THE VOICE OF REASON
Solon, (born c. 630 BCE—died c. 560 BCE), Athenian statesman, known as one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece (the others were Chilon of Sparta, Thales of Miletus, Bias of Priene, Cleobulus of Lindos, Pittacus of Mytilene, and Periander of Corinth). Solon ended exclusive aristocratic control of the government, substituted a system of control by the wealthy, and introduced a new and more humane law code. He was also a noted poet.
The matriarchy knows it cannot win arguments on the basis of truth, logic and morality alone. I do hope you will be discussing the effects of men denying that they live in a matriarchy.
You live in a matriarchy if the number of illegitimate births are approaching or are over half the number of legitimate births. You know this is the case in the West.
Western men fear to challenge feminism because they already know that their womenfolk are overwhelmingly feminist.
You are a feminist if even if you are a man complaining about feminism and feminists unless you also condemn fornication.
No man will publicly condemn fornication because there are too many vested interests eg men who wish to have sex with women they are not married to, men who are already having sex with women they are not married to, men who have fornicating daughters, men who used to fornicate, men who have gay sons, men whose associates have already been condoning extramarital sex and underage sex for decades.
Last, but not least, is big pharma who manufacture the contraceptive pill and of course those with shares invested in big pharma.
This is pretty much everyone really in the West and also in Russia.
Feminism is a disease of the mind and I would only be too happy to explain why it is destroying Western civilisation if given the opportunity.
We know that it is overwhelmingly women who vote for the left. Ann Coulter herself said so.
The average Western voter is a 40 year old single mother whom all political parties pander to. This explains why no one cares about foreign policy. You must understand that the national character in democracies can be easily determined by working out the average age of the nation and deciding which sex wields more power.
A patriarchy is a society that prioritises the preferences of married fathers, a matriarchy a society that prioritises the preferences of the unmarried mother, usually with variously fathered illegitimate offspring whom she badly parents.
Why the West is sucking in foreign workers from around the world because the class supposed to constitute its own labour force is degenerate, incompetent, uncompetitive and unwilling to work because it can claim welfare.
The Welfare State is another Sacred Cow that must be slain.
We live in an Idiocracy because we live in a matriarchy. The matriarchy is not only dangerous to the patriarchy, it will also destroy itself after it has destroyed the patriarchy.
The only political ideology that can now shame these shameless women that their men are now too afraid to criticise of is the one with a holy book that has the verse at https://quran.com/24/2
If you are in a burning building but are too afraid of your sacred cows that you know are blocking the exits and the windows, you will die in it, unless you remove those obstructions.
You know you must remove those obstructions or at least talk about removing those obstructions, man to man.Once you agree that this must be done, simply convey the message to the US President by promising him your support in the slaying of these sacred cows.
That would be the quickest non-violent way of restoring the patriarchy.
There are too many entitled middle class female undergraduates in universities. Male undergraduates who seek sexual access to these females will commit violence to gain access to these women by flattering them and committing violence to impress these women.
When are you going to discuss feminism and how it affects men and male politicians?
Harry C Smith:
Wouldn't that be a very tricky thing 2do properly - & fairly - without at least one woman in the mix? I can't see the Duran boyz wanting to touch that with a 20-ft pole! Not least of all 2b taken into account is how just the term 'Feminism' itself not only means different things to people depending on their age, class, sex, political affiliation, nationality, sexuality &, last but by no means least, their educational background & depth of understanding of what Feminism IS, what it means & the importance of its contribution to society!
As a well-educated, middle-class poststructuralist mid-30s polyglot agnostic gay socialist Anglophone man, raised in three countries & a citizen of two, by a single mother of nurse-midwife-journalist background, & a Labour-voting Australian solicitor atheist father, I'm happily aware of my own particular subjective bias; and I'm better schooled than most in the history, function & role of Feminism in 'Western' society. Yet I would never consider myself a classical 'Feminist', whose central purpose & thesis I would summarise as 'A woman is equally capable & valuable in any act or contribution as a man.'
I call myself instead a Post-Feminist: the above argument of classical post-War feminism is, for me & my ilk, so obvious & foregone a conclusion as to never need debating or any further proof again! Rather, to the Post-Feminist, the terms of discourse have long since shifted beyond holding the Man as the standard of comparison against which Woman must still be compared. And how even this may have affected Men is, to my mind, of such little consequence as to be almost comical - IF that is to be the only question for consideration! I don't see much difference between asking this & asking how racial de-segregation & integration has affected the poor dear old white people!
