Progressive policy triumphs AGAIN

What kind of a crazy question has the following as the only practical answer:

“Why, Mr. Brown, we need to send them guns: lots and lots of guns. And prayers. But mostly guns: little neat Derringers to keep under the sleeping mat in case hubby didn't get the memo; stripped-down handbag Uzis for when your brother comes around to announce the name of your newly-chosen fiancé; lots of ammo and lightweight M-4 carbines with plenty of mags and grenade launchers for when yout family decides that a brand-new piece of paper signed without the agreement of the village elders doesn't trump the Koran, Hadith and Surah and 1,400 years of sharia law.

Oh, and some anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry and supplies and training to hand out at street corners or better yet brought into the home on during Friday prayers so the right little hands get to hold and point them at their sons and bothers and cousins.”

That question, dear reader, might be: "How do we make this a reality?"

But I suppose it’s a start, by declaring that something is so, so that it might become so. It worked for God. And the next step is to believe: really believe, children, that it will be so if only we believe it strongly enough.
As Tinkerbell said.

Just assume I’m not totally evil incarnate here: work with me for a minute.

Assume if you can that I really, really want Tunisian men to stop hurting their womenfolk. Assume also that I’d like Tunisians not to die for want of medication and treatment and also that I’d like them to be able to earn a decent living and not be harmed by pollution: real or imaginary. I wish them well, I really do, but I’m not God. Or Tinkerbell.
Except that one time...

Anyhoo.

How’s this for the progressive mind-set?:

After what had at times been a slow and frustrating process, the Tunisian National Assembly on Sunday evening voted to approve what is one of the most progressive constitutions in the region, with only 12 members of the 216-member legislative body voting against. Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki and outgoing Assembly chief Mustapha Ben Jaafar signed the document on Monday morning, bringing it into effect.

Um, where have our centuries of British or American ‘progress’ after a longer and slower process from, say the Fall  [if any] of Rome through the Dark Ages and Mediaeval period to the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment, the Agricultural, Industrial, Social and Information Revolutions and also all the meaty, socially-based revolutions (the ones with all those statistics involving numbers containing tens of thousands and, famously, tens of millions), tons of politics, billions of votes, got us to?

Some peace, some order, vastly better technology and material production…as well as technological unemployment, real pollution, unredeemable debt and great big areas in our cities where you can’t walk at night for fear of murder. And some pretty free, happy women, thank God.

And Tunisia’s going to get that all the good stuff very soon, during our biological lifetimes, from a piece of paper.

Of course it can’t fail because it’s not wrong at all, it’s  - what’s that word they inserted in front of ‘Ghostbusters’ when they made the cartoon version of Ghostbusters? - oh, yes: ‘real’. It’s real.

Really, really real.

Picture from here.

Eloiwatch Gold Prize 2013

Duck Season! Wabbit Season.

Duck Season! Wabbit Season.

Duck Season! Wabbit Season.

Wabbit Season. Duck Season! SHOOT!

I’ll try to be brief as a husband of my advanced years is expected to be and cram a whole lot into what - for want of a better metaphor - I shall call an English tuxedo.

Fisking Laurie Penny line by line might very well be a fistful of fingers of fun but time is short.

Via Jihadwatch we can observe the most helpless of maidens happily sawing away at the gnarly, spiky branch on which she sits because the Big Bad Wolf below isn’t nearly as fearsome as the nasty old branch. No siree, Bobbitt.

In addition to the umpteenth confirmation that the correct Left to English translation of the word ‘diverse’ is ‘narrowly, closely circumscribed and exclusive to people exactly like me and who also don’t smell funny or make me look bad by comparison,’ this is a perfect example of the saying; “Best is the enemy of the good,” and as such is Chapter 12665 in the best selling Why Conservatism is Clever and why the Jury’s out on Everything Else, and the Jury’s not Going to Deliberate Very Long.

So what if not all anti-Jihadists in Britain’s history haven’t exactly fit the Rad-Fem stencil? If pointing out that Islam most everywhere during most of its history hurts (murders, acid attacks, stones, rapes and enslaves) many women and girls and argues that it’s a bad thing, wouldn’t it be better to agree that it’s so, gang up on the crazies, hit them from left and right and worry about who gets into the Carlton Club and who doesn’t as a side issue until after we've made the crazies stop?

