Quote of the day (well, three or four of them actually)

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 April 2005 07:41.

... what “no-go area” generally means is that you can vote for Tweedle-left or Tweedle-right but all the great questions have been settled by transnational elites sufficiently insulated from your tedious parochial griping.

Mark Steyn, writing in today’s Telegraph.

Steyn is an interesting case. He earns what must, in journalist’s terms be a substantial crust by extending both ends of the political commentator’s art. On the one hand, he skits across the stolid affairs of nations and the works of powerful men with a delicious irreverence and lightness of touch. Where serious political analysis should be are the acid truths and improper musings of a one-time student rag writer grown more skilled but also more comfortable and rounder of girth with age. Thus:-

I’ve no reason to disbelieve the crop of polls showing Labour and Conservatives neck and neck, but, unlike American polling, where distinctions between “registered” and “likely” voters are carefully studied, none of us has any clear idea which unloved party will do the least effective job at further depressing the turnout of whatever unenthusiastic faction of its dwindling base is most unresistant to being cajoled to the polls.

On the other hand, as a beneficiary perhaps of the double detachment of being a foreign national and a Jew, he eschews the familiar petty battles of British political life in favour, amazingly, of the things that actually interest us. So we get transnationalism over the cornflakes - the rude but oft neglected reminder that our votes don’t mean a damned thing. If we did not know before, we are plainly told now:-

The Guardian complained yesterday about Michael Howard’s assertion that “for too many years immigration has been a no-go area for public debate”, and I sort of agree with them. It’s not that it’s a “no-go area for public debate”, but that you can debate it all you want and in the end nothing happens.

And:-

... the so-called public “indifference” to the royal wedding is part of a deeper fatalism toward British institutions and the British state. The Windsors have been wily adaptors to the evolving mood of their kingdom, but with the kingdom evolving itself clear out of business, who needs a king?

In the free and scandalously irresponsible cyber-world of blogging this sort of hard truth-speak is meat and drink. We don’t get nearly enough of it in a mainstream that assesses the cares of the public no higher than a morbid fascination with bed-blocking in the NHS. Where can one find a few more Mark Steyns?

Tags: Journalism

Comments:

Posted by Stuka on Tue, 12 Apr 2005 13:44 | #

...all the great questions have been settled by transnational elites sufficiently insulated from your tedious parochial griping. (Mark Steyn)

Well said. Glad to see a Neocon (?) hack like Steyn has identified our predicament. Steyn is a delight. Even though, his support for Bush’s adventure in the Middle East is grating. Also, his apparent belief that the US does not share the same racial fate of Europe, because the US imports Latin Americans instead of Muslims and Africans, is badly misplaced. The immigrants may differ, but it’s the same race-replacement agenda at work.

Did you see his piece in The Telegraph a fortnight or so ago, in which he discussed the demographic decline of the West? He argued that a lack of babies is at the root of most of our problems: retirement benefits, social security, crime, immigration, terrorism, etc. Well worth a read.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 12 Apr 2005 15:01 | #

“He argued that a lack of babies is at the root of most of our problems: retirement benefits, social security, crime, immigration, terrorism, etc.” (—Stuka)

I saw that piece and he’s absolutely right about that. Japan proves it’s possible to not get race-replaced and keep the lid on the native birth rate both at the same time. But for some reason whites can’t seem to walk and chew gum at the same time the way yellows can, so we’d better start looking to our white birth rates until we get the rest of our house—a better understanding of the forces pushing race-replacement, etc.—in order. It’s like gases in chemistry—you need outward-directed pressure to counterbalance inward-directed pressure. Check out the gas laws and the principles of thermodynamics.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 12 Apr 2005 15:08 | #

The point is, Stuka, that if Steyn and Rod Liddell are taken out of the equasion I can open my paper every godamned day of the year and never see another reference to the hard issues we blog about.

Time was when Liddell was perceived as a typical BBC leftie. So I and, I imagine, a lot of others are gobsmacked that he has emerged from the polenta proletariat speaking the godawful Truth. He doesn’t have to stand on exactly the same patch of ground as me, and neither does Steyn. They are both prepared to broach the great issues of our day while the rest stumble around in health statistics and educational outcomes, and for that small mercy I am grateful..

I think I started reading Steyn’s piece on demography. I guess I gave up because it ain’t a lack of babies at the root of our problems. There’s nothing wrong with a declining population that a free market can’t fix.

At the root of our problems is liberalism full stop. Steyn probably knows that perfectly well. It’s just that whereas most journos are stumped by big issues like transnational progressivism, and can find no way to tell Jo Bloggs about it, the horrors of liberalism are just too vast and unwieldy even for Mark to take on.

Posted by md on Tue, 12 Apr 2005 19:20 | #

In response to your question, the internet and the blogs (like this one). Only there will one find some intelligence, some diversity of thinking, and some seriousness.

The MSM is irrelevant to any understanding of the world. As our secular episcopate, we know what they are going to say before they say it, and we know they are primarily concerned solely with their own self-preservation (the corollary is of course they care nothing about us, our nations, or our futures). I always find it tedious when some blog devotes time and energy to the vacuities of someone like Maureen Dowd. Why bother? If we thought the ciphers of the MSM were worthy of our time and consideration, we would be reading them and not the internet (in any case, we don’t really need to read them, because we already know in advance what they will and will not say about specific circumstances or issues; in this sense, they are enormousy deadening).

And I like the word “deadening.” One could say that is one of the primary functions of the MSM: to deaden the sensibilities and thought of the general population, to mire it in the muck of the repetitive monotone of the liberal whine, and to establish and inculcate a monolithic worldview to which all else answers.

Hence, the MSM assumes that John Paul II and the Catholic Church must answer to the demands and presumptions of secular liberalism. I waited—in vain—as these questions were asked of churchmen in the wake of John Paul’s death for at least one churchman to say: “The Church does not answer to the demands and presumptions of secular liberalism. To the contrary, the Church demands that secular liberalism, and all its aberrations, answer to the kingdom of God.”

Posted by Svigor on Tue, 12 Apr 2005 20:43 | #

Pat Buchanan and Tony Blankley said pretty much that on the McLaughlin report. Well, they essentially said “ffs, it’s not the job of the Pope to be progressive and to ‘bring the Church into the 20th century,’ it’s the job of the Pope to make the Church reflect God’s word.”