Elections are meant to be a competition between various Parties with differing views on how to maximise citizen potential, where the People consider their various merits and then vote accordingly. Media manipulation, ignorance, ideology, money, distraction and conformist education have handed power to unelected oligarchies. The Slog examines all the hard, recent evidence to prove this reality, and makes another appeal for ex-Parliamentary movements designed to reverse the process.
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The Daily Mail had a scoop last Thursday morning on the subject of inattentive US schoolteachers:
Things have come to a pretty pass when a student is dead but nobody notices. Clearly, another student did not find sitting next to a corpse agreeable, and so he shot it. This was pointless behaviour, but then the US is a country which firmly believes weapons can solve any problem. So traumatised by the lax classroom standards was the armed assailant, he ‘then’ killed himself, and is ‘now’ dead as well. Not a tale one can end with, “and they all lived happily ever after”.
A terrible indictment of the teaching staff, but another feather in the cap of he who runs the Grieg Motel. One wonders what the function of Geordie’s cap is: certainly not to identify him as a dunce, because he is anything but stupid. Perhaps it is a Dutch cap he sports, to make it abundantly clear that he is a dick. We cannot tell. We can only judge GG by his output:
No comment.
Globally, this has been a terrible year for ‘free’ media, open government, separate judiciaries, democratic tolerance and elective sovereignty in the West. By contrast, the Unelected States now emerging from their chrysalides in almost every country continue to make rolling progress forward in their bid to consume every green leaf in the garden.
The Daily Mail is a horrible newspaper, but it is far from alone. What was the lauded Fourth Estate of previous centuries is become a cacophony of tabloid titillation, celebrity obsession and pernicious fakery. It used to hold the Black Hats to account via strenuous investigation; in 2019, it is owned by a tiny oligarchy that engages in mutual onanism with the ruling classes.
Open government barely exists now in Spain. In France, the only open thing about Macron’s régime is the way it beats seven bells out of every citizen not too happy about being milch cows to supply the élite – themselves a soi-disant stratum of idiocy as incapable as ever of balancing the books.
In the US, an Alt State only too aware that grassy knolls are no longer tolerable decided from the off with President Trump that they woud have to find a “legal” way to get rid of him. In this too, the media acted as the catalyst for a stream of accusations and investigations that went precisely nowhere. Now at last, however, The Donald has been “caught” demanding that Ukraine’s government must investigate the Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden for his role in plotting to undermine Trump’s campaign during 2016….”or else”.
Blithely ignoring the fact that Joe has an unpleasant touchy-girlie habit – and may well be guilty of engineering foreign interference in an election himself – Congress swiftly decided that Trump had misused his power (which he had) to obtain….er, foreign interference in an election. An impeachment enquiry is now under way.
Barack Obama of course tried to do the same in the UK Brexit referendum of 2016, while US administrations have interfered in the democratic elections of almost every South American State at one time or another. But Trump is an evil scumbigotfascistsexpest, so he must be impeached.
In the highly unlikely event that Elizabeth Warren is chosen as the Democratic nominee and then beats a potentially torpedoed Donald, the unspeakably unelected will do for her too….in one way or another. Wall Street is already spending millions on advertising and PR to position her as some kind of cross between Eva Péron and Vanessa Redgrave: if elected, she will be hounded as ‘anteye murican’ because – more than any other credible US senator – she represents a genuine threat to the ruling oligarchy.
You see, the thing is, the Unelected corporocratic State doesn’t doesn’t giveAF about political labels, just so long as they own the winner in the White House. They owned Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, the Clintons and Obama. They shot Kennedy, conspired with Iran to bury Carter, and now they want to impeach Trump. Be in no doubt, Biden is the man they want in 2020: that’s how he knew who to contact in Ukraine in the first place.
The only good thing that has come out of Cameron’s election with Clegg in 2010, and the three-year attempt to snub democracy since 2016, has been the multivariate revelation of just how powerful the Unelecteds are in the UK as well….and public apathy in the face of it.
We saw this in the way Murdoch’s Newscorp wriggled free of all but one charge against it for mass surveillance of private phones – and indeed in the manner of the “sentence” handed out to the sacrifical goat, which was more punctuation than sentence. Rebekah Brooks returned to become the UK CEO again, while Piers Morgan was Scrooge-like in his truth-saying…but now fronts ITV’s morning “news” farce.
