Daily archives: May 9, 2009

The Alcoholism Con

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Bloggerheads is down. For a real blogger, that’s like the sun not coming up in the morning, only a great deal more serious. So I have to link to a cache. (Update – site back up, new link).

http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2009/05/id_like_you_to.asp

I have a very great deal of sympathy for poons and his struggle to break free from alcohol dependency.

http://howtodryout.blogspot.com/2009/04/introduction.html

Poons has realised his life had become a total mess, and I send him my genuine wishes in his brave effort to face up to it and get things together. But I do not beleive in swapping addiction to a substance with addiction to a cult of total abstinence reinforced by group sessions and silly slogans. You won’t see me posting “One day at a time” and “Follow the Twelve Steps”, like other commenters you can see on Poons blog.

And to see the great Tim Ireland posting wussy bollocks about good non-alcoholic beers, is deeply disturbing. There is no good non-alcoholic beer. Drinking it is like watching a football match without the ball.

I admire Tim’s honesty in owning up to being an alcoholic. Actually he is wrong. Part of the cult brainwashing is to convince you that you are always an alcoholic, even when like Tim you haven’t had a drink for a year.

You are not an alcoholic Tim. Alcoholics drink. You haven’t drunk for a year.

Actually I don’t think you were ever an alcoholic, whatever you think. As you know, this blog would not have existed without your help and support, and you have never not been there when I needed you, and you have never let me down. A real alcoholic would have.

I like a drink myself. I got married on Tuesday and drank eight glasses of champagne. I haven’t had a drink since. With friends in the pub I will drink four or five pints. At a dinner party I will have a couple of large whiskies followed by over a bottle of wine.

But I only drink on average on between one and two days a week.

I have drunk more. As a student, I drank every day for months on end. For long periods I drank more than Poons says he has been drinking. But when I had important work to do, or exams coming up, I would simply stop. Those many periods of student months of averaging over five pints a day would make me an alcoholic forever according to the stupid propaganda Tim has swallowed. But it didn’t. I drink when I want and stop when I want.

Poons is indeed, as Tim says, a Man of Courage for admitting and going public with his problems. But courage is not swapping a dependence on alcohol for a psychological dependence on total abstinence and the bullshit that once you are an alcoholic, you are always an alcoholic, like the religous brainwashing of original sin.

Self-reliance is having a drink when you want to and having the willpower and self-respect to stop when you want to.

I have had serious alcoholics in my family. I am not talking without experience.

All of which was said much better by Stan.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/155164/?tag=Alcoholics+Anonymous.

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The BNP “Threat”

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Harriet Harman’s latest wheeze is to warn us that querying MPs’ disgusting behaviour will “Play into the hands of the BNP”.

There is an excellent article on the BNP by Jeremy Seabrook in the Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/09/bnp-european-elections-labour

It is absolutely true that under Blair the Labour Party abandoned the interests of the White Working Class. That hasn’t really changed. Bankers can have hundreds of billions from the taxpayers, but the Corus steel foundry on Tyneside can go to the wall.

Seabrook’s evocative description of “forlorn estates of liquor shops covered with chicken wire, leaky drainpipes, semi-wild dogs and tattered flags of St George ?” everything that symbolised the last gasp of a disappearing working class” immediately transported me back to canvassing in Mill Hill ward in Blackburn. There was little political downside to abandoning the “sinks”. Voter turnout among the hopeless voters of Mill Hill was down to around ten per cent. But I found the people friendly and engaging. I was frequently invited in for tea. They did not vote, not because they were stupid, but because they no longer believed it would do any good.

It was quite simply true that vastly more of the huge amount of public money which underpins the economy of Blackburn, ended up benefiting the immigant rather than the poor white community. But these essentially decent white people fully shared the strong British dislike of anything associated with fascism. The BNP only got just over 5% in Blackburn – the same as I got as an anti-war Independent.

Meanwhile, there was an incredible 29% of all votes cast by postal ballot in Blackburn. This was over twice the national average, and I believe the highest percentage in the country. As part of New Labour’s plan to maximise the value of their postal ballot vote farming through patriarchal power structures in immigrant communities, these postal ballots were by law mixed with secret ballots before counting, so it was not possible to record any discrepancy between postal and secret ballots. But I learnt from tellers that they looked to be “over 90%” for Jack Straw. (See Murder in Samarkand p. 365). That means Straw only got about 30% of secret, non-postal ballots.

These postal ballots came almost entirely from the Muslim community, and almost entirely went to Jack Straw. So he doesn’t need the white people of Mill Hill.

The mainstream parties exaggerate the electoral threat from the BNP because it is in their interest to do so. The astonishing thing is that the BNP do not have more support from the politically abandoned poor whites of this country. That is a reflection of the British people’s fundamental decency.

What is needed now is a politics of fairness and concern, of work and the dignity of labour, and which respects the values of liberty and toleration that still appeal to working class people as a fundamental part of their British heritage. The Labour Party can never again stand for that. New Labour never did. A radical political realignment is beginning to take place in the UK. How men of goodwill should try to influence that for the better is a grope in a forest rather than a march down an open road at present. I hope a track may be found soon. But getting rid of Brown, Harman, Mandelson and this terrible government is an obvious priority.

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Telegraph – Only Occasional Hit on Barn Door

 in UK Policy by | View Comments

The inane editorial staff at the Telegraph continue to throw away through poor targeting the great story they have purchased. They insist on leading on political targets who have not really done anthing wrong. Yesterday it was Gordon Brown and his cleaner. Today it was Phil Woolas and his panty-liners, which seem to cause the boys at the Telegraph some behind the bike sheds sniggering. Woolas claims he deducted the non-eligible items on the receipts from the claims. I used to do this myself – when travelling on business I would regularly submit restaurant receipts and deduct the wine on the claim form.

Given that the system is rotten and MPs were allowed food, cleaners etc which they should not have been allowed, Brown and Woolas did nothing with fraudulent intent.

The problem is that there is genuine wrongdoing here which I believe is criminal, and which the Telegraph just mixes in with the panty sniggering trivia. The morally disgusting and quite astonishingly ugly Margaret Moran is a prime example of the switching or flipping of second home to be able to claim expenses.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5298395/Margaret-Moran-Second-home-flip-paid-22500-dry-rot-bill.html

How Moran was able to claim on a second home which was neither in London nor in her constituency, I do not understand at all. But plainly her designation of a house in Southampton as her second home was purely to claim the renovation costs on an existing family property. Moran joins Jacqui Smith and Baroness Udders in the clearly criminal category, however supine Commons staff may be.

These people are self-serving scum. I am truly sick of being told on the mainsteam media that MPs are underpaid; that they are principled and talented people who could be earning much more elsewhere.

That may have once been true, but it is no longer. The vast majority of MPs are talentless career hacks. More than three quarters of them have never once voted against their party whip. Very few of them have ever had a proper job. The standard of blogging by the tiny minority who bother to keep a blog, is well below the general standard of political blogging in the UK. £68,000 is a perfectly fair reward for these drones. Some of them are more deserving of a jail cell.

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