Practically Useless

Here in my little corner of the UK, a semi-rural area for the most part, most people I meet seem to be pretty decent. They want to be nice and kind and generous - and they very often are.

Admittedly we haven’t yet been overly culturally enriched here by the blessings of the boat people and other incomers who bring their superior moral values and behaviours to our shores. Other places in the UK have so far been granted that overwhelming benefit.

But there are limits to that kindness. Earlier this year I took my camera to the local churchyard just after dawn for a bit of practice. I had only had it for a couple of weeks and didn’t really know what I was doing, but still managed to get a few shots I was pleased with.

I got chatting to a guy who was doing some voluntary work and tidying the place up. I can’t quite remember how we got onto the topic but the subject of our increasing cultural enrichment came up.

He said something that rather disturbed me, which was along the lines of “quite a few people round here have shotguns”. I don’t think he was being entirely serious (at least I hope not) but it is indicative of an undercurrent that tells me even normal, everyday, nice people are getting a bit frustrated and angry with what’s happening.

I have a fear that a tipping point will be reached and things will erupt into violence. This will not be good, and I really hope it doesn’t come to that. But our government and the credentialed soy-latte elite seem to have no idea at all at the level of anger that is brewing.

Express any concern whatsoever about cultural enrichment and you’re immediately labelled as some kind of ultra-right wing Nazi bigot nutjob. Express that concern just a tad more forcefully and you may very well end up in jail.

If we measure time in units of TOERAGG’s¹ an ill-advised single tweet can see you in jail faster than a nano-TOERAGG.

It’s good to know our police and judiciary can actually act swiftly when it comes to really important things like tweets and are appropriately cautious when it comes to trivial matters like the gang rape of underage girls.

And we can see just how trivially they appear to take it from the recent exchange on a radio show when the leader of The House of Commons was asked a question about whether she’d seen a documentary on the grooming gangs. I quote from Andrew Doyle’s article :

This attitude seemed to be encapsulated during an exchange between writer Tim Montgomerie and leader of the House of Commons Lucy Powell on the last edition of Any Questions on BBC Radio 4. Montgomerie had asked Powell if she had seen the programme on Channel 4 about the abuse in the north of England, to which Powell replied: ‘Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Yeah, okay, let’s get that dog whistle out, shall we? Yeah’.

We have a government that thinks an entirely fictional drama (Adolescence) is so important every school should show it. A drama, an entertainment show, that bears almost no resemblance to reality, I might add².

But a documentary about the systemic gang rape of tens of thousands of underage girls is dismissed as a ‘dog whistle’ and a ‘little trumpet’.

Right.

And this, this, is supposed to calm us down, to make us think “maybe we have our ideas about cultural enrichment all wrong”?

It will have quite the opposite effect and make people even more incensed than they already are.

I don’t want to get into the ins and outs of our government’s current fetish for cultural enrichment here. It’s something I’ll probably write about in the future. However, that perennial question which underpins so many things immediately comes to mind

What the fuck are they thinking?

It’s a question that I first started to ask during the covid pantomime. Clearly and obviously stupid things were being done in the name of “science” and “safety” and very little of it made sense. How could they not see this? Whilst some writers have attributed this to governmental stupidity, I still find it very difficult to believe that they’re that stupid.

I’ll just mention in passing here our Environmental Fuhrer Minister Ed Millibrain (or something like that) who wants to pave England over with solar panels whilst simultaneously funding research on how to block out the sun. Figure that one out! So, yeah, maybe they really are that stupid.

The discourse on cultural enrichment seems to have devolved into a kind of emotive sludge. There seems to be little discussion of the principles or practicalities that underpin it all.

About a year or so ago I was chatting to my more progressive friend who is a bit of a ‘current thing’ fetishist. JK Rowling is a hateful bigoted bitch sort of current thing. When pressed on what JKR has actually said that is ‘hateful’ you get a silence deeper than that of an interstellar vacuum. It’s all second-hand received opinion.

