Majorityrights Central > Category: No particular place to go

At odd times when I’ve got nothing better to do – which, being a blogger, by definition I often don’t – I find myself wondering about the Selfless Ones who rule so wisely over us.  What lies behind the media image?  What are they really like in their private lives?

For example, just now I am wondering what Britain’s top policemen, the Chief Constables, are like in mufti.  What kind of chaps are they after the last funny handshake of the day, when they can go home and set down the dizzying burden of power?

Are they, for example, basically just the ordinary bloke who likes a beer in the clubhouse after eighteen holes on a Saturday morning?  Or are they more the type who disappears into the loft for hours at a stretch to be alone with his complete collection of dog-eared 1950’s Parade magazines.

I feel entitled to wonder because, as was rumoured five weeks ago, these Chief Constable chappies have been doing a lot of wondering about what you and I do.  And now they’ve hit upon one (devilishly complicated and expensive) way of getting at the answers:-

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Filed for The Guardian by Trinidad N’siswe

Of 536 same-sex couples of all ages who tied the knot in December 2005, after same-sex civil union became law in the United Kingdom, almost half are now divorced or living apart.

Research published by the Social Policy Foundation suggests that male same-sex civil partnerships are far more likely to fail than female, and both exceed the rate of failure of heterosexual marriage.

Male same-sex partnerships are ten times more likely to split up within the first year of a relationship than heterosexual marriages.  Female same-sex partnerships are three times more likely to see a separation within the same period.

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Multiculturalism is the belief that all cultures should coexist in intimate contact with each other and that territories are largely irrelevant so long as “democracy” rules.  There is a countervailing belief, best called “metaculturalism”, which is that each culture should have its own territorial allocation, and that democracy is largely irrelevant as long as people can choose their cultural affiliation and move to a territory for that culture, with territorial adjustments to accomodate such migration.  Some cultures would naturally be racially separatist, and some would be multiracial—some might even be multicultural within their own territory.  The point is there is an alternative to world-wide multicultural supremacy.

Taking my inspiration from the recent replacement of the Red Cross flag with the Red Crystal flag for use in territories hostile to Christianity (interestingly the Muslims didn’t demand this change—Jews did), I’ve designed a set of metacultural flags for ethnostates—territories whose culture is oriented to blood and soil.

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Readers may recall the extraordinary public response last June to BBC Radio 3’s Beethoven Experience, about which I posted a piece here.  Since that post I seem to recall one or two glowing tributes in our threads to the incomparable JS Bach.  So this post is by way of a “heads up” for the forthcoming baroque bonanza, A Bach Christmas:-

BBC Radio 3 will be celebrating Christmas 2005 by broadcasting continuously over ten days the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach.

The composer’s entire surviving body of work will be performed by some of the world’s greatest musicians including specially recorded performances by Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Yo-Yo Ma, Angela Hewitt, Philippe Herreweghe and Ton Koopman.

The round-the-clock broadcast will begin on December 16th, and is available in your home through the priceless agency of the internet.  No doubt, after the closing programme on Christmas Day an MP3 download page will appear once again on the Radio 3 website.

All this and not a single commercial break.  Who says state-run industries can’t be cool?

“There were two contrasting worlds in the 1960s, the tiny elitist world of Brian Jones, with its sex, drugs and decadence, and the real world, Frank’s world, which was still very grey.  Frank [Thorogood] was very bitter, and jealous of the kids who were reaping the benefits of what he had helped to create.  He was one of the forgotten generation who had won the war and survived terrible things, in his case losing an eye.  And they’d done it though discipline and self-control.  Then along came the 1960s with this ‘Let it all hang out’ attitude.  It was like a red rag to a bull.”

Film-maker Stephen Woolley, quoted in the Sunday Telegraph on his directorial debut with “Stoned”.

The film, of course, investigates the circumstances in which the ex-Stone came to be lying face-down in his swimming pool at Cotchford Manor in Sussex on the night of July 3rd 1969.  It alleges murder and is in part based on a book alleging the same. 

However Jones’ death occurred, it was a sad and sordid end.  Vice or viciousness, it really doesn’t matter.  But, as Woolley’s words show, “Stoned” has a sub-text which is much more interesting.

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Few MR readers will argue with the proposition that there is a seemingly irreparable fissure running through the politics of the right.  As I see it, it is demarcated by the lack of sympathy which those who answer to their intellects feel towards those who answer to their sense of kin.  Of course, I am leaving out all those whose attitudes and opinions are merely received.  Unless or until they free themselves they are just the prisoners of liberal thinking.  But the others –  those capable of independent thought and those who have “woken up” -  are all people of interest to me.  I want to understand them better than I do.

In particular, I want to understand the thinkers and why it is they can obviously see issues of race, demography, difference, culture war etc ... yet they hold firmly to the conviction that primacy rests with the individual over the group and with ideas over the ties of blood.  Why?  Is it intellectual pride that causes them to spurn the principle of kinship?  But then I firmly believe that mainstream Conservative thinkers in past times did not spurn kinship but, on the contrary, respected it and even strove to serve – or conserve - it.

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The English climate, being what it is, commends the written word to all but the hardiest or most square-eyed holidaymaker.  Being neither I hope, and having spent a few days footloose with my family in the folds of the North Devon countryside, I, too, have been reading a good deal of late.

Of course, we had travelled west well equipped for the conditions.  Three weighty tomes, in my case - two historical, one political.  But in the event I was charmed instead by the double row of titles supplied for his rained-in clientele by the owner of the farmhouse we had rented.

For anyone remotely interested in ideas another person’s choice of reading has the potential for some fascination.  I am not a voracious reader myself but I respect those that are … at least, the ones who read something of substance.  Without fail, when I go into a home where books are important I will find a chance to survey the titles.  A picture speaks a thousand words, they say, and a bathroom cabinet probably ten thousand.  But a bookshelf is much, much more illuminating.

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Ain’t diversity wonderful?  Can’t see that happening in the Scottish Highlands in January.