His Wallet Was Weighing Him Down

Like I keep saying, the thing about The Dave is not that he's consistently appalling, it's that he always manages to be appalling in new and innovative ways. The guy can't even exercise honestly. Seriously, what next? Weight lifting with balloons on each end of the barbell?

UPDATE:

@Rob: Heh.

PDS? Oh Yes!

And thus was refuted the argument that Palin Derangement Syndrome was another 'right wing myth'.

More Open Borders Theatre

Immigration officials almost knacker up a charity gig by detaining the headline act on bogus grounds.

See? That's what happens when you have border controls. Clearly, the only answer is open borders unless you hate charity.

Moral Dwarf: Terror Laws Are Baaaaaaaaad!

John Le Carre thinks the war is, like, a total fraud being used by The Man to steal all your freedoms, and you know you can trust the judgement of a guy who admits to considering defection to the USSR.

As I understand it, Le Carre was curious about the true nature of Marxist dictatorship, but thinks fighting terrorism is definitely an attack on our freedoms. Not to put to fine a point on it, but when it comes to assessing the threat from Islamofascism, I wouldn't put to much stock by the opinion of a guy who spent the Cold War fantasising about life in the Soviet Union.

Moronic Convergence Continues

Further evidence that all the world's stupidities are combining into one big ball of moronic.

Femiloon Barbara Ellen claims that a Ministry of Justice commissioned report produced by a load of femiloons totally crushes charges that the Ministry of Justice is dominated by femiloons. Well, I'm convinced!

On the other hand, in the same post she warns us that there are some women you just can't trust.

Personally, I'm on tenterhooks waiting to see what she'd say about a guy in a custody battle with a Jewish ex-wife.

Yoofs: Not As Stoopid As You Might Fink

Considering they've survived eleven years in the Gulag,, I'm quite impressed with these figures. I'm guessing even the disappointing 12% figure would be higher if not for the presence of the PC KGB.

Quote Of The Day

A long one this time, Ace puts his finger on what's wrong with the folks who think we should just ignore the current chaos in the financial markets:

I know precious little about economics and still less about South American economics, but I do know this: The history of South America is nothing but big booms (during which South American countries grow more rapidly than any mature economy) followed by profound busts -- depressions, basically....

Is it really true that the "markets sort out depressions and panics" more efficiently than would be had by Big Footing Government Intervention?

Is it really true that it's rational (and healthy) to have six or eight years of 10% growth followed by four or six years of severe economic contraction of 10% and unemployment reaching, who knows (I don't), 30%?

I don't believe that. I believe the boom-times are irrational and "artificial," in the sense that they're not based on any reasonable estimation of future economic growth, and the massive busts are even more irrational and artificial.

They are "natural," however, in the sense that that's how people behave, and will keep on behaving, forever, until the end of time.

And even if that's "natural" (which I concede it is), I cannot concede it's healthy or desirable. Nor can I concede this represents the best, most efficient growth trajectory possible. I do not believe that South American economies are healthier for the fact they essentially start out again from zero, almost as if they're rebuilding after a Road Warrior scale apocalypse, every fifteen years.

This has always worried me about economics in general. It all works fine proving you assume that everyone is an atomised unit moving logically to maximise his economic efficiency.

That'll be the day. Right now, it's more like a rampaging mob. True, they'll disperse eventually, but just how much of the town centre will they burn down beforehand? Also true, to keep the analogy going, torching the local amenities may indeed create room for new and more exciting developments, but can the gains really be enough to make it worthwhile to rebuild from scratch?

I think a lot of this anti-intervention sentiment arises from the libertarians and their hope for an annihilating disaster which will sweep away statism and leave them free to rebuild the world as a libertarian utopia.

Well, y'know, that's them, but there's no reason why conservatives should take tips on damage control from people who fantasise about a Year Zero.

UPDATE:

In case you missed it, we had a drive-by by a libertarian in the comments. I always delete that stuff on sight - hey, they're always fantasising about being Neo in amongst the sheeple, so I say give them the persecution they obviously get off on.

