Alt Left: Socialism for the Win!

Socialism beating all capitalist countries!

You guys wonder why some of us are socialists. Well, here ya go.

As you can see, Cuban socialism beats all of its capitalist competitors in administering COVID-19 vaccines to the largest number of people in the shortest period of time. And keep in mind that the US has, I believe, a GNP 15 times bigger than Cuba’s and it still totally failed in this competition. In addition, many of those countries have social democracies with attendant socialized medicine, but even that didn’t seem to do very well against socialist planning in the health sector. Cuba beat the UK, Europe and North America as a whole, and the combined groups of high and upper middle low income countries.

I don’t have anything against socialized medicine in social democracies, but it does seem to fair worse against a pure Communist system. And in the UK and parts of Europe, public health is under relentless attack by the capitalists under the rubric of austerity and budget cuts.

The UK in particular has been devastated by these cuts which the Tories have been doing for decades now. Nevertheless, the idiot Brits appear to be ready to march off to vote Tory once again in the next election. The entire media combined to promote the Tories and destroy Labor’s left candidate. The current candidate is a centrist named Starmer and he’s so bad, he loses to pathetic Tories like the clown Boris Johnson. But hey, at least Starmer cleaned out the antisemites in the party! That’s all that matters, right Jews. You all would rather have a damned Tory government than a left Labor government unfriendly to your precious little hate state over there.

I’m not sure about the rest of Europe, but I know that public health has been devastated in Greece. The Left Syriza ran on an anti-austerity program but changed and went Centrist as soon as they got in, supposedly due to “forces beyond their control.”

This shows how hard it is to change the system absent an actual revolution as happened in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Without a truly revolutionary party as we had and have in those countries, the forces of capitalism will simply assert themselves and any Left candidate will be boxed in. This is already happening to Castillo in Peru, who finds his options limited more and more every week by the forces of the military, the big capitalists, the media, and the population in media, which is really all the same thing and could be called the Peruvian oligarchy or in US terms, the Peruvian Deep State.

And we can see how this is happening in the US as Biden progressively scales down his promises. At first he rejected Sanders’ Medicare for All, though it has majority support. Then he rejected Sanders’ free college education, a staple in many countries, including places like Mexico! In its stead he offered free community college. Well, he just got rid of that, too. What’s next, Joe? Free ice cream on Sunday?

Really, I don’t blame him. America is still a terrifyingly reactionary country, and in fact it is nearly a fascist country as about half the population is perfectly willing to vote for fascism and the Republican party is now an undemocratic authoritarian fascist party along the lines of the Latin American Right. It follows because the Latin American Right is run by the oligarchies that run those countries, and increasingly, the US is also an oligarchy and is no longer a democracy at all.

Nor are our elections free and fair. They’ve been hopelessly corrupted since the advent of computerized voting and gerrymandering and serious obstacles placed in the way of voting means that we are absolutely not a democratic country anymore.

Democratic countries do not allow partisan gerrymandering, attempts to steal elections, obstacles placed to discourage voting, and open theft of elections via computerized voting machines. I wonder if we ever had a democracy in this blighted country. Perhaps from 1965-2000, we had a pretty democratic system, but under Reagan, the Justice Department under Sessions interfered to keep voting restrictions against Blacks in while putting Blacks who worked for voting rights in jail. The FBI did this, if you can believe that. And you wonder why I despise feds so much.

Alt Left: Malcolm X on Gusanos (Worms) or Anti-Castro Cubans

Alt Left: An Overview of Modes of Transmission for the COVID-19

I definitely read this somewhere, but after I read it, I could not find where I had read it when I went back to look for it. So you will have to take my word for it.

Pre-symptomatic – New infections coming from an infected person who has not yet developed symptoms: 4

Symptomatic – New infections coming from an infected person who has already developed symptoms: 4

Environmental – New infections comes from some environmental contact with the virus: 1

Asymptomatic – New infections come from a person that will never develop any symptoms:

As you can see, almost all infections come from people in the pre-symptomatic and symptomatic phases of the infection. Few infections come from touching infected surfaces and even fewer come from asymptomatic persons who never develop illness.

Alt Left: The China Is at Fault for the Coronavirus Lie

I will here prove that the “China created the coronavirus by ignoring it and delaying a response when it first came out is a lie. Hence, not the coronavirus, instead the China Virus.

This entire post was taken from a Chinese or pro-Chinese poster on the Net.

On December 30, Li Wenliang sent some messages to a private Wechat group with a few of his friends, claiming that he saw patient scans and that “There has been 7 confirmed cases of SARS”

Li Wenliang was an ophthalmologist (a doctor specialized in eye disorders), who claimed that the virus outbreak was confirmed to be SARS. This was objectively false information spread by a doctor in an unrelated field, obviously he would get censured for spreading rumors. Also, contrary to popular belief, he was not arrested at all, only told by the police to stop spreading rumors and sign a notice. He was reportedly at the police station for only an hour, hardly as serious as Western media have made it sound.

Another important point that counters the “coverup” theory. He was called down to the police on 3 January, four days after China had already informed the WHO.

This post goes into further detail debunking the New York Times claim that Li Wenliang was a whistleblower and shows how they twisted the story to suit their narrative:

2019-12-01 – a viral pneumonia patient with an unknown cause was hospitalized at Jinyintan Hospital. This patient was the earliest known case of 2019-nCoV infections. The patient did not have any exposure to Huanan Seafood Market.

2019-12-27 – Dr. Zhang Jixian, ICU doctor at Hubei Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine, files report to Wuhan Municipal Health Commission on pneumonia patients with an unknown cause. Investigation opens shortly later.

2019-12-28 – Three more patients arrived to the hospital, all of whom were related to Huanan Seafood Market.

2019-12-30 – Li Wenliang, an eye doctor, sent messages to private Wechat group about 7 cases of unknown virus, (wrongly) claiming it was SARS. He was not a whistleblower but instead one who had very early information on the little known virus.

2019-12-30 – Notice issued and public health announcement made by Wuhan Municipal Health Committee of an unknown viral illness.

2019-12-31 – China receives genome results from commercial lab.

2019-12-31 – WHO is informed of mysterious pneumonia cases in Wuhan China with unknown cause. Wuhan City authorities put out public notice and is reported by CCTV and CGTN.

2020-01-01 – Seafood market shut down as potential cause of outbreak. Chinese researchers at the CCDC publish an article on suspected outbreak.

2020-01-03 – China reports a total of 44 suspected patients with the mystery disease.

2020-01-03 – Li Wenliang called into police department and warned to stop spreading rumor and is made to sign a letter to that effect. Note that WHO was already informed about the virus four days earlier.

2020-01-03 – National Health Commission classified the virus as a highly pathogenic virus, orders all labs to either destroy samples or transfer them to higher level labs (cited as evidence of coverup such as by NY Post).

2020-01-09 – For the first time, Chinese labs confirm the existence of the new virus. Genetic sequencing work starts.

2020-01-09 – China reports first death linked to Covid-19. A 61-year-old male in Wuhan with several underlying medical conditions.

2020-01-11- China shares the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus to international database.

2020-01-14 – WHO reports there is “limited human-to-human transmission between close contacts. WHO assesses that there was no clear evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission.

2020-01-20 – Zhong Nanshan confirms human-to-human transmission after medical staff were infected.

2020-01-21 – WHO confirms human-to-human transmission of the virus.

2020-01-23 – China declares complete quarantine of Wuhan.

An article quoting the New England Medical Journal is frequently used as evidence that China covered up information about its transmissibility. The journal states that “there is evidence that human-to-human transmission has occurred among close contacts since the middle of December 2019.”

This Vox article quoting Lancet presents two cases of human-to-human transmission before January 20. One is the wife of the first person who died. The other is a family in Shenzhen.

Yes, both China and WHO knew about these cases and did not declare the virus was human-to-human transmissible at the time.

That is because “limited human-to-human transmission between close contacts” is not the same as declaring it “human-to-human transmissible”. For it to be officially declared “human-to-human transmissible” there had to be evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission.

Discussions about the Risks of a Shutdown

First of all, this is all moot anyway because we’re already opened up as it is, so I don’t understand why it’s even a discussion. Also, I have not yet seen a good discussion from the Left about to what extent we can shut down the economy and how we could get away with it, if at all. So I don’t know what I’m talking about here. I don’t know how long or to what extent we can lockdown the economy and the risks that might flow from that. So the things I’m suggesting might not even be feasible.

Here is another problem. You can open the economy back up all you want, but a lot of people are just going to boycott it. A lot of people are almost too scared to even go outside and are limiting their trips out of the house, shopping expeditions, socializing, etc. So if you open up but everyone stays home out of fear, you’re still stuck in a lockdown.

Gathering venue employees are clubs, bars

These are open but it’s not working. They’re spreading a lot of disease. They don’t need to be open if they are physical Typhoid Marys.

Regardless, they are securitized (turned into an investment for others) and resold. Small business loans are often securitized as well.

That should not even be allowed. Those are toxic investments that caused the last crash. They can fuck off to Hell and back.

No not really. The big banks already made their money on the loans.

Nope, the mortgages are all owed to banks, I believe. Or yeah, they securitized them and then sold them off to suckers? Ok, that’s what caused the last crash. It ought to be illegal but if that blows up again, it’s fine to me. Also I would imagine that almost 10

It’s small banks,

No such thing.

credit unions,

They don’t loan out a lot of money. I’m not sure that they do a lot of mortgage and large business loaning. They’re owned by their customers. They’re mostly just there to serve us, as we own the place anyway. I’m a member.

depositors

Ever heard of a thing called the FDIC?

investors that can get fucked

You mean the top 1

Lehman and Bear Sterns were allowed to die. That’s not happening again.

We can just take some banks over and make them public. It’s a better idea anyway. Most of China’s banking is public. Works great last time I checked. Also, they did better weathering that 2008 crash than any other country for the very reason that their banks were public.

In Japan, the commanding heights of the economy are owned by the state as they were in Nazi Germany.

In South Korea, the corporations and the state are all wrapped together in things called cheobols.

Get rid of the stock market. Germany barely has a stock market. They have a sort of a market, but almost all of the stocks and investments are owned by 2-3 large banks. That’s probably the way to do it. The stock market is toxic and evil. Shut it down.

Coronavirus Kills 30,000/Month; Unemployment from Lockdown Kills 1,200 Month

Claudius: Also, stimulus can’t go on forever. It’s borrowed money.

It can go on for some time. We print our own money you know. And if we are borrowing it from ourselves as Japan does, it’s not important.

And what about business who can’t service their debt.

I don’t know. Maybe we can freeze the payments for a while. It’s all owned to bankscum anyway, right. Fuck em.

Claudius: I care about household mortgage payments and businesses making loan payments.

Mortgages can be frozen and loan payments can be frozen too. They both just go to banks anyway. The banksters can go fuck themselves.

Claudius: Credit is what fuels the economy to a large degree.

Last time I checked, they’re still loaning out money. It’s not 2008.

Claudius: Yes, we can hold out the whole summer if need be. But what good does that do? The virus won’t go away. We’re going to reopen sooner or later.

Easy. We get it down to where it’s not killing so many people.

Claudius: We might as well do it now and not destroy three more months of the economy.

The economy’s opened up anyway. What’s not open?

Claudius: I doubt we can save any more lives at this point.

We are saving lives.

Corona kills 30,000/month. Unemployment from lockdown kills 1,200/month.

Claudius: All we can do is kill, hurt and maim people through economic disaster.

But it doesn’t kill, hurt, or maim many people. The virus kills 30X more. You do what kills less.

Claudius: It seems mostly restaurants

I believe they are open now in California in some way or other. They’ve been open for takeout for some time and business has been pretty good.

Claudius: gathering venue employees

What’s that?

Alt Left: Which Kills More, COVID or the Lockdown?

Claudius: A different but related issue: What is worse, to destroy the economy and people’s lives, or accept that many elderly people may die sooner rather than later? This isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s a question we must answer now. Because if we wait a little longer, the economic disaster will hurt more people than Covid-19.

Locking people won’t make the virus go away. We need herd immunity for that to happen or a vaccine. Can we develop a safe vaccine before we destroy the economy? The economy is what feeds people not authoritarian policy.

It’s not true that the economic problems are killing more than the virus. And as soon as the economic problems are killing more than the virus, I say absolutely open up and stay open as long as it stays that way. If the economy is killing more than the virus, open it up. If they virus is killing more than the economy, shut it down a little or a lot.

Unemployment from the lockdown will kill 14,000/yr last time I checked. COVID death toll is 119,000, but it’s actually 145,000 if you look at the 3

14,000/yr. 145,000/4 months.

Looks like COVID is killing a lot more than locking down. This opening up is bullshit. All they’re going to do is kill lots more people that wouldn’t have died otherwise.

And my Mom’s 87 years old, and I don’t like the idea of her dying sooner rather than later of this bullshit illness.

There is no herd immunity anywhere in the US. Doing the “herd immunity” option will end up killing millions of people unnecessarily. Only New York City has anything close and they are only at 2

The economy won’t get destroyed. The state can keep giving people checks. Those checks and the $600/week unemployment checks are the only thing that has saved our economy so far. We would be so SOL if not that for that. The stimulus was also very helpful to the economy.

As far as feeding the people, nobody’s starving due to this bad economy last time I checked.

Alt Left: Rightwingers Are Wrong: COVID Deaths Are Not Being Artificially Inflated

Claudius: I don’t know what the true fatal rate is. It doesn’t seem to be 7x greater than the flu at all because the numbers from democrat cities are probably bogus. The majority of Covid-19 fatalities have come from Democrat states. So either Democrats are incompetent when it cums to public health or they are liars. Probably the latter.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covid19-death-rates-us-by-state/

The figures from Democratic states are just fine.

Let’s say they were amping up the COVID deaths. Let’s say Democratic states had 50,000 COVID deaths, but it’s really 45,000 due to messing with the statistics. Even taking that into account, the death rate is 3

Actually a lot of doctors wanted to list COVID as cause of death but were not allowed to by supervisors.

EMTs went out to many obvious COVID deaths every day, but they were not allowed to list even one of them because they weren’t able to test for the virus.

In Republican states, many COVID cases are not being counted.

Meatpacking plant figures are not being counted in some Republican states.

Florida, a Republican state, is accused of their own COVID statisticians of low-balling the deaths.

In a number of states, deaths in nursing homes or at home were not listed. Only deaths in hospitals were listed. Many COVID patients were sent home prematurely and ended up dying at home. Those deaths were not listed as COVID deaths.

Alt Left: Clearing Up Some COVID Misconceptions

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: Some flu seasons have been as deadly as Covid-19 in recent times.

No they haven’t! The deadliest one was in 1959 with 116,000 and we just beat that one. 1959 was a catastrophic year. Last year the flu killed 14,000 people over a whole year. We are eight times that in only three months. So the death toll is 24X worse than last year’s flu season. Before the 1959 pandemic, I have no idea, but the 1918 pandemic killed 500,000 Americans.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: It’s not the plague the media sold us. It is dangerous; about 2-3x deadlier than the average flu season.

No, latest chart I saw on IFR or Infection Fatality Rate was .7. That’s funny seven times more deadly than the flu. When was the last time you heard of anyone dying from the flu? How many deaths have you heard of from COVID? I’ve heard of lots.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: If it weren’t for the novelty and the fact that it came from China, nobody would have batted an eyelash.

I don’t agree with that at all. Do you care if you get it? Why don’t you go out and get infected and then come back and tell us how harmless it is?

I don’t trust NYC’s numbers. Many hospitals are under a perverse incentive to claim a death as Covid-19 related if the patient tested positive even though they may have died of something else, Covid-19 infection being totally incidental.

I don’t think that false positives are a problem. If anything, New York’s toll is quite a bit higher than it’s figures, 3

By the way, readers are allowed to take a COVID skeptic stance on here. I won’t ban on that. It’s not that important.

Alt Left: Libertarianism and the Alt Left: Prospects for an Alliance?

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: Peronismo definitely won’t fly in Libertarian circles. Argentina is used as a case study for a failed nationalized protectionist economy.

That’s probably not even true. They did great during the Peron years.

I think that the Trump years in general and this COVID-19 response in particular, both of which have been characterized by neoliberal or Libertarian policy and a Libertarian response to a crisis, respectively, has proven the abject failure of the neoliberal or Libertarian model. As if it had not been proven failed by the 2008 crash, which was caused wholly by this model.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: To unify all the nomadic tribes of the Alternative Steppe, three things are need. First, a rejection of central economic planning would have to be declared by right and left wingers. Second, constitutional or legislative limitations on the power of government to regulate. Essentially, castrate the FDA, FCC, FAA etc.* and legalize drugs

I absolutely will not go for either of those. Central planning is working great in China. Even South Korea, Japan, and Germany engage in central planning.

And we will never go along with gutting regulations. Alt Leftists are regulators. We are really Big Government types in a lot of ways.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: And third, a solution to the immigration problem.

There is no solution to this problem.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: The social-economic model, even if never explicitly stated as such, would be capitalism for corporations, socialism for individuals, and tyranny at the border, which is the inverse of what we have now. Warren Buffett agrees.

It’s the capitalism for corporations part that we are going to object to. That’s the whole problem right there.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: The Democrats will stay hopelessly in shambles for the next few elections until minority GDP and population both over take that of whites.

I wouldn’t count on that if I were you.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: Deregulation is hard for leftists to accept because of the strong tendency to falsely conflate wealth redistribution with government regulation.

