Tag Archives: The Spirit Level

Diary Blog, 27 August 2022

Morning music

On this day a year ago

In this month, five years ago

Saturday quiz

Well, this week I again beat political journalist John Rentoul, but only just, scoring 6/10 to his 5/10. I did not know the answers to questions 1, 5, 6, and 7. Amazing that Rentoul apparently did not know where Copacabana is.

The saga of the Royal Mulatta and the Royal Cuck continues

There are rumours that the cover of Harry’s upcoming tell-all memoir about his horrid life as a royal features a picture not just of him, as you’d expect, but Megs, too. The word emasculated comes to mind.

He has become a walk-on part in The Me-Me-Meghan Show, eclipsed by his wife’s ambition.

I never thought I’d say this, but I feel sorry for Harry.

[Amanda Platell, in the Daily Mail: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11150647/PLATELLS-PEOPLE-believe-Im-saying-feel-sorry-Harry.html].

I do not take more than a passing interest in the activities of the Meghan and Harry show, but it strikes me that the closest facsimile of their relationship might be that of absurd TV cook Fanny Cradock and her long-suffering husband, Johnnie, whom the ghastly woman treated like a particularly abused servant; almost a serf, in fact.

I recall Fanny Cradock on TV when I was a small child, in the early 1960s, and the crazed creature was on British TV occasionally until the mid 1980s.

Fanny and Johnnie Cradock began writing a column under the pen name of “Bon Viveur”[5] which appeared in The Daily Telegraph from 1950 to 1955. This sparked a theatre career, with the pair turning theatres into restaurants. Cradock would cook vast dishes that were served to the audience. They became known for their roast turkey, complete with stuffed head, tail feathers and wings. Complete with French accents, their act was one of a drunken hen-pecked husband and a domineering wife. At this time, they were known as Major and Mrs Cradock.”

“[Johnnie] is best remembered as being the long-suffering stooge for his wife in their popular British cooking programmes which were shown from the 1950s to the 1970s. Wearing a traditional blazer and sporting a monocle, he would remain around the back of Fanny’s studio sets awaiting her imperious commands which, when they came, often resulted in his being berated for being too slow.”

[Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Cradock; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnnie_Cradock].

The Royal Mulatta has something else in common with Fanny Cradock— an “inventive” memory in recalling her own background and history.

Worth reading

Who would have thought that I would ever agree with Julie Burchill?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11150581/Julie-Burchill-reveals-refuses-bow-social-justice-warriors-altar-wokeness.html

Sometimes, “a thought out of season” comes to me, the dystopian idea that the present decline of Western society will be ended not with debates or literary disagreements (or rigged elections) but with some kind of multifaceted “Holy War”…

Nordic noirs (literally)

Yesterday, I watched the first episode of a Swedish detective series. Not sure whether I shall bother to watch the rest, mainly because I found it all rather contrived. What struck me, though, was the number of blacks and browns shown. Is that how Sweden really is now, or have the media people exaggerated the proportion (as they have in almost everything shown about the UK)?

On that same theme, the show had a number of (“British”) ad breaks, each with quite a few ads. Every single ad had blacks or half-castes (“mixed-race” persons, if you like) in it. This is pure propaganda. I know that I have been blogging about this evil campaign for a few years now

but we must never allow it to become normalized, certainly not without at least having dissenting voices heard.

As we know, “the pen is mightier than the sword“, but that is precisely why the enemies of freedom of expression try to “cancel” people, and to take away their right to speak or write.

In my case, though “antifa” idiots would probably like to “cancel” even my blog, the cabals who have made repeated and serious efforts to take me down have all in fact been those composed of Jew-Zionists: see https://ianrobertmillard.org/2017/07/13/when-i-was-a-victim-of-a-malicious-zionist-complaint/; and https://ianrobertmillard.org/2017/07/09/the-slide-of-the-english-bar-and-uk-society-continues-and-accelerates/; and https://ianrobertmillard.org/2022/01/15/diary-blog-15-january-2022-including-an-outline-of-the-failure-of-the-latest-jew-zionist-attempt-to-prosecute-me/.