The Feminist project, & its successor movements, have unquestionably changed the world in vital & long overdue ways; but although the concept & the discursive mode in which we integrate its integral principles have moved beyond the male-female binary decades ago, the notion of some men talking about feminism (even if extremely well informed, which, regrettably, very few are - & I do include women here too), would be, at best, on very shaky grounds, academically, & at worst, less than half a debate, easily liable to become diatribal & highly likely of becoming offensive all-round, & performing a great disservice to everyone involved... however well-informed & sincerely well-intentioned all involved may have been!
As a gay man, you would be a supporter of the Western matriarchy. A patriarchy would criminalise gay men as sex offenders, but a matriarchy would indulge you. Feminism operates by bribing men with extramarital sex until they are too stupefied or morally compromised to notice or care what feminism is doing to their society, nation and civilisation.
There is no need to divide feminism into waves or whatever. All those who refuse to condemn and criminalise extramarital sex are by default feminists, even if they are men complaining about feminism. The moment you treat fornicatresses as sex offenders is the day you cut off the legs of feminism. http://thebattlefieldoflove.blogspot.com/2012/11/claire-khaws-aphorisms-on-feminism-and.html
I am basically saying at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlWEZgrMFVE that without patriarchy, not enough good strong men will be produced to defend the national interest. NO PATRIARCHY, NO NATIONALISM (of any kind civic or ethno).
I think the best way of getting round the problem of displeasing RT Editrix in Chief is just to make a direct approach and run the idea of having me on the panel past her. My message is after all global and universal.
Trump is not able to do what he wants to do because he is operating in the conditions of a matriarchy. If he were operating in a patriarchy, he would have built the wall by now. A patriarchy is a society of beta males led by an alpha male. This means beta males get to choose their leader without interference by single mother voters who are half the population who don't care about uncontrolled immigration and who keep voting Democrat or Labour. This means narrowing the franchise to taxpayers only. Currently, all political parties in the West have to appeal to the female voter or not alienate them to be voted into office.
PROPOSAL: Western Man is brave enough to propose and support the narrowing of the franchise to taxpayers only, instead of hopelessly and secretly yearning and waiting for pogrom and race war.
A patriarchy is a society that prioritises the preferences of married fathers.
A matriarchy is a society that prioritises the preferences of unmarried mothers.
The perfect patriarchy - 100% married parents
The perfect matriarchy - 100% unmarried parents
The only way to paint a picture of your preferred political landscape is to give people an idea of what the new rules will be. It needs to be more than Greg Johnson's proposed pogrom and UKIP proposing internment camps for Muslims to galvanise enough educated and influential men already in the political establishment into restoring the patriarchy. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6196159/UKIP-calls-Muslim-prisons-stop-extremists-converting-fellow-inmates.html
My interview of Greg Johnson is below.
1:10:00 All self-respecting ideologies seek global domination eg Marxism, Christianity, Islam, capitalism, liberal democracy.
1:17:00 Muslims actually hate Secular Koranism because they don't think people who are not Muslim have a right to use the Koran. The white man will claim that Secular Koranism is their interpretation of the Koran and in this way claim the Koran and use its ideas to restore their patriarchy. https://thevoiceofreason-ann.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-muslim-who-hates-secular-koranism.html
You will not be required to bow to anything. Secular Koranism is a legal system which guarantees freedom of belief with quran.com/2/256, not a belief system and does not mean forced conversion to Islam, which you seem to assume it must entail! Remember, I am not Muslim.
What I am trying to say is that you can kick out all the Muslims and still practise Secular Koranism. Indeed, you are more likely to be able to kick out all the people you want to kick out under Secular Koranism than continuing to reject it.
1. One Party Theocracy
2. Everyone works/contributes.
3. Anti liberal agenda.
4. Health, food, exercise, well being nationally regulated.
5. Slavery for criminals
6. No medication for depression.
7. No drugs. Ban alcohol, porn , gambling.
8. Any woman having child out of wedlock forced abortion.
9. Ban immigration unless extraordinary.
10. Any colour or creed fine but the national identity trumps religion.
11. Would encourage those here from other countries to go back.
12. Make feminism a crime.
14:30 On having principles, especially moral and relgious principles and rules. People who don't believe in God don't really get principles. When you have a religion, you really get religious principles and understand why they must be followed, if you want to be accepted and identified as a member of your religious group. Islamophobes are militant atheists united by their hatred of the Abrahamic faiths exhibiting antisemitism and Islamophobia which educated people find repulsive and frightening.
23:00 Rules and the Rule of Law.
24:00 The constitutional principle of parliamentary sovereignty is that it makes a principle of having no principles. A theocracy based on the scripture containing the divine laws of an eternal and supreme Abrahamic God based would stop this kind of shit dead in its tracks.
