US Party Politics And The Arizona Shootings

The shootings in Tucson, Arizona have sparked a fierce debate about whether inflammatory right-wing rhetoric was somehow a party to the murders.

Six people died, 1 of which was a 9 year old girl, and 20 were injured, including Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head.


Within hours the local country sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, who happens to be a member of the Democratic Party, held a press conference in which he went out of his way to link the murders with political rhetoric.


This has led to a wave of soul searching in the American media and online.

Most criticism has been directed by the left of centre against the Republican right and in particular Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

The evidence that they have created a "climate of hate" includes Mrs Palin's online campaign map from last year using crosshairs over the Democratic-held congressional seats.

She has also used the phrase "don't retreat - reload".

One typical comment on Mrs Palin's Facebook page read: "You cannot flippantly talk about 'reloading' and putting people on your TARGET list and not expect some nut to take you literally."

It is true that language and symbolism in American political debate is more emotional and violent than in many democracies - but missing from the debate appears to be a sense that it has always been this way and that America has always been a country where the gun has played a role.

The founding fathers called each other "traitors" in print, there have been 20 attempted presidential assassinations, four of which were successful.

JFK, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy died in the blood-soaked, rhetoric-fuelled, 1960s in which one of the most memorable political slogans came from the Black Panthers: "By Any Means Necessary."

In 2004 the Democrats used a map of the US under the headline "Targeting" and bullseyes over states they were concentrating on - the blurb talked about operating "behind enemy lines".

This may have been less overtly violent than Mrs Palin's crosshairs but is in the same vein, as is Barack Obama's "if they bring a knife we'll bring a gun" speech in 2008.

Sheriff Dupnik introduced the rhetoric idea into the news story at an early stage.

Immediately it gave the media and public a different angle to the usual gun control/loner/drugs narrative which arises after similar events.

A link to political rhetoric cannot be ruled out in the Arizona tragedy - and there is a genuine debate to be had about the relationship between language and violence in the media.

But there appears to have been a rush to judgement that there is something special about this event.

Politics in America has always used the language of the gun, and the gun has always been used in America.

My Opinion............



Jared Loughner.............although I hasten to add not yet convicted, but who is the main suspect as the shooter (must be careful in law here)..........was a looney with a gun.

He was un-hinged.............twisted and indeed in strong need of medical and mental help.

A simple read through this piece will give an idea of the individual at the centre of this.

He slipped through the net.............reading the above piece will show that many suspected but nobody did anything about it.

This was a tragedy waiting to happen..............and sadly it just has.

The blame of Sarah Palin is wrong................trust me I think the woman is a political joke.
Her day time TV program / fly on the wall documentary is just that...........A JOKE.

Her choice of language and the use of the cross hairs may well have been inappropriate with hindsight, but has been a ploy used in US politics for many many years..........and is part of the US psyche.

That did not make Jared Loughner pull the trigger..............he did that all by himself.


I will make an inflammatory statement here.............

Hungerford and Dunblane where horrific gun crimes here in the UK. After both incidents there was a huge overhaul of fiearms laws.

Many gun clubs went to the wall. Many sporting and target shooters gave up the sport.

However none of the legislation passed stopped the Cumbria incident or more recently Raul Moat.

Again un-hinged people who pulled the trigger themselves.


Repost from my Blog

US Party Politics And The Arizona Shootings

ACPO Advises Breaking the Law

I have mentioned ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers, before. It is an organisation I believe should be disbanded, and its officers charged with corruption if there is a law general enough to cover their actions, exposed in the press otherwise.

ACPO is not a government body, a QUANGO or even a staff association or union. It is a company limited by guarantee, answerable only to its guarantors. I can only assume it is specifically permitted to leave out the term “Limited” in its name. This is usually required, and leaving it out masks the nature of ACPO.

Now ACPO is advising senior police officers to break the law and keep DNA samples despite a court ruling. Now I disapprove of the European Court of Human Rights. I also disapprove of large tracts of human rights legislation that conveys rights, having seen no case that these rights are inherent. However police of all people cannot just go around obeying only those laws they choose to obey.

Of course there are solid arguments against keeping DNA of innocent people on a database. Political argument (it is unpopular), theoretical science (a large database is arguably less useful) and experience (it has rarely if ever been used to solve serious crime) argue against keeping such a large database.

