Friday 28 July 2017

Mistaken Identity

Identity politics; it’s barmy, isn’t it? I mean, it’s hard enough some days to get through the day without having to worry about whether you’re using the correct pronouns when addressing others. And will you unintentionally offend strangers by appropriating their culture, whatever form that takes? Do Americans get miffed when they see people of other nations wearing tee-shirts and baseball caps?

And what about what’s written on that tee-shirt? Dressing your five-year old in a pink tee with ‘Princess’ in sparkly sequins might upset a minor royal; you never know. It will certainly enrage a feminazi, but then pretty much anything does. Mind you, this is fine because it is always hilarious to see a grown woman having a rant about somebody else’s innocent child and being utterly serious about it.

Talking of funny, one of the ironically wry things about identity issues is how ridiculous you look and sound sometimes when you both assume your identity and defend it. Whatever happened to ‘anything goes’? I mean, nowadays, in some societies a glimpse of stocking is looked on as something shocking; heaven knows! But some identities are more equal than others and one of those seems to be to have no recognisable individual identity at all.

There is a big debate in the west about the wearing of the burka; something that seems to be far less popular in many all-out muslim countries. Quite apart from the alien nature of this practice, which is seen as a deliberate provocation to many, hiding your face is not something we are comfortable with, here in the civilised world; although there are a fair few prominent feminists who we could bear to see a lot less of.

When you hide your identity, especially as a means of asserting it, it can arouse passionate opposition. What are you hiding? Why? And who are you, behind the veil, anyway? On one occasion recently, matters got a little out of hand. A man walked out of a city centre pub after a long, liquid lunch and on hitting the fresh air became a little dazed and confused. When he noticed a burka-clad figure walking ahead of him he rushed up and grabbed the figure in a bear hug.


As the burkee struggled the drunk clung on all the harder and started to laugh. Underneath the burka, legs were kicking and the head was jerking from side to side as the captive struggled, ineffectually, to break free. Eventually the man let go, still laughing and the burka-clad figure stumbled to the ground, gasping for breath. The man looked down and said “Not so tough now, are we, Batman?”

Thursday 27 July 2017

Electrickery

So, the future is bright; the future is electric? The government announcement that by 2040 the petrolhead will be dead has garnered much comment over the last 24 hours, much of it based, quite rightly, on who is going to pay for it all. Well, who do you think? The government has no money of its own so this is yet another pesky green scheme whose targets will quietly be pushed further into the future and whose benefits may turn out to be minimal.

Nebulously linking that long-ago discredited 40,000 premature deaths to the use of fossil fuels for transport is just another project fear tactic. If you really want people to switch you need to pay them, not punish them. Introducing punitive taxation to now reverse previous government policy is showing too much of the stick and far too little carrot. With oil and gas more plentiful and thus cheaper than it has been for a long time, surely the shorter term answer is to continue to develop emission control.

But research into making safer oil-fuelled engines will stall if there is no future in it; the new gold rush will be battery technology and all the eggs will go into the single precarious basket of an all-electric world. I have no objection to electricity; indeed, I make my living from it. What bothers me is how ready those who lead us are to purchase new clothes for the emperor, without regard for the crowds who have to watch him parade in them.

Where, for a start, is all the ‘leccy’ going to come from? What if I don’t have a driveway and have to park my car on the roadside a hundred metres from where I live; how do I charge up? I can fill my tank in five minutes; what will the queues be like at the charging stations of the future? And will fast-charging affect battery life? Talking of battery life, there are studies that suggest the lifetime environmental cost of battery power may actually be more harmful than doing what we currently do. Has this been properly investigated before policies have been formulated? I very much doubt it.

Nobody knows the future, but we have survived the past; the devil we know. The taxes raised by selling petrol and diesel and by levying a road fund licence will vanish, so how will the government recoup lost revenues? Charging for road use, via traffic-strangling toll collection? Or by mileage, in which case how will this be monitored; trackers in every vehicle? Will our cars become part of the Internet of Things and if so with what consequences for individual liberty?

And sooner or later, you can guarantee it, somebody is going to claim that electric cars give you cancer. With more electricity around there will be more electromagnetic radiation. With more use of rare elements in batteries, more people will come into contact with materials never normally encountered before. What of those who make the batteries; what of those who dispose of them? Has anybody even thought of this?


No doubt all these obstacles and more will arise and be surmounted, but in just 23 years? That seems like a lifetime – in fact it is - if you are in the 18-24 group who will uncritically applaud this apparently planet-saving move. But in infrastructure spending terms this could put HS2 in the shade and that’s been hovering about for decades already and still nobody knows what, if any, real economic benefits it may bring. Are you sure you are ready to pay for all this, kids? Until I can see a saving, I’m sticking to diesel.

Wednesday 26 July 2017

Plodding along

You would like to think that the police, with their much-vaunted initiatives to keep a finger on the pulse would know better. You would think that the police, who are supposed to both represent us and understand us, would think twice before they publicised the extent to which they have become tools; tools not for law and order, but for the furtherance of political agenda, criminalising all dissenters from the new orthodoxy.

No doubt Wiltshire Plod thought that getting their twitter intern to post, un-proof-read, an antagonistic tweet was a good idea. And that the use of a couple of iPhone emojis would impart an air of being down with the zeitgeist. But ‘your’ for ‘you are’ and ‘boys & gals’? Who else wonders whether they were paying attention during their gender sensitivity re-programming session? Here’s the ‘offending’ tweet, suggesting a reach way beyond even their Thought Police competence and budget.


