Liberal Self-Awareness Fail!

One of the big differences between conservatives and liberals is that the most of the right have at least a vague idea what liberals think, meanwhile liberals are so wrapped up in their own caricatures of the right as knuckle-dragging bigots, they haven't got a clue what the right is actually saying.

Example here.

Doubtless, these guys think it's a cunning plan to slime independent schools by inventing ever more loopy reasons for them to be fail inspections, but really: the parents who are sending their kids to these schools are sending them there in large part to avoid the influence of the type of leftist ninnies who love jumping out of the metaphorical bushes shouting 'Four point seven nine TWO actually.

Hell, sparing Junior the horror of appropriate playing alone must be worth at least a half term's worth of fees.

The BBC And The Left: A Criminal Joint Enterprise

Viewers of BBC 'North West Tonight' last Wednesday would have been baffled by the choice of lead story: a long segment was dedicated to the news that the mother of Jordon Cunliffe, one of the low-lifes convicted of the beating to death of Garry Newlove, did not approve of her son's murder conviction.

Personally, it made me nostalgic for the days when having a son who was a murderous thug was something parents tried to hide. In so far as she had an actual point, it was that she did not approve of the law on 'joint enterprise' - as she told us at great length. The victim's widow was allowed thirty seconds in the middle of the report, and sounded exactly like a woman still struggling to come to terms with the murder of her husband. Meanwhile, the Violet Kray of Warrington got the proverbial 'last word' in a long interview at the end where she was articulate, polished, poised - in a word 'coached'. Who exactly had trained her though was not something the BBC thought we needed to know. Then again, we never found out why, months after the trial, the BBC thought we needed to look again at settled law. But then, wouldcha believe it?

Two days before Sofyen Belamouadden was stabbed to death at Victoria Underground station during rush hour, a group called London Against Injustice were meeting just down the road in Westminster. Led by Bruce Kent, the famous CND activist who’s so Left-wing he even had to resign as a Catholic priest, which is saying something, the group were protesting against Joint Enterprise, a law that enables groups of people to be convicted of a murder, even if some of them had no direct part.

What are the odds, hey?

Not only that, but it turns out the folks at Lefties Against Justice have also anointed Jordon Cunliffe as their chief baby seal. Small world, huh?

Incidentally, we're supposed to find Cunliffe a sympathetic character because he's 'legally blind' - which only works if you don't know that the definition of legally blind is vision of 20/200 or less i.e. a legally blind person can see an object 20 feet away with the same clarity as a normally sighted person could see it from 200 feet away. None of which matters since the whole point about beating someone to death is that it's kind of hard to do from across the street anyway.

Needless to say, no one pointed this out on 'North West Tonight', which is a pity since - absent this attempt to claim victimhood - this is exactly the kind of case where 'joint enterprise' should apply. A mob of savages set upon an innocent man and beat him to death. Cunliffe's whole defence is that he was innocently administering a beating to the victim when some passing stranger murdered him - he was at the mob, not with the mob.

It's a stupid argument, but the point isn't to win anyone over yet. What the BBC and the left are doing is trying to put the law on joint enterprise in play, to rebrand it as a 'controversial' law that 'some say' needs to be 'brought into the 21st Century'. It's about how our impartial state broadcaster creates the right social environment for radical leftists to dismantle the law.

Enriched Policing

Interesting exchange in the comments to this post, Lurker points out another attack by the fearsome Men of No Appearance gang.

But wait....I hear a squeaking from the corner. Mr Liberal would like to point out that it's early days and the law restricts what can be said about an ongoing investigation. Yes, indeed. Which is why you never see anything like this, via Rob.

....

Except when you do obviously. Say, what can be the difference between these two cases?

Grace Under No Pressure

Speaking personally, I never bought into the MSM's 'David Cameron as a Great Orator' thing. Cameron's speeches, just like Obama's, mainly revolve around the same three themes again and again. There's the ludicrous caricature of what the right is saying, utopian nonsense about the coming Era of Dave and finally a fulsome tribute to his own courage in taking his critics on.

