It's the Hallmark of Good Policy

Call Me Dave has unveiled his new policy: people should be nicer to each other. Take that opponents of niceness! Hard to believe there was a time when Tories modelled themselves on Churchill, not Muriel Kleen.

While we wait for a definitive statement of the Tories position on cute puppies and long walks at sunset, let's try and refine what exactly the Dyson of La Paz is actually saying here. Is it 'nice' to call people 'fruitcakes, loons and closet racists' or 'maniacs', compare them to Nazis or claim they're responsible for deaths from AIDS ? Those first two were Call Me Dave on UKIP and Peter Hitchens respectively, while Tory leader in the London Assembly Brian Coleman compared people flying the Cross of St George during the 2006 World Cup to Nazis and Francis Maude claimed Lady Thatcher was partially responsible for his brother's death from AIDS.

The deeper point Camerong is trying to make is not completely stupid. He wants more non-governmental involvement in curing social problems. That could work actually. Consider how much the Catholic Church already does in the area of adoption, for example.

What ?

Oh right! See, that's the problem right there, that's what's so infuriating about Cameroonacy, the endless amounts of cake had and eaten. For all that Cameron talks about passing more responsibility onto people, he still wants to keep in place Nu Lab's elephantine state, together with Frankensteinesque social engineering, absurd PC, and the taxes required to support it all. So you still won't be able to get an appointment with your GP, but it'll be your own fault for not being pro-active enough.

Religion

The always NSFW TDL on intelligent design (bad arguments for).

It's Different For Libs (Part 1521)

The BBC is just disgusted that anyone can pay tribute to the Nazi sense of showmanship. Well, except them, obviously. That's a whole different thing.

I'll Take All You Jew-Lovers, Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere.... Except Here & Now, Obviously

Blogosphere was having trouble
What a sad, sad story
Needed a new leader to restore
Its former glory
Where, oh, where was he?
Where could that man be?
We looked around and then we found
The man for you and me

Alan Hart: he really is the gift that keeps on giving, isn't he ?. You may recall that his cunning plan to stop people talking about the what he said was to threaten to sue everyone on the planet (and that's not to let off those little green scumbags either!). Well, now it turns out DSD took him up on his challenge, at which point Al suddenly decided that when he said he'd sue anyone, that wasn't exactly what he meant. Apparently, DSD has to give him copies of seven forms of ID, a blood sample, teeth impression and, by the way, could he find a good solicitor for Al, too ?

Hey, who'd have thunk it ? A Lib running away from a fight. It's like a double hat-tip to Python, channeling Sir Robin and the Black Knight both at once. And besides, DSD is STOOPID!!!!! Furthermore, we understand Alan is considering the possibility of escalating to calling DSD a poo poo head.

You've got to admire the excuse though. Al's worried that his solicitor could be targeted by an 'organised barrage of hate mail'. Wow! That's even worse than a disorganised one, where all the stuff just flops through the letterbox, any old how. If only they knew someone who could arrange a restraining order!

Still, it looks like Jenny Tonge was right! This is how firmly International Jewry has its talons around the neck of the working man: they even control the Royal Mail. Yes, it's true: The Jew is using the Post Office as muscle against you. And you are left there helpless.

I'm telling you though, these are sad, sad times for the Zionist World Government. From the glory days of murdering God and starting all the wars in history, to signing solicitors up for junk mail. Where did it all go wrong ? I mean, it has to be said that Al's mates favour a more direct approach. On the other hand though, they haven't yet escalated to the 'mocking references on the internet' stage, so I guess Al's right: the real enemy is the Jews Zionists, after all.

Dale Vs Dale

I told you he kept asking for it. Iain Dale has just sniped at ATW after they noted his Cameroonacy. No, says Iain, he's a wild blog tiger on the road to Mad City, so don't diss his 'tude, dawg!

Speaking personally, I'm thinking the fact he feels the need to remind people how independently independent he is at least once a week kind of speaks for itself. But let's consider the evidence. Let's look at what Dale wrote about the Tories insane plan to cut a deal with the Lib Dems and put up Greg Dyke as their joint candidate for London Mayor.

Back in the far off days of Wednesday April 18th, Dale considered the plan 'bizarre' and claimed that he'd have to 'swallow very hard indeed to lift a finger to campaign for a candidate like Greg Dyke, who doesn't have a Conservative bone in his body'. Not only that, but in post titled 'Fallout From the London Nightmayor', he called the plan a 'a fraud on the electorate'.

Apparently, the delivery boy must have stopped by with the latest batch of kool aid this weekend. Suddenly it turns out that 'a fraud on the electorate' is actually proof positive 'that David Cameron is able to think the unthinkable and to delve into political areas no one would expect him to'. Apparently, proposing a 'bizarre' plan proves that Cameron is a 'risk taker', unlike cowardy custard Ming Campbell, who's so gutless he actually thinks candidates should actually support the party they're standing for.

Hey, here's a free clue: if your plan is too squalid even for the Lib Dems, that means it's really low. But this is where Cameron is taking the Tories, with Iain Dale following him around, explaining that 'fraud' actually means 'thinking the unthinkable'. I guessing he applies the same standards of accuracy when he describes himself as independent.

No Comment

Mark from Blognor Regis points out more Wikipedia fun.

UPDATE:

All good things come to an end, but fortunately Mark has a screen grab.

Moonlighting

Over at TWA, I've written some more on this.

Enormously Huge Scandal

In so far as merely being mentioned on the BNP's website is now to be taken as evidence of being linked with them, I guess we're justified in pointing out that Nick Griffin has even actively campaigned for the Tories. Have they no shame ?

Two From Oz

Tim Blair points out some of the contradicitons of the Left, while Pommygrante proposes some new laws of politics.

Dead Lebanese Guy Oppressed By Britain

Interesting coincidence of stories over at ATW. First, there's the news that the race hustlers want to rebrand St George. Yep, out goes the unilateral aggression against members of the reptile community (a key demographic for Libs), in comes St George as representative of Britain's oppressed ethnic minorities', and St George's Day as a 'day of dissent', celebrating Britain's tradition of 'rebellion against the abuse of power.

Are these guys being paid by the cliché or what ?

As it happens, we do have a noble group of dissenters fighting the abuse of power right now. Yep, The Man wants to use The Power to twist the minds of The Kids, so they'll buy into The System. Call it a hunch, but I'm not thinking the BBC will be producing any drama-documentaries about these guys speaking 'truth to power' anytime soon.

Lamest Smear Ever

I've said before that I don't want to turn this into IainDaleSux.Com, but he doesn't half ask for it. Take his latest revelation.

'Weak' is not the word. But let's just think about what the Tories are saying though. Here we have UKIP, a party that believes in maintaining British sovereignty, small government and law and order, and the Tories are busily claiming that makes UKIP indistinguishable from the folks worrying about the purity of their Aryan essence ?

That's a common enough argument amongst the loony left, but it's a new development for soi dissant Conservatives to use this line of argument. After all, isn't that all stuff the Tories claim they support as well ? So which is it ? Are the Tories lying when they claim to embrace these ideas, or when they claim UKIP are extremists for believing the self-same things ? Or - and this is the one I'd go for - are they a bunch of opportunists lacking any real ideological ballast whatsoever ?

Where Are Our Nuts ?

Ex-Beeboid Alan Hart explains who's really behind the (possible) murder of BBC correspondant Alan Johnson. Don't be shocked, but it turns out to be the Jews what done it. Maybe he could help O J find the 'real killers' ?

That's the thing, not just the proportion of BBC staff who retire then come out of the closet as lunatics, but that it's always the same type of lunacy. If the BBC is truly unbiased, shouldn't there be an equal number of staff who believe that, say, the Left murdered Robin Cook after they found out he was actually working with MI-5 in an attempt to expose their secret alliance with Al-Quiada ?

Bottom line: if the BBC must recruit nuts, at least let's have an equal representation of nuts.

MSM Backtracks On Need For On-Line Civility

Leftists and the MSM - no wait, that's a redundancy - have been busy recently burning up innocent electrons in the name of calling for bloggers to stop being so Conservative nasty. So let's see how our betters deal with a genuinely sensitive topic. Here's the Guardian's Comment Is Free on the Virginia massacre:

I think American gun laws should be loosened so that drunk people and 4 year olds are no longer discriminated against.

The crazy mo' fo's put their right to bear arms above their right to get a broken bone mended for free and then want sympathy when one of the 300 million halfwits works out which end the 'death' comes out of.

Not from me buster..

That's from a creature calling himself Mexicola. As one of the first comments, it's been up all day, without any of the 'mods' seeming to have any problem with it. But maybe he's just one of that tiny minority of extremists, right ?

