Walking While White(ish)

In its original form, Paul Weston’s latest essay included a brace of vulgar phrases, which I have redacted in my customary manner, using square brackets. Worldly-wise readers will easily guess the original wording.

Walking While White(ish)
by Paul Weston

If you view the peculiar antics of Left-Liberals through a prism of morality, decency and honesty, you will always feel slightly sordid, soiled and confused by the inexplicable behaviour of such people, who seem to have a slender grasp upon reality and sanity.

Take the case of the viral video 10 Hours Walking in NYC as a Woman recently put up by the certifiably lunatic outfit hollaback! — a feminist organisation which seems to exist only to stoke a virulent hatred of men — as long as the men in question are white, that is…

A moderately presentable feminist actress by name of Shoshana Roberts thought it would be a jolly wheeze to wander around New York whilst being secretly filmed, in order to show the world what terrible, awful, ghastly human beings men are, as they reacted to her shimmering presence as a half-starved dog would to a meaty bone.

And so they did. Not literally gnawing her to death beneath the kitchen table of course, growling and snuffling as they did so, but they most certainly reacted to her in a variety of less canine ways, ranging from simply saying hello, to walking alongside her and asking for her telephone number.

As I say, the curvaceous Shoshana is presentable if mere youth and the possession of female organs is one’s yardstick when measuring the qualities of a prospective female conquest, but a young Brigitte Bardot she most certainly ain’t. As such, I don’t suppose her daily routine consists in rebuffing the rabid approaches of countless suitors. Nevertheless, this is exactly what she set out to prove with the help of some sissy young feminist male, who secretly filmed her with a backpack camera as she bravely hit the mean and misogynistic streets of the Big Apple.

And this is where it all started to go wrong. As she sashayed voluptuously through white neighbourhoods, it would appear the only unwarranted attention she elicited was when men with good intentions warned a slightly effete-looking young man with a backpack, that: “Was he was aware he was being closely followed by a semi-crazed-looking woman who appeared to be stalking him with frowning ill-intent?”

OK, I made that bit up. The point is, nothing happened to her at all.

Those damned white men in Soho and Greenwich Village seemed to barely notice her! Which was most decidedly not the point of the exercise at all! So off she went to da hood, hoping to be leered at there, which she duly was, as the video will testify. Lower-class black males seem to have an altogether healthier attitude toward [availing themselves of pulchritudinous pleasure] than rich white males, in that they actually have the [manly generative equipment] to talk to women in the first place, which is of course a pre-requisite if sexual congress is your endgame.

Having filmed a number of black males who had the sheer misogynistic effrontery of saying hello to her and complimenting her on her obvious availability, Shoshana then skulked back to the offices of hollaback! and uploaded the incriminating evidence showing all men to be sexist-bastards-fit-only-for-re-education-camps.

Within days of its release, a video with a hoped for hit rate of ten thousand members of the Sisterhood had been viewed thirty-two million times! And the reaction was not good. Rather than exposing all men as sexist-bastards-fit-only for-chemical-castration, Shoshana had done the unthinkable and exposed only black men as sexist bastards fit only for corrective lessons administered by a suitably attired Harriet Harman. In a dimly-lit basement.

At which point, the demented Left went into paroxysms of liberal fury. How dare she show lower-class people in this light! How dare she draw attention to the fact that black males are not yet fully house trained in the Sisterhood’s Brave New World. How dare she draw attention to an “unacceptable narrative” how dare she… how dare she!… ad infinitum.

hollaback! has now issued a public apology in which a Mzzz Emily May writhes through varied contortions of PC insanity. Quote:

“We are deeply invested in a movement that is multiracial, gender inclusive and incorporates place-based leadership specific to each locale. Racial, gender, and class politics is a core part of our work. While we did not create this video, we did allow our name to be used at the end of it. We agree wholeheartedly that the video should have done a better job of representing our understanding of street harassment and we take full responsibility for that. I’m deeply sorry.”

But just what is this weird creature actually apologising for? We know there would be no apologies if the white men in Soho had actually approached Mzzz Roberts rather than so infuriatingly ignoring her ample charms. No, she is apologising because having set out to demonise men generally, only lower-class black men were demonised, which rather runs counter to hollaback’s! Communist/Socialist policy of race, gender and class warfare with the capitalist white male pig-dog oppressor as their principle target.