All of which is by way of saying that's what TDK is referring to in amongst asking a good question: namely - and I hope this is a fair summary - in so far as government brought on the crisis anyway, why trust them to fix it?

The quippy answer would be 'you broke it, you bought it' - and the more I think about it the better that sounds. After all, banking has never really been a free market at least as far back as King Henry carving the nads off bankers (don't tell Harriet Harman about this). Equally, given the central importance of filthy lucre to ever other industry, government can no more let the free market run free here than they can let the taps run dry to teach the utility companies a lesson. The potential collateral damage is too great.

There's also Ace's original point, namely that the defining feature of booms and busts is that the market isn't working rationally. Sure, it might be natural for markets to implode at regular intervals, but is an economic Hiroshima every so often really a good thing? Crunch question: are the dangers of government intervention really worse than the risks of allowing an economic collapse? Yes, say libertarians they are. Well OK, but lets be clear about what it is these people are advocating: total disintegration of the global economy. You don't have to be a caricature 'statist' to quail at that.

About That Non-Existant Mainstreaming of Paedophilia

JuliaM wants to know just what it takes to get barred from working with kids.

Chicks, hey? Isn't it obvious?

No need for weasel phrases like 'suggestive of' in the case of the Reverend & Mrs Nonce, but that one just does not excite our not at all mainstreaming pals.

See, that's the thing. Plenty of hipsters - particularly the libertarian ones - keep telling us that - gosh darn it! - they're all up for nailing perverts to the wall, but you start zapping child rapists and then something, something, something until we're living in the Fourth Reich.

They're never too specific about how we get from taking out the garbage to Strength through Joy, but their loony paranoia doesn't even stand up to cursory examination here. I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say that a prerequisite for a slippery slope is that it should actually be a slope. Au contraire, in this case the issues couldn't be more clear cut. There's no 'profiling' required here, what we have is a 100%, self-confessed, unrepentant pervert flicking a v-sign at decency - and getting away with it.

There's more to it than that though. Let's approach this the other way. The usual suspects justify harassing teachers with the wrong views by claiming that the natives are just one blog post away from forming rampaging mobs of racist killers. Meanwhile, a pervert can openly advocate paedophilia with nary a whisper from our pals. That's revealing in two ways: not only does it show the essential humbuggery of the folks who claim they're ready to tear perverts limb from limb except, y'know... yada, yada, yada, it also flags up just how the lack of condemnation affects how the perverts view themselves.

Put it this way: in so far as Mrs Hart was comfortable defending outright perversion, it suggests a certain confidence that there were people out there who'd offer a sympathetic ear. Crunch question: does the hipsters refusal to forthrightly condemn perversion make it more or less likely that potential perverts will choose to act on their impulses?

Quote Of The Day

Mr Broon, guestblogging over at Ross's place:

This is not a time for novices, we need a proven failure in charge!

Kill Da Pigs II

The non-hateful left strikes again!

And no, you can't even say these people were misguided idealists, or vindicated by history. Their sole claim to fame is that they were cop killers. Again, I say it: this is who liberals are. They support violent lunatics because they're violent lunatics. There's no deeper thought here, liberals will support anything and anyone opposed to western civilisation.

Lassie Must Die!

This is what baffles me: surely at some point even the most libtarded of individuals must look at this stuff and realise these people are nuts.

The Daily Mail: Pro-Choice

I've said it before and doubtless I'll say it again, but the left's characterisation of the Daily Mail as the epitome of modern conservatism is ludicrous when you look at just how much liberal kool aid the Mail actually drinks.

Sadie Nicholas asks 'How CAN A Man Murder His Own Children?' Beats me, but I bet the answer involves scumbaggery somewhere. Maybe she should ask Rosa Monckton? On the same morning, Ms Mockton explains that killing your child is kind of bad, but youse got to have sympathy for the killer, right?

You'll never guess what the difference is between these two killer parents.

Well, It Worked So Well In Schools, Right?

Liberalism: even screwing up the Beautiful game.

It's not just the 'all must have prizes' thing though. Yes, the FA is right, the behaviour of some parents and coaches is terrible, but the answer is surely to give them - and even their clubs - the old heave ho'. In so far as this new policy punishes everyone while leaving the lunatic fringe barely affected, it might just be the perfect example of liberalism in action.

