[party political] reasons it won't be a landslide

Some reasons it will be line ball in the election:

1. Even in 2007, it was clear that Cameron was the wrong man:

One
Two
Three
Four

He should be way ahead of Labour and isn't.

2. The nature of British politics is that one votes for a local member and so local issues and how hard he/she has worked for the constituency come into play, as well as the national picture.

3. There are a lot of thicko voters with very short memories.

4. Some people think that they'll replace Brown with an Old Labour man, people will say, 'Well, back to normal,' and will vote the b-g-ers back.

[l’amour] the latin languages say it all

Let’s face it, folks, the Latin languages really have the romance game sewn up but don’t forget that sybillant Russian can also do the job quite effectively.

Tonight, it’s French.

Boys, here are some expressions you can employ to spice up your romance and have her eating out of your hand [make sure you bring something to eat and drink to the bedside with you – it’s going to be a long night].

Girls, jaded? All spice gone from your sex life? Surreptitiously slip this list into his coat pocket or nail it to the wall of the loo where he reads the newspaper and a special night is ahead of you.

Unattached or unwanted? Never mind. Armed with a selection of these expressions, just select an appropriate female [or male] utter the words in your most sensual voice and following the initial slap in the face, threats of litigation or references to you in an unpleasantly personal manner, you’ll have her [or him] intrigued.

One burger in Macdonalds and he [or she] will be yours for the night or forever, whichever ends first.


A selection

Je crois toi
I trust you.

Toi et moi- Ça ne changera pas
You and me- It doesn't change.

Je respire l'odeur de ton corps
I breath the smell of your body.

Dans tes bras c'est mon destin
My destiny is in your arms.

Tu es dans toutes mes pensées
You are in all my thoughts.

Tes yeux, j'en reve jour et nuit
I dream about your eyes day and night.

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. [Blaise Pascal Pensées]

Entre deux coeurs qui s'aiment, nul besoin de paroles
Two hearts in love need no words. [Desbordes-Valmore]

Je veux passer la reste de ma vie avec vous
I want to spend the rest of my life with you.

Tes yeux, j'en rêve jour et nuit. I dream about your eyes day and night.
Je veux être avec toi. I want to be with you.

Que mes baisers soient les mots d'amour que je ne te dis pas.
Let my kisses be the words of love that I don't say.

Il n'y a qu'un bonheur dans la vie, c'est d'aimer et d'être aimé.
There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved. [George Sand]

Un jour sans toi est comme un jour sans soleil
A day without you is like a day without sun.

La douceur de ta peau est comme une caresse du vent
The softness of your skin is like a caress of the wind.

I love you so much it's hard to concentrate on anything but you:
Je t'aime tellement que c'est dur de me concentrer sur autre chose que toi

J’ai envie de toi (desesperement).
I want you (desperately).

Two expressions I frown on, for different reasons, are:

Ton corps est mon trésor
Your body is my treasure.

The idea of your corpse weighing a ton just doesn’t rock my boat, sorry. And this one for the PCers:

Connais-tu les contrats de mariage?
Do you know about prenups?

My favourite French expression of love though would have to be:

C’etait formidable! Pourrais-tu defaire les attaches, s’il te plait?
That was amazing. Will you please untie me now?

Ah, l’amour!

[oops] forgot the reading specs

Sorry, readers, I came out today without my reading glasses and blogging is difficult. I'm feeling a bit like Dearieme in front of a keyboard. The PC post below was pre-prepared and easy to post, I answered a few comments but I'll have to save visits and comments till tomorrow when the eyes are functioning properly.

[political correctness] and the coming backlash

Steve Rhodes, in reviewing Goldeneye, mentioned that:

Xenia Onatopp, the femme fatale, is played with tremendous zeal by Famke Janssen, and flies brilliantly in the face of political correctness.

Those last nine words are a credit to a modern day writer. It’s difficult to effectively analyse the essential problem with political correctness and many words have been written on the topic but maybe this post might contribute to the understanding of such a societally debilitating phenomenon.

Let’s start with a statement.

Surely no one would disagree with Professor Marilyn Edelstein’s take on what should permeate university policy and by corollary, society’s:

University policies must now become more pluralistic, more multicultural, more sensitive to race, gender, class, personal orientation and disabilities. Universities need to minimize harassment, on campuses, on the basis of gender or race.

