Friday 23 February 2018

The free marketeer demands the freedom to enslave the rest of us

In the aftermath of the Florida school massacre, the National Rifle Association has gone on the attack to defend their right to massacre whoever they want whenever they want. The Chairman of the NRA,Wayne La Pierre, in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee criticised people like me arguing that

“They care more about control, and more of it. Their goal is to eliminate the second amendment and our firearms freedoms so they can eradicate all individual freedoms... They hate the NRA, they hate the second amendment, they hate individual freedom.”

This is a graphic example of someone who doesn't understand the concept of freedom, who believes that being restrained in what you want to do is unfreedom and who blames, as he does later in his speech, socialists, thus demonstrating that he not only completely fails to understand the concept of freedom, but has not a clue what socialism is. You can only understand freedom from the perspective of the human being as a social being, a being who lives in an interactive and interdependent environment. If you cannot accept that then you will never understand human nature and the nature of the human collective experience. The whole individual freedom concept of the human being as an isolated atomistic individual is a nonsense and an impossibility, it postulates a being who does not, nor cannot, exist. He is right about one thing, I hate individual freedom when it is discussed in the manner that Wayne LaPierre discusses it. It is an argument to justify every heinous act, every hate and prejudice so beloved of the racist, the fascist and the would be slaver. They are the arguments we are being bombarded with in this nation by the Brexiteers in their determination to remove all of our rights and freedoms and reduce us to a slave like status. It is the argument of the bully and the authoritarian who refuses to be constrained by norms, morals and ethical behaviour. Such people think that the law is for the little people, that law and order are purely for their convenience and doesn't apply to them.

Let me return to the concept of individual freedom as postulated by Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham. I have probably posted similar to this in the past, but if I have, I will repeat it because it bears repeating, particularly at times such as this. When discussing freedom the waters become muddied as, taken literally, individual freedom is a meaningless concept. Individual freedom is indeed a basic human right, but, as I continually say, has to be seen in the context of the human being as a social animal, in that, one person’s exercise of freedom may require the restriction of another’s, and, in economic terms, one person’s use of scarce resources may mean another person’s lack of resources. That is unavoidable and simply a fact of social life. To discuss the concepts of freedom and rights in an abstract, desocialised way can be a futile exercise, and it is meaningless in the context of the human being as an atomised individual. For example, Hobbes states that:

"Liberty, or freedom, signifies, properly, the absence of opposition; by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion. A freeman is he; that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to do".

That statement looks quite impressive, but what does it actually mean? Am I having my freedom impeded by being physically and/or legally prevented from killing someone if that is what I have a will to do? Clearly this is not what Hobbes intended by his statement, but it serves to highlight just how abstract and ambiguous such a statement is, and unfortunately how it is too often taken in that literal sense, because that is exactly what the NRA in the United States are arguing. If however Hobbes really does mean that freedom is an absence of opposition, he must mean that my freedom is being impeded when I am prevented from murdering someone against my will. Bentham takes Hobbes’s principle further by arguing that “liberty is the silence of the law.” Therefore any law preventing me from murdering someone if that is my will must be restricting my liberty. Indeed Bentham states that “every law is an evil, because every law is a violation of liberty; so that government, I say again, can only choose between evils” (Theories of Legislation). He qualifies this by stating that, if, for example, government passes a law to prevent or punish me for murder, then they must ensure that the events that they seek to prevent are really evil, and such evils are greater than the evil they are about to employ as a means of prevention. According to Bentham’s criteria, preventing a murder, or any other form of crime, is in itself an evil, but it may not be as evil as the actual murder or other crime. If that is the case, then preventing rape or preventing a terrorist blowing up a crowd of shoppers in a city centre must be forms of evil. By that same argument, preventing someone from killing multiple children in a school must also be a form of evil. This a peculiar interpretation of evil, and this philosophical thinking is therefore similar to the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand who argues that altruism is evil – by altruism she means doing anything that may help or assist another if there is no benefit or advantage in it for you. It is this philosophy that is the guiding philosophical thought underpinning neo-liberalism. Another aspect of this way of defining freedom is the position taken by the philosopher Karl Popper, who argues that the state is a necessary evil and must not be allowed to grow greater than is absolutely necessary. What I will argue is that the state is neither good nor evil, but essentially reflects the policies and behaviour of the personnel in charge of it at any given point in history. The state is not a “thing” independent of human activity and behaviour; it is an interdependent set of human institutions, an administrative concept for the regulation and administration of any given political entity. People can be evil and can utilise the agencies of the state for evil purposes, but equally, people can be altruistic and concerned for the welfare of others and can therefore utilise the agencies of the state for good. The state can be large, small, intrusive or liberating; it can be whatever the people directing its activities desire it to be.