Question D'Jour

As so often with cases like this, I've got to ask: what exactly is the risk from unregulated clown activity?

Quote Of The Day

Another great line from the comments at Dirty Harry's Place:

I think the biggest problem with the culture war is just how many tens of millions of people don’t realize we’re in one.

Yes, that pretty much covers it.

Liberals Support The Troops Like O J Simpson Supports Family Values

This is how much the left hates the troops: no cats.

On the plus side, at least we've got some libs on record as supporting profiling...

Winning The Culture War

Another central belief of this blog is that it's a losing proposition for conservatives to get drawn into arguments about particular issues while letting liberals set the term of the debate. Take tax rates. You can argue for lower rates, but it's a losing proposition in a culture where government spending is seen as the only route to progress.

Or take recent events. Right now, the hipsters are all a flutter about the inquest into the death of St Jean the Martyr. This, they hope, will blow the lid! on how State Death Squads murder people totally for no reason at all.

Meanwhile, this case has slipped past without so much as a raised eyebrow from the hipsters. Now, why might that be?

There are simply no objective grounds for claiming that the Matrydom of St Jean is the reification of the darkness at the heart of modern Britain but the death of 'Lois' is a yawner. Or, to put it another way, the right can and should take on the cop-hating scum currently oozing out of our nation's sewers, but we need to do more than that. We need to stop letting them set the terms of the debate by default.

The hipsters want to claim the death of St Jean is the Most Important Issue Evah! Well, let them make that case, because when they do they're exposing who they are. They're telling us what motivates them. They're not guardians of public morals, disinterested seekers after truth or crusaders for justice. They're agenda-driven lunatics, and it's past time we stopped treating them as anything other than that.

See, I Was Right!

Depending on who you ask, we've either dodged a bullet on the economy, or this time next year we'll be living in Mad Max World. Either way, I think it's fair to say that I was totally right.

One of the central points of this blog is that stupidity is underrated. Consider the origin of the crash: banks believing that a group of supa-smart peeople had found a way to turn lousy loans into something less stupid.

Oh sure, I might be over-simplifying, but I bet that's still not the stupidest thing written about this crisis. To the point: not one person in a hundred could explain how all this worked, but they just knew some dead smart folks somewhere had it all sorted.

Actually, I thinking maybe there was just one guy. Maybe he got run over by a bus? That would explain a lot.

In this environment it was somehow inevitable that the guy who steered HBOS onto the rocks would turn out to be an Oxbridge grad whose last job was at a supermarket. It's the generic skills, init?

This is about more than just the propensity of bankers to throw huge sums of money down a hole in the ground on the off-chance. It applies to people in general. The history of British politics in the last fifty years is pretty much the public being bilked into spending huge sums of money on white elephants in the vague hope that some really smart folks in Whitehall will manage to cure all our social problems.

Hey, why mock bankers? Say what you like about them, but compared to the Olympics, giving loans to crack heads looks like sound business judgement.

That Wasn't Meant To Happen

Crivens! The hipsters' favourite search engine falls foul of PC. Even more delicious: it's all about the Most Important Operation Evah!

I believe the operative term is 'blowback'.

Run Screaming Out Of The Room?

Don't be shocked, but a disability rights group has claimed that testing for Down's Syndrome is super-dangerous. It's all hard science too:

Although they admit that their ratio is only an estimate, they are backed by a number of independent experts who fear inexperienced practitioners may also be to blame.

In related news, a blogger estimates that there is no limit to the rubbish the MSM will print.

Mind you, you can't hardly blame the MSM, not considering the example set by actual scientists. Take the defenestration of Professor Michael Reiss. Contrary to what our ever-balanced state broadcaster implies, Reiss is not a 'Creationism biologist'. Here's what he actually said:

Last week Prof Reiss - a Church of England minister - said creationism should be discussed in science lessons if pupils raised the issue.

As opposed to what exactly?

But no: that was all too much for the heirs to Galileo, who came up with a true classic of the witch hunter's art:

The society said some of his comments had been "open to misinterpretation".

