CENTRE PARTIES
There is a good article on �Slate� showing convincingly that the major political parties in a democracy both have to stay very close to the centre. This is particularly marked in Australia where the policy differences between the two major parties are so minute that even a dedicated anti-Leftist like myself would not see it as an important change if the Australian Labor Party won the next Federal election (though they won�t).
So where does that leave parties that proclaim themselves as centre parties? In a mess. Australia�s alleged centre party has just imploded because their desperate search for something different to say had driven them to the extreme Left — which upset a lot of their members who really were centrists.
The really interesting implication of centrism, however, is that you can only get big change by moving the whole political agenda in one direction or the other. This happened very markedly after the implosion of the Soviet Union — after which socialism went out the window worldwide and market-based economic arrangements (particularly privatization of former government-owned businesses) were brought in by parties of every political stripe from Britain to Bangladesh — not even excepting �Communist� China.
This rightward shift in the economic management agenda has been enormously beneficial — with world poverty now becoming steadily �Africanized� (i.e. with India and China both rapidly becoming more prosperous under their new, more capitalist arrangements, populations stuck in dire poverty are now very largely restricted to Africa).
So the job of conservative/libertarian ideologues like myself is now to try to expose the destructiveness of government activism in ALL spheres. If we can convince enough people of that, we will have moved the agenda in a way that the major political parties (whether Right-leaning ot Left-leaning) will have to follow.
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PRESIDENT BUSH AND SEXISM
I have often remarked that most Leftists seem to have absolutely no regard for the truth. So what is the Left now trying to imply about a President who has appointed a record number of women to senior positions in his administration? Yes. You guessed it: He is a sexist. Orrin Judd has the story in his post of 28th.
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DISAPPEARING GLACIERS
I normally leave Greenie debunking to Aaron Oakley but I cannot resist pointing people to this story. It deals with the recent scare that the glaciers of Kilimanjaro are disappearing because of global warming. It turns out that the receding of the glaciers concerned has actually SLOWED in recent decades!
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KRUGMAN THE LIGHTWEIGHT
�Paul Krugman, ostensibly an economist, but actually a polemicist, although not a particularly good one. He writes in a puffed-up way about things he knows very little about, and he is a leading contender for lightweight columnist of the year. �
See here for more.
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Comments? Email me:
Email: jonjayray@hotmail.com.
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