Why would anybody need an automatic rifle?

A lot of fuss has been made about the apparent insanity of Americans with regard to gun control. There is no reason, people argue, that private individuals should have automatic firearms with clips that can fire off tens or hundreds of rounds.

Well, here are a couple of reasons:

• Why should I, a sane, balanced individual who has never harmed anyone in my life, not have such a weapon for my defence or indeed my pleasure, if that is how I want to spend my time? I mean, people collect stamps or do morris dancing or watch cookery programs for fun. I can't understand doing any of those things for fun, but it doesn't mean I think they should be banned.
• "Nobody needs more than 30 rounds to defend themselves." Perhaps if you're John Rambo, or Ethan Hunt; but in the real world, things are very different. It's surprisingly difficult to shoot a moving target, even for trained professionals like soldiers and the police. I was once involved in someone running a road block with a car, where around 80 rounds were fired and only 3 hit the car, none hit any of the occupants. (I wasn't shooting mind, if I had been, no rounds would have hit the car!)
• "There is no need for anyone but the government to have such powerful weapons." This fundamentally misunderstands the skeptical view that the Founding Fathers had of government. It is precisely because the government has such powerful weapons that the common man should have them too, to be able to bear equivalent arms against the state. You need to keep the state's monopoly on violence as weak and counterbalanced as possible.

So there.

The S-word

I am profoundly depressed today: the aftermath of the Boston bombing has left a truly awful taste in my mouth.

The reaction of (some) left-wing people (Owen Jones, Maria Eagle, amongst others: I'm looking at you) has left me profoundly angry: they used the "s-word".

Solidarity.

Just roll the word around your mouth for a moment.

Solidarity.

A word redolent of union activity and collectivist thinking and utterly bereft of humanity. The sort of word that RMT committees might use to indicate moral support of a strike by the NUT. A word, charitably, that communists might use to express their support to workers exploited by capitalist running dogs.

But is it really the word to express your sympathy and empathy to victims of an atrocity? Do you really think such a politically loaded word is the right thing to say to someone who has suffered such violence? You're not standing shoulder to shoulder in the battle against the exploitation of the working class by the bourgeoisie here. These people are frightened, angry, hurt, grieving, anguished.

Where is your humanity, your heart, your compassion, when you all can offer is the tepid, banal solidarity of the proletariat?

Maria Eagle particularly got up my nose with the implication that there was some mileage in levering in the Hillsborough disaster into the frame of this most recent tragedy.

But of course, the masterclass in hypocrisy had to be Gerry fucking Adams expressing his "solidarity" with the people of Boston, who have, ironically, funded him generously to bomb the fuck out of the people of the United Kingdom.

There is no mileage to be made out of scoring points on the back of a tragedy, particularly when nothing is known about who or why it was done (something a lot of people pointing out the previous irony seem to have forgotten by going on to say unpleasant things about Bostonians deserving this tragedy.)

But there is hope among the bile, vapidity and stupidity: thousands of Americans (those callous, heartless bastards) have opened their homes to victims and their families to help them get through this.

It just goes to show that when you let go of party political bullshit, people can do the right thing without the state forcing them to do so.

Police State Klaxon

The Met Police have, quite frankly, excelled themselves here:

The Metropolitan Police has asked groups planning to demonstrate during or in advance of Margaret Thatcher's funeral to make themselves known to officers so that their "right to protest can be upheld".

I'm sorry, what?

What fucking shit is this? Why the fuck would the police need to know who wants to protest so that they can "uphold" their right to protest? See that fucker over there protesting? Uphold his right. Jesus.

The next thing you know, people will have to apply to the police for permission to protest. Oh, hang on.

Look, Thatcher was a flawed politician, any politician is flawed. I also remain unconvinced that her "achievements", good or bad, were down to her alone. Unlike Blair, she still believed in having a cabinet where relevant ministers made their own decisions. That the mines closed down and industry was gutted was much more down to the unions having no business sense and believing they could leech indefinitely more and more off a failing, sickly host. So I'm not convinced that her veneration by the right is justified.