It is in fact that only thing that redistributes income at all. Absent that you just have never-ending growth of inequality until you pretty much have feudalism. Neoliberalism (or Libertarian economics) has failed everywhere it’s been tried. It’s only success stories are when it’s mixed with socialism. Most of the world rejects neoliberal economics. The US is a holdout. There aren’t many others.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: I suggest aptitude AND loyalty testing for immigrants to keep the stupids or anti-westerns out.

That’s fine.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: No explicit racism, but it would effectively bring in only Christian Caucasians from Europe, Africa and the Middle-East, liberal East Asians and light-skinned Hispanics.

We would object to this part. Of course we want mostly high-quality immigrants, but they don’t have to be any particular race. High-quality immigrants of any race should be just fine.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: Currently, strong regulation of consumer goods & services exists because, ex post fact, individuals can’t afford to sue companies for the damages their products may have caused. As IQ’s, automation, access to on-line information, and personal income increase worldwide, people could rely less on byzantine jurisprudence.

I don’t understand any of this.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: But as I see the tsunami of technology and globalization approaching to totally demolish the justification for our current system, I can’t help but take preparations for the utopia. We must agree on which anarchist utopia to usher in, lest our system turn into a Blade Runner dystopia.

The future will not be any type of anarchism. In fact the future will see a greater role for the state.

Alt Left:Massive Fail: India Is Actually More Messed Up Than Sub-Saharan Africa!

You don’t actually believe that Africa is somehow better off than India?

Yes, I absolutely do. Less outdoor shitting, lower malnutrition and starvation, fewer women dying in childbirth. I was appalled. India is even more fucked up than Sub-Saharan Africa! Talk about pathetic. You need to stop defending your shithole, man. Face it, it’s a shithole. SHI is right. Embrace the fact that it’s a shithole, drop out of Indian society, and be done with it.

Many Africans haven’t even come out of the hunter gatherer lifestyle

This is absolutely false. The White Nationalists (in other words, the nigger-haters) say this all the time. I went and did some research on it, and nope, there are only a few hunter-gatherer societies left in Africa. Almost all sub-Saharan groups are agriculturalists, either tending small plots which is the norm or growing crops on large plantations.

Africans in fact may have been the first to invent agriculture 12,000 YBP in the Gambian Highlands. As with so many things human, once again, Africans did it first. Africans have had plantation agriculture since 1,100 YBP. It started in East Africa around Tanzania and places like that.

Africa overall, may also have more land but probably has less habitable land than India, so putting all these things into perspective, I don’t see how India could have a higher rate when there is no open defecation in South India, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand, there may be very little in Jammu, none in Kashmir/Ladakh, and very little in Northeast (I’m assuming Assam is the only one where it may be common).

They do. 6

Dude, stop. Defending India is a fools’ errand that leads nowhere, and you end up lying all the time because the only way to defend India is with lies. Come to think of it, that’s pretty pathetic right there.

I would also like to know where these stats are from and how did they actually manage to conclude that this number of Indians are openly defecating.

A while back when organizations were promoting the war on open defecation, I did the research. And yep, India was worst. 6

And when I did my research, not only was Africa lower (I think 25-3

In contrast when I looked into India, I found that a lot of Indians simply didn’t care or else actually preferred to be streetshitters. I don’t know what to do about India. Sometimes I think India needs Maoism. Total Cultural Revolution. Not The Cultural Revolution , which definitely had issues, but the cultural revolution that the CCP initiated as soon as they got in and which they pursue to this very day.

I am so sorry. But when you are actually more fucked up than Sub-Saharan Africa, of all places, man, you got problems. When even some of the worst failos are beating you, man, that’s fail with a capital F.

And while it may be difficult to have pride if you are a Sub-Saharan African (though I think they should anyway), Black Africans can at least take  pride in the fact that so many of the biggest milestones in the development of Homo sapiens that left us able to be this civilized were actually initiated by Africans.

All the way up to agriculture. Yep, Africans did it first once again. They started smelting iron awful early too. In fact, Africans were smelting iron even before Europeans were 2,900 YBP! Sure, Africans didn’t advance much beyond that, but still, being the first to reach so many of humanity’s milestones is pretty cool. And Africans can also be proud of the fact that they are more socially advanced than Indians!

Alt Left: What Will Be the Future Post-Coronavirus?

Rishi Ji: This blog has been my companion and a source of intellectual nourishment since 2012. I go around posting links on India and Hinduism all over YouTube, and I bet Robert gets a lot of hits through that alone (rabid Indians coming over). I demand, in these tough times that Robert pay me a small amount of money (Just kidding hehe).

On a serious note what do you guys think the future is gonna be like? Can Robert create a topic on this subject? This virus has had a traumatic effect on us as a species the likes of which I doubt have ever been seen. Bigger than 9/11 or even WW2 in my opinion.

What will be the future once (hoping) things resume? Will there be a renewed kindling of all people or we will revert back to the same baloney we were used to? Will China be held accountable in any way?

Surely globalization as a concept will take a hit. I would love a topic- a philosophical one on this subject here. Last month this time I was chilling with my joint pondering which game to play on my PS4, and now it looks like the apocalypse. Robert- you fear death? You are above 60, does the thought enter your mind?

Great comment from Rishi Ja here.

I will let the rest of you all use the comments section to comment about the important questions that Rishi is bringing up.

Thing about aging is you start to think about death a lot. I think about it all the time, pretty much every day and even quite a few times throughout the day. It’s not a terrifying thought like it used to be, so I suppose I have come to some peace about it. It’s not really depressing either. It’s hard to say what I think about it. I just do is all. It’s hard to explain.

It really is good to frame your mortality in your mind as you go about your life. Ideally, it should enable you to try to get as much out of life as possible.

Of course I am very worried about this virus. But I’m a bastard and a rebel, and I pretty much rebel against everything, in part because I’m sort of an asshole, and nobody tells me to do anything. As a matter of fact, I have a date tomorrow and a hot young 22 year old cutie says she’s driving up here to visit me. She’s 40 years younger than me! She explicitly stated that she wants to fuck when she gets here.

We are all supposed to be quarantining, but I will make an exception for dating. I don’t think dating is a big deal. Dating is one on one and that’s not a huge risk. The real risk is crowds. Not only that but close contact with infected people. Close contact has been defined as 10+ minutes within 6 feet or closer to an infected person.

8

I don’t have any symptoms. Well I do, but they are due to allergies (cough) and asthma (shortness of breath). I know these symptoms very well, and I am certain that the COVID-19 symptoms are quite different.

I am keeping my fingers crossed. People are social distancing in lines at the grocery store. Workers all wear gloves. At the local clinic, workers wore masks and sometimes gloves too. They were shuttling all patients out of the waiting room to individual rooms or out to their cars to wait to be called. Grocery stores are only letting in 50 people at a time. A gas station has a plastic window up between customers and the cashier. Gas stations are deserted.

I was out on Sunday morning, and the town was dead. Most of the people on the streets were homeless, and they were quite prominent. Never realized we had so many in this city. The freeway is almost deserted.

So far this county of 100,000 people has 6 cases, five (or up to 7-8) of them connected to one man, a police officer who works in a nearby county, who probably got it on the job and gave it to his father who lives with him. They then gave it to three more people. In addition, 2-3 more of their contacts have symptoms. All cases are in this city of 60,000 where I live.

The first case in the county, an elderly man in the foothills, has recovered. Five of the six active cases are hospitalized, no doubt in the local hospital where I have elective surgery coming up with pre-op on Thursday. I am wondering whether to cancel it.

One thing I have noticed is how very friendly everyone is when you go out. Cashiers and other workers, fellow shoppers, even just people walking about. Everyone is so nice and kind, even people who are not normally like that. Not sure if I get it except that maybe disasters tend to bring people together, as we finally realize that we are all in this shit together and how much we all depend on solidarity with each other to stay alive and function.

It’s a great time for socialist consciousness, and it’s really exposing how utterly bankrupt neoliberal capitalism really is and how it is literally an out and out death cult.

My phone company is forgoing all bills and late fees for two months, but I think I will pay anyway, as we will probably owe more at the end. Utility company is doing the same, and all cut-offs will be stopped for two months time. Credit card companies don’t seem to be giving breaks. Might be nice if the landlord would blow off the rent, but that’s probably asking too much. I hope to pay my Internet and utility bills anyway this month.

Really this quarantine bullshit is not so different from my day to day life sadly, so this is really nothing new for me.

Coronavirus Has an Affinity for Cold Weather

SHI: Many Asian cities are very urbanized, and there is also a lot of air travel. We will have to watch out before concluding more about patterns. Who would have thought a month ago that Wuhan, the origin of this virus, would now be returning to normalcy. Even as we speak, the number of cases in India, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, etc. is rising very fast. I still don’t think it will get as bad as Italy in these parts.

It’s rising a lot faster in colder parts of the world than in hotter. Even in China, Southern China is not much affected. Nor is Taiwan, SE Asia, Philippines, Indonesia, or even India for that matter.

In Italy, it mostly hit the mountainous north. The south has hardly been affected.

In Austria, most cases were in the Alps in the west.

In France and Germany, most cases were in the Alps SW Germany and SE France.

Switzerland was hit bad.

Netherlands and Belgium were hit hard.

In Iran, it is hitting mostly in the mountainous north of the country.

In the US, it has hit Washington State and the Northeast very hard. In California, it has hit the Bay Area and Sacramento for the most part.

The Southern Hemisphere is being spared.

Africa and the Middle East are little effected outside of Iran, which is a cold country.

Central and South America and the Caribbean are scarcely effected.

There are 25 countries in the Southern Hemisphere. If it hit the South as easily as the North, there would be 12 countries in the South in the above average sphere and 12 in the below average sphere.

Instead, 3 nations in the South are in the above average sphere and 22 are in the below average sphere.

An easy explanation is that the South is experiencing summer right now, or late summer anyway whereas we are in winter or late winter anyway.

SHI: By the way, anti-malarial drugs such as chloroquinine have been found to be effective cures for Coronavirus although not laboratory-tested fully. What do you make of that?

By the time you are going to the hospital, you pretty much can’t breathe. At that point, drugs will do fuck all. You’re going on that ventilator, unless you are in Italy where they will decide if your life is worth saving or not. If you are being placed on that ventilator prone as you see in some of those videos out of Italy, you are in pretty bad shape, I guarantee.

There are lots of drugs that are being found effective for this illness. What all of that boils down to right now, I don’t know because here in the US, they tell you it’s viral pneumonia, and there are no drugs to treat it because it’s a virus. Also US rates are very low because many, many people are being refused tests due to a test shortage.

Locations of Madera And Fresno County Coronavirus Carriers Revealed for the First Time

There is presently two persons infected with coronavirus in Madera and Fresno Counties, one in each. Both are elderly men who caught it on the Princess Cruise Line. People are wondering who and where these people are because authorities are not releasing information about the person’s location. Both carriers are elderly men who are self-quarantining.

I pinned the Madera County man’s location down to Oakhust, a Madera County community in the Sierra foothills. I tracked the single Fresno County infection to the Sierras too, possibly near Shaver Lake. I used the coronavirus case map of the US to pinpoint these locations. The Oakhust and Fresno County dots denoting a disease patient were located right at those two locations.

The virus is presently not spreading via community transmission in Fresno or Madera Counties that we know of. Certainly it is not spreading anywhere in the Valley in those two counties, nor is there a single case in the Valley yet. Or at least it’s not known to be spreading there. Perhaps it is and we don’t know. Also, perhaps it will spread in Fresno and Madera Counties in the future.

I did some research on this virus, and it is one ugly virus all right. It is extremely contagious and quite virulent in terms of disease. 1

People below 60 have a less than average death rate, and the 18-20 death rate is about the same as the overall normal flu death rate. More people have underlying conditions than you think. I am 62 years old and I have asthma. I have a 1

Alt Left: Social Democracy Only Works in Homogeneous Societies Is Often but Not Completely True

RL:

The US and a handful of other countries are literally the only countries on this planet that regard social democracy with outrage and want nothing to do with it.

A commenter responds:

Mithridates: Yeah, I suspect much of this attitude stems from the ethnic divisions within the US that no one is ever allowed to talk about in any sort of frank or intellectually honest manner. Of course the Pluto/Mammon-worship inherent in the American mythos is a influential factor as well.

But let’s explore the first:

Basically, Ethnos A, the group responsible for most of the country’s productivity, is forced at gunpoint to redistribute a portion of their wealth to Ethnos B (and C in some regions), and a good portion of Ethnos B takes that money, pisses it away on all sorts of stupid instant gratification fuckery and doesn’t add much of anything to the country’s overall productivity; in fact, a sizable minority of Ethnos B behaves in public like zoo animals.

And then A’s gets called horrible bigots if they object to this, and especially if they object to being forced to live within shouting distance of B’s.

Most of the countries with working social democratic economic arrangements tend to have been ethnically homogeneous for most of the period when these systems were in place. And now these countries have tried the mass immigration experiment, and the same sort of shitty results is happening in those places that we here in the US have been experiencing for many decades now.

Natural Law says that humans are extra-clever social primates who are predisposed to be open to sharing among others they consider to be kin. There’s a certain other Ethnos I won’t mention by name or even a single-letter set of punctuation marks that exemplifies this principle very clearly.

Anyway, expecting all members of an Ethnos to consider the entire planet’s population of clever hominids to be a part of their kin group is quite an aberrant expectation; only weird ideologies can invert what to everyone else is a common sense understanding of Natural Law principles. And finally, loving one’s own kin does not necessarily mean hating other kin-groups.

Of course everyone has always known that this is the dirty little secret for Americans’ hostility to socialism. This is why all of the American White Nationalists are also hardline economic Rightists, Republicans and Libertarians despite this being bad for most Whites. Race trumps economics for a lot of folks. Whereas in Europe, most of the nationalist groups, even the White nationalists, are explicitly socialist.

You’d be pissed to, eh?

Actually I am fully aware of this argument, but I’m not pissed at all. For one thing, I have never been part of the wealthy White group, so Whites with money can go pound sand. They are my class enemies. I think in terms of economics. Screw race. Do the rich Whites want to help the poorer Whites? Of course not. So why should I support them. Also I know quite a few low-income Whites who use those redistributive programs that Whites hate so much.

On the other hand, I am not a typical White person. I am very hard to the Left; in fact, I am an out and out socialist.

Many countries have health care for all despite being ethnically diverse. However, in a lot of these countries, public health care and education is simply underfunded, so the dominant group, whoever they may be, simply goes to private hospitals and schools. India is an excellent example of this as is much of Latin America.

All of the Arab World has social democracy under the rubric of Islam, or in the case of Lebanon, ethnic peace, and Lebanon is unstable for ethnic/religious reasons. And some Arab countries with prominent religious of ethnic minorities are very unstable or at war.

All of North Africa has social democracy except Morocco, although minority Berbers are dealt with by denial of their existence and roping them into the main group, Arabs. Ethiopia has tremendous ethnic diversity and some religious diversity, but they have a good working socialist system. Eritrea is the same but the main divide there is religious rather than ethnic.

Zimbabwe has a good working system although it has many tribes. Argentina and formerly Bolivia and Ecuador has or had working social democracies, although all three countries had serious instabilities; in all cases the rich objecting to sharing with the poor and with a racial element in Bolivia. A number of countries in Latin America do have social democracies, but they don’t work very well because the rich don’t want to share with the poor.

In a number of those countries such as Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Haiti,and Mexico also have an ethnic element in that the dominant rich group tends to be Whiter or lighter-skinned though not usually White per who don’t want to share with the poorer, darker, folks who are more mixed with Indian and in some cases Blacks.

A number of countries in Latin America have homogeneous populations, but the rich still don’t want to share with the poor, so that doesn’t solve everything. And historically speaking, most nations were quite homogeneous, nevertheless the rich still shared just about fuck all with everyone else and needed an actual revolution to be convinced to do so.

Russia and China has very good working social democracies although they have many minorities, although China and to some extent Russia has some ethnic warfare. Ukraine has a good system despite minorities and ethnic warfare. Vietnam, Cambodia, Bhutan, and Laos have good systems despite having anywhere to a couple to many ethnic minorities. Malaysia has a working social democracy and it has a large ethnic divide. Japan has minorities with an excellent social democracy.

Most of the former Soviet republics probably still have working systems although most have large minority populations.Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran have social democracies and minority groups. However, in Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran are currently embroiled in ethnic separatist wars.

Most of the countries with non-working systems are not only rightwing but also quite poor. Hong Kong is an exception. The government is very rightwing, but there are not ethnic problems. It’s all one ethnic group, but the rich ones hate the poor ones, just as it was traditionally.

Some are just poor. Most of Africa has social democracy, but it often doesn’t work well due to poverty. To some extent this is true in Pakistan, Mongolia, Yemen, Moldova, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Burma, and Thailand. It is also true in Ecuador, Guatemala, most of the Caribbean, Chile, and Paraguay. In these places, social democracy doesn’t work more due to poverty than to diversity.

Alt Left: Eight Negative Arguments Smearing China’s Virus Fight That Must Be Refuted

Eight Negative Arguments Smearing China’s Virus Fight That Must Be Refuted

The COVID-19 outbreak in China has begun to decline outside Hubei Province; meanwhile in some countries it is on the rise. This shows that the epidemic is a challenge faced by all humanity and needs to be addressed by all countries. China’s experience in combating the outbreak shows that timely, accurate, and authoritative information disclosure is crucial.

However, “negative energy” arguments in the public opinion sphere which undermine the solidarity and cooperation between human beings and even create panic out of nothing will harm the efforts to fight the epidemic and can be called a “tumor” in the public conversation about the epidemic.

