Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 317

Teapots, Weeds and Geniuses

When will people learn? I am grieved to see still more innocent, well-intentioned contributors, armed with logic, hurl themselves on to the rocky beaches of 'Bunker Island',  that logic-free fastness.  These are pointless suicide missions. I beg them not to continue. The rest of us have to watch in horror as they are needlessly cut to pieces by Mr Bunker's awful little jokes about Goblins and Santa Claus, or prostrated by his amazing power to bore, which causes seagulls to drop out of the sky round his shores, stunned into insensibility by the repetitive tedium of his latest imaginary triumph. 

They really must grasp that within range of Mr 'Bunker' a mysterious force field operates which renders logic inoperable. I suspect that Mr 'Bunker' keeps this force-field going with an enormous solipsism machine deep in his, er, bunker. This itself is powered by a combination of vanity and of the corpses of the many logical arguments which have died, fallen to the ground and decayed on this inhospitable shore. I suspect that without the outside stimulation, it wouldn't be able to sustain itself.

I note that (having been de-bunked yet again without noticing it) Mr Bunker is now bizarrely changing the subject , trying to construct an inconsistency in my critical view of Bertrand Russell's Victorian Cambridge scorn for religion (a position developed, and common among intellectual snobs,  in the days of the paddle steamer) and of my favourable citation of Albert Einstein's non-specific views on Theism. He says the two men were of a similar age.

This is perfectly true, but so what? Russell was a mathematician and philosopher. Einstein was a physicist. Russell's views were formed in late-Victorian Cambridge, well before the discoveries which made Einstein famous and which make his observations on cosmology interesting. Mr 'Bunker' also says (I'll take him on trust, solely  for the purpose of this argument, lacking time to look up the details) that 'Russell, the leading logician, mathematician and philosopher, was agnostic in the sense that he "couldn't know", but was just as atheistic as I in the sense that he was devoid of any belief in supernatural beings'.

Thus Mr 'Bunker', who defies logic for every waking hour of every waking day by inventing an inexplicable and unsustainable  'impossibility' to justify a certainty he otherwise cannot support,  has such a hilarious lack of self-knowledge that he actually equates himself with Bertrand Russell.

Now, Russell and Einstein were undoubtedly geniuses. But is Paul McCartney one? Daniel McKean thinks he is. He says :' The band that brought us 'She's Leaving Home', 'Here, There and Everywhere', 'Something', 'Penny Lane', 'Tomorrow Never Knows', 'In My Life' and so on are certainly not 'trivial'. McCartney himself is undoubtedly a genius; a deeply gifted songbird whose melodies have been recycled by hundreds of thousands across the globe and studied by classical musicians as well as 'pop' musicians. If the Beatles music is so trivial, why is it that each time their music is released on the latest technological format, their sales increase and break more records, decades later?

There are several points here. What is about these songs that Mr McKean thinks is so marvellous? Can he cite the particular elements of them that rise to the level of 'genius'? Can he explain why they are works of 'genius'?. Also, does he really believe that mass sales are themselves a sign of quality?  Many trivial things, pitched to appeal to a mass market, sell plenty. Does that make them good, let alone works of genius?

 

I am well aware that many people like the Beatles. If it were not so, then they would not have become rich and famous. The question is whether their renown is based on a lasting quality, or on that fickle and evanescent thing, well-marketed popularity. People get angry, rather than argue reasonably, when I raise the possibility that the Beatles are forgettable and will be forgotten (except in the way that famous stars of the past are remembered for being famous in their time, though their appeal is now incomprehensible). Merely to hold the view that the Beatles may not last is a sort of dissident position. What's more , neither side can be certain of the outcome.

Now, as one who remembers his first sight of the Beatles (and what an odd name that is, if you think about it) in their neat uniforms on some early-evening TV show in the early sixties, and can recall such works as 'Love me Do' .Twist and Shout' and 'I wanna hold your ha-a-a-and' when they were freshly-pressed 45-rpm records in rough paper sleeves,  retailing at seven shillings and fourpence a go, I have always been puzzled by the way they never went away again afterwards.  And I am also puzzled by the way they became intellectually respectable, pretentiously praised by critics who, it seemed to me, saw which way the wind was blowing. There were scores of such groups at that time. They are almost all forgotten.

The thing that seemed to distinguish the Beatles from the others was that they had the power to produce a worrying hysteria in girls aged about 14 or 15. These girls, screaming, often made it quite impossible for anyone to hear the Beatles at their live concerts (but as they dominated the audiences nobody seemed to mind). It was on that strange, unexamined hysteria, that –in my view -  their exceptional success was based.

I'm glad you have given up cannabis, Paul - maybe you'll think straight now

Paul McCartney, who was a popular singing star many years ago and is for some unfathomable reason treated as if he is a serious person, tells us that he thinks the Monarchy is 'an amazingly old-fashioned affair'.

In that case, I had better call him Mr McCartney. For if he thinks kings and queens are outdated, he must feel the same way about knighthoods, not to mention the MBE that he was careful to cite when he so irresponsibly called for cannabis to be legalised back in the old-fashioned Sixties.

Mr McCartney is much more outdated than the Monarchy. I don't just mean that anyone listening today to the works of The Beatles must be puzzled and embarrassed that such trivial stuff plunged millions of teenage girls into shrieking hysteria.

I mean that his political views are much the same as those of a student revolutionary of half a century ago, or of a BBC executive (much the same thing). During the past 40 years or so, republics haven't exactly distinguished themselves, have they?

Apartheid South Africa was a republic. East Germany  was a republic. Iran and Iraq are republics. North Korea is a republic. Republican America searched through more than 200 million citizens for a President and came up with . . . George W. Bush.

Yet among the small number of the longest-lasting free, law-governed countries in the world, most are monarchies. This fact would make an adult think.

But like so many children of the Sixties – and children is the right word –  Mr McCartney has  generally preferred fashionable beliefs to independent thought.

After all, what grown-up, informed person would call for the legalisation of a drug whose users so often end up suffering from incurable mental illness?

The busy, well-funded pro-cannabis lobby will no doubt say that the connection has yet to be definitively proved. The fact so many cannabis users end up tragically mentally ill, or that mental illness has increased since cannabis use became widespread, is not enough for them.

The tobacco lobby used to spread the same complacent story about cigarettes and lung cancer – in fact, they did so for about 30 wasted years, during which many thousands of  people were fooled into thinking that smoking was safe.

By the time they found that it wasn't, they were already dying in pain in the cancer ward, or ravaged by heart disease and emphysema.

The only good news is that Mr McCartney has announced that he has at last given up smoking cannabis. Why? Not because  of our allegedly cruel drug laws, anyway. Possession of  this substance is supposed to  be illegal, and Mr McCartney  has made no secret of his taste for it, but British police have  taken no action against him for 40 years.

So I wonder why he has given up? It is supposed to be because he is worried about the effect on his youngest daughter, Beatrice, aged eight.

But what about his other, older, children? Wasn't he just as concerned about them? Whatever the reason, let us hope that, once the greasy fumes of years have cleared away, he realises how much harm he has done by his espousal of this poison and  joins the campaign to make it properly illegal again.

There are children now in school, the same age as Beatrice, who may be saved from life in the locked ward of the mental hospital, if he will only recognise that he was wrong..
 

Policing the forces of tyranny
In January 2007, I wrote this about the arrest of Anthony Blair's aide Ruth Turner in the pursuit of the supposed 'cash for honours' scandal: 'Still, silly people are rejoicing over the arrest of New Labour's Ruth Turner.