Naturally, Twitter went to town; if there is one tradition that runs strong in this country it is pricking the pomposity of those who seek to bully and clumsily impose authority from afar. The police have long been accused of detachment from the front line and disengagement from the policed; this could have been an opportunity for them to admit their mistakes and play along.

But no, lessons have not been learned. After a day of light-hearted mild abuse and the odd more strongly worded criticism they got what they thought was a grown-up to write a response. Talk about putting out the fire with petrol. This sinister warning shows a grave misreading of the public mood and an utter lack of understanding about who or what controls and operates social media.


If the threatening language was intended to make us feel like criminals it worked. I now understand that anybody who dares to criticise the official line is as bad as a murderer or a rapist; not a muslim rape-gang rapist, of course, they are off limits to the long arm of the stupid. Quite apart from the sheer idiocy of pushing back against an online presence many times their size and geographically spread worldwide, the police seem to have forgotten that they police by our consent.

When they left the beat they began to lose our trust and respect. When they began to strut about like paramilitaries they put themselves apart from the public they used to be a part of. When they start to openly threaten potentially large numbers of ordinary people just having a laugh, they have exceeded their remit. The crowd turns on the slightest of whims; those size ten boots could so easily be on other feet.

Tuesday 25 July 2017

Flip!

There is a healthy living to be made by selling out the human race for a bag of magic beans labelled 'Social Justice'. The latest burgeoning sector of the industry, drumming up trade for human rights activists and their camp followers is the gender-bending world of the non-binary brigade. Justine Greening has aided their crusade for the massive majority of the population to pay compensatory homage to their demands to be accepted as an utterly normal manifestation of human variety.

But, you see, ‘normal’ implies conformation to some model which occurs more frequently than others. Synonyms for normal are: usual, standard, typical, common and so on, but as gender dysphoria genuinely affects a minuscule proportion, then by a simple mathematical reality it is far from normal. This doesn’t mean that those with genuine issues shouldn’t be treated fairly and equitably by society, but giving people licence to declare a change of gender at whim is going to open the floodgates, just as defining hurt feelings as hateful has fuelled an imagined surge in hate crimes.

Nobody knows how many people are affected; some medical estimates put it as 0.01% but as transactivism has risen and the young are being persuaded, as with sexual preference, to give-it-a-go, try-before-you-buy, there are claims of it reaching 1%, a hundred times higher. Given that for flu an occurrence of 400 cases in a population of 100,000 (that’s 0.4 %) would be labelled an epidemic what are we standard models to make of a sudden massive increase in instances of trans-gender claimants? One thing is for sure; public money is bound to be involved somewhere.

I’m sure all of this is occurring organically, at least I’d like to be sure. I’d like to think this is simple a more open society allowing people to express themselves, explore their identity and find their place in the world, but is it? Some may use the phrase ‘cultural Marxism’ but that’s way too conspiracy-theory for me; I don’t credit human beings with the ability to maintain conspiracies beyond a tiny number of people. But it’s definitely a strain of leftism and fuelled by the notion that everybody should be allowed to be who or whatever they wish to be and if there is no profit in it, the rest of us should pay.

One thing is for sure and that is political interference is unlikely to improve things for anybody, gender-fluid or otherwise. A modernising Tory party loses its core support over this sort of thing and anyway, Labour does this stuff so much better, appealing as it does to a constituency all too ready to throw away what has worked for the many in favour of what might gain the votes of the few. But were does it all end?


When we made it easier for people to go soft-bankrupt more defaulted on their credit card bills. When uncontested divorce was made easier the divorce rate increased. When we made it acceptable to live on welfare forever we created an underclass of state dependents. Let people buy their own homes and we end up with a housing shortage. There is a clear direction of travel here; increase apparent freedoms and we shackle ourselves to runaway trains leading to unknown destinations. Will gender-flipping one day become compulsory? It's not going to end well.

Monday 24 July 2017

Scared? Damn right we’re scared

There is something sinister going on with islam and the authorities’ refusal to tak hat is perceived as a threat to our way of life seriously. Say that there are non-muslim no-go areas and you are shouted down with screeches of ‘racist!’  Point to the evidence and if they can’t ignore you, you hear guff about payback for colonialism, the fatuous mantra that ‘immigration is a net benefit’ and of course, diversity. How about this 2016 piece about the new diversity of SavileTown in West Yorkshire?

Yes, I know the Daily Mail is regarded as a banned publication by the bastions of free speech at the Ministry of Truth – the Guardian/BBC Axis – but this isn’t a hate piece. This is what millions of ordinary people see while they are hearing about our wonderful inclusive multiculturality. It’s the sort of cognitive onslaught that might be endured while undergoing brainwashing in a 1960s-style psychological thriller. No wonder people are afraid.

Yes afraid; not because of any imagined, hyped-up, far-right propaganda but through direct experience. We see barbaric acts of terror our screens daily. We have been subjected to relentless images of slaughter of the most brutal kind. And we hear daily how an enormous proportion of the ‘muslim community’ simply refuses to condemn any of it. For every reformist muslim paraded on television in refutation of our suspicions, there are thousands who nod in silent approval and thousands more who are happy to take to street praying in an insensitive and open act of defiance.