A good example of this stark Leftist fact is Mzzz May’s following comment in her apology letter: “We are using the door opened by this conversation to expose the harassment faced by women of colour.” Which suggests that when a woman who is ostensibly white suffers at the hands of black men but not white men, then the issue becomes one of “women of colour” rather than the politically obvious issue of a white woman being “abused” by black men.

And what can we learn from this? Simple: feminism is just one part of the Leftist assault on the foundations of Western civilisation, built in the main by Christian, capitalist, married white men. If you google Mzzz Shoshana Roberts or hollaback! with the added search words of “FGM” or “Islamic Misogyny” or “Stoning Adulteresses To Death Outside A Mosque” you will find they are strangely mute on such trivial and immaterial subjects when compared with the nightmarish horrors of “Walking As a Woman in New York.”

So what can we conclude from this? Simple again; not only are Left-Liberals wicked, evil, dangerous subversives. They are also — as evidenced by the charming Shoshana Roberts and hollaback! — quite astonishingly, surreally, monumentally thick as well.

Paul Weston is a British-based writer who focuses on the damage done to Western Civilisation by the hard left’s ongoing cultural revolution, which seeks to destroy the Christian, capitalist and racial base of the West. He is the leader of Liberty GB, his website may be found here, and his political Facebook page here. For links to his previous essays, see the Paul Weston Archives.

39 thoughts on “Walking While White(ish)

  1. Paul Weston just lost my vote. And I’m not a member of the feminist movement nor am I a left-winger. I’m a Christian and a conservative with a fondness for men. But the custom of some men to whistle, make animal noises and talk to me (when I was young) in the street as if I was a common streetwalker did not make me feel admired and loved. I hated it.

    • i have to agree. the street is not a nightclub. you didn’t go out there to make contact with the opposite sex. you need to get from point A to point B and you don’t want to be engaged by someone just because they decide you should. it’s also been my experience that there is no good response, even not responding. just because i need to walk down this street does not obligate me to respond to you. leave me alone!

    • Pavelina, this is not about being whistled at in the street, it is about the sheer hypocrisy of feminism when it comes to black men, who apparently trump feminism by dint of simply not being white. Which is peculiar, no?

      • I think it is about “being whistled at in the street”. If it was not you would not have written the article. I didn’t miss the point. She said she was harassed by White men as well, but the brief section of the 10 hours of tape that was shown on the Web showed mainly non-white. It’s mainly the non-whites who are loitering in the street entertaining themselves by discomfiting women. (Incidentally, mass third world immigration has only made this situation worse.) I was particularly taken aback by your statement that “the point is nothing happened at all.” Really!? If you intend to run for office you’ll want votes, and there are undoubtedly many women such as myself who agree with you on every issue but this one. Sincerely, Pavelina

        • One of the worst places for harassment of women are the urban streets in India. Women report coming home sore from being pinched. It is largely due to the shortage of women, the high rate of female infanticide. In India there are millions of men who can never marry.

          I saw that video and felt sorry for those men. Obviously poor and unemployed – or they wouldn’t be standing around during the day – and without much hope of ever establishing a family. That woman has no pity…as though she showed them all the material things they can’t have, of which she is just one.

          That video says more about her than it does about the men. Sadistic, at the very least. No wonder men have issues with women…she’s a prime example of why.

          As for making Mr Weston’s remarks the basis for your vote? That’s trivializing the democratic process. I am appalled at your lack of gravitas. The world is not about our feelings and sensibilities. Get serious, ma’am.

          • Dymphna,

            That you recognize that what Ms Roberts did was sadistic and why it was so does you much credit.

            “As if she showed them all the material things they can’t have, of which she is just one.”

            It would never occur to the self-absorbed little twerp that that was what she was doing. And look again at the situation from the perspective of the males in the ‘hood: what the hell is this curvaceous white woman doing walking alone in our ‘hood? Is she looking for some action? Ms Roberts by the circumstantial unusuality of her actions was inviting attention. And just how bad was that attention?