Jeremy Hunt lied to Parliament about his role in Newscorp perfidy, and Boris Johnson lied about trying to smother the Met Police investigation into it. The two men five years later fought for leadership of the Conservative Party; the latter is now Prime Minister. It’s difficult to avoid giggling in some ways.
During the inbetween years, Theresa May got to know those nice people at the Home Office – along with their bosses in military intelligence. While Jihadists murdered at will across the length and breadth of Britain, she put forward the idea of making non-violent extremism a crime: that is, pointing out that Pakistani Muslims have been grooming, abusing and raping underage girls and getting away with it. UK Intelligence strategy remains fixated on arms and oil in the Middle East, and fixed with supergloe to whatever the US Alt State’s neocon objectives might be.
When David Cameron failed to keep Britain chained in the Brussels dungeon, Mrs May’s new best friends lifted her into Downing Street. She ceded all EU negotiating power to a lifelong rabid eurofederalist called Ollie Robbins, and placed the UK’s top NATO spook Sir Mark Sedwill into the twin roles of Whitehall supremo and Cabinet Secretary….the better to ensure a clean, Sovereign Brexit, obviously.
Caught with various euromembers in his back passage, Mr Robbins left to work for Goldman Sachs. Sedwill is still in place. So powerful is this British Beria (look it up) the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom dare not move against him: and so wired into the Establishment is the blocist Remain mentality, this *Leave* PM has been forced to accept a Tory Remainer candidate in Broxtowe to help rid us of….a Tory Remain deserter in the shape of Anna Soubry. If you’re not giggling uncontrollably by now, I beg you to try: it’s very good for reducing high bp.
Free speech is, it goes without saying, at the core of liberal democracy. So too, I should add, is the existence of an entirely civil and politically neutral police force. In a sound liberal democracy, the police exist to protect the citizen from criminal attack and unaccountable power. Their role when faced with socio-political demonstrations is to stop violence in all its forms…..not to curtail the use of free speech.
It follows (if you accept my definition) that Britons no longer live under a liberal democracy.
Former Labour Deputy Leader Tom Watson earlier this year went out of his way to apply privileged pressure to social media allowing those with contrarian views to express them. Mostly, the media complied. No policeman in any shape or form felt Watson’s collar for this blatant use of unaccountable power to restrict free speech. Watson has now stood down as an MP – not because of public pressure, but because Jezzer Corbyn and his gangster’s Moll Mo Mentum think he isn’t censorious enough.
The Boys in Blue are no longer civil police officers: they are officious seekers after homophobes, hate criminals and Islamophobes. They have become politicised. Special police squads “working for” Mayor Khan in London visit the homes of those who criticise appeasement of Islam. When working for Mayor Johnson, they conspired to cover up the depraved sexual activities at the Elm House children’s home.
For decades – in every location from Plymouth to Bristol via Rotherham and West Yorkshire – they turned a politically-tuned blind eye to the worst kind of despicable anti-social misogyny. And in order to defend their core voters, the Labour Party went along with it.
They do not work to protect Us. They work to defend every last insanity emitted by Them.
Last but not least (more probably “most”) we have seen Scottish Courts got at by SNP influence, and the British Supreme Court ruling against Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament on the grounds of (a) illegality – it was perfectly legal – and (b) Johnson having lied to the Queen about why he wanted it. It seems that all eleven SC Judges had bugged the BoJo/Brenda audience and penetrated the PM’s thought processes in order to reach this conclusion. If so, I am profoundly concerned about the leap forward of invasive technology being employed in the country of my birth. If not, the unanimous decision of the Court against Boris was and remains an unmitigated disgrace. The abject failure of the MSM to analyse such a Page One example of inadmissable conjecture is in turn another reason to put the media barons in the dock.
It remains only for me to point out yet again that nine of the eleven Supreme Court judges stand to lose annual six-figure sums if the UK quits the EU. Wallets are important and handy portable money devices. But when everyone in power votes with the wallet rather than the conscience, civilisation is doomed.
