Blue Revolution Archive 09.09.15 to 24.11.15

09.09.15 segregation and faith- demanded by some but is it still necessary

There has recently been the debate about women only carriages on trains, seemingly supported by a Labour leadership contender. This along with the demand for gender segregation in universities who have accepted some Islamic guest speakers, as well as the use of the veil and other kinds culturally specific practices and behaviours, seems to have caused confusion to commentators and some politicians alike. There seems to be among some well- intended and liberal minded people the view that acceptance of these requirements confers important inclusive status on them.

Perversely there has also been a growing intolerance by some females who identify themselves as liberal feminists but who rail against men who have the audacity to speak to them in public. Whether these men are “chatting them up” or are simply trying to make polite conversation in that strained British way, is perhaps irrelevant; the point is why react so aggressively to what is on the face of it harmless attempt at human interaction. Perhaps segregation provides the answer.

The main issue in these scenarios is that it is gender based and thus open to a whole world of confusion and misunderstanding; particularly in respect of what is suggested and intended. This happens in the absence of a coherent position about why such segregation is demanded. Should that position statement offer support for segregation though? Should it be general segregation, segregation in lecture halls, segregation on trains and the veil as a means of emphasising segregation. Are these the right and proper responses to the issues thrown up practically and culturally by men and women sharing the same space in lecture halls, trains and the world in general. We at Blue Revolution think not and wonder why there is little compelling analysis of why not. The well-intentioned liberal sleepwalking towards a world of sexual discrimination on the back of demands for cultural inclusion. You couldn’t make it up.

Culturally mankind has been through phases where such segregating behaviour was not only logical it was necessary to preserve the social and economic context that provided the value and wealth necessary to sustain the community, be that a family, tribe or nation. Men and women had separate spheres of influence and therefore separation seemed logical and created stability where otherwise instability may have cast a shadow over survival. Like much that is outdated but “cultural” such practices become totemic of particular cultures or as with the veil, fetishized politically as a means of emphasising one’s faith based moral superiority. This is done not always with a calm and deep conviction that adherence to such beliefs about modesty is about personal identity, but as a loud expression of cultural and group difference. Culture can get caught in a time warp and distorts faith so it provides a reactionary solution to very modern problems if indeed some of these things are problems. Things like being chatted up on a train; solution; women only carriages, sexual delinquency in the community; public separation of the sexes, abuse of women by men; the veil. Really?

Of course rather than accept these ideas at face value it makes sense to explore them sensibly and to arrive at a coherent perspective; the danger of not doing so is that the rights argument kicks in and the whole issue is drowned out as it is in France by the application of competing rights to do and not do. A kind of fetishism develops on both sides of the argument.  The real question is this; just how necessary is segregation, in a world that needs to progress cooperation between the sexes so that mankind’s creative social and economic power can be maximised and perhaps the production of people curtailed.

Do we really need to adopt practices which were more in keeping for an age of uncertainty, contingency, war, disease and famine?

Now apart from confusion about how to solve the wests gender related social problems, what often leads to the demand for gender separation amongst the liberal minded is that the advocates are largely from a range of nationalities who feel their largely Islamic  faith is persecuted by the west, thus oddly legitimising any anti-western cultural position on anything. So, some on the left give advocates of separation a sympathetic hearing. Some thinkers and even feminists appear sold on the idea that the capitalist world commodifies or objectifies people on gender lines too, therefore a solution is to segregate the sexes for non- capitalist reasons and thus neutralise the power of that capitalist objectification. This for us at Blue Revolution is like accepting the removal of a leg to cure the pain of an ingrowing toenail. We have explored objectification ourselves in previous posts. It is one of our deadly sins, the solution is nor separation though.

Of course, the west has issues, big ones too. The freedoms allowed in the individuals having rights to Consent, Contract and Choose means that we can promote lifestyles which of excessive and bad for us and for our communities. We at Blue Revolution call this negative side to western culture “Secular Westernism”. However, the solution cannot be separation or segregation. We need to address the West’s problems be they problem of debt based over consumption, illegitimacy, divorce, depression, drug or alcohol misuse; but we can’t do this at the expense of our freedoms and our ability to mix and mingle together as genders because this is how we deliver social and economic value.

If you look at the joyous outcomes of the West’s freedom; the technology, engineering, space exploration, medicine, arts and sports one would not want to turn the clock back to any kind of separation or segregation based on a social and economic model that is now largely defunct apart from in ISIS territory. The blue revolution is not about taking away choice, contract and consent or removing anything that is positive about the way the west has evolved; it is about analysing and understanding why things are as they are including oddities like the demand for segregation.

However, we counter these demands with a positive celebration what the West could achieve if individuals controlled their personal behaviour and adopted a more coherent view of life based on the freedoms they enjoy, but with the practice of personal self-restraint. This Blue Revolution is in the minds of individuals and unlike past “Red” revolutions not in the head of the group, be that group a segregated one or not as the case may be.

14.09.15 What should a Corby win mean for those of faith?

This may be a bit polemical but it is clear for the Labour Party that a coalition of the socially vulnerable, the ill-informed and the downright stupid have elected  leaders of such breath-taking  economic illiteracy that it is to be hoped that they never have control of the leavers of government.  People of faith or no faith, people who value their freedom to live  a moral life or faith based life, feel safe to hold their own opinions and express their genuine fears about the state of the world however  they see it, should worry a little more now. There will be unwanted interference from a party, even in opposition, who have declared a will to tax high and disincentivise work, effort and profit and who will,  more importantly, try and define and control the social and economic paradigm in a way never seen before; simply to maintain fear and build support.  This will mean the views of the Labour movement or the  spokes people at its head, determine what is politically acceptable or unacceptable, who is in and who is out; what is socially acceptable and what is not, all driven by naïve collectivist thinking influenced by goodness knows who.

There is no “capitalism” that needs bringing to heel; we are not living in the 1900’s. The changes that have been positive at least in part since the last world war, have delivered a socialism (Initially the catastrophic government ownership of business and industry then re distributing wealth and protecting the vulnerable). However, the socialist dream in Britain and the American dream in the USA have delivered from “Capitalism” a free market system that has many faults and flaws. It has given rise to the commodification of people, given rise to illegitimacy and substance abuse plus needless consumption and waste of the planet’s resources.  As we at Blue Revolution are always trying to point out the solution to this “Secular Westernism” is not collectivism on an economic level or socialism or sharia law on a social level but for people to embrace freedom and responsibly; not a Corbyn Red Revolution but a Blue Revolution with no head just millions of freethinking intelligent moral minds.

17.09.15 Modern Deadly Sin Number 6- Selfishness

Selfishness is a socially corrosive behaviour and to many people it is not something they readily associate with themselves. However, selfishness must extend beyond the personal into the social sphere for it to be a deadly sin. It is not simply about putting yourself first by taking the last piece of cake, although clearly this is selfish too in certain circumstances; it is about living your life based on fulfilling your personal needs and desires without any consideration being given to others. Working in the public sector; retiring to Spain and returning when infirm to be cared for by the NHS is clearly an act of selfishness. Ignoring the needs of adult children in a world  where challenges for them are great and their chances are limited by straightened economic circumstances is selfish if what wealth you have goes on holidays or cars; divorcing the partner with whom you have children of whom you has tired or no longer find attractive, is selfish.

There are many similar examples. Selfishness is linked to other modern sins such as Objectification (number 2) and Want Based Consumption (number 5). At its worst one must objectify others to overcome one’s own scruples about being selfish and more often than not selfishness is about having money for one’s own excessive personal over consumption.

The social and economic consequences of this sin is that we withdraw emotionally from wider society or indeed from our families. We cease to be socially active and therefore our positive beliefs and values become obscured by our preoccupation with applying these values to ourselves i.e. generosity, kindness etc. In practical terms this means have fewer volunteers to staff everything from Charity Shops to soup kitchens to community litter picks. We have fewer people to support and work with the vulnerable, we have more single parents for whom partnering to raise children is not a selfish enough lifestyle choice. We have children who are simply not wanted but were brought into the world because of the access they gave to resources, often taxpayers resources, to pay for tattoo’s, alcohol and drugs flats cars and houses.  We have the elderly being looked after by the state.

Selfishness which was once frowned upon by those of faith (and for some if recognised, still is) is like our previous modern deadly sins, a component of what we call Secular Westernism, It is something all good people of all faiths and none  need to distance themselves from; so the right social values start to filter back into those parts of society which need them and people come to accept that whatever one has or does not have, we should never turn our backs on our widest responsibilities to others.