That such questions are even asked and have to be challenged in our modern uncivilised world shows the extent of the true disease of British and American society, the spread of greed and selfishness which is the gospel of the free market individual freedom argument. A dominant ideology of aggressive individual selfishness will produce aggressively selfish individuals. If there is any area of public life that displays the benefits of intervention by the state and regulation, it is in health and welfare. If empirical data displays anything, it shows that the major contributions to public health and welfare came, not from the medical profession but from politics, in the form of legislation. The requirements of legislation for the provision of sewage systems, drainage, clean water systems, public toilets, inside toilets, council housing with internal plumbing and baths, the requirement for toilets fitted with ‘s’ bends and other such regulations have done as much and more to remove the causes of disease and illness as any medical measures. Industrial legislation in the form of health and safety legislation, controlling pollution, asbestos, requiring air extraction, limiting exposure to dangerous chemicals and a host of other measures have also contributed to the health and welfare of the population. Legislation limiting hours of work, the provision of school meals and milk, providing factories and schools with canteens, massively benefited the health and welfare of working people and their children. I could go on and on, but hope that this is sufficient to show that such forms of preventative and protective regulations are incalculable in their effectiveness as a provision for public health and welfare. History records such measures, but with little comment on their effects, or little research into their success in combatting disease and raising living standards. In other worlds, real freedom for our peoples came from restrictions on other people's freedoms to do whatever they liked.
What should rouse our anger is that in the UK every one of the measures just discussed have been attacked by the free-marketeers, and if they haven’t been removed or transferred to the private sector they soon will be.

The right are just simply wrong on almost all aspects of the human condition, they do not want to consider any other points of view that may mean they have to consider other people, but they are not only wrong, they are dangerous. They are in power because they appeal to every lowest common denominator in  the human condition. They understand the lowest common denominators in people because that is what they represent, the lowest of the low. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Thursday 22 February 2018

Billy Graham, religion as showbusiness.

I was contemplating the news and the various reports of the death of Billy Graham and thought I would share my thoughts with you. I attended a Billy Graham Rally in the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow when I was twelve years old and it has stayed with me all my life because it marked the beginnings of my disillusion with religion. Rather than inspire me, the experience disturbed me despite (or perhaps because of) my tender age. When I was young I was in the Boys Brigade and I still have the Bible I was given for perfect attendance at Bible School. I also attended the local gospel hall meetings that were held right across the street from where I lived, so I had a very conventional brainwashed Christian upbringing. When I say brainwashed, what I mean is that religions have this very handy and effective trick of convincing you that questioning or doubting is the ultimate sin for which you will be condemned to eternal hellfire, and so you are socialised to accept Christian teaching uncritically and to regard their clergy and people like Billy Graham as good people by definition. That is why so many religious people get away with some of the most heinous behaviour imaginable for so long. 

What I saw at the Billy Graham rally made me suspect that I was being conned by a master con artist, although at twelve years old I could not articulate that way, I just had a feeling that it was wrong, and that the man who was supposed to be a great man leading me into a better way of life was a fraud. My doubts began right from when we arrived at the hall. When we arrived we were greeted by young smiling 'counsellors' who showed us to our seats, to my young mind they were too nice. In the foyer there were merchandising stalls, long before this ever caught on at pop or sporting events. During the rally, Graham was supported by a mass choir who hummed in the background as he was speaking and who raised or lowered the pitch of their backing as the emotions conveyed by his preaching varied. I found this very effective and began concentrating on this aspect of the rally rather than what Graham was actually saying because I found it rather inspiring but also understood that was the object of the exercise. This was accompanied by numerous 'praise the Lords' and 'hallelujahs'. On reflection later I realised that whilst I found it inspiring I also found it rather sinister. At the end of his service Graham had what he called an alter call, in which he invited whoever wished to, to proceed to the front of the stage where they could pledge their lives to the Lord. I was seated near the back of the hall where the 'counsellors' had stationed themselves during the service and when this alter call was issued, I was quite shocked to realise that one of the principal roles of the counsellors was to act as Judas goats and lead the parade to the front of the hall and encourage others in the audience to do the same. I was alerted to this because one of them openly signalled to those closest to me to begin this operation. It was a stage managed performance Hollywood would have been proud of, accompanied by the choir who came on cue with rousing and inspiring songs of praise. I was left with an overwhelming feeling of being manipulated and that the whole experience was empty and rather sinister. Even at the age of twelve I realised that what I was witnessing was a business, religion as a money making enterprise. I was glad to get out of the Kelvin Hall that night, and forever after distrusted Billy Graham and similar evangelicals. It is testament to the effect that this rally had on me that I still remember it quite vividly after all these years.