This had damaged its reputation.

Say what? A statement of the blindingly obvious is a firing offence just in case someone else interprets it some other way.

This is like criticising Darwin because his work was used to support eugenics, except that his work really was used to support eugenics, rather than merely being open to being used to support eugenics.

It's not even good politics. Creationism survives because a large number of people are convinced that scientists will go to any lengths to push an atheistic agenda. Call it a hunch, but I'm thinking that this obsession with punishing anyone who dissents from the party line probably won't have anyone taking their tinfoil hat off any time soon.

It's especially a pity that these people have give into their inner Dawk at the self-same time even dyed in the wool lefties are starting to mock him.

Liberals: All Class, All The Time

RWN rounds up the 20 most obnoxious anti-Palin quotes. If nothing else, they nicely bury the myth that it's the right which is nasty.

Meanwhile, the left is celebrating their own version of the storming of the Bastille. Doubtless, if Baz wins there'll be a public holiday to celebrate the storming of the Palin e-mail account.

So there you have it, the liberal position in a nutshell: reading other people's e-mail is cool, unless they're terrorists, in which case it's an outrage. See? It makes perfect sense!

But At Least His Rights Were Respected...

Bad though this case sounds, the specifics of the (non-)escape are even worse.

Meanwhile, five months after the escape, the sweepstake is still open for which femiloon and/or hipster will be the first to suggest that avoiding offence may not be the main concern when dealing with a serial rapist.

He's Reporting The Stuff British Journalists Just Won't Report

Michael Yon with British troops in Helmand Province.

Hey, You Know What We Need More Of Over Here?

Open Borders Lobby: people who claim it's racist to say that the immigration system should distinguish between a neurosurgeon from Madras and this guy.

The Left Has Lost Its Mind (Part II)

While the hipsters have been busily trying to cram September 11 down the memory hole, there are some deaths that bear revisiting again and again: are you ready for The Passion of St Jean?

It's time to check the scorecard. Apparently, September 2001 is ancient history, but the events of July 2005 are a hot issue. Hmmmm.... that makes the window somewhere between three years two months and seven years - guess these guys better step it up on their little movie before it too becomes, like, so ten minutes ago.

Of course, there is one problem here. How can I put this? There's not a lot of back story here for a whole movie. It's not like the police shot Frank Sinatra.

Fortunately, the left has a solution:

Interestingly, the main focus of the UK-Brazilian co-production isn't so much the death of Jean Charles as his life. It will look at how he, his cousins and friends lived it up in London.

'It's a life-affirming story, full of fun and laughter - and then tragedy strikes,' Luke Schiller, a key producer on the film, told me.

Yep, a whole film full of magic gauchos.

Of course, this sort of thing is inevitable given who St Jean actually was. I guess liberals don't like us to talk about how he got into Britain, so we'll just move onto his life as a fraudster working cash in hand as an electrician, despite being wholly unqualified. He was El Chavo.

Hey, if evading tax and building regulations is evidence of aufenticity! how come that doesn't apply to folks from Barking as well as Brazil? What chance a life-affirming story about a guy from Essex who sticks it The Man and his whole 'fuse' jive?

Bottom line: you could pick probably forty of the victims of July 7 and find a more interesting back story (then again, how many of the folks taking out onions for St Jean could even name five victims of July 7)?

Come to think of it, the Martyrdom of St Jean isn't even the most obvious case of a police firearms-related upscrew, so when are we going to see movies about James Ashley and Harry Stanley?

This is the thing: the left is telling us who they are. The Passion of St Jean isn't being made because they're hoping to produce an entertaining film. There is absolutely no artistic criteria by which the life of a sleazy fraud justifies a movie, except that it serves the left's agenda.

This isn't just moral equivalence. Liberals think the West is actually worse than the terrorists. That's why we get saccharine movies depicting sleazy crooks as tragic heroes, but you never get to see the original footage from September 11. It's why the same people who spread weird Truther theories about July 7 claim that the police were chomping at the bunch to shoot anything that moved two weeks later. It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to help drive home that the real threat is from the forces of civilisation.