***
Those of you paying full attention will have spotted that I just took all the vital elements of a free, democratic State and analysed why – apart from a sliver here and a shard there – they’ve all been severely damaged. Equality before the Law, for example, was always a questionable virtue that the British awarded themselves. In 2019, it simply doesn’t exist: those who sit on the bench are bent, period.
As a teenager, I was always impressed by the much-used aphorism, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for many good men to do nothing”. But that was when the World was young, an enormous percentage of media were still shades of colour in a vast rainbow, and education was designed to encourage not just learning, but also investigation of received truths…..what an old boss of mine in advertising used to call “reading around the subject”.
To be wicked for a second, “thinking”. Not knee-jerking, soundbiting, chanting or marching, but thinking.
There was less time-starvation back then. Zero hours spent punching keyboards, taking mobile phone calls, reading texts and emails, following Downton Abbey and going online to “save time”. No zero-hours contracts demanding you come in to work now.
And so today, far too many good-hearted UK citizens (when the chips are down) do nothing: sometimes there are good reasons for that, usually there aren’t. But in truth, it takes more than good men and women doing nothing for totalitarian rule to triumph; there are two further elements of telling importance:
- There have to be a lot of naive voters of little or no discernment – what Lenin called “Useful idiots” – to unwittingly opt for evil
- There have to be uninformed, misinformed and ideologically rigid people who haven’t seen (or don’t believe) the evidence pointing to evil
In the West, to a greater or lesser extent, the varietal existence of desperation, tiredness, apathy, fluffiness, ignorance, confusion, distraction and conformity has advanced to a point where we don’t have mob rule as yet, but the Establishment certainly looks for mob approval.
Plato would’ve been appalled, as he believed ignorant people should not have a say. So too would Socrates, who believed that virtue came from knowledge. Aristotle – who felt philosophy was inseparable from reasoning – would almost certainly have condemned every ideologue as, by definition, dictatorial and culturally dangerous.
George Orwell would without doubt have excoriated Johnson, Corbyn, Swinson, Farage and Lucas as people of narrow viewpoints and constipated thought patterns. I don’t even want to think about what he would’ve made of Harriet Harman, Jess Phillips, David Lammy, Dominic Grieve, Owen Jones, Nicky Morgan, Diane Abbott, David Cameron, George Osborne, Ken Clarke and Anna Soubry; but I suspect there is a play in there somewhere that a younger Alan Bennett could have turned into riotous fun.
***
We can all nurse our various analyses about this unfortunate collision between globalist Mammon, technology and media explosion on the one hand, and narrow education, deregulated working practices or “Belief Need” on the other. But perhaps all peacefully radical philosophers can agree on one thing: as a species – less so in Asia and Africa, but certainly in the West – we are not going to get any future fulfilment for The Greatest Number of Citizens from a patronising Establishment seeking only mob approval. Down that via lies bread and circuses (unlimited welfare and free broadband if you will) followed inevitably by a complete breakdown of social cohesion.
But but but….just because Britons are living through the tertiary stages of fin de l’empire does not mean that we have to suffer the fate of Rome. The thinking decent minority needs to find a movement that can persuade the conformist tendency to face reality.
The end of Nazi Germany and its immediate aftermath proved beyond any reasonable doubt that ‘brainwashing’ as a concept – far from being a life sentence – is relatively easily reversible. At the risk of being endlessly repetitive, yet another political Party is not the answer: elections in the UK from here on are solely for making an unequivocal protest about how obscenely unrepresentative those elections are. They offer us nothing more than the opportunity to reject ideological unreality and punish privileged injustice.
No: we need some form of peaceful but nuisance-making apolitical movement that will warn everyone against wannabe Demigods, and deliver a politico-cultural system whose sole building block is the Human Being.
We need an influential thinking minority devoid of blind belief, but acutely aware of consequences.
Call this idealism if you like. But as a famous US adman said, “If you don’t aim for the stars, you’ll wind up with your ass in a ditch”. Maybe Boris Johnson will indeed end up dead in a ditch; such is the fate of all cynics.
