Wednesday 18 November 2015

Something MUST be bombed!


The London response to the Paris attacks is actually not the one to watch. In all likelihood it will follow the usual pattern of platitudes, followed by a bump in defence spending and some gratuitous and militarily useless air strikes. We’ll later see some or other new initiative to sift thought our Amazon receipts and Linked In requests in our Gmail accounts along with yet more risible policing policies. It is so predictable as to be boring to seasoned pundits.

As far as that goes, I don’t think there is anything I could add that you couldn’t get from the mainstream media and there are probably commentators better qualified to comment. My own view is that London has abdicated much of its own responsibility for governance to the EU and so we must look to Brussels to see where the real action is.

What caught my eye was the news that France asked for assistance under Article 42.7 of the Lisbon Treaty, in response to the attacks. Article 42.7 stipulates that “if a member state is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other member states shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power, in accordance with article 51 of the United Nations charter”

This article has never been invoked before. This is unprecedented. Many believe this to an automatic compulsion for EU member states to go to war. It isn’t and the EU would never insist in that it would show just how unlikely a unified response would be. Besides, the devil is in the detail.

In reality, it is little more than a gesture with so many loopholes as to be utterly meaningless - except for the gesture itself. In international politics, gestures are everything. It is an attempt to Europeanise our response and to put the EU at the centre of events rather than our respective heads of state.

We have already seen unanimous motions of support passed in a grandiose display of unity among our euro-elites but it doesn’t take long for the hypocrisy to shine through the cracks. Predictably, as with Libya, Germany has declined to offer up military assistance and if there is a larger military offensive it will be executed under the aegis of NATO with the EU trying to insert its brand wherever it can.

What this shows is that despite the EU’s continued efforts to usurp the nation state in all areas of interest from tackling climate change to regulating the more mundane aspects of everyday life from plastic carrier bags to the sugar content of condiments, when it comes to the holy grail of dropping bombs on people, it will never obtain that elusive supreme authority.

But then the EU has no need of such authority. The EU only ever needs supreme authority to push a “common position” that would otherwise not be realised. In this and in all such attacks there is already a common position. Something MUST be bombed!

After 9/11 we heard that same cry. It took a little while to decide who and where – and were we not already at war in Afghanistan and Iraq when the 7/7 London bombings took place, the RAF would have been bombing somebody somewhere. It seems to me that the response is uniformly the same every time. Death begets yet more death.

The West simply doesn’t know how to handle this kind of war. This is a war of ideology. We have a long history of fighting and winning territorial wars where armies fight armies and we have yet to shed that mentality. You cannot kill an idea with tanks and aircraft.

What we are looking at is a wholly nihilistic enemy that has neither the means nor the intention of fighting us directly. It wants us to destroy ourselves - and for reasons that escape me, our leaders seem hell bent on obliging them.

The way asymmetrical warfare works is to make your enemy afraid, put all kinds of barriers, suspect each other and spend extraordinary sums of money on war operations that accomplish very little, apart from create more refugees and the problems that go with it.

Thus far we've given the terrorists EXACTLY what they want. It took less than forty eight hours for a French aircraft carrier to set sail to the Middle East. If Iran were at all entrepreneurial they would open up a service depot for them in the gulf. There’s plenty growth potential there.

We can look forward to several months of pounding the desert with multi-million pound aircraft dropping ordinance costing in the hundreds of thousands to take out tents, Toyota trucks and dilapidated Russian APCs. Already an extra £2bn has been allocated for British generals to go toy shopping.

Next up will be the militarisation of borders, erecting further fences, more regulation placed on banking to detect irregular transfers, more snooping and whatever else they can think of that will diminish our liberty. After which ISIS will launch yet more attacks just to show how impotent we are.

Only when we have made a prison for ourselves will we be safe, by which time we will have dismantled our freedoms and given the nihilists the satisfaction of wrecking everything that’s good about the West. In that regard, if ever the moves to make our response to terrorism an EU wide response succeed, it will be less a mutual defence agreement – but a joint suicide pact.

Meanwhile, the right wing fear that Europe will become Islamic will not be through birth-rate demographics but through half of the middle east fleeing to Europe in terror of whatever boneheaded military stunt the West embarks upon next. For ISIS, that’s mission accomplished. 