This is a personal reflection and is not meant to be anything other than that. Perhaps Graham had a positive and uplifting effect on others, and I understand that 'being saved' has literally saved people's lives in circumstances where their lives have been in mortal danger due to things like drugs, alcohol or criminality. If religion works for some people then good for them. My retreat from religion took many more years, largely due to the deep-seated superstition that continuous socialisation produces in the human being, but was mostly driven by my experience with Christians that only confirmed my childhood suspicions of holy men and I finally realised that Christianity is represented by some of the most unscrupulous gangsters and fraudsters on the planet. But it had its genesis (no pun intended) that night at a performance by a con-artist that left a twelve year old boy very suspicious that he had just witnessed a masterpiece in fraud. Christianity is not any worse in this respect from other religions, but it is Christianity that dominates in my culture and pollutes the political, social and economic environment that impacts on me most directly. My doubts were solidified over the years as I came to recognise Graham as a right-wing zealot devoid of a social conscience. He was the first experience I had of the concept that life can be hell on earth due to all those who are trying to make it heaven. You have been warned, don't listen to what people say, watch what they do.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

If the NRA is a terrorist organisation, does that make the 45 a terrorist?

I have just witnessed genuine insanity, genuine unbridled insanity from the 45. He has just crossed the Rubicon. That is not hyperbole. There is no other adequate description for the 45's solution to mass shootings in America's schools. His solution is more guns in schools, to arm the staff, to licence what Americans call concealed carry's. He wants teachers to be responsible for the physical safety of the pupils in a situation where they are faced with a committed serial killer. But why stop at teachers, why not arm the administrative staff, the cleaners indeed all the adults employed in America's schools and make them responsible for the safety and security of the children thus absolving the political class for their most fundamental responsibility, the safety and security of the body politic. Such sentiments may not seem outlandish to an American audience completely socialised within a gun culture, but to people like me, raised in a European environment, indeed in a nation where the police are not even armed, it is quite insane, there are no other words to describe it. It is completely alien and indeed uncivilised.

This raises a scenario where American schools may well be turned into the modern equivalent of the Alamo or the OK Corral in the event of any further atrocities. This is an idea that has been proposed by numerous Republicans but it has been publicly endorsed by the 45, thus taking the office of the most prominent political person on the planet, not into the gutter, but right down into the sewer. He has demonstrated that he is not remotely interested in any meaningful solutions to this form of atrocity that involves any restrictions that will impact on his paymasters, the only obvious and effective solutions available. I was reminded of Bob Dylan's line "Nurse, get your pad, the boy's insane" You can only draw one sensible conclusion, the 45 and the entire Republican Party in the USA are utterly indifferent to the safety and welfare of America's children, indeed the safety and welfare of the general population, and that their only concern is profits and the money the National Rifle Association channel into their personal bank accounts. Their mindset is genuine madness. The most sensible thing I have heard all week is when one of the survivors of the Florida shooting called the National Rifle Association a terrorist organisation, because, as I said in a recent post, such events are examples of terrorism. To my European way of thinking, there is only one solution to America's deadly disease, you must amend the Constitution, because no amount of tinkering around the edges is going to relieve this situation, only a mass purge of gun ownership will address the problem. The solution is both political and legal, but above all, it is a moral issue. The Second Amendment has assumed a kind of religious significance, as if gun ownership and the 'freedom' to bear and carry arms has been borrowed from the ten commandments. This is a perfect example of how that kind of freedom impacts on other people, in this case taking away their freedom to walk the streets or go to school safely. The right to bear and carry arms in America impacts directly on other people's right to life. 

Since 1968 there have been 1,516,863 gun-related deaths on US territory. Since 1775, there have been 1,396,733 war deaths. That figure includes American lives lost in the revolutionary war, the Mexican war, the civil war (Union and Confederate, estimate), the Spanish-American war, the first world war, the second world war, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the Gulf war, the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, as well as other conflicts, including in Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia and Haiti. So, just since 1968 more Americans have been killed because of their obsession with guns that in all wars that Americans have been engaged in since it began its struggle for independence. That genuinely beggars belief and raises the question of what would the true figure be if we were able to calculate how many have actually died since, say, 1868, or even 1768?  What is worse is that no-one seems to care unless they themselves suffer personal tragedy. I hope this is a watershed in American life, but listening to Republican legislators and those appalling creatures who speak for the NRA, I will not hold my breath. Such people genuinely care more for their guns than the lives of their children and when you vote for people like that then you had better brace yourself for the next slaughter. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Monday 19 February 2018

You cannot shame the shameless, people devoid of an ethical centre

In the past two days I have listened to media commentators describing the 45 as demented and deranged. I read a post from a survivor of the Florida shooting calling the 45 a f.....g piece of s..t. This is how the American public are beginning to describe their president, the head of state. He is widely viewed by the rest of the world as quite insane but more importantly as rude, ill-mannered, a bully, a racist and a misogynist and is widely described as a man-baby subject to temper tantrums. That is some indictment, particularly of the holder of the most powerful office on the planet. All of these people cannot be wrong. I wrote here a long time ago that his ego and narcissism are a deep seated illness and his antics demonstrate that on a daily basis. But at least there are signs that America's youth, their future voters, are no longer prepared to tolerate his behaviour or support him.

