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How do the Scots Nationalists get away with it? In every other country on earth the addition of the word nationalists to a political partys name makes self-described liberals shudder. Even many conservatives are wary of the connotations that the term brings.

Yet among all the nationalist parties and movements, only the Scots nationalists are given a pass by the respectable and media classes. And this is curious because Scots nationalism is no different from any other type of nationalism. In fact, it is worse than most. Its sole motivating factor is anti-Englishness. Its leaders will speak well of any country in the world (Cuba, Iran, France) just so long as they can portray the English and the dreaded Westminster in the worst possible light.

Of course they have pulled this off in recent years by portraying themselves as progressive. No right-on cause can appear without the SNP putting its fumbling, fat hands around it. From there the contradictions pile up without consequence. At present the SNP is an avowedly green party whose sole honeypot is (it believes) North Sea oil. It is a pro-diversity party that welcomes people of all creeds and colours. Except the English.

In power it has presided over failure after failure in every sector in which it has any control. It has been responsible for a decline in Scotlands once-great education system, an increase in waiting times in the healthcare system and a failure of Scottish care-homes (even before Covid) on a fatal and tragic scale.

Still the polls show steady support for the party. And since the last once in a lifetime referendum, support for the idea of an independent country that would be perpetually governed by these numpties has actually risen. If a referendum happened today, Scotland might sail off to join sub-Saharan Africa in the ranks of the world poverty indexes.

Unionists are right to be worried about this. Not least because nothing we say has any effect, as the recently departed leader of the Scottish Tories, Jackson Carlaw, discovered. Personally I find the idea of a second once in a lifetime referendum ridiculous. But if it ever did happen, it should only take place with the consequences of a yes vote fully agreed upon.

Next time, let the voters know exactly what would happen to their currency, international alliances and security arrangements. Above all let it be agreed what share of the national debt they would be forced to take on. Only once these things are agreed upon should any vote even be considered. Which is one way of course of ensuring that it never happens at all.

See more here:
Why are liberals so happy to be associated with Nicola Sturgeon's brand of nationalism? - Telegraph.co.uk

Tasmania's Upper House appears set to be dominated by the major parties for the first time in its history, with new faces looking likely to enter the state's Parliament from the divisions of both Huon and Rosevears.

After a campaign prolonged by the coronavirus pandemic, voters have finally had their say on representation in the Legislative Council seats of Huon, south of Hobart, and Rosevears along the West Tamar in Tasmania's north.

In Rosevears, Liberal candidate Jo Palmer and independent Janie Finlay a former Launceston Mayor were virtually neck-and-neck throughout early counting, before strong performances in Legana and Riverside booths helped push former newsreader Ms Palmer ahead.

Ms Palmer was on 41 per cent of first preference votes at the close of counting on Saturday night, and Ms Finlay behind on 30 per cent, with 63 per cent of votes counted.

The other four candidates in Rosevears all remained in single digits.

In Huon, Labor candidate Bastian Seidel led the counting all night, polling 31 per cent of first preference votes, with 64 per cent of votes counted.

The incumbent, conservative independent Robert Armstrong, overtook Greens candidate Pat Caruana on postal votes to finish the night in second place with 19 per cent, ahead of Mr Caruana's 17 per cent.

Electoral analyst Kevin Bonham posted on his Twitter feed at 1:00am "called. Huon ALP gain".

Earlier, Professor Bonham said it would be "very difficult for the candidates in second place, which is now Finlay and Robert Armstrong in Huon, it's very difficult for them to get up from here".

If the final result is as predicted, there will be no significant change in the make-up of the Legislative Council in terms of progressives and conservatives.

Dr Seidel would replace the conservative Mr Armstrong for Labor in Huon, but retired progressive Kerry Finch would be replaced by Jo Palmer for the Liberals.

It would also be the first time in its history that party members have outnumbered independents in the Legislative Council, with both Labor and the Liberals adding new members over the past few years.

Labor would end up with five members in the Upper House, and the Liberals three.

"Party representation in the Legislative Council as a percentage was already at an all-time high even before this election, so if the parties win both these seats it will go up to eight out of 15 which will be a majority for the first time," Dr Bonham said earlier on Saturday night.

"It will also be the highest number of party members in the council at one time, there was a time in the old Legislative Council with 19 seats where there were seven party members in."

Final results may not be known until after postal votes close on Tuesday, August 11.