To make a positive change  part of our Blue Revolution, it cannot be directed for us by the state but must come because we realise that our selfishness is bad for us but more importantly it is bad for our community, our society and gives a very poor impression of our Western culture.

20.09.15 Men and women; has our creative tension gone toxic.

The more we at Blue Revolution kick the topic of “men and women” around; particularly when we stray from a purely European or US centric model of gender relations, the more some of the fundamental issues we have covered over the last six months or so can at a very basic level, be put at the door of poor inter sex relationships.

The Muslim faith is want to refer to “the role of women in Islam”; a very important role but one largely dependent on women accepting two principles: one being a woman’s role is essentially social in character rather than economic and the second being that a woman acts in line with the requirements  of her faith as determined by her husband  or father who in turn takes his advice from the local religious leader who is an expert in the Qur’an and hadith.  Now there is little scope within Islam to be of a “reformed” persuasion. Hence, we think we get the confusion over Islam and extremism. From a secular western vantage point much of Islam seems extreme; and indeed, it perhaps is.

It seems that for many within the faith that the “reformed” can be construed as un-Islamic. Therefore, relations between the sexes are quite prescribed; but living amongst people of the Islamic faith in the UK one is struck by the overall sense of peace that applies to the Islamic community in general. When it works it works well, but perhaps not to every secular western taste or social appetite.

Women with hair covered marshal their usually largish brood with love and devotion whilst father is at the Islamic club, work or mosque.  There is overall an acceptance that this a prescribed way of life and therefore dissatisfaction is both pointless and unacceptable. We suspect this is a fact lost by the left wing who whilst promoting the destruction of the family through a change in values engineered by tax and benefit arrangements, also buy in to the wider collectivist moral values of the Islamic faith.

When one looks at the lives of women culturally through the ages one sees by modern standards some very barbaric treatment; some of which has become fetishized around faith or culture such as veiling, shrouding, stoning of “Harlots” and adulteresses, the dowry, arranged marriage, foot binding, neck coils, and FGM. This treatment of women which we at Blue Revolution have described as a form of “proto fascism” has evolved over many thousands of years and apart from the fact cultures differ, the intent seems to be the same; to control women, constrain them in a “patriarchal” hegemony t0 protect male wealth and or status. No wonder once women lose their cultural link to this type of hegemony in whatever form it takes and for them it ceases to have legitimacy, some can get politically angry whilst others seem to want a kind of revenge for patriarchy’s past ills of which the hapless males in their lives are often on the receiving end. Paradoxically some women seem to turn to Leninist socialism; the bedfellow of all moral collectivist ideologies. The majority however it seems to us at Blue Revolution simply revert to a kind of primitive reproductive behaviour which is neither moral, sustainable or fair; particularly on their children.

If anyone is reading this; you may be getting a little angry; we are not however advocating any return to patriarchy. Alternatively you may start recognising that there is something rather odd about a hegemonic patriarchal almost universally derided culture which was at its creation designed to preserve the species through male power and supply both the maximum amounts of social and economic value and whilst legitimately being thrown away has no obvious replacement. Now in the west patriarchy has been abandoned its loss throws up anomalies like industrial scale child illegitimacy, lone parents; the oddity of people step parenting other people’s children whilst someone step parents theirs, lonely grandparents locked out of families with the loss of social values lost to a generation and mentally ill fathers with little contact with their kids and the need to unlearn “love”, kids in cars being driven for “access” and so on and so forth.

The question therefore arises thus; is there something innately human and dare we say legitimate about this derided way of ordering society. After all it goes back to the days when humanity was wealth creating as it is now. Or is there something wrong with how we as a secular western society have managed the sexual revolution in the absence of any faith-based belief in the ways we did things in the past. Whatever your views, (and there will be many, most, we suspect conflicted at a social, political and psychological and personal level)  it is in our opinion a good question. We will consider it and return to the topic later.

29.09.15 The world drifting Left? -What does this mean.

The Pope is going left when it comes to an array of issues including global warming, world economics and migration; the Labour Party is giving up the “middle ground” and going left wing. They are taking with them an array of morally well-intentioned, but we think muddled individuals who amongst other things attack “gentrification” by “direct action” and claim to represent the “working classes”. From the perspective of Blue Revolution, the self-confessed left wing whether people of faith or not, are something of an oddity. Faith has always acted to influence personal behaviour and the outcome has generally been positive and generated social and economic value. Notwithstanding unacceptable by-products of discrimination against women and gays being in modern terms unacceptable but culturally specific, the benefits to the majority were all to obvious.

The differences between faiths have been essentially cultural but the unifying characteristic was the requirement to observe certain ways of conducting one’s self; one’s behaviour was required to conform to social rules to maximise societies survival. The rise of Secular Westernism has seen the west strip away any broad observance of moral as opposed to strictly legal behaviour. Britain’s New Labour specialised in the kind of “moral minimalism”.

The consequence has been the rise of issues which require state intervention to correct; the correction usually comes via welfare subsidies and the moral decline that is caused as a result, simply adds to the overall problem generation on generation. The solution adopted by right of centre governments is to restrict the availability of Government generosity; the so called “austerity agenda”. The problem is that unless there is a moral revival those who feel the loss under austerity and are “entitled” to support, become angry when the support is restricted, reduced or removed. This is in simple terms the cause of the rise of the left wing.

The problem however is that the modern left wing sees more Government as the solution. More Government means more government workers, more tax, more welfare and ultimately less opportunity, freedom and choice. If the Government was so good at planning and getting it right, we would stop the disaster of modern dating and relationships and ask the Government to find us our friends and mating partners. But we don’t and that tells us all we need to know.

The left really is old hat. The idea of the government stepping in may have been necessary in 1900 but today…it’s a quaint throwback to an era that we are never going to return to. There are problems with “the free market” but the solution is not “Leninist socialism”. We at Blue Revolution agree regulation is necessary to ensure the producer/providers relationship doesn’t overwhelm consumers. But, the main power for change is the mass choice of morally informed people who reject the lifestyle of Secular Westernism by their positive economic and social choices. At the same time, they should also reject any laughable idea that bureaucratic state socialism has anything positive to offer either. Go figure!

01.10.15 Love me do…….But in the bar the piano man’s found another nail for my heart

One of our occasional contributors was listening to a radio show in Stoke on Trent in the UK and heard an interview with the 1970’s and 1980’s pop group Squeeze. The interviewer was apparently very excited about interviewing them asking questions about influences such as location in south London etc. What struck our contributor however was that the lyrics of the songs written by Squeeze in the 70’s and 80’s resonate with images of a life of disastrous relationships, unplanned babies, failed marriages and general emotional sorrow. Men (and women) of a certain age let us say 50 to 60 were weaned on the Beatles “Love me do” but too many have, in the last 30 years, had nails riven through their hearts. These songs perhaps speak to that generation. As he says what kind of society can be cold hearted enough to think that the emotional warmth of the loving union of two people can be thrown away on an almost industrial scale and somehow that society survive more than a couple of generations. We agree; and we believe it is another symptom of Secular Westernism and unless we all address it as individuals by being more coherently caring with each other we will all be “up the junction”. ”Now, is that love” we ask?

02.10.15 Migration-can faith offer some hope?

Migration is different and somehow the same as it has been for centuries. People moved away from the straight jacket of Catholicism as it was becoming a stifling brake on the aspirations of the motivated and proto entrepreneurial. In the past as we have said before the Catholic faith had a legitimate role for the poor as well as for the rich and a whole culture was based on faith and feast days, Matins, Vespers, Compline and the Latin mass. But this didn’t make a good basis for progressive social and economic development. The people who escaped from Britain and its Anglo Catholicism went to America and founded states and great cities. Their faith evolved but there was a faith that endured. Their faith required hard-work and self-reliance. Not the dogmatic certainty of rich men in castles and poor men at gates.

Today we have again faith-based migration caused by what is seen as a predominantly political crisis engulfed in a war. This crisis as with earlier ones promises to engulf economies, societies and enduring certainties; yet for some reason it seems not to be called a faith-based migration. But the more we look at it here at Blue Revolution the more it is clear that this is exactly what it is. People are fleeing warring tribes in Iraq, ISIS in Syria, they are leaving repressive regimes but in all these scenarios they are leaving a religious faith that is unyielding to the demands of modern economic progress. Thus, we have western attired youths and young people who are escaping the confines of Islam…not abandoning their faith but finding a place where their Islamic faith is more compatible with their own desires and aspirations. They are for this reason clearly more “economic” migrant than refugee….although there are many of them too.

