Samizdata quote of the day

Samizdata Illuminatus (Arkham, Massachusetts) · Slogans & Quotations

Progressive really means nasty, dictatorial, prurient, busy-body, fussbucketing, nanny statism. People who think that your business is their business and they should have the power to tell you what to do, what to eat and how to live your life – even to the point of policing your thoughts. That these people are thoroughly nasty is obvious from every pronouncement they make – and the Greens are probably the most extreme example we have in British politics. They ain’t referred to as watermelons for nothing.

– Longrider

April 30th, 2017 |

15 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

• jim jones

  April 30, 2017 at 6:08 pm

  I prefer to call them the Fascist Left

• Mr Ed

  April 30, 2017 at 6:27 pm

  At the last General Election, there was some airing of the fact that all the Greens want to do it to ban things, they were wonderfully described as having a platform that was ‘Communism for middle-class women‘, but sadly I cannot attribute that description to the deserving coiner.

  Here’s a clip from their 2015 Manifesto (England and Wales only, the Scots and N. Irish have their own parties), it doesn’t copy and paste the letter ‘f’ well.

  What scientists say
  So… the Green Party… a party of sentimental tree-huggers? Yes, we do love trees, and many of us take great moral and spiritual solace from the natural world. But we are also a party of science, and we listen to scientists. Here is what the Royal Society, the UK’s pre-eminent scientific body, said in its 2012 People and the Planet report (pp. 7–8):
  ‘First, the world’s 1.3 billion poorest people need to be raised out of extreme poverty. This is critical to reducing global inequality, and to ensuring the wellbeing of all people…
  Second, in the most developed and the emerging economies unsustainable consumption must be urgently reduced. This will entail scaling back or radical transformation of damaging material consumption and emissions and the adoption of sustainable technologies, and is critical to ensuring a sustainable future for all…
  Third, global population growth needs to be slowed and stabilised, but this should by no means be coercive.’
  We agree. In the General Election you can vote for the only real party of science or for the parties of neo-liberal economic ideology, which believe in the illusion that we can continue to expand forever on a finite planet.

  It’s news to me that the Royal Society thinks that there are too many people on Earth, but there you are. We must ask them and the Greens if that also means that they think that there are too many, say, black, white or Asian people on the planet, whose numbers need to be controlled – of course they would do it in a ‘non-coercive’ manner – because that it what I understand them to mean, even if they don’t intend to say that, I hope that I am wrong. Starvation however, isn’t, technically, coercion, if it just happens when food runs out.

  But since when has it been anyone’s proper business how many people are alive in the World?

  The Green Monetary policy is quite interesting, printing money was just a first step:

  Regaining control of our money
  One of the most fundamental tasks of government is maintenance of the currency. Without stable money accepted by all we can’t buy and sell things or plan for the future. In ation in particular makes it hard to take the long-term view that the environmental crisis demands.
  Most people believe that our money is currently created by the nationalised Bank of England. It isn’t. A pound in your bank account is no more than a promise by the bank to pay you that pound; you don’t actually own any publicly created money. In fact, commercial banks create new money (in the sense of money in bank accounts) whenever they make loans, and that money disappears when the loan is paid back.
  The fact that the size of our money supply – the total amount of money in circulation – is dependent upon millions of separate commercial lending decisions by banks makes it hard to maintain economic stability. During the great recession of the past few years, the unwillingness of banks to make new loans and the desire of people to pay down their debts has meant that the money supply has shrunk, and the government has had to resort to the emergency policy of printing money (called ‘quantitative easing’) to prevent an even worse slump.
  We believe that the time has come to recognise that the creation of currency and the control of the money supply is far too important to be left to pro t-seeking private sector banks and should be brought back under the democratic control of the state. Quantitative easing was but a first step. Commercial banks should be no more than the custodians of publicly created money in current accounts, and the creation of that money should become the function of a new monetary authority, independent of day-to- day government control. This policy would protect ordinary bank accounts, and
  • allow banks to fail safely
  • separate ordinary and investment business
  • provide some control on overall lending and debt
  This would be a massive and complex change to our banking system, with many ramifications, and its implementation, involving many years of consultation, legislation and the creation of transitional arrangements, would not be appropriate for one Parliament. But we would take the first steps of preparing detailed proposals and consulting upon them, and Green MPs will press this issue in the next Parliament.
  The change to the new system would create a new and substantial cash flow for the government, which could be spent on social and environmental priorities and assist in paying down the national debt.

• Sam Duncan

  April 30, 2017 at 7:22 pm

  “the Scots and N. Irish have their own parties”

  The Scottish Greens being the party for people who think the SNP’s plans to construct a sort of Jurassic Park of 20th Century corporatism north of Hadrian’s Wall aren’t mad enough. Astonishingly, and frighteningly, there were four times as many such people in my constituency at the last general election as thought we shouldn’t be part of a continental empire ruled by committees of unelected bureaucrats.

