Movie Night
It must be a good show when a sociologist (who doesn't seem to think his discipline is a by-word for socialism) says
A lot of progressives have stopped believing in progress...and have begun to look nostalgically to the past and have come to reject modern life in many respects and, in a very kind of desperate way, believe that in the good old days when things were small and tangible and when people lived in small villages, everything was all right.
Yah. When asked if those making charitable donations to certain green organisations campaigning to halt industrial-scale development in the third world realise the consequences of their support, this same individual says
Absolutely not, people do this for the best possible motives, but the kids don't realise that by going there and telling them 'this is the way you must live your life', you're actually being fairly coercive; you're imposing upon people a lifestyle that is quite ill-suited to their circumstances, and you end up becoming complicit in an authoritarian world order where one group of people's world-view becomes the dominant one and everyone else's becomes quite secondary. [my emphasis - JW]
Who is this erudite chap? Why, it is Professor Frank Furedi, interviewed on the excellent Mine Your Own Business documentary. This movie has been billed by some as a "right-wing" counterpart to a Michael Moore production, but it comes across as considerably less polemical - and enormously more believable - than the average output from the portly and infamous self-declared son of Flint.
This is a useful film for the liberal cause. I am twenty six, and I have a lot of friends who I would describe as instinctively left-leaning. I have shown the film to some of them. I would like to describe a 'road to Damascus' scene, but there were no Pauls in my audience. Still, several seeds of doubt were planted, and that is a great start - I too was a socialist, but for that seed of doubt planted several years ago. Consequently, I talk to a lot of young people about extending the principle of personal responsibility. I have often thought that the young are natural libertarians - yet, because they are frequently reliant upon the patronage of others for their livelihoods, matters of economics concern them not. Socialism appears affordable and desirable when one pays less than 10% of their income to the tax man. Regardless, I have discovered that it is not so hard to convince a young person of the merits of what is dismissively described as "rugged individualism" by statists - until the environmental question is raised. This is much harder to overcome, because the underlying science is arcane, mastered by few and is thus vulnerable to manipulation. I firmly believe that green politics represents the ultimate bulwark against the adoption of liberal ideals. Therefore I recommend this film. It graphically displays the victims of international green politics - the world's poorest - those that the green movement purports to champion. For this alone, Mine Your Own Business is a useful production. Young people who are socialists are generally well-meaning. They want to help the poorest. Fine - help the poorest the liberal way. Help them via voluntary charity. Decouple the link between the Greens and the poor, because the poor confused Greens are inherently antipathetic towards the plight of the poor, whilst championing them. They are no good to anyone - in fact, they can be positively deadly.
Thus, it is essential that the Greens are denied the ability to become a large 'catch-all' political movement by encroaching meaningfully into the economic arena. Scarily, they have come thus far and we must aim to roll their influence back to saving sequoias and killer whales, because when it comes to economics - that is, the realm of human welfare - Greens are instinctively genocidal. Of course, they will deny this, but ask them about the earth's grave overpopulation problem. Most will concur but not extend this rationale to its logical conclusion because they are good (and misguided) people who would never associate themselves with a cause that overtly demands the slaying of billions. Deduction, fools! Admittedly, the Greens have their consistent advocates. And you thought the Final Solution was a pretty fucking awful idea.
The point is that the Green movement has crept into the mainstream. It urgently needs to be repulsed to the ideological fringes, because it is inherently anti-human. Mine Your Own Business contributes to this process, so it should be supported.
A lot of progressives have stopped believing in progress...and have begun to look nostalgically to the past and have come to reject modern life in many respects and, in a very kind of desperate way, believe that in the good old days when things were small and tangible and when people lived in small villages, everything was all right.
Yah. When asked if those making charitable donations to certain green organisations campaigning to halt industrial-scale development in the third world realise the consequences of their support, this same individual says
Absolutely not, people do this for the best possible motives, but the kids don't realise that by going there and telling them 'this is the way you must live your life', you're actually being fairly coercive; you're imposing upon people a lifestyle that is quite ill-suited to their circumstances, and you end up becoming complicit in an authoritarian world order where one group of people's world-view becomes the dominant one and everyone else's becomes quite secondary. [my emphasis - JW]
Who is this erudite chap? Why, it is Professor Frank Furedi, interviewed on the excellent Mine Your Own Business documentary. This movie has been billed by some as a "right-wing" counterpart to a Michael Moore production, but it comes across as considerably less polemical - and enormously more believable - than the average output from the portly and infamous self-declared son of Flint.