I had my Twitter account removed in 2018 by reason of the manipulations of the same Jew-Zionists, really just a quite small handful of individuals plotting together, and presenting themselves as if a large and/or “important” organization (the so-called “Campaign Against Anti-Semitism”, or “CAA”, mainly).

The enemies of civilization are of various kinds. May they all end the same way.

Tweets seen

I was tweeting in the same vein (before the Jewish lobby had my Twitter account taken away in 2018) for about 7 years, amid the economic illiteracies of the fake (and disastrous) “austerity” policies promoted by the part-Jews George Osborne and David Cameron-Levita, and supported by the part-Japanese sadist Iain Dunce Duncan Smith. I have, also, been blogging along similar lines since late 2016.

The well-known book The Spirit Level is still worth reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(book).

If you transfer money to people on low incomes, they spend it (and almost have to spend it), thus stimulating the economy. If you do the same to people on moderate incomes, they will both spend some and invest some, but if you give money to very wealthy people who already have more than enough to satisfy both needs and wants, they will mostly park that money in hedging assets such as real property (and thus drive up the current value of such assets without actually helping the economy).

In essence, that is why it is better to have at least moderate redistribution of wealth.

Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak both seem to believe in some pathetic “trickle-down” economic theory of the 1980s “Reaganomics” kind. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics.

More tweets

So “they voted for Boris“? How truly stupid are those voters?

Liz Truss will say anything, just to win the contest and/or get through the next day, or the next week, just as Boris-idiot does.

Never a word in the msm or on these online comment sites about how a foreigner should never be Prime Minister of this country, even if one of his passports is “British”.

A little light music

Late tweets seen

Late music

Diary Blog, Christmas Day 2021

My Christmas and Yuletide greetings to all well-intentioned readers of the blog, to all Europe, and to the wider world.

Christmas morning music

On this day a year ago

Some thoughts from 5 years ago, revisited

I take the opportunity to resurrect from my blog archives the following post from late 2016: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2016/12/03/the-society-of-measure/.

I have made just criticism in the past few years of, inter alia, Aaron Bastani and Ash Sarkar, and their idea called “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Communism], but (despite not having read the book), I apprehend that one of its basic premises is that the benefits of modern technology and productive techniques have been arrogated by a tiny minority of finance-capitalists. If my understanding of the book is correct in that regard, then I certainly agree with that view; indeed, it can hardly be denied.

Books such as The Spirit Level [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(book)] have shown how inequality in the “Western” world has grown since the 1950s and particularly in recent decades. Numerous studies have shown how the remuneration and wealth (capital) of corporate owners and the highest strata of executives has become grotesque.

In the 1950s, in the USA the typical disparity between the pay of highest-paid and lowest-paid in a company was about 15:1. Now it is hundreds to one and, in not a few cases, thousands to one. That is without even getting into share options, capital gains etc

The same is true of the UK. There are many large companies where the top executives are getting a million or more a year (many millions in some cases) in salary alone, while the bottom-level employees are on something like £15,000. A ratio of at least 70:1, and in many cases hundreds to one.

It is not a question, for me, of inequality alone (some inequality is inevitable and indeed good) but of inequality so great and so unfair that it amounts to inequity.

We see how some of the wealthiest capitalists on Earth (Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Elon Musk etc) vie with each other to build their own space rockets, not to do anything truly worthwhile with them but to take what amount to joy-rides into space, accompanied by other hugely-wealthy individuals. Meanwhile, their own employees live on pennies, in many cases unable to pay their rent, feed their families properly, or achieve even a modestly-comfortable standard of living.

The fruits of scientific and technological innovation must be shared more equitably.

Tweets seen

Hopper“, not “Hooper” (and “they’re“, not “their“) (etc)…but never mind. It’s Christmas.

