The Last Ditch

Those of a Guardian disposition, move along. Nothing to see here.

Jeremy Clarkson Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 Spyder review | Driving - Times Online.

Jeremy Clarkson is a hate figure of the Left. Read the linked article to find out why. Here's a short sample to give you a flavour;

It was, I think, the most enjoyable drive of my life: to be in a car that good, with its V10 bark echoing off the limestone and a bit of Steely Dan on the stereo, doing about a million with a man who truly knows what he’s doing at the wheel. This is what those of a Guardian disposition don’t understand: that a car can be a tool but it can also be so much more. It can be a heart-starter, it can be a drug, it can be a piece of art, it can stir your soul and it can get you from Marbella to Ronda before the bar closes.

Truth is, Jeremy is more fully alive than a whole London borough of the miserable little self-satisfied soulless zombies. And he can write better too.

A degraded nation

Baby P's father to sue Haringey Council - Telegraph.

The natural father of Peter Connelly, "Baby P", with no apparent sense of irony, is suing Haringey Council for negligence in the discharge of its duties. The council's social workers, he says, failed to protect his son. For shame.

Relationships end, of course. Fathers often have to leave their children in the care of their ex-partners. Indeed, due to what Harriet Harman might (if she were at least consistent in her foolishness) call "institutional sexism" on the part of the family courts, men can seldom obtain custody. Yet if ever a father could have done so, it was this man. If there exists a mother less fitted to the care of her child than Tracey Connelly, I hope never to meet her. His father must have known the true character of Peter's mother. Knowing it, how could he leave his son in her care?

Peter's parents lived together for the first three months of his tragic life. After their relationship ended, and the monsters who killed Peter moved in, the father had continued access to his son. Given what we know now, it is hard to conceive that a loving parent could have failed to notice his distress. A loving father with occasional sole charge of the boy had more opportunity to clean off the chocolate smeared on Peter's injuries than a social worker. We are told that Peter reached out to him, screaming "Daddy, Daddy!" when handed back to his tormentors shortly before he died. The best that can be said for this hopeful litigant is that Peter thought him a better carer than his mum. It's hard to think him more than slightly better.

So, the more true his accusations against Haringey's social services, the greater his own guilt. If he is innocent because he was deceived by Ms Connelly (who would have to be considerably more cunning than she looks), so much more so (given their lesser knowledge of her and access to the child) are the social workers.

If I were him, I would be too tormented with guilt to function, let alone to calculate the monetary value of my loss. But this product of the Welfare State is made of sterner stuff than me. He confidently denies all suggestions that he might be to blame. He believed his ex's explanation for Peter's injuries; that the child was "clumsy," though he had opportunities to observe Peter himself. Are we to believe he didn't know his son was on the child protection register? Are we to believe he could not discern the true nature of the brutes who lived with Peter and his mother?

I am sure he is as sincere in his claim as in his desire for £400,000 in damages. It makes sense in the warped logic of underclass Britain. How could he think himself to blame when the Welfare State denies the very notion of  personal responsibility? The "caring" apparatus of the "progressive" British state deplores the concept, as witness the agonising over the cruel fate, not of the dead child, but of his killers. After all, they are not responsible either. They are the products of their social environment; mere automata to be successfully reprogrammed if only the taxpayers would not be so mean about employing enough social workers. Haringey Social Services may not like being sued on this occasion, but they share Peter's father's underlying objective; to supplant the responsibility of the parent with that of the state. If he wins his claim, they will soon realise they have been given a stick with which to beat the ungenerous taxpayers.

Not only the jobs, but the ideological integrity of its employees depends upon the notion that the citizen is a passive product of his environment; that he can't take care of himself, can't educate his children, can't look after his family without their benevolent intervention. By their own logic, as they are the only truly responsible people, this man's claim should succeed. But by the same logic, since in truth the health and welfare of every human depends on self-reliance and the loving support of family and friends, we are all damned to some (let's hope lesser) variant of Peter's fate.

A damn close run thing

Poll: What's the best TV show of the decade 2000-09? | Media | guardian.co.uk.

Beaten into second place (click to enlarge) but the Guardianistas can hardly enjoy the fact that their most-hated TV show came second with 43.3% of the votes. Thank you to all those readers who voted.

Guardian TV poll: let's keep up the pressure

Poll: What's the best TV show of the decade 2000-09? | Media | guardian.co.uk.

Come on, ladies and gentlemen, please click on the link above and infuriate the Guardianistas who are posting such exasperated comments as;

Top Gear is not fit to grace any list that has the likes of the office, the west wing and arrested development on it.

The Wire is catching up fast on Top Gear with one day of polling still to go, so if you want to see Jezza ending the show with the poll results and the words "...and on that bombshell..." you need to get over there and vote. Urging on family, friends and work colleagues, not to mention posting a link to the poll on your blog (and in comments to every blog you frequent) would do no harm either.

