I always seem to get back from Africa physically exhausted. I now have to tackle all the organisation of a family Christmas at the last minute. It is both the charm and disadvantage of this blog that the blogging is just me – it has no staff, and no revenue. That is not to devalue the contibution of the volunteer comment moderators – who help out with other things too – and the technical help from Tim, Clive and Richard and the the hosting team. But if I am not writing, nothing happens.
When I am lacking time or energy for deeper thinking, I tend to throw out some provocative thoughts from the top of my mind to see what people make of them. I am worrying today about the attacks on people of whom I disapprove.
I blogged recently about excessive police action against a blogger who argues against the existence of man-made climate change. I think he is wrong, but I don’t see why he should be the victim of police raids. I am going to surprise you by saying that I think that the hounding of Aidan Burley is going too far. Bad taste humour around the Nazis has existed throughout my lifetime – and was brought gloriously to the screen in the brilliant Mel Brooks’ The Producers (the first one, with the fantastic Zero Mostel).
Burley’s stag party seems rather a throwback to the Federation of Conservative Students of the late 70s, important elements of which delighted in singing Nazi songs to emphasise how right wing and taboo-free they were, with an element of self-parody (I speak as an eye-witness). You always worried there were genuine Third Reich sympathies in there – as of course there were so strongly in the British elite in the 1930s. That is the underlying worry in the Burley case – but if there were any evidence of real sympathy for Nazi views from Burley, it would have been dug up by now. I think we should just take this as bad taste humour a la Producers – a play which presumably cannot be produced under French law? Burley has been punished, revealed as a twit, and we should move on.
John Terry is a man whose TV persona and reported behaviour I have always found repulsive. I don’t know what he (or Suarez in a related case) actually said. I find racial abuse absolutely unacceptable. But again, I do not think that where it occurs between two individuals, and unless it is persistent and repeated over a period, it is a matter for the state and police. Not all bad behaviour should be a matter of higher intervention, and shaming can be a good sanction in itself. Both individuals and society have ways to sort things out without always involving the state or constituted organisations within it. I doubt Terry will do it again and it has been made plain that this is unacceptable behaviour in football. It is enough.
The same goes for Jeremy Clarkson. Again, total wanker. But nobody could have seen his TV appearance on the One Show and felt that he actually believed or advocated that strikers should be shot. His body language and tone of voice made it plain he was indulging in hyperbole with the object of being humorous. Exaggerated polemic should not be banned, or even censured. The real problem here is balance. Very right wing polemicists are very often allowed free rein to mouth off on broadcast media. On TV, opposing polemicists (like, err, me) are strictly banned. On radio, George Galloway on Talk Sport is pretty well a lone example. Personally I welcome the vigour of Clarkson’s expression – if only someone equally firm were allowed on to argue with him.
Finally, I am going to defend Herman Cain. No longer a candidate, and his tax and other policies were completely barking mad, therefore pretty mainstream Republican. But I saw very little wrong in anything he was alleged to have done in his love life. One woman alleged that he made a physical advance – put his hand on her leg – towards her in his car, after a dinner where she had asked him for help. It seems to me his behaviour was perfectly normal, and the important thing is she asked him to stop, and he did stop. If men were not allowed to make such advances, the human race would die out. Desisting once it is plain your advances are unwelcome is the important thing. The long term affair alleged was entirely mutual and consenting. Chatting up employees is tasteless, but ought not be a crime.
Burley, Terry, Clarkson and Cain are all people of whom, in different ways, I do not approve and with whose views on life I am heartily at odds. But I don’t hold the view that only people who hold certain approved views should be able to wander round and function, or that we should all be limited to certain highly constrained social behaviours. They are all, in various ways, victims of galloping political correctness. I thought I would express some sympathy for them. Human beings have a right to be wrong, and sometimes foolish. It is part of the human condition.
After all, John Terry has been prosecuted. So white people, too, can fall foul of the law in this area. But I guess what you’re suggesting is that wrt incitement specifically to violent acts, there has come to be a different attitude and practice with respect to Muslims than to others, eg. the self-styled “lyrical terrorist”, whose case ought never to have been brought to court.
I mean, on one of my hardly-used blogs, I had a somewhat puerile post declaiming, “Up againt the wall, motherf..s!”, after the famous late 1960s/MC5 slogan/song, with a list of perceived power groups in the UK. I wasn’t intending it an injunction to shoot people, it was a figure of speech – rhetoric – and a call for the dismantling of the worst kinds of liberal elitism extant in the arts in this country. I think that Clarkson’s silly commments were made in similar spirit – though from the opposite political pole. It’s laughable to suggest that in this country, he actually meant literally what he said. I think he was simply promoting his own celebrity – his only talent resides therein – but of course to some extent he miscalculated this time.
