Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

In response to those who say, “Oh, come off it, it was just a bit of cake”. Or, “what did you want - for the dogs to be abandoned to the Taliban?” Or “Who cares who paid for the wallpaper?” the complainants are now insisting “We just want to be told the truth. We just want transparency. We don’t want to be lied to.” A shame then that they don’t hold themselves to the same standards when concocting a simple lie about the Foreign Secretary using an expensive ‘private jet’ when she in fact used an official government aircraft manned by the Royal Air Force.

Did you ever tell your kids about Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy? Well there you go. But, you will protest, at that age they need to be protected from the harsh realities of the big, bad world, and a bit of pretend magic does no harm, surely? Would you be surprised if the salesmen of wine companies, while forbidding pilfering, see no harm in helping themselves to their product while wooing new business? Do you really believe that stationery manufacturers don’t covet the odd paperclip?

In many parts of the world – including all those holier-than-thou, Labour-run councils – a backhander, a bung, a little sweetener is an open secret. The wheels of commerce are greased by lies, insider information, nepotism and graft. And nobody bats an eyelid. Why should we hold governments up to a level of scrutiny we rarely manage for ourselves? And what, seriously, is wrong with a leader possessing a few human foibles? Let he who is without sin and all that…

Dare you even imagine a world run by perfect humans? My god, what A sanctimonious, joyless, beige place that would be. We love our pantomime villains, our cads, our rogues; so what is it about petty politics that turns mediocre public figures into arbiters of the greatest virtues? Do they imagine the public applaud their daring quest to uncover the truth, or is it more likely, to paraphrase Colonel Jessop said in A Few Good Men, that they can’t handle the truth?

The latest anti-Johnson hashtag doing the rounds is #ALiarNotALeader and it is predictably being promoted by the same old toothless circus lions who have, no doubt, never in their lives lied to gain any sort of advantage. Hypocrisy, thy name is Davey, Rayner, Starmer, Lucas, Blackford, and so on and so on and so on. The emotional investment alone must qualify them for therapy.

I really hold no candle for Boris Johnson (I feel the need to keep saying this) but don’t you just get bored when the same tired old hacks trot out the same tired old lies of their own? They told the electorate a million times before the election that Johnson is a liar. The electorate voted for him in their millions (and yes, the UK general election IS now a presidential style affair) knowing exactly what they would get.

So what that the Met asked Sue Gray to delay publication? ‘They’ wanted the police involved, but now that they are they cry foul. Establishment fix! Conveniently forgetting, of course, that in this case ‘the establishment’ is their own. Cressida Dick, I’m sure, would be delighted to scupper Johnson. And her boss politico, Sadiq Khan, must be salivating at the chance. I neither know nor care how the police will interpret events, but it isn’t Big Dog who is riding roughshod over democracy here.

Same shit, different day.

 Another one of those old blogposts which seems more relevant with each passing day:

https://batsby.blogspot.com/2019/06/cometh-hour.html 

Black Looks

“Doctor, I need to lose some weight”

“Don’t eat anything fatty.”

“You mean cut down on the fry-ups, eat fewer chips?”

“No, you weren’t listening. I said don’t eat anything, Fatty.”

The joke could have been written for Ian Blackford, the corpulent, quivering, jowl-bedecked, mountain of human blubber who makes a fool of himself every week at Prime Minster’s Questions.

In response to the usual inane inquiry from the SNP’s Clown in Residence, this time about ‘birthday cake gate’, the Prime Minster responded with a quip about who had probably eaten the most cake. Blackford – hypocritically, no stranger to breaking lockdown rules himself – was immediately supported by howls of indignation form the opposition benches, as the government rolled in the aisles.

I can’t be the only one who finds it odd that the side (the same old, illiberal, left) whose entire line of persuasion relies on making the ordinary shameful, who criminalise thought itself, is regularly enraged when others do the same. Boris Johnson was accused of what they call ‘body-shaming’, or what the rest of us see as ‘telling the truth’. (Ironic, given that he is being harangued for apparently – quite obviously, in fact – doing the very opposite.)

Fatty! Spotty! Smelly! Weirdo! Freak! The playground insults that, for the most part, spurred individuals on to improve their game are now considered hate crimes. The over-close scrutiny of the vanishingly small incidents of actual harm has become an industry. This industry seeks to define and divide. Every childhood slight has become a legitimised excuse to seek reparation; every insult is now a trigger for mental frailty and a lifelong excuse to do nothing to help yourself.

