Some Friday afternoon name-calling fun

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Recently I tweeted this:

I’m not going to call lefties ‘lefties’ any more. It suggests there’s something still slightly loveable about them, or that I still feel some affection for them, despite our differences. But those days are long gone. As Kurt Schlichter says, ‘The left hates you. Act accordingly’.

The question remains, though, as to how we shall address lefties from  now on. Suggestions in the comments, please. (C’mon, my stats tell me I have readers, so get cracking.)

My suggestions are:

Gulag builders

Kobas

Venezuelans

Berias

Mass grave merchants

Philbies

Hoxhas

Social Justice Stasis

3am door-knockers

Challenging a Conservative leader — what everyone on the internet has failed to realise

Hector Drummond Posted on by

In the last year there have been endless calls for Theresa May to be given the boot, including from me. And I’ve yet to see a single commentator calling for her to stay. But what nobody at all has addressed is how she could be gotten rid of. Many people seem to be under the impression that if forty-eight letters go in from Conservative MPs, then a leadership contest is on, which the party members will ultimately decide. But that isn’t so. What happens first is the MPs have a vote of no confidence in May. (That’s assuming that May doesn’t resign once those forty-eight letters go in, but I’m assuming she won’t.)

The likelihood at the moment is that May would win that vote of no confidence, and would, as a result, stay in post. In times past a leader would be expected to resign if the confidence vote did not result in an overwhelming victory, but given the Brexit situation, and the way May has clung on to the leadership no matter how bad things have gotten for her, I think we can forget that.

But here’s the worst part, the bit that every commentator is ignoring, or is ignorant of. If May wins the confidence vote then she cannot be challenged again for a full year. This is not something I’ve ever seen mentioned in regard to Theresa May. It also not something that is mentioned in most guides to Tory leadership elections, because they are more concerned with what happens when a leader resigns or loses a confidence vote. But it is mentioned here (see p. 8), here and here. And the MPs will know this, even if the Twitterati don’t. A full twelve months grace, and there won’t be a thing the Brexiteers can do during that period to stop her doing what she wants.

This explains the inexplicable. Why are the Brexiteers not getting those forty-eight letters in when clearly they must have enough people on side? It’s because they know that a leadership challenge has to succeed in knocking May out first go, otherwise it will only have made things worse. A May that wins the vote will be re-strengthened, and will probably sack most or all of the Brexiteers from the Cabinet. It’s why they’re waiting until things get really bad, so bad that even a lot of the spineless, centrist Conservative MPs will have had enough of May. But it’s hard to see how the Brexit situation can get much worse than it is at the moment. So the fact that the Brexiteers haven’t acted by now doesn’t give one much confidence that they ever will, especially when David Davis keeps threatening to resign and then not doing so.

There is one thing that will make it more likely that May would lose a confidence vote, and that is if the Tories slip in the polls. A lot of Tory MPs are okay with May because she is keeping them ahead of Corbyn, and also they’re afraid of what could be unleashed if May is deposed (possibly even another early election). But if it looks like she won’t even be able to beat Corbyn then they would probably turn on her. However, while a downslide in the polls could definitely happen, it will only happen if the public realises what is going on with Brexit, and that could take a while, as the Tories are past masters at fudging their way out of trouble. In fact, it may not even happen at all, especially now that the Daily Mail is replacing outgoing editor Paul Dacre with an arch-Remainer. And the fear of Corbyn may keep May buoyant for as long as Labour remains hard-left. So we may be waiting for those forty-eight letters for quite some time yet. (It’s even possible that forty-eight supporters of May could call for a confidence motion in her before forty-eight Brexiteers do.)

Update: Some further thoughts on this issue:

It’s hard to “fatally damage” a zombie

They’ll have to drag May out by her fingernails

 

 

Non-violent violence

Hector Drummond Posted on by

I spent all of yesterday in a mostly useless workshop, of the sort I had hoped I’d left behind when I got out of academia. My favourite bit was when a self-righteous left-wing woman said, “When I hear people talking down social care and charities I really want to punch them in the face. Not because I’m a violent person, but because they deserve it.’ This was not said as humorous overstatement, but matter-of-factly.

‘Not because I’m violent.’ The world is full of non-violent left-wingers who have peace in their hearts, love flowing through their veins, and the best interests of humanity in the forefront of their minds at all times, but who still somehow end up personally taking thousands of people around the back of the prison block and shooting them. Perhaps she’ll get her wish in about ten years to dispense her savage but non-violent justice to all those who use a sardonic tone of voice within earshot.

Welcome to the hut

Hector Drummond Posted on by

I’ve been saying for a while now (especially on my Twitter page)  that white feminists are quite mistaken if they think that they’re on the top of the victimhood tree. Once the ‘victims’ are in charge, white women will quickly find they’re classed as oppressors, second only to white men in culpability.

