Circus Freak Show Morality

In response to a poster who contributed to this debate.

Good article – now we just need statues of Orwell and Churchill to be put outside the houses of parliament!

– RussN , London, 05/4/2013 10:16

Why Orwell?

Could we not have Kipling?

And I’m not sure we’ve had a proper Conservative Party for a number of decades.  Look at Margaret Thatcher’s voting record on ‘liberal’ issues.  Fiscally conservative, maybe but morally and socially Conservative? I think not.

Mick Philpott’s children were living in moral squalor and yet this country made him into some kind of circus freak show.  That should be the issue being discussed here, not how much they cost.

Bystander apathy on a national scale.

On The Acquisition of Knowledge (And, If You’re Lucky, a Smidgeon of Wisdom)

In response to this:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps.html

A poster called Joe Young asks: ‘Can you really take every class at MIT and Yale online? How much does that cost?’

He gets a rather good response:’It’s free. Check out MIT’s OpenCourseWare, and Open Yale Courses’

An anonymous poster whines:’Nobody knows who that is.’
At this point I raise my eyes heavenward and type the following: ‘Try looking at your iTunes.  (Winston Churchill’s speeches are on there too).’

When Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street in 1979 a journalist asked a rather obvious question: ‘How does it feel to be the first female prime minister in Downing Street?’

After pointing out that she had no other basis for comparison, Margaret Thatcher alerted the journalist to the fact that she was also the first science graduate in Downing Street. Her predecessors had mostly been humanities graduates.

The only cure for ignorance is knowledge and generally it doesn’t come to find you. You have to seek it out.

Is it worth commenting on the fact that there are many great historical figures who never graduated from university? Orwell was one of them. They didn’t think he was bright enough to attend. Imagine that? Methinks that maybe they weren’t bright enough for him.

Back in Time

When America Sneezes…

‘They were almost as bad as the riots we saw in America in the 1960s and the 1970s’

Margaret Thatcher on the 1981 Brixton Riots (or what some people, in a mad fit of historical revisionism, call The Brixton Uprising) in The Downing Street Years.

I love that woman. Don’t you?

She also had a lot to say about Noraid. Remember that?

Little Chav Brats

 

I bought my mother an electronic photo frame for Christmas. She unearthed an avalanche of old photographs. The photo above depicts my brother and I, aged nine and three, in the garden of our grandparents’ council house.  The neighbourhood consisted of  ‘streets of ugly 1930s red-brick semis‘.  And no, it’s not in Dewsbury.  They were however similar to the house that my parents spent most of their working lives struggling to buy.  Oh, Mrs Thatcher, you never told us that in your utopia, in your ‘home owning democracy’, you would still be despised if you didn’t own the ‘right’ kind of house. Respectable working class people.  Respectable but most certainly never respected.  Thou shalt not suffer little chav brats to live.

Just an afterthought: the Catholic working classes deter their brats from promiscuity by telling them that God is watching and, if he sees them behaving inappropriately, they’ll roast in the fires of hell for eternity.  Of course, in the long term, this tactic results in some seriously fucked up people but, in the short term, it is highly effective.

Say it loud and say it proud: ich bin ein untermensch.

Finally, oops there goes the neighbourhood.

P.S.  The times they are a changing: illustrated here and here.