Burst your bubble

"I'm forever blowing bubbles" isn't just the anthem of West Ham supporters, nor is it merely the alleged hobby of the late Michael Jackson. Bubbles are very much a thing of the age. Yes there was the South Sea Bubble, which was three hundred years ago, but the words of the song are just as apt for bubbles old and new: “They fly so high, nearly reach the sky, then like my dreams they fade and die.” Bubbles tend to burst, but some are more robust than others. True, the housing bubble and the regular stock-market bubbles are flimsy, ephemeral things, not to be relied on, but the bubbles we try to live in are armour against harsh reality.

Everybody has heard of the Westminster bubble, within which it is said, ideologies flourish unchallenged and unsullied by any contact with the grim facts of life. There is also the BBC bubble, so thoroughly coated in diversity that it can deflect any mono-cultural opinion save that of tiny minorities whose difference must be celebrated as exemplars to the rest of us. Students, Occupy, any other V-Mask wearer not doing it ‘for the lulz’ and anybody who includes ‘social justice’ in their Twitter bio... all living the dream. Or should that be, living in their dreams?

The bubble-dwellers, who breathe only such rarefied air as has been exhaled by their fellow believers can, in some cases, exhibit such detachment from reality as to ignore all evidence that contradicts their world view as statistical blips; a single newspaper headline about the conviction of a white rapist, for instance, cancels out the thousands of rapes carried out by specific ethnic gangs. See, they need to believe, white people are just as evil! Therefore you are all Pakislamophobes for believing that repeated occurrences of a quite specific behaviour by that poor, beleaguered minority are in any way typical.

In the various bubbles ISIS has nothing to do with islam, profit is only ever evil, there is no such thing as widespread and systematic benefit fraud, Tories wish death upon the needy and we have but six days left to save the NHS. And there is no greater bubble than the Climate Change Industry, which (according to the current thesis of an alarming number of bubble-zens) caused all the other bad things to happen in the first place. Thus the vote to assist in the allied air strikes on Syria, in an attempt to weaken an enemy which can’t be reasoned with, is not in self-defence but a simple act of aggression to the thousands, possibly millions who are suitably insulated against the possibility of terror attacks by a nice warm coat of fuzzy feelings.

Christmas is coming - break out the Bublé

There is a special time in your life when you are allowed to believe in all sorts of improbable things, like dragons and unicorns and magic beans; that people will all be good if you treat them right and when you die you go to a special heaven; that everything happens for a reason; that we will all live happily ever after; that world peace is ours for the asking if we all just talk nicely to each other. But beyond childhood all that is simply pretty bubbles in the air.