Not if you are co-author of The Communist Manifesto, as Engels was with Marx, Greenflag. Indeed Marx would have been pressed to survive at times without generous subventions from Engels provided from the profits that Engels made as a successful industrialist. Marxists do not assume capitalism to be “sinful” but rather a stage of human social production that will inevitably be superceded containing as it does the seeds of its own destruction.

As to homosexual practice – surely the question is not whether or not it is “sinful” – but whether or not it is fun. Herself and I have just returned from a short break in Brighton, the “Gay Capital of Britain”, and I have to say that crude empirical observation during that time would suggest that everyone was having a whale of a time.

“isn’t there such a thing as society[?]”

There is – but I don’t think you have been complaining about it’s existence. But rather you have been complaining about the forces within it. One of them being modernity.

“less licentiousness”

And how will that be enforced ?

And by whom?

As to your second point, well, the answer to increased licentiousness is, surprisingly enough, less licentiousness, or, to put it another way, a reformation in social attitudes. It has happened before. Victorian England, for all its faults and hypocrisies, had a higher moral tone than Georgian England thanks to the evangelical revival of the early nineteenth century, in the after-glow of which we have lived until quite recently.

A Watchman writes

“But the point is that so many of the social problems from the past listed by Sammy have been worsened by increased licentiousness”

And what do you propose to do about that – given what I have said about the true nature of gay political and social identities here?

“… it is the aggregation of all such “lifestyle choices” that cumulatively shape a society where Persons B, C and D think they can intoxicate themselves without fear of moral censure or criminal intervention.”

That makes no sense at all.

A Watchman Writes:

“At least in the past, when there were street fights, drunkenness etc., there was a greater tendency for others to condemn that behaviour. Is that really the case now in modern Britain?”

Well there is Left Theory and their is social practice…..

I have had cause to remind Iris’s supporters here that the most important people she has betrayed are not the vast army of liberals or radicals or SFA supporters but her **own** supporters who happen to be gay.

I think the policeman a constituent of Iris’s who I mentioned is a case in point. He saw his role as protecting the public from crime, bad behavior – only to be a victim of that same behavior himself in his own (faith) community. He would agree that such behavior is unacceptable . But to then link him culturally with those who attack him and his home because he wants to live with who he chooses – that is just absurd.

On the other end of the matter the anti agreement unionist I mentioned has just been involved in stopping the closure of his local post office. He was recognised at the meeting by one of the pensioners “there is is cleanest man on our road’ . Why because he is very very militant – about keeping his area free and the province of litter. He is in fact an anti litter campaigner. I don’t think they are untypical of gay protestants’ approach to public life and work here.

As I said I wish the majority of those who are gay in the province were raving liberals and radicals but I can assure they are not they are in the main conservative and socially responsible people who care just as much as any other person does that the streets they share with their fellow citizens are safe.

It was Gramsci Wot Done It: The Relationship Between the Left and The Promotion of Homosexuality

Flashharry your recent postings indicates that you know very little about the relationship between the Left & Homosexuals and the gay movement:

‘Trust me if the Left ever decided that promoting homosexuality in some way impeded their Cultural Revolution (as may soon turn out to be the case as they embrace their new friends in Islam) the Comrades will drop the gays without a moment’s hesitation.’

We can have an argument or a discussion about the issues but the above is low grade discourse – a bad wind up.

“It’s protestants and unionists like these that DUP let down -because these members of our community believe that being gay is simply incidental to who they are and their values.”

Well said.

Posted by willowfield

Willowfield

I realize we fell out of late, but I hope you do not mind me saying this, but well said to you to

regards.

“It’s protestants and unionists like these that DUP let down -because these members of our community believe that being gay is simply incidental to who they are and their values.”

Well said.

I don’t think Hitchens is at all nostalgic for a supposedly pre-60s golden age. No one can dispute the social problems of the time, or that moderate reforms, such as the decriminalisation of homosexuality (something supported by Hitchens), were appropriate. But the point is that so many of the social problems from the past listed by Sammy have been worsened by increased licentiousness, which is the real legacy of the 1960s. At least in the past, when there were street fights, drunkenness etc., there was a greater tendency for others to condemn that behaviour. Is that really the case now in modern Britain?

No he doesn’t, he charts the deliberate use of homosexuality, divorce, recreational drug use, unmarried motherhood, mass immigration, the destruction of proper schools etc by cultural Marxists in order to destroy the broadly conservative and (despite the usual litany of social problems that actually still exist today) remarkably stable and crime free society that existed prior to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960′s.

