Democracy Part111. Postscript

The cause of all the rage in Western Democracies that we are witnessing in the form of emergent populist movements can I think be put down largely to the issues I highlighted in my 2 previous posts on the matter ie a prevailing and overwhelming sense of frustration and impotence in the face of the democratic process itself which has gone completely unidentified by the clerisy and intelligentsia for reasons I can only conclude are deliberate and conscious, motivated as they undoubtedly are by a desperate need to hang on to its power and influence as the prevailing elite orthodoxy across politics media and academia.

Rather than tell the public their rage has its origins and cause in the failure inherent within democracy itself they seek to deflect onto personalities or parties arguing with cognitive dissonance that the problem is not  enough government,not enough statist interventionism and nannying busybodying in their lives,not enough regulation and state support -in other words like a losing gambler the statists argue for a doubling down on statism in an Einsteinian repetition of folly. The drunken man lying unconscious in the alley just needs more alcohol!

The public in red mist mentalist mode is strangely susceptible to this Sirenic doublthink as it has clearly taken leave of its senses and is looking for a strong man to save it and like the drowning man they will clutch wildly for any straws however flimsy. Maybe they will listen to the cool voice of reason, someone who will tell them politely that they have drunk to deep at the well of statism and its time to dry out. No politician will of course do this any more than a publican will tell his clients not to booze. Hence the dilemna. But the cause is clear, Democracy itself has brought us to this pass and identifying the cause is more than half way to the solution.

Obummer's (Charge sheet) Legacy

Worse race riots in 30 years. Healthcare seized and socialised. Bin Laden shot -supposedly instead of captured and waterboarded for wealth of information on terror. A muddled confused and ambivalent incoherent foreign policy. Appeasement of Cuba. Appeasement of Iran and a craven suicidal one at that. Hostility to Israel and concomittant encouragement of its enemies. Tax funded bailouts of industry. And that is just the little I know about him.His was a triumph of style over content,the man was the message and too many people voted for him because of the colour of his skin rather than the content of his character which was always patently negligible and voting on pigmentation is racist no matter who is doing the voting.

Democracy Pt11 Why politicians love it

Why do they love it ?because it takes away the liberty of the individual completely and gives it to the mythical artificial construct called 'society',the 'public' the 'public good', and since every human being is an individual everyone is automatically robbed of their rights and freedom. Ingenious when you think about it but that is what the banal invariably is which is why no one can ever see it.The politician will forever invoke those false and fallacious collectivist constructs and purport to be their spokesmen.He will cite the public interest whenever he is about to violate individual rights and depradate the polity. Who could be against the 'public interest' -its disarms the victim before devouring it, it is the paralysing venom of the human snake politician -a veritable Ickean shape shifting reptile indeed. No one has ever met 'society' or the 'public', it always seems to be someone else, some amorphous aggregate from another dimension perhaps with mystical properties that demands propitiation usually in the form of huge amounts of money filched through the democratic process called taxation,commonly known as theft.It's a stand in for apple pie and motherhood but is of course the get out of jail excuse for every every socio/psycho/spiritual criminal, small time politico huckster and snakoil salesperson on the perennial take in the political go round called Democracy.

Democracy -What is it Good For?

Or what the hell is it? Democracy is the politician's excuse. Its the excuse for just about any imposition he seeks to visit on the hapless electorate who every 4 years signs what amounts to a blank cheque from which he promptly draws with prodigal liberality. On the strength and the pretext of a sprinkling of bromides,dollops of generalities, helpings of vague approximations,hollow promises,veiled threats,ludicrous pledges and crowd pleasing demagoguery, class warfare and the politics of victimhood and  identity politics he divides and rules his clueless sheeple and empties their pockets into the bargain.

Is democracy a process or an ideology? A politician only has to invoke the word to put his listeners into an altered state of consciousness,passivity credulity and acquiescence.To challenge it is to risk charges of base heresy,to put oneself outside civilized society and beyond hope or rational discourse.It is in short the inpenetrable armour of the blackguard,mountebank authoritarian and fraud,  every politician cum sociopath's intellectual backstop and failsafe, the solid rock and foundation upon which he builds his shaky career of evil and defalcating sinecuring parasiting raiding of the public purse.

He,the Democrat will concoct all the rights under the sun, ignoring the only one that matters and upon which civilization was built,namely individual rights which he violates at every turn with collectivised rights that are of course a complete violation of individual rights.He will even usurp the greatest intellectual revolution of all time, the American one and subvert it with the Democracy tocsin,devouring it from within and turning it from the first experiment of capitalism in human history and reducing it to a dungheap of collectivisation and socialisation, the very excrescence and pullulating puss of Democracy itself. It ends as it only could in the grotesque spectacle of the Twitter in chief,the demagogue in chief Trump himself astride the dungheap of what was once a noble country,gesticulating and firing off obscenities and profanities,mired in corruption,cronyism and moral delinquency and not yet innaugurated.I have a Nightmare and its name is the Uniturd Sraits of Amerikkka.

Who Will Defend Us?

There is no protection whastoever from the predatory State - the individual is in mortal danger and his situation is all the more dire and perilous in that he is alarmingly and sublimely oblivious of his servile state! No, slavery was not abolished 200 hundred years ago, it is alive and flourishing in the 21st century in the regulating taxing meddling quasi totalitarian welfarist states of Western Europe and beyond. It cannot be the case as some libertarian minded folk bizarely posit that we have not yet reached the point where outright rebellion and resistance is required on the frankly ridiculous claim that the State is still allowing for delimited  liberty and freedoms and hasn't yet come for the whole cake.

Would such a claim be accepted in regards to a burglar who has just ransacked a property and  the owner shrugs and says,well that's ok, he left us the TV and loads of other stuff so not to worry, no need to call the police and have the burglar caught and punished. If such a policy was widely adopted towards burglary (and some say it  tacity and implicitly already is) how long does anyone think it will be before the burglar comes back and takes the rest?

This is exactly and precisely where we are as regards the individual and the State today. The principle has already been established way beyond perchance or doubt that the State has a statuary right to reach into the purse and wallets of its citizens, nay subjects, and help itself. Once that principle was established  the sums involved are a secondary issue. and it is only a matter of time before their depradations widen. The pass has already been sold and we are now at the absolute mercy of the subjective whims, impulses,appetites,predatory impulses  and discretion of the State as to how much it will plunder and pillage with the moral sanction of us sacrificial altruistic schmoos.

The time to stop a burglar is when he steals your first penny, the time to stop the State was centuries ago and hence our Herculean task before us of re education and discussion of this the only serious issue of our times. We do not have the arsenal to start a revolution so it is to words and polemics that we must launch the bid for freedom and liberty so in peril today.

Er, Sorry, I told you so

Less anyone think I have been in any way  prone to exaggeration on the total ideological  confluence of Left and Right I give you the latest George Galloway interview on RT with billionaire businessman Aron Banks who is widely attributed with bankrolling UKIP and the Brexit team to victory last June. (For those who do not know Galloway he is an extreme Leftist who was kicked out of the Labour party along with Ken Livingstone years ago). Banks and Galloway were in absolute lockstep agreement about the  desiderata of State nationalisation of the banks, utility companies and de facto the pharmaceutical industry with Banks proffering a prediction that Trump will be going after Big Pharma big time. I really do rest my case.

Tristram and Jeremy, Brother's Under the Skin

One of the most telling commentaries of New Labour is how accommodating and aquiescent it has been to the Corbyn Project all the way along  opposing it purely and only on tactical grounds not moral intellectual ones. The most it has said re Jeremy is he cannot win an election not that his views are poisonous and toxic and socialism is an evil collectivist creed. They are just terrified that they will be out of office with all its emoluments and prestige that goes with it if Corbyn remains the leader,there is nothing whastsoever principled about the New Labourite's anathametising of Jeremy.

Tristram Hunt's departure illustrates the opportunism and cynicism of New Labour on steroids. He moves to another State institution, The Victoria and Albert Musuem because he has read the runes and thinks he will not be part of a Labour government under Jeremy, although as I have said I think he could well be wrong about that butt here has been no substantial criticism of Corbyn's socialism from him or any of the other time serving New Labour members. This can only mean that they agree with his goals but just think he has been inept in articualting them so starkly and frightening the horses. If this is not the case and they truly oppose his ideolgy then their silence on this matter has been  all the more reprehensible and despicable. Either way it is not a good look.

How Conservatism Sold Capitalism down the River

The faux competing pathologies of Left and Right have their provenance in the post WW11 era when in a collusive pact both within the US and the UK they conspired to foist Welfarism on the people through propaganda. Britain defeated German Socialism but succumbed to English Socialism straight after and the US went as equally seamlessly from war Socialism to Peace Socialism and compounded their folly even further by bankrolling the UK's welfare state in its foolish lend-lease programme fostered by the Leftist economist and rabid statist Maynard Keynes.

Neither the US or the UK benefited whatsoever from its involvement in the Second World War and without such involvement it is an absolute certainty that neither countries would have succumbed and fallen prey to the deadly socialist welfare delusion and both would be looking and faring a million times better than they are today bedeviled as they are by crippling national debt and an addiction to State subsidies,regulation,taxes and ever exponentially expanding statism.

One has only to look at the blatant propaganda put out by the British coalition government during the Second World War laying out very clearly what amounted to demands for a socialist welfare state after the war to compensate for all the sacrifices engendered in that struggle. But one statist encroachment begets another as the poor British were shanghaid and conscripted into the 'war effort' and were effectively hostages to the State and so felt entitled to claim recompense in the form of housing,jobs etc after the battle was won. War Socialism indeed leads to Peace Socialism. The State and its ever expanding emissaries and aparatchicks are the only beneficiaries of course.