So, looking at this as a crisis within a faith specifically Islam a number of suggestions can be offered; Places we call “dust bowl” Islamic countries need to see these migrations as evidence that there countries need to move from the 16th century to perhaps the 19th. Establish principles such as Contract, Choice and Consent as the basis of a slow move towards democracy.

Countries that are currently repressive 19th and early 20th Century in the way they maintain order i.e. through bureaucracy, repression and lack of accountability, need to move forward to the 21st century, promoting human rights and freedoms irrespective of gender, sexuality etc. Saudi Arabia falls into the first category, Assad’s Syria the second. Much of Africa is in the former category. The western world’s fetishizing of “Democracy” needs to be tempered by the realism that until people can freely support themselves within their societies and to create economic value through contract, choice and consent; democracy will simply be a pipe dream. We think Putin gets this point better than western leaders.

Is there a word of caution in all of this; well of course there is. Firstly, the countries from whom the migrants flee are the cause of their problems; not the countries to which they wish to migrate. Migration can be temporary as technology and transport remove the enforced permanent geographical and cultural separation migrants endured in the past; think air and sea travel, Skype and the internet; forces for good as well as mischief. But there is a lesson in all this for the west too. As we at Blue Revolution are always saying Secular Westernism is a cultural  aberration caused by a lack of personal moral behaviour within a liberal economic framework and thus not fully worthy of the title civilised. For those people of faith who come to the west we must accept that many of them will find our culture deeply troubling. Rather than assuming they are wrong why don’t we accept they have a point and adopt the principles of the Blue Revolution to ensure we can accommodate people of all faiths and none.

07.10.15 Dust bowl economics in Britain- some mistake surely

The conference season has come to an end, thankfully! What are our observations? Well Tim Farron gave the most passionate speech about migration, wonderfully delivered but unfortunately it lacked the smack of realism; a kind of German welcome without the jobs or the infrastructure. Labour were back on the old socialist treadmill; sucking up value created by working people and spending it on government projects to help, well the government; government employees, and perhaps the army of people who have been undermined by years of moral minimalism at the hands of  New Labour.  These sad and vulnerable people now lack not only skills, but the values that make work the first thought in the morning rather than the thought dismissed as the duvet goes back over the head at eleven PM. We understand what causes this problem it’s the secular nature of modern western culture; secular westernism as we call it.

As for the Conservative party; we would prefer to refer critically to what we view as a policy designed to appeal to the imagined “middle ground” but which has as much moral substance as borrowing from the future to pay for the excess of the present; we refer of course to the myth of home ownership and the destruction of lands productive food value.

Now let us define our terms; we at Blue Revolution are only concerned with value; social and economic. Value is inherent in land, as it is in people’s productive capacity both for economic production and the production of social value in the form of cohesive behaviour that promotes the survival of the group be it family, tribe, country, kingdom or empire.

Taking a piece of unproductive land and building housing on it allows that land to realise some social value as well as create some wealth. As unproductive land it has the actual food producing value of a piece of rock. However, take some fertile farmland that gives up it produce in the form of food value and you turn a repeating cycle of value into merely wealth. That wealth might increase, but the food value inherent in the land is gone. Even open unfarmed land has some social value as recreation. So, if you promote house building on farmland, are you really creating anything of real economic value or is it simply a case of creating wealth, which simply feeds the monster of secular westernism? Paying as it does for consumption and with that all that the secular market offers but which has no discernible social or economic value.

This is the “dust bowl” economics in the west. Whilst the moral outcomes are not inhumane, the process is like that of the oil rich states; you take value out of the ground and use it to prop up an increasingly unsustainable economic model. As you do this people become more dependent on the valueless wealth and entitled to receive it and the whole socio/economic model becomes utterly incoherent, unable to pay its way in the long term. Incidentally we also feel that the Conservatives “own rather than rent” policy drives the same kind of incoherence; trapping people into wealth generating “homes” which simply feed the desire to consume unsustainably. We agree that all forms of home ownership and good quality tenancies are legitimate; but the government has no place interfering in the market at all. Germany does a lot better than us because there the economy produces value rather than using home ownership to generate wealth.

Oh, and all the above explains why socialism is the ideology of the past and has no place in anyone’s future. Socialists only speak of wealth; they have regrettably lost all notion of value. But expanding on that, is a post in its own right.

 

13.10.15 Labour and Conservatives; what if anything do, they have in common?

Most notably they both define their economics in terms of the nation’s wealth, its creation and distribution as opposed to the nations value its creation and distribution. Wealth has become a shorthand for value but is it?

They have differences of perspective of course but they are economically less striking than they at first appear. Since Adam Smith first penned his “Wealth of Nations” the term wealth creation has become the shorthand for what economies should do; they create wealth don’t they? Politics of course is about how governments manage the nation’s wealth and how and to whom they distribute it.

Those who read the Blue Revolution posts will possibly be aware we very rarely refer to wealth, preferring the term value. Value has two essential types; social and economic. Social value is about the capacity of a society to behave in a stable way within the economic context which defines how economic value is created.  The creation of economic value is determined by the way society mixes the resources (land, labour, money and skill) necessary to feed and support its people. Both types of value are connected but to really appreciate the raw necessity of this link we need to look at tribal society.

Tribes are simple societies, but they have faith in and are compliant with their tribal system which defines everything from the age at which one comes of age and what one is expected to do at that age, to how food is acquired and consumed. Value therefore is about how we maintain ourselves within a stable community based (hopefully) on a shared belief system. Beliefs which are necessary to maximise social and economic value.

Wealth on the other hand is not what a tribal society had to worry about managing, they don’t generate wealth.

Simple wealth arises when one is able to generate more value than is required by society and then having created it, store it and accumulate it…..storing it became easier with the discovery of precious stones, gold and silver. As we said above to get to even simple wealth creation you must generate more economic value than you need. Once this has happened the next stage of development is politics because wealth can be controlled and does not have to be distributed. Unlike the cave man dragging the valuable carcass of an antelope into the tribal compound to be consumed by all before it rotted; wealth could be stored, managed, and therefore controlled. The person who controlled wealth had power, power to hang on to it all or give a portion of the stored value on those who served them. Their wealth conferred for loyalty would be used to buy food shelter etc.

Now this simple wealth has a strong link with value; because simple wealth is an accumulation of actual economic value. Our early political evolution was essentially a process by which we argued about to whom simple wealth was distributed; feudal overlord or merchant trader. later, Marxism was about the distribution of wealth and the need to change the whole social and economic system to achieve a fair distribution to those “workers” who create the wealth, rather than the “capitalists” who it was claimed exploited the “workers”.

The above is a whirlwind trip through the history of faith, society and economics all three sort of linked in a somewhat wobbly but coherent progression. So far so good but what has it to do with modern politicians. By the time Karl Marx was writing the obvious abuses of wealth accumulation were hard to avoid. Poor people were working to create wealth for the rich and suffering extreme poverty as their reward. Not even tribal society with its gender defined roles and tribal mutilations was responsible for such extreme differences in what people had within the same community. Hence Marxism’s claim that capital is misappropriated by capitalists under a cloak of contract and consent.

Anyway; how can we pull this together and answer the question above? Well once we were able to escape the tyranny of wealth based directly on actual use value and we developed ways of creating wealth based on smaller and smaller amounts of real value and politically wealth distribution and consumption became a social pre occupation, we were able to use some of this largely valueless wealth to “speculate” on the future. Borrow and pay back tomorrow, buy now and sell at a higher price later. Then even more recently take something of no actual value (stocks and Shares?) and sell them for money borrowed from banks by the person who buys them or in the case of ‘shorting’ borrow the shares themselves. Once we have got to this point wealth bears no discernible link to value and is indeed a froth on the surface of a very impoverished economy paying for a slowly diminishing society.  We call this secular westernism, others casino economics

It remains the objective of modern secular western politicians to oversee societies which create and distribute “wealth”. Both Conservatives and Labour old and new are interested in wealth and its redistribution; But what relationship does this wealth have to social and economic value. We at Blue Revolution suggest very little. Broadly but not exclusively government has taken on a role generating wealth via Quantitative Easing and spending to create a budget deficit if. The banking system, house building, increasing house and stock values creating wealth too. Both are in very simple terms ways of manufacturing wealth rather than creating value. Of course, this is a very simple model; it ignores things like low interest rates as a positive way of driving progress, stock issues as a way of facilitating investment and the need for a complex society to have underpinning it a complex and accessible economy. It also ignores the role of the rest of the world producing the value we no longer can, perhaps because we simply have too many unproductive people here in the west a consequence of capitalism’s failure and evolution into a free market.