Anticipating that new legislation on DNA retention will come into force next year, a letter from ACPO states

“Until that time, the current retention policy on fingerprints and DNA remains unchanged.

Individuals who consider they fall within the ruling in the S and Marper case should await the full response to the ruling by the Government prior to seeking advice and/or action from the police service in order to address their personal issue on the matter.”

Why is an unaccountable body making policy? Why is it doing so in secret? On what authority does ACPO determine what any officer ‘should’ do? Why moreover is an independent body coercing the police to break a court judgement?

Cross posted from my blog.

ACPO Advises Breaking the Law

Orwell’s Forgotten Predictions

Since the formatting problems this blog has lacked for contributions, so I reckoned this could be cross-posted from my blog. Apologies to Not a Sheep if I steal any of his thunder!

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Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book from which most people only know one concept, that of being under constant surveillance. It is far from the most important concept in the book.

Not a Sheep highlights today a satirical comparison of 1984 and Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s idea of socialist Utopia. The cartoon goes much further than that shallow idea of being watched, but does not address what I always felt to be the most important themes in 1984, Newspeak and corruption of history. It is too long since I read Brave New World, and I cannot remember if or how Huxley addressed these issues.

In 1984 language was changed to control thought. Words were not to be used, others no longer had all the same meanings and others still had their meanings reversed. In that way it was intended to control thought, because abstract thought without language is very difficult (and all but impossible to communicate) and control of language allowed control of what could be thought in that language.

While I agree with the cartoon that Huxley’s vision is closer in many ways to developing reality, Orwell did get the language concept right. The authoritarian left is quite literally doing what Orwell predicted.

There are words we cannot say, concepts we cannot express without being the object of contempt or hatred. Other words and concepts have been twisted to the reverse of their original meanings. Words such as 'liberal', 'tolerant' and 'progressive', concepts such as anti-racism, anti-fascism and  diversity are used to mean exactly the opposite.

An important slogan in 1984 is “Whoever controls the past controls the future. Whoever controls the present controls the past”. Winston Smith, the protagonist, works is the Ministry of Truth changing the records of history, the control of the past.

The left has altered history, in a wide variety of ways. We are told that European culture is solely responsible for slavery, when the truth is that until European culture developed to ban slavery it was almost universal. We are told that FDR saved the world from depression with his ‘Keynesian’ and other socialist policies, when they actually deepened recession into depression, and Keynes later disavowed them. We are told that racism is historically right-wing, when from the Democrat Party and unions in the Southern USA to Nazis and Communists it has been far more a factor in the left.

Unless we wish to succumb to shrill left-wing authoritarianism we must take back our history and take back our language. In order to do so we need to challenge bias in government, education and the media, especially powerful, influential special interest groups like the NUT and the BBC.

Orwell’s Forgotten Predictions

Political Policing

A cross post from My Doubts.

The words ‘politics’ and ‘police’ have the same root, but they have drifted too far from the root and too close to each other. Polis meant a body of citizens or a city state, police protect them and politics represents them.

Now politics has moved away from that body of citizens, as have the police. I have previously made plain my disdain for the idea of hate crime. I don’t think motive should be important unless it mitigates the crime (for example self-defence). Setting apart certain groups as more important victims is not blind justice. Allowing the police and prosecutors to judge motive means they are automatically politicised.

In front of me is a case in point, in a copy of the Operational Directory for Sussex Police. Several parts of the ‘Hate Crimes’ section are politically controversial or likely to encourage misinterpretation.

On racism

“In its more subtle form it is as damaging as in its overt form”

What more subtle form? How does the officer know if he is seeing subtle racism or just inconsiderate and unthinking behaviour? Is an officer going to look to find subtle racism reading that advice? How about if he sees subtle racism when someone reports a crime by a non-white, so the police ignore the crime and go after the victim or witness? I would not have considered that 12 years ago, now it is easy to believe.

“The term ‘racist incident’ must be understood to include both crimes and non-crimes in policing terms. Both must be reported, recorded and investigated with equal commitment”

Why should a non-crime “in police terms” be investigated by police at all? Why should they be investigated when there are not enough resources to investigate all crimes? If they are investigated at all why should they receive equal commitment?

