Fight the Power, Oxford Antifa! “On Saturday 18 February, fascists and climate deniers are planning a “community day” in Oxford to exploit concerns and tensions around traffic filters. We won’t allow it!”
On Saturday 18 February, fascists and climate deniers are planning a “community day” in Oxford to exploit concerns and tensions around traffic filters. We won’t allow it! pic.twitter.com/mU8qlm2rzv
— Oxford Anti-Fascists (@OxfordAFN) February 6, 2023
Hat tip to Andy Ngô.
I have not looked that hard into this “15-minute” city business. This article by Henry Grabar on Slate dismisses opposition to it as a ludicrous conspiracy theory. Well, the first few paragraphs do. However nine paragraphs down he is not sounding so sure:
In Oxford, however, the urbanists’ ambitions are more serious. Next year, the city plans to implement a souped-up toll network on major roads. But it’s not to get cars out of the city core, which has had a hefty congestion charge since February. Instead, the city’s six new “traffic filters” will limit daytime car travel between Oxford’s neighborhoods, which stretch from the medieval center to its ring road like slices of a pizza. There are the usual exceptions for buses, taxis, emergency services, people with disabilities, freight, and so forth, but other drivers will face camera-generated 70-pound fines for motoring across town on local streets. The intention is to unstick the jams that slow the city’s major streets to 5 mph in the mornings by diverting traffic to the ring road and encouraging residents to use alternative transportation.
The result, they hope, will be faster traffic, a functional bus network, and cleaner air. The goal is to reduce car trips in Oxford by 25 percent; grow bike trips by 40 percent, and cut road fatalities in half by 2030. Planners project traffic downtown could fall by more than 50 percent.
Oxfordians will not, in fact, be banned from visiting their mothers, as the conservative provocateur Katie Hopkins suggested last month. You can take the bus or ride a bike. You can drive all you want for free, so long as you use the city’s ring road to cross town. You can also drive through the traffic filters after 7 pm. And locals are entitled to 100 free driving days per year. (This last part, I have to confess, seems like it might be both messy and annoying.)
Still, these “traffic filters” are pretty bold as anti-car measures go, and the controversy has not been confined to red pill anti-vax forums.
Despite Oxford Antifa not giving their permission, the demonstration did take place. Dave Vetter, an Oxford-based climate journalist, was there, and took a lot of pictures and videos. He called the demo “an intoxicating mix of far-right conspiracy slogans, antisemitism and really terrible hip-hop.” I’ll believe him when he says he talked to one person who said Ashkenazi Jews were “not like us”; all demos attract a certain proportion of lunatics. But one would think that if antisemitism really were a big part of the Oxford crowd’s motivation, he would have had no trouble finding loads of placards proclaiming it to photograph.
I’m sick the baby steps and double speak. Just cut to the chase and say “there are too many people in the world and your betters will decide who lives and who dies” and get this show on the road.
Question from one who doesn’t know your streets, neighborhoods, or traffic patterns:
In many American cities and suburbs, a house development will go up, roads go in, and then after time traffic patterns develop as drivers find efficient routes other than the planned ones. Traffic patterns develop in unwanted ways, leading to lots of traffic in what should have been quiet residential space.
And then, (usually with the homeowners’ blessings), the road people start setting up barriers and signals and regulations that discourage that unplanned-for traffic.
Is this what they’re doing here? Or is this much more blatant “we hates cars” meddling that really won’t help residents, but will serve some green value?
Because they ought to be serving their residents, I would assume.
(More on topic, next we’ll get the hysterical AntiFa posters scheduling a direct action against chocolate, because while not all chocolate-lovers are Nazis and Fascists, most Nazis and Fascists do seem to like it, and this must be stopped before the extreme right scum kill us all . . . )
Why you take their name at face value?
Unpopular opinion no doubt, but why must people and places always be dominated by cars and lorries? Cars are pretty new in the scheme of things, most towns were never designed for them. Those that were, are the very definition of shithole .. you know it’s true 😉
No, in fact horse shit: the very definition of shitholes were cities before trucks & cars. Horses & horse shit. That was how all the stuff that makes cities possible got moved around. Horse drawn carts of various kinds, and horse shit absolutely filled the streets, providing the proles with jobs shovelling it away every day.
If you want to live in a planned society under the watchful supervision of a regulatory bureaucracy, segment everything & introduce internal movement controls like the Soviets. What could possibly go wrong?
Ashkenazi Jews ARE “not like us”. They make a point of being “not like us”. Or am I missing the point of ther different fashion choices?