The recent shootings in Florida have unearthed many of the issues I raised here last time on the concepts of freedom. I have rarely heard such genuinely demented arguments as from those who have attempted to defend the freedom to bear and carry arms and from spokespersons from the National Rifle Association, arguments that are so irrational they border on the insane. I wrote here that I was contemplating introducing a new category for political analysis, the politics of shamelessness, and then listened to the Florida students calling 'shame on you' at all the supporters of the gun lobby. I was heartened by their bravery, a quality completely absent from their parents, and from their refusal to be influenced by the perverted propaganda of the American pigsty, but was sadly struck by the realisation that they were voices in the wilderness because the people they are calling out to are incapable of shame, they are truly shameless. You cannot shame anyone who has no moral compass, who is totally selfish, devoid of dignity or self-respect, and who are in office with the sole purpose of promoting their own personal wealth and power. Such people have successfully purged themselves of all moral and ethical inner voices, that human capacity Adam Smith called 'the impartial spectator' who speaks to us on a moral and ethical level. They are sociopaths, with many accurately described as psychopaths, a description levelled at the 45 by a Democratic senator. 

The British Prime Minister falls into such a category. She was actually asked on television yesterday how long she thought she could hold on to office and if she was not constantly on alert for the possibility of being stabbed in the back, and she just sat and smiled. Unlike the 45 she at least appears to be aware of just how incompetent and useless she is, but has the satisfaction of knowing that all of her immediate competitors are actually worse. Any person with a modicum of self-respect would retreat in shame from such a public persona, but the 45 and May do not possess the capacity for shame.

But the real culprits are the American and British electorates. If anyone should be ashamed it is the people who voted for the 45 and the Tories, the people who voted Brexit. I am amused by the lather being generated about the Russian interference in both our nations, because, obviously the British and Americans would never dream of interfering in another nation's affairs, or attempting to influence the outcome of their elections. What we should be ashamed of is being so ignorant and ill-informed that we would take any notice of Russian inspired propaganda, that we would believe the nonsense they promoted. No use blaming the Russians, we are our own worst enemies, because the Russians are not half as bad or corrupt as the Daily Mail, the Express, Conservative Home Office, Fox News etc. It was they who picked up the Russian messages and ran with them, who delighted in the 'fake news' and promoted it with a vengeance. If the Russians told lies, they were not half as bad, or half as effective as the lies spewed out by The Spider or Nigel Garbage and the rest of that loathsome sociopathic set. I just regret that the Russians didn't do enough to influence the Scottish Independence referendum and decouple us from Westminster. If our politicians and media were honest and robust enough, no amount of propaganda from anywhere would be effective enough to do the damage that the Russians are accused of. If the Russians did indeed influence our respective democracies then the fault lies, not with the Russians, but with our own societies and their national institutions that have become so venal and corrupt, and so disconnected to their own populations, that our respective peoples are ready to believe just about anything. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat 


Thursday 15 February 2018

I fear Americans value their guns higher than the lives of their children

One of the persistent themes of this blog is that you get what you vote for. Another is that we are characterised and known by our fruits. What we do is far more revealing than what we say. That is the empirical approach, we are a reflection of our experiences, both individually and collectively, they both define us and reflect who we are as individuals and societies. Yesterday was the 14th of February, Valentine's Day, and we witnessed what was obviously an attempt to replicate the original St Valentines Day massacre, the eighteenth shooting in an American school this year - that's eighteen shootings in six weeks involving children, on average one every sixty hours. Eight of those shootings involved injury or death. In the case of mass shootings such as that in Florida, those teachers and children targeted will mostly be complete strangers to the perpetrators of these atrocities, people who have an unlimited, unrestricted and unregulated access to guns, the wet dream of every free marketeer. If what occurred is not a definition of terror, a deliberate attempt by an extravagantly armed person to murder as many unarmed people as possible, for no particular motive other than a desire to kill, then I no longer understand the English language, but the American authorities refuse to relate such activity to terrorist motivations. Terrorism only applies to foreigners, particularly those from Islamic countries. According to this mindset, conditions do not exist in the US to foster terrorism, it is a foreign import. It could be the British Tory Party that is speaking, the racist xenophobic mentality is exactly the same. As with the 45 and the Republicans, they are incapable of accepting that the conditions that lead to such things are home grown, fostered by their policies and rhetoric. I watched a report on CNN recently that highlighted that the US Department of Homeland Security published figures that show that 73% of all such terroristic events in the USA since the election of the 45 have been carried out by those who are characterised as white supremists. These events are never categorised are terrorist activities, they are normally passed off as lone wolf vigilantes with mental health disorders, exactly the explanation forwarded by the 45 once again on this occasion, indeed the 45 has a tendency to defend white supremists by persistently demonising other groups and painting the white supremists as victims, as he said, there are good people on both sides. Those poor white supremists are just good old boy patriots who are draining the swamp in their own inimitable way.

