Een leven zonder schulden en schuldeisers…

I think I’ll go on a course about working this stuff.

I do not think I recognise Pickled Politics as the place you make it out to be with this comment:

“Now frankly – when your major vehicle is that of a blog which invites debate, the fact that every opposing view is greeted with ridicule is rather indicative that you’d rather be seen as the asian equivalent of LGF than foster real debate.”

There seem to be a wide range of people who post here without compromising their views to the party line. And they don’t get ridiculed. I wouldn’t comment here if debate was as uncompromising as it can be on some other political web sites, not to say we don’t have good rows. Or fall outs. But there is a real sense of community about it all.

It is also quite amusing how threads can go completely off topic and yet be pulled back without the whip hand of moderation, usually. (My: how the hell do you get an acute above a letter, and everyone missing the whole point of my post, but helpful, funny and friendly) It is an interesting thing that this site is as popular is it seems to be, which is a good thing. There are a lot of very bright people posting in the threads here. They wouldn’t do it if they either didn’t think they’d get read or that the site didn’t foster debate. Sunny started off the debate on NGN here. Whether you agree with it or not, I can see contributions from commentators on here to it. That is internet democracy at work.

[ testing for El Cid, if it's not maybe it's ]

Re post 98,

“We,” basically, are the ones who get shafted. It is our culture, our language and religious heritage, our aesthetics and iconography that get slowly but surely eroded.

I’m quite sure i’ve said this on more than one occasion, but talking about ‘culture’ as a function of society over any period of time only makes sense if you apply it to law.

The way of life you wish to preserve you preserve through statute. Any other talk of culture with respect to society is meaningless rhetoric. The government asking people to ‘integrate’ makes no sense beyond asking them to respect the law.

Unless ‘they’ are preventing you from practising your ‘religious heritage’(!), speaking in whatever language you wish or displaying your aesthetics and your iconography nothing has been eroded.

The BNP would deport those it considers unworthy just as labour, the tories and the lib dems would.

The most disturbing thing about these witch-hunts (and that is all they are) is the utter cynicism with which Labour and the Tories treat their own voters. The BNP is held up as the evil party and grave pronouncements are made about the working class turning to them if their own policies aren’t made stricter, harsher and more irrational.

It says something about character and integrity if you continually need to whip (but subtly ape) a political party that has never remotely looked like coming to power, on the off chance the people who voted you in may turn to them.

The British National Party probably don’t think much of me, regardless i neither fear nor hate them. If anything they should, at least, be applauded for attempting to move their movement on from thugish violence.

Despite the problems they face i don’t think the working class will ever vote in a quasi-socialist statist party, and i find it incredibly patronising that anyone would think they would – especially members of parliment elected by them.

Obviously as the decendant of immigrants im concerned that Simone Clarke feels as she does, but i take no joy from what must be a very very difficult time for her and her family. I wish her well.

There is such a thing as giving one’s enemy further ammunition due to one’s own actions, Anas. Especially if other party opportunistically uses it to say “See, what did I tell you ?”.

Good question. This is, fortunately, an extreme example. But it does illustrate a common deformity of patriotism – love for one’s own country can turn into hatred of other people’s skin colour. I was recently rereading one of my favourite books, The Four Loves, by C.S. Lewis. Lewis discusses patriotism in his chapter on affection, the love of the familiar just for being familiar. Affection is the humblest form of love: you feel it for your dog, your nextdoor neighbour, your home, just because they are yours, not because they are particularly excellent. You are apt to feel affection without realizing it; it sneaks up on you over time and grows gradually.

My own view is that people are naturally patriotic. It’s normal to love your homeland. You almost can’t help it, in the same way you almost can’t help loving your family. And you become more aware of it with loss or separation. Furthermore, you can love your homeland without excluding those of dark complexion. Over many years, they become part of your extended family. Many perfectly patriotic Britons find Griffin himself loathsome, disgusting, and shameful. It is because we love our country so much that we hate having him symbolize it to the nation. Some people feel the same way about Tony Blair.

Culture is intrinsically valuable. It matters to a great many people. I’d rather be poor and live in a safe, familiar, and predictable environment than be rich and live in some fluctuating, multicultural ghetto.

Amir

That is not really fair, Amir. Why are you excluding racists? If someone believes that blacks and asians are not part of his people, why shouldn’t he, like you, smugly say that these outsiders are infringing on his god-given right to be with his own?