Real reformers don’t want the stars: a near miss that fulfils the vast majority is good enough for them. They don’t believe in the perfection of Homo sapiens, but they do want our species to be content enough to be compassionate: about the plight of less fortunate men and women, but also about the need to study in depth and breadth about the best way to interact with every life form on this, our one and only planet.
e = mc² suggests that – at least for the foreseeable scientific future – we are stuck with life on Earth.
That reality needs men and women with their feet on the ground.
***
If you enjoyed this, you’ll probably also like A matter of Birth and Death
There’s the poll results and then there’s the fiddle factor,
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You’ve inspired me, John.
I’m going to do something constructive yet-again tomorrow!
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John.
RE Andypandy ……………..later-day inqistion: I was expecting them to bring on Comrad Kleb to do the stuff!………Complete with very sharp winkle pickers ………… should he go off mantra, not so. Dammned close though.
dofornow
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Sheeple everywhere, all part of the Grand Plan http://tomatobubble.com/society_shapers.html
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The truth, our Western Education system will NOT teach our children….why on earth would it, when the “truth” doesn’t fit their agenda, an agenda that has been labelled a “Conspiracy Theory” The problem with that is it is patently obvious (to those blessed with the ability of Critical Thinking that is) that the “Theory” has now morphed into FACT. https://europeansworldwide.wordpress.com/2019/11/16/the-trophy-affair/
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I imagine you mean people like you, Keith.
JW
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Plenty of information on the “alternative” world history on this very informative website…..not sure how much longer “they” will allow it to remain in place so best take a gander before it is taken down! http://www.chuckmaultsby.net/
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Free Ale For The Workers!
Free Ale For The Workers!
Sorry but John will probablly remmember that refrain.
Been hiding out in the woods and avoiding TV and radio news. Yesterday I put the radio on for the weather and time checks and decided to check back into reality. It seems though that reality has already checked out! We seem to be in some kind borrowing and spending bidding war along the lines of, I’ll see your trillion and raise it by another half trillion.
Strangely with all this largesse being bandied about, not a peep about the Waspis. An easily fixed injustice which compared to all the other extravagant promises would be affordable. This probably indicates how much credence we should put on all the other guff.
Back to the woods.
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I know I dropped lucky on a Saturday night in November in 1981, but I had to play it really cool. She has almost no interest in politics, but enormous interest in local cultures, everywhere we travel in the World. It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, my wife will smile at you and talk to you and make friends with you, even if you don’t understand a word of her extremely strong Lancashire accent. I have never met anyone who doesn’t like her. I try to keep up, but I am not yet that good.
Tony
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Thank you John; Brilliant. I notice the measure of desperation in this one, and I have but two points.
Sen. Warren of the US is not going to cause any waves. She “Talks” her way to nothing. She won’t implement anything that doesn’t benefit her friends in “the rich” She was a republican like the Clintona virussia we have been attacked with. Nothing is real if seen on TV.
One sentence, written another way, might describe the reality show; You wrote “Equality before the law” When in reality it has become “Equity before the law” in every nation on earth. If you go before a court of law, it is based solely upon equity. If you are challenging the claim of ownership, the ruling will go to the claimant because the rule of law does not in any way apply.
But the one thing that is going to cause real change for good or ill is that the paper substitute for actual money, whether pounds or dollars, yuan or euro will soon be worth what paper is worth as scrap. All the king’s men won’t be able to put it back together again. The tax shelters will return to being poor islands that will return to their tourist business history. But there won’t be any tourists.
When you can’t trade paper for lunch, things may go bad rapidly. Who coulda node? We didn’t see this coming….. The banks are all broke and blackmail governments for bail outs, but the HuMonkey shows draw eyes away.
Trading paper for lunch. Doesn’t that sound ridiculous?
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Very thought-provoking thread, Brian.
JW
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Excellent
JW
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When The Liberal Democrats, come knocking on my door, asking me to vote for them, like I used to 10+ years ago, I hope to explain to them, that I am still a Liberal Democrat, but you, your party and your leaders, are neither Liberal, nor Democrats. In fact you are more right wing than the Tories – and if need be, especially if it is him, I will ask him, about his voting record, and in particular why did you vote for this country to bomb the hell out of both Libya, and Syria, when in your youth, you always voted against war?
What changed your mind?
Have you become senile, stupid, power crazed or what?
