In this week’s episode of London Calling, James and I discuss the big news of the week, namely, James’s visit with his grandson. In other news, Boris Johnson has been defenestrated by the Conservative Party, which James thinks Bill Gates flew in to oversee, and a leadership election is underway. I’m Team Kemi – I think the 41 year-old anti-woke warrior princess would make the best Prime Minister – and while James says if he had to go for someone he’d go for Kemi he thinks – predictably – that whoever wins will be a puppet of the World Economic Forum. James wants to talk about the farming riots in Holland – caused by the closure of Dutch farms, according to James, which is yet more evidence of the WEF’s de-population programme – while I want to talk about the coup in Sri Lanka. In Culture Corner, we both enthuse about The Terminal List and other non-woke Hollywood fare, like The Boys and Reacher, and I give two emphatic thumbs down to Thor: Love and Thunder.
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I very much like what the incomparable Philip Larkin said on the subject, in his classic interview with Paris Review.
Interviewer: What about your politics?
Larkin: I’ve always been right-wing. It’s difficult to say why, but not being a political thinker I suppose I identify the Right with certain virtues and the Left with certain vices. All very unfair, no doubt.
Interviewer: Which virtues and vices?
Larkin: Well, thrift, hard work, reverence, desire to preserve – those are the virtues in case you wondered: and on the other hand idleness, greed and treason.
I also like this from the equally incomparable Thomas Sowell
I love TS
Perhaps you could change from binary to triple, along the lines of employed/unemployed/economically inactive? This is a concept which is officially used for various reasons. Then it would be left/right/politically inactive – perhaps.
Regardless of whatever arbitrary labels are used state level politics is the problem, not solution.
We are on this planet to advance spiritually through exercising ever-increasing moral self-control, not carry out ultimately violence-backed control over others.
Nation-states originally arose out of the mass murderous and land-grabbing activities of medieval warlords. Countries remain the only level of human organisation granted ‘legal’ exemptions from the basic spiritual moral code of non-violence (eg wars and the existence of humanicidal nuclear weapons), non-theft (land confiscation, enforced taxation), honesty (deceptive secret services) etc.
Multi-party liberal democracy is a huge step forward from tyrannical state structures such as absolute monarchies, communist and fascist dictatorships (hello China, North Korea, Russia etc) and theocracies (Iran).
But ultimately we need to work toward a fully tolerant, cooperative and non-violent world by evolving away from the power-based nation-state system and all the politicising (left, right, up or down) which largely acts as a smokescreeen for its fundamentally immoral nature.
Finally, and to preempt a frequent misunderstanding of this position, it is most certanly not an appeal for world government, quite the opposite.
Ah, the “medieval” period – that age of chivalry, sadly now almost dead. Whatever their faults, these “medieval warlords” (perhaps you have Genghis Khan in mind, who however I understand was revered by his supporters), they didn’t preside over the killing of their own people on anything like the scale that happens in most multi-party liberal democracies today. And they were less able to interfere in the daily lives of their citizens than today’s tyrants (from Trudeau in Canada to jumping jim in China), and probably would not have done anything on a par with the last two years even if they could.
That’s a very good point.
Western medieval barbarism was at least to some extent tempered by a belief in individual spiritual and moral responsibility (via Christianity);
Whereas contemporary Darwinian atheism shrugs it’s shoulders at worldwide internment (‘lockdowns’), economic suicide (‘Net Zero’) and potential humanicidal nuclear exchanges
You have learned nothing about the world you live in and the species who dominate it.
Go play another John Lennon song and smoke another joint where you can dream about your fairytales while the real world of dog eat dog will continue until the end of time.
The origin of the left – right dichotomy in politics was the sitting order of the revolutionary national assembly of France. The deputies on the right where the ones in favour of keeping a constitutional monarchy, the ones on the left wanted a republic instead.
which as i say makes any Republican party a party of the “left”
My ‘entry point’ into this subject was as a newly elected councillor investigating ‘Local Government Climate Change Adaptation’ policies, and I learnt rather quickly how the arguments had been ‘Framed’ to give bias to the various ‘Intergovernmental Organisations’ who were quite clearly a front for the Ecology/Green Party: ‘negative growth’ types. This led on to Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ (the perfect entry point) and the concept of System 1 and System 2 thinking. Kahneman states that System 1 and System 2 are NOT physical, but merely tools to enable understanding. Later research (that you perhaps allude to) has begun to investigate the physical processing within the left and right hemispheres. I could go on all day. All very interesting. Just saying really.
I think it was Einstein who talked about the shortest distance between 2 points being a curve? certainly in my opinion, politics is not linear with the left or right going off in an ever more left or right direction. It increasingly seems to me the politics is more curved or even circular, at the top you have good balanced honest government a the bottom you have totalitarian, fascist, autocracy. Go too far down the curve on either side and you are on the slide into horror at the bottom of the circle.
The clever trick with covid was that in the interests of ‘keeping safe and protecting lives’ both sides shot down their sides of the curve and met at the bottom in a maelstrom of restrictions, totalitarianism loss of freedoms and in some aspects outright barbarity. The same approach is now being tried with climate change ESGs and the net zero policy.
It is interesting that despite the huge number of words written about politics, Abraham Lincoln’s, fairly brief, Gettysburg address is still seen as one of the great political statements. ” —and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
To my mind politics is about the checks and balances we need to keep society at the top of the circle. After covid and facing climate change stuff; we need people who value self reliance , resilience, independance, freedom, people who are rational realists. Are there any such politicians at the moment? well of course no politician is perfect and they get worse the longer they are in power, but people like Ron Desantis, Kemi Badenoch, Victor Orban, Bolsonaro etc. show signs of being the sort of politicians that can drag us back towards the virtuous top of the circle. It must be remembered of course that they are all only human with all the normal human flaws, in time they will need to be challenged and changed.
Excellent article … really had some thought provoking stuff. Thanks
A political spectrum that ranges from Communism on the left to Fascism on the right is a false dichotomy. You have totalitarianism on both ends.
Would it not be more useful to define the political spectrum as Anarchy to Totalitarianism?