Meet Melanie Philips, Homophobe and Primitivist

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1356699/David-Cameron-Tory-Prime-Minister-upholding-traditional-morality-bigotry.html

Another week passes, another lozenge of barely congealed crud emerges from the mind of Melanie Philips, traditionalist extraordinaire and enemy of social progress. When I think of her spiteful missives arriving at Daily Mail HQ, I think of the beginning of Jurassic Park, when the velociraptor is delivered to the compound and a poor hard-hat wearing sap gets eviscerated as Bob Peck shouts, “Shoot her! Shoot her!”

This time, she’s attacking the perfectly reasonable demand that gay people (or anyone sitting further along the Kinsey scale than Jude Law and Ron Jeremy) be allowed to marry in a Church. By attempting to offer gay people the same options as straight people, David Cameron is – according to MP – “signing up instead to the wilder extremes of political correctness.” That this is poisonous drivel spawned by religious bigotry is plain to see, and not worth mentioning; what is worth mentioning is that MP believes that treating homosexuals fairly is both “wild” and “extreme”.

It is not wild, nor is it extreme, to be fair. Nor is it wild, or extreme, to dismantle prejudice wherever you find it (and if you look in the Bible, you’ll find it often enough). MP argues, unsuccessfully as is her wont, that the government is pandering to “a politically motivated faction within a tiny minority of the population”. She is so staggeringly thick that she actually believes that the only people opposed to homophobia are Peter Tatchell, Graham Norton and Alan Carr. In fact, a vast majority of straight people are in favour of gay marriage, because thankfully most people in Britain are reasonable and benevolent. The “politically motivated faction within a tiny minority of the population” is in the fact the pathetic cabal of primitivists MP stands for.

After all, it is possible to be male and support sexual equality and feminism; it is possible to be white and oppose racism against black people. So why should it not be possible to be straight, or as near as dammit, and support gay rights?

MP’s vision of marriage is quite quaint. To her, it is nothing more – absolutely nothing more – than a means to increase the likelihood of procreation. It is not about love. It is “a unique institution because it involves the process by which humanity reproduces itself — which is only through the union of male and female”. Marriage is “vital for the healthy nurture of the next generation.” Since I was raised by a single mother, I feel a special anger at the insinuation that I was not ‘healthily nurtured’ because my father was, as circumstances decreed, largely absent (but always loving, always a friend) during my childhood. Then there are the unmarried couples who raise fine children. Then there is MP herself; if she is the product of husband and wife, then she is an argument against the institution of marriage, surely?

The starkest moment of idiocy is here: “children need to be brought up by the two people who created them.” Yes; people like Josef Fritzl. Or any of those inept or cruel people who tyrannise their
children so much that Supernanny intervenes, or Social Services. Or, in the case of Baby P, the coroner.  The very idea that the only people suitable to bring up a child are the natural parents insinuates the barking mad notion that every man capable of ejaculation and every woman capable of being ejaculated into are automatically suitable for the role of parenting. Does MP even read the papers?

She then continues to compare homosexuality to bestiality. It would be ludicrous to offer the option of marriage to zoophiles, she argues, therefore it is ludicrous to offer it to homosexuals. “I’m not suggesting gays are on a moral par with zoophiles”, she writes, a paragraph or so after doing just that.

MP is horrifed to discover that “a Conservative Prime Minister effectively endorsing the idea that upholding Biblical morality and the bedrock values of Western civilisation is bigotry”. Of course, this zealot mentality is familiar to all critics of religion – the concept that the Bible (or some other holy book) is the root of all good. That the human race did nothing but rape, steal and murder until Christ said stop. Indeed, there is much evidence to the contrary; how many holy wars have there been, how many murders in the name of some fantasy father-figure? How many maniacs have used religion to justify their abominable behaviour? True, not all atheists are humanitarians, but they have less in their library to use to explain away their evils. MP would be wise to get her head around the fact that kindness, decency, compassion, courage and morality existed before the patriarchs compiled the Bible. She would also be wise, being a bigot herself, not to pretend that she is anything but.

Criticise Cameron of many things. He is a buffoon and a cultural vandal. He has appeased the banks (more than half the funding for his bid for power came from the City) and plunged the very poor into despair. He has masterminded a culling of libraries and disability care. But supporting the idea of gay marriage is not another error; it is one of the few right things he has done. MP believes that morality requires injustice and prejudice. She is wrong. It requires the opposites of those deplorable elements. It requires things that she does not possess.

