Yes. People really are this stupid...

In the Guardian obviously:

I don’t know whether the left has been sleeping, but there has been a dominant narrative that has remained quite unchallenged in the media. This narrative suggests that there is no connection between the super-rich and abject poverty, that you can keep getting richer and richer, and this has nothing to do with people getting poorer. And it wasn’t always like that, people in the past have known that maximising at the top means you are depriving somebody else further down.

Now Karl Marx got a lot of things right but the lump of labour idea wasn't one of them. The painful truth for these numpties is that the "super-rich", by creating new wealth ake everyone better off - Facebook and Google and Amazon may seem trivial things but they have provided enormous additional value to the lives of people across the world. And something like 2-3% of that additional value goes to the people who created those firms. The thing is that 2-3% of trillions of dollars is an awful lot of money.

For a non-stupid commentary on the "abolish billionaires" rubbish read this...

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Carefully crafted bigotry - a comment on Hilary Mantel's 'Assassination of Margaret Thatcher'

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Hilary Mantel, I'm told, writes historical fiction. I haven't read anything that she has written before today.I am unlikely to read anything she has written or will write in the future.

However, Ms Mantel has written a little short story about the assassination of Margaret Thatcher and is defending herself from the criticism that her writing inevitably precipitated. Now, I've no real issue with Ms Mantel writing such a story, just so long as she is willing to countenance counterfactual history written from a perspective that challenges her prejudices (which I somehow doubt - imagine a story where the assassination of JFK failed and he led the US into WWIII or one where Nelson Mandela was executed for terrorism).

However, her defence (or at least the part quoted in The Guardian) is something of a confused concoction:

“I think it would be unconscionable to say this is too dark we can’t examine it. We can’t be running away from history. We have to face it head on, because the repercussions of Mrs Thatcher’s reign have fed the nation. It is still resonating."

The first sentence is fine. Of course we can contemplate why someone might want to assassinate Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, we don't have to go far to understand that mindset because a man who actually did try to assassinate Margaret Thatcher is alive, well and living in freedom (which says a great deal about our society). However, the second sentence - from someone who has made a fortune from exploiting history - displays a profound misunderstanding of even some history within my living memory. It is Ms Mantel who is running away from history, choosing instead a slanted rewrite formed out of prejudice rather than a real analysis.

In the end all this is fine - I've read the story and it's filled with the sort of bien pensant hatred we've come to expect from the UK's literary elite. It gives us a sort of stage Scouse Irishman as a suitable mirror to Mantel's personal hatreds, a kind of justification for her carefully crafted bigotry:

''It's the fake femininity I can't stand, and the counterfeit voice. The way she boasts about her dad the grocer and what he taught her, but you know she would change it all if she could, and be born to rich people. It's the way she loves the rich, the way she worships them. It's her philistinism, her ignorance, and the way she revels in her ignorance. It's her lack of pity. Why does she need an eye operation? Is it because she can't cry?''

As an analysis of Margaret Thatcher this is useless but as a revealing insight into Hilary Mantel's hateful bigotry it is really valuable. Everything about the paragraph resonates with the dismissal of an inferior (Thatcher) by her superior (Mantel). Just as the working class man in Ms Mantel's little story is shallow, cardboard, a thing to be patronised, Margaret Thatcher is provincial, suburban, a little bit ordinary. In both cases unlike Hilary Mantel. But the working-class terrorist is portrayed as a victim whereas the lower middle-class shopkeeper's daughter who became prime minister is the villain.

Speaking personally, I find it hard to contemplate creating a false history purely from blind - and ignorant - hatred. Not the fictional vehicle of a conversation between a terrorist and a women whose home he'd barged into - that's a fine basis for a short story. The blind and ignorant hatred is the caricature of Margaret Thatcher, the view that this is the sort of women - indeed Ms Mantel can barely call her a women - who is so unlike me as to be a monster. Ms Mantel goes on and on about how Margaret Thatcher wouldn't like her hair, how she doesn't like the way Thatcher walks, her handbag - she casts herself as some sort of Anti-Thatcher, as a thing entirely built from the PM's disapproval.