  “the democratic control of the state”

  I love that old verbal sleight-of-hand authoritarians always use, shoving “democratic” in there to make it sound, if you’re not paying attention, that ordinary people will have more say in the process, rather than less (or, if we’re honest, none at all).

  “The change to the new system would create a new and substantial cash flow for the government, which could be spent on social and environmental priorities and assist in paying down the national debt.”

  Of course! What could possibly go wrong?

• Thailover

  April 30, 2017 at 7:23 pm

  Pat Condell on youtube. The Truth is Incorrect.
  https://youtu.be/nwK7VRkbGiU if you prefer.

  And Oldie but a goodie.

• Tim Newman

  April 30, 2017 at 7:58 pm

  And right on cue:

  The level of household food waste in England is “unacceptable” and householders have a key role to play in reducing it, MPs have said.
  The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee said 7.3m tonnes of food was wasted in UK households in 2015.
  The committee said shops should relax standards that prevent the sale of “wonky vegetables” to help cut waste.
  And the next government should consider whether “best before” dates were needed, it said.

• Paul Marks

  April 30, 2017 at 9:32 pm

  I agree with the post.

• Alex

  April 30, 2017 at 9:43 pm

  Morrison supermarket doesn’t seem to need those regulations to be relaxed, it has been selling “wonky vegetables” for a couple of years now – and good they are too, both in terms of value and quality. Nevertheless it would be a good idea to scrap – not relax, scrap – the regulations that force best before dates that people follow slavishly, and standards that are intended to prevent fruit and vegetables from being sold if it is blemished.

• Rob

  May 1, 2017 at 5:48 am

  Is this the same State which demanded “Best Before” dates and lambasted companies who did not display them? It might be!

• Niall Kilmartin

  May 1, 2017 at 7:45 am

  Alex (April 30, 2017 at 9:43 pm): “it would be a good idea to scrap – not relax, scrap – the regulations that force best before dates that people follow slavishly”

  I like having a “best before” date. It helps when I find something at the back of a cupboard that could have been there for a year or ten. I do not follow them slavishly, and I note the phrasing is “best before”, not “will probably cause death if eaten after”.

  Information is good. Slavish following is bad. Scraping regulations is good, but I’ll scrap ones that tell me what to do before moving on to those that merely mad ate information. It would appear the greens have the opposite priorities.

  In Scotland, over the recent indy2 discussion, we’ve had the chance to see that green’s interpret referendum commitments very loosely indeed. Something the PO’s quotee omitted – probably just because it was so obvious – is that greens attitude to the truth is indeed watermelonish.

• Alex

  May 1, 2017 at 10:45 am

  I agree Niall. However it is harder to repeal some unnecessary regulations than others. When the enemies of freedom are right about something, even if they are right for the wrong reasons, I see no need to pick a fight with them but rather to support those ideas that are good and reserve the powder for the wrongheaded ideas.

• Lee Moore

  May 1, 2017 at 11:19 am

  I thought this was a good write up :

  http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=669&theme=home&page=1&loc=b&type=ctbf

  The critical distinction, for me, between progressivism and authoritarianisms of the right is that while the latter believe that you need to be ordered about so as to prevent you doing the wrong thing, because human nature will stand in the way of you doing the right thing as a matter of course; the former believes that this ordering about is merely a temporary expedient until human nature itself can be changed so that you do the right thing without needing to be ordered.

  I think it is this belief in – and pursuit of – the alteration of human nature that is at the root of the mania, and which makes progressivism especially venomous.

• rxc

  May 1, 2017 at 11:39 am

  I prefer the moniker “Ctrl-Left” as a descriptive term for the progressives. It neutralizes the use of Alt-Right, and gets to the nub of the issue immediately.

  And I don’t accept any whining from them about name calling, etc. They are the worst practitioners of the corruption of the language, starting with the name that they use to describe themselves. They say that they are all in favor of “progress”, but is more of a “back to the feudal past” sort of progress, where there are benevolent kings, kind and caring aristocrats take care of the local shire, guilds, and LOTS of serfs.

• Brian Swisher

  May 1, 2017 at 12:09 pm

  “Ctrl-left” and “Alt-right” implies the existence of a “Del-center”.

• Mr Ed

  May 1, 2017 at 5:56 pm

  It is May Day, the festival of socialist terror and idleness, only a public holiday in the UK since Jim Callaghan so decreed in a gesture of appeasement to the KGB-backed Trade Union thugs of the 1970s.

  As a gesture of defiance, I bought some toilet paper today, a luxury that socialism denies to many Venezuelans, a lot of whom voted for their own bottoms to be unclean. May the good people of Venezuela wipe away the arseholes.

• PersonFromPorlock

  May 1, 2017 at 6:03 pm

  Rob
  May 1, 2017 at 5:48 am

  Is this the same State which demanded “Best Before” dates and lambasted companies who did not display them? It might be!

  Well, why not? The ‘what’ in “What is not forbidden is mandatory” isn’t set in stone. 😛

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