Clark,
I wrote a long rebuttal then decided not to publish, the thread is already long enough and there have been more or less the same arguments forwarded. so briefly;
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1- Just because someone draws a pretty graph, we cannot conclude the hydrocarbons are finished any minute now.
2- I am questioning the basis of the science, ie prove to me, not some half-baked assertions of a bunch of misanthropist and carpetbaggers made to appear credible with a peppering of maths.
3- Time and again I have alluded to the weight of the missing factors but to no avail, look at what is absent in the bluster, and ballyhoo? Have any of the oligarchs started to dash for their bolt-holes? Are there any moves in the field of energy provisions the alternative? Are there any massive troop movements to safe guard the personal oil reserves of the oligarchs?
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Your assertion about psychopaths and sociopaths running the show are correct, but then you fail to see that these bastards will plan for their survival come what may. In the other thread there is a debate about Dr. Kelly, what did he do? All he said was; “the evidence was sexed up”! That poor bastard got killed because he spoke out of turn and at the wrong time. Therefore any hints that the end of hydrocarbons is nigh would mean a wholesale bums rush, and a wholesale slaughter of most of the human beings.
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Therefore, considering the above, we can safely assume that there is no crisis, however we also can deduce the same bunch of fuckwits are intent on stealing more of our earnings, turning the clock back to days of miners’ scrip payments.
Fedup, of course we are seeing military operations to secure hydrocarbons; why does it have to be oligarchs? Gazprom probably counts:
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http://www.killick1.plus.com/map.jpg
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The global population has risen by a factor of four in a century and you reckon there’s no imminent problem? Yes, there are psychopaths etc., and they’re a cause of many problems, but not the big problem; that, they just exploit.
And Fedup, be careful not to see more misanthropists than there are; I was identified as such earlier. If I believe in co2 reduction, it is to save lives, not to take them. The same is probably true of many of the people you are criticising.
Clark,
Why on earth do you think I am criticising you? I am one of the few around here who writes what he means and often my colourful vernacular leaves them in no doubts about being criticised. I mean you no criticism, my intentions were to highlight the probable underlying trends, as well as hoping to start a debate about new methods of energy production as well as different fuels for this process.
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You are one of the few I debate with because you care about human beings. However, we need to protect human beings from those fraudsters who are bent on destruction of humanity because the weak kneed specimens cannot stomach any competition.
Fedup, I wasn’t taking anything personally; I was using my own experience to illustrate that sometimes people see more misanthropy than there is, especially regarding the co2 argument, it seems.
@Clark: “The global population has risen by a factor of four in a century and you reckon there’s no imminent problem?”
There’s a problem for the folks in Britain whose population did not rise by a factor of four or even two, but who are now being inundated by those whose population is still exploding, and who, here in Britain, out-breed the British by a factor of up to three.
So although it may not be exactly the problem you were referring to, I would say that there is certainly an imminent problem for the British: they’re being displaced in their own home by a mass of immigrants whose right to live in Britain is aggressively championed by Craig Murray and others who worry obsessively about climate change but not about the destruction of a 9000-year-old nation, a genocide that does nothing for the environment since the place of the British is being filled and more than filled by a mass of immigrants of whom you and your leftist friends have such a high regard.
Clark,
Blaming the rise of carbon dioxide on human beings is misanthropy at its best. This line of thinking in the past led to the trial of the witches, and heretics, and their subsequent death .
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To accept the proposition would mean that the scientists espousing this ghastly concept have measured and investigated the numerous factors that go to determine the compositions of the elements and compounds in the atmosphere, and having been taken account of the same in the past then have concluded that; it is human beings wot done it!
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Considering that Earth has been around for 4.54 billions of years (we have to make this assumption), and also considering humanity has only evolved to use energy in the past two hundred years. Also taking note of the age of the incomplete climatic records we have that do not go back more than few hundred years. This itself a very unreliable slice of the last umpteen million years. Then to find the talking heads/scientists are attempting to make predictions akin to predicting a twenty four hour cycle of events and outcomes based on observing only 380 milliseconds of that cycle based on incomplete data (ie sitting in a semi-lit room, somewhere on Earth) they have gleaned from their observations. This prediction needs more than scientific methodologies to hold true, and only faith and dogma can hold it true, ie wishful thinking.
