Friday 6 January 2017

Brexit, Trump: Whose fault? The Basket of Bigots says the Left (Flo and Joan on video)

Hi Sal,

Great to hear the doings of a happy and active Grannie…  I envy your grand-motherliness.  Happy New Year to you and your multitudinous family!

But, oh dear on the "Flo and Joan" bit of nonsense!  

To be clear: If I were British I would have voted Remain. if I were American I would have voted for Hillary.  But with the losses on both sides of the Atlantic, the Left is in denial.

As for the "world-is-going-to-hell-in-a-handcart" view of current events, I think I may have suggested before "The Better Angels of our Nature" by Stephen Pinker.  There's also "The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley. A couple of solid books. Which lead to this:

For all the doom-mongering, the world has never been happier, healthier, longer-lived, faster-developing, safer, richer or more at peace.  In the UK, the economy is strong, even post Brexit win. In the US there's been an economic bounce, even post-Trump win.  

Even global climate change is going to be fixed in our life times, or in that of our kids. Fixed by technology: that is to say, by capitalism.  The only real world danger is radical Islam: and this, this topic alone, is off-limits to criticism by the regressive left….. (Maajid Nawaz, explains the "regressive left").  

Those "desperate people" you mention?  Syria was an Obama own-goal. Obama's failure to punish Assad's crossing of the "Red Line", a line Obama himself had set, made Assad contemptuous of the US.  Obama's failure to be more robust in Iraq and then Syria, led to ISIS and now to Russia ruling this radical roost. Line them up these Obama errors: withdraw from Iraq (>> Al Qaeda, then ISIS), do nothing in Lybia and Syria (ditto), do nothing about Crimea or Ukraine (weaken Nato, embolden Putin), diss the EU (ditto), fold to China's South China Sea hegemony (embolden Xi Jinping)…. so much, so sadly much…. and then his valedictory stabbing of Israel: not in the back but in the chest.  An ally and the only democracy in that part of the world, frontally skewered by a dishonest, biased UN resolution supported by such bastions of probity as China, Russia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Senega, Uruguay, Ethiopia and Egypt. A sick joke. 

Obama's foreign policy, I'm convinced, will go down in history as a monstrous avoidable failure.  I think he may even be judged the uniquely awful foreign policy president in the pantheon of presidents.  The worst in 44.  It's hard to deny that his presidency has made the world more dangerous.  Yet that's the same Obama that won a Nobel Peace Prize. (And an Obama I would have voted for….). Obama Foreign Policy summary: a signal, unique, avoidable, disastrous, catastrophic, failure. 

As for those "refugees" from outside Syria, well, blame Mad Mutti Merkel.  The bulk are single young men, out for a better life. Young men who saw on social media her say "refugees welcome". Can we blame them?  No.  But they are not refugees. The are economic migrants. There's a process for economic migrants.  Unless you're Merkel. In which case you simply tear up the process, because you're still guilty over the Nazis (she is).

Anyway, I wrote a comment at YouTUBE video by the Dopey Duo, Flo and Joan, (about #445), as follows:

Arrant nonsense.
The Left needs to acknowledge why it lost to Trump. Which wasn't because of racism, or xenophobia, or bigotry, or islamophobia, or the FBI, or even the Russian hacking. It was mainly because Hillary and her team ignored the mid-west and the concern of white working class people about jobs. Bill C, had got it right, but they ignored him. Including his wife. But that's where it turned for them. The electoral college, remember? Not that popular vote. I put this failure down to Hillary and her team. Plus the fact of her own very flawed, disingenuous character. (Benghazi, e-mails)
And Brexit was not because of (or by a long way not *just* because of) racism, xenophobia bigotry and the rest of the dreary excuses that the Left reached for straight after the loss. It was mainly because of concern over sovereignty. (Flo and Joan may have to look that word up....). There was also concern over free flow of labour, of course, but then again, that impacted working class people (studies show that it did: in a negative way), but these are people and places -- the working class, middle England -- that the middle-class Left no longer seems to care about: and just sing dopey songs on YouTube about. The Left used to the party of the working class. No longer.
As for saying you're screwed if you're "female, Muslim, POC or LGBTQ" that's also arrant nonsense. They've never had it so good; at least in the West: just check history, and what things were like in the fifties. There's been huge advancement in the rights of POC, LGPBTQ, women. On the other hand, if you're a woman, a POC, or LGBTQ, in an Islamic country you're in line to be killed. Nothing of that in this nonsense of a video by these two brain-dead Straight White Females. For them, it's now and always has been OUR fault, the fault of the West, the fault of Cis-gendered White Men.... I don't' accept their critique at all. I've always voted Left: Labor in Australia, would have voted Remain, and would have voted for Obama. But if the Left takes this attitude, that nothing is their fault, that it's all the bigots and racists, then there's no hope for the Left to come back to political power.

Away w'yez Flo and Joan! You're yourselves as leftie-bigoted as were your near namesakes Flo and Jo right-bigoted (Qld in the 70s)…..


Luv,
F xx