            You rightly refer to India. Ms Roberts should try her stunt in any city in Pakistan or Egypt or [insert name of any Muslim country here]. her physical well being could not be guaranteed, to put it mildly. I would challenge her to walk a half a mile in any such city, but the obtuse nincompoop would probably take up
            the challenge. And though I don’t know her from a bar of soap, I wouldn’t wish harm upon her.

        • My understanding of this was that she was NOT catcalled by whites. Hence my point about blacks trumping feminists. If you remember the National Association of Women’s refusal to condemn O. J. Simpson simply because he was black, you will get my point about this. Tammy Bruce resigned from N.O.W. over it and wrote a book about the insanity (and pecking order) of PC called “The Death of Right and Wrong.” If you read it, you will better understand the point I was trying (clearly not very well…) to make.

          • When it comes to the dreadful p.c.-generated myth about the “war” on women, there is NO point to the contrary that one is permitted to make. We’re in victim territory.

            Thanks for reminding us about the Tammy Bruce book. I found it at an airport terminal and became a fan.

            The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values

            One commenter said:

            Wow–I heard Tammy Bruce on Sean Hannity’s radio show and clicked on Amazon to get the book and read what I now know to be one of the strangest Publisher’s Weekly reviews I’ve ever seen. She seemed like such a reasonable person on radio, I couldn’t imagine how her book could be as they described.

            Well, it wasn’t. The subject matter is difficult sometimes–especially Chapter 7 which deals with the sexualization of children in our society–but this is a book which *must* be read if you want to be educated about what is really going on in our culture. She breaks it down like she did in New Thought Police–and deals with the gay elite, feminist elite and black power elite…

            What she was referring to re the Publisher’s Weekly Review was indeed bizarre: they called Ms. Bruce’s book “this lurid right-wing screed”…

            BTW, Ms. Bruce is on our blogroll:

            http://tammybruce.com/

    • I think you have missed the point here…. it is the blacks and latinos that did the wolf-howling not the whites!

    • Lighten up, Pavelina !They barked at you and you NOTICED them. Their mission accomplished.

      A lady surely knows to ignore it, consider the source and just keep moving on.

      Heavens, this flirting , ETC happened to me in downtown Atlanta all the time back in the early 1960s. So I just shook my long red hair and kept moving in the other direction.

      I thought it was hilarious of those guys old enough to be my dad… to whistle and say , Hey baby!!! LOL : ) HA!

      • Precisely. Within limits, it is hilarious. They bark, but there was no bite. I agree with your assessment: in the American South we say “if she’s Raised Right, a woman ignores the riff-raff”. To do any more is to encourage such behavior. In that sense, she was behaving correctly. But filming the process was mean-spirited and its final effect is to encourage the riff-raff, only now they’re more likely to be humiliated and angry.
        —-
        BTW, you know your time has passed when the call-outs stop. It is a recognition of the fact that one is past the age of child-bearing and at the age of being helped across the street…we move on to make room for those who come behind.

        Let’s see her make that video in 25 years or so…or will she be the NYC kind of girl who has “work” done to maintain the illusion of youth and fertility? Like, say, the gorgeous Nancy Pelosi.

      • LOL, I must visit NYC. If those young guys said anything to me, I could honestly say ‘I’m old enough to be your granny!’.

    • I watched the video. Some of the comments were just ‘have a nice day’ or ‘god bless’. Nothing abusive or threatening. In my ‘burb everyone greets each other nicely. The guy walking beside her was creepy though, that was harassment.

      Paul’s main point is valid though: it’s like a card game, what trumps in the I’m more Oppressed Than You game: being black or being a woman. Tricky for the ueber-left.

    • I’m a heterosexual, conservative Christian male who, while not wolf-whistling, may have cast a few admiring glances at attractive women (got a reply that’s lasted30+ years blessed by both church and state, with sons and a grandkid now). I see your point. One of the things I thought quite respectable about Taiwan in the bad old days of martial law was that respectable young women could go out late for xiao ye (a nighttime snack that was and is an enjoyable indulgence on that island) without a fear of assault. I think it a mark of civilization and decency that the sexes respect each other.

    • I think so.

      Mr Weston wrote “The point is, nothing happened to her at all”.

