Sorry to post again on the state of the economy but I couldn't let one particularly cynical piece of rubbish go by without comment.
This article by former Revolutionary Communist Party organiser James Heartfield was quoted by Flip Chart Fairy Tales. "Former" communist? As in former male or former female? Former breather of the air?
In summary, Heartfield’s view is that British capitalism is now so crap that it needs to be supported by the state. That is why the government is nationalising and privatising at the same time. Privatisation, he argues, allows the private sector to make money from state functions while nationalisation and state intervention is used to prop up failing banks and car companies. Both are a result of capitalism’s decreasing ability to generate profits in the traditional way; by creating products that sell in the marketplace. It is because capitalism is now so feeble, says Heartfield, that it needs propping up by state spending on outsourced services and bailouts.
What absolute bollocks and precisely what was expected as the next stage in the dismantling of the free state. Rick's contention is that today's managers are rubbish, "intelligent" cuts are necessary and that capitalism has failed. He's right on two of these.
With one or two words altered, by and large, this was my reply to his post:
As I and many others have been pointing out for some years now, the problem is not capitalism. It is the international socialism as represented in Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BIS, Round Table groups et al who advise and control governments. One key figure in this, in British terms, is Paul Tucker.
The immediate goals in America are different to in Europe – here it is tied in to post-Lisbon and the unsustainable Blair/Brown utopia which Blind Freddy could see was never going to work.It’s hardly fair to accuse “capitalism” of failing when Brown’s treasury has snuffed out incentive to start up small and medium businesses and those which do have their hands tied by a punitive tax code and a range of stealth taxes are on a hiding to nothing.
It’s wonderful these calls for cuts which are going to be dumped onto the Tories plus the debt for two generations. And who will be cut first? The NHS patients least able to afford it and newly redundant middle-class employees.
Brown’s lot have crippled “capitalism” and then turned around and said capitalism’s failed. As Chesterton said, “it hasn’t been tried and failed. It’s been found too difficult and left untried.” Or in other words, turned into state and monopoly capitalism and imposed on a market which would like to be free please, thanks very much.
We haven’t seen unfettered capitalism for decades, the sort which gives the jobs, not the sort which is now losing jobs all across the country.Heartfield would be expected to trot out that balderdash because it is part of the dismantling of the bourgeoisie that that lot have always subscribed to.
What's the difference between a communist and a socialist? In my book, it is that the socialist swallows the balderdash which the communist feeds him and actually believes in a state where everyone is forced onto the one wage, everyone is forced to be equal by Procrustean legislation, everyone is forced to become dependent on the omnipotent state and everyone lives happily ever after.
The communist knows it will never work but it's a good enough path to the totalitarianism which is their true objective - not the dictatorship by the proletariat but the state dictatorship over the proletariat. It has ever been so.
The sheer gall in suggesting that a system which can't even breathe under these circumstances and is at the mercy of Them, as named above, has somehow "failed"!
Now, what should be done? Penalize the man in the early stages of his game and have him thrown out, as the regulatory body at the stock exchange used to do or to extinguish capitalism altogether?
What is needed now is for the socialist shackles to be thrown off, for government incentives to be given to start up small and medium businesses in terms of cranking down legislation, for venture capital to be available on terms from a plethora of small banks, for the managers of the large banks and all their bailed-out ilk to be prosecuted for their crimes instead of given pay rises, for them to be prevented from going anywhere near the trough in future, for the tax codes to be radically altered so that both business and the ordinary citizen can breathe again, for the cuts to be made to the ridiculous socialist programmes such as ID card legislation, CCTV and so on and so on and for representation at Westminster to be on the basis of merit rather than cynical preselection procedures.
The NEP men in the USSR, the PFIs and the like show categorically that the socialists are well aware that capitalism is the best model. Heartfelt above even acknowledges that. So it's time to allow it to show what it can do free of the touch of death of Mandelson, Brown and their ilk.
Globalization certainly requires authority, insofar as it poses the problem of a global common good that needs to be pursued.