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However the impact of any such “fact” on the human progress, and human societies is incalculable, as the impact of getting blamed to be practising witchcraft, because someone had a feeling in their water.
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Finally correlate the talking memos, and policies that are in pipelines and are usually introduced in the wake of a fanfare by the talking heads/scientist/nice men on the telly, laying the grounds in preparation for new laws, that normally means more costs, less speed, less work, less quantity, and more of the burden of taxation on the punters. In the pay more and get less, dimensional warp we are caught in.
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PS. The latest is a minimum pricing for booze, ie increasing the taxes on booze to stop people from drinking it, how thoughtful of the oligarchs.
CanSpeccy,
Can it man. “Genocide” go fucking find out what the meaning of the shit is before you start plastering it all over.
@Fedup: “”Genocide” Go fucking find out …’
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If you’d looked at the article I linked to you have found the UN definition :
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UN’s definition of genocide:
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Article 2: In the present convention genocide means any of the acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group, as such:
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2c: Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…
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Although the UN did not really draw up their charters with the best interests of white people in mind, that does not mean they can be ignored. When Bonnie Greer, a foreign, feisty feminist of colour had the effrontery to tell an outnumbered and visibly intimidated Nick Griffin on “Question Time” that there was no such thing as the indigenous English people, she was greeted with wild applause by the baying audience of hand-picked BBC rent-a-mob impartiality, but was she aware that her denial of a nationality and culture to whites that was afforded to all non-whites was covered by another UN Declaration?
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The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples states the following:
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Article 6: Every indigenous individual has a right to a nationality.
Article 8.1: Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture.
Article 8.2: States shall provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for:
(a) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities;
(b) Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources;
(d) Any form of forced assimilation or integration;
(e) Any form of propaganda designed to promote or incite racial or ethnic discrimination directed against them.
CanSpeccy,
Destruction; getting the bastards wiped out, killed, and piss off with Nick blind tweet Griffin, wont go to take a piss without his thugs to keep him safe.
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Shrill immigrants this, and that, genocide, …. in all probability you are a fucking mongrel interloper, truth be known, go get a DNA profile and stick it on your blog, and then start standing up for the “English”
@Fedup “in all probability you are a fucking mongrel interloper…”
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Yes, I do understand that people don’t like being held accountable for the evil consequences of their beliefs and actions, particularly liberals and lefties who specialize in laying guilt on other people.
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Still, anyone wanting to understand the impact of mass immigration on the British people, particularly the English, and why that impact is genocidal should take a look both at the UN definition of “genocide” and The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, both of which are quoted in the article I linked to (see above). They might also want to consider this article: How Britain’s Liberal-Left Are Destroying Britain’s National Identity, since the destruction of national identity is a definitive aspect of genocide as that term was defined by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish scholar and lawyer who coined the term.
@Fedup
Re: “piss off with Nick blind tweet Griffin, wont go to take a piss without his thugs”
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Do you perhaps need to take a break to sober up?
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Cheers
Oh dear.
CanSpeccy, I’m not more concerned about the British than anyone else. We can cross the seas at a pinch, but we can’t get off the planet and besides, there’s nowhere to go, so after all the ordure has struck this planet-sized fan the British will be as deep in it as anyone else. Probably worse, due to the resentment from bombing so many people’s home countries.
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Incidentally, CanSpeccy, I’ve often heard it claimed that birth rates fall with decreasing poverty and rising female literacy; do you have figures for whether that birth rate is falling with second and third generations?
Yes indeed, Clark, you are correct in all respects, birth rates are falling, as one might have predicted. ‘FedUp and Can Speccy: A wrestling match!’ No thanks, the bait is rotten.
CanSpeccy, I suppose I should make it clear that I’ve nothing against the British as a nationality, either. I’m just not too fussed about immigration because I think it pales into insignificance compared with energy depletion.
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And CanSpeccy, it’s not just Liberals and lefties. The Tories will permit just as much immigration as the other parties; they have to, because they can’t think of another way of balancing the productive and dependent sectors of the population. They’ll just be more hypocritical about it, loudly saying how much they’re against it but quietly implementing the policies that are responsible. Worse, they’ll probably act against asylum seekers, because it’s highly visible, so a few people’s immense suffering will be thrown to the right-wing media like table scraps.
Tallbloke: A great post of clarity and intelligence. Thank you.
