your welcome to link to my blog on this

http://hermeneuticals.blog.co.uk/2009/12/20/ressentiment-lefty-thinking-and-right-response-7611364/

This post was mentioned on Twitter by libcon: :: Understanding right-wing mentality http://bit.ly/4GgEVG...

CCTV: I dunno, I think the right to know that your murderer can be caught is a fairly basic assumption.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/4060443/Seven-of-ten-murders-solved-by-CCTV.html

Smokers: If you want to smoke in your own home, I don’t think you’ll find anyone stopping you. But in the same way as I can’t urinate in a swimming pool, it’s only right that public areas should be free from people indulging their vice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn6Z9djh8eA

Secularism: The idea that political decisions shouldn’t be solely supported by the fact that “This old book says it should happen,” of course, I include Capital in that batch.

Public Ownership: Labour doesn’t represent “the left” but Tony’s Third Way. As we can see, the Tory government was so keen that governments shouldn’t own energy and water companies that they sold them off. Who owns the majority now? Oh, foreign governments. Well, that’s much better.

Not sure about Strong Unions – Unions tend to represent to me the idea of an unskilled easily renewable workforce who as individuals have little more than their sweat and diligence to offer. Now most of us have employment rights and career structures, I think the time of the Unions is largely past.

But that’s because I sit in the nave of the broad church, rather than at the altar.

Are you having a laugh

“Civil liberties” – CCTV, unprecedented amounts of legislation around freedom of speech and association, the database state, ID cards

“A pluralistic acceptance of a wide range of life-styles”, yeah right, smokers, drinkers, the “obese”, people who eat unhealthy diets, motorists, this government has been relentless in stigmatising behavious which are off meassage

“Secularism” – the wholesale embracing of any religion except christianity

“Public ownership” – don’t make me laugh, didn’t you hear that clause 4 was ditched 15 years ago

“Strong unions” – tell that to post office workers or BA staff.

As I said upthread the left doesn’t stand for anything except a mushy, undefined egaliatarianism

All rounded off with a sherry in the local pub.

The result of that presumption was a consumer debt mountain of £1.4 trillion, a house-price bubble which pushed a million or more households in Britain off the house-purchase ladder, the collapse of a succession of banks with the resulting shrinking of bank lending to business as banks rushed to repair balance sheets, and a deep recession which, at one stage, looked as though it could lead to a replay of the 1930s depression.

Regarded at with appropriate political detachment, the benighted Blairites have much to answer for besides the Iraq war.

If the centre-left is that stupid, shouldn’t we debate the urgent health and safety issue of banning Rugby as a vicious and dangerous sport for humans?

“RUGBY: Possibly the most brutal contact sport on the planet. These boys put NFL stars to shame by being just as vicious in their tackling but without any of the protection. Given that fact, it’s hardly surprising that rugby has more injuries per player than any other participation sport. In fact, they’re three times more likely to get injured than someone in martial arts. Torn muscles, concussion, broken bones – these boys don’t stop unless they can’t physically continue.”
http://www.sportingo.com/all-sports/a10042_ten-most-dangerous-sports-world

The main winter sport of all those fee-paying schools at the heart of our class-biased education system is rugby, not soccer, the obsessional populist sport, which Britain is patently so mediocre at. Could playing rugby at fee-paying schools account for the supposed blood-lust of all those toff fox hunters?

At this point I have to declare a personal interest: never once in my misguided yoof or later did I ever play soccer – but I used to greatly enjoy playing rugby at a maintained school.

My definition of ‘rightwing’ includes being strong on law and order, censorship, the nuclear family, tradition, religion, private property and the accumulation of wealth through exploitation; ‘left-wing’ SHOULD cover civil liberties, free speech, a pluralistic acceptance of a wide range of life-styles, secularism, public ownership and strong unions.

By that definition I am firmly on the ‘left’: I don’t, however, believe any of the latter can be guaranteed by a centralised, coercive state and the history of the last hundred years bears that out. If you want an approximation of the kind of economic system I would prefer to either capitalism or the red bureacracies read Ursula Le Guinn’s Kropotkin inspired ‘ambiguous utopia’ novel ‘The Dispossessed’ which ought to be as popular with the Left as Ayn Rand is on the Right. It certainly seams to have influenced the authors of Parecon.

I have a lot of sympathy for the ecology movement and I believe the arguement about AGW is almost as strong as that for evolution but I cannot take the Greens themselves seriously while they are embrace alternative medicine while opposing embryonic research. That renders anything they say suspect. I have no sympathy AT ALL for conspiracy nuts with all-embracing theories which ‘explain’ everything (and therefore nothing) or with postmodern fruitloops who believe that evidence based rational arguement is a relic of a discredited Enlightenment.

I also have no patience with those who obsessively pick over other people’s blogs or tomorrow’s chip wrapping looking for something to moan about. For one thing the hyperdermic model of the relationship between media and viewer is condescending and bears no relationship to actual studies.

My only regret about the fox-hunting ban is that it WAS the start of a slippery slope of illiberalism which has led New Labour increasingly to interfere with the leisure activities of ordinary people, just as the hunt supporters claimed it would.

Also, hunt sabbing WAS fun.

Many decades back, I did know some folks who seriously hunted and with one of the toff hunts. I have to say they seemed rather congenial and convivial to me, not the sort who lusted after blood but rather bookish. Btw you are still dodging the significant issue about what are those other means of controlling fox populations which cause less distress to foxes and which, preferrably, select out older and weaker members of local fox populations.

I still can’t understand why fox hunting is unspeakably cruel while angling isn’t – especially since there are many more anglers than fox hunters so the totality of cruelty with angling is greater.

You obviously have not looked closely into their eyes, like I have. Blood lust just pours out of them.

That is not to say some of the hanger- ons are like this. But the hardcore are.
In some cases the only thing they live for is to kill. Rural hooligans is a better and more honest name for them.

Sure – although not all hunts have such programmes. As I keep saying here, rural foxes have the valued ecological function in rural areas of controlling the local populations of rabbits, rats and other country vermin which damage farm crops.

The problem is that older and weaker foxes are more likely to go for easier, vulnerable targets among farm livestock. Fox hunting with dogs tends to selectively take out the older and weaker foxes.

What the anti-hunting lobby persistently fails to do is to show how and why other means of controlling rural fox populations, besides hunting, will cause less distress to foxes. There is absolutely no evidence to show fox hunters are motivated by blood-lust rather than the social life associated with hunting communities.

The farce about all this is that Parliament has spent a total of over 700 hours debating a ban on fox hunting.

I agree, there’s no distress free way to kill wild foxes. But there is a difference between chasing over distance and driving out a fox from its lair/habitat to be cleanly shot. Theoretically, techniques such as lamping should be painless, but I am not convinced. There’s too much reliance on the skill of the rifle shooter.