Diversity built Britain?

Hard on the heels of yet another barbaric muslim atrocity and the insistence by the close muslim community that these devout followers of islam are not real muslims, the Chancellor announces with some degree of pride a new 50p coin bearing the words ‘Diversity Built Britain’. Not content with that simple lie, he then states in a tweet: “I have seen first-hand the contribution made by ethnic minority communities to Britain’s history.” That would be all the fantastic ethnic historical figures of the last 40 years, then?

This is what propaganda looks like and it is bolstered by the continued presence in the broadcast schedules of the likes of Ash Sarkar and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and the grotesque Kehinde Andrews and Shola Mugabe Umbongo from SOAS, banging the race drum for all they are worth. Yes, they may be making black British history now, but none of it is helpful; it is just a non-stop demand for special treatment and unearned reparations. There can be no statues to celebrate their divisive actions.

It seems there is no position so extreme that the BBC will not give it oxygen, unless that position represents a white viewpoint. Whatever the topic, time should not be devoted to giving the majority view. Where is the balance? Where is the platform given to people who espouse personal responsibility and don’t forever demand that the government bows down before them? Important debates are not being had; important voices are not being heard.

I haven’t watched BBC Question Time in an age and not just because it airs a mere five hours before I get up to go to work. I have also tuned out of the weekend politics and discussion shows because they demand I spend far too much of my time listening to people with whom I profoundly disagree. Now, you may say, one ought to give ear-time to those with whom you disagree, the better to understand their argument and perhaps to empathise with their world view.

Fine, but why is the same tolerant patient demeanour not expected of them? It is okay for them to call me a Nazi, to insist that I live a life of hate, that I am a racist who despises all people of a different skin colour. But where is the condemnation of them when they blast me for the colour of MY skin? Hypocrisy is too weak a word; we need a new one to describe this prolonged attack on ordinary, decent, working people. This has been going on for decades now and every time somebody gets close to having a platform to air a contrary but no less valid viewpoint, they are screamed down.

Katie Hopkins, Darren Grimes, Roger Scruton, Douglas Murray and plenty of others have been de-platformed. Hell, even Germaine Greer was deemed insufficiently acquiescent to woke mobsters. What Alibhai-Brown said to Laurence Fox on Jeremy Vine’s show the other day would have had a nominal right-winger exposed to the might of the Crown Prosecution Service. What Darren Grimes said in exasperation some years ago, in the face of the extreme remain faction trying to overturn a democratic vote, has been held up by Femi Oluwole – yes a-fucking-nother one – as tantamount to inciting violence.

As I said, hypocrisy doesn’t begin to explain how some people get away with what would be a crime if aimed at them. The organised left, then, actually get to engage in violence and vandalism, with their never-ending assault on public decency. They get to exercise their right to protest with police protection while the police are deployed to whip up and then suppress those who exercise the same rights to different ends.

There is something sick about a society in which the majority view is regularly held to be the wrong view and those espousing it are regularly demeaned as bigots and fascists. And now, of course, Brexit is back on the menu. This means that the overworked insult ‘gammon’ is enjoying a whole new resurgence. That’s right, a term based on skin colour and used blanket-style to cast a majority sector of society as pantomime villains in jackboots. This is what diversity has built; and it has built little else.

Metaphors are Easy - the Truth is Hard

I’m planning on committing a hate crime. D’oh, what am I saying? I am thinking, therefore I am automatically committing a hate crime. It is only a matter of time before the pre-crime units throughout the land will be equipped with the necessary pre-cogs and intuits to read my mind. D’oh again, my mind is already being read as I type; as you read. You know what I’m going to think even before I think it myself. Bastards! (But you knew that, didn’t you?)

The trouble with facts is that that there are too damned many of them. Bloody facts, coming over here, raping our beliefs, taking advantage of our tolerance. Millions of facts are flooding into Europe; you can’t move for them. Sometimes I wonder if there is any space left for the truth, as the truth gets pushed out of our public lives and facts appear on our screens as if if fact lives are the only lives which matter.

Respected historian, David Starkey, paid a price for dabbling with the politics of facts and Darren Grimes in his turn is being made to suffer. There is no justice for truth these days, but threaten a fact and the Old Bill will turn up in a dawn raid to take your liberty in a heartbeat. The truth of the matter doesn’t, er, matter, when facts turn up en masse, demanding attention in far greater proportion to their numbers.

A very recent study even demonstrated that facts are over-represented in all visual broadcast media. What room is there, these days, for the truth, for all our truths… for our truths’ truths? I fear for the future of the young truths of today; they even want to be fact, as if somehow a raw fact has the same value as the honest truth. Truth is the bedrock of a civil society, whereas facts have a habit of multiplying without reason and imagining they have the same value without putting in the hard miles.

