(*) Apart from all the other best things ever he has done so far…
Just like The Simpsons in the days when it was good, Trump’s ban on transgenderism in the military is great because it works on so many levels.
It’s great because it trolls like a boss.
Read the rest at Breitbart.
The BBC has thrown its feminist High Priestess to thetransgender wolves because she dared to suggest that a man born with a penis isn’t really a woman.
As blue on blue SJW infighting goes, you could scarcely ask for a more perfect popcorn movement.
Up until now, Dame “Jenni” Murray has maintained a reputation for stern, disapproving, joke-free feminist political correctness (but is there any other kind…?) of the most impeccably fingerwagging rectitude.
Listening to her morning BBC radio show Woman’s Hour is like being subjected to a 60 minute lecture on the shortcomings of men, the superiority of women and the manifest injustice of the patriarchal hegemony, delivered by a school games mistress wearing iron underwear and a kaftan knitted by a Turkish oppressed women’s collective, while being forcefed organic breast milk laced with Hormone Replacement chemicals and the collected works of Germaine Greer, Erica Jong and Susie Orbach.
So for Dame Jenni [she’s very proud of her title and uses it a lot] to find herself caught out on the wrong side by the PC Gestapo is about as deliciously unlikely as Meryl Streep raising her next Oscar statuette high and saying: “I’m dedicating this one to my hero The Donald!”
But where, if anywhere, should our sympathies lie in this hilarious “Death of Little Nell on steroids” tragedy?
On the one hand, it’s true, Murray has long deserved her comeuppance. She may not be quite as shrill or deranged as some of the younger generation of Third Wave feminazis, but she has definitely helped poison the wells for male/female relationships by promulgating her grisly, joyless Marxist feminist view that any time a woman does the dishes, cooks a souffle or puts on a sexy maid’s outfit then basically she has failed as a meaningful human being.
Read the rest at Breitbart.
Check out these arses. Not just any old arses, either, but proper, educated Cambridge University arses. On a miserable, cold day in which I have been laid low with man flu, these pert buttocks have restored my faith in the future of Britain. (Especially – though I do not wish to prejudice your voting – the splendid pair belonging to Katie from Sidney Sussex.)
Can naked bottoms really be that socio-politically significant? Oh very much so, I’d say. Especially to anyone who has just read the quite monumentally depressing cover story from this week’s Spectator by Brendan O’Neill. His argument is that political correctness has become so heavily entrenched in academe that our seats of learning are in serious danger of abandoning perhaps their most important function: opening up developing minds to new ideas and experiences.
If your go-to image of a student is someone who’s free-spirited and open-minded, who loves having a pop at orthodoxies, then you urgently need to update your mind’s picture bank. Students are now pretty much the opposite of that. It’s hard to think of any other section of society that has undergone as epic a transformation as students have. From freewheelin’ to ban-happy, from askers of awkward questions to suppressors of offensive speech, in the space of a generation.
This was certainly the impression I got the other day from the mostly university-age audience on that car-crash BBC debate programme Free Speech. What struck me forcibly was that these young people had given up on the ability to “think” in any useful or meaningful way. Not only did they lack the core knowledge base (history, current affairs) which might have informed their identikit, off-the-shelf opinions.
But they all appeared reluctant to offer any view that wasn’t “safe” – ie one that hadn’t been extensively pre-validated by the groupthink herd. No one, for example, was prepared to question the premise that Muslims were blameless victims of “Islamophobia” nor that Britain, nay the world, is currently in the grip of something called “rape culture.”
Brendan O’Neill, who speaks on university campuses more often than I do, has noticed similar problems.
I’ve been jeered at by students at the University of Cork for criticising gay marriage; cornered and branded a ‘denier’ by students at University College London for suggesting industrial development in Africa should take precedence over combating climate change; lambasted by students at Cambridge (again) for saying it’s bad to boycott Israeli goods. In each case, it wasn’t the fact the students disagreed with me that I found alarming — disagreement is great! — it was that they were so plainly shocked that I could have uttered such things, that I had failed to conform to what they assume to be right, that I had sought to contaminate their campuses and their fragile grey matter with offensive ideas.
Where once students might have allowed their eyes and ears to be bombarded by everything from risqué political propaganda to raunchy rock, now they insulate themselves from anything that might dent their self-esteem and, crime of crimes, make them feel ‘uncomfortable’. Student groups insist that online articles should have ‘trigger warnings’ in case their subject matter might cause offence. The ‘no platform’ policy of various student unions is forever being expanded to keep off campus pretty much anyone whose views don’t chime perfectly with the prevailing groupthink.
