Make energy expensive so industry moves abroad, then tax the goods coming back in due to their carbon content.
You pay twice.
– Steve Loftus, illustrating why the Tories should and will burn to ash at the next General Election.
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Samizdata quote of the day – screwed and then screwed againDecember 18th, 2023 |
 16 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – screwed and then screwed againLeave a Reply |
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The Conservatives do not deserve to win the next election. But neither does Labour.
Vote harder.
Forget “Why Johnny Can’t Read”, I wanna know “Why Can’t Senator/MP Smith and Jones Math”.
That, right there, is the question for the ages. How’d these innumerate ignoramuses wind up in charge? Why do we give them this power over us, when the raw and unpleasant fact is, they’re dumbasses?
Same with the media. Why does everyone listen to these assholes? Gell-Mann Amnesia is demonstrated each and every day in our media, and yet… Somehow, the media still manages to exert pressure on public opinion. Supposedly. I actually suspect it’s all one big self-referential bubble that the “elites” running things live in, and that there’s going to be a moment of clarity where it becomes quite apparent that they’re the only ones still believing really, really hard in their own bullshit.
One would think that you’d have a semblance of basic functional intelligence demonstrated by people that manage to win elections, but… Man. Just pick up a newspaper and read the things these idiots are saying, doing, and legislating. Illiteracy, innumeracy, and whatever the hell we term the idea of being ahistorical: That’s all you can see, as well as an utter incomprehension at the simplest cause-and-effect chains imaginable. “Oh, we outlawed and taxed cigarettes to death? Why are these people selling “loosies” on street corners, and how’d that guy wind up dead when we sent the cops in to enforce the law…? Oh, gee, why aren’t the people paying attention to all these other laws that are actually socially necessary?”
From the appearances of things, it would seem that you have to have a lobotomy in order to be elevated to leadership as a politician in all major nations.
I’ve voted in every election that I could since I came of age but next year I am seriously considering not voting. There’s no-one to vote for. My local Tory MP is an absolute clown, useless and clueless. The Labour candidate seems equally poor.
I don’t actually know if there will be another alternative, the Lib Dem candidate is hopeless and cannot win anyway, and there may not even be any other candidates.
I can say that I have rarely experienced the deep current of anger locally. It’s a rough area but when I stood in a local election although I got some low-level nastiness, mostly thoughtless and ill-considered, the kind of things I hearing now are almost frightening. People are simmering with rage about immigration, and they don’t really distinguish between legal and illegal, and the cost of living is a hot topic too.
Maybe angry words is all that it will come to but I suspect Labour may get a landslide, which is entirely undeserved but I don’t know what the alternative is. If people don’t vote, or don’t come away from an election feeling things can change, I think things may get pretty ugly.
My read on the UK from what I can see from where I sit is that the Labor Party is going to win bigly, and then screw it up by the numbers yet again. Whereupon, the Conservative “saviors” will again advance from the wilderness to supposedly rescue everyone, only to prove out as consolidators of Labor policies…
Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat…
Same swindle the establishment Democrats and Republicans have been pulling here in the US.
What happens when the electorate goes past the point where they’re willing to play the game anymore? When they refuse to fall for the scam?
Here in the US, I think a lot of the reaction to Trump is precisely due to the fear of the Uniparty elite that the game is up, or coming to an end. Watch this space, should they foolishly succeed in taking out Trump; you think things are bad, now? What do you suppose the effect on Trump’s popularity would be, were they to make him a martyr? Who would succeed him, take up his banner, use his martyrdom?
I guarantee you that the establishment types are destroying their future, as we speak, through incompetence and greed. When the denouement comes, it’ll be ugly and it will be quick. One day, precisely as I told my Seattle PD friends and acquaintances, it’ll all be the same as it ever was. The next day, you’ll go into work of a morning, and you’ll find that the world has changed, irrevocably and beyond your recognition and imagination.
They’ll fight the change. They won’t win; they’re discrediting themselves so utterly that they won’t be able to. God alone knows what will happen long-term, but things cannot and will not continue as they are. Not with the set of idiots we have running things, and trying to do what they are trying to do.
The key point is “make energy expensive so industry moves abroad”.
“Free Trade Greens” people who think it is O.K. to go for expensive energy as long as people can import “cheap” goods from abroad (“paying” with borrowed money) are cretins. They are cretins even if one accepts their own theories – as C02 is just as “evil” if produced in China as it is here.
Sadly the international economic and political elite is dominated by such ideas.
The American corporate financial elite sold out long ago – they do not give a damn about the destruction of the United States.
Perhaps they think that when America is destroyed they will get cheap slaves – but they will find that things will not work out that way.
For example, Los Angeles, the second largest city in the United States, is now dominated by looters – Marxist looters, including the Mayor (a long time supporter of Communist Cuba and various terrorist groups) and the DA – who has a staff of actual looters (who have personally looted shops – not just supported it in theory).
What do the rich “liberals” of California (and elsewhere) think the Marxists are going to do to them if America collapses?
Your “friends” are going to eat you – and I am not using a figure of speech.
People are simmering with rage about immigration
And they are also simmering with rage at the deflaction from discussing immigration.