Conservative governments of both sides of the Atlantic put up practically no resistance or opposition to the massive wholesale welfare programmes of Roosvelt and the Labour Party whatsoever because they were largely in agreement with them and had no ideological position from which to launch any objection both priding themselves on their militant pragmatism which they still do to this very day. This sytematic betrayal of the Right over generations is the greatest indictment against them and why the Right should be seen for what it is and perhaps always has been, essentially a fundamentally statist socialist oriented movement with a thin gloss and scintilla of capitalist sympathy which it invariably protstitutes compromises and betrays at every possible opportunity and turn.

In the light of all this the only course is for those who support these intellectually bankrupt Right parties to totally reject and break from them and form  new Capitalist parties stripped of all association and ties with the discredited conservative movement with its amoral and opportunist statist power lusting.This should be relatively easy as with the advent of Alt Rightism and Trumpism the conceit that there is any ideological/ economic difference whatsoever between Left and Right has been comprehensively exploded, albeit that it is undoubtedly the case as I have had cause to mention before that Nationalism and Socialism have always been haindmaidens  re National Socialism.

What is the Constitution Good For?

If the Constitution of the United States can permit the socialist depradations of a Roosvelt and Johnson to say nothing of Wilson before them and Obama after, then the best thing for it is to be put through a shredder as it has done nothing whatsoever to protect Americans from the progressive liberal advances over the past 100 years that have had the cumulative effect of making it a de facto quasi European Socialist Republic which is why Americans were prepared to even entertain the out there eccentric leftist Bernie Sanders as a presidential candidate who only narrowly lost to Clinton herself a leftist.

The flaws in the Constitution that allowed this essential capture of the State by collectivists must be systemic and fundamental and now almost everyone is prepared to admit it as they wait in horrified anticipation for the annauguration of an arrant knave and mountebank of positively Hitlerian proportions,a petulant sollipsist and demagogue not even imagined in the the most polemical and extravagant outpourings of Mencken and Sincalir Lewis. Behold, the thing some of us feared the most has come upon us.

The Wildly Exagerrated death of History and Politics

When you have an ex Channel 4 economics reporter Mason openly saying on radio 4 that the wealthy rich will be 'taken down' by a Corbyn government and repeating this open threat you know the howling madness of collectivism has returned with a vengeance. Not since the Right wing - let it be noted - Labour chancelor Dennis Healey threatened menacingly that he would 'squeeze the rich until their pips squeaked' in taxation which threat he carried out raising income tax to 99% in the 70's and creating the tax exile phenomenon, have we seen such a direct assault on capitalism  so baldly and starkly articulated.

When Churchill warned that the introduction of the Welfare State in 1945 would necessitate a Gestapo to enforce it he was widely condemned and dismissed as an alarmist/ fantasist and in a sense he was proved wrong because the British people proved perfectly capable and indeed willing to act as their own self enforcing Gestapo and voted for  enslavement through  the ballot box but it is nevertheless an inescapable fact that freedoms have been curtailed and circumscribed in order to bring about this wholesale co option by the State of the individual in practically every area of his life and this latest particularly virulent strain of militant socialist expression is merely an extreme amplification and intensification of what was an already  pretty advanced direction of travel towards a progressive State expansionism. The prevailing orthodoxy and culture of collectivism and anti individualism was very fertile ground for the leftists to emerge and go for a final push from mixed economy to pure socialism as represented by the Corbyn leadership coup.

If anybody believes that Theresa May is going to halt this trend when every speech she gives is interlarded with socialist sentiment of state interventionism and suspicion of capitalism and self advancement they are in for a very rude awakening.With Ukip advancing on the same Old Left protectionist ground there is simply and alarmingly no opposition whatsoever to this Statist collectivist juggernaut hurtling towards us. Democrat's Demagogues are waiting in the wings...

Sociopath in waiting

It has been said that the people get the kind of government they deserve so I suppose we should not be too sorry for Americans who are about to get the biggest screwing of their lives and indeed in all of their chequered history. But what an embarrassment the man is, one devoid of all sensibilities, sense of decency and propriety,  without an ironic bone in his body, a man who no one has clearly ever told that self praise is no recommendation, a man who has clearly had a self awareness bypass operation, is amoral,ethically delinquent,financially and politically compromised,clearly in the pockets of the Kremlin with practically  'impeach me' written on his forehead, a man who makes Richard Nixon seem like a straight talking guy, a sexual predator who makes Clinton seem like a man of sexual probity, an ignoramus,  militantly uneducated and who talks like the third rate huckster he clearly is,delusional,borderline sociopathic, paranoid, hair trigger tempered, mentally unstable, a pathological liar, a fantasist, a thin skinned narcissist, a socialist in Republican clothing but with fascistic tendencies that will no doubt take America down a very dark and scary place from which it may struggle to ever extricate itself. As goes America,so goes the world. The nightmare is about to be inaugurated,be very, very afraid.

Do you Feel Lucky, Punks?

Corbyn's blood curdling speech yesterday when he said he would take 100% of the wealth of the higher earners has met with some critical response in the press but it wide off the mark nevertheless . How about Dominic Sandbrook a left wing historian in the Daily Mail no less who laments on the fact that this measure by Corbyn will drive all entrepreneurs out of the country and with it all the tax revenues that flow from their earnings! Nothing about the wholesale looting of private property,ust the negative effect it will have on government revenues yegods.

Sandbrook then proceeds to say that as horrific as Corbyn's proposals are he does not think we have much to worry about because it is unlikely that Corbyn will be elected because the  polls indicate he is very unpopular.Leaving aside his credulity in trusting to anything the polls have to say in the light of their recent abysmal record consider th grave implications of his comments and what he is actually saying. We may be confronted by a prospective Prime Minister who will launch an all out assault on private property and raid the incomes of our highest achievers but do not be concerned because he will probably not get elected! So we are to rely on the subjective whims and goodwill of the public towards our entrepreneurs as to whether or not they will be ruined and their businesses are destroyed and the country's economy shot to pieces? Any political system that allows even a distinct possibility of such an outcome and is predicated on self preservation and indeed  sanity itself  needs to rid itself of such a suicidal system immediately..

False Dichotomy of Left and Right

It used to be said with some truth that the difference between Left and Right was that the Left wanted to control people's finances and the Right their souls.  With the death or decimation at least of social conservatism however that is no longer strictly true but in fundamentals it is the case that there is not any ideological difference between Left and Right as economically they seem to have coalesced into an incoherent blob of collectivist premises - I cite the marked verisimilitude between Bernienomics and Trumpenomics.

The religious right tend to be anti welfare and taxes at least rhetorically but in practice and when in office did very little to reduce the size of the State.To the extent that the religious right maintains anti big State ideology they are flying in the face of the essential nature of Christianity which is about altruism and sacrifice or it is nothing.Theirs is a bogus Christianity therfor.

The only way to challenge the hybrid Left-Right statist monster is to highlight its faux divisions and expose the hydra-headed monster as a single monster that needs tackling head on and that those who wish to overturn the present politcal cancerous system should separate and distance themselves from this monumental Left-Right fraud and reject its pretence of being ideological enemies and reveal its true Tweedledee and Tweedledum imposture.

The Personality is the Political

In all the criticism of Corbyn there has been extremely little about his ideology and almost all the attention has been focused on his personality defficiencies,his appearance -like a geography teacher apparently. It is a bit like Hitler being castigated for his moustache. If there has been any serious analysis of Corbyn's socialism I have clearly missed it.

This coyness to identify ideology or indeed to even discuss it at all is not just an exclusive pathology - for such it is - of the media but even extends to the Left itself and Corbyn in some respects for the Left as a whole usually tries to deliberately couch its toxic ideology in code and euphemism so as not to scare the horses, a sort of bland baby-talk of innocuous sounding bromides to gull  the inattentive public who are not so versed in subjecting their utterances to a close reading and will be more inclined to take their anodyne blandishments at face value.

Most leftists know that a bald unvarnished statement of their intent would drive away all but the most committed collectivists to their cause  so they have resort to this abovementioned blandspeak, liberal servings of stock phrases and words such as as fairness. income inequality, the rich asked to pay more,the income gap,growing gap between rich and poor ad nauseam.

So between the media that contrives to evade any discussion of ideology and the leftists who collude in this evasion by resorting to self censoring generalities and obfuscations the public is totally disarmed and left in the dark as to what is in store for it until it is a fait accomplis and an ideological demagogue is installed in power and the mask is finally discarded.

Who will resist the Corbinista Red Menace?

It's the 1980's revisited on Corbenn steroids but where is Maggie? We may have someone who apes her mannerisms and external appearance but Theresa May is no Maggie. In her ideology such as it exists under her typical tory pragmatism - which for some reason she and they appear to take pride in as if it were a virtue instead of the abject renunciation of moral principles values and integity that it is -we seem to have someone who as I have said has been captured by a fuzzy touchy feely leftistism full of vague half hinted at subliminal statist interventionist  tendencies but never overtly enunciated or explained which is the mark of moral cowardice and cynical opportunism so typical, common and rightly despised by all those heartily and wearily sickened by the corrupt amoral manoeuvrings of  politicians on the make, in other words the whole stinking parasitic political class.

So in the far left corner we have Corbyn and in the  other fuzzy left corner we have his half sister Theresa. Who is likely to prevail in that contest? Theresa May but who's to bet on it. Opinion polls have proved a catastrophically unreliable captured as they have been and still are by establishment groupthink. We may be sleepwalking into the Red Terror so passports at dawn ladies and gentlemen. And do not look to UKIP for salvation as under their superficial old Tory exterior beats an old Labour heart with protectionist,statist, restrictive practices tarriffs and nationalisation running through its dna like the writing through Brighton rock.