But we are the bad guys. The Metropolitan police published a report on hate crime against London’s muslim communities (I don’t recall seeing anything similar on hate crime against all of civilisation) in which they spell out what they regard as islamophobia (page 6).According to the definition they use, there are 8 components of islamophobia to wit:
  1. Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change.
  2. Islam is seen as separate and 'other'. It does not have values in common with other cultures, is not affected by them and does not influence them.
  3. Islam is seen as inferior to the West. It is seen as barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist.
  4. Islam is seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism and engaged in a 'clash of civilisations'.
  5. Islam is seen as a political ideology and is used for political or military advantage.
  6. Criticisms made of the West by Islam are rejected out of hand.
  7. Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society.
  8. Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal.

Well, the first six seem to be the entirely normal observations of what islam actually is in the west and the last two appear to be the almost justifiable reactions of some in seeking to protect themselves from further assaults on our own culture. As a small, but typical, example, take the case of the woman suing a school for banning full face coverings. This is nothing to do with religion and everything to do with an invading ideology imposing its will on the kuffar. If they can ban the burka in Morocco why should such consideration be deemed oppressive in Britain? But what do we do? We attempt to place more and more muslims in positions of power over us; the police are also guilty of this.


It is as if the police force, who once it was once assumed used to defend without prejudice the law of the land now seems determined to thwart those aims. Bandits wear face masks; bank robbers, rapists; villains of all persuasions. In our culture (and how come there are no white British ‘community leaders’?) hiding the face is a mark of shame. Maybe the police should wear masks now? Fight back? We aren’t done fighting among ourselves.

Friday 21 July 2017

Always look on the bright side

David Davis is in bullish mood, as befits his Brexit Bulldog persona portrayed on Radio 4’s Dead Ringers. Meanwhile the malcontents of Remain spin yarns of endless protracted ‘transition deals’ which sound like nothing so much as the case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Bleak House, whereby the lawyers effectively spend all there was to be inherited. It’s as if some would prefer to see the country punished; brought to its knees in chains before the high and mighty EU and becoming a burden, rather than running free and becoming richer, to the benefit of all.

But this is the great human dichotomy, the contrast between optimism and pessimism played out every day on both the national stage and at the kitchen sink. Glass half full, glass half empty – for every positive outlook there is a Newtonian opposite reaction to dampen the mood. In every cloud, some find the silver lining; and while the optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds, the pessimist fears this is true.

Take the climate debate, for instance: None can know the future but just as preachers prophecy the end of days and the heavenly hereafter, the climatists claim to see the fireball of hell that awaits us – global warming – and set to appeasing Gaia by using yet more of her resources to build massive altars on which to sacrifice the nation’s wealth. Christopher Brooker’s excellent article is a must-read for those who see the futility at the heart of every shame-driven green project.

Where are the cheery bright-side observers? We need more men like Joe; the eternal optimist. At every bad situation he would always say “It could have been worse.”. The Somerset Levels floods? According to Joe it was a mere blip. The great financial crash? A simple correction. “It could have been worse” he blithely recited, with a grin, “It didn’t affect me at all, because I had no investments and nothing to lose.”


His three best friends hated this cheery acceptance of every ill wind as bringing sub-optimal gloom, so they came up with a story they thought not even Joe could find a worse scenario for. The next Saturday, only two of his friends showed up for their regular tee time. When Joe arrived’ slightly late, he looked at his watch and asked “Where's Geoff?”

One of the others said ”Didn't you hear? Yesterday, Geoff found his wife in bed with another man, shot them both, and then turned the gun on himself.” Joe looked shocked, but then shook his head and declared “That’s terrible... but it could have been worse.” His friends were aghast and one asked, “How the hell could it have been worse? Your best friend just killed himself, his wife and her lover!” And Joe replied, “Yes, but if it had happened two days ago, it would have been me!”

Thursday 20 July 2017

Go Juggle!

Bread and circuses, as the satirical poet Juvenal wrote, was a metaphor for the practice of governments, rather than accomplishing worthwhile reform, of appeasing a selfish population and distracting them from harsh reality. Nowadays it is more akin to cake and condemnation, as developed world populations have more than ever before, yet are still not satisfied. And who better to condemn than those who appear to have even more still? To this end the publishing of the BBC ‘Rich List’ is a master stroke.

I feel sorry for each and every one of them – yes, even Gary Lineker – their reward for years of achievement being to taste the bitter wrath of the envious. Next stop will be publishing their tax returns so that the aggrieved can ignore the massive contributions they make to state coffers and instead focus on every penny they have managed, perfectly legally, to avoid. And why stop at the BBC stable: next up, leaders, administrators, moguls and magi will all be in the spotlight of public derision, purely for having slithered up that greasy pole.

On top of the basic malcontent, the media has cleverly contrived to make the BBC affair all about some imaginary gender/race/diversity pay gap, but it’s really about nothing so much as putting a group in the stocks for entertainment while absolutely nothing is done to change a single thing. Hot on the heels of Lineker-gate comes the revelation that some workers – who have yet to even contemplate retirement seriously - will only have twenty years to plan to keep working until the age of 68 before becoming a welfare waif. Outrage!

But nobody does angry injustice quite so well as the daily-multiplying ex-residents of Grenfell Tower. Not content with surviving the fire, by proxy in some cases, they are now determined to talk themselves into disability through post-traumatic-somebody-else’s-stress-disorder and demand that official after official sent to help them is sacked, dismissed or otherwise shamed. In this way they can prolong the perceived hurt and turn their salvation into madness; the kind of madness only lots of money and lots of attention can assuage.

