The Communists Next Door

Listening to Any Questions on Radio 4 on the drive home from work last night it was fascinating to hear the inner workings of an alien species. Broadcast from Glasgow, it didn’t take very long to realise that the Scots aren’t like the rest of us. Or if they are they may have succumbed to a wasting disease that we should all worry about. The SNP appear to be pink to the core, espousing many of the contradictions of communism itself; collective misery and hardship and wishing death on the hated Tories, while, simultaneously expressing a deep seated desire to save the world, when they can’t even save themselves.

Part of the problem with pretending that you are so nice, while spitting hatred at those who pay for you to maintain your delusion, is that sooner or later you have to come face to face with reality. The reality that not everybody is equal, or that some people are not worth saving. That those you despise genuinely don’t care what you think of them. And that lofty ambitions of egalitarianism will remain unreachable without the enlistment of capitalism’s ability to do the things that communism can only dream of. And why get so agitated and angry when you find that not everybody shares your impossible quest?

And then you come up against people like me. I don’t care. I really don’t. I don’t care about refugees, asylum seekers, sick children, the unemployed, minority rights... In short, I don’t care about you and your bizarre obsession with taking and living the hypocritical oath. Oh, all this weird shit interests me, but in a fascinated ‘Ripley’s Believe it or Not’ way. It interests me that you can be all for equal treatment for all but also want to kill Tories. It interests me that you will believe without question and without proof a narrative that says the Westminster Government has a deliberate policy of exterminating the disabled and unemployed, yet refuse to condemn a murderous ideology which actually tortures and kills people live on screen.

Not caring doesn’t make me a typical Tory because there isn’t a Tory in the land who would espouse the complete disdain and disregard I hold for the human species and all its self-inflicted suffering. For instance, I don’t believe in every woman’s right to procreate; some people should never be allowed to replicate. I broadly support preventative abortion and if necessary post-natal culling. Up to 40 years post-natal ideally. You may call me a monster but you should be aware that I genuinely do not care what you think of me. If you are the kind of person who is offended by strangers not agreeing with you then why are you even still reading this?

Manufactured rage, dog-whistle reaction to barely grasped events, the confusion about which murderous bunch of foreigners you are supposed to support today, your fanatical devotion to the NHS even as it eats through money that might better get your children properly educated to not rely on others for their health and well-being... and maintaining the constant state of readiness to react angrily to every story of cleverer people passing on their advantage to their children must take its toll. I expect the cognitive dissonance roars like tinnitus and disturbs your very balance.

No? Me neither... Jockanese translator required

But, you see, the world needs people like me. It needs people like me to go out to work and pay my taxes and do my level best not to spend those taxes ten-fold. It needs people like me to hold up as hate figures, even though we do nothing to make the plight of your oh-so-many special cases any worse. And it needs people like me to be good little Aunt Sallies for you to rail against and wave your feeble little fists at. But at least I recognise that nobody cares what I think and nobody is going to spend any wasted time trying to rearrange the world to suit me... which is almost the exact opposite of the whining entitlement monkeys of socialism.

Any Questions?

Just because an idea is, or can be made, popular, it doesn’t make it either achievable or true. Among ideas that sound wonderful are: give everybody a meaningful job or a meaningful life, for that matter. Pay everybody enough not to want for any essential need. Stop people being cruel to other people. Educate all children so that a real university place is an option. Let women control fifty percent of everything (instead, presumably, of the mere 90% they already control). End slavery, homelessness, starvation and climate change. Oh and prevent lovely fluffy kittens from growing up to be grumpy cats.

On Any Questions last week I heard repeated the idiot mantra that the refugee crisis was as a result of the first world’s inability to counteract climate change. As if droughts and floods and famine were all our fault. Really? Even if you take the bible largely as the work of fiction it is, there are still historical records of droughts and famine, wars and pestilence in the old world as well as the Old Testament. You’re surely not going to blame all that on global warming? The audience responded warmly to every knee-jerk left wing simpleton response while resolutely staying silent whenever a pragmatic view was offered.

The lefty commentators on the panel were quick to brand every current government policy as being entirely ideological. Everything the hated Tories are doing – including all the things Labour promised to do – is a dogmatic attack on the poor. Austerity is not a case of living within our means, rather it is some calculated right-wing plot to starve everybody to death. Presumably the obesity epidemic is an allergic reaction to hunger? In the idiot world we have created I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody actually posited that as a rational explanation for the explosion of plus-sized infants.

To judge by the audience’s juvenile lapping up of nice-but-dim rhetoric the propaganda has done its job and spurred on by the crowd-mind they cheered ever more fanciful fictions of the harm caused by ‘the far right’ by which I imagine they mean David Cameron. Is it so inconceivable that Conservatives want a better world, too? And that their proposal to get everybody to build it together is as worthy, if not more worthy than compelling one half of the population to forever pay for the other half? But no, if it’s ideology you want you need look no further than the left who have clung fiercely to their little red books and the foolish refusal to recognise difference.

You want equality? Come and get it...

Equality, they cry, unaware that every heavy-handed piece of equalities legislation creates not wings for the underdogs but millstones for achievers. Just as socialist redistribution of wealth tends to make everybody poorer, shoehorning everybody into a one-size-fits-all jelly mould increases the sum total of mediocrity. You want women to be equal? Then stop whining about there being seven men and only two women in the new passport design; although they have a point – they should at least have included Margaret Thatcher. Oh, but that’s the wrong kind of woman, isn’t it? I suppose they mean people like ‘Dr’ Jack Monroe... although apparently she’s not a woman any more. Confusing isn’t it?