I can understand the hatred of the left, however, because it's much easier and more desirable to blame someone external for your own complete, abject failure than to look at yourself and say: "We fucked up." The petulant, pouty lip of people who weren't fucking born or were still in nappies when Thatcher was ejected from power is ludicrous, but typical of the whingeing lack of responsibility of communitarian, authoritarian leftards.

But having said all that, if people want to protest her, they should be free to do so and the police's burgeoning contempt for the Peelian principle of policing by consent needs to be slapped down very soon.

A new religion

A couple of days ago, it dawned on me why religion is becoming less relevant in our lives. It isn't. It's just that the god we worship is no longer the abstract skyfairy YHWH or his myriad descendants and variants, but the equally abstract (yet much more apparent) state.

Authoritarian worshippers of the two main factions (the Left and the Right) argue violently about which of them holds the keys to the True Way Forward To Holiness by insisting their grip on the levers of the state will lead to a path of plenty and righteousness.

As with most religious beliefs, the opportunities for apparently sensible, intelligent people to talk utter bullshit in defence of their religious hierarchy and slant on what the state should be are no more illogical and incomprehensible than Catholics refusing contraception in an era of HIV:

Funnily enough, last year one of those sympathetic to Brown had a very different take on a 17-year old tweeter. Graham Linehan noted in the case of “@Rileyy_69”, who was arrested for tweeting abuse (and a lame death threat) to Tom Daley:

As a symbol of free speech, Riley69 is not Lenny Bruce. He’s not even the EDL. He’s a teenager going through that thing a lot of teenagers go through where they seem unable to feel empathy. This kind of temporary sociopath can be very dangerous and using these new tools they can wreak havoc more efficiently than ever before.

He was all for Riley’s arrest - there was no ‘oh teenagers!’ on display here. Yet Riley69 wasn’t a public figure, just someone who had tweeted idiotic comments to a celebrity. If Tom Daley had quickly blocked him, almost no-one would have ever heard of him. Instead Daley alerted his followers and we ended up with people like Linehan defending Riley69’s arrest. The logic, then, that it’s simply awful to bring to light the casual homophobia/racism etc of a newly-pointed police figure but fine and dandy to arrest someone of the same age for their idiotic tweets seems rather…pained. It’s for this reason that I have zero doubt that, had Brown’s tweets not came to light via the Daily Mail but rather (say) through some left-wing blogger who presented them as highlighting her use of ‘faggots’, the response from many would be very different.

People on the Left will grumpily endorse actions from their bishops that would drive them insane if called for by the bishops of the Right and vice versa.

It's also ironic how many left-wing "atheists" will happily venerate the state to irrational heights. In a sense, I'd regard the Left as the devout Catholics of statism, and the Right as milque-toast CoE. The Left seem to have a peculiar belief in the holiness of the state: philanthropy and charity of individuals is shameful, the Holy State should provide for all from its extortion. The Right still go to church, but they've jettisoned some of the more ludicrous aspects of the theology.

Irrational, prone to violent and unreasoning reaction to heretics, filled with internecine squabbles and ridiculous sects, governed by arcane rules interpreted by people of dubious morality using their shamanic powers to hide disgusting deeds: religion has not gone away at all, the world has just adopted a hungrier, more violent god.

Rust In Peace

Well, Margaret Hilda Thatcher has finally succumbed, and from the clamour on both sides, you'd think it was a current serving prime minister who had popped her clogs in office.

I look at the right and I see beatification of someone who ultimately believed that the state had a purpose, even if it was a different purpose than what Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband would expect. From the left, it's like Adolf Hitler had been toppled by people beating him to death with rolled-up copies of the Socialist Worker.

Her policies broke the mould of a nation that was still, 35 years after the event, shaped by the attitudes and experiences of a war that everyone else in the world had left behind.