Next up, there's 'freepoland' - whose name incidentally provides further evidence that Lefties are always ready to take up a cause, so long as events have rendered it moot - proving once again that multicultralists believe all cultures are equal, except western ones:

The right to 'bear arms' always sounded like a piece of mediaeval pageantry. And it results in mediaeval barbarity when kids don't understand that life and guns don't mix.

Yep, those mediaeval barons were notorious for encouraging the serfs to be well-armed and self-reliant. But anyway: 'Kids' ? Liberals want five years olds to be taught about oral sex, but a 23 year old is a child ? Hey, who'd have thunk it ? A Lib trying to shift the blame from an evil degenerate onto them GUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNS!

At least 'Lennorthfield' cuts out proxies, like the Right to Bear Arms. No, the real enemy is freedom itself.

The cult of the individual is the source of this horror. The US and the UK and slowly creeping into continental Europs. Self centredness, lack of respect for others and an unswerving belief in one's right to do whatever the hell one wants, regardless of consequence, is to blame. And we have taken to this paradigm like ducks take to water.

The answer? I dunno, maybe teaching people that its how much you do for the people that's important not how much you ger from them?

Yep, the killer was a product of the crazed individualism of Asian culture. At least there are still some parts of Korea free of the cancer of individual rights!

But that's a side-issue, the real question is this: what are the odds that the stuff he's 'done for people' happened to involve the happy by-product of a fat public sector wage packet and generous pension at about 38. I say 2-1 on.

From 'definitivecynic' comes this insight into the Liberal mindset:

What absolutely amazes me is the lengths the gun lobby will go to in order to find a place within the debate that lets them defend their hobby/fetish/constitutional sacred right to bear arms/whatever while still looking as if they care about young people not being blown to pieces with guns.

A guy from the Virgnina Defense Coalition (or some such tossy nonsense) was on Newsnight last night suggesting that if students were allowed to carry guns then they could defend themselves against this sort of thing, presumably by waging a full gun war on any intruder and hoping to win by sheer force of numbers.

That must be some ammo if it can blow people to pieces. But since when has utter lack of knowledge stopped Liberals talking about anything ?

Nope, the real pearler is the talk of a 'full gun war' (huh ?). Yep, maniacs wandering round shooting people ? That's bad, but people defending themselves ? Liberals have never heard anything so terrifying. Hey, someone could get hurt.

Next, there's a contribution from the winner of 'most unconvincing screen name', 2007. Yep it's 'ExArmy', proving once again that if you were talking about crop rotation in Chile, Liberals would still find a way to inject their love for surrender into the debate:

If I lived in America I would carry, hell America is a gung ho society shoot before you talk as the Iraq operation proved. As they would like to do in Iran if Iraq had and as Waco and Ruby ridge proves. No wonder Americans on both the left and right are scared of the American government.

But... but... wasn't St Bill in the Oval Orifice Office when Ruby Ridge and Waco happened ? I guess, for the purposes of attacking America, even Slick Willy gets thrown overboard.

Meanwhile, if you do think your government regularly sends out death squads to kill innocent citizens, would you really want to have to rely on agents of the state for your personal protection ?

But no, Liberals see no conflict in claiming that the US government is a fascist dicatorship, and demanding that the only people allowed to carry arms should be agents of that state. Here's 'southoftheborder':

there's no way that effective gun control can come into to force in america with the powerful dynasties running the country still in power. there's too much money and influence involved.
a sad result of this saddest of events will probably be more guns sold and more profits for the 'masters of war'. just so some 'patriotic' vigilante feels they can be a hero next time.

Yep, curse those deviants who might fire back at a crazed gunman. Don't they know homicidal maniacs have rights too ?

Then there's this comment from 'DisUall'

Look on the bright side - much better for Americans to stay at home killing each other than roaming the world slaughtering innocent men, women and children wherever and whenever they take the fancy.
Let's hope this aspect of the violence-obsessed US culture thrives.

Seeing as how one demographic is represented more than any other in these statistics, I'm wondering about the likely response of the Guardian mods to anyone reposting this with all the references to Yanks replaced by references to you know who.

Ditto, with this comment from 'questionnaire'

Of course guns are a problem. But Canada, Switzerland and Northern Italy have higher per capita gun-ownership rates.
It has happened elsewhere. But it is happening in the USA with alarming frequency, so explanations based solely upon individual pathology hold no water.
If one views this in the broader perspective of very high murder and imprisonment rates, mass media productions obsessed with death and violence and an aggressive foreign policy, it becomes obvious that there is something fundamentally wrong with mainstream American culture. It is beginning to look like an experiment gone wrong.
Whatever it is, Britain is beginning to show signs of it too.

Except it is overwhemingly not 'mainstream America' that suffers from these crimes. As in the UK, the violence is concentrated in certain demographics. Funnily enough, it's the Left doesn't want us to ask what's wrong with those cultures though.

The difference between the USA and Europe is that the Americans are much more religious. The combination of religion and weaponry is very dangerous, they value life much less than the more secular Europeans.
Also the religious-mindset is too fatalistic to bother with fixing the problem. They blame 'God' or 'Devil' and abrogate their responsibility rather than face reality.
There is no point asking Americans why they don't restrict gun ownership every time dozens of youngsters are massacred. Even if this happened every week it wouldn't occur to most Americans that there was anything they could or indeed should do about it. They'd just go to Church and pray.
Its a crying shame as its a lovely country and the people are incredibly friendly and hospitable but they've got a bad case of religion and it has a price that is paid in blood.

Yep, Americans are violent - even when they're actually Korean - because of Jesus. Isn't that just like a Guardian reader ? A Korean guy goes nuts in Virgina, but he still finds a way to blame it on a Jew.

HuffPo Published This ?

OK, three times and it's a trend: have a look at this one. Looks like my theory was right, after all.

MSM Death Groupies

I'm guessing there weren't many bloggers around when the nation lost Sir Frederick Mercury, but I like to think Social Conservatives would have had enough class not to spend the day after claiming the loss of a music legend shows what's wrong with the gay lifestyle.

For all the supposed nastiness of the Right, it's hard to imagine anything equivalent to today's frenzy of US hating. The bodies have barely started cooling in Virginia, but already the MSM is busy explaining why they always knew you couldn't thrust them damn yankees. Apparently, there's no vast majority of peace-loving Americans. Ditto, with swords, oak leaves and gold cluster, for the hopolophobia. Apparently, a lone criminal slaughtering huge numbers of law-abiding citizens means we have to crack down on law-abiding citizens. Plus, if Reynard breaks into the hen house, the farmer should really do something about the chickens. Laban takes this idiocy head on.

Not The 300

Wow! It was bad enough when the Left was coddling Islamofascists, but now it looks like even an outbreak of killer zombies can't distract them from the real threat. The Right's often accused of being prejudiced, but I think I can speak for most Conservatives when I say that even the French are better than a horde of flesh-eating undead.

Not much better,obviously, but measurably so.

The thing is, not only are there already approximately 8 billion movies using a variety of moronic metaphors to indict Conservatives, it's not even a new development for the zombie genre.

At this point, all I can do is quote this again:

After forty years of liberal rule in Hollywood it is nihilism that’s old-fashioned. It is moral relativism that is tired. It is political correctness, the always-noble people of color, the always-evil white guy, and the metrosexual that is cliched. A film with a clear divide between good and evil is something new. A film that celebrates patriotism, heroism, sacrifice, freedom, and honor is something revolutionary. In 1955 300 would be old-fashioned. In 2007 it makes a counter-culture statement as strong as Easy Rider in its day.

Dept of the Obvious

Again I say you could run a whole blog just reporting cases of Libs breathlessly reporting stuff anyone with half a brain could have told them. Here’s today’s entry.

Who’d have thunk it ? Paying everyone the same irrespective of how hard or well they work results in people who don’t do much of either. It’s almost as if incentives matter. Meanwhile, we’re left wondering what it is about Liberals that makes them so obsessed with pushing a policy which favours the lazy and stupid ?

How Not To Defend Abortion Rights

Completely deranged article pointed to by the folks over at ATW. Abortion as jus’ good mothering ? There’s taking a new angle on the subject, and there’s completely unhinged – this is in group two.

On the plus side though, you have to respect her candour. Pro-abortion campaigners often claim to have come to their position only after years of agonising, but now here’s one telling the truth - she supports abortion because she thinks its a good thing. Hell, exaggeration for comic effect is pretty much half this blog, but even I couldn’t come up with line about the kitchen worktops (seriously, if you haven’t clicked through to the Times, it’s worth it just for that).

