Not So Much A "Cold" As A "Deep-Frozen" Warrior: New Zealand's most industrious anti-communist, Trevor Loudon, would have been much happier peddling his red-baiting wares back in the days of US Senator Joseph McCarthy and his local franchisee, National’s first prime minister, Sid Holland. At least back then there was a market for left-wing names, addresses and meticulously-recorded red rendezvous.
IT’S HARD NOT TO FEEL just a little bit proud of New Zealand-born
businessman, Chris Liddell. To have a Kiwi in the West Wing of the White House
– as Director of Strategic Initiatives, no less – is a pretty big deal.
Another Kiwi making waves in Donald Trump’s America is a lot
harder to like.
In her coverage of the recent Conservative Political Action Conference
(CPAC) held in Washington DC, Rolling
Stone journalist, Sarah Posner, name-checked our very own Trevor Loudon.
Describing the Christchurch-born anti-communist as: “a
conspiracy theorist who appeared on a panel moderated by Ginni Thomas, wife of
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas”, Posner offered Loudon’s outlandish
conspiracism as proof of the Republican Party’s “willingness to look the other
way as the movement mutates from 20th century conservatism to a
Trump-Alt-Right-white-nationalism.”
What caught Posner’s attention were the startling claims
contained in Loudon’s 23-minute video America
Under Siege: Civil War 2017. Decrying the very idea that the Russians intervened
in last year’s US Presidential Election on Trump’s behalf, Loudon advances the novel
theory that Vladimir Putin is, in fact, the principal funder and director of Donald
Trump’s enemies.
New Zealand Leftists of a certain age, especially those who
belonged to the gaggle of tiny communist groups that once clung like limpets to
the broader labour movement, will have little difficulty recalling Loudon. I
certainly remember his NewZeal blog and its ferocious dedication to tracking
down and monitoring the membership and minutiae of every Marxist-Leninist group
that ever published a pamphlet or stood on a picket line. Verily, wherever
three or more of them were gathered in Marx’s name, it seemed that Trevor was
with them also.
To be honest, I felt sorry for him. Like so many others who found
themselves swept up in revolutionary politics in the 1980s and 90s, Loudon was
born too late. How much happier and more gainfully employed he would have been
had he been able to peddle his anti-communist wares back in the days of US Senator Joseph
McCarthy and his local franchisee, National’s first prime minister, Sid
Holland. At least back then there was a market for left-wing names, addresses
and meticulously-recorded red rendezvous.
But Loudon’s influence, both here and in his spiritual home,
the United States, grew out of the Internet. There is considerable irony here, because
by the time New Zealanders started connecting themselves to the Internet and
starting up blogs, Loudon’s great fountainhead of subversion and sedition, the
Soviet Union, had suddenly and irrevocably blipped-off History’s
computer-screen.
Not that Loudon was about to let a little thing like the
fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of what used to be called “actually
existing socialism” get in the way of his Manichean conviction that the future
of the entire world turned upon the never-ending twilight struggle between the Children
of Darkness and the Children of Light.
Nevertheless, the collapse of the Soviet Union in August
1991, did leave Loudon prey to the same deadening realisation that had demoralised
its loyal disciples all over the world. Without so much as a bang, indeed, with
barely a whimper, all the patiently collected literature and memorabilia of
Soviet-style communism – along with all the bulging files detailing its
collectors’ every move – were reduced to piles of worthless junk. Like those Russian
warehouses filled with unwanted busts of Lenin and Stalin, Loudon’s vast
archive of red subversion in Godzone no longer had any serious buyers.
Luckily for Loudon, the USA remains the one place where comically
unserious people can still be taken very seriously indeed. While their more
adaptable comrades made the necessary Manicheist transition from the evils of Soviet
Communism to the evils of Radical Islam (assisted admirably by the terrorism of
Osama Bin Laden) dyed-in-the-wool anti-communists like Loudon (now based in the
United States) doggedly insisted that the Red Menace was still very much alive.