The Left Has Lost Its Mind (Part I)

How dare you question their commitment to fighting terrorism! Besides, I've just checked with the BBC and apparently it's the right that's full of thuggish losers.

Quote Of The Day

Another great line from a comment thread over at Dirty Harry's Place:

As for the Whoop and her pals, by imagining and fighting against oppression that doesn’t exist and persecution that will never take place, these creatures elevate themselves from their pointless, narcissistic, selfish, over-compensated existence, giving themselves heroic stature they don’t have to sacrifice for. It’s Dr. FeelGood, free of charge.

Assimilation

Personally, I think its great that at least one immigrant has made the effort to fit in with British culture.

They're All About The Justice

Something to remember next time you see some lawyer in the MSM waxing pious about justice.

Apparently, bombs going off, kids being murdered and industry being choked to death are all prices well worth paying for justice!, but low fees? That's just crazy talk!

Personally, I'm just glad no one in private industry is talking about letting murderers off the hook just to protect profits, otherwise liberals would be calling for air strikes. It's not even as if we're talking low wages in any sense that an Earth person would use it. Check out the figures:

under the new rates top Queen’s Counsel were on preparation rates (for work leading up to trial) of £91 an hour... a barrister would pocket about half of that after paying overheads, expenses, tax and so on.

Let us move smoothly past the humbuggery of liberals complaining about the cost of taxation, and consider this: preparation work - isn't that kind of like paying Dame Judi Dench for learning her lines? But still, for the sake of this ludicrous argument let's specify that for some reason our hypothetical QC never does anything other than preparatory work. He's still taking home an after-tax income of £3640 per week. Hey, in some parts of the country that's not considered a bad wage.

Of course, no one does only preparatory work:

For a day in court the rates range from £285 to £476 [per hour] for a top QC.

Just in case you're keeping track at home, that means an eight hour day earns scores them £3880.

At this point it's worth contrasting the legal profession with another well-subsidised group. Liberals hate, hate, HATE! farm subsidies, but look what the quid pro quo is: farmers are faced with everything from environmental regulations to production quotas. Meanwhile, lawyers bleed the taxpayer dry and claim it's just the free market in action.

Ditto, I'm pretty sure drilling thousands of metres into the Earth's crust to extract volatile hydrocarbons is not a simple task, but the same liberals who demand windfall taxes for energy companies would never dream of the same punitive measures being applied to lawyers.

Still, it's hard to have much sympathy for the government. Not only has the government's habit of outsourcing law making to the courts helped bloat the budget in the first place, it's also emboldened these people to the point where they feel they can strong arm a democratically-elected government into acting as a giant ATM.

In this, as in so many other areas, Parliament has utterly failed to live up to its role of acting as a check and balance on the power of the courts. Just to give two examples of what needs to be done, Parliament could remove the ability of lawyers to pervert the public debate by forcing lawyers to identify themselves as such when they appear in the media, instead of allowing them to pass themselves off as 'concerned citizens' or such like, and they could remove the ability of lawyers to choke off public criticism with libel suits.

After all, these are the folks who insist that the medical profession, the police and the Army can't be trusted and so they must be subject to having their actions picked over by the courts years after the fact. How come criticism of the legal system is subject to review by the self-same courts? Aren't these the folks who issue teary declarations about the importance of independent tribunals?

There are plenty of other measures that could be done, but all of them rely on our elected representatives being reunited with their spines, so I guess we may as well resign ourselves to ever more money going to lawyers. Still, in so far as these people would let murders go free just to make their point, could the MSM at least stop portraying them as guardians of justice?

Hey, Dorothy, What Do You Think of Traditional Britsh Values Right Now?

I'm thinking Laban is becoming the master chronicler of MONA related events. He's just passed on news of clashes between the Men Of No Appearance and the Men Of Fabulous! Appearance.

Of course, we must treat such incidents with the seriousness they deserve:

Yep, that's me: harsh! But can you blame me when even the guy breaking omerta wraps his statement up in every weasely liberal phrase imaginable?