A good society: just, robust and confident enough to withstand organized ideological violence might encourage as wide a variety of people as possible to protect the weak and uphold some common sense of justice. Not so for Britain’s lowest-value base metal disc. The Riders of Rohan must all ride a pony called Russet and must all be called Rhiannon. Who needs men?

And that whole proportion thing: doesn’t size matter?

And don’t things change through time? Don’t the Left believe in evolution? If so what are the odds that any ideologically perfect, largely childless RedFeminist army will be numerous enough to outnumber and overpower the fast-breeding armies of the Religion of Peace? Perhaps there’s a tipping-point and perhaps it’s imminent or even receding into the past…

And just who, and what, exactly, is going to stand between our liberal elite and the Surprise Haircut?

“No retreat, no surrender. That is Spartan law. And by Spartan law, we will stand and fight... and die.

Not you Leotychidas, you’re left-handed. Or you, Ariston: you sound a bit too rich. Or you dopes from southern Lacedaemon: bloody peasants. And I bet you all like Demaratus, yeah? Back home for you crazies on the right wing. Call that long hair? So, how many are now?...”

   

Picture from here.

Freezing sacred cows: stark bullock naked

… or the rationalist has no clothes.

Reason, according to Enlightenment thinking, was supposed to be a panacea for Mankind’s ills and as such was and remains the proclaimed foundation stone of liberalism ancient and modern, washing away millennia of superstition, ignorance, obscurantism, illegitimate power and the privilege of elites to be above criticism, questioning, mockery or other challenge.

Reason was imagined to be something like aSwiss Army knife for politics, philosophy, economics and morality: the duct tape of Liberal Man; The Force.

Nothing could not be faced, identified, defined, explained and dealt with by the fearless wielders of the sword of reason, who would go anywhere, pay any price, to seek any knowledge without fear or favour.

Perhaps in the new religion of the mighty mortal mind, Reason was to be the illuminated ones’ equivalent of Charity for the Christians as described in 1 Corinthians 13.

It turns out - quite unexpectedly I’m sure - that in fact all the patience, persistence, humility, intellectual courage, openness and tolerance of the unorthodox in word, belief and thought and that all the hope and endurance intended in seeking the truth wherever liberals’ inquiries led them has been reduced to an economy-sized bottle of Pig-Be-Kleen, at least as far as onemouthpiece of the American educational establishment is concerned.

You can transpose this to its UK equivalents without too much effort.

Someone has suggested - in a place created by and for the supposed leaders and instructors of a nation’s educators as a subscription-only content site no less - the notion that a particular new ‘academic discipline’ might in fact be ill-suited to solving certain kinds of problems in the same way we might question dowsing, phlogiston theory or phrenology.

The questioner was removed; banned from making her case ever again; exiled untested and unanswered.

Why? Because her methodology is wrong? Because her statistics are too narrowly selected or fragmentary or because her evidence was unattributed or her experiments proved unrepeatable and thus difficult to recognize as science?

Nope; it was because her critics are upset at being having their beliefs questioned and their opinions challenged.

Since Brainstorm was created five years ago, we have sought out bloggers representing a range of intellectual and political views, and we have allowed them broad freedom in topics and approach.  As part of that freedom, Brainstorm writers were able to post independently; Ms. Riley’s post was not reviewed until after it was posted.

I sincerely apologize for the distress these incidents have caused our readers and appreciate that so many of you have made your sentiments known to us.

One theme many of you have sounded is that you felt betrayed by what we published; that you welcome healthy informed debate, but that in this case, we did not live up to the expectations of the community of readers we serve.

You told us we can do better, and we agree.

Freedom of speech but only when pre-approved by authority….Public distress as a justified reason (that word again) to exclude distasteful dissent.

So it’s back to tradition, deference, customary good manners, respect for authority and the established ways of thought for the people who lead the people who teach the children of the only nation on earth to put men onto the surface of another world.

I second that emotion.

If it’s good enough for educated modern liberals, it’s good enough for me.

And good luck figuring out that tricky old foreign policy, guys!

Originally discovered here.