Here we summarize eight typical “negative energy” arguments in international public opinion and reveal their absurdities, hoping to provide a mirror to show the other side of these arguments about the epidemic.

1. The Economic Fall of China Argument Ignores the Complete Picture

During the coronavirus epidemic, the streets in Chinese cities were empty for a time, and as a result, there is no doubt the economy will be affected to some extent. However, to claim that the fundamentals of the Chinese economy have changed and that growth will plummet from mid-high speed to zero or negative is an overstatement.

For example, the New York Times published an article on February 11 titled “Like Europe in Medieval Times”: Virus Slows China’s Economy suggesting that the epidemic has put the Chinese  economy into low gear.

This coronavirus epidemic has been widespread, and many industries such as catering, tourism, and film and television have been severely impacted. However, it should be noted that the impact of the epidemic on China’s economy is mainly reflected in the restriction of the demand side resulting in a short-term structural imbalance between supply and demand.

In the long run, the means of production are still there, and production equipment and technology have not been affected by the outbreak. So the outbreak will not dent the internal dynamics of the Chinese economy. International Monetary Fund (IMF) spokesman Gerry Rice stated at a press conference on February 13 that “over the medium to long term, we remain confident that China’s economy is resilient.”

The IMF expects a V-shaped recovery for the Chinese economy in which a sharp decline in economic activities would be followed by a rapid recovery. With improvements in containing the epidemic, the supply side will gradually return to normal, while at the same time the potential demand suppressed during the epidemic will be released, and there will be a large rebound in future economic growth.

Structural transformation has given China a strong and resilient economy. First, consumption has become the primary driver of growth. In 2019, consumer spending contributed 57.8 percent to economic growth. Second, the proportion contributed by the service industry keeps rising, and the proportion of value added by tertiary industry to GDP in 2019 is 53.9 percent.

The third is a shift from an excess of savings to an absorption of savings which has led to a continuous increase in disposable household consumption. Fourth, via a huge wave of innovation, the current digitization and intelligent transformation of various industries has led to the rapid development of online business.

Although the epidemic outbreak has increased short-term downward pressure on the economy, the long-term positive trend of the Chinese economy has not changed.

2. The China-US Decoupling Prediction Is Farfetched

During the coronavirus epidemic, the resumption of work in many factories in China has been delayed, which has affected the global supply chain. But it may be delusional to talk about international companies fleeing China and to think that the US and Chinese economies will decouple as a result of the outbreak.

For example, US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross told Fox Business Channel on January 31 that the novel coronavirus epidemic helps “accelerate the return of jobs to North America, some to US and probably some to Mexico as well,” adding that factors such as this will prompt US companies to reevaluate risks such as the supply chain of China-related businesses.

It should be noted that in the face of the epidemic, the Chinese government has demonstrated its firm belief in winning the battle. It is believed that the outbreak will not last long nor will it cause lasting damage to the economy. Business confidence in the future has not disappeared. The experience of the SARS epidemic in 2003 also shows that after the epidemic, people’s desire for consumption will erupt and the economy will see rapid growth.

Compared with the US, where the tertiary industry accounts for 85 percent of the total economy, China’s tertiary industry only accounts for just over 50 percent. There is still more room for development. Naturally, companies will not lose sight of this and abandon huge development space to go to a place where competition is fierce.

The US government’s push for the return of manufacturing is not new. It began during the Obama administration, but the real results have been poor. This is because China is the world’s largest manufacturing base with a complete upstream and downstream industry chain and a large and diversified consumer market.

Only by being close to the Chinese market can companies accommodate cutting-edge demand, have faster production speed, and ensure more reliable product quality.

Of course, China’s industry is in a period of transformation and upgrading, and some enterprises that can no longer adapt to China’s market will leave. This is the natural law of economic development, and it is by no means the exodus that Ross is talking about.

3. The Collapsing Image of China Meme Is Baseless

Under the coronavirus epidemic, some voices in international public opinion have tarnished the image of China.

For example, on February 6, under the headline “This is Not a Coronavirus, It Is an Official Virus,” a Deutsche Welle report stated China’s governance system is not modern, so it was vulnerable in the face of the epidemic.

On some overseas social media, some people have hyped the argument that China’s national image has collapsed in order to disparage China’s image as a responsible power. They even claimed that China would not be able to build a moderately prosperous society as planned.

It is clear that the above slander is groundless and based on a play of words. The “China threat theory” is a virus in the field of international public opinion.

After the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic, the Chinese government quickly set up a special team to deal with the problem, deployed team members extensively throughout the country, and assisted relevant countries in evacuating personnel. These things could only be achieved by an excellent governance system with modern capabilities.

Compared to some advanced economies, China has also done a much better job of reducing the risk of the disease spreading globally.

On February 16, in response to the shortcomings and deficiencies exposed in the response to the epidemic, the Chinese government again made a “two-handed” deployment, improving the biosafety law, the national emergency management system, and the distribution of production capacity of key materials.

China’s epidemic prevention measures have been praised by the international community. French President Macron expressed admiration for China’s effective measures and the country’s openness and transparency in fighting the epidemic.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus praised China for taking many prevention and containment measures that go far beyond the relevant requirements for responding to emergencies. This has set a new benchmark for epidemic prevention in all countries. The speed, scale, and efficiency of China’s actions reflect the strengths of its system.

4. The Sick Man of Asia Metaphor Rekindles a Century of Discrimination

Amid the outbreak of the COVID-19, governments, enterprises, and people from dozens of countries have donated humanitarian aid to China to support the country’s fight against the epidemic. Meanwhile, some people have maliciously taken the opportunity to spread discrimination against China. For instance, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia” on February 3, hurting Chinese people’s feelings.

We should not only refute such absurdities with a comprehensive victory over the epidemic but also continue increasing China’s public health services and national capabilities, throwing the discriminatory views like the one above into the junk heap of history.

China was once weak due to its seclusion and was taken advantage of by Western powers which derogatorily called China the “sick man of Asia.” Such contemptuous words have been a scar on Chinese people’s  psyche. With unremitting efforts of more than 100 years, China is much stronger than it was, and people’s general health status has reached a new high.

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the country has been improving its public health status, eliminating malignant infectious diseases such as smallpox and cholera and developing a cure for schistosomiasis, which once threatened Chinese people for a long time.

A comprehensive medical system has been established in China, covering all rural areas. China has also sent medical teams to help African countries battle against epidemics such as Ebola. As China is completing the building of a moderately prosperous society, the country is rapidly increasing the budget for medical treatment and public health, assuring residents in cities and towns have basic medical insurance.

Currently, Chinese people’s average life expectancy, which continues to grow, has surpassed that of Americans. Through international medical and health cooperation including the building of a Health Silk Road, China’s experience in medical treatment and public health has been widely recognized and accepted.

5. Yellow Peril Hysteria Is Pure Racism

On February 1, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel had a cover headline saying the novel coronavirus was made in China. At a crucial time when the world is jointly fighting the epidemic, the German magazine inhumanly spread Yellow Peril hysteria, at the core of which is the West’s fear of the East.

The Western world regards the Eastern world as a threat, fears it will lag behind the latter, and thus refuses to accept the fact that the East has become more developed and much stronger than it once was. The West wants to safeguard its dominance in the world.

Hence some nationalists in the West have taken advantage of the COVID-19 epidemic to spread this particular form of racist hysteria.

In the era of globalization, human civilization should no longer engage in zero-sum games between the East and West and between races but rather in building a community of shared future where people can co-exist and jointly develop. In the face of this public health emergency, no one can really escape and remain isolated. Only cooperation, solidarity, and mutual help can help people win the fight against the virus.

It is high time to put an end to the farce of Yellow Peril hysteria that encourages people to play a “hunger game.”

6. The Comparison with the Novel 1984 Obscures Reality

To fight against the COVID-19, China has adopted various high-tech measures such as Big Data and artificial intelligence to control population flow and reduce cross-infection risks. However, some Western media outlets seem to be frightened by China’s governance capability. Real Clear Politics published an article on Thursday saying, “China’s Government Is Like Something out of ‘1984.’” There are two reasons such viewpoints echo in the West.

First, people are more likely to believe stories they are familiar with. George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 is well known, but not many people know the real China. Therefore, Chinese people find it hard to persuade their Western friends that China is not something out of 1984. This is like giving a friend who has never seen a real panda a toy panda, and the next time you mention pandas, this friend will think of the toy rather than the real panda.

Second, the media always caters its subscribers with reports that draw attention, even though their viewpoints are abnormal. For those media outlets, a frightening China is obviously more effective than a normal China at attracting an audience.

Using 1984 as a metaphor, those Western media outlets can spread fear of China among Westerners and thus make more profit. This is why a very ordinary story with an eye-catching headline can be forged into something that is scary and strange about China. As many Western media outlets are driven by business interests, it is not hard to understand Western people’s stereotype of China.

What 1984 describes can happen anywhere people live. The novel was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual. George Orwell’s masterpiece is not banned in China. Instead, his books have been among the bestsellers in China since the country’s reform and opening-up. China is moving forward in a broad way using Chinese people’s accumulated experience rather than something out of a novel.

7. The Biochemical Weapon Conspiracy Is Pure Fantasy

Conspiracy theories are a constant reality in the international public opinion field. Once there is a disturbance, they will surface.

On January 31, US senator Tom Cotton tweeted “It’s more urgent than ever to stop travel between China and US,” and “MESSAGE TO ALL AMERICANS IN CHINA: GET OUT NOW.” He also claimed that the virus might have originated in a super laboratory in Wuhan.

The Ministry of Heath of Russian Federation on January 29 published a guideline for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of the novel coronavirus. The handout stated that COVID-19 was recombination of a bat coronavirus and another coronavirus from unknown origin, triggering speculation that the virus had been developed by the US as a biological weapon.

Although such arguments have been common, even in mainstream Western public opinion, there are few experts who agree.

The Washington Post on January 29 published an article entitled “Experts Debunk Fringe Theory Linking China’s Coronavirus to Weapons Research,” with interviews from five experts from prestigious US universities and research institutes. All of them rejected the idea that the virus was man-made.

An expert on chemical weapons said he and other analysts around the world had discussed the possibility that weapons development at the Wuhan lab could have led to the coronavirus outbreak in a private email chain, but none of them had found convincing evidence to support the theory.

A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also pointed out that a good bioweapon in theory has high lethality but low, not communicability, but the opposite is true with the coronavirus. He also described the bioweapon theories as irresponsible misinformation.

The Lancet, the world’s leading general medical journal, released on February 19 a Statement in Support of the Scientists, Public Health Professionals, and Medical Professionals of China Combating COVID-19 signed by 27 top public health experts around the world.

The statement strongly condemned conspiracy theories saying that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin and stated that scientists from multiple countries overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife. The statement also called on the World Health Organization (WHO) to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture.

8. Questioning WHO’s Impartiality Is Destructive

China’s valiant efforts and achievements in fighting the epidemic are obvious to all. Everyone with a realistic attitude will make a fair evaluation. However, some in the international community have been looking at China through colored spectacles and have even stooped to slander those entities and individuals who have praised China.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’ affirmation of China’s performance has been described by certain media outlets as skewed in China’s favor.

Tedros was asked on February 12 whether the Chinese government had approached WHO and asked it to praise China’s efforts in confronting the virus and if there was there pressure put on WHO to make statements along these lines, considering how important the notion of saving face is in China. He responded, “China doesn’t need to ask to be praised…because we have seen these concrete things that should be appreciated.”

He noted that he has observed China’s tremendous efforts to stop the virus from spreading to the rest of the world, including notifying other countries of those confirmed cases with outbound travel history.

State leaders and public health experts of various countries have applauded China’s efforts and transparency. Tedros has also called on the international community to stop stigmatizing China and stand in solidarity with the country in fighting against the common enemy, COVID-19.

Similarly, former WHO Director General Margaret Chan Fung Fu-Chun was also criticized in 2015 for taking sides with South Korea in combating MERS.

WHO’s remarks and actions are based on information reported by the government at the epicenter, the latest data generated by the organization, and suggestions given by the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee. Clarifying and dispelling rumors and misinformation is also part of its job.

Moreover, the WHO has already taken action to prevent the coronavirus epidemic from triggering a dangerous social media ‘infodemic’ fueled by false information and to try to curb rumors, lies, and misinformation.

Along with China, the Singaporean government is also urging citizens to stop spreading rumors.

Authors: Wang Wen, Jia Jinjing, Bian Yongzu, Cao Mingdi, Liu Ying, Liu Yushu, Yang Fanxin, Guan Zhaoyu, Wang Peng, Liu Dian, Chen Zhiheng, Zhang Tingting, and Zhang Yang from Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn

Coronavirus Update

My first coronavirus post. I hope to have more later on.

Look here for the best site on coronavirus numbers, updated daily and even more often than that, every hour and often even at intervals in the hour.

Presently worldwide:

  • 20,639 confirmed cases
  • 427 fatalities

Breakdown:

  • Over 600 critical
  • 2,788 serious
  • 632 recovered
  • 23,214 suspected

The virus appears to be much worse than reported or reported at the moment. Thread discussing that here. There are reports of 1 million infected and up to 30,000 dead. It’s really a serious matter. The Lancet estimates that there are 74,000 infections, and that was several days ago. There are videos of nurses in China saying that there are 90-100,000 people infected, and that was a week ago.

There are videos of people literally dropping on the streets. There are other videos of people just lying in the streets or hospital corridors until someone takes them away. There is a video of a hospital with three dead people in the hallway. They’d been there all morning.

There are reports that Wuhan’s crematoria, which normally burn four hours a day, have been burning 24 hours for days now. These reports also state that bodies are being burned without being identified as coronavirus cases. There are also reports that many coronavirus cases are simply being diagnosed as pneumonia.

However, in support of the Chinese government, there is a huge shortage of test kits, which were only recently developed anyway. They only have 2,000 test kits in Wuhan, so they can only test 2,000 people a day. Until they test someone, they cannot diagnose coronavirus.

On the other hand, it may be important for the government to cover this up, at least for now. Let the truth come out later.

If they tell the truth, the resulting total panic all across China will probably kill more people than the virus. The Chinese economy, already taking a hit from this, will blow up. A lot of countries will refuse products from China, especially fruits, vegetables, and meats. Many of the large corporations who have overseas factories might close up or even move to another country.

Everyone knows this is a big deal. The whole city of Wuhan is locked down. When you to the supermarket or any state building, a government employee is standing right there to take your temperature. The state is delivering free meals to many people who are stuck in their apartments. Cars were banned, but the resulting uproar caused them to be unbanned. The roads going out of Wuhan are all blocked with barricades. No one can go in or out.

And now a number of other cities in Hubei Province are locked down too. For now, the problem is mostly confined to Hubei Province, especially Wuhan. There have been a mere eight deaths in the rest of China.

The Chinese government incredibly enough built a huge hospital in Wuhan with 1,000 beds in only six days! There is another new hospital in Wuhan due to come online on Wednesday, February 6, with another 1,000 beds.

Existing hospitals have only 30 isolation units per hospital. People who are severely ill need to be in ICU units, but those are also in severe undersupply. But that’s not uncommon. In the UK for instance, there are 6,000 ICU units for the whole country of 80 million people. How would the UK fare with an epidemic the size of China’s? Pretty poorly.

The state has massively ramped up the manufacture of surgical masks, as there are shortages everywhere. There are even shortages in places like Australia, as local Chinese are mass buying surgical masks to send back home. Many physicians and nurses from all over China are converging on Wuhan. Many are Communist Party members.

Hospitals are overflowing with people wanting to be tested or worried that they might have the virus. There is a shortage of beds and isolation units, so the hospitals are having to triage and just focus on the worst cases and forget about everyone else.

A lot of people who seem like they have the disease are simply handed some pills (or maybe not) and told to go home and wait it out. A number of people have died in their homes. Everyone in Wuhan and many in other parts of China are wearing masks. Hospital workers are completely suited up.

There has been a huge hullabaloo about China arresting eight physicians who reported on the case very early on. They are being called whistleblowers. There is a lot of anti-China propaganda going on about these whistleblowers.

However, the whistleblowers all got released and had compensation paid to them. The Supreme Court ordered it. So you can see there is quite a bit of democracy in the party, and there are even some separation of powers in the government.

China’s not a complete dictatorship. There are 500 legal demonstrations in China every single day. There are all sorts of organizations that have sprung up about just about every issue or interest to some area: dialects, flooding, pollution, you name it. Most are legal and local Communist Party (CP) officials are often involved.

Also if China is so horrible, why does the CP have 8

You’re Not Going to Get HIV from a Woman

Just forget it. If you like to worry, please worry about something else, something more reasonable preferably.

This is from my notes. It is a comment I got from a commenter who said that he had been on HIV forum. There were HIV researchers on there who had been studying HIV risk for many years and they had yet seen a single case of a man getting HIV via being an insertive partner to an HIV-positive woman as long as the man wore a condom.

Although condoms do break at times, he had never seen a single case of a condom break resulting in a man getting infected from fucking an HIV-positive woman.

I was reading some stuff on there saying that they have never seen a insertive partner test positive from a condom breakage in their many years of doing risk assessments.

You guys can quit worrying now, please.

