I for one don’t want to be prohibited from doing things I enjoy and that harm no-one, just because some other people can’t do them. Which is one potential corrollary of the argument against stiles.

Personally, I like and enjoy stiles. Taking them away is to put the “rights” of one lot of people above those of another. And that doesn’t seem fair to me.

I could simply send her a photo and save everyone a lot of time and effort.

Anyone who ‘pimps’ or believes in intelligent design should be put in a fucking ducking stool. That morons such as this are given space in national newspapers is a complete disgrace to any concept of genuine free speech, or rational journalism. It is idiocy as ‘balance’.

You and I might rail against it here, but we’ll be lucky to get ten readers. She is guaranteed a million.

That this lunatic could claim, for the sake of controversy, that ID has the slightest merit, is of the same measure as newspapers publishing astrology. It is shite, most readers know it is shite, but still they buy their shite opinion of choice.

It is all very sad.

I’d like to hear you further on the subject of ‘arguement for the sake of it’ and how it ties into creating a tribalistic gestalt. ‘Cause that’s the way I’m seeing it too.

to prove that “the Left” wears swastika pants and bathes in the blood of unborn children

Not to mention using stem cells as face cream.

My personal view is to try to avoid prejudicing any conclusions I (or others) might reach, not because my preconceptions might be wrong, but because I’d never be able to be certain whether those preconcieved ideas were right or wrong.

Not that I’m apolitical, but it does help to try to preserve the appearance of it, in order to obviate the threat of being characterised as one thing or another, when the reality is somewhere in between or somewhere else entirely, open, and not unsympathetic to the potential to be convinced by logic.

I certainly think it is important to be able to draw fine distinctions in order to seperate the idiotic from the absurd and the wildly unrealistic, but sometimes it is just wiser to say nothing!

There are people on all sides of the political arena with whom you can make common cause and plenty whose minds are open to ideas. To imagine that Melanie is one of them is to fatally misunderstand what culture war is.

See, you’re looking for a debate or a civil discussion. The culture warrior wants an argument, the more bitter and ferocious the better, because that’s the whole point. It’s’ all they’re after – start an argument, then keep it going indefinitley.

A raging argument gets people angry and tribal, causes them to close ranks against your designated enemy and opens them up to accepting more extreme ideas than they otherwise would.

That’s why Mel accuses “the Left” of hungering for genocide and pimps intelligent design – it’s not supposed to foster discussion, because the argument is all there is to it. It doesn’t matter what Mel’s readers are angry about, so long as they stay furious – in fact, it’s better</em if her arguments are patently ridiculous, because it guarantees her a fight.

There’s no reaching out to the Melanies of this world. All they want from you are a few quotes they can use to prove that “the Left” wears swastika pants and bathes in the blood of unborn children.

http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2007/11/16/dialogue-debate-and-political-commitment/

Melanie Phillips has clearly undertaken a developmental stage in her intellectual life by doubting her previously held assumptions, thus is leading her to reach alternative conclusions. Having questioned one idea, it is easy to then become scathing about all ideas.
I feel is would be more helpful if onlookers offered her some patience and enabled her to rediscover her spiritual bearings by which she wishes to guide her way through her life.
Currently I would characterise her writings as Deuteronomist in nature, as though she is placing more emphasis on the lessons of that book in particular. So my recommendation would be for her to go back and study in more detail the other books of her scripture.

For Sunny, I’d say that the left was never interested in balanced debate, only rebalancing debate, so he still seems to be confusing necessary corrections with ‘correct’ and ‘final’ answers. However, please continue opening access to debate, it’s interesting and instructional to view your shifts in position too.

Both Sunny and Melanie can both be included within the transepts of liberal thought, were they liable to choose to have a productive discussion to investigate the areas of shared agreement they hold and using this to lead them to develop their ideas, but it seems difference and division continues to retain a stronger hold on the identity of both.

People move from left to right and vice versa all the time. I suspect the reason why many make a big deal of chastising the left when they make the move to the right is that there’s money to be made in it.

I don’t think the left is aggressive enough anymore. I think its too obsessed with balance and hearing both sides of the story.

As I say in my CIF piece today, rather than pandering to those reactionary sentiments, we should ignore them…. why not, they certainly ignore lefty sentiments.

