Saturday 13 April 2019

In The Event

If the claims about Julian Assange's behaviour are true, then he has understandably developed mental health problems. Apparently, it is now acceptable to mock mental health problems on things like The News Quiz, just so long as you are mocking an enemy of the Empire. They also managed to shoehorn in a snide remark about Piers Morgan, who was one of the very few official journalists to see through the Iraq War from the start. This is what passes for satire in Britain today.

Bringing us to the League of Empire Loyalists who have written to demand that Britain meet an extradition request that Sweden has not yet made, and has in fact dropped once already. Notice how that took mere hours, hours that most people spend asleep, to become the main news on the BBC, and could only have taken minutes, also late on a Friday night during a parliamentary recess, to become the front page story in The Guardian.

Meanwhile, not a dicky bird about the $4.2 billion loan to Ecuador from the IMF, but instead a puff piece on Lenín Moreno in The Economist on the very day of Assange’s arrest. Oh, and all the blue ticks are running around Twitter, making this about the supposed uselessness of Jeremy Corbyn, whose party now has a consistent lead in the polls as we enter of the official campaign period for the local and European elections.

Apart from their desire to be on television instead of Corbyn or Diane Abbott, and apart from their apparent inability to spell correctly the names of other signatories to an attack on Julian Assange, what motivates the likes of Stella Creasy and Jess Phillips?

The only lasting legacy of the #MeToo lynch mob will be the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, whose record on any one of torture, Guantánamo Bay, mass surveillance, workers’ rights, consumer protection, environmental responsibility, treaties with Native American tribes, and healthcare for people with pre-existing conditions, ought to have seen him blocked by all Democrats and by enough Republicans.

Joe Biden is complicit in war crimes. That, and not anything #MeToo-related, is why he is unfit to become the President of the United States. Sniffing the hair of a white woman is not worse than blowing the head off a brown woman. Although that would come as news to Creasy, Phillips and their co-signatories, whose argument against Assange is more or less exactly that.

The all-women shortlist system, of which Creasy, Phillips and the present MP for North West Durham are all beneficiaries, has done more than anything else to turn the Parliamentary Labour Party from 50 per cent Broad Left in 1994 to 85 per cent Hard Right today.

The changes to the British economy since 1977 have turned into the ruling class the public sector middle-class women who dominate the PLP, while the wars waged since 1997 have barely affected them, having largely been waged for explicitly feminist reasons, albeit to no good effect for the women of Afghanistan, and to catastrophic effect for the women of Iraq and Libya.

A position of being anti-industrial at home but pro-war abroad is ridiculous in itself, and bespeaks a total lack of comprehension of how wars are fought. But those MPs are Thatcher’s Daughters, unable to understand the rage against deindustrialisation and against the harvesting of young men in endless, pointless wars, and probably unaware of a growing number of young men’s closely connected discovery for themselves of the various schools of heterodox economics, and of the traditional Great Books that, for ostensibly if questionably feminist reasons, have been excluded from school and university curricula.

It is possible to detect a connected failure to appreciate that life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and that the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth, so that human mastery of nuclear processes is beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. Instead, Mother Gaia reigns supreme, and we are expected to fight wars for Her even while, under Her petticoats, we shiver and starve in the dark.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

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