“The so-called ‘culture war’ now raging between those determined to destroy Western moral codes and those struggling to defend them is simply the most urgent domestic issue we face.” MP is right in part. There is a ‘culture war’ raging, but it is not between permissive libertarians and courageous traditionalists. It is between compassionate and fair-minded liberals and mean, dogmatic primitivists. It is between the latest pinnacle of human evolution and the previous kind of ape. It is a war between good and evil, wisdom and ignorance, light and darkness. It is a war between compassionate, ethical, moral human beings and base, crude animals. It is a war that must be won, and perhaps much of MP’s zeal is borne of the fact that her side is losing, inexorably, and will one day be a half-remembered myth: once upon a time, people got their truth from an old book of savage legends, and they judged people based on their gender or their sexuality. They thought they were right, even in moments of callousness and cruelty. They thought they were good, even in moments of profound wickedness. They thought they were wise, even when they ignored common sense and evidence.

It takes a lifetime to recognise one’s friends. It takes but a moment to identify an enemy. MP closes her repugnant tirade by referring to the heroic campaigners of fairness and justice as “bullies”:

“those cultural ‘lifestyle choice’ bullies will stamp their boots ever more brutally on the faces of everyone else in a pitiless war of all against all”

Hypocrisy is an ugly thing. That a homophobe should have the brass neck to label gay rights campaigners as “bullies” is disgraceful enough. That she, as a zealot who wants to divide people by sexuality, claims that it is her opponents setting “all against all” is simply twisted. So illogical, so willfully perverse is her logic, that I wonder if she has some sort of psychological problem. If she does, it is unfortunate for her; if she does not – if this poisonous nonsense is the product of lucid graft – then it is unfortunate for the readers of Daily Mail, and unfortunate for our society.

Ethical Capitalism, Humane Communism: Missions Possible?

It is difficult to see any other economic system other than capitalism; it is the lingua franca, and as such every other system is measured against it and inevitably, since the only currently functioning system is capitalism, found wanting. Other options include various shades of socialism, and communism.

The latter is a strange one, mainly because we can't point to a working model. This is down to two reasons: firstly, capitalist states have undermined practically every attempt to test communism, and secondly, those attempts that went ahead produced, in the overwhelming majority of cases, a standard of human suffering unachievable even under the bootheels of Nazism. If communism is to be of any use at all, it needs to be rebuilt as a theorem.

A crude analogy: a man builds a shelf for his books. When he places the books on the shelf, the shelf falls down. The man frowns, builds the shelf again, replaces the books, and it falls down again. 'Strange,' he mutters, 'that's the second time that shelf fell down.' So, he rebuilds it a third time, using the same design. He places the same books in the same place, and the shelf collapses once again. 'Hmm,' he ponders, 'perhaps I should try building it in another country.'

I'll admit quite freely that much of Michael Hardt's column in the Guardian, 'Reclaim the common in communism', sailed over my head. I get the feeling it was supposed to; Marxists tend to forget that the only people who understand the terms they use are capitalist economists and students of Marx. The former will ignore it, the latter will probably agree with it already. This sort of preaching to the converted is partly why no viable alternatives to running our economy presented themselves after the financial crisis swallowed our civilisation. It offers nothing practical (but then, neither does this blog) but manages to massage the egos of intellectuals who understand the terms and arguments whilst simultaneously ignoring the millions of people who might actually be suffering under capitalism to such a degree that they might consider some sort of Egypt-style revolt. Why on earth not popularise Marxism? Why not take it to the street, if you genuinely think it has merit? Why lock it up inside universities and coffee shops? Perhaps the intoxicating thrill of feeling like an exile in one's own country, member of a reclusive revolutionary cabal, is too great.

How communism is supposed to succeed without becoming accessible to the layperson is the question.

However there is one more pressing concern for neocommunists. If they are to reclaim the terms and the arguments, if they are to capitalise (no pun intended) on the current economic situation, they must engage with the monsters in the attic: Stalin, Mao, et al.

The economic crisis has been a dance of seven veils. The last veil was torn away when Labour gave billions of pounds of our money to the very banks who had crippled the economy in the first place. And what did we see? A beautiful naked nymph? Sadly not; we saw capitalism for what it truly is – or rather, what it has become – in the twenty first century, and what it shall remain if it is not changed.

We did not see a system in which people earn money by working, pay taxes for the upkeep of the NHS and other bodies, and then spend the rest on luxuries. Nor did we see a system that enables, in the right cirumstances, individuals to switch careers, transform their lives, or take a sabbatical, using their savings to fund the purchase of musical instruments, art supplies or to simply travel the world. No, we did not see the pretty side of capitalism (and yes, there is an underclass that has never seen this pretty side; there was also an underclass in every socialist state, and every capitalist state. The presence of an underclass is not evidence of utter failure, merely partial failure; one could callously argue that every system will inevitably have an underclass. This does not mean such a weakness should be accepted, or even expected. The propagation of an underclass should always be warred against).

