Author: Aristotle's Bench Press

News, Politics and Culture for the Unimpaired.

One Foot In The Grave

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It has been reported that Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn fell asleep watching tv a week over a ago and only awoke Friday morning to discover that Britons had voted to leave the European Union.

Corbyn had been expected to lead the Remain campaign in the lead up to Thursday’s vote, but couldn’t be bothered due to only being 75% committed himself to continued E.U. membership, and fell asleep whilst watching Escape to the Country.  Read More

Staff didn’t notice him missing until the day of the referendum, and the first attempts to contact him failed, as his pay-as-go phone hadn’t been topped up by his son during his weekly visit to drop off itchy blankets.

The Labour leader is being held responsible for the victory of the Leave campaign after not turning up and engaging with abandoned Labour voters in the biggest decision British voters have made in the last 40 years.

Brexit: Britain Leaves & Progressives Throw a Tantrum

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Against all expectations, Britain has voted to leave the European Union in a truly seismic result. The federalists have been sent packing in what was always going to be a close run referendum: 52% to 48%, with over 70% of the eligible population turning out to vote.

The Remain campaign, consisting of a rather unlikely but revealing alliance of federalists, progressive liberals & crony capitalists, ran a campaign built on the classic progressive chassis of slurs, vilification & scare tactics, ultimately failed as people decided that the apocalypse they were told would unfold if they made the decision to leave was a risk worth taking, given that past generations had paid in blood to retain the sovereignty they were being asked to casually surrender.

Throughout the morning defeated federalists queued up to give life to the rather fanciful idea that the British people hadn’t really voted against further E.U. membership, but instead were giving a bloody nose to the establishment.

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Even though he was not the official leader of the Leave campaign, the man of the hour has to be Nigel Farage, whose raison d’etre (excuse my French) for the past 25 years has been to remove Britain from a European Superstate.

It must have been fairly lonely being Nigel Farage at times over the past ten years – taking all the medieval village waste the Conservatives, E.U federalists and the progressive left could throw at him. He deserves this moment and this very British victory.

Strip away the spin and the narrative still being offered the next day, the British people, have rejected a politburo model of remote governance, unbridled by democracy or policy restrictions.

Contrary to what a conveyor belt of leftist politicians were saying this morning, this was a vote against a federalist E.U. who enjoys ultimate power without accountability; it was about wrestling sovereignty back from technocrats whose last interest is that of the British people. Their’s is a federalist agenda. Eurosceptecism across Europe is rife due to the failure of their progressive policy of forcing ideological pegs into cultural holes that has the commission handing out migrant quotas to nation states under threat of heavy fines.

The fearful thing to do would have been to stay, and full credit should given to people who did not buckle in the face of slurs and threats. The E.U. is an unelected governing body that decides policy in private and then imposes those decisions on the populations of member states. America fought and won a war of independence over these very issues, and they should appreciate the significance of this moment more than anyone else.

During this campaign, it mattered not that you could articulate your reasons and challenge those whose only game seemed to be a childishly simple shame game. To date we are yet to hear one convincing argument from anyone in the Remain camp. They clearly thought all that was required were the usual slurs and vilification of the opposition. Well, today they are left with nothing but the brittle shell of their failed propaganda and their ideological tears.

 

Cole’s Notes on Defeating Guerillas

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Interesting article over at Return of Kings about how Peru defeated their Shining Path guerillas, led by Abimael Guzman, with obvious applicability to the likes of ISIS:

But the government eventually learned counter-insurgency methods. These began before the election of Alberto Fujimori, but he definitely added impetus and urgency to them. In 1992, Guzman himself was captured and exhibited to the public in a cage. It was a stunning reversal for the Shining Path, and thereafter it gradually withered away.

Read it all here.

My Name is “Death To Traitors”

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Earlier this week, British Labour MP, Jo Cox was shot, stabbed and killed outside her surgery in a suburb of Leeds. Cox had been appointed to parliament the previous year by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and was an outspoken Remain campaigner in the up-coming Brexit vote.

The similarities between this killing and that of Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands in 2002 are worth noting. Both appear to have been assassinated for political reasons just prior to an election – Fortuyn an outspoken right winger, and Cox a progressive left winger.

Her killing came as the Brexit campaigning entered it’s final ten days, with public support for leaving the union at its height after a recent surge in the polls. It is not an overstatement to say that the Brexit vote will be the most important vote Britons have ever cast. At stake is the sovereignty of Britain and the survival of the Union itself, as many E.U. nations already unhappy with the terms and realities of membership will see a Brexit as a green light for their own referendum and possible exit. Read More

As yet, the motive has not been established, but witnesses reported the gunman shouting the name of the British far right group “Britain First”. These reports were then later denied, with witnesses going out of their way to refute such claims.

Needless to say, given the timing of the killing, any motive offered or narrative floated should be treated with a healthy skepticism. With the stakes being so high, it would be naively foolish to think that the establishment would miss an opportunity like this to play public opinion in their favour. If you find this idea offensive, you need to lay off the state sponsored soda for a while.