Fine, ‘more sensitive’ and ‘minimize harrassment’ – all good stuff. But notice the other elements also slipped in there as a job lot.

Now we come to the problem. The Politically Correct see the method of implementing these ideals as rewriting history, indoctrination, legislating in order to beat people down with a big stick and finding funds from anywhere the state can lay hands on them, even plunging the country into a generation of debt.

You see the motif – no idea whatsoever of how money is actually generated, ‘someone’ injecting the finance, from ‘somewhere’ to pursue the noble cause and riding roughshod over any opposition. The amateur rules, OK?

The indoctrination itself can be seen in the quotes below but is especially visible in the Mentoring programme, which says that parents can’t be trusted to bring up the child so the state needs to take a key role in this.

Beating people down with big sticks can be seen, tangentially, in the Rest In Peace Act:

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) was changed [in autumn, 2007] to allow police to force people to hand over passwords or keys to encrypted data. Refusal to do so is a criminal offence carrying a penalty of two years in jail, or up to five years, if the issue concerns national security.

One criminal law specialist has told technology law podcast OUT-LAW Radio that the law could be challenged under the Human Rights Act, though he also warned that such a challenge could fail under legal tests set out by the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

Perhaps the worst aspect of it all is the utopian lack of realism in the targets, the idea that the pursuit of an impossible dream lends legitimacy to heavy handed tactics, put well by Winston Churchill [1920], when he referred to the:

… world wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and impossible equality …

You only need live in the former Soviet Union for twelve years to see the legacy of those years, especially in the ‘arrested development’ and the infantilization of the population, alluded to by Tom Paine.

The envious malevolence refers to the way the have-nots look greedily at those who have built something up, automatically ssume that it must have been come by corruptly, latch on to a political philosophy which reinforces and legitimizes the politics of seizure of that which is not theirs and so the call goes out for the state to redistribute resources their way, without the need for any contribution on their part. They’re quite happy for anyone other than them to be dispossessed, as with the calls to remove the pension from Goodwin, which, in itself, reveals a key aspect of the PCer’s mindset – vindictiveness.

Another key aspect is ‘multiculturalism’:

Multiculturalism is nowadays affiliated with a postmodern outlook. The pivotal ideas of this vision of life are relativism (cultural relativism, in particular), a negative attitude toward Western political tradition, the cultivation of collective guilt for the transgressions of the colonial past, and other real or presumed black pages in Western history.

If Western societies think they have no core values important enough to fight for (by peaceful means), then there is no reason for immigrant minorities to accept them. If the dominant ideology in Western societies is that democracy, the rule of law, and human rights have no specific quality that makes them superior to theocracy, dictatorship, and authoritarianism, there is no need to oppose the radical assault directed at Western democracies by the teachers of hate.

Here are a few examples of how bizarre it has got:

• In 1988 a Stanford University faculty changed its popular "Western Culture" course to "Cultures, Ideas and Values", as "western" was now seen as a dirty word for some minorities.

• The Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work, in the UK, believes that "non-fluency in English should not be used as grounds to refuse employment, even for an interpreter or air traffic controller". That means you don’t need English any more to become an English interpreter – you learn it on the job.

• In 2003, the University of Middlesex drew up a paper calling for a ban on all "unsound" words which a committee had identified. When you look at the composition of that committee, it becomes even more interesting.

• American historian and educator, Diane Ravitch, in 2003, quoted guidelines by New York publishing houses for prospective writers: "Topics not to include are: abortion, death or disease, criminals, magic, politics, religion, unemployment, weapons, violence, poverty, divorce, slavery, alcohol or addiction. Women cannot be depicted as mothers or caregivers or doing household work. Men cannot be depicted as lawyers, doctors or plumbers. African citizens are not to be portrayed in a negative light. None of these things can be themes in any publications handled by us."

• A London educational conference was told, in 2003: "Everything written before 1970 was either gender or racially biased" and that "reading and writing are merely technologies of control." Therefore, writers like Shakespeare are now out of favour.

• In 2005, at two universities in Britain, it is now possible to obtain a degree in English literature without even reading Shakespeare. Two-thirds of reading lists now comprise feminist writers instead.

• Early in 2005, in the United Kingdom, a government think tank wanted schools to replace the term "Failure", for under-achieving students who did not pass their exams, with the term "Deferred Success", so they would not "feel sad".

