It seems that every sub, self- identified grievance group wishes to have it’s name attached to some sort of “hate speech” legislation.
Some of these “grievance groups” are huge. Islam for example. Some are minute “trans people” for example .
Many of the whole range of diverse groups wishes to have some form of speech prorogued in order to avoid offense falling on their ears and eyes. Some of them deploy activist outrage in order to drive home their point that whatever has offended them has REALLY offended them. And for a few the implicit threat of force is included in the activism. Salman Rushdie and Charlie Hebdo are grotesque examples and there are plenty of lesser ones.
And now we have that phenomenon of our modern world – cancel culture. A mostly digital representation of the worst aspects of the Terror in France and lynchings in the USA. The motivating factor in all cases is insane levels of anger aimed at destroying as much of a person as possible.
Free Speech , vigorously defended, is the ONLY antidote to this mob insanity. Reasonable people from all sides MUST speak out, every time these egregious attacks happen. We must be “out there” talking logic and reason. We must be pointing out the utter insanity of this behavior and we must not leave the field to the mob.
Free speech is powerful and fragile. Once lost it is incredibly hard to recover. Once governments discover they can pander to the mob by reducing Freedom of Speech is there any doubt, at all, that they will continue to do it? The UK has become an awful example of this. They even have policemen tracking down offenders who dare to post something controversial on-line that “offended” someone. This in a country that used to revel in Free Speech.
The world is facing food shortages brought on, in part by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The little known fact is that Ukraine is a key agricultural supplier of grain and vegetables, particularly to the middle east, where much of the wheat goes into producing the daily bread of millions of people in Egypt and Lebanon. Interrupting Ukraine agricultural production puts a damper on predicted supply and thus prices in the world market start to rise.
At the same time many western countries have just announced initiatives that will result in reducing food supply from many countries. Several European countries are moving to take agricultural land out of use by government fiat. The one that has attracted the greatest interest has been the Netherlands because the farmers’ reaction to being told that one third of them are going to lose their family farms to reduce nitrogen fertilizer use has brought about massive protests from the farming community. But the Netherlands is far from being the only country to announce this measure – Germany, Italy, France, Belgium and Canada have announced similar measures. Great Britain has opted for paying the farmers to get out of farming, offering buy outs to the oldest (and most experienced of course) farmers.
It is worth noting that none of these decision are being made with the intent of INCREASING agricultural production. Removing high nitrogen fertilizers from use will, provably (see Sri Linka), reduce crop yields dramatically and, at the same time they are taking land out of production.
Sri Lanka some three years ago banned the import of high nitrogen fertilizer. The President claimed it was a virtuous move to reduce emissions, but, in reality it was forced because the country lacked foreign reserves to pay for the import of high nitrogen fertilizer. The results? Crop yields collapsed and the middle class disappeared into poverty.
A person whom I admire, very much, Neil Oliver who has become an international figure for his sane commentaries and observations on real life as seen from Scotland has, in recent weeks, been stating that amidst all the confusion of Covid, lock downs, energy bills spiking, Inflation, energy supplies in Europe becoming problematical one philosophical principle helps make things understandable:
“The simplest explanation that fits all the facts is probably the correct one” – a paraphrase of Occam’s Razor. I heartily agree with Mr Oliver on this.
Why are the governments of Europe enacting a policy that most voters seem to have no clue about? Why are they choosing (or being told to choose) such a course of action at this time?
At the same time that they are doing this, those self same governments have been investing untold billions of dollars into windmills and solar panels, forcing their populations to transfer their transportation to Electric Powered vehicles, adopt electric heating and not gas, in the UK’s case they wish people to adopt “heat pumps” instead of gas heating, Note all these “choices” will cost far more than the current options, Installing a heat pump is a minimum of ten thousand pounds, electric vehicles are more expensive to buy than petrol or diesel vehicles and will require a massive increase in building up of the national power grid.
The investments required for all this are ENORMOUS. And the results are not even definite, there is no proof at all that this will result in some sort of perfect planet. Or that things will magically become cheaper. Most people will be financially much worse off than they are now.
Neil Oliver said it best – at least for me. “They are taking away choice“. The governments of this world, or at least the western part of it, have decided that it is time to restrict the ability of ordinary members of their country to make choices. They are adopting policies that will increase the cost of energy and travel which will force us out of cars and onto buses, they are adopting policies that will dramatically increase the price of food, particularly meat, so that anything other than a very basic meal plan will be out of most of our reach. They are doing this without asking. They are merely telling.
In T.H. White’s seminal work “The Once and Future King” there is a part where Merlin the Wizard is instructing the young Arthur by using examples from the animal kingdom. You may remember the Walt Disney cartoon “The Sword in the Stone” which was a telling of part of this. He turns Arthur into a fish and a bird as life lessons. In the book there are more examples – one of which involved turning Arthur into an ant. Arthur got to see what the motto of the Kingdom of the Ants was;
Just recently we have seen the Biden administration and it’s hyenas in Congress and its jackals in the press explode with fury at an imaginary outrage. They have yapped out in loud chorus about how Border Patrol on horseback “whipped” Haitian illegal immigrants attempting to enter the USA. It was clear from the video they were whipping themselves up to a frenzy about did NOT show the Border Patrol “whipping” anyone.
