Elsewhere (83)
Tim Worstall on the ever-changing grievances of the left:
There are certain people, Dianne Abbott being a good enough example, whose existence is only validated by telling people to do something different from what they are. If everyone’s a model of Victorian primness then the shriek will be that free love is a necessary part of civilised society. If everyone is indeed practising free love then Victorian modesty is the only valid more for society to allow. It’s not that either is better or worse. It’s that, by definition, whatever people are doing is wrong and they must be controlled to do the other. After all, Kip Esquire’s Law does require that someone should do the controlling and there are those who do insist they are in the vanguard of those who ought to be. What is being controlled and to what end is much less important than the controlling itself.
Daniel Hannan tackles the myths of Occupy:
The Occupy crowd are occupying the wrong place. In this country, they were literally occupying the wrong place – they set out to occupy the Stock Exchange; they ended up in St Paul’s Cathedral, on grounds that it’s vaguely near the Stock Exchange. But even if they had a better sense of direction and found the place they were after, they’d have still been occupying the wrong place.
And Christina Hoff Sommers ponders attempts to reinvent children:
Swedes can be remarkably thorough in their pursuit of gender parity. A few years ago, a feminist political party proposed a law requiring men to sit while urinating – less messy and more equal. In 2004, the leader of Sweden’s Left Party Feminist Council, Gudrun Schyman, proposed a “man tax” – a special tariff to be levied on men to pay for all the violence and mayhem wrought by their sex. In April 2012, following the celebration of International Women’s Day, the Swedes formally introduced the genderless pronoun “hen” to be used in place of he and she (han and hon).
Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.
There are certain people, Dianne Abbott being a good enough example, whose existence is only validated by telling people to do something different from what they are.
The revolution has to go on forever, David. Eternal progress!
My sister tried desperately to get her daughter interested in non-traditional-feminine stuff, because she didn’t want her to become a poor musician/performer (like herself), but instead a prosperous engineer (like me). Her (older) son had all the right toys, and she tried to interest her daughter in them, but to no avail. I remember one memorable quote “She picks out the pink stuff every time, dammit!”.
She eventually got several degrees in the arts filed, and after a while, a law degree. She is now a prosperous NYC lawyer, working hard to pay off her law-school loans, so she can quit NYC and go do public-interest-type (i.e., low paying) law.
Oh, and this was the most intereting quote:
“.. in the book Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women, “We do not accept biology as destiny … We vaccinate, we inoculate, we medicate… I propose we adopt the same attitude toward biological sex differences.””
More of the progressive tactic to declare that everyone who disagrees with them has an illness. Where have we seen this used before….?
I love all the equality stuff in Sweden, where I understand the muslim immigrants in particular take to it like a duck to water (or is that a hen?)
The revolution has to go on forever, David. Eternal progress!
There’s a certain type of person who very much enjoys bossing and nagging, telling others how they should be living and what they should and shouldn’t value, all while displaying their own moral superiority. Or illusions thereof. The ostensible cause being championed is often just a vehicle for their displays and can change quite dramatically. One cause may be replaced with another, even its opposite or something jarringly incompatible, all quite suddenly and as if nothing had happened. And so Lierre Keith, mentioned here, went from radical vegan and fan of “militant action” to radical meat-eater and fan of “militant action.” Whether or not people ate meat suddenly shifted in its importance, while the need to indulge in haranguing and vandalism, and of course moral preening, continued as before. For some, the important thing – the constant thing – is the urge to lecture others while feeling terribly radical, virtuous and important.
[ Added: ]
To some extent this describes much of our political class, including the statist academics who call for restrictions on which foods we may eat and who demand that popular foods be made more expensive – for our own good. The people who want “radical action” – i.e., taxes and intrusion – to “tackle obesity,” and who happily contemplate “limiting individuals’ freedom to consume junk.” The kind of people who feel entitled to “correct” every proletarian habit of which they disapprove, using the power of the state and other people’s money. The Conservative Party is hardly free of nannyism but, by its nature, so-called ‘progressive’ politics – which requires our correction and collective transformation – is a perfect license for such urges.
The kind of people who feel entitled to “correct” every proletarian habit of which they disapprove, using the power of the state and other people’s money.
Usually starting with ‘if it saves one life’…
Usually starting with ‘if it saves one life’…
And often followed by an assumption that if you object to an ever-growing state of ever-greater reach then you must want overweight drunks roaming the streets and kittens catching fire in unprecedented numbers.