I have come to the conclusion that we need a new political category for analysis, the politics of shamelessness. In any civilised nation were such a thing to happen the authorities would immediately seek to prevent such an occurrence ever happening again, but American authorities resolutely refuse to impose any regulation on the sale or control of firearms, indeed, whilst they appear on television crying their crocodile tears for the victims of atrocities the 45 and his Republican Party are reportedly seeking to actually loosen the extremely liberal restrictions already in place and actually want to make it easier to carry concealed weapons across state lines. Thus we can logically conclude that they do not in fact give a damn about those who have been gunned down so callously. They have no shame. We had an incident like that in Dunblane in Scotland, fortunately we have never had another because public opinion forced the Tory government to take measures against gun ownership. I recall the 45 promising the NRA that he would oppose any limits on gun ownership during his campaign for the presidency. American politicians are indeed shameless as they watch the frequent shooting of their constituents children whilst promoting the expansion of the weapons they are being shot with.

One of the underlying causes of this situation is the perverted philosophy of individualism that flourishes in the United States and was enthusiastically embraced by the Blessed Margaret and her disciples. This false concept then leads to a perverted understanding of the concept of freedom, because the notion of the freedom of the individual cannot be properly understood without an understanding of the individual as a social animal. If you base your policy agenda on the false hypothesis of an atomised individual then you must produce a flawed policy because it is predicated on a false conclusion. As I have repeatedly noted in my blog, the notion of the atomised individual is a fiction, indeed an impossibility. For example, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes states that: "Liberty, or freedom, signifies, properly, the absence of opposition; by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion. A freeman is he; that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to do." That is simply wrong. This false concept was then expanded by Jeremy Bentham who took Hobbes’s principle further by arguing that “liberty is the silence of the law.” Indeed Bentham states that “every law is an evil, because every law is a violation of liberty; so that government, I say again, can only choose between evils”

This is a call for unlimited and unrestricted liberty which makes no sense at all. Freedom is not an unlimited resource as your exercise of freedom must almost certainly be at the expense on another's freedom. This is an argument that is far too complex for a blog such as this. However, if anyone wishes to have me explain my approach to freedom I will happily email you it if you simply contact me on doktorkommirat@gmail.com. It beggars belief that American society can allow the present system relating to guns and their lack of regulation to continue. However, I have been hearing people saying that all of my adult life, and nothing ever changes except that it gets worse. If the Tories could get away with it we would have the same situation in this sorry nation, so I am not claiming any form of moral high ground here. Thatcher and Reagan's dreams of effectively destroying their respective societies are coming to fruition, you have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat


Tuesday 13 February 2018

You cannot live on your pension? You voted for it!

I have persistently warned that the long-term goal of the Tory Party is to reduce the British working class people to a state of slavish dependence, under which conditions they will gratefully accept whatever crumbs the ruling class see fit to offer them. Their latest salvo in this never-ending war against their own people is to claim that the pension system in modern Britain, the seventh largest economy in the world, is unaffordable. They argue that the nation cannot afford to keep the present system of old age pension provision, with the Government Actuary, Martin Clarke, warning that the pensions bill “is unsustainable in the long term without persistent support from Treasury grants”. All my life, people in this country accessed their pension at age 65, but the Tories have now raised that to 70 for all those people in Britain who are under 30 at this time. A pension's expert, Malcolm Mclean, of retirement specialists Barnett Waddingham, said: “It wouldn’t surprise me to see the age go up to 70 before 2050 and conceivably reach 80 or even 85 by the end of the century.”

As I warn you, the free marketeers are determined to destroy all our traditional norms and values and since the advent of the Blessed Margaret they have been remarkably successful in this endeavour. It was a traditional norm in this country that people enjoyed full-time permanent employment with most employees qualifying for a final salary-type pension to supplement a low state pension, whilst the state pension itself was traditionally boosted for employees by an earnings related part. This was to avoid pensioners being trapped in poverty on retirement. That has all but vanished. The situation today is revealed by the same figures that support the claims that the current pension provision is unsustainable. These figures reveal that Britain has the worst pension provisions in the developed world. Workers on an average of £26,500 per annum receive a pension of 29% of that in their state pension, and, those who are privy to government thinking on pensions warn us that we may have to wait until we're 85 to get that in future. The Dutch presently receive 100% of their retirement salary in their pension and even Chile, Poland and Mexico pay better equivalent state pensions than the UK. I wonder what all those pensioners and working class racists approaching pension age who voted Brexit will do after Brexit when the Tories sell off the NHS to the private sector and they have to purchase American style health insurance which they will never be able to afford? I await with interest. 

