It’s funny how whenever the People’s Vote mob pop up the only people you hear talking are celebrities, politicians, Lords and academics. There’s no-one there who’d you actually describe as ‘one of the people’.
My view is that the People’s Vote is a vote for the ‘people’ in the same way that a People’s Republic is run by the ‘people’.
So why is it millenials know nothing at all about the atrocities and disasters of Communism? Some Conservatives have complained that it’s because the schools are not teaching it. Students know all about the dangers of Nazism, but they have a vague, rosy-tinted impression of Communism, because the schools, and the culture at large, tell them in great detail how bad the Nazis were, whereas the truth about Communism gets swept under the carpet, or sanitised.
I think this is generally true. Of course there are plenty of other factors at play, but this is an important reason. But the question it raises is, why are the teachers and cultural gatekeepers doing this? The obvious answer is: because they’re on the same side as the Communists. This may not be a very controversial contention for most readers of my blog, but it would be regarded as a strong thing to say to many other people. But it is the most natural conclusion to draw.
One might try to qualify the conclusion, and say, well, these people are of the democratic left, but they’re not Communists. They suppress the facts about Communism because they think that what makes Communism look bad may also reflect badly on the democratic left. Centre-leftism gets unfairly tainted by hard-leftism, so best not to mention hard-leftism.
That reasoning may have seemed plausible a few years ago, but now I think it has become clear that it’s not true. Large numbers of these gatekeepers have revealed themselves, since Brexit and Trump, to be authoritarians, who will tolerate no dissent. They’re not the democratic left, they’re the authoritarian left. They may not call themselves Communists (though more and more of them are), and they may decry past Communist methods (or at least past Communist results) when forced to, but they do share with the Communists the strong desire for a non-democratic central authority to run society, and to run everyone’s life along certain lines.
After all, if you really are of the democratic left, wouldn’t you be at pains to distance yourself from Communism, by saying, well, this is how things turned out whenever we went the non-democratic route, so it’s better that we stick to democracy? Sure the Russian Bolsheviks killed millions of people, but they’re nothing to do with us, they had a completely different system. Wouldn’t you stress that it’s not just that we’re going to do Communism differently next time, we don’t want to ever do it again at all?
Look at the democratic right. They take great care to completely distance themselves from fascism. The democratic right has nothing to do with fascism, but it’s constantly being accused of being Hitler. And they respond by going into great details on what the Nazis did, and how their system led to those evils, and generally specifying the difference between Nazism, or some other fascist system, and modern conservatism/libertarianism. They don’t just mumble some reply and try to change the subject.
But that’s what the left does with Communism. Pretend it never happened. If that’s not possible, pretend it was some rogue leaders, not really Communism, so no lessons to be learned from it, quick, change the subject to orange man bad. This is not the response of someone who is seriously opposed to Communism. This is rather the response of someone who doesn’t want you to notice the parallels with modern Western society and societies which were being taken over by the Communists. This is the response of someone who doesn’t want people to learn how authoritarian leftists gain power by studying the history of it.
The truth about Communism hasn’t been neglected, it’s been deliberately sidelined. By authoritarians in positions of power who crave the power that the Communists had.
In an excellent article on what Sweden is really like (and is not what the likes of Owen Jones imagine it to be like), Tim Worstall says this:
To desire that the world be a better place is a noble aspiration, to campaign for it a righteous occupation.
Most people, whatever their political views would surely give assent to the first part of that statement: To desire that the world be a better place is a noble aspiration.
I don’t.
Why not?
Well, for one thing, pretty much everyone has that desire: “I wish the world were better”. Even the most selfish person has that desire. “The world would be better if I was rich and feted”. Hitler had that desire: “The world would be better if we gassed all the Jews”. But even the most banal person has that desire: “The world would be better if we all drank more tea and chatted”. People who are fanatics about their sport: “The world would be better if netball was a bigger sport”. Or pervs: “The world would be better if there was more sexual freedom and I could have sex with animals.”
People who actually think “I wish the world were a worse place” are in a minority. They do exist, but there’s not many of them. So wishing the world was a better place hardly puts you on a pedastal.
And from that list you’ll notice something else: what counts as “a better place” can vary enormously from person to person. So you can hardly just assert that all these visions are automatically worthy. Was Pol Pot’s idea that everyone should go back to being a peasant automatically a noble aspiration (even if we ignore the forced element in it)? The specifics count. The specifics always count.