Saying they’re “not like us” is merely saying that we’ve noticed.
The private car is perhaps the most significant contribution to personal freedom ever. This is why it has to go and what we are seeing is a rather more direct attempt to remove an incredibly important property right – the right to own and run your own personalised transport – than we have seen previously.
All the “benefits” of 15 minute gulags are imagined, and – given the record of all such attempts to restrict private car use – will bear no resemblance to the real world chaos that will ensue.
In the specific case of Oxford (I certainly don’t know, just wondering if anybody else does) the basis has to be that the “basic needs” are all in place and available, or is it that the “basic needs” will follow, requiring of course, more restrictions and controls (I think everybody knows the answer to that!)
@Perry de Havilland
Surely you mean what could possibly go right? (or even not totally disastrously wrong)
@Bobby b
In my limited experience of US cities (ditto Canada) the immediate impression is one of far greater space being available (which would sort of tilt things towards car use). Interesting to hear that this sort of thing afflicts you too.
We do get similar sorts of things here “rat runs” where people try to find a way round the deliberately created obstructions and because they don’t want to stand around like a tawdry streetwalker until some shite bus deigns to turn up, fight their way through “traffic management” schemes, not have tracking constantly put out by “traffic calming” etc etc. Those “rat runs” that do tend to get further restricted tend to be those that go through the nicer parts of town (of course, there will come a time – probably not that distant – when I won’t be able to drive. I’ll hang on to my car as long as I can, but I dread being without one)
I was born and raised in the centre of a large city (cough) years ago. For the past 30 odd years I have lived in a moderate sized south coastal town. 18 months ago, for the first time in many years, I had the need to drive into that centre again. It was an almost surreal experience. I knew exactly where I was. I recognised all the buildings and landmarks and I pretty well all of the roads (there had been a few changes of course) and could easily have got to my destination in my sleep.
But fuck me! Lights, filter lanes, one ways, no left turn, no right turn, no entry, this or that road now blocked to traffic…..I almost did a Michael Douglas in falling down!
How do they do all this “zoning”? Very likely various overpaid “consultants” and “experts” using expensive software without ever having set foot in the streets in question.
Oxford Council has no problem taking rates from the car factory which has been there for a hundred-plus years.
A few thoughts about the photos:-
1. Always nice to see the Gadsden flag.
2. Jon Snow (not the GoT one) would not have approved of the racial makeup of the demonstrators. By failing to mention this (unless “far-right” is shorthand for the absence of colour) Mr Vetter has missed an open goal which makes his rather desperate attempt to bring antisemitism into the picture even more confusing.
3. Was there much of a counter-demonstration? Normally the lefties can get the troops out and a university town should have been pretty much a home fixture.
They use the word “Fascist” but they do not define the term.
“Fascism” as such is nothing to do with “racism” or “anti Semitism” – and “racism” and “anti Semitism” have nothing to with opposing these “Green” policies, indeed the German National Socialists (unlike the Italian Fascists) had a strong Green wing. Someone like Himmler (head of the SS) would have fitted into the post war German Green movement in quite a few ways – but, I repeat, National Socialists (Nazis) and Fascists are two different things – although they can sometimes form an alliance.
So what is Fascism? Fascism is support for the Corporate State a system of Public-Private partnership of the state and leading Corporations (backed by fiat money – not a detail, one can not really have Fascism without fiat money) in what today is, thanks to Dr Schwab and others, sometimes called “Stakeholder Capitalism”, like the “Great Reset”, “Stakeholder Capitalism” is a book title by Dr Schwab.
But one must not fall into the error of thinking that this is just Dr Schwab and the World Economic Forum – on the contrary Fascism, although the word itself is no longer much used, is the philosophy of our age. Agenda 2030, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, is very much based on a fusion of governments and leading corporations.
The irony is that these “Anti Fascists” in Oxford (mostly Marxists) are supporting the leading governments and corporations on the planet.
Yes the “Anti Fascists”, no matter how much they are personally Marxist, are supporting the very Fascism they claim to oppose.
Perhaps the circle can be squared – after all before Karl Marx there was Saint-Simon the French Collectivist who believed that Collectivism would NOT mean the shooting of the capitalists and Credit Bubble bankers – but, on the contrary, that the Big Business types (especially the Credit Bubble bankers) would introduce Socialism.
Some important in the home town of Karl Marx (Trier in the Rhineland) were Saint Simonists – as was his kinsman the poet Heine. If Dr Klaus Schwab was on this thread he could point out that many highly cultured people in the 19th century were Saint Simonists – and I do not deny it.