I wonder if there is an equivalent ignorant, ill-informed and stupid electorate anywhere else in the world who persistently vote against their own interests in the way the majority British do? Pensions are not a gift or a benefit, they are a right. In a money economy where you are prohibited from purchasing land either by law or financial circumstances, you are dependent on working for your income and your means of survival. If you are then legally prohibited from working once you reach a certain age and removed from that money economy by what is an artificial and arbitrary means, then those who have designed the system that produces such circumstances must make adequate provision for you. In Britain working people have a sum of money deducted from their wages and salaries to pay for any future health and social security needs, thus, you do not get health and welfare for free as the Tories persistently tell the rest of the world. It is prepaid for by what are known as deferred wages. As I have told you before, for the bulk of my working life I paid 35 pence in the pound in income tax on top of another circa 30% of my wages on national insurance payments. If our pension provision is in such dire straits, then it is the result of deliberate Tory policy, which is? To reduce the working class to a state of modern slavery! Again I warn you that the real motivation behind Brexit is the complete removal of rights, particularly employment rights, but also social security rights. These are human rights and why the Tories are so desperate to remove us from the protection of the European Courts of Human Rights and Justice. This is what they mean by sovereignty, by taking back control. Once again I remind you, by their fruits shall ye know them. There is no pensions crisis, it is an artificially created crisis, an accountancy fraud. It is the same with the NHS and the welfare crisis. The money exists, but the will does not. This is the free market agenda, the legacy of the Blessed Margaret, strangle all wealth and improvement at the bottom so you can transfer it to the top. Just keep giving them Royal weddings and births, bread and circuses, and they will thank you for their poverty and slavery. Never underestimate the hatred and contempt that the Royals, the aristocracy and the Tories harbour for the lower orders and their determination to reduce you to total dependency. Britons never never ever shall be slaves, aye, that will be chocolate. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat 




Friday 9 February 2018

Sane stable governance is becoming a thing of the past

There can no longer be any doubt in anyone's mind as to the utter incompetence of the British government. There can no longer be any doubt in anyone's mind as to the utter insanity of the American.

Article 50 was triggered by the British government on 29th March last year. This week, over ten months after triggering Article 50, the British Prime Minister convened what she herself termed a 'war cabinet' in order to establish what their opening position would be with respect to Britain's relationship with the EU following our withdrawal from the European Union on March 29th 2019. Think about that, over ten months after officially posting their intention to leave the EU, a process that allows them only two years to negotiate their withdrawal, they have yet to actually decide on what it is they want. If that is not Olympic gold medal incompetence and stupidity, then someone will need to explain it to me. I personally think it is wonderful. Only the utter chaos and economic disaster that must surely follow this insane moment in our history will bring home to the racist majority in this country the realisation of the consequences of their mindless hatred. Another quite delicious irony is that the government's own research has revealed that the worst effected areas in the country are all those with the largest Brexit votes. The North East, which encompasses areas such as Newcastle, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Durham etc. are estimated to see their economy shrink by an average 16%. Only this week, the government minister responsible for our future trading relations following Brexit, Greg Hands, was asked by Andrew Neil on one of Britain’s major political programmes if Britain sought to be in or out of the customs union after Brexit and he could not answer. They have still to decide on something so completely fundamental as that, you genuinely could not make this up. Things are so bad that the Tories are now genuinely considering Jacob Rees Mogg, a man who thinks that Hitler was a dangerous lefty, as a potential Prime Minister. We may soon have our own 45.

However, this insane position is also reflected in the Labour Party who have also yet to establish a position on our future relations with the EU. This is the nature and quality of the British political class. It is genuinely frightening, or would be if we Scots did not have the option to leave this racist shambolic disaster. It is of course in marked contrast to the situation in Scotland the only area of the country to retain a modicum of sanity and civilisation. It is incompetence such as this that cost the Labour Party negative 9% in the constituency vote and negative 7% in the regional vote in the last Scottish elections. The unionist vote in Scotland went almost exclusively to the Tories. That is a reflection of the contempt with which the Scots view Labour, that they could vote for a party that only a few years ago had no MPs in Scotland before they will vote Labour. The Scots voted by a 62% majority to remain within the EU, which was higher than the highest leave vote in the rest of the country which was 59% in the West Midlands (the Birmingham area, which is also predicted to suffer heavily following Brexit). Just yesterday the Japanese warned the British government that their industries will leave Britain if they cannot guarantee access to the EU single market and the customs union, and just this week, the atrocious Theresa May refused point blank in the Commons to rule out selling the NHS off to American health care firms. If you follow British politics you will know that I am not exaggerating when I tell you that the Tories have not one coherent policy on any substantive area such as health, education, housing etc. It genuinely beggars belief that any government could be so useless. 