More evidence (from Sweden) that Greens are just Fascists out of uniform.
The modern Conservative Party is 98% Progressive. I think I might be underestimating there. Can anyone mention a single advance for personal freedom over the past 2.5 years, where they have rolled back the Progressive State?
statist academics who call for restrictions on which foods we may eat and who demand that popular foods be made more expensive – for our own good.
Journalists too…
Observer, January 6:
“On Tuesday, MPs will debate the introduction of a 1% cap on benefit and tax credit increases under the Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill. If introduced, this hardship penalty will hurt millions of families across the country –families already struggling to pay for food, fuel, rent and other basics. Many thousands have turned to food banks for help.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2013/jan/05/cameron-new-year-message-what-best-for-children
Observer, January 13:
“Price is the key factor in our behaviour with food and food may, simply, be too cheap.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/13/price-to-be-paid-cheap-food
Hunger is bad.
And cheap food is bad.
“Hen” isn’t genderless.
Oh, yeah–Swedish. Sorry, forget that, stupid of me.
The Swedes are proving a hidden flaw in pacifism–it encourages the foolish belief that a rule can exist to cover any imaginable turn that reality happens to take, and that human beings naturally desire to follow a rulebook always. The Swedes have been getting away with it, to large amusement, but nothing lasts forever. I’m thinking that all those Muslims they’ve let in to their country might prove to cure them of this sort of silliness.
Once Were Vikings.
Apparently the Labour leadership think we’ll all have safely forgotten the last time Dianne Abbott came to everyone’s attention, and that she can be allowed back into public debate.
I don’t know why I do this to myself, but I listened to her taking part in an edition of ‘Women’s hour’ yesterday. She is now shadow public health minister, and as Worstall says, exhorting us to “do more” about the sexualisation of girls (boys will be just fine, of course, no need to worry about them). Politicians of all stripes are always making vague noises about “doing more” and “education” so she wasn’t being unusual there, I thought.
To digress slightly, the main thing that struck me was the handling of the debate – which I felt was kind-of-screwed-up. The comparisons so carefully chosen, the continual use of the passive voice claiming, for example, that girls are being “victimised by a pornified culture”, or by some nameless entity. When a female student accidentally said “girls are doing this to each other, it’s not always boys” the conversation was hurriedly moved on. It was a dishonest discussion.
As for Abbott, I suppose the genuine (and crashingly un-PC) criticism of her is that she sounds as though she has only the feeblest grasp of what she is talking about at any given moment. You might think that doesn’t stop many people in politics, but in actual fact I don’t think she makes much of a mainstream political party member either, since staying on-message is not one of her strengths.
Henry,
Yes, Diane Abbott, the incompetent class warrior, jaw-dropping hypocrite and Queen of Sweat. The would-be “first black female leader of the Labour Party” who isn’t keen on “blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls” working as nurses on her turf, and who tells us “white people love playing divide and rule.” Oh, and who declared, quite emphatically, that “the British invented racism.”
She’s a love, she really is.
The Finns have always had a genderless pronoun, hän, which is perhaps the inspiration for the Swedish proposal. In everyday speech they use “se” indiscriminately to refer to he, she or it. This doesn’t mean that Finns are gender-confused or particularly pacific – they are not – or that they fail to distinguish between people and inanimate objects. They do though watch events in Sweden carefully, and take care not to repeat the mistakes they see.
As for Abbott, I suppose the genuine (and crashingly un-PC) criticism of her is that she sounds as though she has only the feeblest grasp of what she is talking about at any given moment.
I really think you’re giving her far too much credit Henry, far too much.
Finnish language, as well as its distant cousin Hungarian, is genderless. Not so with the germanic Swedish. Until now.
With respect to Sweden I must confess to being genuinely fascinated at their Lemming-like efforts to commit cultural suicide.
Fascinated too as in I simply don’t understand it….
Where does the self-loathing originate?
The Chinese have words for he, she and it. Those words are ta, ta, and ta. The characters are different.
American Democrats are becoming indistinguishable from Soviet “socialists” except in one major way: Democrats are terrified of guns. The very thought of touching a gun, much less firing one, fills them with nausea. Communists, on the other hand, loved to shoot guns—and people. So we can therefore conclude that American Democrats are sissy Communists. Commie sissies sounds better. Still true.