Alt Left: “The Pentagon’s “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB) Dropped on Afghanistan (2017): Devastating Health Impacts, Ruined Farmland,” by Abdulhaq Omeri

These armaments are ridiculous. War is supposed to be fair. Both sides are supposed to have a chance to escape from attacks. Drone armaments, conventional bombs, RPG’s, grenades, anti-aircraft missiles, anti-tank weapons, all manner of artillery and mortars, all small arms, and even IED’s, suicide vests, car bombs and suicide car bombs all have an element of fairness about them in that it is fairly easy for the enemy to escape from these weapons.

None of these weapons wipes out whole neighborhoods and cities. That’s ridiculous. The idea is that if you have an army that is superior in size and armaments, using conventional warfare tactics, typically involving invasion of enemy territory, you should usually prevail. But you are going to lose some men. So will the other side. Well, you wanted to fight a war, right?

You simply cannot have bombs that blow up whole cities and whole neighborhoods. Those are rightly called WMD’s. Napalm and white phosphorus, cluster bombs, dum dum bullets, and land mines (mine fields in particular) are all banned weapons of war.

This damned thing is a WMD. Ban it. And ban fuel-air explosives too. Those are absolutely WMD’s. And depleted uranium munitions should have been banned long ago

The Pentagon’s “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB) Dropped on Afghanistan (2017): Devastating Health Impacts, Ruined Farmland

In April 2017 the US Air Force dropped its most powerful non-nuclear bomb onto a Daesh stronghold in Nangarhar.

Almost two and a half years after the United States dropped the “mother of all bombs” onto a Daesh hideout in eastern Afghanistan, locals say they have been afflicted by “many diseases” and agricultural lands are not yielding crops.

TOLOnews reporter Abdulhaq Omeri interviewed residents of Mohmand Dara village in the Achin district in the eastern province of Nangarhar. Omeri witnessed many children and teenagers suffering from skin problems and listened to many residents speak of the bomb’s lasting effects.

In April 2017, US Forces dropped a GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) on a Daesh stronghold of caves and tunnels in eastern Nangarhar province. The bomb, nicknamed the “mother of all bombs” is one of the most powerful conventional (non-nuclear) weapons in the US arsenal, according to the US Department of Defense.

MOAB is a concussive bomb, meaning it detonates above ground rather than penetrating hardened defenses. Anyone within 300 meters will be vaporized, experts say, while those in a one kilometer radius outside ground zero will be left deaf.

Nangarhar residents said the bomb has had a lasting effect on the area.

“The ‘mother of all bombs’ was dropped here,” said Pacha Shinwari, a local resident. “You can see that the stones can be broken easily, the plants are dry, the trees are dry, the nearby houses are all destroyed–40 or 50 of them.”

“The government evacuated the people (before the bomb was dropped), but when we came back, we saw that the houses were destroyed,” local resident Mohammadullah said.

Some teenagers are suffering from skin problems following the bomb explosion.

“Many diseases have emerged in this area after the bomb was used. Most of them have skin problems such as acne and skin irritations,” local resident Jam Roz said.

“The agricultural yields are not the same as in the past. The harvests are lesser,” said Aminullah, another resident.

Medical doctors and analysts interviewed by TOLOnews said the use of such bombs leaves an impact on areas where it is dropped.

“There are some concerns about the emergence of diseases after the use of the mother of all bombs in Achin, but so far the public health directorate has not recorded any disease that is related to the bomb,” said Zahir Adil, a spokesman for Nangarhar’s Directorate of Public Health.

“This bomb has three effects:

  1.  It impacts the eyes. People will feel irritation in their eyes.
  2. It impacts the inner organisms of the people who breathe the air where it has been used. It also impacts pregnant women and newborn babies… Afghanistan is a laboratory now.
  3. It has an impact on lungs,”

military affairs analyst Atiqullah Amarkhil said.

President Ashraf Ghani’s advisor and state minister for Human Rights and International Relations, Sima Samar, confirmed that the use of the MOAB in Nangarhar has had long-term effects on residents of Mohmand Dara village.

“It inevitably impacted the health of the Afghan people, especially in areas where explosives are used a lot, including the ‘mother of all bombs,’ which has left its mark on the lives of Afghans,” Samar said.

Featured image is from Tolo News

Alt Left: Labour Isn’t Working: A Radical Program for the Party to Reacquaint Itself with Victory

A most interesting text out of the UK but a group calling itself Alt Left. Though I don’t agree with them on everything, in a broad sense what they are arguing for is more or less within the broad scope of what I had in mind when I founded the Alt Left. This group calls itself Alt Left Publishing.

I had to cringe at some of the more rightwing things this group wants Labour to do, but the fact is that Labour needs to win elections, and if they have to be a bit more conservative to do that, well so be it. As long as we are not electing Blairites, Labour will always be much better than the Conservatives, and UKIP doesn’t look very good either (sort of neoliberal Trump Republicans-lite).

As usual with the Democratic Party here, the Left is shooting itself in the foot with massive overreach by being wildly SJW in ways that the majority of people do not support, and by being fantatically anti-immigration when 7

Labour is getting massacred on this issue, as many working class folks are anti-immigrant and feel that immigrants are taking their jobs and in addition, these people feel that they are losing a sense of their country.

Working class Labour voters are left on economics while being rather socially conservative, and that’s the Alt Left right there. What’s the point of alienating working class voters, screaming racist at them, shoving hundreds of thousands of unwanted immigrants down their throat, and bombarding them with SJW extremism that most of them reject as too radical?

As the piece points out all this is doing is making more and more of these socially conservative working class Labour voters defect to UKIP, mostly over the immigration issue.

Labour is also alienating people by being openly unpatriotic. I’m not a patriotard myself, but I do want the best for my country, so I suppose I love my country more than a corporate types who deliberately harm our country. I certainly don’t want to do my country any harm! I may disagree with domestic and especially foreign policy, but I’m not so angry about it that I want to screw the country over. I mean I have to live here too you know.

At any rate, the people around Corbyn are openly unpatriotic and do not pay proper deference to national symbols and institutions. Most British people are patriots, particularly socially conservative working class folks.

While I love Hezbollah myself and even have a soft spot for Irish Republicans, most British people despise both Hezbollah and in particular the IRA. The latter is heavily due to anti-Catholic sentiment in mostly Protestant UK, a tendency that goes back to at least the 19th Century to “anti-papist” and “anti-Romist” sentiment at that time. At any rate it does no good when Corbyn lauds these groups. All it does is create more UKIP voters.

What’s the point? Politics is after all the art of the possible.

While I love Jeremy Corbyn of course, most British people dislike him, and Labour has been shedding votes since he took over. It doesn’t matter whether I love Corbyn or not. What matters is that most British people hate him. And a leader hated by most of the population should definitely go in favor of someone more popular.

There are other good suggestions here about being tough on crime and the causes of crime. This is an issue near and dear to socially conservative working class voters, and Labour, like the Democratic Party, suffers from a soft on crime problem. That’s not necessary and anyway, crime hurts the working class.

This is a very long document, 12,000 words and 25 pages. I edited it quite heavily. The Alt Left Publishing website can be reached by clicking on the title below.

Happy reading!

Labour Isn’t Working: A Radical Program for the Party to Reacquaint Itself with Victory

Labour Isn’t Working in many ways lays the foundations for the Alt-Left. It establishes fundamental principles like the importance of group identity, the need to restrain the free market, and rejection of radical social justice.

It’s my view that whether your interest in politics is keen or fair-weather, you’ll be intrigued by the book, though I do recommend it particularly strongly to Labour party members and to those interested in the Alt Left and what it stands for.

The transcript can be read in full below, or alternatively downloaded for free here.

If you’d like to purchase the text in E-book format you can do so here.

T. James

Cover JPEG

Preface

The modern Labour party is out of touch with the working class whom it exists to represent, and many of whom turn increasingly to the Tories and UKIP for answers. Labour has been too scared to address immigration, too complacent to address jobs and too divided to address Europe.

The working class is dead. Long gone are the days of the Welsh miners’ choir and the workplace union meetings. The flat cap is worn now by avant-garde members of the rural middle class, men too old to shake a habit, and metropolitan hipsters.

Blackface isn’t the inevitable consequence of a day spent hewing coal from the center of the earth, but is now a racial faux pas. Where once a hard day’s work involved forging world-class steel, for many it’s now manning a call center in order to best resolve Mrs Smith’s broadband issues.

The modern economy necessitates that even the bricklayer has his own local advertising, Facebook page, and website. He doesn’t consider himself part of a homogeneous working class, but instead an entrepreneur, and rightly so.

The production and harvesting of real resources has been shamelessly outsourced to third-world countries. We allow the rest of the world to grow our food, forge our steel, and sew our shirts, and in doing so, we not only deprive our own people of work, but we impose it on others without the benefit of health and safety, a minimum wage, regulations, or any semblance of automation.

Britain’s economy is overly reliant on the financial sector, leaving us vulnerable to the next U.S.-born crash. Where people once took pride in their work as builders, now they are resigned to employment in this coffee chain or that.

Nationalism now rises in tandem with uncontrolled migration leading to names like Le Pen, Wilders, and Farage taking the establishment by storm. What appeared to be a consistently declining level of global violence has begun to reverse itself in recent years, as the wildfire of extremism continues to ravage the Middle East, prompting the worst migrant crisis yet seen in human history.

Humanity is on the precipice of upheaval, there are new questions, and few answers. Left-wing parties across the West are struggling to rally support, caught between the relentless march of globalization and the toll it takes on workers the world over.

The British Labour party is no exception to this trend, and its inability to mount a competent opposition to the government is enabling a period of unchecked Conservative rule. Exerting scrutiny on the executive is essential to ensure that its policies reflect national needs and not self-serving ends. Thus it is in the interests of both Conservative and Labour supporters that the Labour party resurface as a government in waiting and not persist as a party of protest.

In the wake of the 2015 shock general election defeat, long-time backbencher and maverick Jeremy Corbyn, assumed power in the Labour party. Propelled by an anti-establishment appeal and left-wing policies thought to have been consigned to history, he easily defeated his three opponents.

His unprecedented victory prompted a surge in party membership, from some 200,000 to over 500,000, making it notable for being the largest left-wing party in Europe. It appeared that the man to reverse Labour’s fortune had made himself known.

Yet at the time of writing, far from arresting the party’s decline, the Corbyn administration has only exacerbated it. Polling shows Labour now trail the Conservatives by as much as 1

Owing to resignations, the shadow cabinet is more of a skeleton crew, much of it manned by newly elected and inexperienced MPs.  The vast membership, which was seen as the formation of a campaigning vanguard, has since been shown to be in large part idle, indicative of a niche opinion in the country, and a thorn in the side of the parliamentary party.

That’s not to say that Jeremy Corbyn killed the Labour party. He merely sits atop its coffin. The party has been in a state of managed decline since de-industrialization stripped it of a clear reason to exist. The program detailed herein will therefore not lay blame exclusively at Corbyn’s door, though it will do so where appropriate, but instead will lay blame where deserved, and offer remedies where needed.

It’s not enough to insist that the electorate are deficient or suffering from a false consciousness when they reject you time after time. Nor is it good enough to abandon the values upon which the party was founded in order to pursue public opinion at the expense of all else.

Instead the party must align its core principles with the will of the people, conceding ground on either side where necessary. It’s essential that in order to recover, the party enter a period of reflection, and in doing so it must produce a meaningful answer to the question so many are asking: “Just what is the Labour party for?”.

If it’s to defend the NHS, then that’s an insufficient reason for the electorate to eject a sitting government. No doubt the creation of the NHS was Labour’s finest hour, but to relentlessly invoke its name at every public rally like a war cry is to cement in the mind of the public the idea of Labour as a one-trick pony.

If it’s to be a nicer version of the Tories, this too is inadequate. Aside from the fact that the Liberal Democrats already occupy that ground, the public at large will always opt for competency over compassion.

It’s vital that should Labour ever seek to win again, it must first rediscover its identity. It should reforge its raison d’être from an anti-Tory think tank to a government in waiting, able to steady the nation through what promises to be a turbulent future. Drawing from various tendencies within the party, significant research, personal experience, and observable reality, what follows is a detailed roadmap for Labour’s return to government.

Chapter I – The New Working Class

Labour once had a core demographic on which they could rely: the working class – a monolithic block who worked almost entirely in heavy industry. Commonly united in tight-knit communities centered on a factory or pit, they were class conscious and proudly so.

To inherit one’s father’s job was not just an expectation but a de facto right. The membership of the Labour party and consequently its leadership still holds to these antiquated views of what it means to be a worker. So long as they fail to recognize the nature and needs of modern workers, they will fail to produce policies that appeal to them.

This isn’t a failure exclusive to the left of the party. After all, Blair did once assert that, “We’re all middle class now”, a view still manifest among those of his ilk who exist in substantial number within the parliamentary party.

It’s not so much that this view denies the existence of the poverty-stricken or the manual worker but that it sidelines them. It relies on those people to vote for Labour consistently and is unconcerned when they stay at home, since most such people live within Labour safe seats won on a minimal turnout.

This leads us to a divergence in approach: one that caters to a romanticized and now largely deceased working class and the other which overlooks it entirely. To portray the party as these two schools of thought and nothing but would be disingenuous, but they do have the most to say on the subject. The so-called ‘soft left’ offers little thought on the matter, and the Kendallites have been too preoccupied with plots in recent times to set out any clear views at all.

In order to identify those whom Labour must bring into the fold, we must first establish those who vote for it currently:

Old Labourites. Blue-collar chaps for whom the memories of Thatcherism are still all too vivid. Formerly miners and manufacturers, many now live in the deprived post-industrial communities of Wales, the Midlands, the North, and Scotland. Increasingly, their inherent social conservatism and skepticism regarding immigration has led them to vote Conservative and UKIP in increasing numbers.

Londoners. Labour enjoys ever-growing support within London, a crowd often misidentified as being part of the ‘metropolitan elite’. While much of this demographic could be characterized by the sort of person who hangs a picture of Marx in their parents’ Kensington 4-bed, such people are a minority. Labour’s London support base can be differentiated by its social liberalism, particularly in its concern for LGBT rights, feminism, and police practices.

Public sector workers. Over 56.

Ethnic minorities. This demographic can be more or less divided between those of African and Asian descent. The black British demographic is concentrated predominantly in London and Birmingham, the product of a generation who were invited to the UK to rebuild in the wake of the Second World War.

Now living in overwhelmingly deprived communities, over 7

As these groups continue to move out into the suburbs and expand their businesses, it’s likely their transition from being staunch Labourites to reliably Conservative will only accelerate.

Entryists. Often hailing from Trotskyist outfits, their influence is at a peak within the Labour party since the days of militant expulsions. Such people are self-professed associates of groups such as the Alliance for Workers Liberty and the Socialist Workers Party. Though not great in number, it seems Tom Watson had it right when he suggested there are some “old hands twisting young wrists”.

This coalition cannot win elections; it lost in 2010, 2015, and it will do so again in 2020, if not before. Where previously Labour had a clear platform that spoke directly to workers the country over, they have so far failed to adapt to the new nature of work in the 21st century.

Talk of workers’ rights to the 4.6 million self-employed[ii] means precisely nothing. When Jeremy Corbyn gives speeches about Keir Hardy, he might as well be reading from Istanbul’s phonebook for all the relevance it has to the voters he’s attempting to reach.

This sort of rhetoric would suggest that Labour now stands on a platform of reviving heavy industry when in fact no such plans exist. It’s evident that such populist polices are not incompatible with electoral success in modern times.

We can look to Donald Trump’s rise to power as evidence of this. A campaign punctuated with the cry – “We’re gonna put the miners back to work!” – roars which carried the rust belt states and Trump himself to an electoral college victory.

While such an agenda should never constitute the headline of a Labour campaign, there is room for it to form a fractional element of a wider economic plan. With the benefits of automation and clean coal, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t create new jobs in coal, steel and manufacturing: industries whose revival would be predicated on a new regime of tariffs and public infrastructure spending.

Though Labour are often happy to ingratiate themselves with the attendees of events like the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival and the Durham Miners’ Gala, they have nothing substantial to offer on the issue of heavy industry yet are content to bask in the romanticism of it.

While the decline of the British steel industry predates recent governments, it now faces a crisis that threatens to end its very existence. The proximate cause of this crisis is China dumping its own steel at below cost price on the world market. This is comparable to a supermarket opening next to a corner shop and offering loaves of bread for 10p.

Inevitably, the former will put the latter out of business, and then, when it’s free of competition, it is able to raise its prices with impunity. Similarly, if we surrender ourselves to a reliance on Chinese steel, we’ll face higher prices in the long run. Failing to protect them would deliver a coup de grâce to the last bastions of our national manufacturing industries, prompting the decline of communities and our capacity for self-sufficiency.

It’s for these reasons Labour would do well to adopt policies to the effect of the following:

  • Introduce tariffs on Chinese steel to such a point that it becomes unaffordable in the UK.
  • Lobby other European nations to form a steel block, not dissimilar from the Common Agricultural Policy, which will allow for free trade in steel amongst nations with comparable wage levels and health and safety standards.
  • Legislate that all public works must use British steel with appropriate caveats (e.g. certain types of steel are not produced in the UK).
  • Cut the disproportionately large foreign aid budget from 0.

As the supply of steel drops, the free market will necessitate investment leading to the construction of new steel plants, not only in the UK but across Europe. It’s an excellent example of triangulating socialism with capitalism and reaping the rewards of the free market in the 21st century.

Now, I don’t suggest that such policies should be the focal point of a Labour manifesto by any means, on the contrary, they should be towards the bottom of the list, but they most certainly should be on that list.

Such a policy, though necessary, is not an election winner, and speaks only to a specific group of people. It should be brought about in tandem with policies that resonate with the 4.6 million self-employed individuals who are in dire need of strong representation.