No matter where you stand on abortion, something surely gets killed. It’s just a matter of whether it’s an actual human being, or just some kind of mindless, soulless living cadaver, sort of like a lawyer. And that’s all without taking into account the dangers to the mother, both general to any type of surgery, and the specific risks of this procedure in terms of increased risk of cancer, infertility and the like. Executive summary: the whole abortion-as-female-empowerment ideal is moronic.

Then there’s the extra-yukky factor, the weird subtext behind it all, best summed up in the line about a ‘child that, through no fault of it’s own, would be the destructor of a marriage, a family, a parent.’ Yowser! No issues there then.

It’s that thing again: moral seriousness, or lack thereof. Never mind the specifics of abortion, there’s the wider issue of what this sort of thing says about our culture ? Where a woman is writing about the empowering effect of killing her foetus, or the horrific effects of children on family life, that raises questions like whether or not the cult of abortion – based as it is on death, or at least, the prevention of life – has a coarsening effect on society ? Bottom line: surely I’m not the only one whose sympathies are naturally with the pro-killing side of the debate, but feels my stomach turn over a little when I see rhetoric like this from abortion defenders.

No Violence Here!

Have Liberals traded in cocaine for sodium penthol ? In the self-same week we’ve had Princess Tony caught in public admitting that there’s an overlap between the demographic that’s most likely to be involved in gang violence and the target market for Kop Killa Kollective’s new ditty ‘Da Ho Had It Komin’, the Observer reported this.

Hey, it is the Observer, so naturally the Dept of Absurd Rationalisations has been hard at work but – as commonly happens – the effect is the opposite to the one intended, emphasising just how indefensible this all is. The winner of ‘Best in Show’ is undoubtedly the claim that the murder was partially down to the failure to fund racially-exclusive leisure facilities. Can you imagine, in the wildest extremes of possibility, the Observer ever justifying tacit support for racially-motivated homicide amongst native Britons by citing the shortage of ‘whites-only’ swimming pools ? Call it a wild-shot in the dark, but I’m thinking folks who demand apartheid down the leisure centre are already pretty far down the road to justifying racial murder.

See, that’s the thing. There’s no need for talk of ‘institutional racism’ here. Here it is front and centre. A racially-motivated homicide occurs in front of a bus load of witnesses, who promptly shrug and go do whatever scumbags do all day. If the players had been the other way round, the BBC would already have sixteen programs on the go.

UPDATE:

Thinking about it further, you have to admire how the Observer's story manages to include a full load of rationalisations for racial violence, without ever spelling out that it was a racist murder. Well played, Sir!

Meanwhile, I'm left wondering if there is a deeply Conservative point under all this. Steve wondered whether the black communities acceptance of (support for ?) mob violence in the 1980s created the conditions for today's crime wave. Me, I'm thinking it proves the absurdity of 'hate crimes' laws. Conservatives argue against hate crimes laws because they suggest some murders are to be taken more seriously than others. But maybe that's cuts the other way too. Maybe there's a connection between the violence and anarchy in the black community and a culture where murdering whites is no big thing ? Maybe murder is murder after all ?

Something A Little Lighter

Now, this is funny.

Violence ? These Guys ?

As I understand it, we're now allowed to mention the mayhem in the black community, but only if we agree that it's all the fault of whites. I guess the race hustlers might have a point, after all, who could imagine guys like this being involved in anything disreputable ?

Liberal Slapfight

Red on reds are always fun, but I have to admit to admiring Blair's courage in actually pointing out that 'Britain' doesn't have a problem with knife violence. Rural villages, Golders Green and Chinatown all remain mostly free of gang warfare. Pointing out that gang violence is centred on certain demographics seems to be the modern equivalent of saying 'Jehovah'. Still, Blair being Blair, he effortlessly manages to steer the truck into a ditch.

It needed to be addressed by a tailored counter-attack in the same way as football hooliganism was reined in by producing measures aimed at the specific problem, rather than general lawlessness.

Well, yesssssss! In the technical sense of the word, soccer hooliganism has been mostly beaten, but take a walk round the average city centre on a Friday night. The mayhem still happens, it's just more dispersed. Footy hooliganism is a textbook case of the Liberal tendency for treating the symptoms not the cause. The analogies are there, but I'm guessing they're not the ones Blair wants you to draw.

On the other hand, at least Blair makes a kind of sense. What of the ten mile long queue of black activists, who've been filling up the airwaves all day claiming that the black community is already facing up to its problems and, besides, its all down to poverty... deprivation... alienation... racism... the vast right wing conspiracy... Jews... global warming ?

Yep, they're addressing their problems.... by blaming whitey. OK, homies, I'll buy that, but it has to be both ways. If black guys killing other black guys is the natives fault, then every time a black kid gets his stethoscope, that's our achievement, right ?

Oops. Guess not.

The readiness of supposed 'community leaders' to fall back on victimhood and flirt with racial paranoia raises the question of why exactly they're considered part of the solution rather than part of the problem. But what about Blair ? Just how much cheese does it take for Blair to come out with this:

I think that is to do with the fact that particular youngsters are being brought up in a setting that has no rules, no discipline, no proper framework around them.

Gosh, someone should have said something! Wait...the Right has been saying exactly that for years. Meanwhile, the Left has been waging a jihad on the very concept of boundaries. If Blair was really worried about kids being deprived of rules, he probably shouldn't have presided over the castration of the school discipline system.

Ditto, who was it who set up the MacPherson Show Trial ? The central lunacy of MacPherson was that the witch hunters started from a premise that the police were so obviously racist, they didn't need to actually provide any, y'know, evidence. All of which means we have ended up with all manner of perverse outcomes like this one:

It might seem strange that an investigation into the stabbing of a teenager would lead any sensible person to conclude that we should restrict the power of the police to search young people for things like knives

Blair's shamelessness have been one of his few consistent features over the years, but if chutzpah was dynamite, he'd be on the Moon right about now.

Indeed, it's a sign of just how much damage the Left has done to political discourse in this country that merely pointing out an undeniable fact - that the violence is concentrated in black areas - is treated as controversial in the first place.

Even More Supporting-of-the-Troops

Thinking about that last post, it occurs to me that the Navy still isn’t the most obvious example of a British institution throwing in the towel. Just what can we expect them to do in a culture where even soi dissant Conservatives have taken against the military ?

Look at Iain Dale for a perfect exemplar of how the Tory Party supports the troops. He writes a twittering puff piece about loveable Jack-The-Lad Piers Morgan. Hello ?

For the record, Morgan was not fired because he squabbled with his proprietor, he got caught bonking his secretary or he dropped LSD in the punch bowl at the Christmas Party. Morgan was fired because one day in 2004, he sat at his editor’s desk and thought ‘You know what we really need more of ? Bogus war crimes story based on faked pictures’!

No doubt some over-enthusiastic controversialists would admire Morgan’s wacky jape. Ditto, many of the L3 scum would buy into Morgan’s absurd defence that an editor could hardly be expected to check a story and besides, while the story was completely bogus, it reflected something that could have happened somewhere in Iraq. But what’s with an endorsement from the internet face of Call-Me-Dave’s prissy princesses of PC posturing ?

Hey, if you’re going to support the Tories PC purging, you’d think you could spare some outrage for a guy who takes part in a hoax designed to defame the Army during time of war. The Left keeps claiming that almost any action Britain takes will provoke terrorism. Well, OK, Libs, here’s a guy producing genuinely provocative material out of whole cloth - shouldn’t he be held accountable for that ? Even if, like me, you’ve noticed that it’s easier to note the things that don’t provoke the RoP to violence, we’ve still got a guy who’s attempted to defame his nation’s forces – and still maintains the ‘truthiness’ of his charges. Even if you’re a moral nihilist, this should suggest a certain something about his likely credibility.

Bottom line: the only thing Morgan should be writing is a prison diary, but no, in the Nu Tories even producing libellous rubbish about people serving their country in a war zone is no big thing. With that kind of 'moral leadership' on display, it’s hard to blame chav scum for lacking moral conviction.

Screw-Ups Yes, Heroes No

The saga of the Iranian hostages having easily made the transition from potential tragedy to certain farce, I have a confession to make: in some respects it’s a weight off my mind. See, I’ve run into a few Naval folks, and 90% of the time I think ‘what a tosser!’, closely followed by a vague guilt about thinking badly about one of the people defending my right to call them tossers. So, naturally it’s a relief to find that they are tossers after all.

Well, yeah, you can’t say how you’d handle a situation like that until it happens, but just how much worse could it have been handled ? Seriously, just what exactly did these professional warriors do that couldn’t have been done by Joe Public ? But let’s not lump all the blame on the Navy. The Romans knew that an Army reflects the society from whence it came. Need I say more ?