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“Ask yourself this: If the cool phase of natural variation has been able to cancel out co2 warming of the atmosphere since the start of the C21st, how much did it contribute to global warming during its warm phase at the end of the C20th? Logic tells me: “at least half”. And at least half is also a number which describes the natural contribution to the co2 increase too. Which means humans are responsible for at most 0.1C of the late C20th rise in surface temperature globally. Assuming we can measure global surface temperature that accurately, which we can’t.
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The media loves scare stories, they sell lots of newspapers and gain lots of viewers. Politicians love scare stories too. As H L Mencken put it:
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“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
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From the political point of view, if you can tax the populace for breathing and keeping warm while you regale them with tales of carbon doom, so much the better. Especially if you can contrive a situation where the measures put in place don’t actually reduce co2 emission. That way you get to continue the taxation indefinitely. 287 billion euro of public money wasted propping up the carbon market. The same money spent on flue management and new boiler systems for generating stations could have reduced European co2 emission by 40%. Where is that money now? Where is the buffer the public purse should be able to provide against economic swings which can wreck the lives of ordinary decent taxpayers?
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Hearing stories of pensioners having to burn second hand books from charity shops to prevent hypothermia is getting me angry, because the science doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, and the scientists involved are saying one thing in public, and another in (no longer) private correspondence. The politicians and placemen are willfully whitewashing the malfeasance to try to save their taxation plans in a dodgy economic situation partly brought about by the pouring of public funds down the climate hole. Meanwhile the emergency rooms overflow with broken hipped old folks every time it freezes because your local council believed the hype and didn’t buy the grit. It doesn’t want to spend the money spreading it anyway, so not having it on the pretext of govt scientists like David Viner telling us snow is a thing of the past fits the bill.”
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1) I agree completely that freedom of speech includes freedom of reprehensible speech.
2) The issue about Cain is not sex and procreation of the species or lack thereof. The issue is power. He was in a position to assist the woman after she had asked for his help. His response to make a sexual advance had the clear implication that he would help her if she ‘put out’ for him. Would he have made the same requirement to help a man? In a power relationship, such as with employees of your company, consent can never be clear. Are they agreeing with the boss in order to get ahead or do they truly want to sleep with him? Because of that, employers should consider their employees as Not Available for Sexual Advances. The subordinate may feel that saying ‘no’ will result in negative consequences.
Sexual advances between consenting (i.e. equal) adults? Knock yourself out as long as, as you say, a ‘no’ means ‘no’. Sexual advances between unequal parties who may not feel they have the option to withhold consent? NO, full stop.
@Clark: “I suppose I should make it clear that I’ve nothing against the British as a nationality… I’m just not too fussed about immigration because I think it pales into insignificance compared with energy depletion.”
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Oh, I see. You don’t hate the British people, you just don’t care if they are replaced by people from elsewhere who reproduce three times as fast.
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But then that only aggravates the catastrophic depletion of energy that you’re panicking over.
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Which is kind of dumb, as well as genocidal.
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As for energy depletion, you’re in a panic without a reason.
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Peak oil will be deferred for decades because new technology allows redevelopment of old fields and access to unconventional oil (we have two trillion barrels in the Canadian tar sands, more in the Venezuelan Orinoco tar sands and more still in the American oil shales.
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Then there’s ten times as much gas as there ever was oil. Then there’s even more coal.
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If by the time we burn through all of it we haven’t figured out how to consume energy more efficiently and use solar power, then it will be time to write off the British race along with the rest of humanity.
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No, CanSpeccy, I just think immigration will probably sort itself out. You know, there are all sorts of people and they’ve all got to diffuse everywhere eventually, the alternative is more rigid and stricter controls. Yes, there are inequalities now that are driving waves of migration, but if we’re serious about development we expect those to equalise, and it’s inconceivable that a more developed world would be more restrictive of people than a less developed one. You know, it’s a matter of principle, really.
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Pardon the discontinuity, I just had to throw out this Paki who was trying to replace me at my keyboard… NOT.
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No, I’m not “panicking” over hydrocarbon depletion. I’m just very boringly calling for hydrocarbon conservation in the face of a very sharp peak in our most important energy source.
“You know, it’s a matter of principle, really.”
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WTF?
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You have a genius for drivialization.
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“I’m just very boringly calling for hydrocarbon conservation”
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As something vastly more important than the ongoing genocide of the British people. Well at least you’ve quit denying that genocide is happening, now you’re saying is simply inevitable.
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Try telling that to the Chinese.