Yesterday, in response to a tweet about yet more rapefugee asylum seekers being represented by what are referred to by government voices as ‘lefty lawyers’ the Dorset Eye (me neither) challenged me to produce evidence to back up my re-assertion that they are, indeed, lefty lawyers. That is the truth of the matter; they are defending left wing ideals in regard to these invaders. But lawyers don’t deal in the truth, do they? They deal in facts. And facts, like statistics, if tortured long enough, will tell you whatever to wish to hear.

Where this leads...

The rule of law is devalued when it deals in facts and ignores the truth. The fact of the matter may be a rash word, issued under duress. Gather enough of these inconvenient facts and the truth of a good life lived in tolerant harmony with others is buried and forgotten. Only the fabricated facts of the ‘hate’ remains. This is important because the truth is being denied on a daily basis. I’m not just defending David Starkey here; I’m speaking out for all of us.

Sinister or Sense?

David Attenborough says we should curb some of the excesses of capitalism. I think he’s right. He says that those that have a great deal, should, perhaps, have a little less. I think he’s right. His words: "We are going to have to live more economically than we do. And we can do that and, I believe we will do it more happily, not less happily. And that the excesses the capitalist system has brought us, have got to be curbed somehow." I think he’s right.

The chatterers are railing against the UN agenda to ‘build back better’. I think that is right, too. As an ambition would you prefer to build back worse? They also point to the ‘massive conspiracy’ that is Agenda 21, a non-binding action plan from way back in 1992 that is so far, two whole decades past its target date to achieve global sustainable development. As a sinister plot to rule the world it is pretty poor, given that it will also miss its current optimistic deadline of 2030. So much for all-powerful elites, eh?

How can it not be right to wish for a more equitable world, one where developed companies do not relentlessly pillage the third world; one where we all give a little for the common good? And for all the gnashing of teeth The Great Reset is no Machiavellian plot to subjugate, rather is an injunction to curb some of our excesses. If you are on the breadline it is not aimed at you. If you are self-sufficient it is not aimed at you.

But if you are a rapacious super-consumer who disproportionately eats up resources with an arrogant sense of entitlement it may be aimed at you. If anything, then, the great reset disproportionately affects the very people its opponents rail against on a daily basis. You and I are impotent against the grotesquely wealthy, the egregiously powerful, so isn’t it a good thing that world leaders (who are not these wealthy and powerful people in the main) are taking a stand?

It would only ever be conjecture to imagine a world where nobody has an excess until everybody has a sufficiency; that world will never exist. Our species survived and evolved because of greed, lust, desire to succeed; strip that out of our DNA and we cease to be human; we are back in the forests, grubbing about just to survive. It’s just a shame that the instinct which ensured our success also inculcates envy.

Humans thrive on competition, both directly and vicariously. And the very best vicarious success is that which you achieve via your offspring. People might agree to an equality pact, but they will break it in a heartbeat if it gives their kids a head start. Who wants their kids to be average? (There are several types of average but none of them are desirable. Nobody want to be the median and only the unthinking dullard wants to be the mode. The alternative is just mean. 😉)

This man is not your enemy

So what it boils own to appears to be this: conspiracy of my guys to achieve what I believe in = good; conspiracy of others to an end with which I disagree = bad. Also my conspiracy is not a conspiracy, but their aims, by whatever means, most definitely is a conspiracy. I think that’s the reality; I think that’s the sane view. Occam’s Razor tells you that new-world-order cabals couldn’t organise a piss up in a pub; this has been confirmed time and again. David Attenborough wants a better world? What’s so sinister about that?

Mental State

Pull yourself together, pull your socks up, man up and get on with it… While not decrying all self-diagnoses of mental illness, the majority of people now openly talking about their inner wellbeing would probably benefit greatly from ‘a good talking to’. The nebulous endeavour of exploring the mental landscape struck gold when Sigmund Freud made psychology into an opportunity to make easy money by exploiting the natural human propensity towards dissatisfaction.

No tools, no heavy plant or machinery and no troublesome employees are necessary, and in many cases, it seems, little in the way of any formal objective training is insisted upon. Incline your head thoughtfully to one side, murmur the occasional non judgmental ‘I see’ and sit back as your cash cows pour out their identikit psychobabble. Repeat back to them their own assessment of their condition, reinforce the need to repeat the process at the same time next week and trouser the moolah.