Despite, that, I think he is an honest man of integrity. I have no evidence of him being bent. He has probably just been brainwashed. It can happen to the nicest people, and it is not their fault. I think reversing it, is almost impossible without the use of Electro Convulsive Therapy, which does work on some religious/political lunatics.
Tony
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Apparently they are all going to save the world planting trees.
Who is going to ask them:
1. Is this another tax avoidance scam for millionaires?
2. Is it just another way to force us all to be vegans?
3. Will there be any joined up thinking (like matching species to soil type, planting with ecosystems in mind, creating a sustainable tree nursery system as suppliers etc) or is this a PR handjob for politicians?
4. Are you going to focus on upland forests or just cannibalise farmland?
5. Will you all pay back your salaries and resign if this is just electoral BS?
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“nine of the eleven Supreme Court judges stand to lose annual six-figure sums if the UK quits the EU”.
I have read this before in a previous article on your blog but have yet to find any supporting evidence.
I’d like it to be true – but in this case imagine the wish is father to the thought.
https://fullfact.org/online/supreme-court-no-EU-stipend/
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Well, you are wrong: go back to the original Slogpost and read the Judge by Judge involvement in ECJ etc consultancies.
And no, I am not going to help you find it: that’s what I have a search engine for. Wipe your own bottom, I’m not your Nursey.
JW
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@ Impoverished Psychologist
Far from unpopular (with me at least) this strikes to the heart of the matter. If – as sadly seems likely – de Pfeffel is returned with a sufficient majority to consolidate his work to the satisfaction of his corporate chums and paymasters, then the very best we may look forward to is more of the same: increased taxation of every type, micromanagement by the gauleiters of local government, demonisation of those less fortunate souls in our society, further impoverishment of the middle classes, and lie upon lie told about how they have achieved Brexit. Whereas if McDonnell gets his hands on the levers of power (with a bemused puppet Corbyn blinking in bemused confusion, “I need a wee”) UK plc will quickly be driven into the ground. We are fully capable of recovering from this, once the silly young stoodents and socialists who never grew up are blasted in the furnace of economic reality as you suggest, but I fear we may be far from recovery if the tory socialist/corporatists are returned to office, it will just drag on.
I joked recently about a military coup setting the country straight – not so sure it’s a joke now.
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More good stuff from the Court of King Caratacus.
To quote an old Soviet joke, “Under capitalism man exploits man. Under Communism, it’s the other way round”.
JW
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A WASPI stepping up to the plate!
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John
A while back………………… Tricky Vicki was going hell bent for a punch up with the New Rusia…………………………..pre Putin…………..Mevdev was he top felow He was the guy who got rusia back ito working order:
Some how or other a delivery of the latest sniper kit had gone adrift…….#complete run away ………………… info got out that tricky and all the other shites bolt holes……….. miltary and domestic was in circulation.
If there is one thing the ruckies are good at ……….it is sniping……….ask Gery and his troops from WW2 period.
dofornow
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the difference between civilisation and the wild jungle is that the latter feed on the weak and vulnerable whilst in a civil society the weak and vulnerable are protected and cared for.. so we have the difference between the two as real human beings been civilised whereas the others fail to make the grade necessary to be called human beings… its up those with their feet on the ground to manifest their humanity ever more not less.
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Much as I sympathise Desmond, it’s the other way round: Alphas in pack species in the wild keep the Gammas at least well fed, for they need troops for pack defence. Homo sapiens has lost this plot. Believe me, I have passed many hours on safari observing this: the natural order of things in the raw is pack mutuality.
JW
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John, insightful and entertaining as ever! I have a question for you…
Regarding your comments:
“And so today, far too many good-hearted UK citizens (when the chips are down) do nothing: sometimes there are good reasons for that, usually there aren’t. But in truth, it takes more than good men and women doing nothing for totalitarian rule to triumph; there are two further elements of telling importance:
• There have to be a lot of naive voters of little or no discernment – what Lenin called “Useful idiots” – to unwittingly opt for evil
• There have to be uninformed, misinformed and ideologically rigid people who haven’t seen (or don’t believe) the evidence pointing to evil”
What are your views on the English Democrats assertion that ‘unlike Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, England does not have its own parliament; that there has been/is a move to break England down into 7 regions to weaken it further; that Blair et al started this process and base its need on the marxist statement that (paraphrasing) communism has constantly been shipwrecked on the rock of England.’