Is Trump a Soviet Manchurian Candidate?

His refusal to acknowledge that the election was tampered with by Russia when the evidence is overwhelming suggests that Trump may well be under the evil sway and tutelage of Putin and his goons in the Kremlin and it is not altogether impossible that he could face impeachment down the line as the collusion and his special relationship with his new found friend and fellow authoritan  soviet thug is beginning to smell real bad.

That Trump is mentally unstable there can be no doubt.His incessant tweeting in response to every perceived affront to his fragile and precarious self esteem and to every imagined slight suggests a man with a tenuous grip on reality and a thin skin that is positively and potentially lethal in a soon to be innaugurated President of the most powerfull country of the free world.

His prodigal recourse to twitter, the latest being an attack on Merril Streep in a Hollywood reward ceremony in response to a few critical remarks she made about him is on the petulant level of the kindergarden in its lack of proportionality and suggests that he is locked in a seemingly perpetual presidential campaigning mode and indicates a man dangerously and perillously mentally unfit for high office.

How Now Red Cow?

I have not been able to glean what Theresa May means by there being a need for a more 'sharing culture' but it smells nevertheless. When parents enjoin their children to share their toys with their friends it is clearly a socialist injunction that they do not even honour themselves as they cannot be found 'sharing' their house or cars with their neighbours so sickening hypocrisy is clearly at play leaving aside if one can the evil unjust and obscene immoral philosophy of socialism that they are seeking to inculcate into their hapless charges.

Whatever she precisely means by this sharing meme it is becoming clearer by the day less there was any doubt before that the woman is a socialist change agent and has been shoehorned into her job under the radar,bipassing  the electorate and is a remainer in Brexit clothing who cannot be trusted in any capacity whatoevere and is under the malign influence of a dodgy cabal of advisers whose political persuasion is dubious and ideologically sinister in its leftist composition and for this reason an early general election seems to be the only just and politically appropriate way to proceed.

Why the Left hates the World Wide Web

Despite all their attempts to co opt the interenet with such collectivist nomenclature as Social Media the Left is fighting a losing battle with it because the thing they have trumpeted since almost the beginning of time, namely the rights of the voiceless has now come to pass -except that the voice ,the free democratic expression of 'the people' far from being imbued with as they supposed and told themselves it was, namely, egalitarian and socialistic sentiment has turned out to be  the most virulently populist,hostile,non conformist,non pc and anti public service politicians who have rightly been exposed as third rate carerists and power lusters draining the public purse. Now the voiceless people much vaunted by the Left as the sole raison 'd'etre for their coming in to politics are roundly dismissed as vile trolls to be censored out of the existence by the State, if the Left have their way that is.

It was bad enough that Britain continued to have a free press very critical of the Left which it has tried for the longest time to censor and demonise but that was as nothing compared to the sheer horror revealed in the wake of  the interent which has given a voice to the general public, the 'little guy' in a truly revolutionary way it has never done before in the whole of human history but who have turned out to be far more virulently anti left than the much demonised so called right wing press itself. So the Left is now fighting an unwinnable war on two fronts having  been totally outflanked by the forces of reaction and populism and moreover exposed as profoundly intolerant,bigotted and illiberal into the bargain.

Objectivism is the Philosophy of Love (No, really)

All the propaganda against Rand's philosophy Objectivism aside, namely that it is a malevolent theory of man is just that,a canard of the left for it is on the contrary a benevolent view of man as a non sacrificial creature -neither sacrificing himself to others or sacrificing others to him. It is a live and let live philosophy, allowing people to work out their own destiny although Rand did not beleive in such but leaving people alone to succeed or fail by their own efforts. The Constitution enshrines  this principle as the right to the pursuit of happiness and there is nothing in the Constitution that says that man is his brother's keeper and that the role of the State is to provide people with happiness,welfare,healthcare,housing,education. All of that is statist collectivist talk totlly alien to the principles of personal independence of the Founding Fathers. Just as no critic of Ayn Rand has ever been able to cite verse and chapter of any of her opus where she advocates Nazism no one can cite any verse and chapter of the Constitution where it guarantees anyone a house welfare,education or healthcare search as they will in vain.

Rand's philosophy advocates a dog eat dog, Darwinian survival of the fittest dystopia say her critics. Really?Ony if not sacrificing oneself to one's neighbours is seen as an act of aggression which is pretzellogic crazy.Objectivism allows for personal charity and benevolence between men -but unforced and not enforced by the State with a gun.It enshrines the principle of non coercive force: no man can initiate force against his fellow man and force is only justified in retaliation to the one who initiates force.This perforce precludes acts of force by the State as well as the individual ie taxation,regulation,licensing,tarriffs etc. The only transactions between individuals must be voluntary and uncoerced and the State 's sole role is to protect individual rights and prevent those who would use force against others from doing so. To try and conflate allowing man to flourish or starve by his own actions or inactions with exterminating him is grotesque inversion of logic and an evil slur.

Whose afraid of Ayn Rand (And Why)

The Left loathes,  detests and fears Ayn Rand and for good reason. She is like the atom bomb -she spoils their whole day. Conservatives and Republicans are easy to attack because they are so feeble,temporizing, weak,equivocating and generally pathetic and compromised in their half-hearted apologetic defence of markets and the smaller state because they sold out their core principles decades ago in their accommodation and acceptance of the mixed economy welfare state and it is questionable whether they ever had any core principles from the get go so quick were they to capitulate to the welfare status/statist quo.

Ayn Rand and her totally uncompromising passionate defense of individual rights, liberty,the delimited state and man's inalienable right to live for himself and not be regarded as a means to the ends of others with their  needs and wants is historically unique in the whole philosophy of politics although other figures contributed in the groundwork going back to Aristotle,Locke,Adam Smith and Hume but she is the only one who provides a systematic philosophically based system dedicated to the defense of individual rights presenting  man as a self made being rather than as a sacrificial animal to the needs of others.

Confronted with this direct assault on everything the Left holds most dear,the collectivist herding of men through government dictat,it simply does not know how to handle Rand and starts off ignoring her, hoping she will go away. Decades go by but her influence steadily grows in the culture but although resistance is total the Left at least has to start acknowledging her existence.So what does it do? It demonises her by smear and misrepresentation. Rand is a Nazi is the commonest abuse it musters relying soley on the hope that no one will actually read her and discover the terrible truth namely that she is the scourge of all manifestations of collectivism be it Left or Right. Conservatives equally have nothing but fear in response to her total excoriating of their compromised vacillating accomodation with statism and welfarism. She has exposed their joint fraud,their collectivist sleight of hand exposing them both as illiberal and anti individual.

So hated by the whole political establishment Rand stands alone in the culture and even the libertarians who attempt to co opt her teachings rip them to shreds with their anti intellectual anti philosophical expediency and compromises,hideously misrepresenting and distorting her ideas and by so doing discrediting and setting back the objectivist cause by decades.

But what can the Left do in the face of Ayn Rand's  continued and ever growing direct existential threat to them and all they stand for and have constructed this past century across the Western world and beyond threatening to bring the whole shaky edifice crumbling around their ears? The 3 choices remain still: Ignore, misunderstand or misrepresent. The first is myopic and doomed,the second offers no protection and is an argument from ignorance and the third will not succeed because truth will out.

An Empty Hull

It is extremely difficult to determine just how much taxpayer's money has been thrown at the Hull Culture Centre bid as all the websites I have visited are extremely coy about details.The most I sould glean was the usual coded reference to 'no direct taxation' has been spent which when decoded means the money has gone through 3rd party State intermediaries,proxy byzantine government bodies,rather like the convolutions of money laundering procedures so hated by the Left when exposing tax evasion operations.

Leaving aside all the obsfuscations and glaring ommissions by the media in covering this story there is the central point that the State has no business bigging up and aggrandizing failed cities with taxpayer's money in an attempt to create a Potemkin Village facade of smoke and mirrors in the hope of by some alchemistic means never explained to turn its fortunes around. Culture zsars are airlifted in to this doomed enterprise and it all has the whiff of White Elephant syndrome that statists revel and specialize in from Olympics on down.The grandfather of all this empty show was Goebelles himself, one of the first Ministers of Culture which profoundly sinister  sinister post has incredibly enough been replicated by most post-war  European countries including alas the UK.

To the Finland Station

If anyone doubts that there is barely a scintilla of difference between Left and Right economically these days they need only look to Finland whose  centre Right government has introduced an automatic wage to its citizens the equivalent of £4oo per month -regardless of whether they are unemployed or have a job! This however is not really a new phenomena as socialism and right wing go together like a horse and carriage as witness Nazi Germany -National Socialist party -the clue's in the name. Hitler's speech and programme and  were interlarded with the old theme of the individual sacrificing himself to the Motherland State. The present day sees Marie le Penn and Trump on the right seeking protectionist tarriff imposing anti capitalist policies.Try telling them apart from the Left wing economic programme if you can.

This patent fraud on the public should have been rumbled a long time ago yet we hear the same old tripe about 'both sides of the polical aisle' perpetrated by the advocates of statism of course who seek to present Left and Right as opposite poles when they are ideological bedfellows with a minute insignificant variation between them.When or if the public every rumbles this ruse we may get a genuine choice at last -ie between the Left-Right statist parties and the advocates of small state free market capitalism on the other.

