Astonishingly Enough, Cameronism Still Not Working

One term Tories? Why not? It's not like The Dave can run on his record is it?

Of course, arguably, the whole point of Cameronism was to achieve nothing. Nasty old right-wing ideologues were thrown under the bus, and instead Cast Iron Dave's Nu Tory Party promised to take over and change things very, very slightly.

And that was how the Tories achieved a 100 seat majority.

But never mind the wider issues, Cameronism doesn't even make sense on its own terms. Cameronism relied on a tacit quid pro quo with the labour placemen in the bureaucracy. Cameron and pals would move into the big offices and the leftists would be left in place and in peace to keep pushing their own agenda. Hence why under a nominally-conservative government we had cops standing around watching rioters go on the rampage - it was Labour appointee police managers following liberal doctrines, but the Tories still got the blame anyway.

This is brilliant politics.

Robert Peel: Vigilante!

Focusing like a laser on the key issue, as ever, liberals have decided that the real problem with law and order breaking down is that it encourages ordinary people to defend their communities.

Oh sure, they're all for it when the defenders are exotically ethnic, but when the white trash get involved, why, that could ruin the riot for everybody.

Liberals claim to be terrified by the prospect of people taking the law into their own hands, even when there's no law to be had in the district anyway. There's plenty of humbuggery on show here, not least in hearing deranged cop-haters explaining why only fascist pigs are competent to protect the public, but the central issue is this: the argument against vigilantism is a constitutional as well as a moral absurdity.

Consider Sir Robert Peel's own principles of law enforcement, specifically number 7:

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

Or, to put it another way, the police are just citizens in uniform, which means the idea that one group of citizens are required to curl up in a ball and await rescue from another bunch of citizens makes not a lick of sense. If it's illegal for one group of citizens to patrol their own neighbourhood, then that would surely apply to hirelings of the state drafted in from out of town.

Then there's principle number 1:

The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.

My unnuanced take on that is 'prevent' means in the sense of 'stopping it happening' not 'standing around filming it, then arresting the perp two weeks later'.

Letting scumbags run rampage and catching them later might be safer for the police, but the citizen is under no moral or legal duty to let himself be victimised merely for the convenience of the police.

Quote of the Day

From a predictable source:

London, the progressive dream: shopkeepers of every race and creed, looted by thieves of every race and creed.

Ann Got There First

Ann Coulter covers our recent festivities. I'm not sure she's right about the racial breakdown - you'd think she'd know better than to trust the BBC - but she does revisit some of the old classics, like the Shannon Matthews non-kidnapping - remember that?

All of which is by way of making an important point: no, this didn't come of the blue. All that's happened is that a whole year's worth of Saturday nights have come at once. No one can say they weren't warned.

I'd say Ann would be able to get a whole book out of this stuff, but she already has.

You should read the whole book, but for now, a short summary: nothing is accidental. Liberals have been relying on mob violence since at least the French Revolution. Liberals stoke mobs, protect them, then create absurd heroic narratives about it all afterwards. They can't win in the marketplace of ideas, so they try and persuade chavs to burn the it down.

You May Not Be Interested In War, But War Is Interested In You

It's a sad sign of the times when Trotsky makes more sense than a soi-dissant conservative home secretary, but here we are with our cities burning and Theresa May is still jabbering about policing by consent.

That will be some negotiation, all right: maybe she's hoping she can get them to agree to only loot one in every two shops?

Of course, this is par for the course for the Nu Tories. The essence of Cameronism is the belief that everything is negotiable and the shortest distance between two points is always straight down the middle.

The worst of it is that this isn't mere spinelessness. On the contrary, in the demented world of the Nu Dave Order, moral equivalence is not only a sign of sophistication, it's their sole raison d'etre. They might be awful at running the country, but look how nuanced and sophisticated are their positions!

The country's burning and silver-spoon degenerate fops are penning oestrogen-laden articles lamenting the incivility of those awful right-wing Mobophobes. Exhibit A here.

Hey, shoot looters, don't shoot looters. There's arguments either way, but nothing sums up the sheer fecklessness of Cameronism like a member of the demographic that's been busy complimenting each other on their fiddling while London burns suddenly start demanding the purging of anyone who says they can smell smoke.