Monday 16 November 2015

Extremism

Religious extremism I don't get. I can't speak to that. Political extremism I do understand though. Politics is a frustrating game. We can vote out MPs, but we cannot vote out their backers or the people pulling the strings and financing them. It's a game where money talks. Say the wrong things and your meal ticket dries up. Piss off the wrong people and find yourself unpersoned.

Challenge the orthodoxy in any way and all the platforms are snatched away from you. And as much as the guardians of orthodoxy cannot be removed, they cannot be persuaded. For with office comes prestige. Even their farts are applauded. Prestigious office or high standing within the bubble is a licence to talk crap and those who have the audacity to mention that the emperor has no clothes are labelled troublemakers.

Challenging them makes one rude and "aggressive" and impolite. Only by telling them how magnificent they are will they grant you an audience. They may momentarily listen, but they are surrounded by sycophants who are threatened by different ideas who will manoeuvre to block the outsider.

Without privileged access by matching their prestige, you don't have a voice. So if you ever wonder why I am angry and ranty it's because I speak to an establishment that cannot and will not listen. When they say I'm ranting, that is how they describe a long and detailed post. Our wafting establishment don't do petty detail. Such is for "ranting" madmen. And because they have their snivelling yes men among the lower orders, they will do their part in promoting the narrative that you're some kind of crank.

If that fails, and in my case it will always fail because I won't go away, they will pull all kinds of dirty tricks to try and keep me quiet. If I had a business they would go after that. My dad's had exactly the same pulled on him. Just today, an MEP pretended that a tweet disagreeing with him was somehow threatening and called it "a matter for the authorities". I may well get a visit from the plod tomorrow and it wouldn't be the first time. The message is clear. Keep quiet plebs, know your place, do not question your masters.

So in the face of an immovable establishment I can see why revolutions are necessary and why they are so murderous in clearing out not just the front line politicians, but also the court scribes who pass themselves off as journalists and all the party officials who have assisted in the political assassinations. Those guardians of the firewall that protects the orthodoxy. That is why revolutions are so vengeful.

They say an election is a bloodless revolution. But a revolution that does not purge the whole establishment is not actually a revolution. It's just window dressing. I can see this. And there are none so dangerous to them as men who can. Quietly they are ostracised and marginalised, sometimes to the point of insanity.

The psychologists call them "lone wolves" seething with anger. Ultimately revolutionary politics is the politics of the losers. The people who tried and failed to achieve political change. The ones who the establishment succeeded in beating down. Sometimes they are moved to terrorism.

As to whether it is ever justified, well, that entirely depends on whether you wanted them to win or not. Whether they were right or not. Sometimes an establishment order is so foul that it must be removed at any cost. That is why one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. But since our establishment does not resort to torture and murder, that is the best we can ever hope for from our politics. That is just how establishment orthodoxies work. We are a tribal species and it is in our nature to behave that way.

That power cannot be removed without savagery. Presently nothing about our establishment is so foul that it warrants murderous savagery, but every now and then one can fantasise. For while it is not foul enough to warrant murder, it is a foul and stinking corrupt cesspit, and hating them is the only sane and normal response to these men. Because they are scum. The very worst kind of scum; stupid, arrogant, aloof, devious and nasty.

So while I can never find sympathy with those who kill for a god, one can understand those who find empathy for those who would kill for an idea. After all, it is commonly accepted it is a fine thing to die for an idea. And if one of them one day succeeds, chances are, their target had it coming, and one day, in the right circumstance, the public might well be moved to pick up rifles and join them.

So you might ask why I am even bothering if it is so futile. After all, I get little thanks and no joy from it and the harder I work the more futile it is. I do so out of blind faith that fate may smile on me and maybe I will get through. We have at least to try to change things so that when we do finally give up and see these people murdered in their beds, we can say with some justification that we tried to stop it happening.

Saturday 14 November 2015

We are the architects of our own prison.

Yea yea, another snobby pontificating pseudo intellectual telling you how to think. Yep that's me. I make no apology for it because you still have the freedom to ignore it. But listen anyway. Sky News, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, along with the Guardian, the BBC and the rest of them know exactly which of your buttons to press. That's how they make their living, and so press those buttons they will. They set the bait, you rise to it. Every time you do the cash register rings.

These people are not in the business of reporting news. They are an adjunct of the entertainment media who use international events as their raw material. They don't want you to think, they don't want you to question them, they just need you to keep unquestioningly lapping up their bilge. They don't give a the first fuck that they toxify everything they touch or that your reaction makes for bad policy making or that the net effect of it is more death.

