The Aged P

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FORGET THE SUFFRAGETTES…..IT WAS THE SUFFRAGISTS WHO WON THE VOTE FOR WOMEN

 

 

WHEN THE LENS OF WISHFUL THINKING TURNS HISTORY INTO MYTH

 

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Much of the reporting about the centenary of the granting of votes to women has been strong on emotion and weak on historical facts. Most of the narrative has been about the “suffragettes” and their militancy, with various celebs and politicians decked out in purple, white and green, the WSPU (suffragette) colours.

In fact most of the heavy lifting for women’s suffrage was done by Millicent Fawcett’s “suffragists” (NUWSS) who favoured non violent campaigning. It could well be argued that it was the NUWSS effort that won the right to vote. Yet they (and their colours of red.white and green) have today been overshadowed by the Pankhursts and the suffragettes.

Curiously enough the NUWSS was a tad more left wing than the suffragettes. The WSPU abandoned action in 1914 and fully supported WW1. Although Fawcett also supported the war she had to be more circumspect because many of her members were pacifists. Nevertheless today even left wingers were decked out in purple white and green when they should have been red, white and green.

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Maybe the passionate grandstanding of the suffragettes has a greater resonance with 21st century culture than the equally determined but less theatrical behaviour of the suffragists. However, although the current commemorations focus, quite rightly, on women gaining the right to vote and the democrat in me celebrates that landmark, the historian in me does get irritated when facts get….massaged…..

“The failure of a second bill in 1867 led to the formation of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage in Manchester, gradually joined by numerous other branches around the country, which were united in 1897 in the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. The suffragists of the NUWSS were many more in number than the militants who in 1903 set up the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union) and adopted direct militant action as tactics. By 1914 the NUWSS had 50,000 members, the WSPU 5,000. The NUWSS retained their focus on peaceful campaigning: petitioning, demonstrating, writing, speaking and teaching, organising and lobbying in favour of the vote. Many of them saw the violent tactics of the suffragettes as bringing the movement and the credibility of women as aspiring responsible members of political society into disrepute and compromising the female values which they argued were needed in government and society and which necessitated that women should have a vote.”

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Facebook Feminists Quite Happy To Call Theresa May The C Word…

Am I the only person whose Facebook timeline has uncovered posts from apparently well educated, middle class women (usually in their late 20s/early 30s) who regularly proclaim their feminist purity by railing against male misogyny yet who quite happily call Theresa May a b**** or a c***?  These are women who would prickle with resentment if you called them “love” or complimented them on the way they dressed. If you called them the c or b word they would go full metal discrimination. They stoutly defend Diane Abbott against any criticism by swiftly playing the sexist card yet they quite happily fling those words around when pontificating about the Conservative leader and do not smack any wrists when their male friends resort to similar name calling in the threads to their posts.

There is not a peep of protest.

Why?

It’s because the target of their ire is a) a right wing politician and b) she appears to be winning. Hence sisterhood goes out of the window and the claws are unleashed.

It happened to Margaret Thatcher and it also happened to Sarah Palin (even though she didn’t win)

If one were cruel it could be put down to hypocrisy. But since that sin is endemic on the left perhaps it is best filed under bad manners……

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Marie Le Pen Is Not Finished – She Has Only Just Begun…..

The media and the punditocracy were having orgasms last weekend over the defeat of Marie Le Pen in the French Presidential election. “Crushed”, “landslide” were just two of the words used in celebration of her loss. Consigning MLP to the dustbin of history the hacks went on to gush over Emmanuel Macron, the young former Rothschild banker/civil servant who had “come from nowhere” to win the presidency.

Come from nowhere….lol….

Nobody “comes from nowhere” to win like that. Once it was clear that the traditional parties were persona non grata the French and EU political elites needed a package to sell to shore up their interests in the face of Le Pen’s nationalist and anti globalist rhetoric and the young photogenic former socialist banker fitted the bill perfectly.

What the media have failed to grasp is the fact that Le Pen knew that victory was very much a long shot. Her eyes have always been on 2022. What she needed from 2017 was legitimacy – and that she has gained in spades, firstly by coming a close second in the preliminary round despite having zero support from the official French media. Then, and this is of even greater significance, she gained the support of  over a third of those who voted. In other words a sizeable chunk of the electorate wanted her to lead France. This is something her father (and founder of the Front National) could never achieve. In 2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen won just 4.5m votes in the presidential run off – his daughter gained 11m. She did well with younger voters and women and easily outmatched Macron amongst the working class.