This is wrong, dangerous and short-sighted. Just because this creepy totalitarian method has been used against someone you don't like, it doesn't mean it's right. What you do to others will eventually be done to you. If you unleash the police as a political weapon, then you have authorised their use against your own side.

'One day, when you are whimpering amid the wreckage of your ransacked home or having your DNA swabbed and your dabs taken at the behest of your political enemies, you will complain. And they will reply, "Where were you when they did this to Ruth Turner?" And they will be right.'

The job of the police is to patrol on foot, preventing crime and disorder. If they cannot or will not do that, we would be better off without them. Once they attach themselves to political causes – like the current liberal elite campaign against press independence – they are a monstrous engine of tyranny.
 

And today in Dictionary Corner... Trevor Phillips
Trevor Phillips, chief commissar of our embryo Thought Police, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, says Christianity is fine in church, but not if its beliefs conflict with the stern will of the liberal state.

He says those who want Britain  to stay Christian are like Muslims who want sharia law. That's what he means by 'equality'. The ancient religion of this country on which its laws and freedoms are based is now 'equal' with Islam.
 

What hope for our children's children?
How do civilisations end? Once, merciless hordes of barbarians would ride into peaceful, prosperous valleys whose inhabitants had gone soft.

Now, we do not need to wait for the barbarians. We are so busy enjoying ourselves that we cannot even pass on the basics of civilisation to the next generation.

Teachers report that children arrive at school aged five, still wearing nappies and unable to speak properly. They come from prosperous homes filled with gadgets and – of course – TV sets.

I first warned of this back in 1996, when the long, mad, ultra-feminist campaign  to persuade women that bringing up their own children was demeaning and  unworthy of them had finally succeeded.

By Christmas 1997, Britain's female workforce outnumbered the male workforce for the first time. This wasn't because everyone suddenly agreed with loopy old trouts like Betty Friedan, or anti-marriage fanatics such as Germaine Greer – but because big employers realised that women were much easier to exploit than men.

So off they all marched to work in call centres or banks or human-rights law firms, and their babies were left to whimper in day orphanages and dumped drooling in front of TV screens. Year by year, we pay a higher price for this. What sort of children will these children have?
 

Where there's a Willetts...
Nothing succeeds like failure. Turning British secondary schools into comprehensives was an educational and social disaster almost without parallel.

So now we have decided to do the same thing to  our universities. Equality of outcome is to replace equality of opportunity,  and politics is to override education.

Professor Les Ebdon, friend of the Mickey Mouse degree, is to be appointed to help achieve this aim.

Can we please stop pretending that this act of national suicide is the responsibility of Liberal Democrat Vince Cable alone? Equally to blame is that most useless of Tories, David Willetts.

How does the State get away with grooming 13-year-old girls for illegal underage sex?

As the age of sexual consent is 16, what are state employees doing fitting contraceptive implants in 13-year-old girls? Aren't they colluding in a criminal act?

These sinister devices are a clear admission by the Government. It actually expects these children to have unlawful sexual intercourse, and wants to make it easy for them.

How strange, given that the one crime we all disapprove of utterly and completely is paedophilia. Even convicted gangsters, rapists, burglars and muggers look down on the paedophiles in their midst (they have another word for them, as they cannot spell or pronounce the official term).

Those who engage in paedophilia are often also accused of 'grooming', preparing their victims for violation and abuse.

Yet here we have a policy that directly condones and encourages the sexualisation of children, and is at the very least comparable to the 'grooming' we are all so shocked by.

What child, equipped with this rather revolting chemical lump or dose, would not grasp that she was expected by the authorities to act accordingly? I would be very interested to know exactly what the victims of this scheme are told, and how they are chosen.

This thing is done by doctors and nurses, supposedly symbols of rectitude and mercy. It often takes place in schools, where our children are meant to be safe from molesters. It is protected by law. It is paid for by your taxes and mine, extracted under the threat of prison.

Perhaps most sinister of all, it is – like all child-molesting – 'our little secret'. The girls' parents are not asked their permission beforehand for their daughters to be corrupted by our sick state. Nor are they told afterwards. This is both totalitarian and evil.

The judges are always ready to confirm that this is no longer a Christian country in anything but name, and did so again on Friday – though I do wonder where they think our laws and their powers come from.

But it is much worse than that. We are turning into a sort of Babylon, only with drizzle and sleet. Almost every sexual practice and habit – with the single exception of faithful marriage – is now encouraged by the state.

First, the state poisons young minds with so-called sex-education, which is now unleashed in primary schools. Then, when the poor things act on what they have been told, doctors push chemical anti-baby capsules under their skin. I believe this sort of thing is known as 'harm reduction'.

It all depends what you mean by harm. Having privatised the telephones, electricity and the railways, we have nationalised paedophilia.

West is making things worse for Syria's victims
The BBC is working hard to get us to go to war in Syria. Its incessant coverage is – as it was in Libya and Egypt – mostly dim, partial and unquestioning. This should cease.

If there is a rebellion against a dictatorship, then it must, as far as the BBC is concerned, be noble. If a government defends itself against rebellion, it must, according to the BBC, be wrong.

Great slabs of history tell us that this is not necessarily so. In this case, I tremble for the fate of Syria's Arab Christians if the Assad regime falls.
Bad is often replaced by worse. This is already happening in Egypt and Libya, though the BBC seldom troubles to record the aftermath of the 'Arab Spring' it welcomed so simple-mindedly.

Perhaps the Corporation is trying to please our Foreign Secretary, William Hague, an increasingly pathetic figure who seems to have mistaken military intervention in foreign countries for conservatism. Someone should also ask him why he gets so outraged about Syria, and was not outraged by equally bloody repression in Bahrain.

It seems that, having been refused UN permission to destabilise Damascus under the blue flag, we are now looking at running guns to the rebels. What British interest is served by this dangerous policy?

The revolt in Syria would long ago have faded away had it not been for the noisy support of Washington and London. Much of the bloodshed and destruction is, I believe, the responsibility of the 'West', which has falsely encouraged naive people to believe that Nato helicopters and bombers are just over the horizon.

ID cards: the spectre's still lurking
Since identity cards were abolished long ago, why do we still have an 'Identity and Passport Service'?

I asked the Home Office, and they treated it as a silly question and snapped dismissively that it would cost too much to change the name. I said I was sure that the plaque on the Home Secretary's door didn't still say 'Alan Johnson', but they didn't get the joke. Then I asked the

Department for Education, as it is now known, how much it had cost to get rid of the stupid New Labour name it used to have. For the entire department (far bigger than the Passport Office), it cost £8,995, small change in Government terms.

So why do we still have an 'Identity and Passport Service'? I wonder if identity cards have really gone for good.

What the Dickens?
Sad to think, as we mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, that hardly anyone will still read his books 50 years from now.

What with mass 'dyslexia' (otherwise known as very bad reading teaching), and the takeover of childish imaginations by TV and the internet, reading books for pleasure will soon be as rare as seedcake and clay pipes.

You can't replace warships with empty words
The more David Cameron rattles his rusty sabre, the more I fear for the Falklands. Margaret Thatcher nearly lost them, by proposing to scrap much of the Navy and withdrawing HMS Endurance. Luckily for her, the Argentinians didn't wait till we had sold or melted down the ships that formed the Task Force, or she'd be a footnote.

