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There seems to be a stage missing

Lest anyone look at the previous post and think that it is only the Yank media that thrills to the sound of breaking glass, here is our very own Evening Standard giving over its pages to Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion: “Roof spikes and the noble art of window smashing— protesting for Extinction Rebellion”.

She writes,

Just having left an impromptu roadblock on Millbank, I found myself yesterday suddenly among a swarm of cyclists pedalling friendly mischief around the city. There’s something about the spirit of this rebellion. When people join together in courage and love for life on earth, willing to take the punishment that will come, the system doesn’t know how to handle it. The Government itself declared a climate and ecological emergency last year, but little more than lip service has followed. On Tuesday, together with environmental organisations, academics, lawyers, and now more than 30 MPs from seven parties, we handed to Parliament on a plate a Bill fit to address the crisis. All they need to do is pass it — and all we need to do is tell them we want it.

Away with all that pettifoggery about persuading the public. That XR want it done should be enough to make it law.

Edit: Further demonstrating that persuasion is not their thing, Extinction Rebellion protesters block newspaper printing presses.

Darren Grimes said it well:

Extinction Rebellion hasn’t been ‘infiltrated’.

Black Lives matter hasn’t been ‘infiltrated’.

These movements were never about the environment or racial justice.

These movements were always about control.

They cannot win at the ballot box, so they have to use other means.

20 comments to There seems to be a stage missing

  • lucklucky

    Nothing new under the sun. The Bolchevik and Anarchist terrorism in Russia was created and supported by the bourgeois and even aristocracy looking for some religious experiment to give meaning to their lives.

  • Flubber

    Proving that nothing changes the Bolsheviks also had the New York Times running interference for them.

    To this day I pray that Walter Duranty is roasting in hell.

  • George Atkisson

    Flubber-

    I pray that Duranty be like Prometheus, burned slowly and then renewed to full health and awareness of his impending doom before the cycle repeats for all eternity. In my more cruel moments, he should also be given a sliver of hope that the cycle had ended, before repeating. 😈

  • “I don’t think it is sensible politics to break the law
 If you are any good at all, some of your demands will be met and then you will be demanding people abide by those new laws. You can’t have it both ways.” (Sir David Attenborough in The Sun newspaper, and Guido’s quote of the day)

    In logic, I agree, But Hitler, Stalin and Mao did have it both ways. Their revolutions destroyed legitimacy and consistency, then use their secret police to ‘justify’ their rule. Sir David’s argument assumes that Parliament continues, and it is what passes the pro-XR laws. It also assumes that elections continue, and Parliament retains the power to repeal the laws. I don’t think XR intend either.

    This approach inevitably requires purges of comrades and sympathisers, as well as the general public. Those most comfortable with that rise to rule within the movement.

  • Mr Ecks

    They are Marxist scum who need the shite beating out of them. The train incident of a while back is what would happen to them, en masse –save that in BlueMarxist Blojob Johnson’s Britain –Plod stands ready to protect them as they harass you.

    Luckily they are winning themselves no friends. Just a lot more trouble once Plod can be broken. Millions are going to the Dole soon–there will be ever less sympathy for these middle class Marxist scumbags trying to make an already difficult life more different.

  • […] This is absolutely correct, of course. However, the bit that Kenan Malk misses is that coercion is at the heart of these movements. As seen over at Samizdata: […]

  • Cesare

    It is well that they are ‘willing to take the punishment that is to come’. For myself I have no desire to engage. But if engaged on an involuntary basis it will end when and how I say it ends and unfortunately I am not equipped for prisoners.

  • Jacob

    The UK Gov. already passed a bill committing to “net zero carbon” energy by 2050. You can pass all the bills you want. It will not happen – you can’t pass a bill to cancel the laws of physics.

    But, if you will, you can declare a carbon-power-station holiday – close down all coal and gas power stations for week and see how it works…

  • Johnathan Pearce

    Janet Daley in the Sunday Telegraph today https://bit.ly/3lQc46d:

    Extinction Rebellion has lost out big time in the race for front page headlines since the Covid epidemic. Hence this desperate, stupid move against the press with which newspapers will have to engage in a very publicity-worthy fight.

    In fact, XR has not only lost the star role on the public stage for the duration of the present emergency – it has actually lost some credibility. Many commentators have pointed out that even the drastic decline in air travel – severe enough to bring about the collapse of the airline industry and all the employment that it entails – has not made much of a dent in the level of carbon emissions. So what exactly would it take to produce the falls that XR is demanding? A return to pre-industrialisation with all the poverty and social backwardness that went with it? An end to the social and geographical mobility that modern economic freedom has enabled?

    Given what even this tiny reduction in pollution has cost – socially and economically – the prospect of what XR proposes is devastating.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    I scanned and read the Evening Standard (a paper so crap that people leave it on the bus rather than pay for it), and wondered what must go through the mind of editor and former finance minister George Osborne, in printing this gleeful disdain for the democratic process? Note the superciliousness and lack of self awareness of the author of this screed: the enjoyment of shafting the public, the sense of entitlement. (There is also no awareness that the lockdowns this year have been a test run for what ER wants.)

