I am not being sarcastic when I say that I admire the way that Nick Young, writing for Greenpeace Aotearoa (the country formerly known as New Zealand), at least has the guts to admit that Sri Lanka’s ban on chemical fertiliser was a disaster. In a piece called “Sri Lanka’s fertiliser ban and why New Zealand can phase out synthetic nitrogen fertiliser”, he gives his reasons for supposing that despite Sri Lanka’s experience, it will work next time. He is enthusiastic, for instance, about the prospects for the Indian state of Sikkim which has also prohibited chemical fertilisers. He writes,
The key thing to note is that it wasn’t something that happened overnight. And it didn’t happen because Sikkim’s shoppers suddenly decided to buy organic food or because its farmers woke up one day and decided to switch to organic with no support. It happened because the Sikkim Government used policies, public investment and a transition plan to make it happen.
It is strange to me to see someone delight in the fact that the choices of shoppers or farmers, the ordinary people whose lives would be affected most, played no part in this change.
This Guardian article is five years old now, but I would bet that the problems it describes have not gone away: “Sikkim’s organic revolution at risk as local consumers fail to buy into project.” More recently, Pawan Chamling, who as the then Chief Minister of Sikkim did much to put the policy in place, said that the current Sikkim government “has put Sikkim’s organic mission on the back burner”. He writes,
The organic mission has been totally wiped out of the government’s vocabulary and State budget. Not a single penny has been allocated towards organic farming. Even more alarming is that chemical fertilisers are being brought into the state and are freely sold in the market.
Freely sold and freely bought. Farmers making their own decisions. How awful.
Despite everything, I have nothing against organic farming. But the way that Sikkim being “100% organic”, a source of pride and a key part of Sikkim’s identity according to Mr Chamling, withered as soon the government subsidies dried up suggests that the change was never, if you will forgive the metaphor, organic in the first place. It was imposed from the top down. It had no roots.
As a resident of the country formerly known as New Zealand understand that NZ is rapidly becoming the Woke capital of the southern hemisphere.
Therefore pretty safe to assume that you will be right many more times than you are wrong if you look at whats happening here and then do the opposite.
Its basically one big farm, so declare war on greenhouse emissions, set arbitrary targets that no one else is signing up to and wipe out the farmers – check
Implement regressive and undemocratic policies to assuage guilt for actions taken 200 years ago – check
Ditch educational standards, social norms and legal standards in the name of addressing repression – check
And so on……
People in New Zealand used to say that they had practical liberty, freedom of speech, firearms, fairly limited regulations, no farm subsidies – as much or more practical liberty than the United States, without all the ideological documents and conflicts.
But, in the end, ideas have to be opposed by other ideas – being “non ideological” means the left win by default.
There has to be ideological conflict – and it has to be won. Americans are correct about that.
The United States is engaged in a political and cultural conflict right now – liberty may die, but it will not die by default.
Just as you say that, New Zealand is going to get a right wing government. The woke aren’t winning very fast, if at all, here.
There are some aspects of modern day NZ that seem woke to outsiders, such as the progress on Maori rights, language etc. However those are being done in a very bipartisan way, in a manner utterly unlike how the woke view race. Integration, rather than separation.
Back to the original topic:
There is basically no “industrial” dairy farming in NZ. The cows live in fields, and only go inside to be milked. They largely eat grass. That “industrial” is thrown in simply as a slur, because dairy farming in NZ isn’t that far from how peasant farmers do it, except the milking is by machine.
There’s precious little industrial farming of any sort here actually. Some chickens and pigs, but between customer preference for free range eggs and the banning of the worst forms of pig rearing, it is getting less industrial over time.
“Over 50%” of NZ’s emissions don’t come from agriculture: https://www.stats.govt.nz/indicators/new-zealands-greenhouse-gas-emissions-published-april-2019 (My guess is that he picked a period during the Covid lockdowns to make that statement “true”)
The whole thing is distorted because NZ uses so little fossil fuels to generate electricity. That makes the agriculture percentage look higher, while I’m guess that on an acre for acre basis that our emissions are lower than Europe because almost all are animals are primarily grass fed.
Greenpeace just hate farmers. That’s what it is all about. Emissions are just a stick to beat them with.
I’m beyond sceptical about the whole nitrous oxide scare anyway. It’s based on it’s half-life being over 100 years. But that makes no sense for a gas that is trace, even by the standards of carbon dioxide. A gas is trace only if it breaks down reasonably fast or is extremely rare to begin with. If it has the half-life claimed, then it should be increasing four times faster than it is, at least.
