A post about Melanie Phillips

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This is Nora, the piano playing cat.

This is Melanie Phillips on Monday.

Breivik may be one unhinged psychopath – but what is now erupting as a result of the Norway atrocity is the frenzy of a western culture that has lost its mind.

My emphasis both times. Only now? How odd. A pedant asks, are psychopaths ever hinged?[1]

This is Melanie Phillips in June on Roger Scruton.

Anyone seeking to understand why the west appears to have lost its mind would do well to read this profound little gem of a book.

So the West had lost its mind in June? Now just now? I are confused.

This is Melanie Phillips in 2006.

The case is a snapshot of a country that has lost its wits -- and, just possibly, the instinct for survival.

This is Melanie Phillips last year.

In the light of the Islamic war of conquest being waged against civilisation, the western embrace of lies and bigotry against Israel can only be seen as the death-rattle of a culture that has lost the will to survive.

This is Melanie Phillips in 2004.

Sated by unprecedented material prosperity, this society has all but lost the concept of overcoming setbacks or hardship. It has lost its capacity for endurance.

So, this is the death of Western culture. The language of Shakespeare, and Milton, and Henry James, reduced to the same metaphor, a dry thought in a dry season. God, she's a terrible writer. Arguments and battles are won or lost hands down. If you don't fight, you're a Chamberlain-like appeaser. She carries on performing the sacrament of extreme unction over phrases which were moribund before Oscar Wilde was born. It doesn't bring them back. This woman read (ooh la la, fancy) English at Oxford yet she types prose dead, as one would say, as a coffin nail.

As you can tell, I searched for 'lost' originally. To my great shock, this came up The MMR controversy: an investigation. Part three.

According to the medical establishment, the whole idea is a nonsense. The suggestion that a new autistic bowel disease is now affecting large numbers of children who were previously normal until they were vaccinated with MMR is simply not borne out by the evidence.

There is, say these experts, nothing new going on. All that's happened is that a few parents are desperate to invent a reason for the appalling disorder of autism that has afflicted their children.

She got that right. This is Phillips trying to be fair.

The Wakefield camp and the parents are not against vaccination -- indeed, most of them agree on its importance -- but say the evidence is stacking up that the MMR carries too great a risk of injury.

The Wakefield camp has not yet proved its case. Its studies need to be replicated.

On the other side, Wakefield's opponents have not proved their case either. The epidemiology is flawed, and the claims made for it by government have often been bogus and misleading.

So one side is innocent until proven guilty, and the other is "flawed" and has made claims which were "bogus and misleading." Very impartial. And totally wrong. Well done the Sunday Times!

Here's a Google search of her site for "Wakefield". Strangely, there's no "I fess up, I was duped" apology. Modern medicine, it's just all part of the conspiracy to bring down Western culture!

No, I'm not even going to go into what that lost instinct for survival might have looked like. Nor am I going to speculate what Phillips thinks we should do about all these immigrants who are swamping the country. I can't help but quote this.

The real reason Blunkett was attacked was that he had uttered an unsayable truth: that upholding a sense of national identity is normal and desirable, and it is legitimate to want to resist the pressures which would destroy it.

How might one do that? But I said I wasn't going to speculate, so I won't.

PS This is Melanie Philllips on god-knows-what.

But the problem is that it [Islam] does not just oppose libertinism. Having never had a 'reformation' which would have forced it to make an accommodation with modernity, it is fundamentally intolerant and illiberal. As a result, it directly conflicts with western values in areas such as the treatment of women, freedom of speech, the separation of private and public values, and tolerance of homosexuality.

Ah, tolerance of homosexuality. Like this? Tabloid Watch handles that one well. (Short version, all the 'facts' are wrong.) Update 17:35 I went back on Twitter, and I saw this tweet from Lizz Winstead (producer of the 'Today' show; the Jon Stewart one):

I didnt need "Brainwashing" to befriend gay kids in high school. We bonded thru our mutual disgust for idiots.

Win!

[1] They may be, if you accept the thesis that many successful people in business or politics are in fact sociopaths.