The American Dream 250


Here am I spreaking at the Oxford Union, in entertaining mode.

You can see the other speeches in the debate. The Motion “This house still dreams the American Dream” was defeated.

The following week the motion “This house believes that Israel is a force for good in the Middle East” was also defeated. I hear Peter Tatchell was excellent.

I don not think the format of such debates is antiquated and irrelevant. It helps get students thinking, and you get a range of opinion denied an airing elsewhere. I can never get to say those things on the mainstream media.


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250 thoughts on “The American Dream

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  • crab

    Fred,
    “I think he knew exactly what he was doing. That he deliberately set out with the intention of doing it. That he had learnt how to go about it from others.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21314585

    From the sensational BBC –
    “Children are increasingly being groomed over the internet for the sole purpose of online sexual abuse, research by a child protection watchdog suggests.
    (…)
    The growth area seems to be grooming, contact, and then sexual abuse purely online. We really need to make sure that young people are target hardened [sic] against that.
    We can talk to young people and educate them on staying safe online just as we do about stranger danger or drugs”
    Claire Lilly NSPCC
    (…)
    Mr Davies said the “devastation” caused to young people’s lives through online grooming could be seen on a daily basis.
    “UK children can be targeted from anywhere and offenders will cast their net widely to target large numbers of children,” he said.
    ‘Trick victims’
    She said: “What is apparent is that parents and carers can make that vital difference in whether or not a child becomes a victim of these ruthless predators online.

    Just consider, what “devastates” children today, being spooked and tricked into doing dirty webcaming online? By predatory men – its no doubt corrupting, disturbing. But by another 16 year old? The child is only going to be “devastated”, or even get into the situation if their family and peer culture is so poor as to leave them very naive, manipulable and then very ashamed. That is the foundation of the devastation proclaimed – shame.

    We are ready to ramp up the anxiety levels and unleash a new wave of ‘target hardening’ professionals, and imprison wayward teenagers for playing dirty games.

    Let kids be kids. Discipline them, teach them yes -but demonise and worry them over transient smut No. Children are abused by culture of fear and repression which would equate a dirty webcam trick with being physically molested. Putting an evil face on musty adolescent misadventure, its neo-puritanism. A culture rife to cause emotional devastation.

  • BrianFujisan

    Mary @ 2nd March. 2 ; 40.. The Japanese have been doing the same on a grander scale with Dolphins, and Porpoises, there is a devastating documentary called ‘The Cove’ which shows this Horrific Slaughter being carried out…some of this stuff is hard to watch

    Here’s a few mins of the documentary, i’Ve seen the full thing, very brave people filming it. a Short description first.

    The Cove exposes the slaughter of more than 20,000 dolphins and porpoises off the coast of Japan every year, and how their meat, containing toxic levels of mercury, is sold as food in Japan and other parts of Asia, often labeled as whale meat. The majority of the world is not aware this is happening.

    http://www.takepart.com/cove

  • angrysoba

    King of Welsh Noir: Hey Angry, you’re back!

    Eating whale meat, huh? You be careful, my friend, some of the ‘value’ lines contain sea horse

    Mmmmmmm…sea horse!

    But as someone upthread points out, apparently mercury-rich dolphin meat is sometimes passed off as whale meat, but it isn’t promoted, as you might think, as being good brain food, unlike fish. These days I buy all my organic non-GM whalemeat from local Greenlandgrocers. As long as those pesky corporation supermarkets don’t close them down with their instant ramen!!! Grrrr…don’t get me started!

  • guano

    So, does one draw the conclusion that all righteous causes, even escaping the tyranny of European religious totalitarianism, will dissolve themselves into other forms of totalitarianism. The pain of being oppressed will in turn fuel the act of oppressing others and logically reversed all oppressors come from a history of being oppressed themselves.

    If logic was involved the US would fear the backlash from the war on terror, which will eventually teach it humility, as the two world wars taught the UK humility not to oppress its own people or its near neighbours or its far neighbours – for one generation – before Mrs Thatcher came along and said this ain’t working, we have to go back to sh***ing on people like the old days.

    People say that socialism and withdrawing from imperialism had brought us to 50 mph speed limits and the 3 day week. Being nice to people doesn’t work. That’s the problem. Being nice to people does work, but it doesn’t satisfy the malice, greed, lust for power of a small group of people I identify as bankers who artificially squeeze the resulting benefits of altruism in order to flip society back into selfishness and oppressing others.

    Those bankers who were trusted to manage the boom of resulting from altruism as honest brokers, abused that trust for ulterior reasons, principally to build a Zionist power in the Western world. Furthermore, the bankers who are at present the honest brokers of the Asian booming economies will probably artificially flip those economies back into disfunction and tension and war, when it suits them.

