Wednesday, March 25, 2020



Support for abortion now defines the Left

It is a "Litmus test", in Bernie's words

Politics is downstream of culture. As the mores, standards, and lack thereof change, so do our politics. Look no further than the definition of life in the womb.

Leftists’ demand for abortion is now just to be safe (for the mother), not rare. That’s in contrast to the stance from 28 years earlier. In 1992, the Democratic National Committee Platform referenced abortion twice. In the 2016 DNC Platform, the mentions of abortion increased to six with a great deal more copy devoted to demands of reproductive choice and “justice.”

Back in the days of Bill Clinton, Democrats promised affordable health care that included “the full range of reproductive choice — education, counseling, access to contraceptives, and the right to a safe, legal abortion.” They argued, “The goal of our nation must be to make abortion less necessary, not more difficult or more dangerous.”

But in the 2016 DNC Platform, the desire to see a reduction in the practice of ending the life of the preborn child in the mother’s womb is anathema for militant feminists. They now say, “We believe unequivocally, like the majority of Americans, that every woman should have access to quality reproductive health care services, including safe and legal abortion.”

As the 2020 presidential election approaches, both the DNC and the Republican National Committee will publish their newest platforms that provide the ideological framework for the respective partisan organizations. Don’t be surprised to see even more radical language from Democrats who equate life-ending abortion with healthcare.

Still in doubt?

Just last week, Illinois Democrats defeated their last pro-life member of Congress, Congressman Dan Lipinski. Representing the more moderate but still Democrat 3rd Congressional District, Lipinski suffered a defeat at the hands of a more “progressive” Marie Newman, who had backing from all the big-monied abortion industry: Planned Parenthood, NARAL, Emily’s List, and Pro-Choice America. This bloodthirsty coalition spent over $1.5 million to aid the campaign aimed to defeat the incumbent Lipinski. It wasn’t just the big money of the abortion industry. The Who’s Who of hard-left politics joined in. Endorsements of Newman included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders.

Sanders, along with other presidential hopefuls on the Left, has declared that abortion support be a “litmus test” to be deemed a Democrat. As time has passed, Democrats have become galvanized in their determination to support abortion as part of the modern Democrat Party.

Newman ran previously against Lipinski and lost in 2018. Her success in 2020 is due to any number of factors, but one that can’t be overlooked is that the new Democrats have no tolerance for any who define life as beginning at conception, or who say that the life of a preborn child should be protected.

Despite the decline in morals, universal support of abortion is not the mainstream opinion of Americans.

As few as 13% of Americans support abortion during the last trimester and more than 75% want restrictions on abortion — anything from limiting it to the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, allowing it only in the case of rape or incest, or not permitting it at all. Even registered Democrats show limited support of abortion in the last three months before delivery, with just 18% supportive and up to 30% of Democrats being pro-life.

What does this mean? Are our politics becoming more radical? Are women really more likely to support abortion rather than motherhood?

Politics is downstream of culture. Our society has embraced less of God and more of self, which leads directly into the narrative that one’s life is all about one — the Me, Myself, and I Holy Trinity of the religion of Secularism. When the entity of secular deification is looking at any event or life choice, even pregnancy, one of the key factors is whether an event or action is convenient as well as whether said event adds to or takes away from the rights and independence of the individual involved.

Abortion is performed less today than in years past thanks to the improved technology around ultrasound imaging and laws that honor the rights of the preborn. But on the political front, the facts are that beliefs have shifted due to cultural indifference to truth that masquerades as tolerance and that which is now accepted as a societal good. Most alarming should be the latter. Abortion accepted as some societal good reflects our tendency toward selfish existence with no ability to understand legacy or the need for family — only convenience. The trouble with our politics reveals the trouble with our culture.

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Why ‘Empire nostalgia’ is declining in Britain

It is rightly seen as something from yesteryear that will never return

Britain’s surprise decision to leave the European Union in the referendum of 2016 has encouraged many people to ask why the majority of voters rejected the advice given to them by the government and experts in economics.

