“He [Gordon Brown] was smiling when he spoke to me but he was thinking that! What else is he thinking when he smiles…” ~Gillian Duffy.
Remember when Obama was exposed in all his contempt for small-town America, depicting potential voters as clinging to their guns, god and other “bigotry”?
At least Obama was generalizing about a perceived prototype, and not badmouthing a flesh-and-blood human being; a constituent just encountered.
People seem surprised that Brown would harbor contempt for the typical Briton revealed in the person of Gillian Duffy. After hearing Mrs. Duffy’s worries over deficits and immigration, the pompous, two-faced ponce retreated to his limousine, and mic on, proceeded to berate this perfectly decent lady, calling her “horrible,” “old woman,” and “bigoted.”
Poor woman; how hurt and shocked she looked when a reporter first confronted her with Brown’s wicked words.
When the real boor in this electioneering farce came calling, asking her to forgive him on camera, Mrs. Duffy refused to play along. She forgave the bastard as a kindly person would, but refused Gordon’s demand for a public display of affection.
Mr Obama had, before an audience in the liberal bastion of San Francisco, tried to explain his trouble winning over white, working-class voters, the fabled “Reagan Democrats” who will be crucial in the general election.
He said: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
What on earth is a representative of the British National Party (BNP) doing in what he says is Wembley (an area of north-west London), but looks like Calcutta, warbling in Welsh? Be gone with you, you rambling racial supremacist. Give it up. As the Virginia Postrel thesis goes, change is always good. Embrace it. Count your blessings: there is still one pukka British symbol on the streets of Wembley: the double-decker bus.
Update I: Surprisingly, most comments hereunder ignore the larger reality, preferring to concentrate on minutia: are the streets clean and orderly (how the fuck do they know?). Western liberals are like that.
By contrast, confronted with a take-over of swathes of their towns, Chinese, Indian or Pakistani men would be furious. This is to their credit.
Yet an out-migration of the indigenous English population from a section of the city they no longer recognize or feel comfortable in is dismissed by your average, non-nonchalant, liberal-minded westerner. How sophisticated! This is why I, with few exceptions, have little respect for western men and, like Tom Fleming, hold white liberal-minded men responsible for everything from affirmative action to racial set-asides to speech codes—and, in general, for most forms of cultural and legal foot-and-mouth. As Dr. Fleming put it:
“[W]e should not make the mistake of blaming black people for the suicide we continue to inflict on ourselves. We white males are the problem, not blacks, women, homosexuals, or Mexicans. We–at least the liberal part of “we”– turned away from our religion and our civilization; we made war on property and marriage; we rejected Haydn and Sophocles in favor of John Cage and Kate Chopin. We have emasculated ourselves, pithed our brains, destroyed our vision and hearing …”
I believe this is the very impulse evinced in the blog posts that dismiss the Wembley footage. It’s left-liberalism at its seeming suavest.
Update II (Nov. 5): DEMOGRAPHICS? DIDDLYSQUAT! It is a great shame that the Jacobinism of the Steyns of the world is mistaken for a coherent defense of the West, or for the good kind of nationhood, for that matter. A little reminder: When the barbarians of the banlieusardrioted through France in November of 2005, one neoconservative troika—Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg, Frederick Kempe—fingered French racism and snobbery in marginalizing its poor Maghrebis. France, in this unholy trinity’s assessment, fell short in offering its Third Worlders freebies and fraternité.
When America’s news cartel woke up to one of 2005’s biggest stories—Muslims running riot across France—the response from many a neoconservative was to gloat.
The Schadenfreude was tinged with a sense of American superiority [can you say Steyn?]. It’s not happening here because we’re better. And why are we superior? To listen to their accounts, it’s because we’ve submerged or erased aspects of the American identity.
Taking the Frank out of the French hasn’t been as easy. As the famed (neoconservative) Francis Fukuyama has observed, in Europe “identity remains rooted in blood, soil and ancient shared memory.” How gauche.
Steyn, your “One-Man Global Content Provider,” is, predictably, wrong. Demographics are NOT destiny.Demographics are the excuse of statists (such as our neoconservative contingent) to persevere with immigration policies that destroy western civil society and shore up the western state. (I will incorporate these idea in a column.)
Did the now-waning West become great because it outbred the rest of the world? Ridiculous! The West was once great becasue of human capital—innovation, exploration, science, philosophy; because of superior ideas, and the willingness to defend such a civilization.
Of course, if I spouted the silly Steyn line I’d be rich.
The young thug flexing his Muslim muscle in this YouTube clip on the streets of London should not be the object of your contempt. He is true to himself. The society that hothouses this vile creature with his veiled threats to snuff out the life of anti-Islam activist Geert Wilders—that country deserves your scorn.
Today that self-immolating society is Britain; tomorrow it’ll be the US. We’re nearly there.
In the hoodlum’s words (via Brenda Walker of VDARE.COM):
We’re here to protest against this man, Geert Wilders, who insulted the message of Mohamed, [blah blah aleikum Islam]. We’re here to give him a message that, like he’s doing his interview today holed up, he’ll remain holed up, because he obviously knows that in Islam, the punishment for the one who insults the prophet is capital punishment. And he should take lessons from people like Theo Van Gogh and others who faced the punishment. So obviously we’re here to warn him and remind him that he’s going to remain holed up as long as he insults Islam and Muslims.
Interviewer: Is that going to be construed a threat, what you just said?
Well, obviously I’m saying, I’m not saying that I’m personally am going to carry out, but, he needs to know that there are Muslims in every corner of the earth, and these people they all have the love for the message of Mohamed [blah blah aleikum Islam]. And in the message of Mohamed he said, ‘the one who insults any of the prophets, kill him.’ That is a capital punishment. Not necessarily that personally I’m going to carry it out, but he should be warned that, you know, of the consequences of it.” [VDARE.COM note: Transcript here, the “blah blah” being the transcriber’s substitute for whatever the fellow is saying when he’s not speaking English.] [ilana’s note: he’s blessing the “prophet.”]
This phenomenon is disturbing for what it says of Britain’s dhimmi culture; not about the bum who should be deportedto a sandy place. Speaking and publishing under the threat of injury or death: this is one of the defining libertarian issues of our times. A society that allows into its midst a sizable contingent whose members, as a matter of creed, threaten to kill countrymen guilty of speech they deem offensive—that society is sick. It will not survive.
The young thug flexing his Muslim muscle in this YouTube clip on the streets of London should not be the object of your contempt. He is true to himself. The society that hothouses this vile creature with his veiled threats to snuff out the life of anti-Islam activist Geert Wilders—that country deserves your scorn.
Today that self-immolating society is Britain; tomorrow it’ll be the US. We’re nearly there.
In the hoodlum’s words (via Brenda Walker of VDARE.COM):
We’re here to protest against this man, Geert Wilders, who insulted the message of Mohamed, [blah blah aleikum Islam]. We’re here to give him a message that, like he’s doing his interview today holed up, he’ll remain holed up, because he obviously knows that in Islam, the punishment for the one who insults the prophet is capital punishment. And he should take lessons from people like Theo Van Gogh and others who faced the punishment. So obviously we’re here to warn him and remind him that he’s going to remain holed up as long as he insults Islam and Muslims.
Interviewer: Is that going to be construed a threat, what you just said?
Well, obviously I’m saying, I’m not saying that I’m personally am going to carry out, but, he needs to know that there are Muslims in every corner of the earth, and these people they all have the love for the message of Mohamed [blah blah aleikum Islam]. And in the message of Mohamed he said, ‘the one who insults any of the prophets, kill him.’ That is a capital punishment. Not necessarily that personally I’m going to carry it out, but he should be warned that, you know, of the consequences of it.” [VDARE.COM note: Transcript here, the “blah blah” being the transcriber’s substitute for whatever the fellow is saying when he’s not speaking English.] [ilana’s note: he’s blessing the “prophet.”]
This phenomenon is disturbing for what it says of Britain’s dhimmi culture; not about the bum who should be deportedto a sandy place. Speaking and publishing under the threat of injury or death: this is one of the defining libertarian issues of our times. A society that allows into its midst a sizable contingent whose members, as a matter of creed, threaten to kill countrymen guilty of speech they deem offensive—that society is sick. It will not survive.