We at Blue Revolution believe that what western society needs is to get closer to creating proper value; even if we are poorer in terms of our apparent wealth for doing it. We believe we will be happier as a result. This is the basis of our Blue Revolution; moral renewal and value creation by proper un-gendered social and economic endeavour. We will explore this later and explore what we can all do to become a Blue Revolutionary.

17.10.15 What might happen if women lose their biologically and sociologically defined role as child bearers and mothers?

All faiths and even many of no faith; governments and other groups continue to promote a biological and sociological role for women; encouraged with varying degrees of emphasis or compulsion by the welfare based incentives offered in the west to the threat of punishment up to and including execution for those who fail to deliver on this “expectation” elsewhere. We have described the historical treatment of women by early culture as “proto fascism” and when the reality  of past women’s lives are examined that term seems to acquire serious relevance today; particularly in places like the definitive dust bowl economy that got lucky; modern Saudi Arabia with its ancient gender and faith obsessions parading as civilised behaviour in the twenty first century. No chance of women in Saudi being given choices to re-evaluate what is a biological accident but which determining a thoroughly ghastly sociological reality. Anyway, we have Blue Revolution observe more interesting places that Saudi Arabia and Japan is one such place.

On the face of it  Japan probably doesn’t strike one as being of much of interest to the secular western populations in Europe and the US; less of an economic power house more of a post-industrial society settling down to the reality of declining influence and exposure to the exhausting effects of global competition. A bit like us in the west. However according to what we have been told there is a sociological phenomenon taking place in Japan which is quite fascinating and probably needs some Blue Revolution evaluation; men in Japan in the critical 20 to 40 year old demographic are losing their interest in sex; at least sex with other people.

We would vouch that when you empower women and they are able to assume an economic role as opposed to following the pre-determined path towards motherhood; the effects on men is to turn sex into simply another narcotic experience; and for the Japanese and I would suggest the more protestant inclined amongst the Christian community plus others, this “narcotic effect” of sexual behaviour in not worth the complex sociological and psychological consequences on men of getting tangled up in unnecessarily complex relationships. The relationship with a woman who is economically independent would become like that of any good friend. Is this a good thing or a bad thing we ask?

Well anything which gets away from the biological predetermination based on sex and gives people real as opposed to an imagined “choice” about their lives, has to be good; so long as they work to create the social and economic value necessary to support them and their community. It also has the effect of reducing carbon emissions and is kinder to the planet. With fewer people the planet might stand a chance of recovering from the combined effects of carbon dioxide, monoxide, methane, sewage and plastic bags. The oddest phenomenon for us is the sight of the right on earth parent with seven children who wants to save the planet. No chance.

So, to conclude our latest rant; what is our conclusion. Well bring it on. Reduce the incentives for women to have babies; there are enough people in the world having children in cultures where sex is for reproduction rather than for the narcotic effects, we in the west “enjoy” and obsess about. There will be fewer by products often paid for by an unwilling taxpayer to parents who would have been better off drinking a strong coffee or doing some aerobic exercise or simply “sorting themselves out”. The longer we continue to define a woman’s role in religious terms and engineer a welfare system to support it within a culture that sees reproductive sex with someone else as  a recreational entitlement,  the bigger our problems will be in the longer term, economically, sociologically and environmentally.

26.10.15 Feminism and the obsession with the biological role of women- Why not join the patriarchy

Feminists including the sainted Germaine Greer obsess about “women’s experience” as though it unalterably different from men’s experience. In some specific situations it is, but really, we are talking about some specific instances. Ms Greer who we at Blue Revolution  understand is something of an apologist for the cultural barbarity of FGM, overlooks the fact this is a practice that is intended to lock women from traditional societies into a subservient social and  biological role, in contrast to the more “important” male role of ‘economic’ provider. If it happens here in the west it is because we have helped establish the absurd idea that all cultures are equal without the qualification as to how we might measure equality. This is Ms Greer’s problem. Cultures are only equal in the sense they provide the framework for the creation of social and economic value. In simple societies and ones that separate sex for cultural reasons this is gender based. How cultures justify this is either coherent to the means their society has of creating social and economic value i.e. it makes sense socially and economically;  for example men and women’s segregation in 7th century Arabia; or it is totally at odds with how value, social and economic is created and preserved today.

If any modern society or feminist commentator, observes the pre-eminent role of women as “biological and social” and in the case of government this perspective gets props up with  the support of a welfare system that reinforces women’s biological rather than economic role, they are over playing the significance of the role women have been fighting to escape from for centuries.

In the west biological and economic roles are hard to combine effectively; hence past discrimination. By supporting the biological and social role of women, sympathisers such as Ms Greer are setting a trap for western women that many cultures of the world would like western women to fall into (Saudi Arabia anyone?). They are, without even being aware of it, aligning women with the patriarchs of male hegemony; seeing women in purely biological and social roles; from which here in the west, it is all too easy to fall. Our broken families attest to the challenge of combining so many roles.

Ms Greer’s views on transgendered people is illustrative of the point. Gender is irrelevant unless you see people as social and economic gender specific terms. If you see people as a mix of social and economic and that the mix is determined by them and by no one else, the women’s experience for those who opt for an economic role becomes no different from that of men and people who are transgendered. You work, you contribute to society (be a good citizen) you die. It really is time we started to ignore the ideological academics who capture a view that bears little relevance to reality and in its pretence is a dangerous distraction from the aim of creating first gender and then genuine faith and cultural equality. This gender equality of course must be distinguished from the transactivism agenda. Even if equal they are still biologically women as distinct from biologically male.

 

28.10.15 America-a country in need of help?

John Kerry believes that the world is an angry place; people are angry he has said; the flood of people from Syria and Libya and other places in Africa reflects a flee not just to wealthier economies but from the anger of War and hard-line Islam. In America gun crime and the all too predictable schoolboy shootouts continue as evidence of individual bursts of insane anger by a collection of sad and lonely misfits.

In the UK the anger feels less pronounced but bubbles up with either nationalism or socialism amongst the more political, its effects mitigated elsewhere by a welfare system which promotes for too many citizens “self-actualisation” through survival by fornication and the consumption of welfare income. This promotes a pointless hamster wheel lifestyle for too many Britons that achieves little but is unlikely to generate too much in the way of revolution, as it dampens rage, but also delivers little or no social or economic value.

Compared to the US the UK has also managed to avoid some of the pitfalls that have both positively and negatively shaped America, its economy and faith. America has a frontier mentality, something which is sublimated in the form of the “American Dream”.

Whereas the class system in a country like the UK has placed a psychological limit on what citizens believed they were entitled to achieve, in America there is no such constraint and failure is very personal. Whilst class has lost much of its relevance in the UK it has left something of a perverse legacy and people are less inclined to “self- pathologize” their failure, the welfare system assists them to adapt by expecting very little of them for the welfare they receive. They can of course blame the Tory government.

Whilst the value created by the British economy is like all western economies much lower than the wealth it can generate via its banking system, the effects of the old class system and the generosity of the welfare system take the sting out of peoples sense of personal failure.

The role of the economy in creating “wealth” as opposed to “value” is a major contributor to American anger. Wealth is fluid and can like fluid flow only through channels created by people. In America these channels are manufactured by the leaders of the financial system and direct the wealth to those within the system. It is not as American Senator Bernie Sanders says a “casino” system….that is too random. It is a system like the political system in America, designed to maintain the status quo. The old-fashioned Marxist term “Hegemony” i.e. an enclosed system which operates to benefit only certain privileged groups, applies to America more than any other western country. Unlike the UK there is no generous welfare system softening the blow of low achievement and failure.

What the US hegemony delivers, or so we at Blue Revolution believe , is a situation where the poorest become angry and polarised, with low expectations poor state schooling and poor health. Unwilling to accept their personal failure they turn on each other hostile to black people, white people, Hispanics, Jews, Freemasons or just those who seem to be able to ride the wave of wealth that flows through the American economy. The geeky conspiracy theorist no different from the KKK fanatic in the speed at which they get legitimately angry but ignorantly willing to blame another group often irrationally. If one can’t understand what is going on it is easy to be empowered by blaming another racial group.