Otherwise the Rodent’s spot on, and there’s no point playing nicely with her: her views on all subjects are utterly uncompromising and hateful, and based on crude political tribalism more than anything more thoughtful: she really does believe in a huge Liberal Conspiracy. As Jamie K put it:

Liberals, atheists, environmentalists, Muslims, the “main stream media” and so on… your starting point is that these people are enemies – and you know that they’re enemies because they plot and you know that they plot because that’s what enemies do

In short her Zionism still resides within the broad perimeters of debate within Israel and the Jewish diaspora. In contrast, her global warming denial, criticism of Darwinism and indeed her piece of stiles, all place her right on the fringes of British political debate at least.

I think you need to catch up with some of her more recent material, in which she’s fairly consistently trotting out the line that Palestinians don’t exist and that the solution to the current problems lies in re-designating them as either Egyptian or Jordanians.

Whatever she might have toyed with in the past, she’s becoming more and more hard-line as things progress, sometimes with disturbing results.

As for being liberal, I suspect you’ll find that she’s misusing the term in the ‘classical liberal’ sense as a bit of transitional crutch.

Her relationship to what you call ‘right-wing Jewish ‘blood and sand’ nationalism’ is perhaps less clear-cut than you give her credit for. She has at times leaned towards the position that the settlements should go, albeit in a never-never land future when Palestinian terrorism is permanently defeated.

Her membership of a synagogue headed by a liberal rabbi is perhaps a sign that she still hasn’t summoned up the courage to completely leave the left-liberal world behind.

It may be that at some point in the future she will embrace theocratic fundamentalism more fully (her defense of intelligent design seems to be pointing this way) but I don’t think she is there quite yet.

Because it’s capitalised Culture War she’s waging, in the American sense, and absolutely anything associated with the hated enemy must be destroyed utterly.

If anyone has ever been alarmed by the loonybin that is American politics, with its Terri Schiavo cases and ten commandment tablets in the courts, cutting people like Melanie slack is a damn fine way to bring it to the UK. She’d be in her element in a world where the top three political issues are gun control, foetuscide and religion in schools.

So, no sympathy for Mel – she knows exactly what she’s doing when she’s bashing Darwin, abortion or anyone who opposes the indiscriminate bombing of the Middle East, and she deserves the mockery it earns her.

Melanie Phillips may consort with Christian fundamentalists, however the synagogue she actually belongs to New North London (http://www.nnls-masorti.org.uk/) is not an orthodox one.

That’s hardly a comforting thought considering the extent to which MP has come to openly espouse some of the worst aspects of right-wing Jewish ‘blood and sand’ nationalism in recent years. A retreat in hard-line religious orthodoxy would at least give that some sort of philosophical basis but without it one is left to conclude that she really doesn’t give a damn about Western liberal democratic traditions and would happily sell us all in the hands of a hard-line Christian theocracy in pursuit of a narrow set of nationalistic interests.

I also agree that it can’t help if this site is going to target individuals for not being on the liberal left, though in defense of this article I’d say that what it is trying to achieve is not to necessarily alienate people like Melanie but to understand what it is that drives her so far away from what some of us believe.

This is on a par with all those “you’re not allowed to call it a blackboard any more” stories from years ago, which usually turned out to have been invented by a Sun or Mail journalist on a quiet afternoon, and which got a grip on people fearful of standing up for themselves. It’s interesting, when someone ticks you off for asking for a “black coffee” or something similar, to ask them who exactly they think has banned this, and what they think the penalty might be. The answer is usually “the race relations”, or “the government social services”, or some other figment of their imagination.

It raises the prospect of public morality style offences being used punitively against people for political reasons.

Imagine that there’s a farmer who is a ring-leader in an anti-establishment political movement. Is it too hard to imagine a call from the ministry…
“ah, good morning Mr Giles. Lovely weather isn’t it. But I couldn’t help noticing that you have thirty stiles on your land. Surely you are aware of DDA legislation which has been in place for ten years now. I’m afraid that could cost you £30,000.”

Countryside access has to be balanced against the burden on farmers. This can be considerable. I remember a few years ago I spent a weekend helping to lay down a boardwalk for wheelchair access to a nature reserve. I went back last year, and it had been torn to pieces in a storm. In ordering a farmer to replace a stile with a wide gate, which can be more prone to damage, you are also requiring him to maintain it for perpuity.

Please don’t forget that every single day a farmer blows his brains out or hangs himself in this country. It’s a fair bet that every time we place additional burdens and costs on farmers, we are in danger of raising the suicide rate.

Farmers are not a majority community either, and deserve consideration of their needs just as much as disabled hikers.

It’s perfectly legitimate for somebody’s hackles to be raised by this level of intrusive legislation.