But look, I mean really, take a good long hard look at yourself. If you are today raging against the BBC, the Kensington councillors, the hateful, hateful future government who might not give you a pittance until you work another few months, then you are where the fault lies. If you look at others earning more and think that they are the problem, treat yourself to this Spectator illustration, wherein a couple earning £70k pay tax enough to subsidise a couple on £17k to have pretty much the same lifestyle.


When life gives you lemons; lemonade. When you are schooled at Hard Knock High; knock back. One day you may discover that while reality sucks it’s going to suck a whole lot harder if you give the job of sucking to somebody else. Suck it up, snowflake, you get one life and it is nobody else’s responsibility to make it a good one. You want your daily bread? Bake it yourself. You want your circus? Go juggle.

Wednesday 19 July 2017

Mad Men

Picture the scene: A child awakes to the sound of a running engine. From the window she sees her drunk father, slumped over the front steps, a bottle clutched in his hand. Behind him the door of his pickup truck is open and the engine idles. The girl goes to her mother’s bedroom where her mother, surrounded by what the newspapers like to call ‘drug paraphernalia’ is in a stupor and unresponsive to her child’s entreaties. She wakes her younger brother and while he is dressing she dials a number on the house phone. Cut to the girl and her brother sitting on the sofa. The doorbell rings, she answers and a large clown fills the doorway. The theme music swells “I’m loving it!” sings the familiar voice while a narrator describes MacDonald’s new home delivery service. Boom!

I like it; it’s no worse than the sort of stereotypes used by advertisers everywhere. Unfit parents? No problem; Maccy D’s got this. Or how about this funny comercial for Audi in China? (Go on, watch it) What’s wrong? It’s funny. Ah, maybe that is what’s wrong. Humour, almost by necessity, has a human subject; the errant husband, the idle child, the nagging wife, the intemperate vicar and there is no end to the chuckles to be had at the strange ways of ‘foreigners’, if that word is still legal. But the holy scriptures of the powers of PC decree that nobody must ever again be offended, thus all laughter must cease.

The Advertising Standards Authority is going to get tough on stereotyping. In other words they are going to reach into your televisual world and suck the joy out of it. No more mocking, joshing, ribbing, poking, or tickling of ribs. All future portrayals of persons of whatever shape, size, gender or origin must henceforth avoid inaccurately labelling human characteristics as remotely amusing. Don’t these virtue-signalling morons at the ASA have real jobs to do? I thought their remit was to ensure advertising was legal, decent honest and truthful; not wholesome, sterile, inoffensive and utterly dull.

Stereotypes exist for a reason, the reason being that most of us, inadvertently or otherwise, conform to them. But advertising stereotypes are not intended to portray anybody in any particular light, rather to cynically use pre-existing conceptions and – especially with humour – appeal to a bit of the brain that says ‘drink me’, or preferably ‘buy me, then drink me’. The Alice in Wonderland realm of the Mad Men is a bustling hive of subversive humour, cynical manipulation and appeals to the psyche; their sole purpose is to sell. And if efforts like this second Chinese example (go on!) do the trick, where’s the harm?

Good clean fun!

Racist, you say? Well, try making an interesting, re-watchable, memorable, commercial that is politically and factually correct in every detail, offends nobody, doesn’t schmaltz up the screen and doesn’t make you want to stab yourself in the eye. I’ll be waiting over here, chuckling at feckless dads, overworked multi-tasking mums and overbearing bosses... and not believing for one moment that they are meant to represent real life. 

Tuesday 18 July 2017

On Track

Some stuff has been agreed about HS2, but unless you are directly affected you won’t really care. Obviously if you have recently bought a new house in Sheffield, or you have spent forty-plus years farming a certain acreage of land, the effects of the declared route will be potentially devastating but hey, people survive earthquakes, floods, overwhelming forest fires and so on, so you are expected to take it on the chin, relocate and carry on.

But apart from the relatively few, sitting where the tracks may one day be, the only cost is the headline capital expenditure. Of course the projected £55billion might be better spent elsewhere; it could pay off the laughable Brexit ‘divorce bill’, or it could quiet the public service unions for a couple of weeks, or it could even help to mollify Nicola Spudgun’s incessant whining, although that is entirely debateable; she seems to exist to complain.

But of course it won’t be; that is the project won’t, as it were, be derailed over current spending concerns because this is ‘investment’ and therefore good spending. At least it is touted that way. It will bring inestimable benefits, they say. But to whom? Yes, there will be employment, but how much of that will go to foreign contractors, or taken on by migrant workers? How much of the huge sum of wages will find itself not invested locally but sent abroad?

It is scarcely creditable that a golden opportunity to train up our own will be missed – over the course of the project a whole generation of new civil engineers, project managers, construction workers and on and on, could be built up – but missed it will be. Too hard, they will say, to try and convert the recalcitrant, idle British from welfare to work. Too easy, they will discover, to go for the short-term cheaper option. And this is the great tragedy of the British state.

Is it a lack of confidence in our own? Is it kow-towing to Brussels and free movement? Is it, genuinely, a bizarre commitment to diversity at any cost? This apparent abandonment of all the things we used to be good at is part of the despair that my generation feels when they look at how our country is turning out. And in part it might explain some of the attraction of Jeremy Corbyn, who talks the talk of Britishness while at the same time condoning an economic ideology that would prove ruinous.

The tangible direct benefits of a finished HS2 are nebulous. In the decades it will take to complete, the aims set out some decades ago will be half a century out of date by the time they come to fruition. Nobody with any experience of human caprice claims that degree of prescience. But the potential benefits of putting the British first during the period of investment will be lost in our inability to discriminate in their favour. If we don’t start to right the wrongs of the last twenty years, very soon there will be no point.