In fact – all videos of the “incident” and testimony from those who took the videos merely show horsemen with split reins attempting to use their horses to block the forward progress of the illegals. Nothing else. Even on the soundtrack there is no evidence of animosity from the Border Patrol, merely men doing their job.
The manufactured outrage from the Biden campaign and the cohorts of the agit-prop department is verifiably false. Why are the Republicans in Congress not calling them out on their lying – and doing so loudly and repeatedly.
Leftists ALWAYS lie. We need to stop treating with them like they are talking in good faith – they are not.
There are perceptions and narratives that abound in the current climate, the oft repeated Government line that “the biggest threat to the USA from a terrorist perspective is White Supremacy” is one, the leftist cry of “if only the rich would pay their fair share what a paradise we would build” is another. There are more of course.
But one thing that is never questioned is what destruction will be wrought if the left has its way on destroying or dismantling Capitalism.
It is something that few seem to be able to visualize.
What happens if the left succeeds in bankrupting the country? Overwhelming the systems that exist? What happens when the trucks stop running – and they will when the fuel does not arrive, when the means of paying for the freight are not available? How will hospitals be funded? When paychecks no longer arrive or in a currency that is no longer supported what happens? What happens to the nations food supplies when farmers can no longer hedge their harvest on a futures market that will no longer be there? How will energy supplies be secured?
The cost in lives lost is going to be huge. Not just in the confusion and and struggling for control but in starvation and illness. The gradual reduction in treatment of serious conditions will reduce the lifespans of those who are receiving service.
No-one that I have been able to see has modeled what the left’s programs will do in real life. The reality is that leftist regimes always have shortages. Leftist regimes rely upon government force executed by heavily armed police and loyal military units to enforce government fiat. The only people who will be somewhat more able to cope will be those furthest from the centers of government.
As for the rich, well most will have transferred a lot of the wealth out of the country and beyond the reach of the USA – this will have been done during the runs on the currency that precede the total collapse.
What the left wants to do comes with a HUGE price in human lives lost, human misery expanded and human existence devalued.
It is, by far, the worst option for any country or government.
Like Ringwraiths sent out from Mordor the Five Horsemen of the Technopalypse are laying waste to the rights and freedoms of the very people who helped make them successful in the first place.
Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter. An Axis alliance worthy of Mussolini. All run by billionaires. Using their clout and control to subvert any hint of freedom of speech.
Normally, giant corporations acting in concert to corner a market and to deny access to competitions would be in deep do-do with the Government.
But no – they are encouraged by the Government – who are constrained (for now) from passing laws to ban free speech but who have the power to pass legislation to make it easier for “private” companies to do it for them.
It would almost funny, seeing the lefties kowtowing and groveling to billionaires. Antifa and activists being funded by Soros – another billionaire and a hedge fund manager to boot. Yes those black bloc outfits are out there on the streets creating mayhem and destroying private property. All at the behest of their paymasters.
Most of the GOP – with very few exceptions have proven themselves to be too spineless for the battle to come. They cannot be trusted, at all.
It is down to us to gear up for this struggle and get on with it.
Google have decided that they are the arbiters of internet approvals.
They have decided that they are fully justified in deciding what another company should regulate in it’s own space. They have decided to remove Parler from their App Store because Parler refuses to proactively supervise and ban user content.
This is not how Google wishes the internet to run.
Google are not friends of free expression and free speech. People who work for Google need to seriously examine what they are working for and toward.
I have been wading through, or in and out of, a mammoth book – the second book in a trilogy about Communist Dictator Joseph Stalin. The Second book in this painstakingly researched and notated series is called “Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941”. I am not trying to work my way through the book page by page – the sheer amount of trivia recorded is almost impossible to follow. Instead I use it as a sort of “pot luck bag” I open it up at some random spot and I start reading. And wow, does that give some real glimpses into the evolution of a Communist State. Fascinating stuff.
Today I opened up the book at page 364 – (less than half way through) – and found myself reading a segment about the Comintern and its baleful influence on, of all obscure things, the Spanish Civil War. I was intrigued because I had just listened to a song written by the tedious old lefty, Christy Moore called “La Quinta Brigada” praising Irish Republican support for the Communist side in the Spanish Civil War. The main object of Moore’s praise is IRA member and left winger Frank Ryan. Bear with me here – the story is going to get even more involved.
Frank Ryan ( on the left of the photo) in Spain
What attracted my interest in the book was not, as it happens, La Quinta Brigada and Moore’s chirpy anthem to communist ambition. It was a note that says; “Stalin ordered the Comintern to have the Spanish Communists intensify the ‘complete and final annihilation’ of the Spanish ‘Trotskyites’ as ‘agents of fascism’ “
The organization they were targeting was named “POUM” – which is a Spanish acronym for “Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification” and whose members were fighting in “La Quinta Brigada” alongside the very people who were being instructed to wipe them out! One of the leaders of POUM was named Andreu Nin and he was arrested by the Russian Secret Service (the NKVD) IN SPAIN and tortured to death!