Picture from here.

Here’s the objectionable blog post.

I’ve posted a small print version below the in case of erasure, or censorship as it used to be called back before liberalism ate everything.

The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.

NB: To see Chronicle editors’ final response to the below post, please read “A Note to Readers.”

You’ll have to forgive the lateness but I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recentpiece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.

Then there is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of “Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s.” Ms. Taylor believes there was apparently some kind of conspiracy in the federal government’s promotion of single family homes in black neighborhoods after the unrest of the 1960s. Single family homes! The audacity! But Ms. Taylor sees that her issue is still relevant today. (Not much of a surprise since the entirety of black studies today seems to rest on the premise that nothing much has changed in this country in the past half century when it comes to race. Shhhh. Don’t tell them about the black president!) She explains that “The subprime lending crisis, if it did nothing else, highlighted the profitability of racism in the housing market.” The subprime lending crisis was about the profitability of racism? Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.

But topping the list in terms of sheer political partisanship and liberal hackery is La TaSha B. Levy. According to the Chronicle, “Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’” The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights?

Seriously, folks, there are legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates. But it’s clear that they’re not happening in black-studies departments. If these young scholars are the future of the discipline, I think they can just as well leave their calendars at 1963 and let some legitimate scholars find solutions to the problems of blacks in America. Solutions that don’t begin and end with blame the white man.

Fry’s Turkish delight

Polymath and Olympic-standard bien-pensant Stephen Fry puts the boot in against the Daily Mail.

Of course I know Putin isn’t Hitler. But then Hitler wasn’t the full Hitler we now think of in back in 1935 either. The death camps and atrocities were years away. He became the Hitler of 1939 because we never stopped him. All historians agree now on how doubtful and uncertain he was in 35, 36, 37, and 38. The occupation of the Rheinland provinces of Alsace Lorraine and the annexation of Austria went unchallenged. The Olympic games reinforced his huge status at home.

Nor was Stalin the full Stalin in 1920. True terrible bloody leaders become so because they are not stopped. The last four lines of W. H. Auden’s The Tyrant come to mind:

Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Franco and any other despot you care to mention: they become despotic, maniacal, more autocratic, more insane every time they are given a greater sense of their own power. The fanatical junior KGB officer Vladimir Putin will become, if he is allowed to get away with it, as autocratic as any Tsar or any Soviet chairman. Vladimir the Terrible will have blood on his hands. He already does, but there will be so so much more. Little children will die in the streets. All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. That saying is so well-known it’s hardly worth repeating. You would think…

So he’s a neoconservative, too!

I agree with his implicit retrospective wish that the British and Allied expeditionary forces against the Bolsheviks in 1918-20 had been successful in the hope of preventing the Red Terror and its ideological contagion spreading as it did with a 100,000,000+ worldwide body count by the time of the fall of the Iron Curtain.

I’m also bang alongside his wish that the Allies had crossed the Rhine a decade earlier than they did to overthrow the result of the 1933 German elections and impose a government not fundamentally ideologically committed to conquering the world, suppressing women and killing Jews. That would have involved ignoring the peace-lovers of Left and Right, and siding with the alarmist ultranationalist, proto-Tommy Robinson, Winston Churchill. That lout.  See how the cast of peace heroes has not changed much in seventy years or so.

I wish he’d get with the same programme regarding the little global difficulty we’re facing right now.

Perhaps we’d better hold the Olympics somewhere in the Middle East.

Only overwhelming and ruthless military force could have prevented either socialist empire consolidating the ambitions that were explicit in their founding documents. But in the long run the West lacked the resolve so the totalitarians racked up a 150,000,000 death toll, including genocides, police states and their wars of mutual aggression.

On the other hand, Fry is bang to rights about the Daily Mail.

You only have to take a stroll through many of our major cities to witness what a paradise of multicultural neighbourliness, respect for women, respect for private and public property, freedom of conscience and the rule of law that ignoring the Daily Mail has made the western world into.

I for one just can’t wait until we get our fair share of Bulgarian and Rumanian gypsies. I’m sure they’ll fit right in with the law-abiding and settled British ones who live amongst us peacefully now (No irony intended, great grandmother.)

