The Sunday Ishmael: 10/11/2024

 I'm really not a liberal. I used to be, but a few decades working for the Probation Service knocked that nonsense out of me. Most people just bandy the word about without thinking anything other than it sounds like a good thing to be. I suspect it means just what you want it to mean - when I looked it up on-line, the AI gave me 6 definitions denoting 6 different usages. The problem with being a liberal is that people are shits. If you let them be free and do what they want, you'll generally find that what they want is pretty self-serving, venal, dominant, triumphalist, self-aggrandizing, sexually deviant, selfish, ruthless, narcissistic, cruel, exploitative and tax avoiding. Why do you think there are so many exhortations these days to be kind? And why are they on T shirts?

Probably because the wearer is such a colossal a-hole shit that he/she/it needs a constant reminder - or can point to the T-shirt when accused of being cruel, judgementalist/racist/misogynist/homophobist/disablist/fattist/ageist/generalisingist/downright arseholerist and say, No, Not me - I'm Kind.

This is why we need laws, regulations, tax inspectors, the RSPCA, the NSPCC, the Advertising Standards Authority, armed police to blow people's heads off when they drive their car with intent to kill (although they are a really nice boy/drug-dealer/weapon-wielding gangster), Courts, prison officers although they are generally shits too, having sex with inmates and providing them with drugs, and probation officers - who start out as kindly, leftish, liberalish, until life persuades them otherwise. Cock fights. Now that's nasty. Sex with the step daughter - a game all the family can play. I remember the sex offender who with great faux sincerity attempted to persuade me that he was towelling himself after his shower, when his 6 year old mouth-breathing stepdaughter got a little too close and it just went in her mouth, honest, mrs ishmael, that's all there was to it and I love her to bits, just like my own. Locking the family's two German Shepherd dogs in a flat for days with nothing to eat but their own faeces and then complaining when the RSPCA broke down the door and uplifted the dogs, because they were guarding the flat and who's going to pay for the door? Delivering the coup de grace by closing up a sofa bed around the chap beaten up but still breathing when he sat down on the sofa bed and leaving him to suffocate and welter in his own blood. Biting a woman to death - honest, mrs ishmael, I can't remember a thing, I was so out of it, it was my birthday you see - you were convicted on dental evidence, Patrick - there's the clue.

So, when I hear someone describe themselves as a liberal, you'll forgive me a little cynicism.

We used to have a political party in Britain called themselves the Liberals. Honest, not invent. Dirty bastards. For our younger readers, the reason they became popularly known as the Dog-Shooting Party, mainly through the efforts of mr ishmael, was pretty straightforwardly unbelievable. The party's leader was Oily Thorpe, his nickname earned at Eton by his habit of toadying up to masters. In May 1979 he was tried at the Old Bailey on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder his ex-boyfriend Norman Scott, a former model. Thorpe was acquitted on all charges, but the case, and the furore surrounding it, ended his political career. And the dog? Rinka, a Great Dane, belonging to Norman Scott, the casualty of a murder attempt by Andrew Norton, an airline pilot who undertook to murder Norman Scott for a fee of between £5,000 and £10,000 - which  used to be a great deal of money, enough to buy a modest house in the Midlands. You can order a hit these days for considerably less than the cost of a 3-bed semi. Thorpe procured £20,000 from Bahamas-based millionaire Liberal Party donor Sir Jack Hayward, ostensibly for election expenses. Thorpe later denied that the money had been used to pay Newton for the murder of Scott, but it never was used to defray Liberal Party costs. That reminds me - whatever did happen to the £600,000 disappeared from the SNP funds? Andrew Norton turned out to be a rubbish hit-man - he failed to shoot Scott, but killed poor Rinka, causing the old gun to jam and therefore saving her master's life. Douglas Murray, currently associate editor of the Spectator, wrote: " "Jeremy Thorpe had hoped to be remembered as a great political leader. I suppose they all do. And perhaps he will be remembered longer than many other politicians of his age or ours. But it will always be for the same thing. Jeremy, Jeremy, bang, bang, woof, woof."

There's Liberals for you. There's a book and a BBC three-parter: A Very English Scandal.

In his review of Michael Bloch's biography of Jeremy Thorpe, mr ishmael wrote in February 2015:

"In his last years Jeremy hustled for a peerage - purely to get back into parliament, y'understand, and display his dazzling gifts of gabshitery; when his claim to a nonsensical Mediaeval  baronetcy evaporated he lobbied unsuccessfully for a life peerage.

The nerve of some people, who do they think they are?

I generally feel some sympathy for human villainy  as long as there is  an element of remorse in the villain. Thorpe was as much a victim of parental expectation as was Scott of parental neglect; both were fantasists,  both, at that time, criminal deviants, abiding in the demi-monde of rough, urgent buggery and showy - flamboyant - I Dare You masquerade but from those to whom much has been given, much is expected and in this as well as in his lifelong denial of his criminality, Thorpe disappoints. He has enough sympathisers. I was never one but Bloch's book, well worth borrowing from the library, confirms my hostility to he and all of his ilk.