... and then comments:
This statement does not acknowledge that no electorate has ever been asked whether they wish their government to pursue a globalist economic policy, the Global North having had globalisation imposed upon them by elites, the South by a World Bank and an IMF in thrall to The Washington Consensus; and accordingly it does not and indeed cannot address the fundamental question of whether globalisation, whatever it actually is, can be considered to be legitimate.
Amen to that. Finally, tangentially to the main theme above, William Gruff brings us a ray of hope for the new week:
Thirteen 'specialist medics' have come together to allege that Dr David Kelly was murdered ...
1. A late-nineteenth-century French school of painting. It focused on transitory visual impressions, often painted directly from nature, with an emphasis on the changing effects of light and color. Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro were important exponents of this.
2. A method of painting developed by Seurat and Paul Signac in the 1880s. It used dabs of pure color that were intended to mix in the eyes of viewers rather than on the canvas. It is also called divisionism or neoimpressionism.
3. A Russian abstract movement founded by Tatlin, Gabo, and Antoine Pevsner, c. 1915. It focused on art for the industrial age. Tatlin believed in art with a utilitarian purpose.
4. An association of French landscape painters, c. 1840-70, who lived in the village of Barbizon and who painted directly from nature. Theodore Rousseau was a leader; Corot and Millet were also associated with the group.
5. An eighteenth-century European style, originating in France. In reaction to the grandeur and massiveness of the baroque, it employed refined, elegant, highly decorative forms. Fragonard worked in this style.
As for there having been 'deliberate moves' to break up the normal family as alleged by an earlier commenter, she (for I assume given the pseudonym employed that the writer is a she) wisely states that she has no evidence to back-up this bonkers claim.
The question is where to start showing the estimable Bill the evidence for this but as that's been done ad nauseam, not least on this blog, let's move tangentially and look at the concurrent attempt to snuff out Christianity as well. From the new UK citizenship test to the Beeb, it's a constant drip, drip, drip and sometimes a deluge. So many to hat tip for this one - Man in a Shed, Gates of Vienna, Paul Weston and Old Holborn:
Opening with Christianity, the first BBC page reverts to Marxist type as it explains that discrimination can only occur when prejudice is combined with power. As no minority race or religion in Britain is deemed to have power, so they can never discriminate against an indigenous British Christian.
The BBC would like us to believe that religious programming can be left in the safe hands of a Muslim. The relative treatment of Christianity and Islam in these revision articles shows this is just not the case.
It's a surprise to the supposedly down-for-the-count, irrelevant, superstitious Christian why the humanistic socialists are still so hell bent on snuffing out the last vestige of faith, instead of allowing it to die off of its own accord, given that said 'enlightened' humanists now regulate the world's moral compass and indoctrinate us from nursery school days onwards into believing that Man can do everything himself, thank you very much; one can pause and judge the veracity of this from the current state of affairs in our society.
Bit of a puzzler why these bozos wish to break up the family anyway, setting men against women via the irresponsible sexual predator and feminist ethos, creating a new society where we live separately in our little boxes and detest one another. Bit of a puzzler why we've created a nation of chavs with calloused knuckles, see it as the ultimate chic to play the gay, hold up the tattooed Jolie, Hilton, Spears and Madonna as youth's role models and allow our kids to create the new Generation Sexually Liberated Urban Teenager, hooked into the drug conduit. Bit of a puzzler why the new ambition of the young female is to get pregnant and go onto welfare and why the dole offices are filled with the young and the old.
Bit of a puzzler until you see the hand of the international socialist in either his EU form or whatever form he currently happens to manifest in that Armani suit.
However, that's not what this post is about.
Rose coloured glasses
There's a tendency to look back at the past and think of the good old days when things were more clear cut and small furry animals from Alpha Centauri were small furry animals from Alpha Centauri. Just how innocent was it all back in the 50s, say, as the sexual revolution was just around the corner?
"No thing remembered is ever again seen as it is but is laden with barnacles of meaning."
The revisionist history of the 50s to the 70s is largely an Alpha-Feminazi distortion of what actually happened, filled, as it is, with the oppression of women, all desperately unhappy in their chains, which is, strangely, not the memory of any of the ladies of that age group I've spoken with.
