JULIE Lynn’s post ‘ldentity politics – the new writers’ block’ split opinion, with Stuart disagreeing:
Well I have seen the film and I think Spike Lee is right. It’s an entertaining film with great performances from Vigo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali. In the end it is a feel-good movie with a tired and rather unconvincing message that everything will be great if we all just get along. Hollywood pabulum. Spike Lee’s own movie this year was good too. Neither deserved best picture which IMO should have gone to Roma.
But mudlark 1 wrote:
I’m afraid that all this will only lead to people withdrawing further into their own ‘communities’ for fear of causing offence. We will have even fewer opportunities to simply interact naturally, as the public spaces contract and are occupied entirely by ‘victim’ groups. We seem to have come full circle from efforts in the past towards inclusion, regardless of skin colour, to the situation now where we have a form of apartheid, with non-blacks becoming a put-upon underclass.
And Jonathan Tedd joined in:
In other words a cultural apartheid. I saw the film and actually it uses a lot of guilt tripping – with prejudiced Italian immigrants’ attitudes to black Americans as the vehicle. The pianist is also gay. They go on tour and end up in the south. You can guess the rest . . . anyway I enjoyed it very much.
Meanwhile Joe Smith commented:
The left ten years ago: ‘Books and movies are too white. White writers must include people-of-colour in their stories!’
The left today: ‘White writers including people-of-colour in their stories is cultural appropriation!’
You can never make a crazy person happy. Which is why sane people don’t even bother.
Paul Horgan’s review of Dr Kristian Niemietz’s new book Socialism: The Failed Idea that Never Dies drew this from Charles Dawne:
Orwell was wrong on killing the sex instinct in his version of the future. Instead it has been encouraged as Huxley correctly predicted in Brave New World. The first and foremost barrier to our freedom is being imprisoned by our pleasures and what feels good (sex education for four-year-olds, destruction of courtship rules, drug legalisation . . . ) People who can avoid these pleasures will then receive the jackboot on the face from the state.
Mobile phone technology has brought both Orwell’s and Huxley’s concepts of surveillance and pleasure into one handy (literally) device.
And a reminder from Cassandra that: There’s a bit of old wisdom which characterises the purblind leftist attitudes to the multiple failures of the socialist idea: ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’. Of course, since human nature is not major in leftist thinking, that is wasted on them.
The Conservative Woman writes: The Left have certainly succeeded in silencing debate about immigration, by casting aspersions on any politicians who raise it as a problem; leaving Conservative politicians in particular in thrall to the thesis that any questioning of immigration is driven by ‘atavistic fears’. It’s the fear of being accused of exploiting such fears that then inhibits proper analysis and discussion. We have no intention of letting that prevent us at TCW either debating the facts or discussing any of the problems associated with the unprecedented levels of immigration to the UK over the last 13 years, over which the public has been given no say.
However we do reserve the right to moderate any readers’ comments that give grist to the Left’s mill, that confirm that prejudice or otherwise undermine fair-minded critical commentary and expressions of opinion, as on our editorial on the latest migration numbers, ‘They have no intention of cutting immigration’.
Colkitto03 pointed out that the country’s immigration dependence is a Ponzi scheme that won’t work:
Absolutely they have no intention of stopping immigration. This ‘people Ponzi’ scheme is the only way the elite can see their way out of half a century of economic mismanagement. Governments have vastly over-spent and over-promised.
The total value of unfunded or underfunded government pension liabilities for 20 countries belonging to the OECD, a group of largely ‘wealthy’ countries, is $78trillion. In Western Europe alone estimated public sector pension liabilities top 300 per cent of gross domestic product.
Add to this vast amount of both national and personal debt across western countries and low growth for a decade and you can see the future economics don’t add up.
What they should be doing is slashing public spending, but they cannot countenance that. Instead they want to fill Europe with immigrants to make up the new entrants to the Ponzi scheme.
It works for a while, but eventually will be a disaster.
Likewise derekandclive asked:
At what point does it stop? Mass uncontrolled immigration (because it is uncontrolled – those who don’t laughingly get let in legally simply come in illegally instead) has to have a finite end to it – we already house millions at the cost of homing our own people, we have millions cast into minimum wage work because it’s cheaper for business to import workers and flood the market with them than it is to invest in technology (which would remove the need for the vast majority of them) and then to socialise the cost of actually supporting the bit their minimum wage doesn’t cover – you know, housing, caring for and educating them and their children – as far as I am aware there is no programme in Whitehall that oversees the building of at least 100,000 new homes every year expressly to house imported people, no programme to provide new hospitals, schools, doctors’ surgeries for all these hundreds of thousands of skilled doctors and nurses and teachers to work in, no waste management systems or additional public transport infrastructure to cope with the additional population – there is no visible assessment of the capital cost of delivering any of this, the numbers are simply absorbed into the system and hidden from view, whilst the resources they consume are spread ever more thinly among those already here. Any meagre tax they do contribute is simply eaten up by the vast salaries of the bureaucracy that encourages it. At some point it will go bang but just as with the unfunded public sector pension liabilities, the state parasites and their chums will just keep enriching themselves today and kick the consequences of their utter failure and self-serving wickedness further down the road for a later generation to deal with.
Nigel Ford wrote:
The Conservatives are signing their own electoral death warrant, not that I care any more (having helped displace our Tory MP in 2017 by voting for the candidate most likely to defeat her, after Cameron’s socially liberal reforms endorsed by May).
Whilst the EU migrants tend to integrate better and make a more significant contribution to GDP, the BME populace vote Labour en masse which has seen dozens of constituencies in London, Birmingham, Lancashire and Yorkshire that John Major won in 1992 now heavily Labour and lost for ever.
Which isn’t to say that the majority of BME aren’t hard working, law-abiding, decent people playing a productive part in the economy.
With one word, Colonel Mustard summed it up: Unsustainable.