Besides, someone has to put to good use all those unused houses, empty hospital beds, echoing GP surgeries, oceans of spare tax revenues and unspent benefits money and unoccupied school places that are cluttering up the country.

Picture from here.

And finally...

   No decent person can fail to condemn without equivocation the arson attacks alleged to have been made on mosques in Grimsby and Braintree.

   Violence of any sort can have no place in a democratic society and this blog is in no way defending the alleged attacks by individuals who may be members or supporters of a network of working class community associations prominent in run-down areas of cities across the country.

   We should make plain that the alleged perpetrators of these unconscionable crimes are in no way representative of patriotic English sentiment in this country. They don’t speak for us. They weren’t encouraged by us to take any illegal (let alone life-threatening) action. There is nothing inherently violent or aggressive in the belief that communities live happiest and safest together if they follow common legal systems based upon shared values and venerable customs, and by identifying with each other through symbols and rituals that have been passed down over the generations. Nor is there necessarily anything bigoted at indicating that some ideologies have a dark side, and that, for example, a minority of Muslims worldwide may be involved in occasional wrongdoing.

   The lives of innocent individuals, including women and children at prayer have been put at risk. We can only hope that all involved are safe and well and that the police make rapid progress followed by arrests and exemplary convictions of the guilty parties. The perpetrators are not genuine English patriots but rather a tiny number of unrepresentative extremists who give the rest of us a bad name.  

   And yet, one can’t help but wonder what led to this violence; to this sudden unthinking and meaningless savagery.

  The media and political elites have been quick to point the finger of blame at the English Defence League; a suspected Right-wing or nationalist group with links to groups in other countries who have also been suspected of being Right-wing and nationalist. But what makes young, poorly educated, excessively diverse and disenfranchised men break out of the accepted norms of society and throw, if reports are true, improvised explosive devices at places of worship?

  Can it be the atmosphere of contempt and loathing that the most powerful in society have created around an increasingly beleaguered community, with public figures from the highest in the land right down to David Cameron not only refusing to engage with their concerns but also tacitly supporting those who attack their demonstrations? Are a small number of exaggerated or over-heated urban myths about attacks on this poorly-educated minority’s women and girls a contributory factor in their unthinking rage? Can the senseless but unique attack by deranged individuals against an off-duty soldier have sparked these disenfranchised and impoverished young men to become militant?

   We may never know. All we need to know is that these unconscionable crimes have met with solid and sincere condemnation by the entire patriotic community, continue to call for calm and be aware that the safety of innocent civilians is in the best of hands.

Meanwhile, gangs of youths may have been involved in scuffles with the police.

How does all that sound?

Let’s use more nuts to crack some other nuts #2341

House of Dumb features thoughtful criticism of a man who finds it hard to join the herd when that herd gets all down-their-noses at an everyday misunderstood matricide.

Well…taking a position where you face down the Guardian, the Daily Mail and the Mirror all at once either demonstrates the kind of raw courage the SAS look for in their recruits or here’s a man who doesn’t mind cooking his own light suppers for a week or two. Oh, and the suburbs might twitch their lace curtains at him for a while as well. In the chip shops and kebab houses of the inner city, however, I suspect he’ll lose very few of his devoted friends.

“The belief that children are "devils", that they are feral beasts who if they aren't smashing up bus-stops are murdering their mothers, reveals far more about adult fears than it does about actual young people.”

Isn’t the definition of the liberal as someone who accepts the paleontological history of our species - that we’re essentially meat-eating and foraging pack animals from the scrublands of East Africa - yet who denies the possibility that the aggressiveness and potential for violence that for a couple of million years kept blunt-toothed, slow-moving, clawless omnivores alive and flourishing amongst various ambush predators from the savannas to the Arctic Circle did anything other than disappear amongst everyone (except for a few throwbacks) the moment that the ink was dry on first edition of The Social Contract? Really, Mr. O’Neill, where did all those instincts and hormones and genes to mount a counter-attack against lions or polar bears disappear to in the era When Periwigs Ruled the Earth?

For the most part, children who kill are unstable not evil; they are profoundly confused rather than consciously cruel. Yes, they sadly must be removed from society, but ideally for help and education, not in order to be punished or to suffer public ridicule. 