Today, Britain is still largely defined by what she did. For all the talk that I hear from "the left", the only way Labour came to power was to embrace Thatcherism and evolve it very slightly.

I think Thatcher's real legacy is not her considerable achievements for both good and bad as a politician, her immense climb to power at a time when sexism was still rampant and she was not of the Eton / Bullingdon elite or the strength of the mutual bond that she forged with the US that no subsequent PM matched, or indeed anything else that she did.

Her real legacy was to show the poverty of British politics, where leaders who are not merely mediocre dross, leaders with actual ideas and the will to take them forward come along only once in a lifetime.

Before Thatcher, everyone was still living based on the war, weak, tired and stultified while the rest of the world surged past. Thatcher may have broken the old, comfortable, "clubby" Britain, where your club was either the Bullingdon or the local working man's club, but she also opened Britain up to the rest of the world again.

How depressing that people on the left and the right have got nothing better to offer than evolutions of, or rebuttals to, Thatcherism. It was nearly a quarter of a century ago that she was in power, more than a quarter of the average person's life, and still politicians have nothing more to offer us than what she had.

Ultimately, by dishing up increasingly hair-splitting variations on what Thatcher left behind, British politics is starting a massive race to the bottom.

The empire is over. Britain's first world status is severely at risk and old ways and reversion to some golden era are just not going to happen. Stop dwelling on what's been and start looking to the future, or another 35 years will have gone by and Britain will become an irrelevant museum again, this time the museum of Thatcherism.

Gothic policing

I see the rozzers have decided to start record attacks on goths and emos as "hate crime".

Sorry. I just had to stop and sit with my head in my hands for a moment and think about how fucking stupid that is.

Apparently, this is because someone got killed because they looked a bit different.

Sorry, I had to stop and rock back and forth again, keening.

I almost can't work up the strength to blog about this stupidity. All this kind of thing does is to encourage people to focus on their differences, not their common humanity.

All this is going to to is to validate the sick fucks who go around looking for excuses to beat people up. Society gives preferential treatment to one group, which makes people not in that group resentful. This then validates them when they express their frustration.

I find it odd that people who support things like quotas and "positive" discrimination never work out the consequences. By highlighting the differences between people, you diminish the things we have in common. Adding to the pool of differences simply adds to alienation. "I'm not in one of the approved groups, so I'm not worth as much as a human being."

The only upside I can find to this is that if this divide and conquer bollocks is taken to its natural conclusion, ultimately we will all end up in some "preferred" group or t'other.

But we could short-circuit that process and immediately focus on that ultimate minority: the individual. Treat every crime against people as an affront to the person, not to some specious, artificial group.

Or is that too much to ask for?

Philpotty

So, the Daily Mail has done it again: trolled the chattering classes into a good old froth.

Vile product of Welfare UK: Man who bred 17 babies by five women to milk benefits system is guilty of killing six of them

Apparently, the word "bred" offended one frother. Well, yes, but he wasn't exactly guilty of "fathering" them, was he? He did absolutely treat them as cattle. He may have shown them affection from time to time, but so would any farmer of milk cows. Just because they were human beings, doesn't mean he treated them as such.

Furthermore, it's hard to say why Philpott isn't the product of Welfare UK. He was definitely a weapons-grade cunt, but if he didn't have a benefits system he could milk to fuck he'd have had to become a criminal or work. The Welfare State may not have made him a complete cunt, but it certainly enabled him.

To be brutally honest, I've personally met more people who milk the benefits system and more people who have been completely let down by the benefits system than I've met people who have been helped by it, by about 5 to 1.

I notice, too, that the much vaunted social care that the saintly state provides completely bypassed all these poor children, despite the minor red flag of him bragging on national TV about what a cunt he was. Well, I guess that's a bit subtle.

As an inquiry was launched into the case, it also emerged that:

• ‘Shameless Mick’ faces a fresh police investigation for allegedly raping a woman who went on to bear one of his children.
• He was jailed for trying to kill a schoolgirl lover, stabbing her 27 times after she ended their relationship.
• Philpott plotted to ‘get rich quick’ – turning funeral funds donated by the local community into Argos vouchers.