Politicians who have to tap into banker’s wealth to get re-elected and who then get richer on state and federal finance are seen as part of the greater American problem.

Like the other countries of the west, social value has been supplanted by an obsession with creating mere wealth. In the US more than elsewhere this alchemy of wealth creation doesn’t benefit all people, only the “elite” and the Government. The elite being those who are born into or have made it into this system. Now one point implicit in what we have said but not made explicit yet, is that those who see themselves as the human failures in the American system are genuinely failures of the system. There is no attempt to empower them, educate them, or even wrap them in numbing welfare. They are ghettoised and imprisoned become racists or gangsters determined perhaps to achieve the American dream by making others the failures in their own closed system.

All criminals are vulnerable and entitled in the way they achieve status at the expense of others. Prison gets them out of the way but doesn’t take away the “hegemony”; of being in an enclosed system of alienation and poverty, discrimination and abuse to rival the worst third world ghetto.

The UK has less of these American problems too because it has a sane attitude towards guns, preventing for the most part those who do become insanely angry about their loss of economic position and opportunity the option of shooting up other people.

Essentially America espouses bourgeois freedoms which create expectations but offer a system to fulfil them which creates not value but wealth, which is then channelled into the hands of bankers, stockbrokers and those commissioned by government to create weapons to reflect American status on the world stage. The poor in America don’t have the cushioning or numbing effects of seventy years’ worth of welfare, they don’t have a culture that at least is well intentioned if not always successful in driving social progress and inclusion. Whilst the UK has to row back a little in terms of the numbing effects of welfare and like America and the west has to get away from mere wealth creation and move towards a value-based economy.

America has to move towards a system which is probably unaffordable given the extent of the people problem, ignorance, obesity anger, conspiracy and vested interest up to and including government contracts and political influence mean that for America Secular Westernism will be a hard ideology to shift.

02.11.15 Do we need a revolution? if so, what type should it be? Red or Blue?

Some wag once commented that there was no such thing as a free lunch. There is certainly no such thing as a free revolution. Whichever past revolution one selects there is mayhem; destruction, death and the promotion of one special interest group over another, someone pays!

Revolution, it seems to us at Blue Revolution ushers in one repressive regime, often ousting something out of date muddled and incoherent, but replacing it with something, perhaps more coherent but, if not at least as bad in the short term probably considerably worse. Why this might be is not altogether clear to us (we are not academics, historians etc) but of course things settle down eventually, once society recovers from the “birth pain” of the new order.

Over the last 2000 years we have progressed in fits and starts but not without pain and bloodshed on mankind’s muddled revolutionary journey.

If we look at what is going on now (early 21 century) we see that there are, demographic, religious, economic, political and gender-based tensions, accompanied by a demand for “change” and “something must be done” growing ever shriller.

We at Blue Revolution have written about this global anger and have stressed the need to finally move away from economic, racial and biological determinants of social class, caste and position as the best way of healing society and moving us all forward. We thought we had put aside western class-based determinants of social position, but, whilst significantly diminished they are still here, and they too need finally addressing. But how?

There are people; and groups of people who would like to engage us all in violent revolution based on the overthrow of the dimming embers of our current class and establishment paradigm. This old-fashioned approach however owes too much to the past and too little to the future. These people seem to demand a spitting and shouting, burning and destroying with Red style Revolution. They, like we, see the fault lines in the west….they see our “Secular Westernism” for example not as a product of the interplay of numerous forces including global economics coupled with faulty individual moral choice and poor judgement, but as the product of a corrupt and corrupting economic system. They want a violent struggle and an overthrow of the past to replace the hated rule of the “corrupt elite” (Banks, right wing governments, industrial conglomerates and Stock holders in particular) with the rule of errrrr…..an elite force of well-intentioned and informed super moral people in super moral governments all somehow financed and licenced to guide plan and steer our lives . However, they don’t stop and think that as part of the past, these people if appointed, would like the rest of us, be part of the problem not the solution. Power, control setting the agenda, limiting freedom would simply replace wealth, control, marketing and restricting opportunities through exclusion.

The Red Revolutionaries do have a point…Secular Westernism is bad….it is particularly bad for those at the tail end of societies, societies which are today as corrosive psychologically and socially as in Victorian times the faith- based counterpart was corrosive physically and socially.

Secular Westernism leads to a moral vacuum corrupting those who have neither the stamina or the self-esteem to hold their nerve, having to manage their lives within its marketplace of unavoidable levels of economic and social uncertainty.

The State to mitigate the effects of this moral vacuum has, rather like the Christian faiths of old, provided security, a welfare as opposed to spiritual security that makes the system seem legitimate in the minds of the most vulnerable. This is particularly true of the UK but also to a lesser degree America and elsewhere. So why the current high levels of anger?

The west has created a global free market with consumption at its heart……for us therefore it is not capitalist we have moved beyond “Capitalist”. We are now buccaneering free marketeers.

Capital has actual value owned and controlled by, well “Capitalists”. It is stretching a point too far to say that a made-up stream of central bank, government and credit based ‘funny money’ sloshing around the globe is “Capitalist” in character. There is little real capital around anymore. What we have are systems of wealth creation and wealth allocation which favour certain groups at the expense of others. Some mitigation through welfare is possible, but essentially the free market is both the cause and the cure of the problem. The “problem” being defined as too few people having too much money backed by too little if any real value.

Whoever you look at who has “loadsamoney” be it Beckham or Trump, pop stars and celebrities, or a person who made their  millions selling personalised this or tat related that, the truth is that they have far more money than there is value behind their money; and therein lies the dilemma for our “revolutionaries”. What exactly is being “reallocated” in the revolution…….”funny money!!”

What the Red revolutionaries seem intent on doing; depending on which one you listen to, is empower the government to do what the financial and other markets currently do, but to do it for the benefit of the poor.  However as with previous revolutions if they simply replace one busted system with another version of the same system, they fail to progress society and in the case of our spitting taunting shouting and burning Red Revolutionaries they will replace one group of power and wealth grabbers (let’s say Bankers) paid for with funny money with another, let’s say state officials, paid for by funny money. The moral hazard associated with this funny money continuing to make people both idle and entitled and increasingly unproductive. The process will survive until the Government, or rather the people go under. Not so different than the current risk of individuals eventually going under. Same destination….different route and scale so to speak.

Now here at Blue Revolution HQ the Blue Revolution approach is just as radical but considerably more difficult to explain, but we think better informed. Of course anyone who reads our posts will know we are no fans of the corrosion inflicted by Secular Westernism, with it’s under regulated global free market undermining personal and public morals. Its lack of moral hazard forging societies which don’t resemble civilizations and alienate and makes enemies of people who, quite understandably, but illogically, find answers to the west’s problems in old world type discriminations. People for whom control and discrimination (gender, faith racial sexual orientation, nationality etc.) are the solution and who all too often and perversely become the bedfellows of the Red Revolution as they all want to “change the system” by force.

The Blue Revolution takes as its starting point the fact that wealth and value share little in common these days. They have since we learnt to store value been different; one depending on the other (wealth depending on value) but in a ratio which was on a human scale. Now wealth is out of control and is consuming value as fast as it can be pumped out of the ground, harvested, built over or manufactured. The slush of wealth corrupts life and bloats expectations, creating the moral vacuum in which we all co-exist and which taints all of us.

The Blue Revolution is not a violent revolution, it is the nearest thing to a free lunch. It asks everyone who can think and has the capacity to control and modify their behaviour to do so on the basis of certain principles; down scaling expectations, have belief in the capacity of people to do good and actually do good; behave in a thoughtful and moral way putting back and not just taking out. An act of kindness, selfless and unrewarded is the simplest form of “value added”. Recognise that wealth, our wealth and that of others, is of no value unless it is backed up by hard work rather than luck, over confidence and the vagaries of the market.

We must also moreover recognise that if the Government must bail us out it is the nation’s people bailing ourselves out. With better regulation by government we as consumers can use our power to influence the market, to bring about the necessary change in the hope our improved outlook translates via the free market into change and acts to inspire others.

