(0833) Morning all. Dull Gates grey out there. (1002)
6. DAD at 1021
a) According to Le Parisien, a series of attacks targeting several French prisons since Sunday is now the subject of an investigation by the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office.
b) French impotence in the face of Algerian provocations. Algiers expels diplomats after France arrests suspected Algerian agents in kidnapping plot. *
c) €9,842,534 [Yes! You read that correctly – nine million Euros] is the grant, paid for with our taxes, awarded by the European Research Council – an organization created by the European Commission and funded by the EU budget – for “The European Quran.”
d) Media Revolt: even establishment journalists slam EU over secrecy. The Commission’s delays and rejections of freedom of information requests hinder journalists “from fulfilling their watchdog role,” the letter signed by 140 reporters points out.
……
*Sigh … Algeria back with a vengeance … high ups in France incapable of getting anything right, a bit like the British car industry and managerialism in the past.
5. To what extent is greed
… actually the covering up of ideological incompetence?
This question I ask in the light of two things … one was a chance comment when I was in Russia, plus an article this morning at TDS.
To mention the chance comment from a stray Russkie will not go down well with readers here, esp. as the Russkies were just as “bad” in their own way. The comment was, after I was introduced to one of the (literal) plebs and was asked by him what it was like over here: “Ah, the English are very greedy, aren’t they?” Think my answer was: “No more than any other nation or ethnicity.”
There are all sorts of things mixed in there, not least being that plebs were taught via TV and radio 24/7 … every home had a state receiver outlet in the wall … that the greedy capitalists in the west only wanted money, money and more money. Just what was taught about Americans … taught by state, by parents, by teachers, by entertainment … I never quite got to that … though I think it was about America being the land of opportunity, of prosperity in Russkie eyes … if only you could get there. Also Americans wanted to invade Russia and strip it of her resources.
As always, there was this logical leap, ever-present in people’s thinking … let me bring in another scene to illustrate. I’d been showing my Russkie mate, online in the Brit news (Blair, then Brown raiding pension funds, selling off gold), that we were heading for UKSSR and he at first said, “Rubbish,” but after I showed him (his English speaking was excellent) so many incidents, debates over e.g. Brown’s thousand new laws in one year, the RIPA (act) etc. … “Well,” he asked me, stunned, “but why would you want to do that? To bring in communism? You’re a rich nation.”
How does one answer that? He’d fallen for exactly the same logical fallacies almost every nation I know has in them … that the people of any land think exactly as the govt does, that we’re all “at one”, agreed in almost every way. Perhaps he was referring to Thatcherism.
Overall, it’s been just as oppressive through Brit history … though a sort of middle-class was emerging, post-war, post-rationing, just as it was emerging post-Soviet era in Russia. The conversation was pure 1948 Show or Four Yorkshiremen sketch … outdoing one another in oppression and penury in one’s past.
And once again, there was truth and error both ways. The things done by Lenin and Stalin to the ordinary people, the treatment of dissidents, the mass starvation, the utter cruelty in the USSR, the pogroms, the gulags, all the rest of it … might edge those in Britain but still look at the Jarrow March:
And forget not the harrowing of the north, the highland clearances, the way Russians mostly had indoor loos for a start, the state of the workhouses in Britain, child chimney sweeps, the East End, the Gorbals in Glasgow, then Middlesborough as a whole during industrialisation … it goes on and on … I’ll trade you one atrocity for one super-atrocity.
It’s a stoopid argument to have in the first place. Similarly, to say people shared Blair’s all-in-the-EU plan plus warmongering and national guilt, did not hold water.
His reply was: “How many times did your people elect, then re-elect Blair if he was so bad?”
Sigh. How does one answer that? I’m thinking that it’s better to argue brainwashing in Britain through the tele and radio, plus weak compliance with strictures from above “in the national interest”, then a whole lot of grumbling to no effect.
Plus every petty official finding him or herself with a bit of power suddenly going all tin god, looking down the nose at those “plebbier than they” (see current Labour MPs). It’s a surefire sign of an unequal society, with those below crawling over their grandmothers to “get on” … oo, look at im, boy dun well.
And so are sown the seeds of greed and lawlessness to the extent of Britain being ripe for brutal, godless communism … just as the Russkies and outlying Krai or outlying regions were … Krai forms another word U-krai-enye in Russian … or the Ukraine in English.
If you look at the American bible belt and then at Britain and Russia … the latter two also had remote, lecturing, robed and pointy-hatted synods, not the least concerned with the plebs, except to quote select verses at them … accept your lot, plebs, they preach from gold-clad Churches … with both populations open to spiritualism but not so much to Christian values … except in charity. Both nations learnt to muck in together under severe conditions … there was always a sense of charity for those worse off than even you were.
Prosperity breeds its own evils too but that’s another post.
And so to the Daily Sceptic article linked to above. Through all the gobbledegook in that BBC interview, the leaping-about logic is jawdropping, justifying why benefits are never passed back to the people … it does come back, to a great extent, to that quote from yesterday:
Greed, in that situation, is in pushing an ideology hard, with zero tolerance of dissent, always opting for the illogically and unsustainably ideological, known or suspected by those at the top but fervently believed in by the apparatchiki.
Our apparatchiki are the Woke left. …/END for now.
