To the death?

Voltaire didn't actually say that he would defend to the death your right to say something with which he disagreed, but he is usually quoted as saying so and it is widely agreed that's what he meant. It's often the last thing somebody tweets before then trying to rouse a nice, caring hate mob to get a user's account closed down.

Whether or not such action is successful seems to depend very much on from where the disagreeable words originate and at whom they are aimed. It's exactly as if some people's hate is more acceptable than other people's hate. So, it is okay, apparently, for people to loudly demand for two decades the death of an individual, yet it is wrong to observe that almost every suicide bomber hails from one closed community holding a single irrational and unprovable belief.

It appears to be hateful and loathsome and vile to drunkenly utter on social media a racist taunt which you then withdraw, but it is fine to loudly and widely revel in the death of an octogenarian and hurl abuse of the most extreme kind at any who defend her legacy. And now it turns out that being from Liverpool places you in a special class affording you protection from nasty words, presumably because you can't handle them when they're coming your way.

Thus it was that Twitter stalwart @Old_Holborn was reported to Essex Police yesterday for repeatedly tweeting and blogging harsh words about Scousers, yet no such action seems to have been taken against any of the many that took it upon themselves to call for a mob to descend on his home and take the abuse from the merely verbal to the physical level. Predictably, Twitter has 'gone off on one' today. (Search the hashtag #SaveOldHolborn if you really need to know.)

Is it naivety, gullibility or plain old immaturity? What ailment afflicts those who believe free speech is a one-way street? And if it is,what law says so? When I was growing up the mantra "sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me" was the accepted defence against jeering and name-calling. We were told that millions of men had died in wars to defend, literally to the death, our right to a free society; and that freedom has always meant the right to express oneself, however misguided, however distasteful.

We even allow frequent Islamic protesters to loudly and fanatically call for the actual death of all non-Muslims, yet quickly deploy police to turn away those holding counter protests, denouncing those views as hate crimes.

The originators of cries for speech suppression seem to me to most often be those who hold to socialist inspired views, those who have self-identified as victims and those who most vociferously demand the Police uphold their own imagined 'rights' not to ever hear, see or suffer offence. Defend freedom of speech to the death, Lefties? Or defend it only so long as it suits the cause?

Enough commentators over the centuries have made the point for it to be taken as valid, that freedom includes the right to make a twat of yourself in public, in print, on placards; to support or oppose a person a cause or a principle. Laws exist to prevent you from spreading harmful lies in the form of libel and slander. But we already have laws that suppress your right to express your fear or dislike of people who don't look like you. Arresting somebody for merely saying 'out loud' what a significant number of people are thinking is one step on the way to making opinions a legal matter.

And when we get to that point (this year, next year?) who will decide what opinions are acceptable? In fact, will we allow individual opinion - let's call it dissent - at all? I believe such things have been tried before and Winston Smith would easily recognise the sort of world that creates. What thought crimes have you committed today?

For a more dramatic, close up view of events I urge you to read this blog also, by another Twitter worthy, @fatcouncillor to see how far some people will go to deny freedom of speech.

Pick up thy bed and walk!

On Monday I accidentally deleted – like the twat I clearly am – approximately sixty thousand words of a novel I have been ‘working on’ for nearly two years. Bugger. I could blame somebody else of course, Bill Gates maybe, but it’s entirely my own fault and it was entirely avoidable; I was just stupid. I've been told it might be recoverable and I've had a go - no joy - but actually it’s not an issue.

Truth is I've been dragging my heels a bit because I had distractions and anyway, it got too involved and too ‘plotty’ to be able to leave for long periods and then get back into. If it was hard work for me, how much harder for a reader? All just excuses, really. So despite offers of help to recover the files, I've decided to start over. The plot is in my head, I know where it's going and I know the characters, so it’s just a matter of ditching a struggling project and adopting a new, streamlined routine with a view to meeting a deadline and getting to market.

See, for my one-man wording band the means of production are truly under the control of the worker and I can make the right decisions and live with the consequences of any shortfalls. Same with my household budget. In straitened circumstances I've cut my cloth to suit and managed to reduce my outgoings by the simple expediency of doing without. It’s hardly rocket surgery; you just have to pick up the pieces and get on with it.

What a shame that back in the dark days of the late seventies the entire country didn't have an inspirational leader with exactly those same values of thrift and balance and a sense of proportion.  Oh, wait... The irony of the poor, supposedly oppressed people of Goldthorpe dressing up and cavorting and recording their Thatcher hate day with their smart phones and posting the photographs online wouldn’t have passed the great lady by.

We have NOTHING! Look, we're burning it!