Read more:
Independents out, Liberal and Labor in, as Huon and Rosevears voters have their say - ABC News

Today is the Islamic festival of Bakra Eid where thousands of cattle, goats and buffaloes specifically are slaughtered by pious Muslims as an offering to Allah. For the entire duration of the festival and the build-up to it, you probably did not read any preachy articles from the Left media or even the righteous Liberals who during every Hindu festival, tell Hindus what they should or should not do to uphold the collective morality of the country.

From preaching to save milk during Mahashivratri to saving the water bodies during Ganesh Chaturthi, to caring about pollution on Diwali to talking about saving water on Holi Hindus have seen it all. In fact, recently Holi was equated withterrorismand fake story aboutsemen filled balloonswas propagated. Media and the celebs are pushing the bar higher every year.

The very same celebrities and media go completely silent during any Islamic festivals. Well, not completely silent. They wish the Muslims of India and of the entire world. Hope that peace prevails and that all of the rest of us learn the principles of sacrifice, brotherhood and devotion from the Islamic festival.

But have you ever wondered how would the media and these very liberals who hold sanctimonious placards at the drop of a hat react if Eid was a Hindu festival? What if everything else was constant the festival, the Qurbani et al and just the religion had changed? Would the Liberals still be talking about peace and brotherhood? Or would their reaction be completely different?

Here are 10 images that show how the Liberals would have reacted had Eid been a Hindu festival:

What would PETA and Prashant Bhushan be doing if Eid was a Hindu festival? Surely, running to the court.

And Bengal?

When there is a scope for Hindu shaming, Swara Bhaskar would surely not be left far behind.

If Eid was a Hindu festival, Barkha Dutt would surely be interviewing Asaduddin Owaisi of AIMIM.

If the Liberals had the chance to shame Hindus on a festival where Hindus went around slaughtering thousands of animals, it would be quite a surprise if the media and their favourite Hinduphobes would not have branded Hindus are terrorists.

And, of course, the portal that turned Holi in a terrorist attack with children being the terrorist would have gone hammer and tongs against the Hindus.

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation would have condemned Hindu Nationalists and passed a resolution to ban the festival.

And, of course, no Hindu shaming event would be complete till the secularist would invoke Jinnah and justify the partition See? This is why Muslims did not want to live with Hindus! Ram Guha would certainly be the best person to give a whole new meaning to the Shaheen Bagh slogan Jinnah wali Azadi.

Disclaimer: I wish Happy Eid to everyone! This article is just to show how the liberal crowd is as bigoted as people they brand as bigots, and how their preaching and disdain are reserved for only one community. I wish no ill will to anyone or wish to offend any sensibilities, except theliberal kind.

More:
If Bakra Eid was a Hindu festival: 10 images that tell the tale of how liberal media and celebs would have reacted - OpIndia

This is a revolutionary moment in American culture.

On one side, activists and employees are demanding fundamental change to overturn structural racism deeply embedded within institutions of journalism, education, and business. On the other, critics accuse the would-be revolutionaries of engaging in acts of illiberalism, including the silencing and firing of people who resist the proposed changes or even show insufficient zeal in enacting them.

So far, the fight between the two sides has generated far more heat than light. That's what makes Osita Nwanevu's essay in The New Republic, "The Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism," such a welcome intervention.

In defending the activist side of the dispute, Nwanevu's tone is high-minded, his reasoning clear and thoughtful. While critics of the activists frequently call the latter a "mob" or describe it in explicitly religious terms, Nwanevu makes a careful, deliberate, complex argument designed to show that it's actually the critics who are acting and speaking impulsively, reacting to events without deep thinking, intentionally refusing to see the reality going on around them.

As one of those critics (unnamed in Nwanevu's essay), I disagree. But it's important to clarify exactly why to ensure that both sides keep the conversation going instead of merely talking past each other, with each side doing little more than bucking up allies and seeking to discredit opponents. In my view, Nwanevu is quite wrong to describe social justice activists as "expanding" the bounds of liberalism, since the aim of their reforms is a deliberate constriction of debate. It would therefore be more honest for him and his ideological allies to admit this and accept its illiberal implications.

I've been pointing to the illiberalism of the social-justice left since at least 2013. I backed off somewhat during the first couple years of the Trump administration, since it seemed a little peevish and an offense against proportionality to write frequently about the topic with the White House occupied by a man who regularly expresses contempt for civil liberties. But there have been events worth addressing over the past year or so. Roughly since the publication of the "1619 Project" in The New York Times last August, but especially since the newsroom rebellions began early last month, I've found myself led once again to call out the illiberalism of the activist left.