We need to forget this idea that we just reflex praise anyone who engages in wafty talk like “I want the world to be a better place”. That’s so vague as to be almost content-free. Especially don’t pat young people on the head for saying that. Challenge them instead. What are the specifics of your claim? In what way do you wish things to be different? And if the answer to that is “I want everyone to be better off, doing what they want”, you have to ask how that is to be achieved. Always, always drill down to the specifics. Never praise empty loftiness: challenge it.
I think Dominic Raab is set to join the list of Conservative Party disappointments.
It’s always the same: a new MP starts out with a lot of fine talk and conservatives get excited that this person is the next great Conservative that they’ve been waiting for for years. Over the years it all goes sour, as the yawning gap between action and words is revealed. Here’s a few entries to start with. More suggestions in the comments, please.
William Hague
George Osborne (remember when he flirted with a flat tax?)
Michael Portillo
Matthew Parris
Michael Gove
Alan Duncan
Liam Fox
Sajid Javid
Andrea Leadsom
Rory Stewart
Possibles:
John Major (although you might argue that he was always clearly a hopeless case)
Jonathan Aitken
Boris Johnson (he did at least resign over Brexit, but…) Update: On later reflection I’ve decided Boris doesn’t deserve to be here.
Ian Duncan Smith
Possible next candidate: Jacob Rees Mogg Update: I’ve also decided that JRM shouldn’t be on here either. Or Raab for that matter.
(I’m not including Tories who are disappointing from the get-go, because that would mean putting down about 90% of every Tory MP ever.)
Update: At the suggestion of Roark in the comments I’ve added Liam Fox.
Update 2: Alan Duncan added at the suggestion of Andy in Japan.
In the Telegraph yesterday:
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is now under fresh pressure to provide evidence on fake news and ads after politicians in the UK and Canada today jointly called for him to appear before an International Grand Committee in London.
In a letter penned to Mr Zuckerberg today, Damian Collins, chair of the Digital Culture Media and Sports Committee and Bob Zimmer, chair of the Canadian standing committee on access to information privacy and ethics said: “We believe that your users in other countries need a line of accountability to your organisation – directly, via yourself. We would have thought that this responsibility is something that you would want to take up.
“The hearing of your evidence is now overdue, and urgent.”
Zuckerberg has until 7 November to respond to the summons.
Facebook is already on the side of the Establishment. Do you remember when it was revealed a few years ago that Facebook had a team of employees sifting their newsfeed and making sure it tilted left? Maybe you don’t, because that has gone down the memory hole; you hardly ever see it referenced any more.
So this current story is basically the modern equivalent of a Communist government asking why the tractor factory is not producing enough tractors to meet targets. Or questioning why the editors at Pravda are allowing some unapproved stories in. Facebook is mostly doing what the Establishment wants, only it’s not doing it thoroughly enough. Why is any ‘fake news’ — ie. stories that make the populist right look good, and the Establishment bad — getting through? That’s what this is really about. Pulling Facebook completely into line by pretending it’s enabling the counter-revolution when really it’s doing what it can to prevent it without it looking too obvious.
In the same story, we get this:
Facebook’s new political advertising tool is under fire after approving a fake pro-Brexit advert marked as “paid for by Cambridge Analytica”.
The ad was really taken out by Business Insider as a test to see if Facebook’s system, which is supposed to be able to determine whether the people who are taking out the ad really are who they say they are. To which my response is, who cares who paid for the ad? Why isn’t anyone entitled to put up an ad for what they want, if they pay for it?
Or, at least, I’ll care about this when they start caring about George Soros’s spending billions on propaganda campaigns all over the world.
And a final nasty little sting in the tail:
BeLeave was discovered to have broken electoral law in July.
This has nothing to do with the story, and that judgement was a highly dubious one which may still be overturned. But because the author is one of those soft-left millenials that the Telegraph is so fond of these days, in it goes. But there’s no mention at all of Facebook’s aforementioned little helpers who already tilt the news.
Far-right plumber Dave Bloggs today visited the far-right London History Museum to view inflammatory material about far-right political extremists, including Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Bloggs, who travelled on the far-right Docklands Light Rail service which has trampled over union rights by using driverless trains, was with members of his family, including his wife who is believed to be a far-right sympathizer. While in London he visited far-right food outlet McDonalds, which still allows its far-right clientele to drink from plastic straws if they ask for them. Eyewitnesses say that Bloggs was openly reading far-right literature on the train, including The Sun and The Times. One witness claims that Bloggs’s oldest son was reading a magazine which featured a white man on the cover, which experts believe indicates that it was probably far-right material.