Nin – in Uniform in Spain
In the meantime our leftist Saint, Frank Ryan was captured in the Civil War by the Nationalist side (Franco’s forces) accused of murder, sentenced to death by a Court Martial and stuck in Borgos Prison. In 1940, his sentence having been reduced to 30 years, he was released, thanks to some connections between the Irish minister to Spain and the German Government, into the custody of the German Intelligence Service – the Abwehr. He was taken to Berlin where he was persuaded to take part in various operations to support the IRA and to attack British and American interests. Nothing that he did seems to have born much fruit and, in 1944, he died of pleurisy and pneumonia in Berlin. He was buried in Dresden, and in 1979 his remains were repatriated to ingratiating praise and public display from his former comrades. They were loud in their assurances that ‘Auld Frank” had never abandoned his leftist views, even when he was living well in Germany as an agent of one the most reviled regimes in history.
There are, I think, two points in this little, bizarre, historical drama. One is that the left is totalitarian in its structure and outlook. It “progressively” attacks factions in its own structure that it perceives as “not really ‘true’ “ and that Keeping themselves more pure is more important to them than the welfare of the people they are claiming responsibility over. The second point is – that if the IRA and its leftist wing see no difference at all in working either for Joe Stalin or Adolf Hitler – then there really is no difference between them.
It is a simple fact of modern life that the left has been advancing its agenda and cause under the battle banner of Hate.
Disagreement with the socialist agenda is labeled as “hate speech”. Failure to enthusiastically agree with the latest insane pronouncement about racism in America, or Trangender Rights – gets labeled as “hate speech”. Someone going to a University to deliver a lecture on the Rights of the Individual will be labeled, in advance, as both “divisive” and “hate speech”. The word “hate” is bandied around in Liberal Speak almost as much as the word “racist”. Neither word is correct – but labeling people with stark, alarming and frankly threatening words is all part of Agit-Prop – the Leninist idea of advancing the cause through agitation and propaganda.
The left brooks no idea of discussion or give and take. The Left’s idea of give and take is; people give, the party takes. The idea of of “discussion” is that it is the audience’s job to shut up, sit down and listen. Applaud at the end. The only sound they wish to hear is enthusiastic and subservient cheering.
You might think that I am exaggerating for effect. I wish I was. But no.
Don’t believe me? Go look at Twitter and see how they behave. Give yourself a day or two of watching the stream of sewage that flows effortlessly from the left and you will be ready to get quit of Twitter nd its twits and move over to Parler or some other place where the unrestrained hatred of the left is, for the moment, non-existent.
Hate, the word, the use, the banners is the stock in trade of the Left. They hate opponents, they hate disagreement, they hate individuals and they hate people.
They do, however, love the exercise of power. The will do or say almost anything to get into power.
Boris Johnson is, without a doubt, the biggest political disappointment in my personal panoply of choices throughout my life.
When Boris wriggled his way into the limelight and he looked like he was going to be the man to actually lead Great Britain into the new golden age. Giving the impression to the electorate that he was going to be ferocious in their interest. He was going to be the firm and confident hand that would guide Britain out of Europe, would be the man to make trade agreements and alliances throughout the globe and who would also start pushing the advantages of infrastructure toward the north of the country.
Then came Covid 19.
And the pressure of the crisis revealed the true character of Boris Johnson. He got infected and had a rough time of it. Contrast his approach to getting the disease, to the 74 year old Donald Trump who was fiercely brash about getting over it as soon as he could, pushing his medical staff to treat him with Regeneron, an experimental antibody cocktail, to excellent result. Boris was very ill. Maybe he tried to get back too fast -but whatever reason he has become almost hors de combat in the real challenges facing Britain. He has been seen to ally himself to The Great “Green” Proposed swindle.
Boris has laid forward a plan to ban the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles in the UK in 2030. A masterly piece of seeming to be revolutionary and visionary without actually taking responsibility for what actually happens. In 2030 working people in the UK will be forced to take on expensive-to-buy and maintain electric vehicles, most of the people will try to cling onto the cars they already paid for and own and try to get even more mileage out of them because they will lack the spare 20K Pounds or so to afford the rich libs’ toy. But that doesn’t seem to worry Boris – after all the chances he will be PM in 2030? Crashing madly toward zero as things stand.
He claims to be an environmental “believer” yet he is embarking on a course which is going to require the extraction and production of untold millions of batteries requiring huge supplies of mined materials. All of which are abroad, all of which will be imported. He will dump this on the British people and economy in the hope that no-one has a clue as to what is going to happen when, after around 8 years the batteries in the new cars are going to need to be replaced – and what will happen with the extremely polluting used ones?
The title of this article is “Boris the Loris”.
Pygmy Slow Loirs
Most people don’t know that a Slow Loris is a cute furry little mammal that has one outstanding characteristic. It is venomous. The only primate that is (and one of only very few mammals).
Perhaps the one comfort we can take from “Boris the Loris” and his venomous behavior, is that when the fight comes over the Green Scam , Boris’s support for that planned scam will be as poisonous and toxic as his plan to lead Britain to greatness was.