HS2 - what it definitely WON'T look like

That £55billion (but of course it will really be many times that amount) could go to buy 350 of the new £150million-a-pop fighters, or half that number and the platforms to carry them. Or it could be used to build hospitals, schools, or reintroduce actual policing. It could even be put towards reversing the sudden declining life expectancy... or curing cancer. But it won’t be, will it? Like every other national ‘investment’ opportunity, it will be misspent, misappropriated and basically pissed up the wall until the day they abandon it, unfinished, five times over budget and twenty years too late.

Monday 17 July 2017

If she could turn back time...

Well, they’re back. Tony Blair, Stephen Kinnock and their moribund troupe of Remoaners are popping up everywhere, determined to thoroughly piss on the chips of all who wish to release us from the deadly chokehold of the EU. Project Fear, despite several charges on many fronts did little to dampen our ardour and if anything strengthened the resolve to leave; especially when George Osborne’s dire predictions failed to come true.

When economic Armageddon didn’t materialise and the drip, drip, drip of bad business news items was regularly cancelled out by prominent figures breaking ranks and declaring bonanzas a different tack was required. So they waded in with charges of racism. Shame on you, they cried, tish and fie and away with your xenophobia. Surely, they reasoned, if we malign their desires for sovereignty as little more than open hatred for other nationalities, they will cease to clamour for independence.

It didn’t work. So they said: ah, but we can already control our borders anyway; we just choose not to. And think of the farmers, they alarumed – with no easterners to pull their carrots the crops will rot in the fields and a pestilence will stalk the land. Bollocks, we said. But, but they sound-bit back: ‘nobody voted to become poorer’. But, but, we said, we don’t care. Bummer, they said, we need to find another chink in their armour of indifference to our pro-supranational zeal.

So, with a stirring Teutonic chorus of Ode to Joy – for let us not be fooled that the EU is anything other than the Fourth Reich – on came the spear carriers and assorted supporting cast, with their handy one-liners to pour scorn on the very notion that the UK could even survive in any civilised fashion outside the work camps of greater Germany. Barnier, Verhofstadt, Juncker, Merkel and Uncle Tom Macron and all, merrily singing – for once – to the same tune.

Then came the disparaging claims on social media that, ‘funny, you don’t hear many leavers these days, do you?’ Accusations of buyers’ remorse flew thick and thicker as they challenged Brexiteers to prove they knew exactly why they had voted leave; we told them what we’d always told them and poll after poll showed a majority in the country was heartily sick of the whole debate and just wanted to get on with departure. ‘But how shall we leave?’ they asked, ‘hard or soft’. We just leave, we said.

And so, finally, slowly, some toe-dipping into the murky water of negotiation began, at which the EU team scoffed; whatever you want, we’re not letting it happen. We’ll walk, said the team; you can’t said the enemy. Well, offer us something, said we; nope, said they. Then Tony Blair began hearing the voices again; the messianic mania is strong in this one. Look, he opined, but nobody was listening.


They were too busy deploying Project Pity. The Tory Party is in disarray; they are briefing against each other; there are leadership challenges... the latest attempt to pour scorn is to go around telling any news outlet that will listen, that they feel sorry for Theresa May. Poor Tess, they say, she has no feeling but despair, no empathy save that for a faded old flag, no allies, no friends; beset by a sea of troubles. I bet she wishes she could turn the clock back; what a shame the new Doctor Who has already been cast.

Thursday 13 July 2017

In da hood

The latest employment statistics are being bandied about; lowest unemployment for 42 years, apparently. But of course, the Labour Party doesn’t like it – it’s the wrong kind of full employment, they say and then cite falling living standards, portray more state funding for everything than at any time in the past as ‘cuts’ and generally whip up the fervour of discontent. How the memories fade, eh? Anybody remember the last time a left-wing Labour government was in power?

Compared to the late seventies, the 21st century is a cornucopia of riches beyond avarice. Walk down any supermarket aisle; the biggest problem today must be which of twenty identical products at food prices cheaper than at any time in history do you want to complain about. And the internet! My god, for some of us a hoop and a stick was once the height of technology and we had just two television channels, which broadcast for about six hours a night tops.

Today’s kids have instant and largely free access to all the world’s wonders and still they are not satisfied, using it to organise demonstrations about their meagre and cruelly shrivelled potentials; children pay for nothing today, not even music, which used to cost us a week’s paper round money for one lousy single. The closest we had to streaming was ‘dial-a-disc’. But none of this is good enough and the spirit of revolt still beats in revolutionary breasts stirred by the great tenets of the age: “Equality! Diversity! More free stuff!” They cry, as they don the mantle of victimhood.

Over the last day or so I have been gently joshing with a no doubt charming, caring, intelligent young lady who – possibly because she has yet to accrue the self-critical hindsight which comes with age – cannot grasp that there are very good reasons why some people would prefer to work with people more like themselves. Many immigrants to foreign lands tend to  congregate and work together and certain parts of the muslim community are almost exclusively monocultural, but when it comes to whitey we must diversify or be crucified.

Confident in the certainties of the doctrines of multiculturalism – a system that has failed throughout Europe – she has been insisting that even small firms must have diversity at the forefront of their thinking to the point that employing somebody you feel you can get on with is practically racism and that you should instead hire the one with the shiniest CV, the blacker the better, even if he despises you and your white privilege. I am, of course, reading between the lines.