Hitchens has no problem with homosexuality per se, he has a problem with how Gramsci Marxists used it as a tool to destroy the society that he thinks was, all its many problems notwithstanding, a better society than today’s. Trust me if the Left ever decided that promoting homosexuality in some way impeded their Cultural Revolution (as may soon turn out to be the case as they embrace their new friends in Islam) the Comrades will drop the gays without a moment’s hesitation.

Most of the material benefits of modern life came from the increased wealth caused by conservatives and would have occurred anyway, I am afraid that most of the dreadful aspects of modern life be it feral, barely educated, adolescents living in grey council estates producing illiterate offspring on the back of the welfare state to rising crime and a soulless society are the deliberate results of left wing social planners.

I am relieved that you do not see us as being responsible for incivility or crime. But you still see the fact that we can live a contented, peacable, life without having to spend our lives telling lies about who we are as a sign of a decaying and decadent society. That’s a profoundly depressing view of the world.

I do not accept your view of unintended consequences; whatever your view of the social revolution of the 1960s, its adherents were primarily ordinary men and women simply taking advantage of unparalleled prosperity, almost universal freedom from serious want and disease and the Pill. While voluntary restraint is a necessary part of any civilised society, I do not see the chain of causation from, let’s say, people being able to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover to children stabbing their teachers in schools, as the Hitchenite paeleocons would have us believe. Nor was the pre-1960s world as idyllic as you would have us believe. The problem with debating the idyllic past world before The Revolution is that most of us weren’t born there, and most of us doing the debating are terribly middle-class. Spousal abuse, child abuse, alcoholism, drinking your wages by the time the pubs closed on Friday, vicious street fights, affairs, ‘nasty men’; it’s all there in the past three generations or so of my family story, and I would suspect among those of most people who grew up in working-class parts of Belfast.

But if Hitchens is your cup of tea, you’re welcome to it. Reading the first chapter of The Abolition of Britain is a remarkable experience. Hitchens celebrates a world were things are basically naff; food is poor, beer is poor, people are poor, rigid social hierarchies mean the poor stay poor (not true actually; the left are sooo wrong about this) but are content in knowing their place, authority is unquestioned even when corrupt, and even if the system stinks people are happy because they trust in it. Ironically, ex-Trot Hitchens and the new left he detests work from the same fairy story of primitive poor people being kept in their place until liberated by the great New Left of the 1960s. Both ignore, for example, the massive social advances for the working-classes in the Midlands and Southern England in the 1930s and the radical social advancement of those lucky enough to be young, poor and clever in the 1950s. Shamefully, Hitchens celebrates ignorance, oligarchy, deference to unearned authority and even bad plumbing. Anyway I could go on all night about Hitchens, but suffice to say, I’ve read him, I think he talks nonsense, and he’s another one who blames all the ills of society on homosexuals (and, to be fair, Guardian readers, social workers, Americans and the Second World War).

Yes those wonderful 1950s, when doctors could do a Harold Shipman on their patients, have the medical establishment close ranks to protect them, and get away with it thanks to all that wonderful deference to authority.

Harry, shall I expand on your thesis? Twenty centuries ago people in Britain (that’s pre-Roman invasion, you know) and Ireland lived in tribal, non-literate societies with only a rudimentary social structure, primitive economics, pagan religion, polygamy, human sacrifice, etc., etc. Somehow the social norms that shaped their lives remained constant through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, two mass invasions of foreign peoples, the first of which in particular was characterised by massive forced movement of population and a reordering of the ethic map of these islands unparalleled since, the advent of a literate élite, the arrival of Christianity and its eventual adoption as a state religion, the transition from tribalism to pastoralim to feudalism to the squirearchy to capitalism, the advent of banking, the printing press, the telegraph, immunisation and modern medicine, the railway, radio, the aeroplane, the motor car, urbanisation and industrialisation, colonialism, the Reformation and the two centuries of relgious war that followed it, mass trade unionism, the transition from autocracy to parliamentarism to the universal francise, not to mention wars, plagues, dynastic intrigues, multiple changes in langauge and periods of mass immigration. The earthquake that ripped apart that bedrock of societal values, which apparently united my daily communicant, devoutly Catholic grandmothers (but not their heavy drinking, philandering, husbands) and pre-literate Celtic tribespeople whose idea of religious liturgy was to sacrifice their cousins on Lughnasa, was the evil 1960s and nasty liberals like Roy Jenkins allowed homosexuals to take drugs without hanging them.