It might be worth noting that Thorpe's perverse acquittal - one of the jurors later said "Oh, he done it, but he and his wife had suffered enough" - and  shamelessness set a new benchmark for dastardly conduct amongst politicians;  none now resign, all now, like Cameron insist that they take responsibility whilst doing nothing of the sort, 

 

all trouser others' money, all serve wealthy benefactors rather than the nation, many are gleefully, audaciously, degenerate and decadent

 - flamboyant, in Thorpe's time. 

 I saw Chris Underpants, MP, on Question Time last week. 

mrs ishmael was amazed, this is that bloke who posed in his pants and sent the picture all around the world, seeking casual gay sex 

and now he's on  Labour's front bench and here on the telly, moralising at us? 

Yes, dear and before that he was an Anglican priest.

Still, at least he's not a Liberal, doesn't go around trying to murder his embarrassments, like they do."

So, mrs ishmael, why are you banging on about the Liberal Party scandal of the Seventies? Don't you know that the past is a foreign country where they do things differently, that Homosexuality is now legal, if not compulsory and that the Liberal Party is a dead parrot?

Well, because I'm cross and utterly fed up with people saying "liberal" like its a good thing, rather than the whited sepulchre that shelters the rotten corpse within. Of the 6 definitions of liberal that the AI spat out, this is key: relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise

What's wrong with that, then? As I carefully explained above, because people, including senior politicians, are shits and need reining in. Especially when exercising their individual rights and civil liberties to terrorise Jewish  men into jumping into canals in Amsterdam to escape them. The excuse was a football match at the Ajax stadium in Amsterdam, when hundreds of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were repeatedly ambushed and attacked by Arab migrant men on scooters, in hit and run attacks. The violence was perpetrated by Amsterdam locals of Arabic origin, who shouted "free Palestine". The Dutch King Willem-Alexander called the Israeli president Isaac Herzog to tell him of his 'deep horror and shock' over the events, saying: 'We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War Two, and last night we failed again.'

This is where liberalism gets you - European countries have proved entirely unable to defend their culture and rule of law against the onslaught of a wholly illiberal religion and culture which is committed to eradicating a legally-constituted nation state and killing its citizens, wherever it finds them. It is almost enough to make you proud to be not European, to have escaped the rotten, liberal sarcophagus of Europe. Britain stood against the fascist anti-Semitism of Europe during the Second World War and defeated its pustulating Germanic heart - and promptly lost its way. I  said "almost enough"  because Britain, also, has proved incapable of asserting British culture against Islamism. Liberalism has broken it. So tied up in knots are we by the human rights and civil liberties  industry that we cannot defend our borders, deport illegal immigrants or stop pro Palestinian demonstrations on the streets. Anti-semitism is the acceptable face of racism for liberals.

I saw the annual ritual of hypocrisy as broadcast by the BBC today. All solemn, vying with each other for the best funeral suits, wearing very solemn face and poppied up to fuck, the war lords processed around the Cenotaph with their wreaths. The King and his Avaricious Family led the way - and I suppose they were the least of the hypocrites, since they haven't actually started any wars, on account of being symbolic placeholders. They were followed by the true culprits - Blair, Cameron, Brown, Johnson and the rest, with Kemi Badenoch and Keir Starmer processing shoulder to shoulder. Considering the loss of male life in Britain's wars, they are probably planning how to incentivise women to produce more babies as Britain's women, most sensibly, seem to have decided that the game is not worth the candle and have given up reproducing; while pretending they give a fuck about the dead that they are commemorating with dirges, speeches and poetry. This morning on the Laura Kuenssberg Show, Tony Radakin, Priti Patel and Lord Andrew Roberts were all agreed that the elevation of Donald Trump to being President Elect was a bit of a worry and that Britain must commit a larger percentage of its GDP to defence spending. Admiral Sir Antony David Radakin, KCB, ADC, Chief of the Defence Staff, and Lord High Constable of England (very Gilbert and Sullivan, I know), was particularly upset about it, saying, more or less, we couldn't defend ourselves from an attack by a jam doughnut, now that the Democrats aren't going to do it. However, Baron Mandelson - yes! him again! said, reassuringly, no, no, its all going to be alright. Donald Trump won't turn his back on us, because he would lose America's international reputation as a good guy. Well, good thing he's going to be Britain's next Ambassador to the United States, and he can tell President Elect Trump himself all about reputation. When his fellow panellists all urged him to come out about being  the next Ambassador, he said, coyly, that William Hague is an even Bigger Beast than he is. Honest, not Invent. The Baron is probably proud to describe himself as a liberal.

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of mr ishmael and stanislav, the young Polish Plumber, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.