As far as the 45 is concerned there is something seriously wrong with someone who can only be associated with success, greatness, who is incapable of being wrong or saying sorry. After attending a military parade he has become obsessed with organising the 'greatest' military parade ever, motivating people who know him to label him a despot with pretensions of dictatorship (what I have been warning you about since he first became a candidate). Everything the 45 does is great, huge, beautiful. Everybody who works for him does a great job, until he fires them. Every policy he comes up with is the greatest ever, the biggest, the most successful etc. etc. He is single-handedly demolishing the American system of government and shredding the constitution because, like all free market neoliberals, he will not tolerate constraints on his freedom of action. He is being enthusiastically supported by the Republicans and the God-fearing Christian community who find it quite acceptable to go to church, sing hymns, pray and justify pathological lying, racism, sexism and fascism. For the American Christian, love thy neighbour appears to be restricted to white fourth and fifth generation American born Anglo-Saxons. In both our nations time is running out for democracy and human rights. The causes are to be found in our ruling elites. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat 




Monday 5 February 2018

Now would be a good time to listen to the real Adam Smith

I trust you will indulge me if I ask you to once again consider the words of Adam Smith

"Society, however, cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another. The moment that injury begins, the moment that mutual resentment and animosity take place, all the bands of it are broke asunder, and the different members of which it consisted are, as it were, dissipated and scattered abroad by the violence and opposition of their discordant affections. If there is any society amongst robbers and murderers, they must at least, according to the trite observation, abstain from robbing and murdering one another."

There is a very powerful society of robbers and murderers in both the UK and the USA that has developed efficiently and powerfully since Smith's day, the political class. They have their own respective meeting places, in the UK it is called Parliament and in the US it is called The White House and Congress. A close federation has developed historically between the two parcels of rogues that traditionally looks after each other's interests in addition to their own. However at this moment in our respective histories a radical movement within each society of robbers and murderers has emerged that have decided to begin robbing and murdering each other. In the UK this movement is known as the Brexiteers and in the US it is known as the 45 and his supporters in the Republican Party. I will refer to both groups as Tories for convenience given that a Tory was the Irish term for a robber or brigand and was the label attached to those Americans loyal to the British monarchy during the War of Independence, in short, in both our societies they continually work against the interests of the people and in favour of a very narrow sectional and class interest. Indeed they are deliberately working against the interests of their own respective parties. What we are witnessing in both our nations is a perilous division being deliberately fostered and manipulated by those Tories who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another for their own personal interests irrespective of the damage that is being, and will continue to be, done to the rest of society. 

In both Britain and the US our nations are riven with mutual resentment and animosity, and the peculiar phenomenon we are witnessing is that this is largely taking place within the Tory orbit of influence in both countries and the radical elements within the Tory group in both nations are quite deliberately and systematically breaking asunder the bands and different members that hold our respective societies together in peace and stability. Their attitudes have percolated down throughout each society as both factions systematically attack the norms, values, legal systems and institutions of society. In both societies they relentlessly attack those who disagree with them. Today we had the 45 calling the Democratic Party treasonous in the same week he called the FBI and the Department of Justice scandalous and a disgrace. In order to save his own skin from future public accountability he is destroying the fabric of American society. If this continues America must inevitably face either a dictatorship or very ugly civil unrest.

In Britain Brexiteers have attacked the judiciary calling them the enemies of the people, attacked the medical and legal professions, the BBC and all media outlets that call for proper scrutiny of the Brexit process. They have stimulated hatred and division with one Labour MP being shot and stabbed to death and others telling us they wish to kill prominent public figures like Jeremy Corbyn and Sadiq Khan as I reported to you recently. We have a right-wing media in both societies that are now, in my opinion, openly fascist, with the standard bearers being Fox news and the Daily Mail. I ask you to heed the words of Adam Smith - society cannot subsist in such conditions. Both America and Britain are in great peril because of the behaviour of the political elite. They are out of control and in open warfare, amongst themselves, and with the rest of society who disagree with them. At the apex of both our societies we have a collection of lunatics, incompetents, pathological liars, and serious psychopaths driven by a poisonous ideology who are determined to get their own way irrespective of whatever constraints that society, legal processes, constitutional norms and values or public opinion, stand in their way, and they will say and do anything to succeed. This is the lasting legacy of Thatcher and Reagan, of Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek and Ayn Rand. It is the end product of political and economic free market neoliberalism that demands unregulated and unrestricted freedom of action for the economic and political elite. Brexit and the 45 will destroy both our societies unless we say that enough is enough. I will leave you with words of Adam Smith I have used here before, but they are taking on a frightening significance in today's world 

"the great never look upon their inferiors as their fellow-creatures.........Society may subsist, though not in the most comfortable state, without beneficence, but the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy it. Justice is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice. If it is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society, that fabric which to raise and support seems in this world, if I may say so, to have been the peculiar and darling care of nature, must in a moment crumble into atoms."