Where once it was only far-right rabble-rousers who were no-platformed, now everyone from Zionists to feminists who hold the wrong opinions on transgender issues to ‘rape deniers’ (anyone who questions the idea that modern Britain is in the grip of a ‘rape culture’) has found themselves shunned from the uni-sphere. My Oxford experience suggests pro-life societies could be next. In September the students’ union at Dundee banned the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children from the freshers’ fair on the basis that its campaign material is ‘highly offensive’.
This is what is so great about those Cambridge arse photos. Yes, it’s quite true: one of the reasons I chose to write about them is because I wanted to run a photograph of Katie from Sidney Sussex’s bottom and this seemed like a half-way decent excuse.
But it’s also true that I believe that news features like this, run in Britain’s most popular online student newspaper The Tab, may be all that stands between today’s student generation and the eradication of the Western intellectual tradition by the kill-joy forces of cultural Marxism.
Read the rest at Breitbart London
Rich Vail says:26th November 2014 at 3:49 pmI have to agree with your assessment sir. For sometime I have worried about that the state of English society, but if these people can do this it may not be beyond redemption after all.
Doubting Rich says:26th November 2014 at 4:36 pmMy only disappointment is that the young lady from my own college chose to be photographed with her underwear on. However it has sadly gone somewhat downhill since I left, the bar getting quieter as it steadily rose from near the bottom of the academic leagues of the University.
jb001 says:1st December 2014 at 10:09 amDidn’t members of the Frankfurt School talk about eros as a means to achieve their ends James?Cultural Marxism is “liberating”, remember.Comments are closed.
The other day on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions, I made a point which unfortunately went right over the heads of my booing audience. It had to do with the way lefties like my fellow panelists Chuka Umunna MP and TUC leader Frances O’Grady too often choose to misrepresent the meaning of perfectly harmless words and language for nefarious political ends.
We were discussing Labour’s confected furore over Lord Freud’s remarks on the disabled. As is now abundantly clear to anyone even halfway acquainted with the background to the story – the fact, for example, that his comments were addressed sympathetically to the father of a severely disabled daughter – Lord Freud’s intentions and meaning were unimpeachably honourable and decent.
So instead his critics resorted to that well-tested lefty fallback position: distortion and misrepresentation. In this case, Lord Freud’s remarks about disabled people being thought by employers to be not “worth the full wage” were twisted so as to mean that he thought disabled people were “worthless.”
This is a weasel trick and when Labour MP Chuka Umunna tried it on Any Questions, I called him out on it. Umunna has his faults but unutterable stupidity is not one of them. Suppose, I put it to him, that he had heard someone in the pub after a rugger match boasting about having “murdered” the opposition. Would he call the police?
Of course he wouldn’t because like anyone born into our richly allusive English-speaking culture he would have understood that our language depends as much on tone and context as it does on the words themselves. That verb “murder” is a perfect example of this. Sometimes, it can indeed mean literally “kill”. But on many other occasions it can mean something innocuous like desperation for a drink (“I could murder a pint”) or abject defeat in a board game (“he murdered me at Scrabble”).
And the amazing thing is that despite the fact that depressingly large sections of our population have low IQs, are functionally illiterate, and are almost totally uneducated thanks to our dumbed-down education system, even the most unutterable thickos among us are yet capable of grasping these semantic nuances – even though they wouldn’t know what a “semantic nuance” was if it bit them on the arse.
So if even the thickest of thick native English speakers can understand basic concepts like the fact that even though “worth less” and “worthless” sound the same but actually mean something different – why can’t a bright, articulate, Manchester- and Burgundy-University-educated, City lawyer like Chuka Umunna?
The answer, of course, is that it suits him not to – in much the same way it suited Nigel Farage’s various lefty-feminist critics not to at the time of his supposedly contentious remarks earlier this year about women in the City.
What Farage said, you may remember, was this:
“And if a woman has a client base, has a child and takes two or three years off work, she is worth far less to the employer when she comes back than when she went away because her client base will not have stuck rigidly to her.”
This is a fairly straightforward economic point which, I’m quite sure, any City employer would tell you (albeit guardedly, lest they seem in any way “discriminatory”) is no more than the ground truth.
Yet the truth was no defence for the likes of Labour MPs such as Harriet Harman who naturally piled in to accuse Farage of saying something he had never actually said: that female employees are, to some degree, “worthless.”