These people are more inclined to identify as entrepreneurs than as part of the working class. Mechanics and carpenters are now business people not proles. They don’t care about the history of struggle, or talk of how the EU is essential because it ‘protects workers’ rights’ which is nonsense in its own right, but they do want to have constant work with good pay and little else.

Indeed, until pressure from the Tory-supporting press prompted a u-turn, the Chancellor meant to levy upon self-employed people an even higher tax rate. In the wake of such a clear display of contempt towards the self-employed by the Conservatives, no better opportunity exists for Labour to launch an appeal to white van men the country over.

So, what problems do self-employed people face, and what policy platforms can appeal to them?

By definition they don’t have an employer from whom they can claim sick, maternity, or paternity pay, their work can be inconsistent, and they must continually reinvest their earnings to facilitate the survival of their trade or business.

Such policies should include:

  • Cutting taxes for the self-employed, allowing them to free up income they can use to cover the cost of sick pay and other work-related benefits (alternatively, introduce self-employment working tax credits where feasible).
  • Lowering VAT so that consumer spending increases, thus pushing up demand for new wardrobes, landscaped gardens, vehicle modifications, and so on.
  • Forcing the banks that we taxpayers bailed out to provide loans where feasible to self-employed individuals at a special low interest rate for the purpose of buying tools, refurbishing workshops, or taking on trainees.
  • Sending apprentices to work with the self-employed rather than with huge multinational chains, where they exist as little more than wage slaves.

Again, such policies won’t provoke a landslide electoral victory, but they are essential to attract to the Labour cause the sort of voters who are not only needed to win an election but whose interests lie in the Labour camp; the clue is in the name, after all.

But policy isn’t enough. We can’t expect people who work two jobs and maintain other responsibilities besides to read complex manifestos and pay attention to policy documents – to do so would be an unreasonable burden. Instead we need to talk in a language that ordinary people understand. That is to say: we should speak like normal people.

In 1917 the Bolsheviks condensed a complex economic program into three simple words: ‘PEACE, LAND, BREAD’. It was a message that was understood by every echelon of Russian society without exception. This is no means to advocate Bolshevism, but it serves to demonstrate that exactly 100 years ago, without the benefit of social media, YouTube, spin doctors, and hashtags, it was possible to create easily digestible slogans that summarize a policy platform.

Yet somehow the modern Labour party is entirely incapable of developing a slogan, sentence, paragraph, or message of any length or format that appeals even remotely to its core vote or to those it needs to incorporate into it.

In 2015 Labour produced “A Better Plan for a Better Future” as its campaign slogan. This inspired precisely nobody and means exactly nothing. Given that unemployment in 2015 was 1.9 million[iii], how about this: “Labour Will Give You a High-paying Job”. Or with a little more finesse “Higher Pay, More Jobs”.

At the end of the day, despite the Twitterati’s various obsessions, jobs are the primary concern of most voters, and they have been and should continue to be at the forefront of any Labour campaign. Moreover, nobody speaks the language of the 60’s union bosses or the Marxist Politburo; talk of ‘comrades’ and ‘struggle’ should be consigned to the dustbin of history unless in the context of a historical discussion.

This chapter has thus far dealt with the need for and the avenue by which the traditional northern post-industrial vote can be shored up, and how best the 4.6 million self-employed can begin to be brought across to Labour in greater numbers, as well as a brief mention of language and communication which will be dealt with in greater depth in a subsequent chapter.

With all that said, there remains one ever-growing and crucial voting block who cannot bring themselves to vote Labour for reasons easily condensed into one word.: Immigration.

Blue-collar blokes are sick of being called racists for daring to criticize immigration. There is nothing left wing or liberal about the free movement of people; to the contrary it’s a right–wing, neoliberal idea that disproportionately favors employers.

The Labour party has no need to become radically nationalist, but by God it should be patriotic. It should fly the Union Flag and St. George’s Cross at every speech and every office, and the same for the Welsh and Scottish flags. But above all, Labour should call for a points-based immigration system that guarantees people the world over get a fair shake at entering the country on the basis of having the skills we need in the economy.

Let’s take India’s best scientists and China’s best students and do so on the understanding that they will commit themselves to the country for a specific amount of time. Let’s not feel obliged to take unskilled workers, of which we already have a surplus, in order to further drive down the wages of construction site laborers, baristas, and private hire drivers.

So, here’s a ‘radical’ suggestion for a slogan “British Jobs for British Workers” the words of one Gordon Brown as recently as 2007. This is the sort of slogan that should be plastered so thickly on the walls that they begin to be structurally integral to the building they occupy. Like communication, immigration will be dealt with in detail in a subsequent chapter, but in relation to appealing to the forgotten working class, it must be a cornerstone.

Over 900,000 people are apprentices[iv], mostly young women – an  ideal demographic for Labour voters. Since an apprentice in their first year is entitled to a below-subsistence wage of £3.40 an hour, and those most likely to enroll in an apprenticeship are poorer to begin with, it’s a total no-brainer: Labour should be promising every apprentice in the country a pay rise.

To those who suggest this would be irresponsible spending, we’ll be enjoying the benefit within two years of not having to send the EU hundreds of millions of pounds a year, of which a fraction could be spent on improving apprentices’ pay.

Here’s another groundbreaking slogan “A Pay Rise for Apprentices”. It’s time the unions with their multi-million bound budgets and 6-figure wage packets stopped resting on their laurels and actively began unionizing young apprentices the nation over. An offer of free membership for a year would be hard to refuse.

Others talk of an ‘anti-boss’ brand of populism, but as well as being counterproductive, since we absolutely want bosses to vote for Labour, time has rendered it irrelevant. We now live in an age where peoples’ bosses are oftentimes a relative or a friend, where this isn’t the case, it’s rare that employees don’t know their manager or supervisor outside of the workplace on a casual basis, at the very least as acquaintances.

Any anti-business or anti-boss talk cannot be part of a modern Labour party’s rhetoric or policy. Where there is room for populism, it’s anti-corporate populism.

Let’s make sure Google, Starbucks, and Facebook pay the taxes they’re duty bound to, given that without a taxpayer-funded education system they would have no employees, without the NHS they would have to provide insurance, without public roads they would have no means of haulage, and without internet and phone-line infrastructure they would have no means to even exist.

From the gains made by appropriating the correct levels of tax owed by such corporations, let’s move these profits into delivering tax cuts for small business owners, incentivize them to take on new employees, and expand their trades. It’s by means such as these that Labour can successfully convert traditional Conservative voters simply by offering them a better deal.

We can also reach the middle classes. For the first time in their history, junior doctors went out on strike, and did so on several occasions in the wake of Jeremy Hunt’s punishing reform proposals. Legal professionals are in the process of a mass exodus from the legal aid program, with Scottish wages having dropped over 2

While an opportunity clearly presents itself to launch an appeal to traditional middle class Conservative voters, the Labour party is too embroiled with internal affairs to mount any effective effort.

On this point of traditional Conservative voters, it’s time to speak to farmers once again. We will soon have control over farming subsidies, let’s outbid the Tories on this issue and in addition offer an innovative rural apprenticeship program in order to train future generations in the ways of agriculture, while also aiding overworked and beleaguered farmers.

Furthermore, let’s force supermarkets to pay a fair price for dairy, meat, and vegetables, while subsidizing the cost to the consumer, paid for by an equivalent tax on sugary foods in order to ensure farms thrive while still protecting consumers and simultaneously improving the health of the nation.

Once free from the Common Fisheries Policy, let’s put our fisherman back to work and become the fishing capital of Europe. It makes no sense to subsidize corporations through working tax credits. Labour should promise an increase in the minimum wage and use the welfare savings to fund new infrastructure in our now-decrepit seaside towns.

Through this dual approach, we can not only increase the quality of life of those left behind by globalism while once again making British seaside towns worthy tourist attractions, but also bring back into the fold voters who have long since deserted Labour for UKIP.

Through these methods, we can expand our ever-shrinking coalition to include people from all walks of life, while still staying true to Labour values in a modern and relevant way. Let’s go forward in lockstep with farmers, fishermen, carpenters, shopkeepers, laborers, dockers, lorry drivers, and lawyers.

Some may ponder, then, might this not alienate the metropolitan middle classes, who as of this moment form the last bastion of the Labour bloc vote? Well, the biggest genuine issue for such people is the absurdly high house prices which keep people off the property ladder to middle age, and some of the highest rents in the world.

All the while we spend £25 billion every single year on housing benefit[vi], money which goes straight into landlords’ pockets, (not that we don’t want landlords to prosper).

It’s time to announce a national house building program that takes the money straight out of the housing benefit budget and puts it into building 250,000 homes a year until the housing shortage becomes a surplus, at which point the free market will dictate rents, house prices will return to affordable levels, and the UK will once again become a home-owning democracy.

This is how we can offer concrete solutions to clear issues that will resonate with the 8 million people who live in London. Such a program would also lead to the employment of hundreds of thousands of people, prompting a higher tax revenue and increased spending in local economies throughout the country.

In summary, in order for Labour to properly construct policy that appeals to the working class, it must first understand how the working class has evolved over the past century. It should adopt a dual approach that halts the decline of traditional manufacturing and shores up our export market, while simultaneously engendering job growth in emerging markets, with an eye to appealing to those whose new nature of work leaves them without a natural party to vote for.

This program should incorporate the good work done by Ed Miliband in formulating policies to re-introduce security into the workplace, particularly in dealing with ‘zero-hour’ contracts, while also acknowledging that such policies do not have a broad enough appeal amongst swing voters. Labour must push for full, proud, and secure employment. By these means, Labour will rally all elements of the modern working class to their cause. 

Chapter II Foreign Policy and the Military

Foreign policy is not an election winner. Even when Blair’s hated decision to invade Iraq prompted the largest marches ever seen in the UK, the Labour government comfortably held on to power in the 2005 elections.

However, it’s important to remain principled and strive always to do what is right and best, both for the people of our nation and for those abroad but never at the expense of either. Moreover, Labour faces challenges from the left, notably the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, whenever it assumes an overtly pro-war posture.

There is scarcely a sentient being on earth who still believes Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan were successful interventions, and for all the times it’s been said, it’s clear we haven’t learnt the lessons of the past. The Labour party should make it clear that they will not involve themselves in foreign military entanglements that do not directly concern the security of the United Kingdom and its allies.

British blood should not be expended to remove a foreign dictator only for that nation’s people to find liberation give way to an unimaginably worse kind of tyranny as has happened when ISIS filled the vacuum that Western bombs created.

Having said that, it is crucial that Labour demonstrate that it does not take security lightly, and its commitment to having first-class armed forces should be clear to everyone.

We have a Conservative government that has sacked soldiers before they could claim their full pensions, moved hundreds of thousands of positions into the reserve army, has aircraft carriers that we can’t land aircraft on, and now, most bizarrely, is offering troops the option of not serving in combat zones in return for a pay cut.

In uncertain global times, Labour should put itself forward as a patriotic party committed to the primary duty of the state: the protection of its own people. It’s essential that a commitment to at least

The latter is contentious, particularly within Labour circles, but there are some universal truths on this matter. Firstly, Trident has been commissioned, and should Labour win power, they will inherit the system no matter what their policy is. Secondly, the majority of the population are in favor of nuclear weapons, and confusion on the issue only allows the Tories to portray Labour as a threat to national security, philosophical arguments about MAD aside.

It’s also right that we reverse the horrible mistreatment suffered by our veterans. No individual who has laid their life on the line for the nation should be allowed to sleep on the streets, and as part of the aforementioned house building program, there should be guaranteed homes for veterans with subsidized mortgages, a cost to be taken from the

There should also be jobs in the public sector reserved for them, particularly in the police and border forces. It’s my view that the treatment of veterans is a legitimate use of the term ‘military spending’.

Our foreign aid spending is disproportionate, badly allocated, and unsustainable. We are running a budget deficit of £40 billion, and continue to borrow more money to spend abroad, often sponsoring foreign militaries in proxy wars, or putting money into the pocket of despots to secure exploitative trade deals.

After the United States of America, we are the second biggest foreign aid donor on the planet in real terms. We spend $18 billion compared to the U.S. spending of $31 billion[vii]. That is over half of their expenditure despite being significantly less than half the size of their economy.

There are many cases in which it is not only right but morally incumbent upon us as a nation to send funds and resources abroad, to combat Ebola as a recent example.

But setting an annual target of 0.

Foreign aid does a lot of good, and where it does so it should continue to do so, but where reasonable savings can be made, this is exactly the course of action that should be pursued. The liberal, Guardian–reading, mocha-sipping elites will tweet furiously in response to such a suggestion, as if there’s something essential about the budget being set at 0.

It’s important to ignore these people, whose numbers appear  more significant online, as they represent a minority as has been shown time and time again, with only 1 in 4 supporting the current foreign aid policy[viii].

For those who suggest that giving money to space-program-pushing India will somehow engender good relations with developing countries, I’d suggest we could better build relations by ceasing to hinder their economic growth through climate regulation (with caveats) and ending the practice of Western and Chinese companies exploiting the developing countries’ natural resources.

We currently face the worst refugee crisis the world has yet known, and as a party, people, and species, we have a duty to help those in need. In the immediate future, we should accept lone child refugees and house them with willing volunteers in the UK.

Subsequent to this, we should quiz every local council in the country and see what facilities they can spare to house other refugees, prioritizing families. However, there are 60 million displaced people globally and counting. The UK cannot effectively double its population by accepting every single individual – even

Thus, longer-term solutions must be found, and they begin with rich Middle Eastern countries which have so far allowed the burden to be shouldered by their neighbors like Lebanon as well as Western nations, namely Germany.

It is time we lobbied Saudi Arabia, to whom we sell jets and whose pilots we train in order to better fly them, we gave a free ride when they invaded Bahrain, and continue to do so as they fight in Yemen killing civilians with British bombs, and whose disgusting head-chopping record gives ISIS a run for their money.

This is not a suggestion to cut ties with the Saudis or the UAE, but given the support both militarily and diplomatically that we provide for them, it’s reasonable to assume we can make demands of them: and if ever there was a need to, it is now. These countries should be taking in great numbers of refugees. They have the infrastructure; they just lack the will.

Further to this, the foreign aid budget should be used to contribute to a wider transnational program to build U.N.-protected safe zones across the Middle East, to prevent refugees making the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean, which in itself will save thousands of lives but also to keep them safe from terrorism and keep them fed, watered, and sheltered until such time that they can return to their country or region of origin.

The geopolitical landscape has suffered a seismic shift in the past year alone, and upcoming European elections look to continue that trend. The long and short of the matter is that we have distanced ourselves from our European neighbors so long as their current rulers last anyway, and thus we must move closer to our historic allies in the U.S.

However, Jeremy Corbyn (perhaps out of some need for the adoration of the echo chamber of his cult of no personality) is making a frequent habit of attacking President Trump vocally, viciously and publicly. He’s joined in such attacks by other high-profile liberals, notably the speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow.

When the Cameron government shamelessly courted the Chinese into buying out our public infrastructure, John Bercow was front and center in welcoming Xi Jinping to address both houses of Parliament.

Yet in a stunningly hypocritical fashion which must require Olympic levels of mental gymnastics to justify, Bercow has come out against Trump addressing Parliament and intends to block him from doing so, all the while being supported in these efforts by the leader of the Labour party. Part of the problem is the disingenuous hysteria around Trump that you’ll find in the Guardian, Mirror or indy100.

But putting that aside, even a blind man can see that it’s absolutely within British interests to foster closer cooperation and trade with the U.S.A., the biggest economy in the world, which also has in common with us in language, culture, and history.  In fact, for anybody who considers themselves on the left, a closer relationship with Trump can only be a good thing for world peace, given his thus-far successful moves towards détente with Russia.

On this point, there’s no need to paint Putin as the eternal bogeyman. There are elements of his governance which we can all criticize from one angle or another, but to invoke the words of a separate J. C. for a moment, “Those without sin should cast the first stone”.

The domestic policies of Russia are entirely an issue for the Russian people, and continuing to burden Russia with ever worsening sanctions not only destroys diplomatic relations but is mutually harmful for both our economies. Let’s work with Trump and Putin to defeat ISIS, and in doing so we will position ourselves closer to their ears to best influence them on any human rights issues we find significant.

We claim ownership of an island over 7,000 miles away from our shores on the basis that its citizens voted in a referendum to remain British. This is no bad thing and we should continue to respect the right to self-determination.

However, when those in Crimea, who are 6

This is made even more bizarre by the fact Crimea was part of Russia as recently as 1954, when Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine, and now over 60 years on, it’s reasonable that its inhabitants would rather unite themselves to a superpower rather than a failed state.

Some will surely cry ‘appeasement’ to the idea that we should improve relations with Russia. To those people, I say: compromise is essential in international relations, we can’t preach to the world how they should live and operate, and it’s arrogant and pseudo-supremacist to try and push our liberal democratic model on every culture and people of the earth.

That’s not to mention that Putin did little when we invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, supported French action in Mali, and imposed sanctions against their Iranian allies, yet liberals appear indignant at any suggestion that the Russians be allowed the same freedom in their international actions.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t assume a strong posture – we absolutely should – which is one of the reasons this text has hitherto advocated the maintenance of Trident and spending of

Working closely with our American allies, we should aim to maintain peace through strength, but this is by no means mutually exclusive with closer cooperation with Russia, with whom we should be seeking to strike trade deals, closer ties, and better relations. In short, we should make allies, not enemies, wherever possible.