For proof of the real pathology affecting the Forces, consider that while the MSM was offering huge deals to the Navy’s answer to Jade Goody, the BBC was busy spiking a drama about VC winner Johnson Beharry as ‘too positive’. What more can you say ? Well, other than ‘against the war but for the troops’ must mean something different in Liberalland.

Then there’s the many specific policy decisions that have damaged efficiency. Take the PC recruitment policies that lead to people like Jabbah Turney being on an (alleged) warship in the first place. In fact, it goes further than that. The innuendo-proof RAF sent a team to a Manchester gay pride festival, complete with a mock up of the front end of a Eurofighter, so gays could climb into their cockpit, grab the joystick and fantasise about thrusting upwards. What could possibly go wrong ?

But that’s not the worst of it. Aside from the specific idiocies, there’s the logic that underlies it all, the belief all this talk of the ‘art of war’ and the like is just macho blather designed to prevent members of the headless lesbian community from getting their fair share of the cake. Ditto, the same idea underpins the Left’s determination to subordinate the Forces to the courts, via ‘human rights’ legislation and the like. Once you accept that dogfighting with a Mirage is just another job, sort of like working in a bank, why not have m’learned friends picking over every high-G roll ?

Well, here’s the news: if you remake the Armed Forces as a uniformed branch of the civil service, don’t be surprised when the troops act like the average civil servant.

Part of the impetus for the founding of the welfare state was the Boer War – or more specifically, the lousy physical condition of recruits for that war. Maybe history is repeating itself: could there be a better barometer of just how far our society has fallen than this case ? So don’t be too harsh on the Navy. After all, they’ve done what the Left wanted, look at these obese, whining chav scum and tell me we don’t have a Navy that ‘looks like Britain’.

Liberal Victory

Ross F reports proof positive not only that Liberal's default foreign policy position is surrender, but that they think that's a good thing.

Words Fail Me

For further insight into the Neverland of Cameroonacy, consider this latest proposal.

In a parallel proposal, I understand those found guilty of tax evasion will be given a 'limited' right to keep the money.

What It Did For The NHS, It Can Do For Policing

For those few folks out there still believing that the Cameroonatics are a bunch of geniuses who just play idiots on TV, I’ve got some really bad news.

I mean, really, just look at these proposals. In so far as the Tory plans are distinguishable from those of Nu Lab, it’s because they take already stupid ideas and push them that idiotic bit further.

Take the question of meetings between police and members of the communidee. Where doesn’t that already happen ? Police management love to spend their time on community action forum planning group committees, it’s actual law enforcement they can’t stand. Now, they’ll have a whole new herd of white elephants to spend their time on and for what ? Community involvement sounds like a good idea, but who really wants policing priorities to be decided by the type of people who’d go to these meetings ?

As it happens, we already have a whole infrastructure to provide local accountability – if, indeed, local government can’t control the police properly, then that surely speaks to a more profound failure of government ?

Come to think of it, even the Tories don’t seem to like the idea of local control after all. Hence, this:

It suggests that the 43 police forces in England and Wales must either co-operate more on serious crime or a national serious crime force should be established.

So, more local accountability, but also more centralisation. Cake, have/eat, much ? Ditto, with the idea of a national, super-special, elite, serious crime force, and besides, in which universe exactly are police management reluctant to set up special task forces. Again, special teams they got, it’s the day to day policing they don’t want to do.

They also want stronger local accountability, with directly elected police commissioners to replace police authorities.

Can the Tories finally have stumbled across a sensible policy ?

The elected commissioners would control budgets, target setting and policing plans, while chief constables would be in "operational control" of their force

That would be a 'No' then.

Isn’t that just like a bunch of Oxbridge graduates ? You can almost hear them now, explaining how their ‘policing plan’ was just brilliant but those idiots in blue bungled it. Just what the country needs, another tranche of highly-paid managerial babblers, busily drafting vision statements and nudging the elbows of the folks doing real work.

But think this one over. The Tories idea for bringing more accountability into policing is to parachute in a whole bunch of folks who don’t have any actual responsibility for policing.

No, what it’s all about is what it’s always about with Blu Labour. The Saddam thing.

Tory police reform spokesman Nick Herbert said… increasing the accountability of the police was important, as was the need to "drive up performance" of the police by modernising work practices.

"We need to recognise that policing has changed and society has changed and we need a differently shaped workforce to respond to today's needs."

Change, change, change! Quick everyone, let's re-engineer our core processes for the opportunities of the new century. Or, alternatively, why not stop screwing around and let the police police ?

Yep, things have definitely changed, in the sense of getting much worse. But isn’t that just typical for the Tories. They start yapping about accountability and the like, but it always turns out that the problem is with the worker bees.

So there you have it: the Tory vision for law enforcement. More Potemkin communidee input from the bored, the mad, the political hacks and the single-issue fanatics, plus a whole new class of managerial bloodsuckers, employed to administer regular floggings to the folks who actually do the work. What could go wrong ?

And Another Thing...

Thinking further about yesterday's post, it occurred to me that we really need to check the scorecard here. If I get the Left's position right, it's that '24' is dangerous because it leads people to support torture, but all those programs that present dysfunctional insanity as hip and cool are 'just entertainment'. Right ?

"Ultra-Right-Wing Boneheads"

This is what passes for rational debate at the BBC.

Oh, hang on - I hear a whimpering from the corner. Mr Liberal would like to point out that this post was in the BBC's magazine section, so it should be counted as commentary, rather than news. Well, alright, now lets see the figures on how often Conservative commentators get invited to denounce 'degerenate terrorist enabling Liberal vermin' - I'd start the betting at 'never' and work down from there.

But let's not let the superficial bias blind us to the deeper bias evidenced here. The fat blusterer is ranting about 24. Yep, that 24, but it takes more than climbing into bed with the truthers and swallowing whole the Liberal metacontext to shrive a single suggestion that the Right might have a point.

So think that one over. There's no Liberal bias in the MSM, but when a program gives the merest hint of a Conservative point, it's enough to have Liberals start channelling Linda Blair in The Exorcist. How very balanced!

Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

Turns out John Jeffries thinks Christianity is kind of rubbish.

Ah no - maybe that's unfair. He just wants to remake it to take out all the nasty stuff, and make it a kinder, gentler touchy-feely bunny rabbit of a philosophy.

Wait - I was right first time.

So who cares anyway ? The moonbats have always hated Christianity. Except it turns out to be that John Jeffries, the bloke who wanted to be the Anglican Church's first gay bishop until those nasty homophobes forced a climbdown.

Who'd have thunk it, eh ?

Looks like those nuts had a point after all. In so far as the crucifixion is kind of important for Christians, John Jeffries views really are incompatible with the religion. Maybe it would be better for the world if there was a faith which emphasised the happy, smiley Jesus, but it wouldn't be Christianity.

As ever, there's a wider issue here. Yet again we have a gay rights activist claiming he 'just wants to be one of the lads', who turns out on closer inspection to have a radical agenda. Equally, whatever your views on the mechanics and morality of putt bunching, nothing speaks for the incompatibility of the wider gay lifestyle with Christianity more than Jeffries attempts to rewrite the Bible.

This the key point. What those pesky 'homophobes' perceived clearly was that Jeffries' support for the status quo was purely a tactical and transitory thing. As with many other institutions, the Church could stick to its traditions, or it could reinvent itself as some kind of touchy-feely big tent, but it surely could not do both.

Red on Red

Ever since the Left somehow managed to bilk people into believing the Nazis were right-wing, they've been pushing the line that indexing tax thresholds or school vouchers inevitably leads to Auschwitz. Hence their desire to remake the history curriculum as Nazism 101, complete with painfully contrived analogies to Conservatism. The only problem is that it's all gone horribly wrong for them.

Isn't that just like Liberals ? They've spent years pushing the 'Conservatives as Nazis' meme, but when they meet some folks who really do share common ground with the Nazis, they roll over. To return to a common theme, this is how essentially amoral Liberalism is. They've spent years claiming to be terrified that British Conservatives could create the Fourth Reich, but now it turns out Nazism is no big thing after all.

So much too for all the Liberal posturing about 'challenging racism'. If the Adolf Hitler Fan Club don't count as racists, who does ? Ditto, if someone's offended by people criticising Hitler, I don't think we can really call him a moderate.

This is Liberals telling us who they are. This it it: Liberalism in action. Even Hitler doesn't motivate them, not if it means they'd be on the same side as Western Civilisation. Here's the nihilistic train wreck of Liberalism in all its glory.

All of which raises a question: just what are they going to do with all their 'Bush=Hitler' signs ?