      Without being upfront that this is what she objected to Pavelina then said he’d lost her vote and only after Mr Weston’s response Pavelina then admitted she wouldn’t vote for someone who reminded her of the feelings she had when young of being catcalled. In a kind of a way this is is not unsympathetic to the approach being taken by the UK regime in suppressing discussion of unpleasant realities.

      Ms Roberts got the reaction she wanted but I read Mr Weston’s point as being that the femnazis were upset not that she got the reaction that all men are bastards but that she inadvertently emphasised that all black men are bastards.

      Whatever the case regarding the meta-cicumstances Roberts was just using them and their situation in life to make her point and that is what is the disgusting thing going on in the video per se.

  2. My two female colleagues (one black South African, one white Londoner) thought the woman should get over herself (while agreeing that the man who accompanied Shoshana for five minutes was a creep).

  3. Well done Paul! Back in my time as a cop I had confrontations with those I call the feminazis. Typical of the mindset from that bunch is the brainwashed, propagandized, delusional, hate filled and butch misandrist female who just cannot be reasoned with, and like those who are atypical the loony left, chant, scream, yell and hurl offensive abuse until they are arrested and thrown into the back of the paddy wagon for disobeying a lawful direction.

    It was always a pleasure to deal with them!

    • I have to chime in here with a priceless description by Paul Johnson (Spectator, 12/2005) of the type of women you invoke here:

      “[M]ost PC advocates and enforcers in [Great Britain] are women in their thirties or forties, with some education (snip), no longer young enough to be much interested in sex but old enough to have acquired a certain modest authority in their work, which is overwhelmingly in the state sector, and often unmarried or childless (snip). I would also describe these women as unappealing physically, non-orgasmic, disapproving and fastidious by nature, embittered by personal misfortune or slights real or imaginary, overwhelmingly agnostic or atheist, women who in an earlier age might well have been nuns but are now fanatics for whom class warfare and hatred of Christianity form a fulfilling creed.”

      • Thank you Mr Seiyo

        I read Paul Johnson’s book some years ago on the “Intellectuals” and have ever since wondered why a man with such wisdom failed to make a difference upon our sad new world. The answer of course is that a moral and intellectual giant alone has no chance against the ravening hordes of “intellectual” pygmies massed against him, who now hold the crucial to our survival propaganda keys. Unfortunately, the “intellectuals” have an ideology of suicide if you agree with them, or an ideology of civilisational murder if you don’t.

        Can we sort this out democratically, given the new propagandised and suicidal generation? I don’t think so.

        So what do we do?

        I rather think we cannot mention it here. Which goes to show how monumentally screwed we are. We can no longer talk about what we need to do in order to survive this century.

        Fortunately, reality is on our side. We are now in a race of “wake up or be destroyed” versus “you have nothing to be worried about you fascist something ist.” Reality must surely override propagandised fantasy?

        Time will tell. But time is rapidly running out. Solving it will not be violence free, which, of course, is not nice. But survival in the natural world is not nice. It is simply nature. Will nature prevail over fantasy? We simply don’t know. At the moment, it will not, based purely on what we see every day in campuses all over the Western world.

        This is an epochal moment in evolutionary respects. Odds? 90/10 against us. Having said that, we still have the military……

        • I think you are optimistic about the military. There is no social institution in the erstwhile West that is more PC, more tyrannically Muzophile, philo-homoist, averse to any racial or gender truth than the military– certainly so in the US, UK and in France. The latter, I believe (hard stats are hard to come by), is at least 12% Maghrebian.

          In the US, nonwhites and women get easier promotions and a much easier road to officersship than white males do — meaning that competence has been thrown out the window. Combat units that, by definition, ought to be guided by the ability to combat, have normed fitness and battle readiness tests for women. A 4-star general and despicable opportunist, Gen. Casey, said after the Maj. Nidal Hassan jihad that as bad as it was it would be a much greater tragedy if we sacrificed our glorious diversity because of it.

          I am convinced that if the people in any European country get really sick of being tyrannized, Islamized and deconstructed and rise in violence, the U.S. Marines will be landing in Normady to protect the “New Europeans” — e.g. the “Asians” — and not the old ones.