My Worst Nitemare

As I have predicted the last 3 big events namely our recent general election,Brexit and Trumpet I do worry that my abiding fear and horror may also come to pass namely a Corbyn premiership. The same people who quoted opinion polls asserting with arrogant confidence that Remainers would win,Hillary would triumph and also there would be a hung parliament in 15 and Scotland would leave the UK are now telling us that Jeremy does not stand a snowflake's chance in hell of being PM. How can we listen to them or even trust them with used toilet paper?

So why do I think Corbyn could be our next prime minister? Because as evil and vile as his ideology is, he has one and he has kept faith with it all his adult life,never wavering one nano second from what he beleives in his black heart of hearts is true, he has the conviction and iron will of  a Thatcher and whether you agree with this archetype conviction politician is actually irrelevant or of secondary importance because people are drawn to someone who holds their views and ideology consistently and unwaveringly over time,who holds those beliefs to the very core of their being,for who the ideolgy and the person are one and indivisible,who are an embodiment and living manifestation of their values from which they will never shrink or deviate. Such people throughout history almost always prevail regardless of the nature and content  of their beleifs and this matter is key because for some it would sound counter intuitive but it is so nevertheless and they ultimately prevail  no matter what obstacles they initially face.

Besides these leviathans of principle the mere jobbing politician,the careerist ideological free zone of a zero politico with all the principles of a warthog and the moral values of a raddled whore are the mere flotsam and jetsam of history,the moral ciphers who would sell their soul if they had one for a sinecure and emolument, these are the ethical vacuums and black holes of amorality who make up the large majority of mos Western political institutions of office and the people rightly have total comtempt for them. Give us a Bernie a Donald a Jeremy,a Hitler a Stalin they have always cried over these moral derelicts and so I fear it will be once more all the while politicans abandon principles for power we are in mortal danger of choosing instead something even worse, a sociopath with perverted collectivist ideological convictions -anything rather than nothing.  

A Working Class Zero is Nothing to Be

Smash the working classes! Well, what I mean is to hell with them because the lumpen proletariat are merely the tools of the intellectual middle class agitators and socialists who rode to power in the late 20th century on their coat tails and wreaked the havoc of global revolution and ushered in the worst totalitarian nightmares of human history Hitlerism and Stalinism and all their lesser small scale petty horror states before they in turn were swept away with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the domino effect across the globe  was set in train re Thatcherism and Reaganism.

The working class yet stumbled on, neutered and enfeebled for a few more decades,carrying out timorous sorties and raids into the neo liberal polity,symbolic skirmishes with the liberal zeitegeist getting ever smaller in size and reach, dissolving and diluting into the arid wastes of political correctnes and the fetid waters of identity politics with all the rigour and vigour of an impotent fantasist reliving old long ago conquests,muttering to itself,retracing its footsteps in ever decreasing circles yet still with enough life in it to muster and murmur a few half hearted imprecations against globalisation and the inexorable march of time passing by it on the other side of the road.

But now the final death knell rings, the working class rump trembles at the sound, the now deafening sound of Mechanisation! The thing it feared the most has come upon it -it is surplus to requirements. It can either adapt or die.It can embrace the new,technology,skill up,tool up or face its inevitable doom.It can embrace change and innovation or it can listen to the sire call of the Trump who wants to strike a Devil's bargain with the working class.He will make America great again! How? By putting the clock back 100 years,reversing the course of time itself.It will not just stand still for the God Donald but will actually reverse! Magical powers indeed.Forget the art of the possible this is the alchemy of the mystics of old,the authoritarian Gods of Collectivism all concentrated in the power of the Master at the click of the mouse at the twitter of the twitterer in chief.Mass hysteria in the 21st century.Water will run up hill.

Pol pot did it for a season,Chairman Mao too.The country ran with blood though and it ended in a sea of tears.Sorry, the working class is dead,long live the middle class.Mechanisation is good.The machine is our saviour let us embrace it and spurn the mystical mumbo jumbo of collectivist in chief Messrs Trump-Bernie'Hillary with their magical incantations of doom dressed up as salvation.

You say you want a revolution?

One of the characteristics of all revolutions is how quickly they are co opted by the status quo and diverted from their original intention and course -the revolution devours its children,meet the new boss,same as the old boss etc.Sometimes this is a slow serpentine process and sometimes it happens very quickly. The latter example could be Egypt that went through an Arab Spring and jumped a few seasons almost instantly and became an Islamist winter with the Muslim Brotherhood which was mercifully neutralized by the militia and stability restored albeit unfortunate that the military were forced into such a position. Sometimes this process can take centuries such as the case of the United States which began as a unique experiment in the whole history of the human race -a nation predicated on a revolutionary new concept of man as a soverein being with inalienable individual rights not be regarded as a number, a cipher and pawn in the hands of a mighty arbitrary State,a mere means to the ends of others rather than an end in himself.

It is difficult to overstate what a truly radical revolutionary departure in thinking this represented -a nation built on an idea. Up till this point the European model had been the only one to follow,namely a quasi autocratic,semi totalitarian authoritarian deep state with wide sweeping powers to curtail individual rights and liberties, one with a purely statist relationship with its subjects,the idea of citizenship totally alien to it,posing a threat to its autocratic rule based on semi feudalism,kingship and the mysticism of brute force from on high.All of this was smashed and overturned by the formation of the United States and the Constitution.

Roll forward 150 years and the US turns its back on its unique experiment and adopts the socialism of its former colonial masters and Woodrow Wilson and Roosvelt and then Johnson usher in a defacto quasi socialist state and it has been pretty much mission accomplished since then with Obama being the grandson of socialism merely engaged in dotting the i s and crossing the t's but still presiding in massive state over reach in all areas not least with Obamacare. Americans themselves speak and act like socialists now demanding ever more state control of their lives,whining that life is not fair and the governement should give them more stuff,masochistically demanding more chains and manacles to forge their spiritual captivity, seeking and demanding dole, manna and succor from the super state to fill the void where their self made souls used to be. From frontiersmen, forgers of their own destiny and spiritual redemption  to grovelling cowering whining timorous supplicants in just a few generations.How the might have fallen! An American tragedy indeed.

Leftist Mythologies continued

The gender pay gap! It is the litany of aggrieved feminists who iterate it with all the dogged dirge like repetitiveness of a mantra in the obvious hope that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. There is a gender pay gap but they will not admit that it is down to the life career choices women make regarding starting a family. They also choose professions that do not have the same career structures that their male counterparts choose such as the stem science oriented ones because they are less interested in them not because such professions are closed to them as they like to claim.

All the while it is women who have babies there is not really any way round this fact of nature so the feminist argument is actually with existential reality itself which they have always had a problem with and a lamentably tenuous relationship with at the best of times.

So what do women, or at least these feminists want.? Equal pay for unequal work! The same pay for Wimbeldon women tennis players as their male counterparts even though they only pay 3 sets as opposed to the men's 5 sets!

Employing a woman can often be a liability for if she is on a career path with her company how does the employer know is she will be around in a few years and does not want to start a family? She is paid less because that is an insurance policy for the employer for whom maternity leave is just another burden  so it is offset by lower wages for women employees.

Women with children work less hours in the workplace than men! They have different priorities,work is not the be all and end all for them. That is perforce reflected in their pay structures.When all these things are taken into consideration then, ie context is brought to this issue it can be seen that any talk of the gender gap is a load of feminist bollocks which is probably not so inapt a terminology as lots of this is down to nothing more than old penis envy.

Death of Sir Humphrey?

One down tens of thousands to go! We know and indeed I have discussed it before how the civil service is crawling with statists and bedevilled with rampant federast Brusselphiles and putting them in charge of Brexit is a bit like putting Gary Glitter in charge of child welfare. They went native a long long time ago. Their panjandrums are not just Our Men in Brussels but Our Men Of Brussels and we should not trust them with used toilet paper.  Thatcher attempted to purge the fellow travellers in Whitehall decades ago but they have exponentially reproduced their alien spores and now infect every department and office of state with calamitious effects on trade, industry and cultural polity. Sir Humphrey clones have taken over the lunatic asylum. This latest ignominious departure from the Brussels quisling  whose name I have already forgotten is so symptomatic of the deep malaise in the civil service and it like the Lords and judiciary is ripe for purging and  radical deep systematic root and branch ideological cleansing. Removing a man here or there and reshuffling the pack when it is so infected is deckchair re arranging on a Titanic scale.

Who are the Racists?

It is an inescapable fact that the racists in any given society (allowing for the fact that there is no such thing as society and it is just a figure of speech) are always without any exception  from the  poor white trash . Racism is almost unheard of amongst the educated middle classes, anyone educated up to university level. The anti immigrant poor are the strata that Ukip has made a very successful appeal to and thus stolen large swathes of Labour's working class voters, the old unionised Enoch Powel racists who cannot cope with economic competition and have been  softened by union controlled anti competition feather bedded protected socialist jobs in the public sector.Even the tories are exploiting the racism of the decadent working classes and appealing to their xenophobia and anti economic migrant prejudice. Racism is the worst sort of tribal colectivism, it is the deep toxic poisonous well Trump is drawing on as his electoral base and it is ugly and evil and the preserve of demagogues from Marx and Stalin to Hitler on down

The idea that the racist poor working class voted Brexit because it is anti EU is fanciful as most of them would not even understand anything about the EU and the only thing they want is protectionism.Our own politicians pander to them at their peril -and ours.

Learn the Truth at '17?

The rolling revolution which we may term Eurogeddon or the Insurgent Spring may yet claim more scalps this year with the coming general elections in 3 key european countries. If Marie le Pen does indeed win the seismic shock could well topple the EU and tip it into the garbage can of history for France is its lynchpin and it would struggle to withstand such an existential shock to its being. Despite her unsavoury alt right views it is worth stomaching them just to see an end of this sclerotic doomed dystopian nightmare institution just as it was worth having Trump in the Whitehouse as he represents a trashing of the long protracted and much despised, discredited and failed liberal hegemony.