We saw what capitalism has become in the hands of its most extreme adherents (just as we saw what communism became in Romania, for instance). We saw the gaping flaw in the model that allows banks to invest speculative, non-existent funds (what I previously referred to as phantasmal money) in get-rich-or-die-tryin' schemes. Failure to foresee the problem inherent in allowing banks to gamble the nation's money led to the current fracas, in which certain banks are still parasitic, and the necessary boom and bust mechanic has become more pronounced, with the bust feeling positively cataclysmic.

We saw that capitalism had ceased to be a system of individualism, in which those fortunate enough, or skilled enough, or well connected enough, or diligent enough, could prosper (it's more meritocratic than any other system, if that's any salve against its worst excesses); that it had ceased to be a system that encouraged work and individual responsibility. We saw that it had become a means for the new aristocracy of political class to retain their position above we wretches and plebs, a mechanism that enabled those at fault for the collapse to retain their fortunes whilst libraries closed. We saw a system that had evolved into a means to ensure that the poor remained so, the rich remained so. A system that strives, through the intervention and complicity of the new aristocrats in the governing class, to maintain as the status quo a system that does not even work.

So we must look elsewhere for guidance, for ideas. Of course, we look to the long dead like Marx, and we find lots of good ideas. We also find, bound to the name, memories of famines, secret police, torture, mutilation and devastation. We find nation-sized Dachaus and Belsens. We also find the inability of communists to explain how their system can be so easily hi-jacked by psychopaths.

Like any religious system, communism lends itself to abominably cruel and mindless totalitarian despotism not through any specific rule of process, but through the lack of a safety valve. Had Stalin's grim misadventure been a one-off, we could have argued that communism deserved the chance to be tried again; like the man building the shelf, we would have seen it fail again. It is not good enough to fight to regain control of the terms and the arguments. Communists, if they are to be any good to the nation whatsoever, need to demonstrate a willingness not to escape the shadows of Mao and Stalin, but to confront and explain them. When this happens, the people who – llike me, and possibly, like you – cannot help but think of communism in terms of the fact that more people died in its name than in the name of any other system, religious or secular, ancient or modern, will have to take notice. Fix the gene in communism's DNA that enables the most astonishing cruelty, and you make it a viable option; admit that it has a propensity for producing savages, and you can begin to remove that propensity by amending its mechanisms and processes.

Likewise, capitalism. There must be a way to salvage the good from the system whilst limiting the influence of the bad. For instance, what I have termed Ethical Capitalism, and which is a germ of an idea at present, and might become something bigger.

Imagine if companies had to syphon off a percentage of profits by law to fund libraries, women's refuges, homeless shelters, etcetera. Imagine if, by law, companies had to hand a percentage of profits over to schools and hospitals, perhaps even universities. One argument would be that companies would be forced to cut back on their services, to raise their prices, to slash the workforce. Not so; it would force the companies to provide a better service, under the capitalism ball-game of market competition. For instance, a company loses 25% of its after-tax profits to a particular committee (not the treasury, for goodness' sake, and not the government) that oversees distribution to the areas of the community that need the money. This means that the company is still profitable. It might not be able t grow as fast as it would like, but that is the high street's gain, not the consumer's loss. Those companies seeking to send their money abroad to escape this mechanism would be kindly told to either participate, or face legal action. If certain businessmen wish to leave such a nation as this, then let them. He (or she) who is not willing to participate in repairing the damage done through ethical and constructive means is of little value going forward. Let them flee to Monaco, or whereever the rich go these days to forget about the good things they could be doing with their ludicrous wealth.

This would not be such a problem for long anyway; once the world sees how well the system works in Britain, it will no doubt be adopted by every sensible government. It will reek of socialism to various American unthinkers, but their criticism will serve as praise, as it always does; when the neocons attack an idea, it stands to reaso that the idea is a wholesome one.

One example of how the capitalist system can be rescued from the hyperwealthy and the new political aristocracy, then. There are many more, I am sure. I fail to see the sense in abandoning wholesale the current system, but I also fail to see how, when something has utterly failed, and failed repeatedly, it should continue to be utilised without recourse to the drawing board. Fix it, don't abandon it.

So my message to communists and capitalists alike is the same: there is good in your system, but it has produced unspeakable vileness time and again. Work out why, and put safeguards in place to stop it from happening again. Then and only then, will we have a system to put to the public, an alternative to the current stupidity. Utopia does not just have to be an unattainable dream. The hyperwealthy have built their utopia around us; Cameron, Clegg and the rest of the new political aristocracy are living in their paradise right now. Why should the rest of us feel that our dreams can never be realised?

