COP26 will help to consolidate this neo-aristocracy. And, bizarrely, the left will cheer it on. The left once said: ‘We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance… We do not call for a limitation of births, for penurious thrift, and self-denial. We call for a great production that will supply all, and more than all the people can consume.’ (Sylvia Pankhurst.) Now it pleads with the super-rich to come up with more and more creative ideas for how to rein in the filthy habits and material dreams of the masses. What a disaster. It isn’t climate change that poses the largest threat to humanity in the early 21st century. It’s the bourgeoisie’s loss of faith in its historic project, and its arrogant generalisation of that loss of faith into a new ‘green’ ideology we must all bow down before. A revolt against environmentalism is arguably the most necessary cause of our age. Who’s in?
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Samizdata quote of the dayNovember 1st, 2021 |
 23 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Kip’s Ma.
(Character in Atlas Shrugged, for those that don’t recognize the name.)
Count me in.
FWIW.
I note that Brendan O’Neill is not the only writer who sees this farce through a class-analysis lens.
Joel Kotkin is another.
Greenfreaks=Marxist run eco-scum are opposed by any not evil morons.
I appealed against a weeks suspension on Twitter for saying something mildly unkind about a chunk of political pork. My previous 2 successful appeals took overnight each. Anybody want to bet my “appeal” wont be settled until Cockrot26 is over?
Why bizarrely? Marxism was always a tool to build an aristocracy. That is why it do not have checks and balances, limits to its power.
People do not make Revolutions. Only the bourgeoise and aristocracy do.
The first words I heard when my alarm radio came on this morning were, “We should force people to…”
decnine
complete this sentence:
a) ‘…live with only 18th Century technology, food and medicine if they believe this Green propaganda.’
b) ‘…listen to a 3 hour speech from Greta…’.
c) ‘…pay for this by themselves if they want it…’.
or am I wildly optimistic?
We should force people to…
…listen to the screams of the elite as we hoist them via piano wire up the lamp posts for the crimes inflicted upon the electorate.
Ecksian solutions all round!
of the masses is the key phrase in that sentence. IIRC, Al Gore kept a heated swimming pool that used more electricity in a month than the average home used in a year. How many private jets are flying to this farce of a conference?
It’s “living like a medieval peasant for thee but not for me” all the way up to the stinking, festering top.
Cake for me, but not for thee.
If they believed it they would act like they believed it.
I’m not sure if that’s true. They could genuinely believe that CO2 is a problem and also genuinely believe that that problem can be solved by stopping the plebs from emitting it. The elite can carry on as normal because, although their individual carbon sins are huge, they are relatively small in number and will do little harm.
Climate change is the new religion of the elite and like all such religions its main purpose is to justify their power. COP is their annual revival meeting, where the faithful pledge to redouble their efforts and the priests pass round the collection plate and threaten sinners with eternal fire.
The jets at COP are much like the guy who trudges across the grass to put up the “Do not walk on the grass” sign. A minimal problem in the scheme of things.
But the issue here isn’t that one guy’s impact on the grass, or the jet-setters’ impact on climate. It’s the optics. At least the guy putting up the sign isn’t usually one of the rich elite.
At COP, it feeds a “let them eat cake” vibe bolluxing their we-must-all-sacrifice PR stunt. Personally, I hope their jets get bigger and bigger, and they never figure out that they’re sabotaging their own cause.
BBC Breakfast TV was full of this BS this morning. God I love the delete button.
For a revolutionary marxist BON is pretty sound…
He is far more classically liberal that that phoney turd Boris.
BON might be able to claim to be a Marxiat in that he writes through a class based view but he is an old English liberal from the Leveller tradition in reality.
bobby b November 1, 2021 at 9:39 pm
We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance
no, it does not come from Ayn Rand 😉
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pankhurst-sylvia/1923/socialism.htm
Mr O’Neil is correct that the very rich are (mostly – there are a few who are not) supporting the growth of totalitarianism, as are most of the vast Corporations.