Marine Le Pen has broken out of the core rump of the FN faithful and become a major political figure and could lay claim to the mantle of the leader of the opposition to the Macron administration

She will now capitalise on this by restructuring and rebranding the FN into a broader political movement that can still sell the FN’s seductive fusion of right wing nationalism with left wing social policy but without the old vichyite trappings that always held her father back.

She reacted to her defeat with grace and dignity but vowed to carry on

I will be at the head of this fight to gather together all of those who choose France first.

For those who hope to think that Marine Le Pen is finished – she has only just begun….

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“It is not the task of the criminal law to censor offensive utterances”….At last – a judge with common sense..

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Evangelical Protestant preacher Pastor James McConnell from Belfast is, unlike many 21st century public figures, not a man given to nuance. Such a character, naturally, fits awkwardly with the modern state which increasingly seeks to discourage vigorous and robust debate. Hand in hand with the legions of the easily offended who patrol social media to hunt out and silence anyone who upsets their sensibilities our political and judicial masters are happy to enact and enforce laws to metaphorically cut out the tongues of those refuse to avoid giving “offence”

Thus Pastor McConnell, as a result of a sermon he preached to his congregation in May 2014 that was also streamed over the internet was charged with improper use of a public electronic communications network and causing a grossly offensive message to be sent by means of a public electronic communications network.

The state sought to punish him for making this statement.

‘Today we see powerful evidence that more and more Muslims are putting the Koran’s hatred of Christians and Jews alike into practice. ‘Now people say there are good Muslims in Britain, that may be so but I don’t trust them. Enoch Powell was right and he lost his career because of it. ‘Enoch Powell was a prophet and he told us that blood would flow in the streets and it has happened.

‘Fifteen years ago Britain was concerned of IRA cells, right throughout the nation they done a deal with the IRA because they were frightened of being bombed. Today a new evil has arisen. There are cells of Muslims right throughout Britain. Can I hear an Amen?

‘Right throughout Britain and this nation is going to enter a great tribulation and a great trial. To judge by some of what I have heard in the past few months you would think that Islam was a little more than a variation of Christianity and Judaism, not so. 

‘Islam’s ideas about God about humanity, about salvation are vastly different from the teaching of the Holy Scriptures. Islam is heathen, Islam is satanic, Islam is a doctrine spawned in hell.’ 

Words, claimed the prosecution, deliberately designed to offend Muslims.

Not so, said the Pastor.

no way I was out to hurt them – I wouldn’t hurt a hair on their head. But what I am against is their theology and what they believe in.

But, from the moment he was charged he remained defiant and said that he would not stop preaching the Christian gospel even if the price was finding himself behind bars.

Certainly there were expectations that the state’s aim of shutting him away in a cell would come to pass in this age of tender feelings. But a miracle happened – or rather an equally unexpected manifestation – a justice with common sense in the person of District Judge Liam McNally.

‘The courts need to be very careful not to criminalise speech which, however contemptible, is no more than offensive. ‘It is not the task of the criminal law to censor offensive utterances. ‘Accordingly I find Pastor McConnell not guilty of both charges.’

I rejoiced at that judgement. I might or might not agree with the Pastor on what he said. But I would be outside the courthouse clapping the verdict. Not because I supported his sermon – but because I supported his right to preach it. Just as I would be perfectly entitled to then stand up on a soapbox and rip into everything he said.

It is incredibly illiberal for the state to police hatred. Hatred might not be big or clever, but it’s only an emotion. And officialdom has no business telling us what we may feel — or think, or say, or write. Allowing the state to monitor belief represents a brutal reversal of the Enlightenment itself. John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), set the tone for the Enlightenment as an attempt to ‘settle the bounds’ between the business of government and the business of morality. ‘The business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of every particular man’s goods and person’, he wrote. That ideal is now turned on its head. Across Europe, governments ‘provide for the truth of opinions’, and in the process they silence those they don’t like and patronise the rest of us, reducing us to imbeciles incapable of working out what is right and wrong, and of speaking out against the wrong.

