norman tebbit: "britain should change to accommodate the moral views of muslims"

I was thinking about this kind of issue from a different angle today, in that I tend to think that attempts to at once aim for a hope in the next world -- that everything gets resolved after death -- and to 'reform' *this* world in the way it 'should' be is by definition contradictory. Hardly a new belief, I realize, but it occurs to me that the wish fulfillment drive of a relentlessly religiously-defined world right here and now based on the imposition of strictures beyond a community that universally and willingly accepts them (and therefore does not consider them strictures, which can be the problem) will simply NOT happen, at least not as planned.

Rewriting history, and ignoring human nature, those sweets never lose their zing. Hey! Why don't we combine those two great tastes? We could ... partition Britain! Hell, it worked in India. And Greece. And Ireland. I'm sure the sweet British public will make it work here. We could play each other at cricket.

I don't think you are. What the fart-chomper's proposing is to sneak in a reversal of the permissive society under the cover of better integration. Let's put hajib on table legs while we're at it.

The better integration thing, though, that's a no-brainer. Of *course* we need better intergration, as Pakistan chided us after the London bombings. What we don't need is a monoculture while we're at it. You can have an integrated multiculture, as swathes of the US so aptly show.

Good god: the US as race-relations model. Who would have thought?

xpost: pretty much everything means that, Ned.

Actually, the US example being followed here is the Republicans' campaign to reach out to Hispanic voters by scaremongering on moral issues. (Never mind that the issues that get them hot and bothered are strongly rooted in conspicuous consumption and laissez-faire principles.)

yes, he is. i'm not denying that. my question was: does he have a point?

and i think he does.

there've been enough threads on ILX alone recently along the lines of "my neighbourhood's gone to shit"/"i got grief from kids on a bus, WTF?"/"is it just me or is society falling apart" to suggest that i'm not the only one who thinks the current standards of "human nature" in society aren't particularly acceptable. indeed: since when has allowing human nature to find its own level been remotely acceptable? call me a fascist, but society - like children - needs boundaries, a clear definition of what is and isn't acceptable. for a whole variety of reasons, a growing number of people in each generation are effectively making the choice to opt out of society. we need to address that; to find out why they're so disaffected at such an early age, then do something to improve matters.

and we wonder why our large muslim population isn't falling over itself to integrate? right-wing commentators keep wheeling out the line about "being part of british society" ... but, er, what is british society right now? i'd be hard-pressed to give you any kind of definition. it depends from city to city; from district to district; from street to street. yet you really believe we've got it right: that society as it stands is absolutely fine, and that the reason many 15-year-old muslims look at us with disgust (this is worth reading too, even though i don't like its tone) is because they're all in the wrong?

yeh, right. good ole fucking britain. we've got it so right, haven't we?

Besides, the only way of getting a tebbitised society, where everyone knows their place and kowtows with defferenc eto their better's, would be through some kind of fascism (forcing matrons and vicars to bicylce through the morning mist, make anyone born within the sound of bow bells say 'cor blimey guvner' and doff his cap on seeing a known better etc.

i think schools do try to do instil decent values in kids - they try very hard - and yes, i agree that "faith schools" are a fucking ridiculous idea. i'm not advocating a return to religion here at all: what i'm dreaming of is a decent secular society in which those who are misguided keen enough to practise their silly wee superstitions are more than welcome to do so. (i'm deliberately staying away from dealing with individual facets of islam such as its approach to homosexuality because a) i don't know enough about the actual beliefs involved, and b) i'm advocating a tolerant society based on mutual respect, not a religious one based on fear of god.)

but i don't think schools can be expected to sort this on their own. i've mentioned this here before, but: my friend was a primary teacher, and ended up quitting because he was so sick of watching the work he'd done - the values he'd tried to instil - being destroyed at the school gates by arsehole parents who'd struggle to bring up a fucking dog, let alone a child. (remind me again why you need a licence to have a dog, and not a kid?) i sound like a stuck record most of the time, but i really do blame the parents for almost everything: schools can try as hard as they want, but it's what children learn at home that sticks with them for life.

yes, we need to educate children to be active participants in a tolerant and understanding society ... but right now we need to work out a way to educate their parents too. or, at the very least, to ensure that what children are taught in schools isn't destroyed the second they get home.

xpost - dv

OMIGOD - you are a genius. A sick genius.

