If a landlord in France turns down a potential tenant because of his skin color or ethnicity, he can receive a 45,000 euro fine and three years in prison. This is the result of the anti-discrimination agency known as HALDE (High Authority for the Fight against Discrimination) created in 2005 by the French government (at the behest of the EU institutions in Brussels), and advocated by then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

Seeing things plain, not lying to oneself, not subscribing to the delusions of others – these virtues, seemingly so simple, prove in life difficult to achieve and tricky to exercise. An inevitable imitative pressure assimilates people to one another so that mere opinion, received but never vetted, comes to function as a surrogate reality, in the cave-like error of which people stumble about their errands in a lurching mockery of witting behavior. The ancients worried about false or second-hand judgment (doxa) or about superstition. Modern people must grapple with ideology. The critique of ideology is the single most important exercise that an individual can undertake who wants to stand in truth and by his own lights against the conformist pressure of public opinion, or what dissenters nowadays call political correctness.

George Handlery about the week that was. EU expansion: compromised principles and missed opportunities. Your UBS (Used to Be Smart), account privacy and the IRS (Infernal Revenue Service). Reaching out to the public – to take or to give. When is a minority in trouble? Progress against the will of the M&M (moronic majority). Keep quiet and postpone the problem until it becomes unsolvable.
 
1. The expansion of the EU results in the inclusion of countries that are not ready for membership. Geographically they might be European but in terms of their economic-political system they are not. Such inclusions – they contradict reason – imply the voluntary violation of officially avowed principles.

There is an article, with numerous links, posted by Joachim Véliocas at his website Islamisation. It concerns the Turkish population of Metz, capital of the Lorraine region in the northeast of France, and its hope for a giant mosque of its own, despite the many prayer rooms that already exist in the city. The article is based on a report in the daily Républicain Lorrain, dated February 20, that discusses plans for the mosque, focusing on comments made by the leaders of five Turkish associations of the city of Metz. Each of these associations hopes to manage or co-manage the projected mosque. One of the associations is the Islamist Milli Görüs party, whose founder, the former prime Minister of Turkey Necmettin Erbakan, was forced out of power in 1997 by the Turkish military and by the constitutional court that found him too radical.

The German – well OK, Bavarian – centre right party is in all sorts of trouble right now. They currently have 9 sitting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), including some big hitters in the Parliament like Inigo Friedrich. Due to a change in the way that the European Parliament election’s are being held in Germany, they stand to lose all 9, despite still picking up over 40% in their home, and Germany’s most populous Land, Bavaria. This time they have to get over 5% of the whole of Germany’s vote.

George Handlery about the week that was. Credit today, tax burden tomorrow. The attack that never was. PC vs. reason. How to avoid threatening victory. Obama's charisma and the magic's limits. The General's dedication.
 
1. We tolerate the abusive misuse of adjectives. Terms such as „Nazi," „Fascists„, „racist", are thrown around with the abandon of a kindergarten's snow-ball fight. The following shall illustrate the misuse of abusive terms. Newly I can vote in Switzerland. Therefore, I joined the SVP (founded in 1919). At best, it is labeled in the foreign press as xenophobic. Recently, I attended in my first local assembly of members. My friend, Rico, a local physician, introduced me. By opening my mouth, I betrayed the fact that I am not be native to Swiss German - which Germans do not understand to the extent that Swiss films are subtitled for them. Furthermore, while the Swiss write in High German, they do not like to speak it. Most people here are rather handicapped in German as it is a foreign language learned in school. Hardly seated, the chairman approached me. Do I want the meeting to be held in German? My passive command of the language being perfect, I asked that, by all means, we should use „Schwitzertütsch". After that, it took a moment to realize that the episode tells much about the charge of yahoo nativism. In fact, the SVP is not at all against „foreigners". What it is against is, besides big government, criminality. This position is held resolutely, regardless of whether culprits are indigenous or foreign. Me think that the smeared SVP deserves the apology it will not get.

If conservatism (a word that discomfits me somewhat) were an attitude to existence based on a yearning for truth and if, as Plato and his twentieth century exegete Eric Voegelin argued, truth were not a doctrine, but rather a loving quest for harmonious relations among mortals and the divine, then neither would conservatism qualify for a doctrine, any more than truth.  I take these propositions not merely as hypothetical, but rather, as commonsense-wise, "just so." Conservatives should in that case heave a sigh of relief because in being other than a doctrine, conservatism, supposing that one kept the word in usage, must likewise be other than an ideology.  Ideologues of every stripe not only can explain – they in fact eagerly leap from the start to explain – who they take themselves to be and in what, passionately, they believe.  The passion counts more for them than the specific content of any belief, but the themes, such as equality and tolerance, are consistent.  Liberal loquacity, once let out the gate, has a nightmarish way of never shutting itself up.

Squaring the circle

To square a circle is a common metaphor describing a futile attempt to solve the unsolvable. But a glance at the root of this metaphor may prove instructive.

Since ancient times, geometricians have tried to construct a square with the same area as a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with a compass and straightedge. Without going into the details, outside this author’s competence anyway, the challenge was invalidated as per the Lindemann–Weierstrass theorem, which proved that pi (π) is a transcendental rather than algebraic irrational number.

Recently I visisted Orléans cathedral. It is one of the largest cathedrals in a country of huge ones, a magnificent late Gothic construction whose interior soars more dramatically than the heavier interiors of Chartres or Notre Dame de Paris. Orléans is also one of the most dramatic towns in French history, the site of the greatest battle of the Hundred Years War when Joan of Arc, “the Maid of Orléans”, defeated the English and thereby ensured the liberation of her country from the foreign invader.

For a long time there has been talk about a giant mosque to be built in Marseilles in the department of Bouches-du-Rhône. Now, the project is several steps closer to becoming a reality.

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