I suspect it is like the “Berne Model” for carbon dioxide, where some trickery is invoked to make a molecule instantly gobbled up by plants become something that lasts for ages in the atmosphere.
Chester Draws – I hope you are correct Sir.
Politics is notoriously hard to predict, but at current rates Jacinda is toast. There’s a few very contentious items being processed at the moment, and almost nothing good for Labour.
I work in a Labour voting environment, and the mood is they don’t like Labour policies and Jacinda’s personal magic is fading.
The adulation for Jacinda outside NZ is quite something. She’s not particularly woke — she’s very much old school Labour. They haven’t made many social changes, but instead have done things from the 1970’s — centralising health, technical education and water. They’ve even tried to bring back naton-wide bargaining. It’s weird to watch such old, and of course failed, policies being put out by someone alleged to be so modern.
The next National government will almost entirely wipe out the changes. They aren’t popular, and they are expensive.
@Chester Draws
Politics is notoriously hard to predict,
Before you get your hopes up you might consider that you can substitute “democrat party” for “labour party” and “Biden” for “Jacinda” and you’ll get a description of the situation in the United States at the end of October. The promised revolution against “the man” (or in your case “the lady”) did not go at all as planned.
And FWIW, what is it about Polynesian languages that they have so many vowels in their words? “E Ihowā Atua, O ngā iwi mātou rā” That is eight syllables out of 13 that have no consonants. Aotearoa, three quarter of the letters are vowels. Maybe the lilting vowels remind them of the rolling Pacific ocean.
In assessing the US experience for comparative purposes, I would include your own:
If Chester cannot match you in that detail, it is possible his expectations will be less cruelly dashed than yours.
That said, your echoing of his point – politics is hard to predict – is very true.
Tony, do you think there’s time to import cigarettes and sell them to people who are forbidden to buy them? NZ has a peculiar law that forbids anyone born after a certain year from buying tobacco- is it 2010? If they are suddenly getting a sensible Government, this will change, so bootleggers must move quickly!
This guy, Nick Young, is a typical smug stupid well to do middle class JAFFA. Just Another F***ing Aucklander.
For the last twenty five years after getting a degree in “psychology” (one of those affluent middle class kids Toilet Paper degrees) he has spent his whole career as one of the those NGO parasites. He has never done a real days work in his life. Never had a real job. Just a professional “activists”. Whose self-righteous arrogance is directly proportional to his ignorance and stupidity.
A typical “activist”.
The term “Organic” food is an advertising term. Pure and simple. Nothing more. For food that is sold at a steep premium to clueless people mainly as a Class Marker. I’m better than the common people because I eat “special” food. etc. etc.
There is no nutritional benefit. None. There is no “ecological benefit” due to the huge loopholes in the “certification” and the freeloader effect. Once more than a very small percentage of land is “certified organic” yields quickly collapse. Mainly due to disease and pests.
At heart every “eco” wants mass genocide. Mass death. Because that would be end result of their beliefs. And they want everyone but themselves to be the people who “go away”. To “save the planet”. Pure narcissistic delusions of self-importance.
Very dangerous people no matter how ludicrous they may sound. And should be treated as such.
I’m pretty sure it was with sarcasm that Burke summarised a 1770s speech by a British government minister. The speech detailed rather frankly the unhappy outcome of the government policy so far in its American colonies and then reiterated the administration’s commitment to carrying through that policy.
1) This might have applied here too. Nick Young might have honestly detailed the sad outcome of the policy in one instance before drawing the bold and manly (and left-wing) resolution of not letting experience influence him.
Or it could have been mere ego. It was said of one French king that
and Thomas Sowell is fond of the John Randolf quote that makes a similar point in the opposite way:
It may be much easier to recognise the disaster that happened in Sri Lanka than the disaster that threatens one’s self-esteem.
2) HOWEVER, all that said, I’m suspicious enough to wonder if Nick’s admitting instead of denying Sri Lanka is simply a debating prep point: “Yes I know about Sri Lanka. As I explain in my recent article, that is not the devastating counter example that the idiot climate denialists imagine. Getting back to the main point …. ”
The way he puts Sri Lanka after stating his conclusions, and introduces it with
suggests this is at least part of a complex mixture of deceit and self-deceit.
What would we do without ‘experts’ to advise us – against thinking the result of following their advice was their fault and not ours. ‘Excessive speed’ was the key excuse of Stalin’s “Dizzy with Success” Pravda article when he briefly paused the collectivisation of agriculture – and of Isaac Deutcher’s bowdlerised safe-for-left-wing-readers biography of Stalin when it talked about the Soviet collectivisation of agriculture a.k.a the Ukraine famine.