they wouldn't need to spin a sob story cos anyone who asked for it would get it, chav or otherwise. the idea isn't to stop children being born to the "wrong" type of ppl. all this is for is to check that they've considered the idea of having a child/children and decided that yes, they definitely want to do it, and although you can't know that everyone would really properly think of all the responsibilities, implications blah blah - and you would know that a percentage of them definitely hadn't - at least you know that they've made a decision that this is something they actually genuinely want to do, rather than something that happened accidentally and they couldn't be arsed to do anything about it. the teenage-mum-just-got-pregnant-so-she-could-get-a-council-flat stereotype always seems to me to have been blown out of all proportion wrt statistics, and i think this would reduce the number of kids born to fuckawful harpies & grunters who drag them round the shops by their hair, screeching at them and calling them cunts one minute, stuffing them with mcd0n4lds and t0mmy h1lf1g3r to placate them the next, and shoving them in front of the tv as soon as they get home. fuck, i sound like an insufferable twat here, but i HATE this, HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT. how can you treat your kids like that? do you never stop to think about the consequences of anything you do? argh.

because this is such a big decision a world-wide vote will have to be made, and the winner will thus be someone who has had children, and quite well known. so i guess...

3. michael jackson
2. chris & gweneth martin
1. david & victoria beckham

god have mercy.

"of large parts of britain", as any.

Yeah but *loads* of fine kids are born and raised in exactly the circumstances you're describing in the first bit there

yes, and it's down to luck rather than good planning, isn't it? *loads more* suffer needlessly at the hands of ignorant - and i use that word in a non-pejorative sense - parents.

Yes, and there are ancient Sumerian clay tablets etched with near-impenetrable runes which, after much decoding by boffins with grate branes turn out to say "ye society is goin to hell, ye kids have no respec, i got grief on the cart earli todae". Didn't Aristotle also have a girn about that too? Basically since writing began people have been moaning about the state of things. Two things always goin to hell: grammar and society.

(It's funny: the "golden age" people long for generally seems to be about 50 years in the past. Just long enough ago for those who actually lived it to have died, but short enough for only the good bits to be remembered.)

British society is *fine*. There is no better time for it to "return" to. It can pull together when it wants, as the outpouring of cash and help after the tsunami showed; it is resilient, as the bomb attacks proved; it can be politically active, as the Iraq and G8 protests showed. And as homophobia and racism are becoming ever-more unacceptable, I'd say it has at least two things up on the 1950s.

this jumped out before i read the rest of your post. i now don't see the point in reading a single word of it. it's fine if you're a wealthy middle-class journalist living in a nice flat in park circus or battlefield, yes. but that sure as fuck ain't society as a whole, as i think every other post here demonstrates.

just because things have always been shit, does that mean we can't strive for anything better? sheesh, you might as well start voting tory now and be done with it. after all, you're all right: fuck everyone else.

stet, it doesn't have to return; it has to get better. racism is a complex and changing thing and i'm not actually sure that things have improved on that score. to compare with the 50s makes no sense anyway since that was the pioneer decade of immigration. yes there was racism, but the possibility then of *not* making ethno-religious ghettoes such as you find in britain 2005 was not realized -- and that's a damning relfection on today.

actually, the more i think about it, given that we now live in a british society that is happily nurturing its very own home-grown suicide-bombing psychopaths, i feel this is perhaps the single wrongest statement ever made in the history of, eh, british society.

but that sure as fuck ain't society as a whole, as i think every other post here demonstrates.
No, every other post demonstrates that people *think* society's going to hell. As I was saying with all the other words you didn't read people always think society's going to hell. Usually, a lot of them are also wistful for earlier times. Times when -- yes! --people thought society was goin to hell.

just because things have always been shit, does that mean we can't strive for anything better
Nice strawman. Things haven't always been shit, they've been slowly getting better.

one other point:

And as homophobia and racism are becoming ever-more unacceptable

yes, among nice liberal hand-wringing guardian readers. but i'd refer you to the iain macwhirter column i cited above for some deeply disturbing suggestions on the racism front.

er, really? so the gap between rich and poor *isn't* widening? we *don't* have homegrown suicide bombers? the national diet *isn't* complete shit? we *don't* have serious drug problems as a society?