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“We can all nurse our various analyses about this unfortunate collision between globalist Mammon, technology and media explosion on the one hand, and narrow education, deregulated working practices or “Belief Need” on the other.”
Here’s one I’ve idly nursed for a long time, a root cause which ‘for correction only’ requires people to let go of hang-ups :
“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future.” – Alan Watts
We wouldn’t be so easily suckered by snake-oil selling politicians and the media if we weren’t totally brainwashed by HOPE that our all-round happiness lies in a bright, better future somewhere over the rainbow. Of course the hucksters are similarly brainwashed by this cultural myth too, and so the narrative rolls on decade after decade in each generation. And who can forget Clinton who was possibly perspicacious but certainly unconsciously (?) wicked in choosing Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” as his campaign theme song?
The real revolution lies in not buying this essentially puritanical crap. It lies in savouring and enjoying the present and telling those fearful neurotics who argue against it to take a long hike on a short pier. When sufficient numbers take it to heart, maybe if necessary after sufficient visits to shrinks, we will see some deep changes.
For a while in the 1960s an amazing number of people did live by this credo, and general happiness/creativity/demands for liberty have never been greater.
Unfortunately there were still plenty of congenital miseries who didn’t or couldn’t bring themselves to this happy state and who actively set about ending what they fearfully labelled the “permissive society” (we need permission to just enjoy BEING?). Thus we have our uptight, non-permissive, pc society today.
Never mind, a door slammed shut can always be re-opened… :-)
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A great article, again. We need a ‘truther’ movement that holds both governments and any untruthful or propaganda Media to account. I would only have a couple of quibbles with John’s analysts.
Elizabeth Warren is a swamp creature, just not a deeply embedded as some. A better choice may be Tulsi Gabbard. I’m not really sure about her yet, she could be a controlled opposition candidate, but have hope that she is for real.
”Now at last, however, The Donald has been “caught” demanding that Ukraine’s government must investigate the Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden…” is to believe the Mainstream Media interpretation. Ferreting out corruption and uncovering malfeasance, in this case over the 2016 election period, is the duty of a US President and his Department of Justice. Follow the timeline and President Trump is not in legal jeopardy. The sham of the impeachment hearings is showing this; when asked directly what laws were broken by the POTUS, the three witnesses so far have admitted ‘none’.
This is not a left v right struggle. It’s a good versus bad (evil or criminal) struggle. As for the MSM, who watches the watchers? John’s call for a movement is timely. There is one out there, mostly, but not completely, US based. You can tell they are over the target, the Mainstream Media denigrate and attack them, using all the usual watchwords, racists, far right, conspiracy theorists, supremacists etc. We all know the tags used to denigrate unwelcome truth tellers. In fact they are a broad church and dedicated to the sort of outcome that John advocates. Their time will come.
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This won’t be a popular view but given the very accurate assessment you have provided above I can see only one workable solution to the current malaise.
People are not just going to start educating themselves to fill in the inadequacies, the younger generation are hardwired into the social media nexus via their phones and being corralled by PC culture to avoid challenging convention or asking difficult questions.
Maybe what is needed is for the student Marxists to have their student Marxist government and find out that their much vaunted system of social justice is just a vehicle for social destruction and impoverishment.
Only through collapse of this rotting system will anything like the society JW aspires to be brought forward, sometimes you just have to start again and Corbyn is the quickest route to collapse we have had in some time.
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Impov –
A lovely thought….but what if Corbyn’s heirs make it irreversible?
JW
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Ultimately any movement will need to find expression through a political party otherwise it just remains on the sidelines of democracy. In this respect, Momentum and other various Labour causes have been very successful, albeit parochial in both time and space, aka middle class metropolitanism.
Success therefore is dependent on political representation, the relevance of the issues being promoted and coopted and perhaps most importantly, the ability to control the narrative. Hence the juxtaposition of political parties, social media and MSM in order to reach a national audience. In common parlance, this might be described as the national political culture.