Really Offensive

Hey, does anyone know if the Iranians have forced any of the hostages to make videos ? Wait, I've just checked the BBC, where they've apparently got them on continuous 5 minute rotation.

Yep, the folks who refused to broadcast the Motoons have no problem airing kidnappers' home movies. I dunno, is it just me who finds our state broadcaster headlining every show with the site of British citizens being ritually humiliated also kind of offensive ?

More to the point, I'm guessing the Iranians haven't managed to persuade their captives to take part in these little productions purely by the force of reason. Nope, they almost certainly been threatened, and probably tortured as well. The Iranians are doing this to produce propaaganda they hope the MSM will pick up and disseminate.

All of which is by way of saying that the BBC is tacitly encouraging the torture of British citizens. We have no problem with seeing that those who pay for child pr)n are as guilty as those who produce it, so surely the same standard should apply to those who disseminate material produced by torture and coercion ?

Oh sure, a boycott by the BBC - or even the whole of the British MSM - alone might not stop these videos being made, but then again, there are plenty of nonces out there, but that doesn't mean we should force people to pay for their perversions.

Nothing

Who says the government can't get people freed ? The BBC has been pushing this story all day and always next to reports from Iran. I guess they're trying to suggest an equivalence between this scumbag and the Iran hostages.

A lot of folks would call this moral equivalence. I wouldn't, I'd call it moral nihilism. If you can't see the difference between professional soldiers and a guy who thinks blowing up the No 27 is a fine way to make his point, then your moral compass is terminally twisted. If nothing else, can these people stop yammering about 'atrocities' ? If setting off a bomb on a crowded train is no big, then sure as hell nothing the British Army has done in Iraq rises to the level of evil.

But, of course, it's all tactical. If nothing else, the Iran hostage crisis has proven just how bogus all that Liberal moralising really is. The Red Cross, Amnesty International and all the rest of the caravan of fools have suddenly been struck dumb. Liberal morality turns out to mean whatever they claim it means. We always knew the Left was full of it, and now they've been exposed.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....

As a bare minimum, I'm thinking that 'shocking' and 'provocative' artwork shouldn't just be another variation on something that's been done approximately 800 000 times before. Ditto, shouldn't a verdict of 'courageous' actually require facing some risk ?

Hey, if anyone's boldly sticking two fingers up to the zeitgeist, it's the protesters. How come we never see glowing tributes to their courage ? Surely their work counts as 'thought provoking', even if the thought it provokes goes something along the lines of
'giving house room to people who want to insult your customer's deeply-held beliefs probably isn't such a good idea'.

Bottom line: same ol', same ol'. Liberals claim the right to insult and abuse the Right, then when the return fire comes in, they try and cast themselves as, well, Jesus on the Cross.

Wilberforce, Sayat and the Left

Unlike Laban, I do blame the BBC. We’re talking about a bunch of folks who can’t make a cup of coffee without lauding their own anti-establishment credentials, but whenever the received wisdom tilts Left, they’ll gobble it up with a shovel.

It’s true enough though that the commemoration of Britain outlawing the slave trade was always going to degenerate into a Hate-Britannia fest. If you claimed there were echoes from the Nazi era in modern Germany, Liberals would want you jailed for hate speech, but events 200 years ago ? Practically yesterday!

Needless to say, the Left’s position is absurd. The Anglosphere was involved in the slave trade. Fine. So was everyone else. Liberals objecting to slavery in the Anglosphere, and only the Anglosphere, is as transparent as a guy claiming to be worried by mugging, who only writes about cases involving black offenders – and deserves exactly that much respect.

Still, the bile directed at Wilberforce surprised me. There's the fruit of the poison tree thing, of course. After all, no one contaminated with British blood could ever truly be considered innocent, but still, some of the Leftist rhetoric has been truly unhinged. What's that all about ?

The Left does love their crusading heroes, but here’s a real-life Atticus Finch getting slimed. Wilberforce sure sounds like he should be a Lefty hero, a man who really did take on 'the system' and defeat a great evil. Ah, but that's the thing of course. For all that Liberals like to rant about the 'evil' of particular opponents, the thought of any kind of consistent moral framework brings them out in a rash. Au contrair, as Evan Sayat shows in a brilliant speech, large parts of the Left are at war with the very concept of morality:

It’s hard to really accept; there is no criteria for truth, beauty, justice or anything else for the modern liberal. Indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because rational moral thought is an act of bigotry. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. But at the very minimum, in order to be called a freedom fighter, wouldn’t you have to be fighting for….freedom? Quite literally, being indiscriminate leaves them unable to tell the difference between freedom and having your head hacked off.

Far from being a Liberal pin-up, Wilberforce was the antonym of modern Liberalism. There was nothing tactical about Wilberforce's loathing of slavery, he saw it as an offence against both God and man. Even worse, he insisted on dragging morals into a whole range of issues, even to the point of being an early advocate of 'zero tolerance'.

To Wilberforce, good and evil were as real as north and south. He opposed slavery because that was the position his moral compass took him to, and so it was with the rest of his life. That's why the Left hates him, he's further proof of an embarassing truth for them. For all Liberals like to indulge in Utopian pretensions, hysteria and outright violence, when it comes to actually making the world a better place, the Right beats them hands down.

Really Huge Mystery

Laban reports on the insanity of the ‘sexual orientation regulations’. Latest news: the government wants to make it an offence to indirectly induce someone to discriminate. Huh ? What couldn’t be caught under that law ? Who knows ? But, apparently, the horror of indirect inducement is enough to justify shredding the basic principles of law.

I can’t help detecting a certain chutzpah here. Back when these people were forcing through gay marriage, anyone who wondered whether destroying a millennia old institution might just have some adverse consequences further down the road was ridiculed as some kind of Nazi.. No talk of indirect inducements then, any consequence more subtle or long-term than an outbreak of botulism at the wedding reception was not admissible in the debate.

See, it’s at times like this you really need a scorecard. On the one hand, some guy calling for opposition to this law is such a serious threat to social order that it must be criminalised (they’re all about the freedom, these gay rights activists!), yet at the same time the prospect that the rise of gay marriage might lead to the final hollowing out of the institution of marriage is self-evidently ludicrous. So which is it ? Is social order sufficiently robust that the state can play ‘Operation’ with the institutions of society with no consequences, or is it so fragile that even a country vicar speaking out against this legislation threatens to bring about social chaos ?

Actually, I vote for Option C: it’s just a crude attempt to silence their opponents. After all, even some prominent gays have admitted they lied about their motivation in forcing through gay marriage. Now, we’re supposed to believe them on this ? Still, I’m with Laban - this might not be a bad thing. Now, everyone can see what’s at stake. It was never about hairdressers cringing in terror at the thought of someone reading the Bible. Nope, it’s an outright attack on the whole idea of morality and the sooner everyone realises that, the better.

Pandering Never Works (Part 2455)

OK, this story is funny on its own merits, but I can't be the only black-hearted conservative enjoying the sight of a lefty being hoist on his own PC petard. Still, you've got to have some sympathy for this guy. He bows down before the victimhood hustlers, and all he gets is demands that he lick their boots clean while he's down there. Well, duh! They're grievance hustlers, whining is what they do. There's no point trying to address their complaints logically, it's the simple act of whining that's their thing. The only thing that will shut them up is someone developing a set of gonads and learning the gestures for the phrase 'get a life!'

Who'd Have Thunk It ?

So, a guy decides the best way to sort out a family dispute is to tear his wife's eyes out ? Ah yes. You'll never guess what his name is.

I'm sure the femiloons would speak out, but they're tied up dealing with the horrific case of a City Witch who was called fat by a colleague.

The Conspiracy To Stop You Robbing Stuff

What to say about Adam Curtis’s latest outbreak of stupid ?

It must mean something that even fellow Lefties are starting to mock Curtis’s dreadfully clichéd nonsense. Not that that’ll stop the BBC. After all, the fact Curtis has been employed again after ‘The Power of Nightmares’ proves once and for all that the BBC is incapable of embarrassment.

Actually, all you really need to know is that Mad Maddie gave it the thumbs up in the Guardian. Of course, the delusional pay their licence fee just like the rest of us, but don’t ask me to watch their stuff. There’s plenty to say about Curtis’s absurd thesis, but that’d almost be giving it more credit than it deserves.

Nope, what intrigued me was the sheer chutzpah of it all. Here’s Curtis taking out an onion for the collapse of social cohesion. Yet what is the central thesis of, well, more or less everything Curtis has ever done ? Ah yes: IT’S ALL A CONSPIRACY!

