In praise of Sir Christopher Chope

Sir Christopher Chope MP has provoked outrage in England by crying out 'Object' and thus sabotaging a private member's bill criminalising taking 'upskirt' photographs of women. Such pictures are yucky and reprehensible, but does this mean it is useful to make them illegal and with a penalty of up to two years' imprisonment? Whatever your view, one has to admire a conservative who wants to limit the power of the state. 

Also in today's papers

Headline on John Rentoul's article in Independent

I thought Theresa May would survive – now I’m not sure. Sajid Javid could be PM by the end of the year

Guardian today 

The advent of Donald Trump, the “disrupter-in-chief”, and his America First ideology has proved even more damaging than Merkel feared, Der Spiegel said.
“If Hillary Clinton had won the US election, Merkel would not have run again [in

What the papers say - I have found four plums

In his upcoming book on US immigration, my brilliant friend Reihan Salam — himself the son of Bangladeshi immigrants — makes a bold argument: America must either restrict immigration or risk civil war as rising inequality and racial tension combine.
I hope Salam is right that the American melting pot can somehow be salvaged. But I have no such hope for Europe. No one who has spent any time in Germany

Jordan Peterson

Responsibility - that's what gives life meaning. Lift a load. Then you can tolerate yourself. 

People are pack animals. They need to pull against a weight.

That's the counter-culture: grow the hell up.

The first two come from this really wonderful talk about how to become a man.  From another talk, about Peter Pans who never grow up, came this.

Happy pride month in Canada!

CBC, the Canadian state-owned broadcasting company, has broadcast this clip which repays watching and posted it on the net under the rubric:

Happy pride month! Jessi Cruickshank talks with kids about gay pride and being gay allies

The children look about seven or eight and are ardent believers in sexual diversity.
Jessi Cruickshank asks the little innocents

I'm not gay but I'm a gay ally. Are you gay allies?

Yes, they chorus. 

I suppose none of them are being brought up as Catholics, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims or the traditional sort of Christians or Jews.

Rod Liddle, from whose Facebook wall I copied it, says Canada is fast becoming his least favourite country. I feel the same.


Yesterday, the Canadian Supreme Court upheld a decision whereby Trinity Western University's law degrees would not be accepted as valid by the legal profession. Trinity Western University is an Evangelical university in British Columbia that requires students, when they matriculate, to adhere to a 'covenant' that allows sexual intimacy only in marriage, marriage meaning marriage between a man and woman.

Law societies in Ontario and British Columbia decided that they would not license graduates from Trinity Western to be lawyers because the covenant amounts to discrimination against homosexuals and, after being sued, they have won. This is now settled law in Canada and will be a precedent in the future.

Quotations

"In this world you either have an empire or you have to be part of somebody else's." Peter Hitchens, who says the EU is Germany's empire.

"Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action." Benjamin Disraeli

Bucarest, mon amour

“There's not a city in the former Soviet Union [she meant Bloc] which hasn't been christened The New Prague (apart from Bucharest, and if you've been there you'll know why).”
Guardian travel article by Joanne O'Connor

I remember the 1989 Lonely Planet Guide to Eastern Europe (individual countries didn't merit their own guides) included Bucharest in its list of ten things to avoid in Eastern Europe. I don't remember what the other nine were but they were things not places.

'Public officials have a duty to direct propaganda at the population'

Speaking before an audience at an event held by the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Stengel, head of the office for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department from 2013 to 2016, argued that governments have a responsibility to direct propaganda at their domestic populations and ultimately control the political narrative.

“Basically, every country creates their own narrative story and, you know, my old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the ‘chief propagandist’ job....We haven’t talked about propaganda… I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population, and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”

Some Americans find these remarks shocking because, unlike people in Europe, Americans still believe, by European standards, in limited government.

Move along, nothing to see.

John McDonnell supported the IRA's use of ‘the ballot, the bullet and the bomb’

According to a story in The Times in 2015 John McDonnell, who will be Chancellor of the Exchequer (Minister of Finance) if the Labour Party come to power in England, told a public meeting at a pub in South London in 1985, attended by Sinn Fein and left-wing Labour Party members, that ‘the ballot, the bullet and the bomb’ would end British rule in Northern Ireland. He then called local Labour councillors who had boycotted the meeting ‘gutless wimps’ and said ‘a kneecapping might help change their minds’. A kneecapping means having their kneecaps shot off.

You can't generalise

No-one esteems aphorisms any more. Were Wilde around today (and not in gaol for going to bed with underage boys), every quip he made would get the response: Oscar, you can't generalise.