Now, we could not possibly take the islands back if we lost them again, and I am not convinced we are strong enough to hold them against a determined attack.

We also have many fewer friends in the world than we had in 1982. I dread waking up one morning and hearing that Port Stanley is once again in Argentine hands.

Mr Cameron hopes to look tough by boasting about ship deployments. But while I don't want to give too much away, our ships may not be well suited to the task they face. And they can't stay for ever.

He should boast less, and try to rebuild the Navy he has cut so clumsily, before it is too late.

Fairly Depressing

Before I go on my travels, I just feel the need to draw readers' attention here to the weblog (on this 'Right Minds') site ) of Dr Robert Lefever. He has chosen to write about the very serious subject of 'antidepressant' drugs, a matter I have discussed here. I increasingly believe that the resort to these highly questionable chemicals, like the 'treatment' of the fictional complaint 'ADHD' with powerful mood-altering drugs, is part of the same cultural and moral sickness which has led to the de facto decriminalisation of drugs which were once despised, rightly feared, and properly banned by law.

 

We are a society increasingly unwilling to face, recognise or deal with reality.

 

In any case, I commend the Doctor's article to you. I was especially struck by his mention of Aldous Huxley's fictional panacea, 'Soma'.

Tying up a Few Loose Ends

I shall be travelling for a few days, and posting only my 'Mail on Sunday' column during that time.  Before I go, a few general remarks.

Plainly I can never hope to reach agreement with all my correspondents. Too many of our differences result from disagreements on principle and purpose – the drug issue being the most obvious of these, and the God issue being the one on which passion so often gets in the way of logic. On cannabis, either you want a society which thinks that mass stupefaction is a noble aim, or you want one which thinks it is a squalid path to moral and material decay. That is what it is about, though it seems to me that the truth lies very much on the anti-cannabis side, in the discussion about the dangers of cannabis to the human mind, as opposed to the 'Red Herring' (as Mr Keith Stroup of NORML described it, so complain to him if you don't like the phrase. Don't accept any attempts to deny that he said it, because he did and I have proved it (see aerlier posts). Nor was it 'taken out of context' or any other such excuse) of 'medical cannabis'.

I still think the 'medical cannabis' people have three very deep holes out of which they must climb. First, experts in all the complaints allegedly treated by cannabis ( e.g MS, Glaucoma)  attest that there are better, less risky and less intoxicating ways of treating them; two, how can THC be properly tested against a placebo?  Its intoxicating effects are so powerful that nobody could conceivably be unaware that he had been given a sugar pill instead. Proper blind testing is therefore impossible; third, I have yet to find any advocate of 'medical cannabis' who does not join the campaign for general legalisation, and allow himself or herself to be used by it. Surely, if such people really wanted cannabis to be legalised *as a medicine* they would have nothing to do with a campaign for general legalisation of its use for recreation? Associating themselves with such people is bound to delay (at the very least) the outcome they claim to seek. I have never heard an answer to any of these points, only abuse for my alleged callousness.

On religion, there are a number of guests here who are at least prepared to own to the merits and intelligence of their opponents. But alas there is also Mr 'Bunker', who moans about his supposed mistreatment here.

He really should grasp the fantastic tolerance and patience which is and has been extended to him. He comes here almost daily,  hiding behind his boastful and self-important fake name, skipping about, scampering just out of range of facts and logic whenever they threaten to get the better of him (the word 'impossible' always occurs as he scurries up the nearest hazel bush, chattering derisively at whoever has almost caught him) ,  like a sort of atheist Squirrel Nutkin . He emits little squeaks of derision at believers, ignorantly equating them to polytheists, and repeatedly telling them(in the face of many requests to refrain from these bad manners)  their faith is indistinguishable from beliefs in goblins, fairies and unicorns. Whenever anyone pins him down he wriggles out from underneath the argument by changing the terms of it. And when his own words are played back to him, he complains of 'misrepresentation'. I would say he was insufferable. And yet I am resolved to suffer him. I was however entertained by a contributor who summed up the view of Mr 'Bunker' as (roughly) 'Belief in God is possible for humanity in general, but it is impossible for Mr 'Bunker'.'  I think this is actually quite fair, emphasises just how special he is, or thinks he is, and brings us round again to the real question to which we cannot know or even(in detail) guess the answer, because Mr 'Bunker' hides from us his true name and identity. What is he really like?

That of course leaves us free to speculate.

But not now. I've had enough of that. I've also had enough of Mr 'Ludicrous Pseudonym' who has repeatedly tried to attribute to me thoughts about fatherless families which I haven't held, and words about them I haven't said. Now he wants me to set out a detailed policy on exactly which benefits would be withdrawn, at nine months' notice, to discourage the future formation of such families.

The answer is, I haven't gone into detail, because there is at present no hope of the policy being implemented. As soon as it is, I shall examine the current situation in detail and make detailed suggestions. But I can assure him that I have no intention of allowing any human creature to starve to death, or go without shelter, if I can help it. It seems to me to be quite possible devise a system which achieves that, without actively encouraging fatherless families, as our present system does.

What annoys me about the assaults of Mr 'Ludicrous' is a) that he assumes that I am either motivated by cruelty or indifferent to suffering, and that eh cannot see that the current arrangements are not the default position of human society, but a special set of circumstances, which as far as I know exist almost uniquely in this country, and which can be correlated with an enormous increase in fatherless families. 

You can respond to this in several ways. You can say you think fatherless families are a good idea – I'd really like it if someone would actually come out and openly argue for this consequence, since even if it wasn't originally intended, it is clear that it is and has been the consequence of existing welfare policies for several decades. An unintended consequence which is not corrected after four decades can, I think, be reclassified as intentional.

You can argue that this revolutionary change in our society has other reasons (in wich acse, of course, reforming the payments would not reduce the rate of creation of fatherless households.

Or you can shout boo-words into the void, about 'attacking single mothers' ( absolutely and demonstrably not my intention. I believe they act rationally, and cannot be punished for doing so. It si the government which has misled them which I attack) , or about leaving women and children in destitution to 'teach them a lesson'.

I can respect the first two, and would be interested in debating the matter. But the third I dismiss with contempt.

One or two other points. I'm told that cannabis never used to be illegal. True enough. And nor did cocaine. Note, particularly, the opening scenes in the Sherlock Holmes story  'The Sign of Four' (in many ways my favourite of the long stories) in which Holmes injects himself with cocaine and Watson furiously disapproves. It is made clear that on other days Holmes has been taking morphine, that is, heroin.

Watson expostulates : '"But consider!" I said, earnestly. "Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process, which involves increased tissue-change and may at last leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed? Remember that I speak not only as one comrade to another, but as a medical man to one for whose constitution he is to some extent answerable."

Readers of the Wootton Report of 1969( which can be found on the Internet with ease) will find that until the middle 1960s, use of cannabis in this country was tiny, and restricted to very small social groups. The reason for the growing government concern and legislation as that, for some unknown reason, cannabis was by then beginning to spread far beyond the small circles where it had been used, and was becoming a major drug. The statistics in Wootton are interesting.

United Kingdom convictions for Cannabis possession stood at 4 (four) in the whole year of 1945, rising to 79 in 1950, 115 in 1955, 235 in 1960 and 626 in 1965. Then something happened. In 1966, the figure almost doubled to 1,119, and in 1967 doubled again to 2,393. Of course compared with now, when in England and Wales alone the police (who aren't really interested anyway) handle more than 160,000 cannabis possession cases a year, and let off the great majority with meaningless cautions and other disposals, these figures are microscopic. The question is, how much has the decriminalisation of cannabis in Britain, stealthy and gradual but undeniable, contributed to this growth.