Putin and his “puppet masters”, says Loudon, have been
“guiding the chaos unfolding on America’s streets”. Still inspired by the
doctrines of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, these shadowy string-pullers have
been “organizing protests and riots in the United States from the Vietnam War
to Ferguson, Missouri.”
The CPAC crowd lapped-up Loudon’s Cold War retro paranoia
like gravy. Instead of being hailed as Trump’s best friend, Putin was, very helpfully, being
recast as America’s old adversary.
As strategic initiatives go – it’s a beauty.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 3 March 2017.
38 comments:
Pat Buchanan argues that Russia is a natural Allie
http://www.vdare.com/articles/lavrov-vs-mccain-is-russia-an-enemy
Elsewhere they are using the term "new cold-civil war"
What's the difference between Trevor's virulent view of communism and the reaction of journalists and students to the European club at AU? Duncan ___? from Spinoff said :"when the lights come on the rats scurry away"
And yet more "evidence" from an extreme right wing Website designated as racist by the SPLC. Sorry, VDare also makes shit up.
It's interesting that during the Cold War both sides supported the premises on which it was based. Neither side did a great deal to alter this for quite some time. It seems that one conclusion might be that it served the interest of both sides to have a carefully controlled set of circumstances in which neither side was aiming for victory.And it is notable that whatever conflicts there were never took place on the territory of the major players.Whatever you might say about Kissinger – and I think he should have been jailed as a war criminal myself – he did see the sheer futility of this. What he replaced it with though... meh.
Reds Under the Bed.....arghhh!!!!! Yes, as the Leningrad Cowboys manager said to them in Siberia at the start of the movie, "You are rubbish, only Americans buy rubbish, we must go to the USA!" Ditto Loudon.
I have a major thank-you on this whole subject to GreyWarbler who put us onto the BBC documentary "Hypernormalisation" which can be viewed on Youtube. It is 2-1/2 hours but well worth watching. It explains very well the psychology behind the Democrats failure to paste Trump (with absolutely no credible evidence) with Putins (non existent) electoral interference. Post truth applied to the accusations, and the American public showed decisively that they did not buy it, as contrary to the aforementioned Leningrad Cowboys the US public do not necessarily buy the rubbish that the MSM tries to feed them.
Trev Louden, ex ACT; it always seemed he was a kid, nose pressed against a shop front window after closing time, denied admittance–there is little doubt he had a direct channel to the security forces files re all those trips to Moscow and Nicaragua that he featured online
historians, Chris, are inevitably revisionists to varying degrees, the small NZ left sects provided ample ammunition themselves for mockery and sideways looks, particularly with their favourite sport of vicious sectarianism towards each other, opportunities lost when you consider the approximately several thousand members and supporters of the SAL, SUP, CPNZ, MLO, WCL etc. evident in the late 70s to mid 80s
so you do the NZ marxists a disservice here, there would have been little militancy in the NZ unions post ’51, no mass movements against the Vietnam War and Springbok tour, no nuke free NZ without the commos!
What Sonya Davis daid to Chris Trotter: "if they [the people ] knew what was going to happen, they would be horrified:. That would fit many peoples definition of a *fith column".
Vdare make stuff up. Nigel Latta says "research shows 90% of us want to luve in a multicultural society".
References please.
George Monbiots latest on the Alt right shows how blind the left is. He claims it all grew out of gaming.
Wrong George we evolved to live in smallish groups surrounded by people like ourselves. Occasionally we ascend a staircase as we sacrifice ourselves in battle so our group survives (sort of).
George invented the phrase "people and place aren't fungible", however to George it only applies to people and shopping malls.
Nick J,
Thanks to you, I've just spent 2.75 hours (when I should have been out walking in the fresh air) looking at "Hypernormalisation" and searching for evidence in favour of the claims you make for it.
