Dale Flower

Wage slave and family man. Hovering between the Slough of Despond and the Pit of Despair.

[Roger Helmer ☀️🏴‍☠️ @RogerHelmerMEP]

Nonsense, Ben. The CO2 impact comes because oil is burned, not because it comes from the North Sea. The same amount will burn with or without Rosebank. The fuel consumption of my car remains the same, no matter where the oil comes from.

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

@MikeCol58 Grocery stores aren’t designated single-sex spaces. So why would there be any conflict? Do you people never think before you tweet?

[Kelvingrove Mummy @TheGlasgowMummy]

As I've been out of my case and able to read the news been it's great to see many ancient Egyptian practices still being kept alive today

Ross Greer, Gillian MacKay, John Swinney and Jenny Gilruth all clearly having had their brains pulled out through their noses

[Dale Flower @BoycottsBat]

@DanielJHannan Bravo!

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

Yes, the monarchy was deeply implicated in the slave trade. But not the British monarchy.
The biggest African slavers were not pirates or bandits. They were kings. In the 1750s, King Tegbesu of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, was reported to be making £250,000 a year from selling slaves. That astronomical sum, equivalent to perhaps £45 million today, was vastly more than any British aristocrat
While Tegbesu was trafficking human beings, the future George III, who had recently become Prince of Wales, was becoming a convinced abolitionist. He wrote a monograph arguing that “slavery is equaly [sic] repugnant to the Civil Law as to the Law of Nature”. He went on, as King, to sign the abolition of the slave trade into law in 1807.
That act prompted incredulous rage among West African chiefs.
In the 1840s, King Ghezo of Dahomey, played by John Boyega in the 2022 film, The Woman King, fiercely resisted such pressure.
“The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth,” he complained.
Contrast his attitude with that of his British fellow-monarchs. Although Victoria, as Queen, was expected to refrain from expressing political opinions, her husband was under less constraint. Albert made his very first speech as Prince Consort to the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa. His words are a reminder of how determined Britain was to ensure that ending the Atlantic slave trade did not simply push the commerce eastwards.
“I deeply regret that the benevolent and persevering exertions of England to abolish that atrocious traffic in human beings (at once the desolation of Africa and the blackest stain upon civilized Europe) have not as yet led to any satisfactory conclusion. But I sincerely trust that this great country will not relax in its efforts until it has finally, and for ever, put an end to a state of things so repugnant.”
The difference between the British Crown and contemporary African monarchies can be glimpsed in the story of Aina, a young Yoruba girl owned by King Ghezo of Dahomey.
In 1850, a naval captain called Frederick Forbes came to Dahomey to try to convince Ghezo to stop selling slaves. He was unsuccessful but, during his visit, he was offered Aina as a gift.
Forbes knew that such slaves were generally destined for human sacrifice, so he accepted the child, naming her Sara Forbes Bonetta. When Sara arrived in Britain, Queen Victoria became her godmother, paid for her education and arranged for her to marry a wealthy Yoruba businessman. Are the British really the baddies here?
Critics talk of telling our nation’s story “warts and all”; but they rarely get around to the “and all”. The “and all” surely includes the vast sums devoted to stamping out slavery, calculated by Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape as 1.8 per cent annually of GDP between 1808 and 1867, the most expensive moral foreign policy in human history. Even if there were a case for reparations in principle (which there is not) that sum alone – not counting the billions given in aid – would surely have covered any debt.
What we are seeing is not a debate about history, but an argument about contemporary politics. Critics want to convince us that Britain became rich through exploitation rather than, as was actually the case, through private property, free contracts and independent courts.
The easiest way to demonstrate the negative correlation between capitalism and slavery is to look at the places where human bondage is most prevalent today – in order, North Korea, Eritrea, Burundi, the Central African Republic and Mauritania. If William III owning shares in the Royal African Company bothers you more than the continuing abomination of slavery in those places, you need to ask yourself some hard questions about your motives.

[Great British PAC @GreatBritishPAC]

The debate on rejoining the EU, in the form of two blokes discussing the implications in the pub.

All the polling supports this view - that as soon as you ask about the details, the majority of Brits want to stay out.

Credit to @TerraOrBust for the cartoon.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

To understand why Western leaders all sound the same, you need to understand how a system that has captured its own institutions keeps producing elites aligned on the worst possible line.

In 2004, Klaus Schwab created the Forum of Young Global Leaders. Every year, the WEF selects a few hundred people under 40. You don't apply. You get nominated by people already inside and vetted by people already inside. Then come the annual summits, Davos, and a two-week executive program at Harvard Kennedy School built around global governance, climate, global health and "21st century leadership."

Emmanuel Macron: class of 2016, the same year he launched his presidential campaign. Gabriel Attal: listed by the WEF itself among its notable members. In 2017, at Harvard, Schwab bragged that his network "penetrates the cabinets" of governments. His words, not mine.

Now here's the mistake most critics make. They imagine a brainwashing camp. Two weeks at Harvard don't rewire anyone. The YGL program doesn't create the mindset. It certifies it.

The capture happened upstream. The formatting starts at 18. Sciences Po, ENA, Harvard, Columbia, Yale Law. Ten years of being graded by people who already hold the consensus. You learn fast that the reward doesn't go to whoever is right, but to whoever restates the room's beliefs most elegantly. Every essay, every oral exam, every internship in a ministry or a consulting firm teaches the same lesson: the frame is given, your job is to optimize inside it.

Obama never went through YGL. He didn't need to. Columbia, Harvard Law, president of the Law Review. Same factory, American edition.