Fellow passenger Juanita Gonzalez, a 28-year-old sociology student, described the scenes: “It was awful, like something out of a dystopian movie. They were brazenly wearing far-right clothing, the Dad for example had an England shirt on. One of the boys had the far-right white supremacist band Motorhead on his T-shirt. Motorhead have only ever had white band members of the band, and have never had a LGQBT member. They’ve also not signed up to the NME Rock Code of Conduct. I was literally shaking and crying. London is a tolerant, multicultural city, and people like this should not be allowed to enter.”
Fellow passenger Fifi Bangles, a 28-year-old Sociology student, concurred: “The worst thing was, they were all white. Just sitting there and laughing, like it didn’t matter. I was literally shaking and crying, and had to go and vomit in the toilet.”
CCTV footage indicates that the racist far-right pack, believed to be from the far-right North of the country, engaged in other anti-social far-right activities after their visit to the far-right shrine, including playing the far-right sport of ten-pin bowling, which is still legal in most parts of the country, and eating at a pub with a far-right sexist and nationalistic name, the Cock and Bull. Reports are also coming in that they ate a curry in an off-hand, insufficiently respectful manner.
Police have confirmed the far-right incidents, which numerous people reported to them, and said it is investigating. “Unfortunately this sort of far-right behaviour is still tolerated in other parts of the country”, said Chief Inspector Ruth Tavistock. “We are working with the government on an information campaign to warn visitors to London that these sorts of far-right activities are no longer tolerated in a vibrant, diverse, multicultural city like London.”
I’m well aware I’m entering Tim Newman territory here with this post about a woman re-entering dating in her 40s:
My first dateback out there after 14 years had a noticeable limp, drooled when he talked and knocked a glass of red wine over my white shirt before leaving me to search for a napkin to mop up the mess.
I could have left that pub in tears of despair about the dire pool of middle-aged men out there but instead I called my sister, told her what happened and had to pull the car over on the way home because I was crying so much with laughter.
So many media women are quick to tell everyone else that they need to be compassionate and love everyone and understand that no-one’s perfect and that everyone has their faults. They’re especially quick to criticise men who are picky about women, who don’t appreciate the wonderful qualities that women have that aren’t always immediately apparent.
Yet when it comes to themselves and dating they start talking like they’re the head of Hitler Youth. Zin vun haz ze limp. Zis is not acceptable for a vomen zuch as me. Introduce him to ze cleaning lady.
Compassion for everyone is right in the abstract, but for her personally only the cream of the crop will do. Don’t talk to me about hidden depths, he has insufficient control over his saliva glands. Everyone has worth and it’s wrong to judge people harshly, but don’t fix me up with a loser, I’m special and I’m not settling for a clumsy third-rater. Isn’t it wrong how advertising makes modern people think they’re better than everyone else? No, I’m not dating a guy with no degree, that’s beneath me.
And do we have the embarrassing self-regard section? Yes we do. Of course:
Get ready to fall in love
In the short time I was dating after my divorce, the person I fell for most wasn’t any of the men, but me. I’d listen to myself talk and be blown away by some of the things I had to say. I was a mother of two boys. I’d been bereaved. I’d been working for over 20 years. I had opinions and wasn’t afraid to share them.
But actually, when it comes to these sorts of articles, this woman is one of the better ones. She met a lot of guys she liked and found a long-term relationship, unlike that other Telegraph dating woman who claimed every guy ever found her intelligence — she got a 2:2 in French from Kent — intimidating.* And she admits elsewhere that she isn’t great-looking. So I’m not happy, because she’s supposed to be providing me with material and it’s fizzled out, so now I’m going to have to go looking through the Guardian.
But the general point holds. When you hear a modern woman criticizing men for their shallow tastes and unrealistic expectations, just think about what they’re going to be like themselves on the dating scene. Will they be looking for the nice man behind the surface disappointments? In a word: no.
*I was going to link to Newman’s fisking of this woman, but his site is not letting me search it.