Political scientists like the late Peter Mair, Matthew Goodwin and David Goodhart had long been explaining that popular disaffection with mainstream politics meant that the pro-EU stance of the political class was particularly disliked by voters. For reasons best known to themselves, most commentators refused to hear these sensible and well-founded conclusions.

Rejecting the actual evidence on popular disaffection with the EU, most academics and commentators latched on to bizarre and hate-fuelled prejudices about their fellow citizens to ‘explain’ why they had voted ‘the wrong way’. The most telling reaction was to blame the voters’ incipient racism for the Brexit vote.

The flaw in that reasoning was that negative sentiments towards migrants have generally been falling in Britain for decades now, and they fell more sharply in the period after the Brexit vote.

When they aren’t promoting their counter-factual belief that their fellow citizens have become more racist, those who were uncomfortable with the decision to leave the EU have argued that Britain is clearly mired in ‘Empire nostalgia’. This was the argument put in Fintan O’Toole’s anti-Brexit book Heroic Failure, by columnist and media professor Gary Younge, and by SOAS’s Eleanor Newbigin, among others.

A new YouGov poll commissioned by the Guardian has been reported with the headline ‘UK more nostalgic for Empire than other ex-colonial powers’. The Guardian’s report on the poll includes the factoid that ‘more than 30 per cent of British people are proud of the British Empire’.

But this is less remarkable than it appears. Thirty-two per cent thought that the Empire was ‘more something to be proud of’ (the question was actually ‘to be more proud of than ashamed of’). That means that 68 per cent did not think that the Empire was more something to be proud of. The plurality – 37 per cent – held the eminently sensible view that the Empire was something neither to be proud of nor ashamed of. And then, a fifth of Brits are woke enough to be ashamed of the British Empire.

The figure of 32 per cent who think that the Empire is more something to be proud of than ashamed of is hardly remarkable. Since Britain has for most of the past 300 years had an Empire, it is not easy to be proud of Britain’s history without that meaning the Empire, too. Are you proud of the way that the British Empire fought against fascism in the Second World War? Or are you proud of the role that the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy played in suppressing the slave trade in the 19th century? Do you feel a shiver of pride at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day? These are not views that should put you outside of the mainstream of public opinion.

What about the direction of travel in public attitudes to the Empire? Though the discussion of ‘Empire nostalgia’ is framed as if it was obvious that a positive assessment of the Empire was on the rise, that is not the case at all. In fact, the same YouGov poll carried out in 2016 found that 44 per cent were proud of the British Empire. A better headline in 2020 might have been, ‘Marked decline in identification with the British Empire’. But that would disturb the prejudice that ‘Empire nostalgia’ is on the rise.

Those who fear the rise of Empire nostalgia are like people on a train who think that the station is moving away from them. They have not understood that it is they who are moving. The belief among academics and intellectuals that wider British society is in the grip of a yearning for the past are surprised that the rest of the country does not feel the same compulsion to decry the past. That does not mean that the popular reputation of the Empire is reviving – it is just not falling as fast or as hard as the critics would like it to.

How should we understand the shift in attitudes on the Empire? I would like to suggest that the substantial change driving attitudes to Empire is the transformation of the Labour Party, from a party rooted in a mass labour movement to what it is today: a more middle-class and somewhat alienated minority.

No institution in British society did more to popularise the Empire in the 20th century than the Labour Party. When popular disaffection with war was rising in 1915, it was the Labour Party that rallied Britons to back the war effort. When dismay at the prospect of another war was at its height in the late 1930s, it was Labour that won the people over to support the ‘People’s War’. Labour gave an anti-fascist gloss to the British Empire all through to the 1980s. Labour leaders were, generally speaking, patriots who identified with British influence in the world, seeing it as a force for good.

Behind those Labour leaders stood trade-union leaders who similarly identified with British success overseas. Baron Geddes of Epsom had been general secretary of the Post Office Workers’ Union from 1944 to 1957, and president of the Trades Union Congress in 1955. On 18 March 1969, he told the House of Lords that ‘the men who ran the trade-union movement… could be called patriots’:

‘They believed that they supported the government of the day, not because they were, in the left-wing words, “capitalist lackeys”, but because they believed that the good of the country in the long run, in the long term, was for the good of their members.’