God only knows what those children would have turned out like with that as a role model, though.

And God help the rest of them.

Cyprus

I don't really have coherent words to describe this.

I cannot believe that anyone can still think of the EU as any kind of force for good if they are prepared to take this kind of action to protect their precious, impractical, insane, vanity project currency.

What's worse is the Pandora's box that's been opened. Now, any government in need of money will simply hit your bank accounts, your pension any fucking thing they want and can with a "one off stability levy" that doesn't even need discussing in parliament.

Just so they can piss it up against the wall of their incompetence and interference.

Nice going Urophiles.

Publish and be Damned

First of all, despite the fact that I am not a lawyer, I am a deeply cynical person and arguments such as this do not compel me in the slightest:

In light of these definitions individual bloggers are unlikely to be subject to the new proposed regulatory regime. So for example those individual blogs on WordPress or Blogger would remain unregulated and not subject to the adverse costs awards, or possibility of exemplary damages, that can result from not signing up as members of the proposed regulator. On the other hand websites such run by those such as the Huffington Post or Guido Fawkes could be.

Paul Staines’s ‘Guido Fawkes’ website for instance has a number of contributors, is run as a business and despite being off shore is targeted primarily at an audience in the United Kingdom.

If I enable Google Ads on my blog, I would fall under this regulator, because I've got a couple of guest posts on my blog.

The article goes on to say:

Whilst he is entitled to protest and refuse to join the regulator one has to ask, from a commercial perspective, why such a website would do so?

Well, up to a point, your honour. The events that led up to Leveson were NOT issues of regulation, they were quite clearly acts that were proscribed by law in which the media, police and the political establishment were complicit. The whole Hacked Off bollocks was not a failure in the existing media regulatory system, it was a failure of the criminal justice system to which the media were a party.

That is quite a different matter altogether and one that our glorious politico-legal Establishment has quietly glossed over with some fetching Farrow & Ball Red Herring emulsion.

The whole issue of media regulation (or not) should much more correctly be looking at the consumers of this tripe. The Sun, the Daily Star, The Mirror, The Daily Mail, etc. all feature swathes of salacious, scandalous gossip because that's what people want to read. If people didn't want to read this shit or see tits on Page 3, they shouldn't buy papers that provide that sort of thing.

The fact that this tripe gets bought and read so avidly is because there are cunts who want to read this sort of shit. It's a fucking lie to say that if papers didn't print it people would suddenly start reading Tolstoy, because there is a massive market for vacuous magazines filled to the brim with the banal details of Z-list-sleb lives.

You can regulate yourself to death and not fix the root cause of this shit.

And, of course, the slebs themselves are not at all blameless for this situation. It's insane for Hugh Grant to live the vacuous life of a sleb, trolling from movie star wife to movie star wife, enjoying all the glamour to then get the hump when the same media that fawned over him suddenly get the chance to report that he's been sucked off in a car by a prostitute.

The people who are actually the least to blame in this whole farrago of bullshit are probably the media, who are simply providing consumers with what they want.

The people who buy this shit and the slebs who whore themselves around for media attention both need to take a long, hard look at themselves.

The cunts.

The Pope is a Dope

So much for infallibility: Da Pope has apparently been rumbled for dodgy dealings in Argentina. What is it with the Catlicks and fascism, eh, Benny?

But you have to admire his brass neck:

"The unjust distribution of goods persists, creating a situation of social sin that cries out to Heaven and limits the possibilities of a fuller life for so many of our brothers."

... said the man who is now in charge of one of the world's largest businesses, built almost entirely off extortion from the poorest and most vulnerable.

When these fuckers stop telling us how we have to change our ways to help out other and start changing their ways to help others, I'll start listening to them. Until then, they're no fucking different to a government.

Jesus wept.

As it were.