So the Marxist “Anti Fascists” who are, in fact, SUPPPORTING Fascism in Oxford, have a pedigree – Mussolini himself was a leading Marxist (both in Italy and internationally) and even after he became a heretic (from the point of view of Orthodox Marxism) he remained a devoted admirer of Karl Marx to his dying day – when he was killed by Orthodox Marxists.
The quickest way to meet lots of anti-Semites is to go to a meeting of any far left ‘anti-fascist’ organisation.
Problem for our “betters” is that it will be them fighting against the dying of the light.
When the proles aren’t happy (and we clearly aren’t) then our “betters” have reason to be nervous. That they aren’t shows their utter stupidity and failure to understand that history is always against them.
It’s great we’ve solved all the world’s problems and people can devote their lives to being a climate journalist.
Oxford: isn’t that a place full of academics who are supposed to be frightfully clever?
Obey, bend the knee, pay.
Your betters command that you submit. Submit.
Katie Hopkins has NOT said that people would not be allowed to walk between the zones. Although who knows what the future will bring – a few years ago the Covid lockdowns and the fanatical attacks on farmers would have considered “impossible”.
Indeed Katie Hopkins’ reporting on the rally (almost a festival) has been rather good – especially considering the state of health of Katie Hopkins, who is very much on borrowed time.
Not so long ago that would have been taken as a warning.
“Why are our towns and high-streets dying?” It’s a real mystery, that one.
Sam Duncan said:
This is the sort of thing that drives me to the conclusions I’ve reached about the inimical effects of our selection for the sort of idiot-savant autistic types that do well on all the tests, and yet manage to fail miserably in real life.
You can see the same sort of autistic logic in many public endeavors here in the US: Homelessness? Gee, let’s pay people to be idle and enable them to spend all their time shooting up drugs. Why ever do we have more and more homeless in the Puget Sound metro area? It’s a mystery, that is… Crime rates up? Well, we effectively quit punishing crimes, so why should we be surprised when people start committing more of them?
We currently have one of those “situations” going here in my home state, one which I venture to predict is going to be Exhibit “A” for explaining how a bunch of politicians got themselves lynched:
https://www.courierherald.com/news/group-home-for-high-level-sex-offenders-opens-near-enumclaw/
If you want an example of piss-poor governance by the autistic morons we’ve put in charge of things, just do a quick web search on the terms “sex offender” “tenino” and “enumclaw”. Those last two are community names, and they’re (Surprise!!!) mostly rural and somewhat conservative towns. Also, not all that large; not enough voters to really affect anything if they get righteously angry.
I suspect we may be seeing some group homes burn, with their occupants inside. Along with their assigned social workers. Not condoning, but I do understand why it will happen. It’s bad enough that the state hasn’t executed most of these creepy bastards, but deliberately releasing them into group homes they’ve foisted off on small rural towns…? Oh, yeah; that’s gonna work out really well.
We are governed by some of the worst idiots in history, and I blame the entire systematic implementation of the IQ test as a proxy for virtue and criteria for selection and promotion. Actual wisdom and performance are devalued in our system, which is why everything is spinning out of control. They’ve put autists in charge of everything, and they simply don’t understand how the world really works.
Once Katie Hopkins had access to the newspapers and television – these days the lady is only mentioned as a target for smear attacks (such as a recent one on BBC Newsnight), but she has reported well on these matters – although confined to Social Media, such as YouTube.
However this is presented, it is all about control. Councils—and politicians especially—love the idea of control. What could be finer, in their view, than restricting movement, or at least issuing documents and passes and putting up yet more road signs? The town where I live hasn’t as yet imposed such restrictions as Oxford but given how busy its workers are in widening pavements and thus narrowing roads to restrict the flow of traffic, while incidentally being unable to fill potholes, I suspect the local town hall has at least discussed the possibilities of following suit.
A nearby city has imposed a ‘clean air zone’ in its centre (already pretty dead with a once busy High Street now consisting of mostly empty or ‘bargain’ shops thanks to onerous parking charges in the few places available for access by car) and the rash of signs on approach proudly announce the reason for another round of the restriction game: ‘Pay online.’
And there we have it. At the heart of all this there are not only controls but also extra revenues, and with them the delicious prospect of fines too, all adjustable at the flick of code on the council’s website. I do wonder when the insanity of net zero bites and very few people have a car just how these councils will then make money. Maybe they will charge us not for breathing but exhaling deadly gasses.