Rich Seam Of New Labour Dross
Is there anyone alive today who can remember what that funny, old fashioned Labour Party did?
There was something about helping the poor and acting as a safeguard against the ravages which the rich might inflict upon them if left to their own devices. It was a party which stood up for the weak and made the voices of ordinary people heard against the clamour of the rich and privileged.
None of that nonsense now applies, of course, in this rich and brave New Britain, where everyone is on the make and only wants to be given “opportunity” and “empowerment” to exploit their “talents” to make money, or so says John Hutton.
As far as he is concerned, the rich should have no obstacles placed in their path to amassing more and more money and if poor people get in the way, they can just be mown down by the onslaught to create more and more millionaires.
“Over the coming months and years, we must be enthusiastic - not pragmatic - about financial success.
“We are, for example, rightly renewing our historic pledge to eradicate child poverty in Britain. But tackling poverty is about bringing those at the bottom closer to those in the middle.
“It is statistically possible to have a society where no child lives in a family whose income is below the poverty line - 60 per cent of median average income - but where there are also people at the top who are very wealthy. In fact, not only is it statistically possible - it is positively a good thing.
“So rather than questioning whether high salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country.
“Rather than placing a cap on that success, we should be questioning why it is not available to more people.”
To be enthusiastic, rather than pragmatic, sounds like a formula for idiocy, which is probably what John Hutton hopes will propel the rich to become richer. Pragmatic simply means guided by practical experience and observation rather than theory. The pragmatic experience of everyone trying to get rich quick is that the process tends to devastate both the body politic and the lives of the poor.
So, John Hutton, the one who has not heard that Thatcher’s wonderful world of market forces has been discredited, even amongst those foolish enough not to spot the gaping holes in the theory first time round.
Still, crazy guy, crazy, stupid ideas.
So, enjoy New Labour while you still can.
Come election time, it will not be coming to a town near you, but will be more forgotten than the old version is now.
New Britain: Land Of The PC Yellow Belly
It would never cross the minds of people who follow to the letter the utter nonsense which is the world of political correctness that what they are doing is both imposing a gratuitous censorship on other people and stoking a pressure-cooker of problems which will one day explode.
The head (master, mistress? - unknown) of a school has sent out an internet newsletter in which the faces of all the children have been covered with the bright yellow smiley face of the acid house drug culture, just in case any pervert might not be able to get hold of publicly available images of normal children going about their business in a normal, fully-clothed condition.
This person presumably has charge of educating these children. If they stay under his or her care, they are all likely to end up in mental asylums by the time they leave school.
See their bright yellow smiley faces here.
Read more here.
Credulous Babbling Idiots
The tendency is that you believe what your parents say when you are a small child. You soon learn, however, that they do not really have any more of a clue than you and so start to look for more credible sources of knowledge.
This should be a continuous process in which we do not meekly accept any old drivel which is foisted on us from people who appear to hold positions of authority. If that were true, we would all believe the nonsense spouted by intellectually challenged fantasists like George Bush and Tony Blair as if it had even a remote connection with reality.
One problem is that we can look at precedent and say that the vast thrust of general opinion has been wrong plenty of times before. Before Galileo, we thought the sun revolved around the earth, so there seems to be forever room for crackpots to ponder the mysteries of the world in the hope that they might come up with some enlightened theory which has eluded all the other great thinkers hitherto.
Except, of course, that this is not what happens: they just come up with harebrained ideas which only appeal to other mentalists and nutters, but aided by the fact that the internet acts as a magnet for all these other delusionists to congregate, somewhat in the manner that governments always attract the dross of society to coalesce together.
So, over at The Telegraph, Damian Thompson runs through some of the conspiracy theories regarding 9/11, Creationism and Aids and how credulous people absorb some of this nonsense willy-nilly, as if by osmosis and the fact that it then dilutes real science and real knowledge and leads to people being unable to make rational and intellectually rigorous judgments.
Once the wonder of the internet wore off, we all saw that it is mainly a massive pile of doo-doo and nobody sensible takes it very seriously. It is a bit like the old illusion that financial institutions were run by incredibly clever and honourable people, when we now know they are controlled by psychopaths with a lemming mentality, whose only intellectual ability is doing sums quickly in their head.
The problem, though, is that we get stuff like this, from Damian Thompson’s ‘Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and False History’ :
The fingerprints of the alternative medicine lobby are all over the worst British health scare of recent years, in which thousands of parents denied their children the MMR triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella following the dissemination of flawed data linking it to autism. In that case, distrust of orthodox medicine increased the danger of a measles epidemic.
But that is nothing compared to the impact of medical counterknowledge in underdeveloped countries. In northern Nigeria, Islamic leaders have issued a fatwa declaring the polio vaccine to be a US conspiracy to sterilise Muslims: polio has returned to the area, and pilgrims have carried it to Mecca and Yemen. In January 2007, the parents of 24,000 children in Pakistan refused to let health workers vaccinate their children because radical mullahs had told them the same idiotic story.
These incidents cannot be dismissed as examples of medieval superstition: these people are not rejecting life-saving vaccines because they reject modern medicine, but because their leaders are spouting Islamic takes on Western conspiracy theories. Counterknowledge, with its ingrained hostility towards a political, intellectual and scientific elite, appeals to anti-American, anti-Western sentiment in the developing world.
My father used to say, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” and he was speaking from experience. I say, “Never believe what you are told”.
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