A small but significant victory in the fightback against a censorship being imposed by those who consider themselves morally superior to the rest of us. But we must resist the temptation to sheathe our swords.

There will be many more Pastor McConnells to defend…..

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When Russell Brand Was Treated Like An Adult Rather Than A Precocious Infant He Collapsed Like A Deflated Balloon

Russell Brand – sliced and diced during BBC Question Time by a member of the audience (who was obviously a UKIP supporter)……

It had all been going so well for Brand – he had been interrupting with impunity, shouting over the women on the panel, shrieking simplistic slogans buttered by vulgarities.
‘Stand for Parliament then!’ the old man boomed. Russell looked as though he had been rabbit-punched. ‘Stand!’ repeated the man. ‘Do it!’
‘I’m scared I’d become one of them,’ mewed Brand. He meant become one of the Westminster crowd. The audience scoffed at this pathetic excuse, perhaps suspecting that multi-millionaire Brand would hate to be an MP because he’d have to declare his income and would soon be exposed as a political fraud……….The fight went out of Brand. A balloon shrivelled

Brand had prepared for the show by memorising a few pithy phrases (Farage as a “pound shop Enoch Powell” was clearly contrived but nevertheless a neat barb) and, on a series of cards, had written down a series of Unite bullet points. Add to the mix those trusty old BBCQT crowd pleasers ”bankers” (BOO) “the city” (HISS) “tax dodgers” (SNARL) and orgasms of ecstasy were rippling through many in the “balanced” audience.

Everything was working to script.

But Russell had made a fatal mistake. He had forgotten that BBCQT is a two way show. Unlike his own routines or the regular chat shows or HIGNFY the audience is not there as a congregation of sycophants whose sole purpose is to massage showbiz egos with rapturous applause. It’s there to come back at the panel with awkward ripostes – and that’s where the script gets blown out of the window.

Brand was obviously shaken by that man’s contemptuous put down and, for the rest of the programme, appeared visibly shrunken.

But why the hell does it take an anonymous face in a crowd to show up Brand as a stuttering, stumbling knownothing with less grasp of political and economic reality than an earwig of average intelligence?

It’s because, on television, he’s been given an easy ride with softball interviews, indulged like some sort of precocious infant actor from a remake of “Annie”….Paxman, anyone?

That hasn’t always been the case with other inarticulate peddlers of political  infantilism. BNP’s Nick Griffin was mercilessly dismantled on one BBCQT show and the assault was so savage that both himself and his party slipped mercifully into oblivion.

So why not Brand?

The answer, my friend, is obvious. His infantile pseudo revolutionary rhetoric, his friend of the downtrodden posturing, his carefully choreographed presence at left wing protests fits comfortably with the mindset of the middle class metropolitan poseurs who dominate the worlds of the media and the arts. They despise the “fatcats” of industry and commerce, the men and women who run the systems that generate the wealth that funds the cultural sector either directly by paying the wages which enables their employees to purchase the tickets or indirectly via the taxes that subsidise elements of the media (BBC) and whole swathes of grant funded artistic ventures.

If only once, on television, an interviewer or a fellow panellist had just turned round at the end of one of Brand’s unintelligible diatribes, looked him squarely in the eye and and said “What a load of bollocks” and asked him to explain his commercial activities in Hollywood, his association with nice little tax avoidance schemes in the UK and his regular forays into the Ritz and Claridges.

But he’s a luvvie – and luvvies never eat their own…unless they’re called Angus Deayton

 

 

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Green Anarchists Think We Are Stupid – So They Turn To Violence

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It seems that The Revolution is alive and well in Bristol

In recent months, police in Bristol have dealt with over 100 related acts of vandalism to police stations, military bases, banks, multinational companies, railways and churches. The police are in little doubt as to who is responsible – anarchists and animal-liberation activists – and have put up a £10,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest of even one suspected offender. 

It’s all part of rage against The Man, of course, particularly, the establishment’s “failure to live up to green ideals”. It’s no good trying to convince ordinary voters via discussion and debate, naturally, because, frankly, the masses have been brainwashed by an education system and a media that simply sneers at environmentalists and their concerns.

