The Left is the Left; nothing “pseudo” about it. And it is hardly surprising that it would want to block anything at all to do with Western civilisation: it hates Western civilisation and intends to bring it down. It is doing just that, now, as the Right either waffles or buries its head further in the sand.

Ttbn

You articulate dead arguments well. But as arguing a point from baselessness goes, it's inevitable down a bush track.

You also confuse politics with a boing out of date premise of a left and right.

The greatest difficulty of any Governing system is accomodating it's autonomous citizens.
It's not a left and right thing.

Our governance needs to smarten up and quickly if it's to be of use: otherwise we head to the wide road of civil war.

Agree with most of this and add the following observations.
When mankind made carbon its slave instead of people, we became (more or less) civilized.
And with every new source of energy and its utilization, made rapid forward technological steps along with accelerated economic growth! Putting a man on the moon,e.g., may have seemed an enormous waste of valuable resources? And only true if you discount or dismiss the associated technological spinoffs!
That said, we have tethered all these advantages and technological advancement to a highly flawed economic paradigm and compounded that idiocy by coupling it to fatuous and fundamentally flawed, ideological imperatives and unrepayable debt, that serves nobody!
Every western style economy, rest on just two support pillars, energy and capital!
And because we made the fatal error or privatising both have allowed the Shylocks in our midst to extract their pound of flesh for their involvement and captive market control/price gouging! When these things should be managed and controlled by the society/economy that created them!
And for the ultimate and maximised benefit of that society and homegrown entrepreneurs!
To that end, we need to completely jettison our highly convoluted tax system and replace it with an entirely unavoidable 15% flat rate that everyone above the agreed threshold pays!
Then as the final pieces of the economic jigsaw, fully embrace both cooperative capitalism and social credit. Thereby recreating the economic miracles of post-war Australia, America, Japan, the tiger economies and the Celtic economic miracle!
The definition of insanity is to keep doing what you've done while expecting different outcomes!
Alan B.

>The Left is the Left; nothing “pseudo” about it.

There's more than one Left. There's the Marxist Left (where David McMullen's obviously from) and the PC Left (which he's criticising). Both groups want to define who's part of the Left, and IMO he has more claim to do so than those like you who despise all the Lefts (including the Marxists, the PC crowd, and people like me who are neither).

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Alan B.,
Carbon didn't directly replace slavery. For a millennium in between, we relied heavily on animals.
Our economy rests on many more pillars than energy and capital. There's water, information and ideas...
A 15% flat tax system is highly undesirable. If we want real tax reform, the best approach would be a broad based tax on the unimproved value of land. That would avoid land price bubbles, and would make better infrastructure more economically viable. The trouble is such a tax would have to be phased in over many decades to avoid unfairly disadvantaging existing landowners.

Left and right is an outmoded concept. It makes little sense viewing the political scene today globally through that lens.

This is a Humanist V Theist world. The left right paradigms, are extensions of a moral argument raging between the former two.

Calling Malcom Turnbull a leftist is laughable. Calling him a neoliberal-humanist, suddenly sheds light on his position.
Keep in mind, the SSM bill recently passed through parliament, came from his side of the fence. So, Marxists have infiltrated the Liberal party have they? And that through the facility of Turnbull.
That's a laughable position.

This concept also helps explain the seemingly strange position some take in defending the rights of Muslims, to live and practice their religion in our society in peace. Nothing whatsoever connected to a left right concept.

Read Pinker, the arch neocon-humanist, who considers all is well in spreading the wealth of the West to the poor of the world, (leftist world government tag by some here), at any cost to the poor of the West, since poverty is simply relative.

As always Adian has a persistent predilection find something not quite perfect that he can critigue! And as a result, often winds up lambasting or contradicting his own earlier input! And done to eat up the adversaries word limits! And believes everybody else is too dumb to see through his juvenile subterfuge.
Yes Adian, we didn't go directly to carbon, but used water, animals and slaves to accomplish most tasks!
The Romans invented the steam engine, but only as an interesting novelty hat spun. And the industrial age of steam was not universal but phased in with time. Even as some cultus remain locked in a Wheeless stone age!
As for land tax. as a landowner being screwed by ever-rising rates! I think that it's a dumb idea, that puts already unaffordable housing even further away from the masses!
As always, in your flight to microscopic pedanticism, you completely miss any element of fairness or basic common sense in your lofty dehumanized prognostications!
And just as most of humanity, but not all, have made carbon their slave.
It behoves us to embrace the nuclear age and energy that is cheaper than coal, cleaner than coal and safer than coal Without question every western style economy rest on two critical support pillars energy and capital!
And proven if you remove either one or both!!
The other things you rate as pillars are available as naturally occurring like water etc.
I'm talking about western style economies and you as per usual are patently preoccupied with pedantic puerile point scoring!
Like some narcissistic egoistic puffed up popinjay!
TBC Alan B.

