Conservatism

Seth Barrett Tillman: Reflections on the Revolution in the UK: Parts 3 and 4

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Part 3: Farage’s Poster Is Racist:

Farage was called a racist (and worse [1 minute mark]) for this poster.
 
Yet, no one claims this photograph was a fake, i.e., a staged photograph made with actors and props. No one claims that it was photoshopped. No one claims that the skin tone of the people in the photograph was altered or, even, darkened. No one claims that the photograph was out of date. And no one claims that the picture is not representative of the pattern of large scale immigration coming into the European Union (here, Slovenia—an EU member state) from the Third World.
 
In other words, if you reproduce a photograph of an actual, recent event, you are a racist…

and

Part 4: Errors of the Labour Party and the Remain Camp:

A fictionalized exchange on television between any Labour candidate for MP and an audience member during the 2015 general election …
 

[. . .]
 
Labour Candidate for Parliament: I understand. New immigrants—frequently coming without skills that fit the modern U.K. economy—cause wage compression at the low end of the wage scale. We will make sure employers pay the minimum wage; we will ensure that your economic interests are protected.
 
Audience Member: No, that’s not my point (at least, that’s not my only point). I don’t like how our society is being changed by mass immigration. I don’t like polygamy. It is illegal, but no one gets prosecuted for it. I don’t like FGM. It too is illegal, but it is not actively prosecuted. I don’t like it when the immigrants’ customs are accommodated in these ways—I don’t want our criminal laws ignored by the immigrants or by the police and the prosecutors. It makes me feel unsafe—it makes me think the immigrants’ way of life is preferred over ours. The immigrants should be integrated into our communities, not the other way around.
 
Labour Candidate for Parliament: I understand. We will work to ensure that your wages are not compressed.
 
Audience Member: You’re not listening. That’s not what I said: I don’t like the direction your party’s immigration policies under Blair & Brown have taken our country. I don’t like where we are now as a result—not that Cameron has done anything to modify those policies.
 
[. . .]

Read the whole series.

Quote of the Day (Brexit Edition)

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Richard Fernandez:

It should be obvious to the status quo that the crisis has arrived. Brexit, for all its drama, was a warning. The real collision is close ahead.
 
The basic demand is for a moderation, if not a reversal of the centralizing tendencies. It’s a brief for less immigration, less political correctness and less government.
 
Unfortunately conceding to these demands this is like reversing the Titanic. There’s so much momentum, it’s hard to stop. But they have to stop. The Iceberg looms ahead. All Brexit has done is give the warning.
 
From now on, the countdown begins. Can the elites turn the ship in time?

Jim Bennett’s New Book

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A Time For Audacity: New Options Beyond Europe

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As we approach tomorrow’s long-awaited referendum on continued UK membership in the European Union, James C. Bennett, author of The Anglosphere Challenge, co-author of America 3.0 and friend of this blog has a new short book out that deserves attention.

From the book’s Amazon page:

For Britons, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders, and their friends and allies, the time has come to consider an audacious option. It is time for many reasons. One is that each of you today faces a series of critical decisions about what and who you are and will be. Britain less than two years ago passed one such decision point, which is whether the historical British Union of the four nations would continue together. Although the option of full independence for Scotland was rejected, the question of how the four nations will work together, and in what sort of framework, has now been opened, and it is time for the options that this book will discuss to be part of that discussion.
 
Now, Britain is on the verge of making another decision threshold about another Union. Again, this is an issue where the answer appears obvious to an outsider, but seems to be a matter of great controversy within the UK. There may be valid reasons why Britain might not want to exit the European Union, but the lack of adequate alternatives for closer trade relations and partnership should not be one of them. Ironically, many of the arguments of advocates of British membership in the EU work better as an argument for the option presented in this work, a Union of the Commonwealth Realms.

You can read the rest and order the book (Kindle download only) here.

The Bottom Line …

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On the Orlando Ramadan massacre –

I know everybody’s trying to spin this thing to support their favorite political hobbyhorse, be it gun control or anti-immigration, but it you take a deep breath and step back and look and the evidence in the cold light of day without political spin, this guy seems to fall into the profile of the typical mass shooter:

He was a person with psychological problems. Clearly he was socially awkward, not well-acculturated, had gay desires that he couldn’t reconcile with his religious upbringing and lashed out in an attempt to resolve his personal demons and maybe give his sorry life some meaning.

He had an ideology, but I think that ideology should be seen as a seed. If it didn’t fall on the fertile ground of a guy with profound psychological issues, it probably wouldn’t have sprouted.

At the end of the day, though, that’s all psychobabble. What matters is how do we protect ourselves from guys like this without destroying our freedoms. Don’t expect to find an easy answer to that one, but here are a few suggestions:

1. Stop all the nonsense about “assault weapons” and gun control. We’ve had that debate for 50 years and the American people have consistently rejected draconian gun control. Ain’t gonna happen. People aren’t going to disarm themselves when the government is incapable of protecting them.

2. My question for Hillary Clinton (which I am sure she won’t want to answer) is “Is it ok to fire an armed security guard who publicly espouses support for jihad even if he hasn’t broken any laws?” If we don’t have the same answer to that question as we would if we substituted Ku Klux Klan for jihad, we aren’t in the right place. And if the answer to both questions isn’t yes, what exactly is the point of licensing security guards?

3. We need to do a better job of acculturating foreigners and getting them to become Americans. We used to be really good at that back when we believed in America as an idea, but we’ve gotten so mired in multiculturalism that we’re afraid to insist that people embrace American values, even people to whom we grant birthright citizenship. That’s a problem. Of course, that will require us to come to some agreement on what “American values” are. And if you think the answer to that question is just going to be White Evangelical Protestant Values, you need to take a look around you and count heads. If we can’t come up with a definition of “American values” that has a place for gay people and people whose parents don’t speak English and atheists and Muslims who don’t support violent jihad, then we’re screwed. We will just balkanize ourselves into armed camps and become Lebanon.

4. We need to stop the war on men. It’s creating a lot of disaffected, alienated young men with no real purpose to their lives who become fertile ground for radical ideologies. Omar Mateen and Dylan Root are both fruit of the same tree.

I’m not sure any of this would have prevented this particular incident. But I am sure that we’re going to have more of this stuff if we don’t get the above items right.

From commentor JLPandin, on this thread at Instapundit.

Steps

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I suppose that the most horrifying aspect of the Trump rally in San Jose last week was not that there were obnoxious and semi-coherent protesters outside the event, or even that they became violently abusive to those attending the Trump rally. It was that the San Jose PD, and the civil administration appear to have at best sat back and watched ordinary citizens be chased down and physically abused and at the very worst, facilitated, enabled and afterwards blandly excused such attacks. The civil government of the city of San Jose apparently decided that it was okeydokey for the agents of law and order in San Jose to sit back and allow law-abiding citizens exercising their rights in attending a political rally to have the c**p beaten out of them … because they didn’t approve of the particular candidate.

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