He’s a big fan of immigration and largely uncontrolled at that. He did the usual anecdotal stuff about families fleeing war zones and the like - whilst seemingly not understanding that many of our ‘guests’ seem to be working-aged young men who seem to have courageously left their families behind to die in these alleged dangerous hell holes.

Or that we might be the 3rd or 4th stop on their journey to ‘safety’ having passed through such incredibly life-threatening places as France.

OK, I asked, that’s rough. It must be hard for those families, but why? Why is it our responsibility to take them in?

A deliberately provocative question.

Of course I want to help people in dire situations. But what I wanted to get to was where are the limits? Can we take them all? If not, how many can we take? How many should we take? What are the principles here? The working parameters?

He seemed to think there was no limit and that a country as small as the UK could cope with even a massive influx.

Where are they going to stay, or be housed? Who is going to pay for it all?

Ah, that one’s easy. There are people who have more than one house. Properties that are empty. Hotels not fully occupied. They can just go there. In other words, people who may have used their savings and invested in 2nd homes as a way of securing their financial futures should be forced to give those up? Yes, but they could be paid for it.

With whose money?

We can just tax people more.

It’s so easy when you just take stuff of other people isn’t it? The incomers, apparently, have more rights to these things than the people who earned them in the first place.

This, then, is the kind of thinking that the ‘progressive’ wing sees no problem with. It’s the endless money and resource pot at the end of the rainbow. Or I should say at the end of other people’s rainbows. Heck, Jeff Bezos could probably pay for it all so we should just tax him to oblivion.

But where are these kinds of discussions amongst our political elite class? Have they even ironed out the ‘why’ question as a first step?

It’s an interesting question. Why should it be incumbent on any country to take the ‘refugees’ from another?

Personally, I would like to think we could be charitable enough to take some - but it is an act of charity, and there has to be limits. All the heart and goodness and kindness and compassion in the world will be about as useful as a cardboard hammer if you bankrupt yourself in the process.

Where’s the discussion about what those limits might be, or should be?

I think we should do our best to take in genuine refugees - as far as we practically can. It’s part and parcel of who we are, as a people. It’s part of our culture³ to be kind and generous and to help those in need.

And then there’s a separate question about legal and planned immigration. Who, exactly, do we want to welcome into our ‘house’, our country, the place we live? Do we not have the right to be selective? On what basis, what principles, are those selections made? How many can we welcome?

And, surely, we have the right to refuse entry and to be able to eject those guests who violate our laws and principles? Is this not reasonable? I fail to see how this is in any way ‘hateful’ or ‘bigoted’.

It could become hateful and bigoted if, for example, entry criteria were partly based on skin colour. We wouldn’t want that, and discrimination based on immutable characteristics is not welcome. Immigration should be based on, dare I say it, a kind of meritocracy⁴.

Oh my, how very white supremacist of me.

If you are a non-citizen and rape someone then, after a serving an appropriately long sentence⁵, why on earth should we not send you off somewhere else? You shouldn’t be welcome here and I couldn’t give a flying fuck whether you’re white, black, brown, or blue with green spots.

According to the insane wokoids, I’ve probably made more dog whistles in these few short paragraphs than my local kennels - but as I can’t hear the damn things, I don’t know.

It’s not only the issue of cultural enrichment that seems to lack a set of decently thought out underlying principles, it happens with other issues too. What, for example, are the principles that underpin the whole trans debate?

Even if we accept the un-scientific and absurd proposition that men can be women (and vice versa), even if it’s only as a legal fiction in the name of compassion, how do we balance the competing rights and privileges where biology matters - like in single-sex spaces and services?

The recent case in France where a doctor had to undergo investigation for (politely as far as I understand it) refusing to give a man a cervical smear test shows how ridiculous things have got.

Was it a case of “I’m sorry, Sir, erm, Madam, I do not appear to be able to find your cervix. Your balls are in the way”?

Balls or not, men do not have cervixes⁶.