'Modern Conservatism' is a sick, disgusting fraud. A incestuous dogpile of smug, elitist, no-marks looking down their noses at anyone with a proper job, even while they can't even pass the basic test of maintaining law and order.

PC Update

Old Meme: Raycist police officers refuse to clamp down on evil drug-dealing filth becuase they hate black people

New Meme: Raycist police officers execute drug-dealers because they hate black people

A 'Peaceful Protest'

Looks like the enemy within have chosen their line on the Tottenham riots: a peaceful protest about the shooting of 'a man' was hijacked by mysterious extremists.

Hello?

In the real world, people who protest in support of a would-be cop killer with multiple convictions are themselves generally considered pretty extreme. What's the line here? That the peaceful protesters are opposed to the use of violence, except for the whole 'shooting cops' thing?

Again, the contrast is obvious between the BBC's pious denunciations of extremist rhetoric when Oslo comes up, and the self-same organisation pushing a moral equivalence between the forces of law and order and a bunch of lunatics who belive they should be above the law. Just in the past 24 hours, the BBC has given more house room to conspiracy nuts and racist buffoons than five years of the Daily Mail.

Bottom line: does the BBC think there is likely to be more or less violence when a state broadcaster is prepared to propagate myths about executions and police brutality?

Riot In Tottenham, No Blondes Involved

Yes, apparently, it's a Mob of No Appearance, with absolutely no defining characteristics whatsoever, although it's certain they were provoked into by da cutz.

Hey, I'm not an economist, but I'm pretty sure shooting gunmen is pretty much fiscally neutral.

Still, let's check the scorecard here: two references to her work in 1500 pages prove Melanie Phillips caused the Oslo massacre, but there's no connection between outbreaks of mass lawlessness and a wider environment where a Labour MP coming out in defence of the vital human right to shoot at police officers without consequence is treated as a perfectly reasonable position.

Quote of the Day

Via Ace of Spades blog, some badly-needed perspective on America's decision to drop the bomb on Japan, and evidence of a more general problem:

Arthur T. Hadley said recently that those for whom the use of the A-bomb was "wrong" seem to be implying "that it would have been better to allow thousands on thousands of American and Japanese infantrymen to die in honest hand-to-hand combat on the beaches than to drop those two bombs." People holding such views, he notes, "do not come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen or pilots." ... That is, few of those destined to be blown to pieces if the main Japanese islands had been invaded went on to become our most effective men of letters or impressive ethical theorists or professors of contemporary history or of international law.

Shorter d'Ancona: The Dave Just Needs New Ways To Bamboozle You Idiots

Pal, it ain't a perception problem when the guy really does suck. Besides, on most issues Cameron's not the fireman, he's the arsonist.

How Government Budgets Work

You can't tell me it's any different in Britain. Well.... except that it always turns out that the taxpayer is funding astroturf campaign groups to run studies proving that lack of dairy products in space causes 20,000 deaths per year.

The Amy Thing

Given that this is a blog dedicated to the idea that smart is the new stupid, I guess it makes perfect sense that this guy has produced the sanest thing I've read this week about the death of Amy Winehouse.

Forget the MSM's attempts to turn her into a martyr or a monster. The truth is she was neither a hero nor a villain, she was simply a young girl crushed under the weight of her own talent and now she's dead and it sucks.

Hollywood Still Awful

Interesting theory over at Big Hollywood on just why modern movies are terrible.

I'd actually say he's underestimated the awfulness of liberalism. These guys not only have a downer on individual responsibility for bad behaviour, they don't believe in moral judgements in the first place - not unless the villain has blond hair anyway.

Consider the difference between 1971's The Omega Man and 2007's I Am Legend. In 26 years we've gone from Colonel Neville under siege by Matthias's crazed cult to Will Smith fighting CGI monsters. Of course, one problem may be that by 2007 standards, Matthias's cult were probably saner than half of California but at least they had a coherent motivation. Absent that, what are you left with? Two hours of Will Smith shooting at computer graphics.

