From The Heresiarch we have this quite brilliant piece skewering the dimwitted idiocy of Harriet Harman’s latest loonacy. Do go read it - it’s great - do come back because I have more to say, being a gobshite and all.
It also of course dismembers the ultimate stupidity of identity politics and that I love.
Let’s be perfectly clear. I have rights and you have rights because we are individuals. Western cizilization is based entirely upon that premise. I am increasingly of the opinion that all sorts of quasi civil-rights type movements that invariable demand “equality” for groups x,y or z are utterly wrong-headed. As The Hereiarch implies the number of the categories that we can be divvied up into is potentially equal to the entire population so why not go the whole hog and take it to it’s logical conclusion that individuals have rights and these are intrinsic to us as individuals and not because we fit into arbitary classification schemes devised by Harman’s minions in her joke ministry?
Why not? Because they won’t. They won’t because they’re… Well they’re just gits aren’t they?
The Heresiarch is right to take this to absurdity over the example subject of “sexual orientation” and things like BDSM because here we can see the absurd folly of regarding humans as neatly categorizable. The bill Harman is trying to get enacted inter alia “protects”* people from discrimination on the grounds of their sexual orientation but it does this by specificying three sexual orientions (a bit like rolling up a D&D character coincidentally also known as PCs). Anyone with access to the internet knows (or should know) that “straight”, “gay” and “bisexual” are a mere rough first-order approximation to what people really are. Sexuality is too rich, too gloriously chaotic and too infinitely unpredictable to crushingly force everyone into just three rigid categories. It is the sheer intellectual and moral bankruptcy of attempting by governmental force to ensure “equality” for easily defined groups that gets my Billy Goat Gruff, grabs him by the horns and takes him roughly from behind. Regular readers will note my fondness for Kylie Minogue. Does that make me Kyliesexual? I am sure there are others. Can’t we be a protected group as well?
The state is not about protecting groups. It is certainly not about protecting groups arbitarily (and crudely) defined by our Lords and Masters. If it ought to be about anything it should be about protecting the rights of the individual through the Common Law and nothing else. We emerged from tribalism and through the PC mob we are returning to tribalism but with a supposedly benevolent overlord ensuring Ugg’s tribe and Ogg’s tribe get equal hunting rights**. If you pitched your yurt outside of those recognized tribes then… Well, you’re fucked ain’t you? What the PC mob are doing is enforcing multiple-choice conformity as though it were a SAT. They are practising discrete mathematics on a continuum and they can’t even imagine the Argand Plane. They allow you to have a choice but only between discrete, recognized, approved and protected categories. Talk about thinking inside the box! My personal choice would be for Harman and her ilk to be in that box and for that box to be at the bottom of the Atlantic.
The sad thing is they probably think they are ever so liberal but true liberalism is not about legislating to “allow” things. It is about people just getting on with it whatever it happens to be*** without let or hinderance from trough-snouting social engineers. Alas with this shower of gits or the coming of the Cameroons we (I almost added, “the people” there) ain’t got it. I so hope one day there is a reckoning.
We as a species**** we are better than that. Well, we can be and we should be. Our destiny is the stars and we are allowing ourselves to be ruled over by a bunch of Happy Shopper dictators who dream of every one of their chosen groupings, on average, when the National Office of Statistics have dun da sums, getting the same GCSE results, earning the same money and having the same life expectatancy. Fuck that! That is the dream of nerds without intellect or soul. That is the dream of technocrats without technical skills. It is dismal and I for one am better than that because I dream of attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
One day we will be shot of them and they can be kept in some sort of reserve where they can legislate and set-up quangos to their abysmal hearts’ content just like Hitler, in his final weeks, issuing directives to divisions that no longer exist.
I don’t believe in gods or demons but I do believe in our capacity to do great things when we are free of tyranny and that our political class is a tyranny. They are not the balls-out (they don’t have any of those) murderous tyranny of Mao or Mugabe but they are still a tyranny of stultifying mediocricrats hell-bent on classifying and therefore controling every single lonely impulse of delight we might have. That it is not as blatently evil as Pol Pot or the Politburo is not the point because it is still evil because it is a betrayal of our hopes, dreams and talents and the very individuality that is the very essence of being human. Without that we’re just Jaqui Smith’s ant farm.
It’s time we knocked over that ant farm and let them escape. I hope some crawl up (censored - ed) in the dead of night whilst her hubby is watching Asian Babes downstairs along the way.
We gotta do it folks! Anything else would be the ultimate betrayal of the only known sentient beings in the Universe. And it would piss me off as well.
It’s clobbering time!
Now for something completely different:
*Can we please also have a bill that protects us from meddlesome ratbags?
**As long as it’s not with dogs, obviously.
***Usual properly liberal caveats apply.
**** I appreciate that sounds terribly collectivist but I’m being rhetorical here, OK? Anyway, how could I be more “inclusive”?
“We emerged from tribalism and through the PC mob we are returning to tribalism…”
I could write for months about that one sentence. Hope I remember to give you credit when it happens.