          I believe that at the end things will be right again–but things are too-far-gone and it will take much more pain and suffering that we can possibly imagine…

        • Paul Weston..Thanks for all that you do and are doing..In my not so humble opinion you should be PM at this very moment..You were a breath of fresh air when you came upon the scene. Now you are pure oxygen..(from a Montrealer,Quebecer) ..Keep ‘er goin’ Weston!..Nothin’ but the best!

      • Yes indeed Takuan Seiyo, and one of the great no, no’s in the PC/MC world is stereotyping the individual who fits an obvious niche, as noted by any astute observer, within Western society as of that described above by the Spectator. Hmmmm! My sister in-law, apart from not being state employed, fits most of those descriptions!

        • Your sister-in-law conforms to most of those criteria, but her job ISN’T a tax-payer funded one?! Something is amiss! I take it she is your wife’s sister rather than your brother’s wife.

      • Dear Mr. Seiyo,

        Ah, Paul Johnson was a vital influence way back when I was making the transition from ‘pod person’. His ‘Modern Times’ was the first transfusion of Real in my ‘progressive’ life.
        I have a long held belief that certain ‘Ur-texts’ from the early radical fringes of a movement contain the complete ‘genome’ of the final product of said movement. In the case of ‘feminism’ may I suggest two choice artifacts: INTERCOURSE by Andrea Dworkin which is not ‘about’ anything but is merely ranting, raving hatred for the procreative act itself. The other Ur-text would be the infamous S.C.U.M. Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men) by the psychotic who shot Andy Warhol. I see all that is happening through the lens of these two texts and it has yet to not make sense.

        • Anon,

          The secret to ‘feminism’ lies in the eye of the beholder — I mean, literally. To wit, I encourage you to google photos of the unlamented Andrea Dworkin, of Bettina Aptheker and of the younger, current shining light of militant leftist feminism, Judith Butler.

          Just the way Paul Johnson has stated it — except to the nth power because these women are not merely unattractive but repellently ugly — instead of turning to God as their likes did in the past to divine the secret and puropose of their punishment here on Earth, they turned their self disgust and anger at their lot to hatred against others.

          • Familiar with the physical appearance of the pitiable Andrea Dworkin, I took your advice and Googled Judith Butler (simpliciter, not “images”).

            1. She actually isn’t all that naturally physically repellent, she just tries really hard to be; with the butch haircut, etc. I blame the large mole on her upper lip for her obvious psychopathology.

            2. By coincidence the image that I clicked on led me directly to an article written by a Mark LeVine. Oh that Judith Butler! She really has the full suite of afflictions doesn’t she? Why was I not at all surprised that she’s anti-Israel and active in the BDS movement? BTW I’m very familiar with the execrable Mr LeVine: a slippery Californian academic of profoundly limited intelligence (at least Taqiya Ramadan has a functioning brain), basically pro-Hamas, who represents the male side of the Butler coin. The affectation of effete long blonde hair, the complete absence of any masculinity. I don’t know who I dislike more, Butler or LeVine. Happily I’m not forced into a choice.

          • Re: Bettina Aptheker

            Irrespective of her plain appearance, plainly the driving force in her florid psychopathology is her belief/the fact that her beloved “Communist Party USA’s leading theoretician” father sexually abused her from age 3-13! Nothing could be more damaging to the psyche of a child. If it happened at all: which as is widely contended, appears to be an open question.

            Now this gets truly bizarre. In 1988 Robyn, the bisexual female best friend of my then girlfriend, departed for the USA to undertake PhD studies in “Semiotics*/Gender Studies”. At the University of California – Santa Cruz. Which is where Aptheker, I have learned in the past hour, had been teaching in that “discipline” since 1980.

            Robyn, too, experienced “discovered memory” of child sexual abuse upon her return from years of study under Aptheker’s aegis.

            * I once opined to Robyn that I had read a little of Jacques Derrida and found his writing to be unfathomable. She dismissed me with a condescending “It’s subtle”.

        • Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times” (I wrongly recalled the title earlier) was also my first transfusion of “real”, other than Soviet-specific authors such as Robert Conquest.
          My social circle at the time (all in public sector jobs), including my then older girlfriend, disparaged, pod-like, Johnson. I had to read him somewhat furtively ( pornography would have been frowned upon less) initially, but eventually got accustomed to the dismissive comments when Modern Times and other works of his were espied in my bookshelf by visiting pods. Most were so unread that they didn’t know who he was. And if they did, hadn’t actually read anything he wrote, content to rely on the received wisdom about him.

