Three items have caught my eye, each supporting the melancholy conclusion in the title. This, though in two of the cases a TV presenter was supposedly making an argument for the sane side.
One such presenter was Piers Morgan, interviewing a fellow journalist. His guest spends much of his time in France, where his dog Bella runs free among the vines. That puts her in danger, but mercifully an Austrian company provides a dog tracking service. The device attached to the collar lets the owner know where his pet is at all times, which is a good idea.
However, to paraphrase a well-known expression, no good idea goes unpunished. In this case, the punishment came as the Austrian company’s demand that all its tracking devices exhibit the rainbow badge of the on-going Gay Pride Month. Virtue-barking was supposed to augment virtue-signalling.
Morgan’s friend refused, and as a result the company cancelled his dog, or rather his subscription to the tracker. If you are a troglodyte homophobe, was the implicit message, may your dog croak, see if we care.
The owner protested, and miraculously the company relented. It ascribed the confrontation to an overzealous employee, reinstated the tracker and even gave the owner three months free by way of compensation. In his letter the company’s president explained that, much as he disagreed with the owner’s views, he wasn’t going to punish him for holding them.
A victory for sanity? Not so fast.
Discussing the event, Morgan and his friend proved that nowadays every such victory is illusory. It’s just another word for defeat.
Both Morgan and his guest did their utmost to reassure their audience that there isn’t even a particle of homophobia in their bodies. Some of their best friends are homosexuals and all that. And it went without saying that they loved and supported the idea of Gay Pride.
Their only objection was that it takes a whole month to celebrate such hubris. After all, we have only one day to glorify our veterans and just a handful to hail Jesus. Wouldn’t it be better to put Gay Pride somewhere between the two? Why give it a whole month?
The two also objected to being forced to display those rainbows. Nothing wrong with the symbol, but let us decide when and how to show it. Both agreed that demanding canine devotion to the rainbow-clad alphabet was ill-advised.
That’s it, argument lost. Because Morgan and his friend conceded the fundamentally perverse premise, while then arguing against its ineluctable consequences. That’s like giving a man dying from brain cancer a couple of aspirins for his headache.
I don’t know what either of them really thinks about this whole mess. Nor do I care because what they really think is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that, even if they thought, as I do, that copulating with a person of the same sex is nothing to be proud about, they would never be able to say so.
As I keep arguing, the underlying orthodoxy is already chiselled in stone, and no one can chip away at it without risking his job, status and in some cases even liberty. That again brings back the hideous memories of the Soviet Union, where it was only possible to criticise little excesses at the lowest rungs of the Party hierarchy – never the premise for the existence of that hierarchy.
Whenever I point out the similarities between the Soviet Union and today’s West, people counter by citing the differences. However, while rejoicing in the latter, we should still bemoan the growing number of the former. Not only does today’s West resemble the USSR in many respects, but the gap between them is getting smaller by the day.
The second case again involves Sky Breakfast News, which I watch for some 10 minutes over my first cup of coffee. That’s usually enough time to vindicate the title above.
This morning, presenter Kay Burley was interviewing the chieftain of Just Stop Oil, the subversive movement whose members disrupt traffic and sporting events. Their chosen weapon against the latter is orange paint that they spray all over everyone and everything within range.
Cesare Lombroso would have had a field day with Burley’s guest. He looked every bit the fanatic he is, his eyes glaring in a way that would make me cross over to the other side of the street if I saw him coming. As my professor friend used to say back at university, “When you see a madman, step aside.”
Again, Burley repeated Morgan’s cowardly (or else stupid) stratagem of taking issue with the zealots’ methods, while endorsing their principal premise. “Scientists agree that we are in the midst of a climate crisis,” ranted the fanatic. “No one is disputing that, but…,” objected Burley.
That was another orthodoxy on show. “Roma locuta; causa finita est,” as Augustine once said. Rome has spoken; the case is closed. Except that in this instance, the speaker isn’t an almighty empire, but the rancid, malodorous zeitgeist emanating from the vociferous woke minority given the power to put its foot down.
It would be pointless to suggest even to the marginally sane Burley, and certainly to her rabid guest, that scientists don’t really agree. Some write extremely well argued and extensively documented books against that fraudulent claim, and I could recommend a small library of such tomes.
Yet they would remain unread and unmentioned. Orthodoxy locuta, and, as GULAG guards used to say to marching prisoners, “Any step aside will be treated as an escape attempt. We’ll shoot without warning.”
The two cases I’ve mentioned show that the only possible outcome of any meekly abject resistance to insanity is putting an added emphasis to its resounding victory. Perhaps realising that, the Bank of England decided to go the whole hog and surrender unconditionally without even pretending to put up a defence.
That venerable institution agreed that people of any ‘gender identity’ can become pregnant. And should any employee feel the need for gender reassignment treatment, the Bank will pay for it using private medical insurance.
Its memorandum on ‘family leave policy’ uses the phrase “birthing parent”, neglecting the rather long tradition of calling such a parent ‘mother’. To clear up any possible confusion, the Bank explains that the term means “the parent who is/was pregnant with the child but includes persons of any and all gender identities.”
The Bank also reiterated its commitment to gender-neutral lavatories, a shift to which is described as an “upgrade”. At the same time, the Bank’s 4,000 UK employees have been drafted into the service of insanity.
Each of them will be given a “diversity and inclusion objective” for every year, at the end of which their performance will be assessed on that criterion. They are also encouraged, though not yet ordered, to wear a rainbow lanyard and display the symbol at their workstation.
It’s good to see that, at a time of interest rates going up and inflation refusing to go down, our central bank never loses sight of what really matters in life. High principle comes before petty pecuniary concerns, and isn’t that laudable?
Piers Morgan and his dog-loving friend wondered why Pride activists defend their noble cause by such ignoble methods. Why can’t they be happy celebrating their well-merited pride for the same number of days as the calendar assigns to Jesus?
I’ll be happy to answer this question. They do those things for the same reason Bella licks her genitals: because they can. And, as their fellow subversive Lenin taught, if they can, they must.
Their objective isn’t to assert the right of homosexuals proudly to parade perverse practices, but to take away the majority’s right to resist.
All modern perversions, and not necessarily sexual ones, are inherently aggressive. Their aim is to smash traditional society to smithereens and reassemble its fragments under the rainbow (red, green) flag of victorious insanity.
If they are the lunatics, we are the asylum. And you know who is in charge.
Reminds me of the often heard platitude that ‘Communism is a good social system which has just been badly implemented’. Piers has done the same with ‘stop oil’ fanatics on his show, questioning their methods but not climate change ideology, which is a fact to him.
He is to these zealot activists what a bouncer is to the drunken thug whom he stops from mercilessly beating an innocent patron, with the few placating words, “ok chap, you broke his teeth, he’s probably deserved it, but get along now. He’s had enough.”