Now that the unthinkable has come to pass this provides an opening for those of neither the above camps to put forward a case for smaller government although this could be a tad optimistic as I have pointed out on numerous occasions both camps are statist to varying degrees and we should not be too carried away with what is essentially a Trumped up Farageo of a  faux revolution.

Money For Nothing

When Rudyard Kipling wrote a hundred years ago of a government welfare project whereby people would be paid just 'for existing' some may have thought he was possibly being a tad harsh but now somewhere in Scotland that is about to come to pass literally as they are rolling out an experiment where some people in a few towns will actually be paid just for existing although it will have the characteristic euphemistic gloss that politicians apply when they want to pull a scam on the public and is thus termed universal income.The rationale for why they are doing it? to see if it will discourage the recipients from seeking work.(?!) Politicans kill satire do they not.

Everyone will get it irrespective of income! English taxpayers may feel that funding Scottish communist programmes is just a bridge too far and independence is a consummation to now be devoutly wished and who could frankly blame them. This programme if it is successfull (?) will bankrupt the country so there is obviously something in the water North of the border of sanity and howling madness. The infamous Scottish parsimony is clearly off the menu when English mugs are footing the bill.

Further studies in Leftist Mythology

Student debt! It sounds terrible right? Poor students! A debt millstone round their necks. Well not, actually. For student debt read Taxpayer Debt because guess who gets to bail them out when they cannot pay, do not earn enough if anything at all to fall into the decile of paying it all back? So the greatest propaganda coup goes to the left for successfully convincing the public that it is the students who are footing this humungulus bill although of course that is true in the end albeit not as the left describes it because parents are taxpayers and they are going to be carrying the can for this soley governement created debacle.It is just that some of those taxpayers will not even have had teenagers going to university but will be having to be part of this ongoing bailout.

The solution? Student loans have to and should be placed in their right and proper domain and sphere namely private, ie the banks whose job it is to issue loans at the going rate so that the contract is between them and the students rather the nation as a whole who should not have to take on the unwarranted and unjustified risk - and risk it is - implicit in student further education. This will have the added advantage of concentrating young minds on what exactly they are going to university for and what sort of courses they should opt for in the light of future career rather than contracting out that moral hazzard to the hapless general public who have a right to their own lives and should not have to take on the burden of other people's childrens choices which at present seem to be ill conceived, arbitrary,subjective and frankly in many cases mindless and delinquent which explains the high drop out rate and the trail of havoc emotional and collateral wrought by abandoned studies.

Further to this students will gain autonomy as they will be more demanding of their lecturers who will in turn be kept on their toes by the pressure of having of actually  to deliver quality and innovative challenging courses rather than coasting on a calm sea of complacency in the full knowledge that the captive taxpayers are footing the bill and they can run a quasi sinecure at their expense.In order for this to fully work of course the universities should be privatised and this is what the educational establishment is terrified by and is the reason it is presently agitated alarmed excercised and so up in arms by the government's latest proposals to even allow the setting up of some more private universities. Standards will fall! Really, standards?! For this read, our sclerotic stranglehold on the profession,our closed shop cosy monopoly of higher learning will be challenged and overturned and with it of course their greatest - and justified - fear of all and the one they dare not mention, their baleful suffocating intellectual stranglehold on the culture will be undone and the true spirit of enquiry will reign which means their centuries long  leftist hegemony over higher education will be smashed.

My Green Bicycle

One of the major assaults on modernity is the environmentalist movement and of its countless and ugly manifestations in recent times the most irritating surely has to be the resurrection  and fetishisation of the bicycle as a modish mode of transport, driven by Green public policy and ideology and used by its practitioners as a particulary tiresome form of virtue signalling.This has set up a direct confrontation between modernity as represented by the automobile and the bicycle as symbol of Maoist backwardness and boorish reaction  as typified by Peter Hitchens (yes him again) and his kind who insist on riding their bikes in built up areas in a deliberate and conscious attempt to not just arrest modernity but drive it off the roads and out of history altogether.

The bicyclingistas must not be allowed to win this battle and they must be crushed under the juggernaut of history with their hooligan insolence and their flagrant upfront violation of all highway rules and etiquette -one minute they are road users then the traffick lights turn red and they are up on the pavement carreering along and threatening and intimidating pedestrians with their loutish delinquency and recklessness and complete open and unchecked,un policed contempt for others. Yes as kids we were told by policemen patrolling the streets -remember them? to get off the pavement, now they turn away which can only be as a result of orders from on high which of course has been completely captured body and soul by the corosive Green lobby\Gestapo.

Religious sense of life pt 2

Lefty cleric - an oxymoron if ever there was one - called Giles Frasier was on BBC Radio 4's Thought for the day which section is no doubt statutorlily mandated as a precondition of the BBC's  broadcasting licence (although we are forever told that the institution is independent of the State!), was using his platform as an excercise in self therapy to the nation about his periodic bouts of depression and apart from the narcissistic tedium implicit in the excercise is was a timely reminder that those of the faith disposition are by no means immune to the Churchillian black dog except of course they can pass it off as a higher, mystical form of depression namely 'the dark night of the soul'. And so he used it thus in his tortured rationale to interpret it as an opportunity to sit it out and wait for the beneficence of his merciful creator to lift his burden of helplessness.

All depression will lift after a while and to attribute it to a mystical intervention from another dimension is as dumb as you can get but of course religion elevates dumbness to the dizzy heights of wisdom. Such rationalisations can even be interlarded with the pseudo intellectualism of Christian apologetics and in the process totally abdicating responsibility for one's mental state and contracting it out to a third party, one of the trinity no doubt.

Many of faith relish in castigating the intellect but are quite happy to put it to the service of their religion whenever it is challenged and will resort to the lowest form of casuistry to defend their corner albeit as I abovementioned it is invariably by the the abjectest methods of pseudo intellectualism.Be that as it may the inescapable fact is that if at the most fundamental level of one's belief structure is the notion that one is a piteable creature laid low by its own prideful sinfullness how can one possibly exist as a man but in a state of semi permanent miserable wretchedness, subject to the vicissitudes of unknown arbitrary forces that can buffet you at will,for their pleasure and to test your mental and moral fortitude? One can only be a pessimistic character with a crabapple face waiting for one's inevitable judgement in craven fawning and obsequious supplication.

A BBC reporter of the God persuasion summed it up when asking herself the question 'where is God in Alleppo? Wait for it, he is putting all those people through a living hell to test their faith. Who needs mere earthly psychopaths ladies and gentleman, when confronted with this pure unadulterated cosmic evil?

What is the religious sense of life?

I shall illustrate this examination of the above question in the title heading by exampling that miserable wretched human abomination who goes by the name of Peter Hitchens as being an archetype of the religious sensibility. He appears to be in a perpetual sulk, a sort of airy and weary disdain  for the world and all that is in it which may be affected but one doubts it as it seems to spring from a very real and genuine well of misanthropy and hatred of the world and which manifests in divers ways from his hatred of free markets, his desire for in his words 'protection' from it, a pig headed Luddism and antipathy towards mechanisation which benefits everyone in making goods cheaper and is  especially important to the poor whose cause he putatively champions, a technological revolution that will moreover let us not forget, impact the middle classes every bit as much as the so-called working classes who do or did  manual labour whose decline of course Hitchens vociferously laments.

What is the motivation of this modernity-hatred - a genuine concern for the so called victims of it which as I have hinted by any objective standards, are rather the direct beneficiaries of? I want to posit that it is a misanthropic impulse that informs the religious sensibilities of which Hitchens is one of its most overt and extreme and for that reason most illustrative representatives. According to his bible, work by the sweat of one's brow is man's lot in life,he is a cursed being who was thrown out of paradise and condemned to work like a beast of burden to atone for the sin of being born and rebelling against God by daring to acquire knowledge and thus seek to make himself a God which God will not tolerate as he is by bis own admission a 'jealous god'.So he has to go out of Eden and do physical atoning labour. What does man do instead? He builds devilish machines that do the work for him! O impudent usurper and frustrator of God's will! Smash those machines,build those protectionist walls, get man back to work in the fields or maybe dark satanic mills perchance? Blackadder time: Mechanisation is of the devil!

So we see that the religious sensibility is anti capitalist, anti human life, anti man. Now wonder the Hitchens of this world go around with a permanent sneer and air of disdain and a bad smell under their nose. Modernity is a threat to their whole creaky structure of faith, religious bigotry intolerance and hatred. In the past religion would have put the modernist to the rack, hung drawn and quartered them,smashed their devilish machines and heaped curses and condemend their souls to perpetual torment in the flames of hell. Now they are reduced to pitiable moans and groans of disapproval and tut tutting disapprobation, the petulant and impotent flailings of a defanged beast.For this small mercy of deliverance at least we should all express our  thanks relief and gratitude.

First they came for the business men....