Most people aren’t concerned with international relations. They want food on their table, a roof over their heads, and enough disposable income to live a good life. However, it will never be the case that Jeremy Corbyn could be elected Prime Minister on an anti-American ticket.

It’s a simple truism that the U.S. is a crucial ally, and to worsen our relations in the context of Brexit would leave the UK essentially isolated. Trump’s lewd comments about women are not a hill Labour should be dying on, nor a hill they should have even assumed a position atop in the first instance.

Instead Labour should have a foreign policy that doesn’t indulge in 3-dimensional chess and virtue signalling but instead sends a very clear message. Labour will be second to none in defense of the nation, second to none in rebuilding relations, and unwilling to expend British blood or treasure in foreign wars that do not concern us.

In Europe, let’s form bilateral trade agreements and maintain the same standard of intelligence sharing as exists today, both of which are perfectly possible without power sharing in a technocratic bureaucracy.

The upshot of this in messaging terms is that Labour should state loud and clear that Labour will keep you safe, prioritize our own citizens, and maintain a humanitarian outlook on global affairs. Little else is necessary, and Corbyn’s famous hand-holding with the IRA and Hamas are enough to set him up for a decisive defeat in any British election.

Chapter III – Immigration

Immigration became a taboo subject in the realm of political discourse with the dawn of the Blair Age. Conversation on the matter was shut down, and dissidents were branded racists, outcasts, and forced into silence. A mixture of concern and outrage boiled up amongst those left behind by New Labour, leading to the return of two British National Party candidates in the European Elections of 2009.

Fortunately, both of those vile individuals have since lost their seats and faded into obscurity, with those voters now opting to side with the far more moderate UKIP. Nigel Farage single-handedly put immigration at the center of British politics, and his influence led to a vote to leave the European Union, within which the primary concern amongst Out voters was immigration.

This had been a sleeping giant for some time, and Farage was able to awaken it. However, even now in a post-Brexit world, the issue of immigration is still taboo for many, particularly in the mainstream media. It’s rare that anyone advocating a merit-based immigration system as opposed to no controls at all isn’t branded a racist by a ‘Question Time’ panelist or political opponent.

It’s an issue that’s particularly pernicious on university campuses and in inner cities. In the former, anyone to the right of Chairman Mao on the issue is considered Hitler’s earthly avatar, and in the latter, it’s a common occurrence to find your trip through Central London punctuated with stalls of the Socialist Workers Party distributing leaflets that read along of the lines of ‘Let all refugees in now! Stop racism!’.

Speaking of the SWP, whilst Labour seems curious about its own credibility gap, meanwhile its own shadow chancellor is giving interviews to the SWP[x], so whoever is running the Labour PR machine should enjoy the ‘benefit’ of instant dismissal.

The fact that the views of a tiny vocal minority are over-represented on television and online media makes people scared to air their true opinions, only taking action within the security and anonymity of the ballot box. Over 7

Overwhelmingly, the country is dissatisfied with current levels of immigration. This includes Black and minority ethnic voters of all stripes who believe the number of immigrants should be reduced, and they do so by sizeable majorities[xii].

It’s pertinent to mention that immigration is disproportionately a concern for the working classes, and many of them have fled Labour, leading UKIP to be the main challenger to Labour in a great many constituencies in the 2015 election. Although it’s proven difficult for UKIP to directly take seats from Labour, there are two problems that this bleeding of voters poses.

The first is that it will lead the Labour vote in northern communities to be split with UKIP, thus allowing a Tory candidate to take a seat with as little as 3

We are in the process of leaving the European Union, and thus we will no longer be shackled to the free movement of labor which has given every citizen of the EU the right to live and work in the UK. However, neither the Conservatives nor Labour have made clear the path ahead.

What better opportunity then for Labour to appeal to its forgotten voters, take back the defectors, and win over Conservatives by proposing a strict points–based,Australian-style immigration system. Let’s legislate in order to ensure that only immigrants who possess the skills and resources we need have the ability to settle and work in this country.

Let’s mandate that immigrants should have an excellent grasp of the English language, not just because such a skill is essential (particularly in the medical profession) but also because it will ensure universally beneficial integration.

At the same time, we should make it clear that this country already has enough unskilled workers, unemployed, and disabled people who are struggling to cope as it is, and it should not be incumbent on the country to take more such people in.

It’s here the points-based system comes into its own: for example, if there is a shortage of unskilled labor, we can adjust the requisite points for entry and mandate that people who enter under such circumstances have jobs waiting for them.

Some suggest a migration system based on merit is xenophobic, and to those people it’s worth mentioning that we’ve applied a points-based system to non-EU citizens for years, and as members of the EU, we were giving preference to European migrants who were predominantly White over Indian and African migrants.

A points-based system is totally equitable and accepts people based on ability, irrespective of skin color, creed, or nationality. This is entirely in keeping with the sort of values that led to Labour’s foundation and should remain at the forefront of any respectable leftwing movement.

There is a myth that there is something ‘left wing’ or ‘progressive’ about uncontrolled migration, or that it would be desirable to have an unlimited number of unknown individuals entering the country every year.

Let’s be clear: the free movement of labor is a rightwing, neoliberal, capitalist policy, not dissimilar to the free movement of capital. It’s a symptom of an anarchic free market system that serves the elites extremely well; it drives down the price of labor for corporations, affords the middle classes cheap gardeners and nannies, and perpetually rigs the job market in the employers’ favor.

It’s a fundamental leftist belief that the free market is not infallible, requires regulation, and this regulation should pertain not just to levels of taxation and regulation but also to the distribution of workers.

This is not advocacy of immigration control on the basis of electoral populism, or economic philosophy, though it would indeed be popular, and it does follow philosophically; instead it’s an advocacy on the grounds of basic math.

Plainly, the UK cannot sustain the number of immigrants coming into the country every year. 300,000 is the rough annual net migration figure to the UK per annum. Many point out rightly that a large number of these people are students, and they’re right to do so.

However, whether student or worker, they still take the same toll on transport, health, and social infrastructure.  As a nation, we are building around half the number of houses we need every single year, at around 135,000[xiii], creating a clear deficit in housing availability. That’s not to mention that our own domestic birth rate is over 800,000 per year[xiv].

We already have a dangerous housing bubble which threatens to collapse at any moment, pulling our entire economy down with it, and it’s only exacerbated by such migrant numbers. Of course, part of this problem is that we don’t build enough houses, and issues pertaining to that were detailed in the first chapter.

However, the costs of building such enormous numbers of houses and providing the associated infrastructure would be to say the least prohibitive, and even if it were feasible, it would not be desirable.

Aside from housing there are huge costs associated with the NHS, when people who have never contributed arrive able to take full advantage of it without question. This is one of the factors that has led to a record NHS deficit of £1.85 billion[xv]; although of course underfunding remains the direct cause of this crisis, immigration serves to aggravate it.

You’ll hear from Labour politicians and often to the thunderous applause of their echo chambers, the following platitude: “You’re more likely to see an immigrant working in the NHS than using it”.

Aside from being disingenuous, since it’s entirely determined by happenstance and geography, the point they are trying to make is that because immigrants work in the NHS, we should allow an unlimited number of immigrants to enter the country, as if the former warrants the latter, which is a total non-sequitur.

Yes, we have a large number of migrants working in the NHS, and that’s a good thing to. Let’s keep them there and continue to allow medical professionals into the country in line with demand. Having controlled immigration and having Indian doctors are not mutually exclusive; in actuality an equitable points-based system will incentivize and drive up the number of highly qualified migrant workers relative to unskilled workers.

The people are crying out for a credible party to come out strongly on immigration, and if Labour did so, they would take the country by storm.

Chapter IV – And the Rest

Regarding inertia

As of this writing the most commonly seen Labour slogan is “Working together for real change”. The problem is the party is not working together, and presents no change. The conflict within and between the constituency and parliamentary Labour parties is wreaking havoc on Labour’s public image, and as the well-known adage tells us, voters don’t vote for divided parties.

However, this text will not attempt to dissect the intricacies that have led to this point; instead suffice it to mention a couple of key issues.

Jeremy Corbyn will never receive the support of the current MPs and therefore must go. The only alternative would be to begin a process of deselection across the country –  a sort of Trotskyist Night of the Long Knives, which would only leave the party’s reputation in tatters and replace experienced MPs with amateurs.

There is a divide within the parliamentary party between those representing constituents who are socially conservative working class and middle class social liberals. While Labour has always been a broad church that has incorporated numerous factions, the divisions now seem to be intensifying like never before.

Party loyalty is at record low rates, and people are now more likely than ever to throw out of office the candidate of their forefather’s choice and often on the basis of a single issue. This is more contentious than ever post-Brexit, given that some Labour MPs represent constituencies that voted overwhelmingly to Remain and others the reverse. Inevitably MPs jostle with one another to represent their diverse constituents.

The remedies are imperfect for both issues. For the first, Corbyn must go, which is easier said than done; and secondly the Labour party must support the will of the people and push for a real Brexit that rejects freedom of movement. Neither solution is ideal, but both are necessary, not least because the majority of the country hate Corbyn, and the majority of the country voted for Brexit.

On to the second, and more important, element of the slogan: “Real Change.” The most obvious change that has taken place in the last couple of years is the transformation of the Labour party from a party of government to one that wallows in political oblivion. Change is an important message to transmit, but the kind of change needs to be clear, and Corbyn’s Labour has thus far advocated very few changes indeed.

In fact, in my research for this work, I wanted to see exactly what policies Jeremy Corbyn had promoted in order to deal with them individually. However, when I tried to access Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘priorities’ on his website, it returned an error page reading “Unfortunately the page you were looking for was not found”, which is so patently ironic that no explanation is needed.

Further hunting will lead you to an article in the Mirror listing several flagship policies, which range from unpopular and bizarre like abolishing the monarchy to leftist clichés like ‘tax the rich’, and standard Labour talking points like re-nationalizing rail.

An eager hunter will find a more exhaustive list in a Telegraph article, which is pretty damming for the Labour party PR machine when the right-wing pro-Tory paper gives more policy detail than Labour themselves do. Eventually, one will stumble upon the ‘Jeremy for Labour’ page detailing ten broad policy positions. A brief glance is enough to know it’s a slight rewording of Ed Miliband’s 2015 manifesto combined with some broad meaningless jargon.

“We will build a progressive tax system so that wealth and the highest earners are fairly taxed, act against executive pay excess, and shrink the gap between the highest and lowest paid – FTSE 100 CEOs are now paid 183 times the wage of the average UK worker, and Britain’s wages are the most unequal in Europe. We will act to create a more equal society, boost the incomes of the poorest, and close the gender pay gap.”[xvi]

Do we not already have a progressive tax system? What rate should the highest earners pay? Will you cap executive bonuses? How will you boost the incomes of the poorest? How will you close the gender pay gap?

Such questions could be the only reasonable response to reading such general non-offensive meaningless milk-and-honey talking points. Anyone who feels the media hasn’t given Corbyn’s Labour a fair shake and has undertaken to do their own research will only be doubly disappointed when they discover that in the two years of his leadership, there’s scarcely a new policy to speak of.

For those who seek out concrete information, they should be rewarded with definitive and detailed policy proposals signed off by renowned economists, think tanks, and financial organizations.

Such policies should include pledges to build huge tidal power stations taking advantage of the fact that our nation is surrounded by water, to build offshore wind farms (including specifications on how many of them, at what cost and where the money is coming from), and to build new motorways, detailing how many people such a project would employ and projecting the economic benefits it would bring to this city or that. Alas, nothing of the sort exists.

Not to harp on about political antiquity, but Harold Wilson talked of the ‘white heat of the technological revolution.’ It’s not something that was ever truly delivered on, but it’s a phrase that stuck. What better time than now is there to renew the scientific and technological revolution? In the age of drones, self-driving cars, nanotechnology, and interstellar rovers, the modern Labour party has very little or nothing to say about it.

As a people we have the potential and as a country we have the need to host research and development facilities for the world’s leading technology firms and to have factories producing technology for the modern age. Labour Shadow Ministers should be meeting with Tesla and Microsoft, putting out press releases and winning support amongst the firms of the future, letting them know Britain is open for business.

In tandem with this we need new and forward-looking training schemes. The youth vote is overwhelmingly Labour but also the least likely to turn out.

Labour councilors, MPs and its half million members (Where are they?) should be knocking on every door of every council estate, meeting the unemployed, disenfranchised youth, and giving them a clear, concise piece of paper offering them a world-class training program that Labour guarantees to introduce if it wins the election.

Give these people something to aspire to and something to vote for outside of the Blue and Red tribal dichotomy which means very little to most people.

AddendumI have returned to this section to note that shortly after the time of writing, the Conservative government has unveiled so called ‘T-levels’, which promise to train youngsters in the practical and technical fields of the future. Once again, Labour has been too slow on the draw and attempts to do so now would appear to be a derivative imitation.

Put before people a plan that they can understand and offer them a future: through training programs, scientific advancement, industrialization, automation, pay rises, and tax breaks. Talking points must give way to the tangible.

What matters to most people when all is said and done is the food on their table, the money in their pockets and the roof over their head. Naturally, a sense of community drives many voters, but elections cannot be won through street marches in aid of the NHS. It’s an established truism that Labour will best serve the NHS, and people understand that all too well, but it cannot rely on this one-trick pony to carry it through to government.

Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime

Possibly the best thing to come out of the Blair era was the acknowledgment that the great mass of Labour voters were not ultra-liberal, as the Westminster establishment would have you believe but are in fact deeply socially conservative. As such, it’s crucial not only for the execution of justice, but for the electability of the party that Labour are seen to come down hard on criminals and serve justice to victims.

This should come in tandem with core Labour values about alleviating poverty, which we know to be the leading cause of crime since the devil will find work for idle hands to do. Any attempt to crack down on crime must do so heavily and stringently on perpetrators, while simultaneously delivering a revolutionary jobs program to put those idle hands to work.

As a consequence, such people will be able to sustain a family and home, thus giving people a stake in society they would be unwilling to discard with wanton criminality. The Tories have shamelessly cut back the numbers of police to levels last seen in 2003[xvii]. Prisons are being sold to private companies and the conditions that occur within them as a result is nothing short of disgraceful.

Prison guards are striking, and criminals are forcibly taking control of their own prisons, if such a thing could be believed to be true in 21st century Britain. Not only is this a national crisis that warrants an urgent response, but it’s a political opportunity Labour has thus far made no move to exploit.

It should call for and develop credible plans to introduce an increase in police numbers, prison reform, and higher wages for those on the frontline keeping our streets safe. Labour should be tough on crime because it’s the working class who suffer disproportionately at the hands of criminals without the benefits of gated drives and suburbia to protect them.

The Labour party has thus far failed to make political capital from any of these issues. It should go forth hand in hand with the police unions and declare that Labour will be second to none in its commitment and strength of purpose to cut down crime and clean up our prisons. Labour will serve the interests of victims and not criminals once again.

Corbyn’s irreparably damaging comments that he was ‘unhappy’ with the shoot-to-kill policy have done nothing to reduce the idea that Labour are soft on crime. The party needs to push the message night and day until it’s accepted as a truism that under Labour the streets will be safe again. 

Speaking to the People

Many in the Labour party have become totally removed from the voters they serve. Famously, Emily Thornberry poured scorn on a white van man for daring to hang the English flag on his own home. She was roundly attacked by people living outside the ultra-liberal Westminster bubble and was forced to resign from her then position as Shadow Attorney General, though since then Corbyn has secured her promotion to even greater heights.

It’s no surprise that working-class people continue to turn to UKIP in such numbers, when Labour’s North London elite mocks anyone patriotic or traditional in outlook. The voters of Rochester and Strood where the comments were made had nothing in common with Emily Thornberry and the beliefs she manifests, yet she felt perfectly entitled to go there and belittle the very people whose support she should have been trying to secure.

Unsurprisingly, Labour came 3rd in the constituency, losing over 1

Such events are symptomatic of a wider problem, which at the moment is embodied within the Labour leadership. The public watched in outrage as Jeremy Corbyn failed to sing the national anthem during a Battle of Britain commemoration. The papers made hay when Corbyn made a half-hearted bow at the Cenotaph, and did so, by the way, in a tatty suit. When the Red Flag is sung, it brings a smile to activists’ faces but confusion to the country at large.

Corbyn is known to be a republican. There is no problem with that. But he must understand that the vast majority of the country are in favor of the British monarchy because it speaks to their patriotism, is synonymous with their British identity, and is associated with the wars from times gone by and those lost in them.

Any leader of any party should sing the national anthem with gusto, and do so in the finest black suit with the boldest red tie. A refusal or failure to engage in the traditions that venerate the nation and honor our war dead sends a clear signal to the working class of this country that Labour is not the party for them. Indeed, many in the country view Corbyn as directly ‘anti-British’ given his close ties to IRA figures and his now infamous comments calling Hezbollah his ‘friends’.

Some will suggest that the aforementioned are merely superficial issues. In many ways, they are an issue of presentation, but the image the Labour party and its present leadership is not a secondary or tertiary concern, it should be the primary concern for any party seeking to win power.

It’s all well and good having an excellent manifesto, but if no one reads it or gives it credence because they believe its authors are intrinsically unpatriotic, then the manifesto is entirely useless.

Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader is essentially a job interview with the British people at large. He must win their approval in order for them to grant him power. Yet he can’t be bothered to wear a decent suit, which in the opening days of his leadership campaign was endearing and charming, but at this point marks him as an unprepared amateur.