Unsurprisingly, an essential lubricating ingredient in what is a double feedback mechanism between top down ideological rhetoric and bottom up pragmatism (which is how constituency issues are resolved or not resolved by more generalised ideological frameworks) is money.
It is through money that movements have the ability to mobilise knowledge and thought into the political culture so without money we are generally left diminished in our ability to spread the word. The exceptions of course is when one (and others) are faced with a well defined oppressor against which to mobilise dissent.
In this respect, a movement or a movement of movements either requires very rich benefactors or a clearly defined oppressor. It also needs political representation and an intellectual framework from which to resolve local, national and ideally global issues.
Therefore, the concept of Freedom and Personal Destiny Control is in this instance probably not enough. How would PDC ensure the sustainability of the NHS, the police, our education system, all of which are reliant on taxes. Would PDC promote a pay as you use framework or seek some other financial framework that is decided through liberal democracy.
What would be the aims and objectives of a PDC movement, that is, what would be the constitution of the movement. How will the movement decide how to allocate human and material resources in order to achieve its aims and objectives. How would the movement network across Constituencies, regions and nations.
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BRILLIANT……..it just goes to show that Western Christian Values are being depleted before our very eyes and most sheeple are not even aware of it. “Them” said a long time ago this was going to happen, and “Their” agenda after all was not a Conspiracy Theory, but is proving to be Conspiracy FACT. . Time to believe what “They” said, and do something about it.
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Thanks John. I think you are getting to the nub now. Your previous posts have always been on the nail, but it is only when we see things from a greater height that we can see through the in-our-face particularities to the principles involved, that we can (a) begin to see the general form of what is required of us and (b) find any real source of hope in an apparently hopeless situation – which is just as important.
In returning to Socrates, Plato and Most importantly Aristotle (you might also have mentioned Thomas Aquinas, and I do not speak as a Catholic here), you return us to the roots of enquiry and continuity to which we must appeal (that ‘avoidance of error’) when our political forms fail us. That, and a re-assertion of history, that complex narrative, self-conflicting but with a thread of truth to be drawn from it, of the workings out of risk, conflict, and the ambivalence of progressive collectivisation and the consequence for individual life.
We may be doomed to the seemingly inevitable globalisation of risk, at the equally inevitable Hobbesian loss of liberty to every individual on the planet, through intimate track-and-trace surveillance and the loss of freedom of movement and the consequent losses of freedom of association and speech. There will be no more safe spaces under such a regime.
Alternatively, and more radically even, we may succumb to the climate change nihilists who wish ultimately to remove the source of the problem entirely – the human race itself.
Under these circumstances, we need to know that survival is a matter of approaching risk, rather than retreating from it. And the fount of that capability is the individual, always. Everything else is mere invention.
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Warren is not the candidate the US elites fear. If she won the nomination from the Democrats, Trump would take Fauxcahontas apart in debates. If she won the Presidency, she would soon get bogged down in the Washington machine. The candidate the elites fear is Sanders. They talk about fearing a Warren Presidency because they cannot bring themselves to contemplate a Sanders Presidency. Biden is going senile – he forgot Obama’s name a few weeks ago – and barely campaigning. That is why the elites are panicking and why Bloomberg, Patrick and perhaps even Lady Macbeth are making late entries into the race.
Sanders has learnt from his experience in 2016. He failed to attract Black and Latino support then because his campaign through necessity originated in very White Vermont. This time round his campaign is much better funded and he has employed a large number of Blacks and Latinos in his campaign. Young Blacks and Latinos are a large part of the core support for an old white man – not just a poke in the eye for identity politics but close to a KO blow. It will also be harder for the Democrat Establishment to steal the nomination again. If they try, expect a repeat of the 1968 Democrat convention.
Sanders is 78 and recently suffered a minor heart attack. Possibly convenient for the Deep State to block his candidacy as it did to Bobby Kennedy in 1968. The question has to be whether his health is strong enough to last 4 years as President.
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To enlarge on your “love” of the EU. Did you know that the French government issues two types of Bonds. One are government backed in the “normal way and are used to secure borrowing as all governments do. The other sort are only used for internal borrowing and are backed by UNSOLD POSTAGE STAMLS AND METRO TICKEST!!!!
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