But I think he is mistaken about the far left – they are not stupid, they are NOT being manipulated by the rich elite and the corporations.
The left will support “Bill” Gates and the rest of them till the totalitarian regime is established – then they will cut the throats of the rich elite. The Duke of Orleans supported the French Revolution (financially and otherwise) and after years he got his dream (the Ancient Regime was abolished) – and then his “friends” robbed the Duke of Orleans and cut his head of.
It will likely be the same with “Bill” Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff “I do not really believe in this stuff – I am just playing along” Bezos, and rest of them. Their far left totalitarian collectivist “friends” will cut their throats.
As Oscar Wilde, a socialist, said about the death scene of “Little Nell” by Dickens.
“One would have to have a heart of stone – not to LAUGH”.
“But C02 emissions Paul…” – this is nothing to do with C02 emissions, it never was.
Paul Marks
November 2, 2021 at 8:36 pm
Mr O’Neil is correct that the very rich are (mostly – there are a few who are not) supporting the growth of totalitarianism, as are most of the vast Corporations.
nothing new – see where the money for Bolshevik party came from before 1917
https://web.archive.org/web/20210105002301/https://salo-forum.com/index.php?threads/recommend-books-on-this-thread.801/page-31
Another Centennial work, Mikhail Zygar’s The Empire Must Die is also not found In Smele’s 2003 bibliography, and it is the most surprising book I have read on the Revolution.
Zygar’s portrait is the dysfunctional side of a Russian society and revolutionary assassination and counter assassination framed by a decadent and self indulgent moral elite that encourages this cycle. His targets are not the Autocracy, bureaucracy, the nobility, or the Church but rather the professors, writers, new money, and radical intelligentsia.
His book actually opens and has a significant focus on the literary world of Russia, starting with the excommunication of Tolstoy for his Christian Anarchist Millenarianism and his over support for the Socialist Revolutionaries’ peasant platform. From there we get into his late friendship of Gorky, who donates most of his book money and family fortune to the Russian Social Democratic Party while cucking the theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky of theatre kid fame.
Gorky and his new girlfriend, Maria Andreyevna make acquaintances with the millionaire actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya and one of the richest industrialists in Russia, Savva Morozov and his nephew Nikolai Schmidt. These last three were the largest domestic contributors specifically to the Bolshevik party in the underground phase, and they all have connection to one another in a very specific minority religious sect that were renowned for being niggardly merchants.
That’s right, the Old Believers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers
Now, the Old Believer Question had been in the back of my mind as a lost factor in the Russian Revolution, especially since when I started to dig, I found quite a bit of crossover in the “disaffected sub elite” strata of Moscovite and Petersburg society. But no historian names the Raskol quite as explicitly as Zygar has done in his map of money and connections specifically to the underground Bolsheviks. While there were self financing activities in the Caucasus on the Party’s part, and still other contributors, Zygar makes the case that the unimportant lesser branch of social democracy got its greates pre March 1917 mindfalls from profligate Old Believers who had made up the “native” merchant burger artificially maintained ethno-religious group, which was so novel a take I found it worth writing these series of reviews to get to it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34523811-the-empire-must-die
anon lurker – a grim story indeed.
Russia was getting better over time, but many “intellectuals” (although certainly not all of them) were indeed filled with crazy ideas.
This was just unfortunate (to put the matter mildly) as Russian was basically sound from an economic point of view – at least much sounder than our system is now.
But so many people (including, yes, many rich people) wanted to introduce some form of Collectivism.
Private property rights only last as long as people believe in them.
Look Sportsfans, sadly we are watching the slo-mo suicide of “Western Civilization” (as this crowd once knew it) in real-time before our very eyes. We don’t even need a time-warp like that old 50s CBS TV series “You Are There” w. Walter Cronkite to help. We are ALREADY “There”. (To our great misfortune)