Continued: We have in our midst, folk like Adian who are patently committed to industrialization and turning back the clock to the 15th century or earlier? And engage economic expansion advocates like me in their predilection for pedantic absolutism. So as to divert the discussion away from areas he doesn't want? Like nuclear energy! Forget that it first and foremost carbon-free energy! Or that it's cleaner than coal, cheaper than coal and far safer than coal! As the historical record will indubitably show! Or that one unit of thorium contains the dispatchable energy, of one million hydrocarbon units! And the promise of energy a cheap as two-point nine eight cents per KwH! And truly affordable desalinated water, cheap enough for just about any broad scale irrigation project or massive infrastructure. Like a continent changing inland canal from the Gulf to the Gulf and back, so the enormous northern tides can propel shipping both ways! and lined with nuclear-powered desalination plants that turn the dead heart into an Eden or paradise able to support many more! INDEFINITELY!
And create a template the rest of the world can and will emulate. And in so doing, usher in a thousand years of peace and prosperity!
Always providing folk like Adian, who know beyond question, all the reasons it can't be done/won't work! Can get themselves and their obstinant dehumanising obstructionist selves out of the way!
Because the sad truth is. It's folks just like him who actively, in word and deed, who prevent it becoming our reality!
Alan B.

Wow! Very well explained, it seems to be great and beneficial.

An interesting article. The Middle Ages were indeed a period of technical and political innovation in contrast to the previous Greco-Roman era. I'd agree that the Old Left wouldn't support cultural relativism and its toxic developments such as institutional multiculturalism and an obsession with 'Islamophobia' and 'anti-racism'.

Alan B
you say nuclear power < will create a template the rest of the world can and will emulate. And in so doing, usher in a thousand years of peace and prosperity! >

I find it hard to agree with that, given the wars we've had non stop for thousands of years.
Your point about desalinisation of water is a good one, but if we could cut the population of the world by half, down to three billion, by getting women access to contraception in male dominated societies, I think we would have plenty of food and water, less poverty, less carbon, and many less refugee camps and wars.
Better to fix the cause, then fool around with nuclear power.
The offspin from nuclear power has to be stored in facilities for 1,000years before it becomes radiation free, last I heard.
Correct me if Im wrong.
Im not against nuclear power but it too, has its risks.
As for mankind living in peace.
That'll be the day.
Humankind would have to change at the biological level before that happens.
I dont think that transformation will happen anytime in the forseeable future.

Back to commenting on this article.

Yes, the left is anti - Western, because of the teaching of Hippie ideology,which is really just an older name for globalist, communistic thinking. Embracing this ideology has caused the left to turn on their own people, by default, and bringing down their own countries, while believing they are saving mankind.

The Baby Boomers entrenched it in schools and universities, which have brainwashed
and confused a couple of generations.

The left wing politicians, in contrast to the working class lefties,rely on big pockets of migrant immigrants to keep them in power earning their huge salaries and pensions.

The right wing have a different reason for betraying western countries and their own societies, importing labour to make huge profits by holding down wages for the middle and working classes.

Self Interest in, making more money and holding power, is basically what is causing the traitorous behaviour, on both sides.

Cherful: Most wars have been fought, regardless of the given reason, over land, water and other finite resources.
That being so, energy that's available to all that the most impoverished third world can afford, changes everything!
Now, if the energy comes as it should from proposed MSR thorium and their desalinated water is provided via deionisation dialysis. And guarantees, no nation needs to starve or be dislocated due to enduring droughts or desertification!
And energy as cheap and abundant as MSR thorium means virtually every resource can be reused and recycled. And water pumped to strategic high points to ensure everyone that needs it including a fragile environment has all they need!
And only prevented by the stupid shylocks in our midst, who believe, erroneously. That some folk need to be worse off so they can wax fat and wealthy.
If we are to have a war? Then let it be on that terrible trio, waste, poverty and blind individual greed!
You can't live in more than one house, drive more than one car and wear one pair of shoes at any one time!
What we need for our very survival is learn how to both cooperate for our common good and the art of painless compromise!
Not everything we need has to generate a profit for the greedy, who instead, need to understand that by learning how to share one or two essentials, everyone, including them, will be vastly better off! And it starts with nuclear energy!
And endlessly sustainable fuels created by vacuuming CO2 directly from our oceans, then combining it with hydrogen extracted from the same source, to create all the fuel, fertilizers and plastics we could possibly want or use, unless or until we run out of seawater? And not hypothetical untried science!
Interestingly, as the CO2 is extracted from seawater, The water's affinity with CO2 means similar amounts are sucked out of the atmosphere! And decarb the earth's atmosphere long before we are ever troubled by this or that, critical tipping point!
Alan B.

The author utterly misunderstands the nature of 'the west'. Modernity isn't the same as western civilisation...they aren't interchangeable terms.

Sure, the west created modernity but its just one factor in what makes the west Western. China enjoys the fruits of modernity but it isn't western.

