The Agonies of the Left, They Never End

Hey, Ted…That’s WTP. It’s snootier.
David, Then you’ll have to spend it on hookers and beer. Or maybe just beer. Your choice. Donation coming shortly once I get out of this hell hole to a more secure location.

Simen – reformed…for now..perhaps the self-loathing and liberal insanity will get too much and he’ll crack.
As for Murphy, he is not an economist but an ex-accountant. Quite a difference.
His ignorance of economics is so profound even I notice it.

If Owen Jones wasn’t brandishing a huge, wry smile on his face as he typed: “I know the Left doesn’t get much of a platform”, then I genuinely fear for his sanity.

Done

Twit Richard Murphy ‏tweeted, ‘Where did this absurd myth that the gov’ts money is “ours” come from? Taxes belong to the gov’ts and no else.’
Dear money-handling socialist tyrant enabler, in the USA our WRITTEN constitution begins with “We, the people”. Money doesn’t magically appear as the government demands it. It’s OURS from beginning to end. WE earn it, WE elect representatives based in part on how they say they’ll spend OUR money.

Sandra K,
I have a question. Were these people already this childish and emotionally messed up before they went to university or did they become this childish and emotionally messed up after being ‘educated’?
It’s hard to say, but Marxoid fantasy does seem concentrated in and around the less reputable parts of academia. It can persist there untested, unmolested by reality. And so, in the video linked above, Sarah Knopp can peddle the “enlightenment” of communism to the young people in her care and insist that when they believe as she does – and only as she does – then they’ll be “critical thinkers.” Then they’ll be “emancipated.” Just like her. And I wonder, for instance, how Nina Power would fare outside of her immediate academic circle.
Marxoid thinking does appeal to a certain adolescent streak and I’d imagine some students are more susceptible to this claptrap than others. It’s a strange combination of ersatz rebellion, nasty power fantasies and desperate conformity, which is why we’ve seen and heard it all so many times before; always with the same pathological unrealism, the same barely concealed spite, the same trajectory. And so we get Ms Penny, the Marxoid “anarchist” who wants higher taxes and a bigger, more overbearing state. An egalitarian class warrior who professes destitution but can somehow travel the world to feel other people’s pain. One commenter described Ms Penny as “a montage of clichés,” which has a certain ring to it.

we need a Pinochet.
no. Don’t forget we’re trying to avoid totalitarianism.
The End of Patriarchy is the BEGINNING of men’s opportunity to stop being half-people and to become complete human beings.
Imagine the howls of outrage about demonization, vile stereotyping, dehumanization, etc if someone else (like, say, Ann Coulter) had said a variation of that.

For Mr Murphy, the state is all. You are but a tick upon its fur.
And he can’t believe anyone would disagree with him.
http://timworstall.com/2012/12/21/ritchie-on-politics-and-democracy/

My friends are fretting on Facebook about buying “gendered” toys for their nieces and nephews. Getting them what they want is so passé.

David: It’s hard to say, but Marxoid fantasy does seem concentrated in and around the less reputable parts of academia.
“less reputable”? Some of the more egregious Marxoids are stuck at redbrick institutions (or the U.S. equivalent, such as Pasadena City College).
But they abound in the heights of prestige academia: for examples, Columbia, U of California-Berkeley, Duke, and Oxbridge. Penny Dreadful went to Wadham, not East Anglia. Barack Obama’s old friends Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, retired from setting bombs, now teach at U of Illinois-Chicago and Northwestern, both upper-tier schools. Eric Hobsbawm went to Cambridge and taught at Birkbeck, where the absurd Slavoj Žižek still flourishes.
The Marxoids of high academia train the Schwyzers of low academia (Cal-Berkeley, in his case). As always, those who hold the high ground dominate the battlefield.

To be a leftie you need to be forgetful.
To embrace socialism you must be able to forget every left-wing failure that has gone before (and in some cases as little as three years before because people are apparently ‘pining’ for Labour so soon after their catastrophic performance under Blair/Brown) and also forget what you yourself thought last week. There are so many contradictions in the left mindset (trees have souls and must be protected but unborn babies are lumps of flesh to be disposed of without thought; enterprise and creating jobs is a bad thing but unions — who keep workers in the same place with no hope of progress — are good; we supposedly stand against fascism but ally our organisations with fascist governments) and this forgetfulness of your world-view allows you to pretend you are ‘progressive.’
While self-obsession and narrow-vision helps (I once had a thought that is not approved by committee so it must not happen again! No more free thinking for me!) being a socialist is really about amnesia. Admittedly some of it is free choice (as in I choose to ignore the truth about murderers like Che and Mao) and does involve not looking closely at what’s going on, most of being a marxist is about forgetting.

That Richard Murphy describes himself as an economist is the most scary thing.
Further to Mr Murphy, who doesn’t seem to believe that taxes are any business of the people who have to pay them, this may be relevant. As a snapshot of a mindset, it may tell us something about the kinds of people who share Mr Murphy’s assumptions. When not fretting about whether Pac-Man is “gender essentialist,” the Guardian’s Ms Zohra Moosa tells us that,

I’m a little bit tired of spending so much of my time defending the most basic principles of what I stand for. It serves to distract. What I need is a safer space where I don’t lose so much energy justifying why social and environmental justice are worth spending a lot of society’s money on. What I want is a space where these ideas are a given and the debate is about how best to actualize them.

You see, Ms Moosa doesn’t want to be “distracted” by “defending the most basic principles of what she stands for,” or by explaining what exactly “social and environmental justice” might mean, or whether it’s worth whatever she decides it will cost other people. And what she stands for is “spending a lot of society’s money.” That’s her role, as she sees it – spending “society’s money” until the world looks the way she thinks it should be. And to do this, Ms Moosa needs a “safer space” in which her assumptions aren’t challenged by those who think differently – say, the taxpayers footing the bill.
It’s rather like when Laurie Penny told us, quite emphatically, that “social progress” depends on taxpayers being forced to subsidise leftist self-congratulation pretending to be art. And that grumbling about the extortion and misuse of other people’s money – half a million pounds of it – is anodyne and inconsequential. As so often, there’s a signature arrogance. For some reason, the phrase born to rule springs to mind.

@Mike James..
totally agreed.
Leftism is a kind of parasitic texture, growing on the underlying, wealth-creating free-market substrate.
In lean times, the parasite dies.