We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Watermelons Green on the outside, red on the inside.
I move that any member of this ubiquitous breed of activist shall henceforth be known as a “watermelon”.
UPDATE: members of the commentariat have alerted me to the fact that I did not devise the “watermelon” double entrendre first. Fine – consider this post a propagation of an excellent and underused meme.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Calling Greens “watermelons” has been around for years, James.
…but I’d not heard it until seeing it in Samizdata comments yesterday
Has it? Well, colour me ignorant.
It’s what the KGB used to call them, back in the days when they were subsidising Green groups in the west.
According to ‘Viktor Suvorov’.
It is also how an awful lot of Greens (though by no means all) thought/think of themselves. See the works of, for example, Rudolf Bahro. Many of the more politically astute came from the ultra-left in the first place. A few are a particularly repuslve sort of Trot waiting to welcome an imminent ecological collapse that they hope for, that will pushes the people into the arms of their Revolution.
Most however are not. Greenies of various types are generally reactionary, not revolutionary. That they grope for collectivist-looking answers, wear shapeless home-knit, and follow a scuttle of standard radical causes doesn’t mean they are red in motivation. The environmental movement is far more complicated than that.
And “watermelon”, rather like “euroweenie”, or “Islamofascist”, suggests no desire to understand the complications. I submit it is more suited to knownothing backwoods blogs than the grandeur and subtlety we might aspire to.
OK, Y’all be nice to James. Just because it’s been done before doesn’t mean it wasn’t perceptive. He came up with it independently, after all.
CFM
I first heard members of the Gaian left described as watermelons by the later Petr Beckmann, probably in his newsletter Access to Energy (I don’t think he used the term in his book The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear but I may be wrong).
Jesus, Guy. You are joking, right?
For “subtlety” read moral equivalence. For “grandeur” read pompousness.
Joking? Half. I don’t object to a nicely-turned insult. I do object to clichéed insult used in place of argument, which is why I warn you against resting your weight on watermelons in this context as in any other.
“Equivalence” to/with what, TimS?
What made you think I required you to point this out to me? Just because I haven’t, on this occasion, chosen to write a comprehensive exposition attacking the morality/ideology of the ‘watermelons’ mentioned, doesn’t mean I should’ve, couldn’t have or haven’t done so in the past. Reading blogs would be incredibly tedious if every piece of editorialising demanded the support of exhaustive justification.
Which is precisely what I intended it to be – you may not see it as thus, but that’s a matter of opinion. When informed that the ‘watermelon’ tag has been around long before I posted it here, I quickly updated the post. Consequently, I can hardly be accused of deliberately floating a cliché.
Guy, you are one of my favourite bloggers on Samizdata. I have great respect for your work here and your manifestly obvious intellectual gifts. However, in this instance, I have to agree with TimS – the last paragraph of your first comment on this thread is extremely pompous; not to mention clumsily presumptuous. And I submit such pomposity obscures the grandeur and subtlety you frequently exhibit on this blog in spades.
Hmm, I wonder if we can turn this phrase to better use? It has been the fashion of campus leftists to heave cream pies at guest speakers of whom they disapprove. Might we retaliate by heaving watermelons at, say, Al Gore? Or dropping them from the fire escape? Or would that be considered too, umm, I don’t know, emphatic?
James, don’t feel bad. I once came up with what I thought was a terrific counterblast to the “chickenhawk” insult. I suggested that we start calling peaceniks “turtledoves”, because of their determination to pull in their heads no matter the threat and coo “peace, peace, peace”. I was right proud of myself, until I discovered that Smash had gone public with it earlier.