27:00 The purpose of having moral laws is to govern our behaviour towards each other so we remain in existence as a group and maintain social cohesion to avoid the situation of invaders coming into our society and taking over. Jews were warned against disobeying the laws of God at https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+28&version=NIV They ignored them and got kicked out of their own country by the Romans.
For Confucius, zhengming does not seem to refer to the ‘rectification of names’ (this is the way the term is most often translated by scholars of the Analects), but instead to rectifying the behavior of people and the social reality so that they correspond to the language with which people identify themselves and describe their roles in society. Confucius believed that this sort of rectification had to begin at the very top of the government, because it was at the top that the discrepancy between names and actualities had originated. If the ruler's behavior is rectified then the people beneath him will follow suit. In a conversation with Ji Kangzi (who had usurped power in Lu), Confucius advised: “If your desire is for good, the people will be good. The moral character of the ruler is the wind; the moral character of those beneath him is the grass. When the wind blows, the grass bends” (Lunyu 12.19).
For Confucius, what characterized superior rulership was the possession of de or ‘virtue.’ Conceived of as a kind of moral power that allows one to win a following without recourse to physical force, such ‘virtue’ also enabled the ruler to maintain good order in his state without troubling himself and by relying on loyal and effective deputies. Confucius claimed that, “He who governs by means of his virtue is, to use an analogy, like the pole-star: it remains in its place while all the lesser stars do homage to it” (Lunyu 2.1). The way to maintain and cultivate such royal ‘virtue’ was through the practice and enactment of li or ‘rituals’—the ceremonies that defined and punctuated the lives of the ancient Chinese aristocracy. These ceremonies encompassed: the sacrificial rites performed at ancestral temples to express humility and thankfulness; the ceremonies of enfeoffment, toasting, and gift exchange that bound together the aristocracy into a complex web of obligation and indebtedness; and the acts of politeness and decorum—such things as bowing and yielding—that identified their performers as gentlemen. In an influential study, Herbert Fingarette argues that the performance of these various ceremonies, when done correctly and sincerely, involves a ‘magical’ quality that underlies the efficacy of royal ‘virtue’ in accomplishing the aims of the ruler.
41:00 Our laws should be in harmony with our chosen moral system. Religions are xamples of a moral system are Judaism, Christianity, Islam etc. Political ideologies such as Conservatism, Liberalism, Communism, Fascism, Nazism etc also come under this category, but political ideologies do not last as long as religions so we might as well choose the most practical and durable ideology available, and I recommend Secular Koranism. Judaism is the most successful of all the Abrahamic faiths because it enabled the Jews to get back their homeland after 2000 years of being without it. Judaism enabled Jews to remain a distinct group even after 2000 years of exile. If Judaism is divine ethno-nationalism, then Islam must be divine civic nationalism. Jews in Israel would be more likely to have peaceful enjoyment of Israel if Israel became a theocracy because, obviously, God if He exists always intended Israel to be a theocracy, not be a mere colonial outpost of an evil and declining empire.
45:00 Jay submits to Truth, Logic, Morality and perhaps Islam when he says under his dictatorship there would be "No drugs" and he would "ban alcohol, porn , gambling."
55:00 Jay understandably refuses to discuss his mysterious agreement with me on the issue of a one party theocracy contained in his political manifesto because he is still in the course of putting flesh to the skeleton of his idea. But I consider this progress and movement! Yay!
59:00 Jay explains his love-hate relationship with Iceland.
1:06:00 My dream as a keen amateur portrait photographer to one day visit a male prison and take flattering photos of them.
1:12:00 I think I would be quite a cheering bedside presence for the sick and dying.
1:24:00 quran.com/24/2 is better for shaming sluts than forced abortions imposed on unmarried but pregnant women.
1:37:00 The inclusivity of white nationalists is their strength
The inclusivity of nationalists would be their strength because, potentially, men of all ages, races and religions who wish to restore the patriarchy, would outnumber, outrank and defeat the men who obviously have no intention or prospect of becoming the fathers of legitimate children and who have never been married. Only men wishing to and capable of fathering the next generation of legitimate children deserve to have their preferences prioritised. White men going on about the colour of their skin as if it were a religion when it cannot possibly be is just embarrassing.
1:38:00 Uncontrolled immigration is resented by citizens of all races.
1:39:00 People will bond as Jews did with each other when they are attacked and oppressed.
1:40:00 We are all members of different groups and often our membership of these different groups causes conflict.