My reason for doing so is that I'm still trying to understand the strangely pervasive "Lefties for Trump" mindset, which , today at least, you seem to share. I like to keep an open mind on such matters.
But all I saw was an (overlong, badly edited but admirably detailed) account of how our myth-making, inherently dishonest civilization has handed itself over to even worse liars. These include people in and around the Kremlin and (now) the White House, for whom the dissolution of any distinction between truth and lies is itself a desired objective, and (in the Russian case) an openly declared one.
This, I knew already! But, as a result of watching this film, I am more rather than less convinced of Russian interference in the US electoral process and more rather than less convinced that much of the unredacted stuff on the internet is a far worse enemy of truth than is (for all its warts) the traditional (i.e. professionally edited, non-algorithm dominated) media.
Meanwhile, I'm still trying to work out what it is that the US public has decisively, as you suggest, rejected. Sorry to bore you with the reminder, but Trump's opponent gained three million more votes than he did. Moreover, he's currently languishing much further down the polls than any newly-elected president during my relatively long lifetime.
Best wishes
Victor
The trouble with the internet is it give false authority via a reasonably coherent web site. Trevor Loudon's journey, via the pseudo-religious capitalist (and anti-semitic) cult ZAP, to paranoid anti-communist fantasist is just the journey of a mildly mentally ill crackpot. Spend five minutes watching him rambling to an audience and you'll realise this particular emperor is a shambling imbecile.
Loudon has made a career of a type of paranoia that just has not purchase in NZ, but sadly, economies of scale means he can find enough stupid people in the USA to fund him.
Kissenger not only a war criminal,but also a lounge lizard.what deserves the rope first.
Alt right?
https://psmag.com/on-the-milo-bus-with-the-lost-boys-of-americas-new-right-629a77e87986#.1cuvigv54
An excellent read which puts them in context. Probably more context than they would actually want. I don't know about the gaming, but it shows up there shallow, immature nihilism.
Didn't the German Greens endorse pedophilia
http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.co.nz/2010/05/taking-greens-seriously.html
"Nigel Latta says "research shows 90% of us want to luve in a multicultural society".
References please."
Nigel Latta is an entertainer. But even so he does have some qualifications in psychology. VDare simply makes shit up. So there is a false equivalence in here somewhere. Actually I don't know why you keep posting links to those stupid websites, because surely no one here is actually going to go and read them, except as some as esoteric anthropological exercise. Jesus Christ, even the most extremist right wingers that comment on this blog wouldn't soil themselves going to places like that.
GS
As fine a piece of polemical reportage as I've read in many a long year.
And can you think of a better summary of the human condition than "Hurt people hurt people."? I can't.
Half way through, I started wondering who this "Wendy" was. And then I looked at the intro and realised she was the young woman whose stuff I'd consistently admired in the New Statesman. Dammit, she's good!
Victor, yes surprisingly for a BBC doco it was somewhat badly edited and overly long.
Lefties for Trump. People whose interests formerly aligned with the Dems and voted the other way probably did so because the Dem policies did not align with them. I suspect that they are about to be disappointed by their alternate choice. Lefties against Hillary, yes lots after the corrupt anti Sanders campaign from Dem HO.
Im surprised that you in commenting upon overt lying in the Kremlin and Whitehouse bracket the word "now". Seems to me that the Whitehouse has been an equal cesspit of lies to the Kremlin for as long as I can remember. Past masters methinks.
As for Russian involvement in the US election who knows? If you want me to believe the NSA CIA and Democrats forget it, they are not credible. Would the Russians do it? Probably, if they wish to act like the US. Did they? Wikileaks and Anonymous who know something about cyber intrusion say no. Myself I read the CIA "technical" claims...I know a reasonable amount about cyber security. I laughed along with the rest of the geeks.