Let's be tough on the real causes of crime

Link: The Home Counties boys who planned murder | Uk News | News | Telegraph.

This gentleman speaks directly to Toynbee, Blair and all those other Guardianistas who seek to excuse crime and terrorism by reference to its "social causes"

Omar Khyam's uncle told the Daily Telegraph: "You read in the papers, 'Ah, well it's because of lack of opportunities.' "Rubbish, what part don't you understand? What lack of opportunities? They had a reasonable education, they come from reasonable families, with very stable backgrounds, financially sound.

Thank you, sir. The twin "causes of crime" in Britain are (a) criminals and (b) Guardianistas who hold "society," not criminals responsible. As Theodore Dalrymple says (writing of an emerging Indian underclass in Britain)

In fact, they have assimilated to the local cultural and intellectual climate: a climate in which the public explanation of behavior, including their own, is completely at variance with all human experience. This is the lie that is at the heart of our society, the lie that encourages every form of destructive self-indulgence to flourish: for while we ascribe our conduct to pressures from without, we obey the whims that well up from within, thereby awarding ourselves carte blanche to behave as we choose. Thus we feel good about behaving badly.

The politicians cannot make people feel responsible for their own actions. All they can do is consistently treat them as if they are. Doing the opposite for decades has created the lie that Dalrymple describes. It will take decades of truth to reverse the damage done.

Yesterday, a British jury and a British judge ignored the excuses and special pleading. They held criminals responsible for their choices. Is it too much to hope for the politicians to do the same - and not just for those whose crimes are political?

The failings of Grayling (Part 1)

I have just read Professor A.C. Grayling's book The Meaning of Things. The book is a collection of his pieces published as "Last Word" columns in The Guardian. If you feel ideologically out of place in modern Britain you should read it. It will not make you feel less alienated, but it will explain a great deal.

You would not know it from reading this book, but those of us who fear for liberty in Britain owe Professor Grayling a debt. In the very heart of our darkness (the Guardian's Comment is Free columns) he has written strong words against New Labour's attacks on civil liberties. He has exposed the Right Honourable Anthony Charles Steven Lynton Blair's twisted thinking on ID cards and the Database State. He has articulated what so many of us in the British political blogosphere feel in our wrenched guts, which is that New Labour is an enemy of individual freedom. Only an academic could be surprised by that. Almost a century of history has taught the rest of us that those who despise carrots inevitably favour sticks.  Yet an English academic capable of writing the following is worthy of our respect:

But no amount of giving away hard-won, long-standing civil liberties is going to defend us against the tiny minority of criminals and lunatics who can, if determined enough, do us harm. The right response to them is not to hide away behind generally ineffective laws that restrict our freedoms but to assert our freedoms boldly and to live them courageously.

He is also sound on the subject of free speech, as this quotation from an online interview at Three Monkeys Online (in which he was asked about the imprisonment of David Irving for holocaust denial) shows:

I have no time for revisionists and Nazi apologists, and in so far as Irving is such (and is provenly at least the former), I have no time for him. But it was quite wrong to put him in prison for his unsavoury views. The freedom of free speech results in our hearing plenty of things we do not like, but the right way to combat bad free speech is with more and better free speech, not with the law and certainly not with imprisonment or censorship.

Professor Grayling took me to task for lack of intellectual rigour when I set out my first impressions of him after hearing him speak at my daughter's school. He commented that:

Evidently you don't read widely enough, listen hard enough, or take enough care over the assumptions you make.

I have tried and will continue to try to respond positively to that rebuke. It is taking a while. I am no aristocrat of academia. The people pay no tithe so that I may read, research and think without distraction. I have a business to run, a heavy schedule of travel and a family with which I like to spend time. I have read more of his writing however and in the light of the articles cited above, I accept that it was entirely wrong to describe him as;

an apologist for New Labour's and now Blue Labour's despotic approaches to government.

I did not, indeed, take enough care over the assumptions I made when writing that. I apologise unreservedly.

Professor Grayling balks at the extremes to which the Rt Hon. Anthony C.S.L. Blair has taken New Labour thinking. Having read The Meaning of Things, however, I fear he must take his share of the blame. He has, together with so many fellow-academics with "a permanent list to port', helped fertilise the intellectual soil in which Blair's political bindweed has flourished.

TO BE CONTINUED

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | For Blair, it's child's play to make us all criminals

Link: Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | For Blair, it's child's play to make us all criminals.

Even the Grauniad (almost) gets it.

Green talk but no green walk? | Ethical living | Guardian Unlimited Environment

Link: Green talk but no green walk? | Ethical living | Guardian Unlimited Environment.

I honestly think this is the best confession I have ever read in Pravda  The Grauniad. One of its writers effectively admits, without a flicker of embarrassment, that he thinks his readers' principles are often just for show.

"Hands up anyone who isn't a hypocrite. Come on, own up. Who out there actually lives by every one of the principles they profess to uphold?"