Baron Geddes stood in the tradition of a long line of patriotic trade-union leaders going back to the railwaymen’s Jimmy Thomas.

The patriotic strand in the organised labour movement, and in the Labour Party, barely exists today. Margaret Thatcher’s determination to undermine the corporate status of the unions in the 1980s put paid to its influence. The Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did nothing to reverse the corrosion of the official – and patriotic – trade-union movement.

The decline of labour institutions had both destructive and liberating aspects. The popular patriotism of the trade-union movement was for the most part a conservative tradition, hostile to migrants and younger workers, supine to the employers.

The contemporary sentiment that British people should feel bad about the Empire is driven by a snobbish instinct that sees popular assertiveness as a bad thing in itself. Whenever people in Britain stand up for themselves, as they did in the referendum, the ‘decolonise the curriculum’ influenced academics see some portent of Empire nostalgia, the same way that a man with a hammer sees a world full of nails. They like the idea that people should go around feeling bad about things that their great grandparents might have done. This is an attitude that is entirely at home in the modern Labour Party, so pointedly at odds with the party that it has replaced.

What few seem to have noticed is that most people in Britain do not care about the Empire. They do not feel greatly motivated to glory in things that they never did, nor do they feel bad about bad things they never did. This is a wholly intelligent point of view. The one thing we know for sure about history is that it is what no longer exists.

SOURCE 







What Is the “Missing Middle” for Urban Transport?

“Missing Middle” is a phrase used to describe housing of medium size, density and expense. Many hot urban markets now produce two housing types that are pricier than this middle ground – high-rise units that cost more to build because they require concrete- or steel-frame construction; and single-family homes, which require individual households to purchase entire land plots. Missing middle is the housing types in-between – duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, ADUs – that aren’t as capital- or land-intensive per unit. Legalizing them has become a goal for affordable housing activists.

Transportation is another big aspect of U.S. urban policy, and I think there’s a missing middle for that too – namely in dense cities. This option sits in-between, and is less expensive than, either car ownership or public transit. But before defining it, let me explain these two more traditional options.

First is car ownership. It’s expensive because, even if people shop America’s competitive used car market, they’re still having to pay for licensing, insurance, fuel and repairs. According to the American Automobile Association, the average driver spends $8,849 per year on car ownership. This doesn’t include parking costs, which are especially high in cities, and would be even higher if drivers paid the full price for it (more on that below).

Second is public transit dependence, which is generally advocated by those who dislike personal car use. Its fiscal costs are less, but its opportunity costs are often higher even than car ownership. A Governing Magazine analysis found that average commute times in 25 large U.S. metros was twice as long for transit users than for single-occupancy vehicle drivers. Another report from the Brookings Institute found that in metro America, only a quarter of low- and middle-skill jobs are accessible by transit in under 90 minutes. Part of the problem is that transit agencies feel obligated to cover large areas, rather than running routes that move the greatest number of people to the greatest number of jobs. As a result, transit doesn’t address people’s needs, helping explain why ridership has declined.

But there’s a “missing middle” that could exist between the monetary cost of car ownership and the opportunity cost of transit dependence. Here’s how I see it working: an urbanite walks onto a street corner within a crowded neighborhood in a dense city like New York or San Francisco. From there, he or she can access a multitude of private micro-mobility options by phone—rideshare, bikeshare, scooter-share, moped-share, or various bus services. Some of these buses are more like vanpools, catering to small groups of passengers who want point-to-point drop-offs. Other buses are larger and follow fixed routes. But because of the ubiquity of these services (and the competition between them), prices are low: between $2-10 for trips under 2 miles.

This paradigm would turn U.S. urban neighborhoods into all-you-can-ride transit buffets. A huge diversity of options could be hailed at cheap rates, meaning every income group would be able to make multiple point-to-point trips daily. This would reduce the need for car ownership, and create better urban mobility.