What we see here from Ms Mantel is something that, in truth, is foreign to those of us who share Margaret Thatcher's lower middle class background. Taking the trouble to construct a fiction based entirely on your hatred of a caricature of a women you have never met is something peculiar to the bien pensant left. What this short story tells us about Hilary Mantel - bitter, bigoted, ignorant - is far more important than any flicker of insight into the motives of the Provisional IRA or the character of Margaret Thatcher.

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So these posh lefties think food is too cheap?

Yes folks that's right - the favoured Sunday read of the left-wing establishment thinks you all should pay more for your food:

Here we come to the uncomfortable core of the problem. Price is the key factor in our behaviour with food and food may, simply, be too cheap. Certainly, in Britain it is cheaper than at any time in history: we spend less than 10% of household income on food and drink. In 1950, we spent around 25%. In the developing world, 50% or more of income is spent on food. Tellingly, Britain spends less than any other country in Europe. 

Now I think this is brilliant - and it could be better still if we'd only dump all the daft protectionism - but it seems the lefties don't - they want taxes to make food more expensive (accompanied by higher benefits and a 'living wage' so the poor can still afford to eat):

An alternative to voluntary change is to tax the food industry in just proportion to the damage it causes. Another idea gaining ground across Europe is for a sugar tax – the cheap processed foods and soft drinks that carry the largest profit margins (and which are a key cause of obesity) depend hugely on sugar for their appeal. Food price rises would result and the supermarkets' vast profits might have to take a hit. Those who would really suffer are the poor and their children and that is a challenge to be met fairly with a living wage, not by caps on benefits or food banks.

I would smile indulgently at this drivel but it makes me really angry that these self-righteous, middle-class lefties presume to believe that cheap food is a bad thing. It isn't, it is unquestionably a good thing. It means we can spend our money on other things - things a little further up Maslow's jolly old hierarchy. You know like art, music, holidays and antique-effect wooden furniture for our farmhouse kitchens. The sort of things that Observer editorialists take for granted.

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No surprises here then...

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Among full-time faculty members at four-year colleges and universities, the percentage identifying as "far left" or liberal has increased notably in the last three years, while the percentage identifying in three other political categories has declined. The data come from the University of California at Los Angeles Higher Education Research Institute, which surveys faculty members nationwide every three years on a range of attitudes.

Sadly the article doesn't explain how academics got so removed from common sense!

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Because the left like to target "groups" for punishment doesn't mean the rest of us do...

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The problem with the left is that they think other people will behave as unpleasantly as they do. This leads to the belief that negative consequences of policies are always 'deliberate'. Here's a tweet from Clare Gerada, top GP, leftie and self-professed feminist:

#demoswomen Women hit much harder than men by recession. Kate Green "this is deliberate". Women double whammy - tax credits & benefits 

Now I don't know who Kate Green is but I'm assuming that she's another lefty and that Clare Gerada approves of her views. And this is pretty scary from someone who is bright enough to be a proper doctor. I'm guessing that, like all the other lefties, Kate and Clare think the Conservative Party's inner sanctum is like something out of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" with besuited Tory toffs guffawing as they deliberately design policies that "target" women. I find it deeply worrying that such people - Kate and Clare that is - are anywhere near the levers of power.

The Labour Party when in power may deliberately target groups it doesn't like - parents of children at grammar schools and private schools, people living in rural communities, smokers, small businesses and drivers spring to mind. But Conservatives don't think that way. We really don't.

I know the lefties might be shocked by this revelation but it's true. That doesn't stop us from proposing policies like minimum pricing for drink that fall heaviest on a particular group but that is a consequence of a daft policy not a deliberate act of punishment. It may be true that women suffer more from recession (a recession caused by the last Labour government but we'll let that pass) but it is an enormous leap to believe that the Conservatives are deliberately manipulating the economy and the government's spending just to "target" women. On a scale of 1-10 for stupidity that is definitely an eleven.

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