I’ve been gloomy over at Stan’s blog about the prospects for saving and strengthening the Christian underpinnings of our traditional freedoms and morals in a country where so few people, including me, are believing Christians.
In coming up with examples of good stuff our culture has achieved, I looked up the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy, I found out about The HMS Black Joke, which is mentioned in Wikipedia here.
Here’s one of the lines in that article:
Between November 1830 and March 1832, 11 out of 13 slavers taken by the squadron had been captured by Black Joke and Fair Rosamond.
That means thousands of lives saved from degradation and early death by our country’s military.
Do read the whole thing. Don’t let the Left tell you the British Empire was in any way like the Nazis. Makes Last Night of the Proms come to life a bit, too.
And in those days, the ‘Left’ approved of such military heroism and humanitarian warfare. Now they can’t wait to hand the heirs to the birth of human civilisation in Mesopotamia back to the head-hackers and child-rapists of petrodollar Islam, and Afghanistan back to the girl-killers of the Taliban.
Oh, and there’s another link about this vessel and its work to an American site which revels in and promotes the good parts of our islands' culture. This is the real culture of which we should be utterly proud and most determined to preserve. Take a look if you like, as it’s easy to lose heart in the dung-storm of cultural relativism and multi-culti anti-Britishness we get from the government and its pals.
It’s cheering that; somebody out there likes us, and it’s not just for the accent. It's also a damn good tool in the culture war.
They seem to have their fingers on the pulse of our suicidal nation in ways that some of the happier-seeming freedom lovers and conservatives in the blogosphere do not. It’s going to be a long war, and in following these two blogs for some time I’ve come to recognise the extent and magnitude of the threats against what our enemies have left of our great country. What is ‘the good’ that conservatives must protect?Here’s my basic take on its originals, thriftily copied from my comments in Jon's post.
Which in this case is the Judeo-Hellenic moral and philosophic roots of our free and prosperous Western World.
What I was referring to, and what I may have mis-named, is the Christian, later European and ultimately Western underlying assumptions about the world and where they come from and how they work. For a long time the two strands were at war with each other, and to a certain extent they still are.
But, hey, the world’s a complicated place with strange people in it and consistency is rare and often quite disgusting when it does occur.
Which is what makes conservatism wise, and everything else, well; not-wise.
So roughly:
# The Jews and their ancestors worshipped a single, honest, principled god who made a covenant with them: if they obeyed his laws, he would protect them and not destroy the world again as he had done in the flood.
So there’s the Judeo bit; the world is orderly and governed by laws. Obedience to laws and faithfulness to promises made to God and respect for promises made to God also translated, patchily but ever more frequently, into moral conduct between people. You get lawful, decent behaviour having sacred meaning and worth.
So far, so potentially Judeo-Hellenic.
# Then the Greeks spread the idea that the human intellect was a thing worthy of value in itself, irrespective of - to risk sounding Lefty-polytechnic diversity policy here – nationality, status, occupation and (implicitly, eventually and not yet completely) sex.
So it came to pass that individual people by dint of their reasoning ability could be of worth beyond whatever the local rulers, vicious local gods, and bullying relatives, held them to be and thus eventually they might be handed some degree of freedom. And responsibility.
Lawful behaviour based on natural laws of divine origins. Individuals matter.
Then one particular Jew comes along, says we don’t have to be vicious animals wallowing in our base lusts and mean-spiritedness, and here are a few simple principles we might want to apply when dealing with the lawful God and His children…
The publicity following his trial and execution, plus some remarkably consistent persecution by the mainstream Jews spread this two-parented belief system far and wide.
Obey the laws. Individuals matter. Treat them well. Freedom and some idea of kindness are implicit and explicit in all this, and all the rest of the process builds upon these parents; the Jews and the Greeks.
Plenty of other stuff involved in creating our culture, of course; all that Germanic fervour Tacitus writes about to give passion in war and common-interest projects (if not too long and expensive) and the Celtic clannishness which is of use when cleaving to the collective is needed in society.
But that’ll do for me, along with fermentation, as pretty much the well-springs of the good life in Britain.
So when Dumb Jon and Stan are disappointed – to say the least – when the supposed conservers of this tradition in Britain [The Tories, remember, in jail briefly and out] as often as not go along with the Marxist wreckers and their bureaucratic hordes and multi-culti social saboteurs, then I share their disappointment. And anger.
Stan and Dumb Jon chronicle how the Left and others are sawing away the branch of civilisation on which we are all perched, as our Islamist and feral/criminal/savage and fascist enemies, domestic and foreign, circle around the tree, waiting for us to fall and be eaten.