So by the time the WEF calls, the product is finished. The program just adds the final layer: flattery. You're told you're one of the few people under 40 who will shape the world. You spend your summers with ministers, CEOs, royals and Nobel laureates who all agree with each other. Imagine what that does to a 35-year-old ego.

That's the profile it produces. Very high verbal intelligence, very low dissent. Brilliant at defending the frame, never trained to question it. And a narcissism fed by a network that confirms, year after year, that you belong to the elect. Combine the two and you get leaders who are never punished for being wrong, as long as they're wrong together.

Immigration is the perfect test case. Obama, Macron, Attal can tighten a law, announce deportation numbers, harden their tone before an election. Obama deported more people than any president before him. But listen to how they talk about it. For them, immigration is never a civilizational question. It's a flow to manage, a labor shortage to fill, a demographic curve to correct, a moral duty to perform. Whether a nation has the right to remain itself never even enters the frame. Not because they've answered the question. Because their education taught them it isn't a legitimate one.

That's why the voter who says "my town has changed and I'm worried" gets a lecture instead of an answer. The leader isn't even lying to him. It's worse: he genuinely cannot see what the voter sees. Twenty years of formatting taught him that this perception is a bias to correct, not a reality to address.

That's the real problem with captured institutions. Not a secret plot. A monoculture. Same schools, same summits, same Davos panels, same vocabulary from Paris to Ottawa to Washington. When every leader is selected by the consensus and rewarded by the consensus, the consensus stops being tested against reality.

And a ruling class that never gets confronted with reality ends up governing a country that only exists in its own slide decks.

Before you vote, ask one question about every candidate: who formatted them, and who do they still need to impress?

[Dale Flower @BoycottsBat]

@nmcinroy No, we absolutely must not. That debt has already been paid.

[Dale Flower @BoycottsBat]

I fear that if we pay slavery reparations at the behest of those who feel they fell foul of it (and have been condemned to a life of being a comedian whose career was launched on The Black and White Minstrel Show, say, or as a Peer of the Realm, sitting in the House of Lords, for instance. Poor lambs!) it opens up the door to us paying reparations to the descendants those Africans and Arabs who had their livelihoods pulled from under them when the British Empire banned the slave trade and dedicated their navy to preventing it. Surely, they were the biggest losers in all this? The estimates for compensation must be off the scale! Bartering beads and shells can’t be half as lucrative.

[Dale Flower @BoycottsBat]

@simonwatt85 I think we all miss a world in which we weren’t being gaslighted by people who are meant to work in our interests.

[Dale Flower @BoycottsBat]

Don’t you yearn for the days when all oil was “death free”? It was just used to keep us warm, facilitate transport, manufacture clothing, surgical instruments, medicine… and, probably most importantly, fertilisers to which 5 billion people owe their lives.
If it wasn’t for the woke, extreme left oil and gas would still be serving mankind. Thank God’s they’re there to save us from prosperity, health and travel opportunities.

[Sensible Simon @simonwatt85]

@bencsmoke But the oil we import will be death free?

[Dale Flower @BoycottsBat]

Not really feeling it.

[ɠɧıʂɧ @rirokpik]

Dear white people, just because you give charity to ease your guilt doesn't mean you understand Black people or what we've been through.

[Dale Flower @BoycottsBat]

I don’t have any guilt. If you guys decide to round each other up and sell each other as slaves it has nothing to do with me. If you elect to listen to shit hip-hop music, it’s your problem. If you feel compelled to “pop a cap” in each other’s asses I can hardly be held to account.
Black people would appear to reap what they sow. Please don’t involve me in your sordid lives.

[Dale Flower @BoycottsBat]

An argument in the realm of “most rapists wear socks. Ergo, we should ban men from wearing socks”. Utter nonsense. Brexit and immigration are unrelated. Freedom of movement, however, forces to accept any degenerate a woke EU government admits into their country. And pay him benefits.

[Socialist Opera Singer @OperaSocialist]

If you voted for Brexit to reduce immigration, how's that going for you?

The UK had lower immigration when we ALL had Freedom of Movement.

[Dale Flower @BoycottsBat]

You guys are extremely heartless. You would rather women get brutally assaulted and even murdered in the women’s bathroom because you can’t accept trans-women are men and, as such, should use facilities appropriate to their sex.

[Dale Flower @BoycottsBat]

Oh, the irony!

[Dun Garbhan @Dungarbhan]

If this man had half a brain he’d be dangerous.

[Dale Flower @BoycottsBat]

@Dungarbhan Twice as much as you seem to have, then?

[Dale Flower @BoycottsBat]

Ken wins the internet today.

[Ken Patrick @ochkenny]

@bencsmoke Multiply that by all the oilfields in the world ,and we are finished.

[Dale Flower @BoycottsBat]

Our politicians should be going to prison because they’ve damaged people to the extent they believe this nonsense.

[Ben Smoke @bencsmoke]

it’s estimated emissions from oil at rosebank will cause 57,000 deaths+£114 billion in damage so of course the bbc has written a light hearted human interest story with barely a mention of the catastrophic impact drilling there would have. utter disgrace. https://t.co/NO6hc1kGLo

[Dale Flower @BoycottsBat]

Nutter alert.

[Ben Smoke @bencsmoke]

it’s estimated emissions from oil at rosebank will cause 57,000 deaths+£114 billion in damage so of course the bbc has written a light hearted human interest story with barely a mention of the catastrophic impact drilling there would have. utter disgrace. https://t.co/NO6hc1kGLo