The competing ‘principles’ in the trans fiasco appear to be a principle of ‘kindness’ versus a principle of ‘reality’. There’s no biological basis for adopting the position that a man can be a woman, or vice versa.

In the climate ‘debate’ (such as it is), there’s an emotive fear that we might be destroying the planet - or at least destroying our capability to live on the planet. Cows fart too much and we like things like heating and cooking far too much. Anything and everything that might produce CO₂ is under scrutiny - despite the lack of any real scientific basis for alarmism. Perhaps there’s a scientific basis for concern - but even the models, you know the ones that fail to properly predict the ‘climate’ for the next year, do not point to catastrophe.

The underlying principle here is to get rid of ‘Carbon’ - it’s nasty, awful, stuff that we don’t need. At least that would be the impression one would get from listening to a climate cultist.

It’s the same with the whole Israel/Palestine thing. The more I read up on the history⁷, the less sympathetic I become to the Palestinian cause. Not that I had an awful lot of sympathy to begin with. They started, with the help of armies from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Egypt, a genocidal war of annihilation of Israel and Jews back in 1948, and lost, and they’ve been whinging about it ever since⁸. Five nations (if we include Palestine) tried to annihilate the Jews and Israel - and Israel end up being the ‘bad’ guys?

The conflict here seems to be fundamentally about Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself and the denial of that principle. The use of the term ‘Zionist’ as a slur is itself a negation of Israel’s right of existence.

Even if you think the modern state of Israel should not have been created, that it was an error, some grave injustice, what, realistically, do you think should be done about it now here in 2025 nearly 8 decades later?

Again, what, realistically, should Israel’s response have been to the Oct 7th invasion and taking of hostages which, per capita, was a worse atrocity than 9/11? Is Israel not allowed a response? What was our own response to 9/11, or the mere threat of Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction? What principles need to be applied and should we not expect them to be consistently applied?

If you think the colonisation of the USA was illegitimate and morally wrong and represented a taking of land from the indigenous peoples, what, realistically, do you want to do about that now here in 2025?

Figuring out principles is hard. Figuring out the logical consequences of those principles is harder still. And, yes, we often get it wrong. We need to be prepared to change or adapt some of those principles if we find they’re not working out as we thought they would. Above all we need to be realistic and practical.

1. Time of Enforcement of Rules Against Grooming Gangs

2. It’s got people in it, which seems to be its strongest connection to reality

3. Yes, despite claims otherwise, we do have a culture. Those values of kindness and compassion and a desire to help may not be unique to us, but they’re part of who we are

4. I say kind of here because it’s a bit more complex than picking someone for a job, but much of the same considerations should apply. The point is that each entrant should be properly vetted and allowed entry based on specific criteria

5. I know this would still cost the UK taxpayer money, but I don’t see any other way round this. These useless wastes of oxygen should face serious consequences for their crimes. We can only hope they receive sentences much harsher than those handed out for writing some hurty words but, alas, this is sometimes not the case

6. There will of course be extremely (and I really do mean extremely) rare cases where there’s been a serious malfunction of sex determination and development that leads to significant ambiguity in the physiology. So it may be possible that a ‘man’ has a cervix, but I’m not expert enough (or at all) on the biology here, so I don’t know if this kind of thing is a possibility. The overwhelming majority of those with a DSD, however, are unambiguously male or female and there’s no such ambiguity about the presence or absence of their cervixes. None of these cases, should they exist, would invalidate the sex binary (the existence of DSD’s in general does not invalidate it either) - and besides which, when woke eejits make the statement that men can have cervixes they’re definitely not referring exclusively (or even principally) to those with such a DSD

7. I may be reading the ‘wrong’ history, but I’m trying to read as objective accounts as possible

8. And blowing shit up, or indulging in mass murder and rape and the taking of hostages. You want Israel to stop doing nasty things to you? Here’s a radical thought - try living in peace with Israel and Jews. Try not to start any more wars, if possible