The Labour party has a war coffer of funds at its disposal, including membership subscriptions of over 500,000 individuals, a long list of big private donors, and a great deal more cash donated by trade unions. Yet for all these resources, there isn’t a single advisor who can tell Corbyn not to wear black suit trousers with a blue suit jacket during Prime Minister’s question time. When members of the public go for a job interview, they dress to impress, and they expect their leaders to do the same.

We need a leader of the Labour party flanked by the Union Flag, bellowing the national anthem, and embracing patriotism the same way the people do. Sadly, it appears the liberal elite feels shame and embarrassment at any suggestion of national pride.

There are people who understand this. Andy Burnham makes a particularly good example. A working-class lad who graduated from Cambridge, he returned to his home town to represent Leigh as a member of parliament, where he notably worked to secure justice for the victims of the Hillsborough disaster cover-up.

From a cold reception in a speech at the Anfield Football Grounds in 2009, he returned after five tireless years of fighting for justice to a well-earned hero’s reception. He wasn’t afraid to speak about that which for so long Labour had considered taboo, namely immigration, and during his bid for the leadership in 2015, he did just that.

Burnham rightly acknowledged all the good that immigration brings, from economic growth to cultural enrichment, while at the same time talking about those left behind by uncontrolled immigration. He talked of a factory worker in his constituency who sat alone during lunch times as he was the only English-speaking worker.

He rightly identified that immigration had disproportionately taken a toll on Labour’s industrial and post-industrial heartlands, and since his failed campaign, he has become even more vocal on this issue.

Alas, for some reason he lacked a certain spark during the campaign, though that aside, he spoke directly to the country, but yet it was the niche Labour party membership who had for the first time the total say on the new leader. Consequently Corbyn won. Burnham has moved out of the front line of national politics towards a campaign to be the mayor of Manchester. Let’s hope that he and his fellows plan a return in the near future.

Chapter V – Conclusions

There absolutely is a place for social liberals within the modern Labour party. The Labour party has a history of pushing through excellent liberal reforms from Barbra Castle legislating equal pay for equal work between the genders to the introduction of civil partnerships under Blair.

Throughout its history, Labour has been at the forefront of liberal reforms that have liberated people of all stripes, and it’s a good thing too. It’s also right that the Labour party platform deals with discrimination against transgender, gay, and black and minority ethnic individuals, but it should not do so at the expense of all else.

Too often, Labour party circles have discussion dominated by issues that (while important) effect .0

How can it be that lifelong gay activist Peter Tatchell, feminist icon Germaine Greer, and the left-of-Labour George Galloway have all been no-platformed or attacked on our university campuses. The attitudes that lead to such absurd action are rife among Labour party members and less often to be seen amongst the general populace, for whom these individuals would be considered far left, not something-or-other-ophobic.

There’s a false equivalence between parties like UKIP, a liberal isolationist organization, on the one hand, and fascism or racism on the other, and the comparison between them is consistently pushed by groups like Momentum, the Alliance for Workers Liberty and the Socialist Workers Party, all of which are groups operating with or within the Labour party.

Here’s an excerpt from the SWP publication the Socialist Worker, which I have seen distributed by Labour party members outside meetings and talks:

“And in Stoke Central the racist UKIP party, which came second there at the last general election, wants to whip up racism to take the seat from Labour. Socialist Worker is calling for a vote for Labour in both elections. They will be seen as referendums on Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour—and Corbyn could be forced to resign as leader if Labour does badly.

The racist right will feel ecstatic if UKIP leader Paul Nuttall wins in Stoke. Labour has rightly attacked Nuttall for his previous statements supporting privatization of the NHS. But Labour’s official campaign has not challenged UKIP over its racism. Labour will be most effective if it both attacks the cuts and also confronts UKIP divisive racism.”[xviii]

It’s simply not enough to shout ‘racist’ and expect to win an argument. In fact, at this point it’s no longer even a case of diminishing returns, but it’s actually backfiring, making people more inclined to vote for UKIP when their concerns about migration are met with insult by leftists. We on the left should be trying to win debates, not shut them down.

This isn’t an appeal to the SWP to change their tactics. They are free agents and can do as they please. But the fact that the Labour party leadership meets with them, gives them interviews and is commonly seen marching alongside them is indicative of the sort of attitudes that fester in Labour and also appears to be a soft endorsement of such views.

It’s part of a wider problem where certain social liberals are going so far in their anti-racism campaigns that they shut down free speech within the media, on university campuses, and on the streets, more often than not targeting people who were never racist in the first place.

In short, these liberals have become the very illiberal people they believe they’re fighting against. Such people are fooled into believing the rest of the country is on their wavelength, buoyed up by thousands of retweets and Facebook likes, yet they do not appear to understand that their online presence is an echo chamber. The more their preaching is welcomed by the converted, the more steadfast they become in their initial beliefs.

Most people in the country are not anything close to this level of ultra-liberal, and such attitudes do not resonate with them. The great mass of people are patriotic and socially conservative, and their concern with politics extends to ensuring the system provides them with a safety net and the opportunity for employment.

That doesn’t mean the country at large doesn’t have a sense of and desire for social justice. Of course it does. But the best way to ensure it is to first establish economic justice. When Labour party figures engage in extended diatribes about intersectional feminism, which to most people of both genders means nothing, it turns the public off.

Liberalism is a welcome element of the Labour coalition, but it cannot continue in such an extreme form, nor can it override concern for the economy and for jobs. Labour need to talk less about rules surrounding transgender usage of bathrooms in North Carolina, and more, much more, about jobs.

Corbyn’s position is untenable. He has had second chance upon second chance and failed to rehabilitate his image or reform his party. His name is toxic and his leadership destructive, and for these reasons, he must go.

In his place, we need a strong man or woman who understands the patriotism that stirs within Labour’s core vote, who understands the nation’s deep social conservatism, and who is prepared to meet the electorate’s demands for homes and jobs. Perhaps an Andy Burnham, a Gisela Stewart, a Dan Jarvis, a Richard Burgeon, or someone else entirely.

Labour must overcome its misconceptions about the people’s wants by breaking free of both Westminster and its online echo chambers.

The public are not shocked or angered about cuts to the benefits bill, in fact it’s a popular position[xix]. On this, let’s deliver the biggest benefits cut yet seen, and let them fall on the corporate welfare that now costs over £50 billion a year between working tax credits and housing benefit alone.

Let’s force corporations to pay a living wage, and put the working tax credit savings into a jobs program that will mop up any collateral unemployment. Let’s build houses until prices fall and housing benefit drops to record lows. Let’s cut old-age benefits for the very richest pensioners who have no need of them, and distribute that money to the needy elderly according to their ability and means.

Over a million food parcels were distributed by food banks to hungry citizens throughout the country in 2015[xx], evidence if any more were needed that our infrastructure, welfare, and employment programs are totally failing the British people.

Unfortunately, the people accessing these food banks are the least likely to turn out in a general election. Let’s take Labour’s mass membership and send it to deprived communities to knock on doors and win support from those who have never voted before. Such an effort should be supported by its hundreds of MPs, thousands of councilors, and hundreds of thousands of trade union affiliated members.

Labour’s war coffers are full enough to help out its members when they sacrifice their time for the party. Travel and other associated costs should be subsidized in such campaigns.

Let’s take a strong message into the heart of the country, into Scotland, Wales, the Midlands and the North, that Labour will deliver British jobs for British workers.  It will carry through to the agricultural areas which the Tories presume to sit upon since time immemorial and deliver a program to get British farms working again.

Let’s go into London and make clear that Labour is the party for social justice, and that begins with housing. Guarantee the construction of at least 250,000 homes every year and provide credible plans on how it will be done because whether you’re Black, White, trans, gay, straight, male or female, your primary concern is shelter, of which there is currently a dire shortage.

Let’s spark off a renaissance in 21st century manufacturing, now with the benefits of automation and renewable energy. Take to the public a message that cuts in the foreign aid budget will deliver a program of nuclear, tidal, wind, and solar energy expansion that will not just create innumerable high-paying jobs but will have the added advantage of saving the climate.

Let’s wade into the realm of the intelligentsia and say loud and clear that Labour is the party for true liberals, those who believe in rationalism, freedom of speech, and tolerance. Let’s talk to those who face the prospect of a life behind bars and deliver to them a place behind a college desk, a workbench or the wheel of a JCB.

Let us go to the people and promise them; Jobs, Homes and Health.

[i] Khan, O. (2015 May 15) Race and the 2015 General Election Part 1: Black and Minority Ethnic Voters. Retrieved from http://www.runnymedetrust.org/blog/race-and-the-2015-general-election-black-and-minority-ethnic-voters

[ii] Monegan, A. (2014 August 20) Self-employment in UK at Highest Level Since Records Began. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/20/self-employment-uk-highest-level

[iii] BBC Business. (2015 March 18) Economy Tracker: Unemployment. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10604117

[iv] Mirza-Davies J. (2016 November 21) Apprenticeship Statistics: England. Retrieved from http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06113/SN06113.pdf

[v] Blacking, D. (2014 July) So You Want to Be a Legal Aid Lawyer? Retrieved from http://lacuna.org.uk/justice/so-you-want-to-be-a-legal-aid-lawyer/

[vi] BBC Business (2015 September 21) Why Is the UK’s Housing Benefit Bill so High? Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34290727

[vii] OECD. (2016 April 13) Development Aid in 2015 Continues to Grow despite Costs for In-donor Refugees. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/ODA-2015-detailed-summary.pdf

[viii] Leach, B. (2012 December 19) One in Four Support Britain’s Foreign Aid Policies. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/9770644/One-in-four-support-Britains-foreign-aid-policies.html

[ix] Lubin, G. (2014 March 16) How Russians Became Crimea’s Largest Ethnic Group, in One Haunting Chart. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/crimea-demographics-chart-2014-3?IR=T

[x] Socialist Worker (2017 February 28) Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell Spoke to Socialist Worker on the Recent By-election Results. Retrieved from https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/44161/Shadow+chancellor+John+McDonnell+spoke+to+Socialist+Worker+on+the+recent+by+election+results

[xi] Migration Watch UK (2014 November 18) Opinion Poll Results on Immigration. Retrieved from https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/briefingPaper/document/249

[xii] Migration Watch UK (2015 March 25) Immigration Policy and Black and Minority Ethnic Voters. Retrieved from https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/briefing-paper/11.37

[xiii] Castella, T. (2015 January 13) Why Can’t the UK Build 240,000 Houses a Year? Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30776306

[xiv] BBC News (2013 August 8) More UK births Than any Year Since 1972, Says ONS. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23618487

[xv] Dunne, P. Mckenna, H. and Murray, R. (2016 July) Deficits in the NHS 2016. Retrieved from https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/sites/files/kf/field/field_publication_file/Deficits_in_the_NHS_Kings_Fund_July_2016_1.pdf

[xvi] Our Ten Pledges to Rebuild and Transform Britain. Retrieved from http://www.jeremyforlabour.com/pledges

[xvii] Newburn, T. (2015 November 24) What’s Happening to Police Numbers? Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34899060

[xviii] Clark, N. (2017 February 14) Clive Lewis Backs off, but the Labour Right is out for Corbyn’s Blood. Retrieved from [xix] Wells, A. (2011 May 16) Strong Public Support for Benefit Cuts. Retrieved from https://yougov.co.uk/news/2011/05/16/strong-public-support-benefit-cuts/

[xx] BBC News. (2015 April 22) Record Numbers Use Food Banks – Trussell Trust. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32406120

Repost: Alt Left: What Percentage of Homosexual People Is Acceptable To You in a Given Population?

Answered on Queera.

Believe it or not, all of the answers said that if a country’s population was 10

How could having 10

A given population as in for a country?

  • Homosexuals live 20 years less than heterosexuals. It is horribly sad for gay people that they miss out on so many years of wonderful life, but it seems to me that reduced lifespan is costly to society.
  • Gays have higher rates of mood and anxiety disorders. While this causes a lot of suffering to gay people, and this is sad, at the same time, mental illness is costly to society.
  • Gays have much higher rates of drinking, smoking, and drug abuse than straights. The gay male party and play scene revolving heavily around methamphetamine and club drugs is particularly alarming. Lesbians in particular smoke a lot. The costs of drinking, smoking, and drug abuse to gays themselves are no doubt significant in terms of disease, mortality, and the suffering that can come from excessive substance abuse; nevertheless, this incurs a lot of costs to society.
  • Gay men obviously have a very high STD rate. At 2
  • Tragically, gay men have a suicide rate 3X higher than straight men, even in San Francisco, the most gay-friendly place in the US. The attempted suicide rate is also very high. Gay male teenagers have a tragically very high attempted suicide rate at 8X the normal rate. Suicidal behavior causes unfathomable and heartbreaking suffering on gay men. However, attempted and completed suicides impose considerable cost on society.
  • Domestic violence rates are very high in gay and lesbian couples, especially the latter. A gay man is much more likely to beat his partner than a straight man is. A woman is much less likely to be beaten by a male partner than by a female partner. This causes immense suffering to the partners of gay and lesbian batterers. In addition, domestic violence is costly to society.
  • In gay areas, gay men typically take over all of the public restrooms and turn them into miniature sex clubs. This renders most public restrooms unusable by the rest of us. Most gay men typically vociferously support the use of public restrooms as sex dens for gays. I don’t have much sympathy here. Gay men are simply being very irresponsible with this depraved mindset. Further, this is a cost to society.

It is first of all most important to point out that gay men themselves suffer worst from most from these largely self-imposed conditions, a suffering so profound that it almost moves you to tears. Compassion is essential. Nevertheless, there is a cost to society.

Some of these issues may be caused by discrimination (see the high teenage gay male attempted suicide rate), but there is a cost to society no matter what causes it. Some of these problems would lessen with increased acceptance of gays, but others would linger or possibly even worsen.

The question comes up whether gays pay for the costs they bring to society. Many gays seem to have above average intelligence for some reason, especially gay men. Gays seem more artistically talented than straights. More gays than straights seem to get college degrees, in particular gay men. Gay men seem to earn higher than average wages and are disproportionately employed in high paying and prestigious professions.

I am always hearing about a homosexual, often a gay man, who is contributing something noteworthy and exemplary to our society such that it mentions a media notice. Obviously, gay men contribute more to the tax base per capita than straights. So gays, especially gay men, offer considerable benefits to society, not flowing from their homosexuality but from other aspects of their lives.

I have not discussed lesbians here because I know little about them, but I doubt that they impose serious costs on society other than reduced lifespan.

However the question rises whether gays pay for themselves. Despite their excellent contributions to society and their higher than normal tax contributions, I still do not think that homosexuals pay for themselves.

The question then arises about whether the rest of us should be willing to carry a small burden for our gay brothers.

Personally I feel that at

Honestly, even when you get to 1

Homosexuality in society seems to be one of those things, like many things in life, that is best in small doses.

Alt Left: How the Cultural Left Privileges Gay Male Sex Over Straight Male Sex

Most gay men are sexually degenerate, and they probably always have been. There are reports from large European cities like Paris and Florence of men prowling the city parks at night for surreptitious homosexual sex. These reports date from the 1500’s and 1600’s. Yep, gay cruising was a thing way back in the Middle Ages. I think the wild promiscuity and sexual degeneracy of gay men is part of what I call the Gay Male Syndrome. Male homosexuality is not a mental illness, but it is a psychological syndrome in that certain mindsets and behaviors almost ubiquitous among gay men across time and space. These common behaviors probably have to do with deep truths about male homosexuality that are part of the package it is delivered in. In other words, as with so many things, they have to do with Natural Law. Mother Nature getting her two cents in. You don’t have to like gay male degeneracy to support gay rights. I figure this is just the way they are, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Prominent gays have been screaming about gay promiscuity for decades now since the Gay Plague hit. Promiscuity did drop a lot, but it went down from stratospheric to the cloud layer. Gay men still have very high rates of HIV – in the US, 2 At some point you wonder if gay sex itself is a death wish – Eros and Thanatos, supposedly opposing forces, instead perversely wrapped in a deadly embrace, tumbling to the gallows. And I wouldn’t be the first person to suggest that. Many gay writers have hinted at something similar going on. In other words, gay men still screw anything that moves and probably a lot of things that don’t. A lot will even screw a woman not because they like to but because gay guys fuck anything. Quite a few will screw an animal, gerbils for one. Even if you don’t like gay decadence, you probably ought to shrug your shoulders and leave them alone to sleep in the dirty bed they made. Their stupid lifestyle cuts a full 20 years off their lifespan. It’s death by a hundred self-inflicted cuts. They won’t stop, there’s no way to stop them, and they’re mostly hurting themselves. Leave them alone to the consequences of their misbehavior. Anyway, here we get to the SJW Left. Of course the SJW Left loves everything gay men do, presumably even eating each other’s shit (practiced by Instead the Cultural Left mostly rages at straight men for looking at women or asking them for their phone number. I call that trying to get laid, but the Cultural Left calls it sexual harassment and says it is a form of violence and rapey behavior somewhere on the rape spectrum. Yep, you can rape women with your eyeballs now, but only if you’re a straight man. You can rape women with your mouth if you ask them for a date, as long as you are a heterosexual man. Of course dykes get to to whatever they want to women because they are a privileged victim class on the Cultural Left, and their victim status vastly proceeds that of straight men who are on the bottom of the heap. So gay men can take 100 bareback Black cocks up the ass a year and acquire three different subtypes of HIV, and that’s all fine and dandy. But we straight men apparently don’t even have a right to get laid because that’s called rape, and we don’t even have a right to try to get laid because that’s harassment, which is a mild form of rape! SJW’s are like this because modern feminism is an essential pillar of the SJW outhouse, and modern feminism hates men, especially straight men, and hates us mostly because we dare to have sex with women, which feminists see as a form of violence and oppression against these precious and frail damsels.                          

