She Brought So Much Laughter To Our Lives

I’m still processing Ms Bennett’s belief that living on benefits in the UK, benefits that can total around £500 per week for single parents, is somehow much worse than the desperate, life-threatening poverty to be found in India – “because at least everyone else there is poor too.”

“What are you afraid of, boys?”

“What are you afraid of, boys?”
*shudders*

Ah, if we could but hope that this is the beginning of the end of the Eco-Taliban.
However, my son (19), says that most of his friends support the Greens, so it looks like there still remains a market out there for recycled drivel.

Then of course there was the Guardian’s constant excuse-making for each new media disaster, as when Zoe Williams announced that Ms Bennett’s “mistake was to try to answer a question, rather than describe her vision.” Which is an odd statement, given that vision-describing is pretty much all the Greens seem to do, typically in the most vague and fluffy terms.
In fact, Ms Bennett had a habit of waving aside questions about specifics – such as how much that “vision” would cost, where the money might come from, etc – as if such things were both trivial and inconvenient. “She needs to be able to frame the conversation around her own assumptions,” said Zoe. As if an even more determined shunning of realism would make Ms Bennett’s party seem credible.

somewhere there is a universe where Ms. Bennett and Bernie Sanders are meeting to discuss the fate of Western Civilization.
It’s difficult to overstate the level of unrealism and derangement in Green Party policy.
Ms Bennett’s party advocates massive and unbudgeted state spending, crippling eco-taxes, forced “organic” food production, and a deliberate shrinking and discouragement of international trade in order to curb the evils of consumerism. Curiously, they denounce ‘austerity’ (i.e., modest reductions in the growth of public spending), while envisioning a world in which no-one can buy anything too fancy, or from too far afield. And they see no need to retain an army or navy or air force, all of which they dismiss as “unnecessary.”
In policy NY203, the party says its goal is “to see the concept of legal nationality abolished.” Apparently, they want a Citizen’s Income, in which everyone is subsidised simply for being, while abolishing any notion of actual, legal citizenship. They imply that a country, a society, having some control of its borders, however partial, is racist, and that the world and its wives should be free to breeze into Britain and avail themselves of our already creaking benefits system.
This dissolving of our territorial and cultural boundaries, and the abandonment of our ability to defend ourselves or anyone else, along with uncontrolled mass migration from the shitholes of the Earth, and the subsequent collapse of our welfare infrastructure and general economy, to say nothing of social unrest, riots and other unpleasantness… all of this would, we’re told, create “a world more equal, more balanced.”
And yet they ask, “What are you afraid of, boys?”
I think this may be where entrenched, impervious idiocy becomes… well, something close to evil.

“I’m standing here today as a migrant, as someone who came to this country and chose to make my life here. And today I’m here to take a stand against those who seek to demonise me and those like me, for making that choice”
Right. Moving from Australia to the UK is the same as from Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, or Syria to the UK. I may be wrong, but I think the cultural difference would be greater if one moved from Alabama or one of the other civilized states to Massachusetts.
Regarding the grappling with arithmetic and the £72/week basic income, where the hell did £72 come ? That is about $100 and change, and unless I am mistaken, unless one lives in a refrigerator box under a motorway overpass, wouldn’t trying to get by on that anywhere in the UK be high adventure ?

“yogic fliers”
Heh, after a trip to Canada back around ’94 or so, I read about such. I came back and told my coworkers and friends about how this was taken seriously enough in Canada to make a mainstream newspaper. They all thought I was nuts.

[Party polices which are] coherent, congenial, a path to utopia.
Sounds like the political party I’m in the process of forming. It’s still early, but suffice it to say, Kate Upton in a bikini is prominently involved.

That should read “boy wonder.
Damn Mondays.

I still think this piece, from the Telegraph, is both telling and quite funny:

At the front was a stand featuring a large photo of Ms Bennett posing with her predecessor as leader, Caroline Lucas (I looked in vain for any photo of Ms Bennett that didn’t also feature Ms Lucas). Another stand beside it was emblazoned with the party’s slogan, “Standing for the Common Good,” plus, in little letters above and below it, the names of hundreds of party supporters. “Cordelia from London… Clement from Guildford… Felicity from Cardigan… Darius, Verity, Lyndon, Jasmin, Colette…”

I think it was Spectator columnist Ed West who said of the Green Party, “If communism had been designed by middle-class women, this is what it would look like.”

and playing the gender card,
In the wake of infamous radio interview, Caroline Lucas blamed sexism for level of public ridicule. Presumably on grounds that we mustn’t expect female politicians to be even minimally competent.