There is so much more to western civilisation than just the material miracles it has enabled. Democracy, liberty, freedom of expression, rule of law, individual liberty, women's rights, freedom of religion and the whole plethora of rights and non-material human gains that the west has bequeathed humankind are as, or are more, important than 'modernity'. Modernity can be and has been transplanted into other cultures. But the fruits of the Greco-Roman civilisation married with Christianity that made western civilisation possible can't be so easily transplanted.

The error the left made throughout the 20th century and continues to make is the view that the west can be separated from its past but remain western. It can't. And whenever attempts have made to do so, its always failed and has results in misery for those the left claims to be working for.

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" Most wars have been fought, regardless of the given reason, over land, water and other finite resources. "

When the first sentence of your post is so monumentally wrong, it can only be downhill from there.

Very few wars are fought over resources. Most are fought over misunderstandings as to the intentions of the other or because of attempts to aggrandise the leaders of this or that nation, city or tribe.

Mhaze: I'm sure you're right, inasmuch as some personality cult or other, has been the required catalyst to initiate conflict!
But at the end of the day, it has always resulted in permanent or tempory expansionism and the annexing, by a hostile power, of other folk's sovereign territory.
Replete with minerals, water, power, wealth and arable land resources! The unspoken goal and outcome!
Be the catalyst this or that Tribal Cheiftian, charismatic leader or religious fanatic or both!?
Alan B.

"Mhaze: I'm sure you're right"

You should have stopped there.

" some personality cult or other, has been the required catalyst to initiate conflict! "

Well no. Not required. It has sometimes been one of the catalysts. For example, when Caesar invaded Gaul, self-aggrandisement was one of the reasons. But equally, Rome had suffered numerous invasions over the previous 4 centuries and so another purpose was to permanently remove the threat. There's rarely a single cause for war.

There are as many reasons as there are wars. But the most prominent cause over the millennia was and is the fear and uncertainty of the other's intentions and motives. Again for example, when Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, they had no territorial claims and weren't seeking assess to any German resources. They were simply fearful of Germany's motives and ultimate intentions.

That the winner in a war ends up with the loser's wealth is usually a result rather than a cause of the war.

The biggest problem for David McMullen is that all alternatives to democracy and capitalism have led to tyranny economic collapse and misery.

Only a few years ago Venezuela was being vaunted as the shining example of a non-capitalist system, from which the left whingers are rapidly backpedalling.

A very good and timely article about which I’ll make two brief points.
The first relates to your tongue in cheek comment about our ancestors harmonious relationship with nature. The harmony that existed was imposed not chosen and Nature held the whip hand. It was about survival and wresting degrees of control from nature was hard won, occurring over millennia. There were certainly lessons passed down although enjoying the ‘benefits’ of a frozen, dictatorial harmony wasn’t one of them. Romanticizing what they had to put up with dismisses their efforts – over countless generations – to turn the tables and make survival easier. This strikes me as succeeding to simultaneously insult the effort and intent of these past generations and their present successors.
The other point is about the Roman Empire and I have The Life of Brian in mind. Dead it became but it wasn’t always so. Remember the classic line: “What ‘ave the Romans ever done for us?” The answer was quite a bit, but not as the moribund entity it became. It is this process of becoming moribund, a drag, from something alive and pushing things forward that links that Rome to now. But I liked your corrective on the Dark Ages (the Dimly Lit Ages perhaps?): it taught me something I hadn’t known.
TomG

Alan B.,
What is the point of your false accusations against me? Are you really so stupid that you believe them yourself? Or do you know them to be false but think the other people on here are gullible enough to believe them?

If it is the former, please explain how you managed to come to the absurd conclusion that I'm "patently committed to industrialization and turning back the clock to the 15th century or earlier"?

I could ignore your errors. Indeed I often do, but then you have a nasty habit of repeating them.

I'm as much in favour of economic expansion as you, but I don't support government being so intrusive that it monitors every transaction, nor taxes even being on transactions (except levies on products with significant externalities), nor do I accept that people wouldn't have the ingenuity to avoid your "unavoidable" tax - indeed I've already informed you of a way they easily could. Nor do I share your delusions about the effectiveness of white elephant canals. Such projects would be catastrophic for groundwater systems as well as hopelessly uneconomic. Greater benefits could be obtained with pipelines and trains. But at the moment there's very little development in the area south of the Gulf of Carpentaria, despite plenty of artesian water being available there.

As for land tax, it would slow the rate of land price rises, as people would have less incentive to spend as much on land as they can afford. I suggest you read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent to get some idea of the effects. To say I miss any element of fairness shows your comprehension is very poor, as I specifically stated that "such a tax would have to be phased in over many decades to avoid unfairly disadvantaging existing landowners". And you seem to have overlooked the unfairness of the current situation where some people make more money from rising house prices than they ever do from working.

And now the ANU has turned down the Ramsay Centre's offer. But (as explained on Lateline) not because of anything the left, or the pseudo left, or the unions object to; they turned it down because they felt its conditions regarding the content would undermine academic freedom, and they didn't want to set a precedent for that.

It will be interesting to see whether the Ramsay Centre responds with a less conditional offer.