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O Good Green Earth, swallow me up Play the audio in this story and see if you can suppress an involuntary wince of sympathy: Incredibly Awkward Interview With Natalie Bennett. (Ms Bennett – a Samizdata commenter – is currently leader of the Green Party of England and Wales.)
Kudos to Nick Ferrari who can evidently do what so many media folk cannot: order-of-magnitude mental arithmetic.
Life is unfair. If The Boris had been on the hot seat he’d have said, “Oh cripes, you’ve ker-splonked me there!” and everyone would have loved him all the more.
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Sympathy for communists? Might just as well have sympathy for the devil.
No sympathy at all. He let her off, frankly. She could move to a village in Durham and still get nothing but an exultant smirk from me.
Now if he’d asked ‘So by force-feeding 10 kilos of raw lentils to 500 Bourgeoisie Enemies of Gaia a day, how many will you kill in a year and how much lentils will you need?‘ she’d’ve shot back ‘That would be 182,500 Enemies got rid of using 1,825 tonnes of lentils‘ and then she would have floundered on being asked ‘How will you get lentils when imports of food are banned?’ . And ‘Why are you banning imports of orange juice?‘.*
*2010 GE Manifesto. Note the 5 year plan. Kulaks of the UK, you have been warned. ‘Localising’ presumed to be a euphemism for mandatory local production and prohibition of imports.
Err …. 2.7 billion (which is 2.7 times 1 thousand million 1,000,000,000) divided by 500,000 is 5400 quid by my calculations.
It would have to be piss poor plywood used to build a house for that cost. Sounds more like an elaborate dog kennel rather that “houses fit for heroes”.
From a purely selfish point of view (I am “in the trade”) I would like the Greens to be slightly less moronic – so they got a few votes that might otherwise go to Labour.
Perhaps I should help this lady – write some lines for her, do a few back of envelope calculations and so on.
Actually Ms Bennett’s appearance on the Today programme today was far more worrying, here it is, and the star turn is talking about Russian bombers flying around the UK, at 4 minutes on, she doesn’t think anti-aircraft missiles are an answer to Bombers, but diplomatic and economic measures are. She also said, and got a pass on the following, which to my ears was a call to appeasement.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02kpx6j
Mr Ed – “she doesn’t think anti-aircraft missiles are an answer to Bombers”
Well Obama doesn’t think bullets are the answer to ISIS – It’s job programs.
We can laugh at the greens cos they’re bonkers, but the Obama administration is just as mental.
Johhydub, indeed, the difference being the Greena aren’t in power here, well not yet!
Thank God we had Keith Park (QEPD) and not Natalie Bennett at the sharp end in the Summer of 1940.
“…And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get.”
You all know the source.
Wow. You can practically hear her screaming in her head “I was told there would be no math!”
Sorry, I can’t summon up even an ounce of sympathy. She’s clearly someone who believes that good intentions and “caring” can make up for an utter lack of comprehension of simple economics or, for that matter, the obvious consequences of moronic proposals. People like that deserve to be taken to task, good and hard. Mr Ed is right: she got off lightly.
How can anyone take her seriously?
There’s a lot of it about, Laird.
Yeah – the entire shadow cabinet for a start…
Question for you UK people:
Is there a place you can escape to, far from the reach of government idiots like this woman as we can in the US like Montana, where I live, or Wyoming, Idaho or Alaska? Just curious.
Hebrides, Orkneys (sp?) – some place?
They could try New Zealand John – but would have to endure severe mockery of their (English) cricket team. Probably better to stay put in that case…
Actually my friends in New Zealand have been supportive of the English team – they think it has done very well (considering).
Although they do ask if we also have a men’s team.
You might want to look up Peter Berg (deceased) of “Planet Drum Foundation” who was promoting this crap in the 60s.
“Greens to be slightly less moronic – so they got a few votes that might otherwise go to Labour.”
My daughter is nearly eighteen and currently at sixth-form college. She says that she is surrounded by kids who have been brainwashed by the education system who have every intention of voting Green. I can only speculate as to how many of these kids would have otherwise voted Labour but I would suspect more than half of them would.