THE hospital consultant at the centre of the Baby P scandal has been banned from practising, the General Medical Council announced today.
In this upside-down Nu Labour Britain someone in authority at last has had enough gumption to at least consider the possibility of maybe checking sometime soon that one of the links in the chain that led to the death of Baby P might be worth looking at.
What if the rabid right-wing press had not generated such a fuss, with all its curtain-twitching Daily Mail reading vigilante censoriousness and cheered on by vindictive Tory bloggers? What if instead we had stayed silent and let these moderate-minded childcare professionals and theoreticians (with one noble exception, and a politician to boot!) sort it out? Then would Dr Sabah Al-Zayat still be in a position to ignore bruises on another child's 'body?
I'm not saying that other experts won't 'fully exonerate' her in the fullness of time, and that the official stocks of whitewash aren't being brought out as we wait, but who knows? Perhaps Doctor Sabah Al-Zayat's replacement might look under the chocolate on another child and find something interesting.
Maybe that child will live.
Perhaps we in the dextrosphere aren't all mere windbags grouching from home and never achieving anything. So let's keep blogging, as if lives depended on it. Home.
Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley has apologised for remarks he made saying a recession could be "good for us" in many ways. That's the BBC, here.
And then theTelegraph. 'David Cameron, the Conservative leader, is understood to have given his health spokesman a severe dressing down for his remarks'...' "I've been reading up on the impact of previous economic downturns on our health. "Interestingly, on many counts, recession can be good for us. People tend to smoke less, drink less alcohol, eat less rich food and spend more time at home with their families.'
I can see - just - the electoral wisdom of pretending to be not-Thatcher in a country whose schoolchildren have been brought up to think that Tories eat mummies and daddies (remember him, Chanelle, the red-head with the Liverpool tats four boyfriends ago?) and want to cancel Christmas. But. It's just. Possible to point the finger of blame towards, oh, I don't know, the present government? and its economic genius of a leader who maybe, just maybe, has some small responsibility for the current economic difficulties. Even if you decide not to do that, it is stretching the Cameroonian fair-play and all-in-it-together/no time for petty partisan differences / nation before politics in Our Hour Of Need, to actually say nice things about - whisper it -Mister Brown's recession- in such a way that the party that planned, implemented, and ran the policies that have just bankrupted our economy can blame the Tories for being heartless.
They get to say this: "There is a clear choice for the British people," said James Purnell, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions "...Labour's approach will give real help now for families and businesses to help Britain come through these difficult times stronger and sooner. The Conservatives would sit back and watch as the recession became longer and deeper."
As Dumbjon points out here, it's not about electability.
Why would someone in opposition want to say, of the government's hurtful, expensive, and utterly avoidable mess; 'This might be good for you, kids. Leave poor Mister Brown alone. Why don't you give the chap a break.' ?
I'm going to have to labour the point, I'm so angry.
To sacrifice oneself; to give up one's most precious things in order to help others is the highest standard of virtue of our civilisation; being modelled as it is on the sacrifice on the Cross. But to take up the mantle of the recession-creators themselves and in so doing directing the world's criticism inwards at the moment when the country so badly needs to bring the government to account...Why? Just. Why?
I mean, is it physically possible to be this stupid? Does the IQ scale go down so low that it can measure this kind of clulessness, or will they have to invent a new gauge for it, and if so, what would they call it? The DAF Scale? The TAPS gradient?
Trixie has a dental problem which the Prime Minister oddly appears to have left out of his medium to long term financial strategy, what with one thing or another.
You can help this awesome and dedicated fighter for national and personal freedom by giving generously to some value of generously care of the Devil here.
We should look after our own, if we can. NNW
Also, you have the opportunity to administer a virtual intimate body search to a collectivist person whose virtue, personality, and parents' marital status can all be inferred from its comment. It's the fourth post, and the first one from someone posting as anonymous. Please take care to go in slow, dry, and all the way up to your elbow. After dicing green chillis all day, ideally.
I can recommend it for anyone who thinks perhaps that we enraged Daily Mail-reader types are:
A) too harsh on all concerned, and B) members of a tiny minority of professional right-wing whingers.
On it is a link to another Guardian page discussing how its readers failed to notice an insignificant number of tiny and easy-to-misinterpret clues which might, in a parallel universe, have led to a different outcome for Baby P.
The Guardian Key Questions are a priceless treasure trove of the bleeding obvious, and here they are.
Key questions
• Why did all the children's services in Haringey fail to stick to approved procedures for managing child protection cases?
• Why did Shoesmith chair the serious case review into the handling of Baby P, rather than an independent expert?