Of course I understand why the Harmans and the Umunnas of the world play this game: it’s a useful way of circumventing the awkward fact that the left rarely has any useful arguments.
But what astonishes me is our cultural tolerance for it…
Read the rest at Breitbart London
“Yoo hoo! It’s me again!!”
A couple of days ago I posted on the heartwarming story of Firuta Vasile, 27 – the Roma woman with four children who came to Britain five years ago, claims not to have been able to find work except as a Big Issue seller, and currently snaffles in excess of £25,000 in benefits, courtesy of the British taxpayer. And who has just snaffled another £2,500 in housing benefit having argued – through an interpreter, also funded by you, the British taxpayer, and with the support of a Welfare Benefits Adviser called Andy King – that this is no more than her fair entitlement.
Nice.
What shocked me almost more than the story itself was the reaction from some of our menagerie of trolls.
Here’s one of our friends from across the water:
Vasile says that she looked for work, and the only work she could find was selling The Big Issue. Obviously it is not a proper job if it pays only £100 per week, and obviously she cannot pay all her family’s expenses on that … hence the housing benefit. Would it be better if she were doing nothing and receiving more in benefits?
To describe Vasile as a ‘greedy shyster’ really shows what a vindictive worm you are. How much do you earn?
And of course, having lifted yet another rock, you will watch as the lowlife crawls out from under it to advocate Final Solutions of one form or another.
Here’s another:
I am delighted that Firuta Vasile has won this victory for two reasons.
1. She and her family need the money.
2. It makes Delingpole even more angry.
and here’s one from a caring young lady called @mariannepowell on Twitter (apparently she campaigns for Roma rights in Budapest: well done, Marianne, love! Bet that makes you feel all warm and gooey inside, yes?) who Tweets:
Something vile from James Delingpole. Apparently we are living under ‘cultural Marxism’. Can’t say I’d noticed.
There are plenty more in this vein but you get the idea. Out there, in the world right now, not in lunatic asylums but on the streets with actual voting rights, are angry, quasi-articulate people who sincerely believe that:
1. Mentioning Roma in any vaguely critical context puts you one step away from endorsing Hitler’s death camps;
2. Criticising welfare tourism means you’re heartless and probably a Nazi;
3. The British exchequer is a source of limitless bounty. If there are any poor people out there in the world, it is entirely right and proper that they should partake of its largesse. To argue otherwise is morally indefensible.
I wonder how these people will respond to today’s Telegraph scoop that there are 370,000 economic migrants currently claiming the dole in Britain. Actually I don’t wonder at all. I’m quite sure they’ll think it’s great, in the same way some people think the foxhunting ban is great because of “what Thatcher did to the Miners” or that HS2 is great because it will teach poncy Southerners a lesson by destroying their countryside, or, most appositely, that unchecked immigration is great because it will smash the Tory fascist vote base for ever and dilute our filthy, reprehensible, hideously white Anglo-Saxon stock with people of all colours and creeds holding hands underneath a rainbow.
I wish that last bit was an exaggeration. But it’s not. As former New Labour speechwriter Andrew Neather has revealed, between 2000 and 2009 Tony Blair and his bien-pensant ministers (among them Jack Straw) cynically and very deliberately used immigration policy as part of their Kulturkampf against the right:
“I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”
The “deliberate policy”, from late 2000 until “at least February last year”, when the new points based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.
Some 2.3 million migrants have been added to the population since then, according to Whitehall estimates quietly slipped out last month.
On Question Time on Thursday, Mr Straw was repeatedly quizzed about whether Labour’s immigration policies had left the door open for the BNP.
In his column, Mr Neather said that as well as bringing in hundreds of thousands more migrants to plug labour market gaps, there was also a “driving political purpose” behind immigration policy.
He defended the policy, saying mass immigration has “enriched” Britain, and made London a more attractive and cosmopolitan place.
We need, I think, to be far more courageous and outspoken in resisting this insidious cultural Marxist assault on our values. Since Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, the liberal-left has successfully created a climate in which any criticism of immigration is considered tantamount to racism. This is a grotesque mispresentation of reality. We are – even now, amazingly – for the most part a hugely tolerant nation. But we also have a very refined sense of “fair play.”
It is clearly not fair play when, at a time of severe economic crisis when many of us are feeling the pinch, that we should have our taxes raised and be forced to borrow more money on the international markets in order to fund immigrants who are here merely to leech off our generosity.