• An under age criminal must now be called a "child at risk", so that he does not become traumatized by the word "hooligan".

• A person living illegally in our country is now to be called an "undocumented immigrant", so he does not become anxious about his situation.

• Men must never call their beautiful wives "wives", because that’s humiliating. They are now your "spouses" or "significant others".

One from some time back, related to a Glasgow City Council tiff:

I'm actively involved in trying to rid the church of exclusive language, and would like to see certain words banned, such as ‘brethren’.

Pause for a moment, good reader and consider that last statement, which now brings us to the dirty F word. As Patricia Sexton points out in "The Feminized Male" (1969):

... our schools are run by women for girls" and "cultivate feminine ways of life ...

To succeed in them, notes Richard Podles, boys must betray their masculine identity.

In the last generation we have built a society that is severely inhospitable to men and boys. When one considers the four- to fivefold increase in youth crime, drug use, emotional illness, educational failure during the same period, it's clear whose interests have been served and whose injured.

Or this:

More couples are getting divorced because women no longer see the importance of a dad/husband in the family's life. They think they can and should do it all on their own and no one should tell them otherwise. This leads to higher rates of sexual activity among teenage girls who do not have a father figure that is prominent in their lives.

Thus we come to the recent news of the beauty pageant front-runner who lost the title because she said that ‘gay marriage was wrong’. Far more significant to me was why she was asked that question in the first place. How does that sit with the ‘privacy of the individual and human rights’, parrotted by PCers?

Beauty pageants and the women who enter them are another question, so leaving that aside for the moment, why, when she was supposedly being judged on her feminine charms and intelligence, would an overtly political question have determined her fate instead?

This brings in yet another characteristic of PCers – the rampant hypocrisy.

Ostensibly believing in tolerance and free speech, they ended that woman’s shot at the title on the grounds of her political views. How totalitarian is that? But if you call them totalitarian, they’ll try to legislate for you to retract that statement or implement existing laws to silence you.

Johnathan Pearce, at Samizdata, wrote:

One of the problems with Political Correctness … is that it will invite a backlash. That backlash will not necessarily be for the good, but could encourage a new sort of ugliness: a desire to say things that are by any yardstick offensive, rude and coarsening of public life.

This is the huge fear. It allowed the National Socialist party to be overrepresented at the Reichstag. It enables groups like the BNP to flourish and fare well at elections, as in 2010. Whoops, that hasn’t come yet, has it?

The quietly smug, mentally unsound, hypocritical, big stick intolerance of the intrusive, female-dominated, bourgeois nanny state is heading for a huge over-reaction from the newly oppressed, indigenous population and folks, it ain’t gonna be pleasant when it comes.

The reason I am so concerned with the damage women have done in these two decades is that I’ve spent the majority of my professional life, especially in the early years, trying to improve the lot of girls and by extension, women, only to see the advances in understanding on the part of many males, of which I was but one, swamped and soured by the nutters in the feminazi movement who have, with the connivance of the state, Them, with its own tacky agenda, undone all the goodwill with which the modern male was prepared to meet the needs of the female, in favour of the politics of confrontation and legislation, [the dark side of the female].

Now the average non-emasculated male harbours deep resentment, particularly the older he gets whereas before, he was quite willing to meet the girls halfway. For a person who adores and has worked for women all his life, this is hugely dispiriting and yet understandable.

The average non-rabid woman reading this illustrates, in herself, why PCism is so corrosive – she can’t see that such a concept exists in the first place, outside a male’s fevered imagination and even if it does, she sees it as a positive thing, that feminism did bring a better situation for women and no amount of argument, such as the one below, will persuade her otherwise.

The trouble is, that falsehood usually starts with truths, then perverts them. Yes, women’s material position did improve and she thinks the climate for her own marriage has improved, whereas she can’t see the deep resentment of the male which is going to spearhead the reaction mooted by Johnathan Pearce.

She genuinely believes things are better now.

However, sorry to say, ladies, women in the not-too-distant-future will find themselves in one of two situations:

One scenario says they’ll go right back to where they started from, as oppressed as ever, still clinging desperately to the plethora of legislation designed to protect them from men, not realizing that their politics of hatred and confrontation with the male will have exploded back on them, when their real skill - the ability to influence and persuade – will have been left unexercized these many years and would now need to be rediscovered, in order to avoid a Sharia like situation, even in the west.