1:42:00 Identity politics and how we are statistically more likely to be murdered by someone we have had sex with eg our spouse than with than an illegal immigrant.
1:45:00 We are tired of being lied to by the political establishment. Why do they lie all the time?
1:46:00 The West is suffering from a double whammy of a failed religion and political system.
1:48:00 Slut shaming
1:49:00 I remind Jay of my proposal to go to Aceh, Indonesia to demonstrate the efficacy of slut-shaming. http://thevoiceofreason-ann.blogspot.com/2018/01/qanun-jinayat-in-bandar-aceh.html
2:04:00 The fact that you have misbehaving minorities means your rules are not clear.
2:08:00 The rule of law no longer operates in the West.
2:09:00 Underage sex
2:10:00 Gillick Competence
Gillick competence is a term originating in England and is used in medical law to decide whether a child (under 16 years of age) is able to consent to his or her own medical treatment, without the need for parental permission or knowledge.
The standard is based on the 1985 decision of the House of Lords in Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority. The case is binding in England and Wales, and has been adopted to varying extents in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Similar provision is made in Scotland by the Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991. In Northern Ireland, although separate legislation applies, the then Department of Health and Social Services stated that there was no reason to suppose that the House of Lords' decision would not be followed by the Northern Ireland Courts.
The issue before the House of Lords was only whether the minor involved could give consent. "Consent" here was considered in the broad sense of consent to battery or assault: in the absence of patient consent to treatment, a doctor, even if well-intentioned, might be sued/charged.
The House of Lords focused on the issue of consent rather than a notion of 'parental rights' or parental powers. In fact, the court held that 'parental rights' did not exist, other than to safeguard the best interests of a minor. The majority held that in some circumstances a minor could consent to treatment, and that in these circumstances a parent had no power to veto treatment.
Lord Scarman and Lord Fraser proposed slightly different tests (Lord Bridge agreed with both). Lord Scarman's test is generally considered to be the test of 'Gillick competency'. He required that a child could consent if he or she fully understood the medical treatment that is proposed:
As a matter of Law the parental right to determine whether or not their minor child below the age of sixteen will have medical treatment terminates if and when the child achieves sufficient understanding and intelligence to understand fully what is proposed.
— Lord Scarman
The ruling holds particularly significant implications for the legal rights of minor children in England in that it is broader in scope than merely medical consent. It lays down that the authority of parents to make decisions for their minor children is not absolute, but diminishes with the child's evolving maturity. The result of Gillick is that in England today, except in situations that are regulated otherwise by law, the legal right to make a decision on any particular matter concerning the child shifts from the parent to the child when the child reaches sufficient maturity to be capable of making up his or her own mind on the matter requiring decision.
2:15:00 Instead of answering my question on whether he approves of the concept of Gillick Competence, Jay compares me to a pitbull.
2:17:00 Complaining about Muslims is complaining about the symptoms rather than curing the disease.
2:22:00 Feminism would be eradicated by nationalism.
2:23:00 The supreme authority and referring to a higher power
2:24:00 Jay finally discusses the PSYCHOLOGY OF VICTIMHOOD
2:26:00 The masculinity of Viktor Orban
2:27:00 Hungary's patriarchy came from its Catholicism
2:28:00 Judaism, theocracy and a permanent solution to the perennial problems of human nature.
2:30:00 Jay accuses me of debating in bad faith about Muslims.
2:34:00 Multiculturalism
2:35:00 I sing about immigration
2:36:00 The Islamophobia conference we attended. They recorded the proceedings, I asked a number of questions, but they that video has never been uploaded. http://finsburyparkmosque.org/new/2017/11/30/fpm-launches-seminar-series-as-part-of-islamophobia-awareness-month/
2:40:00 Why doesn't the government of white men care about them?
2:41:00 Christianity and liberal democracy are kaput - there is a big leak in the leaky ship of state that is the West, but white men can't get it together to even think of fixing it.
It is deeply disappointing so many still perceive challenging feminism as an attack on women, especially on the honour of their female colleagues at @RT_com. Fortunately, @PCraigRoberts seems to now understand what I have been trying to say for years now. https://t.co/i7B5mguLDd
Let's go to our next question - probably our most controversial. I am a little curious how you are going to react considering you are all men. Is the moral corruption of the West in the formulation of its foreign, domestic, social and economic policy caused by feminism?
Dmitry Babich:
I think it is caused by a primitive understanding of feminism. I think this year will be remembered only because of Pax Americana but also it will be remembered in Russia for example by media attacks women who oppose the global dominance. Look at Natalia [... ska]. There was a whole campaign against her this year by the Russian and foreign media. Nadia [... ka] the Ukrainian's release was demanded by all the world's media. [ Sterpa] a woman mayor of an East Ukrainian town is sitting in jail since 2014 simply because she participated in the referendum on the Ukraine.