To buy into Curtis’s nonsense – and I’m not convinced even he does – is to believe that every well-adjusted member of society is either a sad dupe or an actual co-conspirator. Ditto, social norms are actually a form of oppression by the elite. How exactly can you call for social cohesion while believing that the self-same society is secretly run by dark forces ?

Oh, sure, Curtis would no doubt try and square that particular circle, but the society-as-conspiracy meme has been one Lefties have been pushing for years – and not without considerable success. The idea that expecting people to conform to social norms is a form of oppression has been given full reign in our schools and courts. If Curtis really wants to see why our society is falling apart, he might want to start closer to home.

Shakedown Latest

This is great. Plus, it's nice to imagine the femiloons reduced to spluttering rage, unable to use their usual tactic of whining about ‘sexism’. Boo hoo! It’s not blokes who are claiming that employers need to provide each female employee with their own chaise longue to collapse onto should they ears be assailed by indelicate language. These losers make the Victorians look like Hell’s Angels.

Personally, my favourite bit was the femiloon claiming that a whole new pack of bogus rights popping up out of thin air actually makes it easier for employers. Presumably, that’s kind of like being mugged means you don’t have the worry of having to decide what to spend all that money on ?

Mystic Marxists Do Defence

Interesting coincidence on this Wednesday’s Jeremy Whine Show on Radio 2. The first hour was spent discussing the renewal of Trident and Zimbabwe. Hey, it’s great that it’s now legal to call Mugabe a scumbag, but it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the Left’s argument against Son Of Trident.

After all, Mugabe’s misrule of Zim has lasted nearly thirty years – more or less the same as the projected life of this new system. Libs claim they can absolutely guarantee that at no time will we ever need this new system, but how long did it take them to realise that, actually, Mugabe was nuts just like those fascists on the Right always said he was ? Up to the turn of the century, Libs were arguing that Mugabe might play a little rough, but he was basically a good hearted sort. If they can’t spot a twenty-four carrot loon like that, why should we give any credibility to the rest of their analysis ?

Funnily enough, the day after the main topic was the Olympics and yes, despite some quibbling over costing, no one questioned whether or not the country really needed to spend 25 billion on two weeks of running around and throwing things.

High Boom ?

You know what we don't have enough of round here ? Posts about '300'. Anyway, the latest news is that the Islamopaths are complaining about the movie's anti-Islamic tone (huh ?).Fortunately, over at Right Wing News, they've been suggesting a few movies to redress the balance, here and here.

Who'd Have Thunk It ?

The BBC reports - no doubt through gritted teeth - the confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. What's interesting about this is not only Funnily enough, they speed past the really interesting part of KSM's admission:

I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z," said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a partial transcript from a closed-door hearing.

He also said he had planned attacks on Big Ben and Heathrow airport in London.

But...but...it's all about the Iraq, right ?

Gosh, must be something else they don't like about us.

Quote Of The Day

Staying inside between 3.30pm and 4.15pm is something you are going to have to learn to do

Ah...the reassuring work ethic of the public sector.Look on the bright side: he could have joined the Fire Brigade.

UPDATE:

OK, so the link is playing up, so just in case, here's a quick précis: it's a police sergeant responding to complaints from a group of local residents about the behaviour of kids from a local school. Incidentally, his other great line was 'We have got to accept there is going to be a certain amount of disorder in a teenage environment'.

Support Our Murderous Troops

Couple of interesting posts pointed out at Conservative Grapevine. I can’t say I’m a big fan of Jonah Goldberg, but he makes an important point here.

I have never witnessed anyone who said that we need to get beyond ideology actually abandon his own position for the sake of unity.

For example, Al Gore constantly says the time for debating global warming is over and the time for unified action is now. But he says that because he wants the other side to stop being such a pain in his neck by disagreeing with him. Gore critics and fans alike can agree that he would be an idiot and an intellectual coward if, valuing unity over substance, he switched sides.

Well, exactly. Endlessly splitting the difference between the collectivist Left and the individualist Right is not a sign of sophistication, it’s a sign of immaturity. Just how much simpler do you need it ?

Ditto, Thomas Sowell in bang on here. If anything, coverage in Britain is worse. Liberals can detect almost infinite nuance in Islamopathic rantings, but they’re sure the Army is savages all the way. That’s why we end up with cases like this.

Well, OK, that does mark some kind of improvement. After all, they did get one result this time, but a single conviction for a minor act of brutality doesn’t really cut it when you’ve indicting seemingly everyone in the Army for involvement in an unlawful killing.

In contrast, Libs were horrified – horrified! – when Mr Plod stopped by for a chat with the Forest Gate Kittens. We need a scorecard to keep up here. Searching an address used by armed Islamic fundamentalists ? Harbinger of the Fourth Reich. A 10 mile tailback of war crimes witch hunts that collapse as soon as they go to trial ? Democracy in action!

Not that I’m necessarily complaining. This is as close as we’ll get to the Left telling us who they really are. Forget all the rhetoric, here is the Liberal worldview in living colour. They're not really opposed to Guantanamo Bay, they just think it should be used to jail British soldiers instead.

The BBC: Your 'No Honour' Network

The BBC is baffled why a man would slaughter his own family. The closest we get to an explanation is this:

Speaking after the hearing, Det Supt Martin Bottomley, who led the investigation, said:
....

"We will probably never know why Arshad committed this awful crime, unless he chooses to tell us."

Except it turns out that les flicks have said quite a bit more than that.

POLICE investigating the deaths believe it may have been a so-called “honour killing”, where people, usually women in certain Asian communities, are murdered for bringing “shame” on their families. Children are sometimes murdered along with their mother because of their association with her shame.

So were these deaths another case of Sudden Jihad Syndrome ? Well, there's loonies all over the map, but there sure seems to be a cluster round one point. Bottom line: the BBC has no qualms about ascribing racial motives to crimes on even the flimsiest grounds, but now suddenly they're Gil Grissom, dealing only with hard evidence ?

A vote of thanks too for the femiloons. They must still be drained after fighting so hard to deal with really serious issues, like the prize money at Wimbledon. Either that, or we've finally found a way to silence their idiot yammering.

Are we sure there isn't some kind of Heisenberg effect here ? The BBC would no doubt claim that they are merely the sewer not the sewerage, but isn't this kind of coy, minimalist reporting of brutal violence part of the problem ? Isn't there at least some truth in the old line that 'silence = consent' ? And shouldn't a multi-billion pound operation be asking these questions itself ?

Man Injured By Reversing Vehicle

I'm sure I've said it before, but there's something truly eerie about Cameron's ability not only to miss the bandwagon, but to get run over by it coming back the other way. Yep, that Glowball Warning backlash is well under way.

Earth Still Cool, Libs Bursting Into Flame

Just seen 'The Great Global Warming Swindle'. First thought: how the hell did this get made ? Well, OK, this may have been a factor. Is there anything she can't do ? Still, what a program, and from Britain's most Left-wing channel as well. Funny how a nasty old commercial channel like C4 can produce this stuff, while our public service broadcaster's reporting remains firmly mired in duckspeak, as even some of its own people admit.

Second thought: in so far as Libs charge any unapologetic right-winger with creating a 'hostile environment', I think we're free to speculate on whether there's a connection between a front-bencher for a supposedly respectable party demanding media outlets silence critics of anthropogenic global warming, and other Liberals exploring more direct forms of censorship.

Final thought: Well of course the tide is turning (and not rising). Look who's leapt aboard the bandwagon. Truly, he is the disco vicar of politics.

That Was Quick

Now '300' has tanked at the box office, Hollywood has reluctantly decided to change tack and start producing Lefty movies.

No, I'm not kidding. These people are insane.

Counter-Culture ? We've Got Your Counter-Culture Right Here!

Exactly:

After forty years of liberal rule in Hollywood it is nihilism that’s old-fashioned. It is moral relativism that is tired. It is political correctness, the always-noble people of color, the always-evil white guy, and the metrosexual that is cliched. A film with a clear divide between good and evil is something new. A film that celebrates patriotism, heroism, sacrifice, freedom, and honor is something revolutionary. In 1955 300 would be old-fashioned. In 2007 it makes a counter-culture statement as strong as Easy Rider in its day.

Hollyweird’s Inconvenient Truth

Biggest March opening ever in the US, and third-biggest R-rated movie opening ever ? Looks like ‘300’ could be another one of those surprise hits, y’know, kind of like ‘The Passion of the Christ’. One more and it’s officially a trend, but till them Hollywood will keep producing droney moral equivalenceograms featuring sinister CIA guys and noble Islamic freedom fighters.

Chickenhawk Down!

Farewell sweet chickenhawk, we hardly knew ye.