    It is not, by the way, just an issue of young people imbibing the ideas of the far Left, and the whole green agenda. There seems a fairly solid core of what I might rudely call “militant grannies”. A certain type of woman, greying, a bit hippy-dippy, but with fanatical eyes. They aren’t so different from the sort of folk who gather around religious cults, which is essentially what ER is. I occasionally meet such people. In former times they’d be bending the vicar’s ear during parish council meetings. Now they go on demos.

    Hopefully, now that parts of the media have been hit by these people, the message might finally get through to Boris Johnson and his colleagues that trying to pander to the Green vote is a waste of time. The “Red Wall” voters captured in Dec. 2019 like their cars, their budget flights to Spain, and their home DIY upgrades. They see the ER obsessives as the sort of upper class twits and entitled wankers that they have shown themselves to be.

  • It is not, by the way, just an issue of young people imbibing the ideas of the far Left, and the whole green agenda. There seems a fairly solid core of what I might rudely call “militant grannies”. A certain type of woman, greying, a bit hippy-dippy, but with fanatical eyes. They aren’t so different from the sort of folk who gather around religious cults, which is essentially what ER is. I occasionally meet such people. In former times they’d be bending the vicar’s ear during parish council meetings. Now they go on demos.

    Not really new though, is it? The entire raison d’etre of the UK Green Party is essentially to provide “Communism for Middle Class Houswives”. Who else who give a misandrist nutcase like Carolyn Lucas as an MP and occasional “Leader”?

  • Flubber

    Communism for Middle Class Housewives” – nah just this generations Greenham Common lesbians.

  • APL

    XR, BLM(white chapter)*, ANTIFA, probably the hippy movement in the ’60s are the accumulated result of the relaxation of the selection pressure European population was under until 1890s.

    These are people, who may be carrying a high genetic mutant load, who in prior centuries wouldn’t have survived into adulthood.

    80% – 85% of the genome is considered to be associated with brain development, and where narcissism, psychopathy, BPD and other genetic disorders are expressed.

    *the Black chapter of BLM seems hardly to exist by comparison. Non existent in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola, etc.

  • APL

    A random selection of ANTIFA gives us an unusually high criminal representation.

    Joseph Rosenbaum, convicted pedophile. Served 12.5 years for sexual contact with a minor.
    Gaige Grosskreutz, a convicted burglar who was illegally carrying a gun.
    Anthony Huber, convicted domestic abuser. Convicted of multiple domestic abuse counts, ADW, battery, false imprisonment, and “strangulation and suffocation”.

    Mark Dakin: “only an exhausting, burning rage and desolate sadness that still nothing has changed . . . you continue to exclude us, poor fellow, seems to be suffering from severe narcistic disorder.

    And then there is this lying grifter.

    Yea, looking like a good theory.

  • APL (September 7, 2020 at 8:14 am), I think what we are seeing is too short-term to have any (worth mentioning) selective, rather than cultural, component. (Also, while useful votes may come from immigrants or spoof ballots, the leaders and activists tend to be woke whites, whose lifestyles do not select that well.)

    It has suited certain left-wing politics to suspend or delay consequences – which teaches all the wrong lessons to the targets. It is basic to typical right-wing political views that separating action from consequence – as any overweening state does – will have rapid bad effects on humans in general (no need to wait for future generations).

    But you are right – and not the first to notice – that antifa shock troops have a huge proportion of criminals. Some say Kyle could have shot three BLM at random in Kenosha and been as likely to hit three such creeps as he did (which I’d prefer to think was overstating it a bit – they were a very nasty trio).

  • APL

    Niall Kilmartin: ” antifa shock troops have a huge proportion of criminals”.

    Who are very highly organised.

    I doubt that ANTIFA UK are any less so.

    Niall Kilmartin: “I think what we are seeing is too short-term to have any (worth mentioning) selective, rather than cultural, component.”

    Selection > cultural.

    1870* – 2020, Roughly five generations ( assuming 30 years per generation ), is long enough to have an impact on society. It may have accelerated in the last fifty years as a result of in utero medical procedures, and the fashion for artificial insemination, where the criteria for mating success is nothing to do with evolutionary fitness of the individuals concerned ( infertility would imply evolutionary unfitness ).

    1870* This date as a rough start point for all the major public sewer works, and clean drinking water projects.

  • The ‘Evening Standard’ is free.

  • APL (September 7, 2020 at 9:38 am), I agree entirely about BLM’s criminal thugs being organised. However, as regards,

    1870* This date as a rough start point for all the major public sewer works, and clean drinking water projects.

    British culture was, and, with all its faults, still is today, superior to that of places that took a lot longer to sanitise their drinking water. It was in the days of clean drinking water that Churchill led us to victory.

    Especially in those parts where today’s world can look as if it has gone mad, I recommend looking at immediate causes. If, for example, certain Dem-run cities allow bail out of Antifa thugs immediately they are arrested, then spend resident-taxpayer money providing somewhere for the thugs to stay locally, there is no need to seek distant and esoteric explanations of why last year’s norm is – in those Dem-run locales – suspended.

    While the triumph of antifa might cause the downfall of civilisation, including clean drinking water, I feel no confidence that the resulting (genuine) pandemics would disproportionately weed them and their descendants over others. And even if I did, I would prefer a more short-term solution. 🙂

  • Paul Marks

    Darren Grimes is correct.

  • CaptDMO

    From the US……
    National Council to Control Handguns (NCCH)
    Handgun Control, Inc.
    Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence
    Brady