These malcontents were hell bent on making women dissatisfied but in the end, most of their machinations did not wash and so we have this sort of comment today from the normal woman:
I came to at-home motherhood, and to loving it, rather unexpectedly. I love what I do and over time, I came to understand that my happiness was intimately tied to the happiness of my family. With five kids under the age of ten, it's not hard to understand why we are all much happier and less stressed out with me at home.
Technology (especially the internet) and a supportive, helpful and grateful husband have all contributed to making my at-home experience (mostly) joyful. I've been doing it for more than ten years now, and I can honestly say that as an at-home mom I feel both liberated and happy. I wonder what Betty Friedan would think of that?
Our own family was, by and large, typical and though the father was the final arbiter for disciplinary reasons [I'll send you to your father], this father of mine still did his chores around the house and had his designated roles. The bottom line was that there was a lot of give and take and if my father had come on the 'head of the family' bit, my mother would have given him the rounds of the kitchen. The prime mover and administrator in our family and those of my friends was the mother. I saw very few Alf Garnett Silly Moos although there most certainly had to have been a few around.
Don't get me wrong - in the field of employment and other areas, the female was certainly unfairly disadvantaged, quite deliberately and there had to be adjustments. There were adjustments but to say that women enjoyed a 'newfound' independence does not accord with history.
In much of the 20s, 30s and 40s literature, the woman is very much a fully functioning person, often running rings round the man mentally and quite capable of handling herself, as and when she wanted. Anita Loos springs to mind, Coco Chanel, Nancy Mitford and so on and so on.
For a start, men and women still danced close in the 50s until rock 'n roll finally bit the dust and distance became the order of the day. Teenage angst was teenage angst and a boy tried to get her to say yes but if she said no, then rape was pretty rare, which didn't stop him from trying, of course.
Mothers seemed to have more influence with daughters then.
When I was 15, my girlfriend of the time allowed me to do most of what I wanted while she was sitting upright on the beach in the evening but the moment I tried to lie her on her back, there was fierce resistance [that summer anyway] and I got it out of her that her mother had put her up to it. My mate who took her away from me later reported a similar resistance.
Why did a girl say no in those days? It wasn't a religious thing - religion was never mentioned in day to day matters but it might have been that the parents loosely subscribed to the idea of the wedding first and kids tended to both kick against and follow parents' and teachers' attitudes. Incidentally, parents and teachers seemed to be speak with one voice at that time.
My mate and I, at 12, once phoned a girl who was one of two we knew 'did it' and as my parents were out, it was a golden opportunity. She wasn't averse but sadly, never turned up. Seems the father got wind of it [how?] and she was stopped from coming up to our place to 'play'. Can you imagine that barrier today? Also, it was pretty lean pickings when only two girls from a year group were odds on certs and well over half you'd never contemplate it with.
I believe that maybe it wasn't the girls alone who had the power but the girl in relation to her peers, her perceived reputation, her parents and extended family which curbed her. It was more usual for a girl to stay close to the support system while the boy roamed far and wide and brought his things home to mom to wash. I'm not suggesting any of this was right or wrong - it just seemed to be the case. A girl always had an infrastructure, even her own 'friends' whom she could hide behind.
You've all seen that scene in Grease when ONJ emerged from her crowd to meet JT who'd emerged from his crowd. I don't recall any of the guys ever emerging from a crowd - all my friends were lone wolves when it came to girls.
[Incidentally, ONJ went to a school I was at for some time and she had a reputation for jumping up on the desk and being every bit the provocative girl she played down in later years.]
There are elements of truth to this but the proving of virility was more a case of diving off the ten metre board, to the adulation of the females down below or having the best drag racer or of having the most girlfriends. I confess to going to all the girls when I was eleven and asking if they'd nominally be my girlfriend. Most told me to p--- off but five didn't and so they were notches on the belt. When my mates went and checked, I had five girlfriends but another guy had seven so I lost.
Nowhere was there anything overtly sexual in that. It was a game.
We'd get drunk and smoke but there were no drugs in our teenage and if there had been, we'd have been into them. They came on the scene in a big way much later. How did they come onto the scene when they did anyway?