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Anyway, hydrocarbon conservation is already occurring. The US is now exporting two and a half million barrels of gasolene a day because consumption is down, as vehicle fuel efficiency increases, miles driven per vehicle decreases and the number of cars on the road decreases.
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So why not ridiculous babbling about hydrocarbons if you don’t want to drive everyone silly with irritation and boredom.
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The market will take care. At $100 per barrel oil use efficiency will go on increasing for years to come.
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CanSpeccy, there are no Asians here trying to kill me. Why do you bang on about this so?
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Grief, right wingers have tunnel vision. They regard “The Markets” like Christians regard their benevolent god, and they’re terrified that people with different coloured skin might “outbreed” them.
“there are no Asians here trying to kill me”
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Ha! The usual leftie bollocks. You’re just as daft — actually just as much of a liar — as Fedup. If they’re not killing people with machine guns it’s not genocide, you assert, except that what is happening is clearly defined as genocide by the United Nations (see quotes above).
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But anyway it’s your blog to spew whatever BS you want. Don’t forget, though, that 70% of the British population consider people like you to be a traitor.
Or more to the point, in supporting Cameron’s policy of continued mass immigration to Britain, you serve as a mouthpiece for the globalist oligarchs, who demand unrestricted global movement of labour, capital, and goods without regard for the interests or democratic will of the people of Britain or any other country.
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But remember, when the demands of the globalists are fully met, virtually all the jobs in Britain will go to an immigrant — yours included unless you’re willing to work for the same wage as a rickshaw driver in Kolkata.
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Cheers.
This rightwing drivel really give’s me the creeps, canspeccy, you poor sod, so alone in Engeland. FFS man, pull yourselfs together the empire is gone and if you can’t get your arse out of bed in the morning then it will be someone from Lithuania who picks the ripe vegetables for your table, get used to it.
The Fenlands grow 1/5th. of our fresh food supply nationally and farmers have gone on record saying that they can’t get their crops in without immigrant labour, that your average english person can’t be bothered to work a 10 hour day for the same wage. before you say starvation wages think again, they earn up to £9,-/hour.
Another sore point is the rubbish in this country, when I see these rightwing spouts clean up their countryside and put their money were their mouth is, I might just look at what they’re actually saying, as it stands, the general public is as filthy as those who they despise most nationally, travellers and gypsies. Filth and rubbish is just that and I do not care which dirty swine causes it, as it stands there is as much rubbish flying out of cars then is left behind by travellers.
tell your mates to clean up Britain, canspeccy, if they are proud of their country, lets see some of it, and start valueing those who pick your food for you, or get your own arse up and do it.
CanSpeccy, are you feeling OK? I have an image of you, cursing incoherently at mostly imaginary foes. Firstly, it is not “[my] blog”, it’s Craig’s. Then you go on, “If they’re not killing people with machine guns it’s not genocide”, but who are “they”? Given your context, “they” would appear to refer to Asians. Then you turn your guns on Cameron, leader of the major UK political party of the Right, despite your original complaint being directed at “liberals and lefties”.
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Look, CanSpeccy, you’re an immigrant into the lands of the Northern Native Americans. If, as you constantly seem to assert, Asian immigrants to Britain are committing “genocide”, then you are guilty of the same crime against Native Americans. It looks hypocritical.
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Your constant obsession with the various breeding rates of people of of different colours strikes me as psychologically unhealthy. Your evident anger when discussing these matters suggests that this is personal for you. I’m really sorry, but this has been going on for months, with you trying to start the same argument on thread after thread, and always your concern is how fast Asians breed in Britain. Then we get to the bit about how you can’t possibly be racist as you love the noses of Vietnamese women and thus wish to preserve their racial character, and your motivations increasingly look essentially reproductive. Please, CanSpeccy, sort it out, you’re making yourself look a fool, which is a shame, because on other matters you contribute much of value.
Ingo, rubbish out of cars, yes. I was given a car last year. Before that I was mostly a pedestrian. After fighting off CanSpeccy’s fifteen Pakistanis who try to “genocide” me with their reproductive organs every time I leave the house, the main thing I notice is the ankle-deep litter along both sides of our country lanes. It all comes out of car windows, obviously
Ingo, I’ve read that farmers can’t get crop pickers at decent wages, too. I suppose it’s because it’s seasonal work; people on benefits have to calculate quite carefully before they interrupt their claim, the poverty trap is significant. Traditionally, wasn’t that sort of work done by travelling labour? And policy has been making life very difficult for travellers…