The Blue Revolution is the real “power to the people” not a committee of ministers and senior Civil Servants with over publicised agitators, acting on behalf of the people. We have this power because we have the free markets, the last thing we want is that power diminished by a traditional left wing, well intentioned, ill-informed but creating an emboldened state. The state for all its positives, when it becomes too powerful, will make too many of us just a little angrier, and some people are angry enough.

05.11.15 The final deadly Sin: Immodesty

We started this process of describing the modern “seven deadly Sins back in April 2015. The idea was to link some personal behaviours over which we all have control to the concept of corrupting “Secular Westernism” which is the Blue Revolution description of the self-destructive “it’s all about me” morality that undermines western culture.

The idea is to try and make the point that many of us will have taken our freedom and with it contributed to the decline of western standards of public morality. The consequence is in our view a reduction in social and economic value, both of which are essential for the health and sustainability of all economies and communities.  In the west wealth has become a very poor substitute for social and economic value. However, wealth unlike social and economic value flows into the hands of too few people. The solution is not to redistribute wealth but to demand the creation of social and economic value; the Blue Revolution so to speak.

Our seven deadly sins are global sins, but they are particularly relevant to the modern western culture. They leave individuals at risk of being exploited and yet also prone to exploit others. The western world’s global “Hegemony” based as it is on creating too much valueless wealth, makes sinners of too many of us. Of relevance is our final Sin.

Our final is also our most widely committed and most controversial sin although by no means our worst; it is immodesty. Let us examine this in more detail beginning with immodesty in places where you may not expect to see it.

Modesty is a universal requirement of faith. Most if not all faiths require us to cover up, be calm and temperate, and to behave in a modest and restrained way. Virtually every culture in the modern world has found a way around this, (it is in many ways the most pervasive of sin) and it includes the immodest braying of fundamentalists of all hues.

In Africa and the Middle East, the hateful criticism of other faiths and ways of life from Christians criticizing Gays to the Sunni Muslim Monarchy in Saudi Arabia banning all other faiths but Islam. American televangelists promising wealth and salvation if you part with your money.  Each shows an arrogance that is ill befitting of faith; a self-regard and easy default position that everyone else is wrong. Ones sympathy with the North African Migrants starts to evaporate when one observes young men swaggering across Europe demanding a new life uninvited, aggressive and bearing the entitled attitude and angry expression of our own entitled from top publicly paid officials like MP’s to bankers to some welfare recipients.

The ancient behaviours of averting one’s eyes and prostrating oneself, open palm gestures and respectful speech, modest dress codes etc which in the west became symbolic of “good manners” all show how important it is to show respect through modest behaviour. Modesty really is universal. To behave in a modest way promotes social harmony and cohesion and a respect for others within and outside our personal relationships. It also promotes a positive and safe social context within which crime could be much lower and economic and social activity would be much higher. In a world of gender equality such as we have in the west, the biggest threat to the individual comes from their own and others immodest behaviour. So, to all we would encourage a revival of modesty in cultural and economic life.

Any discussion of immodesty can’t ignore the fact that when it comes to industrial scale immodesty it becomes “part of our way of life” and it undermines us in the eyes of others. No one in modern times does immodesty quite like “the west”. Immodesty promoted via the internet is a blind spot for the individuals and the western culture in general. We are all ‘at it’.

We don’t want to labour the obvious point but people from most cultures who observe the west see nakedness as a symptom of something going badly wrong, particularly when the wests sexually saturated culture is viewed as both arousing and yet repellent by a more traditional world.

The freedoms we enjoy, our generally fair treatment of one another, our belief that people can reform, and should be treated with compassion are all overlooked as the focus moves onto our casual attitudes towards marriage and relationships, our pornography our widespread obsession with looks and celebrity. Cure this and the west will genuinely become a good and moral place unequalled for fairness, respect and equality. But if to “cure it” means taking away the freedom to do immodest things and behave in an immodest way then it’s not worth it. This is rule book morality a regime. Therefore, we can’t expect government to “put things right”; it is up to us.

The answer is, as with all our sins, simply not to indulge in them. The Blue Revolution is not about telling people what to do but is about showing anyone who is interested that to preserve the best of what we have we need to avoid the worst places that our culture will allow us to go. If I am modest in what I do it may rub off and other people may be modest in what they do.

As a society if we begin to control our behaviour, our generally good culture will become better. Over time a culture which unfortunately encourages some of us to misbehave will slowly modify; a process of slow almost invisible change will take place.

The world which discriminates and abuses to enforce moral behaviour will observe that in the west you don’t have to mutilate and punish, discriminate and control, kill and maim to ensure that society creates the maximum amount of social and economic value possible; it happens because in the west we have grown out of the impulse to be immodest.  Evidence of this can be measured by the extent to which we have exorcised the demons of celebrity and gross planet consuming over consumption. Let us start this revolution now. Lets avoid the seven modern deadly sins.

10.11.15 The great immigration debate- good or bad?

David Cameron the UK Prime Minister has spelt out that he believes the basis of the UK’s negotiation with the EU should be prior to the much-vaunted referendum sometime between May 2016 and Nov 2017. The four negotiating points consist of the political, social and economic but without doubt the most controversial contains elements of all three. His demand to limit the access to “in work” benefits for migrant workers is causing ripples of applause and muted heckling from both sides of the debate. Too radical for some not radical enough for others. As we move towards the referendum, we at Blue Revolution will give an opinion on in or out; however, for the moment let us consider the immigration issue.

There is no doubt that the shift from “free movement of labour” to the “free movement of people” has caused a gearing up of numbers coming here from Eastern Europe. However, we must not forget that in the 1970’s and 1980’s the flow of Labour was from Britain to amongst other places Germany and from the 1990’s onwards the free movement of people was to amongst other places Spain and France. We have taken advantage of the borderless arrangements in Europe so should not be surprised when others want to come here. Left leaning Policy forums are claiming that in addition to the principle of free movement being a good thing as we benefit from it too, migrants also “add value to the British economy”. Now this is a very controversial claim…or so we think.

Firstly, anyone familiar with Blue Revolution will know we are a little obsessed with “Value”. For us the whole purpose of society is to create social and economic value to enable the survival of our culture and in the west to ensure the continuation of equality, consent, choice and contract as the heart of an expanded democracy. To ensure this we need to avoid the pitfalls and temptations of secular westernism and the seven deadly sins. So how does migration interface with our aspirations for western culture as experienced in the UK….it will be different in other places of course.

In the UK we have a culture and economy which is heavily reliant on the state to provide income for workers, services for service users and benefits for those who are unable or unwilling to work. Housing, education, and heath provide a minimum level of intervention for those who need it and we have a humane and fair system of justice with help for those in need. We are however burdened by an economy which has driven out skill and driven down wages to the minimum and locks those wage levels in place with a supply of willing labour; keen to benefit from the above. This arrangement suits too many people in different ways. The welfare recipients don’t have to work; wages are too low to incentivise gainful employment and in any event if you have to claim “Tax Credits” rather than out of work benefits, you won’t be so much better off,  so it fails to make that early morning start in mid-winter worthwhile.

The rest of the stuff on offer; healthcare etc, is available to everyone anyway, worker or not. So, within the context of employment there is a major downside to mass immigration a downside in the form of depressed wages, British workers or potential workers dislocated by choice and from the active labour market. This is an unforeseen social engineering nightmare the social costs of which are pregnancy, single parenthood, depressed adults, low aspiration and unemployment. If there were less mass immigration wage levels would be driven up and there would be benefits to the economy and society. There would be greater levels employment amongst the indigenous British due to higher wages and there would be lower levels of the social problems identified above.

That it is the “left” who peddle the notion that immigration from Eastern Europe is positive is slightly perverse.

What the left fail to take into account of is that the wealth distributed in welfare to migrant workers does not create economic value, simply personal wealth and company profits, through subsidize low wages, and it adversely  drives out for many British people their capacity to maintain high levels of social value independence, resilience and social responsibility for example. Less widely discussed but also relevant is the issue of housing demand; arguably we need more housing to house both migrant workers as well as our own economically inactive people many of whom have children and come from broken families. We also have our workers to house many of whom also have broken families too. Perversely house building and a ‘buoyant’ housing market create the illusion of economic growth; hence the governments obsession with it. Of course, this analysis we believe applies to Germany and France Sweden as well as the UK.