On the other hand, who'd have thunk that the alliance between the Religion of Peace and the Religion of Getting A Piece would end badly? Well, yes, every rightist ever, but the gayers have spent years calling us fascists, so the sympathy buffer is kind of empty at the moment.

For sure, incidents like this, are a sign of the cultural death spiral in modern Britain, not only in terms of the thuggery itself, but also the reluctance to call it what it is. But few people are less qualified to complain about all this than you-know-who. Gayers have served proudly as shock troops in the liberals' war on British culture.

True, some would claim they were only against certain aspects of traditional British culture. At best, this position devolves down to a kind of cultural jenga, and the proposition that it's possible to hack away whole chunks of the underpinnings of British culture, while leaving the culture itself still in place.

More to the point though, whatever they claim to believe, the rest of their rhetoric makes clear these guys aren't just opposed to the family values, they hate the whole idea of people having values. That's why the same people who blather about The Homophobia, think blaming the spread of AIDS on Mrs Thatcher is a perfectly valid debating point.

The hysterical denunciations of those who support traditional values - let alone the open harassment - is just a symptom of the way the gay rights movement have fully bought into the left's cult of indiscriminateness. They're appalled that no one will take a stand against thuggery? Hey, they've spent years describing anyone who takes a stand for traditional values as a Naaaaaaaaaazi!!!!! Besides, who's to say that beating people up is wrong? Did the cat sit on the mat, or is it equally true to say that the mat sat on the cat? And what is this 'cat' thing anyway?

The gay rights movement bought fully into the left's core belief that the only truly moral position is no position at all. At the same time, they were perfectly happy to break bread with the Islamofascists when it came to denouncing Britain as the Worst Country Evah! It is only now, with our culture in ruins, that these people have suddenly realised that there really are worse cultures out there after all.

Palin Scandal D'Jour

Hey, at least the quality is creeping up!

At Least We Don't Need To Change The Acronym

From Men Of No Appearance to Men Of No Affiliation. Like I keep saying, the MSM should cut its prices in half - after all, you only ever get half the story.

Quote Of The Day

Over at Dirty Harry's Place they're discussing what kind of revisionist train wreck Hollyweird's Tarzan remake will turn out to be, and commenter Carolyn sums it up thus:

Yup, this time Jane screws the ape.

Animals have rights too, you know.

The Common Touch

Rob in the comments points out that Dave's New, Representative Tories have just had a photoshoot with... Tatler?

In fact it's worse than that. Not only is the Ayatollah Khameron intent on making us all nostalgic for the good old days of Blair, but now his wife is busy making Chezza look good. Greed and snobbery are never an attractive combination, but that's where it's at. Besides, doesn't everyone have £900 bags?

Liberal Double-Dipping

See, that's the thing with cases like this. We keep getting told that we can't hold these people accountable because they're suffering from a terrible illness that makes them commit hideous crimes, but then we get told that we can't discriminate against someone just because they're kind of wacky.

Huh?

Which is it? Are these just regular guys with an embarassing illness, a kind of mental VD? Or are they victims of a hideous condition which drives them to extremes of homicidal rage? Well, actually both. The liberal position boils down to the belief that murderous insanity is no reason to deny someone their life's ambition to own their own chainsaw.

You can see why liberals prefer to call conservatives names, rather than discuss their actual ideology.

Zzzzzzzzzzz......

'Shocking' is not the word - trite and predictable are more like it.

Blind Pig Day

Put this down as a case of the stupidities cancelling each other out: Reason magazine interviews the US Libertarian Party's candidate for Vice President, and he makes a great point.

And so my answer is, has America really been unfair to minorities? No it hasn't. It was unfair to me. A white butcher's kid, whose father had no money, but nobody gave me a break. And do I have a chip on my shoulder? You're damn right I do. And I represent millions and millions of poor people in this country who weren't lucky enough to be poor and black, they were unlucky enough to be poor and white, and they can't get into Harvard. So maybe that country Barack's fighting for, he's got the wrong country here. He's been just fine in this country.

Don't worry though, normal service is resumed in the comments thread at Reason, with crazee rebel tigers lining up to burn the heretic.

