David Farrar: Harvey vs Wilson on western culture

Simon Wilson, like many on the hard left, sees the West as basically malignant, and that its achievements were based on oppression. This is not an uncommon view from the left.

David Harvey does an excellent lengthy response to Wilson’s assertions.

Read it all, but here are some key aspects:

Lushington D. Brady: Beethoven Should Have Worn a Grass Skirt

Arts luvvie whacked for stating a blunt truth

Simon O’Neill is learning the hard way that it’s fatal to the career of an arts luvvie to say what they really think. Even more fatal to assert the superiority of classical Western culture.

Because the ruling orthodoxy of New Zealand’s chattering classes is that a literal Stone Age culture is the acme of art, science and human rights.

And truth is “hate speech”.

Melanie Phillips: The War Against the West, and Its Defender

Across America, law and order has now broken down. There are repeated attacks on the police and a huge spike in the number of murders.

On FrontPageMag, John Perrazzo reports:

“On Sunday, May 31, eighteen homicides were committed in Chicago, breaking the city’s previous one-day record of thirteen, set 29 years ago. In fact, over the course of that same weekend as a whole, Chicago police responded to at least 73 incidents in which 92 people were shot, including 27 who died as a result. ‘We’ve never seen anything like it at all,”’ said Max Kapustin, the senior research director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab. ‘I don’t even know how to put it into context. It’s beyond anything that we’ve ever seen before.’

Kevin Donnelly: Don’t undermine the West, celebrate it

US academic Samuel P. Huntington, after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, argued that the new global conflict would be between cultures when he said: “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.”

Based on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic State’s reign of terror in Africa and the Middle East and in London, Paris, New York, Boston, Melbourne and Sydney, it’s clear how prescient Huntington was.