Liberals have spent years insisting that unless you’ve personally beaten six Argies to death with your water bottle, you’re not qualified to support the war on terror, but now, following Patrick Mercer’s comments, it turns out that pretty much anyone can run an infantry battalion.

With the nation’s race-hustlers turning the hysteria meter up to 11, it’s quite an achievement to produce the sleaziest contribution to the debate, but Raffles the Gentleman Thug managed it. Cameron not only fired Mercer, but also labelled him a racist – a charge too far even for some of the race hustlers. Hey, if a Tory frontbencher with a fine record of military service gets slimed by Cameron, what chance do the rest of us have with him ? Indeed, you could almost say this is Cameron’s Rose Addis.

But there’s more to it than that. Mercer’s two points were that soldiers often use insensitive language and that some black troops exploit racial paranoia to skive off. As far as the latter goes, if that doesn’t happen, then someone should call the Biology Police, because the laws of human nature are being broken. If next week the MoD announced extra pay for Jedi Knights, the force would be with half the Army by Easter.

As for the insensitive language, well…… Twenty years of PC have resulted in an obsession with social mores that make the Victorians look like Hells Angels. Yet still the running-into-machine-gun-fire industry won’t get with the program. Just a hunch, but I’m guessing this might not be unconnected with the fact that when we refer to soldiers being ‘wounded’ it doesn’t mean someone’s made a hurtful comment about them.

Liberals have spent years claiming soldiers are semi-literate sociopaths, but now they’re just horrified at the thought of the little flowers being exposed to hurtful language. Hey, Libs, you know what else is hurtful ? IEDs, but the Left is happy for our troops to travel round in ‘snatch’ Land Rovers with the survivability of a cardboard box, just as long as no one uses naughty words.

All of which is by way of saying that this debate is emphatically not about anything Mercer said, just the fact he said anything at all. Under the Left’s conception of racial equality, whites are forbidden from saying anything substantial about racial issues. Self-flagellation is allowed, but God preserve the white guy who points out, say, the racist rhetoric employed in rap music. That was Mercer’s problem: he just didn’t know his place and play his cards right.

See, this is why the Tory base is wrong about Cameron. The excuse for Cameron is that he’s not quite as awful as the alternative. I’d dispute that, but anyway, let’s assume for the moment that it’s true. Look at the price to be paid. Just as it took the election of Tony Blair to truly secure the Lady Thatcher’s legacy, so victory for Cameron would set in stone this kind of PC lunacy. In fact, to judge by this case, Cameron would go even further (and, again, if he’ll do all this to Mercer, what hope is there for, say, the average police officer) ? That’s the bottom line: can anything – anything at all – that Cameron might do, make up for institutionalising this kind of PC lunacy ?

Beyond The Satire Event Horizon

About six months back I was trying to think of suitably ludicrous headline to mock the EU's obsession with trivia. I came up with this. I thought I was joking, but it turns out I was just ahead of my time.

Mind you, that is just amateur hour compared to events in Blackburn. There'll be head's popping all over the BBC over this one.

(a tip of the mullet to BNP guy)

Outrage D'Jour

In the comments to this post, LP points out this eyeopening article. Like most folks on the Right, I knew instinctively that the anti-Gitmo campaign was nonsense, but it’s still staggering to see just how blatant was the media manipulation by shills for terrorism.

Yep, saying that MSM got bamboozled into spinning for terrorists is like saying that a Glaswegian got conned into drinking loads of whisky, but it’s still amazing to see how the MSM – multiple layers of fact-checking and all – uncritically published enemy propaganda during time of war. ‘Journalistic ethics’ was always an oxymoron, but now they aren’t even bothering to hide it anymore.

The Tories New Target Demographic: Martians

In a deft attempt to quash those pesky drug rumours, Raffles the Gentleman Thug has been speculating publicly on what Martians might think about the EU. I guess this must be what they mean about going green ?

There’s no word as yet as to whether Cameron will be welcoming Martian input any on other matters. Why not ? After all, we let the Law Lords make the law up as they go along, and they’re not even from this universe.

Mind you, even a visiting Martian should have enough grasp of history not to fal for Cameron’s line on the EU. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but anyway it’s like this….

In one of his most important speeches since becoming Tory leader, Mr Cameron will signal the start of a new engagement by his party with Europe, reforming it from the inside so that it moves from uniformity to diversity and from being an inward-facing bureaucracy to an outward-facing association of states. It would be one which devotes its energies to matters such as global warming, world poverty and creating a dynamic economy.

Every PM since Heath has tried that. Right now it’s a toss-up whether Cameron is just another sleazy Tory federist or a complete idiot. Either way, the chances of anything actually changing are approximately zero.

Critics of the EU are often libelled as anti-European, but how arrogant do you have to be to actually buy what Cameron’s selling ? Apparently, the Continent is full of deluded idiots just waiting for the British to point out the error of their ways and lead them to a bold, new future. Ah yes.

Memo to deluded Tories: the EU is the way the EU is cause that’s the way the EUtopians like it. Take the bureaucracy: that’s the way the Continentals run their governments and always have done. Leaving aside the absurdity of Cameron posing as the enemy of Big Government, the Continentals ain’t going to overturn their whole system of government no matter how nicely we ask. In so far as the Tory position boils down to the belief that the EU will become the next America, if only they’ll let the British run it, it sounds rather like something dreamed up by ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’.

And Another Thing...

Following on from that last post, the thing that really annoys me about the MSM is that they'll rant all day about the vital importance of their right to produce soft-focus depictions of perversion and sadistic insanity (even though no one on the Right actually says they shouldn't have that right). But when a real restriction on press freedom comes along ? Nope, all quiet on the Western front - must be tied up making mini-series featuring hip young crack dealers.

Culture War (Continued)

Interesting comment from ‘Novus’ on last week’s culture war post:

The essence of drama is conflict, something generally absent from a functional traditional family or the life of a successful and well-adjusted businessman, at least insofar as the family is functional or the businessman successful and well-adjusted. Dramatically the dysfunctional family is more interesting than the functional family - though I'm quite prepared to believe that any depiction of a hitherto successful and well-adjusted businessman suddenly finding his life going down the tube is as likely as not some kind of metaphysical punishment from the writer for being a dirty capitalist and grinding the faces of the poor, etc., etc.. The Game is a good example, where all through the film his experiences are presented as punishment for his being rich and successful - but even at the end, after the reveal, it's still apparently a cause for reassessing his priorities and re-ordering his life. That said, I love The Game, and I'm quite prepared to overlook politics in order to enjoy an otherwise great film. This is something you seem unprepared to do. When you accuse the MSM of "pushing dysfunction", all they're actually doing is writing interesting drama. Dysfunction = drama. Function = boring.

Furthermore, I absolutely do not buy the idea, implicit in your complaints, that the audience is bovinely incapable of differentiating fiction from reality, that if faced with a show like Torchwood (which I've enjoyed, though it's not as good as Doctor Who) or Shameless (which I've not seen) they will moronically assimilate everything they see as normal or acceptable behaviour. That sort of elitism ("the proles won't get it") is something you usually rail against, so to find you worried about shows "promoting pathologies", as though they're somehow hypnotising and brainwashing their audience, is slightly odd

Actually, with my type of movies the drama normally arises through an attack by killer zombies. Still, I can understand that not everybody likes rubbish, it’s just that there’s a continuum here. Gloomy Russian novels pretty much require dysfunction, zombie outbreaks not so much, except at the BBC where everything, without exception, has to include mentally-deficient characters behaving horribly – and, again, ‘Torchwood’ is the perfect example of this. It's this constant injection of human misery that's so grating.

Anyway, while it’s true conflict can be a fruitful source of drama, in so far as the Conservative position is frequently ignored, or presented as caricature, where’s the conflict ? Huge number of shows feature Liberal characters parroting Liberal articles of faith to other Liberals. The closest we got to actual conflict is when one Liberal tackles another Liberal about whether or not he’s Liberal enough. Ditto, it may once have been ‘edgy’ to feature a lead character who was, say, a really huge stoner, but it’s not the 70s anymore.

All of which is by way of saying that it’s not the Right that insists on bringing politics into it, it’s the Left that can’t produce the weather forecast without propagandising for social chaos – and that’s without taking account of explicitly political projects. In the same comment thread, RoP mentions ‘Cathy Come Home’. Leftists love that film as just the perfect piece of agitprop. Ditto, Fat Al: Oscar winner. So which is it ? Does the media set the cultural agenda or it all jus’ mindless entertainment ?

Besides, if it is all just meaningless pap, why do we need a licence fee anyway ? Does the BBC play a vital role in our culture, or does it just fill the air with moving wallpaper ? And if it’s option two, why exactly should we be forced to support it ?