But she was having none of it and instead of quietly accepting that to prefer the company of your own is not bigotry, merely preference, she then moved on to the sexism segment of the leftist war manual: ‘ways to defeat the patriarchy’. Honestly, shop stewards were bad enough when they were merely jumped-up little Napoleons, but who would willingly employ one with a race and gender agenda to cleave to? No wonder we have the wrong kind of employment – our poor productivity figures are certainly impacted by the cost of policing work policies which seem to do nothing so much as churn out yet more unemployable victims.

Wednesday 12 July 2017

Equality? Why set your sights so low?

I got into a war of words yesterday about ‘nigger’ and its connotations. Actually, it was more of a skirmish with no blood drawn and despite the antagonist wanting to paint ‘anti-racist’ slogans on every available wall and talk about slavery and black history and all the grievances that the clumsily-monickered BAME community spend their lives dreaming up, it is, after all, just a word. It is in common currency among certain groups and used in much the same way as I am greeted most morning at work with the cheery “’Allo, you cunt” and “Morning, fuckface.”

But those who chip away at the lexicon of difference in the name of celebrating diversity merely do the Left’s Marxist work, which is to sell grievance as an unalloyed good, attack tolerance of this whole charade as indifference and tout an agenda of race hate in the name of the furtherance of humanity. When it comes to words the left far surpasses the right who generally believe that a thing should be called what it is. The strange and uneasy alliance that constitutes most of the political and social activism practices the Orwellian craft of doublespeak - deliberately euphemistic, ambiguous, or obscure language – and seek to deny their detractors the words to respond.

Thrift is denounced as ‘Tory cuts’, increased public spending, year-on-year is similarly branded ‘Tory cuts’ and any Conservative politician who seeks to get a better deal out of this public spending, an increase in performance, say, is a ‘Tory cunt’. Of course the left has always been adept at selling bad things as good – unchecked immigration is celebrated as multiculturalism; an alarming rise in knife crime is merely the small price we pay for ‘vibrant’ communities. And a threat to bankrupt the country in order to buy votes is simply a bid to create a kinder, gentler, more equal society.

Which brings us, once more, to the Holy Grail of leftist dogma; equality. How dare the boss earn more? Why shouldn’t the lumpen proletariat share in the nation’s wealth to the degree they feel they deserve? Why shouldn’t my finger painting and mindfulness diploma hold parity with a degree in mechanical engineering when it comes to work? And how dare you insist that I put my actual name on my job application, so that racists can prejudge me and deny me my right to equality in everything?

Why? Because equality is a crock. Equality is sold as the acme of social achievement when it is in fact the opposite. Chains, of command, hierarchies, and leadership; promotion up these ladders  is how we - humans and other animals - measure progress. I don't want to be your equal; I want to be your boss. If the customer is always right, does that not imply that the balance is in favour of him and against the equality rights of the salesman? We measure ourselves against others all the time and we judge our accomplishments not by how many crossed the finishing line simultaneously but by who came first.


And it's no good talking about equality of opportunity; human nature will skew that every time. All that counts is coming out on top; doing the best you can in the present circumstances, not spending all your efforts in a futile game of victimhood, bleating that somebody else, whom you don’t respect, has judged you and declared you wanting. Maybe you can't get to where you want to be in one lifetime, but don't you owe it to your children to give them the best possible head start when they pick up the baton? Forget equality; you can do better than that.

Tuesday 11 July 2017

Dark Days

There is a convoluted provenance to the saying “the fascists of the future will be the anti-fascists” and it involves today’s so-called ‘Antifa’ convincing themselves that it predates Winston Churchill, to whom it is often credited and that it was in fact referring to patriotic movements, not to those who ‘oppose fascism’. Thus they feel justified in behaving as a violent mob to take down anybody who disagrees with them. Vandalism, Molotov cocktails, darts thrown at police, cars torched, paviours torn up and used as missiles; all essential weapons in the holy fight against the people who create all the jobs, pay all the taxes and generally allow society to function.

Jeremy Corbyn likes to talk about equality. He also likes to talk about kinder, gentler politics; for the many, not the few. So it was somewhat disappointing to see the mob mentality of his kinder, gentler comrades demanding the sack – and much worse - for Tory MP Anne Marie Morris for using a phrase that still has currency and was once very common indeed. Of course, it was downright stupid to have said ‘nigger in the woodpile’ but if you start sanctioning people for ‘offensive language’, where do you stop? Most of the rhetoric of the Momentum Mafia is pretty offensive, not to say downright ignorant.

The thing we should be getting alarmed about is how ready our political and media classes are to string somebody up for a hasty choice of words; as if nobody ever blurted out an anachronism before. When it comes to tolerance we really should play the white man. Yes, that’s what I wrote; let’s be more white about it all and let people get on and do their job as best they can. But, of course, we can’t do that, can we? That genie is long out of the bottle and civilised behaviour along with it; the slightest offence perceived, even by proxy, must receive the same censure as an outright and deliberate attack on an individual.

Of course, labelling all Tories as baby-eating, white supremacist, cancerous, society-destroying malcontents is fine, so by that standard Anne Marie Morris has got off lightly with only the ruination of her immediate career prospects, but how the left get away with industrial strength hypocrisy like this is still quite something to behold. And it was hilarious, as always, to see wee Owen Jones being triggered; honestly I pity the poor sod who dares to order a black coffee in his presence in the next few days.


Kiwi? That downright derogatory!

