of two key issues in the talks, adding that control and financial issues "will probably be the last issues to be resolved" at the summit.
Many developing countries argue that governments need to play a greater role in managing and setting policy for the Internet, while the United States, the European Union and Japan, among others, say government interference could stifle the development of the dynamic medium.
The Internet, at present, is loosely managed by a private organization in California named the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which coordinates such matters as Internet servers and domain names.
Countries with developing and emerging economies would like to hand over that authority to a U.N. agency, such as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).
The Internet medium is too important to be left in the hands of one major power, some argue, and others say problems such as cybercrime and protection of intellectual property rights require greater government involvement.
Yoshio Utsumi, secretary-general of the ITU, which will host the December summit, said in an interview that Brazil is "a very strong advocate" of his agency taking over the Internet.
China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Senegal and many other African countries were also "keen" for the United Nations to have a role, he said.
But, he said, the differences of opinion were "too big" to be settled before the delegates meet in Geneva next month. Other diplomats said there might be no decision even then.
The summit also will deal with questions such as how to block the spread of viruses, prevent unwanted "spam" and prevent the use of the medium for criminal purposes such as identity theft, Western officials said.
Russia has proposed that the final declaration address Internet security in both "civil and security fields," but many countries fear that any reference to military security could limit freedom of expression, Mr. Utsumi said.
There also is pressure for a strong statement in support of free expression on the Internet but sources said that is being resisted by China and other countries that want to maintain strong oversight of the medium.
Nitin Desai, special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said the core purpose of the summit is to establish a common vision for the information society, to utilize new technologies to overcome poverty and to find ways to make Internet access affordable to all.
The president of Senegal has proposed the creation of a "global digital solidarity fund" to help poor countries establish Internet access. The ITU estimates that fewer than 1 percent of low-income country residents are Internet subscribers.
The United States and other industrialized countries say the existing mechanisms are sufficient and argue that funding a new international bureaucracy would not be an effective way to spread information technology.
Poor countries would be better served by establishing an environment in which the private sector would develop the needed infrastructure, the industrialized countries say.

 

Technorati Tags: Access Denied,Lu Kewens Internet Censorship,Australian Labor Party,Internet Censorship,International Socialism,United Nations,China,Venezuela,Iran,North Korea,Australia

Afghanistani “Polyanna” gets reality check after going “home”

 

Pt.1

Pt.2

Australia’s useful idiots support Burqa,Islamic insurgent to be deported

Ban the Burqa

Apologies for throwing a spanner into the Islamic victim hood narrative here, but neither "Islam" or "Muslim" are races of people. Islam is a belief system and its followers are called Muslims (amongst many other things)
This is a simple security issue,trying to protect terrorists by elevating their political and "religious" beliefs to a "race" of people has worked so far and has enabled these self declared Islamic / Muslim Killers/Terrorists/ "man made disaster makers" to get away with anything they choose in the knowledge that they have an army of apologist and spin doctors in the Multicultural Industry, salivating over the opportunity to defend their vile actions and intent.

Belgium the Brave

Australia:Fred Nile calls for Burqa Ban.

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan,Burqa Ban,Islam,Australia