Another sign that I’m not a young man any more: I now fancy Julie Andrews. When I was in my first bloom of youth Julie Andrews seemed like everything a man didn’t want in a woman. A prim, sexless, goody-goody, whose singing was frightful. No thanks.
But now when I see her in old films I have completely the opposite reaction: she’s a beautiful, passionate English rose with a pure heart, and an angelic voice, who you’d marry in a second.
So politics isn’t the only thing I’ve realised I was wrong about when I was a callow youth.
Anyway, the bad news is that a Mary Poppins sequel is about to be released. It’s not like I’m a Mary Poppins buff or anything, so I’m not going to be too outraged, but it just isn’t right…
One more thing: we’ve all laughed for decades at Dick van Dyke’s Cockney accent in the original film, but when you watch him in it, you have to admit that, accent aside, he’s pretty damn good.
“You’re afraid of change”, say Remainers.
‘You white people can’t handle being on the bottom for a change”, say anti-racists.
“Things have changed since your beloved 50s, get used to it”, says every leftist ever.
In other words, white old-style conservatives can’t handle change.
My analysis: Brexit, Trump, Hungary, scream scream scream scream scream, wah, bad orange man, looks like you leftists can’t handle the way the world is changing.
Get used to it. You change-hating losers.
I said the other day that the right needs to ensure that the law is enforced against leftists who break it, as too often they break the law in the name of their political views and get away with it. Here’s a test case (link now fixed):
A new group of “concerned citizens” is planning a campaign of mass civil disobedience starting next month and promises it has hundreds of people – from teenagers to pensioners – ready to get arrested in an effort to draw attention to the unfolding climate emergency.
If they’re prepared to get arrested then arrested is what they should be, and convicted. They’d demand the same if a nasty group of religious nutters broke the law in the name of their religion. (Well, not if they were Islamic nutters. If they were Christian.) And this is basically what these people are: a nasty group of religious nutters. Here’s a letter they sent to the Guardian:
we will not tolerate the failure of this or any other government to take robust and emergency action in respect of the worsening ecological crisis.
“We will not tolerate”? Well, I guess if you’re going to be a fascist you might as well talk like one.
The science is clear, the facts are incontrovertible
What’s clear is that none of you have a clue what you’re talking about.
it is unconscionable to us that our children and grandchildren should have to bear the terrifying brunt of an unprecedented disaster of our own making.
I’m going to suggest re-wording this to “an unprecedented disaster of our own imagination”.
Humans cannot continue to violate the fundamental laws of nature or of science with impunity.
We’re violating the fundamental laws of nature? Take that, gravity!
And to think that a load of Professors put their name to this.
One of the organizers of Extinction Rebellion is Roger Hallam, pictured here while on hunger strike against Kings College London (while a PhD student there) because they have investments linked to fossil fuels. Roger started life as a satirical character in a comedy novel, from which he escaped.
Our government is complicit in ignoring the precautionary principle
Getting out of bed in the morning ignores the precautionary principle. Staying in bed in the morning ignores the precautionary principle.
and in failing to acknowledge that infinite economic growth on a planet with finite resources is non-viable.
All those Professors and Vice-Chancellors, and none of them have an even basic understanding of economics.
Instead, the government irresponsibly promotes rampant consumerism and free-market fundamentalism
The government that constantly interferes in the free-market? That one? And ‘rampant consumerism?’ Was the text for this letter copied from 1973?
Earth Overshoot Day (the date when humans have used up more resources from nature than the planet can renew in the entire year) falls ever earlier each year (1 August in 2018).
I expect the science for ‘Earth Overshoot Day’ is incontrovertible.
The “social contract” has been broken, and it is therefore not only our right, but our moral duty to bypass the government’s inaction and flagrant dereliction of duty, and to rebel to defend life itself.
The amoebae all support your rebellion, because without you they will be left to die by the government.
We therefore declare our support for Extinction Rebellion, launching on 31 October 2018. We fully stand behind the demands for the government to tell the hard truth to its citizens.
Hard truths, yes. Like previous hard truths that wannabe overlords like you have told the people, eg, “You all have to go and work in the paddy fields”, and, “If you read Western propaganda you’ll be arrested and shot”.
We call for a Citizens’ Assembly to work with scientists on the basis of the extant evidence and in accordance with the precautionary principle, to urgently develop a credible plan for rapid total decarbonisation of the economy.
The Citizens’ Assembly sounds nice, doesn’t it? As does “rapid total decarbonisation of the economy”.