Things haven't always been shit, they've been slowly getting better.

i'm sorry: i would happily swap the entire 1990s for the present day. how can you possibly say a society in which there is seething resentment from people whose only desire is to kill themselves and as many other people as they can is anything other than totally and utterly fucked? and that's before we even get on to the shocking state of schools (which i think are substantially worse now than when you were a lad, stet); soaring rates of teenage pregnancies; growing fear and loathing of young people (even if actual crime rates are down); etc. society is fucked and sitting there saying, well, it was a bit worse in the 1950s is not going to help.

this looks very wrong now, for some reason. what i mean is: i'd go back to the 1990s in an instant.

"So, I've decided to take my work underground…"

it made me feel old, i was like wtf? it was all coded messages when i were a lad, this one gets straight to the point

xp

it made me feel old, i was like wtf? it was all coded messages when i were a lad, this one gets straight to the point

Damn right. I was going to post this on 'socially irresponsible pop songs' thread. There is not a single part of the song that warns about getting sand in yer bits.

mmmmm biological discovery corrr *dribbles*

hardly going to inspire your average crazed jihadi with respect for our "liberal" "society" is it?

(xxxxpost)

xpost

I went to a Scottish Catholic School. We didn't get sex education as such, we got "Science Section 6: Reproduction" where we got to draw tadpoles and had to work out what that weird Satanic Goat picture was (ovaries, IIRC).

I got my sex education from Porky's and Kentucky Fried Movie (which differed slightly from my idea of what a Catholic High School Girl In Trouble looked like).

am i the only one who sniggered loudly at this?

o well.

stevem OTM upthread anyway. i'm hardly a prude - anyone who's ever been subjected to one of my foul-mouthed tirades about the slightest possible mishap will know as much - and i've been reading viz and chortling at smut for as long as i can remember. but suddenly sex seems to be absolutely everywhere - every advert, magazine, episode of big brother and T4 link.

if society is going to thrust sex in our faces, as it were, surely it also has a duty to educate children about it as quickly as possible. we can't turn the clock back, so let's just stop the double standards, accept that our society is more sexualised and our children's perception of the world less "innocent" than before, and start getting to grips (ooer) with the nub (fnar) of the matter.

and it's not just a matter of saying: "look, kids, here's a condom." there has to be some kind of moral/emotional element to it; some notion that sex has consequences. (and i don't just mean a baby or an itchy cock.)

yeah, that was pretty much what we had. however my school wasn't catholic, so we didn't get the "brimstone and damnation if you so much as LOOK at a lassie" sermon.

blimey, i went to see kentucky fried movie when i was 14, at la scala in sauchiehall street! quite funny but the "confessions of a whatever he was this time" supporting feature was terrible.

maybe the parents were 4 years and 14 months old respectively. in that case you could perhaps understand their ignorance.

eh? i've never seen an actual prostitute to my knowledge, but this surely isn't so.

some notion that sex has consequences. (and i don't just mean a baby or an itchy cock.)

more realistic portrayals of sex on TV perhaps. the things witnessed on big Brother this year are surely enough to put a teenager off sex for life.

'suddenly' ?

good lord grimly, haven't you been PAYING ATTENTION ?

easiest fix: add anti-aphrodisiac chemical to water supply

and watch the economy collapse

no, i've been reading ILX.

and watch the economy collapse

sorry mrs fiendish, not tonight: my economy's collapsed.

i blame elvis

i like how he addresses blog responders by name

Even worse we had blisarighorowitzskinlik claiming that continental Europe has a better sense of human rights than the UK. Tell that to the Jews, or the Poles, or the Basques, or almost anyone in the Balkans. Come off it.

I fear that sodit misunderstands the difference between linking the parity of one's own currency to that of another with having no currency of one's own.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/normantebbit/100175288/the-case-of-louise-mensch-is-a-good-example-of-why-the-tory-grassroots-have-lost-confidence-in-the-national-party/

fb?

where did it all go wrong Norm, SMDH

It was never right to begin with was it?

(assume the bump is bcz of his 'Hitler was extreme leftwing' bollocks)

He is a hideous specimen, hope he gets on his bike and rides it into a volcano.

yeah the Chingford Skinhead has always been a piece of work. I suppose I shouldn't be flippant about a mainstream (though the Telegraph has been going slowly off its rocker in the last decade or so, much like its readership) newspaper normalising the "the Nazis were socialists, it's in the name" alt-right talking point, but what else can you do?