The idea that if you weaken the laws against a pleasure drug its use will not rise is so laughable that I will just laugh at it.

As for tobacco, I praise the subtlety with which it has been pulled back from full legality to semi-legality. One of the measures  last effective in reducing smoking has been the application of the law to property owners who allow it to be smoked on their premises. Similar laws on cannabis have, in the same period, been repealed. The alws on the two drugs are moving in almost exactly opposite directions.

A contributor who has also read 'Sir Nigel' and 'the White Company' chides me that I didn't act as Nigel Loring would have done, towards my critic in Southampton.  Well, I'm sure the good Samkin Aylward, Nigel's hard-headed squire,  would have counselled me against staining lance or sword on such a person. Samkin himself might have given him a buffet, but I doubt if either man would have regarded this sad, sunless creature as worthy of chivalrous combat.
Anyway, in Nigel's time there was no politically corrected police force and CPS,  anxious to uphold the human rights of the cannabis community.  I'm no great fighter myself, but my guess is that most British police forces would seek to prosecute *me* for *being* assaulted by a political critic, were that to happen. And they might well persuade the Crown Prosecution Service to do so. Think I'm making this danger up? Then look up the amazing story of the preacher Harry Hammond, a frail and elderly man who was indeed arrested and prosecuted in Bournemouth, after being attacked and pelted with mud by young, fit, strong people who did not like his views on homosexuality. Nothing happened to his assailants.  Mr Hammond died shortly after being convicted and fined, and posthumous efforts to appeal against his conviction have failed.  Peter Tatchell, to his lasting credit, spoke up against this appalling behaviour by the police and courts.

Returning for a moment to Nigel Loring, I do wish more people would read Doyle's historical novels. 'Micah Clarke', about the Monmouth Rebellion, is I think the best, but they are all witty, clever, enthralling, informative and unjustly neglected. Doyle hopes to be remembered for them, rather than for Holmes.

The Continuing Crisis, and some responses

The following post is an enlarged and revised version of a long comment I placed on the previous thread. First, a warning against sarcasm in print. What follows immediately after this is perfectly valid, but it was written in response to a comment I thought was yet another 'wot abaht alcohol' comment from a pro-drugs campaigner. It turns out ( and I'm truly sorry for the person involved) to have been written with the opposite intent.

Even so, it's a clear, full updated response to the 'Wot Abaht Alcohol and Tobacco' drivel which is so frequently raised here, presumably because it is now taught in schools.

The amazing purblind self-interest of the drug lobby is frequently demonstrated by this pitiful, drivelling non-argument ''Legal regulated recreational drugs - being easier to obtain (for both adults and children), and carrying no legal disincentive - are far more popular than, and thus kill far more people than illegal unregulated recreational drugs.'

Wow.

Or perhaps, not Wow.

Examine this:

1. Drugs which have once been legalised are almost impossible to de-legalise. The existence of two highly damaging legal drugs in our society is in fact one of the strongest arguments for not legalising any more drugs, and not at all an argument in favour of legalising cannabis.

2.The damage done by alcohol, which this writer has never denied, is indeed great. That is partly because it is so widely used. That is because it is legalised.Were cannabis as widely used as alcohol, and as readily available, the damage it did would be vast and appalling. That is not because it kills, a claim never made here, but because it has the power to wreck, irreversibly but unpredictably, the mental health of those who use it. Its users are already badly affected by mental health problems in large and growing numbers. Only our vestigial laws keep this from happening. If alcohol now enjoyed the legal status which cannabis enjoys, what sane person would want to take the restrictions off?

3.The sneaky introduction of the word 'regulation' by the pro-drug lobbyist also backfires. Legal alcohol and tobacco are also 'regulated'. Regulated alcohol does a huge amount of damage to those who use it, as does regulated tobacco. These things are inherently dangerous, as is cannabis. Further, the fact that these drugs are legal has not prevented the emergence of large illegal markets in both of them, illicitly distilled alcohol being particularly dangerous, while criminal gangs smuggle cigarettes in quantity. Thus, these arguments, examined with an ounce of intelligence, are actually part of the case for continuing to ban dangerous drugs such as cannabis forever. Why make the same irreversible mistake again? If cannabis were legal, we would have many years to find out what it would be like to have this poison sold as widely as alcohol now is. (very large numbers of irreversibly mentally ill people, a severe decline in public safety and the work ethic, a growth in violent crime and in traffic deaths, etc etc, plus the continuing disadvantages of the illegal market that would continue to flourish outside the tax system). But our decision would be almost impossible to reverse.

A very important part of this argument is the irreversibility of legalisation. One of the reasons why we need to stand so firm on this frontier is that, once lost, the position can almost certainly never be regained.

Mr Ford of the 'Comment Warriors' joins us (welcome!) to complain that 'prohibitionist' commenters are foul-mouthed, just like the cannabis campaigners he can't restrain. Are they? I suppose it's possible, but I find a tendency to resort to four-letter abuse much more common among the self-stupefiers than among the so-called 'prohibitionists'. For obvious reasons the pro cannabis lobby struggle to express themselves. Their command of language, and their ability to restrain themselves from bad manners, are often limited by their extensive drug abuse. Worse, they mistakenly believe their drug of choice is harmless and are unaware of their decline as social beings.

Most of them don't think there's anything morally wrong with the public use of obscene language, just as my critic in Southampton felt happy to use an obscene gesture to me. My main point about Mr Ford (who ought to learn how to spell my name if he is planning to come here a lot) and his warriors is that, now everyone knows that their sieges of sites such as this are organised, we can all ignore them as stage-managed, and recognise them as orchestrated lobbying by selfish, cruel people who put their own pleasure above the health and sanity of others.

Of course, this term 'prohibitionist' is used to confuse the banning of cannabis possession ( an already illegal drug) with US alcohol prohibition, which attempted only to ban the sale and transport of a drug that had been legal for centuries. This is pure propaganda.

In answer to Mr 'Ludicrous Pseudonym', I have no idea where or when he claims to have criticised my 'no more subsidies for single mothers nine months from now, but existing single mothers keep them' policy. There was no evidence in his comment that he understood this. But if people get married before they have children, then the welfare state should of course protect them if the husband and father later dies or deserts. Our current welfare system, incredibly contains no special provision for widows, but generous payments for mothers who never married in the first place. It certainly doesn't privilege (I put this mildly) those prepared to commit themselves to marriage. It should. I do not know the individual circumstances of the woman I spoke to in Southampton. But the current rules certainly allow considerable payments to her, for housing and subsistence.

Mr 'Ludicrous Pseudonym' now dodges this point and replies thus :' Mr Hitchens, unless you believe that your proposal would scare all unmarried women into complete abstinence from sex, you must then at least acknowledge that there would still inevitably be some single mothers, and therefore children, that would suffer as a consequence'.

My reply : Of course there would be some fatherless households. As for suffering, I believe that the children of such households already suffer greatly as a result of adults having been encouraged into this lifestyle by a dogmatic and callous state. There always were such households. Read my book 'the Abolition of Britain' for a description of the state of affairs before the 1960s revolution. But in general their families were expected to care for them, something which I believe still happens in the Netherlands and many other highly civilised European countries which have not chosen to offer substantial subsidies to this form of household. As a result, most other such countries have many fewer fatherless households. The fact that my suggested change in policy would not completely end fatherless households is not an argument against it.