Like many of a libertarian persuasion, I have few problems with immigrants who have come here to work. I have major problems with immigrants who are here to sponge. As, I hope, does anyone out there with even half a brain or a scrap of moral integrity. (Guess that doesn’t mean you, trolls).
Posted on 22nd January 2012Author jamesCategories Blog
Nige Cook says:24th January 2012 at 12:13 amJames, this is an EUSSR story: if you watch the BBC news, they only report immigration problems of people coming in from outside the EUSSR, like hard-working Americans who can’t get work visas here. They won’t report problems of people coming from within the EUSSR for benefits handouts.This is your friend Cameron’s fault for staying in the EUSSR. We have no border controls against EUSSR benefit seekers from communist Greece, Spain, Greece, France, Greece, and former communist states like Romanian gypsies don’t go through the green channel and aren’t even recorded in statistics when they arrive, so there is no hard data, just anecdotal cases which Cameron easily ignores.
Of course Britain is the soft touch. The irony is that Cameron – instead of telling the EUSSR to **** off and getting out of that new Warsaw Pact – is punishing British people by tightening up welfare for all here. If he had quit the EUSSR and stopped this benefit scam, the money would be available for the people already here. Instead, Cameron believes leaving the EUSSR is immoral. So he has to limit benefits to large British families and force them to move into cheaper areas to survive, instead of cutting the benefits drain by quitting the EUSSR and controlling immigration from Europe.
I can’t watch the BBC anymore. They keep claiming that because there are no statistics kept on immigration from Europe anymore, there is no immigration from Europe. This is the delusion Cameron is in. Avoid keeping records, and then conflate the absence of data with the alleged absense of a problem. Socialists who claimed immigration controls from Europe are racist will, we can predict, next start complaining that the benefits cuts needed to the welfare state (due to immigration) are even more unfair.
Of course Britain’s benefits culture, the most generous in Europe, is a magnet for these EUSSR immigrants. Nobody with more than a single brain cell could ahve failed to see this problem emerging from the EUSSR. We can’t afford it. Ultimately, benefits will be cut for all, just because Cameron doesn’t want to stop further abuse by those responsible for the drain, by ending our EUSSR membership. It reminds me of a mentally weak socialist school teacher, who refused to punish or deter disruptive students and instead kept the entire class in during breaks, in the belief that it was more “fair” punish everyone for the excesses of a few. This is Cameron in a nutshell. Political correctness on EUSSR membership, to help prop up a few losing big brand names whose chairmen he is friends with or whatever, who keep our “balance of trade” with the EUSSR a trade deficit, but insist that it is somehow vital for British jobs that we’re controlled by slimy eco-socialists in Brussels.
Terrywiltorn says:26th January 2012 at 12:35 pmWell done JD. I have just read that Gloucestershire Police have closed 19 police stations and plan to cut more officers and even reduce neighbourhood policing! Perhaps if we started to look after the British tax payer and used the monies spent on immigrants being paid welfare, then, these cuts would not happen. On a similar note I hear that the Overseas aid budget will increase to some £11 billon in 2014! Why oh why do we put up with this?Comments are closed.
Anders Breiviks manifesto – not the fault of Right-wing bloggers
Apparently it was all the fault of Right-wing bloggers and Right-wingness generally. We know this because an important, symbolic, portentous cartoon by Martin Rowson tells us (Or not: see note below) so in the Guardian. And so does the New York Times.
More broadly, the mass killings in Norway, with their echo of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by an antigovernment militant, have focused new attention around the world on the subculture of anti-Muslim bloggers and right-wing activists and renewed a debate over the focus of counterterrorism efforts.
Damn. What fools we were. There we were deluding ourselves after the USS Cole, and the Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam bombings, and the Madrid train bombings, and 7/7, and the ‘Mumbai’ Massacre and the shoebomber plot and the Heathrow plot and the LAX plot and the New York car bomb plot and the Fort Hood massacre and, oh, yeah, 9/11 that the world’s greatest terrorist threat came from Islamists who love death even more than we love Coca Cola. But this in fact was all just a red herring, brought about by the racism and Islamophobia of conservatives and libertarians and Tea Partiers to distract anti-terrorism resources from the real menace: Right-wing extremists like themselves.