“I think this may be where entrenched, impervious idiocy becomes… well, something close to evil.”
Exactly.

‘In the wake of infamous radio interview, Caroline Lucas blamed sexism for level of public ridicule. Presumably on grounds that we mustn’t expect female politicians to be even minimally competent’.
Snork.
Incidentally, if anyone is wondering how the hell Natalie Bennett ended up in charge of the Greens, here’s a picture of the alternative candidate.

I’ll leave it to you all to guess what kind of banner she’s holding.

The same sort of elevated notion of one’s mental faculties that we so often see exhibited here by the sundry parasitic ‘creatives’ would seem to be hard at work among Green Party politicians. I remember seeing Natalie Bennett before the last election and thinking that she spoke like someone with an undiagnosed brain tumour. The Dunning-Kruger is powerful in this one.
Farnsworth M.: Wikpipedia informs us that the person in your photos is 73 years old. If her sartorial choices are anything to go by it lends the lie to the idea that with age comes wisdom.

this was taken seriously enough in Canada to make a mainstream newspaper
It should be noted with fairness that the primary reason it made the papers here was because a popular Canadian celebrity, Doug Henning, had run for office in Britain under their Natural Law party, placed fourth out of four with under 200 votes in total, and returned home to Canada to try his luck here.
The nearest approximation that I can think of would be if someone like Tom Cruise or Jeremy Clarkson started their own party, and had enough supporters and fans to field candidates in every riding. As such, getting newspaper attention was pretty much guaranteed, out of curiosity if nothing else.
Despite fielding 200+ candidates in the 1993 election, it was virtually impossible to read any article about the party that didn’t mention Henning, and most articles were almost completely about him.
While they attracted a great deal of attention and curiosity, they never reached even 1% of the vote.

reduced to whining about nasty negative press bullying […] the press were doing the Greens the favour of treating them as a serious party
This is a fairly common occurrence in candidates and parties that are woefully unprepared for the actual task of governing. Generally these types make assumptions that (a) simply stating your goals is enough to make them come true, and (b) the fact that your predecessor/opponents have not succeeded in bringing about Nirvana clearly means that the are evil, because since goals are trivially accomplished, clearly the opposition must not want to bring about prosperity.
Recently, Bernie Sanders in the US had a bit of shakeup when he was interviewed, and the interviewers unfairly (in his mind) asked him how his plans would work, and he just kept reciting that things needed to be fairer, more equitable, etc.
Back in 2004, I remember John Kerry hilariously boasting about having been hand picked for a secret mission by President Nixon in Christmas 1967. Of course, Nixon didn’t take office until January 1968, so he’d have no authority to make such a call in the first place. Also, why would a President select a low-ranking naval officer he’d never met for a high risk, questionably legal Hail Mary pass that could sink his presidency before it had even started? When people started asking these “duh” questions, Kerry got amnesia, stopped giving interviews, and sympathetic newspaper articles started claiming that the Democratic candidate for president “couldn’t” get an interview with a newspaper. When people read those articles and said “well, you’re a newspaper, why don’t you interview him”, things quickly moved into “look! a squirrel!” mode…

Thanks Darleen – that’s great. I plan to work my way through his others now.

“What are you afraid of, boys”
Among other things, freezing to death in the dark.

Sometimes this site is reminiscent of the toffs going down to Bedlam and poking at the inmates with sticks.
Great fun!

@WTP
You mean like the magician?
I do indeed. Oddly enough, I spent my high school years in Oakville, and went to university at McMaster, just as he did, although being 14 years his junior, we certainly didn’t cross paths very often. He was a local celeb and was frequently at various public functions, of course.
He came across as a fairly decent fellow, quite charitable, though a bit of an odd duck. But of course, we’re talking about a stage magician, not being a few slices shy of a loaf would be unusual.
Of course, this was years before he went into full meltdown yogic flyers mode. He was odd at the time, but not yet a loon. Or if he was, he was better at keeping that fact private.

The latest is that Natalie will be attending the ‘Marxism 2016’ jamboree hosted by the Socialist Worker’s Party.
The same SWP that made the news three years ago by taking aside an alleged victim of a rape by a senior party member, and then telling her to keep her mouth shut or else.