So did the US voters reject Hillary? In the states that counted amongst the Rustbelt swing voters yes they did very much so. Trumps playing fast and loose with the truth was merely faster than Hillary whose alleged crookedness stuck. She could still have won had those extra huge numbers who voted for Obama voted for her. They rejected both of them. And to rub salt into the wound the voters rejected the Dems with the GOP winning Senate and Congress.
I remember Loudon from his Zenith Applied Philosophy [ZAP] days in Christchurch. I never quite worked out what it was all about but from the little I did learn it seemed to be all about not paying your bills......
I remember the stories about ZAP. Wasn't it some sort of offshoot of Scientology and madly anti-left? On a par with Bert Potter, but without the paedophilia.
This seems to be essentially a conversation going on among the left for the last 40 years, without much change in the line of the participants. By chance I was glancing at Christophers Hitchen polemic against Kissinger, and I don't really agree. I think Kissinger was and is very much a realist, keen to defend American and Western interests to avoid all out war. What I call the percentage attrocities of the Vietnam war were general practice in the 1950-1980 period and later in Central America. The British did pretty much the same thing during the Confrontation, with only the kiwi's refusing to use their special forcves in cross border raids into Borneo.
In terms of Chile, on the balance of evidence i think Nixon and Kissinger were correct, probably to demand a harder line than the CIA and other US agencies wanted. allende had confiscaed major US and Western industries and resourees and was allowing marxist peasants and revolutionary priests more and more space to confiscate land, private property. The evidence is that Allende was intending to follow Castro example and on a much greater scale apply the East European Marxist Lenist police state and industrial model. The fact most NZ doctros admire what was the Cuban health system and East Hernab housing estates, fills be with horror at there lack of education and insight.
In his breakthrough work on strategic policy and the need to maintain the ability and doctrine for all out war in Kissinger magnus opus of 1958, which argues for the need for tactical nuclear weapons, Kissinger is not making a straw man or hypothetical argument, Nuclear deterence is not a viable or workable policy. It's hopelessly inflexible, assumes and invulnerabiltiy of the Us Strategic triad to first strike, whieh alos as not existed since the mid 1960s. The Russian/ Soviets could throw all their ICBMs at the Minuteman in the farm states. The remaining US heavy bomber force is slow, vulnetable and was never likely to have got through after 1962 and the US SSBMs nothing more than domesday machines for post nuclear war scenarios and much more vulnerable to communication intercepts, than imagining. They actually contginually ocmmunicate with bases like NW cape, WA ( in the past), but in a post nuclear war scenario might well be operating without communications or surviing ground terminal. In 1958 kissinger seemed to envisage tactial nuclaar weapons as 100-200 kt which was the, Soviet size to counter initial inaccuracy and guarantee target destruction, but most US tactical nukes were 0.5-10k.
Our system is very corrupt. For instance :Equality and social cohesion On some measures inequality has worsened over the last 40 years • The shift. Inequality is difficult to measure, but looking at income levels and the concentration of wealth, inequality has worsened over the past 40 years. Research suggests that inequality reduces social cohesion—and moving from an area of high social cohesion to an area of low social cohesion is as bad for personal health outcomes as taking up smoking.
The 2050 challenge: future proofing our communities
..,
New Zealand’s ethnic composition is changing • The shift. From a mix of natural population increase and net migration to New Zealand, the European population is expected to decrease by 12 per cent while all other ethnicities are expected to increase (the Māori population by 25 per cent, the Asian population by 71 per cent, and the Pasifika population by 40 per cent). • Enduring questions. How can we best embrace the changing face of New Zealand? How might we empower and enable communities to express and celebrate their diverse cultural heritages, and respect the particular cultural significance of Māori as tangata whenua of New Zealand?
........
If it's as bad as smoking then why isn't Putnam's Study on diversity and social cohesion acknowledged? What a load of b.s?
Nick J
I, of course, agree that the White House has been a source of lies and half-truths since the dawning of the republic, much like any other seat of government.