Why Don't More People Do This?

First we had 'freedom of the use of the press' meaning anyone could print off their material of choice. Now that's become 'freedom of the press' which apparently means we have these super-citizens known as the press, able to ignore the law as it applies to lesser-mortals. Still, even accepting that, there's no way you can read freedom of the press as meaning that citizens are legally required to appear before MSM show trials.

Why on Earth would Sarah Palin want to give credibility to a bunch of partisan lunatics? Wrong question. Right question: just why do some many folks on the right think it's just a matter of fine-tuning their media skills, and suddenly the kool aid drinkers in the MSM will start playing fair?

Nope, the only conservatives the MSM likes are the ones that denounce other conservatives for being too conservative. There's the exception that proves the rule in Cameron. Sure, the MSM gives him a fair crack but that's only because he gobbles up the liberal agenda with a shovel. In the unlikely event that Cameron ever tacked to the right, he'd get slimed faster than you can say 'coke head'.

There's the flip-side to all this. If liberals have won the culture war, just why is the MSM so desperate to cast every conservative as Hitler? Or, to put it another way, if conservative ideas are so toxic, wouldn't simply reciting what conservatives believe be enough to damn them? No?

Considering it's supposed to be an utterly discredited ideology, liberals seem mightily afraid of letting any conservatism escape into the public square. Nope, the MSM's unhinged rantings aren't a sign of strength, they're a sign of weakness. Unhinged denunciations of opponents as Hannibal Lecter's crazier cell mates is not the sign of a string argument. So why do so many Official Conservatives want to give these losers credibility?

Cognitive Dissonance?

Apparently, even the Indie staffers don't read their own rag. Today's headline story was a report claiming fewer woman are scoring top jobs. Typical sob sister stuff, but what was above it? Why, a full page banner photo of Bristol Palin and fiancée, of course. No mixed message there then!

Today's Inspiring Afirmative Action Post

Remember, they're trusted with guns while you're not because they're highly-trained professionals.

Support Our Murderous Troops!

Looks like there's some forms of discrimination the left thinks are just fine.

Of course, it's all an aspect of the wider culture war. This sort of thing is the natural result of supposedly respectable public figures who come out with garbage like this:

We should accept that we cannot impose democracy at the barrel of a gun,” he said in Islamabad. “We cannot drop democracy from 10,000 feet and we should not try.

Yep, that's what our troops are doing out there: randomly bombing from two miles up. I guess all those casualties are just the result of soldiers falling off the back of the plane.

At least with the collapse of Labour, we'll soon be rid of these these kooks.

Thought Police

Look like the weasels are circling Inspector Gadget. There's an enigmatic post on his blog, with some background from his publishers.

I guess they'll be trying the 'disrepute' route. The only thing is that no one can actually point out any actual inaccuracies in what Gadget said. Let's face it, if there was so much as a chink of daylight, the usual suspects would be popping up everywhere claiming 'Nine point six seven, actually!!!!!!'. The fact they aren't raises an important question.

In so far as Gadget's writings are accurate, but he's still (potentially) being charged with bringing the uniform into disrepute, what does it say about modern policing when even the top brass seem to be admitting that a fair account of what actually happens, by definition, brings the police into disrepute?

I Bet There's An Innocent Explanation For This

Fortunately, my nano-violin is back from its annual tune-up just in time to play a sad song.

Where'd All That "Absolute Moral Authority" Go?

Talking of the femiloon's nuanced approach to membership of the sisterhood, Guardian writer and raving loon Julie Bindel has been giving a rape victim a good kicking.

Actually, the clue is in the article itself. Bindel never gets round to making any actual arguments. Instead, we get the ludicrous claim that Mirren claiming that date rates are hard to prosecute means she wants to 'impose her twisted logic upon other women'. And you thought she was just giving an interview...

The point is that if someone - and a rape victim at that - expressing opinions Bindel disagrees with counts as them imposing their views, then that suggests that the femiloon's definition of oppressive conduct is kind of loose. Sure, Bindel is right to point out that rape doesn't always leave marks, but where exactly does Bindel draw the line between rape and normal sex? And is there any relation between her definition and the one used on Earth?