Mr 'LP' continues 'When planning to have children, many unmarried women will not think that they will ever need benefits so your proposal probably wouldn't deter them from having children.'

Well, if he is right then it won't make any difference. But I think he is wrong, and feel we should try . It does strike me as interesting that , since such subsidies were introduced, the number of fatherless households has increased by many hundreds of thousands, and has become common when it used to be rare. I do not, as is always claimed, criticise the women themselves. They have made a perfectly rational choice in the circumstances and I don't blame them at all. I blame the politicians who have encouraged them into what I believe is a way of life which disadvantages children. I believe people are rational and will respond rationally to objective circumstances. Mr 'Ludicrous' seems not to agree.

Mr 'Ludicrous' continues: ' The woman in the programme didn't expect to become single, but more importantly she said that she had plenty of money behind her when she fell pregnant, so I think it is fair to assume that she wasn't planning to rely on benefits and so she probably wouldn't have been deterred. Do you honestly think that your proposal will act as a deterrent for all the women for whom the last thing on their mind, when they are about to have sex, is future benefit payments should they fall pregnant.'

Well no, if it's the last thing on their minds, or unimportant to them, then it won't have any effect. But if that is so, why did the introduction of these payments alter behaviour in the opposite direction? But what if it does influence them? Last November I quoted the singer Adele Adkins who once said of her own schooldays 'the ambition at my state school was to get pregnant and sponge off the Government', adding: 'That ain't cool.' . I've dealt with the case of the woman in the programme elsewhere.

If the proposal did fail to achieve its purpose of preventing single mothers then it would only serve to punish women for having sex outside of marriage. This is pretty much like saying: '"Tough, we warned you about this and yet you still made the mistake, so why should we help? Even though we know that you and your children will be suffering, we simply don't care anymore."'

Ah, having tried 'in effect' and 'effectively' to introduce distortions of my views, and to suggest that I have said things I haven't said, and think things I don't think Mr 'Ludicrous' now employs :'this is pretty much like saying'. No it's not. It's precisely because I care so much about them that I wish to stop distorting the lives of the young by seducing them into dependency and leaving great masses of children without the immeasurable benefit of having a husband and father in their lives.

When we see 'the words 'this is pretty much like saying' in front of an invented quotation, it is a huge red warning sign, telling the wise reader that what is coming will be a twisted misrepresentation. The point is that we have for decades encouraged young women into a way of life that is unhappy and grim for them and for their children. We have sought to influence their behaviour in wrong directions by powerful and costly state intervention. Let us try just not doing that, and see if they don't as a result find a better way of living.

Mr 'Ludicrous' also criticised my behaviour on Radio 4's 'Start The Week' (this is still available on i-player). As for broadcasting etiquette, it is quite different in the 'Start the Week' studio where four people of equivalent force and initiative are placed round a table and expected to argue with each other , from the way it is in programmes such as the 'Big Questions', where several dozen people of varying confidence and experience compete for microphone time. It is also perfectly legitimate to interrupt another guest when he or she has reached the end of a sentence or point (if you do not do this on STW you will hardly get heard at all, and no conversation will develop) It is quite different to do so when he or she is still in the middle of what he or she is saying, and especially when he is trying to answer a question you just asked him.

Finally, on my encounter with my fan in Southampton. I never intended to meet him. I just saw the banner and thought it would be fun to have it as a souvenir, and was surprised to find its author there. I hadn't seen him as I went past. I never intended to confront him, and if he hadn't been such a poltroon I would have parted on reasonable terms with him. I am always happy to engage with critics and opponents, as I should have thought was clear. But I do loathe people who skulk behind anonymity. And I object to deliberate liars as well. As for my comments about his appearance, as I said, these were limited the aspects of it that he had chosen, not to anything about himself that he couldn't control, by a different choice of clothing or a healthier way of life. I think it perfectly reasonable to comment on these things, when someone tells public lies about me, so that others can see what sort of person the liar and coward is. Of course, if we knew his name, and his many friends could attest to his character, kindness to animals, charitable giving, work in night-shelters, love of literature, service in Afghanistan, lifesaving awards from the Royal Humane Society, etc, things would be different. As it is, we have to go on what we have. Which is what I described.

I quite take Mr Reynolds' point about the intention of his comment warriors. But I make two points in return. One, by no means all of this irregular army of comment warriors abide by his wishes that they should be polite and coherent (one or two contributions to this thread have been too obscene to display). And I suspect, having met at least one of them, that Mr Reynolds will never be able to ensure that they do.

Two, many people, knowing for certain that the large number of pro-drug comments on artlcles and blogs are consciously organised, will rightly take them less seriously and see that they do not represent general opinion, but an orchestrated attempt by a pressure group to appear stronger than it is, and to discourage opponents.

Finally, I am baffled by a comment from Mr Dean Haywood, who seems to have joined our old friend Mr Lemon, posting from one of the Moons of Jupiter , so obliquely from reality and logic that it is very hard to work out what he is trying to say. He asks: 'So what you're saying, Peter, is that it is acceptable for a human being to choose their own grammatical preferences, but not what herb they choose to consume in their own time? Another reply would be highly appreciated.'

Has this man never heard the expression 'category error' ?

Comment Warriors, and How to Spread Bile

I have at last been honoured. No, not some bauble or title, but my first ever hostile demonstration, personally directed against me. Alas, I cannot properly thank the solitary person involved because, although I assured him that I don't normally sue over defamatory lies, he still lacked the courage to tell me who he was.

It happened in Southampton on Sunday, as I was leaving the King Edward VI school, from which the BBC programme 'The Big Questions' had been transmitted live that morning. Very unusually, I was in a car provided by the programme makers, as I had to hurry to a distant railway station. As we turned into the main road, I glimpsed a large banner. Vain as I am, I can usually spot my own name in a piece of small print at about 50 paces, so it was no hard matter to see it in six-inch letters on a bedsheet hung on a wall. I was thrilled.  Forgetting the train, I asked the taxi-driver to turn round and go back so that I could take  a proper look.

There it was -  a large, apparently unattended, off-white piece of cloth, bearing the words, in block capitals : 'Peter Hitchens is a hypocritical racist alcoholic. Spread your bile elsewhere. No-one cares what you have to say'. (I'll analyse this message later)

Not having a camera, I thought I would take it home as a souvenir, but as I approached it I realised that a middle-aged woman was taking a picture of it, and asked her to send me a print.  I was going to give her my address, but didn't in the end,  because as I inspected it, a person appeared at my elbow, growling 'Do you have a problem with free speech?'

I said that no of course I didn't, and explained my desire to take it home as a souvenir. By then it was plain that it was far too big (and wet)  for this to be practicable, and in any case this person was obviously its guardian, judging by the smirk of pride on his features. So I offered to pose in front of it, while he took the picture.

So far , so jolly and tolerant. Then I asked him who he was. I explained that the banner was actually libellous, but that though I could certainly sue him if I chose, and pursue him for quite a lot money as I would undoubtedly win, I did not usually do that (I have only once made a serious threat to sue, but only when the defamation was committed on a wide scale by the official of a large organisation, and only to secure the apology and retraction that I swiftly and rightly received. I never sought any money, but it was probably the only way to correct the record.  On that occasion too I had been described as 'racist', a simple and total untruth).