• Is it a coincidence that a death happened in Haringey again, eight years after the death of Victoria Climbié, or is there a specific problem in the north London borough?
• Did police urge social workers not to return Baby P to the family home? If so, why was this ignored?
• Why did Haringey fail to pass on all relevant documents to police and prosecutors until the case reached trial?
• Why did NHS staff fail to follow the correct procedures when there was evidence that Baby P suffered non-accidental injuries?
• Was the management and supervision of staff involved in the case up to scratch?
• Why did the local authority not abide by the fostering regulations when it used family friends as temporary carers for Baby P?
The bodily hygiene behaviour of family Ursidae in sylvan environments springs to mind, and also speculation about how well the Reformation has been received lately in the topmost stratum of the Vatican.
I’ve decided not to swear much online, but a chap has to do something or else the anger just builds up and builds up and fills his world until he finds himself on top of a church steeple or some other tall building; stark naked and with nothing for company but a high-powered sniper’s rifle, some fondue forks, a deep-fat fryer and a cage full of hamsters.
I have a dream that one day it will be better.
One day; just for one day, I’d like to live through that day and not go to bed thinking that - spiritually at least – I can feel the cooling trickle of Gordon Brown’s genetic code darkening the seat of my pyjama pants.
One day; just for one day I’d like to think that the Conservatives, the heirs of Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher might have a clue; perhaps clue enough to oppose the man and the party that have bankrupted Britain and who mean to do so much more to harm the car boot sale of its surviving economy, and that their top leaders would show enough gumption, enough nous (and this is the leaders of a party whose basic, fundamental, simple-to-understand philosophy means ‘step away from the really, really stupid stuff that always hurts and use the things that you can see actually working) to pin some kind of blame on him and to promise without apologizing to do something different and stick to it, rather than giving the impression that they’d be more gainfully employed fellating farmyard animals on late night reality TV.
One day; just for one day in what’s left of 2008 or even in all of 2009 (I’m a patient person), I’d like to see someone very senior and who owns part of the government’s responsibility to protect us from violent mass murder and who controls one department or another whose budget runs into the billions recognise that an ideology exists whose thirteen-hundred year mission from God is to subjugate all of mankind into complete and unbroken obedience, and I'd like to see him acknowledge the idea that during those thirteen centuries of war and oppression, no powerful group or sect within Islam has sustained anything but minor modifications on the universal suppression thing, and that petro-dollar-rich death-cult fantasists are not exactly the same as falafel-eating ecumenical Anglicans would be, and that such a minister or official might adjust defence or security policy to acknowledge that situation in some kind of co-ordinated and, yes, sustainable way that is not girded around with apologies for the cultural insensitivities that might taint or characterize any government action intended to avoid getting some of the rest of us killed.
One day; just for one day I’d like to see one influential part of the multi-billion pound Welfare State actually perform one simple task with consistency and without making things worse, such as protecting a child who for whatever reasons (and let’s not be ungentlemanly here and blame, oh, to pick a scapegoat totally at random say "the Left") appears to have briefly lived in a man-made hell on earth.
I’m not saying that I expect such an organisation to have anything useful to say about how such a hell was created in the first place despite the oceans of money that have been spent over past decades to improve the lot of the poor, or how or even whether such a hell might be modified let alone abolished (one must be realistic, after all; wide-screen TVs with a hundred satellite channels in every hovel in the land is a sustainable and desirable ecological goal, but wiping chocolate off a sick child to check for injuries is just a science fiction pipe-dream). I'd just like to see that someone not yet sacked from such an organisation who might commit to and actually bring about some kind of change from previous cluster-related official behaviour that allows such satanic evil to perpetuate itself, decade after decade unchecked and unchallenged. Just for one day I’d like the senior officials of the welfare state behave as if they were the ultimate, court-of-last-resort protectors of childhood rather than acting as if they're merely the proximate sources of childbirth.
This is where you can find the Haringey Council Social services budget. There's a PDF file which you can download.
Look amongst the pages for 'children and young peoples' services' p 25, or 'social services' p5 under cost of services, and 'children and young people' p 103.
May be some repetition there, but still, I can't quite see where it says 'check under the chocolate, there's a dear.'
Devil's Kitchen has a second post about this case. He takes time to offer a different and contrasting view from his own. He doesn't swear once in the new post. He is very calm.
GLUG. said The Death of Beer. 'Glug?!' asked the beer. GLUG. replied The Death of Beer.GLUG. 'Psshh, click, glug, glug, glug?' asked the beer, hopefully. GLUG, replied The Death of Beer, not unkindly. 'Glug,' said the beer, rather bitterly.
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