For the past twenty five years the narrative in Britain has been controlled by the progressive left. Anyone who had a problem with the trajectory of the planned society, e.g., Tony Blair’s ‘open door’ immigration policy, was branded a ‘racist’ or a ‘fascist’ and told to go away.

This attitude existed at both the official and grass roots level, as demonstrated in Gordon Brown’s confrontation with a Labour voter who had concerns regarding the level of immigration Britain was being subjected to due to the then unbeknown program of coercive engineered migration (CEM) implemented by his party to cynically manipulate the voting demographic permanently in their favour. Read More

However those people don’t go away. As the effects of failed policies start to take their toll on previously stable societies (see France & Belgium), they find another way of making their voices heard, as we have witnessed in the recent rise of nationalist parties across Europe. It’s fairly simple how the current situation came about if you can afford to be honest and objective about it.

In the late 1990’s the New Labour under Tony Blair created an immigration crisis, then refused to acknowledge it’s effects as legitimate concerns; electing instead to vilify and shame into silence those who spoke out. The steadfast refusal of those on the left to engage in dialogue or accommodate those voices has set the political spring for a nasty visceral backlash that is only now just starting to build momentum.

However, rather than address the issue or face a gathering storm compounded by the Merkel’s mishandling of the migrant crisis last summer, they have decided that they will simple double down on the rhetoric and continue on as planned. The language employed during throughout the Brexit campaign has been consistent, with those who support the Leave campaign being labelled as ‘xenophobes’ & ‘Little Englanders’.

The rise of nationalism in Europe has been easy to predict and can be traced back to the mechanisms that were introduced to ideologically modify society – the stripping away of sovereignty and ramming of ideological pegs into cultural holes, as the E.U. architects set about realizing their dream with little concern for, or recourse to the societies they have under their jurisdiction. Read More

The progressive left entertains the arrogant and abstract idea that the country is filled with bad people just looking to be fascists, or simple people looking for someone to blame. Whilst each time there is an addition to the depressing catalogue of Islamic attacks, they spend the next day in the press rummaging through their empty bag of excuses like the loving mother of a criminal son. This is partly to do with the fact that they have remained relatively unchallenged until recently, and are still running off a 1970’s script of motivation that sees a borgeois fascist behind every pillar.

The gunman, Thomas Mair – a solitary figure by all accounts with a history of mental health issues, clearly lacked the perspective to save himself from what appears to be a radicalized politically inspired murder.

However, ultimately the conditions for the killing of Jo Cox in Leeds were created by an ideology that ignores realities, and should be laid squarely at the feet of those who have arrogantly and steadfastly refused dialogue or to accommodate valid criticism for their failed policies: the progressive left, of which Jo Cox was unfortunately an active member.

 

 

Hillary’s Gun Control or Trump’s Islam Control?

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In the wake of the attack on a gay nightclub in Florida by an Islamic gunman, the same old issues continue to raise themselves with depressing regularity, along with a few new ones.

As the left now pretends to wrestle with an aggregation fallacy they have entertained for some time now: gay rights vs Islam, those of us who have been following this for some time know that the progressive left has already chosen Islam over gay rights. It was decided some time ago, and implicitly supported by LGBT silence over the treatment of gay people in countries who follow Islamic laws. Read More

Ideologically you cannot support both without arriving at an awkward or impossible contradiction at some point, and it would seem, that point is now. I am of course basing this on the trust that there remains enough people within society who are free of the worst ravages of this particular brand of insanity to force a change, or capable of realization.

At the same time, the Democratic party’s leadership, both Barrack Obama & Hillary Clinton, continue with the policy of circumventing a global threat whose name they refuse to utter. Instead using the killing of 50 people for their sexual orientation as an opportunity to drive home their gun control agenda. Read More

At this stage, it’s all getting a bit ridiculous. Obama’s continued failure to say the words ‘Islamic terrorism’ is indicative of either affiliation or a denial that disqualifies him from further office based on mental health grounds. Of course I am be disingenuously naive: it is part of a perverse progressive logic that appears to be laying the groundwork for the Islamization of all western societies.

It is so bad that even gunman Omar Mateen did not trust the Obama’s admin to report his motivation honestly, instead deciding to call in his motive to 911 just prior to the attack, because presumably, he knew that the Obama admin and press outlets would do everything they could to avoid making the link to Islamic terror.

Obama’s dogged refusal to utter the name of a foe that has declared war on the rest of the world, instead choosing to focus on the enemy’s access to weaponry, is akin to Winston Churchill in 1941 decrying Nazi Germany’s access to twin engined bombers during the Blitz without mentioning Hitler or the Nazis specifically by name. It is simply ludicrous and criminally insane.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is being touted as a dangerous demagogue, but in all fairness, they are making things childishly easy for him. When you have an incumbent leader and presidential candidate, both of whom refuse to identify the enemy they face, Trump’s unbridled ability to identify that enemy and say its name rather makes him look like the only person at the top table who is living in reality; when all you have to do is merely point out that the emperor is naked, your opponents (or rather the ideology they inhabit) make it an incredibly simple game in times like these.