Of course, this is a caricature of a part of the mindscape mining profession, but it is the most visible, most accessible and arguably the most harmful sector of the mentally-industrial complex. The Talking Cure, it strikes me, gives licence to the self-indulgent therapy culture to let the weak talk themselves ever weaker. Everybody experiences unhappiness, loneliness, occasional helplessness, grief and anguish; you wouldn’t be normal if you didn’t. But a kick up the arse would often be better medicine than prolonging the state.

Worse is the way that perfectly normal, universal, small sufferings are labelled, dressed up and sold back to the patient as some form of licence to continue demanding attention. As a result, those who can afford it (and many who can’t) spend years, decades even, engaged in a process that first validates and then exacerbates the condition for which they sought counsel in the first place.

The Covid Crisis has given people who already needed little excuse the licence to talk even more openly about their own personal mental health, a subject which was once, like religion and politics, verboten at the civilised dinner table. But if talk about it we must let’s get real. The way things are going with scarcely a day going by without some cry for ever more funding to treat the mental state of the nation, we may soon the rent-seekers in the ‘poor me’ trade competing with the burgeoning and ever-fragmenting grievance culture.

Can we really survive as a nation if the only people making money are those doing so by perpetuating the harm they undoubtedly cause. Give a man a fish and he’ll fry up some chips. Tell a man he can’t fish because his daddy didn’t love him and he’s already had his chips. It’s like taking candy from a baby – a great, big baby – and the country churns out more with each generation.

As I said, I don’t wish to decry those who genuinely need help. But to divert ever more resources to salve the self-inflicted mental wounds of those who merely seek attention looks to me like a one-way street to pitiful dependence on others; the very opposite of what you should wish for your children. So, if you have a friend who is weepy, filled with despair, anxious that the virus stalks them like a wraith… give them a slap, from me.

Thoughts of an Angry Gammon

The intended insult ‘gammon’ is usually accompanied by the invocation of an angry person, screwed up by hatred and unable to process a world in which black people aren’t merely servants. This is funny. It is funny because it so grotesque a caricature that even Spitting Image would reject it as facile and it is funnier still because so many angry young people actually believe it.

There they are, huffing and puffing, going red in the face and looking quite gammony as they chant their slogans and jab their pointy fingers and raise their black power salutes, while kneeling before their new masters. Hey, young people will believe anything, right? But belief in false prophets is, sadly, not confined to callow youth; plenty of older folk have gone corona crazy as they try to make sense of their current, temporary state of being.

The coalescence of all their suspicions, the apotheosis of all their tinfoil hattery is the out-in-the-open conspiracy of the World Economic Forum and ‘The Great Reset’. Oh. Come on! Have you seen their handy little infographic (below)? Fuck me, that’s going to take some joining up! But just apply that well know razor to the actions of our current government. The same people who think it is being controlled by extra-governmental forces are also critical of its farcical incompetence. I’d put it to you that if some all-powerful organ was really pulling the strings, the marionettes would at least be dancing in time.

Ah, but that’s exactly what they want you to think, say the Resetters (everything has to have a label these days). They want you to believe it’s clumsy rather than coordinated. And then, as if this somehow validates their supranational control theory, they point to Sweden which did the opposite of what most European countries have done. This is as sophisticated a level of doublethink as employed by the practitioners of Critical Race Theory which simultaneously posits that both racists and anti-racists are racists… as long as they are white.

I sit back and laugh at all of this because, while organisations like the WEF might have high and mighty ambitions and BLM may think that by stoking the race wars they will somehow create tolerance and light, ultimately it is down to fallible humans to bring about change. And this they will do as they always do not by combining forces in some great global crusade, but by individually exploiting opportunities that come their way.

And anyway, so what if the powerful want to create a better world? What’s not to like? If their methods are excessive you will resist. If their ideals are not yours you will reject them. And please (oh, please!) stop referring to 1930s Germany every time you want to validate your fears. What am I doing to make the world a better place? Well, for one, I’m not spending my time jumping aboard the latest hoaky bandwagon and panicking.

When you all come back to your senses don’t worry, all your usual gripes and grievances will still be there to wallow in. If you hated Boris Johnson before you will still hate him later. If you think that Extinction Rebellion are a bunch of unemployable unwashed louts then the soap dodgers will still annoy you. The only thing that will be reset will be your level of angry and that will dissipate once you put down your placards.

This all looks simple enough...

But I do see, now, the simple utility of bread and circuses. Lockdown has given too many people with too easily stimulated imaginations plenty of incentive to make mischief. And far too many, with too easily suggestible sensibilities have followed them. Following the breadcrumb trail to grandma’s candy cottage has made some of you quite giddy with the excitement of a new, imaginary enemy to rail against. Help is at hand, however; I hear the coming vaccine will contain a powerful sedative which will render you compliant and quite, quite content.