There have been quite a few comments in the press recently about how no-one in the Tories wants to be seen as being involved in getting rid of Theresa May. Supposedly anyone who is seen to plunge the knife in will never be trusted by anyone ever again.
This may be true when you’re getting rid of a popular, election-winning leader like Tony Blair for no good reason, when it’s obvious that the only reason you’ve done so is because of your own personal vanity. But I don’t think it’s true when you’re getting rid of a universally-hated and traitorous leader who ran a secret operation to sell the country out. In that case plenty of people will regard you as a hero.
Who, exactly, likes Theresa May? She is reviled on the left to a Thatcher-like degree. (Not for any good reason, really, but the left is irrational in its hatreds.) The centrists and New Labourites are more tolerant of her, but none of them like her. The right loathes her. No-one will shed a tear for her, but many will hold parties to celebrate.
What the people will not forgive is not getting rid of her, but failing to get rid of her, as she tries her mightiest to keep Britain enmeshed with the EU to as much of a degree as she can get away with. The Tories will never be forgiven for that.
The Brexit side of politics is starting to sound like global warming fanatics with all the warnings against Theresa May:
Jan 2018: “We have to act now and get rid of Theresa May before it’s too late”.
Feb 2018: “We have to act now and get rid of Theresa May before it’s too late”.
March 2018: “We have to act now and get rid of Theresa May before it’s too late”.
April 2018: “We have to act now and get rid of Theresa May before it’s too late”.
.
.
.
Oct 2018: “We have to act now and get rid of Theresa May before it’s too late”.
Every day my Twitter feed is full of this stuff: Act now before it’s too late, from both greens and Brexiteers.
But of course in the case of Brexit there really is a genuine threat. Unfortunately it pretty much is too late now. The actions needed to have taken place at least six months ago. Although if they did actually vote her out tomorrow then perhaps Brexit could be salvaged. But it’s clear that they won’t. I can’t believe that there aren’t at least 48 MPs who want her out, so the fact that they haven’t put in their letters tells us that they don’t think they have the numbers for the vote of confidence. Look at the way they rolled over at the 1922 meeting yesterday.
So May is just going to trundle on obfuscating endlessly, playing for time, running out the clock, until it really is too late to do anything, and Parliament will then vote for the deal she presents, because they’ll be terrified of a no-deal Brexit where no time is left to sort out the problem areas. Tory MPs are mostly Remainers who are trusting that despite a Brexit betrayal they’ll still get more votes than Corbyn, although I think they may be in for a shock there. But the aim is to fudge the Brexit betrayal so the voters aren’t really sure of what’s happening, so they won’t get angry enough to desert the Tories when Corbyn is the alternative.
The only hope is that enough rogue MPs put their letters into Graham Brady despite being told not to by the other rebels. But May winning a confidence vote would be disastrous for Brexit. The only thing the rebels could do then is to try other wrecking tactics which would probably split the party badly and may bring on a general election (although I doubt they’ll have the balls for any of that).
Then again, wrecking the Conservative Party would be a pretty good outcome in my view. But not as good as getting a real Brexit. (Best of all would be to get Brexit and then see the Conservative Party destroyed.)
David Allen Green tweets:
There should never be a UK-wide referendum ever ever again. On constitutional issues pertaining only to some of the four member states of the UK, fine. But UK wider referendums are a negation of parliamentary supremacy, creating mandates which cannot be gainsaid.
This is partly what the whole Remainer screaming fit is about. It explains why they’ve gone so berserk over Brexit. It’s not just about trying to stop Brexit, it’s also about trying to prevent the public ever having such a direct say on anything ever again. They figure that even if they lose this battle, if they make the whole thing as difficult and (for the average person) as tedious as possible then no-one will ever want to have a public vote ever again.
So it’s about keeping the decision-making powers in the hands of the Establishment, and out of the grubby mitts of Midlands factory workers.
The only problem with that is that, although the Brexit process has become tedious at the hands of Theresa May, a lot of people have thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle of the great and the good — well, Blair Clegg and Adonis at least — thoroughly getting the wind up them, and losing the plot. And a lot of people have now seen that the Establishment is full of nutters, and they’ll now be more keen on geting a direct say in future, rather than letting the nutters make the decisions.
(And, of course, it hardly needs to be said that referendums work perfectly well in other decent countries, such as Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland.)