John Galt III, at least the Greens are only “government” idiots in the loosest sense. The party has one MP. According to Wikipedia, “The Green Party also has one life peer, three Members of the European Parliament, two members of the London Assembly, and a small number of councillors on various local councils in England and Wales.”
As for escaping Leviathan, while nowhere in Britain is remotely as remote (so to speak) as the Rockies there are places where you can escape the notice of government if you are willing to forego “welfare”. Any bad estate in South London or Birmingham should do. I’ve heard that the same strategy can work in the urban US. You certainly won’t be much troubled by the police.
John Galt- we will head west. I hear the USA is becoming far more permissive with regard to economic refugees.
@John Galt III, not the Hebrides or the Orkneys, for sure: both are run by the SNP, which supports all the Green nonsense, and believes firmly in the magic money tree.
The frustrating aspect is La Bennett’s car crash will be expunged from the collective consciousness by the end of the week & never referred to again. Whilst, for instance, Farage’s observation of s̶i̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ o̶n̶ occupying a train where he’s the only one using English – familiar & commented upon by most residual Londoners – is hauled out for reinspection at every opportunity.
Wince of sympathy? No fuckin way!
All our power needs will be provided for by sprinkles of magic fairy dust, every person in the land will be given £72 a week, working or not, from the Crock at the end of the Rainbow, and the Elves will build 500,000 affordable houses and will be happy to take Cadbury’s Chocolate Buttons in return, and she expects not to be ridiculed by anyone with still one functioning brain cell?
John Galt III, our best escape would be the Isle of Man, a Crown Dependency with lowish taxes and self-government. If Labour get in again, it should declare independence.
The trouble is, if too many Britons move in, they would replicate their own toxic political culture and ruin the place.
I still maintain a billion is 10^12. It would be easier to talk in megapounds, gigapounds and so on. Eg “The UK national debt is 1.5 terapounds, and interest on it was 2.9 gigapounds last month.”
The reason why Boris would “get away with it” is because, in general, he doesn’t think it’s his job to tell you how to to behave or how to spend you money for you, unlike dear Natalie.
Note regarding “local” farms, I believe it has been established economically that local produce is more carbon polluting than globalised farming, as the reliance on mechanised methods in the UK outstrips the mass transport costs from places where manual labour is used, the only real answer to local produce is to also insist the farmers revert to pre-1940 methods and employ thousands of labourers (then again I see that as totally in line with Green policies).
Andrew Duffin – Orkney is most definitely not run by the SNP; it was the area of Scotland with the smallest yes vote in the referendum (about 33%).
If someone knows this poor woman perhaps they might lend her a copy of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels – it would not necessarily improve her maths but it might improve her sense of life.
TomJ: if by “2.7 billion”, Ms. Bennett meant 2.7 x 10^12, then she is proposing to spend 2.7 x 10^12 pounds to build 500,000 homes. Which would be 5.4 million pounds each – houses fit for princes, not just heroes.
I have just had the pleasure of watching the first episode of the BBC’s “How We Got to Now: 1. Clean” which deals with the issue of clean water.
It is worth bearing in mind that all the environmental improvements detailed in that programme were dependent on a single source of power – fossil fuels.
Miss Bennett and her immoral party say, however, and I quote “…we must commit to at least zero carbon emissions….”
‘Zero carbon emissions’? Don’t we all breathe out CO2, aka Carbon Dioxide? Maybe she could set the example of not breathing, and the rest of us can see if we like it?
RAB (February 25, 2015 at 2:24 pm),
I don’t see why you’re casting aspersions on the quantity (or quality) of Ms. Bennett’s brain cells. For heaven’s sake, noted, up-and-coming young “libertarian” (I kid you not — that’s what they call themselves, and the libertarian Intelligentsia seem to believe them!) so-called “philosophers” such as Matt Zwolinski and Jason Brennan and John Tomasi (I think the latter) are all for BIG, or “Basic Guaranteed Income” with the words disordered so as to make that nice acronym.
If this is the sort of thinking that Cato and various other bastions of intellectualism find intelligent, well, I was going to say “Heaven help us,” but I think Heaven has already given it up as a bad job.
Re: Nicholas’ comment…
One part of the Utopia series that amused me was when they said that if you really wanted to reduce your carbon footprint, you’d have to kill your kids.