Or rather it was so until Twitter. A very useful achievement of Twitter was to relaunch the aphorism, before they increased the maximum number of characters in a tweet.

Quotations

"It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom)."
Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Society is a shared inheritance for the sake of which we learn to circumscribe our demands, to see our own place in things as part of a continuous chain of giving and receiving, and to recognize that the good things we inherit are not ours to spoil" Sir Roger Scruton, How To Be a Conservative

Quotations

Schopenhauer quoted with approval Voltaire's remark: "La terre est couverte de gens qui ne méritent pas qu'on leur parle" ("the earth swarms with people who are not worth talking to").

Sir Roger Scruton: "Mismanaged sexual feelings lead to a society of casual encounters, jealousies, and aggressions, in which there are neither lasting commitments nor sacrifices on behalf of children."

'You are loved when you are born. You will be loved when you die. In between, you have to manage!' Steve Jobs close to death.

An empty wish

I am far from being a huge admirer of Mr Trump (though his presidency is enormous fun) but I do wish England (by which I mean the UK) had him to lead us out of the EU, not the pygmy we have.

I hope pygmy is not a racist expression.

Boris Johnson has come round to the same futile wish, to judge by his recent speech made

Quotations

Philip Roth:
"Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, a form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing."

Ivano-Frankivsk in balmy summer weather

After Bucacs we went on, through green countryside glowingly fertile, to one of my favourite towns, Ivano-Frankivsk, known till 1962 as Stanislau or Stanisławów. 

It was founded as a Polish fortress in 1663 and was named after the Polish hetman Stanisław "Rewera" Potocki. Like Bucsacs, it became a largely self governing city and was later incorporated into the Austrian empire in the first partition of Poland.

Greek Catholic church, Ivano Frankivsk

Loss of belief in God and Man

It is sad that many people think animal lives are as important as human lives. Worse, they feel that this is a noble sentiment. Loss of belief in Man is a consequence of lack of faith in God.

Love of animals is beautiful but often strongly felt by misanthropes, sentimentalists and extremists. Goering wept whenever one of his dogs died, despite all the indications that he was a psychopath.

I spoke to a friend who is Green Party member who thinks animals as important as humans. He is not alone in thinking this in the Green Party, a party that attracts many very worrying people.

Tweets

Matthew Goodwin

‏Verified account
@GoodwinMJ Jun 1

Challenging numbers for Europe "Islam is fundamentally incompatible with our country's culture and values" Finland 62% Italy 53% Austria 48% Germany 44% N'lands 43% Denmark 43% Swiss 42% UK 42% Belgium 40% France 34% Sweden 34% Portugal 31% Source: Pew

Daniel Hannan‏Verified account @DanielJHannan May 31

More

You can have European integration or you can have democracy. Pick one.

Mark J. Perry‏Verified account @Mark_J_Perry Jun 1

More

If you fell out of your chair upon realizing that the University of Michigan has a full-time diversity staff of nearly one hundred employees, one of whom earns more than the president of the United States, you can be forgiven. I nearly did too.

Buczacz

I blogged about Buczacz last year and Professor Omer Bartov's excellent and searing book about the murder of the town's Jews. I have now visited the pretty little town. In warm weather on the first day of June it brought to mind Sherlock Holmes' remark about the vilest alleys not hiding as much sin as the smiling and beautiful face of the countryside. 

Buczacz was founded in the seventeenth century by Polish nobles in what was effectively the Wild East. The  nobles who started towns encouraged the settlement of Jews, desirable immigrants because of their commercial expertise. The Jews came east tired of constant friction with Poles. The Jews lived in their own community and were largely preoccupied by their own religion until the nineteenth century. In the 1920s 60% of the townspeople were Jewish.

Back in Cernauti/Chernivtsi (no longer the USSR) again

I just paid my fifth visit to Cernăuți. This is what I wrote after my third visit, two years ago. The Hotel Bukovyna is as good as ever, a four star hotel with a pool and good restaurant it costs EUR 30 bed and breakfast.



An unmistakable sense of freedom as soon as we arrive in Ukraine. A sense of normal people who think like human beings. A civilised place where people believe in God and love their country. Romania is like that too but is becoming EU-ised.

It took eleven hours to drive from Bucharest to Cernăuți instead of the eight we'd planned on. As happens every summer in Romania there were floods, a road was closed. At the border we waited over an hour. An argument for the European Union. All Romanian borders took half an hour to cross before she joined the EU.

The electorate is the problem

Populist voters are the problem. Politicians should dissolve the electorate and choose a new one.

Oh wait, they are doing so.