Quote Of The Day

Amongst other things, the MSM is claiming that the beasting of Bristol Palin is justified by the need to move forward the very important debate about sex education in schools. Not only is this a blindingly-obvious piece of self-serving rubbish, it doesn't even make sense on its own terms. Social conservatives aren't opposed to the principle of sex education in schools, we're just worried about the specifics of it.

No innuendo intended, but Ace puts his finger on it here:

Most people who object to sex ed in schools aren't against sex education -- they just want to do it themselves, and are frankly suspicious (with some good reason) that government-school sex-ed teachers will be a bit more pro-sex and bit less pro-abstinence than they'd like...

I think sex-ed in schools really is more effective as far as providing frank instruction in birth control. I'm guessing that many parents are uncomfortable with the whole discussion and, to the extent they do discuss birth control, do so vaguely and without much elaboration.

On the other hand, just like the immigration debate, the government could do an awful lot to build trust on the "enforcement" side of the issue. People just don't trust union-protected teachers to go out of their way and appear "uncool" and give real warnings of about the consequences of sexual activity.

Exactly. Most parents aren't against the idea of schools covering S-E-X, it's just that they have - almost certainly well-founded - fears about what kind of train wreck will result from putting it in the hands of groovy teachers.

PDS

I'm a firm believer in Ann Coulter's dictum that the effective conservative is always the one liberals are calling evil, stupid, insane or all three, so naturally I'm pleased by the reaction to Sarah Palin's candidacy.

This little summary is two days old, so probably doesn't include the last sixty or so talking points/rumours/LSD hallucinations, but it gives a nice sense of the left's effortless class. To think, some of us remember the days when the right was attacked for being too hostile to teenage mothers.

The thing I don't get is how Bristol Palin's pregnancy is supposed to vindicate all these stupid rumours. Take one of the (marginally) less crazy rumours, that Sarah Palin pretended to be pregnant to hide the fact Bristol was pregnant with Trig (and, again, I remind you that this one of the saner rumours). So now the Palins have released news of Bristol's pregnancy, that proves the Palins obviously engaged in a nine month conspiracy to hide a previous Bristol pregnancy. Huh? Plus why would someone who's supposed to be just the obscure chief exec of a bunch of moose molesting white trash bother about hiding a pregnancy anyway? Isn't that par for the course for a bunch of trailer trash from a small town like Alaska?

If Sarah Palin achieves nothing else, she's exposed the femiloons for what they are. When this stuff gets a pass, it kind of cuts the ground from under the femiloon's usual atrocity stories.

Ditto, the MSM. Having thrown whole hillsides full of mud at Palin with nary a hit, the MSM's new tactic is to claim that McCain was negligent in selecting a VP candidate who liberals could smear so easily. St Ann points out the obvious problem:

Barring some all-new, trivial and probably false story about Palin -- her former hairdresser got a parking ticket in 1978! -- the media apparently intend to keep being hysterical about McCain's alleged failure to "vet" Palin properly. The problem with this argument is that it presupposes that everyone is asking: "HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?"

No one's saying that.

Attacks on McCain's "vetting" process require the media to keep claiming that Palin has a lot of problems. But she doesn't have any problems. Remember? Those were all blind alleys.

At least there are some resources out that are more reliable than the MSM.

What If Someone Breaks In To Flytip In The Kitchen?

As I understand the left's latest big idea, we'll have informers on every block reporting to council wardens with the power to dispense instant fines. What could go wrong?

More to the point though, doesn't this kind of chip away at the left's arguments against self-defence? After all, these people have spent years waxing pious about the dangers of people 'taking the law into their own hands'. That position was at least internally consistent just as long as leftists could contrast professional police officers with our own lumpy, dumpy selves, but now the law is in the hands of semi-literate council thugs and bitter curtain-twitchers, it doesn't even make sense on its own terms.

The liberal position is that the nation's households are full of folks going to bed every night desperately hoping someone will break in so they can torture him to death but giving the same people special informers hotlines or council uniforms will turn them into disinterested servants of justice. Huh?