In fact, it's a double whammy. Hollywood not only won't produce villains with any more coherent motivation than an urge to drown puppies, they simply assign any vaguely right-wing characters to the same puppy-drowning demographic.

Consider Michael Douglas in Wall Street, Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men or Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. Chances are you can quote at least one line from each. They were meant to be villains, but they had rational motivations and the ability to explain why they believed what they did. In short, they were believable. Now? It's all drowned puppies and mutants.

Say, Does Anyone Know What Colour Hair The Oslo Attacker Had?

I don't know, but I kind of get the feeling the media is trying to make some kind of point when they keep telling us the attacker was a blonde. Are they trying to tell us that there's some kind of non-blonde terrorists out there?

Hey, and after all those years of liberals telling us there was no point profiling airline passengers...

It's All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses A Pie

... As Ann Coulter once said.

Yep, liberals tried to throw stuff at her too. Ditto, Jeremy Clarkson, Bjorn Lomberg and seemingly everyone who's ever spoken out against the left in any way. That's in addition to the whole 'riots' thing, of course.

Meanwhile, Sharon Shoesmith, Abu Hamza and Gary Glitter all remain not only resolutely unpied, but also the subject of approximately 1 billion editorials equating even the mildest criticism of them with coded support for lynch mobs - and if there's one thing the liberal media can't stand, it's people encouraging violent thugs....

Then again, the left's decision to give up actual arguments, and make juvenile acts of intimidation the central plank of their platform is probably a case of making the best of a bad job. Consider allegedly serious politician Tom Watson's line of attack on Murdoch: apparently he's a doddering, incompetent old fool who spends all day drooling on his paperwork, and also a sinister puppet master single-handedly responsible for making British liberals look like a bunch of whining no-marks.

Mind you, you can kind of see why they're worried - the last time they got so worked up about a supposedly senile evil genius, he won the Cold War. Ralph Miliband was never the same again.

Still, all that's way better than the latest conspiracy theory. Apparently, Murdoch pledged his support for Cameron so in return The Dave will push policies supported by Murdoch.

Really?

It never worked that way for the Tory base. On past form, Murdoch's lucky Cameron didn't announce a £1 billion bailout for the Guardian.

High Priest Loses Faith

Guido is uncharacteristically gentle with the now-ex Cameron groupie Peter Oborne when he deserves much worse, and not just because Oborne's rose-tinted specs only seem to come out with MPs from a certain demographic.

Oborne is shocked - shocked - to find sleaze going on here, but who was hiding that from Petey in the first place? On the contrary, Oborne spent years writing about the question marks over Cameron's integrity. Which is to say he spent years sliming anyone who raised questions about Cameron's integrity. Now he's finally where the bumpkins and bigots got to years ago, he wants us to admire his integrity.

Oborne wasn't just wrong about Cameron, he was the opposite of right. You'd have been better off listening to just about anyone in the conservative base instead of Certified Deep Conservative Thinker Peter Oborne.

Even now Oborne doesn't get it. The Coulson thing doesn't just undermine Cameron's moral posturing, it also undercuts the main excuse for Cameronism in the first place. We were assured that whatever Cameron's ideological shortcomings, he was a political genius. Now he's landed himself in a completely unnecessary scandal, where's all that genius gone?

Planet of the Conspiracy Nuts

Say what you like about Russell T Davis, but at least his latest effusions are thought-provoking, even if the thought is 'hey, I never knew his stuff was ghost-written by a drunk, homeless guy'.

Second thought: how come whenever ones of the staff at the ever-unbiased BBC goes feral, they all go feral in the self-same way? They never suddenly announce that Cast Iron Dave should slash housing benefit and use the savings to bolster the RAF, or that we should have our own Second Amendment. No, it's always some guy who think the right is, like, totally evil.

Where's the diversity?

On the plus side, at least he is unusually candid about how he reached his diagnosis: he thinks the right is too harsh on media luvvies. Yep, these people are all about the hospitals & schools & long lunches at chintzy restaurants. He probably thinks the right are selfish too, all poncing round Barnsley with their coal-mining friends.