Or …

An even more likely scenario, which explains the active collusion of the state in driving a wedge between men an women in a fundamental way, creating the desire to be unencumbered with a partner we can’t deal with [as distinct from office friendships and pillow talk], a scenario which is the logical extension of the current climate of female infidelity and non-commitment, matching that of the male, something the female has always wanted for herself but can only have with the active support of the state, will be the disempowerment of all of us, male and female.

This will put the last nail in the coffin of marriage as an institution and result in a semi-permanent Brave New World scenario of enforced, female, sluttish promiscuity, a climate of coupling with anyone and separating the act from the notion of love, with in-vitro procreation reserved for state-controlled ‘hatcheries’.

Girls, the state’s agenda is far more focussed and powerful than your warm, fuzzy feelings and your demand for gender justice but you can’t see the danger we’re all in as a result, can you?

When we unbalance society, however much it is to our personal advantage, we are reaping a whirlwind and it has always been so throughout history – it’s always been the avenging wind of Moriah.

[truth] and how to lose a contest for speaking it

“In my country, and in my family, I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman,” she said on Sunday night. She went on to come in second to Miss North Carolina.

PC rules, OK?

Her sentiments might be worthy but she's a bit inaccurate. She said gay marriage was 'wrong' but actually, it doesn't exist. What gays have is a partnership, right or wrong.

Marriage itself, on the other hand, is an official union for the purpose of procreation and the idea of anthropologists 'debunking' that is laughable.

Put simply, there's no such thing as 'gay marriage' but people have always tried to struggle against reality.

Marriage exists in virtually every known human society. . . . At least since the beginning of recorded history, in all the flourishing varieties of human cultures documented by anthropologists, marriage has been a universal human institution.

As a virtually universal human idea, marriage is about the reproduction of children, families and society. . . . Marriage across societies is a publicly acknowledged and supported sexual union which creates kinship obligations and sharing of resources between men, women, and the children that their sexual union may produce.

Gays are welcome to do what they do, they can form partnerships all they like but they're simply not 'married'.

Now let's support the campaign for the right of men to have babies or for an elephant to be a lion.

[pdfs] negotiating the maze

I've just wasted two hours of valuable blogging time trying to find a way to put the chapters of my book as pdfs. I'd already made the pdfs on my Mac and that was no problem - there they sit on the desktop, in a folder.

The problem is uploading them to my bedside reading website. When using googledocs, they're only available to google users and the url skews the whole template when the link is put in the sidebar.

OK, so I went to Scrbd and it uploaded fine, the url was made, it was put in the sidebar, all was fine, except for one thing - to click on the link doesn't take you to my pdf, it takes you to my pdf upoaded on their site and your have to register with them to view it.

Stuff that.

My friend mentions easyspace but I'd like to know from you good people out there - what do you do to get your pdfs in a form where I can come along, click on your link and read them?

[pornography] keeping it where it belongs

Zoey Zane was murdered and they finally got the killer.

It’s hard to get sound stats on the explosion of porn around the world but here are some articles about it.

These things tend to be dry and boring but to go anecdotal is also fraught, for obvious reasons. It comes down to how much you care, in the end. It’s so widespread that even religious groups are trying to come to terms with it as to how much and what type is acceptable.

I think I’d like to step back from moral judgements and just urge all men [and women], boys [and girls] to start boycotting any images or categories which depict the type of young lady in the pic above, the one who was murdered. Start boycotting the webcams, don’t post them, don’t view them.

Idealistic, yes, but …

If we were to pull the rug from under the young market and concentrate more on the Milfs and the like, then market forces would surely prevail and kids would not be drawn in to the same extent. We could start a campaign ‘Milfs, not Teens’ or some such.

You might say, ‘Let’s wipe it out altogether.’ You can’t – it’s human nature for men [and women] to try to cater for the libido. Even being married is not going to help that – look at the stats on the most common age range of porn viewers; these are more often than not married.

Sexuality is too powerful to control. Of course I’d be tempted to see that girl in the pic unclad but when it involves multiple men and even farm animals with her, somewhere the line has to be drawn. And that’s the most frightening thing today – how young they are doing things which twenty years ago would have been the preserve of scaggy whores.

I hate to defend old-time pornographers from decades ago but at least they portrayed women in those pics, not children. There just wasn’t the broad market for kiddy porn then which there is these days.