What sort of therapy cures you of human nature, I wonder?

I confess, too, that I suspect him of a little bit of logical confusion when he asserts that removing a child from society (by putting him in prison) holds him up to public ridicule - unless they’re filming a reality TV series down at Tofu Borstal for Boys Who Want to be Girls, or wherever.

The lib meme of that old violence thing; it’s just so everything up until 1762 just keeps on being funny:

It was police and judges, for example, who took the disastrous decision to try the 10-year-old killers of James Bulger for murder in an adult court, riding roughshod over the idea that children under 14 were doli incapax – incapable of crime. It was the judge in that case who decided to release the names and photos of the Bulger killers, because they had committed an act "of unparalleled evil and barbarity". It was a commentator for the erudite Times who said that those two clearly very disturbed 10-year-olds were a "reminder of humanity’s most ancient and bestial instincts". 

“…humanity’s most ancient and bestial instincts". And there’s the rub. In Libworld, humanity is a social construct and there are no “ancient instincts”: It’s all superstructure that functions to keep profit margins high and the toffs supping Champers at the Ritz.

Or something.

But seriously folks; what does O’Neill expect The Man to do nowadays? The, ahem, authorities haven’t got the will or the understanding to uphold whatever has worked since Adam was a lad (partly because they reject any book with Adam in it); including the sometimes-reasonable doli incapax. They’ve lost any sense of proportion and discrimination because they’ve thrown wisdom out along with God knows how many babies with the bathwater of all that excessive deference to authority that they wanted to eliminate in the 1960s. In so doing they ditched all the successful socializing (moralizing!) mechanisms upheld by the legitimacy conferred by ancient custom and tradition throughout history down to what every schoolboy knows  - especially not to slaughter Mummy and little kids.  And they did it on purpose. The permissive society trashed millennia-old mechanisms for rearing children not to be sociopaths by breaking the connection (until then held to be central to Western morality) between a moral choice and its consequences.

It acid-bathed the family by easy divorce (mea culpa, my friends: I can’t type this part so easily because of this beam right here); dissolving the moral and economic links between sexual intercourse, child-rearing and fatherhood via child-related welfare payments; and it infantilized parents themselves through an education system that never finds fault or points the finger of blame at any individual or corrects misbehaviour.

Certainly, it’s foolish to treat those too young to understand cause and effect and moral responsibility quite as if they were Jack the Ripper, and we can hope though not expect that imprisoned children might one day have their immorality replaced with morality, but the statist ‘youth’ snuck into the woodpile in the first place thanks to O’Neill’s pals’ mindset.   

How else do you explain this piece Hobbesian  set a sledgehammer to crack another sledge-hammer statist war-of-all-the-bureaucracies-against-all-the-other-bureaucracies?:

Schools which fail to teach pupils to read and write should be fined, an independent panel investigating the causes of last year's riots has said.

About a fifth of school leavers have the literacy skills of an 11-year-old or younger, leaving many with no stake in society and no reason to stay out of trouble, the riots communities and victims panel said.

Introducing fines, which would then be used to help bring children up to the required standards, would help ensure the risk of future riots on the scale seen last August was "significantly reduced", it said.

Got that?

Western morality = bad.

Individual responsibility = bad.

Nuclear family = bad.

Blame for and punishment of misbehaviour = bad.

Parental choice in education = bad.

Bureaucracies intended to replace anything nasty with tea and sympathy and understanding = good.

Riots = embarrassing after fifty years of social liberalism.

Solution = let’s punish our own libtard schools by using more dictatorial government power!

Letting parents take their children away from the violent jungles that so many inner city comprehensives have become by allowing other, non-tropical rainforest schools to exist just isn’t on the menu.  

The panel also identified "500,000 forgotten families", citing poor parenting, a sense of hopelessness among young people, no clear path to work, reoffending and a lack of confidence in the police as key reasons behind the riots.

Say, does anyone out there know how reoffending can happen at all in our enlightened world of ASBOs and suspended sentences and community service orders?

Anyone? Anyone at all?

So what actually works? Well, how about more of the same?