Peter Lavelle:
I would say in 2017 in the West there is a war on men.
Victor Olevich:
Today, we are talking about the war on men. It is not just feminism, it is radfem, radical feminism from the 60s and 70s that doesn't just oppose patriarchy but wants matriarchy. But the real anti-Utopian sentiment is going to come in a few years. We are actually talking about roboticisation and a new industrial revolution and that brings a spectre of a world where gender differences are not going to matter that much at all. Robots do not need sex and that is the danger in the next decade.
Mark Sleboda:
There is moral corruption in the West but it doesn't come from feminism, or even from a few radical feminists in the later years who have gone off the ranch. This show is made by women. Without feminism, this show wouldn't be made. I've got no problem with classical feminism. Actually, the problem comes from Classical Liberalism, the cult of the individual and the rarefication of neoliberalism, the economic system of the unfettered, unregulated free market over everything, the marketisation, the commodification of all human relations - that's where the real moral decay of the West comes from.
I am afraid I found the answers rather disappointing. Too bad Paul Craig Roberts was not invited to answer the question.
My answer to the question is yes, but you were probably expecting that.
Indiscriminate universal suffrage in the West means all political parties pander to the female voter by offering her more laws to protect her and more public spending to appease her. This means Western governments are bribing usually irresponsible and unmarried mothers with the taxes of male taxpayers and offering her more laws to raise her status in relation to married fathers.
Patriarchy is a society that prioritises the preferences of married fathers eg lower taxes, condign punishment of criminals and immoral women, fault-based divorce, low immigration, masculine and paternal authority, fewer laws, free speech, proof beyond reasonable doubt required of men accused of a historic sexual offence etc.
Matriarchy is a society that prioritises the preferences of unmarried mothers eg higher public spending, the deification of immoral women, excuses for their badly parented illegitimate offspring, no fault divorce, gay marriage, high immigration, more laws, hate speech, the loss of masculine and paternal authority, men accused of a historic sexual offence considered guilty until proven innocent etc.
The average age of the UK is 40. There are more unmarried mothers than there are married mothers.
The average voter of the West is a 40 year old single mother who doesn't care about foreign policy who has probably never heard of RT and will never watch Crosstalk with pleasure or understanding.
Immoral, ignorant and irresponsible women cannot be expected to care about foreign policy. Political parties know this, which his why foreign policy is never a factor in elections.
Our age and sex is relevant to the choices we make. The West is basically a society of old women whose men are in fear of them. It is probably impossible to reason with women, especially old women suffering from dementia.
Old men become like old women, but since old men die before old women, the preponderance is that of old women, and so we have a society full of mini-dowager empresses who cannot be offended.
Because sex is more highly valued by men and their access depends on the willingness of women to supply it, it can be seen as a valued good where women act as sellers and men as buyers, By withholding sex, women increase its value and render it a scarce resource, scarcity ratchets up the price men are willing to pay for it and this means pressure is put by women on other women not to undercut them, because if other women give sex away too cheaply, it reduces what women can ask from men. Monogamy is socially encouraged and enforced. A man is encouraged to stay with a woman because he is less likely to have opportunities to reproduce elsewhere. You will only get sex if you hang around and commit to that woman and, because all women are behaving like that, you are not going to have many opportunities for mating outside your mate.
Female sexual withholding is therefore key to paternal investment. Paternal investment facilitates reproductive success."
There is much too much talk about the Far Right and the Extreme Right and too much head-scratching the rise of parties like the National Front in France and the Freedom Party in the Netherlands. What has happened in fact is not that these parties have risen, it's instead that the centre of gravity across Western Europe has shifted inexorably to the left. When I say the left, I'm not referring to old style socialism which indeed has been abandoned. I am referring instead to the body of liberal left-wing opinion which believes in the end of the nation state, which believes in progress and progressivism and so on and which is daily fighting and winning new battles on completely unexpected things like transgender and gay marriage and all the rest of it. The centre of gravity having moved to the left and the political class having become increasingly dominated not by any relationship to reality, but increasingly by ideology, yes, voters feel alienated and they feel alienated precisely because of this ideology which dominates and which means that political decisions are taken not with respect to reality, not with any desire to influence reality or to react to it, but instead within the self-referential terms of the ideology of left liberalism. So, political decisions are taken to justify even on a symbolic level the ideology to which these people apply. I have increasingly said that politicians, including the famous Brussels bureaucrats, are not politicians or bureaucrats or technocrats, they are instead a kind of clergy engaged in a series of symbolic acts which have meaning for them but which don't have any meaning outside their point of reference and certainly not to an increasing number of voters.
