Looking across the main obsessions holding the world in thrall this morning, it is hard to miss the thread between each story:
* A hundred or so Ultra-Orthodox Israeli men screw up a flight because they demand separation from the women. El Al is not a hassidic airline – the fundamentalists knew what would happen: what did they expect? It was a demonstration, pure and simple. By fanatical believers
* David Haines’s daughter tells the Telegraph ISIS should be eradicated. As she thinks they just beheaded her Dad, WTF else is she going to say? The Telegraph is pro-intervention in Iraq: they knew what she was going to say. It was a tactic, pure and simple. By fanatical neoliberals who don’t pay UK taxes.
* New York and Paris have stepped up security on their subway train systems as the Iraqi prime minister revealed “credible” intelligence about a terror plot to attack public transport in the US and France. We’re not told why it’s credible or indeed what it is, but the Iraqi PM is also in favour of intervention against ISIS…so he would say that. And he’s at the United Nations. And his US Allies would like them onside and on-message. It’s scaremongering, pure and simple. By fanatical US business interests and the Jewish lobby who want to turn ISIS into the next Al Q-aida.
* Dave Lee Travis gets hounded nearly all the way to jail by legal attitudes directly resulting from insane feminist constructs about men and their behaviour. In trying to look at 1965 and pretend it was 2014 all along, a vindictive female prosecutor is in my view rearranging history….which is what feminists do anyway. DLT, Rolf Harris and Stuart Hall were gropers dressed up to seem like predatory paedophiles. It is an illusion, pure and simple…and a distraction: from Elm House, from Newscorp’s ambitions to destroy the BBC, and from the reality of the damage inflicted by fanatical feminism.
* I’ve probably posted 10+ times about how silly the optimistic global population stats are, and why the ramifications of population we have are already misunderstood. Now, the headline projection in the UN-sourced Science study says the world’s population is likely to grow from 7.2 billion now to 9.6 billion in 2050 and to 10.9 billion in 2100. Before that, the UN had projected a population of 9.3 billion for 2050. For years, fears of population growth have been diluted by lobbying. Highly monied lobbying. And it usually traces back to one place: the Vatican. This is the mendacious defence of a crazy idea, pure and simple. By fanatics who think every sperm is sacred.
The obvious common thread is this: empiricism is dying in our world. It is being replaced by provably daft religious ideas, even dafter interpretations of Mammon, and blatant manipulation of facts as and when necessary. As a result of this confluence of Fitting Facts with Blind Belief, our world is turning into a series of arrogant and intolerant demands upon the rest of us. And today specifically, it will (I suspect) produce an overwhelming majority amongst MPs for the approval of military action in Iraq.
It tries to demonise Viktor Orban because he is anti-EU, Alexis Tsipras because he refuses to see why Greek citizens should pay for the largesse of Trichet and Wall St, bloggers who point out the instability of French banks, Spanish demonstrators who wish to show their anger in public, and Russian-Ukraine separatists who suddenly found the EU trying to wrest them away from the Moscow orbit.
The two F-words: fascism and fanaticism. They’re in the ascendancy, and it can only end in tears.
The Slog 