All things considered, this is probably all the Dave speeches you'll ever need:

You know, as I travel round Britain people come up to me and say 'Surely conservatism means eating babies'? Well, I say to them 'no, they will be no baby eating in my government because I'm not afraid to say the Conservative Party has changed, and there is no place in it for cannibalism. I want a Britain where babies are free from being consumed and everyone of them will grow up to be above average, and drive flying cars that run on water and every house will its own unicorn.

All of which is by way of saying I wasn't too surprised by his recent meltdown. After all, The Dave's whole reputation as a master communicator has been achieved mainly by dealing with softball interviews. We're invited to admire the way he stays cool even when faced with a barrage of fawning.

Still, fun though it is to see the myth of Dave the Great Communicator implode, that shouldn't blind us to the way this interview also exposes the myth that The Dave is a master tactician.

Just about the only consistent themes in the teachings of the Ayatollah Khameron have been throwing social conservatives under the bus at every opportunity, and pandering to the gay rights movement. As the saying goes, how's that working out for you? The more they denounce The Dave with the same unhinged rhetoric they use for social conservatives, the more obvious it becomes that us nasty old social cons were right after all: they are a bunch of loonies. They're not Rosa Parks, they're Robert Mugabe.

Actually, this all points to a deeper absurdity, and not one limited to The Dave. We're told that Cameron's lack of ideological ballast makes him a master politician, able to trim his sails to the needs of the moment. True enough, but as Gerald correctly points out, the flip side of that is an obsession with the purely tactical leads Cameron into elephant traps like this.

Consider this particular issue. There's obvious humbuggery in Ed Balls saying he supports faith schools, but only providing they don't teach anything that conflicts with the gay agenda, but at least he grasps the wider issue. The gay agenda is a essentially transformative one, they want to remake society, and freedom of religion is just one more egg that's got to be broken to make that omelette.

Ditto, consider the specific issue at stake here. The activists want to rebrand the demands of the gay movement as human rights. In other words, they won't have to go through the tedious business of promoting their views in the marketplace of ideas, and pushing their preferred policies democratically, instead the gay agenda will be the default setting, with everyone else having to get with the program or else.

You could pretty much choose a conservative blogger at random and they could explain why using the power of the state to push a radical agenda, free of all democratic oversight, is inherently anti-conservative. Meanwhile, the World's Smartest Man is thrashing round like a stranded goldfish. He doesn't support the gay agenda, but hates social conservatives. He's a brilliant tactician, but he's spent years pandering to fringe groups only to have them turn on him. He's a great communicator, except when he has to go off script.

All this would be bad enough under normal circumstances, but for a party that's devolved into little more than a cult of personality, there's bound to be trouble when the personality concerned turns out to be an empty vessel.

Will No One Speak Out For Unhinged Bigots?

Thinking about cases like this, it baffles me that these tools still think this is a valid defence:

Director for Children's Social Care at Birmingham City Council, Colin Tucker, said: "It can be a case of you're damned if you do and damned if you don't."

See? They're fair-minded: they don't just ignore the guilty, they also persecute the innocent. Why will no one on the right point the absurdity of this defence?

More to the point, why will no one take it to the next level? It's not just that these people make lousy decisions, it's that they're a bunch of bigoted lunatics. It was inevitable that the really big bogus abuse scandals, Orkney, Middlesbrough and Rochdale would all involve native families, just as assuredly as the kids left to die are disproportionately ethnic minorities. 'Starvation' is an eurocentric concept, but the average British family is the Auschwitz of today. That's why they're damned - because they're a bunch of leftist nutcases using children as sock puppets in their deranged agitprop.

Telling Us Who They Are

Tom Hanks proves what we always suspected about Hollywood actors. Needless to say, he's not really talking about the war in the Pacific. Nope, he's making a heavy-handed analogy: 'Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?'.

Actually, he's right: it does remind me of modern politics. Specifically, the bit about liberals explaining how America being attacked by bloodthirsty fanatics proves America is evil. It shows not only just utterly rote this recitation of American sins really is ('was the Apollo program raycist?'), but also the essential narcissism of liberals. American history, and the rest of the world right now, is naught but a reflection of US domestic politics. That Imperial Japan, or the Taliban, might just be evil for their own reasons and in their own way, never occurs to them. They're only of interest in so far as they show America in a bad light. For folks who claim to believe in universal human rights, it's noticeable just how the universe seems to shrink to the places where US forces are engaged.