Perhaps we just need to tinker with our machines, and then turn them loose.

Mubarak: A Dead Cat Bounces in Cairo

As I write this, protestors in Cairo have been attacked by leather-jacketed thugs in support of the incumbent tyrant, President Mubarak. Reports say that the military presence has been largely idle; that is, they have not tried to restrain the aggressors or protect the victims. Plus ça change. No doubt by the time I proofread this missive, this glorified diary extract, things will have either calmed down or escalated. John Simpson has just said that the pro-Mubarak followers have been “chased off”; an anonymous tweeting journalist has also claimed that things elsewhere are getting very violent indeed.

Mubarak will want to stay in power. This is not as obvious a statement as it sounds; he has lost the population’s faith, he has also lost – to all intents and purposes – the army, which cannot move on the people as the world is watching. More importantly, he has lost the support of his fundraisers around the world. Even the US, which has been sending him something close to $1.5bn p/a to spend on fluffy pillows, hearing aids and women’s refuges – whoops, I meant guns, bombs and tanks – has lost interest in him, in a volte-face more bare-faced and duplicitous than Hilary Clinton’s flip-flop about WikiLeaks and the importance of transparency.

Usually, these despots will try to appear reasonable just before the guillotine falls on their tumescent tendrils. They will hope that, if they can retain a little of the cuddly old media persona so carefully cultivated by the sort of sycophantic scum send by Thatcher to appraise, and inevitably praise, Augusto Pinochet, then their powerful allies will enable them to enjoy a safe, long and prosperous retirement.

Unfortunately for Mubarak, he has made a critical error. Just when his allies were falling like dominos, he decides to send a gang of lunatics to savage his opponents. While the entire world is watching. What a dickhead. This is Mubarak’s last hurrah, his last grab onto the reins of power, and he has totally fumbled it. Now everyone despises him, even those who were still clasping that last atom of doubt.

This last surge of violence is Mubarak’s dead cat bounce. And no cat ever deserved to get its pinched, flea-ridden little head stoved in more.

So what happens next? Well, that depends on who you ask. Us liberals (that’s ‘us’, not ‘US’) are desperate for a nice revolution. We want to enjoy the same sense of occasion the Romantics experienced before the French Revolution (until it turned sour, of course, as some revolutions do). I suppose we also want to guide the Egyptian people in a direction we prefer. That would be morally repugnant; it isn’t our country. Simon Jenkins of the Guardian (for it is he) has declared that it is not our business and we should stay out of it. Sadly, it’s a small world. Someone should talk to him about butterflies and hurricanes. The concern amongst the pro-meddling lobby is that once Mubarak and his clowns have been booted out, the liberal and progressive voices in Egypt will bicker and squabble, while the less palatable characters will seek to capitalise on the presence of a power vacuum.

The West’s options (is there such a thing as ‘The West’? There isn’t much love lost between the nations of Yerp, the British don’t like the penpushers and poindexters of Brussels, and the US doesn’t like anyone, a stance that is thoroughly reciprocated, natch) lie there like strands of spaghetti in a noxious shit-stream sauce. Egypt sits there, in the midst of it, like a meatball. We don’t yet know what kind of meat it is; it could be rat-meat, or it could be venison. Mmm, a venison meatball. It’s what every liberal wants. But it could be rat-meat. Which is what every neocon is expecting. Does the West get involved, and risk alienating the very secularist democratic progressives it seeks to covet, by behaving like a nosey old patriarch? Or does it stand back and risk abandoning a nascent secularist and democratic progressive Egypt to the forces of chaos? And if the West sits this one out, will everybody else?

I’d like us to sit it out, but make it clear that we’re willing to help. Be ready to offer support to whatever the people of Egypt choose to do. It seems that they do not like repression and violence; otherwise, they would have overthrown Mubarak violently, which they have not done, or they would have not wanted to overthrow him at all. Already they show what sort of country they wish to live in.

What I don’t want to see is a running battle erupt between liberals and theocrats, insiders and outsiders. If that happens, we’ll have to watch something beautiful turn into something ugly. And we’ll be damned if we step in damned if we don’t.

For now, let’s be hopeful, and trust in “the people”. Let’s not see assume guilt, or behave as if the Islamic Brotherhood – a very minor group, hardly worth noting – has already started stoning homosexuals. After all, the Egyptian people have done something the British haven’t : they’ve overthrown a totally shit rulership. Let’s give them the same respect we’d expect from the rest of the world, were we in their position.

Let them give it a go, I say. The likelihood of the next regime being worse than Mubarak’s is there, and we should not forget that, but it is very slim indeed. More likely is that the new Egypt will be a much better place when Mubarak’s deceased feline stops bouncing, and the people will thank us for our trust in them.