Yeah, right.

I’ve run out of energy to respond to the rest of your post. If you think I’m a Marxist, you need to visit Iris’ pet shrink who can cure homosexuality. Gramsci is a very sharp analyst but his conclusions are the worst sort of Marxian tosh. Yes, I would contend that alcohol consumption was much higher, at least among adult men, 50 years ago than it is today. Just think how both prevalent drink driving and the lunchtime pint were just a few decades ago. And yes, the number of boys without male role models is pretty unique outside times of war or plague, is a direct consequence of genuinely history making advances in reproductive technology that cannot and should not be undone – thank God women are no longer chained to the sink – and your whingeing about the evils of the left and homosexuals does nothing to advance the debate on society addresses it.

The 1950s are not coming back, and as that means I do not have to fear blackmail, arrest, electric shocks, hormone therapy or losing my job just for loving the man I do and not being afraid to say so, I am glad.

But I think Dave the Watchman and Flash Harry have been consistent too . Pointing up the connection between things gay and liberal and awful and….social decline of life and the quality of free speech etc – so much power ascribed to such a very tiny minority – that really hardly exists here – in the terms that you find in parts of UK or Europe – where people don’t think the sky is going to fall on their heads because a man passes them in the street with his boy friend.

What then is the likely hood if they live here of them voting for the DUP or Unionist or enjoying OO marches? – answer very high as a gay lifestyle does not make someone raving liberal or radical. Social life here is effected by modernity and travel but as I said we have gay people who are also protestant preachers, Loyalists, police officers gays who are anti agreement and most importantly gays who will support Iris -whatever she does. And that is not going to change any time soon I wouldn’t call them abominations – I know them. Let me introduce to some of them…

One young man plays the flute in Orange Band and looks after his disabled father , another is a retired civil servant who is anti agreement and pro Iris his gay colleague who still works at Stormont who is very much opposed to Sinn Fein.

Then there is the gay policeman who actually knows Iris quite well -he could be described as one of the most important gay activists in the province. He meet her in a personal capacity seeking her help with the constant attacks on his home by young thugs. He asked to meet her again this week – this time in his official capicity- she refused. It’s protestants and unionists like these that DUP let down -because these members of our community believe that being gay is simply incidental to who they are and their values.

Some I argue with of course but generally I don’t as all they want is to live in peace as British subjects with the same rights as anybody else. A modest not a radical proposal.

But in the reactionary games that are played here they are often expendable. Two of them took their own lives last year.

Don’t be surprised if Comrade Peter redesigates them as “enemies of the people”. If the psychologist doesn’t work I’m sure water-boarding won’t be far behind.

In the 1950’s allegedly some men beat up their wives and said racist things so we had to overthrow the twenty centuries of social norms which had created in Britain and Ireland remarkably stable and law abiding societies and replace them with what?

People “allegedly said racist things”? That is close to Holocaust denial. And “twenty centuries” of social norms? Victorian values were not kicking about for twenty centuries, Harry.

Societal breakdown with feral children who have never known male adult supervision, rampant drug taking and alcoholism (who seriously believes that alcohol consumption has declined in these islands since the 1950’s?), lawlessness, unlimited mass immigration, impotent policing, a massive increase in teenage pregnancies and abortions generally.

There is also a danger here of exaggerating the extent of the problem, here. If you want truly rampant crime, go to the cities of Brazil or Russia or any number of developing countries. Second, not everything can be put down to politics – we have become increasingly urbanised which places pressure on communities, and strides have been made since the 80′s in reducing the crime rate.

But we have abolished spouse abuse and racism haven’t we? Have we fuck!

But we have affected real change. A black man can plausible run for the Presidency of the United States. Black football players do not get monkey noises jeered at them. Gay people may marry. And so on.

Kensei I haven’t heard a single person advocating beating up gays here have you?

I have heard people with dog whistle “well, if they will flaunt”. I have also heard silence from people regarding the issue.

Curiously however there seems to be a growing demand to outlaw free speech that is deemed “offensive” by gays, I’m sure you’d oppose such illiberal Stalinism vigorously, wouldn’t you?

Of course I would. People have an absolute right to personal conscience. But you don’t have the right to shout fire in a crowded cinema (thank you US Supreme court), and you have to bear the consequences of your actions.

Anyway, once again, generate your very own Harry Flashman post:

http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/the-twat-o-tron/