Until Obama, Clinton and the likes of Trudeau here in Canada start living in reality instead of ideology, they will continue to be challenged and embarrassed by the realities of the world in which we live. But don’t hold your breath, liberals do not acknowledge mistakes, and consistently double down on the coercive rhetoric when challenged with such realities.

 

 

Little Englander Disease Spreading

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O.k. so this is how it goes: if you don’t want to be part of the European Union, you  are a Little Englander – a small minded bigot, a xenophobe and racist. It matters little that you can to communicate practical & philosophical reasons why you oppose the creation of a bureaucratic superstate build upon collective surrendering of sovereignty; or why you don’t think it’s a good idea being part of a stagnating and restrictive trading block; or why you have an issue with an unelected commission imposing immigration quotas under pain of financial duress.

None of that matters, because those on the liberal left who want you to be part of this brave experiment in collective failure have built their entire political & ideological modus operandi on slur slinging and coercive spin.

At this stage being called a bigot or a racist by these gameless tub-thumping clowns should be seen as a compliment.

They should really be asking themselves why they find themselves bedfellows with progressive Conservatives like Cameron – who is clearly doing the bidding of a shadow elite. Or why they, the same people who opposed globalization 10 years ago are now so eager to be part of an E.U. superstate? Or why Barrack Obama did an Op-Ed in the Daily Telegraph to remind British people that their best interests lie in Europe? No agenda there then.

Well, it seems that Little Englander disease is now spreading throughout Europe.

According to a series of recent Pew Research polls (lefties hate polls), anti-Brussels sentiment has risen sharply all across Europe over the past year thanks to a toxic combination of economic stagnation and the mismanagement of the migrant crisis

Full Article & Pew Research Report

It would appear that this ideological sickness is spreading and the recorded cases of Little Spaniards and Little Greeks disease are rising, with a significant number of cases also being reported in Germany.

There are two areas in particular where attitudes towards the E.U. are poor to say the least: the handling of the immigration crisis and economy. With nearly 94% of Greeks and 88% of Swedes saying that they disapprove of the way the E.U. is handling the immigration crisis, and a majority in Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Sweden & the U.K saying that they disapprove of the way the E.U. has handled the economic crisis.

In a sign that Europe’s publics increasingly want an end to the principle of ‘ever closer union’, more than twice as many people surveyed – some 42 per cent – said they wanted powers returned to their national parliaments than said they wanted powers transferred to Brussels.

As the British head to the polls, just 6% of the public in the UK wants such an outcome. And only 8% of Greeks favour more power for the EU. The strongest backing for an ever closer Europe is only 34%, in France

Someone needs to explain to them that their condition is in direct relation to their inherent racism and xenophobia, and nothing to do with practical experience living under a collapsing E.U.

Remember, in progressive ideology: if the dream is correct, reality must be made to fit.

Ivan Penaluna

Brexit, Euro 2016 & Islamic Terror: A Black Swan

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It seems like sheer arrogant folly to have decided to hold a referendum on continued British membership of the E.U. in the middle of a European soccer tournament. Regardless of the results and final positions the English & Welsh teams during this summer’s Euro 2106 in France, to hold a vote on membership during a time of heightened nationalist identity was surely a poorly conceived idea.

It is worth pointing out that this is the first time in 58 years that Wales have qualified for an international football tournament, and together with England whilst both face a vote for continued membership of the E.U.

The Remain campaign is essentially asking the people of Britain to surrender their national sovereignty for something considered progressively better: membership of a European Superstate with little to no control over borders or laws, but a greater good of shared benefits in return.

Add to this potentially fatal cocktail for the Remain campaign, the spectre of Islamic violence that threatens a now perpetually unstable France, and you have the socio-political makings of what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls a Black Swan – an event or occurrence that deviates beyond what is normally expected of a situation and is extremely difficult to predict. Black swan events are typically random and are unexpected. Read More & Black Swans for 2016

Islamic terrorists are known to be planning attacks during the Euro 2016 tournaments in France which starts on June 10th. Read More The threat is so imminent that the U.S. government has issued a travel waring to its citizens thinking of attending the tournament to stay away. Read More

Top of the list on their target must be the England Vs Russia game on Sat 11th in Marseilles – which offers no shortage of local population with Islamic affiliations and sympathies. Read More

Any attack on England fans during the tournament would provide no favours to the Remain campaign, as Britons start to view countries like France as failed states in waiting due to the pursuit of reckless E.U. immigration policies.

Together, these disparate elements have all the properties necessary to create a black swan event that could drive the E.U. referendum vote firmly in Britain firmly into the Leave camp, and in doing so trigger the collapse of the greater European project as other countries see it as a green light for their own referendum and exit from a dysfunctional coercive system of bureaucratic elitism employed and personified by the likes of commissioner, Jean-Claude Junker.