I’ll make the wild guess that it was not guts that made Nick add that final ‘So what about Sri Lanka?’ section but a feeling of annoyance after he was asked that once too often.
@Niall Kilmartin
If Chester cannot match you in that detail, it is possible his expectations will be less cruelly dashed than yours.
There is a word of wisdom that I subscribe to: “never blame mendacity for that which can be explained by stupidity.” I don’t doubt there were a lot of shenanigans in the election but the reason it went the way it did is because, apparently, the American people are too stupid to vote their own self interests, and such self loathing hatred was well hidden in the polls and analysis leading up to it.
One can hope that the Kiwis are smarter, but they always strike me as even further down the path to woke perdition than even the Americans. One need only look at the reaction to Covid, or the Christchurch murders to see how the Kiwis feel about their liberties. However, I can’t claim know a great deal about NZ, although I did do a primary school project on it, and I ate a lot of their lamb when I lived in Scotland.
And WTF is that about? How come Brits eat so much NZ lamb when New Zealand is literally the furthest place on earth from the UK?
“Even more alarming is that chemical fertilisers are being brought into the state and are freely sold in the market.”
Yeah, and people aren’t starving en masse, either.
Politicians doing something as a “legacy” or to “make a statement” are even worse than normal.
These people will throw away the Green Revolution and then blame “Capitalism” for mass starvation.
It’s remarkable how many “green” policies turn out to be anti-environmentalist in practice. Banning artificial fertilizers and gmos and chemical pesticides means a lot more acres under tillage and a lot less “natural land”. And of course “greens” are almost all anti-nuclear.
We have no Trump equivalent to throw a massive spanner into the right. Indeed our right is relatively solid, with both National and ACT quite tightly led.
Non-Trump candidates did well enough in the last US election. But some really poor Trump candidates didn’t. The Democrats crowed, but they lost that House and don’t have firm control of the Senate. It wasn’t really a win for them, just not the bloodbath they feared.
I don’t know why you think the Christchurch murders affected our liberty. The Labour Party are trying to get a “hate speech” bill through, but running up against the fact that people here don’t want it, and have raised all sorts of objections. By the time it passes it will be so watered down as to be useless. And it’s not our police force that call round at people’s places to talk to them about mean tweets. Oh, and there were some minor tweaks to gun control, but if you want a gun for hunting you are still free to have one.
Our Covid restrictions were shorter than most in the West. Because we actually can shut our borders we managed to squeeze out the first wave. When Delta arrived we locked down again, but stopped when it was apparent that people were sick of it. Our politicians get elected every three years and by PR, so tend to be quite sensitive to popular feeling because we are not in a two-party lock (it is noticeable that Covid has caused a drift out away from the main parties, who didn’t do very well).
I personally was all for adopting the Swedish approach, but all things considered we got off lightly. Schools, for example, lost only a month or so with each lockdown. We still had end of year exams and kids are back where they should be already. We were allowed to go out for walks in lockdowns too, so nothing like what much of Europe did.
What we had were quite firm lockdowns, but a quick return to normality. Compare that to feeble semi-lockdowns and slow drifts out of them that most of the West had.
I can’t help thinking that the International Left sense this, hence the recent promotion in the media of the Finnish Prime Minister, an altogether more marketable totem than the current cult figure of the Left.
And tfourier’s analysis is perfect, thank you.
Sanna Marin has the advantage of being easy on the eyes whereas Jacinda looks like Gollum.
Fraser:
It might seem like a small disagreement, but i think it important to note that it’s not a matter of stupidity, but delusional insanity.
I submit that self-loathing is a symptom of insanity, not stupidity: stupid people are not self-loathing, just resentful of people who are smart enough to do well in high school.
To go further off-topic: I believe that the Republicans have chiefly themselves to blame for their disappointment. They (beginning with Trump) should have repeated every day, beginning on February 24, that “Biden” has been financing Putin’s war by raising energy prices. By not doing so, the Republicans deserved to lose for allowing the Democrats to claim the moral high ground. (But i give a pass to De Santis, provisionally, since foreign policy is not his responsibility.)
Not much of “Europe”: only the most irresponsible parts of it.
But then, most “Anglos” seem to be delusional about “Europe”.
If only the Eco-Nuts could spray their bullshit on the crops instead of out into the media, the world could solve two pressing problems in one go.
Snorri – we are not delusional about the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, he is a disaster.