Here’s comedian Charlie Brooker in the Guardian showing us all the correct way to think, using the medium of mirth. He knew, did our greatest living scourge of poor quality game shows, he just knew right from the start that the Norway killings could never have been the result of Islamist extremism. With his characteristic Swiftian scorn, he concludes:
So despite this being a story about an anti-Muslim extremist killing Norwegians who weren’t Muslim, they’ve managed to find a way to keep the finger of blame pointing at the Muslims, thereby following a narrative lead they’ve been fed for years, from the overall depiction of terrorism as an almost exclusively Islamic pursuit, outlined by “security experts” quick to see al-Qaida tentacles everywhere, to the fabricated tabloid fairytales about “Muslim-only loos” or local councils “banning Christmas”.
Yeah, stupid, Right-wing dominated media and Right-wing commentators. Fancy leaping to the conclusion as the first sketchy reports emerged that the car bombing and shooting of innocent civilians might be the work of Islamist terrorists. I mean, where’s the precedent for that?
The New York Times does even better. It has actually found a tame “expert” ex-CIA no less who declares of the “counterjihad” blogosphere:
“The rhetoric is not cost free.”
This, needless to say, has made the more excitable elements in the Left-wing commentariat positively explode with vengeful glee.
Here’s Greenpeace’s Head of Media tweeting, as they say, in a private capacity.
@sunny_hundal Yep, curious Twitter silence from Ms Phillips since cited on p 361-3-8 and 370 in #Oslo manifesto.
So all those commentators who’ve ever claimed with such devilish tricks as evidence and fact-based argument that political Islam poses a threat to Western security, and all those people who have ever expressed concern about the apparent unwillingness of many modern Muslims to integrate with their host culture, or about the double-standards of Western governments over issues like genital mutilation and “honour-killing”, or about the dangers of unchecked immigration, are tacitly responsible for the massacre of over 90 innocent teenagers by a deranged, lone-wolf killer?
Great. Glad we cleared that one up. Better clamp down on freedom of speech right away, in case any more of these atrocities happen.
*Just had a note from Martin Rowson, pointing out that the fulminator of internet hate in his cartoon is in fact a Muslim. You can tell by the crescent on his laptop, which I failed to notice. My bad. Sorry, Martin.
JimmyGiro says:26th July 2011 at 1:03 pmWith so many commentators, each cherry picking their favourite Breivik ‘association’, and therefore ’cause’, we will either end up with a one man legion of Breiviks, or else a stew of idiotic commentators, left holding their collective dicks.
Breivik is unique, or if familiar to any science, of such a rare breed as to be near impossible to categorise by mere association. And with a 1500 page document, with words he selected when not himself the author, would give as good a summary of the man than any cherry picking exercise by those desperate to ride in public their personal political hobby-horse, entitled “Why all good people like me, are not ‘Breivik’.”
As an illustration, how many on the left will point out that from the age of one, Breivik, along with one of his step sisters, was raised by his single-parent mother?
Andrew Ryan says:26th July 2011 at 2:37 pmYou reap what you sow – every time some nut goes on a rampage, the Right falls over itself to look for a Lefty or Godless background. If this guy had Polly Toynby in his reading list instead of Jeremy Clarkson and Melanie Phillips, believe me we’d know all about it by now.
And if he’d been a Muslim or an atheist, or had targeted a church or a bunch of right wingers, we would never hear the end of it. Muslims would be asked to ‘put their house in order’; atheists would be told to ‘disassociate themselves from this murderer among their ranks’.
When people on the right such as Ann Coulter say things like “‘The question is not, ‘Are all Muslims terrorists?’ The question is, ‘Are all terrorists Muslims?’ The answer is yes ,” then it is surely quite fair enough to point out a terrorist who is not a Muslim.
Finally: “With his characteristic Swiftian scorn…” followed a paragraph or so later by: “Fancy leaping to the conclusion … I mean, where’s the precedent for that?”
Please tell me this is deliberate irony – damning Brooker for attempting “Swiftian scorn” followed by a sarcastic paragraph completely aping Brooker’s style.
colin powis says:26th July 2011 at 6:25 pmLet’s face it , Norway is not exactly a bastion of Christendom; this creep was an admirer of ”christian heritage ”and most certainly not a christian , per se…by his own admission , he accepted the facts of evolution and was probabely a deist , angostic or new age animist
David Heffron says:27th July 2011 at 8:24 amI think it is importiant to challenge our assumptions. Was he right wing? Some people might say that killing a whole load of people because of a percieved hatred of “cultural marxists” and who wanted a “crusade” against the spread of Islam was right wing.
But are these beliefs “right wing”?
Yes. Yes they are.
I agree however that the likes of Melanie Phillips cannot be individually blamed for inspiring any one person. It’s like eating nothing but cakes all day then blaming an individual bun for making you fat.
Comments are closed.
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