    When Obama states that he is going to focus his foreign policy on the Pacific he means that Asia is a user-friendly zone to survive in while the Zionists continue to dismantle and weaken our Western world until Israel becomes its central controlling intellectual engine and political power. The subjugation of that Protestant drive for freedom which created America is to be achieved through ‘fast food and Fox news’ in the whole Western hemisphere, and the Islamic instinct for freedom and justice will be put in the prison of the Muslim Brotherhood thought police both in Muslim countries and here, in London.

    We are being softened up with recession until we go begging like President Mursi to the Zionists in Washington for a little relief. We have been de-industrialised to drive us to submission, just as Syria and Libya have been de-stabilised by violent dictators. If you are not forked-tongue and competent in lying, you will not find work in this country. No-one will be valued for skill and integrity here. If you do not submit to the spying thought control of government agencies, you will be blocked from finding employment under the Muslim Brotherhood.

    The only place you’ll be able to find honour and justice in Europe will be in the utterly rejected religion of Judaism. The only place you will be able to find religious freedom or satisfaction as a teacher or an engineer will be in the Pacific region. They want to make Europe a Biblical zombie-land like a greater Israel, a museum or mausoleum to a dead idea, and the Middle East into a divided ghetto run by mad mullahs or worse.

  • BrianFujisan

    while the Zionists continue to dismantle and weaken our Western world until Israel becomes its central controlling intellectual engine and political power

    Thats already the truth, FFKS

  • Chris2

    “Does it matter what they call it?….

    “Lock him up and throw away the key on any charges they can make stick I say.”

    Now there is real debauchery compared with which the silly tricks of teenagers with webcams are bagatelle: do you have any idea, Fred, of what throwing away the key to a prison means?

    And is it not obscene to talk of justice in terms of making charges stick, regardless of the law.

    You are hiding a truly disgusting lust for vengeance and punishment behind a pretended concern for young women. As to whom nothing could be a greater threat to their lifelong well being than to be fated to live among lynch mobs in a society in which a sadistic appetite for punishment co-exists with contempt for justice and indifference to the suffering of convicts.

  • angrysoba

    I really have to wonder if some of the people on this blog who spout about Zionists every chance they get actually talk like this in real life. It reads like the paranoid fantasies of the deranged. Now fast food is a Zionist plot? Do you blame anything at all you don’t like on Zionists, Guano? Oh, look, it’s raining! That’ll be the Zionists! My football team lost! Damn Zionists! The roof is leaking! Must have been the Zionist Federation of Carpenters trying to get me to pay to have it fixed! The dog’s let off a nasty pong! What are those Zionists feeding it???!?

  • lwtc247

    Craig. The stoney silence at the “election fix in Florida” tells me they don’t have have clue.
    I wish you would speak more often in public, that way I’d actually have something good to watch.

  • lwtc247

    And for the “Israel”-Palestine comparison to not get a sinlge clap was very sad – was there house rules not to clap? I hope so.

  • lwtc247

    Angeysoba… don’t forget:
    That boy’s been shot while playing football – That’ll be the Zionists!
    The roof is leaking – That’ll be the Zionist Federations bomb which destroyed it and the whole tower block at the back
    The dog’s let off a nasty pong – because the Zionists have flooded Gaza with sewage.

  • karel

    Halibaba,

    you may have noticed that an angry zionist sobba has returned with his nasty posts to make life less beautiful for all of us. It seems to me that he is a self-hating antisemite who needs to be cut down. Can you please apply you “intelectual firewpower” to bust the chair under his bum.

  • guano

    aNGRy

    Maybe you didn’t listen to Craig’s address to the Union about fast food and Fox news. Have you ever asked the same question to yourself whether Israelis talk amongst themselves in the same poisonous tones of Marg Regev being interviewed in front of a global audience by the BBC?

    I travelled with an Australian, Jewish student from Crete to Israel in 1973. I was his guest by chance and I stayed with his family, which was much appreciated. Even then, from their conversations with political journalists who accompanied us on a comprehensive tour, however much they loved their country they took much amusement from the increasing disfunctionality of the lives of the Palestinians.

    It was like a foreigner being taken on a tour of the UK by a Tory, and shown with amusement the food banks, closed businesses, and negative equity caused by the bank’s theft of the country’s capital. We know that the politicians will never succeed in borrowing their way out of the problem, and that they do not have the power to prosecute the bankers in order to reclaim what they have stolen.