For the benefit of any passing Guardianistas, please consider that a principle you merely "profess" to uphold is more of an affectation, really. Still, it probably impresses your "right on" friends down at the wine bar every bit as much as a real principle, so don't worry.

On the other hand, if you would like to start living a principled life, perhaps you should use more intellectual rigour when forming your principles? You might consider only adopting those you are able to live up to? You might reflect on the notion that, in professing principles for others to adhere to, while failing to do so yourself, you are following in some fairly unsavoury footsteps.

Just a thought.

Railing at Grayling

Link: A.C. Grayling - Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, Univ. of London.

Yesterday, I attended a lecture by Professor A.C. Grayling. His subject was Responding to Socrates: Philosophy and the Making of the Best Life. Grayling is a good, if rather affected, speaker. He's big on affectation actually, with his flowing locks and cravat. I welcome such signs of rebellion against the grey, puritan spirit of modern Britain.

There is little of the rebel in his thinking, however. A regular contributor to Pravda the Guardian, he seems to me, while undoubtedly a serious thinker, very much an apologist for New Labour's and now Blue Labour's despotic approaches to government. His political views have, as he has put it himself, "a permanent list to port."

His subject was how to respond to the challenge in Socrates' statement that "the unconsidered life is not worth living." This thought is at the heart of post-Enlightenment values in the West. I could not agree with Socrates more. I could hardly agree with Grayling less. As he spoke, he seemed the model of the reasonable man. Everyone, he argued, should try to plan his goals in life, based upon his inclinations and according to his talents. As his life unfolds, he should consider the extreme responses to every choice that faces him, only so as to steer the middle path between them.

Grayling's opinions, rooted firmly in the classical tradition, seemed sagely liberal. The ancients, he explained, valued the martial virtues of courage, strength and endurance but Socrates favoured the "civic virtues". These, according to Grayling, mean that a man should follow his own inclinations only insofar as they do not conflict with the interests of society.

Man is, of course, a social animal. A civilised man should respect others in his community. The danger, however, is in the nature of that "respect" and the way in which it is enforced. I accept I have a duty to do no physical harm, but reject (mere politeness apart) any duty to spare another's feelings. My freedom to express myself is not limited by the sensitivities of those around me. I expect of them pre-Socratic virtues in the face of my words, if not my deeds. Unlike most in modern Britain (and unlike the law) I therefore respect the freedom of Umran Javed to call for the bombing of Denmark and the United States, while not respecting his right (had he the martial virtues) actually to do it. What he says may be infuriating, but I claim no right to assault him, either personally, or by the use of State power on my behalf, for saying it. In return, I expect equal forbearance if I call (for example) for the abolition of the the Commission for Equality & Human Rights, or the bombing of Tehran.

Professor Grayling would consider me lacking in "civic virtues" on all these counts. I also consider that I should be able to choose whomever I please as my friends, colleagues, customers and suppliers. Professor Grayling disagrees. He pompously declaimed that he was against "discrimination of all kinds." Let us pass lightly over the fact that, in saying this, he abuses the English language. It was clear from the cut of his clothes, for example, that he discriminates firmly in his choice of tailor. I assume he meant to say that, with tedious conventionality, he disapproves of discrimination on certain specific grounds; the currently fashionable ones being race, sex and sexual orientation. On this basis, he was firmly against the Catholic position in relation to the new Sexual Orientation Regulations.

He is strongly anti-clerical in his views (although he was sickeningly unctuous to the religious in his audience in regretting his strong tone against churchmen in the past). It seems to be his view that the religious man by definition lives an unconsidered life, perhaps on the basis that faith is the opposite of reason. As my readers know, I am as much an atheist as Grayling. However, I hope I have the humility to accept that others may arrive at different conclusions, even after all due consideration.

Given the failure of the Socialist idea as a justification for State power, would-be totalitarians are on a quest for a replacement. The members of the proletariat having proved resistant to the temptations of the dictatorship offered them by Socialist Statists, today's "true believers" have sought to replace them in the vanguard of tyranny with "oppressed minority groups." Ever greater powers are demanded to prevent others (to most of whom the idea had never occurred) of "discriminating" against such groups. So effective has this tactic been that a ludicrous game of "trumps" is now underway, as the Statists try to work out which victim group outranks the others on any given issue. Meanwhile, all except the hapless, despised white working classes (the last acceptable hate figures, as Jade Goody recently found) vie with each other for victim status, so as to increase their claims to the "protection" of the State and the money extorted from its taxpayers.

The more victims clamour for protection, the more powerful it seems the State must be. The more our every move is seen to cause nebulous harm to such groups, the less free we are to live as we please, however considered our choices may be. It is possible so much to qualify a thought as to make it meaningless. That seems to be Professor Grayling's approach. I was sad to see him so well-received by an audience that should have known better.