Peter Lavelle:
What we have right now is a crisis of terminology, a crisis of lexicon because you can look at political parties that are hovering around power. They are more interested in power than representation. They are more interested in ideology than the will of the voters. And it is a crisis as to what Conservatism and Liberalism really mean. I really think we have a crisis of lexicon.
Jeff Deist:
When John mentions clergy, I think that's correct, because I think what we're talking about here is a faith - a faith in neoliberalism that doesn't necessarily match the facts, and I do think that the old left/right paradigms are breaking down. He mentioned Margaret Thatcher stealing votes away from voters. Well, Donald Trump did the same thing in the United States by taking blue collar working class votes from Democrats and at some point we have to ask ourselves a question which is what does that blue collar union truck-driver in a state like New Jersey who likes American football aqnd beer - what does he really have in common with the left wing professor of feminism at Berkeley? What does he have in common with a non-profit ideologue at a place like the Sierra Club? The answer might be not much. So I think we are reaching a point where populism is a healthy thing. When elites become corrupt and when they become corrupt by virtue of their relationship with a state and finance nexus then anti-elitism or populism can be healthy and warranted.
Peter Lavelle:
You have these elites and they have these party labels on them, but you can look at the elites in both parties particularly the Democratic ones obstructing Trump every step of the way. You have Republicans who are just as obstructionist in many ways as well. They're not representing their party, they're representing their own interests inside this clergy. They are a clergy of ideology and power.
A lot of people are tired of identity politics, because identity politics doesn't get you a job, it doesn't give you prosperity, it doesn't give you security. It gives small groups of people a good feeling inside - nice and fluffy and warm - but it doesn't make a better society.
John Laughland:
I didn't say voters were moving to the left, I said the political class and the centre of gravity of political debate was moving to the left and voters have stayed where they are, so when we describe the rise of the extreme right, I am implying that the voters have stayed where they are but the politicians have moved to the left leaving the space open for what might wrongly be called the Far Right. It is true that the left have abandoned its traditional values and traditional electorate, but the right has as well, and I speaking as a Conservative, I believe very strongly that on balance the left has won battle after battle in the last 25 years since the collapse of state socialism in the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe. The left has not given up its basic ideology of progressivism, revolution, anti-authoritariaism, anti-traditionalism and so on. Instead it has simply transferred itself away from state socialism - so its completely abandoned that aspects of its policy - but it hasn't abandoned any of its underlying ideology of constant revolution and constant progress. Indeed, to the extent that it has adopted the free market and the ideology of globalisation, it has done so only because it sees in those things - as Marx himself incidentally did - an instrument for dismantling structures like the nation and the family. So I see in the last 25 years left and right converging around what is a left liberalism where Conservative values are basically absent or they come out in a mangled and somehow extreme way. A straightforward Conservative party does not exist in Western Europe.
Jeff Deist:
Conservatism Inc is on life support in America. Trump does not represent the resurrection of the GOP. On the contrary, the GOP is dead and buried when it comes to ideas and deservedly so. No one is going to die on a hill for Ryancare. Progressives have shown time and time again they will die on a hill for all kinds of things the American public cares very little about. This is a party that doesn't organise in union halls, it organises in the sociology department of some wretched university somewhere. This is the left in America that has suffered a black eye with Trump, perhaps, but this is a speed bump, not a roadblock. The left in the West controls academia, it controls the media, it controls mainstream religion, it controls corporate boardrooms ...
BREAK
Peter Lavelle:
Politics and politicians are supposed to resolve problems, that's what we elected them to do. I don't elect people to moralise and tell me what my values should be and this is the speed bump we've been hitting for decades now. We're not solving problems. We're just told how to think about them and usually not your own problems but some other person's problems.
Kees Van Der Pijl:
Jacque Chirac was once asked about the power of politics. Chirac said there was no power. We are the ones who see the trains go by and we make sure the barriers are down on time.Society was developing in a progressive way in the post war period. There was work for people, excellent education and healthcare and so on. From the late 70s that has been dismantled. In that situation, people who call themselves left have not replaced this and instead concentrated on such things as transgender rights. Society has moved right because it is in a state of profound stagnation and crisis.
Peter Lavelle:
Peter that call themselves Conservatives who are not, people who call themselves from the left who are not, they have just created on train wreck after another and this is why people are voting in an angry way. They want some new solutions and what we hear is retreads.