Councils across London are working hard to build strong and resilient communities but the key to success lies in more joined-up services with responsibilities and funding available to make it work.Responding to today’s report by the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, London Councils – the body representing the capital’s 33 local authorities – said that boroughs need more freedom to ensure there is more sharing of information and funding for local schemes such as projects to tackle youth re-offending and early intervention work.

Brilliant. What could possibly go wrong?

Picture from here.

A lass, Smith and Jones

Stoner jailed.

A GAINSBOROUGH man who plastered his front window with vile anti-Islamic hate literature has been jailed for a year.

Darren Conway, a self-confessed supporter of right-wing organisations, was given a 12-months' sentence at Lincoln Crown Court.

The court was told on Tuesday that carer Conway had covered the front window of his ground floor flat in Heaton Street in Gainsborough with 17 photographs and posters.

Many were offensive – attacking both the prophet Mohammed and the Muslim religion.

Conway, 44, had denied displaying the religiously aggravated hate material on April 16 last year.

But he was convicted following a short trial earlier this year, when sentencing was postponed for reports to be prepared.

Judge Michael Heath told Conway: "To describe the material you put in your window as grossly offensive is an understatement.

"There is no place in a civilised society for conduct of that sort and the only sentence I can justify for it is an immediate custodial sentence."

Conway was also given a three-month concurrent jail sentence – to run alongside the longer term – after admitting unlawful production of cannabis.

Was he urging anyone to violence, or to otherwise break the law? No sign of that at all in the other local online press. Some nice pictures of the convicted individual there, so everyone can see what he looks like for when he gets out, unlike the absence even of descriptions in a report of actual violence referenced here.

So he’s in jail for expressing his opinions, for, and I repeat: attacking both the prophet Mohammed and the Muslim religion. As well as being a stoner.

But, thank God, along comes the offer of Amnesty. 
From Amnesty International: peerless global human rights organisation.

Throughout the world individuals face harassment and imprisonment as a result of exercising their right to freedom of expression.
Everyone has the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas without fear or interference.
This right is important for the personal development and dignity of every individual and is vital for the fulfilment of other human rights.
Freedom of expression has always been a core part of Amnesty International’s work and is closely linked to the right to hold opinions and the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

Let’s see how they’re getting on with Darren’s case, shall we?

(Click to see properly)

:

 

 

Fair enough, perhaps as it’s early days yet. Give them time. Okay then, let’s see whose freedom they are looking after.

(Click to see properly)

That's:

Hana Shalabi, a member of the Islamic Jihad,   (Yes, that Islamic Jihad, Ed) stopped taking food after Israeli troops seized her in the West Bank on Feb. 16, becoming the second recent Palestinian detainee to go on hunger strike.

So to paraphrase a friend, let’s check the score shall we?

If you live in the United Kingdom: home of William of Ockham, John Locke, John Stewart Mill, ace anti-fascist Winston Churchill and of course legendary birthplace of Amnesty International and you put up posters critical of a particular religion you go to prison. 
Silence (but watch that space) from Amnesty International.

Belong to a terrorist organisation (dedicated to the aforementioned religion) that killed these folk, and A.I.'s all over you like a cheap suit.

And Cameron and Clegg are where, exactly, promoting the freedom of peaceful protest and political discussion that is passionately proclaimed to be sacred to liberal conservatism and liberal liberal democracy respectively?

Picture from here.
My apologies to whoever's blog it was that drew my attention to this new polical prisoner of our great nation's.

Triumph of the will

Overheard and somewhat paraphrased on a recent Radio Four campaign promoting further moves towards legalising euthanasia:

“Do you know when the present law on suicide was written? 1961! It’s older than I am.”

Soon to be placed before Parliament by the MP from Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles as the Let’s mercy kill a sad case or two and treat the legislation as a triumph of decency forever after and as quickly as possible before the neighbourhood where Granny’s house is situated goes even further down-market Bill.

And that’s the ultimate triumph of cultural Marxism  - marketed as Political Correctness ™ in all places of shrivelled, residual freedom of expression everywhere. After all, if you can get a nation to fear and hate their own babies, you can likely make them do anything you want, right?

If it’s older than a human – and in some matters tragically brief and painful – life, then how can any law be right?