This is already happening in regard to the transgender movement. Feminists who don’t appreciate transwomen moving in on their territory have been finding themselves on the receiving end of the sort of smear tactics that the feminists pioneered. Germaine Greer is one the more visible targets, but there’s plenty of this stuff that goes on away from the public eye. There are to be found on Twitter and Facebook furious exchanges between the ‘TERFs’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) and the transloonies. I’ll pick out a few choice ones over the next few weeks.

Germaine Greer in happier days, working as a roadie for Blodwyn Pig and replacing a broken D string.

It’s hard not to laugh at the feminists getting a taste of their own medicine, but this is nothing more than gallows humour. In the gulags there might have been some grim satisfaction when a former interrogator joined your hut, but that didn’t make up for what was happening to you.

This if, of course, what happens when you push identity politics and victimhood as the big issues of the age. There are plenty more ways of dividing society up than into men and women (or rich and poor). And if you’re a University Professor living in a big house, or a BBC presenter on a few hundred thousand, then you’re a ripe target yourself. Eventually some people notice that they’re not being invited to your soirees and dinner parties, because you can’t invite everyone, can you, so you’re forced to engage in some discrimination.

So, white feminists (and soon, rich black feminists): welcome to the hut.

This is not something I ever expected to say, but… I’ll take Germaine.

The feminist bubble

Hector Drummond Posted on by

So the writer and critic of feminism Peter Lloyd posted a Tweet in which he made reference to this story where twenty women invaded a men-only pool in Hampstead dressed as men. They were protesting about the proposed legislation that would allow anyone to go to a gender-segregated pool if they merely ‘identified’ as that gender. (Lloyd possibly got the wrong end of the stick about this story; it’s hard to tell from his brief tweet.)

Then every angry stereotyped tattooed feminist clown in the country piled on with comments, and likes for the comments. (Because I left my own comment I got notified of dozens of these likes; it was like a women’s studies conference straight out of central casting.) And these weren’t even the really dumb feminists, because most of them could at least see that gender self-identification was a stupid idea. Although one of them was so dumb that she actually had this virtual-contradiction in her Twitter bio:

Supporting equality with protected female only spaces. Gender is a social Construct.

And one particularly idiotic woman said:

Because Mongos like you don’t give a shit otherwise. Men d.g.a.f untill it happens to THEM or their sacred spaces. Did you know about gender self I’d issues before this mra *Man* tweeted about it (and didn’t read his own link, div.)??

Yes, this outraged bag of cliches actually though that men like Peter Lloyd had no idea about ‘gender self issues’ before these brave feminists had brought the issue into the Twattersphere. They had no clue whatsoever that conservative men (and women, for that matter) had been going on about it constantly for the last few years. From which we can conclude that the loony radfems really do live in their own little bubble, with no idea of what anyone outside it really thinks.

Radical feminist stock image. Most of them look like this, only uglier.

 

Robert Harris’s logic — it probably works when he’s preaching to the choir

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Via Sean Thomas’s Twitter page, I saw that novelist Robert Harris has tweeted this:

Just came across this reference to Lord Carrington in Antony Beevor’s excellent “Arnhem”. Carrington won the MC and like many of his generation was strongly pro-EU. Contrast his character & life experience with that of Boris Johnson and you realise how low we have sunk

Read this tweet and realise how low we have sunk. Harris went to Selwyn College at Cambridge. Sure he studied English Literature rather than anything that dealt in serious reasoning, but has his brain really gone so bad that he thinks this passes as logic? Or does he just think he can get away with it as he’s tweeting to the left?

Let’s start with the selective examples. Did Tony Blair serve? Andrew Adonis? A. C. Grayling? As Sean Thomas replied, “Some generations were obliged to fight. You and me were just lucky.” Hardly anyone on both sides of the Brexit argument has served in the military, so picking out some convenient examples like Boris Johnson proves nothing. Would his Selwyn tutor have let him get away with that?

(There are in fact a few ex-soldiers in politics these days, although not many at the top. I agree that there are too many career politicians, but he appears to be unaware of the existence of many of these ex-soldiers.)

And how many World War II soldiers were anti-EU? How does one soldier prove anything? If we had plucked out a war hero who was anti-EU Harris’s Cambridge training would have come to the fore and he would have quickly informed us that this proves nothing.

And it’s all very well to say “Many of his generation were pro-EU”, but is this true? What evidence is there of it? I thought that the Remainers were bitterly complaining that the Brexit vote was due to the older generation? Or were they pro-EU in their youth, but then they went off it as they wised up?

Harris also appears to be unaware that Carrington later went sour on the EU:

“I thought we were joining a common market. It did not occur to me that the Europeans would interfere in our affairs….