John Laughland:
Jeff's speed bump metaphor was meant to imply that the election of Trump was a minor obstacle and will not prevent the onward march of the left and Jeff is absolutely right. I very strongly agree with this: to emphasise the degree to which the left dominates the world of the media and the world of culture and so on. We are a hundred years after the Russian Revolution and Lenin thought that the way to state socialism was by controlling the state, but there is far more powerful revolutionary figure whose influence goes way beyond that of Lenin and that is Antonio Gramsci who theorised this idea that indeed that the left to win had to colonise the great institutions: universities, schools and so on and as Andrew Breitbart used to say "Politics is downstream of culture." That's why Jacque Chirac said "Politicians just watch the trains go by or the caravans pass" whichever metaphor you prefer, because politics is downstream of culture. We have observed the Soviet system 25 years ago. What people perhaps forget in watching this spectacular historical event is that Marxism was alive and well in the West in Western universities throughout the entire Cold War period with strong Communist parties, plus there were strong pro-Soviet Communist parties, so you had a vast reserve of people in the West - never mind people in the East who believed in Marxism and left wing politics generally, whereas in the East no one really believed in Marxist ideology including senior Soviet leaders. They didn't believe it any more, they stopped believing in it a long time ago. That was not true of the West, so the Soviet system having collapsed we are now left with the inheritance of these generations of people who have been educated in a broadly Marxist system, and those people, educated as I say, in those universities, those people who were young in the 1960s and who were affected by the other great revolutionary - not Lenin but John Lennon - those people are of course in their 60s, and they have now been governing us for decades.
Peter Lavelle:
I had the opportunity to live in Poland and Hungary before they joined the European Union and I've lived in Russian for almost 20 years but I told Poles and Hungarians "You think your culture is important and that's your right, but you want to join a club that doesn't care much about your culture and your values and - voila! - we have two countries in the European Union that are criticised severely by the "clergy" - but culture does matter! The political class don't want to respect culture and if you do you're backward, you're primitive, you're old fashioned, but they're wrong and we're right.
Jeff Deist:
Poland will forever be a renegade for the simple fact that they are a religious country within the EU. This is not allowed or accepted any more and it's interesting when John mentioned this blathering about the Far Right and AfD and Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen being white noise and nonsense - it is white noise and nonsense because the real authoritarians are in every public school in America, they're in every university in America - the petty people on the left who would control us and gtovern us, who would restrict our speech. There's one thing they're right about and I don't want to call them liberals because I don't think that's a term that's earned, but I will say that the one thing the left is correct about is that Trump and Le Pen and Geert Wilders is that they are reactionaries. This is a reaction. The question is a reaction to what? The answer is a century of progressivism that has never been popular in a pure democratic sense in any Western country. This has always been imposed from the top down and has never arisen from the bottom up, and people don't like it. There's still a pulse, there's still a heartbeat that says I want transgender people to be treated well and to have happy lives but I don't think it is the momentous issue of the day where they go to the bathroom, for God's sake. We've reached a point where left and right doesn't matter and that heartbeat, that pulse does matter.
Peter Lavelle:
I don't want to give the transgender point more time than it deserves, but that's the point, isn't it? This is what people are told to talk about and think about when the infrastructure of Europe is in decay, when the infrastructure of America is in decay, and we need more space for those issues and I will never stop talking about the need for people to have work and well paid work, because that's where you get dignity in our society and I don't see our political classes addressing those issues.
Kees Van Der Pijl:
In 2012 Francois Hollande was elected on the promise that he would end austerity. One trip to Berlin was sufficient to forget about that promise and gay marriage was then the compensating factor. It cost him the Muslim vote in France which he had won because of his promises on the economic front. I am of the left and am in a university but in the 1960s our relevance was not because of our brilliant ideas because behind that was a powerful working class which was unionised. Behind that was the Soviet Union which is unrelated but it was there, and now we can have fantastic ideas but there is nothing behind us and that is why we are completely ignored.
Peter Lavelle:
One thing that seems to be prevalent in all of this in the US elections and now Europe is the lack of introspection on what has gone wrong and all you do is blame Russia for it. That is one of the most pathetic reactions to not knowing what to do and not owning up to your own mistakes.
John Laughland:
It just enters psychiatric territory, doesn't it, when every single conceivable evil is projected onto Russia with no evidence whatever. I think that this is a consequence of a more general trend. What I said just now quoting Andrew Breitbart that politics is downstream of culture, I was referring to what I believe to be a left wing political culture in universities, but there is a cultural problem in more general terms. As education has declined, as people have fewer cultural references and fewer external cultural references, as they have fewer religious references, they just don't have the fabric, the intellectual or moral or spiritual fabric to do anything other than what the herd - the political herd or the political caste - tell them to do. So you have this narrowing of the cultural base and you have an ever increasing series of taboos ...