Moreover, of recent decades, it’s propagated some grotesquely extended narratives of falsehood, inter alia, to occlude its alternative foreign policy during “Irangate” and to provide a fig-leaf of respectability for the murderous folly of the invasion of Iraq.
And, of course, the lies have tended to be propagated with the same suave and gleaming marketing that’s become one of the less admirable hallmarks of American culture, albeit one that’s been eagerly copied elsewhere.
I suspect that the Kremlin has lied even more often and thoroughly down the decades. But that’s a moot point. Moreover, for much of the last half century, not many of Moscow’s subject peoples looked to it as a source of unadulterated truth.
As the old Soviet joke put it: “There’s no Pravda in Izvestia and no Izvestia in Pravda”. Hence the amazement with which Soviet dissidents (some of whom I’m privileged to have met) noted the credulity of their own government’s “useful idiots” in the west.
What seems to be new, though, is the official and semi-official Russian media’s consciously post-modern rejection of the possibility of objective truth. And, forgive my cynicism, but I don’t think they’re taking this line primarily out of philosophic scepticism.
What they seem to be saying is “my story’s as good as your story”, irrespective of how much balony it contains. And this message then morphs into “your story’s obviously balony because you keep insisting that it’s the objective truth, which doesn’t exist”.
In that sense, the Russian media and its bosses are definitely “post truth” and committed to lies as a matter of strategic principle rather than as merely an expedient of policy .
Is this also the case for the Trump White House? Well, it’s clearly true of Steve Bannon and might be true of his boss, although it could also be that Trump has never bothered to concern himself with the difference between truth and fiction and that all he can focus on is whether or not an ostensible fact feeds his ego. If not , with Kellyanne’s help, he can always find an “alternative” fact.
.....more to come
.....concluding previous post
Oscar Wilde once famously defined hypocrisy as “the compliment vice pays to virtue”. And, in a similar way, lies used to be a sort of compliment to truth, in that most governments did all they could to render untruths credible and to fit them into an (at least ostensibly) truthful mega-narrative. But now we seem to float unanchored on a sea of constant falsehood. If something turns out to be true, it’s probably by accident.
Turning to “Lefties for Trump”, I wasn't primarily using this term to refer to US voters but to overseas sympathisers with the new administration, particularly in New Zealand, where, to my amazement, they seem to be legion.
Members of this tendency often speak and write as if last November’s vote represented a decisive repudiation of lies and the alleged machinery of lies (i.e. the rather over-vilified MSM) and a concomitant affirmation of truth on the part of the American people.
Well, sorry to have to have to mention it yet again, but the fact is that a majority didn’t vote for Trump. Moreover, the majorities in the rust belt states that went Republican were wafer thin and the overwhelming majority of those voting for the GOP across the US would have done so irrespective of the candidate’s identity (providing, presumably, he wasn’t John McCain).
And there would have been all kinds of reasons why swing voters would have voted the way they did, including, amongst many others, Trump’s promised tax cuts, paranoia over immigration and cultural change, generalised rage, problems with Obamacare, the (probably unredeemable) promise of industrial revival and the then current incumbent’s pigmentation.
And, of course, if they really were voting for Trump in order to repudiate lies and the culture that spawned them, then they couldn’t have been more mistaken!
As to Russian involvement in the campaign, I’d agree there’s no proof (yet) of collusion, let alone of sabotage, but quite a bit of circumstantial evidence thereof.
Yet there can be no doubt at all concerning Russia’s bid to influence the outcome with a consistent, well- organised and well-funded campaign of misinformation.
Personally, I don’t think this campaign had much impact. But that’s only because both Republicans and Democrats were drowning it out with their own noise.
I see the Zenith Aplied Philosophy lads have even got a Wikipedia page in their name. You know youve made it when you have your own Wikipedia page.......
"If it's as bad as smoking then why isn't Putnam's Study on diversity and social cohesion acknowledged? What a load of b.s?"
Probably because:
1.If you read Putnam's article to the end, there are numerous caveats and cause for optimism. And he would probably rather resent your use of his research if I read him correctly.
