Saturday 18 July 2015

Prime Politics, Indeed

"Two months have passed since the publication of Laudato Si’. Sticking it to the pickiest of all Cafeteria Catholics, the right-wing American and wannabe American ones, is always necessary. Popes have been doing it, at least implicitly, for as long as the terms have been meaningful. But this time, the targets have paid attention. One might call that a climate change."

"Did no one foresee the catastrophe that the euro has become? Of course they did. On precisely those grounds, 59 Labour MPs voted against Maastricht at Second Reading, joined by a mere 22 Tories, while 66 Labour MPs voted against Maastricht at Third Reading, still joined by only 41 Tories. On both occasions, both tellers for the Noes were Labour, Jeremy Corbyn was among the Noes, and five Labour MPs were among the Ayes. Of those five, none is still in the House of Commons, and two are dead."

"What a far less hysterical time the Cold War was. Everyone with any sense knew that it was all lies. People who could not see that, including those who imagined that a threat of domestic revolution existed, were a joke even at the time. The Soviet Union had neither the will nor the means to invade Western Europe, never mind the United States. It had no desire whatever for alternative centres of Communist power. It would in any case collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, exactly as and when it did. Consider quite what Britain was like in those decades without the world’s coming to an end, or the United Kingdom’s constitutional order collapsing, or either party of government’s adopting Marxism-Leninism, or anything like that."

"Many Muslims, especially women, mistakenly assume that their Sharia-compliant marriages in mosques were binding under the civil law. Therefore, it is being suggested that only civil marriages be legally valid. Leaving couples then free to have whatever, if any, religious ceremony they chose in addition. If people wanted the religious ceremony enough, then they would make the effort to arrange it. But why stop there?"

Not bad for a first day’s work.

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