Well it has been an eventful year. The low was definitely the relentless and near criminal hounding and scapegoating of Phillip Green by the media hyenas particularly the Daily Mail and I cannot help thinking some of it is pure anti semitism. The Mail has a dark history of suporting Fascism in the 1930's  after all.Green committed the cardinal sin of being a successful entrepreneur who legitimately sold a business all perfectly above board that had pensions liabilties which were passed over to the new owner. As the man said if you sell someone a car and they crash it its not your fault. Impossible standards are demanded of the wealthy that are not applied to anyone else and they are treated like moral lepers, a persecuted minority who are fair game and ergo subject to inhuman villification and prejudice and its permanent open season on them. Envy is an ugly emotion at the best of times but when it is passed off as moral indignation it is all the more nauseating and vile. Spare us all from the faux moral outrage of moral pygmies and envy eaten mediocrities who go by the name of hacks.There is no more sickening a spectacle than such in full cry. Meanwhile the great man has been hauled in front of a kangaroo court of third rate politicians standing in judgement on him and small wonder he has retreated to a foreign land nursing his wounds and bemusedly asking journalists what it is with the British media that so hates successful people and seeks to character assassinate them. The real villain of the pieice is undoubtedly the sanctimonius pipsqueak Frank Field who has turned this witch hunt against Green into a personal vendetta and crusade. Had he lived in another time one can imagine him in full Nazi regalia persecuting his jewish victims in a show trial with obscene and sadistic relish.

What IS Prison for?

Rehabilitation! We have that mantra trip from the lips of wooly minded liberal do gooders with monotonous regularity and like most things they opine it is sooo wrong on multiple levels. As an old associate used to say in his characteristically concise way ' you cannot rehabilitate those who have never been habilitated in the first place'. But I actually say that should not even be the aspiration. Prison serves one purpose and one purpose only: Punishment! Or should I say two purposes the other one being incarceration to protect the public from dangerous felonius criminals.

Even putatively hard line Conservatives like Anne Widdicombe seem not to get this point and bleat on endlessly about the R word. Sorry, Why does a good parent reproove his recalcitrant offspring if not to din into them the folly of their ways and course and to imbue them with a positive worldview and instill within them the discipline to live a good and productive life therafter? Prisoners are the end product of the absence of such an upbringing and prison is effectively acting as a surrogate stern albeit just disciplining loving father.Not a nurturing spoiling mother who gives it drugs and television and panders to its delinquency, rewarding it when it runs riot anthrows the equivalent of a tantrum and hurls its toys out the pram. Cause a riot and we will give you more amenities! Madness. Take All their toys away and throw away the key more like. And totally privatise the prisons and make the inmates work for their bed and board.And lastly but not leastly send all the armies of penal reformers packing with their pleas to half empty all the prisons of their inmates and deploying their lethal confection of  psychobabble excus- making, false, absurd, Marxist rationalisations, explanation and exculpationss for pure plain human evil.

The day God died?

Profesional miserabilist and jaundiced columnist Peter Hitchens the very mediocre lesser talented brother of the much lamented late great writer and polemicist and scourge of religion Christopher, asserts in so many words that effectively Christianity died on the fields of Flanders which is extrarordianary in its ahistorical and purblind perspective. As if Christians had not been slaughtereing one another on a pre undustrial scale centuries before that and dreaming up exotic ways to torture the innocent who refused to bow the knee to the insane and demented cult of Christianity. Very often of course it was murdering its own kind who had deviated ever so slightly off the doctrnaire course and paid for it with a very painful and protracted death of gothic dimensions.Up to the present day Christians continued this homicidal trajectory as witness the horrors of the internicine sectional killing grounds of Norther Ireland.

It was perhaps only the fusion and marriage of modern technology with barbaric Christian faith  that made the First world war so uniquely horrific in form and scale and if Hitchens wants to claim that it was the last nail in the coffin of Christianity I am happy enough to concede as much. It is not to be lamented that man leaves aside his childish delusions and fairy tales about his origins and embraces this life in all its multifarious beauty and wonder and promise unless of course the Hitchens of this world (or the imaginary other) choose to throw a reservoir of cold water on their aspirations and make a sick career of it.

Israel and Obama

John Kerry the Herman Munster of politics has monstered Israel over its settlements and colluded with the UN to put it in the dock of public disapprobation yet again but this latest assault smacks of cynical opportunism and moral cowardice being as it is the equivalent of a drive by shooting or someone who thinks it smart to make a debating point whilst half way out the door so they cannot hear the riposte of their interlocutor.

There may be someone who knows less about the Israel Arab conflict on planet earth but I have never met them but this will not stop me from making a general point on the matter as it never seems to be an impediment to everyone else airing their views on the matter so why not me. How can it be called occupied land since it was got from conquest after Israel was invaded by its neighbours in a full on unprovoked attack, and faced the very real threat of total destruction and extinction.The land was part of the spoils of war.

There is however the thorny issue of US foreign aid to Israel and if that is what it is Israel should wean itself off that and the US should not be using American tax payers money for that purpose. There is no doubt notwithstanding that the Democrats are anti Israel and have been for the longest time and their support for the Palestinians is amoral but par for the Democrat course.

Russogate

As a precious few other people have pointed out what Russia did in hacking into the computers of Democrats is a re run of Watergate which caused such a cataclysmic effect on American politics for a generation and led to a presidential impeachment. Yet not a peep of outrage from the establishment to what is in effect an act of war. Obamma has been very late in condemning this espionage by Russia which is morphing back into the Soviet monster of old although he is right to apply such sanctions he has announced but they hardly redress what Russia has done.

Trump of course is seeking to dismiss this outrage as he would wouldn't he, but my only suggestion would be for the US to block the State run RT TV channel if it is possible. As it is a tool of the Russian government this would be entirely justified.

Socialised healthcare is bad for your health (part 2)

Another lamentable but inevitable corollary of socialised health care that I did not explore in my last post on the subject is the sinister encroachment of the State into people's personal lives and habbits that flows from it, which if not totally necessitated by the nature of the NHS is certainly used as a pretext by politicians to justify it, namely, its involvement in attempting to change behaviour, to 'nudge' people in certain directions re the kind of food they consume, using it as rationale for yet more taxation of those goods deemed bad for people. Ergo one massive governement intervention into the health market is followed by another into the personal consumption and behaviour of its citizens and the slow inexorable ratcheting expansion of the State is thus effected.

Once Upon a time in NHS land...

Aside from all the obvious reasons against socialised healthcare such as the implicit violation of individual rights involved, namely the State appropriation of the doctor's profession, the hijacking of their careers to the service of the State and the denial of individual rights of the patient to choose their own doctors and treatment and personal healthcare all of which is worthy of much comment and criticism, there are some baleful and often fatal effects of socialised healthcare that are not so commonly discussed that involve the calamitous harmful medical  consequences of a health system 'free at the point of use' to use the coy socialist newspeak by which the NHS was visited on an unsuspecting, naieve albeit eager public when it was ushered in to much fanfare some 70 years ago.

In a proper rational  free market private health insurance system a patient's premium would be predicated on their health and lifestyle choices and those who smoked or took drugs,were obese through over eating and reliance of junk food would pay a higher premium than those who led a more healthy lifestyle and rightly so. A stunt man pays a lot more insurance than someone working at a sedentary job in an office for instance as objectively reflecting their respective lifestyles. If they both paid the same premium the insurance system would simply collapse and no one would have any insurance at all. Now examine the same principle as applied to the NHS! Well it does not obtain which is why it is in a perpetual state of crisis and people are dropping like flies from poor health choices confident in the knowledge that no matter what harm they inflict on themselves,how much food they stuff how much they smoke and drink the 'free' NHS is going to put them back together again. Well it won't and it can't anymore because it is collapsing upon its own internal contradictions but all politicians without exception know that the public does not want to hear that so they go on telling them what they want to hear, that more shed loads of money are going to be thrown at the Sovietised healthcare system and maybe at the end of an umpteenth 5 year plan it will all turn out fine.

Good luck with that one -wasn't it Albert Einstein who observed that insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result? So politicians lied and millions died. The NHS killing fields will claim many more victims, their corpses will circle the earth before the politicians come clean and admit that socialised medicine is a poson toxic and just as socialism has failed wherever it has been practiced it has failed in the NHS with catastrophic cataclysmic consequences and that the only solution is to dismantle the whole thing and return it back to the free market from which it was criminally wrenched 70 years ago in an act of national state brigandige, a defacto communist takove of healthcare without a shot being fired. We are all living, or rather not living, with the consequences.

Referendum Revolution!

Received wisdom is the bane of reason. Take the issue of referendums and their putative conflict with democracy as voiced by the Establishment -the commanding institutions of State and the media in general. There is almost universal disapprobation towards referendums not to mention the predominant un named never to be admitted emotion regarding them, namel blind pathological fear and panic. It is that age old terror of the powers that be, the prospect of the mob in all its incandescent rage, rebellion, bloodymindednes and non conformity. This keeps the politicians awake at night for they have contrived the whole democratic process with the sole purpose of obviating the will of the people,to circumscribe it,limit it,circumvent it through the sclerotic bureaucratic offices of State and cirumlocution the intent of which is to frustrate the will of the people,retard its advance and true expression,to dilute its wishes and to further its own statist agendas and garnish ever more emoluments and monetary advantages in expenses and fiddled accounts. All the while they couch their empire building and embezzling chicanery and self advancement in bromides about public service and fulfilling the role as representatives of the electorate.

The very word Referendum sends them shreiking into the night like Dracula at the sight of a cross. We have seen how reluctant they were to hold a referndum on Brexit and how they have tried and are still trying to make its resounding verdict null and void by every contrivance and pretext they can muster.It is for this reason that I have come to the conclusion that referendums are the way to go.Imagine a roll call of them on all the burning issues politicians never want to go near: the death penalty, the future of the NHS, Britain's membership of the UN and Nato, the BBC licence, the Welfare State, legalisation of drugs, taxation, regulation and so on.