We live in a world today that is profoundly unjust, but a world where the elite and their lackeys continually glorify injustice and continually tell us that it is actually a good thing. The removal of justice today is deliberate and systematic and it is a brave or foolish soul who would doubt that the fabric of human society is not beginning to seriously fray at the edges in both nations. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Thursday 1 February 2018

Never take democracy for granted

I don’t wish to appear overly dramatic but I have a lurking suspicion that if we in Britain, but more pertinently the American public, are not careful, both nations could quite speedily find themselves in a form of dictatorship. It is not so pressing in Britain, the threat is there, but in the US it could be quite imminent. In both the USA and Britain we are witnessing hard right politicians deliberately waging open war against their own state and civil service because what the civil servants are saying is opposed to the government narrative. Does this not strike you as eerily familiar? The 45 and its supporters in Congress have declared open warfare on the FBI and the Department of Justice, that is, against the very people appointed by the 45 itself, but more importantly, against the very institutions tasked with guarding and upholding the rule of law. Both the Republican Party and the hard right Brexiteers in Britain are now openly ignoring and indeed flaunting, the norms and values, customs and practices that bind the political and governmental systems of our respective nations. They are deliberately refusing to exercise the self-control necessary for efficient governance and refusing to accept the institutional controls imposed by their own political systems and are therefore, in effect, out of control. There will be one narrative and that narrative will be accepted as the truth, regardless of its reality. The Republican position is that the 45 must be protected and saved, even from his own stupidity, and if necessary, criminality, for their own self-interest, regardless of the effects on America and its people. Opposition must be, and will be, discredited and demonised. It is only a question of time until all opposition is forcibly suppressed. In both our nations it is therefore incumbent on the electorate to enforce control and to exercise our democratic rights and imperatives to demand that the political class respect the oaths of office they so mendaciously swore to on election.

There is a similar trend developing in Britain, although it is, as yet, only in its infancy. I warned you some time ago about the sinister creature that is Jacob Rees Mogg. He has taken on the mantle in this country assumed by Devin Nunes in the US in being prepared to say anything necessary to discredit any facts, evidence or personnel who have the temerity to challenge their narrative, regardless of how accurate or honest such facts, evidence or personnel are. In Britain, Mogg raised a conspiracy theory in Parliament by which he claimed that civil servants may be secretly distorting evidence to “influence” the Government to stay in the EU customs union. He planted a question in the Commons to the Brexit minister Steven Baker who claimed that the head of The Centre for European Reform, Charles Grant, told him that “officials in the Treasury have deliberately developed a model to show that all options other than staying in the customs union were bad and that officials intended to use this to influence policy”. In other words, Mogg was openly accusing the civil service of conspiracy and Baker was happy to support this position. This was immediately flatly denied by Charles Grant and his version was supported by another Tory MP Antoinette Sandbach, who had also been at the meeting where Baker alleged this had been said. Thus, the right-wings in both Britain and the USA have abandoned any pretence at veracity and have adopted the Goebbels strategy that if you are going to tell a lie, tell a big one and tell it often.

The method and practice of the right in Britain are having a very disturbing effect and it is escalating. They have abandoned any pretence at morality and ethical behaviour and this is percolating down into society with like-minded right-wingers being emboldened and becoming more active. Today a jury took less than an hour to convict Darren Osborne of murder after he drove a van into a group of Muslims outside the Finsbury Park mosque. His defence would be amusing were it not so shocking in that he claimed that he was not guilty, that it was someone else who was driving as his mission was to kill the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. The Finsbury Park attack followed the assassination of the Labour MP Jo Cox in June 2016 by Thomas Mair, a rightwing extremist, who shot Ms Cox three times before stabbing her fifteen times, all the while shouting “This is for Britain”, “keep Britain independent”, and “Britain first” The British press reported that prosecutors acknowledge privately that the febrile atmosphere in which the EU referendum campaign was waged appears certain to have contributed to Mair’s decision to murder his MP, but this played no part in their case. There was no need to refer to the referendum in order to establish his guilt and so it was left to people like the Kommirat to make this known to you.

All the British press, even the Daily Heil, who are more than anyone responsible for inflaming hatred and violence are reporting an alarming rise in hate crimes. Antisemitism hate crimes are escalating rapidly. The Heil is of course openly fascist and literally hate everyone, but they are now openly dangerous. We are seeing the result of the lies and propaganda of the EU referendum and the hatred and demonization of foreigners, immigrants, Muslims and Jews fostered by Farage, the right-wing of the Tory Party, the Mail, Express etc. Today we had the 45 at it again as he claimed that his State of the Union address was watched by “the highest number in history” despite the fact that it was nowhere near that. It takes a special kind of mentality to make public claims like that knowing that they are barefaced lies that can be discredited almost immediately. What is worse is that people know that he is a pathological liar, a bully, a racist and a misogynist, but still support him and vote for him. We have the same phenomenon in this midden with The Spider and his cohorts, who everyone now concedes what I told you years ago, that he is an imbecile, who, rather than being ‘very intelligent’ is a blowhard who knows very little. I end by reminding you that the health and stability of states and political communities are dependent on justice and a respect for the laws, norms and values of the political and social system. In our two societies, it is the personnel we have elected to guard and protect those norms and values that are wilfully destroying them. You get what you vote for. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat