An absolutly sick tweet from Harry Harpham @sheffharry
Here is the rest of it,
"How come someone like Neil Armstrong (who had so much humanity) dies, whilst The Snatcher just keeps on breathing"
What is interesting about this tweet is not its totally disrespect for another human being, one that was democratically elected three times in her life. Or its implied hatred of a sufferer of dementia, not dying in one go from a heart attack and the like, but is suffering a living death you would not wish on your enemy. No its not all that, its Harrys use of the death of Neil Armstrong that is the really interesting thing about this sick tweet.
The psychosis of hatred, is not unique to the Left, but as with their new and more current hatred of Nick Clegg you would have thought people who think they have something to offer the voters and people of the UK would put their energies into a positive pursuit of policies and ideas rather than petty hatreds.
20 July 1969 was an probably he greatest day in human history, no one will ever take away from Neil Armstrong the fact that he was the first human to step on a heavenly body no matter how far we make it out into the cosmos.And all I can remember is standing in my rubber nappy feeling a bit wet and half asleep, but there you go.
Todays smartphones are thousands of times more powerful than the computer used to get Apollo to the moon. Think about that for a second, we humans for thousands of years lived in a world that hardly changed then came the industrial revolution and within a few generations we had got to the moon and 40 years more had multiplied the computing power that we used to get to the moon by thousands. As a narrative that is almost unbelivable.
So ten years later we come to Thatchers first election victory and 4 May 1979. The first and only Prime minister with a scientific degree as well as being a woman of course. Three years after we had been bailed out by the IMF, and already into the agreed austerity measures that came with that loan (*that's right the Thatcher cuts started under Labour, that's what the winter of discontent was about, remember?)
The question I ask myself about Mrs T. is did she matter? To Harry and many more people around the North she most certainly does. She is the reason for their suffering and blight. Which is odd as this country even today is a much better place than it was in 1979. Would you really swap 1972 or 2012?
I don't have the figures to hand but say with certainty the number of man hours to make a tonne of steel has fell significantly and this is a result of the same thing that helped put man on the moon. The microchip.
So too coal, which was made uneconomic by North Sea gas. Microchips gave
us the tools to discover and control the resource and even today the
discovery and extraction of Shale gas is not possible without the
computing power we have at our disposal. Every Industry in the world has been in some way touched by this revolution. And its highly probably that the reason we are struggling for growth now is that a lot of these efficiency saving we have got from this revolution are now priced into the economic system.
Another question I ask myself is one relating to Feminism from the 1960s onwards. Does that really matter? Seems to me the Pill gave women for the first time in history, power over reproduction. This discovery far exceeds anything political that feminists have come up with since 1960. They like to think it was them, protesting and eventually legislating but I doubt it, seems to me it was the changes in the demographics and dynamics the contraceptive pill brought about into the economy that mattered.
This revolution and the microchip one that we are still living through today, comes with advantages and disadvantages and regardless of who was Prime Minister, it was likely to happen anyway, we cant put the genie back in the bottle. I don't believe that anything is certain in life, but Trade Union reforms, the control of public finances were all highly likely to be the answers to the questions in the world we found ourselves living in. So why the hate?
No one likes economic change in their lives, Mrs T was the figurehead of that change. I for one did not like and still do not agree with her ideal of a meritocracy, that to me is a harsh society to live in, but she got the big stuff right, in so far as you can get political questions right. She was a lucky and skilled political leader. Clemente Attlee, and Margret Thatcher are the two leaders to study in British post war politics, they were in the right places at the right time. Agree or disagree with then both but they set the tone on if not the direction of the ship to varying degrees of success and failure.
I feel sorry for *Harry and his like, they are like primitive people in primitive societies, they have the same brains as we have today but they lack the cumulative knowledge that we have available. In those gaps like the ancients they put in superstitions,fears, and hatreds. Harry does not understand the link between Thatcher and Armstrong it would represent to him too difficult an issue to contemplate. His gaps he is filling are in his 'keep breathing' tweet.
Harry is like walking on the beach after a storm in the moonlight and coming across half dead and dead fish in shallow ponds trying to find the sea, some beginning to rot and stink, others shining in the moonlight as they slowly die, some flapping in desperation. Like Harry all lost. I pity him. I wonder if the fish have ever noticed the stars and wondered like me. We all know Harry hasn't.
*The Royal Hallamshire Hospital for a time was mothballed for a while due to these cuts and the completion was rushed to try and get it finished for the 1979 election.
*I suppose I should use the title of Councillor, but I think you need to be worthy of it.