Genius Ain't What It Used To Be

Say what you like about Tommy Boy, but he does a great - if inadvertent - job of illustrating the latent fascism that underpins much modern libertarianism. Here he is trying to explain away the Bulger/Venables case without referencing the elephant in the room.

The thing with it all is this: the knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal, tabloid-addled, drunken, dirty, illiterate, sewer-dwelling, Ford driving, football watching, coupon clipping Untermensch...... were right. They - we - always believed two things: Venables & Thompson are violent felons and should be treated as such, and the legal system could not be trusted to do so.

As luck would have it, Venables was declared rehabilitated and released from yoof custody (aka Playstation Prison) approximately one second before he was due to be moved to an adult prison, then - as we now know - he embarked on an odyssey of drug-fuelled criminality, much of it in the city he was specifically barred from visiting.

Meanwhile, the Certified Super Smart Set are busy explaining that Goodison Park is 'on Liverpool' but not 'in Liverpool'. Besides, who'd have guessed that a convicted killer would react badly to a snoot full of Bolivian marching powder?

The bottom line is that John Venables was 'too big to fail'. By hook or by crook, Venables was always going to be classed as rehabilitated, and he was going to stay rehabilitated, no matter how many felonies he committed.

From the start, this was supposed to be the flagship case for the supposedly enlightened, and definitely privileged, to throw in the face of the unsophisticated masses with their stupid ideas about 'public protection', 'deterrence, 'vindication' and other childish nonsense. They wanted the success of this case to be the metric by which we judged their claims to sophistication versus the ignorant moralising of the peasantry.

Hell, if they'd managed to keep the fraud going just that bit longer, they'd doubtless be trying to cram a BBC docu-drama about it all down our throats. But now it's all gone horribly wrong, and the truth about the rehab industry has leaked out (it's exactly the sleazy farce the right always said it was), they think we shouldn't talk about it, otherwise lynch mobs will rampage through the streets and eat your neighbours!

It's genius, Jim, but not as we know it.

Steynism

....I give up on the whole d'/de/du jour thing.Instead, on with the show, and this perfect summing up:

News from the Netherlands: To protest the Islamophobia of Geert Wilders, a male teacher from Eindhoven has taken to wearing a Muslim headscarf in public.

Look, I like a neat visual shorthand as much as the next fellow, but this is almost too perfect a symbol of what's happening on the Continent: European men are auditioning for the part of Muslim women.

Shot In The Dark

What are the odds that the proposed compulsory dog insurance will be subject to insurance premium tax @ 1.5%?

About That Extremist Rhetoric...

One more thing about the Bulger case: is it just me, or is there a certain 'motes and beams' quality to the left's sermonising about this case? You'd have to search for hours to find anything as unhinged as the average MSM liberal ranting about the coming vigilante holocaust. Hell, a whole week of Daily Mail editorials couldn't come up with something as utterly foul as this from Guardian moron Steve Bell.

Yes, indeed: he really is suggesting that people who report stuff what the justice system does are exactly the same as murderous savages. Which is not at all a deranged position to take.

Reminder: The Left Doesn't Do Well When People Know What They're Talking About

Zoe Williams in the Guardian 04/03/2010:

Venables, of course, has served his sentence for the death of James Bulger... Actually, if his case demonstrates anything, it's how effective parole can be, and how quickly the conditions of a licence can be acted upon.

OK, so that's a little like arguing that Toyota's jamming accelerator problems gave them the opportunity to demonstrate just how well their air bags work, but let's say that from first principles, that's not such a bad argument. Except....

Venables, 27, is banned from visiting Merseyside as one of the conditions of his release, but he has reportedly been to Liverpool several times, where he has gone clubbing, snorted cocaine and been to Everton football matches.

Never mind the specifics of the current allegations, these revelations alone testify to a system that's neither quick or effective.

For all that liberals whine about media scrutiny in the Venables case, that cuts both ways. From the moment the Bulger killers were sentenced, they became a flagship project for the touchy-feely, deep thinkers in the rehab industry. Beardy-Weirdy had a free hand, an unlimited budget and complete protection from public accountability, so it's only now, when we finally get a chance to peek behind the curtain, that we find out that the whole rehab effort was pretty much the pseudo-scientific farce the right always said it was, global warming with psychopaths instead of polar bears.