Starting a political party is so difficult, the first past the post system is not the problem and PR is problematic but the tribal nature of politics is very hard to circumvent and the media tends to perpetuate the two horse race of Tory Lab because it suits their statist agendas as the two parties are almost identical in ideology, protest as they strenuously will to the contrary. Referendums cut through all this historical bar to entrance and introduction of innovatory radical ideas for change.Voter turnout for Brexit was phenomenal and it has scared the beejesus out of the 'Stabs.Endless plebescites horrifiess it which of course is the greatest argument in their favour.

Taxing Times

Most people would balk at mugging someone and taking their purse or wallet or burglaring a house but they are perfectly ok with the State doing it on their behalf through the tax and welfare system. Theft by proxy -no problem! Politicians being the arch parasite's parasite are happy to oblige of course, making sure they couch this larceny and wholesale looting in euphemistic terms and coda such as 'wealth redistribution' and other Orwellianisms such as 'fairness',public good 'asking' people to contribute more. They are not 'asking', they are demanding money with menaces but this lying and deception is par for the course and the tribute vice pays to virtue but even the mafia would not stoop to such tergiversation although they do like to give children turkeys at Thanksgiving with their stolen loot of course so there is a politician in them too.

All of this is a perversion of the original rationale for taxation that most leaders going back into antiquity would invoke,namely, taxation to fight wars and maintain a standing army -bad enough and  morally insupportable in itself but at least having the semi saving grace of being delimited. Then came the ideologues who decided to co opt the tax system to pursue their egalitarian agendas and thus was born the redistribution of wealth on ideological socialist collectivist grounds. Dressed in quasi religious terms -the New Jerusalem the Welfare State was born and in the UK at least, and a wholesale takeover of private property and business was effected without a shot being fired. Why did it take a bloody revolution is Russia to achieve such ends when in England people voted in their millions for socialist servitude? That is harder to determine but it is not insignificant that both countries shared a common characteristic that made them vulnerable to the siren call of collectivism namely they  were both steeped in Christianity and no doubt this prexistent credulity pathed the way for and made it much easier to effect the desired end of statism in both countries.

The mysticism of God worship was simply transferred to the mysticism of State worship where the collective substituted for the Almghty to be genuflected to like the totem of a new religion. All the Marxist socialist votaries were fresh from the seminaries and churches, steeped in the mysticism of blind faith and obesiance to the Godhead and thus the spiritual and secular were easily interchangeable as passivity and credulity were the chief requirements in both cases.

Exaggerrated Death of an Illusion?

It cannot be stressed enough that though we appear to live in a post-religious secular world this is illusory for as I hinted at in a previous post the average person may think he or she has shed the superstitions of faith entirely and indeed to a large extent has at least in its overt outward forms of organised rote worship, but it  remains true nevertheless that  far more more than vestigial and residual religious premises - albeit largely unconscious - animate their political beliefs and allegiances.It is not just those who as I alluded to in said post still aver their belief in God but do not attend church but those who will tell you that they no longer believe at all and yet still hold to political beliefs and views that derive soley from religious precepts about man being his brother's keeper and the need for self sacrifice and the paramountcy of eschewing 'selfish individualism'. This is because most people hold beliefs implicitly without fully identifying if at all the roots of said beliefs,from where they philosophically derive.

This is why it is so important during debate to point out the roots of people's political views and subject them to the light of day where they can be challenged rather than just accepting the premises of their positions as given conventional wisdom. When such positions have their roots exposed it is far less likely that people will be so ready to defend them or at the very least they may be forced to revisit some core assumptions in the light of such exposure and those who are less doctinaire may be far more likely won over to the argument from freedom liberty and individual rights or at the very least to give it some consideration.

Leftist Mythology

One of the biggest myths or canards the left likes to peddle is the notion that Western culture is suffering from a surfeit of individualism. This is to pay the culture a compliment it most definitely does not deserve.Would that it were true. It conflates individualism with consumerism and hedonism and the misplaced accusation is nothing but a pretext to argue for yet more state domination of  citizen's private lives and erosion of liberty. The word selfish usually accompanies the anti individualism charge which again is the conflation of subjectivist feelings with individualism. This false meme is a cover to conceal the true nature of what animates the culture which is nothing more than a faux individualism oriented around consumerism which is not the essential aspect of human existence.Man may be free to consume but he is severely hampered in his freedom to produce and enjoy the fruits of his production.

The Left is correct however in identifying the greatest threat to it which is individualism in its truest sense for if individual rights were ever to trump its much revered collective rights that would be the end of leftism so it must perforce attack individualism though it be a patent chimera and bogeyman as the chief characteristic of modern culture is a prevailing and oppressive morribund collectivism  that is reflected in all its institutions, politics and  ideology.

Religious Folly

Church attendance may have radically and progressively reduced since the end of the first world war but a common error lots of lapsed churchgoers make is encapsulated and articulated in the following ratiocination: I do not need to worship in a church but I still believe in God. Such people like to present themselves as free thinkers but this a nothing but a conceit. Imagine if someone said I don not like going to Nazi rallies and going through all the rituals of saluting Hitler and dressing up in all that Nazi regalia but I do beleive in Nazism and its core principles. Would anybody think well of them?  The  non church goers are unctuous to the extreme in wearing their faux non conformity on their sleeves but in any objective analysis they are all in the same faith boat and share the same irrational creed as the church going fraternity.

If we add all the faith based non church attenders to the those who observe their faith in outward forms we would see that far more people are faith oriented than the church attendance figures would suggest. Add to that all those who adhere to New Age mystical mumbo jumbo and other religious and quasi religious sects from paganism to Jehova Witness Church of scientology Mormonism and God knows what else and throw in the equally irrational conspiracy theorists, believers in astrology, UFOers and junk science Environmentalists and we are dealing with probably a majority of the population that are irrational to a fault,unhinged and quasi insane to boot. Not to mention all the irrational philosphies people adhere to which practically means all of modern philsophy with hardly any exceptions.

Against this culture of unreason it is hardly surprising that modern politics is so bad and completely dominated by collectivistic ideology as this flows directly from the core beliefs  people hold and the general culture. As all the abovementioned faith systems Without exception adhere to the notion of self sacrifice and altruism any attempt  to challenge the altruism implcit and explicit within collectivist statism is to challenge people's deeply held philosophy and belief structure and this explains the awesome Herculean labour that will be required to turn the culture around and why the question what is to be done is so vexing and challenging and resistant to any easy solution or programme.

The Individual versus Democracy Or What can be done?

I do not pretend to have an answer to my question. End of post really! So permit me a Boxing day ramble instead and we may get somewhere obliquely. If you are a Jihadist life is at least simple. You blow yourself up taking as many people as possible with you. The attraction is in the simplicity. Nihilism means never having to think or care to think. It is pure destruction which is why it attracts the lazy minded, in other words the religious. We must not forget that this was the Christian way until a short while ago but parliament stepped in and wrested power from our theocratic tyrannical capricious psychopathic mercurial  jihadist off with her head for not bearing me a son, Kings. They had monuments built to their name and image,monstrous cathedral edifices constructed with the people's blood in taxation and to this day the public is forced to finance the upkeep of these mausoleums to the faded gory glory of the popes and satanic votaries of hell called Christianity.And we have no separation of Church and State, and we have a monarchy soaked in the blood of its victims down the centuries still exacting tax tribute and parading its mannered parasitism at every national event. So I come back to my question what can we do? This is the 21st century for chrissakes why are we still even having this ancient problem and am I having to waste my time attempting to clear up the garbage of history that should have been done and dusted centuries ago? This post is destined to raise more questions than answers clearly.And we have not even touched on our political masters who have merely transferred all the arbitrary power once endowed to the priesthood to themselves and brilliantly effected and installed a far greater and subtle tyranny in the very name of freedom and liberty! Ingenius indeed.How to steal candy from a baby.And the worse part of it all is that people don't even care or are even aware of this all pervasive and invasive tyranny and serfdom.Maybe there is something in the water? End of post!

Happy Christlessmass

Season's cheers to all my numberless readers and thank God its been secularised. Co opting Christmas was a masterstroke of Reason and one to be warmly welcomed as the Godless appropriate the fairy tale of faith and turn it into a celebration of life rather than the celebration of death the religionists promote. We should all raise a toast to the much to be wished for death or religion in all its multifarious manifestations and horrors. The queen may blabber on her throne and condescend to her witless subjects but her days too are numbered for the monarchy has a sell by date on its crown and is counting down to dissolution though it may not know it yet.Brexit is the start of things falling apart, all our institutions are on shaky foundations and would not take much pushing to come tumbling down if the right pressure is concentrated in the proper locus.The Establishment corrupt and rotten to the core is ripe for a massive kicking and the old order will not survive in its present form. Happy Brexmass one and all!

Prince Charles's brain fart

Thought for the day on R4 featured Charles lamenting the persecution of christians in the Middle East and beyond. What a short memory the royal prat has when it was only a few centuries ago that Christians were hunting down muslims like wild animals and his own Christian ancestors were chopping off people's heads under the slightest pretext. No doubt Diana would have been for the chop had she been born a few centuries ago for consulting with psychics and committing adultery all over the place.

If Christians are being persecuted in a modern crusade it is only the chickens coming home to roost and when it comes to religion a plague on all their houses as it causes war death and destruction and the sooner the human race grows up and throws of its primitive need for fairy tales and starts treating  one another with reason instead of superstition and barbarism the better.Bear in mind also that the only reason Christians now behave civilly towards everyone is because Christianity has been defanged and reformed and stripped of its power. Were that not the case it would still be behaving as barbarically as the muslims are right now who have yet to have their own Reformation. It is not morality that keeps Christianity in check but the sheer power of the law that circumscribes its latent and suppressed baser impulses.