It’s not elitism to suggest that a popular culture that features a constant diet of unfeasibly handsome characters engaging in consequence-free dysfunctional lunacy might just have real world effects. Well, not unless you’d also support a sitcom which featured a group of loveable Neo-Nazis and their wacky queer-bashing exploits. After all, the Left has spent years telling us that one guy using the wrong word can make an entire campus a ‘hostile environment’ and persecuting anyone who goes off-message. Look at their girly hysteria over the presence of supposed 'right-wing extremists' on this 'ere Net. No one on the Right wants this kind of witch hunting, we just want to point out the humbuggery in the MSM’s claim that they make the cultural weather, except for all the bad stuff, which just happens for no reason at all.

Freedom of Information (Tory Style)

They haven't even been elected yet, and already Cameron is trying to strangle debate. And this is the guy we want to trust in government ?


I guess there's only one thing for it:

Gorillas In The Mist: Washington Edition

OK, I’ve said before that I don’t want to turn this place into IainDaleSux.com, but if ever a guy wrote posts with a metaphorical ‘kick me!’ sign on his back, it’s him. Take his post on his visit to America’s CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference). In so far as this event attracts the kind of lively, youthful, non-elite crowd the Tories couldn’t attract if they had a free bar, you think any Tory visitors would be taking notes. Well, not so much.

Actually, it’s tempting just to reprint his post, subbing in the word ‘gay’ at the appropriate places, particularly when faced with prose like this:

The Conservative Political Action Conference, which I am attending in Washington, shows the very best and the awful worst of the American right. I had never attended one of these before and wasn't sure what to expect. Part of me expected to be appalled by a predominance of so-called "religious right" groups.

If anyone wrote this way about a Mardi Gras, Dale would need a novacaine suppository to calm him down. Instead, we get a Christianist atrocity story:

Apart from a twenty two year olf who confidently asserted that he would pray for my redemption and that he had the self discipline to banish lustful thoughts from his mind, I haven't really seen any evidence of what I feared. In fact, quite the reverse.

I guess we’re supposed to be appalled by loony evangelicals claiming they can cure homosexuality, but let’s just compare the number of Christians who believe this with the number of gays who talk about ‘repression’. Plenty of mainstream, prominent homosexuals claim just about every straight guy on the planet wants to sleep with them, except we’re just too repressed to recognise our true, gay nature. Renounce your sins, release your inhibitions. Potat-o, potat–ah. Except no one ever used the Bible to justify anal rape.

As with much else, Dale’s whining about ‘gay cures’ would have a lot more credibility if he was similarly energetic in condemning the toxic ideology of the home team, but don’t hold your breath. Besides, consistency doesn’t appear to be his thing:

However, having gone round the conference centre this afternoon asking people who they would like to see as the Republican candidate in 2008 it was clear that Giuliani has a lot to do to appease the social conservatives.

Appeasement ? Is the Reverend Dale, pastor of the Church of the Perpetually Offended, really comparing socio-cons to Nazis ? Yep, and that’s a mere aperitif to the humbug that’s coming next:

One lady told me she wouldn't vote for Giuliani because he wanted to take away her gun. I gently pointed out he was a proven leader and had a great record on crime in New York, but she wasn't going to be persuaded.

Yes – that really is Iain Dale criticising someone else for being over-invested in a single issue. Mind you, if you’re a snotty Limey, wandering round one of the top US political meetings ‘gently’ pointing out how ill-informed and stupid actual Americans are about their own politicians, I can see why you wouldn’t want them to be armed. I’d find Dale’s condescending drivel easier to take if he showed any evidence of trying to understand why the RKBA is such a totemic topic in US life, but apparently socio-cons are so despicable there’s no need to actually listen to what they say.

But what really sums up Daleism is this quote:

But [John Bolton] lost my respect when he appeared to advocate a US intervention in North Korea, designed to bring about the reunification of North and South Korea. He also made clear his view that the US should prepare to use military action against Iran. I would certainly not rule that out, but he seemed to positively salivate at the thought.

No actual policy disagreements then, but he doesn’t like Bolton because….. what ? Excessive salivation ? How exactly is that measured ? Is it a simple scale or logarithmic ? And is Dale really saying that he would have had no problem with these policies if only Bolton had indulged in Cameronesque theatrics, complete with sonorous phrase-making and ostentatious lip-biting ? If ever there was a good reason for letting Israel be ‘wiped off the map’ – as Ahmadinejad once said, while doubtless rending his clothes and wailing constantly – the failure of US statesmen to behave like guests on Oprah isn’t it.

Of course, not to put too fine a point on it, but Dale’s decision to concentrate on the Bolton Saliva Status Report may actually be for the best all round. It’s not at all obvious why events in Iraq would prevent the US striking at Iran. No matter how heavily engaged the US Army is, massive air and naval forces remain free to strike. Ditto, how exactly does Dale justify Bolton’s criticising the UN for giving too much power to free riders, even as he criticises Bolton for not showing enough respect for free riding Europeans. Shouldn’t being an ‘ally’ require deployment of actual troops ? Who knows ? Not the Reverend that’s for sure.

Inevitably, Dale’s ‘what I did on my holidays’ report tells us more about the pathologies afflicting the Tories than those of the American Right. You almost expect his report to be popping up anytime now on a pro-UKIP site, so perfectly does it capture the basic obnoxiousness of the Tory top brass. On the plus side, I’m sure they’re tough on salivation and tough on the causes of salivation.

Thou Shalt Not Mock Thy Lord The Dawk

Remember how Atheists (as opposed to mere 'atheists') are always banging on about how anal the religious are about their faith, as compared to their own open-minded selves. Ah yes.

Apart from anything else, what’s with EweTube ? Now, they’re your one-stop shop for Obnoxious Atheism and Islamofascist propaganda ? You know, sometimes I think the Left doesn’t have an actual ideology aside from hatred of the West.

More-Than-One Global Warming

This has been out there for a while, but you can’t point it out too often. Clearly, the Americans must have a base on Mars already. Well, either that or the ecoloons have been making it up all these years. But wait…check out this report.

OK, so as conspiracy theories go, it’s pretty funny – and the first comment is brilliant - but let’s consider the implications further. The suggestion that contrails prevent sunlight reaching the surface would tend to neatly decapitate the argument for taxing flights. Hey, taking the ecoloons own arguments to their logical conclusion, Mr Broon should be subsidising trips to Spain. But there’s something more.

Here we have a group of scientists admitting that there was a whole extra factor influencing the climate that they had no idea about right up until an unprecedented occurrence in 2001. Just how many other X factors are there out there ? And shouldn’t we find out before we destroy the economy based on theoretical models we keep finding holes in ?

Leadership

Down at Clare College, they’ve finally given up trying to excuse their surrender to the headchoppers. Instead, they’re trying the rhetorical equivalent of taking their ball home, claiming that it’s all an internal matter. If only.

Then there’s David Cameron. Don’t be shocked, but it turns out that the Future Greatest PM Ever was a member of a club made up of deadbeat, over-privileged yobs with a hatred of state school pupils and Jews. But enough about the Tories. Apparently, Cameron spent his Oxbridge years in a club which revolved around £1000 meals followed by wrecking the restaurant, with side-lines in sexual assault and violence. See ? It is a training ground for the nation’s leaders, after all, except that we can’t ask them what they did there because it was all a long time ago, and they were young. So, which is it ? Is an Oxbridge education proof positive of superior status, or is it a meaningless interlude ?

Of course, Oxbridge has always relied has on its own version of the light in the refrigerator problem, arguing that they’re so super smart that only other super smart people can appreciate their super-smartness. Their medics can’t cut it, the physics lacks gravitas and engineering is a train wreck, but that’s OK because they aren’t here to waste their time getting bogged down doing a job any old prole with a scalpel could do, they have special, generic skills, they’re leaders, strategists, visionaries, they’re….David Cameron.

See, this is where the rubber meets the road. If you’re USP is your supposed leadership qualities, people are going to expect you to demonstrate some actual leadership. It’s harsh, but there you have it. That’s why Clare College's surrender could never be an internal matter, not as long as the products of these places keep penning paeans to their special status, vis-à-vis drones from places like Imperial or Edinburgh. Not only because their conduct is the very definition of unfitness for command, but also because their self-appointed role as the natural rulers of Britain means that their conduct reflects unfairly on the nation as a whole.

This is what connects Cameron with the folks at Clare. Both claim an entitlement to power, even while renouncing the responsibilities that should come with it. Forget any talk of the balance between centralisation and localism, or cunning plans for remaking the tax system. None of that matters until we can find some actual leaders.