Go fuck myself and my mother

That’s something I don’t hear very often

Look at us, all limiting our own freedoms

Sounds pretty damn free to me.

By that definition most of the people in jails are free.

Viciousness??? You are a delicate little flower aren’t you?

YOU say…

“I ridicule views where I find them not worth responding to, and reply carefully and in detail where I disagree with a viewpoint that is opposing and valid.”

A vast majority of the UK say…

“The people of Britain face mass immigration on an unprecedented scale. Local demography is changing faster than at any time since the Norman conquest. The cultural heritage of the nation is forced to a sideline in the name of hospitality and political correctness. People on an already over-crowded island find even more competition for services, housing and space. The working class is undermined by cheap foreign labour. And, to top it all off, many of the recent crime waves have direct links to mass immigration.”

*audience groans*

Sorry Mr. Hundal but you’re WRONG.

You’re constructing a straw-man and then asking me to show examples of where I have taken it down. I ridicule views where I find them not worth responding to, and reply carefully and in detail where I disagree with a viewpoint that is opposing and valid. If I did what you said all the time there would be no semblance of debate on this blog in the first place.

(1) “I think Amir is wrong on a lot of things.”

Don’t be silly.

(2) “…you’d rather be seen as the asian equivalent of LGF [Little Green Footballs] than foster real debate.”

The interesting thing here is that the pro-immigration lobby can’t make their case with rational, impersonal argument. They feel compelled to adopt a tone of haughty scorn, making irrelevant ad hominem charges against large numbers of people they have never even met. Without these tactics, they seem to have no way to defend their position.

If freedom means anything, it means the natural right to live amongst your own people (“own,” by the way, should not be interpreted to mean “white people” – to forestall any misunderstanding). This is precisely what mass immigration denies. The cultural Marxism known as “political correctness” assures us that we’re all the same, wanting the same material things, sharing warm feelings toward one another, united by consumerist optimism far more than we could ever be divided by faith, culture or ethnicity. “Diversity,” they told us, would unite the best from all cultures, while the worst would magically vanish.

At a time when it was still unfashionable to question let alone criticize the multicultural orthodoxy, I knew that this Utopian dream was at best an undergraduate fantasy. My conservatism was never passive, you see. It has always been a frantic activity, like rescuing possessions from a burning house. In a world of constant demographic fluctuation, most things are always perishing, and you have to decide what’s worth saving. Edmund Burke, for example, stressed such principles as prudence, tradition, and a sense of limits, as opposed to utopian hopes for perfect political arrangements on earth. Culture, he believed, was more important than economics. Culture is what keeps us relatively sane. It is what keeps us united on more or less the same wavelength.

I don’t care what Chris Dillow thinks. Culture trumps economics.

Amir

I said until recently. Do you want me to start mentioning Enoch Powell? Oh I forgot, he’s your hero.

History is rather incomplete if we ignore the minor fact that Enoch Powell was actually sacked for making the ‘rivers of blood’ speech, but do go on ..

The rest of your diatribe is typical. I have friends within the Conservatives and they accept its past and some current racist elements. Its time you did too.

Yes, And the Conservatives racism takes on the particularly insiduous form of ‘people like us’ versus ‘people like you’ which is all the more poisonous for being couched in apparent politeness (the ham sandwich test – as it were).

However, let’s be clear; where is the BNP doing well? Not in the Aylesbury constituency of the reprehensible John Bercow (he of the Federation of Conservative Students – I’m sure you recall the ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ T-shirts) – but in constituencies where Labour has typically done rather well. The ‘policies’ that the BNP espouse are typically rather statist and welfare driven – rather than whigish or right wing in the market fundamentalist or classical liberal sense.

I think Amir is wrong on a lot of things. However, I do think that Britain is (still) a (very) class driven society, and a significant number of the former working-class, having been disenfranchised by the start of globalism, are willing to leap upon any scapegoat to which can be transferred the sins of globalisation. Any commentary about the BNP has to take this into account – as it does organised labour’s (small ‘l’) long ambivalence to the notion of migration.

Now frankly – when your major vehicle is that of a blog which invites debate, the fact that every opposing view is greeted with ridicule is rather indicative that you’d rather be seen as the asian equivalent of LGF than foster real debate. You could, of course, disabuse me of this notion by naming one person here who you respect even if their views are different to your own.