“Incidents where visiting international students are the victims of crime will normally be recorded as racist incidents”

Why? This only goes to show that the way police define hate crime has no rational basis.

So the official guidance from Sussex Police advises that police see the bogeyman of racism and hate wherever possible, and to investigate even if there was no crime. This is advice to harass people for their thoughts and opinions. This is, quite literally, Orwellian. Reporting, recording and investigation of opinion as if we have no freedom of conscience is making political issues an offence.

Update: I spoke to a friend with police connections. One of the main reasons for identifying crimes against foreign students as racist is so that the files are easy to find from a large number of police reports. Remember that next time you see hate-crime statistics. Many of those are for convenience of categorisation, they are not hate crimes at all.

Funny how I don’t see this as reducing the relevance of my post.

Political Policing

Unemployment........hidden Figures

So the unemployment figures did not quite make the 2.5 million figure just yet.
Still a catastrophic 220K rise

Predictions from the business sectors say top out at 3.5 million.
Not good reading.

Must have been a sigh of relief from No10 now Mandy is back as the mighty 2.5 million was not breeched.

But just look at the figures you dont see and then make your own mind up.

The number of people working in the public sector actually went UP - there were 6.02 million in March, compared to 5.87 million in December. So private sector employment suffered even more than the headline figures suggest.

Also - the number of UK born people in employment fell, year on year, more than the headline - down 625,000 compared to 573,000.

But the rise in youth unemployment appears to have slowed - the number of 18-24 year olds out of work up just 46,000 in the three months to the end of June, to 722,000.

So factor these in and then have a re-think.

Also add a bit of Mervin King in from this morning and well settle down for a long drawn out painful period that is MOST DEFINATELY NOT going to end soon.

Unemployment........hidden Figures

Politics of Envy

I published this on my blog, but had a belated thought that it might be of interest here too.

A good piece by Janet Daley in the Telegraph blogs today had me thinking about the politics of envy, what it means and why it is generally applied to the left, when envy is pretty much universal in humans (and even many animals).

The piece points out that in Labour before New Labour, and in society before Margaret Thatcher, “… self-determination and individual aspiration had to be seen as the exclusive province of the petit bourgeois middle classes”. Libertarianism was, in effect, incompatible with British society before Mrs Thatcher. Since she was voted in on my sixth birthday it is hard for me to have a clear impression, but from what I know I can quite believe it.

So now consider envy. It is, as I have said, a human emotion, not specific to any class or political group. However I can think of three rational responses to envy.

• Work hard to achieve more of what inspires envy
• Demand that you deserve what inspires envy, and it should be given to you
• Prevent the people who are envied from having their enviable benefits

The first is of course one of the driving forces of capitalism. In his book The Armchair Economist (a fascinating book, by the way) Stephen Landsburg suggests quite convincingly that the reason top executives are well paid is not to make them work hard, but to make the rest of the management work hard. Envy of his salary makes people want to achieve his position.

The second and third are both embraced by socialism.

If you are a driver on an underground train your work is not terribly specialised; most people could be trained to do it. Therefore the natural salary is not high. A driver who envies others’ high salaries could work lots of overtime, or work to improve his qualifications and find another job. The socialist worker goes on strike for higher pay. The socialist government takes the benefits from the envied and gives them to the envious.

Finally we come to the connection with my quote from Mrs Daley. If “self-determination and individual aspiration [are] seen as the exclusive province of the petit bourgeois middle classes” then the only way to cope with envy is to prevent self determination, and thwart aspiration. Hence the left-wing attacks on education, the very engine of aspiration, and hence the strong connection between socialism and authoritarianism.

Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, to give him what little he is due, understood that individual aspiration is not exclusive, and Thatcher at least understood that self-determination not class underlies aspiration.

In that way Tony Blair could justify to a limited degree his silly claim to be the heir to Thatcherism. It is in delivery that they part, she largely succeeding, he seeming to mistrust self determination and being prevented by his out-of-date party (as even he acknowledged; the “forces of conservatism'” did not have a capital ‘C’) from actually making anything of this revelation.

That is why the Thatcher years were remarkable for social mobility, and New Labour years for the return of social stagnation. It is in the response to the politics of envy.

Politics of Envy

Keeping The Masses Silent

[Cross-posted from my blog]

Instapundit has a cartoon from the Washington Examiner, which in that one piece of satire justifies the title of the publication.

The left has always tried to silence dissent. That is one aspect of their desire not to listen to anything that does not agree with them, or to learn which has been a bit of a theme on my blog recently, but it is also an aspect of the natural authoritarianism of the left.

If tyranny needs the silence of people of good conscience, how does tyranny gain that foothold? It does so by persuading people that speaking out is not an act of good conscience, it does so by shutting them up. It does so by crying ‘racism’ at every mention of immigration, at every criticism of or satire on a black person, at every arrest of Islamic suspects, or simply as a smear of an opponent. It does so by telling us to think of the children (in that link I am not commenting on the case, but the NSPCC reaction). It does so by saying ‘poverty’, and defining that word as broadly as possible. It does so by talking about workers’ rights, but never allowing rights to employers or customers (even when they are the same people). It does so by accusing opponents of its own flaws (astroturfing in the debate over Obama’s programme of legislation, financial interest in the climate debate).

The left has always tried to silence debate. It has had to more and more because it lost the rational debate; objective evidence of the 20th century is that socialism does not work, and never has.

All Tyranny needs to gain a foothold is that men of good conscience remain silent, so the left has to make sure such men remain silent, or are redefined as not having good conscience.

Keeping The Masses Silent

A Poor Concept of Freedom

I am a libertarian. I believe that unless there is a good reason we should be free. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown fundamentally disagrees with me.

What is freedom of speech? In her piece Alibhai-Brown tries to say that “Freedom of speech is a precious right, fought for in Europe over many centuries … ” yet also that underpinning the laws that prevent direct harm from exercising freedom of speech (libel, official secrets and so on) she claims “… is a general understanding of what would be inappropriate and hateful if expressed in public”. At no time does she say that this has any legal basis, or provide any reason why it should, although the strong implication of the piece is that some people should shut up, and if necessary be made to shut up. The standard left-wing response, shut up!

The true irony is that it appears that one of the first pieces of speech Alibhai-Brown would silence is the bloggers who are criticising her (and this really goes beyond all parody) for writing a hateful message. She wrote of Iraq “… there have been times when I have wanted more chaos, more shocks, more disorder to teach our side a lesson …”, and obviously felt she should have the freedom to write that, yet wishes to curtail others’ freedom to criticise those very nasty words.

As for Peter Tatchell and Poly Toynbee, I suspect the former would be horrified at the idea of restricting free speech and after taking on Mugabe and Putin he can probably be fairly sanguine about a few internet nutters (Tatchell has gradually gained my respect, although I still disagree with him on many things) and Polly Toynbee really does deserve fury. She was lucky Robert Fisk got there first, or she’d be an internet verb.

Finally how can an opinion writer even think the words in her final paragraph “We don't yet have a really effective way of restraining material promoting racism, sexism, violence (except against children), homophobia, and other group hatreds”? Two points, Ms Alibhai-Brown. First that all of those are opinions and beliefs, and all you ever write is opinions and beliefs. Why should others not be allowed to write there own? Second is, what on Earth use is an opinion writer, if not someone who involves herself in debate? Just the kind of debate which is the best way of restraining such material. Any other method simply plays to the strengths of those that hate.

Freedom of speech does not just include the freedom to say what we don’t want to hear. It is that freedom. The freedom to say nice and fluffy things is trivial. It is only when there are people who don’t want something said that such freedom becomes relevant in any way. I don’t think Yasmin Alibhai-Brown can conceive of that freedom.

Hat tip Harry’s Place. A slightly different angle on my blog.

A Poor Concept of Freedom

Honduras

This is a blog about British politics, so I shall be brief, but could I beg a little indulgence to help publicise what is going on in Honduras? EU governments and the USA, siding with Castro, Chavez and the UN are trying to subvert a sovereign country, yet there is almost nothing in the British press. I have a few details and links on my blog. As the left seem to have again thrown a democratic government under the bus for the socialist Cause (again), I thought more of you might like to blog this one.

Thanks.

Honduras