What about the other “old Chestnut” immigration as a driver for genuine economic growth? We have referred to housing demand creating an impression of real growth, but in our opinion house building has simply short-term benefits and does not add long term value. Housing feeds into the asset inflation mirage of growth, looks good on paper but like stock values is just froth, masquerading as real value. growth. Economic growth therefore must be more than building houses for a growing population of those with housing needs including migrants.

Having to understand the term migrant is also a challenge. There are many types, (EU, Non-EU, Illegal immigrant, Refugee, Student, legitimate non-EU immigrant, Asylum Seeker)  but the group almost universally cited by left and right wing alike as having had a positive impact (i.e. value creating) is the pre-war migrant who “made good” and contributed to Britain’s post war economic  boom. These were predominantly Jewish migrants fleeing Nazi Germany.

In the context of modern migration this clam needs some analysis. Firstly, we do believe that the post war economy grew as a result of pre-war immigration. Highly skilled men and women with ability who were driven from their homes by a genocidal regime and came to Britain escaping to freedom, created value both social and economic. Many were wealthy and well connected and talented; but not exclusively so.  These migrants are used as evidence to support the idea of widespread mass immigration today. But regrettably the situation is not the same. Much as the political class wish it were.

Modern migrants are not on the whole wealthy or highly skilled…of course there are some who are. They are also coming here in huge numbers far greater than in the past. Many fleeing crumbling economies in North Africa bring their faith which has different expectations of how as a society Britain should create and preserve its economic and social value offering a rule-based regime with expectations and entitlements based on sex for example or tradition such as halal slaughter. For many of these newly arrived there is too much reliance on the service and hospitality sector and within this overcrowded sector a reliance develops on government financial business support.

So, what are we left with? There is no doubt migration can be very positive. The value of migration to the British economy and society in general depends upon who is coming and what values and skills they bring with them as well as how many come. To detach the issue from social and economic realities of value creation and preservation as the “something must be done” people or the immigration is simply about ‘diversity’ people believe, is utterly naïve. There is evidence of good and bad in respect of migration, but you need to look more analytically at what is really going on socially as well as economically.

What  seems interesting to us is that with modern technology and transport there is no need for people to leave their culture of origin; they can connect and re connect anywhere and whilst this may promote a view that the host culture is alien and needs change it also allows the notion of location to be separated from the notion of nationality and cultural identity. In many ways we are free to be anywhere and the idea that we have to locate permanently anywhere is absurd, if you can’t cut it socially and economically where you are… it is not that difficult to go home and maybe you should not have left in the first place.

13.11.15 Jihadi John and moral confusion; can we help?

Jihadi John killed in a drone attack; one view is good riddance the other regrets the lack of a trial and “proper” justice. two conflicted views. The Americans show the usual lack of restraint and treat the death of one pathetic if psychotic individual as though it is the climax of the battle and in so doing demonstrate exactly the kind of western hubris that should antagonises people on all sides of the moral debate as well as unintentionally harden the resolve of ISIS to get their own back. Tone it down a bit guys!

There are enough innocent westerners in these war zones to kidnap and behead to avenge the death of Jihadi John, so we should show restraint in our success to avoid provoking more bloodletting. One of our Seven Deadly Sins (the things that make modern western culture problematic to those of all faith and some of no faith) is immodesty and it is a characteristic of the swaggering ISIS too. Irrespective of the way he was dispatched, we should restrain our impulse to gloat at his death. He represented nothing good and his death should not be significant either.

Now the subject of whether we should have put him on trial rather than execution by drone is interesting we think; The liberals in the west and ISIS themselves should not necessarily expect a proper trial for people like Jihadi John. Jihadi John lived in a chaotic and cruel dustbowl. A place where economic and social value is eroded by barbarism and a lack of coherent economic ambition. A trial would have been impossible for practical reasons (arresting him?)  and it would be impossible to make a trial meaningful for those who support the ISIS cause. Justice has to be if nothing else a reminded to all that the values of civilization have been breached and the process of justice and the sanction are an example of right being re-established or restored in the face of whatever was wrong; dishonesty, violence or evil.

In the case of Jihadi John and the criminals of ISIS they do not see western justice as re-establishing the values of civilisation but the exercising of infidel justice on the virtuous warriors of Islamic State. On that basis it is naive to think that any good can come of our imposing our justice, however benign, on them. They do not value what we value and have set themselves against the culture of the west and elsewhere; cultures that are to varying degrees more likely to respect the individual and believe we should work peacefully together to grow together through co-operation  greater social and economic value……things of which they have declared a violent hatred.

Given this perspective it is right to ask why in the west perspectives are so conflicted about the right response to Jihadi John; a humane if naïve judicial response or a gloating aggressive one; typical of reductive polarisation.  We at Blue Revolution believe that it is because the west does not have a clear and coherent view of what the basis should be for western justice in the 21st century. After all the west is a bit of a moral shambles itself as we never tire of pointing out, greed, arrogance and stupidity on an industrial scale create major social problems in the west. Our Blue Revolution is our preferred response to this calamity but the fact there is a moral calamity means getting a moral perspective is quite hard.

However there may be a way forward; we don’t think many would disagree with us that the aim of any civilized community (at any point in history) including in the west (with the exception the major lapse of moral judgement in the Bush/Blair years) is to preserve value, be it social or economic in nature. ISIS put themselves outside the culture of any legitimate nation or state because it does not believe in preserving the legacy of the past for the benefit of the future. It destroys the past and the value that belongs from the past so it can’t be used to help society evolve socially, culturally or economically. Therefore they do not deserve to have any more than the minimum amount of scarce human and economic and social value deployed to remove their crazy life limiting and soul destroying ideology….the fewer of us who are harmed or the least time wasted in that process the better.  ISIS are sad, mad and bad and they need to be eroded but let us not bray about it…let us just quietly get on with it; it is a bit like having to put down a violent dog.

17.11.15 Terrorism in France – “something must be done”

Have you ever driven the wrong way down a motorway? No neither have we; however, we imagine it would be very scary once you had worked out what was going on. The rhetorical question you might ask would be “oh shit something must be done” and “how can I deal with this FFS”. These are question’s the French specifically and the west generally are asking in the aftermath of the French terror attacks.

The Journey down the motorway would have started easily enough no cause for concern, nothing to worry about; I might have been 3am and the roads were clear at the start. However, as mile upon mile passed the slow realisation that something didn’t add up would have dawned and eventually you have traffic travelling towards you at 70 miles an hour to contend with. At which point there are two choices; panic or evaluate the threat properly. What you could not do is blame the road, or blame the other traffic, swerve around or brake hard. Neither could you carry on oblivious to the risk. This is a very self-inflicted problem.

The above feels to us like the situation Europe faces now it has woken up to the fact it has allowed it’s continent to become, in places at least, the nearest thing you can get to a caliphate. The European political elite, comfortable, multi lingual, and living off he labour of ordinary Europeans have from civilised subsidized citadels, allowed their “splendid isolation” to blind them  the obvious fact that many who come here from North Africa do not share our values and are appalled by what we do with our freedoms. So faced with Paris what is the solution having finally worked out that we have been travelling the wrong way down the motorway for the last two decades or more?

Firstly, we cannot jam on the brakes; we are travelling at 70 miles an hour. We cannot carry on either as we must deal with the threats from other traffic or eventually, we will have an accident. We need to think about how we safely turn around or pull over put the hazard light’s on to make ourselves and others safe and get out of the danger zone and not repeat the same stupid mistake again.

Our Blue Revolution recognizes the march towards a common culture will happen over time and should be organic in character. So, in many respects driving the wrong way onto the slip road was an easy mistake for most western countries to make. The idea that cultural convergence would be a product of simple mass migration is an easy justification for mass immigration. What is there to worry about?

However, the Blue Revolutionaries at Blue Revolution link cultural convergence to the production of the collective social and economic value within a modern context of freedom and equality based on contract, choice and consent. This is the bit that all western countries fail to recognise. Convergence is not simply about “celebrating diversity” or “being PC” as has been the belief since the mid 1990’s. It’s not about ghettoising migrants who have been “rescued” or “allowed to remain”. Cultural convergence is not about closing boarders to migrants either. We don’t want to speed up on the motor way or jam the brakes on. We must have a controlled and measured response.

So here the west there are all these countries, France, Germany, Belgium, Sweden even the US and others all driving the wrong way down the motorway, it all looks ok for some time, no one had until recently seen the on-coming truck because the road was empty. However now we need to deal with the issue. But how?