We have F16's, GR4's and all the high tech military equipment we could possibly want in the fight against zealots, but our enemies have the most potent weapon ever created. Our media. They use it with skill to drive a wedge between us and so long as the media keeps making a living, why should they give a tinkers damn?

But it isn't just them who use that weapon against us. Our own rulers do. They will never tell you want to think outright because they know that doesn't work. But they will lay out a trail of breadcrumbs to lead you to the conclusion they want you to reach. It is a battlefield of ideas, but mainly their ideas. Mine and yours don't get a look in.

They show a particular skill where it comes to excluding ideas they don't like. For sure, the columnists we see in the media are ordinary people just like me and you, but the ones they choose are carefully selected. There is no better way to discredit a good idea by picking a fool to promote it.

It's no coincidence that they roll out the red carpet for Nigel Farage, Owen Jones and Russell Brand. The ideas they represent threaten them, but they themselves do not. They are poor on the specifics but each in their own way represent one basic idea. That the power must be challenged and retaken from the establishment.

There is no better way to neutralise a threat than by taking their weakest spokesmen and allowing them access into the inner circle. Their egos are their undoing. Such men are tiresome, blethering egotists whose own self-regard leads them into a very human trap of believing they are infallible. From there they then speak on matters of which they hold no knowledge. It is we who do the rest in bringing them down.

Having seen us coming they know how to deal with the threat. It's like judo. Very easily can they turn our outrage into a sentiment against our own. We shout down the very ideas that threaten their grip on power. They draw their power from your outrage. That is the means through which they obtain our consent - and that is how they use use our own power against us. Left, right, divide and rule.

The bottom line is that by rising to their bait you consent to whatever they wish to do in your name. It is for this reason I watch no news programmes or read their newspapers for any purpose other than ridicule.

There's nothing I can get from the newspapers that I can't get from bloggers or by researching for myself. We do not need these people to tell us what is happening or how to interpret events. Every day I see better thinking on my own social media feeds than anything they provide. It's time we cut them out of the loop.

You can't seal yourselves off from them entirely and you cannot avoid their influence but you can strip them of their power by ignoring their output and and refusing to react. If we do that, we soon rob them of their hold over us and also rob terrorism of its power. Soon enough even the terrorists will learn that the worst atrocity they can think of holds no power over our ideas, is mourned on the first day and forgotten in the next.

Then, maybe, when those who rule us do not react to it on our behalf, on the basis of a manipulated sentiment, we will start to understand each other and not be afraid of each other.

The bottom line is that we will never be safe from the zealot and the madman. The darkest reaches of their minds are hidden from the prying eyes of the state mechanisms we have. All we can achieve by asking for more and more safety is to make a prison for ourselves and hand yet more power to the people who thrive on, and profit from our fear.

Sunday 8 November 2015

Europhiles don't think much of Britain do they?


There was no place to put this post other than here. This is one of my more immoderate views.

"Britain is too small, it can't survive on its own, and leaving the EU is risky. The future is unknown." That's the essential message from Europhiles. Basically, sniveling, pessimistic, Jeremiah cowardice.

Fuck that. Britain is a massive economy. It has dominated the world and culturally continues to do so. It is a power in its own right and we are perfectly capable of choosing our own fate and we have absolutely nothing to lose from breaking out from the herd and asserting our values in the wider world. This notion that we are small and timid little island that cannot fend for itself is a gross insult to our culture and indeed those who we remember on this day of all days.

Britain is an amazing country. It has shaped Europe and the world, it has pioneered workers rights and human rights and it leads the field in so many ways in spite of the EU, not because of it. 

As offensive as the europhile view of Britain is, it is also a reflection of what the EU itself is. As much as it cannot make a case for its own existence without resorting to a massive pack of lies, it has achieved so little that it has to steal the accomplishments of the global community and pretend they belong to the EU.

It actually has so little to say for itself that the Remain campaign mainly crows about roaming mobile charges as if the majority of us give a tinker's fuck. And even that is a global agreement and it's happening everywhere.

Brass tacks... If you want safety and security and certainty - go to prison. You will live a long, safe and futile life - but please don't condemn the rest of us to your miserable retreating vision of Britain. If you think that the pedestrian certainty the EU offers is the best we can get for ourselves, and that surrendering our voice at the global top tables is a price worth paying then prison is probably the best place for you.

