Once again I find myself having to preface a post by saying that I am not convinced in any direction these days. The media is so selective in what it presents; agendas are everywhere; bias is everywhere. We have perhaps sadly seen RT news taken down in the west when it would at least have shown us what Russians are being told. We seem to fixated on having Good Guys and Bad Guys. Zelensky good: Putin Bad. Biden Good: Trump Bad. The West Good: Everyone else Bad! You get the point. So as ever here’s some food for thought, not a settled opinion.
“G. I. Joe” might just become a prophetic statement. Pray NOT! Joe Biden hints at American soldiers going into the Ukraine and even responding like with like if Putin uses chemical weapons. Hints of assasinating Putin and bringing regime change in Russia! Careless, off the cuff words? Yes.
American policy? Hopefully not.
A dangerous President at a very dangerous time in history.
He has tried to retract what he said, but that only underlines how confused and out of control he is.
Is Volodymyr Zelensky all that we have been told or are we being conned by the Western Media?
Good Guy? Bad Guy? Comedian? Serious Politician? Corrupt businessman?
BTW Ukrainians are very similar to Russians culturally. They are way different to the much heralded modern liberal Western mindset.
In fact the Liberal Left have a real problem with the Ukraine. For years Ukrainians have been described as corrupt, Right-Wing, even fascist, resisting immigration, even denying LGBTQi and gender identity demands. Now they need to be seen as innocent victims with western values. Is that #Catch22 or what?!
I have to post this link as an intriguing look at what may be going on in Putin’s head.
A very different perspective for sure.
One surely has to believe that there is more going on here than meets the eye.
“We see many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilisation. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. Putin regards his spiritual destiny as the rebuilding of Christendom, based in Moscow.”
Putin appears to have baptised himself? Bizarre at best. Blasphemous at worst. The merging of church and state has been a bad idea ever since Constantine.
I quote “Admirers and appeasers of Putin — who can be found across the political spectrum — often repeat a well-worn cliché that he plays chess while his foes play chequers. He captured Crimea, crushed Chechen rebels, weakened Ukraine and grabbed effective control of Belarus, while detaching a chunk of Georgia and breakaway republics in the Donbas. He intervened in Syria to shore up his fellow dictator Bashar Assad. He supposedly interfered in the US election and has since made sinister moves in African states. “Putin has run rings around whoever was in the Oval Office, getting away with invasions, hacking, human rights abuses, assassinations, shooting down passenger airliners,” complained one US columnist last month.”
Well that one was a surprise wasn’t it! Mis-speaking seems to be the in thing these days.
But seriously Whoopie, or should I say Caryn Elaine Johnson, really should have stopped to think. Here she is, a black woman who has “appropriated” a Jewish surname appearing to say that Nazis weren’t racist. Oh boy what a can of worms. But wait a moment.
When she suggested that if she were standing on the sidewalk with a Jew and the Klu Klux Klan marched down the street, she would be the one running, not the Jew, because he’s white, was she revealing something? She clearly knows “Jews” but most likely thinks of them mainly as white Americans.
What she has revealed is that there is a serious difference in people’s thinking between racial prejudice and colour prejudice. I hadn’t really spotted that before. The darker you are, the more prejudice is likely from white people. So it’s colour. A white South African is indeed an African, but we wouldn’t refer to them as “Euro-Africans”, like “Afro-Americans”, nor do we refer to to people of African heritage living in Europe as “Afro-Europeans” (do we?). Words are powerful and interesting and confusing at times.
What Caryn missed so obviously is that it is the Jewish RACE that Hitler wanted to eliminate.
It is the Jewish RACE that Hitler wanted to exterminate. That is racism in the raw. GENOCIDE. It is confused by the fact that Jews and Judaism* get conflated, just like Arabs and Islam or indeed Europeans/Americans and Christianity. When people speak negatively against Islam they are usually dubbed “Racist“, which of course they aren’t. That is the wrong word. But “Religionist” sounds ridiculous.
So perhaps its time to go back to using the term “Colour” instead of “Racial” Prejudice.
*Many Jews are atheists, not believers in Judaism, so they are Jewish, but not Jewish!