Humbuggery

Well, now, isn't this nice: an article in the Times criticising the public and politicians for not facing the realities of our economic meltdown, written by... Matthew Parris.

Hello?

Parris is a textbook example of the type of Nu Tory douches who've spent the last few years sneering at anyone who claimed binging on borrowed money would not end well. We've had no end of patronising lectures from these people on how, sure, Thatcherism was right at the time, but we needed to move on, let it go and climb aboard the groovy train. Now, shockingly, it turns out that the socialists are running out of other people's money, just like that witch said they would, and now the chattering classes are saying we need to face the consequences of their actions.

That's what really sticks in the throat. These people have never hidden their disdain for the public, but now it turns out that all that genius can deliver is a standard of living 'ratcheted down a good couple of points relative to other nations'.

Thanks to pseudo-cons like Parris as much as any leftist, we now have an elephantine state that interferes in just about every aspect of British life. Such businesses as haven't actually been sucked dry by the need to support millions of Certified Bottom Inspectors are now having to fit their actual work around the need to complete two bazillion forms, inspections and other forms of low-level war waged on them by the undead denziens of big government. And, after all that, after billions of man hours and trillions of pounds wasted, it turns out that all we have to show for us is snippy communiques from our betters telling us that we're screwed so suck it up.

Enough already. If they can't even manage to keep the economy on an even keel, why listen to the rest of their garbage? Our elite have failed utterly. They're ten out of ten for paying generous tribute to their own brilliance, but that whole reality thing keeps letting them down.

Shocka! Femiloon Is Man-Hating Headcase

Hey, maybe we could set her up with John Venables? Either way, we win.

Lord Ashcroft Killed James Bulger!

Or possibly not, but at least that might get our fearless MSM to start investigating the increasingly bizarre revelations about John Venables, the certified '100% rehabilitated' killer... who's back in jail.

As I understand the hipster position, revealing what criteria the legal system used to determine that a convicted killer was, in fact, a fluffy bunny rabbit of a man may lead to the Earth falling into the Sun. Meanwhile, demanding critics of the government submit to the financial equivalent of a prostate exam has no negative implications whatsoever for democracy.

Speaking personally, nothing says 'robust scientific process' like an unaccountable cabal of activist liberals awarding each other contracts to carry out a process we aren't allowed to know anything about. I wouldn't say the rehab industry was slippery, but I hear the folks at UEA are complaining that they're ruining the good name of science. Meanwhile, the only way the MSM will take an interest is if Lord Ashcroft turns out to be moonlighting on the parole board.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm thinking we ought to be drawing a chalk outline around British journalism right about now.

Amy Winehouse Was Right

Achtung Peasants! Our hipster betters command you to support the release of this guy. After all, everyone knows the rehab industry is the very model of scientific rigour and impeachable integrity.

Besides, what could possibly go wrong?

ANOM

....this being the opposite of a Man Of No Appearance.

Down in the comments to this post Lurker points out this case, where Asians 'yoofs' victimised...well, who knows? Apparently, they're Victims of No Appearance.

I guess it's a bit like the Ultimate Question & Answer in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where knowledge of one automatically precludes knowledge of the other in the same universe. I guess we have the Men of No Appearance, or we have Victims of No Appearance.

Of course, it goes without saying that Asian or not, to the MSM, they'll always be 'Men of No Affiliation'.

Beeboid Self-Awareness Fail

Bad news everyone! Supa-smart Beeboid ecoflack Richard Black has got our number:

I’m not surprised at the level of UK scepticism as the main impacts of CC are decades away and in other places.

Yep, that's us. We're just a bunch of selfish, insular bigots, blind to other people's suffering.

We should be more sensitive, like Ricky:

I agree that a short term disaster would be effective in persuading people.

A-huh! So we shouldn't ignore potential human suffering, instead we should fantasise about how we could use it to push our goofy cult.

How very.... sophisticated.

Gosh, it's a mystery why there credibility is in the landfill with the rest of the UEA's data. Perhaps they need to have another 17 meetings with each other to try and work it out?