He wouldn't tell me his name. Now, it seems to me that there's nothing specially brave about attacking public figures if you're not prepared to put your name to it, especially once you've had an assurance that you won't be sued.  I thought this contemptible. So I called him a coward. I then pointed out that two of the statements on the banner were untrue (I have no doubt that I am sometimes a hypocrite. No fallen creature with a moral code can escape this charge).

He affected not to understand this.   The person involved was the stuff of nightmares, exactly what you would expect an abusive commenter on the internet to be.  Beneath a woolly hat sat a podgy face, as starkly pale as 1950s British ice-cream used to be. Large sunglasses obscured the eyes, as if their owner seldom saw daylight. All this surmounted a body that was plainly an efficient machine for converting sugar into lard. I mention these characteristics as they all seem to me to be matters of choice. He had chosen to look like that.

And it came to me, that if he wanted to tell lies about me, then I could tell the truth about him. So I told him with some force, but without swearing,  that he was a coward and a liar .  I never offered him violence, or contemplated it.

Then,  confidently expecting to hear more of this on the internet, where such people are over-represented, I left him to it. As I was driven away, he gave me an American one-finger salute – why has this awkward gesture replaced the good old British two-fingers?  I waved and smiled, regally.

This morning I turned to our old friend UK420.com,  a seething bog of semi-literate declamations about the wonders of cannabis, which rather emphasise my point that, whatever this drug may or may not do, it certainly doesn't sharpen the mind or increase intellectual curiosity and acuity.

And, not to my surprise at all, I found my new acquaintance posting, oh so humorously, as 'Osama bin Laden'(Bin Laden, for all his faults,  was much better-looking, as it happens) , Full member Number 65799,who has posted 387 times on UK420 since May 2011. The picture of me standing by the banner, taken as I was saying something, is also there for those who wish to see it.  Now, when I republish other people's writings I normally correct mis-spellings and typographical errors. None of us is immune to them. But I have left them in this effusion, because I think they are part of its rather pathetic character.

This is what he says:
'I turnt on my tv this morning, onto "the big questions" on bbc, and was greeted by the odious little tossers face, staring back at me. I very quickly realised that he was in Southampton, at a school not too far from where I am.. 
WAY too good an opportunity to miss I thought, so I grabbed a dust sheet and a spray can and nipped over there..
i knocked up a quick banner, and draped it over a wall near the school so he would see it when he left, and waited on the other side of the road.
10 mins later his taxi leaves the school, drives past the banner, turns around, and out gets the arch oxygen thief!
by this time a lady is next to it taking a picture of it, and he actually tells her to stop so he can pull it down!
No way I think, so over I go. "you'd best leave that alone" I say, to a visably bristling hitchens.
he asked my name, I refused, so he called me a coward! "Do cowards put up signs like that?" I said..
he said he didnt sue for defamation, but could as 2 of the 3 things I said were incorrect? When pressed he wouldnt say which one was correct, tellingly.
He then started on the personal abuse, which to me is a sign he has lost the arguement. I have been toe to toe with him now, and it took all my self restraint not to headbutt him, or worse, but I did give him a body shove when he got "in my face" at which point he retreated to the cab.
im SO glad I went, im looking forward to his version of events in his blog.'

(Mr 'Bin Laden' here utters two other straightforward falsehoods. It is not true that I asked the woman to stop taking a picture so I could take the banner down. I asked her if she would take a picture of me with the banner, before explaining that I wanted it as a souvenir. I am not sure where she went. Nor did he 'give me a body-shove'. As he perfectly well knew, that would have been assault. Nor was I 'bristling'. Until the person's cowardly refusal to tell me who he was, I was quite prepared to have a civil conversation with him, and treat the matter as an amusing encounter, hence my willingness to have my picture taken by him. He also didn't say 'You'd best leave that alone', not least because I never touched it). I mention these small things not because they matter much, but because my failure to correct them might otherwise be taken as confirmation.

I think the event was in fact amusing in its way, and post my own version here in case, as these things sometimes do, the matter attracts more interest. I thought from the wording of the banner that its author was almost certainly angered above all by my campaign to have proper laws against cannabis properly enforced.

On a similar and related subject, I'd like to reproduce two items from a well-known pro-cannabis website which have been drawn to my attention. These, I think, help to explain why any anti-drug articles or Internet postings are so swiftly besieged by hostile comment. And I think they give sensible people a reason to discount such comments

'Dan Ford appointed head of CLEAR 'Comment Warriors' Campaign'
 (2nd Feb 2012)
'The CLEAR "Comment Warriors" campaign has drawn a line against misleading and unthinking reporting of cannabis stories.
Every time cannabis is mentioned in the press, wherever it is possible to leave comments in an online forum, the CLEAR comment warriors will be there.  Our aim is to inform, to tell the truth, to redress the balance against the misinformation and prejudice which is so often evident in reporting of cannabis stories.
In cases of serious inaccuracy, a Press Complaints Commission complaint will be made but every day there are stories about the police raiding cannabis farms.  Sometimes these are major organised crime operations with trafficked gardeners and violence involved.  On other occasions they are quite clearly about someone growing for their own use, frequently for medicinal reasons.  Often the police seem incapable of distinguishing between these extremes and so are the media.  That is when the comment warriors are at their very best.  That is when they are performing a vital service to society.
Every day though, we will be there.  We shall never let a story pass without confronting the real issues behind it, without ensuring that the truth is told.'

At another part of the site we find this: 'Every day there are stories in the British press about cannabis.  Most concern yet another police raid on a "cannabis factory", usually involving victims of human trafficking and organised crime.  Such are the horrendous costs of cannabis prohibition.  Innocent lives are destroyed, property is wrecked, electricity is stolen, neighbourhoods are ruined – all because of an inane, pointless and irrational government policy.
Every day the CLEAR Facebook page points to such stories and calls for comment warriors, people who can post polite, well-informed, persuasive comments.  This is an excellent way of driving opinion from the grass roots.  Over time we can influence newspaper editors, local opinion formers, those people who are prominent in local society.  It is a long game and requires patience, persistence and politeness – but also passion.
So follow the Google news service for stories and keep an eye in the  CLEAR Facebook page. Watch out for calls for "Comment Warriors" when we find a story that's really worth complaining about and  feel free to add any you notice!    Please take the time to leave a comment, express your point of view and use some facts to counter the lies and propaganda that are published about cannabis. If you can't write a comment to the newspaper's website, then write to the editor.
To be most effective, your comments should be polite and refer to scientific evidence.  Please do not use bad language, however angry you feel at the content of the story.  Please feel free to copy any information you find on this website to use in your comments.  Over time, you will be able to build up some standard comments or paragraphs that you can save on your computer and copy and paste as you need them.
In most cases you will need to register in order to leave comments. This can be frustrating to begin with but soon you will be registered everywhere. Of all the local newspapers published in Britain, most use one of only three or four standardised comment systems.  Once you've registered once, you'll be able to comment on all papers that use that system.
The most important thing is to keep going.  It can become tedious but invest just 10 minutes a day and you can be part of making an enormous difference.  Working together we can have an enormous impact from the grass roots.  Become a comment warrior today!'

Well, they're right about it becoming tedious, anyway.

Don't forget, it takes a cynical knave to create a dodgy knight

I really used to think a knight was something  special. I dimly recall meeting my first one, at some prehistoric school speech day, and being badly disappointed by this wheezy, portly person.