But that's not it. Liberals have always been leeches. No, the real question is this: in so far as the head honcho has now outed himself as an off-the-scale loon, are you still a tin-foil hatted kook if you complain about liberal bias in his shows?

PC And The Shrunken Mandate

NNW isn't too impressed by the left's response - or lack thereof - to Weinergate.

Indeed, it's not just Weiner that's been left exposed. It's hard not to notice that the left's conception of freedom looks a little... shrunken? Flaccid? Inadequate?

Libs think anyone who has issues with the Honourable Member's Honourable Member appearing in in-boxes across America is, like, a total square but if he had used a felt tip to write 'Islam Sucks' on his junk beforehand, they'd have demanded the death sentence.

Of course, we've been here before. Hell, after years spent defending Clinton, Weiner flashing his majority to all and sundry probably seems refreshingly normal to them.

Liberals are proverbial for turning into Bernard Manning once one of their guys falls foul of PC, but the corollary is often missed. Professional conservatives endlessly jibber-jabber about the need to ditch the embarrassing bumpkins in the base, get with the PC program and reach out to all those groovy youngsters who were just waiting to vote conservative, but were put off by the lack of tackle twittering. But how does that work exactly?

In so far as leftists in both the US and Britain ditch their PC principles faster than a speeding e-mail once one of their guys is in the frame, why even pretend it's anything other than a stick to beat conservatives with? Criticising Cherie Blair's sleazy dealing is The Sexism, but John Prescott can use his private office like a harem, and that's 'just John' as Tony helpfully explained. Why even bother to play in a rigged game?

Professor Dawkins Was Not Available For Comment

Uber geek Paul Nurse has decided that the real problem with British science is that the public won't just shut up and take it all on faith.

Curiously enough, FoI requests and all, they still manage to bang in plenty of requests for taxpayers' money and press releases announcing that school vouchers cause cancer.

On the plus side, at least his complaints about 'FoI Aggression' have neatly laid to rest the myth that scientists are a bunch of whiny wimps. Maybe we need some research into why people don't trust geeks? After all, what could possibly be wrong with this:

Nurse said that scientists were not blameless. At the University of East Anglia, they were too defensive in their responses to freedom of information requests over climate change, but their experience was one among many that highlighted a need for better training for scientists in the most appropriate way to respond to information requests.

Curiously though, it takes a commenter called randstead to point out the problem with that little theory:

One small but not important point , Phil Jones planned to avoid FOI requests , BEFORE he got a single one...

Now lets talk numbers UEA received just six FOI requests between January 2005 when the act was introduced, and January 2009, while in 2009 it received 97 FOI requests 59 from people asking or information on contracts between the UEA and the foreign met offices they said were preventing publication of the data, remember CRU's claims on this front mostly fall apart once investigated.
These number are tiny in real terms , while its only from FOI requests that we learned that the research papers reviewed in the investigation of CRU where not selected by the RS as claimed but by UEA , that the head of the one review never actual did any interviews , that for one review there is no accurate record of what question where asked nor what the answers are...

Another commenter, conflation, includes the full text of one e-mail:

Phil Jones wrote: Mike, I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc ! Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it !

In other words, geek face card Paul Nurse writes an article calling for people to take scientist's public pronouncements on faith, while utterly misrepresenting his opponents in the self-same article.

That's Clue Number Two right there. For all the talk of diversity, there's apparently no one around to tell Nurse that his point is absurd. Scientists are disinterested seekers after truth, but it just so happens that their personnel rosters are exactly the same as you get if they were enforcing an ideological blacklist.

All of which is the real message of Climategate. What's wrong with British science isn't just that there's a lot of corruption, it's that corruption has become the new normal, with supposed thought leaders like Nurse on hand to denounce anyone who doesn't accept senior scientists threatening to delete inconvenient data as a perfectly normal practice.

Up, Down... Who Cares? Just Give Us Your Money!

Yes, indeed: the new Big Bad is Global Cooling which, being the opposite of Global Warming, obviously means that we need the opposite policies, so say hello to tax cuts, rolling back red tape and all pigs to the trough capitalism....right?