    What I am saying is that intelligent Israelis had no power to prevent their politicians from leading them down the Zionist path, and intelligent UK people have no power to be anything but spectators of the road to ruin the bankers and politicians are taken us down between them.

    For the UK to survive we have to:
    1/ Take the apology for rendition to Belhadj and prosecute the war criminals of the cabinet of Tony Blair.
    2/ re-coup the assets of the banker class and lose it in its entirety in the long grass as far away as possible from the city of London.
    3/ dismantle the rhetoric of the war on terror so that intelligent and analytical voices can come forward from the Muslim community instead of its leaders being dominated by the most anti-western menacing voices. Then the work can begin to explain to the UK people what Islam is really and how it can benefit their lives.

    I do not believe that the present UK governing parties can apologise for illegal rendition ever. Rendition is continuing under Obama and Cameron, so how can it be apologised for? If the two blonde bits of skirt on the platform of the Oxford Union debate above, i.e. the President and the speaker in the video could pool their experience, her non-Zionist knowledge of Israel and his non-establishment knowledge of the UK, we might be able to make the world a better place through apology and contrition.

    Otherwise we are going to drift onto rocks like a cruise ship while the political captain sneaks back to shore.
    (BTW There was an apology in there somewhere for my comments made before)

  • Mary

    David Ward MP will be further humiliated by the LDs by receiving corrective treatment from their odious Friends of Israel groupies.

    http://johnhilley.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/david-ward-now-on-probation-well-teach.html

    Their active Gavin Stollar, not an MP, seems bent on making a name for himself much like Ms Fitzsimons who ran the Labour FoI (until she left in a hurry) and was reported for using inappropriate language.

    http://www.bucksfreepress.co.uk/news/610037.0/

    Clearly not too fussy who he brands with the N-word. Language “proportionate and precise”? Hardly.

    David Ward should free himself from the clutches of these Zionist supporters and set himself up as an Independent. In any case the party will make sure that he will not stand again. Liberal? Democrat? No way.

  • guano

    Simply put, I passionately believe that all things are solvable by truth-seeking analysis, and all things are made worse by lies and politics. We have to be honest enough to acknowledge the Zionist driving force behind the economic and religious problems facing our world. Zionist bankers are trying to highjack our country for their own fanatical religious purposes, while laying the blame at everyone else’s door.

    We in the UK have to re-industrialise and de-financial-servicise. We have to dismantle the ability of the bond-buying speculators to break down the stability of nations. We have to do it. If we don’t do it, remove the power of the zionist banking class, we will be no more than the ruins of Pompei quite soon. That’s why I asked A Node if he had any other contenders for responsibility for the mess we are in. It is stark, staring obvious that we have to weaken this group of individuals who have set our course on the rocks through the war on terror and by embezzlement of our world’s capital. We have to wake up, smell the coffee and move. Now.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)

    @ Karel :

    no, actually, I don’t think I want to bust the chair from under Angrysoba’s ass because I think he makes a valid point. Condemning what Zionists are up to in Palestine is one thing, but the the tendency to see everything that goes on on this planet as somehow the manifestation of a Zionist masterplan is just plain silly. There are many examples of this foolishness on this blog.

  • Fred

    Chris2

    While I understand that there are those who see bullying, blackmail and sexual abuse of children as “character building” I didn’t go to public school and I’m not a Catholic so I’m not one of them.

    I don’t believe a crime is any less serious if committed by remote control. Killing someone with a drone is just as much murder as shooting them face to face. Making a girl do things against her will out of fear of what would happen if she didn’t is just as serious over a web link as face to face and if that thing involved penetration with an object then yes I would call it rape.

    Sexual experimentation may be OK between consenting young people in a relationship but it is not if forced on several preyed upon victims under duress even if it is done at a distance and under the anonymity of the internet.

    Sorry if this disillusions you.

  • Herbie

    Angry and Habbakuk both claim

    “the tendency to see everything that goes on on this planet as somehow the manifestation of a Zionist masterplan is just plain silly. There are many examples of this foolishness on this blog.”

    Can either of you provide some substance for this claim?

    Or is it little more than paranoid fantasy.

  • Herbie

    By the way Angry, your claim that:

    “Western standards of living don’t require poverty, war and starvation and in many cases resulted in the opposite.”

    https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/03/the-american-dream/#comment-396760

    isn’t supported by the book you cited, Guns, Germs and Steel.

    Its author, Jared Diamond, is under no illusions about the impoverishment of others by plunder:

    “Europeans could not settle in large numbers, but what they still could do was to extract wealth from Africans, initially slaves, then rubber, diamonds, and copper. Basically that means robbing Africans and setting up legalized institutions for corruption. Colonialism also changed the Africans’ traditional way of life. They moved to cities next to the mines where their immunities no longer provided protection against tropical diseases.” ”

    http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2005/07/0706_050706_diamond_2.html

  • angrysoba

    Herb, “Can either of you provide some substance for this claim?