But, coming from the last generation to be brought up on Arthur Conan Doyle's Sir Nigel, I knew that a feeble appearance could conceal a heart of fire – so I was able to imagine that the pinstriped buffer I saw might once have led a charge or sunk an enemy ship against all odds.

Probably he had just done long service on some committee, or obeyed the Tory whips down the decades, with misplaced loyalty. But a little chivalry still hung around the ancient title.

As I grew up, I came to realise that chivalry was generally unwanted in modern Britain. And I also noticed that knighthoods were now awarded for several bad reasons.

It seemed ludicrous to me (and still does) that I actually knew men who were knights. 'Him?' I would chortle, as I read the lists.

Perhaps the politicians wanted to suck up to re- ally famous people – rock stars, actors and comedians. Perhaps they wished to reward donations.

Then there was the mysterious world of the higher Civil Service and the senior ranks of the Armed Forces, where you got rewarded for good behaviour, like long-term prisoners.

In the end, the only decorations I took  seriously were those given for valour in the field – and even they are unfair.
But the awarding of knighthoods has for years told us far more about the politicians who hand them out than about the people who receive them.

The governments that bestowed titles on Nicolae Ceausescu and Robert Mugabe shamed themselves. Who can blame tyrants for taking what is offered? They should keep what they are given. What we need to do, every time this comes up, is to name the politicians who approved the award.

There's little doubt that some of those honoured by the current Government will in time turn out to be embarrassing.

And that is what they should be – embarrassing.
I think 'Sir' Fred Goodwin should have kept his title, just as I think 'Lord' Archer should keep his, as a perpetual embarrassment to those who hoped to gain by dishing out these  cynical baubles.
 
How come China has no ADHD?
The made-up complaint ADHD apparently doesn't exist in China. The horrible drugs used to numb the poor children who are scandalously 'diagnosed' with ADHD are not available there.

And yet somehow, Chinese boys and girls manage to behave in class.

And at last the counter-revolution against this nonsense is beginning in the USA, where the mass drugging of healthy children also started.
In the New York Times on January 28, psychology professor Alan Sroufe wrote: 'Back in the Sixties I, like most psychologists, believed that children with difficulty concentrating were suffering from a brain problem of genetic or otherwise inborn origin.

'Just as type 1 diabetics need insulin to correct problems with their inborn biochemistry, these children were believed to require attention-deficit drugs to correct theirs. It turns  out, however, that there is little  to no evidence to support  this theory.'

The article is easily found on the internet.

I recommend it, above all to the raging furies who always write to me when I tell the truth about this appalling scandal.
 
Thanks for the invite, Keith
My thanks to Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, which I criticised last week for listening to the laughable views on drugs of 'Sir' Richard Branson.

Mr Vaz has now invited me to give evidence on the non-existent 'War on Drugs'. But will the MPs (and the civil servants who really run policy) listen?
 
Square eyes
If I watched much TV (and an hour a week is a lot for me), I would be very cheesed off indeed with the way the digital picture breaks up into a mass of tiny squares whenever anyone moves much faster than the average tortoise. Is this just me, or does anyone else have this problem?

Dave's dupes are humiliated AGAIN
One of my chief joys these days is in saying 'I told you so', especially to the gullible dimwits who voted Tory 'to get Gordon Brown out' and now find that they have Gordon Brown still in, only he has acquired an Etonian accent and is smashing up our Armed Forces more effectively and permanently than Labour would ever have dared to do.

I told you so in December, when many people who should have known better swooned and gasped over Mr Cameron's alleged 'veto' in  Brussels. I pointed out that there was no veto, and that  the French were actually rather pleased by what had happened.

I said that Neville Chamberlain was also praised by mobs of fools when he came back from Munich in 1938 with his worthless piece of paper.

Well, Mr Cameron has now admitted, with a shamefaced contortion of his impossibly smooth features, that his great stand against the EU was nothing of the sort. I expected that. He has done this again and again on the European issue.

But where is the anger and dismay among those who let themselves be swindled?

The only MP who gave Mr Cameron the sharp edge of his tongue when the climbdown was debated was Dennis Skinner, the last straggler of the great class war of the Eighties.

Tory MPs and Tory media, whose unwise joy and undeserved praise helped boost Mr Cameron in the polls at Christmas, buried the news or held their peace.

Well, if you let him treat you as a doormat over this, he will be sure to wipe his mucky boots on you many, many more times.
 
In the name of the fathers
I promise you that the supposed reforms aimed at giving divorced fathers more access to their children will not work. Our anti-fatherhood state and courts will simply fail to implement them.

And so our national tragedy drags on, with its growing millions of small victims.

Last week, Pennsylvania State University academics exploded the myth of the 'good divorce' and showed that children suffer however the parents behave.

The answer's simple. More than 40 years ago a slapdash Parliament was lobbied by liberal fanatics into making divorce ridiculously easy.

Since then the courts have handed down a series of judgments furiously prejudiced against fathers and husbands.

Parliament has very little to do between now and the 2015 Election. It should put its back into a thoughtful and thorough recasting of the rules of divorce.

And that, surely, is a job for the bishops, instead of taking Trotskyist positions on welfare reform or rowing about the few dozen homosexuals who – bizarrely – wish to get married in churches.

If they really do, let them, provided the law also lets heterosexuals marry in gay clubs. I suspect the take-up will be about the same on both sides.

Einstein versus the Atheists

Since I first got into this fight, I have noticed that the God-hating faction don't actually want Christians to be reasonable or accommodating. They want to make them into mirror-images of themselves – dogmatic, intolerant, rigid and filled with spiteful scorn for their opponents. I decline, and what do I get in return? Concessions? No, bigger, deeper buckets of slime than if I had been some sort of Elmer Gantry.

 

So they seldom if ever notice any of my mollifying points. No, I am not a Bible literalist. No, the Bible is not a Christian Koran and is not the unmediated word of God, but requires careful interpretation. Yes, I accept that religious believers have done terrible things in the name of God, and only ask in return that Atheists accept that Atheists have done terrible things  in the name of their various utopian, Godless faiths.

 

Finally, I concede that reason and science cannot take any informed person further than agnosticism – a reasonable recognition that we simply do not know enough to know if there is a God or not.

 

I say, to the dismay of some believers and the bafflement of almost all the Godless, that belief in God is a choice. I choose to believe, for reasons I have often given and will happily give again, most fundamentally that I wish to live in an ordered and purposeful universe, rather than to exist in a meaningless, random and pointless chaos in which my life and actions  have no meaning beyond their immediate and observable effects.   But I add that belief that there is no God is, equally, a choice.

 

 

Thoughtful atheists recognise this. But the new breed, of enraged and furious anti-theists, do not. As in the case of the absurd Mr 'Bunker', they deny that there is a choice (always the mark of a totalitarian , which is also the mark of someone who hasn't really grown up –  an autocrat is, in many ways, just an enormous and lethal spoiled child, with armies at his command, and dungeons and torture chambers and concentration camps at his disposal).

 

So when I mentioned Einstein in passing yesterday, I did so to reinforce this position. I did not say (for I know it is not the case) that Albert Einstein was a religious believer.  That is an entirely separate question. I know perfectly well that I could never persuade someone who didn't *want* to believe in God to do so. I'm not interested in trying. And I recognise that there is a large, further step after that, in the adoption of the Christian faith trather than any other. There is no point at all in debating that with someone who is an atheist .