It’s the Russell Brand school of “don’t vote – act” Which is rather strange when you come to think of it because isn’t it The Man in Westminster who has increased energy bills by making us pay for vast numbers of expensive and inefficient windmills – and insisted that the school curriculum should teach some very questionable “facts” about “manmade global warming”

The primary driver of  this “green vandalism” is, of course, hatred of humans….we are all far too stupid and selfish to rein in our greed – and we need to be taught a lesson. Echoing the ISIS jihadists the fault lies with the seductions of the modern world. We need to return to a life of marginal consumption away from the technologies that have poisoned our world view. In other words – a medieval rural based self-sufficient society where travel is limited and priests (be they imams or green gurus) can keep our minds tamed and our horizons lowered….

….and if they have to use violence to recreate that world….so be it…

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UAF Targets UKIP…Hey, So That’s The Reason Cameron Endorsed This Hard Left Front Group….

It has always puzzled me why such a smooth operator as David Cameron should have nailed his colours to the UAF (Unite Against Fascism) mast. Anyone with any sense of historical perspective or political savvy would have recognised the UAF’s true nature as a hard left designed “front” by looking down its list of officers.

Since the earliest days of the Bolsheviks the authoritarian left have crafted “front” organisations that attract the soft left as self indulgent “ornaments” to mask the fact that the organisation is actually controlled by professional agitators. If, like me, you had been a trade union activist during the 60s and 70s you would have been constantly aware of how these people operate. At least the naive students attracted to such fronts can cite ignorance as their excuse. That someone like Cameron, with his squadrons of advisors, should have fallen for this just beggars belief.

But then if you delve deeper into the news over the last few weeks Cameron’s motives might be more rational than first glance might indicate.

Dave has obviously been rattled by the emergence of UKIP as a serious political force that threatens to make inroads not just into the Tory rank and file but also across party lines towards the urban working class. Sneering put downs from Tory ministers and tame political hacks have failed to dent UKIP’s reputation – indeed, since so many people hold both our political class and their symbiotic media elite in contempt, these attacks have backfired in spectacular fashion.

So the news that the agitprop merchants at the UAF, spearheaded by the dynamic duo of political has beens Ken Livingstone and Diane Abbott, have now set their sights on UKIP as their prime target must have lit a little flame in Dave’s heart.

As recent events in Hove indicate the storm troopers of the UAF, a motley crowd of “students”, professional race card operatives and opponents of free speech have been given their orders to cause maximum disruption at any significant UKIP event particularly where Nigel Farage is present. The aim is to link the party with reports and pictures of violence and mayhem initiated by UAF with the hope that the public will begin to  associate UKIP with disorder by default – and turn back to the traditional parties.

So, as far as  Cameron is concerned…..job done!!!!!

Far fetched? You be the judge. But of course Cameron could, with one move, prove me wrong – by publicly disassociating himself from UAF….

 

An afterthought – how many UAF operatives have been present at these protests about the increasing authoritarian nature of the Erdogan regime in Turkey?

Just asking….

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Shameful – Craven Newspaper Censors Its Own Website To Placate UK Govt Minister

I have always liked reading Julie Burchill. I rarely agree with her left wing feminist views but she writes with spirit and passion. I would love to meet up with her in a pub and have a good old fashioned political argument over a few pints and a pork pie.

Lynne Featherstone is a Liberal Democrat MP who is minister for International Development in the Cameron/Clegg coalition = in other words she has been given a non job with a sack of taxpayers money to waste so that Guardian readers can feel good about themselves. She is a strident humourless feminist in the mould of Harriet Harman. I would rather stick my head in a bucket of sheep dip than meet her anywhere.

Burchill recently came to the defence of Suzanne Moore, another left wing feminist

Burchill took up the cudgels on behalf of her friend and colleague Suzanne Moore who was being monstered by the militant ‘trans’ lobby.
In a magazine article, Moore had remarked that modern women were coming under pressure to look like Brazilian transsexuals. Innocuous enough, but it sparked a firestorm of self-righteous anger and unpleasantness on Twitter, forcing Moore to close her account.

Burchill doesn’t do nuance.