At least a boycott might be a start.

[inference] deduction, induction and abduction

From the International Encyclopaedia of Communication:

Deduction, induction, and abduction are three basic forms of inference that inform the methodologies of communication research as well as other fields and disciplines.

Whereas the most familiar forms are inference from a general principle or law to individual instances (deduction), or from several instances to a law (induction), abduction is an equally important constituent of scholarship, serving to identify possible explanations for a set of observations.

Different traditions of communication research can be seen to rely on distinctive variants and combinations of deduction, induction, and abduction.

Aristotle had identified abduction as a type of inference; it was reintroduced in modern philosophy by Charles Sanders Peirce in an 1878 article.

Wiki defines abduction thus:

Abduction, or inference to the best explanation, is a method of reasoning in which one chooses the hypothesis that would, if true, best explain the relevant evidence.

Abductive reasoning starts from a set of accepted facts and infers their most likely, or best, explanations.

The term abduction is also sometimes used to just mean the generation of hypotheses to explain observations or conclusions, but the former definition is more common both in philosophy and computing.

Just thought you’d like to know.

[caption time] what's wrong in this picture

[easter day] today in the eastern tradition

This article was from the Melbourne Age from 2005. Sadly, I can't attribute it, as it is from my pre-blogging days but it does put the significance of Easter in perspective. There are statements in this article you're going to challenge.


The question is how our shared values might be kept from consignment to the museum if the faith that shaped them continues to decline in influence.

The cross, according to Christians, stands at the centre of history. On this day, about 1975 years ago, Roman soldiers scourged Jesus and nailed him to the cross. Christians believe this appalling piece of cruelty was God's deliberate plan, the supreme demonstration of his love and his identification with human suffering. The cross is used repeatedly in the New Testament as a metaphor to sum up the content of Christianity.

On the cross, the Bible teaches, humankind was ransomed, redeemed, reconciled with God and acquitted of guilt and sin. Sydney Smith, the 19th-century Anglican wit, was surely right when he observed that "man is certainly a benevolent animal. A never sees B in distress without thinking that C ought to relieve him directly." According to Christianity, God saw A, B and C's distress and acted, in the cross.

Non-Christians, of course, don't see it this way. Nevertheless, for them, too, the cross represents a defining historical moment because Christianity's influence has reached most of the globe. Certainly it has been the overwhelming force shaping Western culture and values, so much so that many humanists concede there is little in their ethical outlook that wasn't earlier in Christianity.

Sometimes the influence is obvious, as in the church's work among the poor and broken. Hospitals, for example, are a Christian invention, along with free public education. And sometimes the influence is malign, as when the church has helped to entrench injustice and endorsed the status quo.

Sometimes the influence is so deep it is taken utterly for granted. Take the ethic of love: Christianity took the Greek concept of unconditional agape and gave it new meaning, centred in human relationships. Or humility - perhaps the central virtue of a Christian - is by no means esteemed in all cultures. Agamemnon and Achilles, Homer's heroes of ancient Greece, fell out over the honour owed them.

Centuries later, Aristotle's great-souled man was duty-bound to trumpet his worth and require due recognition, so long as he did not exaggerate it. As Australia moves into post-Christian modes of living, humility is ever less valued, and most of us regret its loss (at least in other people).

The most enduring ethical bequest of Christianity is the belief that all humans are equal in dignity and have unique worth as individuals. That flows directly from the belief that every person is created in the image of God. Many can no longer use that sort of language today - opting instead for the discourse of rights - but most still insist that humans have individual value. Whatever else people might make of what Christians commemorate today, this enduring value flows from a Christian culture.

Most Australians, while valuing a pluralistic and multicultural society, also admire many other ethical values that linger from our Judaeo-Christian heritage - such concepts as compassion, love, forgiveness and redemption. The question is how our shared values might be kept from consignment to the museum if the faith that shaped them continues to decline. Some ethical capital remains but it is fast being spent.

One thing Christians note with interest is that though atheists and agnostics may reject the notion of a personal deity they admire the example Jesus set in his life and teaching. Non-believers often suggest that these ethical qualities can endure independently of religious belief. Christians have their doubts, because Jesus' ethical teaching flowed directly from his theological commitments.

But, in a pluralistic society, Christians should be glad that their values retain the purchase they do. Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the church is to present and preserve a world in which these values can flourish.