2.Scholars can't actually agree on how to measure social cohesion. So it's a very vague concept.
3.The results of other studies are distinctly different then depending on how you define social cohesion.
4. Income inequality, which is also risen in the last forty years quite possibly has more impact.
5.Longitudinal studies of which there are few, suggest that eventually things settle down., Something that Putnam himself says, if you read the article to the end.
6. Perhaps you could explain what all this has got to do with a post about a nutty right wing anti-Communist? Apart from some sort of affinity.
Morning Vic,
I think we may have to agree to disagree on things until (and if) we get empirical evidence rather than suspicion and conjecture. I'm quit willing to be persuaded by undeniable facts.
One thing I would like to comment on (my God we are off topic but I too think it important)is "Lefties for Trump". This you describe as " last November’s vote represented a decisive repudiation of lies and the alleged machinery of lies (i.e. the rather over-vilified MSM) and a concomitant affirmation of truth on the part of the American people."
Its worth noting here that I see it as more "confirmation" as opposed to "repudiation", same old same old really. I am not sure that the US people know an "affirmation of truth" any more than we do when it is presented as "received wisdom" from the MSM and political spin doctors. What people can see is empirical reality like no job, no money, no hope...that's a fact. They can also hear someone calling them a "deplorable", another offering "jobs". That's a fact. Then they trot off and vote accordingly.
So to NZ Lefties for Trump. If you take support for Trump as active rejection of Hillary and the Democratic nexus I qualify. Of course that is a very partisan and absolutist view because I could quite concurrently reject Trump and Republicans. Which incidentally I do. The election did however expose a lot of fault lines in the international "Left". Things like gender preference, political correctness, neo Marxist academic determinism etc that aim to control outcomes butting up against the older Leftist equality of opportunity only. This election proved to me a point where the illiberal progressive Left came into direct conflict with the conservative Left. We the Left are a house divided and Trump merely highlighted this.
Whoops Victor.
First part of your post...just seen. Spot on. Odd bit for me is that the motives of both US and Russian political class align on raw unadulterated power and money. Ideological difference zip. Two sets of self interested dangerous people. Very little "truth".
Nick J
Most people I come across are sick, tired and fed up with the slick hucksterism of so much of our civilization. And I would agree that a great many are starting to connect this with the poor state that so many of our countries are in.
I agree that, for the reasons you delineate in your third paragraph (@ 9.00a.m.),a small but perhaps decisive minority of American voters may well have been motivated by such thoughts in turning their backs on one palpable huckster and voting for an even more palpable (and palpably unpleasant) one.
But that's still a long way short of agreeing with your previous post, where you state that: "the American public showed decisively that they did not buy it" ("it" presumably being the Democrats, professionally edited media and liberalism in general).
I can't respond to your broader point concerning the "illiberal progressive Left" and the "conservative Left" because I'm not sure I understand what you mean by these rather flexible terms.
But I would agree that, globally, the Left is now divided between those who see fascism for what it is and those who don't.
Enough already! We're both way off topic (not for the first time) and there will, no doubt, be many another occasion to vent our differences.
Nick J
re; yours of 14.21
Fair enough. I should imagine the second of my two screeds looks a bit peculiar without the first.
Meanwhile, although, globally, I'm concerned about the similarities between our current situation and that in the 1930s, I also see similarities between now and the age of Nixon and Brezhnev, i.e. when the world was similarly dominated by, as you put it, 'Two sets of self interested dangerous people. Very little "truth"'.
There's a wonderful scene in Oliver Stone's "Nixon" biopic, with the two monsters (plus Kissinger and Gromyko) secreted in the Oval Office.
Nixon's downfall is growing closer and closer and, when a telephone call comes through on the presidential phone, Brezhnev realises its Watergate-related. So he signals to his translator to be quiet and says to Nixon in English: "Go ahead and answer, Dick. I understand."