Whole countries have survived cataclysmic natural disasters killing thousands, have come through ethnic cleansing and have undergone economic revolutions in under a decade, yet a few thousand people in a mere dingy shithole like Goldthorpe can’t get off their collective fat arse and organise themselves into something better in an entire generation.

Instead they mourn a world most of them never knew. As David Tristram said on Twitter, you are allowed to have opinions about things that happened before you were born, but they won’t be your opinions. For thirty years all they've done up there is gripe and moan and wait for somebody else to tell them what to do; wait for somebody else to help them out. Their helplessness deserves none of your pity; it doesn't even deserve your scorn.

Margaret didn't invent selfishness. She didn't invent living within your means. She didn't invent the dole and she didn't invent market forces. Most of all she didn't invent class-driven strife and management and union corruption. Anybody believing she did could do worse than watch the 1959 film I’m All Right Jack. 

'Divisive'? Of course she was divisive. I'm divisive, you're divisive, everybody who isn't a doormat is divisive... and we don't even agree about that. Oh and why are ex-mining communities somehow more important than ex-fishing communities, or ex-shipbuilding communities, or anybody else? You have to wonder. I fully expect to generate a bit of hate myself for this - the downtrodden are remarkably quick with their fists and their brickbats - but the fact remains they are more victims of their own apathy and bigotry than anything else.

A society in which we all club together to help out others less fortunate is a lovely thing to belong to. So it's good that we already do. But ultimately the means of your salvation must lie in your own hands. How many more generations will pass before they grow up and realise the world doesn't owe a living to those who can help themselves? 

If anything it’s the other way round, Lazarus.


(PS: Goldthorpe Colliery wasn't even closed until 1994.)

A moment of silent reflection

Some days there really is nothing useful to say and no way to say it gracefully.

"May you live in interesting times", goes the supposed Chinese curse. Having grown up through the sixties and seventies and seen at first hand a country pulling itself apart, then pulling itself up by its bootstraps in the eighties and nineties, then spending itself into destruction at the turn of the century and now, pulling itself apart once again, I feel we must have been so cursed.

Looking beyond our borders, from the end of the cold war, in which we trembled at the dread fear of assured mutual destruction (which turned out to have been illusory propaganda ) we ushered in the supposed end of murderous Communism, brought down the Berlin Wall and cheered the onset of world peace in our times.

The minor and major atrocities, inconveniences and unhinged demands of assorted groups of dangerous nutters and fanatics: Baader Meinhof, Black Panthers, Branch Davidians, Khmer Rouge, ETA, Shining Path and closer to home the IRA and UDA rumbled on then seemed to quietly dissipate as the interesting times almost, almost came to an end.

And then out of the blue, the anachronistically named 9/11, followed by 7/7 (which is much harder to get the wrong way round) and a resurgence of Middle Eastern and Asian sub-continental violence defining the rise of another ill-formulated threat driven by pure hatred and deeply-ingrained ignorance. North Korea, too, now flexes its muscles and postures to The West. And alongside all of that the rise, once again, of localised malevolence within communities - schoolyard shootings and other killing sprees and rampages of whatever the hell to fuck are you doing and why?

Then yesterday, the cold near-to-home shock of the Boston Marathon bombing.

While Boston mourns its dead, one of our own is laid to rest this morning. Whatever ill you think of her, whatever cruelties you wished on her in life, you only have to look a short distance afield to see what real  terror is and what true evil lurks in the human heart. Whichever version of her life you choose to believe, you can't point to killing fields, suicide sects and mass graves enacted in her name. Be careful who you cheer on today, be mindful of what you do, for the second Chinese curse is said to be "May you come to the attention of those in authority".

Ringside seats for the end of civilisation?

And the third Chinese curse? "May you find what you are looking for." The world is a dangerous enough place as it is. Today, as Big Ben falls silent, do likewise and be careful what you wish for. Me? I'm saying nothing.

Daydream Belieber

When Justin Bieber's career is just a nostalgic tear in a post-adolescent eye nobody will even remember the slightly crass Anne Frank affair, that caused a few people to turn it into an 'international' outrage. Do people not have anything better to worry about? Apparently not; if Europeans really were starving none of this would have even seen the light of day. For what it's worth, I didn't see anything offensive in what he wrote. It was only the slightly self-centred postscript that caused the ripple and that ripple has now disappeared. Que Sera, Sera...

What gets written on social media is ephemeral. Here one second, gone the next. Unless of course somebody copies it and passes it on. Or even better, takes offence and then copies it and passes it on. Then there is the chance of reaping the whirlwind. A carelessly chosen word, a poorly phrased reply... forget to type 'lol' or 'lmao' or append an appropriate smiley and you could find yourself at the centre of the storm.