In the meantime, I have stuff to be doing – I work like a black, you know. So I’m going to polish my nigger-brown shoes, hop in a black cab and get to slaving away, balls out, down on the old plantation befo’ Massa gets in one of his black moods and sends one of his dogs out to give me a whipping. He’s not  racist though, he just doesn’t like darkies!  

Friday 7 July 2017

Snake in the Grass

Voltaire said, ‘If god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.’ He said a lot of things that people quote all the time today; free speech, civil liberties, the tyranny of the unaccountable and so on. But this particular truism relates to the apparent needs of humans to look up to a higher power; the more intangible, the more untouchable the more, well, divine, the better. The Labour Party is rediscovering its religious fervour:

In the beginning was the word and the word was Corbyn. And lo, Jeremy looked upon his work and he saw that it was good and thus began the lord to dictate to his minions upon Earth the new manifesto creed. As his holy voice boomed down from the heavens, the scribe dutifully reproduced it verbatim; by this do we know that his gospel is true, for what proof dost thou need when the word is divine? Trust, have faith, that this is the path to goodness and everlasting light.

The creed:
That the illegal shall be made legal and that he who doth behead a man shall stand as high as he doth not, for the sin of inequality is met with the hardest of stares.
Bring me thy misfits, thy deformed and twisted souls that we may drink from their bitter bile and taste the sweet fluids of self-loathing; for all that is white is unpure and all that is brown shall be rewarded in heaven. Or at least found a good safe seat.
That thine living be bountiful thou must bring forth ever more voters; for only by increasing the population twelve-fold canst thou avert the catastrophe of overcrowding and strain on public services.
That thou shalt have no other god save me... and the NHS.

On hearing the word the evil economic Philistines demanded to know more:
But, oh Jeremy, they asked wherewith shall come all the money for thy good works? To which the almighty Corbyn replied that as you seek, so should you find.
Puzzled, they asked again, from whence would come the money foretold in the prophecies that his children should prosper and grow fat? Patience, the lord entreated, the McDonnell of heaven shall maketh a plan.

And the Lord God all-Corbyn sent forth into the wilderness the angel John who endured for forty days and forty nights the deprivation of humankind, for to better understand their desires. And upon his return to heaven he announced that he had a fully-costed plan to save the world. This plan would bring riches on earth, build hospitals and schools and banish forever the inequity of poverty. All that the flock need do is have faith in the Lord.

Jeremy's Corbyn soldiers...

And Jeremy returned to the stump to give forth the good news. And he spake to the economists and the naysayers and the brutal Tory serpents who crawled on the ground and whispered poisons. Begone, he sayeth, thou art banished and forever more humankind shall dwell in heaven upon earth. Manna, in all its forms, shall be plentiful. But one doubting Thomas, one snake in the grass demanded to know more. “From whence shall come the money?” he shouted, at which the heavenly host fixed him with a beady eye and replied, “Hast thou never heard of PrayPal?”

Wednesday 5 July 2017

Charlie Says

The curious case of Charlie Gard is evoking Aylan Kurdi levels of public sympathy and outpourings of resentment against the naysayers. But the chances of him gaining any relief from further treatment, or even being aware of any such relief are vanishingly small. Medical opinion this side of the pond seems to suggest it would only prolong its suffering. People may say I’m heartless, but in my defence it’s true, I am heartless, or at least dispassionate about things I have no emotional investment in.

On the other hand, when it comes to medical science I’m all heart and kidneys and various other organs and I plan to donate what’s left of me at the end for medical experiments, so maybe those who wish to ship Charlie over to the USA are altruistically thinking of the possible future benefits for others? All the same it looks equally harsh, to me, that you should think it’s okay to donate this child for medical experiments. Ethics and morals; what’s to do?

And here is the problem for humanity; too much humanity and too little to occupy them so they flock to volunteer support for all sort of meddlesome causes, just as soon as they have consulted the oracle to check what their reaction should be. The case of Charlie Gard is perfect; people can express moral outrage that nobody is allowing this kid to be poked and probed and possibly tortured because, well because he’s a baby; it’s his human right to be experimented on!

They can express indignation and rage against the hateful authorities without knowing a single meaningful thing about the realities. But it also gives others the opportunity to look magnanimous and further their own aims. At the end of the day it has sod-all to do with me. Except for this annoying thread which I feel I have to tug on; non-jobs.

Making things, whether on a production line for mass consumption at rock bottom prices, or bespoke pieces for people with more money than taste; that’s a proper job. Passing on skills and knowledge to future practitioners in all fields; that’s a proper job. Reporting the facts of the latest scandal, invention, peace treaty or otherwise; that’s a proper job. Weighing up the evidence, reaching a verdict and sending the bad guys to jail; even that’s a proper job. They all have one thing in common, which is they can be justified, however poor we get.

But from whence sprung diversity coordinators, image consultants, opinion pollsters and the whole plethora of people without whose work the sum total of satisfaction with the world would be likely to increase a hundred-fold? The work which the devil has seen fit to gift these idle hands appears to do nothing but provoke division and unrest. Why should the meddlers make a living – sometimes handsome ones – from peddling discontent?


And why, when we have real concerns over prosperity, health, law and order and many other things do we even listen to the opinions – for this is all they are - of people whose self-created role is to find things to be dissatisfied with? If Charlie could speak, if Charlie had an inkling of the moralising and agonising over the minutiae over his case he might advise: physician, heal thyself.