Yet as far as Nwanevu is concerned, those who hold my views are the ones guilty of illiberalism.

Part of the problem may be that Nwanevu is responding to weaker arguments made by some on my own side. He's right to note, for example, that the core issue has nothing much to do with "free speech" in constitutional terms, since no one is raising a threat of government censorship. But neither does it concern, as Nwanevu asserts, "freedom of association," including the freedom of a community civil society, a newspaper, a corporate workplace to establish its own standards, since no one is denying the legitimacy of that freedom.

As I've argued on other occasions, every community makes decisions about what ideas and attitudes to rule out of bounds to treat some ideas as worthy of debate and others as unacceptable and warranting cancellation. What's distinctive about the present moment is that groups of activists are demanding to be given the power to make this all-important decision within certain institutions and they are using this newfound power to shift (and often constrict) the lines of acceptable thought and discussion, ruling certain arguments (and the people who make them) out of bounds.

Why do I oppose this effort? It has nothing to do with public policy. I'm all for vigorous debate and personally support efforts to ensure that Black Americans and other minority groups receive equal treatment under the law and that police reforms address and rectify manifest injustices in law enforcement. But that's only a small (and peripheral) part of what Nwanevu discusses in his essay and what his activist allies are aiming for. What he and they are really concerned with is defending the view that American society is comprised of "intelligible, if often hidden, systems" of racial oppression, and rejecting the views of "reactionary liberal[s]" like myself, who see the country as "a jumble of bits and pieces a muddle that defies both systemic understanding and collective action."

That really is the nub of the issue, though I think this is a tendentious way to describe the difference between the two camps. My criticism of the "1619 Project," for example, was focused less on the details of the various contributions and more on the framing of the project as an effort to tell the definitive, "true" story of America, with the history of slavery and its legacy sitting at its very core, decisively shaping everything else.

This was an activist move an act of deliberate exaggeration, a flattening out of the complexity that Nwanevu dismisses as a "muddle" and a "jumble," a decision to focus monomaniacally on one (important) facet of the multifaceted American experience and warp everything else around it. It certainly wasn't an example of seeking to achieve what Nwanevu calls "parity" among various groups. It was an effort to make Black history the defining feature of the country.

The best one can say for the effort is that it's an act of intentional overcorrection: American history has for too long been told as a story focused on white people, so now we should tell it as a story focused on Black people. But that's not a way to achieve a more accurate understanding of the past. It's an act of replacing one form of distortion with another.

And this brings us back to the second-order issue to the question of whether the activists fighting for control of decisions in the workplace believe this kind of criticism is acceptable, and hence worth publishing, at all. From his essay, it's genuinely hard to tell where Nwanevu comes down on the question. During an especially perplexing passage, he mocks New York Times columnist David Brooks for "surreal condescension" in wondering, in the midst of an essay about Ta-Nehisi Coates's much-lauded memoir Between the World and Me, whether, as a white person, he had "standing to respond" critically to Coates' "experience."

When Brooks' column appeared, five years ago, it was possible to wave away such concerns. Today, after a series of forced resignations and firings at a series of media organizations, they cannot be. Yet Nwanevu dismisses them anyway before quickly pivoting to expressions of admiration for two more recent columns from Brooks in which the columnist shows that his reading in Black history has "worked" on him, leading to a "conversion" to support for reparations for slavery and an acknowledgement that "moderates" have "failed Black America."

Brooks has learned. He won't be canceled.

But what if his reading hadn't "worked"? What if Brooks stood by or deepened his respectful criticisms of Coates? What if he continued to argue, as he did in that five-year-old column, that "this country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame" and that although "violence is embedded in America it is not close to the totality of America"? What if instead of joining Coates in calling for reparations, he argued, as I have, that it's a proposal doomed to failure? Would he be allowed to make those arguments in The New York Times today? Or would he be risking his job in doing so not because he would be severely criticized, which is assumed and expected, but because he would provoke a rebellion on staff and calls for his dismissal for refusing to adequately listen, learn, and adjust his views?

I want a public world in which Ta-Nehisi Coates is free to make his arguments with as much potency as he possibly can. But I also want a public world in which his critics can do the same without fear of crossing lines newly drawn. One argument. Then the next. And so on, down through the years. That's how we truly learn and grow as a culture not by taking control of the boundaries of debate, narrowing them to verify our tidy certainties, protecting our sacred texts, and punishing those who dare to profane them.

