Merry Christmas

Damn this insomnia and God bless you. At least I can post this good and early.

The Jokers aren’t going to stop their campaign of humping up the world today: communists and Muslims have a habit of choosing other peoples’ holiest days to attack civilization, and I don’t suppose a glance at the news today will show anything very different from the same old, same old infanticide and all-round bullying of the ruled that typified the unchecked powerful two thousand years ago.

I don’t intend to stop insulting them and fighting them however I lawfully can and neither, I’m sure, will you.

It’s just…Just that today of all days embodies (whether you go for the supernatural side of it as I do or not) two ideals that our culture and our civilisation have carried and upheld for centuries and for which, I believe, we conservatives must always fight.

One is that we should treat our fellow men as we would like to be treated ourselves. That’s your actual Jesus, that is:

"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them" (Matthew 7:12, see also Luke 6:31).

Other people matter, just as you do they feel and dream and suffer. So don’t shaft them just because you can and because they’re weak or foreign or girls or the wrong class. They matter. It’s what libertarians are asking for and conservatives have built into our idea of trust the people and also into the notion of duty. It’s even what liberals intend, even if they turned out to be really, really bad at figuring out how to do it.  Marxists even got the idea, but never understood the maths; not for a minute.

The other idea is Yes, we can!

A bunch of stroppy, powerless Imperial provincials kicked over the traces of their own awkward-squad whack-job religion, removed its one-people parochialism for a wider audience by adding the idea that everyone’s entitled to a place at the top table in Heaven if they’d only live right led to the culture that abolished slavery for the first time on 4,000 years and whose sons walked on the Moon. Many of them got around to not wanting to hurt or allow hurt to the Jews which is a relatively new achievement in the world and is a very precious thing indeed.

They did so despite the death of their only teacher and leader – who in life had been some Nowheresville building trade craftsman rather than any of the expected types of leader: not royal, not a philosopher nor a magician nor a political figure at all.

You start weak, you start poor and stand outside power and established society and yet if you think right and act right you can build something huge and beautiful and worth conserving. That’s not just for the process of going from open-air preaching to building the great cathedrals and especially the little churches in Little Dreaming-on-Avon or Nowheresville, USA; but also the spirit that upheld the founders of science, the British Empire, America, the Internet.

Annoying as life is, and as crass as the Jokers can be, scarcely a day goes by in which we can’t achieve something to hold back decay and even to make the world (however slightly) a better place because we are surrounded by people who we can treat as decently as we wish to be treated ourselves.

... Which I plan to let you do right now by stopping reading this guff and sending you off for some carbs or other stimulants and to enjoy the day.

Thank you for visiting my erratic and variable output during 2011. Have a blessed Christmas Day and feast for all it’s worth because we have important work to do next year.

God save the Queen, God bless you, and have a Merry Christmas.


Picture from here.