He claims to be a supporter of the free market, but is anything but that – he reminds me of the Economist magazine.
This would be the Economist magazine that claims (Lexington column) that Freedom of Speech is not under attack in the United States – a lie, indeed a sickening lie.
According to “Lexington” the problem is that people do not “listen” to the lying Corporate State propaganda of people such as himself. The endless lies of the education system and the “mainstream” media.
We do listen, you swine.
There has been a sea change in US elections: the media’s happiness with “Yesterday was election day – we’ll let you know the result in week or a month”, is just the most public of many powerful indicators. Casual assumptions, rules of thumb from the past, etc. – these all need recalibrating. So, as regards,
I’d say such a rule of thumb cannot safely replace the work of assessing the role of each (as best you can in the face of those determined you shall not know). The potentialities for vote fraud have risen by orders of magnitude. This still leaves a margin above which ‘stupidity’ must do the explaining, but the key point is the effect on Lincoln’s aphorism:
If you can fool more of the electoral system more of the time, you can keep going while fooling fewer (still many of course) of the people. And of course, it’s even better if you can fool many people about whether and how you fooled the electoral system.
As did some down-ballot Trump-endorsed ones in the same areas that were ‘unhappy’ for up-ballot Trump-endorsed ones (i.e. ones headed for Washington D.C. and, it might have been, committees on vote fraud and related cabal-fortified-election matters). For Republican voters to distinguish between such attitudes in down-ballot and up-ballot races suggests anything but ‘stupidity’; it suggests an unusual degree of political discrimination. 🙂 So I would not use a rule of thumb to rule out the possibility that they were helped.
(I appreciate my Dying in the light is very long and yet barely scrapes the surface of Arizona 2022, and Arizona is merely the crudest example of 2022 issues.)
It would indeed be ‘stupidity’ to let wokeness’ weapons of ‘mendacity’ (vote fraud, Hunter’s laptop, etc.) blind us to all else that it can deploy in its war, but by the same token, it’s unwise to ignore those weapons of mendacity – especially that one which the narrative’s alternative explanation (“It was those Trump-endorsed election deniers that repelled the voters”) indicates they want to cure you of thinking about.
Paul:
Well…you are delusional if you think that “climate change” is his _justification_ for wanting to cut down on “nitrogen” in agriculture.
“Disaster” is hyperbole. Rutte has been PM since 2010, after all. Few leaders have done well after being in power for over 10 years. See M. Thatcher.
@Niall Kilmartin
It would indeed be ‘stupidity’ to let wokeness’ weapons of ‘mendacity’ …blind us to all else that it can deploy in its war, but by the same token, it’s unwise to ignore those weapons of mendacity – especially that one which the narrative’s alternative explanation
But this is in itself part of the stupidity of the voters. They subscribe to the idea that anyone who raises one question about the safety of the election is a Trump loving fascist who should probably be in jail and certainly should be muzzled.
But election fraud can only take you so far. The situation in the US is so dreadful that no amount of voter fraud should be able to overcome it. Only voters who are utterly delusional can do that. And the important question is: what possible route back is there? When reform requires the people who benefit from the reform castrate themselves it is hard to expect them to do so (even though they certainly are in favor of you doing so to your confused teenager). And certainly the biggest problem of all for the US, and consequently everyone else, is that Trump seems determined to run again, and burn it all down in the process, even though it is pretty obvious that he can’t win. And will he do so again in 2028, and 2032?
The curious thing is that the left seems determined to continue their campaign against him with the outrageous release of his tax returns and the possibility of criminal charges when probably their best strategy would be to let him self destruct in the middle of the Republican party. However, the plain fact is that even if Trump were sitting in jail he’d still get 30 million write in votes in the election. I suspect that even if here were dead he’d still get millions of votes too. (And don’t get me started on the quislings in the Republican party — McConnell needs to be put out to pasture ASAP.)
So we will just get more and more of the same, and the country will continue to spiral into oblivion. This is not pessimism. I’m an optimistic guy about MY future. But to be so I have to look into the brutal reality of what is coming for the West in general and the USA in particular and adapt my plan appropriately. Fantasies about a savior will just leave you even more screwed. (For example, the stock market took a nosedive today, but I made some pretty good money on it nonetheless.)
Of course Britain is right there with them.
Thanks to @Chester for giving me an interesting education about what is going on it NZ. Though he didn’t answer my question about the ridiculous number of vowels in Maori words….😀
I am not sure what you mean Snorri.
I have never, as far as I know, suggested that the Prime Minister of the Netherlands is sincere in his “Greenism”.