Ve have vays of letting Jihadists kill you

The latest security debacle in Germany is one more confirmation of the folly of allowing the Security State to keep surveillance on us all when once again it lets known jihadists who are on the radar in plain sight and with past form as long as the human arm get away with their atrocities with impunity. Thus when they argue with siren like sinuosity for yet more sweeping surveillance powers to watch our every move we should resist it stoutly with every fibre of our being in the full knowledge that it is we, innocent citizens who are in their sights and not the jihadists who are going around in broad daylight with death to the West practically written on their foreheads and shouting it from the rooftops. A European army of keystone cops anybody?

It's the Philosophy, Stupid

A lot of people get hung up and depressed with politics thinking the world is going to hell in a handcart and although this is partly true in many ways we really have never had it so good and this can be overlooked if we focus soley in on politics which admittedly is dire to the exclusion of everything else. The modern poor live better than kings of old and are surrounded by opulence with their I pads and widescreen TVs courtesy of foreign imports of cheap goods which the Donald seems to want to put a stop to with high tarfiff walls and concrete ones as well.

We live longer,healthier lives today, have vast arrays of foodstuffs from all over the globe,cars and material goods are cheaper, more fuel efficient which gives us more disposable income.And we have short memories. Anyone who looks misty eyed and longingly back to the 70's was clearly not there or is suffering from a chronic case of amnesia and selective memory syndrome. The technology was crap,cumbersome,ridiculous, primitive unreliable unwieldy. The politics were dire,violence was far greater etc etc.

No one in their right minds would rather live in the 70's or even the 50's if given a choice. So why all the lament? It is being stirred up by the intellectuals who want to foment and fabricate discontent for their narrow sectarian Machievellian ends, to effectively convince us that we have never had it so bad so they can introduce even yet more government interference in our lives and thus gain total control over us. So they wheel on economists who insist that things are as bad as the 1920's that capitalismk is in crisis even though we palpably do not even have capitlism in any true sense or definition of the word but rather live under a hobbled compromised mixed economy that is tilting towards further statism and government hegemony over the market. Yet despit this business thrives,despite all the controls taxes and hyper regulation the American spirit is unbowed and Silicon valley continues to lead the world in technological innovation and creativity.

Yes politics is awful and dire but what drives politics but philosophy and it is this that needs to change for if people have the wrong philosophy they will perforce have wrong politics so it is the culture and philosophy that we should be focusing on not its end product politics. To attempt to change politics whilst leaving the prevailing philosophical culture unadressed is like trying to treat a cancer patient with aspirin.

And we get hung up on the political process too! Thinking that if we just abolish the electoral college or have proportional representation all will be fine and dandy and the system will then be kook- (Donald) proof. But the electoral college was set up expressly as system of checks and balances but it did not protect the people from Obama being elected or Roosvelt, the first socialist President proper. Only philosophy -good philosophy will protect the people from tyrants,not political process.But what philosophy? That I shall leave for another post.

Rule by Inferior Beings

Watching a nauseating hagiographic BBC lecture on the life of the monumental nonentity Clement Atlee (about whom Churchill famously said 'he was a humble man who had a lot to be humble about') it was clear that this miserable runt of a human being, who bore a fitting and uncanny resemblance to Lenin had political views that were informed by his religious upbringing as so many socialists did.Indeed it is not an exagerration to say that were it not for the baleful influence of Christianity socialism would never have emerged into the light of day and gained the traction that it did in the last century with such devastating and catastrophic consequences for its millions of victims.

The chief reason why socialism and the collectivism that underpins it has never been fully vanquished across continents and has made a depressing comeback recently is down to the fact that its putative opponents have never been able to take a moral stand against it for the simple reason that they have shared the same philosophical roots of socialism namely the belief that man is his brother's keeper, ie, the altruist ethics of self sacrifice as being man's reason for existence as opposed to his own self interest. Every advancement of the socialist argument up to and beyond the creation of the welfare state was met with the feeblest of opposition from Conservatives who could not challenge the fundamental root of socialism and so were impotent to stop its advance and eventual triumph. And so it is to this very day.

This failure to halt the progress of socialism and collectivism is mirrored by the West's inability to challenge and defeat militant Islam. Christianity remains the West's  nominal and residual belief system and the monotheism of Christianity cannot defeat the monotheism of Islam any more than socialism can be defeated by socialism.

The two ideological bugbears of faith and collectivism can only be defeated by reason and this will never be done by Conservatives and it is foolish to look to that quarter as it has sold the ideological pass from the get go. It is up to the men of reason to wage ideological war on these two great evils of mankind if there is to be any future worth having.    

From our own Correspondent - Not

As news of the death of veteran war correspondent Nicholson has been announced today it is timely to reflect on the fact that his trade seems to have died with him as today's correspondents can usually be found skulking and loitering in an adjacent country to any war that is raging and preface their reports by announcing that their source is from an activist on the ground which is about as far from objective reporting as it is possible to get. Whether it is the decadent risk-averse  health and safety culture we are living in now or just  plain cowardice on the part of today's correspondents I do not know but it is a poor show and a travesty of journalism either way. If we have to rely on the tendentious outpourings of activist  'citizen journalists'  or the equally biased UN to tell us what is going on, all of which is relayed and funneled through the equally biased BBC State television, an arm of government at barely one remove, small wonder we have a totally skewed impression of what is going on in Syria right now. It is not only people who are dying in today's wars but journalism itself and with it our proper understanding of world events.

Alt Left and Alt Right Unite

Len Mcluskey of Unite has come out against free movement of labour aligning himself with Ukip. Proof if proof were needed that on economic issues there is not a cigarette paper between the far left and the far right.They both advocate protectionism which means the electorate has no choice as no political party is arguing for free movement of peoples.We are in the era of Henry Ford politics: you can have any ideology you like as long as it's Statism.

Syrian blood on British hands

That the West and the UK in particular is guilty of war crimes in Syria there is no doubt, funding as it has been jihadist terrorists, the so called rebel militia even though the British parliament had rightly expressly voted against any such military involvement in the civil war there. And that the western media has lied consistently about the war is also undoubtedly true, using the emotionalism of child casualties as a propagandisitc tool, a sort of a human shield against the true realities of the conflict presenting it as soley Russian caused rather than a Western proxy war.The ancillary players have also contributed to the horror by protracting it with their involvement such as the White helmets and the UN and other bodies making the war last much longer with their ill advised ceasefires which have enabled the rebels to regroup and re arm. Even now the extraordianary UN organised retreat of the rebels will no doubt have the same result.

Rather than draw the obvious conclusion namely that British involvement has been calamitious congenital idiots like George Obsborne of course still do not get it and was pontificating in the House of Commons about how the UK is responsible for not getting even more involved and was guilty for the horror by its ommissions which is the kind of crackerbarrel logic which has governed all his policy making across the board so we at least can be grateful that he is no longer involved in British politics at least and has been summarily dismissed from the cabinet.But what devastation he and his ilk have wrought on poor benighted Syria and for that of course they will not be  punished as they rarely if ever are as they sail off into the sunset with their book deals and highly lucrative public speaking careers leaving a trail  of corpses and bloody havoc behind them.

State of the Unions: 3 Strikes and We're Out!

What do the following current or recent  union strikes have in common:  The junior doctor's strike, the never-ending,rolling railway strike, the postal strike. You guessed it, they are all 'public service' run operations. If employees of a privately run business attempt to go on strike indefinitely they know they run the very real risk of that business declaring bankruptcy and them losing their jobs. This can never happen in a public service organisation because the government will always bail it out with taxpayer's money. The unions can consequently flex their industrial muscles with total impunity because they know they have the State over a barrel and they can fight a proxy war with the Conservative government using taxpayer's money to fund their politically motivated militant strikes. The public are merely the collateral damage,the commuters whose journeys are disrupted, the thousands of businesses crippled because their employees cannot get to work.

It is not true that the railways are privatised because they are still in the State sector and receive huge subsidies and the financial brunt of this endless railway strike is being born by the taxpayer's thanks to the deliberately botched and sabotaged privatisation of the Blair government who could not bring itself to totally relinquish State control over the railways exacting a very heavy price and burden on the long and  suffering British public to this very day.

Politicians have a vested interest in this appalling state of affairs continuing, their strenuous protestations notwithstanding because the last thing they want is to see the privatisation of these State services as that would mean they would be out of a job and power lusters never give up their power willingly. Industrial devastation all around them, people's economic lives blighted, jobs destroyed, the public screwed in a rigged non market, none of this matters to the politicians and unions locked as they are in a deeply  cynical, amoral  corrupt mutually beneficial symbiosis each needing the other in their power game of  monopolised thiefdoms.  

Ouch this hurts, But: Owen Jones is Right!

Although it greatly pains me to say it cos he is an irritating runt of a boy/man but Owen Jones is undoubtedly correct in pointing out that Putin's Russia is unmistakably Fascist in complexion and makeup and has been almost from the outset but it has has been hard to see so conditioned and fixated as we are to seeing it soley  as the home of Communism, and Putin as an ex KGB goon but the characteristics with Fascism are compelling.

There are its Christian orthodox ties and the Church has a very long association with Fascism  in Germany and Italy, France etc, its virulent anti homosexuality, its xenophobia and nationalism, its strong man, cult of personality worship, its State control of business and close ties with it, its persecution imprisonment and murder of journalists.And the kind of friends it attracts abroad from the far right groups in Europe which it now turns out are being funded by Russian banks, its tacit support for Trump, Farage's respectful noises towards it. Oh, and its tendency to invade neighbouring countries and annexe them. This is definitely one to watch  and further illustration of how Communism and Fascism are mere sides of the same coin of collectivism.