Firstly, that seven or eight deranged psychopaths can cause so much carnage is something to exercise the minds of western leaders and westerners in general. As is the level of fear that eight people generate. The evidence from Paris would suggest that there was an element of “making the targets up as they went along”. They had the guns, the bomb making capability and the hatred, but the targets were last minute. They hadn’t got tickets to the match!  So, two blew themselves up quite safely! The idea of an ISIS mastermind is therefore unlikely. More a general position of “we hate the west, here are some bombs and guns go and destroy the infidel”. This is both a worry and a reassurance. More planning would leave a detectable trail. Organized with the sheer amateurishness of the planning here means they strike out of the blue.

So, the first thing we suggest is not to exaggerate the ability of any one to detect what is likely to happen. Agencies might foil plots, but they might not. To change a way of life beyond recognition probably isn’t worth it in the long term; a bit like a meat and alcohol-free diet you might live longer but it will be a hard life. The second point is that to police and to protect will impede the economy and although western economies produce too little value for the amount they spend. The west needs to continue to produce value both social and economic value and you can’t do this in a police state.

The second point is that we need to develop a shared “narrative” with people from all faiths and none and identify a way of linking with international  partners  which isn’t a rerun of the cold war but neither is clouded in denial about what those with whom we partner  get up to behind their own boarders. This “narrative” cannot be the usual western fetish about “democracy” great though democracy is.

At Blue Revolution we link our blue revolution to three key elements; upon which democracy can be based but so can other ways of ordering society. We believe that Contract, Choice and Consent practiced between all adults is the defining benchmark of a civilised post enlightenment society; whether democracy or not. If countries allow relationships between adults to be governed by the 3 C’s then eventually democracy and freedom with begin to flourish.

The next point is that social and economic value is as much the victim of war as the lives of people killed. Therefore, the adventures of Blair and Bush destroyed too much social and economic value in Iraq for the aims they set themselves, namely “regime change”. On this basis going after IS needs to be proportionate to the long- term aim of preserving enough social and economic value to enable communities to heal. However, the destruction of IS, is essential as they are themselves destroying the very social and economic value they seek to conquer.

Finally, the Blue Revolution is not just about the values of others; it is about the crazy behaviour in the west too; “secular westernism” as we call it. Any society which promotes or ignores the undesirable consequences of our seven deadly sins, is promoting secular westernism. It is not as dangerous as Islamism or fascism or Stalinist communism but is its own way it is equally as corrosive. Secular westernism undermines social value and compromises the ability to create and maintain economic value and gives the enemies of the western world plenty of things to hate us for…..and after Paris; hate us, too many seem to do, even if it is only a handful, it’s a handful too many.

23.11.15 Secular Westernism- who are the Secular Westernists?

The last week and a half have been dominated by France and Belgium specifically and the threat from their friendly neighbourhood caliphates generally. The phrase Islamism and Islamist to describe those who advocate violence to others to further the ambitions of violent social and economic degeneration is becoming common place. We are also at last beginning to get a worldwide perspective on ISIS and their violent hostility to the universal goal of humanity which is bind people together by faith and culture, so they create the social and economic value necessary to enable them to survive.

The future of evolution is peoples of all faiths and cultures working to the same end. ISIS stand apart from this “law of nature” and destroy value and the capacity of mankind to create more value by their violence and a rigid social code that only works if your aspiration is to live in a cave and scratch out a living in the desert. Or you are an oil rich monarchy.

However, whilst the west lacks the criminality, cruelty and violence of the Islamists, the Islamists may not be the only ones misunderstanding value and limiting mankind’s capacity to create more. The west has a more subtle approach to undermining the creation of value; it is hard to see and problematic to tackle as it has become the wests economic orthodoxy. It is what we call Secular Westernism something others have called the “western hegemony”.

We use the Blue Revolutionary term Secular Westernism as we believe that amongst every level of western society (elite to unskilled worker) there are the foot-soldiers of the Secular Western hegemony. It is as much personal as structural. Let’s call its advocates Secular Westernists. In contrast to the Islamist the Secular Westernist achieves undesirable outcomes by simply pursuing personal self-interest within a moral vacuum that lacks a faith based or Darwinian imperative to create the social and economic value necessary for society to evolve.

We talked about the seven deadly sins as the kind of behaviours which when practiced on an industrial scale have negative consequences on society as a whole; but we can add to the seven deadly sins the belief that wealth is a substitute for value, that the more wealth you have the more valuable you are and that wealth is “real” and is not a variable financial figure based on confidence or hubris overheating various markets.

To the Secular Westernist wealth being “real” is more important than human relationships or producing economic value. To a Secular Westernist wealth made by producing pornography is “real” wealth rather than simply money earned by producing something which has no objective value. Try and think of other examples; making money by selling personalised number plates for example or offering sex phone lines or even ‘shorting’ within the equities markets.

Add to this the fact that the various financial crises are evidence that when stock values collapse people loose wealth; there is no objective value there then and worryingly pensions depend on it.

This stuff is hard to understand but you need to think about how much of what a rich person has, is based on something real and how much is simply what they have borrowed or blagged or made by selling to the desperate, ill-informed or plain stupid, and is therefore  the froth on the economy rather than the economy itself.

The challenge for the Secular Westernist and enlightened western governments as well as the Blue Revolutionary is to simultaneously see the “free market” as both the cause and the cure for Secular Westernism, and to see many of the great western general public as the foot-soldiers of the western hegemony; blindly promoting it,  rather than being the “victims” of an evil system that only a governments of the red revolutionary type can overthrow.

A British minister asked how many decades until a British worker works as hard as a Chinese worker, 10,20, 30 years. The answer is as long as it takes the western worker to understand that getting rich is no substitute for creating value either social or economic ……..and how long will that be? Perhaps we need to start by understanding more about value and desiring less personal wealth.

24.11.15 You can take the Islamist out of the dust bowl, but you can’t take the dust bowl out of the Islamist

You can take the Islamist out of the dust bowl; but you can’t take the dust bowl out of the Islamist. This corruption of a British industrial working class saying has so much relevance for our understanding of the origins of Islamism. Indeed, it may help us to understand the passive support violent Islamists receive from the ordinary Muslim faithful and indeed perhaps the world’s Leninist left wing who offer sympathy to the economic underdogs of the world’s dustbowl economies. This Left wing believing the west is wholly to blame for North African poverty rather than seeing it as a combination of geography, greed, discrimination and corruption often with the overt connivance of the west.

Essentially as we have argued before, too many nations that profess Islam as their nation’s faith adopt it as a ‘dust bowl religion’ in respect of its reaction to social and economic justice. It could all too easily occupy a place where making a living was (is) hard and precarious and where value (the product of economic and social activity) could be easily destroyed by war, crime and famine.

This sort of society would be coherent with Islam. In such an environment it would of necessity be hard and uncompromising; high expectations and harsh punishment for disobedience. The separation of social and economic roles would be applied, and women’s role would be crystalized as social as opposed to economic in character and subject to the guidance of men. This would meet the needs of society and its economy, but it would leave little scope to evolve.

Firstly, such an economy would produce too little value and what value it did create was, as in all societies of the era except tribal ones, acquired by overlords. The faith was rigid economically excluding of women and hierarchical; but it worked and in dust bowls to this day still does. Blair and Bush’s folly was not understanding this when waging war in the middle east.

We would argue that when an Islamist comes to the west, they don’t see opportunity they probably see sinning on a grand scale. Their reaction is to reject “our way of life” and some; the most psychotic, take up arms to purify our culture of sinfulness. The fact that our freedoms create medicine, art, engineering and so on and so forth doesn’t occur to them, they are obsessed by the obscene freedoms the west has whilst looking enviously at the west’s wealth. Look around the middle east and you see absolutist kingdoms, wealth being held by monarchs and tyrants, you see a desire for hierarchy, authority and a somewhat hypocritical desire (amongst males) for purity. You don’t see values such as Contract, Choice and Consent which for us at a Blue Revolution HQ was the first rung on the ladder towards equality, freedom and democracy for all. And we still have some way to go.

So, whilst we have much to criticize the west about (too much superficial culture and wealth) it can’t be faulted for the commitment from all countries to Contract Choice and Consent. These three concepts need to be understood and promoted by all those who want to “fit” into the west. When someone from North Africa is able to demonstrate that they understand these three basic building blocks of freedom and can apply them in their day to day lives, they will clearly have taken the dust bowl out of their beliefs. Of how many Saudi princelings could one say that?