And then Brezhnev,reverting to Russian, turns to Gromyko and says: "This is a great tragedy. Such a gifted man".
As I recall it, it wasn't a great time to be either Polish or Chilean.
Good morning again Victor, yes you are right about the fascism bit. It is coming in many forms as the stresses and strains gather momentum.
To clarify the reference to the Left it indicates the creeping totalitarianism, authoritarianism, absolutism of the illiberal Left, fascism, I don't really know how to label it. Some call it "academic Marxism". I am referring to the capture of language by political correctness, and the insistence that one must accept the tenets of this new "correctness" without debate, or more worryingly, the right of reply. I will be more specific in later debates, but that's the heads up on what I was referring to. This is the curse of the Left, the Right has its own "fascist" issues.
GS
Jesus Christ, even the most extremist right wingers that comment on this blog wouldn't soil themselves going to places like that.
..........
How come open border advocates are mainstream and o.k whereas an anti -immigration site that provides an alternative point of view (argued in a challenging way rather than in your face - like Brietbart) is considered out of bounds?
eg
Bryce Edwards
Josie pagani
Michele D'Acort
Johnny Moore (assuming John Moore is the same person)
The BSA say: the majority of news and media coverage appears to us to focus on the ‘negatives’ of immigration
the left is the internationalist left.
"How come open border advocates are mainstream and o.k whereas an anti -immigration site that provides an alternative point of view (argued in a challenging way rather than in your face - like Brietbart) is considered out of bounds?"
Well it's not obviously out of bounds to you. But I would say it should be out of bounds because in simple terms as I have explained over and over again. It "makes shit up."
For instance, they have been caught using picturesOf an NBA parade to represent a Florida Trump rally. Because obviously the Florida Trump Rally had a lot fewer people.
They have been one of the leading advocates of the idea that Obama was A. Born in Kenya, and B. is a secret Muslim.
They have also claimed that immigrants commit more than their fair share of crimes, when in fact according to actual research they commit a lot less.
They also distort what people say – markedly.
They make huge mistakes – often. Like doing an article about Obama nominee "Loretta Lynch." And getting her confused with someone else. Something they eventually had to correct – something I might say that they very rarely do.
This is not just a non-MSM new site, it is a deliberate nutty propaganda organisation and anyone who uses it for anything other than anthropological research loses any respect I might have had for their intellectual abilities.
You lost it years ago.
GS
On Robert Putnams study. He waited 5 years as he didn't want to release the results. You go on to demonstrate a resistance to the idea. It is an inconvenient truth of multicultural policy.
Quite likely:
We evolved in small groups where we learned to trust people who looked just like us. This is supported by experiments with oxytocin.
Putnam says "if we do nothing it will take 50 years to achieve cohesion -based on past experience. He says it is worth it because immigration is very beneficial (pure ideology).
http://www.vdare.com/posts/was-obama-born-in-hawaii-of-course-he-was
The real story here is that Marxist anti racist ideology has been behind immigration policy into "a shrinking pool of prime destination countries" (mainly western). It is an inconvenient truth that humans weren't designed to fit into a multicultural society but is supported by experiments with oxytocin. Computer modelling confirms the adaptivity of ethnocentrism. The Bank of NZ, HRC and Department of Education sponsor Mai Chen's Superdiversity Stocktake which claims benefit to New Zealand from large scale immigration (primarily from Asia). Ian Harrison has critiqued the economic claims and comes to a quite opposite conclusion. Mai Chen's position is politically correct.
Jh
You are fixated on one idea, and refused to accept evidence to the contrary. Putnam himself doesn't like his work being used by people like you to suggest that diversity is evil. And I noticed that you tend to cherry pick Putnam's assertions anyway.