The themes weren't dark, except through the Rolling Stones and people like Grace Slick but that was seen as something remote, at some distance from our real life. We saw black and white porn shots which someone had nicked from his dad but then we went back to playing football. Who knew what the girls were doing at the time? They certainly weren't hanging around with us. I got curious and started going about with girls to find out but as it was fairly boring, I went back to my mates.
The changing culture
Swimming costumes are a fairly good indicator. I remember, as a nipper, the first [discreet] shot in a newspaper of a topless swimsuit, which was meant to appeal to the basic need of Eve to shed as much of her clothing as the mores of the day would allow but they never took on as a fashion - not at that time.
Let me quote from Agatha Christie's Murder at the Vicarage [1930]:
‘What did she shoot him with?’ asked Miss Marple.
‘A pistol which she took with her,’ replied Colonel Melchett.
‘Well, that she didn’t do,’ said Miss Marple, with unexpected decision. ‘I can swear to that. She had no such thing with her.’
‘You mightn’t have seen it.’
‘Of course I should have seen it.’
‘If it had been in her handbag.’
‘She didn’t have a handbag.’
‘Well, it might have been concealed then - er - upon her person.’
Miss Marple directed a glance of sorrow and scorn upon him. ‘My dear Colonel Melchett, you know what young women are nowadays – not ashamed to show exactly as the creator made them. She hadn’t so much as a handkerchief in the top of her stocking.’
Girls started wearing Ursula Andress bikinis but there was none of the type of thing we'd seen in the newspaper. It was all kicking against the moral standard of the age rather than the dissolute lifestyle of today where everything's been done by 14.
Film reflected the times too. Romance and love still featured in onscreen relations and even James Bond treated her as a lady, mid-conquest. I suspect that one of the drawing cards in the 2006 Craig and Green Casino Royale was the return of romance, something which was excised in Quantum and made it a lesser film.
If men had only one thing on the brain, which modern day graphic porn reinforces, then who was it pushed the romance in earlier days? Was it women? Whoever it was, you didn't get her in the cot unless you did a lot of groundwork and mostly you had to get engaged to strike gold. There were always girls who 'did it' but the ones you set your heart on usually at least made an attempt to say no.
There was definitely a subculture in the 50s and 60s. From British coffee bars and vespas to American and Australian surfing culture, there was always something going on and left to its own devices, it would have self-actualized, sexually.
The problem was, it was not left to its own devices. We just wanted freedom and fun but in through the portal to fun we'd carved out for ourselves also swept all the dirt in the Pandora's Box of the world.
The youth culture was interfered with.
The destructive elements of the revolution in music, film and television crept in alongside the fun elements, with television lagging behind [or maintaining its values, whichever way you look at it]. Ed Sullivan forced The Doors to tone down their material, the Brady Bunch was still big in the 70s and sitcoms were the rage.
At the same time, shows like Hair were turning values on their head:
A product of the hippie counter-culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, several of its songs became anthems of the anti-Vietnam War peace movement. The musical's profanity, its depiction of the use of illegal drugs, its treatment of sexuality, its irreverence for the American flag, and its nude scene caused much comment and controversy.
This was to make sure that any hitherto insulated young people finally got a dose of the new culture whether they liked it or not.
Peckinpah and others were also presenting a new type of film where heads were lopped off and the camera stayed on blood spurting from the neck in slow motion. You had no choice. All your mates and the girls were going along to the drive-ins or cinemas to see this stuff and you had to show you weren't squeamish by going along too. It was another test of virility.
Deep Throat came out in main street cinemas in 1972, while the Brady Bunch was still running. Vietnam was showing the real horror of life, the Kent State shootings, the assassinations.
But 1970s television also contributed to the new sexual culture. Television entertainment invited viewers to participate in a world in which “Would you like to come back to my cabin for a nightcap?” was an unambiguous sexual proposition, in which bralessness was an essential component of female sexual attractiveness, in which words such as “rape” and “VD” and “impotence” were part of a common vocabulary. Television made the new sexual culture the new American culture, and it made American culture more openly sexual than it had ever been before.
And that's how the west was won by the cynical people who wanted the current state of affairs we have now. I confess to liking candlelit dinners and walks along the shore so I googled 'romantic candlelit dinners' to find a shot I could use as a closing picture. Here it is - this is your chance of romance these days:
Welcome to your future