Suggesting that “a gaggle of transsexuals telling Suzanne Moore how to write looks a lot like how I’d imagine the Black and White Minstrels telling Usain Bolt how to run would look”, Burchill proceeded to launch a stinging attack against the ‘trans lobby’, denouncing them as “screaming mimis”, “Shims, shemales, whatever you’re calling yourselves these days”, and “bed-wetting transsexuals” who “have your c**k cut off and then plead special privileges as women”.

Twitter erupted in rage – or rather the Transsexual lobby and its fellow travellers within sections of the gay community had a hissy fit. The rest of us sat back and enjoyed the mud wrestling.

But then it became sinister

Ms Featherstone pursed her lips and tweeted

Julie Birchill rant against transgender community is absolutely disgusting – a bigoted vomit for which the Observer should sack her.

A few hours later the editor of The Observer DELETED BURCHILL’S PIECE FROM ITS WEBSITE.

So welcome to the Age of Leveson where a craven editor is so spooked by the public displeasure of a government minister that he spikes a story and grovels for forgiveness. It’s not Burchill who should be sacked – it should be the witch hunting neo NVKD Featherstone. How dare she use her position to censor a journalist for merely speaking her mind in a perfectly legal manner.

It’s just the tip of the iceberg. Strident lobbies will increasingly franchise politicians to crush free speech – which is why we must act now

I DEMAND THAT DAVID CAMERON SACK FEATHERSTONE FROM HIS GOVERNMENT FOR HER BIGOTED VOMIT AGAINST OUR BASIC RIGHT TO ENGAGE IN POLEMICAL DEBATE.

Assuming, of course, that he has the balls to do it…….

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“These overpaid incompetent people” funded out of taxpayers money…OUR MONEY!!!!

“Now we need to learn the lessons and move on. It’s going to be tough but we can do it.” says Alan Yentob, “Creative Director” of the BBC (£183,300 pa )

Meanwhile, in the real world, a comment here has a rather different take on this BBC farce..

All these overpaid troughers, whether Quango CEO’s, Council Chiefs, MP’s or BBC really do think they deserve shedfuls of money from us, the poor sods who have to pay for them.
It has to end, and end now. I am sick of hearing “we must learn from this” and “we must move on” endlessly.
These overpaid incompetent people must be thrown off the public payroll without huge sums of cash as a reward for their incompetence.

Nail…..meet head….

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“Parasitical politicians have been hopeless at holding to account the elites who now preside over us”

Against the background of an irrelevant US Presidential “contest” between two men who mouth similar platitudes and promises on behalf of rival coalitions of nepostic, self serving party hacks only motivated by the desire to get their snouts in the taxpayer funded trough and a Europe becoming increasingly governed by and on behalf of an entrenched and self appointed oligarchy of bureaucrats it would be only too easy to sink into a miasma of hopelessness.

Don’t

The west is in crisis. Governments have grown too big, living beyond their means – and ours. The true costs of extra officialdom have been concealed. Parasitical politicians have been hopeless at holding to account the elites who now preside over us. As a result, Western nations are mired in debt and chronically misgoverned. Should we despair? Actually, no. Precisely because the West s Big Government model is bust, things are going to have to change. The West is on the cusp of dramatic changes driven by the failure of her elites, technology and maths. At the precise moment Big Government becomes unaffordable, the internet revolution makes it possible to do without it. Be optimistic. We are going to be able to manage without government – and thrive. The old political and economic order is about to give way to something vastly better.

Ploughing the same furrow as Prof Glenn Reynolds in his 2006 classic “An Army of Davids” Douglas Carswell, a British Tory MP, shows in his new book “The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy” how we, the little people, can use the internet to undermine and subvert the dreams and schemes of an elite that, until recently, controlled all the cultural engines of the state through their monopolies of communication and media.

Which is why, of course, the elites want to exert greater control of the internet.

As the Tea Party in the USA and UKIP in Britain will vouchsafe, the battle will be tough and remorseless – but fight we must if we are not to be bound by the soft chains of a decrepit and amoral lassitude, drugged into submission by the lies and baseless promises of the parasites who feed on the wealth created by our toil and sweat.

So – let’s fight back…find out more about the ITU Conference in December, publicise it and ask your local political parasites WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY GOING TO DO ABOUT IT….

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posted by david in Politics and have Comments Off on “Parasitical politicians have been hopeless at holding to account the elites who now preside over us”
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