          I once genially raised Modern Times with the history teacher two of my children had. The lady, in possession of a doctorate and addressed, as per her insistence, by her students as “Dr …”, looked at me in utter disbelief and alarm (for Howard Zinn’s “history” is what she teaches). With a smile on my face I asked her whether it would not be “academically broadening” for students to be taught both Zinn and Johnson. “Johnsons not in the curriculum” was the polite but firm reply. It was a private school so it wasn’t bound to exclude that excluded by the state-mandated curriculum. I had previously been unfamiliar with Zinn until my children made me aware of his existence. Whoa, did I get a shock! Sheer sophomoric nonsense. The children of the West do not stand a chance of escaping the pod mentality unless they have parents who have history books about the house.

          I’m happy to report that said ex-girlfriend, after four years of arguments, shifted from a vehement pro-Palestinian to a mildly pro-Zionist worldview. And gave up attending “Women Against Rape in War” marches which were held principally to disrupt our national day of recognition of those who served in our military. And then went on to become, more quickly, more politically conservative than I was at the time after finding herself seconded to the personal staff of a conservative government minister who transpired not to be the expected ogre, but a near paragon of personal virtue, intelligence and charm who was committed to doing “good works”. She worked for him for many years.

          By 40 she became religious (astonishing for anybody who knew her at 30) and attends church on her own every Sunday. Not that I understand or approve of the latter, though I don’t disapprove of it either because its none of my business whether people subscribe to a faith or not. Islam excepted. She and her husband (neither of whom are Jewish in any sense) now attend pro-Israel rallies!

      • Ahh, the redoubtable Paul Johnson. I suspect that a great many Anglophone GoV readers over 50 got their early intellectual introduction to the real world, as opposed to the faux world, by reading him. His “History of the Modern World”*, “Intellectuals” and “A History of the Jews” are a trifecta of brilliant analysis and insights. All are in my bookcase. He started out as a Lefty, editor of the Labour Party journal the New Statesman, and ultimately could no longer stomach the nauseating intellectual dishonesty of the Left. He is now, naturally of course, excoriated, demonized and defamed, by the Left. Which is taken by him as a compliment.

        Johnson’s entries on Rousseau and Marx in
        “Intellectuals” cast both men in a corrective and purifying light that cannot be ignored. Karl Marx was, as a person, simply a vile human being. Parasitic, amoral and cruel. He fathered a child to the London maid his wealthy aristocratic wife, Jenny von Westphalen, had working for them around the house and did not legally recognize the child as his own. So much for his concern for the proletariat!

        Rousseau kept getting his rich older mistress, who financially supported him as a writer, pregnant. Solution: dump each of the five babies he sired at the doorstep of the local foundling hospital!

        A paragon of personal ethics neither of them were, to put it mildly.

        *Not sure I have the title right and I’m too lazy to walk to my bookshelf and check.

        • Western governments and educational systems are full of that type of person. The do as I say and not as I do type of person who believe their own intellect to be so superior to those who may disagree with their utopian, but narrow world view, that they feel empowered to discard their own mistakes and what they consider to be a personal burden onto those whose own superior morality to life allows them to do it.

          • Exactamundo!

            In my early mid-twenties I worked as a personal staffer to a government Minister (who, though belonging to a nominally left-of-centre party, was the most right wing intellectual I had met thus far in my life. We shared anti-Soviet books.). The ethical and moral calibre of the people I worked with was eye-poppingly appalling. All of whom espoused the rhetoric of the “social justice warrior”, whilst sticking their snouts into the public trough as deeply as they could and for as long a term as they could. It was a salutary lesson for a young man and made me determined to acquire another degree so that I could become self-employed and thus avoid having to work in that “shark tank” world. Best career decision I made.

          • You just reminded me of something when you said: the rhetoric of the “social justice warrior”

            I was on Twitter recently and ran across some account in which the woman espoused “social justice”. I asked her if that was a code word, and if so, for what? How is “social justice” superior to plain old “justice”, which once upon a time was robust enough to stand on its own.