I quite like it there, at the centre; all nice and calm while choppy waters and shrieking skies rage all around. And I quite often find myself there, sometimes by design. There is nothing quite like the incoherent rage that grips the losing side in an unequal battle of wills. And anybody that gets quickly offended enters the battle already outnumbered. Sun Tzu counselled that you should pick your battles wisely and not join a fight you cannot win.

Against rage, nothing is a more effective weapon than calm,wry, good-humoured indulgence. And against knee-jerk Socialist 'solutions' to complex problems, nothing is more effective than reason. "Kill the bankers!" they scream, "Eat the rich!" they opine and "We demand a living wage", blind to the likely consequences of their mob madness. And I have to confess I quite enjoy seeing how easy it is to provoke their unchecked fury

Communities and economies have both momentum and inertia and few politicians have the will or the means to alter anything at a stroke. Any outright solution will cause somebody, somewhere to lose out - that's the true nature of redistributive policies. No politician in his right mind will do anything to drive away the geese that lay the gold, so all that's left - apart from bloody civil war - is to balance the budget with what we've got.

Ordinary people aren't any sort of political. They just get on with what they've got it and if they ever give voice it is to the side which seems to speak their language. Why wouldn't they? That's Labour's target vote, but while they may not be political, they are not entirely unpersuaded by calm logic. Which is why, in poll after poll, they express their opinion that while they may not like the treatment, it is preferable to Labour's non-credible plans to increase the dosage of the disease.

Back in your box, sunshine

So, carry on amusing me, Twitter haters, master-baiters. It gives me immense pleasure in seeing one of you descend into a howling spiral of self-destructive, fist-shaking anger after taking offence on behalf of others who are calmly watching and hoping it's not them you are trying to defend. And then - and you'll love this - it's even funnier when you block me and then subtweet about your Pyrrhic victory, not realising I can still see you.

If you're going to end up blocking me anyway, why not do yourselves a favour - that bile must sit sharp on the stomach - and go for the early exit. Block and blow, there you go. Leave it kev, it ain't worf it.

There. An entire blog without mentioning Margaret Thatcher.

Bugger

She sold my brain!

How lucky I was to be born before Margaret Thatcher privatised all the intelligence. This week I was unfortunate to have watched Question Time, the Andrew Marr Show, Sunday Politics and The Big Questions, all of them on the BBC. I've also listened to the radio and watched television and there has only been one news item of significance. (I shudder to think what is going on behind the smokescreen.) 

On audience participation shows every quiet tribute to Mrs Thatcher was met with animal howls of unintelligent, unthinking, jingoistic rage. “Thatcher killed my father!” yelled one, “Thatcher ripped the heart out of my community!” chorused many and then the inevitable simple untruths; she did this, she did that, as if she was an omnipotent and omnipresent deity, individually conferring the curse as people slept in their beds.

Spoken with such certainty and repeated so often, often by mere children, such claims take on the mantle of truth, where no such truth exists. While the pro-Thatcher voices have been steady and measured, often with a balancing statement that the speaker didn’t necessarily agree with everything she did, the voices on the hating left all speak with one illogical, bitter tongue. 

Every Anti-Thatcher voice sounds like the chants of a brainwashing cult. It’s as if the Moonies invaded and took away their ability to think, to reason and more importantly their natural human ability to adapt and survive. For, while Mrs T may have prescribed the bitter medicine, the alternatives could have been so very much worse. What news of the turnip harvest, comrade? And a whole generation later (two in some communities) what's the point of blaming your life chances on events you can never change?

They say there are lies, damned lies and statistics. To that we should add Thatcher fantasies. For, much of the Left’s hatred of Margaret is based on falsehoods and those with most to gain from the useful idiots repeating the agitprop know this well. The best moment of my television viewing was watching the odious Neil Kinnock squirming in the Martin Durkin documentary when confronted with the simple truth that she left the country as a whole very much better off than when she found it. 

Kinnock may look stupid and sound stupid, but he’s made a lot of money by knowing exactly which master to serve. When he had the opportunity to redeem himself by admitting that undeniable fact he found he just couldn't bring himself to do it. In the face of logic and simple truth he had the physiognomy of a pug licking piss off a nettle. It was hilarious. 

Pre and post Thatcher era brain scans

And then the big battle line was drawn between two mediocre songs, neither of which meant what their supporters wanted them to mean. It’s like the country has collectively lost its ability to make up its own mind. I blame Thatcher; she sold off all the brains. Probably.