    Or is it little more than paranoid fantasy.”

    You only have to read Guano’s posts to see that he believes everything bad that happens on this planet is the fault of Zionists. There are plenty of others who have said comparable things too.

    Mark Golding really summed up the mindset once with this little gem: “When we get down to the wire politics is now polarised between the grasping Zionist banking New World Order on the one side and conscience and Islam on the other.”

  • angrysoba

    Herb: “Its author, Jared Diamond, is under no illusions about the impoverishment of others by plunder”

    Nobody is denying there has been plunder by Europeans. I am saying that high standards of living and increasing standards of living DO NOT require war, poverty and famine. You said something along the lines of “Just look at South America, then” (my paraphrase) but didn’t substantiate it.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)

    @ Herbie :

    I think Angrysoba has answered your question rather well.

    Although he could have replied, as one of the Eminences of this blog recently said to me in another context, “do your own research”.

  • Herbie

    Angry

    It’s good that you’re not now denying there has been plunder by Europeans, and I’m sure you’ll now agree, Americans too.

    And obviously that will impoverish those who are its victims.

    Jared Diamond’s argument only goes so far as explaining how Europeans and subsequently Americans managed to get their hands on superior weapons, the better with which to plunder. The vast majority of European and American wealth comes not from domestic agriculture, obviously, but from the exploitation of those with poorer weapons.

    The south American experience is one of European exploitation in the first instance and latterly US exploitation through dictator, though they’re now making a go of self determination, with a few exceptions. There’s no serious commentator who disputes that. There are only arguments around whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing.

  • Herbie

    Angry

    So you’ve two instances which you claim support your case.

    So your case now is that there are two posters who have said Zionism is responsible for something.

    That’s certainly not what Habbakuk was claiming, nor indeed is it quite as comprehensive a claim as you’ve been leading us to believe.

    It’s all very well making these grand statements about all posters here, but unless you can support them you’re just making a fool of yourself, as indeed habbakuk regularly does.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)

    I’ve noticed that conspiracy theories are favoured by at least some of the Eminences of this blog and so I thought that I might contribute an occasional series bringing to your attention new, as yet undiscovered conspiracies which you would get your teeth into. Just for the sake of broadeninbg your horizons and understabding a little, because the Zionist world plot is beginning to get rather stale.

    So here is N° 1 in this occasional series. It concerns the “horsemeat rather than beef” affair.

    If you take into consideration when the news broke, and also the fact that there have apparently been cases in the fresh meat sector where horsemeat has been passed off as beef, it is clear that this is a conspiracy by the Roman Catholic church.

    The purpose is to put off people from eating meat as a way of getting them to better observe the precepts of the Church regarding fasting during the Lent period. By turning people off meat, the hope is that fasting will be better observed. More fasting is but the tip of an iceberg intended to tughten the grip of the Church on humanity.

    You will have noticed that the Roman Catholic Church has been rather silent about the affair, thus demonstrating its complicity. It is also significant that the Church is a major shareholder in the firms which have been identified as supplying the fraudulent meat.

    The Eastern Orthodox Church is of course also involved : at least one of the firms supplying the fraudulent meat is Romanian, which everyone knows is the leading church in that country.

    Feel free to comment. I shall reveal other conspiracies as and when circumstances permit.

    Have a nice conspiracy day!

  • nevermind

    Another great up and standing projection of facts, just, thank you Craig, I hope you have reached some of the synapses present.

    Never in the history of belly aches has a Hanoveranian had more global coverage than today.

    Today is another good day to bury bad news. Maybe add a bladder problem by the Greek consort and we have enough welling up to start attacking Iran/Gaza/China without much notice here, the MSM will see to it.

    @ Mary. Yes it was ‘immature and shallow’, it was heard loud and clear. I’m sure that William bellicose noises, raising the spectre of supplying arms not just hanky’s, on top of the training we have given to Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda mercenaries, will soon be drowned out by Osborne’s budget howls.

    Open nomination for County council election is 25th. March-5th. April

    You want change?
    proved it!

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)

    @ Herbie :

    “So you’ve two instances which you claim support your case”.

    Sloppy reading leads to sloppy answers, Herbie : the instances DO support his case (delete the words “you claim”).

    Just to chuck another morsel in your direction, how about Clark with his “it’s all the corporations”?

    Now get on with your own research and stop being such a chump.

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