There's a choice on the table here. We can either retreat deeper into little Europe, walling ourselves off from the big bad world, doubting our own capability and flushing our distinctiveness down the toilet - or we can decide that we are going to be a proper country and that we are ready to put on the big boy pants and act like one on the world stage.

We can either be a democratic free trading country in our own right or we can subordinate ourselves to a euro elite whose zealotry and hubris will drive all of Europe into the dirt. We can be authors of our own destiny and embrace the future, or we can look back on the failed ideas of yesteryear, saluting the ring of stars as we go.

Franky, if your opinion of Britain is so low that you think it's worth abolishing the country (and democracy) for a bit of economic certainty, then seriously, fuck you.

Monday 2 November 2015

12 reasons why we're staying in the EU

1. Brits are pathetic whingers. It's a way of life. If they actually solved their problems they would be miserable. The further north you go the worse it gets. Hence Scotland.

2. The people who claim to be interested in politics are not. They just like the entertainment value of political gossip and have lost the capacity to tell the difference. The SW1 circus is sufficiently distracting enough that people won't engage in issues of substance.

3. Complexity. Leaver arguments require detail and precision whereas Remain arguments require no thought. Just the same grunting about three million jobs and repeating the same lies. They have full control over the institutions so they don't even need to formulate sophisticated messages.

4. Ukip. Ukip already fucked the dog for the leave camp by becoming a trade guild of village idiots, permanently souring the credibility of euroscepticism. It's irrecoverable.

5. Tories. London Tories with no exceptions are treacherous vermin. Their order of loyalty starts with the inner tribe, the wider party and those they can freely exploit. The notion that any voice other than their own should be heard is offensive to them. Thus they have used their position to take ownership of the campaign, employing two halfwit thieves to run it who haven't the first idea what they're doing.

6. Leave.EU. Basically Ukip Mk2 and about half as smart, made only marginally less awful than Ukip by the absence of Nigel Farage.

7. The left. Gone are the days where you could appeal to a leftist with arguments concerning democracy. The few who know what it is despise it.

8. The EU. The EU is made up of some extremely smart people who know exactly what they are doing and have seen us coming a mile off. They will spend a lot of money to bury all the symptoms of the problems they've created recently, knowing the electorate has the collective memory of a goldfish and a similar IQ.

9. Public ignorance. As much as people haven't the first idea what the EU actually is, the EU is adept at muddying the waters to keep it that way. Try to explain the critical differences between inter-governmentalism and supranationalism and you sound like a conspiratorial lunatic. A sizable portion will vote to stay in because they think it means cheap flights and no roaming charges. The rest think it is democratic because it has periodic voting rituals.

10. The media. The media is largely run by teenagers with no understanding of the issues and no historical context. They will not host a debate unless they can find actors to read from the predefined script. Anything outside those parameters melts their tiny brains. They have no idea what journalism is and no sense of obligation to improve the public understanding of anything. It's one of the few industries where making a quality product is detrimental to revenue - BBC included.

11. Eurosceptics. We are obsessives. We never stop droning on about it, we've been saying the same things for thirty years, nobody cares and even the people who think we're right would cross the street to avoid us - and I don't blame them either.

12. Human nature. Humans fear change. Humans do not like political risk and they will not rock the boat if things are tolerable - and though things could be manifestly better by leaving the EU, things just aren't bad enough to roll the dice.

I can't think of any good reason to be involved in this campaign other than the insights into human behaviour and the thrill of expanding my own knowledge through rigorous debate. The issues are diverse and far reaching, complex in nature and if you have even half a grasp of some of the themes I've been pushing just recently then you know something about 65m people on this rainy little island do not. It's worthwhile for that reason alone.

One lesson is clear - that the expression "knowledge is power" is demonstrably untrue. Nothing is more isolating in politics than having the first clue what you talking about, and the more you know the more alienated you become and the more estranged you become from the surreal pastiche that passes for British politics.

The only real reward in all this is eventually the public is going to get exactly the shitstorm it has invited through idleness and apathy and watching them whinge about it will be delicious. By then I will be having nothing to do with politics and instead will be obsessing over something useful that will make me some serious money. From that position I will take great pleasure in watching you suffer. I may even vote for Corbyn to hasten your demise. It's no less than you deserve.