Steve Bannon used as an election strategy the economic woes of the middle class, cultural identity n the entire project of identity politics https://t.co/Oh0ut9g5Z4
1. A
person who doesn't like acknowledging the possibility that he, his
government and its leaders have been wrong for a very very long time.
2. A person who finds the challenge of understanding Western foreign
policy too difficult, time-consuming, boring and overwhelming.
3. A person who prefers to hang on to his views whatever the facts, logic and morality of the situation.
4. A person who enjoys the idea that white people can just bomb the shit
out of any country they like without suffering any consequences and that
bombing the shit out of brown people is part of their white racial
identity of which they are very very proud.
5. A person who doesn't want to admit that he has been duped by mainstream media for a very very long time.
6. A person who prefers mainstream media because it is all so predictable and familiar.
7. A person who does not like admitting mistakes out of pride, stubbornness and chauvinism.
That would be most people.
Most people do not care to be guided by the truth, logic or morality
and believe that their confused thoughts and inconsistent positions are
better than anyone else's logic and truth just because their confused
thoughts and inconsistent positions are theirs.
Do such people - who only care about the price of beer and cigarettes, more or less - even deserve the vote?
What is the very best thing about RT? For me it is Peter Lavelle's Crosstalk.
And probably the best documentaries I have come across.
RT should be make T-shirts, hoodies and badges for us to wear.
Even if I don't get a job from RT this year, this post will still be staying up.
"Trump is going to firm up his core issues and target the Midwest - the heartland of this country - because that Nixon Coalition of Southern Protestants and Northern Catholics is what's going to carry him over the threshold - if he's the nominee - where Hillary cannot win - among white Catholic men in the Midwest."
"The democracy deficit in the European Union is just astounding to me."
Gilbert Doctorow:
"There is nothing particularly surprising in the failure of democracy to control foreign policy or democratic governments, and this is one of the fatal flaws in the whole neocon ideology: the notion that democratic countries are by their structure peace-loving. The voice of the people has no bearing on the conduct of foreign policy and it is carried out by the executive with its own privileges without answerability in many cases to legislature. The notion of democratic countries being peace-loving is shot through. You are confirming the bigger truth which has unfortunately been driving events for the last 20 years."
Dimitry Babich:
"In the late Roman Empire there was no foreign policy. All was internal policy because the whole world was the Empire, and the Empire had no opponents, only aggressors. It had no insurgents, only terrorists. So if we look at the modern United States and the late Roman Empire, we can see some similarities."
Peter Lavelle:
"When the Empire comes to an end, it is the American people who will find out about it last."
Those of you who know what happened to Athens, who exhausted itself through warfare, is that the Athenians kept voting again and again for war ....
It is truly laughable that Britain, who involved itself in two world wars that were really none of its business and lost its world empire as a result, did so because a Liberal Prime Minister thought fighting a short successful war in 1914 would make it more likely for the Liberal Party to win the 1915 General Election. What happened when the war it participated in turned really nasty? Why, the election was cancelled, of course.
It has been said that WW2 was a continuation of WW1. What, then, was WW1 all about? Britain declared war against Germany because of the Belgian neutrality German troops would violate on their way to France. This was the Belgian neutrality guaranteed in the Treaty of London in 1839. Did Britain lift a finger to help France during the siege of Paris in 1870? Nope. http://thevoiceofreason-ann.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/poppy-mania-day-prevents-any-rational.html
There is nothing peaceable about democracies at all. Voters in democracies don't give a damn whom their politicians murder and whose countries they destroy as long as their taxes are low and public spending high. Many apparently educated Britons are quite convinced that Russia is the more militarily aggressive country even as they themselves are aware that their governments have invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, bombed Libya and Syria. This is what Orwell would have called doublethink.
Do voters in democracies feel well-governed?
The answer can be discerned in how well the anti-establishment Trump is doing in the Presidential primaries and how prepared voters are to believe in conspiracy theories. A significant number of people in the West believe that their governments would actually bomb them and then pretend it was Muslim terrorists who did it, and use that as an excuse to bomb and invade more Muslim countries as well as depriving Western citizens of their liberty and privacy.
Soon, a Caliphate will seem like a sensible replacement for the mess we're in now.
@israel63 Voters don't care about foreign policy and have short memories so politicians can literally get away with murder. @PLCROSSTALK