And it’s a paradigm that, as other world cities show, is doable. But for it to happen in the U.S., two big strategies must change.

The first would be for the government to allow it. For over a century, there’s been heavy demand for private transit, from the early streetcars, to jitneys that arose before WWI, to dollar vans that have operated illegally for decades. Even today, companies such as Uber, Lyft and Lime lobby intensely for the right to operate in cities. But cities have been hostile to the idea for just as long. To name one of many examples, the SFMTA has unilaterally squelched every micro-mobility option mentioned above, in the name of protecting public transit.

The second thing cities should do – beyond just allowing these services – is facilitate them, by leveling the playing field for urban right-of-way. Currently, most of the ROW in dense U.S. cities is used by cars to drive or park. As New York University planning researcher Alain Bertaud writes in Order without Design, this space is often given for free or at well below-market rates, considering the land and maintenance costs it consumes.

This is a sop to people who own cars in these cities, and comes at the expense of those who don’t. If an open market could be used to price, say, curb space, that space could shift to a variety of new uses: racks for bike- and scooter-share, temporary drop-off zones for rideshare, or shelters for bus companies, all of whom could bid on use of the space. These micro-mobility companies would then have space to flourish, rather than always being scapegoated for the “traffic” and “clutter” they create.

If this system ever materialized in U.S. cities—again, by having governments take a more market-driven approach to transport—it would work wonders for urban mobility. A diversity of services would rise to meet the diversity of consumer demand, moving people cheaply and quickly. It would indeed be a third option—the transport version of a “missing middle”—sitting between the cost of car ownership and the immobility of public transit.

SOURCE 







Australia: ‘Closing Uluru climb was a mistake’, says ex-ranger

It was a decision that captivated the nation and brought thousands of people to the Red Centre for their final chance to climb Australia’s most iconic rock. And now the man who oversaw much of that says it was wrong.

Greg Elliot, until recently the head ranger at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, personally supervised some of the last days of climbing. He shepherded scores of domestic and international visit­ors through the gates to march nose-to-tail to the top.

Mr Elliot worked in the park for seven years, two as head ranger, before retiring and leaving this week. He looks back on the World Heritage Listed landmark’s most controversial episode since the Chamberlain affair as a missed opportunity to help Aboriginal people and enhance tourism experiences.

“It’s a negative decision,” Mr Elliot said. “They should have changed it, made it a safer endeavour and then charged people for it.”

He envisions something akin to the Sydney Bridge Climb up Uluru’s flanks, a plan he says was at one point seriously considered.

Mr Elliot said rather than explore that, bureaucrats chose to manipulate the rock’s Aboriginal owners toward closing the climb, so they could remove their liability for its poor safety record while blaming someone else.

“The power of persuasion is a wonderful thing,” he said. “If enough people get told a story enough times, and that story has an element of truth to it, then they will change their opinion on that thing because they’ve heard it enough times … that happens all over the world, in every walk of life, and I’m convinced this is very strongly what aided and abetted this closing of the climb.”

Mr Elliot agrees the old climb was too dangerous. Among the absurd things he saw were parents carrying newborn babies in backpacks — “that guy slips, and that kid’s done” — and a bloke who lugged snow skis to the summit to take a photograph.

And although he would like to see Aboriginal cultural sites in the park better protected, he does not understand why progressively more of them have been declared off-limits. “How can something all of a sudden become sacred when it wasn’t sacred in the past? Or it wasn’t deemed to be as sac­red so no one could go there?

“The rock is the same rock. It hasn’t changed much, apart from the fact there’s a lighter stripe going up on the one face.”

Traditional owners have described feeling intimidated into keeping the climb open and ­said if the leaders who first allowed climbing had suspected hordes might follow, they would have stopped it.

A Parks Australia spokesperson said the climb’s closure was decided by the Aboriginal-majority park board of management, and the decision represented the fulfilment of Anangu’s long-held request for it to be closed and “this was evident in the public statements made by Anangu and the many celebrations Anangu held in Mutitjulu community and at Uluru to mark the climb closure”.

SOURCE  

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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