Then the issue of nationality as opposed to race. There are Arab Israelis as well as other racial groups, so you can have Christian Israelis and Moslem Israelis.
I often listen to Talk Radio (“The home of common sense”) and am very aware that it tends to lean to the right, or maybe better put, tends to lean towards more traditional values held by older people (?). Yay, me!
The other day I decided to try LBC for a change. I’ve listened before and realised that most of the presenters lean left/liberal. It was the anniversary of the “Storming the Capitol” in Washington and they played all of Kamala and most of Joe’s speeches in full. It almost made me feel sick. Kamala banging on as to how the incident would go down in history up there with Pearl Harbour and 9-11! How Senators had felt their lives in danger (note no weapons had been carried into the Capitol that day, except by security and police). Biden waffling on as he always does. All in all a blatant political points-scoring episode openly attacking Trump and denying any ballot rigging, etc. etc.
I’m not saying that the invasion of the Capitol was right.
Now, I’m not saying that the invasion of the Capitol was right. Far from it. But it seemed to be a mixture of possibly a staged event, organised by a small faction of right-wingers but most certainly carrying along, in the heat of the moment, several hundred passionate Trump supporters who had “seen the election stolen from them.” If you listen to the ‘right‘ media you’ll find that Trump did not instigate this and tried to calm things down, but passions were running high.
The crowd were not carrying firearms as an organised insurrection would have required. Only one person was shot and that by a security guard. The other people who died included one heart attack. Once the crowd was inside they seemed to do little more than wander about aimlessly wondering what to actually do apart from throwing papers around, putting feet up on a desk or daring to stand at a podium with a bull horn, looking rather ridiculous. My mind goes again to the Colston Four being let off because they “had a point” whereas these guys get to do jail time. Sorry gaol time.
Oh how I’m glad to live in the U.K.
But for LBC, if that wasn’t enough, when we came back to the presenters in the studio all we got was more leftist/liberal biased commentary. No critique. No challenging. No balance. No-one phoning in to comment from a different perspective.
that’s me done with LBC
So I guess that’s me done with LBC (Liberal Biased Commentary). Back to Talk Radio with James Whale, Jeremy Kyle et al. Some humour. Lot’s of debate. Callers with varying viewpoints. Banter. Strong opinions. But above all FREE SPEECH!
Rumours of Piers Morgan coming on as a presenter. That’ll be fun.
As a child, from the age of about 8 I over indulged in chocolate and became overweight. The end result was name calling, being the last to be chosen in team sports and low self-esteem. When I was in, I think, my second year at Grammar school (still overweight) we went on a school trip to the Rhineland, to a lovely little place called Boppard, near Koblenz. As was the habit then, prefects came along to “look after” the younger boys. One of them decided it would be a laugh to come into the room I was sharing with two others and throw a cake at us. My instant reaction was to pick it up and throw it back, missing him sadly but making a bit of a mess down the stairwell. For that I got the cane.
I have long since forgiven the teacher concerned. He had the reputation of the school in mind, possibly even the image of the English abroad (O K probably not). It was simply the way back then. BUT!
All my life I have had a sense of fairness, of right and wrong, of putting things right.
It left me with an indelible sense of justice and injustice.
I knew that I had not really done anything that bad. I was the “victim” of an attack. Foolhardy maybe for retaliating, but it was in the heat of the moment. I should have been exonerated, not punished. Indeed I had always been “a good boy”, brought up not to swear, to fight, to steal (not even scrumping I recall). The sort of boy who was called to the headmaster’s office not to be punished but to explain “what really happened”, because I could be trusted.
All my life I have therefore had a sense of fairness, of right and wrong, of the need to put things right.
There are ways of doing things in a decent society, and ways of not doing things.
And so to Bristol.
It does somewhat beggar belief that an act that was filmed by many witnesses and confessed to in court can effectively be deemed not to have happened!
Now I am not arguing for one minute that the removal of the statue of Colston wasn’t long overdue, as was the renaming of buildings he funded. Bristol Council should have dealt with this decades ago. I can also almost excuse the people who tore it down as being carried along in the heat of the moment (Hmmm, half an hour or more I would hazard – time to check one’s conscience?). However to find them not guilty is a travesty of justice.
