Bishop Hill An oldie and a goodie
Jan 20, 2015 Greens For reasons not entirely clear to me, Martin Durkin just posted a link to his 2011 blog post about just how posh environmentalists tend to be. If you haven't read it before, you really, really should.
It is not exclusive, expensive delicatessens, but rather the wicked low-cost supermarkets frequented by everyday folk which they find repellent. It is a commonly heard complaint from Greens that things ‘aren’t expensive enough’. The ‘rebels’ down from Eton for the anti-globalisation rallies threw bricks through windows – but not the windows of high-class restaurants. Instead they smashed up and ransacked a working class MacDonalds when they marched down Piccadilly. It is not the luxurious Heals furniture shop that makes them angry, but the proletarian IKEA, with its affordable sofas and lamps.
Reader Comments (58)
The ultimate expression of just how deranged these people are has to be the so-called "farmers' market".
We have one locally, once a month. Like you can buy a month's vegetables in advance. Actually, you can't anyway, because it is full of people selling artisan olives and artisan smoked salmon and artisan pork pies and artisan bread rolls. I stopped going, but last time I looked the one vegetable store cost a fortune. I thought cutting out the evil supermarkets and connecting the buyer with the grower directly was supposed to save everyone money.
But seriously, a farmer has just cropped several tons of parsnips, is it really environmentally friendly for him to shove them all in a transit van and drive from town to town day by day on the offchance that he might be able to sell some of them?
Mass agriculture/distribution/sales IS environmentally friendly because it uses less energy and resources to connect growers with customers, that is why food is cheaper that way.
And just to add, it the government energy policy is to drive fuel prices etc. through the roof, the only survivors are going to be the most massively efficient businesses, That's where the economies of scale lie. Green surcharges will surely disproportionately kill the smaller businesses.
Mark, I very much suspect that what the DT published is certainly not a synopsis of the GP manifesto - rather more likely is that it is all the loony highlights, with all the nice cuddly bits, like free bunnies for nursery kids, left out.
I have no intention of confirming this suspicion by actaully reading the manifesto as this could cause brain damage.
Joanna - 'I don't agree that the UK hippie movement was benign. The New Left ideology which it personified has pervaded institutions all over the Western world'
I can't speak about the peculiarities of Australian politics in the sixties, or the sixties at all, but I think these categories are too broad, and credits the two movements with more agency than they in fact had. The 'New Left' and 'Hippies' cover a great deal, much of it in conflict, and some of it barely connected to the rest. If there is any commonality between/amongst them, it is the breakdown of old orthodoxies; the emerging reality of the Soviet Union in the case of the New Left; and more domestic loss of moral authority in the case of 'turning on, tuning in and dropping out' decadence in the West. Nature abhors a moral vacuum, which is why I suggest this is when many and various movements begin to take a green turn. Notably, and I think this is the point of Durkin's comment, " Global warmers are, in short, anti-capitalist. But – and here’s the really important thing to understand – it’s a very specific form of anti-capitalism. We might call it posh anti-capitalism."
After all, it was a meeting of super-wealthy industrialists and their favoured scientists who met in Rome to turn their back on industrial society, just as it was people who had made their fortunes in oil (i.e Strong) who led the UN campaigns against stuff like oil. Meanwhile, the New Left was heavily factionalised (satirised in that famous Monty Python sketch), at odds with Moscow, itself, and the nascent environmentalists -- the decisive pressures on 'ideology' as such coming from the fallout from WW2 and the deepening Cold War ultimately producing scepticism towards modernism and its projects good and bad, given succour by the end of the postwar economic boom.
Fair points, Ben.
But there was a lot of overlap between the New Left and the hippies. For example, the anti-war movement and the early environmental activists contained large cohorts of both. True, the leftists were more overtly political while the hippie element was more passive, for the most part. But they were broadly in agreement about these kinds of issues, including opposition to "consumerism" and all of the baggage that goes with it. The hippies were against it because they wanted a utopian world where everyone could do what they wanted, while the leftists were against it because they hated capitalism. It all meshed together quite well.
In Australia at least, the Greens still comprise a mixture of old communists/New Leftists and old hippies in the over 50 age group. And they are the ones who run the party.
Not so much a suicide note as a proclamation of intent to terminate: products, methods, lifestyles, growth in populations.
As http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/green-party/11356354/Drugs-brothels-al-Qaeda-and-the-Beyonce-tax-the-Green-Party-plan-for-Britain.html shows this Green party is all about coercion, re-eduction, and control. Governance by agreement with the people is not one of theirs – they will force changes on you if you let them.
Nice point, Douglas2 @ 3:55 PM yesterday. Thanks.
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