            She never answered me.

            RE: Self-employment. Many people fail at that because of the cost of regulations. The woman who cuts our hair got her barber’s license from the state by apprenticing herself to a licensed beautician and then passing whatever tests they require. She saved herself about 5K in “tuition” fees.

            In Virginia, the idea of apprenticing to the law instead of going to law school is still legal. Problem is that the laws have become so clogged with minutiae I’m not sure one could still do it. It would take an intelligent self-starter with true grit to do that. And those are the very qualities that government schools eradicate in children.

  4. Some 25 years ago I was visiting New Zealand as a 40 something newly separated man, I was walking down a hill in Auckland when I was passed by a car full of young women. They shouted and whistled at me. It had to be me because there was no-one else around. Know what? I felt flattered and it made my day and lifted the depression I was feeling of flying home to an empty house.

  5. Paul Johnson is a clever man, and I understand why he moved to the right politically, having moved a little that way myself!

    However his defence of guilty people, up to and including General Pinochet (whose reign of terror he called “Soviet propaganda”!) greatly undermines his credibility.

    • Dear Dymphna,

      There’s no “reply” button on your 4.46pm posting in response to mine so I’ll do it here.

      “Social Justice” is indeed a code word for Leftist activism for selected causes. The treatment of women in Saudi Arabia is not a “social justice” issue. The treatment of attractive (or at least bosomy and bottomy) upper-middle class Manhattan Jewish girls as they stroll the streets of New York in tight-fitting clothes in a staged set-up to elicit “sexist” “harassment” by white (only) men is a “social justice” issue.

      BTW The You-Tube commentary on the Hollaback “street harassment” clip by Tyrone Magnus, a black man of apparent average education, but possessed of much common sense and some decency, is well worth watching. I would love to write to Shoshanna Roberts to set her straight.

      You ask: what happened to plain old “justice”? Aaah, get with the program girl. “Justice” has been progressively superseded since the 1970’s by a new legal/juridicial paradigm which is less about dispensing traditional jurisprudence and more about pursuing the “social justice” causes “d’jour” through a “bureaucratic-administrative” paradigm that retains the outward trappings of the judicial system (for the inherited gravitas), but bears little relation to that which evolved in England over the course of nearly 1000 years and was spread to almost all of the world’s successful democratic states, the Anglosphere most notably.

      Your own President (PBUH) laments that the late Chief Justice Earl Warren didn’t engage in “redistributive change” in his judicial decision-making. Umm, Barack, he wasn’t meant to, it wasn’t his job to do so. The current POTUS placed a person on the Supreme Court specifically because she was a woman of colour (with an activist history); he wouldn’t have appointed the female equivalent of Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell in a million years. It is crystal clear to me that Madam Sotomayor has been elevated over and over again way beyond her level of competence. It is the way of our current world.

      Re: self-employment. It is a difficult path for anybody unless one is born to wealth and even then … The majority of my more affluent, financially secure, friends and acquaintances earn/earned their income (they retired at 55 on lavish pensions) did so working in the public sector. Self-employment is for those who place independence above financial security.

      Re: Virginia’s retention of apprenticing to a lawyer as an alternative to attending law school. Pleased to hear it, though I suspect that that route will be eliminated for all practical purposes by what Mark Steyn calls the “overcredentialisation” of Western societies. The cache , and thus prospects for employment, of a law degree from an elite law school in the USA is a phenomenon of its own genre. The West’s law schools have been hotbeds of silliness and gross partiality for decades: PC faculty staff only, variable entry requirements depending on your personal background (Elizabeth Warren, the Cherokee ring any bells?) and worst of all the elimination of 100% exam based assessment in favour of “open book” exams, assignments and “class participation” assessment which gives the academics the power to fail/pass people for ideological reasons not performance. And they do.

      Mercifully, the US still has State-run bar exams to filter the hundreds of thousands of law graduates before they are able to practise law. There was a very telling study of the bar exam pass rates of graduates from elite law schools in four states: Illinois, Michigan, California and one other, possibly New York. The study found that, from memory, 70% of minority preference graduates failed the bar exam first time around and 40% multiple times. The authors of the study concluded bravely that it was simply cruel to those individuals who were admitted to the law schools on a lowered ability threshold and pushed through years of study only to be incapable of completing bar exams after they graduated. That is, never able to enter the occupation they qualified in at university. It also devalues the currency of possessing a law degree from those elite institutions. But the academics in those institutions don’t care because they have highly paid, prestigious and cushy jobs.