We have all done things, perhaps as children, that with hindsight we know were wrong. Should we have been punished? No, probably not. But should we be told that we did nothing wrong? Absolutely NO. In this case by so doing we not only turn these four into some kind of justice freedom fighters but open a very dangerous door to vandals everywhere.
What the judge appears to be saying is that if you believe in something passionately enough, or you just get a bit carried away, then you are justified in doing whatever you choose. It really doesn’t take a law degree to see the flaws in that argument!
There are ways of doing things in a decent society, and ways of not doing things. This was mob rule.
What would I have done you ask? I’d have found them guilty as charged, but then have seriously considered what was an appropriate punishment given the context and the numbers of other people cheering them on! I might even have used the opportunity to draw attention to the greater evils that were being protested. But to overlook criminal damage, no. That would be like justifying setting fire to car lots in Cleveland or looting in Portland. No. Simply no.
We keep coming back to the issue of how we deal with history and how we view ourselves as a result. Are we controlled by our past or liberated from it? Am I particularly bad just because I was born white? Am I forever a victim because I was born black? And for “black” you can substitute Jewish, Moslem, Hispanic, Irish, working class, etc. etc.
“It is a curious irony that the West’s leading progressive icon is probably the most authoritarian leader in the free world today.”
I quote, “It is a curious irony that the West’s leading progressive icon is probably the most authoritarian leader in the free world today. Since sweeping to power in 2017, the New Zealand prime minister has been repeatedly lauded by the London intelligentsia as the ideal model of a liberal, centrist premier. This is despite the blessed Jacinda‘s stock response to every public policy crisis being to restrict or ban the offending phenomena in question. After Christchurch it was guns; for Covid it was lockdowns, with bans on the unvaccinated. Now Ardern has stumbled onto the solution to smoking: why not simply ban cigarettes?”
I was watching a Smithsonian Channel episode on Adolf Hitler the other day. Wow, I mean what an incredible man. Adored by the ordinary people, he almost single-handedly turned the defeat of the First World War and the economic crisis of the 20’s into a glorious victory for the German people. Fantastic new motor vehicles, a futuristic motorway system, railway expansion and new aircraft. An economic revival like no other in history some might argue. The restoration of national pride to a defeated people. What a great man? Er, wait, hold it just there!
All that glistens is not gold!
Hopefully I had you going there for a moment. But I trust my point is made. All that glistens is not necessarily gold. Leadership is a very tricky thing. On the face of it the governments of the world have all acted in the best interests of their people to protect them from a horror of global proportions. But at what cost?
How many freedoms are we prepared to forego in the name of the greater good? How much economic pain? How many deaths from undiagnosed and untreated illnesses?
Politicians have had centuries to perfect the technique of making black look, well if not exactly white, then at least light grey! We are often told that we are given “informed choices“. That was certainly said of the vaccines. But in reality the information amounted to no more than “trust me, I’m a scientist“. I honestly still have no idea what these “vaccines” are, how they work, why we keep having to have more. Trust is a lovely dangerous thing.
In the 1930’s the German people saw the good stuff that was going on, were kept in the dark as to more unpleasant agendas and were reluctant to go against the shiney new culture than was bringing such great results. Socialism is good, right? And what is wrong with a bit of National pride? Don’t rock the boat and we can create a brave new world.
Thanks again to COVID the other day I watched “The Way We Were” starring Barbara Streisand & Robert Redford*. Expecting a 1970’s love story I was surprised to be watching a political commentary on the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s very well crafted into a hard to watch ‘love story’ from a 1970’s mindset.
It could have been made today as an observation on our “cancel culture”. Leftist idealogues calling anyone who differed with them “fascists”. The promulgation of communism amongst the young as the solution to the world’s problems (despite the evidence). Protests. People, even film producers, losing their jobs over their political beliefs. Government inquiries. It’s all there. All set against a backdrop of a real war against real fascism and a cold war against communism.
If you’ve never seen the film there’s a good description here.