This is a useful film for the liberal cause. I am twenty six, and I have a lot of friends who I would describe as instinctively left-leaning. I have shown the film to some of them. I would like to describe a 'road to Damascus' scene, but there were no Pauls in my audience. Still, several seeds of doubt were planted, and that is a great start - I too was a socialist, but for that seed of doubt planted several years ago. Consequently, I talk to a lot of young people about extending the principle of personal responsibility. I have often thought that the young are natural libertarians - yet, because they are frequently reliant upon the patronage of others for their livelihoods, matters of economics concern them not. Socialism appears affordable and desirable when one pays less than 10% of their income to the tax man. Regardless, I have discovered that it is not so hard to convince a young person of the merits of what is dismissively described as "rugged individualism" by statists - until the environmental question is raised. This is much harder to overcome, because the underlying science is arcane, mastered by few and is thus vulnerable to manipulation. I firmly believe that green politics represents the ultimate bulwark against the adoption of liberal ideals. Therefore I recommend this film. It graphically displays the victims of international green politics - the world's poorest - those that the green movement purports to champion. For this alone, Mine Your Own Business is a useful production. Young people who are socialists are generally well-meaning. They want to help the poorest. Fine - help the poorest the liberal way. Help them via voluntary charity. Decouple the link between the Greens and the poor, because the poor confused Greens are inherently antipathetic towards the plight of the poor, whilst championing them. They are no good to anyone - in fact, they can be positively deadly.
Thus, it is essential that the Greens are denied the ability to become a large 'catch-all' political movement by encroaching meaningfully into the economic arena. Scarily, they have come thus far and we must aim to roll their influence back to saving sequoias and killer whales, because when it comes to economics - that is, the realm of human welfare - Greens are instinctively genocidal. Of course, they will deny this, but ask them about the earth's grave overpopulation problem. Most will concur but not extend this rationale to its logical conclusion because they are good (and misguided) people who would never associate themselves with a cause that overtly demands the slaying of billions. Deduction, fools! Admittedly, the Greens have their consistent advocates. And you thought the Final Solution was a pretty fucking awful idea.
The point is that the Green movement has crept into the mainstream. It urgently needs to be repulsed to the ideological fringes, because it is inherently anti-human. Mine Your Own Business contributes to this process, so it should be supported.
posted by James Waterton at 1:21 AM
2 Comments:
Well said. The Greens are inherently anti-human and anti-progress, and have the potential to do tremendous damage to humanity.
Most of my leftist/Green friends explicitly reject the notion of progress. And more than one has referred to humanity as a 'cancer'. Quite frightening.
It's a dangerous ideology. Sadly it has crept into the mainstream. It dominates the Left and has made major inroads on the Right.
I agree the average Green-leaning person is well-meant. But the activists really do think humanity is a problem, not a source of anything good or decent.
Keep up the good fight.
Years ago, over in some much browner country than ours, DDT had helped to reduce the annual death toll from disease carrying flying things to 7,000. Within a couple of years of DDT being banned, the death toll was up to nearly 500,000.
Trade-offs, trade-offs. Everything has a trade off, no more so than when discussing the environment. Indeed, when it comes to environmental "good", the negative consequences almost always outweigh the touted "benefits". I will, I expect, spend the rest of my life making this one little point, over and over and over and over and over again. To no avail, either, I expect.
BTW - I'm a sociologist, or, as I like to think of it: "inconsequential studies".
Simel? Weber? Durkheim? Foucalt? Freud? (Sorry, haven't checked any spellings.)
Don't confuse similar spelling with ideologies. Sociology has no ideology, and I was certainly taught none when I studied at uni.
Statistical analysis of medical research? That was part of my studies.
As was Faithfulness & Gratitude, and many of Simmel's other stunning essays (The Stranger, The Face), or the brilliant 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' - surely you have read that?
That's sociology.
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