In a way that would be better – if he really believed he was saving the world by sacrificing the farmers.
But actually he is just a servant of the WEF and the rest of the international establishment – indeed he has been called out as such in the Dutch Parliament.
“Disaster” too strong a word? True Snorri – the true disaster has not yet happened. But it will happen and the servant is just as much to blame as the master.
“I was only obeying orders” is no defence – at least not to one of Tolkien’s Dwarves, which is what I am by blood.
Fraser Orr – the undefended southern border is the monument of Mitch McConnell (his endless delays prevented the work being done under President Trump), that and his treachery (not too strong word) in the 2022 midterm elections, where he attacked Republican candidates (Republican candidates) before the election, and did nothing about election fraud (just as he did nothing about election fraud in 2020). And now there is support for yet another orgy of government spending – like all the other orgies of government spending that he has supported.
Hard times have one virtue – they show you who your real friends are and who are false friends.
And 2022 has shown who the false friends are – including the “free market” supporting Wall Street Journal which mocked the victims of election fraud, and just cares about continuing the drip feed of funny money for the corporations of Wall Street – hence its name.
New York, “Wall Street”, is as much free market capitalism as I am a tall slim man with a full head of hair.
In one sense, I agree (and share your deep concern).
In another sense, however, I’ve always accepted that “You can fool some of the people all of the time”.
* Minnesota is a noticeably worse place to live in than before the Floyd nonsense, but bobby b informs us that he knows white progressives there who can move from bemoaning that fact to voting for more of it with no sense of incongruity – that you’ll find more people recovering from their enthusiasm for it amongst the city’s black residents.
* A recent article I stumbled over (via instapundit IIRC) was by a Jewish man describing a visit to his Chicago-resident granny (IIRC). When she moaned bitterly about how the politicians were making things unsafe and absurd, he reminded her she had voted for them. He described the look that then came over his typical Jewish lifelong-Dem-supporting family member as “the aphasia look” – he’d met it so often from such family members of late that he’d had to give it a name.
{That’s nowhere near the worst: a Jewish friend of mine in Oxford had a quite literally Stalinist granny.)
Niall – it is very grim.
There has always been corruption in the Republic – but now it has become extreme.
The Credit Money is the heart of it – it corrupts everything, for example establishment Republicans are addicted to the Credit Money, via the Corporations.
They are prepared to betray Republican voters – which is why they are allowed to win some elections, because it does not matter if they win.
Still many States are not corrupted.
But the Federal Government, and the Corporations allied to it, are an abomination.
One of the problems that we all now face is that the lines have been drawn – and this hits international politics.
When, for example, the British government sides with the regime in Washington – that makes American conservatives hate it, and understandably as it is siding with their enemies (enemies – not opponents, it has gone beyond opponents now).
Even the Ukraine is seen in this light by many American conservatives – they know little of the Ukraine, but they see the leaders of Ukraine standing with their enemies (the Washington crowd – their enemies) and they, mistakenly, think that this is all they need to know.
“Why can so and so not understand that the Ukraine has been brutally and unjustly invaded?” – because so and so sees his enemies (his blood enemies) the Washington crowd (Democrats and RINOs) supporting Ukraine, and so and so fails to see beyond that.
It is easy to point the error from a distance – much harder to see the error close up.
A liar does not lie all the time – Mr Biden, Mitch McConnell, and the rest of them, are liars – but they are NOT lying about Ukaine (at least not when they say it has been brutally and unjustly invaded – although they leave stuff out).
But to the blood enemies of the Democrats and the RINOs, the victims of their endless lies, anyone who is associated with them looks like just another enemy.
Finland in 1941 allied with Nazi Germany because it had no choice – the Finns were NOT Nazis, they were just trying to survive against Moscow.
The Ukraine accepts the money from Washington because they MUST – there is no other way to fight Moscow.
That does NOT mean the Ukrainians supports the sexual mutilation of children and all the other Satanic evil that the Washington regime, and the corporations who depend on its funny money, stands for.
Fraser Orr: They WANT Trump to run, they will win if Trump runs, and so they’re going to keep goading him and his supporters enough to guarantee that the Trump ego cannot step away.
True to Trump-devotee form, Mike Lindell (whom I enjoyed and liked) is now jumping in and attacking DeSantis to try to foreclose his possible candidacy – because Trump still appears eager. More people appear to support RD then DT. We’re going to have a split party for a decade or more.
Love Trump. He should now sit at home and disrupt from the sidelines. We could even officially name him Grande Olde Troll.