Set in the period from the mid-1930s to the 1950s, a love story involving two markedly different people. Katie is an idealistic, uptight, Stalin-loving political activist. Hubbell is an easy-going, athletic, all American-type, and a talented writer. We see their different personalities affect their relationship and how they (almost) manage despite the differences… italics mine
I also found the film depressing in it’s possibly unconcious portrayal of a promiscous world in which real love and loyalty do not exist and marriage is non-existent. A child is born to a single mum whose “partner” leaves her. In that regard, thank you Hollywood. Great job, not! But as a political/social commentary well worth a watch.
*P.S. Is it me or did Redford go to the same drama school as Pinoccio?
First reaction has to be that the vaccines have worked. That is to say I’m not dead yet and no signs of dying. This is just a bad bout of cold. Slightly tickly throat, runny nose, a dull ache around my eyes, muscle ache, slight giddiness, and lethargy. O K , maybe flu, not a cold! No particular problems breathing.
So to Vax or not to Vax. Well, that’s a notty one. It would seem from the above that they work, at least to an extent. I’ve still caught COVID, but it doesn’t seem to be killing me. BUT. What if they now tell us that we have to get injected every 3 months to maintain immunity? What if the variants keep defying science? What if the vaccinations end up killing us?
What if the vaccinations end up killing us?
Yep, you read right. But no I’m not going down the conspiracy theories route. I have to believe that this is too big to be some planned “Big Pharma”, “Illuminate”, Bill Gates inspired world domination masterplan. Where’s Bond when you need him (or her)?
As I understand it the vaccinations are not the traditional form of a mild version of the real thing, they are “harmless” artificial viruses that should trigger our natural immune system into identifying and fighting COVID-like viruses. But will such interference over time reduce our natural immune system’s ability to fight disease? Have we, in our “follow the science” optimism or arrogance played God and interferred with nature, getting ourselves into an ever increasing dependency on medical intervention?
Someone has suggested that we have effectively introduced AIDS to everyone! That sounds overly dramatic, but if we have introduced a man-made substance into our bodies, there’s no going back, no retrieval system and we’ve done it to millions. Rather like chemo-therapy, is the treatment worse than the disease?!
Well, anyway, there’s 7 billion of us. Worse case Bill Gates gets his population reduction! The planet becomes more sustainable. People can stop gluing their hands to motorways …………………………
Oh, just remembered, GOD! Oh yes Him. I seem to recall there is some kind of master plan, an end times, a winding up (or down) of all things. A return. A Kingdom to come.
COVID passports nothing. I’d better check that my Kingdom Passport is up to date!
Oh my what a divisive thing COVID has turned out to be!
Society seems to have divided right down the middle over this one. Either you are a good upright mask wearing trusting person who has done the right thing and had the vaccine or you are, for whatever reason, highly suspicious of what is going on globally and see the vaccine as extremely dangerous if not fatal.
Here Avi explains his take on what is going on through reference to the Tower of Babel. An intersting listen.
I’m a vaccinated skeptic
Where do I stand? Well. I’m a vaccinated skeptic! The more I read. The more I hear of what is going on. The more I wonder whether the conspiracy theorists are right and we are being poisoned, manipulated and ultimately controlled. The loss of freedoms of speech, especially now for Christians and the rise in “protected people groups” such as LGBTQI+ and Moslems (notably not Christians) is deeply worrying.
(April 26th 2021) On a slightly more positive note than many of my posts this past weekend saw a demonstration of hundreds of thousands of people (some say a million) in London, against the lockdowns and restrictions. This went without much police supervision or interference. There was very little violence.
Sadly towards the end there were scuffles in Hyde Park and bottles were thrown at Police who were intentionally not wearing riot gear. However, and I am increasingly emphasising this, the trouble makers were few and it seems just out for the fight with the Police. At any demo these days there are the such a wide spectrum of positions represented and always an element who just want to kick off against the establishment, almost irrespective of the core issue of the demonstration.
One does wonder what the Police hoped to achieve by wading into sucha large crowd with so few officers and it turned nasty quite quickly.
Sadly the Police are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. I fear that we are heading towards more and more heavy handed policing to repress potential riots – and one can’t blame them.
The demo does seem to have been mainly peaceful but such a mix of people and purpose, perhaps more an excuse for a party than anything else!