“What worries me about the Union is that so many rules and regulations come out of Brussels that are not, broadly speaking, anything to do with the Common Market. They want to standardise everything, and that is not very useful.”

And Lord Carrington believes that the EU’s overbearing bureaucracy lies at the heart of the growing disillusionment many British people feel for the organisation.

“The average person is not anti-Europe but they are against over-regulation. You should be left to run your own affairs unless it affects the Common Market. The frustration with lots of people with the European Union is that they feel their lives are being made more difficult by the EU. Put simply, Brussels sticks in their throats.”

Like many people of his generation, Carrington was pro-EU in the sense of being in favour of joining a trading bloc. But he wasn’t at all keen on joining anything that resembled the modern EU. I don’t suppose Harris will be telling his readers that.

The biggest enemy agent of them all

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Philby. Burgess. Maclean. Anthony Blunt. George Blake. John Cairncross. Goronwy Rees. Edith Tudor-Hart. Arthur Wynn. David Floyd. Percy Glading. Bob Stewart. John Symonds. Dave Springhall.

Have we uncovered all the British Communist spies and traitors? Hardly. The biggest one of all still operates, sometimes called out, but never disciplined, and now brazenly out in the open. What’s it’s name?

Why, it’s the modern British Establishment, of course. Currently agitating openly for leftist, non-democratic, oligarchical control of the country. Turn on your TV to watch it in action today.

Windows 10 update failure hell

Hector Drummond Posted on by

I’m in the tenth circle of Hell — Windows 10 hell, that is. I still can’t get my main computer to update to either the Fall Creators 1709 update from last year, or the latest 1803 update. I can usually work out these sort of computer problems eventually, but this time I’m giving up because there are too many other things to do, not least this blog.

(The security and other updates are still updating, it’s just the major updates that aren’t).

So there used to be this drink called champagne…

Hector Drummond Posted on by

In days long past middle-class women liked to drink a fizzy wine called champagne.

Then a group of snooty champagne makers got the EU to declare that only their champagnes could legally be called champagnes.

Thus began a long, never-ending battle involving large amounts of taxpayers money, and private producers’ money, being spent on pointless legal fights, and more power over language being given to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.

And what was the result? Was it that the ‘real’ champagne makers made more money, as they hoped? It doesn’t appear so. The result was (at least in the UK) that the middle class women started drinking cava instead, because it was cheaper than ‘real’ champagne. Then they turned to prosecco, which they’re now all mad for. Richer people still drink champagne, as I would if I was rich, but for everyone else, champagne has become invisible, and ‘prosecco’ is all you ever hear.

This is what happens when you try to control language to control people’s behaviour. Their behaviour slips out of your control in ways you didn’t — although everybody else did — expect.

You’d almost call it ‘champagne comedy’, except that means little to young people nowadays, so we’ll have to call ‘prosecco comedy’ instead, which doesn’t really have the same ring.

(Strictly speaking we should be saying ‘spumante’, rather than ‘prosecco’, but nobody does. It’s funny that years ago ‘spewmante’ was considered low-class, and it was the height of bad taste to serve it. It probably still is considered low-class in ritzy circles, but these days it’s ‘middle-class mum petrol’, even if it’s called ‘prosecco’ rather than ‘spumante’.)

Good Heinlein quote

Hector Drummond Posted on by

From Time Enough For Love:

“Even so, the problems of a planet with more than a billion people can keep a man busy, especially if his intention is to govern as little as possible – as that means he must keep a sharp eye out and his ear tuned for signs that subordinates are doing unnecessary governing. Half my time is used in the negative work of plucking such officius officials and ordering that they never again serve in any public capacity.

Then I usually abolish their job, and all jobs subordinate to them.

I have never noticed any harm from such pruning save that parasites whose jobs are eliminated must find some other way to avoid starvation. (They are welcome to starve – better if they do. But they don’t.)”

(via Duncan S., commentator at Samizdata)

 

The Brexit Memorial Home

Hector Drummond Posted on by

A little Friday afternoon fun:

The Brexit Memorial Home (with apologies to Roger Waters)

Take all your overgrown infants away somewhere
And build them a home, a little place of their own
The Brexit Memorial Home for Incurable Remainers and Lords

They can appear to themselves every day
On closed circuit TV
To make sure they’re still real
It’s the only connection they feel

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Adonis and Osborne
Prof. Grayling and friend, Mrs. Soubry and Morgan
Mr. Blair and party, the ghost of Ted Heath, the memories of Jean Monnet
And now, adding colour, a group of anonymous EU horse meat fonctionnaires

Did they expect us to treat them with any respect?
They can polish their columns and go mad on TV
Amuse themselves as they rant on the Beeb
Ra-cist, gam-mon, overturn the vote

Safe in the permanent gaze of a cold glass eye
With their favourite tweets
They’ll be full of deceit
In the Brexit Memorial Home for European destroyers of democracy

Is everyone in?
Are you having a nice time?
Now the final solution can be applied

The ‘Fuck Off and Die’ list

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The title explains it all, really. Who should be on it? The following is hardly definitive, but it’s a start. Add who you want in the comments.