Scientific logic alone tells us that if we change our cars every few years and our choice of climatological disaster solvable only by massive government action every two or three decades then any law, regulation, European Directive or guideline must be changed at least as often as it becomes inconvenient to someone with the sympathetic ear of those in power.

Never mind who or what the law protects (such as feeble old Grandad who might just beat that tumour yet and move back into his valuable old house), at the cost of some hard cases; if it’s old it’s suspect and probably silly.

And unscientific.

Nearly there.

 

Just you wait till the fashion changes and our rational masters discover that the very notion of racial equality is merely a social construct.

Not sure if this was the sad case referred to, or this.

All things bright and beautiful

In a Christmas nutshell, Julie Birchill shows us just who is on the other side of the culture wars, and why we must fight against them:

I’ve always found the idea that Irish nationalism is somehow radical really cretinous. With its reverence for the supremely reactionary Catholic Church and its historical opposition to divorce, abortion, homosexuality, feminism and everything else that makes life worth living, it’s about as radical as Islam.

So there we have it, ladies and gentlemen: liberal individualism pared down to its very bones.

Notice what’s missing?
No, not sanity, silly; this is liberal Britain!

What’s missing is any kind of a future for the human race. I mean, for a creed that essentially argues that the feelings and needs (however trivial or illusory) of any individual at any one time trumps the rest of the Universe, including the feelings and needs (however trivial or illusory) of any and all other individuals, you’d like to think that people would:

A) be allowed to exist,

and B) live in a world where folk can stick together long enough and productively enough to pay the taxes needed to support every ‘student’ who wants a personally costless skip through a limited viewpoint of the end-products of a culture built upon  twelve thousand years of agriculture and settled existence.

Just look at those Glittering Prizes!

Even of the best of them - the essentially harmless one - you’ve got to wonder how Mz Birchill imagines, in a world run along tastefully furnished lines to the music of Broadway in its heyday (plus Stephen Sondheim’s proto-Emo warblings), who’s going to be alive when she is in her raddled old age. Who’s going to run those darling little restaurants where they do Death By Prosciutto at a very reasonable price when her sugar rush is replaced by an adrenaline crash and she’s growing a moustache, but not in a nice way?


Of course, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, feminism are just the aristocratic fruits of the liberal triumph. Consequences are for the rest of us: presumably there will be Morlocks from the bastardy-and-mother-abandonment-come-as-standard housing estates plus some licenced craftsmen and local shops (not multiples or supermarkets) to service her every ageing whim and to mop up all those non-lipstick stains of her dotage.

And at least we can be sure that Stephen Fry will be on the telly, and making us love it.

Hmm.

Some more of the culture war to be fought, I think. Maybe I’ll do some myself.

In the meantime, a very merry Christmas to any and all of you out there, and a happy and conservative New Year.

Hat tip to A Tangled Web

Picture from here.

The crooked cross

The Washington Post once again demonstrates the intellectual rigour, historical awareness and exquisite moral judgment for which liberalism in its modern form is justly famous.

What's threatening about European attacks on fascist uniforms.

BELGIUM'S PARLIAMENT is so polarized along linguistic lines that it has been unable to agree on a government for much of the past three years. At the moment it is ruled by a caretaker coalition. But the deputies managed to achieve near-unanimity this week on one pressing issue: discriminating against Germans. A law passed by the lower house would ban the wearing of full Nazi uniform in any public place -- and exacerbate what is becoming an ugly European trend.

Like many of its neighbors, Belgium has a significant minority German population -- about 3 percent of a population of 10 million. Like those neighbors, it has done a poor job of integrating German immigrants, and many cluster in ghettos that can be breeding grounds for extremism. This is a serious and complex problem. But too often the response of governments has been bigotry directed at immigrants or Germans as a whole -- which serves only to further alienate even non-fascist members of the community.

Belgium's swastika ban is a good example. The law prohibits any wearing of Nazi symbols with a punishment for violators of a week in jail or a fine of up to $34. Some supporters claim it is an anti-crime measure, but its chief sponsor, Daniel Bacquelaine, hasn't hesitated to describe it as an act of cultural warfare. "The swastika," he was quoted by Reuters as saying, "is the affirmation of a number of values that are contrary to fundamental values and universal values."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is promoting a similar ban in his country, is equally blunt: "The swastika has no place in France," he has said. Foreign fascist rulers must have been pleased to hear those words: Paris will now have no cause for complaint when countries with Christian or Jewish minorities ban the cross or the yarmulke.