The New Open Air Urinals in France

Apparently the French have had such problems with men urinating in public in their cities that they have now installed open air urinals that look something like a brightly painted trash container. Feminists are saying that men like this because now we can take over the streets, whip our dicks out in front of women any time we like, and piss right in front of them to in effect, show that we own the streets and women are trespassing on our territory. I don’t know about that. All I know is that neither I nor most men I know would want to use those things. I would only use one maybe at night if there was no one around to see me. I don’t understand men who would want to do this in public. Most of us men do pee in public if we can’t find a bathroom nearby. Of course we do it in rural or wild areas off the road where it’s quite easy, but I did it quite a few times in alleyways, etc. in the Hollywood area or after rock shows at night in various places like shrubbery or alleyways. You only do it if there’s no one in sight, and then you do it really fast so you can get away with it. Most of us men like to pee in private, believe it or not. And I don’t see why the French can’t put four walls on these things and make them open to women and children.

Alt Left: What Percentage of Homosexual People Is Acceptable To You in a Given Population?

Answered on Queera.

Believe it or not, all of the answers said that if a country’s population was 10

How could having 10

A given population as in for a country?

  • Homosexuals live 20 years less than heterosexuals. It is horribly sad for gay people that they miss out on so many years of wonderful life, but it seems to me that reduced lifespan is costly to society.
  • Gays have higher rates of mood and anxiety disorders. While this causes a lot of suffering to gay people, and this is sad, at the same time, mental illness is costly to society.
  • Gays have much higher rates of drinking, smoking, and drug abuse than straights. The gay male party and play scene revolving heavily around methamphetamine and club drugs is particularly alarming. Lesbians in particular smoke a lot. The costs of drinking, smoking, and drug abuse to gays themselves are no doubt significant in terms of disease, mortality, and the suffering that can come from excessive substance abuse; nevertheless, this incurs a lot of costs to society.
  • Gay men obviously have a very high STD rate. At 2
  • Tragically, gay men have a suicide rate 3X higher than straight men, even in San Francisco, the most gay-friendly place in the US. The attempted suicide rate is also very high. Gay male teenagers have a tragically very high attempted suicide rate at 8X the normal rate. Suicidal behavior causes unfathomable and heartbreaking suffering on gay men. However, attempted and completed suicides impose considerable cost on society.
  • Domestic violence rates are very high in gay and lesbian couples, especially the latter. A gay man is much more likely to beat his partner than a straight man is. A woman is much less likely to be beaten by a male partner than by a female partner. This causes immense suffering to the partners of gay and lesbian batterers. In addition, domestic violence is costly to society.
  • In gay areas, gay men typically take over all of the public restrooms and turn them into miniature sex clubs. This renders most public restrooms unusable by the rest of us. Most gay men typically vociferously support the use of public restrooms as sex dens for gays. I don’t have much sympathy here. Gay men are simply being very irresponsible with this depraved mindset. Further, this is a cost to society.

It is first of all most important to point out that gay men themselves suffer worst from most from these largely self-imposed conditions, a suffering so profound that it almost moves you to tears. Compassion is essential. Nevertheless, there is a cost to society. Some of these issues may be caused by discrimination (see the high teenage gay male attempted suicide rate), but there is a cost to society no matter what causes it. Some of these problems would lessen with increased acceptance of gays, but others would linger or possibly even worsen.

The question comes up whether gays pay for the costs they bring to society. Many gays seem to have above average intelligence for some reason, especially gay men. Gays seem more artistically talented than straights. More gays than straights seem to get college degrees, in particular gay men. Gay men seem to earn higher than average wages and are disproportionately employed in high paying and prestigious professions.

I am always hearing about a homosexual, often a gay man, who is contributing something noteworthy and exemplary to our society such that it mentions a media notice. Obviously, gay men contribute more to the tax base per capita than straights. So gays, especially gay men, offer considerable benefits to society, not flowing from their homosexuality but from other aspects of their lives.

I have not discussed lesbians here because I know little about them, but I doubt that they impose serious costs on society other than reduced lifespan.

However the question rises whether gays pay for themselves. Despite their excellent contributions to society and their higher than normal tax contributions, I still do not think that homosexuals pay for themselves.

The question then arises about whether the rest of us should be willing to carry a small burden for our gay brothers.

Personally I feel that at

Honestly, even when you get to 1

Homosexuality in society seems to be one of those things, like many things in life, that is best in small doses.

Repost: Are Oriental Massage Girls Safe?

This post ran a long time ago too, but I sold some ads on this one too, so I thought I would rerun it. Great post for any male commenters who like to purchase their sex. BX Monger writes:

You missed out and should have boned her good. Most of these MP babes are cleaner than the avg chick you may meet in a bar and bang. Some of the older MP babes that only do handjobs will put out on occasion, and it’s the tightest p*ssy on earth. 40 yo single Korean babe with no kids and rare romp occasionally likes being ravaged!

I don’t discuss my own experiences on there, but from talking to my friends, those Asian massage parlor chicks in the US ain’t got a damned thing. I have friends who used to go to those places all the time. They told me they never caught a damned thing. Talking to numerous men over a period of years: No cases of: Gonorrhea Chlamydia Genital warts Herpes 2 Syphilis HIV Trichomomas Not one single case.

Possible Origin of the Black Plague

Here. The standard view is that twelve ships from Florence docked at Messina in 1347, bringing the Plague to Europe. It would later kill 1/3 of all Europeans and an incredible 2 A new view though is that the Plague, which had already been active in Asia for a while, came to Europe via a biological warfare attack by Genghis Khan’s raiders on the city of Caffa in the Crimea. The Caffans were probably Turkic speakers at this time, but it is hard to say what Turkic lect they may have spoken. Perhaps a dead language called Cuman. Khan’s raiders besieged the city and a number of people died of the Black Plague in the conflict. Khan’s men suspected a thing or two about biological warfare, so they loaded up the bodies that had died of the plague and catapulted them over the walls of the city into the population. Can you  imagine the horror of looking out your window and see a dead, bubonic plague ridden corpse fly by in the air at rapid speed to splatter nearby. Good Lord. In due time, this biological warfare killed a lot of the people in  the city. Khan knew nothing of the  germ theory of disease, but experience with the plague showed that those who came in contact with victims tended to sicken and die. No one knew what was causing it. One European physician posited that plague victims radiated some sort of death vapors or essence out of their very eyes. Without medical science, people had to fall back on spiritual theories. But people caught on quickly that being around plague victims could quickly make you a victim yourself. Physicians refused to treat plague patients and patients were often abandoned wherever they sickened. Family members even fled from their own sickened members, leaving them to die in the home while countless people fled to the countryside. But even there they were not safe. Even farm animals, cows, pigs, goats and sheep, caught the plague. So many sheep died that there was an acute wool shortage all over Europe for years afterwards. There was no solace or respite anywhere. The epidemic ended almost as fast as it began in 1354, but Europe was ruined. Entire cities had been abandoned as thousands of residents fled to the false safety of the countryside. Many people escaped from Khan”s raid on Caffa, and survivors fled all over the Mediterranean. This people soon sickened and died. It was possibly from some of this group, fled to Florence, that the ill-fated death ships docked in Messina on that warm October night. The disease was in Southern France the next year and Germany soon after that. Not long afterwards, it hit Paris. And despite the primitive conditions of the day, it was not long in  Paris before London was also hit. People did have ships in those days you know. Despite the enticing new theory, the medical journal concludes that the entrance of the Plague to Europe was multifactorial and the infection of the Caffa population did not play an important role in the European pandemic.

For Men: How to Catch HIV from a Woman

John writes:

Oh, yes. Hello. Just as I thought. When stories come out in the press about heterosexuals contracting HIV from sexual intercourse, it’s always women. I know two women infected, have heard of others, but never a straight man. I know a bunch of guys who don’t always use condoms and not one of them has HIV. HPV or other less serious stuff, sure; but never HIV. If you ask any person on the street if they know or have heard of a case involving a heterosexual male who never went bi or who isn’t a junkie having HIV, I guess the vast majority will say they haven’t.

This is how you get it if you are a man: Plan 1: Get yourself an HIV-positive wife or girlfriend. Be monogamous with her. Have sex with her ~700 times over a five year period. That means you are having sex with her maybe 140X/yr or 10X/month. Never use a condom. Make sure to have some incidents of vaginal and/or penile bleeding during the sex (very important). Ok, now after you had sex with her 700 times over that five year period, you now have a 2 So you see, you can get it from a woman, but it is not that easy. Here is an easier way: Plan 2: Go to Thailand as a Western sex tourist. Have sex with some prostitutes. It would be best if you ask around to find out which prostitutes are HIV-positive. This is an easier way to get it because the HIV strain in Thailand transmits easier female-male than the one in the West. Only have sex with the HIV-positive ones. Refuse to use a condom no matter what she says. Make sure you fuck her dry, that is, when she is not aroused. This generally will cause some vaginal bleeding (very important). Keep doing for a while, and you will probably get HIV. This is the best way I can think of to get HIV from a woman. So if you are a man looking to get HIV from a woman during sex, I would recommend this route. Plan 1 is much riskier because it takes years, and even after quite a few years, you still might not get it. Plan 2 would be much better for men looking for a more surefire and rapid transmission.

Pass the Zika Funding Without Impediments!

This is from ActBlue, an organization I am part of. They also call themselves Peace Team and The People’s Email Action Network. These guys are all right. This is the hardcore base of the Democratic Party, if you consider the left wing of the Democratic Party the base of the party. Do you think that is a good definition of the base? Anyway, the left wing of the Democratic Party is a pretty cool place. I get mails from these folks all the time. What is interesting is that they do not care much about Cultural Left stuff, which they seem to think is a distraction. They are more into the meat and potatoes of policy like economics, public health, etc. The people who write these newsletters are often very smart. Some have legal training and their parsing of recent Supreme Court decisions was superb – easy enough to understand but comprehensive at the same time. Although these folks have been around long before Sanders, I suppose you could call this the Sanders Wing of the party. Anyway, the left wing of the Democratic Party is a pretty happy home for me, and a lot of people in that wing don’t really care much for Cultural Left stuff. I actually feel that the Cultural Left stuff is more prominent in the center and right wings of the party (Clintonites) where they push rightwing economics + Cultural Left/Identity Politics BS and call it “progressivism.” What they’ve done is taken the left and shorn it of economics. Where there was once economics and a party of the workers (Democrats) versus the party of big business and the rich (Republicans), now you have two parties of big business and the rich but the Democrats have substituted Cultural Left stuff for the economics that they threw by the wayside. That’s Ms. Clinton in a nutshell. Hillary made $28 million last year. Isn’t it obvious that she represents her class interests and especially those of her donors? What makes you think this ultra-wealthy woman cares about you and me? You’ll have to forgive us, folks. We have some strong words to say, and this time it is directed at the Republicans. What the self-righteous Republicans in Congress are doing, by obstructing the funds needed to stop the Zika pandemic, is so treasonous it needs to be called out for what it is. Here is the petition text: “What is it with you poison pill Republican obstructionists? Can’t you deal with an emergency public health crisis without an ax to grind for Planned Parenthood for the umpteenth time? Release the Zika defense funds without such strings attached, or in about 6 months your red state bible thumpers will be hollering for their abortions. This is treason!” —END PETITION TEXT— The day President Obama was inaugurated the Republicans in Congress swore they would fight to make him a failed president, even to the mortal detriment of the whole rest of the county. The had a big secret meeting and they actually did what they promised. And this week they are making good on that threat again, by deliberately leaving us defenseless against the Zika virus invasion about to hit our own shores. The health care professionals in America are practically apoplectic. There is a reference link on the action page itself talking about their utter despair at the inaction of Congress. You really need to read it. The fear is growing that it may already be too late, that we will soon see pictures upon pictures of American babies with shrunken heads, just like in Brazil. But whereas Brazil has now mobilized to take strong action, the Republicans in Congress sit on their hands, traitors hoping that the horrific tragedy to befall American will somehow inure to their political benefit. We all know the Republicans can move fast when they really want to. Boy howdy, when FBI Director Comey said he would need a referral from Congress to investigate whether Hillary Clinton had committed perjury, they had it drafted so fast no Olympic sprinter could have gotten it there any sooner. But, no. Republicans think they were elected to obstruct and grandstand, and in particular to stage endless votes on defunding Planned Parenthood, the one national resource we will need most dearly to confront the Zika emergency. It is beyond reprehensible. And you tell them we said so.

How Can You Tell If a Woman Has HIV?

Chris writes:

Very interesting articles Robert…I have got a lot of questions that I am interested to know. How would you tell if a woman have HIV? Can I smell them if they smells something bad like fishy? My ex bro-in-law have told me that I would only get tell when I smells her virgin that smells like fishy or very cheesy, then I would know she is infected?? He said that if I look at her eyes to see if she is on drugs or something that looks suspect spots on her body, then I would know she might have HIV? And he said that most black male are HIV-positive. Should I always ask my partner if she have shag a black male or with someone who are on the drugs? If my partner say she have shag a black male or with someone that are on drugs, then I would know she might have HIV? If my partner say she is sick or she is on the pills, then I would know she might have HIV?

Let’s go through these one by one here:

Very interesting articles Robert…I have a lot of questions that I am interested to know. How would you tell if a woman have HIV?

You can’t.

Can I smell them if they smell something bad like fishy? My ex-bro-in-law have told me that I would only tell when I smell her vagina that smells fishy or very cheesy, then I would know she is infected??

A fishy or cheesy smell indicates some sort of a vaginal infection, especially a yeast infection. A fishy or cheesy smelling vagina does not indicate HIV infection at all.

He said that if I look at her eyes to see if she is on drugs or something that looks suspect spots on her body, then I would know she might have HIV?

You generally cannot look in someone’s eyes and tell if they are on drugs or not. You can’t look for suspected spots on their body either. One thing you can do is look for track marks or needle marks, usually on their arms, but they can also be in other places.

And he said that most Black male are HIV-positive. Should I always ask my partner if she have shag a Black male or with someone who are on drugs?

Absolutely not true. It is not true at all that most Black men are HIV-positive. In fact, I doubt if

If my partner says she has shagged a Black male or with someone that is on drugs, then I would know she might have HIV?

Absolutely not. The vast majority of women who have had sex with Black men are not HIV positive at all. In fact, the percentage of women who have had sex with Black men where the women are now HIV-positive themselves is no doubt quite small. Ditto if she had sex with a drug user. However, if she had sex with male IV drug users, now that is another matter.

If my partner says she is sick or she is on pills, then I would know she might have HIV?

Not at all. People get sick all the time and they also take pills all the time. I take up to 10-11 different pills every day right at this moment, but it is usually more like eight or nine pills. However, if she looks quite sickly, especially if she is pale and emaciated, then you might want to see if she is HIV-positive. However, many other diseases can also make you look like that. But if someone looks like that, one thing you know for sure is that they are quite ill.

Women Having Sex with Gay Men is a Very Bad Idea

Juno writes:

So Robert, according to you, girls have to be out of their mind when they have sex with a gay guy. To some extent I agree with you. And that goes for the gay guys in fact too, in my opinion. But the reason you give, namely that it’s a health hazard for those girls because of the ‘infection rates’ among gays, is quite outrageous. You obviously have no idea how homophobic that remark is.

Why do so many gay men have sex with women? Why in God’s name would they even want to? They’re gay, for Chrissake! And if you ask one of these guys, he will say, “Oh no, I am not bisexual! I am 10

Women having sex with gay men has to be up there on the list of high risk behaviors for women.

HIV+ rates for gay and bisexual men in the US:

Gay and bisexual men in the US: 2

Gay and bisexual men in Baltimore: 3

Gay and bisexual men in New York: 2

Gay and bisexual Black men: 2

Gay and bisexual men in their 40’s: 2

Gay and bisexual men in the 5 largest metropolitan gay areas in the US: 2

Gay and bisexual men in Dallas: 2

Gay and bisexual men in Houston: 2

Gay and bisexual men in Miami: 2

Gay and bisexual men aged 30+: 2

Gay and bisexual men in San Fransisco: 2

Gay and bisexual men in New Orleans: 2

Many of the women getting infected with HIV nowadays are getting it from bisexual men, especially Black men on the downlow. Straight men have a very low HIV rate. Gay and bisexual men have an HIV+ rate 44 times higher than straight men. A woman who has sex with a gay or bisexual man has a fully 44 times greater risk of getting HIV than she does from a straight man. It’s almost Russian roulette.

At least in the past, gay men had very high rates of Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis A epidemics periodically flared through various gay communities. Hepatitis B is not common among straight men, and Hepatitis A is almost unheard of.

Gay men also have very high rates of syphilis. In fact, 2/3 of syphilis cases are among gay men. Syphilis has very low rates among straight men. Most who have it are illegal aliens screwing illegal alien whores from Mexico who go to a house of 20 illegals and do them all.

Gay men also have much more gonorrhea than straight men. Outside of the group sex and porn scenes and picking up skanky, often Black, street hos, it is quite hard for a straight man to get gonorrhea.

Ameabiasis, giardiasis, shigellosis and salmonellosis are parasites, and straight men have very low rates of infections with these parasites. Gay men have sky high rates of infection of all four of these parasites.

Any woman who has sex with a gay man is insane.

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