 

THE FUCK OFF AND DIE LIST

In no particular order

Corbyn’s Labour (obvious, yes, but we can hardly leave them out)

May’s Conservatives

Hillary, Bernie, and the US Democrats

Anna Soubry

Jamie Oliver

The Guardian

Gina Miller

Owen Jones

Sadiq Khan

Olly Robbins

Jeremy Heywood

Graham Linehan (you can just see him as a Cardinal if he’d been born fifty years earlier)

Richard Murphy

Every British Muslim (not including those who’ve given up Islam)

Seamus Milne

Andrew Murray

Soapy Joe Maugham

Ian Dunt

Laurie Penny

Jon Snow

Rufus Hound

Omid Djalili

Nicola Sturgeon

Public Health England and the tobacco controllers

A. C. Grayling

Andrew Adonis

Paul Merton

Ken Clarke

Cathy Newman

Stewart Lee

Polly Toynbee

Radhika Sanghani

Ian McEwan

Billy Bragg

George Soros

Susan Sarandon

Terry Eagleton

Marcus Brigstocke

Al Gore

Sarah Silverman

Malcom Turnbull

Ken Loach

Everyone on Twitter

John Legend

Robert Webb

All those Australian frightbats that Tim Blair goes on about

Jeanette Garofalo

Kathy Griffin (not so much because of her politics, because who pays any attention to what she says, more for her annoying voice)

Bette Midler

Tim Robbins

Rosie O’Donnell

Samuel L. Jackson

Jimmie Kimmel

Sean Penn

Alec Baldwin

Oprah Winfrey

Harvey Weinstein

Arianna Huffington

Macron

Justin Trudeau

Justin Welby

George Galloway

Slavoj Zizek

Lily Allen

Charlotte Church

George Monbiot

Hugh Fearnley-Fuckstick (how embarrassing for someone much more posh and educated than Jamie Oliver to be the poor man’s Jamie Oliver)

Jacques Derrida (yes, he’s still alive)

Russell Brand

Al Franken

Shia Le Beouf

Michael Moore

The Sheen family

Ed Balls

Caroline Lucas

Kevin Maguire

Caitlin Moran

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Zoe Williams

Will Straw

Bob Crow

Lord Mandelson

David Aaronovitch

Jon Lansman

Shami Charkrabarti

J. K. Rowling

Jenny Formby

Kath Viner

Mhairi Black

John Bercow

Stephen Kinnock

Aaron Bastani

Chelsea Handler

Lena Dunham

Gary Lineker

 

Added: (thanks to Andy in Japan):

Nick Clegg

Matthew Parris

Nick Cohen

 

 

Don’t trust tabloids. But more than that, don’t trust a PR company if you’re not the one paying them

Hector Drummond Posted on by

So this is interesting. That guy who made up the joke story about going on a school trip the other day that has made the papers wrote this blog post a few years ago about how the tabloids screwed him over when he was on some reality TV show.

He makes the usual sensible points about not trusting tabloids (especially The Daily Star, although I don’t think anyone at all takes this paper seriously), but he doesn’t give the same advice about PR companies. He should have done, though, because what happened was this.

He did what PR companies advise, which is that you tell them all the possible bits of trivial dirt that exist in your life, so they know how to deal with them when they inevitably hit the tabloids. Except that he told them to the PR company in charge of publicising the show. Who weren’t paid by him, but by the show. So all those bits of trivial dirt did end up in the media, suitably exaggerated and distorted, but most likely they were given to the press by the PR company itself, and were duly reported as coming from ‘anonymous show sources’.

So the moral is, don’t tell PR companies anything you don’t absolutely need to. That’s what they deal in, and it’s like you’re giving them free money. And that goes double when you’re not the one writing their cheques. And that goes triple WHEN YOU’RE THE PRODUCT.

 

A cartoon can’t improve on perfection

Hector Drummond Posted on by

I draw your attention to a most amusing post entitled “Why Do Feminists Always Draw Themselves Thinner?” The only thing I’d add is that not only do they draw themselves thinner and prettier than they really are, but also younger, nicer, sassier, more intelligent, cooler and more symmetrical. And with better skin and hair. All while insisting that those things don’t matter.

(I think some of the women talked about in this article are the ones whose photos vs cartoons have been shared around Twitter recently.)