The anti-swastika cause is sweeping Europe. In addition to Belgium and France, Italy and the Netherlands are considering bans. Yet the targets of these measures are virtually nonexistent. Mr. Bacquelaine estimates that a couple of hundred people in Belgium wear full storm trooper uniforms. In France, one study estimated that there are 1,900 swastika wearers in a German population of 5 million.

The idea that this poses a criminal or cultural threat is ludicrous. Those who say they are defending people's rights have it exactly backward: They are violating fundamental rights to free expression and political freedom. They are also exacerbating the very problem they say they are worried about. Germans, including devoted fascists, are in Europe to stay. Banning their marches, their regalia or their outdoor rallies will not make them more European. It will only make Europe less free.

Teacher’s edition here.

Truer than anything: Laban writes

Liberalism kills # 27,668

Another awesome anatomy of The Killer Left from Laban Tall.

Liberal Heaven: still not Paradise

WARNING.

This article about a film includes some information that might spoil the surprise for really, really naïve and ignorant readers.

James Cameron’s science fiction film Avatar has it all in Liberalalternativerealityworld ™.

Evil mining corporation.

Check.

Deadly mercenary US Marines.

Check.

Unindustrialised and therefore paradise planet.

Check.

Peaceful natives.

Check.

Peaceful natives who worship a mother earth goddess.

Check.

Peaceful natives who worship a mother earth goddess voiced by actors of color.

Check.

World-spanning and self-aware ecology based on trees.

Check.

Successful defensive war against the Company, Marines and Technology by Tribbles and Triffids.

Check.

And yet, and yet…

All is still not perfect on Planet Portside.

It seems that the arboreal shamans and gatekeepers of the Great Mind of the Great Unwashed from the Great Kos and its tree-based satellites such as the New York Times still manage to see beneath the anti capitalism message of this hugely profitable film.

They remain unenchanted by the hope suggested by the film’s violently achieved pacifist victory. Thanks to their great wisdom and their psychic connection to the Great Old Ones, even the visible dream of a truly sustainable and self-perpetuating industry-free ecosystem that has been made flesh before their very eyes (technological miracle and triumph of the American film industry though it is), the Wise Ones still discern the evil substructures of racist, imperialist, capitalist oppression that gives the lie to any hope for Mother Earth’s redemption short of...well, short of the cinema going public doing whatever it’s no doubt being invited to do as a result of seeing this film.

Here’s David Brooks from The NYT .

Still, would it be totally annoying to point out that the whole White Messiah fable, especially as Cameron applies it, is kind of offensive?

It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.

It’s just escapism, obviously, but benevolent romanticism can be just as condescending as the malevolent kind — even when you surround it with pop-up ferns and floating mountains.

Get that?

From a film that only just avoids showing George W Bush raping Pocahontas upstairs in a men only bar on Wall Street (except perhaps by the most artistic of implications: nothing tawdry or trite here in 3-D you understand), and all that just after eating a meal of manatee fritters with Bald Eagle eggs, easy on the panda, somehow it just isn’t liberal enough.

Sure; Cameron’s attacked and defamed the military, and the industry that has produced every foot of film, every pot of makeup, and every computer his films have ever used and will ever use, and despite not allowing anyone white to act as one of the sylvan good-guys, it still all comes down to Whitey trying to retain his plantation-based racial cotton power after the Civil War (courtesy of US Army and US Navy and US Marines ™) formally ended slavery.

Just the way the Ku Klux Klan did for the Democratic Party till the 1970s.

On TerraSinistra, it seems, we Western white people just can’t agree with their frothing-mad victim hierarchy enough. We just can’t concede enough. We can never apologise or atone enough. It’s never enough.

We’re just rubbish. Even when we say we’re rubbish, we’re still being rubbish.

Why not just get on with it, upholding the kind of society that, for all its faults, allows us the leisure to worry about something other than crop failure, plague, and our children starving or being taken for slaves?

Oops. Belated hat tip to Dumb Jon.