I very much doubt that the lard-arsed Braveheart gives a shit what Boris said, beyond the extent to which it might be weaponised, but the incident reminds me of a trope often erroneously attributed to François-Marie Arouet  (Voltaire): “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” Of course, today, that could mean almost anybody.

Ian Blackford was not available for comment

The only people you ARE allowed to criticise – and without restraint, it seems – are old white men, preferably English ones, so clearly they cannot be in charge. (Oh, god, we’re back to the lizards again, aren’t we?) So, carry on carping; we can take it. While you’re getting angry over nothing, at least you’re not getting in the way of old, white, Englishmen trying their best to fix the society that you broke.

Past blast...

Nothing new here, but this is a blog I published in 2013 and I think it is as relevant today as it was nine years ago.

Try it and see if it fits: https://batsby.blogspot.com/2013/02/opportunity-nix.html 

Long time, no see!

I haven’t blogged for a while, but as Twitter's free speech policy has banned me for a week, for agreeing with somebody else’s free speech, I may as well vent on here for now. I enjoy it, it allows me the space and time that twitter does not, to get my thoughts out there. But it has been an eye-opener, the extent to which people are happy to agree with me, just so long as I agree with them. The diatribe which follows was begun some many weeks ago, but I still think it’s relevant; it’s always relevant.

There are none so blind as those who will not see. This accusation has been levelled at me by an ex long-time follower who thinks I have been gulled by the elite global cabal of paedophile, blood-guzzling, illuminati, royal space lizards who rule our universe. This is an acolyte of the covid cult – those who believe, unswervingly in the ridiculous notion that the lizards are now so bold, so confident in their supremacy, that they can openly perpetrate a global confidence trick in order to coerce all of us to accept some form of slavery.

The form of our enslavement and the reasons behind it are never explained – because there are no reasons, but that never matters to those who believe – in the face of so much evidence against and so little evidence for – that because they think it so, it must be so…

We are small. All of us. To the devotees of globalism, the individual is a grain of sand on a beach comprised of billions. The perils and triumphs of most of us, as individual grains, adds or subtracts nothing to or from the global collage. Yet a collage it is; change enough single ‘pixels’ in the image and the whole image changes. But you must change a lot before it becomes visible. And once you see how the world has changed it is difficult to see how to put it back.

Our world has changed dramatically in the past half a century and the change has accelerated in the last two decades. We have gone from a form of democracy which seemed equitable enough – you don’t like what’s going on, you change the government – to one where no matter who is elected to office, there is but one vision for the future. And what a cold, unfriendly, anti-human vision it seems to be.

Under the banners of inclusion and diversity and fairness and even love, the needs of the harmless individual have been declared selfish and racist and uncaring and greedy. Yet at the same time increasingly fractured individual demands have turned those who believe themselves to be wholesome new world citizens into the new world bullies. Some individual needs are deemed unworthy and ‘unhelpful’, so the majority have become the punchbag of noisy minorities.

As mankind culturally evolved from hunter-gatherer bands to agrarian tribes and thence to feudal landlords and eventually kingdoms, it had held steadfast to the nuclear family. Local communities, comprised of such families established their own identities and their own customs, habits and behavioural expectations. But since the advent of communism and similar ideologies the nuclear family has been attacked and devalued until it is possibly no longer the norm.

What a loss. Now, instead of cleaving to family, village, town and country, we appear to be [dis]united by causes which have the appearance of commonality but often betray the meddling, hands of influencers. Agitators for ‘rights’ have the momentary appearance of freedom fighters but in the main they are just in thrall to the latest fads; as quick as they are hailed as heroes, they dissolve into zeros as the next noisy need makes its voice heard.

I think everybody can feel we are in a time of change. The old certainties have largely gone, and mountebanks everywhere compete for your support. No wonder that a unifying theory, no matter how bizarre, should appeal. But don’t fall for it. Ask yourself how likely it is that some secret plot is being acted out; a plot so dastardly that it offends common decency yet has remained secret for so long.

But there is a precedent for such a fiction. Religion. Notwithstanding the origin argument – big bang or creator – the notion of a controlling deity, benign or vengeful, is an easy sell but impossible to prove. And also, if you really think about it, extremely unlikely indeed. But billions around the world readily give up a certain amount of agency to appease their imaginary being.

You're probably wondering why I asked you all here today...

The solution to the entire conundrum is, I believe, in our own hands… and minds. Whatever the truth of the matter our gods don’t really seem to care very much how we behave; it is we who police our rules and we who order our societies. As ever the answer is not in seeking the benevolence of distant third parties, but looking after number one. Keep yourself safe, be kind to your nearest and dearest and I expect those giant lizards will just leave us alone.