Welby has either never heard of the line:

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast
ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them
under their feet, and turn again and rend you
.” [Matthew 7:6]

…or, more likely, has decided to turn a Nelsonian eye…

It is entirely misplaced and wrongheaded “compassion” to invite into the UK (or to tolerate an unwanted invasion by) those who, most of them, despise British people and/or hate us, and who will be, at best, a heavy millstone round the British neck, forever.

Justin Welby will have to suffer no detriment by tolerating the migration invasion. No, that burden will be borne by the British poor, mostly.

Music

More tweets seen

I was going to keep the blog short today, and concentrated on purely Christmas topics (and one does after all have other things to do on Christmas Day), but the world has impinged on my retreat…

A few thoughts around Christmas

Naturally, Christmas, as we know it in the UK and/or “Anglosphere”, is largely what people today often call “a construct” or “social construct”. You see in magazines or online quite a lot of historical detail about that.

A few examples: St. Nicholas was someone from what is now part of Turkey, not the North Pole: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinterklaas.

In the UK, perhaps especially England, we have a fairly closely-defined idea of what Christmas should be: the Christmas tree, the angel or star atop the tree, carols, Santa Claus in his red suit, sitting in a sleigh in the sky, itself pulled by flying reindeer.

As many will know, the Christmas tree tradition, in England, dates back only to 1834, when one was installed at Windsor Castle; the tradition dates back longer in Germany, to the late Middle Ages.

As for the fairy atop the tree, that may be connected with the late Roman cult of Mithras, though that seems to me to be contrived, in view of the fact that the Christmas tree tradition itself is of recent historical origin. I would not say, though, that I am really qualified to pronounce on that aspect.

As to red-suited Santa with his sled or sleigh, reindeer etc, that is a conflation of ancient traditions, 19thC traditions, and “traditions” which come from as recent a source as 1930s American ads for Coca-Cola: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus.

In Russia, the 19thC saw “Grandfather Frost” emerge, a tradition at least half-heartedly kept up in 20thC Soviet times as an alternative to the usually disapproved-of and sometimes suppressed Russian Orthodox Christmas religious holiday (which takes place a couple of weeks after the Western one by reason of the fact that the Russian Orthodox church still uses the Julian Calendar).

I believe that some Christian occultists aver that the “Santa in a sleigh” picture has an underlying reality in that the Cosmic Christ travels spiritually around the world for the “12 days of Christmas”, assessing the overall spiritual condition of the world. Perhaps.

My own view is that it does not really matter that our 20thC/21stC idea of Christmas would seem slightly odd to Victorian England, and downright alien to the English of Tudor times. It is our mental picture, our idea of what is sacred, our idea of what is worthwhile. It encapsulates what has gone before, and is of social and personal value.

Whatever the origins of Christmas as we know it, and however “inauthentic” some may claim it to be, the fact remains that we regard it as sort-of-sacred, even if in a sense it is not, and that includes the “Father Christmas” or “Santa Claus” figure in his red robes, even if he does only date back, in that form, to 1930s Disney and Coca-Cola. We do not like it being changed for obviously socio-political reasons.

Ghastly

Saw a few minutes on TV of some ghastly Christmas thing in Westminster Abbey yesterday. Some weird fellow looking like a Scottish down and out strumming on a guitar and, er, singing, while queen-to-be Kate accompanied on a piano. Not quite sure what the whole thing was, because I only saw a minute or two of it.

The Mezzotint

Saw a BBC adaptation of the M.R. James story, The Mezzotint. My expectations were not, if truth be told, high, but in fact this was an excellent short film. The original story was written in 1904, but the adaptation was, seemingly, set in the 1920s (judging by the props, clothes, and some music heard).

Even the fact that, typically for today, they shoehorned a non-European into the story (an anglicized Indian, or Anglo-Indian), did not jar, the way it was done. Pretty good.

I can recommend highly the 1995 documentary below, finely narrated by the late Bill Wallis [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Wallis]:

Late music

[Levitan, Vladimirka]