      We have an academic teaching law at one of this country’s top universities (with very highly rated law school) who lives around the corner from us. He does a maximum of 10 hours of face to face teaching a week. I have observed him more than once settle into a bench at our local bar and, armed with two bottles of wine in ice buckets, mark a stack of assignments over several hours. I pity the students who get marked after his first bottle of wine is gone. Or maybe by that stage he’s just passing all of them, so they’re unlucky to get him after only his pre-wine beers on campus (where he chases young American exchange students). It’s obviously a hit and miss affair, a chocolate wheel, as to the marks (grades) he doles out. Unless the subject is Palestine.

      I have only ever had one “conversation” with him. Relatively sober, he regaled me on the subject of his (doctoral, I think) thesis: the Palestinian Olympic team of 1932 or 1936 (or both) and how it was comprised of “all Jews and no Palestinians”. I began to explain to him that in the 1930’s Arab Palestinian society was overwhelmingly a feudal agrarian one, I didn’t get to finish my point that it was to be expected, eg that the womens’ swim squad was more likely to have Jewish members than Muslim ones. This fellow sits on interview panels deciding who gets a job as a law lecturer (law professor in US parlance) and who doesn’t. His obvious alcoholism is appalling to witness. And I’m half Irish with 41 first cousins in Ireland so its takes some seriously heavy drinking to offend my sensibilities in that regard! His Asian wife once came down to the bar and repeatedly hit him with an umbrella and yelled at him: “Stop drinking!!” and he scurried out under her blows. She’s not going anywhere soon because he’s highly paid (but not high enough to enable her to live well on his alimony) and has a lovely residence; en route to which he routinely collapses as he walks home. From my disbelieving enquiries he is apparently well respected by the staff at the law school – or at least not the object of ridicule, disdain and termination procedures. He will have his senior job until retirement age and collect a six figure pension.

      So yes, bring back “apprenticeships” in law, architecture, medicine, dentistry, optometry, veterinary science, etc. In every occupation. I agreed with an older colleague in 1987
      that the whole point of university degrees was to create a gate to occupations that only a proportion of people could pass through (usually based on their parents ability to pay) and thereby limit the numbers entering the “trade”. She also opined that one didn’t need a university degree to do the job we were both doing; one could learn the trade on the job. In the case of medicine and engineering , at least, supplemented by lectures from practitioners. By the third year of a five year degree in Medicine, students spend almost all of their time in hospitals getting practical training. Until a half century ago doctors qualified in teaching hospitals, such as St Barts in London.

      One has to chortle at pipsqueaks like that disgraced hack , lastly of “The Independent”, Johann Hari, when they preface commentary on Mark Steyn’s writings with “high school drop-out and former platter spinner [disc jockey]” or “who never attended university”: Steyn obviously gained a high quality secondary education and writes beautifully, intelligently and insightfully. He is living proof that expensive degrees in “Journalism” and “Communications” are a waste of time and money.

    • Dear Mark H,

      Pinochet was the lesser of two evils. Did Johnson actually state that all negative comment on Pinochet was “Soviet propaganda”? Or did he state that much of it was Soviet propaganda? The latter is certainly true. Lots of reasonable Chileans of varying social class backgrounds regard Pinochet as a saviour of their country. Didn’t he relinquish power voluntarily and Chile became a prosperous democracy; in South American terms?

      For many years I believed that Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius VI (?), was a pro-Nazi, Holocaust-enabler. The head of the Roumanian Secret Service, Ion Paceapa, after defecting to the West, disclosed that that Pope was the target of a massive long term Soviet disinformation campaign to undermine the authority of the Church in its, largely Catholic, Eastern Bloc empire.

      I’m not suggesting that Pinochet was not a brutal dictator who didn’t suspend the rule of law and imprison (and have tortured) people without trial, what I’m putting is that the numbers of people involved, the extent of his wrongdoing, was inflated by Soviet propaganda.

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