Monday 3 July 2017

Speak Your Mind

We used to say that – speak your mind – with the general understanding that inflammatory and prejudiced thoughts expressed would be recognised and denounced as the bigotry they were. The speaker of unsavoury views would effectively condemn himself by his own words. As a system it worked really well. We used to also say ‘It’s a free country’ but as surely as the human rights movement has an oxymoronic monicker your rights to free expression are slowly being restricted to your own perimeter. Say anything against the orthodoxy and you are a Nazi.

At work, we Nazis had to seek each other out, slowly, cautiously feeling the way with the odd comment about current affairs; trial statements to see how they would be received. It took months, years even, until we could freely pose in brown shirts, doodle swastikas on the noticeboards, click our heels, grow Hitler moustaches and make homage to the Führer. It’s almost as if fascism is frowned upon, these days. But one day somebody went too far; in outrage at another atrocity committed by the religion of pieces, somebody said... the ‘W’ word. Can you imagine?

For any irony-deficient readers, that last paragraph just isn’t true. We use the ‘W’ word all the time; it makes us laugh and laugh because, you see, nobody is actually offended. Kids need to be taught that there is no need to be offended, that this is, indeed, within your power. It’s a choice. You can also choose not to instantly block people on Twitter, because otherwise you will never hear dissenting points of view, thus leaving you unprepared for the world outside your own tiny world of revulsion and self-loathing.

Instead, you should actively expose yourself to things you find painful to hear. You can challenge those opinions, those crusades, by all means, but expect to get a little resistance.
Me? I’ve been hearing shit from all sides all my life. And like you, I nod along to the stuff that sounds true and scoff at the stuff that is an obvious fabrication. On balance the measured response of people who have quietly got on with their lives rings far more truly than does the frenzied sloganizing of the marching classes.

Because, you see, the problems with mobs, with ‘movements’ is how awfully easy it is to demonstrate group-think. It’s ironic that it is usually Joseph Goebbels who is credited with the line ‘Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth’. I’ve been hearing a lot of lies of late. For instance, the crowd lapped it up on Saturday when Jeremy Corbyn told them that poor kids were not getting to university, against all the evidence that they are, in fact, attending in record numbers.

Let me tell you what you think...

Of course, if you only listen to what you want to hear, attempt to silence anybody who doesn’t share that view, empty-chair speakers of whom you disapprove, turn up en-masse to disrupt demonstrations contrary to your superior position and general lobby for the charge of hate crime to be levelled at whomsoever upsets your delicate sensibilities, it may not actually be they who are the Nazis.

Sunday 2 July 2017

Submission

News came in the other day that Frankfurt is now a German minority city. In trying to excuse this, much was made of the detail that no other ethnic/geographic minority is represented in greater numbers than native white Germans, but the fact remains that the majority of Frankfurters  are not indigenous. And this statistic only involves the documented aliens; it is well-known that certain immigrant populations have a habit of harbouring many illegals.

It’s a far cry from the Aryan dream, but of course that’s a source of delight to the so-called liberal elites who are so intent in atoning for the long ago sins of their grandfathers. But it is happening everywhere, not just in Germany. Coudenhove-Kalergi, they cry, the systematic eradication of the peoples of Europe, but is it all much simpler than that? For, seriously, how could you impose the will of a few warped theorists on the populations of the world's great democracies? Surely, the average voter would simply not stand for it.

The boiling frog analogy is often used to explain why what, in some eyes, is such an obvious plot; keep turning up the temperature and they won’t notice until it is too late. But we did notice; we noticed and objected decades ago. Unfortunately, a combination of white guilt, the dominance of leftism in political thinking and the drip-drip-drip of pro-mass-immigration and open borders ideology throughout the EU has left us with nations divided.

But that is the plan, they insist. Is it? Is it really? Or is it just the perpetual frailty of political leaders, forever seeking to follow the zeitgeist and fearing what backing the old order will do to their careers? Is it a deliberate infiltration into our systems of power, justice, education and social order by fifth columnists, or is it merely the result of courting the youth vote?  Wilson was our first Prime Minister to openly seek the approval of the young, for whom the rainbow nation of peaceful integration is a misguided aspiration, but it probably came to its apotheosis during the Blair years.

Recognising where we are now, however, is far more important than seeking to point to some shadowy conspiracy. Our tolerance is being used against us and in its muddled, misguided way, the establishment appears to like it that way. The muslim community, in particular, seems to know how to work the system: closed communities, crying victim, demanding special treatment – and with every concession they see the opportunity for more. This appears to be happening in all the major cities of Europe - London, Brussels, Amsterdam are all non-majority native population cities now.

And what do we do? From the top they keep beating the ‘all immigration is good immigration’ drum, a tactic rapidly losing traction but doggedly adhered to. The form of words keeps changing but the message is the same; accept it, submit. Submission is the basic premise of islam. People like Tommy Robinson and Anne Marie Waters are derided as extremists, although they are just articulating what many of us have seen with our own eyes but do not have the platform, or the balls, to say it. They are pointing out what is wrong; not blowing people up. Who are the real enemies of the people here?


Where will it end? I think our society is too fractured to cope. In an effort to be emollient, to not cause offence, to be British about it, we are lying down and letting it happen. We all eat halal now because we have no way of knowing otherwise. We are all beaten into submitting to islamic demands that we respect their culture; police won’t police without the permission of the imams; white children are pictured imitating islamic prayer; female genital mutilation is, effectively, tolerated; sharia courts are allowed to proliferate. Unless a real resistance appears – because mainstream government is clearly toothless here – they have already won. Soon indigenous minorities will be the norm in the capitals and in a generation or so it will be whole countries. There doesn’t need to be a plan; we are accepting it; we are submitting.