He also said this:
"Diversity is a social construction that can be deconstructed and reconstructed - you can erase a line and draw a new line [to define identity] and we do it all the time,"
And this:
"So in the long run, waves of immigration like we're going through now and that we've gone through in the past and increasing diversity is good for a society. But what we discovered in this research, somewhat to our surprise, was that in the short run the more ethnically diverse the neighborhood you live in, the more you - every - all of us tend to hunker down, to pull in."
The Paradox of Diverse Communities
It turns out the most cohesive neighborhoods are almost never the most diverse ones. But does that mean we shouldn't fight against self-segregation?
...
Their simulations of more than 20 million virtual “neighborhoods” demonstrate a troubling paradox: that community and diversity may be fundamentally incompatible goals. As the authors explain, integration “provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity, but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community.”
http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/11/paradox-diverse-communities/7614/
"as bad as smoking"
Another 100 companies pull advertising from Breitbart
Grassroots campaign encourages Twitter users to name and shame advertisers
.....
Asia NZ Foundation make much of knowledge about Asia and warmth (marriage). Who is behind this and why?
I'll bet people don't know:
China today is extraordinarily homogenous. It sustains that by remaining almost entirely closed to new entrants except by birth. Unless someone is the child of a Chinese national, no matter how long they live there, how much money they make or tax they pay, it is virtually impossible to become a citizen. Someone who marries a Chinese person can theoretically gain citizenship; in practice few do. As a result, the most populous nation on Earth has only 1,448 naturalised Chinese in total, according to the 2010 census. Even Japan, better known for hostility to immigration, naturalises around 10,000 new citizens each year; in America the figure is some 700,000 (see chart).
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21710264-worlds-rising-superpower-has-particular-vision-ethnicity-and-nationhood-has
Mai Chen exclaims that she is an average New Zealander: "thete are many like me and more coming"
Imagine if Europeans moved to Taiwan and used the same line?
Power and right to speak
putnam says:
"As you will see when you read “E Pluribus Unum,” my intention is not to argue against diversity and immigration but to point out that if we do nothing,the reweaving of our communities may take half a century, judging from our past experience. By focusing concertedly on bolstering social solidarity in the decades ahead, we can dramatically shorten this period. In this task of reintegration, the United States should feel more confident than many other countries. Racial and ethnic lines of division are not drawn by God or written in our genes. They are socially constructed, and as social constructions we can also deconstruct them, as our own history demonstrates. Wave upon wave of ethnic immigrants arrived on America’s shores; we responded with policies based on our motto of “e pluribus unum” (from many one), not by bleaching the newcomers into some pale copy of earlier arrivals but by developing a more multihued American identity. We
gradually redrew racial boundaries that used to divide Poles from Italians from Irish, and that
encouraged brutal ethnic vengeance. Over the twentieth century, we gradually erased religious boundaries that used to divide Catholic from Protestant from Jew. Clearly we still have work to do in deconstructing racial and ethnic cleavages and fostering social justice and social solidarity, but it now seems like a joke to describe the wedding of an Irish Catholic and an Italian Catholic as a “mixed marriage,” as it was described in the 1960s. As I wrote in “E Pluribus Unum,” the challenge is to foster a more encompassing sense of “we.”
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so Putnam acknowleges the time for social solidarity to develop (50 years) but maintains it is all good and worth it . He says social solidarity is socially constructed, (If so why is oxytocin the moderator of ethnocentrism)? Putnam thinks human behavior is malleable (Standard Social Science Model): "we just need programs for those deplorables. We'll soon have them wound around our fingers". In fact we shut down certain dialogues and tell lies about the benefits of diversity.
Putnam himself doesn't like his work being used by people like you to suggest that diversity is evil.
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Diversity in this context is a matter of elites thinking they can over ride communities. Resistance is seen as pathological racism rather than human nature. Ethnocentrism is what drives communities.
Elites think they should be able to just move people around and recreate an identity.
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on that score those who talk about and value inclusive societies tend to be more intelligent (which give them access to exclusive lifestyles) and there holding of certain views signals they are of an exclusive group..
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