 

That is why I fight on ground where reason and facts can be deployed, and insist that belief in God, or belief in No God is and probably always will be a matter of choice. Atheists might be right. I concede it. I might be right. They won't concede it. Why this inequality? Is there any justification for the Atheist certainty, that theirs is the default position of truth and reason? No. If there were, Einstein would presumably have discovered it.

 

I am very interested as to why the other side so very much want their belief to be considered obligatory. But it also makes me very suspicious of them.

 

But if Albert Einstein was not a religious believer (and he wasn't), was he then an atheist or an anti-theist? I do not think so. Read the following:

 

"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly."

(Dukas and Hoffman 'Albert Einstein, the Human Side' Princeton UP, 1981 p.43)

 

"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings."

(Cable reply to Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein's (Institutional Synagogue in New York) question to Einstein, "Do you believe in God?". )

 

"In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views."

(Quoted by Prinz Hubertus zu Lowenstein, Towards the Further Shore: An Autobiography (Victor Gollancz, London, 1968), p. 156.)

 

 

 

"I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books, but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God."

(G. S. Viereck, Glimpses of the Great (Macauley, New York, 1930), quoted by D. Brian, Einstein: A Life , p. 186. )

 

I think that's pretty clear, in showing what Einstein *wasn't*, though less clear in showing what he *was*. Though of course if anyone knows - and can show -  that these quotations are false or misrepresented, then I shall of course have to withdraw.  If Albert Einstein could see that, why is Mr 'Bunker' so stuck? What special knowledge does he possess, which Albert Einstein did not, which makes it 'impossible' as he repeatedly says , for him to believe in any kind of deity ( 'or gods' as he so childishly adds on every occasion).

 

There remains a sort of belief among the less well-educated atheists that 'science' is incompatible with religious belief. I don't think Albert Einstein thought it was.  The Revd Dr John Polkinghorne, former Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge, certainly doesn't. And as I think John Lennox says, it is quite funny that atheists, who get very exercised over Christians who believe in the Virgin Birth of Christ , seem quite happy to believe in the Virgin Birth of the Universe, out of nothing at all, by nothing at all.

 

Please get it straight, Oh Godless ones. You have no more right to be dogmatic than I do – that's all I'm saying. Once that's accepted, we can have the real argument about why they are so frantically, angrily anxious that there should be no God. I have my theories about that. That really, really makes them cross, because deep down they know perfectly well that it is the whole point.

 

The Tory Party – Who Needs It?

As this is the one thousandth posting here since this modest forum began, I thought I would choose as its subject the most important problem before us – the need to reform our dead and damaging major political parties. It won't interest the cannabis lobby (nothing interests them except the Freedom to Fry) or the anti-theist faction, (who somehow think they are cleverer than Albert Einstein) but they have had quite enough red meat lately.

 

As I write, I have half an eye on Prime Minister's Questions, and so far have seen no sign of anything resembling politics in these tedious and futile exchanges. Minor technical disagreements about benefits and health, and populist anti-banker stage rage are all we get, plus pathetic planted questions from government backbenchers who want jobs.

 

Yet several matters of enormous importance need to be discussed. The first, of course, is the Prime Minister's wholly predictable capitulation to the European Union. There is supposed to be a large 'Eurosceptic' faction among Tory MPs. The Prime Minister is not just their opponent, but their enemy, and he has just proved it quite spectacularly, an act made all the worse because he pretended to be one of them. Why are they silent? Why, when the subject came up for debate on Tuesday, did they hang back from full-blooded wrath, leaving all the Parliamentary sketchwriters to say –rightly -  that Mr Cameron got away with it?

 

What are they for? Why, having been so completely misled, will they not now rebel?  If not now, when? It is all very well acting pleased and credulous when Mr Cameron staged his fake triumph. That could be explained tactically – though it seemed to me that the 'Eurosceptics' looked all too genuinely taken in at the time. But they must surley break with him now if their bleiefs mean anything at all.

 

 

They were shamed by Dennis Skinner, a proper Labour MP recently childishly mocked by Mr Cameron. As a 'dinosaur'.  I do not agree with Mr Skinner about anything, but he has the sense to know that EU rule means that his voice and vote will count for nothing, as everything important will be decided elsewhere.

 

He also knows where to stick the rhetorical razor-blade in the rhetorical potato, saying: 'There's a word for it, it's called appeasement, and if this meeting had been held in Munich you would have been coming back waving a piece of paper.'

 

As I noted in a posting here on 17th December, there are parallels between Mr Chamberlain's ridiculous welcome on his return from Munich, when few understood the true nature of the Munich agreement, and Mr Cameron's equally hysterical and misplaced welcome back from Brussels, when few understood the true nature of the supposed 'veto' . But if the Tory Party were any use, they would have been making those parallels, not leaving the job to Dennis Skinner.

 

Yet millions still support this appalling, useless party which even ahs useless rebels who don't rebel . People still write to me moaning about how awful the government is and, when I ask them how they voted last May, they drone, like hypnotised beings,   'I voted Tory – we had to get Gordon Brown out'.

 

Well, as it happens –and as I point out to these ridiculous, easily-led ninnies -  they now have Gordon Brown with an Etonian accent . And while Mr Brown and Ed Balls can truly claim to have saved the Pound from Anthony Blair's plan to join the Euro, who can be sure that Mr Cameron would have done the same, or can be trusted with the currency now? I might add that Mr Brown would never have dared to devastate the armed forces as Mr Cameron's government has done. Our military decline under this supposed patriot is as bad as the days when the Dutch sailed up the Medway.  It is not just that the defence cuts are huge. It is that they have been wielded carelessly and without thought.

 

I also do get the occasional letter from people (some of them were at the notorious Bruges Group meeting at the October 2009 Tory conference, where supposed 'right-wingers' received my 'Don't Vote Tory' message with chilly scorn) who now regret having saved the Tory party when they could have destroyed it. Most of these had apparently  persuaded themselves that Mr Cameron had a secret agenda which he would reveal once he had won. What a silly, almost childish notion. Its resent-day equivalent is the fantasy that Mr Cameron is being prevented from acting as he wishes by Nicholas Clegg.

Many of the same people also believe the alternative legend, in which Mr Clegg is the cringing servant of a bullying Mr Cameron.

 

Neither of these nursery fantasies are true. Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg grew up in similar worlds and have similar attitudes towards almost everything important. The differences between them are superficial and far less significant than the deep similarities.  Mr Cameron may like to use Mr Clegg as an excuse for doing what he wants to do anyway, as there will always be people stupid enough to believe this in his own party, who are thereby pacified.

 

And Mr Clegg may like to claim that he has forced a wayward, reactionary Tory Party to come to its senses, as there will always be people stupid enough to believe it in his own party, who are thereby pacified.

 

This sterile arrangement, by which one party pretends to be two (and at times three) means that serious, bruising, educational and adversarial debate on the national plight never takes place in Parliament, and is increasingly excluded from media which must depend to some extent on the state of Parliament, if they are to have any influence.

 

So not only the EU, but the real crisis of welfare and marriage, the real crisis of education, the real problems of drugs, and the true nature of the Middle East, particularly the 'Arab Spring', the rise of Turkey,  the Libyan failure and the coming crisis in Syria, remain undiscussed, or discussed so ignorantly that it would have been better to keep quiet.

 

I failed completely to achieve any change with my 'Don't Vote Tory' campaign. There is now a great danger that the dead parties will be nationalised and made permanent through state funding, a terrible thought for anyone concerned with free debate.  How are we to obtain reform of the parties, and to get parties that actually care about what the people care about?