“Oh yes, we’re going to do something about the boats”
NO! That’s *illegal* immigration. There’re “only” 30,000 of them, there was 1.2 *MILLION* /legal/ immigrants last year.
“boats.. boats… boats….”
DON’T YOU HEAR US?????
“boats.. boats… boats….”
I keep laughing at the “NET Immigration” figures. So, if 5 million white, educated, working people with the skills and talents that are welcome elsewhere emigrate this year and 5 million and one sub Saharan Africans whose skills are herding goats and shooting AK47’s arrive, then NET migration is only one, so what is your problem?
Talented, well educated and motivated people and third world, uneducated people possessing zero skills needed in a modern technological society are not fungible (except in the minds of Politicians).
Phil B – it’s even worse than that. Many of our modern crop of politicians would consider that a positive swap – they got rid of 5 million evil whites and took in 5 million virtuous nonwhites. They would make that trade all day long.
I expect Labour will lose the election. I don’t think there is any situation so bad for the Tories that Labour can’t screw it up.
A Labour voter upset with the party will not vote, or will vote Lib Dem, or Green, or Communist. A Tory voter upset with the party will look at the alternatives, think “if I don’t vote Tory, Labour might win,” grit their teeth, hold their nose and vote Tory.
I’m a lifelong Tory voter & I’ll be voting Reform
Likewise. I’ve voted Tory every election since 1979 with one exception (voted BXP in the final Euro elections). I will also be voting for Reform, not because I think they will win, but because the Tories need to lose, lose badly, & ideally cease to exist. We need an actual conservative party in UK.
Wrong, it’s Blue Blairites vs. Red Blairites vs. Yellow Blairites, so I think “if Labour wins, they will be just a ghastly as Tories re. Net Zero, supported the absurd lockdowns like the Tories did, probably better on defence than the pointless Tories, can’t be any worse of civil liberties.”
I’ll be voting Reform, the only party that is not pro-Net Zero, allows mRNA toxic jab sceptical views, thinks lockdowns were idiotic, and can’t be any worse than the others on civil liberties.
A powerful, very readable, very informative, very hard-hitting paper just out from Net Zero Watch:
https://www.netzerowatch.com/content/uploads/2023/12/Prins-Archimedes-Fulcrum-Final.pdf
Strongly recommended!
Someone badly needs to establish the “Sane” party, both in the UK and the US.
I don’t see either nation as being run by anyone with a single whit of common sense or rationality. It’s all sociopathic idiots, all the way down.
Will enough people do that? I suppose that’s the real question.
And then the sociopathic idiots take over the sane party …
Gingerdave said:
It’s all sociopathic idiots, all the way down.
This is why I say that humans are very, very bad at organization. I would personally advise, after having done a fairly extensive survey of the history, as well as having done a practicum or two in real life, that you simply don’t set up anything in the way of a permanent institution. No matter what it is you try to build, if you go into it with the mentality that it’s gonna be there for the ages, forever…? You wind up with a power sink that attracts nothing but the human equivalent of human flies and maggots: The power-hungry, and the “careerists”.
Solution? There isn’t one. Except… Don’t build out these giant reef structures of hierarchy and power in the first damn place. If there’s no power to attract them, the flies won’t come, and they won’t lay their eggs.
Frankly, I look at it like mucking out the stables: You do it occasionally, and you won’t have to worry about your barn getting to be a mess. I say that the entirety of government ought to be an ad hoc affair, and that you should never, ever be able to get a “career” doing it, either on the political side or the civil service side. Everything ought to be set up such that you only get X number of years in any elected position, and Y number in any “government cheese” job in the civil service. Hit your time? You’re done; back to the private sector. Maybe there would be exceptions for truly exceptional people doing special jobs like the Manhattan Project, but at the end of the day, ain’t nobody making a career out of telling other people what to do.
Call it controlled anarchy, or something. You need the functions of governance, but you damn sure don’t need the careerists and the little petty power-trippers.
I’d run the whole deal on the same lines as a conscript army; you’re a citizen? You’re liable for duty in governance. And, I’d go another step further: Law enforcement? Everyone has their turn in the hopper. At all levels.
Of course, I’d also make some changes to it all: People on “public order duty” and in uniform as such? They are sacrosanct, and if you so much as raise your voice to them? Jail. Murder one, on duty? Automatic, no exception, summary execution. Preferably there on the scene, in the exact same manner you killed the person. Why? Because they’re not some individual, they’re the personification of public order, and you need to be made an example of. Period.
I’d pretty much leave it up to communities. You want decency and low crime? Fine; all y’all in your community are up for making it happen, and if you don’t? Well, that’s on you, sweethearts. Ya wanna build a monument out to the George Floyds of the world? Do it; just keep it within your own boundaries.
Guarantee you this: Were you to do something like that, put the locals in charge of running their own “law ‘n order”? You’d see a bunch of outright outlawry there at the beginning, and when they tired of that? Things would get downright draconian.
I think the biggest problem we’ve got is that too much of modern life separates people from the raw fact that they’re responsible for things. The “Old West” was a lot more organized and lawful than many suppose, and it was the self-organizing nature of the public back then that made it so. We’ve suppressed that for too long, and we badly need to get people back on board with the realization that they’re the ones who make these things happen, for good or ill.