I don't know if Osita Nwanevu shares this vision of a free, liberal society. I do know that many of the people on his side of the debate appear not to. And that he nonetheless believes that those who think the way I do are the ones guilty of illiberalism. Maybe one day, if the argument continues, I'll be able to persuade him otherwise.

More:
Who are the real liberals today? - The Week

Shyam Saran

Former Foreign Secretary and Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research

The liberal spirit is suffering from terminal angst. Its political expression in liberal democracy is an endangered political species. What is the liberal spirit? It is a conception of society where the dignity of the individual is sacrosanct and rights are citizen based. A liberal society upholds the fundamental rights of each individual to life, liberty, expression and association, the only restraint being the rule of law, not the rule of state or a group or community. The liberal spirit not merely tolerates but celebrates dissent. It believes in the dictum that what is more dangerous is not when there are questions to which there are no answers but rather when there are answers which are not open to question. A liberal society creates equal opportunities for each individual to develop his innate genius and realise his potential. It is non-discriminatory among individuals irrespective of caste, creed or religion. But fraternity is equally fundamental because a sense of affinity with ones fellow citizens, the empathy for one another in recognition of a larger humanity, these are values without which a liberal society has no meaning.

To survive and to flourish, a liberal society needs a unique state structure, namely, the political dispensation of a liberal democracy. The state is as much bound by the rule of law as is the citizen and exercise of state authority is subject to challenge by even the most humble of its citizens. Another feature is the existence of independent and constitutionally empowered institutions which serve to restrain the arbitrary exercise of state power. An independent media and a robust civil society are its other essential ingredients. For a concrete and comprehensive articulation of the liberal spirit and the institution of liberal democracy, one need look no further than the Constitution of India. But while lip service is paid to the Constitution and constitutionally empowered institutions still remain in place, these are being systematically and relentlessly hollowed out. This is not just true in India but in other democracies as well. How has this happened?

I trace the origins of this slide to 1980 when Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK led the retreat of the state from the economy and elevated laissez-faire economic strategies as instruments of both economic prosperity and social welfare. The role of the state in wealth and income redistribution was progressively decimated and even made illegitimate. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s gave further momentum to this trend. The magic of the marketplace was now hitched together to the notion of liberal democracy. Free markets led to successful liberal democracies and liberal democracies became synonymous with free markets. Thus was born the touching faith in the inevitability of Chinas embrace of capitalism leading to its becoming like one of us. But the very moment of seeming victory of liberal democracy marked the beginning of its unravelling. It became obvious that there was nothing automatic about a free market leading to egalitarian society. The enshrinement of competition, above all else, in delivering prosperity paid no attention to those left behind.

The failure of liberalism lies precisely in its acquiescence in this new orthodoxy, its failure to question these answers. Globalisation delivered immense benefits across the board in terms of rising prosperity but states failed to ensure the egalitarian distribution of these benefits because the free market was assumed to achieve that automatically. Globalisation is not responsible for inequalities of income, wealth and opportunity. It is the failure of public policy which liberals failed to expose. When the free market went into free fall in 2007-08, so did the credibility of the liberal democratic ideal. India has not been immune to these forces. The orthodoxies of the past four decades are no longer tenable. How can one salvage the liberal ideal and liberal democracy?

The liberal idea must be preserved. It still has the power to help us deal with the challenges we confront today because it is the unbounded contention of ideas that will engender possible solutions. If globalisation is here to stay, as I am convinced it is, then we need societies that are capable of adapting to change, of being able to handle immense diversity and cultivate a new spirit of cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Only liberal democracies with their respect for diversity and commitment to non-discrimination are best suited to navigate the new landscape. The pandemic raging in our midst is laying bare the bankruptcy of populist authoritarianism and crass mediocrity that pretends to represent the disempowered and deprived but is unable, unwilling and incapable of mobilising society to deal with current and looming challenges. Instead, there is a constant recourse to quick fixes, the bypassing of institutions and of constitutional norms, and worse, the overturning of the very notion of the rule of law. This is how in India, we have ended up with brazen encounter killings to applause from large sections of society which are unable to understand that once the rule of law is breached they will be its next victims.

How do we engage in a discourse that leads us back to a contemporary design of liberal democracy? What must be its key features? The renewed exploration of the Constitution is a good starting point. Even those paying lip service can hardly object.

If liberalism survives in India, its future in the rest of the world may be brighter.

Originally posted here:
Reclaiming the liberal idea - The Tribune India